This is evolutionist Coyne again but but speaking on a different topic, this time on different ways of knowing other than the empirical mehod of science. It didn't much interest me until he got to religion. Before tht I probably would agree with a lot of what he had to say, I don't know though becaue I was only half tuned in; maybe I'd agree with all of it, not sure. Probably not though, I'm nost not interested enough to find out. Drat, I wish I would stop hitting all the wrong keys. Oops, hyperbole, not all, but too many of them.
This is the title of the video .. a talk he apparently gave to an Indian audience:
Jerry Coyne on ways of Knowing: Science vs Everything Else
But of course, what he has to say about "religion" does inerest me, especially Christianity. In fact I'll probably notsay anything about any religion except Christianity. He starts out saying that the methods of knowing by religion are Dogma, Scripture, Revelation and Authority. . A little odd as applied to Christian claims since they are pretty much synonymous. Dogma is just the codified body of knowledge glened from scripture. Scripture is the source of all Christian knowledge, there is no other source, and it is both revelation and authority. External authority is valid only if it is true to scripture.
His min claim is that "religion" is not a source of truth about the universe though all three of the "Abrahamic religion" say it is. His first example is the New Testament lcaim that we treat as fact that Christa was raised from the dead.
You nharldly call yourself a Christian in America if you do not believe in the resurrection, he says. Well, not just "hardly" .. you simply are not a Christian if you do not believe in the resurrection, it says quite clearly elsewhere in scripture.
Some epirical claimsthat "religion" makes about the way the universe is, include that there is a God, a personal God in the scase of Christianity, that jesus is the Son of God, that He rose from the dead, that there is a heaven and a Hell, that there are angels and demons. These are empriical claims about the universe. Yes they are.
He flatly claims they are false.
These empirical claims are claims that in principle could be tested by science, and says that prayer has been tested and disconfirmed by science. Funny I get a lot of answers to prayer, but anyway. Could these claims be tested by science? A one time historical event such as the resurrection fo Christ? How could you test that? Or the relatioy of God or the existence of heaven and hell. Angels and demons perhaps but sinc ethey are sentient beings who probably wouldn't want to cooperate with your scientific efforts that's not a very good subject for testability either.
and here comes one of the biggest mistakes atheists make about Christianity: Faith is belief without any evidence behind it, he says. Which is just plain false. It's a kind of evidence he rejects, that's all, but it is evidence. It is not physical evidnece, it is witness evidence. And the kind of knowledge it gives us is often of things we could not know by any physiccal means. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." is one way sciprutre puts it. We can't see god or heaven or hell or angels and demons unless they choose to manifest to us, which does occasionally happn so itn that case some of us do have our own experience that counts as evidence although we can't show it to anyone else. Then we become witnesses and you either believe the witness or you don't. One time events, historical events need witnesses of come sort, written testimonies for instance, and good grief hewe have plenty of that although he presfers to dismiss it, different witnesses of the same events. A few seeming contradictions would get him to dismiss them all.
When we believe the witnesses we then have faith in what they reveal to us about what they have witnessed.
One we beleieve we often receive personal revelations thta confirm our belief too, but they are personal and more esily dismissed even than the scriptural witnesses.
This isn't the kind of evidence that is replicable and testable in the usual scientific scense but it certainly is evdience, and the only kind of evidence it is possible to have for one time historical events.
He ss he can't understand how cosomeone could be a believer and also a scientist. ut we're talking about two different kinds of evidence for one thing and for another we're talking mostly about two different kinds of objects of knowledge, that is, the things I believe in through scripture are invisible things and one time events. It is hard to prove either. You either believe those who claim to have knowledge of these thigns or you dont'.
When he sys he doesn't understand how anyone could be religious and also a scientist he seems to think that we use faith for science or think we should but thta's a very strange idea. Faith is appropriate to scripture, to unwitnessed things, invisible things, but the methods of science are what we must use with observable physical repeatable events in science and the lable. Why\\\ There is no conflict.
then he lists some beliefs of Christians he says are simply false: creationism, The exodus from Egypt, The age of the earth as ten thousand years, the Great Flood, and prayer. Except for prayer these are all historical events for which the best evidence we could possibly have is witness evidence, and in the case of the Cretaion Revelation from God. These are the kinds of knowledge that aren't amenable to the empircal methods of the lab. We have to use historical methods for historical claims.
