Nope.
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Nope.
Evolution isn’t driven by our ideas of progress, and involves branching, in this case different branches leading to Gorillas and Bonobos and Chimpanzees and Robust Australopithecines and Humans, and isn’t male-only.
i think next time i run into one of these people i will say: “Gravity is just a theory, so we don’t have to accept it as true.”
That’s a good analogy too, but I imagine some Biblical literalists would counter that the diversity of human language is actually due to the Fall of the Tower of Babel.
This. It is what (seemly most of) the contributors to BoingBoing letters threads don’t understand. In order to really dish it right back to people who profess these beliefs… well logical discourse is great. Particularly with the young, who are usually less vested in the particulars of the sect they were raised in.
However, another good, honest way for someone who is religious to put it is: “I reject the creedal tenets of literalism and inerrancy. They are anti-Christian, and lead people away from knowing Christ.” It might not work well with non-science majors at U of K. Many 18-20 year olds from the middle middle class in that part of the U.S. were brought up attending windowless, block-like non-denom megachurches where “praise” and saccharine sweet talk were served up with a tribal flare. Small old-style fundamentalist churches, where they’d have had exposure to the tenets that actually underlie their “beliefs”, are kind of a thing of the past. Many of them probably don’t know that “inerrancy” is a word, defining the belief (developed in the 19th century) that no word in the Bible is wrong. They just “know” that you must believe – not only that Christ was sent to save us, but that no word in the Bible can be wrong – in order to be a Christian. At all.
Disbelief in evolution is a mark of membership for much of this group. It has little to do Christ – which is exactly why they’re so into it. Loud defenses of Creationism proxy for real Christian living. The latter is hard, unsexy and sometimes dangerous. The former is as invigorating as a meth rush and as pleasing as a hard on.
I am not sure that is a better analogy. The problem is that a) people can learn more than one language and b) the branching tree doesn’t really work - e.g English has a lot of influence from French as well. Whereas the Americans descended from Europeans one really does get across “why there are still monkeys” - because not everyone changed.
One thing I find interesting is a tendency to assume evolution has finished and we are an end product, rather than us being merely the most recent step. You can also discuss whether knowledge should come into the picture - it isn’t passed on genetically, but it definitely is passed on and improves our chances of survival
Oh, FFS. There’s no such thing as an “evolutionist” and certainly not “in the macro sense.” That’s just creationist nonsense that betrays your bias. They’re biologists.
“[A]s dogmatic as any theologian.” Nice false equivalency there. It’s the old “science is based on faith as much as religion” nonsense, but phrased in a way that sounds vaguely more reasonable if you don’t think about it. Nope.
My experience is that it’s a general approach common to a lot of members in almost any mass movement. People like the concept of stability. We like the idea of belonging. We like the idea of bad guys. We like nice clear lines of behavior that are backed up by God or science. We like to be able to share what we know is the truth.
As I get older, I get more accepting of this, perhaps I can see more of this tendency in myself and my peers.
Although truthfully, being part of the God tribe is probably more rewarding than being part of the science tribe. After all, God will love you if you love him (just ask any believer). Science on the other hand, doesn’t need you or care about you. It’ll take all the truths that it told you and that you built your life around, and then casually throw them away, simply because of a few observations, leaving you hanging in the wind, having been wrong your entire life.
You can pledge your loyalty to the cause of science, but unless you’re a scientist, what will it offer back? A chance to hold as truth a bunch of hypotheses that will be laughed at with scorn in a century or two!
:-).
Considering the mismatch between what we intuit and what we can measure, I generally agree. None of this makes sense, and I hope there is eventually a punchline 
The good thing about this analogy is that the missing links from micro to macro linguistic evolution are well-documented as published documents. If they’re not used to reading the KJV, I’d have thought most Evangelicals would have trouble understanding more than a few hundred years of untranslated English. We can see common traits develop and diverge and the history is already there, which dismisses the argument that we just don’t know.
English is a poor example, but it’s what a lot of creationists speak. (You could use it to talk about Neanderthals, but it’s easier to simplify). Neither is a perfect analogy - people travel directly from Europe to America and back and the problem with multiple origins is much larger, so it completely ignores development over time and the tree structure. I think language is a much more organic metaphor which can also help when talking about change without the idea that the change has stopped or claiming that later developments are better than earlier ones.
My two passions that lead me to “I can’t come right now, someone is wrong on the internet.” is gun control and evolution.
I feel for this guy, I really do. I can’t believe he met this character: "One student explained that as a devout Catholic he had no choice but to reject evolution. He accused me of fabricating the pope’s statements. When I explained that he could go to the Vatican website for verification or call the Vatican to talk to a scientist, he insisted that there was no such information available from the Vatican. He then pointed his finger at me and said the only way he would believe me is if then–Pope John Paul II came to my class to confirm these quotes face-to-face. "
That just blows my mind. I mean he is self deluding to preserve his faith, when his faith doesn’t even demand it of him! One reason I converted to Catholicism was because they were ok with evolution and non-literal Genesis.
By far the most hard headed are the Evangelicals and Baptists. Oh, thank God they finally came along to tell everyone that for nearly the past 2000 years we have all been worshiping God wrong.
Some of the points I make repeatedly are things like the topic of Transubstantiation - which none of them believe. I point out, “You are willing to interpret Christs own words and explain away their own meaning to fit your understanding. But for some reason you cling to Jewish prophetic visions as literal and unwavering despite the mountain of evidence saying otherwise?”
I also point out how there are clear eras of life - at one point there no land animals, no mammals, no plants. Did god make multiple acts of creation? How do you account for new forms of life emerging?
I also like to poke them with, “Ironically, my faith is stronger than yours because I can see the world for what it really is and still believe in God.”
But science doesn’t have a loyalty pledge. Science and religious are honestly one of the few places where you can have your cake and eat it too 
Faith is unprovable. Science vehemently accepts unprovable hypothesis. So bang zero contradiction.
I think there are three overlapping reasons why some Christians are uneasy with evolution, or may reject evolution.
Inerrancy is one of them. Inerrancy without literalism could regard the creation myth as an extended parable or allegory, but would have to reconsider Iesus’s, Paul’s, and the author of Hebrews’s references to the creation myth.
Scale is another. Half a billion years of suffering and death is an awful lot to create humans [and other great apes, and dolphins, and certain corvids, and…], though it doesn’t seem like an awful lot to create half a billion years of joy and life, animal life.
I use the example that evolution branches like a tree - just like your family tree.
If you mother was a Smith and your father a Jones, you are a Jones too. But your cousins are from a different branch and are Smiths. Smiths still exist and will continue to do so.
In the case of my half Korean cousins, we look nothing like, but we share the same ancestors.
Any imaginary object, or a real object inanimate enough to not contradict you with its behavior, will love you, even unconditionally, if you believe in it enough.
It could, if you’d believe enough. See above. But such belief is somewhat impractical.
And give you better, more reliable truths, with every iteration. Does religion have any built-in mechanisms for testing its “truths” and improving them over time?
What’s better when you are wrong - knowing it, or not knowing it?
Better, more reliable, continually improving truths?
Einstein did not upend Newtonian mechanics. The latter is still good enough for casual jobs in the domain of sane speeds/masses/accelerations/dimensions. The “engineering truths” won’t get scorned that much; it’s the cutting edge hypotheses and even theories that do or do not make it. The “do not make it” part, the weeding of the chaff, is the crucial part that no system worth believing can afford to omit.
Yes, in two centuries they could laugh at you. But that’s the price of not being stuck two millenia ago, for which they will laugh at you not only in two centuries, but also now.
You can pledge your loyalty to the cause of science, but unless you’re a scientist, what will it offer back?
If you approach science the same way the faithful approach God- with humility and awe, that is- then you will know that the fruits of science aren’t the conclusions themselves, but the chance to allow our understanding of the world we live in to become more surprising, ornate and nuanced for every day we are alive. We might lose a few cherished beliefs along the way, but I think this is a small price to pay for the possibility of coming to terms with the vast universe of which we are a part.
We’ll no. It’s not about the hypothesis (and I think you mean theory), it’s about the process --the point of a journey is not to arrive --and all that. Making a theory the focus of “getting something” out of science is an appeasement to the ego and falls squarely into the trap becoming a system of belief rather than a method to understand.
This is what galls me so much about not teaching young people about how science works. It’s unconscionable that humans in our time reach adulthood without understanding “evolution vs. creationism” is as ridiculous an argument as “cats vs. the metric system”.
I respect that sentiment. I’m getting on myself and do recognize human proclivities inherent in all (and definitely with myself). Mostly I’m understanding. Mostly.
But not with this BS.
Exactly! You gain all the happiness of knowing that you are truly loved! And as a special bonus, no fear of eventual rejection! Has anyone ever been made less happy truly knowing they were loved?
Actually, this was the impetus behind my post. For most of us science-tribe, non-scientists, we don’t truly understand the science. As a youth, I barely made it 2/3 of the way through most Scientific American articles, and now as a Nature subscriber, I’m only reading the Letters rather than the papers. The real science, well, that’s pretty much scripture to me, interpreted by scientists. (At least with God, I can pray to get my “direct line”.)
So, how do I get my jollies? By being right, of course, unlike those benighted God-tribesman.
And then I realized that when you took the parts of my science knowledge that made a social difference (sorry, but everyone believes mechanics, my science tribe membership has to have higher standards than that), most of what I had prided myself on knowing was wrong! Science had left me behind over the years. And then I made the effort to catch up. And it left me behind again!
In other words, a strong part of my identity (and my innate belief in my superiority) was build around believing my interpretation of scientist’s interpretations of science that I couldn’t possibly understand that was already obsolete!
And it still is :-).
Doesn’t Nature cost $300 a year? Lucky you.
It’s actually a lot more specific than that. There are precisely argued theological arguements for individual beliefs, tenets, and socio-political positions and for why they are or are not dictated by a given religious group. So while fundamentalist Christian groups argue for the literal interpretation and acceptance of every dictate in the bible (or from whatever religious hierarchy is in place), that usually isn’t actually what there doing. There’s a fair bit of intellectual masturbation, and historical trend involved in establishing which beliefs, edicts, and dictates “define” a given faith group. Mixed up in all that there is actually a specific approach that involves tying whatever particular features define their group as being essential to belief and membership. So it isn’t so much that denial of evolution is a marker of membership, but that the concepts behind evolution contradict major bits of what is considered to be essentially to their faith. The whole structure of how those belief systems are built and rationalized rests on a sort of checklist of interlaced ideas. Abandon, disprove, or even question one and it must as a matter of course mean you reject the whole edifice. Now your the bad “other”. In other words I think it goes in the opposite direction. Rejection of evolution draws naturally from their restrictive approach to belief, as opposed to be an easy political marker for membership that gets justified later.
And that kind of thinking isn’t unique to conservative or orthodox sects. Oddly enough a lot of left wing, Main Line Protestants seem really, really, angry at Unitarians. And don’t consider them to be Christian. I worked for a brief while at an incredibly liberal, non-affiliated Theology school. The students and the faculty were like conducting Unitarian hunts. Searching them out. Accusing people of being Unitarian. And constantly griping about a pernicious Unitarian influence on the school. It was pretty bizarre.
I’m just gonna say please don’t. This, frankly rather basic, arrogance from religious folks is at the heart of a lot of the prejudice we atheists (yeah bro) experience day to day. Its easy enough to hide, and coast on the assumption that all people (except those people) are religious. But I’ve been told to my face that I can’t be trusted around children, don’t or can’t feel love, must not have any friends, don’t REALLY have family, am actually a murderer, will be a murderer and a dozen other things. I’ve been kicked punched and spit on. All driven by the false and arrogant assumption that only religion provides a person with certain basic things. Whether that’s love, answers, community, or just status as a human being. Those things that religion “gives back” to you? That’s not a feature of religion. That’s a feature of society. And you can get them from all sorts of places. My family, the guys I go drinking with on weekends, the people I troop around with looking for new foods to try, my friends improve troop, a book club, The Church of Satan, the ACLU, a bunch of idiots you talk to on the internet, your neighborhood, a business where you are a proper regular, and yeah even something to do with science. There’s nothing unique to religion that provides these things. You’re religion doesn’t care about you (that’s like saying literature cares about you, or linguistics cares about you) its the people in your religion that care about you. And the social structures that are common to human endeavors that re-enforce that care, and allow you to see it.
So please don’t infantilize or dismiss people you disagree with because you fail to see how we can exist in society without some undefinable thing you like to think your getting out of your particular in-group. Its just arrogant and insulting.
Beyond that you’re just embracing the whole science vs religion thing. Science is not a belief system that is in competition with other belief systems, neither is it intended to provided the same sort of moral guidance or approach the same sort of questions and ideas (that would be philosophy). Unless your religion specifically denies science, or from the other side: your an anti-religious person with a nut on for attacking religion using science, there really isn’t a conflict there. At all. Really. Science in general, and the scientific method is specific, comes to us from religion after all.
It’s not intended to offer “anything back” in the nebulous warm feeling sort of way you intend. Otherwise it offers back the internet, modern medical science, guys on the moon, and silly putty. And a complex frame work for evaluating the veracity of subjective experience. While I may hold certain things to be true now that may be disproven eventually (this happens to me nearly weekly BTW), at no point does that impune science, the scientific method, or the skeptical approach. Because that’s what its for. All we’re talking about is a carefully constructed, rational, rhetorical system for examining the world around us (the real physical world) and arriving at something objective at the end. Its very much supposed to change, reverse itself, purge old false ideas, expand, and repeatedly test and question everything its been used to find thus far. Forever. So even if everything science knows now changes tomorrow, science will still be there. Because the base approach not only still works it’s what will allow us to know we’re wrong.
Oh, alright. You win.
Actually, I have to say, that as someone non-religious, but with some respect for the church, this is what truly angers me about Creationism.
Many of the earliest “scientists” where monks, seeking to understand God’s work. through the gifts that God had given them (senses and the ability to reason). Discovery was truly an act or worship. Creationists tell us that we must eschew what our God-given senses tell us. That we have to turn our back on God’s gift of reason. That we must believe that God has created a world replete with evidence that we must ignore. Essentially, that God lies.
In other words, that everything that God has given us, both our bodies and the world that surrounds us, must be refused in favor of what some man is telling us.
And if I was religious, that would be about as clear-cut definition of evil as I could imagine.
