Haldane’s Dilemma and Numbers

I first learned about Haldane’s Dilemma over at William Dembski’s Uncommon Descent blog. I thought it was a fascinating subject, and one that the neo-Darwinian evolution side of the controversy need to face if they are honest.

But one thought quickly entered my mind. One of the puzzling questions in the Old Testament concerning the Book of Numbers is that the numbers reported in the book of the populations of the twelve tribes seem implausibly high. This, many critics allege, is evidence that the Old Testament is not reliable or accurate—at least as far as historicity is concerned. I would not be surprised if those atheist evolutionists would use this same argument against the Bible. (For the record, there are plausible solutions to this problem of large numbers: these numbers are not entirely improbable, since the Isralites were particularly productive, and the growth rate required to achieve these numbers is not out of the bounds of reasonableness.)

But here is the rub. The same evolutionists insist that there is no dilemma in Haldane’s Dilemma (HD), even though, if they apply the same standard of criticism to HD as to the Old Testament, they are compelled, a fortiori, to regard HD as insurmountable. That is to say, they cannot reasonably deny the Numbers account while at the same time believe that HD poses no difficulty; indeed, HD is a much harder problem to overcome than the large numbers in OT.