Can a Christian believe in evolution and do Christians believe neanderthals were human?

[jinglebelly]

Just curious

Jinglebelly - for an Anglican, faith is sometimes referred to as a "three-legged stool" of scripture, tradition and reason. So yes we learn about our faith through what the Bible says, but we also take into account what the church has taught over time, and finally what our intellect can tell us about both of those.

There are also different ways of taking the Bible - we can treat is as very important, without thinking everything in it is literally accurate. eg the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells the story as "There was this guy and he got beat up and it was the foreign unbeliever who helped him. So who was his neighbour in that?" If you could get a Tardis and watch and that never actually happened to anyone, you could say it was not factually accurate. But that would be to totally miss the point of the story.

Liberal Christians look at lots of other parts in the same way as all Christians look at the bits that get labelled as "parables". So we can look at the Creation stories and say "This says that God made the world and everything in it. It says that God is all-powerful. It says that God is saddened by some of the things we do, but wants a relationship with us anyway" etc. We don't have to say "If we had a Tardis we could watch and it would exactly match this description" in order to believe the message it tells us, and think it is important for our faith.

I know a fair few people who do not believe in evolution, it makes it very hard to take them seriously....one friend thinks God has a great sense of humour with planting the dinosaur bones.

Pointythings.

I think most practising scientists would say EVOLUTION was an answer.

And even Englands religious people would accept evolution. (Not so some in America)

yes Posie.

I think my god would need a sense of humour. (And I am not sure he/she would need worshipping all the time) It could get tedious.

Will this thread stretch to free will/determinism or fatalism? (Red hot in Murdochs Times on occasions) cheers "Gabby"

I know the thread has moved on alot from this but I think the Neanderthal question is great one. I've never thought about it before.

I did once watch a documentery about a skeleton that was found which was believed to be half homo-sapien and half Neanderthal if we could produce offspring together than surely they can be classed as the same as us?

The documentary also went on to say that there once was loads of branches of the "humans" tree and that there is still quite a lot to still be discovered. I think it's all very fascinating.

LOTM, scientific facts that support evolution are not 'theoretical' in nature. Facts are things like birds have a certain morphology, marsupials have the same ecosystem niche as animals in other parts of the world but have little genetic similarity, genetic drift happens under certain conditions and so on.

When creationists dispute this they look at alternative explanations for these facts, such as investigating the number of generations it would take for certain types of genetic divergence to occur.

Creationists don't dispute the facts of the natural world, they dispute explanations science provides about these facts. If you are going to dispute scientific facts, then I'm not sure what sort of ideological umbrella you fall under, but it certainly isn't creationism.

Well, we think of those things as facts now. But hundreds of years ago, people were pretty sure that, for example, dolphins were fish. They defined 'fish' differently and to them it was just a fact that something that lived in the sea and swam, was a fish.

I don't think you could say that the statement 'a dolphin is a fish' was wrong for them - it's only something we think of as wrong because we now define the categories differently.

I imagine there will be scientific 'facts' that we're not actually quite right about, too.

LRD, yes, I am not disputing that. But the reason we now classify a dolphin as a mammal is because we have investigated dolphins and have a better understanding of their relationship to other animals than we did in the past. That is the nature of science. Of course our understanding of evolution will be different in the future than it is now.

But we are looking at the facts that we no know about the natural world, and trying to find the limitations of our knowledge so that we can extend it.

In the situation you describe, at some point somebody must have hypothesised that a dolphin was a fish and must have observed facts about a dolphin in order to have it reclassified as a mammal. Classification of organisms is changing all the time as we do more research into genetics.

That isn't what is happening with creationism - creationists are not disputing that birds have a particular morphology or that marsupials have a different genetic inheritance to animals in similar niches. They are not extending or improving knowledge of the basic facts, so I'm not sure what the link is between the example you are providing and creationism.

That should have said 'we are looking at the facts that we know now' !!

I wasn't really positing a link between that and creationism - I do find creationism strange. I was more taking issue with your claim that scientific facts aren't theoretical in nature, because it seems to me they must be.

I think sometimes that we as a society have the same sort of blind faith in 'Science' that other cultures have had in 'God'. Neither are great reflections either of proper science or proper theology, imo.

Scientific facts are not theoretical in nature because a theory has explanatory power. Facts do not have explanatory power.

Facts may later turn out to be wrong. We may think a species of spider cannot bite and then find out that it can bite. Both of those are facts but only the latter, that spider species X can bite is right.

But at no point was either of those facts a theory, because neither fact has any explanatory or predictive power.

Neither a fact nor a theory has anything to do with faith.

I also dislike the idea that we have science and other cultures have god. All cultures have both scientific and religious beliefs. Hunter-gatherers have more understanding of biology that most people in the developed world, because they have to have more knowledge of it in order to survive.

