Posted on 01/10/2005 2:47:28 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
Antony Flew, the 81-year-old British philosophy professor who taught at Oxford and other leading universities, became an atheist at age 15. Throughout his long career he arguedincluding in debates with an atheist-turned-Christian named C. S. Lewisthat there was a presumption of atheism, that is, the existence of a creator could not be proved.
But hes now been forced to face the evidence. It comes from the Intelligent Design movement, led by Dr. Phillip Johnson and particularly the work of Michael Behe, the Lehigh biochemist who has proven the irreducible complexity of the human cell structure. Though eighty-one years old, Flew has not let his thinking fossilize, but has faithfully followed his own dictum to go where the evidence leads.
Christian philosophy professor Gary Habermas of Liberty University conducted an interview with Flew that will be published in the winter issue of Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and Biola University. Flew told Habermas that a pivotal point in his thinking was when he realized two major flaws in the various theories of how nature might have created itself. First, he recognized that evolutionary theory has no reasonable explanation for the first emergence of living from non-living matterthat is, the origin of life. Second, even if a living cell or primitive animal had somehow assembled itself from non-living chemicals, he reasoned it would have no ability to reproduce.
Flew told Habermas, This is the creature, the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.
Flew has, thus, become a Deistthat is, he acknowledges God as creator but not as a personal deity. In his opinion, There is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or any transactions between that God and individual human beings. In fact, he told a group last May that he considers both the Christian God and the Islamic God to be omnipotent Oriental despotscosmic Saddam Husseins.
But a crack is beginning to develop in his opinion that God hasnt spoken through Scripture. When he reads the first chapter of Genesis, Flew says hes impressed that a book written thousands of years ago harmonizes with twenty-first-century science. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate, says Flew, raises the possibility that it is revelation. A book containing factual statements that no human knew about at the time of writing seems to argue that the authors must have had coaching from the Creator.
The evidence is there for all who will look, as his one-time adversary C. S. Lewis discovered, and as more and more thinking intellectuals are discovering today. So it is that Antony Flew, perhaps the most famous philosopher of atheism, is just a step or two away from the kingdom.
Do you have a clue as to what ID is? Have you read any of the literature?
Hope you don't mind if I steal a tagline from your grand work.
I would think you would enjoy educating me about my poor examination of Genesis. If you could. But apparently you can't.
You can't explain how light and darkness can come before the sources of such things, without concluding that the sequence is irrelevant to the meaning.
You can't explain how there are two different creation stories in the Bible, where man was created twice. With both stories giving specific sequences (this happened, and then that happened), unless you acknowledge that the point of Genesis isn't to convey a litteral history if events.
And then you have the audacity to tell me that I cannot grasp the differences between ID and Creationism. As if that has any bearing on my critique of Genesis 1 & 2. Your attack is quite obviously meant to cover for your own inabilities to explain Genesis. You attack me, in order to avoid admiting you are wrong.
You are the one who can't explain the obvious failures of Genesis as litteral history. And neither you, nor any other ID/Creationist on this post will even attempt it.
Are you on talkorigins', or PatrickHenry's payroll?
Hunt's 'evolutionary sequences' leaves a lot to be desired, as does most of the evolution fairy tales y'all love to tell. Here are a few critiques for the lurkers , so they can draw their own conclusions.
"Transitional Vertebrate Fossils"
So called Transition from fish to amphibians
This "distinction" is simply an ad hoc categorization designed to avoid evidence once it has become impossible to evade any other way.
It's similar to the "distinction" between "a serious charge if proven true" and "not rising to the level of impeachment" used by Clinton's defenders. Any charge that could still be denied by questioning the evidence could be admitted to the former category; anything that had been nailed on Clinton beyond doubt was assigned to the latter category (and thus didn't really count). We saw the Lewinsky affair shifted from the former to the latter before our very eyes after the DNA-stained blue dress surfaced (just as we saw Eohippus --> Equus move from "macro" to "micro" once the fossil record was filled in too thoroughly to deny any longer).
Literal creationism is the belief that God's skills are more along the lines of placing each ball in a pocket by hand.
