Chapter 4: Biology

[bookhobbit]

This one is going to be a doozy. If you're not familiar with the creationist project, you're about to be. This chapter is almost exclusively going to be about how creationism is right and evolution is fake, and it's also going to be doing a lot of ascribing claims about "biology" (biological evolution, really) to scholarly viewpoints that really don't make any statements about them. There will also be a lot of false creationist arguments, which I will do my best to debunk. Strap in.

 

We start off with Noebel situating the arguments he's going to make -- essentially saying that he's going to be defending creationism. He discusses the concept of theistic evolution. Fundamentalists really hate theistic evolution, as you'll see:

To hold this position, Christians must take substantial liberties in interpreting the Bible. They also face most of the same weaknesses as proponents of atheistic evolution. [...] Theistic evolutionists interpret the Bible in accordance with their view of evolution.

Basically theistic evolution is bad because it means not taking the Bible literally and also because, spoiler alert, creationists think there is SCIENTIFIC reason to believe that the earth is only 7,000 years old and evolution doesn't happen. We'll get into that. 

However, when we examine the entire message of the Bible, the theory of theistic evolution severely undermines the Christian understanding of God's place and our place in His universe.

I'm really only highlighting this because Noebel says interpreting the Bible is bad, and yet here he is interpreting the Bible.

If God designed the world to operate according to specific natural laws requiring minimal interference, why would He use an evolutionary mechanism that would require Him to constantly meddle with the development of life?

If God designed the world perfectly, why do we have wisdom teeth? Wouldn't They make it so that we didn't have a situation where our number of teeth regularly outgrew the size of our mouths? This is obviously surface-level and could easily be debunked but so too with Noebel's. If the objection to evolution is that God is perfect, and evolution is not, the imperfection of the human body is a strong counterargument.

Further, such a mechanism seems an especially cruel method for creating humans, since it involves a "survival of the fittest" or "destruction of the weak and unfit" mentality.

This is such a misunderstanding of how it works. Survival of the fittest doesn't necessarily mean "the weak DIE" but "those less suited to the environment reproduce less". And "fittest" isn't absolute, but relative, and can change over time. So it's not necessarily like "the weak and imperfect get killed by the strong", it's "those with features that happened to be particularly well suited to the conditions of the moment reproduce more". 

Again, if your argument is that evolution is "destructive and cruel", while God is loving, it's easy to generate counterarguments. Diseases exist, yet are also destructive and cruel. I'm being very shallow; Christians have thought about the reasons for pain. But the point is that Noebel's arguments here are that evolutionary processes are contrary to the nature of God, but given the qualities he gives, the world as it is is also contrary to the nature of God. So it's just not a very good reason for evolution not to be true.

Noebel here cites several scholars arguing in favor of a young universe. They are all from institutes specifically established to prove that young earth creationism is real, published by Christian presses. This is how they get you: they present young earth creationism (YEC henceforth if I'm too annoyed to type out all three words) as a legitimate scientific hypothesis that's been well-proven but the evidence has been suppressed. They don't mention how the people doing this alleged research all have an extremely strong interest in proving YEC is true. 

Anyway, onto the crux of why evolutionism is bad. This is long and I'm going to have to go to it piece by piece because it's all important. I had an entire Bible study once on this.

More important, if evolution is true, then we must view the story of the Garden of Eden and original sin as nothing more than allegory. This viewpoint, however, severely undermines the significance of Christ's sinless life and sacrificial death on the cross because the Bible presents Jesus as analogous to Adam.

Are we engaged in some interpretation here, Noebel? Again: this is something you have to read the Bible and conclude yourself, not something the text will just literally tell you outright all the time.

The condemnation and corruption brought on by Adam's sin are the counterparts of the justification and sanctification made possible for us by Christ's righteousness and death (Romans 5:12-19).  If Adam were not a historical individual, and if his fall into sin were not literally true, then the biblical doctrines of sin and redemption collapse. 

