A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - I
Introduction
Young earth creationists attempt to dismiss evolutionary biology, cosmology, and geology by asserting they are somehow inferior to experimental sciences, or by pitting them against “operational science” which they claim is ontologically superior to the historical sciences. As such, it is a slightly less risible version of Ken Ham’s “were you there?” chant which he teaches to children as a way of refuting evolution. Needless to say, credible philosophers of science do not accept the YEC distortion of historical science or its invention of “operational science”, and given this such YEC arguments can be dismissed. Therefore, an anonymous fundamentalist Christadelphian article[1] on “God-Directed Evolution”[2] and why it is allegedly incompatible with Christadelphian theology that makes use of this YEC distortion of the epistemological basis of science is built on unstable ground and can be summarily dismissed.
Occasionally, I will search the internet to see if there are any new Christadelphian anti-evolution arguments, and while I may discover new video presentations or papers, I see no argument that I have not already considered and dismissed many times before. Recently, someone alerted me to a 2016 paper that has been republished at a Christadelphian website that hosts videos on fundamentalist interpretations of prophecy among other subjects. Its entire strategy was to begin with a particular fundamentalist interpretation of Christadelphian theology, extrapolate from that the anthropological positions that this fundamentalist theological position demands – in this case monogenism – and effectively declare heretical any attempt to honestly engage with the considerable body of scientific evidence that confirms the reality of human evolution. Unsurprisingly given the lack of relevant scientific acumen among Christadelphian evolution denialists, no substantive attempt was made to engage with the scientific data other than to fret about the naturalistic basis of science and how it does not look for supernatural causes for natural events (a bizarre claim which shows the author to be profoundly misinformed on the philosophy of science), and to invoke the bogus YEC distortion of historical science and invention of “operational science”. Another red flag was the uncritical citation of YEC sources as authoritative. Given these, the appropriate response is to brand the entire paper as nonsense, and move on. However, there are times where ritual flogging of dead horses may have some pedagogical value.
Evolutionary biologists are not all atheists
The author of this article featured at Christadelphian Video (hereafter referred to as CVA) asserts that:
One of the biggest stumbling blocks preventing GDE view holders from accepting God’s own eyewitness record in Genesis as an accurate historic account is their unquestioning acceptance of what non-theistic evolutionary scientists are alleging as “facts” or “demonstrable scientific truths” regarding the evolution of man from lower animal forms.
The reference to “non-theistic evolutionary scientists” is one of the many clumsy rhetorical ploys that the author of this article has used, and frankly characterises the sloppy and poorly-researched nature of the article. The author fails to recognise that many theistic evolutionary scientists exist such as Simon Conway Morris, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, and Graeme Finlay to name but a few of the more prominent life and earth scientists who both defend evolution and show that one can both accept evolution and maintain a strong Christian faith. Furthermore, this is not a recent phenomenon. The historian of science David Livingstone shows that shortly after Darwin published his book, some of his strongest supporters were Christians:
Darwin’s cause in America was championed by the thoroughgoing Congregationalist evangelical Asa Gray, who set himself the task of making sure that Darwin would have “fair play” in the New World. Let us be clear right away that this cannot be dismissed as capitulation to the social pressure of academic peers. To the contrary, Gray had to take on one of the most influential naturalists in America at the time to maintain his viewpoint – none other than Louis Agassiz, a Harvard colleague who vitriolically scorned Darwin’s theory. But Gray was not alone. Many of his countrymen, associates in science and brothers in religion took the same stand. And indeed even those who ultimately remained unimpressed with if not hostile to Darwin were quite prepared to admit that evolution had occurred. It is surely not without significance that Christian botanists, geologists, and biologists – that is to say, those best placed to see with clarity the substance of what Darwin had proposed – believed the evidence supported an evolutionary natural history.[3]
Christadelphians who accept evolution are not being duped by ‘non-theist evolutionary scientists’ but like their fellow Christians who accept evolution do so because the evidence is compelling.
Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology not modern science
Crucially, even if one ignores what evolutionary scientists have found, it is impossible to read Genesis as an “accurate historic account” given both the clear references to a prescientific cosmogeography in Genesis 1 and the contradictions between a literal reading of the creation narratives in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. With respect to the former, biblical scholar Kyle Greenwood notes that the writers of the creation narratives did not hold to a modern view of cosmology:
The ancient Hebrews did not think their planet was a round globe. For that matter, they did not even consider it to be a planet, since planets were in the heavens. Like their surrounding neighbors, the ancient Hebrews believed the earth was a small, round disk supported by pillars. The disk was relatively small by our standards, but its ends could not be reached. Beneath the surface lay the underworld, the final resting place of the deceased.[4]
Genesis 1:6-7, 14-17 clearly refer to this premodern cosmology when it describes a firmament that separates waters above from waters below and in which are embedded the sun, moon, and stars. Of this firmament, Ben Stanhope notes that the linguistic data alone make this case:
Addressing his fellow professional Bible translators in the Journal of Translation, the senior linguist John R. Roberts concludes from the linguistic data that “the Hebrew makes it explicit” that the biblical firmament—the raqia “should be conceived of as a solid dome with a surface.”[5]
Secondly, if we read Genesis 1 and 2 as literal descriptions of creation then we are faced with the problem that these accounts contradict each other in the method, length and order of creation as well as the depiction of God.
Figure 1 – Comparison of the Creation Accounts[6]
Old Testament scholar Peter Enns remarks
These two stories are clearly significantly different, and they cannot be harmonized by saying that the first gives the overview and the second fills in some of the details. The presence of two different creation accounts is troublesome for readers who assume that Genesis 1 and 2 are historical in nature and that the Bible’s first priority is to recount history accurately. Yet the divergence of these stories cannot be reasonably questioned. To stitch them into a seamless whole would dismiss the particular and distinct points of view that the authors were so deliberate in placing there.[7]
Even a theological conservative like Meredith Kline recognised that a literal sequential reading of the creation narratives posed significant problems:
Genesis 2 thus assumes natural providential preservation of vegetation during the creation era, which would be contradicted by Genesis 1 if interpreted as a literal, sequential narrative with vegetation present on day three, before the creation of the sun on day four.[8]
Reading Genesis 1-3 as literal historical narratives poses major problems which are abated when one ceases to read them that way.
Evolution is one of the best attested facts in science
That Genesis 1 and 2-3 are two different accounts of creation is of course unsurprising to those acquainted with contemporary biblical scholarship.[9] Given both the impossibility of reading both creation accounts as literal historical narratives due to the tensions arising from trying to reconcile divergent details on the length, mode, and duration of creation, as well as the clear references to a prescientific cosmology in Genesis 1, the honest exegete will conclude that the creation narratives cannot be read as an “accurate historic account” simply from internal evidence alone.
One cannot discuss evolution without referring to the science, and this is one of the biggest problems with this article, which fails to engage in any substantive way with the science, and seeks via dubious appeals to the philosophy of science to dismiss evolution. The author, in subtly deriding Christadelphian evolutionary creationists for their “unquestioning acceptance of what non-theistic evolutionary scientists are alleging as “facts” or “demonstrable scientific truths” regarding the evolution of man from lower animal forms” fails to recognise just how strong the support for evolution is among scientists, believing and unbelieving. In his standard text Evolution, Douglas Futuyma notes
In The Origin of Species, Darwin propounded two major hypotheses: that organisms have descended, with modification, from common ancestors; and that the chief cause of modification is natural selection acting on hereditary variation. Darwin provided abundant evidence for descent with modification; since then, hundreds of thousands of observations from paleontology, geographic distributions of species, comparative anatomy, embryology, genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology have confirmed that all known species are related to one another through a history of common ancestry. Thus the hypothesis of descent with modification from common ancestors has long had the status of a scientific fact…. The main tenets of evolutionary theory—descent with modification from a common ancestor, in part caused by natural selection—are so well supported that almost all biologists confidently accept evolutionary theory as the foundation of the science of life.[10]
Genomics expert and evolutionary biologist T. R. Gregory likewise affirms the solidity of support for evolution. Writing with respect to the solidity of support for evolution he notes
Each of thousands of peer-reviewed articles published every year in scientific journals provides further confirmation (though, as Futuyma…notes, “no biologist today would think of publishing a paper on ‘new evidence for evolution’ ... it simply hasn’t been an issue in scientific circles for more than a century”). Conversely, no reliable observation has ever been found to contradict the general notion of common descent. It should come as no surprise, then, that the scientific community at large has accepted evolutionary descent as a historical reality since Darwin’s time and considers it among the most reliably established and fundamentally important facts in all of science. [11]
The evidence for human-ape common ancestry likewise is robust. Just the genomics data alone makes that case. Evangelical Christian, medical scientist and former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins notes that
Even more compelling evidence for a common ancestor comes from the study of what are known as ancient repetitive elements (AREs). These arise from “jumping genes,” which are capable of copying and inserting themselves in various other locations in the genome, usually without any functional consequences. Mammalian genomes are littered with such AREs, with roughly 45 percent of the human genome made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam. When one aligns sections of the human and mouse genomes, anchored by the appearance of gene counterparts that occur in the same order, one can usually also identify AREs in approximately the same location in these two genomes.
