Recovering Evangelicals

For Sarah Henn Hayward, reading a few too many books, meeting a few too many beautiful non-Christians, and asking a few too many questions, was just too much for her Evangelical faith. For five years, we’ve been building a community of like-minded people wrestling with a spirituality that didn’t work for us  …. or even harmed us. We’re all Recovering Evangelicals. In this episode, we talk to yet another Recovering Evangelical … Sarah Henn Hayward … who just published her deconstruction story in Giving up God: resurrecting a spirituality of love and wonder. Through her first two decades, Sarah was fully on board with her Evangelical faith, wearing it on her sleeve and actively laboring for it. But she was also a voracious reader, and a critical thinker. Ultimately, we’ll find, she simply asked a few too many questions and read a few too many books, and that led to her leaving that worldview and starting a journey to look for another one. Going to university to pursue a career in health care immediately began to chip away at her Evangelical beliefs and values. One student she befriended was full of life, joy and goodness: however, he was gay. Another fellow student who seemed to share all of Sarah’s values and deep religious conviction, was a Muslim. Sarah’s relationship with both of them, and others, caused her to question so many ideas that she had grown up accepting fully, and so many parts of the Bible which she thought were absolutely condemning of friends like them. At the same time, Sarah discovered the writings of an Episcopalian Christian mystic — which further challenged many of her Evangelical ideas, especially those pertaining to hell. And then, ironically, the fourth serious challenge to her Evangelical faith was a number of theology courses that she took: learning about how the Bible and Christian dogma were put together by humans was eye-opening, to say the least. “A world full of blurred lines and shades of grey felt scary compared to the simplistic black-and-white views I’d held before. Now I had a harder time reading the Bible with all this cultural context added in.” Sarah Henn Hayward Sarah finished university with a much more liberalized Christian faith. As she began pursuing her career, and a husband, and having kids, she continued going to church. But she was still reading …. and asking questions. Her husband opened her eyes to the disturbing links between Evangelicalism and American politics. Simply looking for some medical information to develop promotional material for her health care clinic had her learning about the evolution of the human foot … and about human evolution in general. We heard the same thing from Paul Enns (“Paulogia”), who told us that simply looking up some basic information about dinosaurs, so he could more accurately draw them in a video he was creating, that opened up his eyes to the truth about evolution … and shattered his Evangelical faith! And then the COVID pandemic happened. It forced Sarah to close her clinic temporarily. With her husband now working at home … and able to watch the kids during their nap time … Sarah had hours to go on long walks as she contemplated all this new information, and new perspectives. As well as the racial unrest and deep partisan divisions that were tearing society apart … the crazy things that Evangelicals were saying and doing (and not doing) about COVID … their involvement in politics and the election. A world full of cruelty, hate, racism, murder, cancer, suffering …. couldn’t God have done better? It was all too much. Ultimately, it was theodicy — the problem of a good God and so much evil — that finally pushed her over the edge. She could no longer believe in God. In the final few chapters of her book, Sarah describes how she’s trying out a few new hats … new labels for her spirituality: Poetic Naturalism? … Agnostic? … Christian Atheist? Yes, you read that right: that juxtaposition is intentional. Sarah can no longer believe in God, and yet she recognizes that her Christian upbringing has shaped her: she will always be Christian …. “it’s in my cells ….  my DNA.” We heard the same kind of thing from Frankie Schaeffer when we interviewed him last year: Sarah is a Christian who doesn’t believe in God … Frankie said he’s an atheist who believes in God. In the last few minutes of our conversation, we talked with Sarah about whether it was really the traditional Evangelical conception of God which shattered, rather than other possible conceptions of God. And we asked if she could set aside all this talk of original sin, divine wrath, blood sacrifice, and eternal conscious torment in hell (the Evangelical “Gospel”), and yet still embrace a spirituality that talks about love and liberty, enjoying community and creation (the Christ-ian Gospel). Sarah resonated with that to some extent, but it seems that the baggage related to the Evangelical concept of God is still holding her back. As always, tell us your thoughts … Find more information about Sarah and her book at her website. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like similar interviews we’ve had with Frankie Schaeffer and Paul Enns (“Paulogia”). Episode image used by permission from Sarah Henn Hayward. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

In the season opener, the hosts discuss moving beyond deconstructed faith. They highlight reasons for leaving religion and the need for deliberate reconstruction. The evolution of evangelical Christianity, significance of the virgin birth, and reevaluation of Paul's influence are explored. The podcast also touches on collaboration, morality, and transformation through the gospel.

