BioLogos, formerly headed by Francis Collins, is basically a Templeton-funded religious organization that hews pretty close to the NOMA line. They claim to accept the findings of science but assert that those findings comport absolutely with religion, or at least religion as it’s “properly understood.” But they’ve now surrendered any claim to scientific veracity.
In line with their usual policy, they have a post on their website—a discussion with theologian Alister McGrath—that deals with whether Adam and Eve were historical figures (see below). As one might expect from BioLogos, McGrath asserts that it makes “more sense” to see Adam and Eve as metaphors that “encapsulate the human race as a whole”:
But, oh hai, in another place, discussing a different video that was removed from their website, BioLogos makes this statement:
For example, Dr. Waltke believes in a historical Adam and Eve, and was concerned that some might construe his appearance on our site as his own tacit approval for their non-historicity. In actuality, BioLogos does not take an official position on the historicity of Adam and Eve.
BioLogos does not take an official position on the historicity of Adam and Eve?? Do they not realize what they’re saying? This is like asserting that “BioLogos does not take an official position on the age of the earth.”
Adam and Eve did not exist, and we know that because the entire human race did not descend from two people who were created ex nihilo about 6,000 years ago. Science tells us that. If BioLogos doesn’t take an official position on Adam and Eve, then they’re flying in the face of scientific fact.
Their refusal to take a stand on this issue is, pure and simple, intellectual cowardice, designed to avoid alienating some of their more literal-minded followers. It’s equivalent to the Discovery Institute’s refusal to take an official position on the age of the earth.
And BioLogos no longer can credibly claim that they accept scientific truth.
As the Nard Dog would say – nailed it.
Urgh. All that unctuous creeping around that they do – all that “deeply respected for his insights” and “so much respect in the evangelical community.” It’s like kindergarten. No wonder they have a hard time “taking a position” on the historicity of Eve and Adam. Though they do manage to say that “the Young Earth position is not scientifically or theologically credible.” Well done. Sigh.
And they say that as if the theological credibility matters at all.
Science doesn’t have a huge amount to say about how we regard Adam and Eve! God! The unctious seriousness, trying to pretend that it really matters what someone might think about the characters in a myth. Why doesn’t he just say: “It’s a myth, something like the stories of the Olympians. Some people take it as historical, but this is scarcely credible. So, if you’re going to think of it as having significance at all, you have to transpose it into myth.” But, no, he wouldn’t want to pull the rug out from under the poor little old granny or grandad. I mean, after all, their lives might be built on the historicity of these mythical figures! It just makes the head spin to think that this man teaches at Oxford. What is wrong with this picture?
Do they realize what they’re saying?
Absolutely. They’re saying: “if you’re a Biblical literalist and believe that two humans started the human race from scratch 6000 years ago without crippling the species with the side-effects of inbreeding, please, please, please don’t get mad at us! We didn’t mean any of that metaphor stuff seriously, honest!”
Templeton-esque accommodationism is about keeping theists happy no matter their degree of belief, hence this disclaimer in which BioLogos abdicates any responsibility for its presentation of actual science, even if it is diluted in vague theology.
Thanks for confirming the literalism isn’t confined to the YEC camp but is alive and well and living in the hearts of at least some atheists.
You meant accomodationists?
Yes, isn’t it absurd how some atheists actually take the literal meaning of the BioLogos statement. Clearly when they say that they “don’t take a position on the historicity of Adam and Eve”, they mean that in a purely metaphorical sense, as reflecting the unlimnable uncertainty inherent in the human condition. Only the most unimaginative, dryly empirical person would take that as a literal statement of what the foundation actually “believes” (presuming such a naive and unsophisticated a notion as “belief” has any actual meaning).
Great, I was going to have a pleasant evening with a fine scotch and some manuscripts. Now I’ll have to blog about the accuracy of a dead man rising from the dead, with no onset of decomposition or other issues associated with several days of death. I mean I could use the 1.5 mil to fund my research since NIH is becoming a dry well.
I’d opt for the scotch. In fact, I did.
