Ship of Fools: Golden YECcies

Thread: Golden YECcies Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

A bit of trivia for you. The book The Genesis Flood by Whitcombe and Morris was published in February 1961. That's 50 years ago (to be precise 50 years ago last Sunday, as the first print run was completed on the 20th Feb 1961). I don't think there's much dispute that that book marked the birth of the modern Young Earth Creationist movement. There had been earlier strands of Creationism, some of which like a minority position within Lutherism had persisted through the advent of modern science and the discoveries of the antiquity of the earth and the evolution of species, although the majority of Creationist groups had rapidly evolved into some form of Old Earth Creationists ('Gap theory', 'Day-Age theory' or Theistic Evolutionists) as the findings of modern science made a literal six-day Creation within the last 10000 years an impossible reading of the opening chapters of Genesis.

With The Genesis Flood a new form of Recent Creationist, one who sought to challenge the accepted scientific understanding with a revisionist science, was born.

So, Happy Golden Anniversary to Young Earth Creationism. While celebrating this milestone, perhaps it might be worth contemplating the novelty of the YEC position amidst the antiquity of the rest of the Christian tradition.

OK, I admit it. I've no idea if there's anything to discuss at all ....

Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
...OK, I admit it. I've no idea if there's anything to discuss at all ....

Then why did you bother opening a thread?

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
So, Happy Golden Anniversary to Young Earth Creationism. While celebrating this milestone, perhaps it might be worth contemplating the novelty of the YEC position amidst the antiquity of the rest of the Christian tradition.

I'm not sure that "novelty" is the right term for a position advocated for most of Christianity's history up to the nineteenth century. Even the rejection of secular science in favor of a more theologically convenient position is nothing particulary novel. Faith has always been considered superior to reason in most Christian traditions.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

The modern YEC concept is subtly different from the early versions of recent Creationism, none of which were universally accepted within the Church. There have always been prominent theologians and other leaders of the church who have made it clear that they don't accept a literal reading of the opening chapters of Genesis - including such luminaries as Augustine and Calvin. Others, such as Ussher, used what were the leading scholastic methods of the time in deriving their theologies, and one seriously has to ask if they'd have reached the same conclusions if they had access to the scholarship of a century later - as indeed their spiritual descendents largely rejected recent creationism as a result of advances in scholarship. And, of course the vast majority of scientists who laid the foundations of our current understanding of the world were devout men of faith - Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, Mendel etc

Modern Young Earth Creationism is a novelty dating back a mere 50 years. The selective application of bits of scientific data, while rejecting the vast majority of science, to support a theological view is diametrically opposed to the approach of, say, Ussher who used what amounted to the best of the science of his day to derive a theological view. And, the insistence that their particular narrow interpretation of the passages is in contrast to the humility with which the majority of theologians have held their interpretations.

And, it's particularly novel if you compare their views with evangelicalism rather than the wider church - recent creationism is more prevalent in earlier church history (mostly predating modenr science), until 1961 it was virtually unknown within the evangelical movements founded upon the work of the Wesleys and others who sought to revive the Protestant church with a fresh emphasis on the Bible. It's noticable that the evangelical scholars who authored the Fundamentals series all held old creation or evolutionary views, the Scopes trial had nothing to do with the age of the earth or evolution - except to the questionof whether humans evolved liek other creatures or were a special creation.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
...OK, I admit it. I've no idea if there's anything to discuss at all ....
Then why did you bother opening a thread?

In case anyone was interested in talking about a bit of trivia. If no one was interested then they simply don't need to post and the thread sinks. Simples.

Why did you bother posting on it?

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
I'm not sure that "novelty" is the right term for a position advocated for most of Christianity's history up to the nineteenth century. Even the rejection of secular science in favor of a more theologically convenient position is nothing particulary novel. Faith has always been considered superior to reason in most Christian traditions.

If, in the last two thousand years, I could only find two instances of men dominating women, and every time this was cited the same two instances came up, I wouldn't find that convincing evidence that men have always dominated women.

By coincidence I'm attending a series of lectures that point out that what Galileo, or any other natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, was doing wasn't secular science as we understand it. It was a lot closer than, say, what the Greeks got up to; but the crucial break isn't 'science' from 'religion' but empirical philosophy from deductive philosophy. Galileo's opponents were claiming that a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge since knowledge is stable and necessarily true (a theme derived from Plato and partly there in Aristotle).

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Even the rejection of secular science in favor of a more theologically convenient position is nothing particulary novel.

Maybe not, but the criticism of Galileo wasn't really about that.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
By coincidence I'm attending a series of lectures that point out that what Galileo, or any other natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, was doing wasn't secular science as we understand it.

Hmmmm... any other natural philosopher? OK, I'll give you that Galileo and the likes of Descartes, Kepler, Leibniz and maybe even Newton, might be thought of as using what looks to us like natural science as a tool to write about philosophy or theology with. But Boyle, Cassini, Flamsteed, Hayley, Hooke, Huygens, Malpighi, Ray, Steno, the Tradescants, van Leeuwenhoek?

Although I suppose most of them are more properly described as natural historians, not natural philosophers.

Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
By coincidence I'm attending a series of lectures that point out that what Galileo, or any other natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, was doing wasn't secular science as we understand it. It was a lot closer than, say, what the Greeks got up to; but the crucial break isn't 'science' from 'religion' but empirical philosophy from deductive philosophy. Galileo's opponents were claiming that a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge since knowledge is stable and necessarily true (a theme derived from Plato and partly there in Aristotle).

I don't know if you saw the thread, but IngoB made a similar point here.

- Chris.

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
By coincidence I'm attending a series of lectures that point out that what Galileo, or any other natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, was doing wasn't secular science as we understand it. It was a lot closer than, say, what the Greeks got up to; but the crucial break isn't 'science' from 'religion' but empirical philosophy from deductive philosophy.

I've always thought that "the Greeks" got a bum rap on this score largely because people usually equate "the Greeks" with Aristotle and Plato while ignoring the works of Archimedes and others who better fit the classification of "scientist".

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Galileo's opponents were claiming that a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge since knowledge is stable and necessarily true (a theme derived from Plato and partly there in Aristotle).

If that's the case, why wasn't Galileo's conviction for casting doubt on Aristotle or improper argumentation rather than undermining the Holy Faith?

More to the point, how is saying that "a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge" any different than a Young Earth Creationist handwaving away any number of "contingent observations" that contradict his preferred hypothesis?

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
By coincidence I'm attending a series of lectures that point out that what Galileo, or any other natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, was doing wasn't secular science as we understand it.
Hmmmm... any other natural philosopher? OK, I'll give you that Galileo and the likes of Descartes, Kepler, Leibniz and maybe even Newton, might be thought of as using what looks to us like natural science as a tool to write about philosophy or theology with. But Boyle, Cassini, Flamsteed, Hayley, Hooke, Huygens, Malpighi, Ray, Steno, the Tradescants, van Leeuwenhoek?

I think the idea that some of what Descartes or Leibniz wrote was philosophy (or even theology) and some of it was science is an application of anachronistic disciplinary boundaries.
One way to make the point is to say that if you look at Boyle's publications it's surprising that you put him in your second list.
Let me see how far I can rehearse the claims in the lecture. To some extent, the discussion, being in the English language, draws mostly on Bacon and the Royal Society who were in general rather articulate about what they're doing. So it's possible that continental natural philosophers were more secular.
One: most natural philosophers say that they are evidencing the wisdom and power of God as an integral part of what they're doing. It might appear as a bolt-on to us, but it's not clear that they thought of it that way.
Two: there is a strong apocalyptic element in Bacon's writings. One of the things that he says is that his project aims at the recovery of the knowledge Adam had of things which was lost at the Fall. That's why he names the obstacles to knowledge idols - he means the religious language.
Three: one of the arguments that empirics put forward in favour of their new learning is that deductive knowledge is problematic because human reason is distorted by the Fall. Claims to knowledge based on the ancients are dubious because the ancients were pagan (Romans 19-23 is a key text here).
Four: the other point that the natural philosophers claimed for themselves was that their knowledge was useful for human improvement. This was something of an optimistic claim given their actual achievements, but the claim was that as well as recovering Adam's prelapsarian knowledge, their project would also restore the natural world to a prelapsarian state. (Some of Bacon's stranger projects in the New Atlantis can be understood in this light.)

quote:
Although I suppose most of them are more properly described as natural historians, not natural philosophers.

