Re: evolution and orthodoxy
Lydia wrote:Two things:
- A great deal of scientific knowledge involves that most human of exercises, categorization. However, it is only valuable as a tool to help us cope with the natural world. It is not a pronouncement on the essence of anything. For example, a mammal is categorized as an organism that bears live young. But a platypus is a mammal that lays eggs. So much for human observation and definition. Is a species a species because that's what it is or is it a species because we say it is? As Christians, we put faith in revealed truths, even when they defy observed reality, experience and experimentation.
- Since Newton's law states that motion is relative, it is perfectly correct to say that the sun moves around the earth, in the same way it is logically and scientifically correct to state that the road on which we travel is in motion relative to the car in which we sit.
1) That's a very good point. The categories of things we observe seem to be real, but their boundaries are "fuzzy". The same seems to go for species as much as larger categories of animals, e.g. that example of plant speciation I mentioned above. As a historical linguist, I can't help drawing an analogy to language: there are certainly different languages in the world, not just one single language. We can determine this because we have these different ways of expressing thought using sounds and grammar, which are not mutually intelligible and which differ in systematic ways.
Yet at times it can be hard to determine where one language ends and another begins. We see that in space, when you have a "dialect continuum": as you travel through a certain area, the dialects change gradually from place to place, but never enough to impede intelligibility. Yet when you get to other end, the dialects spoken at either end are not intelligible with each other. An example would be the continuum of Germanic dialects stretching from Switzerland down the Rhine valley to the Netherlands. Or the continuum of Romance languages stretching along the Mediterranean coast from southern Spain to southern Italy.
We also see this in time: the English spoken 1000 years ago is not intelligible today, which means it is a different language for all practical purposes. Yet you can track the gradual changes over the centuries: at each step, it changes, but not enough to impede intelligibility. It all depends on your vantage point: whether you're observing change over a couple generations or over several centuries.
This is one reason why I don't have a hard time believing in gradual biological evolution for its own sake: species gradually changing over the eons makes sense in terms of what we find in the world, namely a bunch of discrete categories with fuzzy boundaries. I understand there are problems with evolution from a Christian dogmatic perspective, but I don't find it hard to believe on its own.
For me, the answer simply lies in a humble attitude to human knowledge. Evolution to me makes the most sense as a naturalistic account for biology, but it would be absurd to put absolute faith in it. There's never a last word in science, and I would actually be suspicious of a scientist who had a dogmatic faith in some theory or other. Scientific theories are always provisional, awaiting further evidence for confirmation or falsification. And since evolution is not absolute truth, we should never use it as a foundation for a new system of faith or morals, as many have done. I believe in Creation, even if I don't understand how it worked in detail.
2) Certainly motion is relative in a sense, so in that way you could say the sun can be said to revolve around the earth. The main problem is the planets. If we assume the planets revolve around the earth, we have to develop a very complicated system of cycles and epicycles to account for their tendency to move back and forth across the heavens, unlike the actual stars, which move in a fixed revolution. But if we assume the planets revolve around the sun along with the earth in fixed orbits, their celestial paths are much simpler to explain. That's the main reason why I can't accept geocentrism.