Dennis Venema Videos on Being an Evolutionary Creationist

In his post on Focus on the Family's "Truth" Project, Steve Martin had a link to some videos done by Dennis Venema on how a Christian can accept evolution. Dennis teaches biology at Trinity Wesleyan University and was faced with a situation where his church began to use the "Truth Project." He felt that he needed to respond, so he gave a series of lectures on evolution. He has graciously posted these to YouTube here.

There are eight of them and I would encourage you to look at all of them. Here is the first one.



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Focus on the Family and the Truth Project

Steve Martin over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, has written a post about the new Truth Project that is being initiated by Focus on the Family. It is a call to "speak the truth in love." He writes:

Focus on the Family is promoting their “Truth Project” to churches and small groups. A quick look at the lesson overview shows that, ironically, the Truth Project doesn’t seem to put much stock in truth when it comes to science (see lesson 5). For example, this lesson states that “Darwinian theory transforms science from the honest investigation of nature into a vehicle for propagating a godless philosophy”. Completely untrue.

Daily we run across a creationist who has no clue about the fossil record spouting nonsense. What do we, as Christians do about it? Well, I write this blog, hoping it will reach out to people that are curious, questioning or searching. Steve says that maybe that is not enough:

Given what has been said above, I would like to propose a guideline for when we as ECs should NOT remain silent. When either 1) a Christian organization in which we participate or 2) our local Church officially promote anti-evolutionary views, I believe that we must speak up. In this instance, we must “speak the truth in love” and provide the message that:

a) the scientific evidence for common descent is massive
b) the acceptance of biological evolution is compatible with an evangelical expression of the Christian faith

For us to remain silent in these circumstances would be a disservice to the gospel. It would be unloving to our brothers and sisters who are being told that their faith rests on a specific view of science that is demonstrably false.

If you have followed this blog for any period of time, you know that I have been leaning the same direction. My problem is that I have come, increasingly, to view the young earth creation model as a radical misinterpretation of the scriptures. I have, however, tempered on my thinking that it might be a modern-day heresy.

I just had a long conversation with my boss about the concept of heresy and his perspective (and I see the wisdom of it) is that as long as a core teaching of scripture is not being violated (think creeds, here) it is not heresy. Different interpretations of Genesis fall in to this category, since the omnipotence and immanence of God is not being debated. However, for me to say that someone who thinks that the world was created 6 000 years ago is not saved is clearly wrong. But I have seen people use that belief as an article of faith and salvation. I will speak up about that!

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Speciation and Human Intervention

Brandon Keim of Wired has a story about the blackcap warbler, a species that is slowly splitting in two. He writes:

Blackcap migration routes are genetically determined, and the population studied by Schaefer has historically wintered in Spain. Those that flew north couldn’t find food in barren winter landscapes, and perished. But during the last half-century, people in the U.K. put so much food out for birds that north-flying blackcaps could survive.

About 30 percent of blackcaps from southern Germany and Austria now migrate to the United Kingdom, shaving 360 miles from their traditional, 1,000-mile Mediterranean voyage. Because they’ve less distance to travel, they tend to arrive home first in the summertime and to live in prime forest-edge spots. All this makes the U.K. migrants more likely to mate with each other than with their old-fashioned brethren.

From these groupings, subtle differences are emerging. The U.K. birds tend to have rounded wings, which sacrifice long-distance flying power for increased maneuverability. Now that they don’t need wide bills to eat Mediterranean olives in winter, their bills are becoming narrower and better-suited to summer insect diets. They’re also slightly darker.

These are the first steps toward anagenetic speciation, a process that has been observed in other species¹. As the authors point out, this is fascinating not just because it may be an example of speciation in action, but that it is speciation influenced by humans.


¹Ayala, F. J., M. L. Tracey, D. Hedgecock & R. C. Richmond (1974) Genetic differentiation during the speciation process in Drosophila. Evolution, 576-592.

Pfosser, M., G. Jakubowsky, P. M. Schlüter, T. Fer, H. Kato, T. F. Stuessy & B. Y. Sun (2005) Evolution of Dystaenia takesimana (Apiaceae), endemic to Ullung Island, Korea. Plant Systematics and Evolution, 256, 159-170.

Stebbins, G. L. & D. L. Hartl (1988) Comparative evolution: latent potentials for anagenetic advance. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 85, 5141-5145.