That too.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
It was a lot closer than, say, what the Greeks got up to; but the crucial break isn't 'science' from 'religion' but empirical philosophy from deductive philosophy.
I've always thought that "the Greeks" got a bum rap on this score largely because people usually equate "the Greeks" with Aristotle and Plato while ignoring the works of Archimedes and others who better fit the classification of "scientist".

It's not clear that even Archimedes fits that classification very well. It's true that he's made a contribution to the physical sciences that is still considered valid (the only named pre-Christian thinker I can think of for whom that's true).

quote:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Galileo's opponents were claiming that a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge since knowledge is stable and necessarily true (a theme derived from Plato and partly there in Aristotle).
If that's the case, why wasn't Galileo's conviction for casting doubt on Aristotle or improper argumentation rather than undermining the Holy Faith?

I've asked you this before, and haven't got an answer. Do you read these documents that you link to?

quote:
That the sun is the center of the world and motionless is a proposition which is philosophically absurd and false, and formally heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture

Note: these people do not have our distinction between philosophy and science. When they say 'philosophically absurd and false', they mean absurd according to the standards of natural philosophy'.

quote:
That the earth is neither the center of the world nor motionless but moves even with diurnal motion is philosophically equally absurd and false, and theologically at least erroneous in the Faith.

And there it is again.

quote:
More to the point, how is saying that "a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge" any different than a Young Earth Creationist handwaving away any number of "contingent observations" that contradict his preferred hypothesis?

The YEC is handwaving away specific observations, while accepting those observations that support his or her case. Your 16C classical natural philosopher has a principled belief that no observations could amount to something that qualified as knowledge. (Compare mathematics: you can measure the sides of as many approximately right-angled triangles as you like, but no mathematician would accept such an empirical inductive strategy as a proof of Pythagoras' theorem.)
The YEC is claiming falsely to be using the methods of empirical science.
Also, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know that Newton was pretty much right, and anything that anticipates Newton pretty much right. That's based on the huge success of the Newtonian program. But at the time nobody knew that Newton was going to be successful. A YEC is not only ignoring observations; they're also have to ignore a whole coherent explanatory picture that takes in the whole of geology, cosmology, and biology.
(I'm talking about the most common forms of YEC here: the kinds that think they can get support from Intelligent Design. I suppose there could be semi-gnostic kinds. Those that think the fossils in the rocks were put there by the devil, or God in a particularly playful mood, to fool scientists have a different set of problems to deal with.)

[ 24. February 2011, 21:04: Message edited by: Dafyd ]

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Galileo's opponents were claiming that a natural philosophy based on contingent observations could ipso facto not give knowledge since knowledge is stable and necessarily true (a theme derived from Plato and partly there in Aristotle).
If that's the case, why wasn't Galileo's conviction for casting doubt on Aristotle or improper argumentation rather than undermining the Holy Faith?
I've asked you this before, and haven't got an answer. Do you read these documents that you link to?

I could ask the same thing.

quote:
We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you as above, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

For some reason I just assumed that the statement of conviction was somehow relevant to discussing the conviction of Galileo.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Note: these people do not have our distinction between philosophy and science. When they say 'philosophically absurd and false', they mean absurd according to the standards of natural philosophy'.

Again, one could argue the exact same thing about Young Earth Creationists. Their position flows from a rejection of any distinction between science and their (religiously inspired) philosophy.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
For some reason I just assumed that the statement of conviction was somehow relevant to discussing the conviction of Galileo.

