When Baptists ignore science

I received this email this morning and wanted to pass it on. Please read the article. It is an excellent example of many that Barry and I have found who get raised in a religious home without any background in science. True science agrees with the Bible, but you would never know it from what this ex-Baptist says....

This article appeared on the Beliefnet website. Some of you might have interested in Wilson's perspectives.

Is Science a 'Satisfying Replacement' for Religion?
A Conversation with E.O. Wilson
The Pulitzer prize-winning author and sociobiologist dicusses creation myths, evolution, free will, and his Baptist upbringing.


Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, famous for his groundbreaking work with ants, is considered the father of sociobiology--the study of how evolution has shaped animals' social behavior. He spoke recently with the Templeton Foundation about his religious background and the future of his science.

This interview first appeared in the July/August 2003 issue of Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology.

What role did religion play in your life growing up?

In my early life, it played a profound part. In some ways, I had a traditional "old South" upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty. Also, I was raised as a Southern Baptist and experienced the evangelical teaching and indoctrination of the Southern Baptist religion, the most common Southern Baptist version of evangelical Christianity. I was born again. I made the choice when I was 14. I went literally under the water with a full-scale baptism. I had deep religious feelings of the most traditional kind.

Of course the Judeo-Christian worldview just does not include nature. All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments. Their founders were nomadic people who were trying to build, particularly in the case of Judaism and early Islam, kingdoms and even empires out of a desert tribal existence. It has to be appreciated that with certain exceptions of imagery of the beauty of streams and fern groves and fruit orchards there is not an awful lot of ecology in the sacred texts of Abrahamic religions. Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

You can draw out of parts of sacred Scripture the implication, if you wish, that humanity is the steward of nature. You can also draw out the other interpretation that has often been applied: that humanity is commissioned and commanded to control and make full use of the living world. So there is an ambiguity in doctrine that cannot be settled by sacred Scripture. The founding literature and beliefs of the Abrahamic religions lack the essential insight. The ambiguity does not exist in science. The scientific perception explains how the world works and that humanity is related to the natural world due to evolutionary history, the millions of years through which we have passed. It continually assesses, tests and corrects.

In your book The Future of Life, you mention that if humans need a creation myth none is more solid and unifying than evolutionary history. Can you elaborate on that idea?

At the age of 17 and 18, when I began to move away from my traditional Baptist and broader Christian beliefs, I began searching for a replacement for the satisfying mythic explanations for human existence, something that can be added to the bare bones knowledge that science produces concerning evolutionary origins of humanity and the human mind. Indeed I have been searching for this all my life.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that I have abandoned my Christian upbringing. I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching. It also doesn't mean I'm toying with New Age ideas. It simply means what I have expressed in books like Biophilia, Naturalist and most recently The Future of Life: that here is to be sought, although perhaps never truly found through a secular understanding of the real world, a full substitute for those spiritual satisfactions that come to us through the easier routes of traditional religious experience.

So you don't see the need to invoke a traditional Judeo-Christian God to give purpose to these religious experiences?

I don't see any such need. In fact, I think it's a waste of time, in the sense that we could be doing so many more interesting and valuable things with our minds. What traditional religion gives you is a fixed set of statements about the world and the origin and the meaning of humanity. These statements are easily learned, and in the context of personal relations or in tribal ceremonies, they evoke a deep sense of satisfaction.

Those responses of the brain have been programmed by millennia of evolution because of their survival value. There should be more to the human experience. So long as we are bound by loyalties to a particular religion's dogmatic beliefs, we are not free in many sectors of human thought and experience to explore afield and more deeply.

I find it far more interesting and satisfying to explore beyond, within the constraints of what we find out ourselves about how the real world works, the fuller explanation of what humanity is, where it comes from and its meaning. This freedom is not open to believers in traditional religions. That search, which may never be fully satisfied or found with success, is one of the best intellectual and spiritual endeavors of which the human mind is capable. That is essentially, if you would like to call it that, my religion.

What about ultimate origins? Is the natural world able to give us answers about that?

Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence--not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!

A lot of your writing seems to lead down the road to genetic determinism. How do you reconcile that with your belief in the free will of individuals?

That's a canard that was promoted some 20 to 25 years ago, to be blunt about it, by critics of sociobiology. Those critics were blank-slaters; that is, believers that the human mind is a blank slate, completely unprogammed so that all we know, all that we do, all that our culture consists of, is that which is acquired by learning. That view has turned up to be completely false, as Stephen Pinker and his recent book The Blank Slate has so eloquently and thoroughly demonstrated.

