Dr. Patrick. Sorry, maybe you are qualified more than just a watcher. But Haarsma and Rana have PhDs too. And I have two masters…in theology.
Yes we all just watchers and synthesizers. And new scientific results are coming faster and faster. Yet, site like RTB and Biologos hold on to the same old song “God did it” (TE) and “Bible Predicts Inflationary Universe” (Ross) and Neanderthals weren’t humans (Faz Rana) and my all time favorite Deb Haarsma’s God created Multiverse. There are tens of thousands of scientists, in all fields of study doing research, writing papers and books. And probably thousands of them are Christians. And then you have these science pun-dents at AiG, RTB, DI and Biologos, twisting and contorting, ridiculing and bastardizing their hard work in order to keep their beliefs intact.
I think it’s important to remember that BioLogos is NOT making an argument for God’s existence, so all Haarsma seems to be saying is that the multiverse is compatible with the existence of the Christian God. That seems like a reasonable claim to me. No?
Anyways, I don’t want to pull this thread off topic.
What? TE isn’t making an argument for God’s existence? Regarding Haarsma and the multiverse, she said if there is (was) a multiverse, God made it. TE and God making the multiverse is certainly not science and certainly not doing science following MN.
Patrick, you might believe science is the only legitimate way to learn about the world and it’s reality. Tgis is scientism.While you might be ok with Scientism, everybody isn’t.
IMO Scientism an illogical and non-scientific view to hold. In the long run its harmful to science as a field of study.
Throughout this thread you keep calling out biologos or RTB for interpreting the science based on their Christian perspective. As long as they don’t make false claims, there is nothing wrong with it. And these articles are not strictly science (as understood currently).
This is the same thing Dawkins or Krauss do. They make non scientific metaphysical claims ( such as materialistic athiesm) and justify it with known science. Why do you have a problem with RTB when you don’t have one with Krauss?
Okay and we are talking about human origins where the latest results and findings in paleontology, ancient fossil genomics, archaeology, and many areas of evolutionary science are rapidly converging into a scientific consensus that theology is ignoring or just pretending that it isn’t true.
RTB’s and Biologos are making false claims about the recent findings of science.
In this case I don’t see any evidence of false claims.
I think you have been misguided by the book you read. Either you misunderstood it or it was wrong.
As for Krauss. His claims of the universe from “nothing” was false. It was just sophistry (a civilised word for deceptive lies).
This is just hand waving… show evidence…
There is lots of evidence, you just have a closed mind who will not accept the evidence. You, like RTB Rana have a closed model on how you think human origins is suppose to be and you hold on to that belief regardless of what new findings are presented. That is the major difference between faith based belief and science based inquiry. New results in science are coming in all the time, collaborating, altering, changing, confirming previous results. Faith based belief is stuck in the past.
@Patrick, you are very far overstating the evidence. I’m not sure you can say all this.
We know that Erectus was smart, but we also do no think he was as smart as sapiens. I think that is all that @Ashwin_s is saying, and he seems to be right.
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I am not overstating the evidence. Erectus was the most advanced cognitive species on the planet a million years ago. Evolution and more importantly culture lead to more advanced cognitively advance human - namely Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. And this continues to this day for the only remaining living species in the genus Homo- us. The evidence for a culture based evolution of human is enormous.
This started as a thread about RTB’s (Faz Rana’s) human origins model.
@Ashwin_s Here is a recent paper for you to consider.
https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0169-5347(18)30117-4
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I am not disputing this. I just don’t see how it is relevant to the discussion. If we go back in time, even single celled organisms would have been the smartest on the planet.
As far as science is concerned mutations do not arise out of necessity, including cultural necessity. We see organisms that live in community like ants, bees etc which manage to have sophisticated ways of organising themselves without language or advanced cognition. “Culture” is an indicator of cognition. I don’t see how it be a cause.
I have read some references similar to what you are saying. But it seems magical to me (another just so story)… besides culture is a vague word.
And Rana is saying the same. That humans with modern features such as the skull shape arose much later. And scientists associate these changes with improved cognition.
Rana doesnt talk about homo erectus.
that’s the point, Rana completely ignores Homo Erectus and all of the accomplishments of Homo Erectus in order to keep his RTB origins model intact. That seems dishonest to me as a scientist. He is keeping to his model by claiming doubt on everything that is found out about other species besides Homo Sapiens. He even calls Homo Neanderthals animals not humans. There is not reason for this as Neanderthals mated with Sapiens and were very similar in culture and technology for tens of thousands of years.
As far as I see, I don’t see any dishonesty in this article.
I don’t think there is much of a case to say that homo erectus had cognitive ability which was of the same level as that of modern humans. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that there was a huge jump in the cognitive abilities of omodern humans somewhere between 100k to50k years ago. Dr Rana claims this happened suddenly (and when he claims this he acknowledges that most scientists disagree).
Making such unfair allegations can hurt your credibility. Unless of course you are only preaching to the choir… in which case, i have been wasting my time in this conversation.
That is a controversial claim but it isn’t a disproven claim.
Please tell me about this huge jump in cognitive abilities 100K to 50K years ago. Because all the evidence is that Sapiens, Denosivans, and Neanderthals were doing the same things including mating throughout Eurasia for that time period. All had language, culture, clothing, hunting groups, same stone tool technology, similar genes, and mated regularly between the species.