Speculating on possible motivations for rejecting evolution

Conversation
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Terms like “the right” and “the left” can come with a lot of ambiguities but I’m willing to interpret the terms as most commonly understood.

That said, even though I’m a huge critic of the right in many many contexts, I also have to say that (based on my experience with 501c3 organizations and the peer-reviewed academic studies of them), “the right” certainly has an impressive history of charitable donations and projects which often dwarf those of people on “the left.” Indeed, lots of non-profit charities (I’m talking secular charities) tune their advertising campaigns to reflect what has long been common knowledge: zip codes associated with conservative and even right-wing voters of modest incomes tend to donate far greater percentages of their incomes to charities [I’m not talk about donations to their churches but to separate charities] than do zip codes associated with left-wing voters, even those zip codes associated with much higher incomes.

Perhaps this has changed since my retirement but I doubt it. Thus, despite my disdain for so much which has developed within “the right” in recent years, I would without hesitation answer that the right more closely reflects the generosity described in these verse.

Of course, generalizations are just that and tend to come with risks. But I would be surprised if this maxim of charitable giving has changed significantly in recent years.

What used to surprise me even more was the fact that those on the right who regularly make significant donations to charitable causes were also making very significant percentage-of-income donations to their churches. To me, this makes their overall “generosity profile” all the more impressive.

I even saw this first hand when I was a professor at an evangelical seminary back in the 1980’s when it got a special award from the local United Way campaign for highest employee participation in a payroll-deduction program. I recall that the second and third place “winners” were the employees of some major corporations whose names you would recognize which happened to have their headquarters in that same very high income suburb of a major city. (It was one of the highest household wealth and incomes zipcodes in the USA.) The average salary at our evangelical university was tiny compared to the average for that suburb. (Indeed, many of our seminary student couples worked as nannies, chauffeurs, cooks, and house parents at the mansions of the wealthy in that area.) I could tell a similar anecdote about another evangelical school and donations to the Red Cross.

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A note, however. A good friend of mine is a fund-raising consultant to charitable organizations and he and I have spoken about this at length. He points out that while this is true, one should remember that most charitable giving, even when we leave people’s churches out of it, is not actually giving-to-the-poor type donations. A great deal of the volume of charitable giving is to things like arts organizations and universities.

I’m not aware of anybody who’s actually broken that out, and of course it would be hard to draw lines. I give money to the Seattle Children’s Theater, and SCT uses some of that money for scholarships to allow poor kids to take classes in theater – but that’s not at all the ONLY thing they use donations for, so is that a donation “to the needy” or not? I give money to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and while its services are almost entirely to people in poverty, one might argue that this doesn’t count because it’s not really direct aid in the feeding-the-hungry sense. The point is: sheer VOLUME of charitable giving tells us something, but it doesn’t tell us all we’d like to know in relation to the kind of human mercy and compassion question at issue here. It may be that politically conservative voters give more to such causes; it may be that they give less; but I don’t think that overall charitable giving numbers are very informative because that’s not what most charitable donations are.

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Could you expand on these a little bit?

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Yes, I was expecting that someone would make this point—and I have had very similar conversations with people in 501c3 administration. Charity in our day comes with very different meanings and scope than charity in first century Palestine.

We also have challenges in defining “the poor.” I have found that significant portions of “right-wing” donations are aimed at disaster relief, for example. In the USA not everyone helped by a relief organization is necessarily “poor” in a demographic/socioeconomic sense—but just after a major hurricane or earthquake, one may find that nearly everyone in that area is “poor” in a sense which fits the context of Jesus’ words. And when that natural disaster is in developing countries, it often involves very long term “helping the poor” aid in a traditional sense.

Because of the risks of apples and oranges, I’m often a bit uncomfortable with virtue competitions staged between demographic groups, especially when the categories are political. So when the popular media makes generalizations about “the right doesn’t care about the poor”, I’m sometimes forced to defend people-groups on the right with whom I strongly disagree politically—because I know that they are in fact generous towards the sick and hungry and downtrodden (just as Jesus commanded.)

