That is by far the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.

Since God made us and everything else, He doesn’t need our vote or approval to be in charge. In fact, any authority we might have is simply by His allowance.

Furthermore, it makes no difference whether you accept the authority someone else legitimately has or not. Point in fact, Kent Hovind [jailed for charges unrelated to Creationism] believed that the government had no authority in an area where it legitimately did. As a result, he answered to their authority. Likewise, whether you recognize God’s authority or not, He still has it and you will in fact answer to Him one day.

Also, your peter Pan straw man fails for the excellent reason that Pan makes no caims to authority while God does.

The only way God would require His authority to be assigned by men is if He were only a construct of men’s imaginations, which rather presumes evolution is true. That should answer your question as to where the presumption lies.

Regards,
Sirius Knott

Accordingly, one could argue that the fervently religious are in some sense ‘addicted’ to the relevant neurochemical, similar to the way some contend that thrill-seekers are ‘addicted’ to adrenaline, endorphins, and/or dopamine.

While I don’t completely subscribe to it personally, the addiction idea actually fits quite well. A brief google search defined addiction as the “uncontrollable, compulsive drug seeking and use, even in the face of negative health and social consequences”.

If a religious experience is (at least partly) due to certain chemical events in the brain, then some behaviours associated with religion might be seen to be symptoms of addiction to those chemical events. In other words, a compulsive, uncontrollable seeking of “religious ecstasy”, even in the face of negative health and social consequences.

Addiction can be thought of as an evolutionary side-effect, our learning circuitry shorting out slightly, or being forced into a positive feedback loop. These sorts of things are evolutionary tools, designed to learn survival enhancing behaviours. A classic example is our taste or high-energy food, like fat and sugar. Even if you have never tasted honey before the chances are that you will like it, although I’m sure there are a few who won’t, just to be contrary, I’m sure. More importantly, you will want to have more! From here comes that midnight craving for McDonalds:)

So perhaps a religion is a meme that persists by allowing a group to get high together? Perhaps there’s some “sacred ‘erb” in the censor?

*stuffs face with big mac*

Nor does any of this obviously favor theism or atheism, as far as I can see. Believers like Hagerty can interpret this as God’s mechanism to ensure we can perceive Him. Atheists like myself can interpret it as a neurochemical/neurophysiological phenomenon that occurs despite the (probable) non-existence of any god.

As for understanding the fervor of the religious, I can think of one rather unflattering response. If religious fervor is thought to be triggered by certain neurochemicals, it could be likened to the high triggered by certain drugs. Accordingly, one could argue that the fervently religious are in some sense ‘addicted’ to the relevant neurochemical, similar to the way some contend that thrill-seekers are ‘addicted’ to adrenaline, endorphins, and/or dopamine.

Please note that I’m not arguing in favor of such an interpretation. It just occured to me as one possible view that could actually create more division between believers and non-believers, rather than less.

I agree. However, as I said earlier, I don’t think this is the sort of definition most people have in mind when they discuss/dispute TE.

For someone like me, who assumes that TE refers to ‘natural’ evolution plus some sort of additional (perhaps undetectable) interference by God, I’m not sure your theistic embryology analogy will be understood the way I think you intend.

After all, if one believes that God subtly directed evolution to ensure the appearance of humans, one could as easily believe that God also intervenes subtly to ensure the embryological development of humans. In fact, most Christians do believe that, do they not? What is ensoulment but an intervention by God during human development? So, even if Christians don’t use the term ‘theistic embryology,’ many do believe in a version of embryology that entails more than purely ‘natural’ development.

If your goal is to get Christians to question why they think God must have intervened in evolution, maybe a comparison to ‘theistic gravity’ would better suit your purpose?

And to reply to a previous comment, I do prefer the term evolutionary creation, or EC, to TE. But as Cliff Martin points out in a comment at Quintessence of Dust, one ought not need to name a position that simply affirms belief and natural explanation. That’s another point of the theistic embryology ploy, and I hope Christians get it: there’s no such term as theistic embryology and we Christians should think about why that is.

Thanks for the further explanation. FWIW, I didn’t think you were acting annoyed or hostile, I was only trying to understand what point you were making.

If I understand you correctly, you consider that everything is “directed” or “caused” by God, including those things that are fully consistent with so-called natural causes. In that case, sure, I can see why there’s no need for God’s specific intervention in evolution. Rather, God “intervenes” in everything, because it’s all part of Him/His creation. I hope that’s a reasonable summary of your view?

I think your point #3 is the crux of where our understanding of TE has differed. I have mostly seen believers use TE as a sort of God-of-the-gaps device. They seem to think that God must have made some special intervention to ensure the appearance of humanity – i.e. that humans could not have evolved by purely naturalistic means, without divine intervention. TE seems to be their rationalization for how evolution can appear to be naturalistic, yet still require specific divine intervention.

At least, that’s been my understanding (misunderstanding?).

We agree on a lot, so don’t infer from my mostly critical responses that I’m annoyed or hostile.

