Posted on 12/18/2004 5:56:30 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Professional danger comes in many flavors, and while Richard Colling doesn't jump into forest fires or test experimental jets for a living, he does do the academic's equivalent: He teaches biology and evolution at a fundamentalist Christian college.
At Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., he says, "as soon as you mention evolution in anything louder than a whisper, you have people who aren't very happy." And within the larger conservative-Christian community, he adds, "I've been called some interesting names."
But those experiences haven't stopped Prof. Colling -- who received a Ph.D. in microbiology, chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene and is himself a devout conservative Christian -- from coming out swinging. In his new book, "Random Designer," he writes: "It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods" when they say evolutionary theory is "in crisis" and claim that there is widespread skepticism about it among scientists. "Such statements are blatantly untrue," he argues; "evolution has stood the test of time and considerable scrutiny."
His is hardly the standard scientific defense of Darwin, however. His central claim is that both the origin of life from a primordial goo of nonliving chemicals, and the evolution of species according to the processes of random mutation and natural selection, are "fully compatible with the available scientific evidence and also contemporary religious beliefs." In addition, as he bluntly told me, "denying science makes us [Conservative Christians] look stupid."
Prof. Colling is one of a small number of conservative Christian scholars who are trying to convince biblical literalists that Darwin's theory of evolution is no more the work of the devil than is Newton's theory of gravity. They haven't picked an easy time to enter the fray. Evolution is under assault from Georgia to Pennsylvania and from Kansas to Wisconsin, with schools ordering science teachers to raise questions about its validity and, in some cases, teach "intelligent design," which asserts that only a supernatural tinkerer could have produced such coups as the human eye. According to a Gallup poll released last month, only one-third of Americans regard Darwin's theory of evolution as well supported by empirical evidence; 45% believe God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.
Usually, the defense of evolution comes from scientists and those trying to maintain the separation of church and state. But Prof. Colling has another motivation. "People should not feel they have to deny reality in order to experience their faith," he says. He therefore offers a rendering of evolution fully compatible with faith, including his own. The Church of the Nazarene, which runs his university, "believes in the biblical account of creation," explains its manual. "We oppose a godless interpretation of the evolutionary hypothesis."
It's a small opening, but Prof. Colling took it. He finds a place for God in evolution by positing a "random designer" who harnesses the laws of nature he created. "What the designer designed is the random-design process," or Darwinian evolution, Prof. Colling says. "God devised these natural laws, and uses evolution to accomplish his goals." God is not in there with a divine screwdriver and spare parts every time a new species or a wondrous biological structure appears.
Unlike those who see evolution as an assault on faith, Prof. Colling finds it strengthens his own. "A God who can harness the laws of randomness and chaos, and create beauty and wonder and all of these marvelous structures, is a lot more creative than fundamentalists give him credit for," he told me. Creating the laws of physics and chemistry that, over the eons, coaxed life from nonliving molecules is something he finds just as awe inspiring as the idea that God instantly and supernaturally created life from nonlife.
Prof. Colling reserves some of his sharpest barbs for intelligent design, the idea that the intricate structures and processes in the living world -- from exquisitely engineered flagella that propel bacteria to the marvels of the human immune system -- can't be the work of random chance and natural selection. Intelligent-design advocates look at these sophisticated components of living things, can't imagine how evolution could have produced them, and conclude that only God could have.
That makes Prof. Colling see red. "When Christians insert God into the gaps that science cannot explain -- in this case how wondrous structures and forms of life came to be -- they set themselves up for failure and even ridicule," he told me. "Soon -- and it's already happening with the flagellum -- science is going to come along and explain" how a seemingly miraculous bit of biological engineering in fact could have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms. And that will leave intelligent design backed into an ever-shrinking corner.
It won't be easy to persuade conservative Christians of this; at least half of them believe that the six-day creation story of Genesis is the literal truth. But Prof. Colling intends to try.
And the scientific evidence for this "soul" thing is... what? It enters into astronomy and biology... where?
computations - of what, travel of a body through frictionless space. I played league billiards. I know what happens in an environment that includes friction, you're dealing in one that excludes it. I'm also aware that in a friction environment, eventually the bodies would stop spinning altogether. This presents another problem all it's own. Again, ya'll are stating this stuff as fact. The burden of proof is yours, not mine.
Oh, right, other people's belief systems and actual circumstances aren't your concern. You just say whatever you want from inference with no regard to the impact your yap running causes. Right. Cause you're above such considerations.. Apparently it never ocurred to you that you might one day have to answer for what you do to others.