Related to this is the popular accusation that “The right wing cares about babies in the womb but doesn’t care about them once they are born.” That has not been my observation. Of course, within any people-group (including political groups) one can usually find plenty of hypocrites—both on the left and the right. On the other hand, I recall over the decades a number of news stories blasting a left-wing politician (and sometimes a right-wing politician) of considerable wealth and income for showing less the 1% of their income in charitable donations on their Schedule A, Form 1040. However, that person may have established a charitable foundation or otherwise structured their charitable donations so that they don’t even show on their personal tax returns. Indeed, I’ve done this for my biggest donations so that I don’t unnecessarily pay Social Security or Medicare taxes on the sum. (Indeed, I used to assign royalties in such a way that they went directly to a charity and never appeared in my income at all. So my donation would not be easy to identify or even detect without a specific investigation.) Also, during years (or even decades) when my income was zero, my charitable donations were quite small. I tend to make my donations when/as the money comes in.

I do find it interesting when media figures criticize somebody by saying, “Why didn’t they donate that money to feed the poor instead?” I would like to ask them: “How about you? Are you foregoing major expenditures on yourself in order to feed the poor?” Hypocrisy abounds.

All of that aside, I have not in my experience observed most “right wing” people being callous and ungenerous (much less below-average) in their generosity toward the poor and hungry.

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Tell that to the scientists and doctors who embraced evolution to defeat Covid-19.

Kindly explain in great detail how you came to know the mind of God on evolution?

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So you are trying to tell me that my affirmation of evolutionary biology as the best explanation of what we observe in God’s creation (i.e, the biosphere) overcomes and defeats Jesus’ promise that my repentance of sins and my acknowledging him as Lord and Savior qualifies me for eternal life. (John 3:16.) Amazing. So you apparently believe the Theory of Evolution is more powerful than the Gospel itself.

You are a good example of those who insist on adding to the Gospel man-made requirements which are not to be found anywhere within Jesus’ teachings.

Have you considered the “risks” which you are taking by presuming to add to the Biblical text and to the requirements of the Gospel which Jesus taught?

I defy you to cite anywhere in Jesus’ teachings where it says that my salvation can be lost if I misunderstand the scientific phenomena of God’s creation. (I eventually came to affirm evolutionary biology after many years as a defiant Young Earth Creationist fan of the “creation science” movement of the 1960’s. Are you saying that I lost my salvation at that point?)

Meanwhile, I hope that you will post a helpful list of all of the other “risky” (i.e., eternally disastrous) scientific theories which Christ-followers must avoid in order to keep their salvation. General Relativity, perhaps? Phlogiston? Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation? Heliocentrism? Germ Theory of Disease?

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Yeah, I could think of quite a lot of examples of generosity and un-generosity among people all over the political spectrum. There might be some valid statistical trends in there somewhere that correlate politics to some particular sort of behavior, but even then, what? One has to then admit that “it’s complicated,” and judge people as individuals, which is probably what one should have been doing in the first place.

I also think that it often escapes notice that being generous to the poor and thinking that the government should use tax dollars to be generous to the poor are two different things. Not that I’m against the latter, but it’s not the same as being personally generous, and other considerations start to come into it.

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That brings to mind Christian (and non-Christian) activists I’ve known who are determined to bring legal changes like policing reforms, bail reforms, and zoning reforms which would actually do far more to increase the financial welfare of poor people than any financial donation which they could ever manage to make. And considering what the Bible has to say about justice and fairness for the poor, they are doing a very “charitable” work, indeed.

But…I guess I’ve drifted off the topic of possible motivations for rejecting evolution.

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Wait … aren’t some dicynodonts are quite tall? … or do you mean that dicynodonts are burning in hell?? Dang but this theology stuff is tricky!

