APOLOGIAreport

> trac ki n g s p i r i t u a l t r e n d s i n t h e 2 1s t ce n t u r y
v o l u m e 2 1 : 9 ( 1,2 8 2 ) / M a r c h 2 , 2 0 1 6

In this issue:
PORNOGRAPHY - are 76% of

Christian young adults actively seeking

out porn on the Internet?

SCIENCE - Skeptical Inquirer takes on

Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe

+ why most published research findings

are false

Publisher: Apologia www.apologia.org

Contact: ar.feedback(at)apologia.org
Post Office Box 9646
Pueblo, CO 81008
Phone: (719) 225-3467
Editor: Rich Poll
Contributing Editor: Paul Carden
Copyright 2016 by Apologia. All rights
reserved.
Apologia (the biblical Greek word for defense)
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the
proclamation and defense of the gospel of Jesus
Christ. Apologias mission is to equip the body
of Christ for spiritual discernment by providing
timely, accurate religious research information
within the field of Christian apologetics and to
advance apologetics in Christian missions.
Apologia Report surveys widely to identify the
most valuable resources for its readers as they
encounter competing worldviews. Since 1997,
AR has been published roughly 44 times each
year via e-mail.
The archiving of Apologia Report (in whole or
in part) is permitted for the private use of its
subscribers alone. This data file is the sole property of Apologia. It may not be used without
the permission of Apologia for resale or the
enhancement of any other product. In citations, please give the following source credit:
Copyright 2016, Apologia (apologia.org)

PORNOGRAPHY
In a mass-mailing from the Josh McDowell
Ministry (JMM) dated February 10, 2016,
McDowell writes about a study I commissioned from the Barna Group <www.goo.
gl/ZML0Oc> [which recently] found that
among Christian young adults:
 76% actively seek out pornography on
the Internet
 52% say that not recycling is wrong
while only 32% say porn is
 Only 1 in 20 have a friend who says
pornography is wrong
 93% say they talk with their friends
about porn in neutral, accepting and
encouraging ways
JMM is hosting an April 4-7 conference
in Greensboro, NC to focus on the porn
problem. Learn more here: <www.goo.gl/
gI0GX0>
While we dont doubt that JMM is touching on a critically important service here,
this wretched, too bad to believe news
reminds us of widely circulated findings
from the Barna Group which were challenged by the Journal of Religion & Society.
We covered this in AR 17:41 noting the
authors conclusion about statistics portraying Christians as having high divorce
rates. Even though more-scientific sources
present statistics suggesting otherwise, the
high Christian divorce rate described by
Barna has become widely accepted. As a
result, this particular construction of moral
fear helps stigmatize Christians as immoral
and hypocritical. ...
As Christian teachers emphasize negative statistics to spur Christians into better Christian practices, this emphasis may
have the unintended effect of demoralizing
their audience and encouraging those hostile to the faith, as the authors also explain.
<www.goo.gl/zY2WzB>
SCIENCE
When an anti-supernaturalist magazine
profiles a Christian ministry, one would be
surprised if it werent hostile. In Does the

Scientific Method Have Biblical Origins?

Brian Bolton lives up to expectations as
he places Hugh Ross and the Reasons to
Believe Ministry (RTB) in the crosshairs.
Only upon reaching the end does one realize that Bolton himself a retired psychologist has curiously omitted any reference
to Rosss outstanding academic credentials.
<www.goo.gl/NWJZae>
Bolton reports that RTB holds the least
popular creationist viewpoint among Christian fundamentalists and the least known
among Christians of all persuasions. This
is most likely because RTB accommodates
three major conclusions from mainstream
science.
Specifically, RTB creationism stands
apart from its creationist competitors
(Answers in Genesis <answersingenesis.
org>, Discovery Institute <discovery.org>,
and Institute for Creation Research <icr.
org> [URLs not in original]) in adopting
the 13.5 -billion-year-old universe and the
4.5-billion-year-old Earth and rejecting the
biblical worldwide flood. Reasons to Believe
maintains that the Noachian Deluge was
a regional flood that drowned all humans
(except eight), since they all lived in a small
area of the planet. Also, while endorsing the
Adam and Eve narrative, Reasons to Believe
dates the event to about 50,000 years ago.
This article is constructed around a
review of Rosss book, More Than a Theory:
Revealing a Testable Model for Creation.1 It
as though the Skeptical Inquirer (Mar/Apr
16, pp53-55) has only just recently learned
about RTB as a result of stumbling upon the
seven-year-old book.
Bolton complains that in his book, Ross
continually invokes [scientific] terms ...
when favorably characterizing RTB creationism and castigating his creationist adversaries who make exactly the same theological
assumptions he does. He even compares
them to flat-Earth and geocentrist believers.
After severely criticizing the other biblical creationists for their lack of scientific
credibility, Ross then contradicts himself ...
preferring instead the Adam and Eve story. ...
Ross asserts that the scientific method
(continued on next page)

