768 thoughts on “I lost my faith in ID”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
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lost fith in this person who is irrelevant to creationism. its not a faith but a issue of science. anyways if he agreed with ID would opponents be impressed? No! Highlighting someone on one side is changes conclusions is surely admittance fighting ID/YEC can’t be done on its merits. Its about persons who agree. Nope it ain’t. Give it up. id/Yec has already won. Its just mopping up operations now I think.
Robert Byers,
Mopping your fevered brow, perhaps.
I wondered how long ago Dr Venema had held ID as a credible idea as I first came across him as a contributor at Panda’s Thumb. so it must be before 2005. Anyway, I was curious enough to check for any recent contributions [by him] at BioLogos and came across a recent article interviewing his pastor, Dave Navarro. This makes a sort of sense to me:
link
But letting go of inerrancy and keeping faith in what’s left must be a difficult balancing act, one I don’t understand because I didn’t get the God gene myself.
So you agree that evolutionary theory has nothing to do with atheism?
While agreeing that one person’s opinion is merely that, it is noteworthy that the natural home of bigging-up such opinions is actually Creationism. See Dissent from Darwin, for example, or the many occasions we see “Nobel laureate X writes…” in Creationist screeds.
Dennis was a creationist through graduate school, and only gave up on that after further studies of theology once he started his faculty position at Trinity Western University, and once the chimp gemome was published and he looked closely at it. That was in 2005.
Perhaps I’m confusing when I first came across the Panda’s Thumb (2005) and when I first saw contributions from Dr Venema, which may have been later.
Dennis Venema says in the video that he began to read “The Edge of Evolution” but found it unconvincing. Then after reading a paper he realised “there is no way that humans and chimpanzees do not share a common ancestor.”. He lost faith in ID at that point.
But in “The Edge of Evolution” Behe writes, “Over the next few sections I’ll show some of the newest evidence from studies of DNA that convinces most scientists, including myself, that one leg of Darwin’s theory-common descent-is correct.”
So I have to question how well he understood Behe’s argument. And this after spending a couple of years teaching from an ID perspective.
CharlieM,
He does not seem to be grounded in his beliefs. Behe accepts common ancestry of chimps and humans and to say he left ID because of similarity of the human and chimp genomes seems like his thinking lacked understanding.
I have had several discussions with Dennis at Biologos and he seems to be a sincere guy he was just into the evolutionists arguments such as; if I can prove that this object will fly 100 ft will then you agree it can fly to the moon.
I think you have mischaracterized the argument. It’s much more like “here is this earthly object on the moon. How do you suppose it got here?”
Flint,
It’s like saying that hypermutation can generate a binding site of a 10 AA substrate shows that a spliceosome can form from random change to a genome.
I think of it more like looking at a row of dominoes falling. The chimp/human is but the first domino that goes on and pushes the rest down.
Something like that happened to me. Not same direction, more like finding that Darwin wrote a reasonable book, instead of the cartoons creationists present, was the first domino. Once understanding that apologists deform a few things, you wonder what else is deformed, and the dominoes fall one after the other quickly.
I went through some stages, but Christianity as such becomes very hard to reconcile with any versions of “theistic evolution.” Rather admit that it’s fantasy. Then everything makes sense.
Entropy,
What I have noticed that many who swing away from Christianity find it hard to work their way back. It’s hard to take back the baggage Christianity ofter entails. I have become convinced Christianity is true so I have no choice 🙂
Evolution is at its core very good science but it is certainly a limited explanation for what we are observing especially if you put the claims to the rigor of the scientific method.
Saying a creator is a fantasy is question begging.
Once the nonsense is noticed why would anybody even try to go back? Too much nonsense to confront. It’s obvious that it’s mere fantasy. I’m not bothered ny t any more. Why would I want that again when I already know better?
Even if it was as limited as you think it is, I see no reason to embrace fantasy to compensate for what’s not known. When we don’t know something, that’s evidence that we don’t know something. That’s it. No amount of human ignorance makes fantasies real.
Any “creator” I have read or heard about are loaded with absurdities on top of each other. The most obvious explanation is that they’re all fantasies. That they’re fantasies until proven otherwise is also the most logical position to hold. It’s up to those who believe there’s (a) creator(s) to prove otherwise.