You'll note that the statement isn't 'this is contrary to Holy Scripture' but 'this has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture'. i.e. they're not complaining that Galileo is contradicting the Bible: they're claiming that Galileo is contradicting them when they've told him what the Bible says.
The problem here isn't religious doctrine as such. It's an authoritarian regime, or to be even more specific, people who hold positions of power in an authoritarian regime, having decided to back a particular position in natural philosophy. Having decided to back a horse, the regime is then objecting that Galileo is backing a different horse.

quote:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Note: these people do not have our distinction between philosophy and science. When they say 'philosophically absurd and false', they mean absurd according to the standards of natural philosophy'.
Again, one could argue the exact same thing about Young Earth Creationists. Their position flows from a rejection of any distinction between science and their (religiously inspired) philosophy.

If you speak with sufficient imprecision, you can say the exact same thing about anything and anything else, since everything is similar to anything else in at least some respect.

As nobody in the seventeenth century would have said that they were doing science, the case is different. The English title of Newton's famous book would be 'Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'. The boundaries between what we call physics (what happens in the science departments) and metaphysics (what happens in the philosophy department) won't be drawn in their current locations for another couple of hundred years. (Consider Descartes and Leibniz, for example.) So again, they're not rejecting a distinction: the distinction has to exist before they reject it.
You brought up Archimedes. If you look at his range of activities, they fall pretty much entirely into mathematics and mathematical engineering. My supposition is that he's not doing physics or natural philosophy; he's not attempting to describe how things are, only what can be made to work.

To some extent, you appear to operating under the idea that there is some single cross-cultural timeless activity called science, and if the seventeenth-century natural philosophers failed to recognise that was what they were doing, it was only because religious dogma and their stupidity got in the way.

I have to say, I don't particularly think your description of YEC is especially lucid either; at least, it doesn't seem to apply especially well to the YECs on this forum.

Posted by Saul the Apostle (# 13808) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
The modern YEC concept is subtly different from the early versions of recent Creationism, none of which were universally accepted within the Church. There have always been prominent theologians and other leaders of the church who have made it clear that they don't accept a literal reading of the opening chapters of Genesis - including such luminaries as Augustine and Calvin. Others, such as Ussher, used what were the leading scholastic methods of the time in deriving their theologies, and one seriously has to ask if they'd have reached the same conclusions if they had access to the scholarship of a century later - as indeed their spiritual descendents largely rejected recent creationism as a result of advances in scholarship. And, of course the vast majority of scientists who laid the foundations of our current understanding of the world were devout men of faith - Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, Mendel etc

Modern Young Earth Creationism is a novelty dating back a mere 50 years. The selective application of bits of scientific data, while rejecting the vast majority of science, to support a theological view is diametrically opposed to the approach of, say, Ussher who used what amounted to the best of the science of his day to derive a theological view. And, the insistence that their particular narrow interpretation of the passages is in contrast to the humility with which the majority of theologians have held their interpretations.

And, it's particularly novel if you compare their views with evangelicalism rather than the wider church - recent creationism is more prevalent in earlier church history (mostly predating modenr science), until 1961 it was virtually unknown within the evangelical movements founded upon the work of the Wesleys and others who sought to revive the Protestant church with a fresh emphasis on the Bible. It's noticable that the evangelical scholars who authored the Fundamentals series all held old creation or evolutionary views, the Scopes trial had nothing to do with the age of the earth or evolution - except to the questionof whether humans evolved liek other creatures or were a special creation.

Alan,

I was surprised to read this, as it was my understanding that the early church fathers and indeed the church generally, up until roughly say Darwin's day, held to a broadly ''creationist'' and consequently a broadly YEC position?

I am not as knowledgeable as yourself on this issue, but my view was that this broad creationism did hold sway until relatively recently?

S t A

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

Certainly, the church fathers and other prominant Christian thinkers have all been 'creationist' in the broad sense, all believing that "God created the heavens and the earth". Until relatively modern times the date of creation has been a non-issue, so it's probably difficult to say whether Christians before then would have been more closely aligned to the modern YEC position or not. "Relatively modern" being since a century or more before Darwin. Darwin didn't start the scientific revolution that makes a recent creation (within the last ten millenia) untenable, such a position was untenable long before he set sail on the Beagle.

