The Early Days of a Better Nation |
Ken MacLeod's comments. “If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Sunday, March 27, 2011
In case anyone doesn't know ... The Genesis Flood argues that the entire universe was created a few thousand years ago, and that a couple of thousand years after its creation, the Earth was devasted by a global flood resulting from the collapse of the vapour canopy that had hitherto kept the early Earth pleasantly warm and humid. There have been some disagreements since about where the water came from, and where it went, but in any case the upshot was that this global aqueous catastrophe completely resurfaced the globe and produced almost the entire geological column and fossil record. The appearance of a succession of forms of life is an artefact of their original location ('ecological zonation') and 'hydrodynamic sorting', i.e. their differing capacities to sink or swim. Just why the ecologically and hydrodynamically almost identical ichthyosaurs and dolphins are never found in the same strata is never quite explained. (There are other difficulties with this hypothesis.) Fate or Providence or the course of nature took an ironic revenge on my parents for filling my head with this sort of nonsense, because having been primed to be suspicious of mainstream science my brain was an open goal for pseudoscience. Flying saucers and Erich von Daniken and Velikovsky other such rubbish went straight to the back of the net. One consequence was that I started thinking, just to try and make sense of it all, and by the time I went to university I was a convinced atheist. I still thought that the anti-evolution tracts had made some telling points. This misconception didn't survive a reading of the first chapter of the first-year biology textbook, Keeton's Biological Science. As often happens it was an entirely trivial point that pricked the bubble: 'Why,' Keeton asked, 'would the Creator have given pigs, which walk on only two toes per foot, two other toes that dangle uselessly well above the ground?' Creationists can argue about the human appendix and the whale's hind legs and male nipples till the cows come home, but the pig's superfluous trotters walked all over that, at least for me. So I studied biology and then zoology and I read everything about evolution I could find. I read The Origin of Species, and I saw for myself how it had been misrepresented in the creationist tracts. One particularly prevalent practice of these was what later became known as quote-mining: taking a quote from an evolutionist out of context or mangling it, so that it seemed to be conceding a point against evolution. An example that jumped out at me was the passage from Darwin's sixth chapter, 'Difficulties of the theory', the one that goes: 'To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' I'd often seen this quoted, but nary a word from the three pages that follow, in which Darwin explains how the eye could indeed have been formed by natural selection. As you might imagine, I was indignant about how I had been deceived. I came to have a very short fuse on the subject of quote-mining. Needless to say, all through my zoology studies the matter came up at home. I didn't raise it myself, but my parents did, repeatedly. They plied me with Young Earth Creationist material, and got very upset when I questioned it, however tactfully. Not that I was always tactful. I was sometimes grossly insensitive. But all but a very few of these fights were picked by my parents and not by me. I don't blame them for that. They were doing good as they saw it. At other times, I've taken a light-hearted, irenic, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude to all this. What a shame, I've said, that some fundamentalists can't seem to understand that there is no necessary conflict between Christian faith and the scientific fact of evolution! One of my tutors, a palaeontologist who was a devout Christian and later became an ordained Anglican vicar, could surely have set them straight on that! But he couldn't have. They were perfectly well aware that there were Christians who weren't YEC. I don't know if they thought these people weren't really Christians, but at the very least they thought they were bad and inconsistent Christians, at least in that respect. I'll say again, I don't blame them for that. The people I blame are the people who wound them up. As time went on I thought very little about the whole creation-evolution controversy, and I only became interested again in the 1990s, when I started following talk.origins, a Usenet newsgroup where creationists (and other anti-evolutionists) have toe-to-toe knockdown arguments with supporters of mainstream science. Its numerous FAQs and other resources are now easily available at its website. What I learned there, from repeated example, is that the problems I noticed in the creationist tracts - the distortions, the fallacies, the faked anomalies, the quote-mining - are still absolutely characteristic of creationists, along with something that doesn't come across in (most of) the books but comes over loud and clear when creationists are arguing online in person: a quite insufferable arrogance, aggressiveness, and ignorance. There are a few creationists who acknowledge the weight of the evidence for evolution and don't distort it but still reject it. But they're the exceptions. What quote-mining shows is that some people who produce creationist material are conscious liars. Behind these pseudo-science hacks are worse people yet. These are theologians who have the education to understand the conflict precisely. It's not one between 'science and the Bible'. It's a lot more stark than that. It's a conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible (what is loosely called 'literalism') and normal scientific method. There would be a certain integrity in acknowledging the conflict, admitting that there was no obvious resolution, and pointing out that we are not always given to comprehend the intent of the Ancient of Days. That at least would allow young people from these traditions to study biology and geology and astronomy without the constant arguments at home interrupting their thoughts like a buzz of static across their brains. There's one further ironic revenge visited on all this. A frequent complaint against the New Atheists is that they're only arguing against fundamentalism, and ignoring the broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. This isn't exactly true, but to the extent that it is, they've hit a sweet spot in the market. When I rejected fundamentalism I didn't turn to broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. I didn't start wondering if maybe there was something to be said for Anglicanism. I just went straight over to atheism. If this is typical, and I think it is, then there must be many for whom the New Atheist books are like water in the desert. We need no condescension from those who have already found an oasis. [Note: this includes part of my Leicester Secular Society Darwin Memorial Lecture that I left out below.] Labels: atheism, creationism, evolution 31 Comments:
Damn fine post. One quibble: I don't think the quote miners are liars; I think they're selectively blind. Quotes that support them are like neon; the rest is grayed out.
excellent, I think the right title would be "Up From Creationism"
> Morris and Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood.<
Yes, that is what gets up my nose - the lying. If they just said "My belief says X so I think you are wrong" it would be fine, but they have to go and twist and alter everything to suit.
My folks aren't Creationists, as such, just Catholics. And I went to Catholic school, and church on Sundays, and all that stuff.
Anon - I like that! Ken, on second thought, it's certainly possible some of them believe anything's fair in their fight for creationism. I would love to ask them why they're fighting so strongly. Do they think Heaven has an entrance exam, and if you flunk the section on the age of the Earth, it's automatic damnation for you? Quote mining is just confirmation bias applied in argument. Most people adhere to that whether their belief system incorporates a religion or any other ideology. Those who look for stuff that undermines their beliefs usually only do so to attack it.
I never understood what was so appealing about Creationism, or ID over evolutionary theory. For me (as an atheist raised in a CofE environment) when I first truly understood evolution, it was a practically religious experience. I can fully understand why someone could point to evolution as proof that there must be a god.
I'd be more tolerant of Creationism and those that believed such things, but it always seems to me a set of beliefs that can't exist unless they are attacking science. If creationism (particularly ID) had to be argued in terms of moral or spiritual terms then it would fall apart. Will - I don't think any of the main creationist groups and churches would say accepting evolution is a damnable heresy. Leaving doctrine aside, I think there are two social reasons: biblical authority (i.e. their authority as bible-thumpers) and costly signalling. Creationism may not separate the sheep from the goats, but it sure separates the hard-liners from the faint-hearted.
Excellent post. I'll be referring others to it. In my (once quite frequent and now fairly rare) debates with creationists (especially the ID folks), I tend to start with the question of agenda.
Will Shetterly: "Otherwise, why would they lie? Lying suggests they actually believe in evolution, and they're just goofing on us."
You may enjoy my live-blogging of some creationist loons who came to speak to my university's Islamic Society: quote-mining and lies with pictures of bears turning into whales with big red crosses over them. Apparently birds can't be descended from dinosaurs because dinosaurs were big and birds are small… They also claimed that all evolutionists were consciously lying rather than wrong, and that all genocides and terrorists were Darwinists. Oh dear.
Came via P Z Myers to read your whole article.
Yes, that's a very good point. It's not just apologists: there's a practice of preaching from texts, i.e. individual verses, and of arguing by 'proof text', that seems quite common in fundamentalism. Examining context and the overall meaning of the chapter let alone the book tends to fall by the wayside. Fun fact: it seems to have been David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, who first raised the structure of the eye as a problem for the (i.e. his own) natural-selection position. And it really was a problem for him (and not for Darwin), because Hume's theory of natural selection was all-or-nothing: various combinations occur randomly in infinite time, the orderly (and heritable) ones survive, and the others perish. Hume's theory was natural selection without competition, and so didn't register the importance of degrees of fitness. I would bet that Darwin had Hume's concession in mind.
Hi Ken. Stephe - that's amazing. Please drop me an email (you can find my address at the top left of the blog).
ilorien - Creationists,
I'm going to drop a small brick into the pond. I think the critics are driven by ideology rather than facts. That would take alot more effort to convince them other wise.
"Theology can be constructed according to as rational a set of rules as mathematics, but the answers depend on the axioms."
I also came here via PZMyers blog, via the weekly Sunday School list from Think Atheist. Isn't link following wonderful?
I recently read a long (rather loose) essay by Laura Knight-Jadczyk in which the creationist/evoloutionist debate is examined amongst other things. You (and other readers here) may find it interesting if you have a couple of hours to spare. Within it, she states her own position, quoted below.
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By Will Shetterly, at Sunday, March 27, 2011 2:58:00 pm