Assignment Cover Sheet - Traverse



[pic] |PE420/620-D

Module 13

Learning Guide | |

|Course Conclusion |

|- Humble Apologetics |

|Before you start... |

| |

|Post to last module’s forum (compulsory but not graded for distance students) |

|Do the pre-reading for this week (see Unit Guide p6 + non-text uploads on Moodle) |

|From the reading, come prepared to share a question, challenge, implication & application |

Introduction

In this session we pick up an earlier topic from this course, being creation and evolution. After some framing questions, we throw open the conversation to consider any remaining “big questions” that have plagued you across the course. Then, after a course evaluation, we conclude with some thoughts on “humble apologetics” done to the glory of God.

OBJECTIVES

The objectives of this module are to:

1. Consider scientific challenges to Christian belief as related to matters of origins.

2. Reinforce how apologetics may be ‘humble’, done to the glory of God.

OUTCOMES

On completion of this module, the student shall be expected to have clarified their own position on creation and evolution, and explain this to another student in a simple role play. Additionally, students should have consolidated their understanding of a personal and humble apologetic offered in love.

SESSION FLOW (lecture runs 6:15-9:00pm, breaks from 7:05-7:10pm, and 7:55-8:05pm)

6:15 Big Story + Readings Debrief (20 minutes) + Guided discussion on origins (30 minutes)

7:10 Course Evaluation and Prayer (45 minutes)

8:05 Course Conclusion on “humble apologetics” (40 minutes) + closing song (10 minutes)

big story “caught out” responses + reading review

|Class Activity 13.1 |

|Using the post-it-notes from module one, two students will each select one of the five |

|circles from “The Big Story”, then randomly choosing a paper slip from that circle. |

|Each student will take up to 1 minute to respond to this question or objection, as if in|

|conversation with the person who posted the slip. Afterward, the class can unpack what |

|worked or didn’t work in this response, and other directions one could take. |

|Class Activity 13.2 |

|In response to the pre-reading for this module, students will be picked to share on one of the following: |

|-a question—something you don’t get, or want to clarify |

|-a challenge—something you disagree with, or want to nuance |

|-an implication—“so what” for our apologetic practice |

|-an application—something useful right now in your context |

Creation and Evolution revisited

In this section of this module, we’ll re-open the question of creation and evolution, arguably one of the most heated objections raised by atheists to seriously considering Christian belief. No extra resources are supplied, as this topic has been previously addressed in module notes.

Perhaps the following “Creation vs. Evolution Rant” from markpowellwired’s blog will get things started:[1]

“I weary of the seeming constant yammer of the creation/evolution debate. I weary of the evangelical requirement to check my brain at the door of the church. I weary of the fear and distain many of the churched have for those in the sciences. I weary of science’s fear of the church, built on the puny shoulders of Hitchens and Dawkins, who build arguments against straw men and state and restate the threadbare mantra that religion does bad things, when everyone know the greatest bloodletting of the 20th century were done by confirmed secularists and atheists! I weary of the lack of conversation between science and religion. I long for an openness and understanding, a dialogue based upon mutual respect and adherence to the notion, on the side of religion that all truth is God’s truth—so science must be given freedom to explore and explore, and on the side of science that they (and their technological cousins) do not have all the answers—so that religion can come to the table not with the how of things (e.g. of origins) but perhaps the why.”

Questions to Discuss:

• What is typically meant by the terms evolution, creation, and intelligent design?

• Why does this topic generate such heat from all sides?

• Who has spent considerable time researching both sides of this debate? Why?

• Within Christianity are a range of positions on a continuum. With which position do you most closely identify: theistic evolutionism (Francis Collins, Danny Falk, John Polkinghorne); progressive creation and/or day age/gap theory (i.e. old earth creationism, a la Hugh Ross); young earth creationism (Jonathan Sarfati; Answers in Genesis; Creation Ministries International)? If you don’t take a position, why?

• What are the key issues associated with these discussions?

• Are there any points of agreement between the evolution, creation, and ID?

• What are the main strengths and weaknesses of each position?

• What different presuppositions lie behind each position?

