Everything that you believe you understand about evolutionary theory is wrong.

That’s a provocative statement, but it is not as strident as it appears.

Whether you are a scientist, a theologian, or a well-read and intelligent individual, what you’ve believed and been told about evolutionary theory is based on a mountain of presumptions that you have almost certainly not thought about rigorously. Even if you think that you have, you are almost certainly incorrect.

Again, whatever is your professional relationship to the subject of evolutionary theory, your perspective demonstrably rests upon a mountain of presumptions that you are almost certainly unaware that you have.

That fact emerges from another fact: Almost nobody has assessed the overarching argumentation of evolutionary theory using an analytic philosophical method. And that rigorous philosophical method evaluates arguments differently from every other method.

That method (and this seminar) says, “Grant evolutionists all of their preferred data. All of it! Then assess the inferences used to draw conclusions about the nature of biological evolution.”

NOTE: We are putting this off until probably early November. The church is ravaged by Covid cases, and too many people who want to attend cannot if we start in September. We will update this site as soon as we can set another start-date. We are very sorry!

This latest iteration of the seminar happens to be presented in a church setting, but it is not “religious.” Regardless of your religious beliefs, or lack thereof, you will find the material to be absolutely not “preachy,” and there are balanced indictments of the sloppy thinking on the part of both Christians and evolutionary scientists. After all these decades, the evolution/creation debate is still a mess, and this seminar aims to clean it up.

Both religious people and scientists believing in evolution will bring certain expectations to a seminar like this. So, here are some important conclusions that this seminar will not establish:

• Judeo-Christian creationism is correct
• The scientific method is incorrect or “broken” in some way
• Religion is incorrect regarding biological origins
• So-called “creation science” should be on the pedestal of “normal science”

Given the list of conclusions this seminar will not establish (one or more of which will seem extremely desirable to either religions people or the scientifically-minded), what’s the point of it? After all, if this seminar can’t “settle the debate” in favor of science or religion, then “neither side” is going to “get its way” in the whole debate. What’s the point?

A bigger, and related, question is: What’s the point to analytic philosophy in the whole debate? After all, philosophy is neither science nor theology, so it seems to have no scope that matters here. Shouldn’t philosophy just still to its favorite past-time, namely acting all “wise” while asking useless questions that have no answers (at least that anybody cares about)?

What this seminar will accomplish will be worth your time and effort, if you are an intellectually honest person.

Ah, another provocative claim.

To even touch it, we must start from the beginning with two very basic questions:

• What is philosophy and the philosophical method?
• What is intellectual honesty?

In the context of those two questions, I wish to clearly distinguish between this seminar and others that purport to “give answers” but that I believe are just more tired apologetics that coddle the “faithful” and utterly fail to convince anybody else. For example, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is now sponsoring an “Origins” series. If you care to check it out, here is the link to the “trailer.” However, I have seen dozens of such series in my life, and they all fit into the same model: Debate science about the evidence by offering alternative interpretations of it. And all such creationist interpretations rest fundamentally on a pile of theistic presumptions. Such series are designed to make the “faithful” feel good about their faith, and they convince nobody else.

By stark contrast, this seminar is designed to appeal to theists and atheists alike. Both groups will find a philosophically rigorous presentation that will have only logic and analysis as its presumptions (because there can be no other foundation for evaluating propositions on any subject). Thus, both groups can follow my chain of reasoning and see whether or not I am smuggling in anything presumptuous. After repeated such presentations, attended by both primary threads of the origins debate, I feel confident to say that you will not find presumptions or apologetics here.

Ultimately, this seminar will teach you depths of the evolution/creation debate that you had not imagined even existed, and you will learn how to be much more careful, rigorous thinker than you now are. Those skills will improve every aspect of how you process all of the everyday information that inundates you. And you absolutely will gain much deeper insights into how evolutionary scientists argue from their data to their conclusions.

NOTE: We are putting this off until probably early November. The church is ravaged by Covid cases, and too many people who want to attend cannot if we start in September. We will update this site as soon as we can set another start-date. We are very sorry!

You can register to attend the seminar at any time. Attendance is limited to the first 100 people that register.

You can join the seminar each week (once you are registered) by clicking this link: EvolutionArgs Seminar.