There are some empircal tests you can do of course, as Archaeology has done with the Exodus ccount, but because these are one time historical events on this list you still have to rely on you have to rely on methods that themselves can't be tested. In the laboratory you can test things over and over again and correct for errors in a way you mjust can't with historical facts. You have to rely on dating methods for instance that may seem quite reasonable, and are, but can't themselves be tested. There are creationists who have gone a long way to show that radiometric dating isn't anywhere near as reliable as it is claimed to be, and when it dcomes to the kind of dating done for a historical event such as the Exocdus it's even fmore iffy.
n fact there is a n Egyptologist who questions the standard dating applied to the Exodus by the firld of GEgyptology in general, and he's not a Christian and has no dog in this fight as it were. He simply reviewed the facts available and concluded that they'd dated that whole period of history I think hundreds of years later than the events spelled out in GenesisThe following is the beginning of a different post I started and don't want to give up yet but hav no way of disposing of it so it's going to stay here for a while.
There are a couple of interviews of him on You Tube but I'm not sure I could find them. His name is Rohr, can't remember hisfirst name, and I think his reasoning is impeccable. there is also a film about hiswork. I wrote a couple of posts about it a few years ago. Sorry my eyes just make it so difficult to track anything like this down. But he was interviewed by my great nephew C J Cox if that helps.
Anyway, Rohr's reanalysis of the timing of the Exodus story is pretty compelling I think including the fact that there is a courtyard in Egypt that has twelve tombstones, one of which contains a status that appears to have once been colorfully decorated, as a "coat of many colors" which you may recall is how Joeph's coat was described, the one his father gave him. So this could well be the tomb of Joseph and the others his eleven brothers who did join him in Egypt.
There are of course many things about Creationist assertions that would be hard to prove although I do think Creationists have gone farther to do just that than they are given creatit for, and I wuld add my own simple efforst that I keep laying out here. The age of the earth is contradicted byu radiometric dating but I think it's so obviously true that the sedimentary layers in which the fossils of the so called Fossil Record are embedded couldn't possibley be time periods and that they dhow absolutely no signs of any sort of wear and tear that you would expect to find on this active planet even in a hundredyyears let alone the millions claimed for these time periods I think all this goes a long way to showin gthat the Earth really isn't lal that old at all.
As for evidence of the Great Flood which he claims does not exist I see such evidence everywhere myself. the whole Earth has a sort of tumbledown appearance, a wrecked appearance. If you look at the Middle East from the stsatellite overheard it looks like the AuSaudi Arabian peninsula is all swirled on it ssurvface as if by a huge amount of water. That's how it looks to me anyway. And then there is of course the geological solumn which shows no signs whatever of being made up of period of time of tends of millions of eyears and for which ithere is no eaway to account for their each being punctuated as it were by a huge thick slab of sedimentary deposition which differs from the deposits above and beneath it. No way was the surface of this earth, or even a layer of it beneath the surface made up of such a horizontally straight flat slab of rock that spans thousands of square miles and a whole series of them at that.
That is first of all evidence agiainst the fossil record interpretation of the geological column, but I think it is also great evidence for the Flood as such sedimentary deposits fit with what we know about smaller scale deposits by moving water. See Walther's Law for one example.
Coyne claims that what scripture teaches as fact is simply false because scien ce has come to other conclusions. But again the kind of science he'd have to use to discover facts about anything in the past is just as iffy as what we have to use as creationists. There is nothing any more scientifically complelling about his billions of years than our six thousand, or his datses for the Exostud versus Rohr's, and certainly he's just obtuse about the evidence for the Flood which is everywhere if you just open your eyes., and especially in tthe geological column which is found in some form or other all over the earth.
Remember: Evolution is historical, it's not a hard science like physicals . You have some facts to work with but they need to be interpreted and can't be replicated for the usual kinds of scientific testing. And So you get one interpretation of say the fossils and it can't be answered because it's an interpretation and not something tht can be tested. And when you really look at the physical facts ofg ghthe goloegical column surely you have to realize that the whole thing is a ridiculous piece of wishful imagination. And nothing more than that.
Same with the biological claims such as Natural Selection. It sounds good but they really don't try to test it at all, they just assert it as the mechanism that makes evlution possible. Again, sounds good, plausible, but as a matter of tfact if you try to think it through as a real proecess in a real wphysial world, considingering real genetics, there is no way it works at all to get beyond what is already in the genome of a species. You can't get from one species to another. Period. You are stuck in the genome of any given species.