Proponents of evolution often attempt to discredit creation by pointing to occurrences of microevolution, such as speciation, adaptation, etc. To the evolutionist, microevolution is vindication for their belief in the much larger macroevolution. Their belief is that if these microevolutionary changes have enough time to accumulate, then eventually this will lead to a macroevolutionary change. And therefore, in their way of thinking, if microevolution is a well established fact, macroevolution must logically be an established fact as well.
1. The unsubstantiation of a Darwinian mechanism of evolution
2. The total failure of origin of life studies to produce a workable model
3. The inability of evolutionary mechanism to explain the origin of complex adaptations
4. The bankruptcy of the blind watchmaker hypothesis
5. The biological evidence that the rule in nature is morphological stability over time and not constant change.
Raymond G. Bohlin is a graduate of the University of Illinois (B.S., zoology), North Texas State University (M.S., population genetics), and the University of Texas at Dallas (M.S., Ph.D., molecular biology)
On the contrary, the one reliable record we have (that contained in the physical evidence) says just the opposite.
One might dispute the assertion that physical evidence is more reliable than documentary evidence. In that case, there's no point in arguing, just as there is no point in arguing with the jurors who found O. J. Simpson's protestations of innocence more convincing than the crime scene forensics.
The actual text of your strawman objections lies shredded already, and nothing more be said of that. But here's where I like to comment on the wrong-headedness of inventing such a cavalcade of nonsense in the first place, trying to argue a thing as impossible in the face of obvious evidence that it has happened.
There are fossils all over the place on the spectrum between bird and dinosaur. Several of these are still argued back and forth as to classification, "bird" bin or "dinosaur" bin. If anything, we have an embarrassment of riches, evidence that the tree of bird evolution was very bushy with tons of extinct branches and lots of failed evolutionary "experiments."
The following forelimb is on an admitted "bird."
Is that a wing, or a dinosaur forelimb? Against such obvious evidence of thing A coming from Thing B, what's the difference if no one can make you see how it's possible?
Your arguments remind me of attempted creationist "proofs" that it is impossible for a bumblebee to fly. You want too much for your refusal to understand how a thing can happen.
My real problem with how the "science" of ID works, however, is that you don't seem to be guilty of practicing it incorrectly. You're doing it about the way Behe does it.
Nice analogy...
"Your attack is quite obviously meant to cover for your own inabilities to explain Genesis. You attack me, in order to avoid admiting you are wrong."
I told you the truth. If you want to think I am lying to you, then so be it. Go in peace.
Brilliant post.
As you are going, having failed utterly to explain the problems with Genesis. Or to even attempt to do so. As you probably recognize that it is impossible.
I think this may be a good tack in future crevo threads. Since IDers are merely Biblical litteralists who PC their arguments for public consumption, forcing them to explain the unexplainable in Genesis might just get them to think that perhaps they are wrong.
Only if you want people to think you're ignorant. Most everyone knows that ID isn't based on the Bible. People get confused because the evo warriors keep spreading BS throughout the WWW.
Questions and Answers about Intelligent Design
4. Is intelligent design based on the Bible? No. The intellectual roots of intelligent design theory are varied. Plato and Aristotle both articulated early versions of design theory, as did virtually all of the founders of modern science. Indeed, most scientists until the latter part of the nineteenth century accepted some form of design. The scientific community largely rejected design in the early twentieth century after neo-Darwinism claimed to be able to explain the emergence of biological complexity through the unintelligent process of natural selection acting on random mutations. However, new research and discoveries in such fields as physics, cosmology, biochemistry, genetics, and paleontology have caused a growing number of scientists and science theorists to question neo-Darwinism and propose design as the best explanation for the existence of specified complexity in the natural world.
I just love this that the utter failure of anyone to step up and explain Genesis is turned into MY failure to recognize some situation about ID literature.
I feel safe in saying that most people who believe in ID do so because they are religious. And that most people who defend ID, do so for the same reason, even if they refuse to acknowledge it publicly.
ID has quite obviously been created as a cover for Bible litteralists, protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
I will continue to respond to ID/creationists by pointing out the self evident failure of Genesis to be a litteral history. They'll get the message, even if they refuse to acknowledge it as you have done.
LOL. Which is no acknowledgement at all. His god has short little arms
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