Some of these may have been lost in one species or the other, but many of them remain in a position that is most consistent with their having arrived in the genome of a common mammalian ancestor, and having been carried along ever since. Of course, some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as “junk DNA” just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation. The process of transposition often damages the jumping gene. There are AREs throughout the human and mouse genomes that were truncated when they landed, removing any possibility of their functioning. In many instances, one can identify a decapitated and utterly defunct ARE in parallel positions in the human and the mouse genome.
Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable. This kind of recent genome data thus presents an overwhelming challenge to those who hold to the idea that all species were created ex nihilo.[12] (Emphasis mine)
The genomic data alone is compelling, but despite what special creationists allege, the fossil evidence for human evolution is hardly minimal. Palaeoanthropologists Matt Cartmill and Fred Smith note how
Opponents of scientific biology are fond of dismissing that record as a pathetic handful of controversial fragments. If that were so, this book would be a lot shorter. An often-repeated creationist canard insists that all known human fossils would fit on a billiard table. This was probably true in the 19th century, but it has not been true for a hundred years. Known human fossils number in the thousands and represent the remains of hundreds of individuals...Having seen most of the major collections of human fossils in the world's museums, we can assure our readers that those collections can no longer be laid out on a billiard table. It would be hard to cram them into a boxcar.[13]
Something that has been accepted by scientists for over a century and is regarded as one of the best-attested facts in science cannot be ignorantly dismissed as the “wisdom of men” but rather demands a substantive response. This is not one that you will find in the Christadelphian Video article, which is as unconvincing as a frantic appeal by a flat earther to ignore geography as a godless conspiracy and an attack on the inspiration of the Bible.[14]
Historical and experimental science – separate but equal approaches
CVA continues by declaring that
The purpose of this Appendix is not to “debate” science, but rather to highlight two important characteristics underpinning modern evolutionary science that make it markedly different to other operational areas of science we trust and rely on every day.
It is difficult to see this as anything other than a desperate attempt to avoid debating the specific scientific facts that the scientific community have regarded for over a century as confirming the reality of evolution by declaring evolutionary science illegitimate. It’s a tactic taken straight from the extreme fringes of fundamentalist Christianity as shown by the use of “operational science”, a term not used by philosophers of science by which instead was invented by young earth creationists[15] to disparage the branches of science such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology that falsify YEC views of reality as one YEC alleges:
To help us understand that science has practical limits, it is useful to divide science into two different areas: operational science and historical (origins) science. Operational science deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present and leads to the production of useful products like computers, cars, and satellites. Historical (origins) science involves interpreting evidence from the past and includes the models of evolution and special creation.[16]
Both the term “operational science” and the creationist misunderstanding of historical science are not recognised by science as legitimate. The National Center for Science Education in commenting on this creationist definition of science notes
Explore Evolution relies on an ill-defined distinction between “experimental science” and “historical sciences,” and asserts that claims about the latter cannot be directly verified. While the terms Explore Evolution uses are indeed applied by philosophers of science, those philosophers use the terms quite differently. Both approaches to scientific questions are valid, a given scientific field can draw on both approaches, and neither approach is less scientifically powerful. Explore Evolution is wrong to state that these different approaches require “different methods,” and even more wrong to state that "in the historical sciences, neither side can directly verify its claims about past events”.[17]
Given that CVA is drawing upon an illegitimate YEC misrepresentation of the epistemological basis of science in order to deprecate evolutionary biology, one can immediately dismiss their attack as unfounded and in the absence of any substantive attempt by them to address the science dismiss with prejudice their attack on evolution. However as I said at the start there is considerable value in an exhaustive criticism and refutation of CVA’s article to expose the utterly baseless nature of the attacks made on evolution by Christadelphian science denialists.