I might disagree with you here. People like to pretend that politics is one-dimensional, but it really isn’t.

Source article: Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors by David Brin, Ph.D.

What about astrologers? They are OK, right?

Congratulations to @r_speir on the occasion of reducing all of Christianity to a sort of cosmic Monty Python skit.

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We look at fossils, we see evolution. We look at genetic material, we see evolution. We look at biogeography, we see evolution.
We look at SARS-CoV-2, we see evolution. If YEC were valid, and a global flood happened a few thousands years ago, there should be pretty excellent evidence left behind for us to see today, but we don’t find any.

Like you it was hard for me giving up my OEC/YEC beliefs on this issue, but I did anyway because the evidence was so compelling. I had to do things the science way.

More importantly, you can remain a Christian and even hold on to de novo synthesis of Adam and Eve, while accepting that evolution produced us.

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Well, yes. They found a pretty big one in Poland a couple of years ago. But most of 'em were a lot smaller than that. There’s a rather petite Lystrosaurus at our local museum.

As for burning in hell, all you have to know is: none of the dicynodonts, so far as anyone can tell, accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. They just lived lives of decadent rooting and rutting. And while they didn’t believe in evolution, they did something even worse: they evolved, mocking God’s creation.

While congratulations may indeed be in order there, I am not sure I actually encountered anyone who did NOT reduce it to a cosmic Monty Python skit until I was in my twenties. Such a reduction, though regrettable, remains a pretty standard feature of faith “as lived” in America.

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Until I learned to correctly pronounce dicynodont, I thought it sounded like a sugarless gum breath mint. Here is the correct pronunciation:

Yeah. Don’t ya just hate it when that happens?

One moment you’re casually studying dicynodonts and the next moment you’ve crossed the line—by incorrectly interpreting the fossil evidence–and you are eternally condemned to burn in hell. This problem must surely discourage a lot of young people from pursuing careers in paleontology and taxonomy.

Of course, this cautionary tale explains why experts often say, “Dicynodonts are gateway fossils. So just say no.”

Perhaps I am misunderstanding you but Galileo and Copernicus and many others would say it went far beyond being some literal interpretations being “shook up.” (Many claim that G. Bruno was burned at the stake over his insistence on heliocentrism—and heliocentrism was certainly one of his many eccentricities— but Bruno was incinerated mostly because he offended virtually everyone in power for all kinds of crazy reasons.)

Sinful dicynodonts go directly to hell—and without collecting $200.

(NOTE: This is a Friday, so obscure and ancient pop culture references are permitted. I hereby decree it. OK . . . I think the overweening power of being a moderator finely went to my head. It was those r_speir posts which put me over the edge. Not my fault.)

Based on that list, I’m not sure you know right from left.

That’s what the signs say.

That was a huge problem for me—and helped lead me out of the YEC community. I would ask people like John Whitcomb Jr. and Duane Gish why we see no compelling evidence of a recent global flood today and they basically either dodged the question or claimed “There’s evidence everywhere” without supporting that claim in any detail. (Neither showed much grasp of geology. Whitcomb told me to ask Henry Morris. At least he didn’t try to fudge.)

Meanwhile, I’ve always thought that a dicynodont would make a good sports team mascot on an old episode of King of the Hill.

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Hm. Not sure. I’ve usually heard “die-sigh-no-dont” but I ain’t no expert in paleontological pronunciations. On that subject, though, I recall asking Christine Janis about some pronunciation variants I’d heard of some names and she said that for a lot of these things there are a lot of variations in pronunciation that all are pretty well accepted as long as they’re not so strange that nobody knows what’s being talked about.

I find that the hardest ones to convince myself to do right are “Cnidaria” and “Ctenophora” as the C just drops off. My brain wants to render the C as an “s” sound. Perhaps this is why my high-school biology teacher taught us that Coelenterata was a phylum.