I don't actually understand this. I was told it time and time again, and yet I still don't understand why. If Adam is a metaphor for humanity in general, and his sin a metaphor for the introduction of sin into humankind once, idk, they'd reached a certain level of sentience, I don't know why that makes the doctrines of sin and redemption collapse. It just makes it so you can't read everything literally and have to decide what is literal and what isn't which opens up room for uncertainty which they hate.

This conclusion is unacceptable to Christians. Thus, the proper Christian worldview requires a belief in the Creator as He is literally portrayed in Genesis.

Note: Christians, proper Christian worldview. Again, using fundamentalist and Christian interchangeably.

A thoughtful reading of Genesis 1 depicts a very literal-sounding creation story, although we often hear the caveat "you can't take Genesis literally." 

"A thoughtful reading". This is not evidence. This is opinion. Which is fine; you can have your opinion, but you can't argue that it's the only possible interpretation.

Genesis 1 mentions sun, moon, and stars along with birds in the air and fish in the sea—these physical objects and living creatures are literal. 

The Parable of the Sower also mentions these items, yet no one argues that it is not a parable, so this isn't a good enough reason to say that it's literal.

The mention of day, month, and year seem literal in the context of Genesis 1.

"Seem": so this is your interpretation, not a textual fact. Can you give me some information about the Hebrew? Have you studied it? Have you looked at arguments based in the original text? Give me more information. 

Adam and Eve are depicted as literal people whose descendants continue through the history of the biblical narrative up to the birth of  Jesus. If Adam and Eve were mythical, it would be difficult to determine where myth ends and history begins in the genealogy of the human race.

There's the crux: it would be "difficult to determine", and we can't have that. Never mind that the history-myth border is often hard to determine, and that uncertainty is just something we live with, in other areas. 

There's also a bit about the film Inherit the Wind and how it's all inaccuracy and bluster. I mean, sure, biopics usually are. But this is from the community that played Michael W. Smith's This Is Your Time every youth group. So it's a little pot-kettle.

For example, Jonathan Wells has examined the ten most popular "proofs" for the theory of evolution (peppered moths, Darwin's Finches, fossil record, Haeckel's embryos, ape to human, etc.) and found that each one lacks scientific rigor.

Jonathan Wells is an intelligent design advocate. He specifically took a PhD in biology with the aim of "destroying Darwinism". If you're thinking "peppered moths and the fossil records are pretty different in scale, right?" you're right, and that's only one of the problems with the book in question, Icons of Evolution. Here. Here. Wells would say that his book was unfavorably reviewed because the scientific institution is biased against him, but the point is that you could say that about anything that got unfavorable reviews.

Then some explanation about the difference between "microevolution" versus "macroevolution", which is one thing that stuck with me after I finished the textbook. Basically, microevolution is "the idea that living things incorporate small, adaptive changes over time" -- on the scale of selective breeding for farm animals, for example. Noebel calls this observable and documentedly true. By contrast, macroevolution is "large-scale changes leading to new species" and particularly "the grand scale of amoeba-to-man". This, Noebel says, has never been observed, and there is no proof for it.

The problem I have with this is that it seems to draw an arbitrary lie. I mean...the concept of a "species" is already pretty arbitrary, right? I know that there are formal definitions (like, species can't interbreed), but there are ~issues~ right? I just looked it up and apparently yes and even Darwin recognized this. But it seems nonsensical to me to draw a line that says "at this point, a new species was created" vs "at this point, some incremental change was made" because different species' differences are the result of incremental changes.  It's the same process at different timescales. So to me it doesn't make any sense at all to draw a line between the two processes and say one is real and one isn't, because macroevolution happens due to an accumulation of microevolutions.

It's not that there's a whole new process involved. It's the same process but over larger timescales. Noebel seems to feel that there's no proof that species change into other species, there's just proof that species vary genetically. But there's no...difference between those two, except time.