Go on, try it. But they never do.
Then he goes on to show some conflicts between religions and sects and says There is no way to tell which religion is true. Well, for me there is: the bibleis the foundational authority and if a religion deviates from it that make sit a false relgion. Evolution for instance can't be true because scripture shows that the Creation world was populated by creaturees that were imortal; death entered when sin entered. That makes liberal sects of Christianity that embrace evlution false. Scripture is also clrea that the leader of a church must be male; that makes those sections of Christianity that have women priests and miniteers false. And so on. In the end there is one true religion and that is Biblically pure Protestant Chrsianity.
he goeson to show that science has a lot more integrity than this motley collection of confused religions, and of course that is correct. Scienc is a great thing, it's brought us marvelous knowledge and technologies. It just doesn't work with historical facts such as evolution and I wish they'd just acknowlege that simple fact.
He goe o to the idea that religions deal with the so called big questions about the meaning of life, suffering and so on, while science deals with facts about the physical world etc. That's a big rabbit hole I don't want to go down here, but I'd say two things: Where he claims that religion can't answer questions about why we suffer, he's wrong, and maybe that's because Christains are just not very clear about that shwhen we talk about it, but the answe isthat this is not the original created world which was perfect and in which we were immortal. This is the fallen world, and we are fallen creatures, that is we have lost our connection with God as a result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve to Aa command God gave them, so this world is subject to all kind s of subffering as a result of that act of disobedience whichw e inherit from our first parents. We do have answers to all those questions becaue of the Fall. The other thing I want to mention is his claim that the Bible is not sufficient as evidence because it's just "one book" but ahatis false. The bible is a colleciton of writings , sisty six of them over more than two thousand years by some forty different writers who did not know one another in many cases,k at least in the Old Testament becaue they lived at tidifferent times. The books fwere chosen as cannonical based on their spiritual uthenticity as judged by the spiritual leaders of Israel for the OT and the Church for the NT. These are different witness accounts by different people. This is NOT one book in the sense he is using it. You can compare the writings of the different people.
I wish I could talk to Jerry Coyne about a lot of his beliefs. I don't know why I wish that, it's kind of unudual. Must think he is reaonable enough to change his mind if I could make a good enough case. Which of course means I think I have such a case. Hm.
Come to think of it, I also wish I could talk to Elon Musk about a few things. And Richard Dawkins. Hm.
Oh well.
Later: CORRECTION: I got the name wrong of the Egyptologist I mention abofve: it's David Rohl, not Ror Rohr. I don't think he's Jewish either, by the way, which would give him a personal motivation.
by the way, Listening back to the post I discovered that I had sandwiched a piece of the text below the asterisks into my discussion of Rohl, sorry about that. It belongs at the top of that other text. Not able to see well enough to find it and move it, yadda yadda.
* * * * * *
\\\keep repeating myself, keep hoping maybe I'll say it in some new way so definitelvely and clearly that anybody reading it will be persuaded on the spot and tell everyone they know that I've succeeded in demolishing evolution. Well, eah, not in this world I'm afraid, but I still hope.
So I'm talking about evolution again, Jerry Coyne again. You Tube keeps throwing up the same people over and over once you've shown an interest in listening to them so it turns out there's more of him to be heard. Saying of course mostly the same things, but I see he's got a new talk, wel new to me anyway, about ways of knowing which is a different subject and I'll try to get to that one before I finish this post.
IIn an iterview of him by representatives of the Freedom From Religion organization he gave the usual list of asupposed evidences for evolution, at least four of them: the fossil record, embryology, biogeography and vestigial organs. each of these categories can be interpreted from the creationist point of view just as well as from the evolutionist, and I think better of course.
But starting with the fossil record, the first thing to say is that it can't be evidence of evllution because there is no evidence FOR it as a fossil record as they understand it in the first place. He likes to claim that evolution is not a theory in the nonscientific sense or casual sense that it's just an upnproven speculation, but in fact that is all it is. He can go on about how it's theory in the scientific scense all he wants bu t it is not a theory in that sense, it IS pure speculative imagination and that's all it is. The fossil record is certainly just an imaginative construct and nothing else. it just LOOKS LIKE it represents evolution from simple to complex but of course there is no actual evidence of such evolution to gaaback up that idea, it remains a simple imaginative construct that osort of looks like evolution explains it but it doesn't.