Hector Avalos on the Wisdom of Debating Creationists

Hector Avalos, of Iowa State University, has a thoughtful piece called Why Academic Biblical Scholars Must Fight Creationism.  His reasoning is very simple:

...Academic biblical scholars are the best persons to debate creationists. The reason is simple. The Achilles’ Heel of creationism is its biblical illiteracy, and not just its scientific illiteracy.

True enough, scientists have done an excellent job in pointing the scientific flaws in creationism. However, the problem is that scientists usually don’t have enough knowledge of biblical scholarship to address or defeat some of the arguments creationists use to harmonize the Bible with science.

Scientists are not trained to recognize how creationists are distorting biblical texts. Thus, Jerry Coyne’s Faith v. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (2015) does an excellent job of explaining scientific theory and methods, but one will not find any discussion of how most creationists are misreading Genesis 1-3.

Creationists in the pews tend to shrug off arguments about DNA, radioactive dating, and other technical subjects because they are not familiar with them. But one need not even go into these scientific intricacies if the Bible does not even say what creationists claim.

Those of us who are educated in a branch of science that bears on this debate tend to think that the science ought to be obvious and scratch our heads in amazement when people reject it.  This is especially compounded by the numerous instances when creationists go out of their way to intentionally distort the science to reflect things it cannot possibly mean.  I found myself in rueful agreement when a leading creationist was described as “horrifically, pathologically dishonest.”

On the other hand, these theological issues with creationism are not new.  Paul Seely, for example, was writing about the theological problems with creationism in the 1970s.  This has had no effect on the masses that accept the young earth model or those that teach them.  Why does this happen?

I think because learning curves are the same no matter what sphere of knowledge you examine.  Dr. Avalos comes from a background in theology, and has knowledge in that area that is far greater than your average church goer, who sits down, sings some hymns, and then opens a copy of their favorite bible, where there it is in black and white: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.  Why should they believe otherwise?  In order to “get them up to speed,” it would require effectively the same amount of theological education as it would to do the same for the scientific aspects of the argument. To Dr. Avalos, it is patently obvious that people have misinterpreted scripture, just as it is patently obvious to me that they have misinterpreted the scientific evidence.  To the average person, this just isn't so. 

Off Topic: Close But No Cigar?

A new exoplanet has been discovered that is the most earth-like planet yet found. It is GJ 1214b. Wired has the story:

“If you want to describe in one sentence what this planet is, it’s a big, hot ocean,” said Harvard University astronomer David Charbonneau. “We can even study its atmosphere. This planet will occupy us for years. That’s part of what’s so exciting about it.”

Described by Charbonneau and 17 other astronomers in a paper published Wednesday in Nature, GJ 1214b is the latest of roughly 400 planets detected by earthly telescopes. Of these, 28 are considered “super-Earths” — planets with a mass roughly comparable to our own.

The super-Earths themselves are too distant to be seen. Instead, astronomers infer their presence from subtle distortions in starlight, caused when photons travel through the super-Earths’ gravitational fields. Depending on the degree of distortion, astronomers can even calculate a planet’s mass.

Once upon a time I asked my friend Rob Kroeger, who is a physicist at the University of Mississippi, how big the universe was across. He said it was approximately 150 billion light years across. When I asked him if that number was generated by the limit of the available technology, he replied "no, it is just that beyond that point, what you see is a 'fuzz' that seems to be the barrier." That we are able to discern with any degree of certainty the characteristics of objects at that distance speaks volumes of the current level of technology and understanding of astrophysics. What an awesome universe!

Now the other shoe. Does this planet have life? The story continues:

That list of ingredients raises at least the possibility of life. With an estimated temperature of 370 degrees Fahrenheit, GJ 1214b is an unlikely incubator (Earth’s toughest extremophile, a microbe that lives in deep-sea volcanic vents, maxes out at 284 degrees) but it’s not impossible.

“I don’t want to imply that there’s any indication of life as we know it. It might have life, but it would have to be a strange kind of life,” said Charbonneau.

The telescopes sure to be trained on GJ 1214b in the near future will try to answer that question. But even if it proves barren, other planets await. The telescopes that spotted GJ 1214b were custom designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and had only operated for a few months before striking water.

“We only look at a handful of stars before finding this planet, said Charbonneau. “Either we got lucky, or the planets are very common.”

But what if we did find a planet that did have life? Gordon Glover, in his excellent blog, Beyond the Firmament, addressed the issues that Christians had when it was discovered that there were people that lived on the other side of the world. He writes:

If all men are physically descended from Adam, and thus Adam’s sin is credited to their account, then any people living on the opposite ends of the earth must have traveled there from the Ancient World after Noah’s time. And since there was no record of any such journey, and the equatorial region was thought to be impassable by ship, it was absurd to think that descendants of Adam could inhabit such places.

This led to the people on the other side of the world being dehumanized. Consequently, when the explorers visited these people, they treated them as if they were not human. It didn't occur to them that their theology needed revising. If there is life on one or some of these exoplanets, does that make God less of a God? Or these creatures less of his creations?


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Now playing: Susan Ashton - Song of Reconciliation
via FoxyTunes

"Stupid Things Christians Say."

Michael Riley of MyCentralJersey.com has some amusing thoughts on the kinds of things that Christians say. Along the way, he hits of my favorite subject:

"I don't believe in evolution." How about gravity? Is gravity workin' out for you? Evolution isn't a matter of belief; it's a scientific fact, an accurate description of the way the world works. And proponents of Intelligent Design (and its ugly, red-headed stepchild, Creationism) forget that religion and science work different sides of the street and reveal different kinds of truth. Muddying the differences always leads to bad theology and scientific illiteracy.

Right on both accounts!