Some earlier Christian thinkers had already cast significant doubt over a 'literal reading of Genesis'. Augustine pointed out that such a reading is logically inconsistent within the narrative itself. Many of the Church Fathers read the opening chapters of Genesis as an allegory rather than history. Luther tried very hard for a literal reading, on the basis that of the Reformers he was probably most strongly of the view that Scripture is comprehensible to all without the need for anyone to explain what it meant (effectively taking the formation of doctrine out of the hands of an elite priesthood and into the hands of the whole people of God), but found that when he came to the opening chapters of Genesis he couldn't really do that and needed to a) allegorize the narratives, and b) refer to the Church Fathers to interpret the allegory - although there has always been a strong strand of Lutheran theology that has held onto his original intent and believed in a recent creation. Calvin strongly asserted that Scriptural interpretation could not be at odds with the physical universe - although he was primarily addressing the position of the earth as being in orbit around the Sun, rather than the other way around, as science hadn't by that stage advanced to the point of suggesting, let alone proving, that the earth is ancient.

By the turn of the 20th century, with the exception of a few Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists (who in bolstering their view that Christians should observe the Sabbath promoted a literal reading of Genesis as that then supports the "observe the Sabbath for on the 7th day God rested" commandment) and probably a few others, there was no one who would accept a recent creation. As an example, the authors of the Fundamentals series of books (the original Fundamentalists) all held views that supported an ancient earth - mostly either a "Day-Age" (each 'day' in Genesis 1 corresponds to a very long age of time) or "Gap" (in which there is a very long gap between the original creation of the earth and a reforming of the surface for a 6x24h period of recreation) model. Even the 1921 Scopes trial didn't address the issue - it was taken for granted by all there that the earth is far more ancient than ten millenia and that life evolved over the vast ages that the earth has existed, the entire trial was about whether the humans evolved from apes.

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Some earlier Christian thinkers had already cast significant doubt over a 'literal reading of Genesis'. Augustine pointed out that such a reading is logically inconsistent within the narrative itself.

It should be noted that, while Augustine did not believe creation was done in the order decribed in Genesis, he was still very emphatic that the world was only a few thousand years old.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

It is true that Augustine held the authority of Christian/Jewish Scripture above the authority of other scriptures. But, one must remember that one of the things he was countering was an argument that the universe was eternal and humanity had always been (an idea very common amongst Greek philosophers who considered changelessness to be a characteristic of perfection, and thus felt that the universe should be changeless). From a Christian perspective, the notion that the universe is changeless and eternal means there can be no creator - and Augustine was still a creationist in the broadest sense of believing in a Creator. Also, if the universe is eternal and changeless then that questions whether any event within time can truly change anything (in which case, could the death and resurrection change us?).

Given that he held logic over the 'plain reading' of Scripture, one can speculate about how he would react to the application of logic to direct observations of the world producing conclusions at odds to a 6000 year old world? Would he continue to hold logic over the 'plain reading', and conclude that not only the order of creation but also the other information that gives an approximate date of creation would need to be reassessed in the light of logic?

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Given that he held logic over the 'plain reading' of Scripture, one can speculate about how he would react to the application of logic to direct observations of the world producing conclusions at odds to a 6000 year old world? Would he continue to hold logic over the 'plain reading', and conclude that not only the order of creation but also the other information that gives an approximate date of creation would need to be reassessed in the light of logic?

It's always tricky to speculate what historical figures "would have thought" if they'd only known some important fact. Augustine also seems very certain that humans have a single ancestor instead of many, and he claims a "logical" reason to hold this opinion, separate from the revelation of scripture (but nonetheless intertwined with his theological/philosophical presuppositions).

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
From a Christian perspective, the notion that the universe is changeless and eternal means there can be no creator - and Augustine was still a creationist in the broadest sense of believing in a Creator.

I'm not sure. Aquinas thought that belief in a creator was an article of reason, but that belief that the world has a beginning was an article of faith. He thought it possible to believe in a creator even of an everlasting world. (He would have meant something different by 'eternal'.) In fact, he cites Augustine's discussion of the matter to show that there were non-Christian philosophers who did believe that.

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :

And, on that point, I'd agree with Aquinas. When Hawking developed his theories on the start of the universe he reached a position where the universe has no boundary, no beginning nor end, and in his popular account asked "What place, then, for a creator?" Aquinas had answered that question a year or two before it was asked ...

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