This post is, of course, super relevant to my interests :) (And I would love to go to a bar with you and talk religion and science, although I would probably get ginger ale :P :) )
I had skipped the more atheistic pop-science books in my adolescence (I'm older than you, so I think the timing was just off a bit for the publishing of all of them) so I didn't get hit by all of this until I was a little older (college/grad school), which was probably good because I don't think there's really a good book like this for Christians. Or if there is, I read them much too late, because yes to everything you said about irreducible complexity being a poor argument, etc. via a convergent evolution (pun intended) in my thought processes as I got older.
Re the argument against randomness in evolution: my reaction was, anthropic principle! :) Which — it's not that I actually believe in the anthropic principle (which seems too pat, really), but it kind of shows why his argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I would actually cast it as a prior vs. posterior probability sort of argument… given that we have this outcome, we can no longer really talk about the outcomes that didn't happen. (It reminds me of the bit in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan talks about Laurie being a miracle because of how improbable her particular sequence of genes is — which I also, at the time, thought was a little disingenuous.)
(Speaking of quantum mechanics miracles: that's interesting, I hadn't heard that particular argument before, though I do agree with you that it's linguistic splitting in a similar sense that Dr. Manhattan was when he talks about "very improbable events" being miracles. Christians, in my experience, tend to concentrate on quantum mechanics' probabilistic nature giving a path to free will.)
I do like the relativistic argument! (As you say, more as a neat possibility than as proving anything.) And I will probably use it the next time my creationist in-laws start in at me, AUGH. They are the nicest people in the world, but!) Although I did laugh at the 20% thing. I totally am going to read Genesis now and add "up to 20%" to those verses, hee.
Speaking of proving things, I agree very much with your penultimate paragraph. I don't even want a specific reconciliation (which as you say earlier could well be proved "wrong" by science changing), but knowing that a reconciliation can be possible — that is reassuring.
(But mostly: nerd camp yay! Have we talked about this? We probably have, I forget. Anyway, I am a TIP kid, myself, though my sister did both TIP and CTY.)
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Date: 2016-08-26 02:16 pm (UTC)I had skipped the more atheistic pop-science books in my adolescence (I'm older than you, so I think the timing was just off a bit for the publishing of all of them) so I didn't get hit by all of this until I was a little older (college/grad school), which was probably good because I don't think there's really a good book like this for Christians. Or if there is, I read them much too late, because yes to everything you said about irreducible complexity being a poor argument, etc. via a convergent evolution (pun intended) in my thought processes as I got older.
Re the argument against randomness in evolution: my reaction was, anthropic principle! :) Which — it's not that I actually believe in the anthropic principle (which seems too pat, really), but it kind of shows why his argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I would actually cast it as a prior vs. posterior probability sort of argument… given that we have this outcome, we can no longer really talk about the outcomes that didn't happen. (It reminds me of the bit in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan talks about Laurie being a miracle because of how improbable her particular sequence of genes is — which I also, at the time, thought was a little disingenuous.)
(Speaking of quantum mechanics miracles: that's interesting, I hadn't heard that particular argument before, though I do agree with you that it's linguistic splitting in a similar sense that Dr. Manhattan was when he talks about "very improbable events" being miracles. Christians, in my experience, tend to concentrate on quantum mechanics' probabilistic nature giving a path to free will.)
I do like the relativistic argument! (As you say, more as a neat possibility than as proving anything.) And I will probably use it the next time my creationist in-laws start in at me, AUGH. They are the nicest people in the world, but!) Although I did laugh at the 20% thing. I totally am going to read Genesis now and add "up to 20%" to those verses, hee.
Speaking of proving things, I agree very much with your penultimate paragraph. I don't even want a specific reconciliation (which as you say earlier could well be proved "wrong" by science changing), but knowing that a reconciliation can be possible — that is reassuring.
(But mostly: nerd camp yay! Have we talked about this? We probably have, I forget. Anyway, I am a TIP kid, myself, though my sister did both TIP and CTY.)