First, to why I think these distinctions are important. I think I should make a post out of that. Briefly, 1) I’m concerned that evolution is being misused in a religious debate (and that this is damaging in various ways), 2) I’m keen to have skeptics be clear about their criticism of belief rather than obscuring it (intentionally or not) behind debates about evolution; and most importantly 3) I’m hell-bent on exposing and eliminating the erroneous tendency among modern Christians to separate that which is natural from that which is God’s. But let’s take those things up separately.

I use scare quotes around “intervention” because I think it’s a loaded and misleading term. It forces a distinction between an intrusive redirection-type interaction (“intervention”) and what Christians have always called providence. Whether and when God “intervenes” is simply not relevant to whether and when he supervises/oversees/empowers. So I and many other Christians see the emphasis on “intervention” as an impoverished view of God’s action and of his role as the Creator. Christian belief, in fact, doesn’t entail any specific amount of “intervention” in any aspect of the natural world. What it does entail is sovereignty (on God’s part) and complete dependence (on the creation’s part). It’s interesting that you refer (correctly) to the notion of God’s playing an “active role” in creation, apparently assuming that this entails “intervention.” I understand the confusion, but I hope you can see why I reject this assumption completely. To do otherwise is to grant that natural phenomena are outside God’s sovereignty, a ludicrous doctrine if there ever was one.

Again, the comparison with theistic embryology (notably, an utterly uncontroversial position) illustrates the shallowness of the “intervention” concern. If Christians are comfortable with a model of human embryology that is completely (or almost completely) composed of natural explanations, then why do the rules suddenly change when evolution is the subject? Ditto for skeptical scoffers: why is theistic evolution a target of criticism when it need only mean belief + explanation? Those who think that belief + explanation = nonsense should just come out with it, and stop abusing evolution in the process.

That’s my point.

I agree that my objections to TE aren’t specific to TE. What I don’t see is why you think a lack of specificity matters.

I assume TE involves intervention by God simply because that’s how I’ve generally seen others use the term, including self-described believers in TE. Many of them seem to see TE as a way to ‘believe in’ the science of evolution while retaining their belief that God took an active role in human creation.

You seem to be describing something more specific; perhaps we could call it Christianic evolution (CE). Under that definition, I agree one can identify specific criticisms such as the disparity between the fossil record and the biblical creation narratives that you note.

But I’m perplexed that you offer that as a specific criticism of TE (or CE), yet you suggest that Christian belief doesn’t entail God’s intervention in evolution. The same creation narratives explicity describe multiple distinct acts by God to create multiple different groups of organisms (including humans). Obviously, one can get around such issues by interpreting Genesis more metaphorically, but one can do the same regarding the apparent temporal conflicts.

Finally, I agree that lack of evidence is a weak argument against supernaturalism. It’s not my intention to argue “There is no God” based on lack of evidence. Nor am I arguing that lack of evidence proves there was no supernatural intervention during evolution. I’m only arguing that the current lack of evidence means there’s no current reason to assume intervention occurred. Certainly not from a scientific perspective, anyway.

I don’t aim to discredit that argument or any other argument with the TE test. What I mean to do is get people to see that most attacks on theistic evolution are nothing more than objections to the embracing of naturalistic explanation by people of faith. Go ahead and make that objection, but don’t pretend that it’s specific to theistic evolution.

The question is not at all pointless, though. Let’s take the most basic form of TE, which is a little more than “simple simultaneous belief in both God and evolution.” I take TE to be simple simultaneous Christian belief and acceptance of evolutionary explanations. Now, are there specific criticisms of that position? I think there are. One place to look for particular problems with TE is in the historical narrative that is common to nearly every form of Christian belief, a narrative that includes creation and fall. Evolutionary explanation necessarily includes a historical narrative of descent with modification and seems to have no place for the kind of punctuational change that historic Christian accounts of the fall seem to postulate.

It seems that you and others believe that TE entails “intervention” by God. For various reasons, I don’t think that Christian belief entails “intervention” outside of explicitly defined miracles, but let’s grant it to be a part of TE for the sake of argument, then see if objections to an “interventionist” God are specific objections to TE. I would argue that they clearly are not. They’re just objections to the notion of supernatural “intervention,” for which one might claim there is no evidence past or present. That may or may not be true, but it’s just not specific to TE.

Finally, I would argue that the objection to supernatural “intervention” during ~ 4 billion years of biological evolution, based on “lack of evidence,” is about the weakest attack on supernaturalism that I can imagine. I happen to believe that life can be accounted for naturally, and that the natural/supernatural distinction should be unimportant to believers. But I don’t see how you can seriously argue against belief in intervention or guidance in a story of such stupendous complexity and temporal immensity. If you think it’s lame to hide God’s hand behind that complexity and immensity, then I’m with you. But it seems a bit premature to me to claim that the evolutionary story lacks “evidence” of intervention, at least until you make it clear what you’re looking for.