Entropy,
Focusing on the God of Abraham Isaac Jacob and Messiah what absurdities are you referring to?
I think the God of Noah would be a bit of a problem, if I’d ever been that way inclined.
So you think that unsuccessfully going through the excuses for each one in turn will lead somewhere other than to get us tired of trying to deal with fantasies?
colewd,
Yet you find the argument “someone made a telephone so someone made everything” to be persuasive?
The God of Abraham and Isaac …
Entropy,
I am giving the opportunity to support your assertion. The evidence for the God of Abraham Issac Jacob and Messiah is as well documented as any claim in ancient history so your label is nothing more than denial.
Allan Miller,
You have out done Entropies denial with mocking denial 🙂
We have the exact same level of evidence for the existence of Zeus and Apollo: we have the ancient texts written about them and archeological evidence of the places and people referred to in those texts.
So Bill,
Abraham and Isaac?
True story?
Kantian Naturalist,
Ninja’d!
It was not an argument, it was not an assertion, it was a description of what I lived. I know most of the excuses for the absurdities Bill. Long ago I knew about them, convinced that it had to make sense because I believed that shit. Even back then, they were not that satisfying. Most of them are rhetorical devices, rather than reasons. Others are problematic by inviting other absurdities into the plate. I went through them in several versions again after resting (rest is the feeling you get when you realize it’s fantasy. No more efforts, no more mental pains, to try and reconcile the unreconcilable).
Extraordinary claims Bill! They require evidence concomitant with the claims. It’s not enough to try and convince people that historians have very low standards for the acceptance of events*, and then turn and say, “See? It’s all true!!!!” It doesn’t work that way. Even if historians really had such low standards, that wouldn’t make fantasies into realities.
*In my experience, actual historians get very offended when this kind of bullshit is told to them.
Kantian Naturalist,
Why do you believe it is the same level of evidence? Do many people today believe Zeus and Apollo were real? If not why not?
Entropy,
The evidence is extraordinary if you look into it. I confess that you had some smoke blown up you keister as I did when I was younger. When I took a fresh look into the evidence over the last couple of years I found it to be surprisingly strong for something documented in the ancient past.
I have yet to hear any refutation that is beyond trivial quibbling.
We have texts written in ancient languages from around the same time period — the Iliad and the Hebrew Bible. We have archeological evidence of Troy and of Jerusalem. There’s a lively debate concerning the historicity of the Iliad just as there is for the Hebrew Bible.
Religions come into existence and die away for lots of complicated reasons, but I don’t believe that evidence has much to do with it. It has rather more to do with the need for community, belonging, togetherness, fellow-feeling, shared meaning, shared purpose.
The other night I suggested to some friends that atheism only makes sense in a Christian culture. One can be a Jewish atheist or a Muslim atheist because there are lots of aspects of the religion besides this bizarre obsession with affirmation of creeds. But one cannot be a Christian atheist (though one can be a Unitarian, which may amount to much the same thing), because both Christianity and atheism insist on affirming creeds — and in that case the creeds would be logically incompatible.
See? “For something documented in the ancient past” means that you have no convincing, no extraordinary, evidence. Just some evidence that you consider convincing and “extraordinary” because you think it’s “good for the time.” That’s not good for reason Bill. I do not care about low standards. Aren’t you reading what I write? Low standards, regardless of how ancient the “documentation” are still low. Therefore not extraordinary. Not enough to convince a reasonable person. You have to be fantasy-inclined to accept it, and I am not so inclined. It won’t work.
But this is not about refuting it, but about whether the evidence is enough for convincing people of something as extraordinary as the existence of magical beings in the sky, or the divinity of some guy who might have lived several centuries ago.
Some folk make the distinction between catholic atheist and protestant atheist.
Entropy,
This religion is supported by over 2 billion people and there are two major holidays where schools are almost shut down for a month to celebrate. There is a book written by 40 authors with over 60 books written over a thousand years. The first part of the book was written by Jews many who do not acknowledge the second part of the book yet the first part predicts the second part.
The evidence is extraordinary although it is impossibly to understand this if you decide to dismiss the evidence out of hand.
Kantian Naturalist,
The strongest evidence for the God of Abraham is in my opinion.
-The existence of a universe with observers
-The testimony of the ancient Jewish prophets and Christian prophets
-The testimony of the Gospel writers and Paul, Peter, James and Jude
– The timing of the crucification predicted by Daniel
– The prediction of the destruction of the first temple by Jeremiah
-The prediction of the bones at Masada by Ezekiel
-The prediction of the Messiah being born in Bethlehem by Micah
-The prediction of a child named marvelous counselor, mighty God, prince of
peace. by Isaiah
-The prediction of Messiah’s hand and feet being pierced by King David in psalm
22 hundreds years before the invention of crucification.
The prediction of a future prophet by Moses that would directly speak the words
of God
I may be mistaken but there is nothing like this supporting ancient Pagan religions. Isn’t it possible that this evidence has contributed the success of Christianity and the current rise in Messianic Judaism.
yes. Evolutionary theory can be seaparate from athesim. loads of god believers, christians, others agrre with all or most ideas from evolutionism .
colewd,
And that’s how your evidence starts? That’s what’s supposed to be extraordinary evidence? That two billion people believe it and that schools are closed for almost a month?
I’ve read what you mean by evidence before Bill, it’s simply not convincing, let alone to believe that some magical being in the sky sent himself, as his son, to be killed to pay for the sins committed by people. People that the the very same magical being created to be sinners in the first place. And that’s but a tiny bit of the absurdity that you’re asking me to believe just because a lot of people believe it and close schools for a month.
For a while, I read a handful of books of biblical history, form which I learned a few interesting things.
1) The Jesus of Paul was not a physical person, but a celestial person.
2) Paul’s Jesus never actually came all the way to earth, but rather to the lowest level of heaven.
3) There was no shortage of prophets of the day claiming to be the messiah, especially after Rome annexed Judea. Most of them considered their mission to be the overthrow of the Romans. Of course, they always failed, they had no chance of defeating the Romans militarily. No earthly messiah lasted. They appeared because existing prophecy seemed to imply that the messiah would come around that time.
4) There’s no actual resemblance between the Jesus of Paul and the Jesus of the gospels (all of which describe a different Jesus, and the evolution of the gospel Jesus from Mark to John is significant).
5) There were a great many books written by a great many authors belonging to different Jewish sects. The decision as to which books should be included in the bible was a political decision made at a later date.
6) At least 7 of the letters of Paul are today regarded as forgeries, and there is indirect evidence that several genuine Pauline letters were omitted (they are referred to in letters that were preserved). In a couple of unredacted places, Paul implies his messiah was a spirit who never came all the way down to earth. One can only speculate as to whether Paul was much more direct about this in the letters not preserved.
7) Several histories of the period, written by Jews and Romans and Greeks, have extraordinary gaps – specifically, even in really detailed histories, the sections covering the time of Jesus’ birth and death are mysteriously missing.
8) Along these same lines, the Jews BCE were surprisingly prolific, writing about every aspect of everything. Then there is a period up to the war in 66 CE where none of these writings have been found. As a result, almost nothing whatever is known of the origin of the Christian faith and church. Most of the Jewish literati perished in that war.
9) There exists not a single first-hand account of Jesus. Nobody even claims they knew someone who knew someone who knew him.
10) The Rank-Raglan scale (characteristics of fictional characters of the time) places Jesus strongly in the fictional category along with Ra, Hercules, Osiris, Gilgamesh and others.
So in a nutshell, our two major sources for this period are the gospels, which are anonymous and written in the style of fiction, and not at all in the style history was written in. Specifically history of the period meticulously cited sources, and the gospels cite none. And we have a couple of historians, whose works covering the period we’re curious about have holes coincidentally at just the key times. Scholars today note that the mention of Jesus in Josephus is brief, written in a different style and vocabulary, and unconnected to the surrounding text – something Josephus does nowhere else in his writings. Clearly an interpolation, added later.
I’m sure most people here know all this better than I do.
Kantian Naturalist,
For real? There’s probably some semantic subtlety at work there, but I have no recollection of affirming any creed, at age 11 or so, when I started to think … “nah”.
I recall something called the Apostle’s creed when attending compulsory worship sessions as a kid but I never joined (or felt the urge to join) any atheist organisation. I’m not even sure whether such organisations exist. Does the Humanist society count as atheist? Do they have a creed?
Atheism is a religious view like not collecting stamps is a hobby. It’s the null hypothesis.
I think you also need to question how well you understand Behe’s argument. For example, could you summarize it in your own words?
Fair enough , folks celebrate what we now call Christmas but the winter solstice was cause for celebration 5,000 years ago at Stonehenge in England. They brought cattle down from Scotland that were eaten at the feasts. Sure there are celebrations around Easter, the Spring equinox. A barrow on Jersey (around
6,5005,500 years old) has an orientation that allows the spring and Autumn equinox sun to illuminate the central passage.The long summer break here in France is more to do with allowing kids to help with the harvest rather than any religious link.
ETA correct age*
PS
In Ireland there is a neolithic monument known as Newgrange that predates Stonehenge and the Pyramids. Passages are aligned with the Winter solstice. Christian myths aren’t new, they are adaptations of older ones.
Thanks, that seems correct. There are quite a few ID proponents who conflate evolutionary theory with atheism though, and reject it on that basis, rather than on its scientific merits.
Behe looks at living structures, the classic example of which is the bacterial flagellum. He notes that they bear a striking resemblance to human designed machines and so declares that these structure also must be intelligently designed. That is basically it. He tries to substantiate his argument by demonstrating that the orthodox proposed mechanisms are not capable of bridging the gaps of irreducible complexity which these ‘machines’ obviously possess.
He admits that, because of his Christian outlook, in his opinion the designer is God, but he says that is not part of his argument. His argument focuses on the design and not the designer.
I don’t recognise that as Behe’s flagellum argument. I recall the claim was that it could not have evolved due to being “irreducible complex”.
Or because it was actually Christ that these people were worshipping under a different name. Krishna, Ahura_Mazda, Osiris, Apollo can be thought of as aspects of the being Christians worship as Christ prior to his descent to earth, which the ancient initiates encountered and described in their own particular way.
When it is said that the ancient peoples worshipped the sun, it is not the same entity that we think of as a giant ball of gas. They considered and believed the sun to be just the physical body of a high spiritual being. It was this being which was worshipped, not the physical sun. They did not think in the rational materialistic way that we do today.
Have you read ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ or ‘The Edge of Evolution’?
Behe states that the flagellum could not have evolved by a “direct, gradual route”. Who would think that it could? He goes on to examine the plausibility of how it would evolve by a circuitous, indirect route. He doesn’t rule this out, he just considers it to be beyond the realms of plausibility.
It is doubtful that many people here are familiar with Venema’s work. Perhaps that’s why this video was posted. An Introduction to Venema for TSZ?
As for me, I’m thankful for this portion of the interview and would like to see more “testimonies” like it from ex-IDists, just like Swamidass was once enamored with IDist vocabulary. TSZ should become more of a place for ex-IDists. How could that happen?
Already ex-IDist Vincent J. Torley posts here occasionally, after being a regular poster here previously. I have met or spoken with several other ex-IDists, both those previously affiliated with the DI and those who gave ID theory as “honest”, “rigorous” and “balanced” a try as any IDist or DI leader could expect someone “seeking” to give, before realizing there was something wrong with the underlying framework, and with the insistence on double-talking Divine Design with human design into a kind of ideological “design universalism”, that makes ID theory both philosophically unappealing and theologically distorted.
Venema is a thorn in Swamidass’ side and vice versa. One’s at a private university (Trinity Western), the largest Christian liberal arts university in Canada, and the other is at a public USAmerican university, that Swamidass insists on calling a “secular university” (WUSTL), along with himself a “secular scientist”. It’s private university genomics vs. public university computational biology, both trying to be “popularizers”, one at BioLogos, the other at Peaceful Science, with Swamidass’ exhortative posing as a “fifth voice in origins”, over against BioLogos which has a humbler & clearer mission to convert YECs to accept evolution, which both men do, and teach, as they continue their public-private Protestant feud. It’s a “no Adam & Eve Christian” vs. an “adams and eves Christian” battle among non-mainline (Venema Anabaptist-Mennonite, Swamidass – Evangelical Covenant) evangelicals.