Stuessy, T. F., G. Jakubowsky, R. S. Gómez, M. Pfosser, P. M. Schlüter, T. Fer, B. Y. Sun & H. Kato (2006) Anagenetic evolution in island plants. Journal of Biogeography (J. Biogeogr.), 33, 1259-1265.

Just to name a few...

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Josh Rosenau Has Fun With Ray Comfort

Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas has this to say about Ray Comfort, the man responsible for the million book giveaway of the altered version of On the Origin of Species (a title that both Comfort and Kirk Cameron got wrong on their version and didn't seem to notice). Josh writes:

It's honestly hard to know what to make of Ray Comfort. First he says bananas are proof of intelligent design because of how well they fit in your hand. Then he retracts the claim, accepting that the domestic banana is, in fact, a product of extensive artificial selection. Then he backs off and insists "There isn’t any evidence that the banana has changed its shape in the last 2,000 years."

As Rosenau points out, Ray Comfort has a blog called AtheistCentral and, when asked whether the earth was in the center of the universe, he had this to say:

The Bible says that the earth is immovable. It cannot be moved. So now is your chance to prove your point. Run outside and move the earth. Perhaps you and your friends could jump on it, or find a rocky outcrop and push it together.

Maybe after that little experiment you will concede that the earth is immovable. So is Scripture. You can push, twist, pull, and jump on different verses, but the Word of God isn’t going to move. It is a rock. It cannot be broken (see John 10:35). It will judge you on the last Day (see John 12:48). You only twist it to your own destruction (see 2 Peter 3:16).

So if I go out and jump up and down on the ground and don't get it to move, it means the earth is fixed in the heavens and doesn't move? I see his astronomy and physics education is every bit as good as his biology education. More seriously, if the earth does move, what does that say about scripture? Well, for most of us, not a dang thing. I wonder what it means for Ray Comfort?

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The Most Important Scientific Breaththrough of the Last Decade

The Irish Times has a story on the most important scientific discoveries of the last ten years. Among the big winners: the Toumai skull, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, MicroRNAs, the discovery of the speech gene FoxP2, and the human genome. The ambiguity of the Toumai skull is correctly described. It was squashed flat and it is not clear even quite what it is. About FoxP2, they write:

Two mutations in a single gene may have provided the evolutionary push that opened the way to human conversation. It all comes down to a master switch for language, the Foxp2 gene, which was first identified in 2001. It was found because of its associations, when switched off, in speech and language problems in humans. The following year German and British researchers compared our Foxp2 gene with matching ones in chimps, gorillas, orang-utans and rhesus macaque monkeys. They found two alterations seen only in humans, and surmised that these mutations had opened the way to language. Extensive research since has shown how the altered Foxp2 also triggered physiological changes that delivered the capacity to talk, something that gave humans a huge evolutionary advantage. Researchers are now studying how Foxp2 interacts with a large collection of genes associated with language.

As you read the discoveries, remember that most of them would have never come about without a modern, scientifically valid understanding of the universe—something that young earth creationism cannot provide.

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"Atheists" Are Mad at Creationists

According to an article making the rounds from the PRNewswire, "atheists" are hopping mad because of the giveaway of the version of On the Origins of Species with the special introduction that attacks evolutionary theory. The story notes:

Despite threats of "unilateral resistance," book burnings, and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins' public encouragement to students to rip out the Introduction, Comfort says his group has decided to continue giving away books.

"It's our aim to get this edition into the hands of students in every university in the United States, then Europe, and then the rest of the world," [Ray] Comfort said. "We have the manpower to do it because of our television program that is aired in 70 countries."

Comfort co-hosts an award-winning television program with actor Kirk Cameron.

"If the Introduction is as weak as atheists maintain, why would they rip it out because it would strengthen the case for evolution? But it does the opposite, and that's why they are so threatened," Comfort says. "Among other things, they don't want students to discover how Hitler used evolution as the catalyst for his 'final solution.'"

Well, this is just a thought but I am guessing they are ripping it out because it contains half-truths and misinformation. I am reminded of what Todd Wood said in the post that I quoted a few days ago:

I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)

Uncharitable but, in some cases, correct. Whether Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have been apprised of the facility of their position and the whopping amount of evidence for evolution is not clear. What is clear is that they have a whole lot invested in their ministry and little invested in learning the truth.

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Climategate, Meet IDgate!

A story by Barbara Hollingsworth in the Washington Examiner likens the current negative response to global warming scepticism to that of scientist trying to promote ID. She writes:

More than 800 Ph.D.-level scientists around the world are seriously considering ID to explain the origin of life, but you'd never know it. Most do so clandestinely for fear of being ostracized by their peers or even forced out of their academic positions.

