Re: ASA'er quoted in Focus on the Family newsletter

On 3/11/04 8:22 PM, "Sarah Berel-Harrop" <sec@hal-pc.org> wrote:

> See:
> http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0031131.cfm
>
> In relevant part,
> ==================================
> Princeton-educated scientist Dr. Ken Touryan, who works with the American
> Scientific Affiliation, said he's never seen a scientific discovery that
> does not point him back to a Creator. In fact, he said DNA evidence shows we
> are all descended from a single woman, who even secular scientists call Eve.
>
> "My experience is that if anything, the discoveries of science more and more
> support the existence of God, the biblical God and God's word, the Bible,"
> Touryan said. "We should not be afraid. God is the God of science. God is
> the God of the Bible. If we can't put them together today, some day we'll be
> able to."
>
> ===================================
>
> Comments:
>
> 1) I am somewhat astounded at how this
> reporter strung together comments from
> several of the camps of the evo/cre discussion,
> as if all of them shared the exact same
> perspective -- that of the correspondent, who
> does not accept human evolution. (eg, AIG
> & Reasons to Believe)
>
> 2) Are Touryan's comments properly
> represented? I believe this was in a
> recent newsletter, but I lent my newsletters
> to someone and don't have access to them.
> Particularly, the comment about mitochondrial
> Eve - that she is the most recent common
> ancestor does not mean she was the only
> living woman when she was alive. There
> were others, they have no extant descendants.
> The mtEve concept really has nothing to do
> with a literal Adam and Eve -- which is what
> I think this article implies, and what I believe
> this article also implies Touryan believes. Am
> I oversensitive? (Not looking for a discussion
> of mtEve, Glenn, just concerned that it is
> properly represented.)

Sarah,

Was Ken Touryan accurately represented in the paragraphs you cited? I doubt
it very much. But I also expect that what you quoted is a complex mixture of
true-bits and false-bits. Any challenge of the false-bits will be met with
an appeal to the true-bits. Any attempt at corrective argument will get you
nowhere. Verbal accuracy is not the central operative value.

Reading this and reflecting on it is deeply disturbing to me for the way it
brings me back to a very painful experience in our family's life. For 10
years one of our daughters was married to a person who was a master at
emotional (and many other forms of) abuse. We didn't know it until a few
days before the marriage exploded in the wee hours of the morning of
Thanksgiving Day several years ago. I'll spare the details of the verbal and
psychological abuse, marital rape, and death threats and focus only on the
way people can use words in an abusive manner.

Soon after the explosion of the marriage, I agreed to meet with the abuser
to give him a chance to say whatever he wished to say to me. Before the
meeting, however, my daughter, though in a state of shock and emotional
exhaustion, managed to instruct me on something that I found both true in
the particulars and applicable more generally. It was a lesson that she had
learned through ten years of emotional torture that nearly reduced her to
nothing. She said, in effect, "Dad, no matter what he says to you, you MUST
REMEMBER that there is NO REASON to believe that he is telling you the
TRUTH. There may occasionally be some true-bits sprinkled in what he says,
but he has no interest whatsoever in the truth or falsehood of his words.
His words are chosen on the basis of one and only one criterion -- their
EFFECT on others. His words are instruments to get the other person to feel
or act in the way that serves his own selfish interests of the moment,
period. Whether those words convey truth or lies is simply irrelevant.
HONESTY is of NO importance to him; getting the EFFECT he wants is
EVERYTHING."

In conversations on this list we often wonder how the proponents of
viewpoint A or B could say things that bear little, if any, resemblance to
the truth that is so readily available to anyone who is actually interested
in truth. Could it be that a commitment to HONESTY is sometimes (either
consciously or unconsciously) replaced by the lust for EFFECT?

Howard Van Till
Received on Fri Mar 12 09:47:32 2004