Some Thoughts on Evolution

Evolution is kind of a weird third party to the whole religion/atheism thing. One can be a theist and still “believe in” evolution. One can be an atheist and still think that evolution doesn’t pass muster.

So what does evolution mean? I think a lot of people are muddled.

My understanding is that evolution means “change over time”. When we say that a species has evolved, it means that species, as a whole, is different than it used to be at some point in the past.

This should be so flatly obvious that I have a hard time imagining anyone would disagree with it. This is the basis for the selective breeding that we’ve done on farm animals, thoroughbred horses, orchids, and show dogs for centuries. If you want to change the shape of the nose of a particular breed of dog, you simply mate pairs that have the noses you like, and pick the puppies from the litter that are closest to what you want. Then mate them with others. After a few generations, you’ll have a dog with different shaped nose.

But people who don’t accept evolution seem to miss some fundamental point. They say “Yeah, I agree with that, but I’ve never seen a dog give birth to a duck.” They say this as if they actually think that that’s what evolution would predict: that in a single generation a parent would give birth to a wholly different kind of animal.

Or they talk about transitional forms. They say “if an animal evolved from one kind to another, then we should see some hybrid mixture somewhere in the middle.” I’m not sure how they can say this with a straight face, but they do. It’s a totally fallacious challenge, because anything you ever show them, they can just respond “that’s not a transitional form… that’s just an extinct species from Creation.”

So there are two halves to the picture. In very short order, we can show that species of animals can change in just a few generations. There have been experiments with fish that have been stocked into different streams with varying degrees of predators. The fish that were put into streams with bigger fish that would eat them changed color over some generations, turning dull and brown and camouflaged. The natural variation in coloration over generations favored these kinds of fish. The fish that were put in streams with few or no predators turned more brightly colored. In this case, flashy colors helped attract mates, and that trait was selected.

Or these California salamanders.


Creationists readily accept these changes, I think. What they just can’t seem to grasp is that the accumulation of these changes over a long period of time can add up to substantial changes.

In this post, the first words were one color. Now they are another color. Can you find the exact word that is half red and half blue? Of course not. But you must admit that there has been drastic change over the course of this post.

I’m running out of steam. Hopefully this makes some sense.

Is the Bible Reliable?

I find Bart Ehrman to be a pretty compelling speaker when it comes to the accuracy of the Bible.

Textual criticism isn't a religious idea.  The study of many copies of a text to determine if it has changed over time has nothing to do with religion.  This is a purely analytic, academic subject.  It just so happens that we have lots of copies of the Bible, and lots of people looking at it.

Listen to the beginning of this video:  Question #6:  Have the gospels been accurate preserved down through the centuries?





In this video, the response from the debate opponent, Craig Evans, isn't shown.  In a separate video, we hear his response.  He generally agrees that the text certainly does contain changes, but they are mostly minor and typographical in nature, or slight embellishments.  The core message of the gospels remains clear, he says, and more or less hand-waves away these minor issues.

Then skip to the following question at 10:22:  Do scribal errors and textual variants significantly impact any teaching of Jesus or any important Christian teacher?



Dr. Ehrman quotes some very famous quotes from Jesus, and probably surprises many people by saying that those quotes only exist in textual variants.

He makes a very compelling argument, in my opinion, that we should at least cast some doubt as to whether the Bible is a trustworthy and reliable guide.

Pretty much this...

Inductive Reasoning

I think a lot of people naturally use inductive arguments in their efforts to prove facts without really understanding the nature of induction.

Inductive reasoning uses examples of individual instances to try to come up with a generality.

All swans we have ever seen are white.

Therefore swans are white.

Or

Everyone we know of who drinks cyanide dies.

Therefore cyanide is lethal to everyone.

Again, we are using specific examples of an event to try to come up with some general rule.  And this is very good for navigating through the universe and figuring things out, but isn’t good at formally proving anything.  “Swans are white” is great until you actually discover a black swan, or meet someone who has some sort of mutation that renders cyanide harmless to them.

Inductive reasoning is a good first step to figure out what is PROBABLY true, but not good at proving it to be ABSOLUTELY true.  We’ve never seen Bigfoot, but we can’t prove he DOESN’T exist using inductive reasoning.  He could be just behind the next bunch of trees, or he could have circled around behind us to hide somewhere we’ve already looked.

Contrast this with deductive reasoning.  This is the opposite, where you move from a generality to prove a specific.

All zebras are black and white striped.

A baby zebra is about to be born at the zoo.

Therefore, it will be black and white.

The strength of a deductive argument rests on the first line (the generality).  IF that is true, then the following lines should also be absolutely true.  In my example above, I think we should question the first line for its veracity.  Here’s another example:

All even numbers can be evenly divided by 2.

342 is an even number.

Therefore, it can be divided by true.

If A and B are true, then we know for a FACT that C is as well.

They are kind of subtle and hard to wrap your head around at first, but they really come up a lot in theological arguments.

I’ve seen videos of people (Ray Comfort, etc) who will hold up a piece of paper with a circle on it. The circle, they say, represents all possible knowledge of everything in the universe.  What percent, they ask, of knowledge do we have?  The answer is, of course, very little.  No one knows the number of grains of sand on the beach, the number of hairs on our heads.  So the speaker draws a tiny little circle to represent the subset of human knowledge.  Isn’t it possible, then, then God exists outside somewhere outside that little circle?

The answer they want, of course, is “yes, it’s possible that God exists”.  They use this to claim that there are no real atheists, only agnostics, and it basically gives them a foot in the door which they can expand upon.  “You even admitted yourself that God may exist and that you’re a sinner!”

The obvious problem, though, is that using that exact same logic, they have also proved that ANY imaginary or mythological creature may also exist.  Unicorns, leprechauns, the FSM.  We are forced to conclude that they are possible when we see how much we don’t know.

Also, we could turn the argument on its head.  Out of all that knowledge that we don’t know yet, isn’t it possible that there exists some ultimate, conclusive proof that no gods exist at all?  By the same reasoning, the evangelist should be willing to admit that he isn’t sure if he’s right or not.

Basically, you can use that argument to demonstrate that anything is possible, which makes the whole thing generally worthless.

Atheists use it too, of course.  We have never seen direct, incontrovertible proof of God.  This might lead people to claim that he absolutely doesn’t exist.  I don’t think we can draw that conclusion absolutely, but I think we can being to make some statements on probability.

And that’s what induction is really good for.  Making some decisions on what is PROBABLY true, rather than what is absolutely true.  No one has seen Bigfoot, and a lot of people have looked around pretty hard, therefore it’s probably unlikely that he actually exists, but remains “unproven”.

Keep your ears open for people trying to prove things using inductive reasoning.  And note that just because someone is using an inductive argument doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.  Inductive arguments are very useful for figuring out what is probably true, but it’s a common pitfall to use them to try to prove something as absolute fact.