Posted on 01/15/2014 8:57:46 AM PST by xzins
One of the most misleading headlines imaginable recently appeared over an opinion column published in USA Today. Tom Krattenmaker, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, set out to argue that there is no essential conflict between evolution and religious belief because the two are dealing with completely separate modes of knowing. Evolution, he argued, is simply “settled science” that requires no belief. Religion, on the other hand, is a faith system that is based in a totally different way of knowing—a form of knowing that requires belief and faith.
The background to the column is the recent data released by the Pew Research Center indicating that vast millions of Americans still reject evolution. As the Pew research documents, the rejection of evolution has actually increased in certain cohorts of the population. Almost six of ten who identify as Republicans now reject evolution, but so do a third of Democrats. Among evangelical Christians, 64% indicate a rejection of evolution, especially as an explanation for human origins. Krattenmaker is among those who see this as a great national embarrassment—and as a crisis.
In response, Krattenmaker makes this statement:
In a time of great divides over religion and politics, it’s not surprising that we treat evolution the way we do political issues. But here’s the problem: As settled science, evolution is not a matter of opinion, or something one chooses to believe in or not, like a religious proposition. And by often framing the matter this way, we involved in the news media, Internet debates and everyday conversation do a disservice to science, religion and our prospects for having a scientifically literate country.
So belief in evolution is not something one simply chooses to believe or to disbelieve, “like a religious proposition.” Instead, it is “settled science” that simply compels intellectual assent.
The problems with this argument are legion. In the first place, there is no such thing as “settled science.” There is a state of scientific consensus at any given time, and science surely has its reigning orthodoxies. But to understand the enterprise of science is to know that science is never settled. The very nature of science is to test and retest hypotheses and to push toward new discoveries. No Nobel prizes are awarded for settled science. Instead, those prizes are awarded for discoveries and innovations. Many of those prizes, we should note, were awarded in past years for scientific innovations that were later rejected. Nothing in science is truly settled.
If science is to be settled, when would we declare it settled? In 1500? 1875? 1960? 2013? Mr. Krattenmaker’s own newspaper published several major news articles in just the past year trumpeting “new” discoveries that altered basic understandings of how evolution is supposed to have happened, including a major discovery that was claimed to change the way human development was traced, opening new questions about multiple lines of descent.
But the most significant problem with this argument is the outright assertion that science and religion represent two completely separate modes and bodies of knowledge. The Christian understanding of truth denies this explicitly. Truth is truth. There are not different kinds of truth that operate by different intellectual rules.
Every mode of thinking requires belief in basic presuppositions. Science, in this respect, is no different than theology. Those basic presuppositions are themselves unprovable, but they set the trajectory for every thought that follows. The dominant mode of scientific investigation within the academy is now based in purely naturalistic presuppositions. And to no surprise, the theories and structures of naturalistic science affirm naturalistic assumptions.
“Religion”—to use the word Krattenmaker prefers—also operates on the basis of presuppositions. And those presuppositions are no less determinative. These operate akin to what philosopher Alvin Plantinga calls “properly basic beliefs.”
In any event, both require “belief” in order to function intellectually; and both require something rightly defined as faith. That anyone would deny this about evolution is especially striking, given the infamous gaps in the theory and the lack of any possible experimental verification. One of the unproven and unprovable presuppositions of evolution is uniformitarianism, the belief that time and physical laws have always been constant. That is an unproven and unprovable assumption. Nevertheless, it is an essential presupposition of evolutionary science. It is, we might well say, taken on faith by evolutionists.
For starters, “belief” means something different in a religion conversation than it means when we’re talking about science. In the case of faith, it usually means accepting the moral and spiritual truth of something and giving it your trust and devotion. In talking about evolution, it is more precise to call it “scientifically valid” or “an accurate account of what we observe.” No leaps of faith or life-altering commitments required.
He really does believe that science and theology operate in completely different worlds. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould believed the same, arguing for science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.” But, as both scientists and theologians protested, science and religion overlap all the time.
Krattenmaker argues, “A scientific concept backed by an overwhelming amount of supporting evidence, evolution describes a process by which species change over time. It hazards no speculations about the origins of that process.”
But this is not even remotely accurate. Evolutionary scientists constantly argue for naturalistic theories of the origin of matter, energy, life—and the entire cosmos. The argument that the existence and form of the cosmos is purely accidental and totally without external (divine) agency is indeed central to the dominant model of evolution.
On one point, however, Krattenmaker is certainly right: he argues that it is possible to believe in God and to affirm evolution. That is certainly true, and there is no shortage of theistic evolutionists who try to affirm both. But that affirmation requires a rejection of the dominant model of evolution in favor of some argument that God intervened or directed the process. The main problem with that proposal, from the scientific side, is that the theory of evolution as now taught in our major universities explicitly denies that possibility. Theistic evolutionists simply do not present the model of evolution that is supposedly “settled science.”
