A General Statement of Belief

[pyat]

I think arguing against evolution in the name of God is akin to arguing against meteorology.

Assuming that God makes weather (or at least guides the systems that create the conditions we regard as weather) why is it that no one decries meteorologists for describing or attempting to predict the way those systems work? After all, meteorology is an imperfect science with a great many inaccuracies, proof of man's arrogance in trying to determine the mind of God.

(Of course, there is scriptural support for meteorology in Matthew 16:1-3, so, okay, maybe that's a bad example.)

Anyway, my point is that evolution does not deny the existence of God, a god, many gods, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, nor does it provide any particular explanation for the creation of the universe. It's a description of a process - you can accept God as the motivator of that process without denying his existence.

I understand why Biblical literalists and Young Earth people argue against evolution. I don't agree with the foundation of their arguments, but I understand that they must argue against evolution as a "logical" result of their belief. What baffles me are those who deny "macroevolution" (the creation of new species) while happily accepting adaptation or "microevolution." They regard their position as enlightened - and there are certainly a few scientists who take issue with macroevolution and who level serious scientific criticisms against it. However, the average person with this view often has totally outrageous ideas about what evolution actually entails. You get nonsense like Kirk Cameron and the Banana, or worse.

(At his site, Kirk Cameron claims that "bypassing the intellect" is the only way to convert people. Then his next video uses logical arguments to convince people that evolution is false. The arguments are false and based on crap, but they are definitely not trying to "bypass" the intellect of their victims. Kirk Cameron needs to be beaten up by a tag-team of Jesuits and 18th century logicians, or something. Go on - watch the video about evolution. They ambush college kids and present them with straw men arguments and misleading logic. One person is asked to point to a transitional species, and can't. And, since a 20-year-old kid can't name a transitional species, they must not exist! Hello? Archaeopteryx? They present anti-evolution quotes from such scientific luminaries as Malcolm Muggeridge. Malcolm Muggeridge. The satirist/journalist. It's like trying to debunk quantum mechanics by quoting Andy Rooney. The whole video is laughable and frightening.)

Finally, there's simply a class of Christian (or Hindu, or Muslim, or what-have-you) that seems to think that there are mysteries we aren't meant to know. They react to theories and ideas as though they were somehow unseating or diminishing God. This has been happening for a long time.

The question you have to ask yourself is this - "What kind of crummy God/god/godess/gods do you worship, that our discoveries about divine creation can somehow threaten or diminish Him/Her/It/Them?"

Biblical literalism is a thin defense, especially if you happen to be Protestant. Martin Luther stripped out entire books because he disagreed with them. You may argue that he was divinely inspired to do so, but then you must accept that God allowed Christians to use a false text as their sole guide for 1500 years. You have to assume that the original synods and councils that selected the books for inclusion in the Bible were not divinely inspired - and in fact diabolically misled.

Or, you can be Catholic (or Orthodox) and believe that Luther was fooled by the devil! No matter what sect or denomination a Christian hails from, they must believe that one version of the Bible is divinely inspired, and the other an abomination. Alternately, they can accept that both Luther and the bishops were simply acting according to their human interpretation of the Divine Will and came to different conclusions, presumably because the Divine permitted it. This somewhat takes the shine off Biblical literalism.

One of my favorite quotes about this whole matter comes from Charles McKay's 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

"Some peculiar custom may disgrace the people amongst whom it flourishes; yet men of a little wisdom refuse to aid in its extirpation, merely because it is old. Thus it is with human belief, and thus it is we bring shame upon our own intellect.

To this cause may be added another, also mentioned by Lord Bacon -- a misdirected zeal in matters of religion, which induces so many to decry a newly-discovered truth, because the Divine records contain no allusion to it, or because, at first sight, it appears to militate, not against religion, but against some obscure passage which has never been fairly interpreted...

... Who does not remember the outcry against the science of geology, which has hardly yet subsided? Its professors were impiously and absurdly accused of designing to 'hurl the Creator from his throne.' They were charged with sapping the foundations of religion, and of propping atheism by the aid of a pretended science.

The very same principle which leads to the rejection of the true, leads to the encouragement of the false."

And that's what I think.

Comments

[hillarygayle.livejournal.com]

You.
Are.
So.
Cool.

That is all.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe I rock a little...

[hawksley.livejournal.com]

we often have this debate in my channel. many good times are had.

-s

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Who wins? :)

[mangoflush.livejournal.com]

There is room for Christians to accept evolution as a valid theory. They have every right to believe that God created the world, but they could accept that evolution was God's way of doing so.

That's how I look at it.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but a lot of Christians don't. This vexes me.

[mangoflush.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

My personal theroy is that because most Christians, as I understand it, are so dead set on the bible being the word of God, that anything that directly contradicts that and has sufficient evidence to support it (more than the bible, anyway) is instantly reviled because they can't handle being wrong.

Of course I could be wrong, you know.

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

That's because many people of many religions (not just Christianity though its gained a noxious amount of steam in born-again Christian streams in North America) need their religion to be something that comforts them rather than challanges them, something that makes them feel big and proud rather than small and humble, and something that lets them make an us to stand agains the them.

So, pretty much the opposite of what IMNHO religion should be about.

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

It vexes me, too, being that I know plenty of Christians who believe in evolution, and that the whole 'On the 6th day' is just a romantic summary of what happened over billions of years.

I don't believe in god, but if I did, mine is a chaotic god, boredly poking at stars, making them collide, and then watching as things evolve, or not, then moving to the next galaxy and doing the same.

:D

[pyat.livejournal.com]

LIke the wizards in Science of Discworld? :)

[tanela.livejournal.com]

It's difficult not to believe in evolution and have an intense interest in what genetics can do for modern domestic animals. :)

I do have a tendency to push off new scientific theories and ideas regarding the vast past and future beyond the tiny generational human lifespans, not because I think they can't be true because there are people and books that insist otherwise for no good reason, but because I don't really care if they are true or not. For me it's not so much a matter of "How dare you say that people came from monkeys?", it's "Why should I care that people came from monkeys? People are people now and they have enough things to worry about, discovering how to live in the world as it is. Tell me discovering our monkey ancestors holds the cure for cancer and I'll start caring."

I think I'm selfish that way. If I can't see any given theory's immediate effect on my current self and my family and even my spirituality, I ignore it with ease. I do think that a deity capable of forming a world is going to present a lot of questions that mortal minds are incapable of ever comprehending. I don't think that's a reason to stop asking and finding answers to the questions that do have understandable explanations. And I do love to think about those questions and toss them over in my head and imagine possibilities. It just means that most of the time, when it comes down to it, I can still sleep at night because I really don't care what the answers are. :P

In debates I end up one of those infuriating people who just sits there and says "So?" and never offers anything useful. :P

[kesmun.livejournal.com]

"Why should I care that people came from monkeys? People are people now and they have enough things to worry about, discovering how to live in the world as it is. Tell me discovering our monkey ancestors holds the cure for cancer and I'll start caring."

Dingdingding! That's pretty much what my attitude is. "There could very well have been a being that I choose to call God that created the earth in six literal twenty-four-hour days. There could have been a process that took billions of years that wasn't guided by any intelligence at all. It could be some combination thereof or neither or something in between. It doesn't significantly affect my life today. We're here now. Let's learn to live with each other now."

My Take

[awolf.livejournal.com]

My biggest concern is people who buy into pseudoscience because it supports what they want to believe. This sort of gulliability and illogical mindset is an extremely poor witness for what they believe.

Not everyone who believes that humans aren't the product of evolution is like this, however. Some people don't believe in many of the principles of evolution that can't be directly shown, but they don't try to "prove" their points with false science, either. This is more palatable to me, and I have some faiths in this realm, myself. However, it's a riskier stance, because science could one day prove those fanciful beliefs wrong more conclusively than it is currently able to. You can go ahead and believe that the mascons under the moon are made of chocolate pudding if you like, but be prepared for future evidence to add more weight against that belief.

Some domains will always be outside the bounds of scientific inquiry, because their propositions are inherently unfalsifiable; the existence of a deity of any sort, the purpose of living, and quite possibly elements of consciousness and the mind, all will be forever inscrutable. When scientists try to disprove these beliefs (Hawking is guilty of this) they become equally as childish and illogical as so-called "creationist science" is.

So from whence does this problem originate? Western religion is schizophrenic, Joseph Campbell suggests. On one hand, we are expected to form a personal relationship with god. On the other, we are expected to follow an impersonal set of rules. The conflict created by these two seemingly incompatible foundations of faith has fueled countless wars, fascinating artistic expressions, and amazing scientific discoveries. But at the end of the day, the problem remains: those of an authoritarian bent cannot follow religion unless the rules are absolute and unchanging, even though this is not the case in any religion; they must therefore cling to the folly that the mythology inherent in this tradition is real. I think it's a weak sort of faith to be so dependent upon falsehood, but we live in a culture--much like the more fundamentalist Islamic states--that supports it whole-hog.

The fascinating thing? Nobody really believes stories like Noah's Ark, other than children...those who claim to believe such stories, deep down in the back of their minds, know them to be false. They pretend to believe because they are desparate to. They seek anything which can provide them with proof because they NEED proof to fix their lack of faith.

Trickster

Re: My Take

[tanela.livejournal.com]

Some domains will always be outside the bounds of scientific inquiry, because their propositions are inherently unfalsifiable

Those propositions are my favourite.

The fascinating thing? Nobody really believes stories like Noah's Ark, other than children...those who claim to believe such stories, deep down in the back of their minds, know them to be false.

I think the only people who know any given myth to be false are the people actually engaged in the disproving. Geographical layer dating (to fix on one of many logical problems with the story and ignore others) is as much a myth to me as the Ark story itself, because I have no experience with it myself, only what other people say. I certainly haven't been on a personal expedition to see for myself that layers of dirt across the globe are never at any given depth consistent the world over. For me, geography is as much "what other people say is true" as any ludicrously illogical myth. I'm not saying science is wrong. That's stupid. I'm just saying I'm not a geographer.

Now any given person could come up to me and present evidence that they insist is true, but unless they give me a good reason to care and discover the truth for myself, I'll take the good I can out of what they and anyone else has to say regarding things that are entirely out of the realm of my experience and get on with the other completely separate things that interest me a lot more than geography.

Of course, it's difficult to be individualist relying on empiricism and argue anything to be truth.

Re: My Take

[awolf.livejournal.com]

I think the only people who know any given myth to be false are the people actually engaged in the disproving.

I disagree completely. I think the most ardent supporters of an idea are often engaged in zealous discourse precisely because they need to convince themselves of its rectitude.

Likewise, the loudest mouthes trying to disprove a myth are the ones who worry that it might be true.

And as a final quibble, you can't "disprove" a myth. :)

Geographical layer dating (to fix on one of many logical problems with the story and ignore others) is as much a myth to me as the Ark story itself, because I have no experience with it myself, only what other people say.

I don't think making a rational judgment is merely about selecting which authority or process to side with. There's a scale of believability; some leaps of faith are more profound than others. Saying that man was sculpted from mud and woman from a rib is MUCH more of a stretch based on observable evidence than to say man evolved from animal ancestors, and any attempt to find observable evidence that agrees with a belief that isn't supported by what we see in nature is a more heavily biased attempt. People who do this make their faith look weak and arbitrary.

Also, evolution doesn't rest on the geological scale; it is a composition of hundreds of separate lines of evidence. People don't chiefly usu the geological scale because they are desparate to believe that some dusty old stories are true.

(Note that nowhere here am I saying that man actually wasn't sculpted from mud!)

Trickster

Re: My Take

[tanela.livejournal.com]

I think I was taking more issue with the idea that nobody believes stories except children. I think I can have as much faith that Noah's story happened to some degree as I can believe in anything else possibly metaphorical, relatively illogical and completely theoretical. I'm not saying some guy definitely crammed two of every animal into a giant boat and they all lived through a global flood long enough to repopulate the earth afterwards without succumbing to genetics as we know it or any of a million other things. I'm just saying, for all I know, it could have happened. Maybe at the time such a thing might have happened, every human on the boat had six hearts and the planet was entirely covered in mold.

I don't mean to defend ignorance, although I guess it seems like that's what I'm doing.

I don't believe Noah's story as it's recounted in the sense of "oh, it must have been true," but I believe that someone had a reason to tell it and I have to figure out if I can get anything out of it for myself.