Which I guess sort of makes sense because he also believes the earth is 7,000 years old. Which is not enough time for a lot of macroevolution to have happened. But...if you allow that microevolution happens, you have to allow that macroevolution will happen, even if every species currently on earth was created as-is. 

So to me, the point of YEC should not be to debunk "macroevolution" as a process but to prove the earth is young. Which you can't do, because the proof isn't there, but a lot of YEC materials do go into age of earth stuff like carbon dating (which they think is wrong). Ken Ham has whole sections about it. But Noebel doesn't even focus on the age of the earth at all in this chapter, he says at the beginning he's not going to. It's more laziness and sloppiness. 

With these distinctions in mind, we turn our attention to developing a scientific view of life's origins consistent with the biblical account described in Genesis 1 and 2.

Note the priorities here. We start from the Bible and fit our theory to it. 

Next a whole page about the watchmaker thing. Not even going to go into it, because it's been chewed over so much. What's important is that the section introduces the idea idea of "irreducible complexity". The wikipedia article about this concept is pretty good. Basically, Noebel claims that creationism is true because if you remove one part the system stops functioning (he's quoting the very famous and much-criticized book Darwin's Black Box). This makes about as much sense as saying that invertebrates can't exist because if you took the spine out of a vertebrate it wouldn't function. 

This section is peppered with quotes from creationists mixed with quotes from secular philosophers and scientists, and Noebel deliberately obscures the credentials and backgrounds of the people he's quoting, so you can't judge them and have to assume they're all equally credible.

Noebel also talks a lot about the teleological argument, using it as "proof" that intelligent design is real. In other words, he says "the idea that life is too complex not to have been designed is proof that life is too complex not to have been designed" but he uses jargon to obscure that. An example:

The existence and properties of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) support creationism both through the teleological argument and by demonstrating evolution's inability to explain crucial aspects of life. 

Translation: "DNA supports creationism because it's too complex not to have been designed and because evolution can't explain it."

DNA contains the genetic information code and is a crucial part of all living matter, yet evolutionary theory is powerless to explain how it came into existence, let alone why DNA evinces such phenomenal design.

The thing is, though, "evolutionary theory" doesn't have to explain everything, and doesn't claim to be able to explain everything (yet). "I don't have an explanation for that yet" is a normal part of science as a process. There are many we cannot explain yet through the process of science and there are many things we never will be able to explain through science because the scientific method is simply useless for creating knowledge in those areas. That doesn't invalidate the things we've found out through it, necessarily, although of course it means there are limitations to be aware of.

That is, we can assume DNA is the product of intelligence because it is analogous to human languages, which are, without exception, products of intelligent minds.

Hm. That implies languages are designed, which is untrue. We don't know how the first languages originated, but language change is rarely a conscious process. It's generated not by a single intelligence but as a sort of side effect of a bunch of different intelligences working together to try and communicate effectively. There isn't really "intelligent design" in language and attempts to create a designed form of language (e.g. through prescriptivism or auxlangs) are often not massively successful. 

Also, bad news for Noebel, language evolution is a whole thing. In linguistics we talk a lot about the benefits and pitfalls of evolutionary metaphors of language, and there are certainly issues with it, but this is not the discipline to go to if you want freedom from the concept of evolution as a whole. 

Overall, a bad metaphor.

A third line of scientific evidence supporting an Intelligent Designer is found in the fact that mutations do not produce unlimited changes in a species. In fact, animals and plant breeders have consistently found that there is a barrier beyond which they can no longer produce change in succeeding generations.

See, here's what's getting me about this. Okay, so I'll allow that there's only so far you can, for example, change a cat in a single direction, within a reasonable human lifespan. There's a limited gene pool, right? So you couldn't get a cat the size of a house, probably. But that's not to say that cats are bounded by some kind of invisible barrier that means if you change them this much you can't change them in other ways. You could make a cat as big as you could get a cat, and then proceed to breed only long-haired animals of that type. Of course the problem I would imagine is that inbreeding would rapidly become an issue. 

But that's different from the idea of "mutations", which are not caused by inheritance (although they can be inherited, obviously). This kind of extremely slow-build change would take millions of years, and would obviously not be observable by human breeders over anything remotely like a person or even a family's lifespan.

So there's no connection between breeders' experiences of trying to select for certain traits (which can only go so far), and the idea that mutations could produce gradual changes resulting in new species. He's just doing a sleight-of-hand here to try and link the two ideas because they sound like they should be linked.

Unfortunately for evolutionists, science simply has not been able to demonstrate that mutations can break these limits to change.

I don't get this idea of "limits" because again this assumes that there are hard lines between species, when there aren't. He also quotes Pierre Paul Grasse who was a fucking neo-Lamarckist! This is the quality of research we're getting here.

If indeed such limits exist, then evolution is a meaningless explanation. If a species can only evolve so far before it hits a barrier and is forced to remain the same species, then no macroevolution occurs.

That doesn't make sense. Because species don't have invisible lines around them. 

Alfred Russell Wallace grew to doubt his theory later in life, largely because he became aware of Gregor Mendel's genetic laws and could not reconcile the apparent limits to change with evolution's need for boundless development.

Dude died in 1913. Modern-day evolutionary theory does not rest on his shoulders alone. 

Incredibly, Edward Deevey, Jr. also recognizes these limitations, yet remains an evolutionist

"Incredibly". Incredibly! Because, again, not having all the answers is a detriment to fundamentalists.

Believing in virtually unlimited change when limits abound within species is irrational. Creationists believe the evolutionary position lacks reason, logic, and meaningful observation and therefore reject it.

Note that none of the observations of evolutionary theory are even presented in this chapter. It is rare as a creationist to be allowed to read evolutionary texts. I think I said this before, but I wasn't even allowed to read On the Origin of Species. Exposure to evolutionary theory is considered toxic and contaminating. If it was really so irrational, they would not be afraid of it.

Okay, I'm going to string a couple of quotes together here, bear with me:

It has been scientifically demonstrated that life only comes from pre-existing life. This accords with Creationism and is yet another disproof of evolution.

In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences framed the issue as follows: "For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components, but rather what pathway might have been followed.""' 

So......what scientific demonstration are you talking about? The National Academy of Sciences is apparently unaware of it.

This statement of the National Academy of Sciences is anti-Darwinian since Darwin rejected the concept of spontaneous generation, arguing instead for a Creator who "originally breathed" life into "a few forms or into one.""

Happily, Darwin is not the Jesus of evolution, and we are allowed to disagree with him upon receiving new data. Noebel is constantly stridently arguing against Darwin and claiming that the sciences are OBSESSED with Darwin and ONLY CARE ABOUT PARROTING DARWIN, but as soon as any institution disagrees with him on anything, Noebel says "But I thought you were Darwinians???"

Many evolutionists point to the work of Alexander Oparin in defense of spontaneous generation. Oparin described a theory that supposedly allowed for chance processes working in a prebiotic soup to give rise to life. Unfortunately for evolutionists, this theory is rapidly being refuted by science.

No citation given for this "refuted by science". Wikipedia says in fact that the Miller-Urey experiment backed him up, although I recognize that this was some time ago and theories have probably moved on since. But it's hardly the resounding "Nope! he was wrong" Noebel seems to indicate.

In fact, the further science progresses, the more unlikely spontaneous generation seems. Dean Kenyon, a biochemist and a former chemical evolutionist, now concedes

Dean Kenyon is one of the originators of the intelligent design movement, so he doesn't speak for any kind of remote consensus in evolutionary biology or biochemistry or anything like that. There's some stuff about his theories, and also some stuff about oxygen, claiming that life couldn't have come about because if oxygen existed at the time then the compounds would have oxidized and if it hadn't existed then the ozone wouldn't have been around to protect life one earth. But apparently, water did the protecting.