A brief retrospective on Season 4, and a longer one on the journey that the podcast has taken us on through Christian belief. Well, we kept it going for over a year, and added 54 more episodes to our archive. But all good things must come to an end. And so this will be the finale for our fourth season of episodes. This podcast grew out of a blog site I started almost 10 years ago. Both were vehicles for my own personal quest to find a new Christian worldview to replace the one that was handed to me in my teen years, and which no longer worked for me. And it also didn’t seem to work for others of my generation who grew up in it: it seems that most of them no longer follow that version of Christianity, and almost none of our own children seem to do so either. The podcast was a vehicle … a catalyst … for my journey out of 20th century North American Evangelicalism, and into a new version of Christian belief. And it has become a public record of that personal journey. After taking a brief look back at this fourth season of episodes, and trying to decide whether we started to get mired in the science weeds, Scott and I talked about where this podcast has taken each of us in our respective personal belief systems, and shared our new perspectives on: the Bible, and Divine inspiration God, Divine intervention in human affairs, Deism and mysticism Hell, and the second coming of Christ the ever-elusive “personal relationship” with the Divine humans need something transcendent, or we slip into anarchy and savagery the relative merits of Christianity versus humanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Biology is unique among the sciences in its apparently absolute dependence on language that implies a goal, direction, or intention. Does this mean that biology IS goal-oriented, or directed? If so, that has huge philosophical and theological implications!? Our deep-dive into Intelligent Design got us wondering why so many people embrace that worldview. Not just “sheeple” who can often blindly follow vocal proponents of even crazy beliefs (COVID was a global government-orchestrated event; vaccines cause autism; everything Q-Anon; the “stolen” election), but even many with impressive academic credentials who appear to have researched the question. In trying to understand this, we came across an article with the title The Teleological Menace: Why Biology (Still) Requires God by Seth Hart, a doctoral candidate whose current research project asks: does Darwinism (Natural Selection as a causal mechanism of evolution) require teleological concepts? He made many great points that are worth sharing with our listeners. Some of the main points we discussed with him included: biology is more dependent upon teleological language than all the other sciences like physics, chemistry or astronomy; both the Darwinism of the 19th century and the more modern Extended Synthesis are dependent on this organisms don’t just occupy their niches … they create those niches and then occupy the latter. In other words, they are agents in their own evolution. definitions of “teleology” and “teleological language” … roots in Platonic thinking; highly developed by Aristotle; points toward ultimate meaning and purpose during 13th to 16th centuries, there was a movement away from teleology within the natural sciences; this was a theological decision led by Theists like Descartes and Bacon, not an anti-religious one! Likewise, it was Jewish and Christian thinking that began to move the world away from invoking spiritual explanations into natural phenomena however, biologists like William Harvey, Robert Boyle, William Paley were very resistant to this effort to remove teleology from biology; Darwin went back and forth on using/resisting their influences today, teleological language is used everywhere and all the time in biology: “birds have wings so that they can fly” … “viruses and bacteria mutate in order to find better ways to infect you better” … “Natural Selection wants to maximize efficiency and reproduction” we reflected on comments made by two widely recognized philosophers when we asked them the same questions: Dr. P. Z. Myers doesn’t see teleological language in biological literature, while Dr. Denis Walsh acknowledges biologists do often use that kind of language, but they don’t mean it. is this overuse of teleological language “just sloppy language,” much like how we humans will often personify inanimate objects (referring to a car or boat as “she”) At the end of this discussion, we addressed what seems to be two inevitable conclusions: biology doesn’t (or can’t) make sense without teleological language. Therefore life must be teleological: it has purpose and meaning. a Theistic worldview seems to be the only philosophically coherent way to hold this to be true. If those two conclusions didn’t slap you in the face, you need to read them again, more carefully. Two equally provocative implications of those two statements: are humans the inevitable end-point of evolution? is Evolution a mythological origin story as much as religions are? Let us know what you think of those conclusions and their implications ….. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy our retrospective of our Intelligent Design mini-series, in which we summarize our current understanding of that worldview, including why so many people embrace it. Find Seth Hart at his university profile page or this Academia profile page. Also make sure to check the article that first brought Seth to our attention on this matter. Dr P. Z. Myers is a Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota Morris, and founder of and writer at the Pharyngula science blogweb-site. Dr. Denis Walsh is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Episode image by meineresterampe from Pixabay. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

The details behind the story of how bacteria mutated in order to grow bigger and better by eating oranges, instead of sugar. Last week, we talked to a member of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, Dr. Zachary Blount. He and his colleagues followed 75,000 generations of bacteria competing for a limited food resource — sugar — and described many different kinds of genetic changes in 57 different genes. Creationists and ID-proponents dismiss this as “simply breaking genes.” In this episode, we take a very deep-dive into the story, and show how this is actually a prime example of evolution proceeding through gene duplication, progressive modifications, and the building up of new regulatory pathways and metabolic functions. How it is that well educated anti-evolutionists, especially the biochemists among them, can only see this as destructive and detrimental either says something about them being biased and misled … or deceptive!? Before we asked Zach to give us the details, we provided some background introductory information: evolution often involves duplication of stretches of DNA, followed by modifications which eventually lead to new functions, while leaving the original copy intact. This is NOT “breaking the gene” we give a crash course on how bacteria extract energy from glucose (see the color image attached below) evolution often happens in three steps: (1) prepare for new function (or “potentiation”) – changes occur which by themselves don’t appear to affect function, but they set the stage for something else (2) get the new function (or “actualization” or “instantiation” – the “something else” suddenly appears as a new function, although usually in a very weak and inefficient form (3) refine the new function – tweaking and optimization Bacterial metabolism of glucose through biochemical conversions (buckets) involving other molecules such as acetate, citrate, and succinate, producing energy molecules (the green “E”s in the figure). A potentiating mutation (#1, highlighted in pink) allows acetate to escape the process, thus accelerating the flow of glucose through the top half). An actualizing mutation (#2, highlighted in yellow) allows the OCEAN of citrate that the bugs are swimming in to now flow into the process, making it possible to grow on citrate in the presence of oxygen when glucose levels drop. [nb: this chart simplifies the story to the point of being inaccurate, but at least a non-expert can follow it!]] With that introduction in place, we then got deep into the details of this story: after 30,000 generations and 16 years, mutant cells had gained the ability to grow on citrate in the presence of oxygen (something that their non-mutated cousins couldn’t do) although the LTEE had found many other mutations that occurred in all 12 test-tubes, this one new function only happened in one of the 12 [and this is still true even today!]; this raises raises big questions regarding evolution, and became Zach’s research project (had to test 44 trillion cells to get some of the answers!!!) they went back to their “Frozen Fossil Record” (see last week’s post), and learned that mutations happened a year prior which weren’t detectable because the advantage was miniscule. BUT IT WAS THERE!  And it could then be refined (which it did by 33,000 generations) some changes enabled the bugs to take up much larger amounts of glucose, but at the “expense” of pooping out acetate, which later became a new food source through a new loophole that connected to citrate other changes that “Potentiated” … set the stage to use citrate as a food source the “Actualization” step was a duplication of a citrate transporter gene that was put under the regulation of glucose levels (the original copy was left in place and still regulated by oxygen levels … in other words, NOT BROKEN!!); now citrate uptake and metabolism can happen when glucose runs out! Like the Energizer Bunny, these mutant bugs now just keep on going when their non-mutated cousins are slowing down and dying ID-proponents, especially their biochemists, should be able to see this as an increase in function, information and complexity, but they PERSIST in dismissing this as “just breaking genes” or asking ignorant questions like: “did they see any examples of entirely new nanomachines?” (again, see last week’s episode) Contrary to the Creationist party line, this is precisely an example of small changes which accumulate and eventually become a new function. Evolution may be “clever” and innovative, but often it won’t be elegant; we talked about bizarre and inelegant designs like the anatomy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, or the biochemistry of a photosynthetic enzyme in plants called rubisco; in the same way, this new re-design of citrate metabolism is also a “clunky” design, but it lets these mutants grow and thrive while their non-mutant cousins go extinct the new citrate-using bugs at generation 75,000 are growing better and better on the citrate/succinate microenvironment they’re creating (niche creation), but at the same time, are getting worse at growing on glucose (their ancestral resource). They are becoming a new species … becoming ecologically specialized! As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more information about our guest, Dr. Zachary Blount at his university profile page and his own lab’s web-site. Learn more about the LTEE itself, including descriptions of the team members and lists of their publications, at their webpage. You can also watch a video in which Dr. Blount regales Dr. Richard Lenski on the latter’s 60th birthday, and recounts the whole history of the LTEE. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like the mini-series of episodes we did focusing on Intelligent Design and its misrepresentation of science. Episode image by Andrew Kirkham. Thanks Andrew! To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Two very different interpretations of the same set of data: one from Creationists and ID proponents, and the other from the scientists actually doing the work. Here, we talk to one of the latter. A frequent talking point for creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in their anti-evolution rhetoric is a ground-breaking scientific project referred to as “the Long-Term Evolution Experiment.” Almost forty years ago, Dr. Richard Lenski began studying bacteria competing for limited energy resources (sugars) — generation after generation — looking for any genetic changes which gave any kind of advantage in that competition. His group have recently reached 76,000 generations, and documented many dozens of genetic mutations: rearrangements of regulatory pathways, elimination of genes which were no longer needed, introduction of new metabolic functions, shuffling of genetic information. In the process, there has been an incredible increase in fitness. This is much like someone deciding to train for a marathon — losing layers of fat, toning up muscles, revising their diet, replacing their normal wardrobe with ultra-light clothes and expensive runners, shaving seconds off of their run-time, increasing their stamina — and in the process, becoming a lean, mean running machine. Nonetheless, creationists and ID proponents persist in diminishing the LTEE findings to just “breaking genes” and losing information. After a brief introduction to the LTEE and the primary variables that they were monitoring (oxygen; fuel sources), we then talked to Dr. Zachary Blount, a member of the LTEE team who is continuing and broadening that research program, building on the findings and strategies of the LTEE. Points that we discussed included: the history of the LTEE: its founder, leaders, goals, and basic methodology twelve different “test tubes” of populations were kept separate, in order to see how the ancestral populations might try different evolutionary strategies they’ve now reached 76,000 generations; every 500 generations, they’ve frozen samples of the bugs so they can do follow-up experiments and/or recover from technical mistakes without having to start all over at the beginning …. they refer to this collection of samples as their “frozen fossil record” aerobic versus anaerobic metabolism (meaning with versus without oxygen) of glucose and another fuel source called citrate why did the experimenters add citrate to the medium in the first place? years later, the cells suddenly acquired a new ability to grow on the citrate in the presence of oxygen, something that their original bacterial ancestors were unable to do exactly how/why does metabolism of citrate change in the presence/absence of oxygen what were the “stressors” being imposed on the cells … answer: no “stress” or “stressor,” but rather simple competition for limited resources (fuel sources) what were the original goals of the LTEE project? the “randomness” of genetic variation mutations are not just simply individual “point-changes” in the base sequence of the DNA base, or individual amino-acids in the whole protein sequence; they can also include movements/insertions/deletions of whole segments of the DNA (thousands of bases at a time), duplication of large segments, and other forms of gene rearrangements the 12 separate populations of the ancestral bugs mutated in different directions and in somewhat different ways, but often landed on the same gene targets (although changing those genes in different ways) the mutated cells are much larger than the original ancestor (the researchers had expected a progressive reduction in size) the LTEE team found 57 different genetic changes …. and these were NOT simply just “breaking genes” or losing information, as creationists and ID proponents will so often say Dr. Blount then got into a very detailed and technical description of the whole citrate story, which is the one detail that creationists and ID proponents will particularly dwell upon, but we’re saving that part of the conversation for next week Scott and Luke then reflected a bit on what Zachary told us so far, and how that relates to the on-going discussion going on between creationists and anti-evolutionists: how it’s okay to be skeptical about scientific claims … to ask questions, and put the claims to the test … this is part of the Scientific Method and something that scientists do all the time; however, once those follow-up questions and tests have been answered and the claim still stands, a good and unbiased scientist accepts the claim and moves on. But creationists and ID proponents keep circling around the same inaccurate counterarguments the LTEE’s finding that 12 different populations set out on 12 different evolutionary journeys and yet often arrived at similar endpoints sounds an awful lot like life’s common ancestor spreading out to several different geographically isolated parts of the globe, exploring different evolutionary pathways and often coming up with very similar and yet fundamentally different answers (comparisons between mammals and marsupials were the specific example here) once again, the frustrating tendency of creationists and ID proponents to focus on just “breaking genes” and degradation of information; cells have a genetic toolkit which enables them to shuffle parts of genes or whole sections of DNA around; perhaps the best and most complicated example of this genetic shuffling is our immune system some might think that an evolutionary advantage of “only a couple percent” is too small to realistically provide a driving force on evolution; however, say that to an athlete who’s just trying to shave a few seconds off of an event that lasts minutes or hours … or to an investor who’s comparing stocks that make either 4% or 6% gains, or the manager’s expense fees being raised to 3% from 2.5% Luke’s intense frustration with the leaders and scholars of creationist and Intelligent Design worldviews, who are educated and smart enough to understand the science here, but who persist in misrepresenting and distorting that science (possibly intentionally so!?) As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more information about our guest, Dr. Zachary Blount at his university profile page and his own lab’s web-site. Learn more about the LTEE itself, including descriptions of the team members and lists of their publications, at their webpage. You can also watch a video in which Dr. Blount regales Dr. Richard Lenski on the latter’s 60th birthday, and recounts the whole history of the LTEE. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like the mini-series of episodes we did focusing on Intelligent Design and its misrepresentation of science. Episode image by WikiImages from Pixabay. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray, a deeply Evangelical believer and state college professor, has long been speaking to and educating Evangelicals about their science denial Unfortunately, science denial and pseudoscience run rampant in Evangelical circles. In our previous episodes, we’ve learned about the exceptionally strong correlations between being Evangelical and: … being against COVID protection measures (vaxing, masking, social distancing) … being against evolution (particularly so about human evolution) … denying climate change … accepting the Sunday School version of the Noah’s Ark story as historical … and otherwise disagreeing on several other points which many others take for granted. Our guest today — Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray — has been teaching, speaking and writing to Evangelicals for decades about this science denial. Here, we talk about her latest book coming out next week from Eerdmans: The God of Monkey Science: People of Faith in a Modern Scientific World. Points that we covered include: science denial and pseudoscience run rampant in Evangelical circles phylogeny (creating a “family tree”) of anti-evolution arguments shows how their arguments gradually evolve, and also how Evangelicals will use the “play-book” for their anti-evolution campaign (e.g., the Scopes Monkey Trial) in their war against COVID policies, or climate change, or vaccines, or …… her first book, Baby Dinosaurs on The Ark: the mental and theological gymnastics involved in explaining or rationalizing the Noah’s Ark story, and a comment made by a Young Earther in a discussion forum about the logistical hurdles in floating that boat: “let’s not get caught up with logic when dealing with faith,” which is a perfect example of one of the things that Mark A Noll wrote about in Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Evangelicals and Evangelicalism have become not only anti-science but also anti-intellectual, as seen in their rejection of whole categories of art, music, philosophy the Galileo Affair didn’t have the impact that the “Scopes Monkey Trial” did. Why? Biblical Criticism (introduced by Julius Wellhausenin the mid-19th century) crystalized a response in Evangelicals against science and intellectualism, leading to an embrace of Biblical inerrancy and infallibility the birth of the new Young Earth Creationism — Intelligent Design — which was presented as an “alternative science” Evolution Theory became a target for Evangelicals, who saw it as the source of all social evils (abortion; homosexuality; rape; murder; etc) science became the front in a culture war … anti-COVID measures were seen as an assault on religious rights and Christianity itself the creation of an education bubble …. Evangelicals set up their own elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions, and poured themselves into home schooling; also set up their own publishing houses and music industry. Answers-in-Genesis and Institute for Creation Research even warn parents not to send their kids to certain Christian schools (the ones that are friendly towards evolution teaching). This leads to intellectual and cultural siloing and cloistering. America has a very broad Evangelical demographic, including “Evangelicals” who don’t attend church Evangelicals have learned to approach/do science with pre-existing assumptions, leading to all forms of pseudoscience (ivermectin; hydroxychloroquin; Young Earth Creationism; Flood geology; Intelligent Design) because secular scientists can’t be trusted (“they’re in on it”). Evangelicals lose the ability to discern between an expert and an authority. A celebrity, athlete, family doctor or pastor can substitute for nationally and globally recognized scientists (Francis Collins), doctors (Anthony Fauci) and institutions (national and global medical boards). The YEC film Is Genesis history? features individuals with scientific degrees who defend views and interpretations completely opposite to those held by a large majority of their peers. Our previous episodes featured ID “experts” who don’t actually work in the scientific fields on which they speak, contradicting scientific experts who do work in those fields. people feel empowered by the internet to be their own experts (“doing the homework”; “following the data to where it leads”) the damage done by denying science and denigrating scientists … Evangelicals can no longer discriminate between authorities versus experts, or recognize when someone is speaking with or without expertise cherry-picking, misapplying and misquoting Scripture in defense of bizarre scientific claims the exponential development of the apologetic industry, making the Bible speak to science, and vice versa, sometimes in order to prove the existence of God science is trying to exorcise itself of teleological language (talking about Evolution as if it had agency, and intention/purpose). Intelligent Design tries to re-insert teleology back into science Dr. Ray teaches at a state [secular] university and is open about evolution: Christian students sometimes feel threatened by her (in their minds, she becomes the Hollywood-ized professor whose goal is to kill their faith). She has had to develop strategies to best teach evolution as well as a healthy Christian response/attitude to it. the damage/costs of an anti-science bubble: opportunity costs (esp. with respect to employment) and health risks (vaccines; transfusions; mental health; sex education; prolongation of the COVID epidemic because of anti-vaxers). That bubble can also actually predispose young people towards losing their faith (they’re not able to deal with the contrary evidence). does evolution have any impact on ones ability to do medicine? ….. or to do research? pro-evolution Christians need to involve themselves in confronting science denial …. get in the conversation (otherwise, you remove self from the conversation) … become relevant. As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find out more about Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray and her books at her profile page at Eerdmans Publishing, or at her FaceBook page. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our mini-series of episodes on: Young Earth Creationism (9 episodes) Intelligent Design (8 episodes) Evangelicalism (10 episodes) a Christian response to Evolution (11 episodes) or maybe individual episodes on science denial (#27), COVID-denial and pseudoscience (#61), the Evangelical response to science (#24), a prominent social influencer whose faith was destroyed by YECism, aka “Paulogia” (#25), or another one whose faith was ruined by working for Answers-in-Genesis (#31). To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

After a seven-episode deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we finally arrive at our better informed opinion of our position on this worldview. We started this 7-part mini-series introducing the Intelligent Design proposal that many creationists hold, and also shared our position at the outset on it: at that time, we were not convinced, feeling like we should embrace it but still a bit skeptical, and not really knowing what to do. It took seven episodes — three in which we gave you, the non-expert, some conceptual foundations to follow the scientific arguments (what is Intelligent Design; how do genes work; how are proteins made), and then the interviews with two leading Intelligent Design proponents (Michael Behe; Jonathan McLatchie) and the counterarguments from three scientific experts (Nick Matzke; Matt Miller; Mark Pallen). We now feel ready to make a better informed opinion about the ID worldview. In this episode, Scott and Luke pull the threads together, compare notes, and try to make sense of the differing arguments presented. Points that we covered include: the reasons why we decided to do this deep-dive into ID, despite the warning that listeners might not be too interested the leaders in this new wave of creationism (Michael Behe; Stephen Meyer; Jonathan McLatchie) are much more highly credentialed in relevant academic fields than those in the first wave (Duane Gish; Henry Morris; Ken Ham) the leading ID proponents and the scientific experts that we brought in told very different stories!? Non-experts listening to these two groups aren’t well-equipped to discern the differences, and to evaluate which side is bringing the better information or interpretation. both Luke and Scott went into this deep-dive willing to give ID a fair chance, but both found the perspective conveyed by the ID-advocates quite unconvincing (and their modus operandi annoying), and the perspective from the scientists to be not only convincing, but even exhilarating despite the protests of its advocates, ID still comes across as God-of-the-gaps thinking the talking strategy that ID advocates tend to use is: selectively cherry-pick the scientific papers/studies they’ll consult or refer to when addressing any given issue; use technical jargon which goes far above the heads of most of their listeners; use glitzy, well-produced videos to mesmerize their audience into an absorptive state (just like watching TV at the end of a hard day); misrepresent (or misunderstand?) the opposing or contradictory scientific evidence; use a lot of hyperbole (e.g., genetic mutations cause “cataclysmic” failure of the organism). ID advocates love to bring up the “junk DNA” story as if they were the ones to set the scientific world straight on this point, but we explain why they have no more claim over this than secular scientists themselves Luke is annoyed when they tirelessly defend arguments that have been repeatedly debunked: this persistence borders on wilful ignorance …. or even deception? we wondered if the tendency towards ID thinking arises from nature (the human tendencies to perceive agency and to be awe-struck) or nurture (Sunday school upbringing; a culture that is increasingly skeptical and questions authorities; the internet encourages us to think we can be our own experts; a culture that replaces credentialed experts with celebrities, athletes, or anyone with a degree who will say what they want to hear) We also took time to respond to some questions/comments from our listeners: Skyler: ID isn’t (and can’t be) a scientific theory; Edward: what’s the difference between ID and Theistic Evolution? Nathan: what’s the difference between ID and Biologos? Nick: what are the falsification criteria for ID? (the problem is, ID advocates hide behind “we don’t know the design constraints” to shut down the conversation, just like AiG use “were you there” to do the same thing); John: ID is making God look deceptive; Mi K.: too much God-of-the-gaps argument; David: ID adherents reject the consensus opinion of a majority of experts, and instead latch on to a minority opinion anonymous pro-ID person: they know at least one scientist out there studying the flagellum who is pro-ID (Luke wonders why that person is so unheard-from); Ian: was pleasantly surprised and pleased with our episode featuring three experts describing an emerging scientific consensus on the origin of the flagellum. As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