Ah, ok, I see what you mean. But I don't think what you're describing are 'facts' really, they're just observations, aren't they? Or statements, maybe?

I get a bit antsy about the term anyway, I've only really heard it used as a colloquialism.

Interesting about hunter-gatherers ... makes sense, though. I didn't really mean that other cultures 'have' god and we 'have' science. I mean, it's not very fair to judge either system of explanation from looking at its most credulous and least-informed members. I reckon we tend to do that about religion.

A fact is an observation. That is what the word 'fact' means in science. It is a verifiable observation. It is an observation that I make, which you or anybody else can also come along and make.

As for religion, there are some incredibly intelligent people within religion, and they can provide insight into all manner of things that are meaningful to humans which science cannot inform us about.

Ah, ok. I didn't know it really was a scientific term. It always seemed like a contradiction-in-terms to me because I'm more used to the word in maths or in normal speech (where a fact and an observation are different).

Bit confused about a 'verifiable observation' though - are we still talking science? I thought you couldn't verify things in science, only disprove them?

The observation is verifiable in that if I observed that a seal has mammary glands, you could look at another seal independently of me and also observe that the seal you were looking at had mammary glands. It is at the same time always falsifiable, as you could look at a seal and find that it didn't have mammary glands.

But that wouldn't verify that all seals have mammary glands at all!

Verification means checking a proposition is true. It's not the same as anecdote at all.

LRD,

You can't verify that all seals have mammary glands because they don't. Only the females do. The observation would only be verifiable if you were both looking at a female seal. This is where science gets complicated - you can then start saying 'All female seals have mammary glands'. Which would also be diffiult to verify because what if you run into a female seal pup whose mammary glands had not yet visibly developed? Dissecting everything to verify one's observations would be a bit much...

GabbyL,

I was actually agreeing with you, not defending the position of Young Earth Creationists at all - on the evidence that we have, evolution is the most likely answer.

pointy, I think you misread my post?

I am agreeing you can't verify that all seals have mammary glands - you can't even verify that all female seals do (I bet there are some deformed female seals out there, so I expect you can disprove the hypothesis).

To my understanding, this is one of the most basic and important scientific ideas - that things are not verifiable; only falsifiable. Someone else explained it much more elegantly further up the thread, I'm just going off GCSE Science a long time ago, but it seems a bit pointless to rehash the thread when it's all there in the earlier pages.

LRD, you are right, I did misread you. I was one of a few who did the explanation you are referring to further up. It was Karl Popper who came up with the concept BTW, it's interesting reading.

It's ok; easily done! Sorry I didn't recongize it was you citing the Popper.

Btw, it drives me nuts, but I was reading a very well-respected academic's book the other day where she basically says she doesn't agree with the idea that a hypothesis should be verifiable, because her hypothesis is so obviously right, it doesn't need verifying.

It was Maggie Snowling on Dyslexia, btw.

But I am a humble English Lit girl, so what do I know?!

There are different views about science and scientific method. Popper's explanation of the deductive method is sort of taken as read now, but whether or not that is how science is actually done is open for debate. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=154140&sectioncode=26 This is an intersting report of a talk by Max Perutz, and addresses creationism and the relationship between religion and science too!

Bugger

FallenMadonna,

Really interesting article, makes some very valid points - but it has to be said that Perutz is attacking from a 'hard' science point of view, and in his field it is quite likely that things can be proved.

I do agree with his take on how the social sciences operate in terms of teaching that everything is subjective - strictly speaking I am a social scientist (Prehistoric archaeology) but there is much in archaeology that is all about physical observation - stratigraphy, dating techniques and microscopy and pollen analysis, all fairly 'hard' science branches in the field. I am of the opinion that many social scientists are bending over backwards to be culturally sensitive at all times, hence the 'everything is relative' approach - which is why I found the anthropology subsections of my field hard to take and specialised in the more hands-on stuff.

I especially like the way Perutz differentiates between using scientific methods to oppose Creationism and people setting out to offend people who have faith - as an atheist I've always felt that not believing is as much about respecting other beliefs (whilst disagreeing with them) as about non-belief itself.

I still think this thread deserves some sort of stamp of approval from MN - something like 'Guaranteed gluten-free - no bunfights on this thread'

Lastly I'd like to say that Popper and Kuhn are not the be-all and end-all of scientific practice IMO - they are just a useful, relatively simple to explain example of how science can work as opposed to how religion works.

I take evolution by natural selection to be in the 'hard science' camp. I have a degree in biochemistry and one in psychology, and I had never studied scientific method as such until I did the latter. Scientists do science, IME. Social scientists think about how to make what they do objective, or scientific. Or reject objectivity completely of course, depending on perspective. My feeling is that in social sciences, most things are relative...