• What questions do you have concerning this issue?

|Reflection Activities 13.1 & 13.2 |

|After reading through the stimulus material in section 3.0 of these notes, journal at least 30 (meaningful!) words in response to the question |

|below, and tick off the related boxes on p. 12 of the unit guide. |

|13.1 What is perhaps the most key question you could ask someone who dismisses Christianity over the issue of evolution? |

|13.2 What key points would you make in commending Christianity in spite of their objection? |

1 Stimulus Piece #1: “‘Creation vs. Evolution’: Is This a Sensible Question?[2]

School boards in an uproar. Parents protective of their children. Teachers defensive. Students confused. And American presidential candidates feeling compelled to declare their views. The furor over creation versus evolution has been going on for almost a century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859).

The sad thing is that so much energy is wasted on what is, mostly, a non-issue: “creation versus evolution” is, in most respects, nonsense.

Belief in creation means simply to believe that a deity, or several deities, brought the cosmos into being. It is a core belief of many religions: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, of course, but also varieties of Hinduism and Buddhism and tribal religions around the world. That God (or the gods) created the world is the belief. How God (or the gods) did so is the open question.

Nowadays, however, many people assume belief in creation means belief that God created the world in six 24-hour days, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that it appears older because a global flood in Noah’s time laid down the deep layers of sediment that evolutionists think took billions of years to accumulate.

Yet these beliefs are a particular, and recent, variety of Christian thought, properly known as “creation science” or “scientific creationism.”[3]

Creation science was popularized in a 1923 book called The New Geology by amateur U.S. scientist George McCready Price. A Seventh-Day Adventist, Price learned from Adventism’s founder Ellen G. White that God had revealed to her that Noah’s flood was responsible for the fossil record.

Price didn’t influence the popular mind much, however. It remained for a 1961 book called The Genesis Flood, largely an academic dressing-up of Price’s work by engineer Henry Morris and theologian John Whitcomb, to disseminate the creation science scheme. A variety of organizations (such as the Institute for Creation Research in California) have so energetically propagated these ideas that some polls show they are believed by more than 40 per cent of the American population and almost as many in some regions of Canada.

This version of creation, however, is but one of four different understandings of creation held by Bible-believing, church-going Christians.

A popular view among conservative Protestants has been that there was a huge interval between an original creation described in Genesis 1:1 and the “formless and void” earth described in Genesis 1:2, out of which God then created the present world. This “gap theory” was promulgated by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), and has since been accepted by millions of Christians the world over.

A third version understands the six “days” of creation to be metaphors describing “ages” of time, any of which might have been millions of years long. This was the view of McGill University’s distinguished scientist Sir J.W. Dawson in Darwin’s day. More surprisingly, it was also the view of William Jennings Bryan, the famous defender of creation at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.

Finally, there are those Christians who believe that God used the process of evolution. Some believe God did so to produce minor changes within species, but intervened directly to produce each significantly new form of life. (This view is coherent with the previous one, such that minor evolution takes place during the long ages of the latter creation “days” when life emerges on the planet.)

Some restrict God’s special intervention to the creation of humankind. Such believers feel that there are key theological reasons to maintain belief in a separate creation of humanity, and particularly in there being a first pair, Adam and Eve, whose transgression helps explain the subsequent history of humankind and particularly of God’s economy of redemption. Without an actual Adam and Eve, so this theo-logic goes, much of the Bible’s teaching about sin and salvation doesn’t make (as much) sense (Gen. 3; Rom. 5; I Cor. 15).

So-called Intelligent Design (ID) is compatible with either of these two views, namely, that some natural phenomena are best explained—particularly because of their complexity and what we might call the interdependent complexity of their components—by positing the direct creative action of an intelligent designer. (I hope to write more about the controversy over ID before long. I don’t think it’s as unscientific and as epistemologically confused as many of its opponents say it is.)

And some believe in full-fledged “theistic evolution”: that God used evolution plain and simple (as if it is “plain and simple”!) to produce all life on earth.

Thus the Genesis account is seen by many believers to be highly figurative about the mechanics of creation, but still teaching important truths about it: that the world is an ordered and interdependent whole; that human beings are to care for the earth as gardeners care for a garden; and especially that it was God, not impersonal processes or other deities, that brought all else into being.

There are only two respects, then, in which “creation versus evolution” makes sense: first, when certain Christians insist that “creation” must mean “creation science” and thus rule out any divine use of evolution; and, second, when certain evolutionists insist that “evolution” must mean only what Darwin thought it meant, namely naturalistic or atheistic evolution. For then, of course, “creation versus evolution” really amounts to “theism versus atheism.” Put this way, however, we should recognize that we are dealing now with a religious and philosophical issue, not a scientific one. Science cannot, in the nature of the case, rule out God as somehow supervising evolutionary processes.

