Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young Earth, I am a young age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.[8]
I have just written something similar in the forum - but I definitely wouldn’t state it that way. (I’d like to see the quote in context but the page Wikipedia links to no longer exists. Maybe I should see if it’s archived.) Basically I see young age/earth creationism as unfulfilled prophecy. It’s what the Bible says and science can change. GAE got me excited about that. A scientist saying it’s easy to get from 2 to all the people we have today in terms of genealogy? That’s great! Then I came across what Nathaniel Jeanson is doing with history. (I’m in the middle of the book - I’m interested to see what he continues to come up with after this book.) I knew none of the science when I started looking into Genesis, cosmology, and evolution, but I’ve learned a lot, much of it due to the regulars in the forum. The next thing I expect is that James Webb telescope observations will not find “dark ages” supposed to be there in the Big Bang Model. I have written in this thread, that if they do, and it’s really obvious, then maybe I should rethink my interpretation. It depends on how clear the evidence is.
I think the Bible is very clear as a whole. Humanity began with just two; animals were created separately in kinds. And the genealogies were recorded to be history. The intent of course was never to give an age of the earth, that would be anachronistic. But it records it nonetheless. But what the Bible says in terms of scientific ideas is not why I am a believer. If I was the only one with this interpretation, I’d be skeptical it was correct. That it’s been generally understood the way I understand it, throughout the last 2000 years means that I can be patient and wait for the science to be more clear. It’s not clear as a whole, IMO.
Hi Puck. Thank you for sharing this. I’d seen you make similar comments about the term worldview in other threads and I didn’t quite understand what you meant until now.
Let me describe your use of the term and you can tell me if I understand you correctly.
By worldview you mean a lens or filter we apply to the events and ideas we encounter. It affects the bayesian prior probabilty we assign to those events and ideas. It may cause us to reject things we ought to accept or to accept things we ought to reject. When stated this way it acts as a type of cognitive bias.
I am not using the term in that way. When I use the term I mean the way we systematize and catalogue the things we believe. It is a framework for organizing our ideas to help us manage the complexity of daily life and the things we study.
So if I believe A’ about topic A, how does it interact with other beliefs I hold? Is it disjoint with B(‘)? Does it intersect? If it does intersect, how do the two ideas interact? Do they cohere or do they indicate a problem with A’ or B’?
This is what I mean by worldview. If it used as a form of cognitive bias then I understand and appreciate your aversion to the term.
Imagine if science worked like that. “That the earth is flat is just an unfulfilled hypothesis. We’re still sure it’s true and will be proven so someday.”
Oh, don’t be so pessimistic. I have no doubt that you will be able to find sufficient lack of clarity in anything that might be found to maintain your belief in a young universe. Don’t sell yourself short.
I honestly don’t understand what the big problem is here.
We are social organisms, which means that by nature we co-exist in large groups. This requires that there be expectations regarding how we interact with one another.
We are also organisms possessed of very large and complex brains, which means that in determining how best to co-exist with one another we are able to use abstract reasoning and discuss the various rules and expectations that will govern our interactions. Some of these rules and expectations fall under the category of what is known as “morality.”
I see no reason that a deity of any sort is required to account for these aspects of our behavior, nor that our answers to moral questions would be any better or more “objective” if they were based on the commands of a god.
Do you understand that this is a fine example of confirmation bias? You read and believe only what fits your prior beliefs. You ignore or explain away everything else. (And you also appear to misunderstand GAE, which does not involve the descent of humans from only two people. It’s not compatible with your understanding of the bible.)
Hi Faizal. I’m not sure I would say it is a problem per se. Step into my shoes for a moment and think of it this way. I’ve grown up (mostly) with a particular way of seeing the world and how we should interact with one another. I then would like to know how I’d approach these same situations from a different background and set of beliefs. So if you were to step into a theistic worldview, it would be a similar process of acquainting yourself with how it approaches these kinds of choices. Please consider it an academic exercise, I’m not asking you to change your position or your convictions.
Well, this is certainly true. I don’t question that either. I’m just trying to understand how I’d see the world and deal with the ebb and flow of life through a way of thinking that has been foreign to me. I’m trying to learn about and even appreciate the way you and others may think about things. I truly would like to have a friendly dialogue with all of you, even if we disagree on things.
Honestly, I’m not sure precisely what you mean by that but it still sounds a bit relativistic to me. I’m not sure I do “systematize and catalogue” the things I know or accept, but I suspect that you must mean something more than a mere filing system here.
And indeed, your responses to @Faizal_Ali seem to give this “worldview” notion quite a larger scope than you’ve stated:
That doesn’t sound the slightest bit like a mere manner of organizing one’s thoughts. It sounds like an entire style of thinking, tilted to accommodate a very specific set of assumptions.
