Free Republic
Browse · Search
Smoky Backroom
Topics · Post Article

To: metmom

Depending on how you interpret scripture, there may be no way to reconcile science and your faith.

There is no way that science can arrive at an age of the earth that is significantly different from 4.5 billion years.

The scientifically trained advocates of ID admit that evidence overwhelmingly supports common descent.

You can choose to believe otherwise, but faith not belong on a science classroom. If you insist it does, you will face ridicule. You can call science itself a faith, but it is a faith that built the computer you post with.


234 posted on 11/30/2005 7:37:23 AM PST by js1138 (Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 233 | View Replies ]


To: js1138

The key is "depending on how you interpret Scripture". I don't have a problem with the age of the Earth being very, very old. I think that some of the accounts in Genensis happened far longer ago than the YEC say which could be why there has not been any evidence to support them found YET. The Bible doesn't give the specifics on HOW much of what it states happened but I don't find as much discrepancy as some here do.

I don't know a huge amount of ID theory, but from what I've gathered here, I don't see that ID denies the evolutionary process at all. What it seems to be saying to me is that everything was created and designed and evolution was the mechanism used by which life evolved on the Earth. I don't see that as a contradiction to evolution at all, unless evoluion can definitively state that there was no design or purpose.


238 posted on 11/30/2005 8:12:59 AM PST by metmom (Welfare was never meant to be a career choice.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 234 | View Replies ]

To: metmom; js1138
You can define faith according to its object or subject.

If we understand that faith is in its most general sense a trust in the agency of something, it makes perfect sense that every scientist operates in some way or other on the basis of faith. This is what you say when we speak of a "faith that built the computer you post with"

But we don't talk this way and there is a good reason for this. The term faith may be reserved for a trust that is placed not in any object. We don't speak about having faith in the computer because the computer doesn't have a will of its own. Faith is therefore best reserved for a trust in the agency of someone with a will. We do speak of having faith in someone or somebody. Reconciling a faith and a science is to reconcile two kinds of thinking about two different objects. The one is a trust in the agency of someone, the other the trust in a conformity to certain chosen principles. There are many features operative here that it has become quite common mistake to simply make it an either or between two things. But, sad to say, it is more than a logical opposition. In one sense, trust in the agency of a will and trust in the conformity of chosen principles may not ever need reconciliation. One deals with determinate objects, the other as objects of free agency.

There is at least one way that a scientist may have faith in the right sense: the scientist would trust that the principles of nature have an aspect of free agency and expects things along the line of unpredictability.

239 posted on 11/30/2005 8:13:10 AM PST by cornelis
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 234 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Smoky Backroom
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson