Thursday, October 20, 2011

Todd Wood on Parallel Cultures

One of Todd Wood's readers asked him to comment on my post about the Barna Group’s results in which I opined that the problem was not with historical Christianity, but with modern evangelical Christianity, which I see as walling itself off from modern society, especially in its understanding of science. Here is a bit of what he writes:
I'm not entirely sure whether he's concerned about the very idea of a "parallel culture" itself or the quality of the evangelical culture. As for developing our own parallel cultures, I would point to the monastic culture (especially medieval monasteries) as an example from a different Christian faith tradition. A crucial difference between the medieval monastery and the modern evangelical culture is that the monastic culture was compelling and appealing to people. As I understand it (and I admit that I'm no historian), the monasteries were important sources of learning and scholarship, and to some extent helped to preserve learning through the "Dark Ages." I think especially of St. Columba's monastery on Iona, which was instrumental in Christianizing Scotland through the power of learning. (I'm going to stop talking about monasteries now before I reveal any more of my ignorance.)
It is quite true that the monasteries were very important for learning and did preserve much of the knowledge that had been passed down from their predecessors. But the monasteries were doing so largely in the absence of, and prior to, the explosion of modern science. Further, they weren't competing with the culture of the time, they were providing a completely different outlook and way of life. The modern evangelical movement, in contrast, is providing its own brand of politics, culture and science in almost exactly the same model as secular society but with a Christian basis. Where the wheels fall off the wagon (and Dr. Wood and I differ profoundly on this issue), is in the (largely) evangelical Christian interpretation of modern science, which is tied to a very strict biblical hermeneutic that dictates a 6,000 year-old creation and further, that evolution as characterized by modern evolutionary biologists, has never happened. There is little to no mainstream scientific evidence to support this interpretation of scientific findings and mountains of evidence to the contrary.

The evangelical community has fought the mainstream interpretations of modern science tooth and nail to the point where those of us that accept them are called “unbiblical.” Further, we get called that by people who have no training in modern science at all.

Dr. Wood has a short section in which he examines the Christian culture that has arisen in parallel. He argues (and I largely agree) that modern evangelical Christianity is reactive in the sense that we parrot modern, secular society and do not do it well. He further notes that this is the reason that so many leave the faith in their late teens or early twenties. Anecdotally (and I have a pretty small sample size) it does seem that those that hang on to their faith through these years hit modern culture head on instead of avoiding it.

I have always been of the (myopic) opinion that one of the key reasons that people in the their late teens or early twenties leave the faith is because they hit an understanding of how the world works, scientifically, and it conflicts with what they have been taught, usually from home school curricula. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps this is only one small part of a greater whole that we, as Christians, are not addressing. I know the challenge of raising children in a Christian home firsthand and some of my children will soon be entering their adolescent years where that struggle will become evident. I can only pray that the Holy Spirit gives us the guidance to be able to provide an attractive alternative to a completely secular culture.

Lastly, Dr. Wood writes:
What I want, and what this blog has always been about, is to improve what we have. Instead of constantly tossing potshots at evolutionary biology, we need to put up or shut up. If creationism is so much better than conventional science, where's our explanation of the pattern of radioisotopes? Or distant starlight? Or the near identity of the human and chimp genomes? And why aren't we working on answers to these questions? Why are people settling for just explaining the problems away with philosophical tricks or just distracting people from the problems by pretending like everyone else has much worse problems? Take the beam out of your own eye before you pick out the speck from someone else's. That was good advice 2000 years ago, and it's good advice today.
He is absolutely correct. And herein lies a large problem. Recently, when Dr. Wood took on Reasons to Believe's interpretation of the human/chimp genome and showed where they were wrong (and not trustworthy), a good many people who are not, to my knowledge, Christians cited this exchange quite positively, even knowing that Dr. Wood is a professed young-earth creationist. Why? Because it was about the only time in recent memory in which the secular data was examined and interpreted by someone from that point of view with complete scientific integrity.

Beginning with George MacReady Price's The New Geology, in 1923 and continuing down to the present day, the evangelical movement has made a complete hash of science. Even worse, there is a persistent evidence that those promoting this view do not even seek to get things correct. To turn the phrase that Dr. Wood used, if I hear one more evangelical non-scientist say “there are no transitional fossils” I just might scream!

Examples abound in which scientific data is skewed or twisted in such a way as to support the young earth model when, in its original form, it did exactly the opposite (Randy Isaac's response to the RATE volumes is, perhaps the best example). This leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of your average scientist.

This is a bad witness.

This is part of the reason this blog exists. Non-Christians need to know that we can confront the data in an honest fashion. If we seek to reach out to those with scientific inclinations for the cause of Christ, we must treat the data with integrity, even if it leads us down a road that we have never been down before.

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6 comments:

  1. [I was the reader who asked Todd to comment]

    Thanks for the counter response, Jim. I think you are doing Dr Wood a slight disservice when you write:

    "Where the wheels fall off the wagon (and Dr. Wood and I differ profoundly on this issue), is in the (largely) evangelical Christian interpretation of modern science, which is tied to a very strict biblical hermeneutic that dictates a 6,000 year-old creation and further, that evolution as characterized by modern evolutionary biologists, has never happened."

    I don't think Todd holds the "(largely) evangelical Christian interpretation of modern science". He takes the 'fact' of a young earth as a tenet of his faith and is looking to see how he can resolve the evidence he sees with this a priori assumption. His whole challenge to the creationist movement is to activley engage in a science that supports their own belifs rather than just trying to poke holes in other arguments. He does not reject evolution from a scientific perspective (he agress that it is a coherent explanation of the data) but from a theological perspective.

    That is the reason why I wanted him to respond to your blog on the Barna survey. I agree with both of you that the mangling and, frankly, disingenious presentation of 'scientific' evidence to support a young earth is a terrible problem for young people in the faith and a terrible witness to outsiders. I think you think the science is more of a problem while Todd thinks that there are other elements of modern evangelical culture that contribute significantly to the problem.

    As a High School teacher in an International Christian school I am keenly interested in this issue and how to help students develop a faith that survives into adulthood. I point my students towards Todd Wood as an example of a YEC who demonstrates scientific integrity. I may disagree with his beliefs but in his whole approach to science and other Christians he smells like Jesus - something I could never say about Ken Ham!

    Thank you for engaging with Todd,

    Tommy Farrell

    [A Bitish, evolutionary creatonist teaching in a Christian International school with many American YEC colleagues]

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  2. Hi Tommy,
    Thank you for the response. You are correct about Todd's take on science and it is strongly to his credit. That is one of the reasons that I read his blog regularly. It was certainly not my intention to do Todd a disservice and I said so in an email that I sent to him. The problem that I see is that throughout the centuries since the Pentateuch was put down, there have been several different ways of understanding how to read those books (and especially Genesis). From Augustine down to the present day, one of those has been that the creation narratives of Genesis were written in a fashion that was not meant to convey a strict literal message (Conrad Hyers has a great book that addresses these issues called The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science).

    My concern about the works of Ken Ham and John Morris and Duane Gish (to name a few) is that, aside from all of the rotten pseudoscience that they propogate, it never once occurs to them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that their biblical hermeneutic just might be incorrect. It might not be, but right now we have no external evidence that it is. It is not my intention to exalt science above scripture (which would be a sin) but simply to point out that there are different ways of interpreting scripture.

    I am reminded of the struggle that many of the early to mid 19th century geologists, many of whom were devout Christians, went through in trying to understand the geological record in the context of Noah's flood. Eventually, the weight of the evidence forced them to give up on the world-wide flood model and by the end of the century, there were no practicing geologists that entertained that model.

    I applaud Todd's call for creation scientists to examine the science for themselves rather than, as you put it, to poke holes in other people's arguments. But what if they do engage the science honestly and with integrity and come up with exactly the same answers that modern science has? What then?

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  3. Thanks for your response, Jim. I have to say, from a personal perspective the approach of much of the YEC machine that promotes their pseudoscience has caused greater troubles to my faith than has the data on evolution. As an adult convert, the lack of integrity on display combined with the unquestionning support and repetition of their arguments by the wider fundamentalist evangelical community really gets me down sometimes. I can't see a way forward when they don't even listen to somebody like Todd.

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  4. "I have always been of the (myopic) opinion that one of the key reasons that people in the their late teens or early twenties leave the faith is because they hit an understanding of how the world works, scientifically, and it conflicts with what they have been taught, usually from home school curricula." [emphasis mine]

    Do you have any evidence to back up your opinion on this? I wonder if anyone has done any studies on the percentage of Christians from homeschooling families vs. public school families who "lose their faith" in their late teens/early twenties.

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  5. Actually, yes. One of my friends has a 25 year-old daughter who walked away from the faith and, being a pastor, he grieves this. When her mother asked her if there was anything that should would have changed in her homeschooling, she replied “I wish you had told me more about evolution.”

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  6. I am not aware of any actual studies that have been done yet but several of my friends in college struggled mightily with their faiths when they hit college because of the courses they took that “broadened their horizons,” both scientific and sociological.

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