On the other hand, such a blending of theology and evolution also requires major theological alignments. There can be no doubt that evolution can be squared with belief in some deity, but not the God who revealed himself in the Bible, including the first chapters of Genesis. Krattenmaker asserts that “it is more than possible to accept the validity of evolution and believe in God’s role in creation at the same time.” Well, that is true with respect to some concept of God and some concept of creation and some version of evolution, but not the dominant theory of evolution and not the God who created the entire cosmos as the theater of his glory, and who created human beings as the distinct creature alone made in his image.
I am confident that Tom Krattenmaker fully intended to clarify the matter and to point to a way through the impasse. But his arguments do not clarify, they confuse. At the same time, his essay is one of the clearest catalysts for thinking about these issues to arrive in recent times in the major media. It represents an opportunity not to be missed.
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.
For some reason, this is a huge blindspot for the hardcore evos - that the information necessary for all the variation we see was ORIGINALLY THERE - not “added” by mutation or any other means.
Looking at the scientific theory (and evidence) for the creation of the Hawaiian Island chain (and the entire chain of what appear to be ex islands underwater to the West and North) is fascinating. What shocked us is how creative and marvelous the creation process is. Looking at the volcanic creation of an island with zero life, then how it was slowly taken over by life forms that eventually thrived was incredible. Seeing the manifestation of that process on the different islands is truly eye opening.
So, a dog has changed into....... A Dog.
Exactly....dog wasn’t changed. What changed was the expression of dog DNA for the significantly different environments.
Are you upset that I’m not buying into mutations???
As for mutations being the source of new, useful information...
Take this sentence and insert, delete, or swap any letter and then tell me that the amount of information contained therein has increased.
I agree. As a rule, when I break something, it isn’t better off afterwards. The same with mutations.
True. But those events are nothing compared to the incredible complexity of a single live cell. Also, those events follow the general trend of the physical universe - order tends to disorder.
To suggest the opposite, that a living cell could somehow form by accident and come to life is, as before, proof that people believe what they want to believe.
Even the unbelievable.
If you think selective breeding is proof of evolution, then you need to go back to the drawing board.
Dogs are still dogs, different ? yes, but most early attempts left them either dead or the inability to reproduce.
And BTW, these experiments were conducted, not in nature but by human intervention.
Seems to me scientists has changed their opinion much more in the last 2000 years than has the Christians, not sure about the religionists.
And the last i heard they were still trying to find a missing link that is not there, no doubt they will invent one.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.
—Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, (1981), p. 19.
If you think great variability built into the DNA is proof of an evolutionist, then I’ll share my drawing board with you. Yes. Dogs are still dogs.
But, Marmeduke is not Scooby-doo.
They created an entire pre-human societal structure from a pig’s tooth, so why not?
And Haeckel also falsified drawings of “embryonic recapitulation.” His claim was that human embryos evolve through the various animal groups on their way to being human. He drew animal embryos and claimed they were a state in fetal development. This was refuted about a century ago, but evolutionists keep putting that lie in “science” text books. This is also one of the lying arguments abortionists used, at least at one time, that women could murder their baby in the womb because it wasn’t a baby at that point, but some animal other than human.
But, of course, that baby was ALWAYS human.
Death certainly could have existed prior to adam.
As you say, there is very little details, the Bible indicates that God may have made Adam after the seventh day which would make him a separate creation than the man or rather men God made on the sixth day.
Which would explain the missing link, there is none.
I think we may be on the same page.
I personally believe evolutionary theory doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory, by their own definition.
I am a creationist.
Young earth, creationist.
I’ve done the math and nothing else makes any sense.
These verses are interesting in this regard:
Isa 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
Zec 12:1 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.
Psa 104:2 Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts black holes, as many are aware, but he also predicted something called a white hole. This can only appear at the beginning of the universe, and if one were near where the white hole originated, relativistic effects, meaning that speeds far greater than the speed of light would be possible.
So if the earth was near the point where the white hole originated, we would’ve seen the heavens stretch out like a curtain, at mindboggling speeds. Billions of years could elapse in space while only a day would’ve elapsed here. Maybe this sort of helps explain why these prophets said what they said.
In the Darwin view of humans as animals, what would cause us to stop practicing animal husbandry within our own species? Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game. Scientific data is well supported in animal husbandry. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.
Isaiah 40
22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
What is a circle? O
Roger that. And Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Babykilling, was big into eugenics. She really wanted to get rid of all the “undesirables,” as she called them. There’s even a record of her speaking at a KKK rally. I wonder why there’s so many PP “clinics” in black neighborhoods?
Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.
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