As it happens, a high school classmate with whom I regularly argue about politics was a writer for that show for a number of years. If they do a reboot, I’ll talk to him about getting some Permian high school to adopt a dicynodont mascot.

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In my experience, on these kinds of Greek and Latin Linnaean terms, both “die” and “dee” pronunciations are extant. My greater quibble is with the accentuation in that video.

It is hard to get adamant about the pronunciation of Linnaean terms when they are such “artificial” words, some of which originated in some biologist or paleontologist calling up the Classics department and asking something like, "What’s a good Latin or Greek term for “two dog teeth”? (DI + CYNO + DONT) Actually, I think the CYNO is archaic English. So sometimes morphemes other than Latin or Greek can be incorporated, especially when place names and people names get included.

Yes, Cnidaria always reminded me of a snide remark.

For those who may wonder why the initial “c” is silent in “Cnidaria” and “Ctenophora”, it is called apheresis, the dropping of an initial sound, usually because pronouncing it is just too much hassle. An example in English is KNIGHT. The “k” is silent but I wouldn’t be surprised if you tracked it back far enough—“all the way to the boar hunting days”, as my professor used to say about any proto-language—the “k” was probably important as its own sound and may even have disappeared when some vowel which followed it and preceded the “n” got dropped. Just a hunch based on experience. I’ve not researched it. But I know that speakers like to drop difficult phonemes. Eventually.

Ask him to look at that image of a dicynodont and try to deny that Bobby Hill was based on it. (It certainly deserves the same voice actor. Yes, I know it was actually an actress doing the boy’s voice.)

I have found that a lot of Texans live in the Permian basin region but have no idea that it refers to a geologic age and an important geologic feature. Some have told me that “Permian is just another word for oil.”

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I was, in the old days, a bit of a fan of the musical style of the Tricynonocts.

As for the combination of components of words from different languages, I am always amused by the objection that “polyamory” is an abomination due to its merging of Greek and Latin.

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In summary we have pseudogene equivalents in linguistics.

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That’s a great way to look at it!

You just gave me all sorts of ideas for other analogies from linguistics. If I had some time to kill, I’m might even try to think up linguistic equivalents for ERVs, introns, and GULOP!

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Well, in this case of evolution, it is scientists who have more cultural and political power. I was referring to implications for people who rejected the science.

@SlightlyOddGuy To your question, biggest one for me is natural evil and death before A&E’s sin. That has a lot of philosophical and societal implications that then affect theology. Next, I notice evolutionary psychology seems to end up being why selfishness is actually good. This is the opposite of what Jesus teaches. And I don’t see how to avoid the idea that people don’t have intrinsic value (not just because society all agrees) if we aren’t created. Things like that. All of those begin to apply when you apply evolution beyond the science. The OP was applying the science to other areas of life, and I was trying to explain that even though I think the author picked the wrong areas in which to apply evolution to, he’s affirming YEC and saying they are right for the exact same things he condemns them for (giving evolutionary science power in other areas), if that makes sense. That’s why it made me so frustrated.

When it’s not an origins topic, it seems to me science (even evolutionary science) often very quickly leads to topics that incorporate design and wonder for everyone. I know evolution as an origins topic does that also for some people (I’ve seen comments on PBS Eons videos) :slight_smile: But studying nature always seems very worshipful to me because I do think it’s meant to point to God. My honest opinion that I’ll get a lot of flak for - sometimes evolution as a path from abiogenesis to here doesn’t seem very far removed from the fertility and death cult worship of the ancient Middle East. I mean you need a lot of death and reproduction to get to the diversity of life we have today in the evolutionary story. We just have sophisticated naturalism to thank instead of carved images. But I generally tend to think everyone, myself and other Christians included, are much worse sinners than we tend to believe. It’s just easy to critique cultures that are not our own - in Christianity and out of it - so I think we as people haven’t actually changed whole lot. So yes, I definitely choose to interpret scientific data with theology first because I find the implications of other ways of doing science very problematic.

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As you are probably aware, some assert that because God is outside of time, he could have already taken into account the sin of Adam and Eve when he created the world. So any “consequences” of the fall could actually precede the fall—and thereby serve a divine purpose in limiting some aspects of the destruction from the fall. Another view is that the world (which is Satan’s domain, as we are told when Satan tempted Jesus by offering him the world in exchanging for worshipping him) was created as a place for Satan after his fall—but God actually built into it Satan’s defeat and the rise of a redeemed people who would have full fellowship with God despite Satan’s rebellion.

Are you sure that “good” is the best description? How about “leads to survival.”? However, even that is a myth as a generalization. Evolution heavily points to cooperation and harmony as an extremely important strategy for survival—which is why so many species are social.

Science investigates what is, not what should be. We must avoid the Argument from Negative Consequences fallacy. For example, just because Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity brought about the bombing of Hiroshima and the Cold War is irrelevant to whether the science of gravity and relativity is sound. Likewise, the Theory of Evolution stands or falls on the evidence, not whether we find it pleasant or not.

I certainly believe that people have great value due to being created in the Image of God—but I have no problem with agreeing with some of the other reasons non-theists have cited in order to conclude that humans have intrinsic value. (Are those reasons just as profound or important? That’s a different question.)

Whether or not we are created is a philosophical and theological question. Science does not address that question—if we are defining creation as something done by an agent outside of the universe (as with a deity.) Accordingly, humans and all other living things can be products of evolution regardless of whether or not they are created.

Nevertheless, I can’t necessarily reject a reality just because it might make me uncomfortable

I would have to reread that because I’ve forgotten that early part of the thread—but I have certainly seen people apply evolutionary biology to other fields of study where it doesn’t make sense.

I do also.

The Old Testament (OId Covenant) is based on a “death cult” of animal sacrifice. And the New Testament (New Covenant) is based on a “death cult” focused on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Both covenants are based on what many have described as horrific amounts of blood and death. So are you sure you want to reject ideas just because they are uncomfortable and even involve death as a path to an ultimate good (within God’s plan?)

And you need a lot of death and evil to get to the culmination of God’s redemptive plan for mankind and his creation in general. So I don’t let death and evil steer me away from the Gospel.

I do also.

I agree. And that was one of the reasons I used to look down on evolutionary biology and the academy behind it. I was suspicious (a downright cynical toward them) because my church background told me that they were “godless” and not to be trusted.

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But is the question of “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” solely, or even mainly, about donations?

I would suggest it is not.

Is not a 15yo boy, abused throughout his life, who murders his abusive grandfather in an altercation, “one of the least of these brothers of [his]”?

What did six conservative Christians do for him? They threw out decades of legal precedent (without even having the decency to admit that they were doing so), in order to allow a sentence of Life without Parole (LWOP) to stand without a finding of “permanent incorrigibility”.

Were not the disaster-ravaged residents of Puerto Rico likewise “the least of these brothers of [his]”?

What did conservative Christian Russell Vought do? He obstructed aid to them?

These are just the most recent incidents, ripped from the latest headlines. There has been numerous such over the last four years, from a presidential administration supported by, and largely staffed by, conservative Christians. And I find it hard to believe that that administration created this callousness (as opposed to allowing it to run rampant).

But even if we look solely at “charitable donations”, we have to ask what proportion of the amount is going to helping the poor, as opposed to empire-building (Warren Throckmorton’s blog covers in detail the financial misdeeds of Gospel for Asia, among others), lavish spending (on private jets, multi-million dollar mansions, among other things) by celebrity preachers, or simply towards church facilities for the parishioners own use?

The Mormon Church’s $100 Billion stockpile would also seem relevant. These may have been “charitable donations” in a purely legal sense, but they seem to have little to do with the charity spoken of in Matthew 25:40.

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