And they accuse atheists of playing the same line as creationists… yet here they are waffling on religious positions as to try to get as many on board as possible, just like the ID proponents who are unclear on the age of the earth. They are mostly old earthers themselves, but don’t want to push away young earthers who support their agenda.
pfft, at least the atheists are consistent in calling it all nonsense.
I refuse to take a position on Pan Ku even though it’s Friday night Chinese take-out.
This statement seems like a natural extension of the accomodationist position, after all what could be more upsetting, offensive and divisive than saying someone’s religious beliefs are wrong. It also reminds me of the earlier comparisons between the ID claims that god tinkered with genes and the BioLogos claims that, well, god tinkered with genes (“guided evolution”). There are some political differences to be sure but from a scientific perspective there’s very little qualitative difference. Now it seems that this small difference is being further blurred, well done.
The above video has the guy saying absolutely nothing in 2:19. His words are empty and meaningless.
This is absolutely standard practice for Alister McGrath. It could have been worse, at least it was only 2:19 of my life wasted!
“It seems to me that, it seems to me that, it seems to me that.”
A career is born.
Indeed, again, it seems to me that that is a very innnteresting question rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb…
Come on, no one was expecting anything else from Alister McGrath other than meaningless drivel, were they?
Incidentally, it’s a pity no one thought to tell Jesus that he was dying for a metaphor, because he was under the impression that he was dying for our sins – inherited from a very much historical Adam.
Well, strictly speaking, science does comport perfectly with “properly understood” religion. The proper understanding of religion is that i’s hokum. Voila! Reconciled! Gordian knot? cut! News to no one here, of coufse.
Compare and contrast McGrath, above, with Alan Bennett:
http://maxatkinson.blogspot.com/2008/11/content-free-sermon-by-alan-bennett.html
Ahh…my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man. I spent much of my late adolescence saying that – I found it inexhaustibly funny.
“One of the most important questions concerning the origins of life is, ‘What is the status of Adam and Eve?'”
And one of the most important questions in dentistry is, “What is the status of the Tooth Fairy?”
I know more people called Adam or Steve than Adam or Eve.
You’ll only find a few people call their daughters Eve because she is to blame for the fall of man, if you take the story literally instead of metaphorically.
Science and religion are perfectly compatible so long as religion tries not to do science, and science tries not to do religion. They are two different ways for understanding different magisterias. Oh, and I have an invisible gerbil named Billy!!
If Biologos begin the slippery slope of making coherent and forthright utterances, they will eventually be forced to admit that they dissemble, fabricate, and lie in order to support their thoroughly infantile fantasies.
We can’t be having that now, can we?
When God made McGrath he wasted a perfectly good skin!
A “perfectly” good skin? Look again!
Liked the comment though.
It’s Alister McGrath’s affected manner that drives me crazy like a cat clawing his way up the wallpaper. It’s so drippingly saccharine, so transparently put on. All his “I think I would say”s, and “certainly one could say something like this,”s and “our knowledge of evolution and cosmology, I think, would shift those time frames.”
Everything with him is a conditional statement, delivered in a simpering manner, with wide-eyed earnestness. He believes this allows him to get away with saying all sorts of ludicrous things without having to take personal responsibility for saying them. He thinks this makes him look “reasonable.” It makes him look intellectually dishonest and pathetic.
Now that’s interesting – one of the points I made in my not entirely laudatory review of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct for Free Inquiry (current issue) was his heavy use of ‘would have.’ ‘Something always “would have” something else, and after a few pages the reader can’t help wondering how Wade knows,’ I said rudely. But it’s true.
Heavy use of the conditional is always a red flag.
Interesting that we crossed in the post, Ophelia! Heavy use of absurdity is always a red flag too.
Precisely, Josh! Very well put. I find that McGrath grates on me in the very same way. Of course, there is a reason, quite aside from his manner, that makes him look intellectually dishonest and pathetic. The words alone would do it! He is intellectually dishonest. To say over and over what an interesting and important question this is – viz., whether Adam and Eve are real, historical persons – is bizarre! How can something so palpably ridiculous be either interesting or important? The very thought is absurd, but he dare not say it, since he has to play to the most infantile of believers.
