rationalskepticism.org

Tzelemel wrote:

theropod wrote:

Tzelemel wrote:When debating a Creationist, never debate the Bible. It has nothing of substance to debate with, so you don't want to be drawn into an argument about it, because you're effectively wasting your time arguing over nothing. Furthermore, if you start debating that, you're effectively saying that evolution is directly opposed to Christianity, which is patently false.

Bold edit by me.

Evolution negates the entire premise of the Bible and therefore Christianity. Christianity is based on mythology. The only valid interpretation of evolution is that it is an observation of reality and a fact. I am challenging you to defend your assertion.

RS

Evolution cannot negate the entire Bible, because it only pronounces on the creation of species. It therefore only negates the bits of the Bible that talks about the creation of species, and even then, I'm stretching the definition of evolution to include abiogenesis.

The Bible is a piecemeal document, written by several different authors. To prove Genesis wrong, does not prove the rest of the Bible wrong, unless you believe that the entire Bible is God's uncorrupted, divine word. If you believe the Bible is God's word, filtered through flawed, and maybe politically biased, humans, then it'll take more than evolution to prove the entire Bible wrong. The former is the fundamentalist's viewpoint. The latter is the more moderate Christian's viewpoint.

Now, it could be argued that we just need to target the fundamentalists, in which case, evolution is indeed all you need to negate the Bible. If you wish to target all of Christianity, however, then evolution is not enough.

At this point, we're into the territory of "what does the mythology in question actually assert?". Once you know the nature of the assertions contained therein, you then move on to the question of which assertions enjoy something resembling external corrobration, which ones are bereft thereof, either through absence of data or through being untestable even in principle, and which ones are actively refuted by external data. The moment you find just one assertion that is actively refuted by data, you do not refute the entire work, but you certainly cast doubt upon its provenance as a source of verifiable fact. At that point, the assertions of fundamentalists can be discarded with ease. Since this has already been achieved with respect to the assertions in Genesis 1 & 2, it's Game Over for fundamentalism as being anything other than a bizarre reality-denial cult.

However, we have to take into account, the manner in which mythological assertions are considered to be linked by the theology crowd. Most astute theologians don't regard Genesis 1 & 2 as essential to the core tenets of Christianity, but they certainly regard Genesis 3 as essential, because without the concept of Original Sin, the whole edifice falls apart. Without the concept of Original Sin in place, the rest, including the entire New Testament, is effectively null and void.

As a consequence, my view is that much of the furore about evolution is a sideshow erected by the fundamentalists, to distract people from thinking the killer thought "is the Original Sin assertion wrong?" Because the moment that assertion is given a kick in the nuts, it's Game Over for all the Abrahamic religions. That's the one assertion the Abrahamic religions have to keep alive in order to persist. However, evolution becomes a central target for those concerned with that assertion, the moment one starts finding evidence that our capacity for ethical thinking didn't magically appear because of some conjuring trick with fruit, but was actually a shared inheritance with other primates. That evidence is starting to grow in quantity, at a rate that is alarming for any theologian that has contemplated the issue, and as a corollary, evolution will probably become a dog-whistle topic for those outside the fundamentalist camp as well, once that data and its implications start hitting home in a big way. Not least because theologians don't have an answer to this one. If they cannot point to a defining moment, when our capacity for ethical thought appeared in an instant, and connect that to mythological assertion, but instead are supplied with data telling us that said capacity for ethical thought was a common primate inheritance, one that in our case expanded over evolutionary time, then the whole Original Sin assertion is fucked. The data is increasingly pointing in this direction, and as a corollary, the killer weapon against Abrahamic mythology isn't the work of Darwin, or for that matter anything that concentrates on phylogeny as a general concept, but that one particular phylogenetic result centring on ASPM and FOXP2, and how those genes launched us onto the path of being ethically aware beings in the abstract realm.