My prior isn't enough, sorry, this is just beyond the pale. It's bad enough that you're so cavalier about yourself but you actually expect to get by with that line of reasoning given the prior one? You need your freakin head examined. I'm sorry, I'm done with you. Cause if you actually expect people to be that stupid for you and you're that careless, you need a whoopin and some serious correction on your attitudes.. at least need to discover a topic called ETHICS. Later, I'm off to the store. Perhaps while I'm gone you might discover what evidentiary proof means and perhaps go one better and learn what authority is - maybe even logic. One might hope you could develope a responsible nature toward others as well; but, let's not go overboard. Getting you out of the ranks of a Stalin would be a good starting point. "I said it, you have to believe it" isn't science so you might discover what science IS.
Geez, someone asks you for evidence of a 'soul' and you go ballistic. Guess you don't like being exposed as someone without support for your positions.
I wasn't sure what I believed about the first chapters until I did a in depth study on Genesis>>
that is interesting. I was more sure of what I believed re: cosmology BEFORE i did an in depth study in Genesis. I spent the summer of 1981 at L'Abri ( Francis Schaeffer's retreat/commune/study center) in Huemoz, Switzerland. Before that, I had done some reading in Hebrew re: Genesis, and had studied it from a systematic theology perspective and OT biblical theology. I gruaduated from Westminster Seminary, but it was reading Meredith Kline at L'Abri that made me think "you know, there really is more than one way to look at this." Before that time, I was a devoted ICR kind of guy, believing that Henry Morris and Duane Gish had said all there was to be said on the issue.
It was only when I looked at the text itself and let it speak for itself that I began to see that scriptural integrity did not demand that I buy in to the whole ICR package. I guess I read and indexed everything they wrote up until about 1987 or so.
To answer your question: Yes, I believe in a global flood.
Please, tell me which direction is the right one! I don't want to offend the Big Bang! [Knees knocking!]
So assertions (e.g: "The solar system had a chaotic early history") with data (e.g: craters, asteroid belt, jigsaw-puzzled gas giant moons) behind them are bad because some kind of INFERENCE was obviously used to get from the data to the conclusion. Assertions with no data (e.g: "People have souls") are not only preferable but cannot be challenged at all without sending Havoc into rabies mode.
The Moon is a meteor magnet. Earth is protected by the Hand of God from such ravagings. Those few impact craters we have only occurred because the Almighty was distracted at that moment, probably creating a brand-new species or something.
It's apparent you don't know anything about law either, or you'd know what res ipsa loquitor meant, and that it applies to VadeRetro's point.
First off, you are definitely not an IDer, having espoused a belief in YEC. Secondly, your assertions and word games are not rebuttals; what you lack is evidence.
Not SO...
Jesus came to make ALL religion obsolete, and did...
How many religious fundamentalists are out there..?
Theres millions to be hornswoggled, just waiting..
Two things wrong with this. First, the conservation of angular momentum says that you cannot change the orbit of any of the planets without affecting the system as a whole. It does not address the direction of the orbits or the rotational direction of any individual planet. This is why the notion of Venus or Earth ping-ponging around the Solar System is so wrong.
Secondly, the Big Bang has nothing to do with the rotation of the Solar System -- the latter was set by the spin of the accretion disk from which the Solar System sprang, and that was determined from the supernova-enriched nebula from which the accretion disk formed.
Oh, and by the way, before you claim that no one has ever seen a solar system forming from an accretion disk, please do a little research.
BTW, the arguments presented at that website were used by the Church for centuries to deny a heliocentric model of the Solar System -- and they are used by the modern Flat Earth Society, too.
The guy doesn't understand - has no concept of proof or evidentiary value. He states something as a fact then thinks because he could infer it, it's true and when called on it, he is more bothered by proof of a soul than by his vacancy of any reality with regard to proof.. Yeah, I'm more than a bit mad; cause you poor excuses are seeing that trash taught in the schools with more impact than you know and I have neices and nephews that are going to have to deal with this pack of fraud soon. It's a travesty and you morons can't even see it. There's room to believe there was fraud in the election, the vote was close, therfore Bush cheated. I infered that. Absent any other evidentiary support, you can't prove me wrong. You can postulate any number of outcomes; but, you can niether prove nor disprove my hypothesis and I get to teach it as true. How's that. Figure maybe if I hit you where you believe it might register - nah.
Pointing out that your claims about phsyics are wrong is not an ad hominem attack, but thank you for playing.
A third fallacy is their refusal to plainly state or acknowledge their presuppositions. The fundamentalist and evangelical Christian believes that the statements of the Bible are true, when understood in their historical and grammatical context, and that, while acknowledging, as Paul does in Romans 1, that man can learn from observing nature, those statements are a superior form of knowledge than human observations. This belief is plainly stated by the fundamentalist or evangelical.