We are a combination of instincts that have a great deal to do with controlling our passions, but obviously we are also creatures of learning and of the constantly cumulating traditions of culture. That was never disputed by me or by anyone else. The only extreme idea in the recent history of the so-called controversy over sociobiology is the part of biology that deals with instinct. The only real distinction was between the blank-slaters on the one side, who gave no credence to a biological influence, and the vast majority of scientists who worked in this subject and other subjects who recognized almost as a common sense observation that the human mind develops as a combination of genetic influence and genetic impulse and learning and culture. I don't want to get into the subject of free will because it is so complex. I'm not trying to avoid it. I've treated it, for example, in Consilience, but I don't want to get into it here because it's one of the most difficult subjects to get into using plain language. But what is understood about it is not contradicted by what I've just said.

What effect do you think the completion of the Human Genome Project will have on the field of sociobiology?

Ultimately a profound effect, because even as we speak, some scientists are developing a new discipline called sociogenomics. So far this has been directed primarily at honeybees and other social insects, and for a good reason: We understand their instincts and can analyze them more quickly than you can humans or even other, simpler vertebrates. But eventually the whole genomic studies of humans and the follow up work now going on in proteomics, the study of the full history and trajectory of individual protein production and their interactions, are going to give us a much clearer picture of the evolution and ultimate basis of human instincts.

Of course we will never be able to jump directly from gene to social behavior, even in a honeybee. We have to go through the steps leading up to behavior, moving from genes to proteins, to cells, to nerve cells, to the action of entire brains, to the behavior pattern itself. Even then we have to study the organism in different environments, where learning and reactions occur, so we can make comparisons. Having the genome of humans is certainly an important step in that sequence.

So with sociogenomics, you're looking for these large patterns that lead to certain behaviors?

Exactly, and in a way that will eventually tell us why the nervous system developed this way instead of that way and why certain instincts are present but other instincts are not.

That leads nicely into this final question. What do you see as the big questions that remain to be answered in your field?

For sociobiology, that's it. What are the origins of evolutionary history? When I speak of sociobiology, I don't just mean humans but all organisms and their social behaviors, including insects and even social bacteria. There are basically two key questions. One is: What are the forces of natural selection, particularly coming from the environment, that have molded the brains of organisms to make them social? Why did they adopt certain forms of social organization as opposed to others?

The second will be the tracking of the few key instincts in humans. These are the major passions and the major tendencies in behavior that guide our lives, whether we admit it or not, from sexual bonding to tribal aggressions, to the avoidance of incest, and more.

For humans at least, the goal will be to get the full understanding of these genetic prescriptions. It is important to gain an understanding of those programs of development that lead to brains receptive to the types of learning. These programs entail strong tendencies, called prepared learning, that cause us to pick up certain attitudes, to have certain emotions and which lead human beings everywhere to do things that a Martian would consider very strange. The way we sexually bond, the way we take care of our children, the way we conduct tribal wars, and so on, through the full repertoire of the human behavior. People on another planet would look on us as very advanced but highly peculiar organisms. So we need to get E.T.'s view of what we are as a species, by understanding what puts us together and what makes us work with the environment the way we do.

Reprinted with permission of Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology.


Folks, please note what has been deleted from his mind: sin, rebellion, the need for repentance, Christ -- the entire message of the Bible! All that is left is some sort of vague "Christian ethic".

Barry and I are lecturers in various churches and colleges all over the world. We have been invited to more places than we can go! But everywhere we go we consistently and frequently hear stories of loss of faith/belief in what was taught in church due to the science taught in high schools, colleges and universities. It is easy, and to my mind escapist, to say that if they really believed they would not be swayed. That doesn't wash. Young people are wrestling with everything about themselves, including what they will depend on as truth. It is true that many will return to the Christian faith and knowledge of their younger years, but after how much time? After how much damage to themselves and others has been done?

It is imperative that good solid science not be ignored by Christians, Baptists or otherwise. There is nothing scary about science. There is only something VERY scary about the way the secular world interprets the data. The results may be seen right here on Baptist board where we see a number of Baptists endorsing evolution, despite the fact that science itself proclaims against it genetically, historically, experientially, in the lab, etc.