Then there's a whole thing about the second law of thermodynamics. Look, I don't really understand this, so here. Someone else to explain it for me.

Then we're onto gaps in the fossil record. A problem with this is again that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and we lack fossil records for many things because fossilization needs specific things and doesn't happen all the time.

When scientists discover trilobites in lower Cambrian strata with magnificent body and eye structure without any ancestors leading up to them—there are no monobites—they know that evolutionary theory is hurting. 

MONOBITES??? First, it would be monoLObites or something similar, not that that's the point. Second, that's just....apparently a misrepresentation of the state of Trilobite Lore? Look. Third, this is one group of Creatures, not the entire fossil record.

The problem at the present time is that "paleontologists lack clear ancestral precursors for the representatives of not just one new phylum but virtually all the phyla represented in Cambrian explosion."

In the Cambrian explosion. Which is only one temporal part of the fossil record.

An evolutionary tree with no trunk (no life forms earlier than the already very complex ones in Cambrian rocks) and no branches (no transitional forms) can hardly be called a tree at all.

Precambrian fossils exist (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the section on precambrian fossils, but the whole article is worth reading). Transitional forms exist.

Not only are transitional forms not to be found in the fossil beds, but the very concept of specific transitional forms are even hard to imagine. 

"Hard to imagine" doesn't mean "not real". 

Evolutionists are unable to present a reasonable explanation for the survival of any hypothetical transitional forms in nature because because most novel features in their developmental phases would be useless until fully formed. Half-developed organs or appendages provide no clear  advantage; on the contrary, they are more likely to be handicaps. 

This is a complete misunderstanding of everything about how evolution works.

The teleological argument provides the best critique of evolutionary theory and the strongest support for creationism. It is clear that God-as-Designer provides a much better explanation for the design evidenced by life than does a theory that requires transitional forms guided by natural selection.

"The argument that life is too complex to have evolved is the strongest support that life is too complex to have evolved. The theory that God designed the world best explains the designed-ness of the world." See? There's assumptions you're founding this argument on that require further explanation you're not giving.

There's more summing up that I'm not going to go into because it's just the same stuff again. And now onto Islam, three thousand and seven hundred words in.

Whew.

Because I've spent so much space on Christianity here, I'm going to be brief where possible about the other worldviews, summarizing rather than quoting, unless I have to keep picking things apart again. For Islam, basically Noebel notes that Muslims are theists (obviously...) and that the Muslim community is divided over evolution vs creation and young vs old earth also. It's mostly repetitive, but there's something that made me so angry I need to stop to discuss it:

Although Muslim scholars agree that God is the Creator of the universe, it is also historically true that modern science did not grow out of an Islamic worldview, but instead, flourished in the soil of Biblical Christianity.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

There's an entire like half page about how Muslim science was "stunted". This is a blatant LIE and I'm so angry I could spit. Oh my god. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān is called the father of chemistry. This is like. Genuinely white supremacist rhetoric, the idea that nobody but "Biblical Christians" (in a historical context of this depth, this is code for white Europeans) originated science. And mind you this is after arguing about how flawed and bad science is for several chapters. Now it belongs to Christians so it's good. GOD.

This is why I feel comfortable arguing from science with Noebel. I wouldn't do that with other people's religions because it could be very imperialists, but I know fundamentalists and I know their relationship with science and I know they love it when it belongs to white Christians and hate it when it belongs to everyone else. So it's not that their worldview rejects, like, the sort if Western enlightenment idea of "things have physical explanations" or reject the idea that ~rationalify~ is the highest good. If that were the case, fair enough. But no, they love imperialistic views of the world that prioritize those things except when those things don't follow their ideas of how it should go. 

So I'm not arguing from "actually theories about evolution say this" because I think that the scientific process can answer anything and should be universally applied and everyone should respect it no matter how much it has historically been used to hurt them. I'm arguing from it because fundamentalists SIMULTANEOUSLY want to claim the achievements of Western science and to paint anything they don't like in it as obviously irrational. It's so hypocritical.