Some have secretly contacted the Discovery Institute (www.discoverinstitute.org) after researching ID, Stephen C. Meyer, author of "Signature in the Cell" -- now in its fifth printing and one of Amazon.com's top 10 science titles -- recently told me over lunch.

Others, like Cold War dissidents making furtive contact with the West, arrange discreet meetings to discuss what "evolutionary biologists don't want to talk about, the origins of the information in the digital code of DNA necessary to produce life."

There is a fundamental flaw in this analogy: different climate models are testable and some have, indeed, been shown to support, on some level, a cooling trend. That is quite different from support for ID which exists in the form of negative evidence. Arguments for ID stem from trying to show the improbability of evolution to explain biodiversity. For example:

When former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe computed the chances that the four amino acids that form DNA could self-arrange themselves into just one functional protein, he found it was 1:10164 -- or less than the odds of finding one marked subatomic particle in the entire observable universe.

This suffers from the same logic that plagued Michael Behe in his recent books The Edge of Evolution and Darwin's Black Box. Namely, that all of the mutations that "self arranged" did so all at once. No model of early life assumes that and all of the available evidence suggests that this is exactly what did not happen. The mutations came about over time and individually.

The other problem with this idea is that it is a post hoc argument. That same logic could apply to any given event on any given day that includes a large group of people. What are the odds that all of the decisions that each person had made over the course of their lives led them to be at that same spot at the same time? The probabilities are infinitesimally small. Yet there they all are. I thought about that as I waited for Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins to take the stage at the Genesis concert I attended in 2007. There were almost 100 k people there, each with a lifetime of decisions behind them.

Then the wheels come completely off:

"The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection -- which is to say, minor changes within existing species," writes Discovery Institute senior fellow Jonathan Wells, who has two Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. "Faced with such evidence, any other scientific theory would probably have been abandoned long ago. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, Darwinism is false."

And all credibility goes out the window. There is very good evidence for evolution in the fossil record (how many times do I have to say this?). If people like Wells don't want to believe in evolution, that is fine, but to say that the fossil record is an embarrassment to "Darwinian evolution" is flat-out false. It gets more false every year!

These, to me, are the principle reasons that ID doesn't get taken seriously. The mathematical models don't address biological reality, they have no testable models, and nobody at the DI seems to know anything about the fossil record. Where is the science?

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Discovery Institute Sues California Science Center

The DI has sued the California Science Center charging suppression of public documents that show bias against the Intelligent Design viewpoint in its decision to cancel the showing of the film Darwin's Dilemma, on October 6 of this year. The story, from the PR Newswire, notes:

On November 2, 2009, the Center released 44 pages of documents claiming to have disclosed "all documents" and that "no documents have been withheld," apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted.

"California Science Center's claims are not true, and we know for a fact that e-mail communications exist, including communications with the Smithsonian Institution, that should have been disclosed in response to our public documents request but weren't, showing clear violation of California's Public Records Act," said Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute.

"The Center withheld public communications by decision makers who cancelled the contract with AFA," said Luskin. "We believe the reason the California Science Center withheld these public documents is simple: the e-mails show evidence of discrimination against the pro-intelligent design viewpoint."

Discovery Institute's lawsuit follows a separate lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the AFA for cancelling its contract to show the pro-intelligent design video.

I am more than a little curious to see where this one goes.

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Hadrosaur Species Drop by a Third

Worse than a meteor impact is a scientists' correction. According to Science Daily, a reexamination of the diversity of hadrosaurs has revealed that much of the diversity thought to be species variability, is, in fact, nothing more than different growth stages of some hadrosaurs. The author writes:

These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study. The confusion is traced to their bizarre head ornaments, ranging from shields and domes to horns and spikes, which changed dramatically with age and sexual maturity, making the heads of youngsters look very different from those of adults.

There have been other discoveries as well:

Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.

"Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth," Horner said, "which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care."

This is science at its best: self-correcting and constantly analyzing. As more information comes out of the fossil record, these sorts of changes will appear in the literature. This is not a problem for science but I am sure the creationists will pick up on it.