An interesting side note on this, however, is, that, if you look at the artistic record, Eve is usually presented as forthright, bold and quite obviously looking at the viewer. Mary, on the other hand, is almost always submissively looking down, not meeting the viewer’s gaze. The one is the representation of sinfulness and pride, the other of appropriate meekness, virtue and grace. The iconographic record is far more interesting and important than the completely absurd idea that these “progenitors of the human race” might have been actual historical characters. McGrath should admit this right up front. That he does not is characteristic and contemptible.
Oh, good! I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed the trickery of the excessive conditional that’s so au courant with the accommodationist set.
I should have been clearer that I recognize that McGrath’s manner isn’t necessarily the same thing as the putative content of his speech. Eric’s right – the words alone are enough to condemn him.
Both things irk me. Pronounced affectations irritate me the way nails on a chalkboard do. That’s an entirely subjective, aesthetic response, I know.
With McGrath it seems worse. While you can separate his vacuous blathering from his vocal and facial mannerisms, they seem all of a piece. All part of what he thinks is a prettily-presented package of warm, humble inquiry and exchange among gentlepeople. Ugh. It literally makes my skin crawl. I’d better stop:)
Oh, it’s like a sore in one’s mouth. . .
The first time I noticed this with McGrath, I’m nearly certain he said, “I think I would want to say,” in a taped discussion/debate of some sort. What do we call that? The Plu-Conditional Cubed?
The reason for McGrath’s strange accent is that he comes from Northern Ireland. When you come from NI, you invariably get lumbered with an accent that sounds like a broken bottle getting stuck through a pane of glass. McGrath went to study at Oxford and he discovered that he would have to try and change his pronunciation somewhat, otherwise no one would understand a word he said. And now that everyone can ubderstand his accent perfectly, no one understands a fucking word he says.
The execrable Alistair and the ineffable Eagleton make a good pair. McGrath’s unctuousness is so extreme one could surely call it extreme unction. ‘Tell it not in McGrath…’
‘to McGrath’…
Jerry, this isn’t quite accurate, though the quote you cite would superficially seem to support the notion that BioLogos doesn’t take the side of biological science against the biblical story.
Darrell Falk clarifies, in the threat you link to:
We do take a firm position on the scientific fact that two people could not have been the genetic progenitors of all humankind
and
Adam and Eve as the genetic progenitors of humankind? No. On this the data is very clear.
I don’t know what room that leaves for a “historical” Adam and Eve that would have been the first human parents, but it seems like a pretty unambiguous endorsement of the scientific consensus on human origins.
Sorry, “thread,” not threat.
Again, why should one expect any connection whatsoever between mythology (of which the many and varied religions are a major subset) and science?
“Science” (I prefer the terms “Common Sense” or “cognos”) is an empirical discipline grounded in the acceptance that the information provided to us by our senses is generally a true representation of the real world. In that sense is must be admitted that it is a “faith”.
It differs significantly from other “faiths” (systems of axioms) in that, for practical purposes, it is one that we all share. Furthermore it is not based entirely on hearsay as are all mythologies. Its precepts are essentially checkable,
It is interesting to note that the vast assortment of deities and “spirits” that our species has dreamed up over millennia all show characteristics of our own mental processes and sometimes even, our own bodily forms.
Man invents gods in his own image!
This is the great trap of anthropocentrism. Unfortunately it catches not only those who lean to mythologies but also to most practitioners of the sciences.
Only by casting off the shackles of this human arrogance can we become able to objectively perceive the true nature of the holistic life process and of the impending redundancy of our species.
We silly little bipeds are, after all, but very tiny cogs in an extraordinarily complex universal machine.
This, together with closely related topics, is discussed in detail in my recent work “Unusual Perspectives” The electronic edition of can be freely downloaded from the eponymous website
I loved this passage.
Dr. Waltke was also concerned that some might construe that he is not sufficiently supportive of those who think differently than he does on issues such as the age of the earth and evolution. He wanted to make it clear that this is not the case.
What would you call that? Counter-scientific etiquette?