Whether or not you are Calvinist, and whether or not you believe that these young people will eventually have to return to their faith, they are losing it at a very vulnerable time because of secular science interpretations as taught in universities and even many churches.

Evidently we are not going to get a creation forum back. I am sorry about that, but I want to plead with Baptists and other Christians to please not be scientifically illiterate. For the sake of your children -- know that the Bible sets parameters for truthful and good science and that it is not just OK to explore within those parameters, but imperative that we do.

The man being interviewed above is famous. He is also, in his journey regarding belief, sadly typical.

 

Timothy, although I understand what you are saying, I don't think you understood my point. This man did not pay attention to SCIENCE. He paid attention to people's opinions about science, and all he had to compare that with was people's opinions about the religion he was raised in.

God's creation does not contradict His Word! The actual data denies any possibility of evolution beyond the simple variation we see with, say, dogs and horses and such. Real science really does show the impossibility of that.

The data are showing more and more clearly that this is a VERY young universe, not to mention earth!

If Baptist, and other Christian, parents were to become educated in the data itself, and pay attention to what the facts really say and not what 'scientific interpretations' are foisted off on us, then the kids they raise would have the ability to discern and question -- two imperative qualities for our world.

You don't have to go deep into science to be able to teach your kids the difference between facts and opinions! But you do need to know a few of the facts in order to do that. God invented the facts. You don't need to be afraid of them! He does not contradict Himself!

 

Appearances are deceiving, Brett. The decay rate of radioactive elements is the product of the rate of atomic reactions. Historic measurements have shown that there are a number of atomic "constants" which are not constant at all, and, as a result, we do have evidence of not only a much faster rate of decay in the past, thus separating the atomic 'clock' from our orbital clock (the one God told us to use, by the way, in Genesis 1:14), but of a 'clumping' of radiometric dates which is in almost exact harmony with the clumping of the quantized redshift data -- indicating these two things have a common cause.

Your post indicates that you have strong belief in men's interpretations of the data. Most people do, I'm afraid. But those interpretations change with the wind. Believing in an ancient age means you believe that the rate of radiodecay has been constant, among other things. This is NOT indicated by the data itself.

And this is precisely what I meant by what I was saying earlier about people needing to separate data from opinions.

 

That is exactly what would be expected if atomic processes in totality ran at a different rate than orbital time.

You are right and you are wrong! The processes have led to some very precise mathematics. But these mathematics are based on the rate of the processes today, and there simply is too much evidence that these processes have not always been going at a constant rate -- the speed of light is only one example. Planck's Constant has turned out not to be constant -- and it is the measurement of the Zero Point Energy in space. This has EVERYTHING to do with atomic processes!

The quickest way to show you that some of these changes have taken place and been measured as having taken place are in the graphs here:
http://www.setterfield.org/Charts.htm#graphs

The clumping of radioactive dates and the clumping of the redshift is discussed here:

http://www.setterfield.org/quantumredshift.htm#periodicitiesandgeo

Barry did NOT expect this match, as shown in the graph if you scroll down a little in that last link. He was rather stunned by it, but it does indicate what he had suspected: the atomic time scale vs the orbital time scale is exactly the same as the redshift vs distance and also exactly the same as the speed of light vs time. Same curve -- essentially a Lorentzian one. And when the corrections are made to orbital time scale, not only do Biblical dates match, but the times of catastrophes mentioned in the Bible fit exactly where they are evidenced in the geologic record.

It's data. Simple data, and where it leads. Barry started out an old-earther, and it was the data which led him and a number of others from that position to the young earth position.

Which ones? Whose? There are a lot of arguments going on....

You don't need to interpret the Bible. Read it. It gives the truth in a simple, straightforward manner. Genesis is written as history, and history it is. You need to accept it or reject it on its own terms, not force some kind of other 'interpretation' on it.

It has nothing to do with mistrusting our faculties, but with checking our presuppositions. And it is, in fact, 'interpretations' of the Bible which lead to moral and intellectual nihilism, not simply reading and believing it. Yes, of course we can be fooled by what we see in life -- the sun really doesn't rise. We turn. But the gathering of data is relatively objective. It is the application of that data via presuppositions in order to achieve 'satisfactory' conclusions which is extremely chancy.

The Bible is NOT a science text. But it does give science guidelines -- parameteres which, if we stay within them, will yield exciting scientific work, discoveries, and truths. Outside of those parameters is the lie. Please do not trust yourself. Trust God.