Evolutionists who criticize the creation scientists who try to disprove evolution from a strictly observational standpoint have a valid point, however. There is a great deal of evidence that supports the position of an old universe, such as the distance of the stars from the earth, measured by light years, the fossil evidence that suggests that life forms became more complex over time, and the apparent age of geological formation, based on the half life of certain elements. There are, of course, some facts that evolutionists have a difficult time explaining, such as the apparent lack of evidence of any random mutation that contributes to the survival of a species and the difficulty in finding "linking" fossils showing the development of Species B from Species A. However, the bottom line is that the universe appears old, according to much data.
(The main differences between fundamentalism and evangelicalism include the latter's acceptance of "lower", or textual criticism of the family of manuscripts from which Erasmus compiled his Textus Receptus, the source of the KJV, Luther's German Bible, and other Reformation era Bibles, and the former's belief in "secondary separation", i.e., cultural, educational, and social contact, from unbelievers. Both groups support Biblical inerrancy and infallibility and come to the same conclusions regarding creationism. John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul, in the evangelical camp, are on the same page as John Rice and Bob Jones, in the fundamentalist camp. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the term "conservative Christian" to designate both groups.)
OTOH, the evolutionists, particularly those who support biological evolution, so-called macroevolution, deny that they start with presuppositions, but claim that they derive their beliefs objectively. There are two basic camps of evolutionists: those who deny or doubt the existence of a god like the one described in Scripture and those who would reconcile the predominant findings of science with the existence of a powerful, omniscient Creator.
A principal set of beliefs held by many, though not all, evolutionists is that the physical universe and the development of species occurred at random. They observe such things as the distance light travels from celestial objects, the fossil record, the DNA of different species, etc., and conclude that these events occurred without intelligent guidance. They are atheists, agnostics, or deists who deny the existence of an all-powerful and personal God. While some evolutionists in this camp, like the late Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan, were not reluctant to state their atheism, by and large they do not reflect on the extent to which their presuppositions guide their conclusions. Such people observe data which seems to indicate that, say, all members of the canine family developed from a single set of ancestors who lived, say, 20 million years ago. Yet they fail to recognize that their non-belief in or skepticism concerning a designing intelligence, and not their observation, leads them to the conclusion that random chance and/or spontaneous mutation caused the development of wolves, coyotes, dogs, foxes, etc., from the initial canid ancestor. They make the error of affirming the consequent.
The position of this camp of evolutionists is that of naturalism, i.e., that there exists no higher truth than natural science. In their view, there is no better method than the scientific method for judging the claims of science, and there is neither any need nor any place for a "first philosophy," such as metaphysics or epistemology, that could stand behind and justify science or the scientific method. However, in adhering to such a position, they are working on a presupposition, that natural science alone is the highest truth. Their position is an unprovable axiom, as much as is that of the conservative Christian. The second group of evolutionists are those who believe in the existence of an all-powerful God who essentially used evolution as His chosen instrument to create the universe. Of course, they work under a presupposition as much as do the other set of evolutionists and the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian. The guided evolutionists come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Some are liberal, neo-orthodox, and neo-evangelical Protestants. Others come from the pro-Vatican II mainstream and left wing of Catholicism. (I presume Eastern Orthodoxy has similar divisions regarding how the universe came to be, as do such groups like Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, etc.) These camps seek to hold to the position that there is some or much truth in Scripture, or in the Catholic case, the Magisterium. However, they hold to the presupposition that when a position in Scripture (or tradition) is confronted with physical evidence that points to a contradictory proposition, such that dinosaurs, modern birds, and modern mammals could not be created on the same day (the Hebrew word yom, which is used over 900 times in the Protestant/Jewish Old Testament, denotes something like a 24 hour day, not a very extended time period), the latter should hold the higher value and the former position should be re-evaluated.
The professed Christians in the guided evolution camp attempt, sometimes valiantly, to synthesize the two contradictory poles of Biblical positions and those of mainstream science. However, they run into an inherent problem: if Scripture is less than true, how does one determine that any portion of it is true? How can Genesis 1-11 be allegorical or mythological, but, say, John 3:16 not be so? If God did not create man by fiat and the Adam and Eve story is fiction, how could the human race have developed the universal sinfulness Paul notes in Romans 3:23 that required the Substitutionary Atonement of the Son of God as the means to pay the debt of sinners? This camp has not presented a satisfactory answer.
This is as much a Catholic as it is a Protestant problem. The Catholic Church holds to the position that the body of tradition (church doctors and fathers) and Papal pronouncements ex cathedra are the lens through which the Bible must be interpreted. While Popes Pius XII and John Paul II issued letters, about 50 years apart, that acknowledged the scientific evidence supporting evolution, they did not authoritatively teach that God used this means to create the universe. Catholics face the same problem as do Protestants: why is one plain teaching of the Bible (fiat creationism) false or allegorical while another (the Substitutionary Atonement) is not. The fact that anti-Vatican II, traditionalist Catholics recognize the problem and thus are creationists is evidence that the Catholic Church has not escaped the Protestant dilemma.
I am not sufficiently familiar with Judaism, Islam, or Asian religious systems like Buddhism or Hinduism to comment on how these faiths deal with the issue of evolution vs. creation.
Another group of theistic evolutionists are scientists who came to the conclusion that a higher intelligence guided the creation of the physical universe and the origin of species. This is the "intelligent design" group, including men like Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski. Unlike the creationists, these men have credibility in mainstream academia. However, their method of debunking unguided evolution is similar to what those in the creation science camp use. They find scientific evidence to disprove a particular element of evolutionist theory, for example, the impossibility of spontaneous generation of the formation of the simplest forms of life from primordial chemicals. Mainstream pro-random evolutionist scientists may regard intelligent design advocates as creation scientists after "a shave, a bath, and clean clothes." They are hated by the random evolutionists as much as leftists despise ex-leftists turned conservative or libertarian more they do "cradle conservatives." Indeed, some random evolutionists have designed their own conspiracy theories, attempting to link intelligent design advocates to conservative Christians with the guilt by association or implication method tried and tested by such noteworthies as Robert Welch, Lyndon LaRouche, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore.
However, the fact remains that they have not refuted the intelligent design advocates' position on the irreducible complexity of life or macroevolution. It is worthy to note that non-believing evolutionists from Charles Darwin to Stephen Jay Gould have acknowledged gaps and weaknesses in evolutionary theory.
However, the intelligent design advocates are themselves amiss at times in acknowledging that they, too, have presuppositions. If, for example, Philip Johnson argues against naturalism, is he not by implication advocating the existence of a supernatural realm, specifically, that an all powerful God exists? As much as anyone else in this debate, the intelligent design supporters have presuppositions. The fact that they acknowledge the existence of a Creator and even His goodness is, as Paul argued over 1900 years ago in Romans 1, something that may be derived from observation of nature. Yet this is not enough from the Christian standpoint, as Jesus noted when He stated that even the devil believes in the existence of God.
The fourth fallacy of the evolutionists on this thread is the ad hominem remark. Below is a sample of the invective thrown at conservative Christians by people whose political beliefs are presumably conservative or libertarian:
Teaching complex numbers to Fundamentalists (inter alia) isn't easy either.
Doctor Stochastic
Militant ignorance.
VadeRetro
Hey who doesnt like to read comic books?
RightWingNilla
Teaching science to creationists? Better to teach algebra to a donkey.
Central Scrutiniser
Clearly there are a number of creationists who don't care about reality.
Dimensio
The fallacy in the title is that you can't teach fundamentalist, be they Christian or Moslem, any thing. The rind surrounding their brains prevents entry of any knowledge from unapproved sources
bert
these threads also show that not all Conservatives are scientifically-illiterate bohunks (I don't think most creationists are Slavic or Magyar!) mired in the dark ages.
Junior
Were "blacks" or "African-Americans" substituted for "fundamentalists" or "creationists," their rantings would be seen for what they are: bigotry. They would likley be banned from posting. Dr. Stochastic, Vade Retro, RightWingNilla, Central Scrutinizer, Dimensio, bert, and Junior are bigots. Were their arguments stronger, they would be not need to resort to ad hominem attacks. Nor can they use unjustified statements and ad hominems made by creationists as an excuse. I believe that, irrespective of one's metaphysical views, the statement that two wrongs don't make a right is valid.
You mention Stalin. Stalin was an authority. Which is a more reliable guide to truth: authority or evidence? Which is more reliable evidence: witness or replicable experiment?
Never tested the theory have you. It doesn't speak to orbit of planetary bodys, it's a general principal. line the inside of a centrifuge with spheres and cap it. Spin it up, pull the top and note the action of the spheres, they launch out spinning in the same angular motion as the centrifuge. That is the conservation - whatever is launched out carries the same angular direction as what launched it. In a frictionless environment, this will be unaffected and unchanged over time.
In the case of encountering friction, the spin should come to a halt. That is your problem. You have retrograde moons, planets, galaxies, etc. Gotta account for that somehow or the big bang is nothing but a big dud. And you guys know that.
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