After last week’s scientific experts cleared up much ID-rhetoric, we ask a rising star in the ID movement — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie — to respond to our reinvigorated questions, concern, and critiques of Intelligent Design After starting this mini-series with an interview with one leading ID proponent, and then hearing from a number of scientific experts who gave a different perspective on things, we now want to finish this on-going conversation with an interview with another leading ID proponent — a relatively new face — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie. With three graduate degrees in biology and evolutionary biology, he may be a rising leader in that movement. Before the interview, we gave him a list of the anti-ID challenges we’d be raising, so that we could get fully prepared and informed responses to those questions. Here are his answers, and our other points of discussion: Challenge #1: for us, ID is still just God-of-the-gaps thinking Challenge #2: ID doesn’t explain anything, it just attributes phenomena to an intelligence without saying anything about exactly how that intelligence might have done it. ID proponents often refer to this as an inference to the best explanation, but is it really just an inference to the best attribution? Challenge #3: where does the science go after the attribution has been established? Does ID make testable predictions which actually advance scientific knowledge? as always happens in discussions with ID proponents, “junk DNA” came up as one of ID’s greatest scientific advances Challenge #4: ID proponents often make reference to astronomically huge numbers when refuting evolutionists (“the chances of that happening spontaneously are one in 10 with eighty-nine zeroes behind it“) …. again, this just betrays God-of-the-gaps thinking Challenge #5: ID proponents are always attacking “Darwinism.” We need to move away from simple Darwinian mechanisms and recognize that genetics has moved far, far beyond simple point mutations; we now know about large-scale movements and reorganizations of DNA what exactly does “Darwinism” mean to an ID proponent? we started to wade a bit into the evo/devo world (a term for evolutionary developmental biology, which pertains to how a single-celled embryo organizes itself into a multi-cellular fetus) Challenge #6: ID proponents often resort to hyperbolic appeals to “cataclysmic failure” and “death” and “extinction” in order to push back on discussions of genetic mutations and rearrangements being the creative engine of evolution; they only see genetic changes as harming a given protein/function, and avoid or ignore the possibility that a genetic change might morph that function into a new one (a process referred to as exaptation) gene duplication with modification is the R&D department of the cell as ID proponents often do, Dr. McLatchie quoted from a small select group of scientific studies which supported his pro-ID or anti-evolution point(s), while not accounting for the much larger number of scientific papers which come to the opposite conclusions (“cherry-picking”) Dr. McLatchie claimed that there is very little evidence of gene duplication and modification producing new functions; we countered with one example of the family of receptors that convey smell (there are thousands of these, all just a little bit different from each other), but didn’t have time to talk about visual receptors, ion channels, protein-eating enzymes, carbohydrate-eating enzymes, neurotransmitter receptors, signaling molecules called GPCRs, antibodies, ………… the list goes on and on ID proponents re-defining the adjectives “detrimental” and “beneficial” when talking about genetic mutations disparaging misrepresentations of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment; we will be talking to one of the members of that project in the next few weeks to fact-check statements from Dr. McLatchie (in this episode), Dr. Behe a few weeks ago, and from ID proponents in general Dr. McLatchie sees evolutionary mechanisms simply “degrading genetic information,” while we see this as life getting creative and trying new things, and re-purposing old ideas function becomes conflated with design; just because something has a function, this doesn’t mean it was “designed” to do that (did someone “design” an old broken brick to hold that garage door open?) strange/awkward designs (backwards wiring of the retina) and truly malevolent designs (convergence of the wind-pipe and food-pipe, or childbirth) make it hard for many of us to embrace ID; a designer working from the bottom up wouldn’t design it this way when asked why humans couldn’t have been “designed” with thicker necks having a food pipe on one side completely separate from a windpipe on the other side, the response can’t be “well, that would look weird” the accumulation of gradual changes that we see in living organisms over time (complete with genetic dead-ends and fragments of old, out-dated designs) is not consistent with the idea of a Master Designer what do ID proponents think of common descent of humans and primates (they’re quite divided on this), and how exactly do they explain speciation? why is the scientific community at large so resistant to ID-thinking? the ancient Hebrews thought the weather involved God having jars of rain, closets of lightning bolts, and breathing out the wind and the dew; today, we can set up mathematical models that only take into account gradients of temperature, pressure and humidity and predict the weather out over the next week or two exactly how would “the Designer” design things? What would this look like? Is he/she/it tirelessly tinkering away at a work-bench, or just dropping in from time to time to nudge things over key evolutionary hurdles? Jonathan’s answer included a reference to periodic injection of information content into the global pool of living organisms (“the biosphere”) As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more about Dr. Jonathan McLatchie, including upcoming public speaking engagements and writings, at his web-site. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Three internationally-recognized, world experts on the bacterial flagellum connect the dots regarding the evolutionary origin of the flagellum, and draw some compelling comparisons to the evolutionary emergence of the Bible! Three episodes ago, Dr. Michael Behe used the bacterial flagellum as Exhibit A in his defense of the Intelligent Design proposal. Last week, we heard Dr. Nicholas Matzke, who actually does cutting edge research on the flagellum, give his understanding of the bacterial flagellum, with comparisons to claims frequently made by the ID community. In this episode, we hear three world-leading scientific experts on the flagellum discussing the latest scientific data on an amazing evolutionary journey which seems to explain the origin of the flagellum. Those three are Drs. Matthew Baker (University of New South Wales, Australia), Mark Pallen (University of East Anglia, UK), and Nick Matzke (University of Aukland, New Zealand). Some of the technical points they discussed include: how to make direct measurements of individual flagellum motors freshly isolated from a test tube of bacteria why is there so much interest in the bacterial flagellum ….. why have so many researchers using such high-tech equipment studied this thing? the flagellum is not just one unchangeable thing (as ID proponents will often suggest); instead, the broad scientific community agrees that there are MANY different kinds of bacterial flagella (hundreds of thousands), each with different genetic sequences, and some of which seem to be missing parts, and yet still work for their hosts at the heart of two bacterial nanomachines there is a third nanomachine called “the type III secretion system” whose function is to squirt out proteins; the one in the flagellum squirts out the proteins that make the long propellor whip, while the one in “the injectosome” squirts out the toxins that the bacteria uses to capture its prey these are two examples of machines built on top of machines – Mark referred to it as “a modular system” there is yet another bacterial nanomachine — “the “ATP-synthase” — whose function it is to generate energy molecules called ATP; given how fundamental this function is, ATP-synthase is probably one of the oldest of cellular machines there are many striking similarities (genetic; structural; functional) between ATP-synthase and the type III secretory system, which suggests a common ancestral origin; in other words, those two very different enzymes seem to have both descended from yet another earlier enzymatic precursor there is some reason to suggest that the precursor for the type III secretory system (and for ATP-synthase) might have been related to one that modifies RNA, an enzyme called RNA-helicase; one of those reasons is the fact that all three are made up of six globular proteins that form a ring wrapped around a central filament of protein (in the case of the type III secretory system) or a filament of RNA (in the case of RNA-helicase), and all three spin like rotary motors as they do their job the type III secretory system is NOT a devolved bacterial flagellum (as ID proponents will often claim) Altogether, the evidence starts to point to a possible scenario involving a recurring theme of gene duplication with subsequent modification of the copies, followed by selection for a useful function: an ancient primordial gene for an enzyme that comprised a rotary motor that spins around some filament was duplicated those two primordial gene copies morphed and diverged such that one specialized for RNA (the helicase) and the other specialized for proteins (becoming a generic protein pump) somewhere in that transition, one of those two new genes duplicated, and the resulting copy started to code for a rotary engine that ran in reverse and latched onto a protein to drive it to generate ATP (ATP synthase) the gene for the generic protein pump was duplicated and the copies began to specialize for pumping certain subsets of proteins … one for flagellar proteins (thereby becoming a propellor, the bacterial flagellum) …. and the other one for toxins (thereby becoming a weapon, the injectosome) Parts of this story are more speculative than others, but the emerging picture is looking quite clear that the bacterial flagellum is the product of a long evolutionary journey. That hypothesis then prompts new research questions which flesh out the details of this evolutionary journey. There was an extended conversation about how genes/proteins can change/morph over time and take on entirely new functions …. and how this phenomenon is precisely paralleled by the evolution of language (the words loyal, legal, and lawful all have a common ancestral origin), and even of the Bible itself! I asked our guests to comment on Michael Behe’s claim that secular scientists themselves are doing the scientific work of Intelligent Design by “doing their experiments from a Design perspective without calling it that.” Admittedly, it’s pretty hard for scientists to say anything about evolution without using wording such as “this protein/trait is designed to enable the animal to XYZ” or “this organism evolved toward being able to XYZ.” This is goal-oriented language … wording that conveys purpose, meaning, direction, guidance … otherwise known as “teleological” language. One response to this assertion was that it can also be “sloppy language,” just like humans have the tendency to refer to Earth as “her” or to a truck as “him.” I also asked our guests if it is possible to meet the ID proponents in the middle by saying that there is indeed “a designer”, but that designer is the cell itself (which orchestrates the genetic changes) and evolutionary pressures (which select out the good stuff). One guest replied provocatively, but entirely legitimately, that if ID proponents insist on personifying “the designer” by referring to him/her/it as intelligent, then how do they explain the flagellum being so well designed to move the bacterium around through the human host’s body in order to mediate such nasty, devastating, destructive disease outcomes. Interesting conversation indeed! As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more information about our guests at Nicholas Matzke’s profile, Mark Pallen’s profile, and Matthew Baker’s profile. Episode image by Arek Socha from Pixabay. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive