Posted on 03/29/2008 6:54:19 PM PDT by wastedpotential
Of all the factors that led to Mike Huckabee's demise in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes (insufficient funds, lack of foreign policy experience), there's one that has been largely overlooked: Huckabee's disbelief in the theory of evolution as it is generally understood – without the involvement of the Creator.
Perhaps you're thinking: What's evolution got to do with being president? Very little, as Huckabee was quick to remind reporters on the campaign trail. But from the moment the former Baptist minister revealed his beliefs on evolutionary biology, political commentators and scientists lambasted him. Some even suggested those beliefs should disqualify him from high office.
We believe most Americans
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
[[It think that’s true. It’s like a court case where nobody saw the crime but there’s blood, a weapon, a pattern of behavior, etc., each of which the defendant might explain away but which taken together point to one overwhelmingly plausible story.]
Whati s plausible about a process that violates nature and for which not one single evidnece is available? What is plausible abotu a process that defies overwhelming statistics against it? What is plausible about a process that violates biological laws? “Overwhelmingly plausible”? Where is all the evidnece?
[[Why do we have finger bones that can be matched up with a bat’s wing bones?]]
Why does a volvo have features that match up with a Volkswagon’s? Because the design works- and has been incorporated in to totally dissimilar vehicle manufatcurers designs. Homological similarities are meaningless when arguing for Macroevolution.
[[Ask your designer. See, that, to me, is one of the innumerable examples of unintelligent design that don’t make sense if there’s an all-powerful designer.]]
Yuo are confusing “Intellgient Design” With “Perfect Design” There is nothing in the idea of Intelligent Design that states that the design MUST be perfect- infact, it is in imperfection that we learn to look to God as we are vulnerable creatures who need protection and who look to our creator when adversities arise. I’d say His design is pretty intelligent in that regard.
“Don’t mistake “Intellgient Design” for Perfect Design” there is no mandate stating that intellgient must be perfect- My gosh- We are surrounded by billions of intelligent designs doen by man, yet they are not perfect- Yet htey are perfectly usuable and necessary even though they have vulnerabilites and imperfections. IF everythign about us were perfect, we wouldn’t need a God now would we? We’d be perfectly designed to withstand punishement, and wouldn’t need a Savior- We’d be perfectly designed to withstand any and all ills thrown our way in this life, and wouldn’t need a God of protections. We’d be so perfect that we simply wouldn’t need anyone or anythign- Where doi you draw the line at ‘completed perfection’ If you demand God should have designed perfectly if He were to create anythign at all? What is your definition of Perfection? Does it stop at ‘perfect yet able to feel pain’? Or perhaps ‘perfect yet able to fully withstand pain but be susceptible to emotional breakdowns’? Or perhaps ‘perfect- fulyl and hwolly, and in no need of any protections, able to withstand any ill without suffering’? Where’s the line of perfection?
[[Ah, then believing nonsense about the physical world is not a requirement?]]
You will never cede anythign will you? All you’re interested in is tripping up a CHritian so you can then say “Gotcha!!!)
O.K- let’s play!! It’s apparent you need justifications for refusing Christ- so perhaps you can find a chink in the armour somerhwere, and you’ll be able to tell God some day that you arte justified for refusing His Son’s sacrifice ‘because’ “Cottshop made a mistake one day- it’s Cottshop’s fault that my heart was hard agaisnt you”
Nonsense? Which nonsense about the physical world are you referrign to?
That's true. More like a cruel, malicious, child torturing piece of filth, if you are to believe the folks who believe malaria nd E.coli were specifically designed. Not just products of an existence having the attribute of free will, but specifically created for their current purpose.
What I find offensive -- since you asked -- is the assertion that the deliberate designer of all this is God.
No, one of the characteristics of a self-adjusting system is that engineering decisions can be made without an engineer or a decider.
Natural Selection, the cornerstone of Evolution, dictates that species with vulnerabilities be completely eliminated by species without.[etc.]
Not at all. "Fittest" is not the same as "perfect."
"No, one of the characteristics of a self-adjusting system is that engineering decisions can be made without an engineer or a decider."
[[What I find offensive — since you asked — is the assertion that the deliberate designer of all this is God.]]
Why would you find that offensive when His original dsign was good? Are you angry that He aloowed free will and that we chose evil and now have to suffer for our ill choice? Are you blaming God for somethign you and I bring opn ourselves?
[[More like a cruel, malicious, child torturing piece of filth, if you are to believe the folks who believe malaria nd E.coli were specifically designed.]]
You’re insinuating God is a piece of filth and hten claim My view of God is ‘offensive’? Amazing. Btw- Those diseases and bacterias were aloowed- and either weren’t aroudn in the original creation, or they weren’t a problem when man was first created.
[[Not just products of an existence having the attribute of free will, but specifically created for their current purpose.]]
Which comes from a misunderstanding of Free will and which is understandable feeling- but it is a feeling which comes from “What God MUST do for me or else...” attitude and doesn’t display a heart that understands TRUE love- TRUE love is not “What the other MUST do for me,” but rather “I lvoe my Savior regardless of what happens because He is my creator. You love (and I’m not being critical as we ALL have an amount of this ttype of ‘love’ in us) is a shallow selfish love that first of all blames God for soemthign we brought on ourselves willingly, and secondly demands that God act accordign to OUR will before we will deign to return our affections to Him. This type of ‘love’ is precisely the sentiments Satan has exploited and manipulated in ALL of us to certain extents and causes us to choose to elevate our will above God’s will and to judge God as though we are more wise and intelligent than He.
[[No, one of the characteristics of a self-adjusting system is that engineering decisions can be made without an engineer or a decider.]]
You know of any such systems? I certainly don’t- These ‘self-adjusting’ systems would have had to be designed in the first place with intelligence.
[[Not at all. “Fittest” is not the same as “perfect.”]]
He didn’t infere ‘perfect’ he simply infered ‘more fit- without hte certain vulnerabilites that made the weaker more vulnerable ot particular scenarios’
[[A system without any means of deciding cannot self adjust, let alone self-engineer.]
This is a good point- and to be added- ‘self-organize’ without a set of instructions and without ever increasing NEW ifnromation- suppsoedly species all aquired ever increasing amounts of advanced NEW complex informations (From where they got this information, noone has been able to explain) and self-organized them into ever icnreasingly complex systems and subsystems, all meshing perfectly enough to advance the species to a next more complex self-organizing stage with NEW NON-Species specific information (Which biologically, can noyl come through lateral gene transference- soemthign that can not be demonstrated between dissimilar KINDS either in the lab or in nature without hte help of intellignet designers manipulating information already present in both species.
Look- I perfectly understand your revulsion to the presence of evil ‘on underserving people’ but if you’ve got time, read throguh the following link- this guy is quite smart (and a little hrd to follow at times), and he ertainly has a deep grasp on important topics and objectiosn to Christian faith. Not trying to convert or anything- but you certainly raise important points and objections for which you deserve the best possible answers/explanations- soemthign that is beyond my massively capable, impressive, eye-popping abilities.
http://www.christian-thinktank.com/gr5part3.html
This second link is to all the articles where He comments on “Why God allowed evil”
http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/ts.pl
Consider a stream. Water does an excellent job of finding an efficient path downhill, dealing with obstacles and changes to the surrounding landscape as it goes. And yet there is no engineer making the decisions--heck, a stream's not even alive! Think about how much more a living system can do. Look at how different areas of the brain can take over the functions of areas damaged by a stroke or injury. And yet there's no engineer in there making decisions about where to reroute the signals--the system makes those decisions itself.
He didn’t infere ‘perfect’...
He said "perfect": "Likewise, for any given mediocre mutation, there must be a perfect counter mutation." And he said "Natural Selection... dictates that species with vulnerabilities be completely eliminated by species without"--not without "certain" vulnerabilities, just without vulnerabilities, period.
I’m going to post a short exceprt fro mthe site I listed because it brings up a very good point about whether or not God is evil and whether or not God ‘yearns’ to inflict pain- the first part is the question from an emailer, which will be in the brackets- the second in parenthesis and — is the answer from Glen- these are honest, heartfelt and deep questions from the emailer asking Glen about who and what God is, and comes from an honest heart asking honest questions, seekign honest answers. My comments will have ** around them **
[[So, there is SOMETHING in Christianity that is The Unresolved Mother of all Questions to me! It is perhaps the most absurd electro-chemical Paradox in the Universe, taking place in the human brain. Perhaps there is some kind of supernatural answer to it ... I don’t know.
I mean this: How can so many people in the world be SO AMAZINGLY BLIND? Eyes they do have, but they really do not see! They do not see the most BASIC, the most OBVIOUS moral discrepancies in the Bible. They do no see what the Bible is REALLY telling us about the NATURE and the REAL ESSENCE of God! Ears they do have, but they really do not HEAR. They do not hear what the Bible itself, and the fire breathing evangelists are preaching unto them ... about the Satanic God, just yearning to torture men and women AND LITTLE CHILDREN, first here in this time-and space dimension and then eternally in the Lake of Fire.]]
—”Yearning” is a bizarre word in there! Believe me, if God was ‘yearning’ to do this, He could have picked MUCH MORE EFFICIENT ways than the existing plan! He could have simply created full-formed adults directly IN some place of torment, and by-passed all this foolishness of morality, patience, the Cross, enduring slander, etc...no, something in the design of all this indicates that ‘yearning’ is not the correct word-choice here!!
These are strong statements, of course, and I would hope you intend to substantiate them later in this document. I am not sure what exactly you mean by ‘moral discrepancies’...I would guess from your phrase ‘Satanic God’ that perhaps you are suggesting that God makes moral demands upon His creatures that He did not follow when He was on earth as a creature (i.e. Jesus)?...but I will read on...but note that so far you have not supported any of these rather large-scope statements...”—
** A quick point I want to bring up at htis point is to say that If it were not for the restraining power of God Almighty, Evil would have absolute reign over htis world- Satan would be unrestrained, and His complete and utter hatred for God would be manifested in Satan’s attack on God’s creation in an attempt to utterly destroy it. Satan is PURE evil- there is NO good in Him- none! God allowed man to freely choose who he would listen to, and we freely chose the liar- the Evil One, knowing full well that we were throwing away the complete restraining protection of God and opting instead for indulging our desires for evil.
It is Satan’s ONLY goal in this world to destroy everythign that God has instituted, and that included destroying the total good- the freedom from disease, the protection from ill- BUT it must be made very clear at htis point that God only allowed Satan to go just so far.
BUT make no mistake about it, the limits in which Satan is restrained are indeed enough to cause much pain and suffering, yet it is through this very pain and sufferign that our hearts are annealed, a trying by fire if you will- that exposes the TRUE depths of our hearts feelings- will we accept that God had hte right to allow Evil to be as prevelent as it is? Or will we shove our fists in God’s face and tell Him that He has NO right to allow it?
[[The biblical picture of God is awful! If you are honest (which is very rare among the Christians), it really is something that makes you vomit!]]
—”I am not sure I could disagree more...the God I see is much ‘better’ than I would have expected...I would have expected more immediate judgment and less patience, for example. I would NOT have expected an Incarnation, life as a servant, death as a criminal, for a world that largely ignores even the most basic of inner-witnessed moral imperatives!—
[[The Bible is “a Love Letter” from God, full of blood and violence! Yes! A lot of it is caused by evil and violent MEN. But the problem is that SO MUCH OF IT is from God! Sorry that I’m repeating this old and wear-out statement here, once again, but I’m doing it simply because the Bible is SO DISGUSTINGLY FULL of blood and violence, caused by the “Loving God!” You just don’t get use to it! That senseless killing, bloodshed and the so called “Divine Judgments”! That’s why it is worth of mentioning here again ... even though I know that no Christian, perhaps, has any satisfying answer to this question ...]]
—”Maybe we are getting closer to the issues here...I can detect two issues in this paragraph: (1) violence ‘caused by God’ and (2) divine judgments as being ‘senseless’...
On (1) you apparently consider it ‘evil’ for God to do violence (e.g. judicial execution, protection of the innocent), but it is not at all clear to me how you could support this view. I am not at all sure how creatures could have some absolute ‘right’ to restrict their Creator’s actions (good, bad, or otherwise)—the thought seems patently absurd to me. Maybe this a matter of the ‘senseless’ clause in (2) so let’s move on to that.
On (2), you assert that the divine judgments were/are ‘senseless’. This, of course, is a rather absolute statement of knowledge! Granted that you have been thinking about this for 40 years, I strongly suspect that God may actually have data / arguments / reasons that you haven’t had access to or have considered objectively. For you to asset that the judgments are ‘senseless’ MUST be restated more accurately as ‘I cannot see any sense in the divine judgments’—this is a huge difference and one MUCH MORE IN KEEPING with the limited epistemic faculties of humanity!
It would also probably be helpful for you to describe what kinds of judgments ARE ‘sense-ful’ according to your standards. Are judgments YOU make of people ‘sensible’? Why? What about the judgments you make of God or Christians or skeptics? How would YOU define ‘sensible’? I suspect (although it is early in our discussion and I could VERY EASILY be wrong) that your definition of ‘senseless’ is basically ‘that which you disagree with morally, or that which you cannot see a justification for’. Again, be careful that you are not being presumptive or rash in your conclusions.”—
**As Yuo can see- Glen certainly has a gift of discerning what is really being asked, and how to correctly respond to such issue- you can read the rest at the link- but I wanted to just bring up some important points here for you and others who I’m sure have very similar sentiments, as we all struggle with hte problem of evil and it’s consequences, and all wonder about God in this manner.**
[[heck, a stream’s not even alive!]]
ASnd this is the key point- it’s not alive- it simply follows natural laws- however, Macroevolution HAD to violate natural laws at trillions of steps of ever increasingly complex self-organizing steps- a biological, natural law violating process.
The stream is NOT intelligently engineering anything- infact just hte opposite- it is producing more rapid entropy.
[[Think about how much more a living system can do. Look at how different areas of the brain can take over the functions of areas damaged by a stroke or injury.]
Which are results that respond to intelligently designed instructions
[[And yet there’s no engineer in there making decisions about where to reroute the signals—the system makes those decisions itself.]]
Based on the already engineered system which incidently is STILL bound to entropy- while a system can repair itself, it creates a strain on the system as a whole and contributes to a speeded up innevitability of the system succombing to entropy.
[[not without “certain” vulnerabilities, just without vulnerabilities, period.]]
I took it to mean without hte same vulnerabilities as the weaker ones had.
"He said "perfect": "Likewise, for any given mediocre mutation, there must be a perfect counter mutation." And he said "Natural Selection... dictates that species with vulnerabilities be completely eliminated by species without"--not without "certain" vulnerabilities, just without vulnerabilities, period."
"Consider a stream. Water does an excellent job of finding an efficient path downhill, dealing with obstacles and changes to the surrounding landscape as it goes. And yet there is no engineer making the decisions--heck, a stream's not even alive! Think about how much more a living system can do. Look at how different areas of the brain can take over the functions of areas damaged by a stroke or injury. And yet there's no engineer in there making decisions about where to reroute the signals--the system makes those decisions itself."
Good thing I never said that then, isn't it? The stream was just an example of a self-adjusting system that "makes engineering decisions" in the absence of an engineer or decider. It wasn't meant to prove anything about how cells work.
The brains ability to re-route signals from damaged paths to unused, already present paths,...
They are not necessarily already present: "When an individual has a significant injury to the brain, several things can cause improvement....Over the long term, there can also be sprouting of dendrites in the brain. The remaining neurons sprout, establishing new connections. After a traumatic brain injury, the brain tries to recover by creating new pathways."
http://www.vistacentre.ca/brain_info.html
Now, I expect you to say that that ability was preprogrammed into the brain. You're welcome to believe that if you like, but I don't know how you'd demonstrate it.
"The stream was just an example of a self-adjusting system that "makes engineering decisions" in the absence of an engineer or decider. It wasn't meant to prove anything about how cells work."
"Good thing I never said that then, isn't it? The stream was just an example of a self-adjusting system that "makes engineering decisions" in the absence of an engineer or decider. It wasn't meant to prove anything about how cells work."And yet there is no engineer making the decisions--heck, a stream's not even alive! Think about how much more a living system can do.""To say that because water does something[that in fact it does not], is proof that living cells containing DNA do something similar for the same reason, is a logical fallacy."
" They are not necessarily already present: "When an individual has a significant injury to the brain, several things can cause improvement....Over the long term, there can also be sprouting of dendrites in the brain. The remaining neurons sprout, establishing new connections. After a traumatic brain injury, the brain tries to recover by creating new pathways."
http://www.vistacentre.ca/brain_info.html
Now, I expect you to say that that ability was preprogrammed into the brain. You're welcome to believe that if you like, but I don't know how you'd demonstrate it."
Allowing evil in a system that exhibits free will is quitedifferent from creating it in detail, s ID proponents assert.
By comparing the two in an equating manner, you were either indicating a similarity, or being deceptive.
Why yes, I was indicating a similarity--a very limited similarity in a very narrow aspect of their behavior. When the singer sings "lips like strawberry wine," do you complain that lips aren't liquid?
If the information required to sprout dendrites and neurons is not present before the brain injury...
You're changing your terms as you go. First you said the paths themselves were already present, now you're saying the information required to create paths is already present. Which do you mean? For that matter, what do you mean by "the information required," and what do you mean by "preprogrammed"? Yes, the brain comes equipped with the ability to grow new dendrites. Are you saying the particular dendrites and their locations are predetermined?
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