To be sure, science might conclude that “we have no need of the hypothesis” that God created the world (Laplace). We should be honest enough and knowledgeable enough to recognize, even as scientific laypersons (among which I am, of course, to be numbered) that science is a long way from proving that we don’t need such a hypothesis—whether regarding the origin of the universe (the “something from nothing” problem); or the immensely improbable cosmological “fine tuning” necessary for life on Earth; or the currently inexplicable arising of multicellular organisms; or the persistent problem (noted by Darwin himself) of the absence of “transitional forms” in the fossil record (the many “missing links”); and so on.

Maybe evolution, theistic or otherwise, can explain all these things–as Christian Francis Collins believes just as firmly as atheist Richard Dawkins believes. But we must allow that evolution has not yet done so.

And that’s a pretty important set of allowances to make—as the ID proponents, as well as the creation science people, rightly insist. Indeed, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould himself agreed, sufficiently so that he and Niles Eldredge postulated “punctuated equilibrium” as a theory to explain the last problem on that list. The creation science and ID people simply aren’t wrong about everything—and their opponents would do well to heed their criticisms, even if they hate their alternative theories.

So what should we do about the vexed questions about origins and evolution?

First, we should teach science as a method, as an adventure of discovery and debate, not as a dull, fixed set of indubitable facts to be indoctrinated. We should teach students what science really is. As the late Neil Postman, no friend of theism or Intelligent Design, has pointed out, what better opportunity could textbook writers and teachers have to demonstrate how science actually works than to plunge students into a controversy like this one?

Second, we ought to keep clear what is science and what is religion. When scientific creationists move beyond positing some vague supernatural force behind the Big Bang (a circumspection ID proponents try to maintain), to proclaiming Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin, then boundaries have been transgressed. Exactly in the same way, however, when leading scientists like Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins start saying (as they often have) that scientific observation points strongly toward atheism, then we’re not talking about science anymore.

Third, let’s all appreciate that human beings don’t know everything about anything. Scientific creationists sometimes sound as if they know exactly what the Bible says, and so they know how science must work out. But no one knows for certain just what Genesis 1 and 2 really say about the origins of the world. We can only give interpretation our best shot, and try to stay open to improving our interpretation in the light of fresh insight or evidence.

Similarly, some scientists sound as if they know exactly what the natural record says, and so they know how religion and philosophy must work out. But no one knows for certain how life really began and developed on our planet: we can only give interpretation our best shot, and try to stay open to improving our interpretation in the light of fresh insight or evidence. This is the way both theology and science have proceeded historically, and this is the way they ought to be conducted and taught today.

Darwin’s main defender–his “bulldog”–T. H. Huxley, coined the term “agnosticism” to describe his lack of certainty about God’s existence. A little agnosticism, or at least a little humility, about our science as well as our theology would help us all make our way better through this needlessly polarizing controversy over what is fundamentally a false choice, “creation versus evolution.”

2 Stimulus Piece #2: Dave’s response to a year 12 student interview on Baptist Beliefs re: Creation & Evolution, composed March 2009

Questions for Kenmore Baptist Church, Pastor:

How long have you been a Pastor?

I’ve been a Youth Pastor from 2002-2006, and am presently employed as Pastor of Evangelism and Community Outreach since February 2009.

Have you always followed the practices of the Baptist denomination of Christianity?

My Christian background has been shaped by the experiences of my parents. My dad was raised in a non-Christian family and came to faith in his late teens/early-twenties, so he wasn’t particularly concerned with denominational allegiance. (His main concern, as with myself, was to be faithful to what God has revealed to us in the Bible.) My mum’s family were Salvation Army background, so this was my first experience of church as a child. Throughout primary and high school I attended a Baptist Church, and while teaching in 2001-2002 I attended a combined Baptist, Uniting, and Churches of Christ ecumenical congregation. While studying in Vancouver (2006-2008) I attended a Pentecostal (Assemblies of God) church.

So, in brief answer to the question, my primary concern has been to faithfully follow what I believe the Bible says—as the inspired and authoritative word of God given through means of God’s Spirit directing human authors to write as they were led, that we may know and find the way to salvation, (2 Timothy 3:16-17; Hebrews 4:12-13; 2 Peter 1:19-21). Each of the denominations with which I have been involved have also held to the primacy of Scripture, and have based their foundational doctrinal statements upon the Bible, such that I have never needed to consider what may be the unique practices of, say, the Baptist denomination. (In fact, I had to look up the Baptist Union’s position statement to find what they say on such matters!)

The Baptist structure is more empowering and supportive, and less authoritative requiring that all members align with a particular stance. The following quotation from the Australian Baptist Union’s website should make this clear:

“What do Baptists believe?

Baptist churches have been around for over 400 years and one of the primary reasons we developed as a separate group within the Christian Church is because we are absolutely committed to the idea of freedom.

We believe every individual believer is free to access God and serve Him in his or her own way (within biblical lines).

For this reason Baptist churches are often very different from each other. Some are very traditional, others very radical, and others are somewhere between. We have no prayer book, no bishops, no hierarchies. We are committed to each church being free to shape its own style, language and ministry.” ().

What is the Baptist belief regarding the beginning of the world and human life?

As per my answer to the previous question, the Baptist Union allows its member churches to determine their own particular stance on practice and belief, so long as it is grounded and consistent with the Biblical witness. Herein lies the problem of hermeneutics: how do we determine what a particular text meant for its contemporary audience (when first written and received—i.e., What was the author’s intent and message they wished to convey?), and how do we faithfully determine its modern application.

On many issues the hermeneutic process is relatively simple. For instance, the Biblical authors are unanimous and clear that all of humanity has fallen short of God’s righteous standards—having offended God, hurting each other and ourselves, and destroying the earth—and thus need a Saviour, who is Jesus Christ. All people, to be forgiven, must by faith confess their wrongdoing and receive forgiveness afforded through Jesus’ paying for our sins, in order to be forgiven. This applies to all people in all ages.

On the issues of origins—the beginning of the world and human life—it is not so clear. In broad brush strokes—and based upon passages such as Genesis 1-2, Psalms 19 and 104, John 1, Romans 1:18-21, Colossians 1, Hebrews 11:3, and the like—all Bible-believing Christians should hold that ultimately God is behind all that exists in the material world, and is in some sense still involved in sustaining creation. That being the case, a purely chance based, non-teleological (i.e., directionless and random) grand theory of evolution should be dismissed, as it does not comport with the aforementioned passages. Questions remain, however. Perhaps the most central question is this: Is Genesis 1-11 to be read literally as historical narrative (like Exodus, Kings and the like), or is it better considered as a metaphorical “creation poem” (like Psalms)? Whatever view one holds must maintain a genuine tension between what science seems to reveal about the natural world, and the Biblical story as a whole. If, for instance, one accepts that death, suffering, and bloodshed are a “natural” part of nature prior to the “fall” of humanity (Genesis 3), then it would seem to require that God considered death and suffering “very good” (Genesis 1:31), in turn making the entry of “sin” into the world through Adam not really such a radical change from what went beforehand. (Furthermore, in what sense can Jesus be considered the “last Adam” who did away with the consequences of the first Adam’s sin, if the first Adam [and Eve] was merely a metaphor? Cf. Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15:45.) One’s answer to these question typically determines what he or she believes the Bible says concerning the beginning of the world and human life.

Do you support the theories of evolution?

The greatest problem in answering questions such as these—and the most confusing element for the public as a whole in understanding such issues—is the matter of definitions. Evolution has at least four levels of meaning. The first and most general definition of evolution is “change over time”—and in particular, biological change over time. Such change is self-evident, whether in non-biological systems such as businesses “evolving” to better respond to changing market demands (which is an intelligently driven change), or our changing ecosystems in response to pollution. Evolution at this level is somewhat of a truism, which I accept. The real questions surround how much change, and the mechanism of change.

A second definition of evolution, then, concerns what is commonly—though not always helpfully—called micro-evolution. Interestingly, all of Charles Darwin’s genuinely scientific observations in Origin of the Species were at this level: the beaks of finches may grow or shrink depending upon environmental pressure, as in survival of the fittest; the size and hairy coat of a dog may change depending upon artificial selective breeding pressure as humans pursue the ideal dog for them. The key thing to note, however, is that the finch is still a finch, the dog is still a dog, and no “kind”—or more technically, genus or family—has changed into another kind. As a former science teacher and a keen student of nature, I accept that such “micro-evolutionary” (or “small evolutionary”) changes occur. Some Christians, largely unaware of the observational basis behind these changes, seek to dismiss any claims that one species may evolve into another species—where species is at a lower level than genus, family, or kind. I don’t see any significant examples of new species evolving, though I do acknowledge that beginning with one specie, changes can occur that render the offspring unable to fruitfully mate with other descendents of the common ancestor—as in a donkey and horse producing a sterile mule—which technically means they are a different specie. This kind of “evolution,” however, does nothing to help the next type of evolution.

