15AR20-02

Apologia Report 20:2 (1,231)

January 14, 2015

Subject: "Most Americans do believe God created us. But..."

In this issue:

GENDER - too scared to admit the obvious?

ORIGINS - "the harder you press about historical claims in the Bible, the less confident people are"

+ a professor in the New York Times as Goliath meets his David

+ objecting to the idea that aesthetics, morality, consciousness, purpose, and meaning are based on just physics and chemistry

+ science continues to make the case for God all on its own

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GENDER

Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, by Melvin Konner [1] -- Library Journal's Prepub Alert (Aug 8 '14) tells us that Konner, the "Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University - draws on a lifetime of study to argue for the natural superiority of women." Kirkus (Dec 1 '14) explains: "Contemporary discussions regarding gender typically revolve around the idea that the masculine and feminine are more products of culture than of nature. The author counters prevailing ideas about gender by taking a biologically essentialist position...." Publishers Weekly (Nov 24 '14) adds that Konner's "bold new book ... claims that 'gender identity is at its core something biological,' and that there are psychological and behavioral differences between men and women that aren't culturally constructed. ... Konner's treatise is carefully referenced and clearly written throughout, but it's the intricately constructed argument that gender identities are rooted in biology that treads new ground." <big yawn>

It would seem that when the need for political correctness trumps common sense, the intuitive requires rediscovery by sources reflecting both cultural authority and plausible freedom from bias.

ORIGINS

"God's Work? A new poll suggests Americans aren't so confident in their creationism" by William Saletan -- and an old apologist notes that the mainstream media tend to see only young-earth views as representing creationism. The author's smug, biased tone is evident throughout, but let's not dwell on it. Instead, here are the facts . . . as presented by Slate. According to the "National Study of Religion & Human Origins" <www.ow.ly/Hdufx>, sponsored by the controversial BioLogos Foundation <biologos.org>, "Most Americans do believe God created us. But the harder you press about historical claims in the Bible, the less confident people are. The percentage who stand by young-Earth creationism dwindles all the way to 15 percent." A chart contrasts diminishing levels of confidence from stronger (origins opinion) to weaker (divine authority). Saletan concludes: "How many people are truly hardcore creationists? For that, you have to look at certainty across a range of statements. [Study author Jonathan] Hill's data show a high correlation in responses to four propositions: that God created the world in six 24-hour days, that God created humans miraculously, that humans didn't evolve from other life forms, and that Adam and Eve were real people. Sixteen percent of respondents said they were absolutely or very certain about all four of those beliefs. That's the hardcore. And even that core isn't as hard as advertised. Ask whether humans have been around for only 10,000 years, and the hardcore—those who are absolutely or very certain on all five questions—shrinks to 7 percent. "Yes, we're a creationist country. But apparently, we're pretty creative about what that means." Slate, Dec 4 '14, <www.ow.ly/H6T5a>

A second less-than-friendly piece comes by way of the New York Times (Sep 27 '14): "God, Darwin and My College Biology Class" by David P. Barash, evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington -- a prof struts over "The Talk" he gives each year "about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don't." For Barash, "evolution is not merely a 'theory,' but the underpinning of all biological science...." He notes that "Stephen Jay Gould called them [evolution and religion] 'nonoverlapping magisteria,'" and considered them compatible. "He and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather loudly); he claimed I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he was misrepresenting both science and religion." The rest of the article is written in Barash's defense as he explains how he strives to redirect the thinking of students with conservative religious backgrounds. <www.ow.ly/H6XJr>

Paul Nelson responds to Barash at significant length in the Christian Research Journal ("Professor David Barash and 'The Talk,'" 37:6 - 2014, pp49-51). He writes to offer "suggestions to any students dealing with their own academic Goliaths." Where, as a David, "Your sling and stones should be the evidence - or its conspicuous absence." Nelson points out that the "only significant claim" made by Barash is "that 'random variation plus natural selection contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness.' No intelligent designer need apply: an 'entirely natural and undirected process' will do the work of building organisms, including human beings." Nelson points out that, in his experience, "examples of natural selection on offer were either strictly hypothetical or at the wrong scale. ...

"If any one doubts this, he should try looking for himself. Choose any complex structure or behavior, and look in the biological literature for the step-by-step causal account where the origin of that structure ... is explained via random variation and natural selection." (He fails to point out the difficulty of proving a negative by virtue of a lack of evidence.) Nelson also reports that such "braggadocio, on behalf of neo-Darwinian theory, is not shared by many of Barash's colleagues."

The Science Delusion, by Curtis White [2] -- found to "take aim at two literary movements" in the review written by Matthew Flannagan in the Christian Research Journal (37:6 - 2014, pp56-58). The movements in question are the new atheism and neuroscience / evolutionary biology. White, a professor of English at Illinois State University, "argues that behind [these literary movements] is the ideology of scientism, which reduces everything - including aesthetics, morality, consciousness, purpose, and meaning - to the workings of physics and chemistry. ... His book is a passionate, scathing rejection of this ideology."

Flannagan makes three points. First, White offers "some telling and perceptive criticisms of both new atheist and popular science writers [and] the broader historical narrative assumed by proponents of scientism." Second, "White's way of making these arguments threatens to undermine his case," and his "ideological assertions ... are backed up by little more than veiled insults." And third, "White is at his weakest when he sketches his own positive alternative to scientism." That is, he simply becomes "obscure and almost incomprehensible." Too bad.

"Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God" by Eric Metaxas -- opens with a reference to when in 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? "The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. ... "As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

...

"There's more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. ...

"Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term 'big bang,' said that his atheism was 'greatly shaken' at these developments. He later wrote that 'a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.... The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.'

"Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that 'the appearance of design is overwhelming' and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said 'the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator ... gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.'

"The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something - or Someone - beyond itself." Wall Street Journal, Dec 25 '14. <www.ow.ly/H71i7> - and the response: <www.ow.ly/Hdvsz> The skeptic calls for proof: His God calls for humility. It's not a challenge that yields to intellectual merits alone. The real "proof" is often first discovered within our hearts.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, by Melvin Konner (W. W. Norton, March 2015, hardcover, 400 pages) <www.ow.ly/H6Rug>

2 - The Science Delusion, by Curtis White (Melville, 2014, paperback, 256 pages) <www.ow.ly/H6ZKT>

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