CVA continues their attack on evolution by asserting that:
evolution is a “historical” science, meaning that the process of microbes-to-man evolution cannot be repeated, tested or observed in the normal scientific way, but rather involves many assumptions and extrapolations to explain events that have already taken place
There are two fundamental problems with this attempt to dismiss evolution as being a “historical” science. The first is that this presupposes a belief in the methodological inferiority of historical science compared with experimental science, one which represents a gross misunderstanding of historical science. The second is that quite often evolutionary biology, geology, and astronomy use what creationists would call “observational science” and “experimental science”, making it difficult to draw a neat dividing line between them, thus invalidating any attempt by creationists to neatly quarantine their work into “historical” science that they can then dismiss.
The idea that experimental science is methodologically superior to historical science is false reflects the popular view that the scientific method involves constructing hypotheses, making predictions and testing them in the laboratory. While incorrect, this view unfortunately is prevalent among some scientists. Philosopher of science Carol Cleland notes that this view is found among many physicists and chemists, and quotes Henry Gee, former editor of Nature who asserted that hypotheses about the past could never be tested by experiment and therefore were unscientific.[18]
Cleland points out that while there are difficulties in performing controlled experiments to test hypotheses about historical events, this does not mean they cannot be tested:
As geologist T.C. Chamberlin (1897) noted, good historical researchers focus on formulating multiple competing (versus single) hypotheses. Chamberlin’s attitude toward the testing of these hypotheses was falsificationist in spirit; each hypothesis was to be independently subjected to severe tests, with the hope that some would survive. A look at the actual practices of historical researchers, however, reveals that the main emphasis is on finding positive evidence—a smoking gun. A smoking gun is a trace that picks out one of the competing hypotheses as providing a better causal explanation for the currently available traces than the others. [19]
She gives as an example the various hypotheses advanced to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs such as disease, climate change, volcanism, and meteorite impact, and notes how the deposition of iridium (rare on the earth’s surface but quite common in its interior and on meteors) and shocked quartz at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary provided convincing evidence for a meteorite impact at that time. This however did not demonstrate that an ancient meteorite impact event caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Further palaeontological work showing that the dinosaurs and other organisms became extinct around the time of the impact meant that
“…the iridium and shocked quartz took on the character of a ‘‘smoking gun’’ for the meteorite-impact hypothesis. In short, of the available hypotheses and in light of the existing evidence (e.g., fossil record, iridium, shocked quartz, crater), the meteorite-impact hypothesis supplied the most plausible causal mechanism for understanding the demise of the dinosaurs.”[20]
Another classic example of how the discovery of a “smoking gun” allowed scientists to choose one hypothesis from other competing hypotheses is the hypothesis of continental drift, advanced in 1912 by Alfred Wegener to explain facts such as the complementary shapes of the Atlantic coasts of Africa and South America, and the similarities in fossils and geological formations on either side of the Atlantic.[21] The lack of a known mechanism for continental movement meant that this hypothesis was not accepted until the hypothesis of sea floor spreading, with the smoking gun being the discovery of reversed magnetism on the sea floor
The subsequent discovery of alternating bands of reversed magnetism, spreading out symmetrically on both sides of the volcanically active Mid-Atlantic Ridge provided the smoking gun for sea floor spreading. The magnetic stripes provided compelling evidence that the Earth’s crust moves horizontally, carrying the continents along with it. But widespread scientific acceptance of sea floor spreading had to wait a few more years until a geophysical mechanism for sea floor spreading was worked out in the theory of plate tectonics.[22]
Far from being epistemically inferior to experimental science, historical science Cleland argues that this assertion cannot be sustained
Experimental scientists focus on a single (sometimes complex) hypothesis, and the main research activity consists in repeatedly bringing about the test conditions specified by the hypothesis, and controlling for extraneous factors that might produce false positives and false negatives. Historical scientists, in contrast, usually concentrate on formulating multiple competing hypotheses about particular past events. Their main research efforts are directed at searching for a smoking gun, a trace that sets apart one hypothesis as providing a better causal explanation (for the observed traces) than do the others. These differences in methodology do not, however, support the claim that historical science is methodologically inferior, because they reflect an objective difference in the evidential relations at the disposal of historical and experimental researchers for evaluating their hypotheses.[23]
This of course does not mean that there are no difficulties involved in accessing the deep past. Philosopher of science Patrick Forber and neurobiologist Eric Griffith recognise this fact,
While all science must confront underdetermination, historical reconstruction often lacks important epistemic recourses available to other lines of inquiry. When reconstructing history we lack the ability to intervene experimentally to test hypothesized causal relationships among events in the past. Moreover, our inability to reproduce or observe repetitions of most historical events ensures that historical reconstruction, unlike tasks involving the identification and testing of regularities, is limited by restricted sources of data. While other areas of scientific inquiry (e.g., celestial mechanics or the structure of the earth) have achieved substantial progress in the face of an inability to intervene experimentally, the task of historical reconstruction faces a further epistemic difficulty: the traces of a past event are subject to disturbance by heterogeneous causal processes over long spans of time, biasing or destroying information extractable from residual traces of the past event. [24]
In examining just how historical claims can become more than “just-so” stories, they reference the “smoking gun” approach, assert that “[g]iven that any line of evidence will include a number of auxiliaries, and that at least some of the auxiliaries will lack strong epistemic support, there will be a strict limit as to how much epistemic support a smoking gun can provide for a reconstruction”[25] and argue instead for the consilience of multiple lines of evidence
We will take a different approach, arguing that the main source of epistemic support in historical investigations comes from the consilience of multiple independent lines of evidence on the chronology or key quantitative properties integral to causal history. If lines of evidence that have a high degree of independence yield convergent estimates for the chronology or a quantity assumed by a historical reconstruction, then they provide epistemic support that is less sensitive to testing holism. The independence of evidential inferences is measured by assessing the amount of overlap between the sets of assumed auxiliaries required by the different inferences. If inferences are sufficiently independent, attacking one weak auxiliary will not completely undermine the overall support for the historical reconstruction.[26]
The authors demonstrate their thesis using the hypothesis of meteorite impact as the cause of mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, and conclude
We have defended a view of historical reconstruction wherein the consilience of multiple independent lines of evidence on the chronology and key quantities integral to a specific historical reconstruction provides the main source of epistemic support. Unlike the smoking gun account, this approach is specifically sensitive to the problem of testing holism. The consilience of several such inferences involving distinct auxiliary hypotheses onto a relatively precise range of values serves to crosscheck the auxiliaries employed in any one inference, simultaneously testing the legitimacy of all of these background assumptions, and thereby allowing for a stronger conclusion regarding the nature of the inferred past cause of the observed data.[27]
There are always going to be challenges in reconstructing past events, particularly when considerable time has elapsed. However, it is incorrect of creationists (and some scientists) to assert that no science can ever be historical or that historical science is epistemologically inferior to experimental science.
The second problem with CVA’s argument is that one cannot draw a neat dividing line between “historical science” and “experimental science” as evolutionary biologists, geologist, and other practitioners of historical sciences will often use both approaches, invalidating any creationist attempt to automatically dismiss the results of the branches of science they deem problematic. Philosopher of science Elliot Sober notes
This division between nomothetic (“nomos” is Greek for law) and historical sciences does not mean that each science is exclusively one or the other. The particle physicist might find that the collisions of interest often occur on the surface of the sun; if so, a detailed study of that particular object might help to infer the general law. Symmetrically, the astronomer interested in obtaining an accurate description of the star might use various laws to help make the inference.
Although the particle physicist and the astronomer may attend to both general laws and historical particulars, we can separate their two enterprises by distinguishing means from ends. The astronomer's problem is a historical one because the goal is to infer the properties of a particular object; the astronomer uses laws only as a means. Particle physics, on the other hand, is a nomothetic discipline because the goal is to infer general laws; descriptions of particular objects are relevant only as a means.
The same division exists within evolutionary biology. When a systematist infers that human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas, this phylogenetic proposition describes a family tree that connects three species. The proposition is logically of the same type as the proposition that says that Alice is more closely related to Betty than she is to Carl. Of course, the family tree pertaining to species connects bigger objects than the family tree that connects individual organisms. But this difference merely concerns the size of the objects in the tree, not the basic type of proposition that is involved. Reconstructing genealogical relationships is the goal of a historical science.[28] (Emphasis in original)
The National Center for Science Education, in directly addressing this young earth creationist misrepresentation of the epistemological basis of science also comments on this creationist attempt to rigidly divide science into “historical” and “experimental” groups
The problem with these attempts to divide science neatly into two piles is that, as Sober observes, a given science, and even a given scientist, can switch between approaches in the quest to address a single question. Geologists can plumb the oldest rocks on earth for evidence of the first life, but they can also go to the lab and recreate the conditions of early earth to test predictions of hypothesis about events billions of years ago. And those results from a modern laboratory will send researchers back to the field to test predictions about historical events generated in the laboratory.
Similarly, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are testing theories about the origin of the universe:
The LHC will recreate, on a microscale, conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.
At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles - quarks, leptons and the force carriers. As the Universe cooled to 1000 billion degrees, the quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong force) combined into composite particles like protons and neutrons. The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’. This will take us back to the time before these particles formed, re-creating the conditions early in the evolution of the universe, when quarks and gluons were free to mix without combining. The debris detected will provide important information about this very early state of matter.
Science and Technology Facilities Council (2008) “The Big Questions” page on “The Large Hadron Collider” website. Accessed September 18, 2008.
Which category of science does this belong to? Clearly, it is both historical science and experimental science. Other such historical claims can be evaluated using modern experiments.[29]
Developmental biologist Paul Myers in critiquing this young earth creationist attempt to dismiss historical sciences makes the salient point that all science is ultimately observational
All scientific evidence is observational, but not in the naive sense that all that counts is what you see with your eyes. There is a sense in which some science is regarded as historical, but it’s not used in the way creationists do; it does not refer to science that describes events in the past.
Maybe some examples will make that clearer.
We can reconstruct the evolutionary history of fruit flies. We do this by observation. That does not mean we watch different species of fruit flies speciate before our eyes (although it has been found to occur in reasonable spans of time in the lab and the wild), it means we extract and analyze information from extant species — we take invisible genetic properties of the flies’ genomes and turn them into tables of data and strings of publishable code. We observe patterns in their genetics that allow us to determine patterns of historical change. Observation and history are intertwined. To deny the history is to deny the observations.
Paleontology is often labeled a historical science, but it doesn’t have the pejorative sense in which creationists use it, and it is definitely founded in observation. For instance, plesiosaurs: do you think scientists just invented them? No. We found their bones — we observed their remains imbedded in rock — and further, we found evidence of a long history of variation and diversity. The sense in which the study of plesiosaurs is historical is that they’re all extinct, so there are no extant forms to examine, but it is still soundly based on observation. Paleontology may be largely historical, but it is still a legitimate science built on observation, measurement, and even prediction, and it also relies heavily on analysis of extant processes in geology, physics, and biology.[30] Emphasis in original
To conclude, it is quite reasonable to state that far from being inferior to experimental approaches, the historical approach to science is a distinct but equally valid approach to doing science. Elliot Sober frames it elegantly
Although inferring laws and reconstructing history are distinct scientific goals, they often are fruitfully pursued together. Theoreticians hope their models are not vacuous; they want them to apply to the real world of living organisms. Likewise, naturalists who describe the present and past of particular species often do so with an eye to providing data that have a wider theoretical significance. Nomothetic and historical disciplines in evolutionary biology have much to learn from each other.[31]
To be continued
[1] https://christadelphianvideo.org/document/why-christadelphians-believe-in-creation-and-not-theistic-evolution-gods-method-of-creation-in-the-bible/#_Toc454546758
[2] The term “God-Directed Evolution” is not one that I or any other Christadelphians who accept the fact of evolution use. I no more believe in “God-Directed Evolution” than I believe in “God-Directed Gravity” or “God-Directed Atmospheric Physics”. The term GDE is one that opponents of evolution have invented in a frankly amateurish and clumsy attempt to try to catch Christadelphians in a trap by contrasting it with what prominent non-theistic evolutionists have said.
[3] Livingstone DN Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (Eerdmans 1984) p xi-xii
[4] Greenwood, Kyle. Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science (InterVarsity Press, 2015), 73-74
[5] Ben Stanhope, (Mis)interpreting Genesis: How the Creation Museum Misunderstands the Ancient Near Eastern Context of the Bible (Scarab Press, 2020), 94
[6] Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 52.
[7] Ibid, 52.
[8] Meredith G. Kline, Genesis: A New Commentary, ed. Jonathan G. Kline (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2016), 18.
[9] “The generally acknowledged conclusion that Gen 2–3 is to be attributed to a different literary source (J) from Gen 1 (P) is presupposed. All of the many studies of Gen 2–3 make this clear. Today there are only a very few exegetes who think that Gen 1–3 was from the beginning a unified account of creation, e.g., U. Cassuto and B. Jacob.” Claus Westermann, A Continental Commentary: Genesis 1–11 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 186. Mark Smith makes the interesting suggestion that the first creation narrative served as a commentary on the second: “In this interpretation of Genesis 1-2, Genesis 1 serves a dual role as both prologue to and implicit commentary on Genesis 2. It offers a cosmic mic vision of God, humanity, and the world to balance and complement the earthly perspective of Genesis 2. Separately, the two accounts would stand ostensibly in opposition: the first favors a heavenly or cosmic perspective, while the second emphasizes a more concrete perspective, one that is literally more "down to earth." Placed together in their present order, they offer a fuller perspective, with priority of order given first to the creations of the heavens and then with greater focus on the earth. The net effect of having the first account before the second is not simply to offer balance, but also to orchestrate a narrative movement from God the Creator at the very beginning to the world of humanity on earth.” Mark S. Smith. The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010) 4-5.
[10] Futuyma, Douglas., Kirkpatrick, Mark. Evolution. United Kingdom: Sinauer, 2017. 8-9
[11] Gregory, T.R. Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path. Evo Edu Outreach 1, 46–52 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-007-0001-z
[12] Collins, Francis S.. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. United States: Free Press, 2006. 135–137
[13] Cartmill, Matt., Smith, Fred H.. The Human Lineage. United Kingdom: Wiley, 2009, xi
[14] This is not a mere rhetorical flourish. Over one hundred years ago, C. C. Walker, the then-editor of The Christadelphian answered a letter from a correspondent who fervently believed the earth was flat and regarded it as a fundamental principle given that the “globe theory” allegedly challenged the inspiration of the Bible. Walker’s response was a masterly appeal to science and non-fundamentalist exegesis, an example which is sadly noted by its relative absence in contemporary Christadelphian Biblical study. See Walker C. C. “Is it “Wrong” to Believe that the Earth is a Sphere?” The Christadelphian (1913) 50:346-348
[15] YECs also refer to historical and experimental science, averring that the former is epistemologically inferior to the latter. While the historical / experimental division is not an invention of YECs and some non-creationists have argued that there is a substantive difference between historical and experimental science, philosophers of science generally believe that YECs presented a distorted version of historical science and that while they do differ, historical science is not epistemically inferior to experimental science. This will be covered in more detail later.
[16] Roger Patterson What is Science https://answersingenesis.org/what-is-science/what-is-science/ Accessed 7th Nov 2023
[17] National Center for Science Education “Historical science” vs. “experimental science” https://ncse.ngo/creationism/analysis/historical-science-vs-experimental-science Accessed 7th November 2023
[18] Cleland, C. E. [2001]: ‘Historical Science, Experimental Science, and the Scientific Method’, Geology, 29, pp. 987–90.
[19] Ibid, p 988
[20] Ibid, p 988-989
[21] Cleland, C. E. [2002]: ‘Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science’, Philosophy of Science, 69, pp. 474–96.
[22] Ibid, p 481
[23] Cleland, C. E. [2001]: ‘Historical Science, Experimental Science, and the Scientific Method’, 989.
[24] Forber, P. and Griffith, E., 2011, “Historical Reconstruction: Gaining Epistemic Access to the Deep Past”, Philosophy and Theory in Biology, 3. doi:10.3998/ptb.6959004.0003.003
[25] ibid, p 3
[26] Ibid, p 3
[27] Ibid p 13
[28] Sober (2000) Philosophy of Biology (2000: Westview Press), 14-15
[29] “Historical science” vs. “experimental science” National Center for Science Education Oct 25th 2019. Accessed 14th November 2023 https://ncse.ngo/creationism/analysis/historical-science-vs-experimental-science
[30] P. Z. Myers “Historical and observational science” Pharyngula July 27th 2013 Accessed 14th November 2023
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/27/historical-and-observational-science/
[31] Sober, op cit p 17