And then even though he basically presents Muslims as agreeing with Christians, he can't resist one last dig:

While Christians and Muslims hold several beliefs in common, the Qur'an presents confusion on the number of days of creation.

Can't let it be said that you LIKE anything at all, not even one single thing, about Islam.

Onto Secular Humanism. There's a weird backwards line of argument that says Secular Humanism relies on evolution because otherwise they would have to rely on God for the existence of humanity. I find this quite strange. It suggests that humanists start from the assumption that secular humanism is correct and then look for evidence (e.g. evolution) to prove it. I think probably most humanists are not that intentional about their beliefs, and instead became aware of evolution before becoming humanists. 

I think we're going to be descending into quoting again, because he's doing some bad reasoning here.

For Humanists, the scientist must only study what takes place in nature and arrive at naturalistic explanations for all events. In this way, the supernatural is ruled out of bounds.

Well, yes, but that's not the same as saying it doesn't exist; just that we can't make scientific statements about it or prove that it exists. Each person has a right to decide based on their own experiences whether the supernatural exists. We just can't prove it in a way that's useful to build further research on. Science isn't the be-all end-all of knowledge or human experience, although I do acknowledge that some people treat it like it is.

Why must "modern" science rule out creation? Because, as we have noted, science cannot observe or measure the supernatural and therefore is incapable of obtaining any knowledge about it. But by this definition science cannot render judgment on the theory of evolution, either. That is because one-time-only historical events, such as the origin of life, fall outside the parameters of the scientific method.

The theory of evolution deals with more than one-time-only historical events. Also, while lack of falsifiability is a problem in some of the things mentioned, it IS possible to say things like "I bet it's possible for certain proteins to originate in this chemical situation" and then test that hypothesis. We can't know for sure or ever prove that's what happened, but a positive result would shore up the idea of abiogenesis by proving that abiogenesis could happen. On the other hand, you can't do this kind of indirect testing with an idea like "God created the universe". 

He mentions the Big Bang later, which is funny because cosmic background radiation was my mind-blowing, and for me beautiful, introduction to the way that you can use indirect evidence to help validate a theory that would not otherwise be studyable. I learned about it in undergrad astronomy and it was one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life.

But in order to change from one species to another. Humanists must first have a theory of how life initially appeared on the planet. Their answer is that life arose spontaneously from non-living matter. However, as we covered in some detail in the section on Biblical Christian biology, the idea of spontaneous generation was scientifically demonstrated to be false through the experiments of Redi and Pasteur in the mid 1800's.

Spontaneous generation isn't the same as abiogenesis. I talked about this in an earlier chapter but it bears repeating. Those experiments from OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO did not investigate the conditions under which life might have arisen, just looked at whether living things arise spontaneously within nonliving things in CURRENT conditions. Which everyone agrees they don't. 

Blah blah, more natural selection stuff. Inevitable reference to Hitler. Bad misunderstandings of the concept of natural selection. More stuff about mutations and the fossil record. He mentions the concept of punctuated equilibrium:

How does punctuated evolution mesh with the theory of evolution as presented by Darwin? Not as well as one might expect—in fact, it clashes directly with Darwin's ideas. He writes, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.""^ Apparently, some evolutionists are willing to "break down" Darwin's theory in an effort to make a new form of evolution fit the facts.

Darwin Isn't Evolution Jesus. And punctuated equilibrium still uses the same mechanisms, just at a different pace. I don't know how accepted it is nowadays, but it's in dialogue with other evolutionary theories, not, like, totally at odds with them.

Onto Marxism. I have to show you guys something really funny:

John Hoffman tells us that Marx so admired Darwin's work that he "sent Darwin a complimentary copy of Volume I of Capital and tried unsuccessfully to dedicate Volume II to him." Darwin's wife insisted he not have any relationship with "that atheist."

CAN YOU IMAGINE. Someone edit that Hark! A Vagrant Poe and Verne comic to be Darwin and Marx. Given that Darwin was a wealthy landowner, I can see why he would not enjoy Marx's attention. GOD. This is the best thing David Noebel has shared with me in this entire textbook.

Anyway, more stuff that's basically repetitive of Christianity. Nothing new, really, except that they talk more about punctuated equilibrium being very popular with Marxists. Unfortunately we then start talking about Lysenko. The thing is, what's getting me is it's talking about Lamarckism being wrong BUT EARLIER IN THE CHAPTER NOEBEL CITED A LAMARCKIST'S WORDS ON EVOLUTION. Anyway tldr nobody champions Lysenko these days and Marxist theorists really don't tend to care that much about biology because Marxism deals with social change which isn't based on biological evolution. 

ONTO COSMIC HUMANISM.

Cosmic Humanist biology is based on a belief in positive evolutionary change over time. This approach does not focus on biological change as much as it emphasizes humanity moving upward toward an age of higher consciousness. 

So why is this in the biology chapter? Once again, this chapter is not "about biology", it's an excuse for Noebel to talk about one Issue he really wants to discuss. Overall, this section just talks about how Cosmic Humanists believe that humanity's consciousness will leap forward and that Cosmic Humanists believe that scientific findings about uncertainty etc support pantheism and so forth. I really, super don't think this is at all relevant to biology and I don't think the average cosmic humanist insofar as that group exists would even claim it does.

There's some stuff about how cosmic humanists believe the natural sciences damaged the earth/humanity. This would be a more fruitful discussion if conducted with an awareness of colonialism and how the concept of science has been used to carry it out, but Noebel doesn't introduce that, of course. He also talks a bit about the Gaia hypothesis, mainly to complain about ecology.

ONTO POSTMODERNISM.

Postmodernists have a tendency to shy away from overtly endorsing any particular theory of origins. This is the case, first of all, because Postmodernism began, not among scientists, but among literary critics and philosophers.

So why are we ascribing a theory of biology to them??

There's also some information about the lack of neutrality in science. I broadly agree with the Postmodernist perspective as Noebel presents it here. But a lot of it is actually specifically, again, dealing with the colonialist assumptions at the heart of Western institutions, and Noebel doesn't touch on that.

However, even in light of the Postmodernist aversion to metanarratives and doubts about science being able to describe the real world, when pressed for an explanation concerning the origin of life Postmodernists will assume anything but creationism! 

BAFFLED by the idea that Postmodernism HAS to express an origin for life. That's not what it's for!!! No citation given for this, btw. Lots of talk about evolution and how it's wrong again. There's some weird quoting of Foucault that I think is a misinterpretation but Foucault is so hard for me to understand that I may quite well be wrong. This, however, needs to be quoted:

While this theory may be imaginative, it has no grounding in observable science.

Unlike "God created the world in literal seven days", I suppose? Foucault isn't a biologist and doesn't pretend to be one.

Although Christians acknowledge that scientists do have biases and presuppositions,

But not that Christians do.

Indeed, Postmodernists use all the comforts and conveniences that modern science and technology provide, yet at the same time deny the foundational premises on which science is established.

Oh my god I hate this. It's so hypocritical. 

Let's finish off with one last quote:

In his book For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark details why Christianity (rather than Islam, Cosmic Humanism, or any of the atheistic Humanisms) is the worldview most responsible for modem science. 

After spending all this time talking about how scientists are atheists and not to be trusted and biased, Noebel finishes off by saying that science is good, actually, because Christians originated it. As ever, he wants to eat his cake and have it too. He wants science to be unreliable, untrustworthy, and biased when it doesn't prove young-earth creationism, but to belong to Christianity when it gives us "comforts and conveniences". This allows him to simultaneously give the sense that Christianity is under threat, and to subtly support the white supremacist idea that everything good in the world as it stands has come from "Christians" -- which here means basically Mostly White People.