Thus far I’ve granted evolution in a generic sense of (biological) change over time, though I have limited it to “micro-evolutionary” changes. Moving onto the final two types of evolution, I do not support either, for theological and scientific reasons. Macro-evolution, the third definition of evolution, is the claim that all (organic, carbon-based) life evolved from a common ancestor—usually an amoeba or simple-cell of sorts—over the last one-or-so billion-years upon our four-billion-or-so year-old planet. Theologically, this would seem to run against a fairly straightforward reading of Genesis 1:11, 12, 21, and 25: everything was made, and reproduces, “according to its kind.” Life produces life, and kind (bird, dog, horse, and so forth) produces kind. This also seems to better accord with humanity being not simply a new and improved animal, but God’s appointed “Lord” over nature as a steward of the world imaging the Creator Himself. (Though, perhaps, God could have taken apes as the most advanced and evolved creature, and have then breathed life into some of these beasts to produce the first humans.) Scientifically, kind begetting kind is a far better representation of the fossil record that incremental change. (Darwin himself acknowledged that the fossil record surely did not reveal graduated change, and the situation, if anything, has got worse as more has been uncovered, such that Stephen Jay Gould proposed punctuated equilibrium—or the “hopeful monster theory”—to explain why the fossil record reveals sudden entry of complete new kinds at various levels that are largely static from there on in, perhaps achieved by rapid evolutionary jumps that leave no fossil evidence rather than subtle and slow change as Darwin proposed. The “Cambrian explosion” is perhaps the best evidence that Darwin’s theory is inadequate.)

At the microscopic level, Darwin’s theory runs into many problems. Darwin proposed that natural selection (i.e., survival of the fittest) over time was sufficient to produce macro-evolutionary changes. Darwin had stumbled across a genuine mechanism that truly described modifications in the beak of a finch, though he was unaware of how it worked, and its limitations. With the discovery of Mendelian genetics (i.e., DNA and the like), the scientific community realized that these micro-evolutionary changes were achieved by taking the ancestor’s greater DNA variability (genotype), and either revealing (in the phenotype) what information was already present in the DNA to help survival—such as the information coding for a longer or shorter beak—or culling traits unhelpful for survival—such as functional eyes in a fish residing only in pitch-black waters. As such, natural selection by itself could explain minor adaptations, but not the generation of the genetic information and complexity itself in the first place. Natural selection could explain how an already complex wolf may yield everything from a Doberman to a poodle—which are in fact genetically simpler than the wolf, so more of a devolution than evolution—but could not explain how you got the wolf in the first place. Micro-evolutionary changes were achieved through a maintenance or loss of genetic information—not through a gain of information like that required for macro-evolution to be the history of life on planet earth. So, in the 1940’s, Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory fused in the “Neo-Darwinian Synthesis”: natural selection + mutation + time = macro-evolution (simple to complex). This is probably the form of evolution you are taught in science class, and that is commonly accepted by scientists today.

Before I briefly outline the last definition of evolution, I philosophical and scientific aside is necessary. Mutation is supposed to be the saving element for macro-evolution—without it, no complexity or novel structures (such as a wings, scales, feathers, and the like) would be generated. So some scientists would have us believe that mutations—being random (chance) changes in the genetic letters improves an organism’s chance of survival and in turn generates greater complexity—is responsible for the first simple cell of around 100,000 base-pairs gradually turning into humans with 3,000,000,000 base pairs of complexly organized information. This requires not just a few helpful mutations, but an almost continuous string of complex and helpful mutations across over one billion years being fixed within each population of descendents. Scientifically, I find this implausible. We know from current experiments—the only evidence from which we can infer what happened in the past—that mutations are 99.9% harmful. For instance, over 20,000 generations of fruit flies have been bombarded with radioactive waves to produce mutations, yielding all kinds of damaged and dead flies—with multiple yet non-functional wings, to non-functioning eyes, to half-legs, and so forth—but precious few “improved” flies better able to survive than their ancestors. There are a number of examples of helpful mutations ( ................
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