science (continued)

could more accurately be called the biblical

method. ...
Rosss unequivocal claim is that the
scientific method has its roots in the Bible.
What direct evidence does Ross provide
to support his claim? Quite appropriately,
he cites six verses from scripture that he
believes document his case.
For Bolton, these verses do not constitute anything like a scientific investigation
involving objective tests of observable phenomena in the natural world. Ross simply
equates the words test and tested with scientific methodology. ...
Ross asserts that good science involves
using models that make predictions that can
be tested for validity. ... Ross is referring to
his own test of how well four creation and
evolution viewpoints predict future scientific discoveries.
In the end, Bolton finds that Rosss conclusions about these viewpoints are just a
contrived and meaningless expression of
[his] highly favorable opinion of his own
biblically derived viewpoint and the corresponding abysmal failure of all others.4
Its almost enough to tempt one to ask
Bolton what he thinks of our next item.
Making It All Up by Andrew Ferguson,
senior editor at The Weekly Standard ready
for another scandal in the academy? One
morning in August, [Shankar Vedantam,]
the social science reporter for National Public Radio ... glumly told his [listeners that
researchers] found something very disappointing. Nearly two-thirds of [related]
experiments did not replicate, meaning that
scientists repeated these studies but could not
obtain the results that were found by the original research team. The extent of the damage, it turns out, is that a whopping two out
of three experiments in behavioral psychology have a fair chance of being worthless.
The most surprising thing about the
Reproducibility Project <https://osf.io/ezcuj/>,
however the most alarming, shocking, devastating, and depressing thing is that anybody at all was surprised. The warning bells
about the feebleness of behavioral science have
been clanging for many years.
The widespread failure to replicate findings has afflicted physics, chemistry, geology, and other real sciences. Ten years ago
a Stanford researcher named John Ioannidis
published a paper called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. <www.
goo.gl/7l31Vl>
For most study designs and settings,

APOLOGIAreport

v o l u m e 2 1 : 9 ( 1,2 8 2 ) / M a r c h 2 , 2 0 1 6

Ioannidis wrote, it is more likely for a

research claim to be false than true. [M]ost
systematic efforts at replication in his field
have borne him out. His main criticism
involved the misuse of statistics....
Two economists recently wrote a little book called The Cult of Statistical Significance,2 which demonstrated how ... a
researcher strains to make his experimental
data statistically significant. The book was
widely read and promptly ignored, perhaps because its theme, if incorporated into
behavioral science, would lay waste to vast
stretches of the literature.
Behavioral science shares other weaknesses with every field of experimental science, especially in what the trade calls publication bias. ...
Surveys have shown that published
studies in social psychology are five times
more likely to show positive results to
confirm the experimenters hypothesis
than studies in the real sciences.
This raises two possibilities. Either
behavioral psychologists are the smartest
researchers, and certainly the luckiest, in
the history of science or something is
very wrong. Ferguson explores the possible
reasons for this.
In a survey of the membership of the
Society for Personality and Social Psychology <www.bit.ly/1SgQMfd>, 85 percent of
respondents called themselves liberal, 6 percent conservative, 9 percent moderate. Two
percent of graduate students and postdocs
called themselves conservative. ...
The self-correction essential to science
is less likely to happen among people whose
political and cultural views are so uniform.
This is especially true when so many of them
specialize in studying political and cultural
behavior. Their biases are likely to be invisible to themselves and their colleagues. ...
In his book Moral, Believing Animals,3
Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre
Dame, described the worldview that undergirds politicized social science. ...
Perhaps most consequentially, replications failed to validate many uses of the
Implicit Association Test, which is the most
popular research tool in social psychology. ...
Sifting data from the IAT, social scientists tell
us that at least 75 percent of white Americans
are racist, whether they know it or not, even

when they publicly disavow racial bigotry.

... The test is commonly used in courts and
classrooms across the country. ...
That the United States is in the grip of
an epidemic of implicit racism is simply
taken for granted by social psychologists
another settled fact too good to check. Few
of them have ever returned to the original
data. Those who have done so have discovered that the direct evidence linking IAT
results to specific behavior is in fact negligible, with small samples and weak effects
that have seldom if ever been replicated. ...
Amid the rubble of the replication crisis,
the faithful of social science have mounted a
number of defenses only to be skewered
by Ferguson at significant length. Social
psychology proceeds by assuming that the
objects (a revealing word) of its study lack
the capacity to know and explain themselves
accurately. This is the capacity that makes us
uniquely human and makes self-government
plausible. We should know enough to be wary
of any enterprise built on its repudiation.
This is probably why humility among
social scientists never lasts; its not in the job
description. The Weekly Standard, Oct 19
15. <www.goo.gl/RX4zS6> Just dont give
up: <www.goo.gl/x9jA3W>
SOURCES: Monographs

1 - More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation, by Hugh Ross
(Baker, 2012, paperback, 304 pages) <www.
goo.gl/TCt7Q4>
2 - The Cult of Statistical Significance: How
the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice,
and Lives, by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Univ of Mich Prs,
2008, paperback, 352 pages) <www.goo.
gl/9k4X9f>
3 - Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture, by Christian Smith
(Oxford Univ Prs, 2009, paperback, 172
pages) <www.goo.gl/YFAH1z>
SOURCES: Periodicals

4 - Skeptical Inquirer, <www.csicop.org/si>

Apologia Report is a fantastic

service to the world missions
community. I read every issue, and
constantly find information that is
valuable. This is one of those rare
ministries that raises the level of
knowledge and understanding
across a wide community of
Christian leaders. Apologia Report
has a tremendous impact that
cannot be measured.

Multiculturalism. Diversity. Pluralism.

Michael Jaffarian
Missions Researcher, CBInternational

Topics covered in Apologia Report include these and many more:

Many of us at Dallas Theological

Seminary receive Apologia
Report. It is immensely strategic and
helpful. Apologia Report creatively
sifts through reams of information
and makes available only briefs of
newsworthy current issues and events,
but also gives me the websites and
bibliographic data I need to research
further. Its like having a research
assistant. I thank the Lord for this
service to His church.
Scott Horrell
Professor of Systematic Theology
Dallas Seminary

How can a Christian navigate the complex maze of spirituality in the 21st
century? How can a Christian stay equipped to communicate the gospel
effectively and with empathy understanding the viewpoint of the person
theyre talking to? Its not easy. But Apologia Report can help.
Apologia Report is designed to provide you with weekly summaries of
articles available (both in print and online) so that you can stay on top
of breaking news and developing spiritual trends. It is an invaluable timesaving resource especially for those in leadership positions, missions,
and education.
Islam
New Atheism
Science vs. Religion
Buddhism
Religious Pluralism
Wicca
Personalities in Religion
Mormonism
Secularism

Spiritual Abuse
Scientology
Post-modernism
Jehovahs Witnesses
Intelligent Design
New Age Movement
Shamanism
Interfaith Dialog
Archaeology

Apologia Report is available free of charge and sent to you once a week via email in
a two-page pdf format. Subscribe now to this valuable resource!
To subscribe: 1. Go to: www.apologia.org/htm/subscribe.htm

2. Fill out the Subscription Form and click Submit.
Apologia Report has an archive of past issues available in an online database. Its a
gold mine of research drawn from nearly 700 print and online sources, as well as
the interaction of Christian apologists from around the world. Search the
Apologia Archive at: www.tinyurl.com/archive-apologia.
AR-talk is a community of Christian apologists. When you join you will be able
to ask questions about an apologetic topic and the members of AR-talk will point
you to helpful resources. To join go to: www.apologia.org/htm/joinARtalk.htm.

C h e c k o u t o u r W e b s i t e f o r m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n w w w. a p o l o g i a . o r g
Apologia

P. O . B o x 9 6 4 6
Phone

Pueblo, CO 81008

719 225 3467