Yet curiously, and not unexpectedly, Venema & Swamidass unite on at least one common non-religious front that they both share as being opponents of “Intelligent Design” theory. ID theory is proposed as a “strictly scientific” theory and they are both “practising scientists” who gave ID theory an honest try only to turn against it. This is a place where they may realize they can meet me on common ground also, though I was never an IDist, once they eventually find their way to openly discussing the sociologies, philosophies and ideologies involved, rather than just natural sciences and evangelicalistic “science & faith” focus.
Apparently the full interview will be coming out soon. Venema lost his position as Biology Fellow at BioLogos over the scandal with Swamidass. Meanwhile, Swamidass, who is more known here through his anti-BioLogos rhetoric, his anti-ID theory efforts (which have indeed sometimes been meaningful, most recently exposing Douglas Axe as the “nice guy, but a stubbornly apologistic fool for ID theory” that he is & many others are in the IDM), his pro-“secular” ideology, defense of methodological naturalism & “mainstream science” (for which he puts on a wilted superhero label trying to unite Unitarian, FFRF, jazz playfulness into a new voice “movement”) at his blog “Peaceful Scientism”, and recent activism for his book TGAE, got philosophically confused and out-matched by Axe’s (& the DI’s/Biola’s) mission and fellow evangelical aim.
This just goes to show that scooping biologists like Venema and Swamidass by ideologues and “think tank” paid instigators and activists like at the Discovery Institute is indeed a problem for society today. Natural scientists, after all, are often not trained in their courses on natural science about ideology, so it is not surprising that many of them are not actually even aware of some of the philosophical biases in the work they are doing. Venema & Swamidass both got scooped by ID theory, yet both landed in tenured positions at a private and public university, in part because they both came to “faithfully” reject ID theory in their professional work, not just because they are trying to ingratiate themselves with “Darwinists” or “evolutionists”, as IDists often accuse them of doing.
Funny that for all the enmity and self-righteousness (both based, of course, strictly on “science” as their weapon against each other!) currently between them, both Venema and Swamidass don’t believe ID theory is either necessary or healthy for their fellow evangelical Christians. And this must be especially maddening for Stephen C. Meyer, John G. West, Douglas Axe, Bruce Gordon, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Witt, Jonathan Wells, and the many other off-centre or peripheral apologist-evangelicalists who predominate the IDM.
It sadly appears that Venema is quite intellectually proud of being what Swamidass calls a “No Adam Christian.” While BioLogos demoted Venema, it is now 2 years later still in the midst of adjusting their views of A&E taking into account both genetics (natural science) and genealogy (largely folk science), as well as more clearly identifying the limits of scientific knowledge, when philosophy & theology at some points inevitably become involved. This argument between Venema & Swamidass, between BioLogos & PS, has clearly yet to play itself out.
Gregory,
WUSTL is a private umiversity. University of Missouri, which has a branch in St. Louis, is the state’s public university.
No, not really. Your list of “evidence” would only be compelling to someone who already believed and wanted to assuage an intellectual conscience by finding the flimsiest of reasons for what they already believed, or to someone who desperately wanted to believe and needed only the flimsiest of reasons for lulling their intellectual conscience to sleep so that they could find the peace of mind that faith purports to bring. No one trained in critical thinking and with a healthy dose of skepticism would find any of those bits of evidence compelling in the slightest.
This goes to my point, though: taking atheism as “the null hypothesis” assumes that the very question of religious faith is an epistemological problem to begin with. For it is only when we’re trying to frame questions in terms of “what is the most reasonable belief-policy?” that the very idea of “the null hypothesis” makes any sense at all. And it is very specific to Christianity that it takes the question of religious faith to involve epistemological problems. Other world religions simply do not do that. To a shocking extent, we in the West have a basically Christian conception of what religion is (and hence of what atheism is).
Entropy,
Is it possible you did not understand the magnitude of the evidence? I certainly did not prior to my more recent and in-depth study. There are much better tools available today then in the past.
Kantian Naturalist,
Like Entropy you don’t understand the evidence as I did not until recently. I don’t think either one of you want to at this point as your arguments suggest out of hand rejection. If you looked into the details of what I listed I believe you would be shocked how compelling the evidence is. I certainly was.
Christianity offers a complete epistemological belief system as such it could also be a hypothesis all other worldviews test against. Atheism is an incomplete epistemological belief system as it has been argued by people here.