It is certainly true that the conclusions one has provisionally accepted in one area will influence his thinking in other areas. Whether one refers to that pejoratively as “bias” or regards it as indispensable to the nature of thinking about complex things, it’s going to be so. But I have no idea what an “atheistic worldview” such as you have mentioned would consist of, and I am pretty sure that I don’t have one. I cannot say that I approach many problems with the assumption that there aren’t any gods; and if a nine-hundred-foot long finger comes down from the heavens while I’m having an argument with someone and squishes him to death, theistic hypotheses for the event will rush right to the front of the line.
In fact, I sort of suspect, from the tone of this, that you underestimate just how Christian the orientation of other people who have grown up immersed in a Christian culture is. All my biases where religion is concerned are bent that way. I grew up as the product of a Protestant family in a Christian culture. My ideas about who the gods are and what sorts of things they might do have been shaped, to a high degree, by the beliefs of Christian culture, to the point that I have often had to realize how slanted – specifically, how biased in a pro-Christian direction – my ways of looking at things have been. And as a consequence I think you might be very badly mistaken if you think that someone who reaches the same conclusions that I do, coming from a Christian culture, is influenced or shaped, or even “systematized and catalogued,” by some sort of “atheistic worldview.”
I have said, and I continue to think, that you are very clear-headed on these things and, as before, it may well be that my advice to you in these matters is advice to do things you have already done or are already doing. But I might suggest that you endeavor to understand, if you do not, that atheists are not from a foreign culture – at least, no more of us are from a foreign culture than any other group of people defined by a conclusion on a question of fact are. Most of us, in this country at least, have more or less your cultural background, with all of the good things and all of the bad things that may entail.
Justice Breyer once was interviewed on television about the differences in judicial philosophy between him and his fellow Justices, and he made the point that there was less difference, at least in his view, between the philosophies of the Justices than people tended to think. He thought that, for example, everyone on the Court regarded “original intent” as a consideration which had to be taken into account on constitutional issues, but that what varied was the degree of weight they accorded it in relation to other considerations. And I think that what you will find, if you examine the paradigm of the average atheist (if, indeed, there is such a creature) is that his differences from you are differences of emphasis. Nobody regards tradition as useless, but people do assign it different levels of importance and different roles. Nobody regards evidentiary scrutiny as useless, but likewise – they give it differing amounts of emphasis.
And so I would say that I do not think that “worldview,” whether as a network of overlapping biases or as a system of mental organization, has that much to do with any of this. I think that what differentiates people, more often than not, is method. The careful and rigorous thinker comes to sets of conclusions that the flighty and poetic will not, and vice versa (for example – that is NOT intended to represent the poles of opinion on the existence of the gods, but only to represent one of many axes in relation to which variance of method might be expressed).
Agnosticism, as Huxley described it, is a method. But atheism and Christianity are conclusions, not methods, and I think that if one is trying to employ those conclusions as methods, in any sense, it is a mistake.
That is more a question I would ask you, or that you would ask of yourself, than one that I can answer for you.
So let me ask: Suppose tomorrow it is somehow demonstrated beyond a doubt that no gods have ever existed. Would that change your moral values and behaviour? If so, how and why?
Hi Faizal. That is an interesting question. I’d have to think quite a bit about it. If that were the case I’d have to find an alternate moral theory to live by. In terms of behavior I’d probably start by no longer attending church.
I ask this very kindly (not with any sarcasm), what would you do if the reverse was shown (someone were to demonstrate the existence of a maximally great and necessary being)? What kinds of changes would you make?
I am curious, what do you think of men like Jordan B. Peterson? I don’t want to debate his philosophy here but I wonder how you perceive him.
I know your question is to @Faizal_Ali but I hope you won’t mind my two cents.
What I’d do is try to learn more about that being.
I cannot imagine that the demonstration that such a being exists would have any bearing on morality – I mean, really, how could it? – and so it’s hard to see why it would influence my own behavior in any moral sense. It’d influence my behavior in the curiosity sense: I’d try to learn more about this interesting new discovery.
I think that implicit in your question is the assumption – which you may not personally harbor, but which is sort of embedded in it – that those of us who don’t believe in the gods are running around saying, “golly, I sure am behaving like a complete bastard! It sure is a good thing that there’s no maximally great and necessary being, whatever the hell that bizarre expression means, because if there were, I’d have to straighten up and fly right!”
And that, I think, does betray a way in which a “worldview” assumption is getting into this for you. Why would one ask a question which seems to assume that atheists inhabit a different moral universe? We aren’t unlike you. Morality doesn’t come from one’s beliefs about the paranormal – how could it? Why would you even imagine that atheists would find themselves needing to change something if they thought that Baal existed?
