William Lane Craig, the geneticist.
April 13, 2016 at 11:13 pm
(This post was last modified: April 13, 2016 at 11:20 pm by Jehanne.)
In addition to being a world-renowned cosmologist, Craig is equally fluent in genetics. Here are some highlights (emphasis mine):
Craig misrepresents the Eastern Orthodox Church's beliefs:
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Original_sin
So, no original sin, no physical death. Craig also ignores the fact that some Eastern Churches are fully Catholic and are called "Eastern Catholic Churches". Continuing,
Because Craig "hears" something, well, then that must make it true!
Oh, yeah, Craig gets an email, and from that, a scientific revolution has taken place!
This is Christian/religious fundamentalism at its finest, folks. Craig will not abandon his views unless he is "absolutely forced" to. This is not the scientific worldview, but a view in which one a priori takes scientific evidence and then twists and distorts that evidence to make it "fit" a preexisting belief system.
Entire interview is here:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-histo...am-and-eve
Quote:Before we conclude that the sky is falling, the sky is falling, it isn’t true that the whole story of human sin and redemption falls to pieces if you deny the historical Adam and Eve. As I share in the Defenders class, the doctrine of original sin, though common to Catholicism and most Protestant denominations, is not characteristic of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Eastern churches – like Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox – do not hold that all of mankind falls in Adam’s sin and inherit original sin from Adam. They do believe in a historical Adam. That is true. But it isn’t the case that the whole story of sin and redemption falls apart without Adam and Eve. For the Orthodox Christian, Adam is simply the floodgate, so to speak, through which sin enters into the world and then spreads to the rest of humanity. But it could have entered at any point when you think about it. There was nothing particularly special about that point. So, as important as Adam and Eve are, we mustn’t think that the doctrine of original sin is inherent to Christianity because it is just not. It is part of Catholicism and Protestantism for the most part, but it is not characteristic of Orthodoxy.
Craig misrepresents the Eastern Orthodox Church's beliefs:
Quote:In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 3, Adam and Eve committed a sin, the original sin. The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that no one is guilty for the actual sin they committed but rather everyone inherits the consequences of this act; the foremost of this is physical death in this world. This is the reason why the original fathers of the Church over the centuries have preferred the term ancestral sin. The consequences and penalties of this ancestral act are transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. Since every human is a descendant of Adam then 'no one is free from the implications of this sin' (which is human death) and that the only way to be freed from this is through baptism. While mortality is certainly a result of the Fall, along with this also what is termed "concupiscence" in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo -- this is the "evil impulse" of Judaism, and in Orthodoxy, we might say this is our "disordered passion." It isn't only that we are born in death, or in a state of distance from God, but also that we are born with disordered passion within us. Orthodoxy would not describe the human state as one of "total depravity" (see Cyril Lucaris however).
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Original_sin
So, no original sin, no physical death. Craig also ignores the fact that some Eastern Churches are fully Catholic and are called "Eastern Catholic Churches". Continuing,
Quote:What he is talking about there is the genetic diversity that is exhibited by the human population on Earth. The claim is that you can’t get that kind of genetic diversity from a bottleneck of just two people. You need a few thousand. I’ve heard as low as 2,000 individuals as this bottleneck. What we need to understand is that these are genetic estimates based upon mathematical modeling and projections into the past. We know that that kind of mathematical modeling is based upon certain assumptions that may or may not be true, and can sometimes be wildly incorrect in their projections. So, although Coyne has a great, great deal of confidence (I think he even speaks of scientific certainty), that, I think, is hyperbole.[4] It could well be the case that these mathematical models are simply incorrect. I don’t want to minimize the challenge that is presented by the genetic data, but it is not as cut and dry as what Coyne presents it. I talk a little bit about this in the Defenders class in the section of Doctrine of Man where we look at the question of the origin of humanity.
Because Craig "hears" something, well, then that must make it true!
Quote:This is the so-called Chromosomal Adam, again playing on the biblical figures. So the claim is that the Chromosomal Adam – the Adam from whom all persons are descended today – lived around 60,000-90,000 years ago, but the woman lived around 140,000 years ago. That doesn’t match up, right? Well, I am no geneticist, but recently Michael Murray, who is involved in the BioLogos movement and with the Templeton Foundation, sent me an email in which he said some recent studies have just reestimated the dates of the Mitochondrial Eve and Chromosomal Adam and they’ve determined that they were roughly contemporaneous.
Oh, yeah, Craig gets an email, and from that, a scientific revolution has taken place!
Quote:I think the most plausible take for those who want to deny that Adam and Eve were literal persons would be to say that the literary genre of Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 is not meant to be historical; that this is something like myth or fable or something that teaches some deep truths in the way, say, that Aesop's fables teach deep truths. But it would be a mistake to take these as literal people. These are not meant to be taken in that way. That would be the most plausible spin, I think, for those who want to take the non-literal view. The really hard part for that, though, is that Jesus and Paul seemed to take it literally. They seem to think that there really was such a person as Adam in which case you’d have to either say that they were wrong (which raises all kinds of problems) or you could say that this was just a part of their incidental beliefs but not part of what they actually taught. For example, Paul may well have believed that the Earth was flat for all we know. He probably believed that the sun went around the Earth based on their perception. But they nowhere teach that. They don’t teach this as Christian doctrine. Maybe you could say that about the historical Adam. It is a really difficult problem as to how you are going to sort this out. For that reason, I am inclined to stick with the literal Adam and Eve until absolutely forced by the evidence to abandon that view. I think we are far from that point.[7]
This is Christian/religious fundamentalism at its finest, folks. Craig will not abandon his views unless he is "absolutely forced" to. This is not the scientific worldview, but a view in which one a priori takes scientific evidence and then twists and distorts that evidence to make it "fit" a preexisting belief system.
Entire interview is here:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-histo...am-and-eve
