Book Purchase: Adam's Quest

I hate it when books come out that escape my attention.  Such is the case with a book titled Adam's Quest, by Tim Stafford.  In it, Stafford has interviewed eleven scientists who have struggled with their understanding of how their faith fits in with their pursuit of science.  In a sense, this is like the book Four Views on the Historical Adam, in that it surveys Christians from different perspectives.  He has interviewed young earth creationists, supporters of intelligent design and evolutionary creationists.

As readers of this blog will note, I have been extremely critical of young earth creationists and intelligent design supporters, not so much for their beliefs (which I also find issue with, though) but for their ham-handed and often deceptive way in which they treat the scientific evidence for an ancient earth and evolution.  At least Todd Wood, one of the assembled scientists, has also had issue with this and, from what little I have read of Kurt Wise, he has as well.

Patheos has a short introduction to the book, which focuses on the first group, the young earth creationists, and some of their consternation at the way that science is examined.  There is a passage with a particularly damning quote from Kurt Wise about this:

After that, Wise lost interest in creationist apologetics, especially as he began to realize that many of the creationist evidences from his reading were wrong. “At first I thought it was ignorance.” As he learned more though, he became convinced that the mistakes in creationist literature were willful. … Wise concluded that for many creationists the end justifies the means. For them, “it doesn’t matter if what you say is true. It matters if it brings people to the right conclusion.” (p. 15-16)

This is, perhaps, why I find people like Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis so contemptible. They pretend to address the scientific concerns in an honest way but misinterpret evidence, arrive at faulty conclusions and smear hard-working scientists as a matter of course.  As i just told my oldest child, I am not going to come right out say they are lying, but it sure looks like it. 

Perhaps one of the scariest parts of the book and one of the principle reasons that I picked it up are in the sample that is available from Amazon, in which the author recounts his upbringing, which is almost word-for-word what I experienced growing up.  He then recounts every Christian parents' nightmare: the falling away from the faith of one of his children, in part because of the strains of learning correct science and being told that he could not be part of his circle of church friends if he continued to accept an old earth. 

Right now my children are in a home school group that is heavily young earth creation-based and I know that several of the parents of their friends would be horrified if they knew that I was an evolutionary creationist.  I simply don't advertise it. One of them thinks of Ken Ham as a hero of the faith.  How would it be of value for me to confront her with the notion that I think he is a charlatan and a heretic? 

As of yet, my oldest child does not seem to be tracking in any scientific direction so I doubt that this will have a huge impact on his life.  The same does not seem to be true with my second child, who is enamored with botany.  She will hit evolutionary biology head-on in college and I will have to prepare her for that and how to hold onto her faith throughout.  That will be, perhaps the greatest challenge that faces me. 

I look forward to reading this book with interest and would encourage downloading the sample.

Science, Faith and Cognitive Dissonance

Josh Rosenau, who used to write a blog called Thoughts from Kansas, has written a very thoughtful post on the world view as it applies to faith in God and the practice of science.  It has been argued by those who view faith dimly that to practice science and believe that God can work in the modern world is to hold two cognitively dissonant views.  If science is to be reliable, the world must be a spiritually closed system—no input from God—or else one can never reliably predict the results of a particular hypothesis without knowing for sure that God did not have a hand in the outcome.

For example, if a hurricane is traveling up the eastern seaboard and the people of the coastal town of West Noiseville pray that the hurricane misses their nice little hamlet, and, lo and behold, it veers off at the last minute, was that, in fact, the handiwork of God or did the naturally-occurring prevailing winds simply act to perform this action?  When testing atmospheric models to see where the hurricane is going to go, scientists do not take into account the prayers of West Noiseville's residents.  They cannot, because those are outside the purview of the scientific method.  Did God answer their prayers?  Science cannot tell us.  The problem, according to some, however, is that by entertaining a world view that even allows the actions of God, we are compromising our scientific endeavors.  We are allowing for untestable hypotheses.  Jerry Coyne, a notable atheist, makes this argument.  Coyne, however, argues that there are perfectly good scientists who believe in God and that this dissonance is almost subconscious.  He writes:

Although I think scientists who are religious are engaged in a form of subconscious cognitive dissonance, I’ve never said that religious belief automatically prevents somebody from doing good science. There were many believers, even in my own field (Ronald Fisher and Theodosius Dobzhansky, to name two) who made immense contributions to evolutionary biology. And although I vehemently object to Francis Collins’s touting scientific evidence for God (i.e., “The Moral Law”), I’ve said repeatedly that Collins was a good scientist and that I had no scientific objections to his heading the National Institutes of Health.

Here is how Rosenau characterizes Coyne’s position:

Coyne takes the philosophical stance that science and religion are, in some sense, intrinsically incompatible, and he believes that a consequence of this incompatibility will be some sort of psychological conflict in the minds of religious scientists.

I happen to think that his philosophy is flawed, simplistic, and ill-argued, but that’s for another day. He’s claiming that the philosophical point makes a prediction about people’s mental processes, which should be testable. Facts are stubborn things, and a good scientist ought to be willing to adjust his philosophy in response to stubborn facts that stand at odds with those predictions.

Rosenau then goes on to give a rousing list of scientists who were devoutly religious who not only performed excellent science but did so, they felt, in the service of their God.

I also think that Coyne is wrong but for a different reason.

How you view science largely depends on whether or not you take the “short” view or the “long” view of creation. For example, there is evidence that some very bad diseases that we as humans suffer from are caused or at least activated by endogenous retroviruses. These include some cancers and MS. The short view argues that the earth was created in the very recent past and that all bad things that occur around us are direct results of a tangible, physical fall from grace by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, subsequent to which the world was irrevocably changed. They are the “decay” of this fall.

But here's the problem. There is also very good genetic evidence that there has been incorporation of parts of some of these retroviruses into systems such as placental development, which means that, from a human survivability perspective, some of this retroviral DNA has resulted in a “good” thing.  Further, it seems clear that these responses have evolved over a considerable period of time.  These findings are clearly incompatible with the short view of creation.  But need these findings lead to philosophical conundrums?

Coyne has no bad things to say about the scientists that he mentioned (Fisher, Dobzhansky) because they performed science with integrity and honesty and yet were men of faith.  These scientists were not just old earth creationists, but, like their modern counterparts Francisco Ayala, Simon Conway-Morris, Dennis Venema and others, they were evolutionary creationists.  To these people, science is our way of understanding God's creation.  In the process of doing so, however, the first casualty is the short view. These folks found, as did 99% of other Christians practicing in the sciences, that, as Pat Robertson put it a few days ago, there just ain't no way the universe was created six thousand years ago.  They further found that, yes, by gum, evolution really does happen. 

Once you open yourself up to those possibilities,  there is no scientific endeavor that will lead you to any kind of psychological conflict because all roads lead to Rome.  If you truly believe that God created the heavens and the earth, then any research will simply be illuminating that.  Does this cause a rethink of the literal nature of certain scriptural passages?  Yup, sure does.  But there have been competing interpretive models of those passages for centuries. 

Coyne is quite correct that cognitive dissonance can occur in some instances.  If you pursue scientific research to its logical ends, and your scriptural hermeneutic is narrow, you will eventually suffer from this dissonance.  This is, in part, fueling some of the problems at Bryan College right now and is causing somewhat of a crisis of faith in evangelical Christianity. 

If, on the other hand, your understanding of scripture looks more like this, then the sky's the limit.  As Conrad Hyers points out:

...the Genesis accounts of creation do not prove to be in conflict with scientific or historical knowledge. This is not because the creation texts can be shown to be in conformity with the latest scientific and historical knowledge, or supported by it, but precisely because they have little to do with it. They belong to radically different types of literature, with equally different types of concerns and goals.

Where does this leave miracles? Dunno. I will tackle that on another day.

Ken Ham Waxes on the Cost of Belief in Evolution. Dan Wilkinson of Unfundamentalist Christian Responds

Ken Ham had a personal note on the AiG page about the upcoming debate.  He writes, in part:

Because our ministry theme for 2013 and for 2014 is “Standing Our Ground, Rescuing Our Kids,” our staff thought that a debate on creation vs. evolution with a man who has influenced so many children to believe in evolution would be a good idea. Now, those of you who know me realize that I don’t relish public debates, so please pray for me. But this debate will help highlight the fact that so many young people are dismissing the Bible because of evolution, and even many young people who had grown up in the church decided to leave the church because they saw evolution as showing the Bible could not be trusted. This exodus of young people from the church is documented in my coauthored book Already Gone.

Dan Wilkinson, on his blog Unfundamentalist Christian, responds:

No, Mr. Ham, no one’s leaving the church because evolution shows that “the Bible could not be trusted.”

Mr. Ham, they’re leaving the church because of people like you: people who fervently create walls, erect barriers, establish rigid rules for what one must believe in order to be a Christian. They’re leaving the church because your version of Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with right practice, and everything to do with “right” belief. They’re leaving the church because by essentially demonizing everyone who doesn’t agree with you, you’ve made believing in Young Earth Creationism* more important than Jesus’ explicit explicit commandment to love God and neighbor.

Ken Ham did not like this much. He responded thus:

Apparently they call this sort of thing 'Progressive Christianity.' I guess that means 'evolving Christianity'--whatever the secular world believes about where they came from, you accept that as infallible and then change their assumed fallible Word of God to fit! So sad. In many ways these sort of people are more dangerous to Christianity than the atheists.

Note--the typical personal attack; no research cited (at least AiG had a professional group--America's Research Group--conduct real research into why kids are leaving the church and published it in the book 'Already Gone'); only one verse of Scripture referred to (Matthew 22); just this person's fallible opinions to justify holding man's word as infallible and God's Word as fallible.

Ham is correct about the lack of research. Wilkinson is working off of anecdotes and conversations. He could quote Glenn Morton, however, who left young earth creationism exactly for the reasons that Wilkinson writes about.  There are others out there, I am sure.  I personally know of one person who walked away from the faith after being home schooled using a young-earth curriculum.  When she got to college, her faith was rocked by the fact that there was quite a bit more evidence for evolution than she had been told.  Ham is also correct that there is invective and ad hominem in the post.  It would have been better if the writer had steered clear of such language. 

On the other hand, Ham, himself, has been guilty of the same kind of behavior, personally attacking Peter Enns to the point where Ham was dis-invited from a home schooling conference for his lack of Christian spirit.  He seems to be unrepentant about this.

Additionally, Ham is guilty of a "one way" approach to the scriptures, in which there is no value placed on either current or past interpretation.  Scripture is revealed directly to us and we do not question what it says or how it says it.  Consequently, passages that have provoked discussion and disagreement in the past are rendered flatly, with no color or depth.   He seems to be unwilling to admit that there may be different interpretations of scripture out there by very thoughtful, honest Christians.  Everyone who thinks differently from him is guilty of believing "progressive Christianity."

Most of the folks at BioLogos and the ASA are charitable to young-earth creationists, even if they don't agree with them.  There is no such reciprocity from Ham.  In describing the EC/TE mindset, he is venomous, calling us "more dangerous to Christianity than the atheists."  More dangerous to Christianity than Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers and Sam Harris?  Really?  We seek to follow God, understand His ways and trust in Jesus as our savior, just as Ham does and yet, for him, that counts as nothing.  That is sad. 

New Poll Results on The Huffington Post

HuffPo has an odd post on a new survey that tracks the belief in evolution and how it has changed since the last such poll.  Yasmine Hafiz writes:

According to a YouGov poll, only 21% of Americans believe that human beings evolved without the involvement of God, and 25% of those surveyed said, "Human beings evolved but God guided this process."

37% of respondents answered that "God created human beings in their present form," in response to the question "Which of the following comes closest to your views on the origin of human beings?"

The research shows a slow change in the national acceptance of evolution, as in 2004 only 13% of Americans said that human beings evolved without God's guidance.

However, the country remains divided on the issue of what to teach in schools, as 40% favor teaching creationism and intelligent design in schools while 32% oppose it and 29% are unsure.

The poll results, themselves, are here.  Ms. Hafiz writes that there is change in the national acceptance of evolution.  That statement is without evidence.  What the poll does reflect is an 8% swing away from a theistic evolution/evolutionary creation explanation of human origins, which may reflect a deeper move of those people away from the church.    Acceptance of evolution may or may not have increased in the last nine years but that is not what is being identified.

Further, despite her consternation regarding the teaching of ID in schools, it is not difficult to see that, if 37% of those polled think that people were created in their present form (that question is a bit fuzzy in and of itself), that 40% would support the teaching of ID and creationism since creation by divine fiat precludes an evolutionary explanation. 

Interesting poll results.  Fuzzy interpretation. 

A Plea From Dennis Venema

Dennis Venema, who has written many good posts for BioLogos has written an article for the Colossian Forum titled “What I Would Like To Hear A Young-Earth Creationist Say.”  Rather than wax scientifically, he focuses, instead, on the things that we should have in common:

...the most important thing I would like to hear a YEC say to someone of my views isn’t a scientific statement at all – it’s a statement of unity in Christ. It’s the simple “brother” or “sister” that says – “we’re both part of the same family.” Even if we disagree on the mechanism of creation, affirming our unity in Christ needs to be the starting point for the conversation.

For those of us who are Evolutionary creationists/theistic evolutionists, he writes about a hypothetical conversation which, for some of us, is a constant fear:

“So, what do you do for work?”
 
“I’m a biologist. I teach up at the local Christian university.”

“Oh, really? You must really love the work that (insert the individual’s favorite anti-evolution ministry) does. It’s so good to have Christians like you who fight against evolution.” 

“Well, actually…”

 I have many friends in church to which I dare not bring up the evolution/creation debate.  I remember when one of of my friends from Bible Study was looking at my poster of the Tower of Time, a small version of the one by John Gurche that hung in the Smithsonian for years.  She remarked "How can you believe any of this?"  Implicit in her comment that was the poster represented an anti-God, anti-biblical  view of the world.  How do you bring someone like my friend, who had little to no scientific background, up to speed on the evidence.  Even if you could, would it matter?

Venema suggests (and I agree) that this issue should always be of secondary importance to the call of Christ and the unity that we should feel and express with each other:

So, to my YEC brothers and sisters, I would make this request. Without minimizing the importance of the exegetical issues that the creation/evolution controversy raises, let’s first and foremost sit at the Lord’s table and break bread together, recognizing each other as brothers and sisters in Christ and members of the same body. Those of us who see things from an EC perspective may need to repent of belittling our YEC brothers and sisters as scientifically ignorant or theologically naive. Those of a YEC perspective may need to repent of condemning their EC brothers and sisters as “compromisers” or theologically liberal.

I confess that belittling is easy to do and that is where the problem lies. It is too easy to do that and not to see the unity in Christ. We enjoy arguments and we enjoy disagreements. It gets the blood flowing and the dander up. But at some point, we have to see beyond that. Are the Christians that espouse the YEC viewpoint going to heaven? Yup. Are those of us that are EC going to heaven. I certainly believe so.

Having said all of this, we do have a responsibility to honestly treat the evidence that we encounter and to learn about God's creation from it. That does not change. To point out the variances from this is a worthy cause, but we should never believe that those who espouse those positions are not saved by grace, because, when the dust settles, we are all in need of that. 

The PCA and Earth History: Litle Progress

A reader sent in the most recent PCA Historical Center Creation Study, a part of the 2012 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America. The link to the complete study is here. It begins with a historical account of how the Genesis days were treated. In this account, evolution is featured prominently. Sadly, their exposition of it is predictably garbled. They define “naturalistic evolution” as:

“The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments” (National Association of Biology Teachers). This rules out any supernatural activity of God in the origin and development of life and of humans, and hence makes a naturalistic metaphysic the basis of science.

It does nothing of the sort. It simply states that there are knowable, observable processes that produce evolutionary effects in organisms. It says absolutely nothing about supernatural activity because evolutionary theory does not deal in origins of life. It deals in the modification of life after it appeared. Science is metaphysically neutral. One can make unwarranted extrapolations based on one's preconceived understanding of how nature works, but the results of science simply are. The scientific testing and engineering involved in airplane design is metaphysically neutral, as is the appearance of two species of salamander in the Great Basin where there was once one. Their definition of science is equally garbled.

A large chunk of the document deals with interpretations of the first six days of Genesis. This is equally problematic. When it gets to the objections to the “calendar day” model, the writers make some extraordinarily wrong and biased assumptions and conclusions. They write:

Some have asserted that this view “seems not to take science seriously and impugns the veracity of God because, on the one hand, it dismisses central conclusions of the current scientific consensus on cosmogony and, on the other hand, it supposedly requires one to view the general-revelation evidence as to the age of the earth as misleading.” This criticism is based on the assumption that man is able to interpret general revelation correctly without the light of special revelation. That assumption reverses the proper principle of Biblical interpretation, which is, that special revelation must govern our understanding of general revelation. Those of us who hold the Calendar-Day view make no apology for arriving, after careful consideration of the facts, at conclusions that differ from this so-called consensus. It is not the veracity of God which is impugned but the evolutionary presuppositions of the majority (not consensus) of the scientific community whose assumptions are regularly passed off as facts. Furthermore, it seems disingenuous to fault the Calendar-Day view for differing with current scientific dogma when creationists of all stripes claim to reject the most dominant aspect of that dogma, namely, evolutionary origins of the species. One unique strength of the Calendar-Day view is that it leaves no room to accommodate any version of evolutionism, Theistic or otherwise, while some other theories seem bent on finding some common ground with it.

First, the criticism is not based on the idea that man is able to correctly interpret the data without special revelation. The criticism is based on the fact that God has revealed to us the inner workings of His creation and they do not accord with a strict literal (and theologically debatable) interpretation of the scriptures. It does not reverse the proper interpretation of biblical interpretation, it assumes that the works of God are to be believed just as the word of God is to be believed. How is it that people that writes these things never once reexamine their own biblical interpretations in the light of the data? That never fails to astound me.

The writers then make an unwarranted assumption that “creationists of all stripes” reject evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory has absolutely nothing to do with arguments about the age of the universe. It is the inferred age of the universe that allowed for the formulation of evolutionary theory. This is the oldest creationist argument in the book and the fact that the writers are unaware that it was disproven over forty years ago is disturbing. It makes one think that they have read only Henry Morris in formulating their opinions. They then argue that it is a strength of the Calendar day argument that it rejects evolution. They can reject evolution if they wish, but they do not speak for me or anyone else that accepts evolutionary creationism.

Much more could be written that I do not have time to write. Read the whole document to see where the PCA is going with regard to this issue. It seems to me that they are adopting a flat reading of the scriptures and, despite giving lip service to the historical debates, regard those debates as unimportant to the current discussion. The document is heavily influenced by young earth creationism and, as such, is myopic and narrow in its interpretations and understanding of science.

Dennis Venema: Ask an Evolutionary Creationist

Dennis Venema has a new post over at BioLogos that is in the form of a Q&A and touches most of the main tenets of evolutionary creationism.  Check it out

Hugh Ross on Common Ancestry

What in the Wide World of Sports is a' Goin' on at RTB??????????

One of my readers clued me in to a podcast by Hugh Ross in which he tackles theistic evolution, otherwise known as evolutionary creationism. The title of the series is “I did not know that.” This particular talk can be found here.

The focus of the talk is how there is evidence for a historical Adam and Eve and that they were created between fifty and sixty thousand years ago. He specifically contrasts theistic evolution with what he calls the “Biblical model for human origins,” as if there is no theological basis for TE.

His understanding of TE is that we evolved from early ape forms but that it was controlled by God in a way that we scientists can never discover. This is a peculiar statement because science, left to its own devices, is not in the business of discovering whether or not God controlled events and processes. It is through faith that people believe in God.

Ross is one of the original proponents of the “tweaking” argument—that the universe shows evidence of a divine hand that tweaked the gravitational constants and elemental formation in just such a way as to allow life to occur. One degree off either way and...nothing. This is put forth in his book Fingerprint of God.

As I have mentioned before, the problem with this argument is that it is post hoc. We think that it is tweaked because we are here to observe it. There was always a slight probability that the universe would have developed like this anyway.

First he argues that evolution cannot explain the complexity of life because the second law of thermodynamics will degrade the genome of any species over time.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Hugh Ross is a physicist and he is not aware that the earth is not a closed system? How can that be? It is part of the earth/sun system. There is also interaction with other bodies such as the moon. Everything on earth receives energy from the sun and this, in itself, is a thermodynamic process. Further, as someone else put it, if the earth really is a closed system, then God cannot operate in it. As soon as you introduce intervention from outside, the system opens. Onward...

He then says that the human genome has gotten more decayed over time since the creation of Adam and Eve also because of the influence of the second law of thermodynamics.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics does not explain this. Genetics does. Our genome is more decayed (if you will) because of the influence of genetic load. With extensive gene flow, bad alleles are masked and can persist in a population in large numbers without expression. As we have been able to address many genetic defects with medical treatments, the number of these alleles has increased in our population. This is especially true in western nations, where our diet and behavior has created even more problems for us.

Ross states that there is evidence that modern humans have not been around very long because in Chromosome 21, there are only three different haplotypes and that, if humanity was older than that, there would be more.

Wrong.

This is a complete misread of a paper by Jin, et al (1999)¹ in which the authors study the haplotypes of Chromosome 21 in an effort to shed light on modern human origins. For one thing, there aren't three haplotypes, as Ross asserts. There are ten. There are three haplogroups that suggest that there were three migratory episodes of modern humans out of Africa. Ross focuses on the word “entropy” and, unfortunately, interprets it the way a physicist would. In this case, entropy refers to a function of Wrights F_st, which is a measure of genome variability. For example, North Americans have less entropy because they have greater genetic homogeneity than other groups that were studied. It has nothing to do with thermodynamics.

Ross argues that the chromosomal evidence that humans and the higher apes have a different number of chromosomes is invalid or misunderstood. In the early 1990s, it was discovered that human chromosome two is an end-to-end-fusion of two ape chromosomes. A close examination of chromosome two revealed that, while the other twenty-two chromosomes have one centromere, or central segment, human chromosome two has an extra non-functional centromere. Furthermore, while every chromosome has end segments known as telomeres, human chromosome two has inactive adjacent telomere segments in the middle of the chromosome. It is argued that, sometime in our early past, there was a translocation of two chromosomes to form Chromosome two. Ross argues that such a translocation could not possibly have happened because this would be “catastrophic for the organism” and would result in death.

Wrong.

There are many documented cases of translocation in animal species. There are species of horses that have different numbers of chromosomes and yet can produce fertile offspring. Ross further hampers his argument by saying that the jury is still out on whether or not the evidence is real because they might only appear to be centromeres and telomeres. This is, again, nonsense. It is obvious what they are. Further, how does he explain the duplication of the genes sequences in each chromosome?

Ross then tackles evidence for common ancestry contained in the disovery that the great apes and humans share the inability to manufacture vitamin C. He argues that in place of the inability to produce vitamin C is a new mechanism that recycles vitamin C in apes and humans. This is, he argues, not a loss of genetic function so much as it is a gaining of a new function. What Ross side-steps here and never mentions is that the arising of this mechanism in apes and humans is still evidence of common ancestry. In fact, it is better evidence because it means that exaptation happened in a common ancestor which was then passed on to each line.

And how does the evidence of the creation of a new mechanism in apes and humans figure into his idea of genome degradation?

He then launches into a discussion of the mitochondrial DNA evidence for the origins of modern humans and suggests that it demonstrates that we are descended from one woman (Eve) and then argues that this person likely lived between 50 and 60 thousand years ago. He further argues that Adam lived at the same time, based on Y-Chromosome evidence. This is their “testable creation model.”

There is a distinct problem with the harmonization of this evidence and the Bible. First, you have to really stretch the biblical genealogies to get them as far back as 50 to 60 thousand years. Second, while it is true that there was one original mtDNA variant from which modern humans are said to have arisen, that does not mean that there was only one woman alive at the time. In fact, there is evidence that there were thousands of modern humans alive at the time and that there was no distinct human couple at all.

Worse, the new evidence indicating that modern humans have 9% Neandertal genes calls into serious question the integrity of modern Homo sapiens as a unique species, suggesting that we are much, much older than we thought—perhaps 200 to 300 thousand years old.

He closes out by suggesting that the DNA evidence supports the disembarkation of four women and four men from Noah's ark, like that in Genesis 6-8. Aside from the genetic data indicating that the modern human population bottleneck reported by Venema occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, not the Middle East, there is not a scrap of biological, geological or palaeontological evidence that there was a world-wide flood of any kind.

In one fell swoop, RTB has turned its back on its historical Old-earth, progressive creation model and embraced the heart of young earth creationism, a model that has no serious scientific support of any kind. Is this really what RTB wants to do? If it really is accepting the idea that there were only eight people alive at the time of the flood, it must. It has always carved out a place that is separate from that of the major YEC groups and attempted to use conventional science as support for its apologetics. Now it seems that they are willing to accept a completely concordist model, even if it means the world-wide flood model, warts and all.

Not a fine day for scholarship.

¹Jin, L., Underhill, P. A., Doctor, V., et al. (1999). Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 region distinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(7), 3796-3800. doi: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/7/3796.abstract

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Center for Faith and Science International

My first post for the Center for Faith and Science International, called "What is Theistic Evolution?" is up. Have a look.



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