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On the Origin of Species For the Lay Person

The UC Newsroom's Iqbal Pittalwala has written an article on a new book that has been written by UC Riverside professor David Reznick that seeks to explain Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species in easily understandable language. The book is titled The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species and is available from Princeton University Press. The article quotes Reznick as saying:

"I have taught the Origin to more than a dozen classes, and felt that I had figured out why Darwin’s arguments were so hard to follow,” said Reznick, a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. “His Victorian prose is a small part of the problem. The bigger part is that the book is rooted in the knowledge of science in 1859, which is quite different from today. To understand the book, it helps a great deal to understand the context in which the book was written and the audience that Darwin was addressing."

This will be a very timely release, given the distorted copy of On the Origins of Species that Kirk Cameron is handing out.

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A Conservative Walks Away

Those of you who lean to the right may be familiar with a blogger by the name of Charles Johnson. He writes the blog Little Green Footballs. For some time, Charles has been getting disenchanted with the GOP and the modern conservative movement—many times for valid reasons—and he finally called it quits. In a post titled Why I Parted Ways with the Right, he outlines exactly why he has done this. I don't agree with some of the things he says, and I think that he sometimes has singled out some truly stoooopid people as representative of this or that movement. You get those no matter where you go. He does point out some problems, though, one of which is "anti-science bad craziness."

This caught the attention of Sigmund, Carl and Alfred. Given that Charles has been such a prominent blogger on the right for some time, they commented on the change. They write:

You don’t have to believe in God to be a Republican. You don’t have to reject Darwin or dismiss global warming science to be a part of the GOP. What you have to be is open. What you are supposed to be is welcoming. The Right is supposed to be welcoming and fiercely defend the right of the individual to have their own beliefs, whatever they might be. Groupthink is supposed to be anathema to the Right!

When did belief in God and Creationism become the litmus test of what it means to be a conservative or a Republican? In pandering to the religious right, the GOP has built a great wall they foolishly believe will isolate from the onslaught of progress.

This is so smack on the money it is almost prescient. The anti-science wave of the current conservative movement will sink them. Whatever you might think of your average liberal's politics, they are, as a group, pretty dang well educated. They know that creationism is junk science and that Intelligent Design isn't science at all. And they will hammer this home until it makes the GOP bleed. And science is booming!

Understanding of organ transplant and repair is now progressing by leaps and bounds with the help of evolutionary medicine. Understanding of how viruses respond to selection forces and how they affect populations differentially is possible with the understanding of evolutionary theory and the interaction of genetics and the environment. Quantum Mechanics allows us to understand the structure of basic particles and their role in the formation of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider works because of this understanding. New oil-discovering tools work because of our palaeontological and geological understanding of where the deposits of oil are which, in turn, is based on our understanding that the geological record is a picture of 3.5 billion years of life on the earth. Palaeoclimatic reconstructions of the earth have allowed us to understand how climate changes over time and how to recognize those changes before they happen. This understanding has led to the current debate on global warming and climate change.

Not one of these advancements would be possible if
creationism was taught in the public schools.

Not one.

I am proudly a Christian, and proudly an evolutionist. How am I going to vote in the next general election? Who knows. Ask me in three years.

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Russians Reject Evolution in Numbers Similar to U.S.

Meanwhile, over in Russia, Interfax-Religion reports that over 40% of Russians polled support creationism. The author writes:

In particular, Darwin's evolution theory is supported by 55% of residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, 54% of atheists, and 45% of highly educated respondents, while creationism by 50% of rural residents, 48% of people believing in God, and 50% of undereducated people.

The poll has shown that most Russians do not absolutely share either the creationism or Darwin's evolution theory postulates. As many as 63% of those polled acknowledge Darwin's idea of permanent development of the living world and natural selection and 71% are convinced that the Earth's age is at least several billion years.

At the same time, 48% of Russians are inclined to believe that man was created by God, 49% that the world was originally perfect and has become more chaotic with time, and 62% that all major changes on the Earth have been caused by global disasters, one of them being the Deluge.

The poll has not been posted online at the site yet and I am more than a bit curious how the questions were constructed and what the sample size was. I will try to follow up on this. On the surface, it is very disheartening since it seems that, despite an acceptance of an old earth, many of those polled just can't get past the concept of biological evolution. I know little of the Russian educational system so I am not sure where the breakdown is. Nor do I know what the extent of creationism "importing" is going on.

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Royal Society Supports Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools

The Royal Society issued a short press release supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools in England. It reads:

"We are delighted to see evolution explicitly included in the primary curriculum. One of the most remarkable achievements of science over the last two hundred years has been to show how humans and all other organisms on the Earth arose through the process of evolution. Learning about evolution can be an extraordinary, exciting and inspiring experience for children. Teachers should aim to explain why evolution by natural selection is the only known way of understanding all the available evidence. In order to assist them, the Royal Society will be sending all teacher training colleges a booklet on evolution to provide information and advice to all new teachers."

No surprise there.

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Todd Wood and the Problem of Cognitive Dissonance

Todd Wood is a creationist, and has a blog where he comments on science and religion. He seems to have grasped the meaning of evolutionary theory, though. Consequently, a few months back, he rattled more than a few cages by writing the following:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

I say these things not because I'm crazy or because I've "converted" to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)

To quote Slim Pickens: "What in the Wide World of Sports is a-Goin' on here??" For those of us that have a background in evolutionary theory and palaeontology, the usual creationist arguments present little in the way of difficulty and can be dispensed with quite easily. Todd Wood, clearly, has an unusual creationist position. He claims that he really is a creationist and really does believe in the YEC model. He writes in another post:

I believe that God created everything that you see in six consecutive days around 6000 years ago.
I believe that Adam and Eve were the very first humans and were directly created by God.
I believe Adam and Eve sinned, and that sin brought death, carnivory, disease, and suffering into the world.
I believe that people really lived to be 900+ years back then.
I believe that there was a truly global Flood that inundated the entire planet.
I believe that humans and land animals were preserved on an Ark (approximately 450 feet long for those keeping score).

A reader wrote the following about him:

For a while I kind of felt sorry for Wood as I read his posts and what he was trying to do with the science, and kind of respected him for his honesty.However, what I see as the real problem is that if he, as someone who really understands the evidence, can still reject it, then what chance do we have of convincing unqualified creationists who don't understand the evidence and just believe what they are told by AIG and ICR?

Very little, it seems, because it is a faith position and those that hold it think that if they accept the findings of modern science, the jig is up and there really is no God, after all. It is this thin line between science and faith that results in a false dichotomy: One can accept evolution as the truth (in a scientific sense) and be an atheist or one can reject evolution, no matter how much explanatory power it has and believe in God.

The problem is that by embracing the YEC model and all of its warts, he is not just saying he accepts that evolution is good science but doesn't believe it, he is saying that all of modern science is good but his faith demands that he reject all of it. This makes him no more enlightened than your average creationist. In a sense, because he knows the evidence that your average creationist doesn't, his position is perhaps even more pathetic.

It raises an interesting theological question as well, one that is applicable to all creationists, enlightened or not. If the God of the universe is the same God that created the heavens and the earth and who created a universe that is knowable, and if we reject the clear evidence that the heavens and the earth teach us, are we not rejecting God's testimony about his creation?

Furthermore, given that the traditional and historical interpretation of the scriptures that cover the creation of the universe— the Primeval History—has not been literal but rather symbolic, and therefore, the modern (1930s) YEC model is not an orthodox interpretation, does this constitute heresy? I am not quite willing to go that far and am inclined to think of it as a radical misinterpretation of scripture. Ask me tomorrow, though. The more I see people lie and be willing to distort the evidence for the purpose of the YEC model, the more I am inclined to think of it as heresy. Someone needs to talk me out of this perspective.

It is obvious from reading Todd Wood's blog that he is a very articulate, intelligent and well-thought individual who has thought long and hard about some of these issues. He addresses the science as though he believes it, which is truly strange, given what he actually believes. I think that probably I need to read more to really get a sense of how deep the cognitive dissonance runs. I keep coming back to the same problem, though: the rocks don't lie.

Hat tip to Ben

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The History of Natural Selection

James Costa writes an article for BioScience in which he traces the history of how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace made the conclusions necessary to devise the theory of natural selection. While a bit of a long read, the article is quite illuminating. For instance, Costa writes this:

The light shed by evolutionary theory today on even more “classes of facts” than Darwin could have imagined is an excellent starting point in educating students and the general public about this remarkable science. In doing so, we might profitably take a page from Darwin’s playbook and teach Darwin with Darwin himself (Costa 2003). The most readily appreciated argument in support of the reality of species change is the very one that convinced the young Darwin: the expansive explanatory power of the concept, tying together seemingly disparate fields. Most of Darwin’s contemporaries saw how compellingly his theory unified biogeography, paleontology, embryology, instinct, and other fields. Modern students are in a position to appreciate a far more expansive unification, encompassing new disciplines unknown to Darwin—the fruits of more than a century of research since the Origin’s final edition.

Indeed, it is the unification that makes the theory so powerful. It is an excellent article, with much insight into how the theory came to be and why it is so important.

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