My take is that at some point physical history falls out of human knowledge and into the realm of possibilities. Yes, there's a certain sense in which observable evidence makes something seem more likely, but until we can observe much more clearly, especially regarding the distant past, I'm hesitant to say anything outside the observable is actually beyond the realm of possibility.

I just don't like the idea that I'm not allowed to believe that, sometime long before anyone can possibly go back and check the source, a guy repopulated the planet with a giant boat full of animals (maybe it was a tiny boat and there were only six animals on it and evolution takes care of the rest, har) that should have died after a global flood, simply because it could not possibly happen here and now.

Re: My Take

[awolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that adults can believe. You'd be amazed at some of the unscientific things that I believe! :) I just think that people who try to "prove" what they believe are, ironically, uncertain.

In other words, those who truly believe don't need empirical proof. That's all I'm saying. There are people who believe in Noah's Ark that don't try to find it on Google Maps.

As for non-literal interpretations of mythology, those don't conflict with science at all.

Trickster

Re: My Take

[tanela.livejournal.com]

Ahh, that makes sense. :D I agree that desperate attempts to prove things that are mythic at essence is pretty silly and definitely suggests an inherent lack of faith. :)

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

Er, I mean, "Good on ya." :)

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

And, since a 20-year-old kid can't name a transitional species, they must not exist! Hello? Archaeopteryx?

The Asian snakehead fish is even better for this purpose; a living fish that you can actually watch moving across land and breathing air for extended periods (assuming you can still find one).

[freifraufischer.livejournal.com]

They don't argue against microevolution because they can't disprove the validity of that evidence. They argue against macroevolution because they think they can poke holes in that part of it. Except that there is no such thing as macroevolution as a scientific doctrin. They also fundamentally misunderstand the fossil record and the nature of genetic change. They cry that evolution isn't right because we can't find middle stages... assuming incorrectly that there would have to be a middle stage in evolution. The punctuated equalibrium arguement of modern evolutionary genetics says that change happens radically, and not gradually.

But than again most of these people don't realize that evolution has "evolved" in the years since Charles Darwin and are still arguing against Origin of Species.

They don't know enough about real evolutionary theory to argue about it, so they make up their own version of evolution to knock down.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

There's really no such thing as a "scientific doctrine", beyond "Thou Shalt Not Alter Data To Fit Thy Model" and perhaps "Thou Shalt Not Put Thy Trust In Results that Are Not Reproducible".

[freifraufischer.livejournal.com]

semantics. Either way macroevolution as a seperate process isn't a scientific arguement.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I have this nasty feeling that there's more to it than the surface argument.

I mean, taking the Bible as not the literal word of G-d is ludicrously easy and doesn't screw up being faithful. And if you're going to be faithful, then evolution can't break your idea of an infinite, incredibly powerful deity - after all, what seems more impressive, a god who works subtly through millions of years, or a god who goes "here kid, have a chicken"?

At the base level, I think there's a lot of fear that there might be randomness in the universe - that sometimes things happen because they happen. Same reason that people have a hard time accepting atheism makes it difficult for them to accept the implications that G-d is not constantly steering, or that G-d being in control doesn't quite synch up with their ideas of being in control.

So what else? Well... if you can dictate to others and yourself exactly how your god created the world, then it's nothing to exactly dictate what the nature of G-d is. Instead of being this scary entity who might not be your exact definition, it backs you up in knowing that you and only you - not the Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Mormons, Protestants, Catholics, whatever - have the only proper knowledge of G-d.

And, it's part of the overall scapegoating and political movement. You get your people so hopped up on the idea that The Evil Secular Outsider Liberals are preaching evolution among other things, that it plays into villainizing them, and promoting your advancement in worldly power. The issue that evolution does not deny G-d, and that lying about evolution is a far greater denial of G-d, never enters into it.

[girlydoll.livejournal.com]

I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, I believe in evolution.

I can't say we EVOLVED from monkeys, we might have evolved from a winged toad for all I know, but I do believe in evolution. First off and if for no other reason, we have found skeletons of "humans" long since past that don't look exactly like us, but are definatly related to us and probably have relatives walking around today.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That's a good way to look it!

You rock.

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan)