When in doubt, shoot the messenger.

Special creationists are notorious for dismissing evidence that argues against their position. Some atheists it seems do the same. John Bedson has attempted a rebuttal of my previous article on the malign influence of sex in the media.

Ken has produced no evidence that "exposure to a sexualised media can influence behaviour in a way that may lead to adverse sexual health outcomes." All he's done is to quote the opinions of others. That is not "Evidence." 

Hmm. I wonder how he would respond to a YEC who argued

John has produced no evidence that "shared identical retroviral elements at identical points in human and ape genomes prove common descent" All he's done is to quote the opinions of others. That is not "Evidence." 

One cannot help but see here the frustration of the atheist when confronted with professional peer reviewed scholarly consensus against his position. He's happy when the literature supports evolution, but when it contradicts his personal opinions? Well, that's another story. 

A hyper-sexualised media is bad news for women. (Looks like Christians were right after all)

One of the reasons identified by the Barna Group as being responsible for nearly 60% of young people aged 15 years and over leaving Christianity either permanently or for an extended period of time was their belief that the church had a simplistic and judgmental approach to sexuality:

"With unfettered access to digital pornography and immersed in a culture that values hyper-sexuality over wholeness, teen and twentysometing Christians are struggling with how to live meaningful lives in terms of sex and sexuality. One of the significant tensions for many young believers is how to live up to the church's expectations of chastity and sexual purity in this culture, especially as the age of first marriage is now commonly delayed to the late twenties. Research indicates that most young Christians are as sexually active as their non-Christian peers, even though they are more conservative in their attitudes about sexuality. One-sixth of young Christians (17%) said they “have made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them.” The issue of sexuality is particularly salient among 18- to 29-year-old Catholics, among whom two out of five (40%) said the church’s “teachings on sexuality and birth control are out of date.”[1]

There is no doubt that simply badgering young people about the evils of a hyper-sexualised media and the need to avoid premarital and extramarital sex with little more than a series of ‘thou shalt nots’ isn’t going to work. What we need to do is show them that the much-derided traditional Christian approach actually has evidence on its side.

ECACP broadens its scope

While this blog's main purpose is to show that Christadelphian theology is not affected by evolutionary biology, it has at times touched on subjects of a broader apologetic focus. What has been a one-off event will become a regular feature of the blog as it expands its focus. The blog will still however continue to look at evolution, both in criticising poor Christadelphian attacks on evolution, and in examining Christadelphian theology in the light of evolution.

Creative Commons licensing returns to ECACP

The main reason behind my change in policy on the use of original material on this website was to disabuse any Christadelphian reader of the belief that the appearance of my material elsewhere implied that I endorsed the aims of the website on which it was republished. While most people would take this as a given, in the atmosphere of hysteria that some anti-evolutionists are creating in our community, one can assume nothing.

I have noted that ex-Christadelphian John Bedson has made explicit this fact:

A Christadelphian has accused Ken Gilmore of co-operating with us.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Although we enthusiastically agree with Ken's ideas on Evolution and the age of the Earth; he most certainly DOES NOT co-operate with us.

We reproduced his articles because they were covered by an open licence that allowed anyone to take them without needing permission.

I value the free exchange of information, and having to take new material on this site off a Creative Commons Licence was personally quite difficult. Thankfully, this public declaration by John Bedson should have demonstrated to even the most extreme anti-evolutionist in our community that John Bedson's aims are fundamentally different from mine. He aims to encourage young people to leave our community, while my aim is to show that evolution  has zero impact on Christadelphian theology.

Therefore, I am able to return to my original Creative Commons licence. Once again, appearance of my material on any other site does not imply my endorsement of those aims, nor is it a marker of cooperation with anyone else.

Change in terms of use of material on this blog

Posts up to and including December 25th 2013 were licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. From December 26th 2013, those wishing to reproduce in whole any posts will need written permission from the maintainer of this blog. I trust this change will be respected.

A critical response to Nigel Bernard's Dec 2013 response to criticism of his Nov 2013 article

Nigel Bernard, co-author of the YEC cover article in the Nov 2013 issue of The Christadelphian elected not to employ Don Pearce’s ill-fated strategy of trying to attack the science behind radiometric dating. Instead, he elected to criticise those who appealed to the early Christadelphian acceptance of an old earth for not recognising that Thomas’ view of geology differed from modern geology: 

Your correspondents invoke the views of Brother Thomas concerning the age of the earth, but Brother Thomas’s views differ markedly from traditional geology.[1] 

Bernard’s argument fails because he fails to recognise that contemporary Christadelphians raise the old earth creationist views of Thomas, Roberts, and Walker not because they represent a completely accurate account of natural history, but because they recognised that the evidence for an ancient earth, even in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was overwhelming. Furthermore, they recognised that the best place to find accurate information on the natural history of Earth was from science: 

“Fragments, however, of the wreck of this pre-Adameral world have been brought to light by geological research, to the records of which we refer the reader, for a detailed account of its discoveries, with this remark, that its organic remains, coal fields, and strata, belong to the ages before the formation of man, rather than to the era of the creation, or the Noachic flood.” (Emphasis mine)[2]

"20 scientific facts seldom taught to students" critically reviewed #10 "There is no evidence for the evolution of multicellularity"

Collyer’s tenth claim was that “while single-celled creatures are numerous, there are none with two, three, four, or even twenty cells. Thus there is no evolutionary sequence from single-celled to multi-celled creatures.”

In short, we have:

• Argument from personal incredulity
• Ignorance of the fact thatone would not reasonably expect tiny, soft-bodied multicellular life to be found in the fossil record. (We do have some evidence however which allows us to make some inferences)
• Failure to acknowledge that single celled animals can be induced to form multicellular forms of life in the laboratory.