Hi Puck. I very much apologize if I have given this impression. If I ask questions about moral values and duties, I am asking about their source. If they do exist, where do they come from? If they don’t exist, how do we create a set of laws or principles by which folks can live alongside one another? I never intend to create the kind of distinction you have mentioned.
I think maybe we should let this topic of moral theory sit for now but please believe me when I say that I’m not seeing you or anyone else on this forum in a negative or different light.
I’m not advocating for any kind of relativism but at the end of the day we all have to live with each other, and to do so in a kind and respectful way. I hope I’m communicating that way here at PS. These are hard topics to discuss.
You haven’t given that impression, I assure you. So nothing to apologize for; my meta-meta-apologies if I have given you the impression that you have given me the impression of having a negative impression of the moral attributes of atheists. My intent was to point out to you that your question does seem to spring from a cultural viewpoint which is burdened with false assumptions about atheists. You seem to be liberating yourself from such viewpoints and assumptions but it seemed to me that perhaps you had not considered how that question ordinarily carries that implication. Without that implication, indeed, it’s a strange question which devolves down to: “I know I have moral feelings, but why do YOU have them?”
I think it’s fairly obvious that moral values come from a combination of (1) innate attributes of our nervous systems and (2) human experience, both in the personal sense and in a broader social/cultural sense. Where else could they possibly come from? I speak, to be clear, of where they come from in a “proximate cause” sense, rather than an “ultimate cause” sense; that they do so spring does not mean that there’s not some divine hand in the matter, but only that the divine hand is not the proximate cause. It’s very much the same as for evolution: that the diversity of life springs from natural causes does not negate the possibility of an ultimate cause, but speaks instead to proximate causes which we can evaluate.
Do they exist? Well, yes. Since they are experienced as subjective phenomena, and since essentially all people will, if asked, report experiencing them, I think we can say that values and duties do indeed exist. But the sense in which a social phenomenon exists is different from the sense in which a rock exists.
You are, and I have great respect for you and believe you to be wholly sincere and honest in this discussion. If the suggestion that these are hard topics to discuss in any way proceeds from a feeling that I’m giving you a hard time, I hope you’ll accept my statement that that’s not my intent. I think it’s a very good and worthwhile discussion and nothing you have said has offended or upset me, so I hope that this is true for you as well.
I would see the effect as not that different from that experienced by people a century ago when Newtonian physics was overturned in favour of relativity and quantum mechanics. It represented a profound change in how one understands the fundamental nature of the universe, of course. But in terms of how average people lived their day to day lives, it had little effect until these theories led to technological innovations that people could use. I certainly don’t see why it would have any effect on my moral values.
In all honesty, even though we both belong to the same (very large) university, I don’t really know much about him beyond the popular commentary about him, and not even that do I follow at all closely. Still, what I do know is enough to make me doubt there would be much value in knowing more about him.
I think you’re comparing things that aren’t very comparable: belief with lack of belief.
Perhaps a better exercise would be to see how you’d approach the same situations from a scientific background. I think you’ll find that scientists, both religious and atheist, take the Ninth Commandment much more seriously than creationists do.
I feel the same is true regarding your beliefs so at least we agree the other’s skepticism meter needs adjustment in one way or another.
Of course I have confirmation bias - I don’t deny that.
But what you said is contradictory. I obviously have to read what doesn’t fit my beliefs in order to “explain away everything else.” But actually I read a lot I have no explanation for, even after researching it; I’ve just become comfortable with not having explanations.
I don’t mean the GAE, as in the hypothesis in the book, but a genealogical AE.
This isn’t meant to be a “gotcha” question. I am curious what you would say - can behavior against oneself be a moral question (ignoring the morality of the affect it has on others) like suicide or other self-harm? Or based on your explanation, is that amoral as far as it’s effect on oneself? I think that would be consistent but maybe there’s an explanation I have not considered.
Hi John. I mean to use this term in a formal sense, that is, referring to knowledge as “justified true belief”. So here I mean positions that are held in proportion to the evidence supporting them.
I’m not sure that I would state it quite that way but I understand and essentially agree. It makes me very sad. I realize that you would not agree with him, but do you find someone like Hugh Ross (OEC) and RTB more credible in this regard? I’m not saying that they are right (and I really don’t want to diverge into a long rabbit trail on OEC), but my sense of RTB is that they will (over the long run) slowly allow the evidence to sink in. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I sense a bit more honesty from folks like Fazale Rana than I see in many of the YEC groups.
I am sure that Christians don’t realize the damage they do to their cause when they involve themselves in various forms of science denial. It saddens me.
