Posted on 08/25/2005 3:17:05 PM PDT by curiosity
Rev Burklo is a radical liberal...Am I supposed to take any of this guy's opinions seriously?
I don't automatically disagree with something someone says, especially if it's an opinion, just because I disagree with 99% of what they've said in the past.
IMO, this guy(?) has a good viewpoint on evolution from a religious perspective. Whatever his background and other political positions, he doesn't think evolution and religion are mutually exclusive. IMO, this is a much healthier and more useful position than the one taken by the creationist/ID crowd.
See #73.
This guy is not qualified to talk about theology. He has no "theo" to talk about.
Let me repeat: he is a radical liberal.
Odds are greatly on the side of his hating the US in Iraq, opposing President Bush on EVERYTHING, agreeing with the murder of babies, wanting to constantly raise your taxes, etc., etc.
Anyplace else on FR, his ideas would be laughed off the board.
But put him in the crevo debates and all of a sudden he's a flippin' genius????
Gimmeabreak!
These stories are true. But they do not have to be "literally" true (although they might if it pleases God to be so). And Jesus did not teach that they were "literally true" as well as he did not teach that they are not. He was not involved with XIX/XX century controversies of US Protestantism. At least not at that time.
When you read the Gospels, put the scientific issues of modern biology aside. The Holy Scriptures are not the scientific handbook. They are something much more important.
Hi, curiosity! Well, at least the writer admits that, in his view, this science issue is a "front of the culture war." The rest is pure polemics, specializing in the attribution of motives to people holding viewpoints with which he disagrees. Put it all in the mouth of a "progressive" Presbyterian minister, and voila!!! We are to gather that the Truth Has Been Told.
Kinda reminds me of what Code Pink is doing on Friday nights at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. They say they are conducting "vigils." But it sure looks like hard left-wing political protest to me. I gather they feel -- as perhaps does the Rev. Burklo -- that to change the semantics is to change the reality.
This article is not ready for prime time, IMHO FWIW.
But thanks for posting it, curiosity!
Let me repeat: he is a radical liberal.
Odds are greatly on the side of his hating the US in Iraq, opposing President Bush on EVERYTHING, agreeing with the murder of babies, wanting to constantly raise your taxes, etc., etc.
Anyplace else on FR, his ideas would be laughed off the board.
But put him in the crevo debates and all of a sudden he's a flippin' genius????
Okay. I understand how you arrive at your opinion of what someone says. It goes like this...."if he/she/it is politically in the other camp then I will agree with nothing they say." Fair enough. I just don't think that way.
Oh come on now.
How much of John Kerry's writings on his military strategy for America did you read?
Not defending Behe, but it sounds like "impossible to have evolved" is a decent definition of "irreducibly complex". So far, that's a legitimate topic of discussion. The question becomes, "is there such a thing as 'irreducible complexity' in biology?" It may well be possible to answer that question one way or the other--for example, to identify a genetic structure with the property that no mutation is viable, or some such thing.
The part where Behe begs the question is when he demonstrates that something is mighty complex, and concludes that it's irreducibly complex. He's equivocating on the definition of "irreducibly" and taking advantage of the fact that one possible meaning of the word is "super-duper".
That shouldn't be a problem. It's the ones that challenge religion that cause problems. I remember on the news a while back a guy with a license plate saying "atheist" and his car was constantly vandalized.
He defines as "irreducibly complex" any biological system that requires substantially all of its parts to function. Take away any part any small subset of parts, and it ceases to function.
Behe makes the falsifiable claim that such a system cannot have evolved in a Darwinian fashion.
Unfortunately for Behe, his claim has been falsified on numerous occasions. That is, it has been demonstrated that certain irreducibly complex systems, according to his own definition, have evolved in a Darwinian fashion (eg. Mammalian blood clotting systems and the E. Coli lactose metabolic pathway).
That's a reasonable definition. It still requires proof, of course. The biggest potential flaw in his argument is that an "incomplete" system might not serve its present purpose, but might serve an altogether different purpose. It's also possible that he's incorrect when he claims that the incomplete system "won't work".
They don't understand science if they say that. Theories cannot be proven, only disproven.
The articles of faith of his church puts all idealizations of deity on equal footing with Christ. This is idolatry with a modern twist: if you don't like the God Who is, then fabricate a "god" of your own choosing. What makes his articles of faith particularly vile to me is that they are being promulgated under the color of Christianity, i.e. a Presbyterian church.
No, I want nothing to do with this man beyond praying for his spiritual recovery from this delusion (Romans 1). I cannot even wish him Godspeed lest I might inadvertently commend his efforts. (2 John 1)
The other urls you provided at post 85 are helpful. The second was an article which had been published by Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith - a source I have found useful in the past.
Precisely.
If someone is going to call ID "bad theology," then at least make him a theologian in the lineage of historic Christianity.
I wouldn't pick this guy's critique as worthy of consideration any more than I'd pick anything by the head of the UFO Cult.
But, I agree, AG, the links curiosity provided are much better.
Thank you for excellent comments.
since the theory of plate techtonics does state that mountains can be formed by plates thrust (i don't know the scientific term) then yes that could be possible, but there are some mountains where for miles and miles (up to 1000), strata are unbroken and "older layers exist ABOVE younger layers" I belive this disputes evolution and helps to prove that the flood could have created these or laid down sediment upon them.
Let's see. The Jesus fish doesn't necessarily promote creation, I haven't seen the Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish, and I've never seen one where the Darwin fish was eating the Jesus fish (copulating, yes, eating, no).
I have seen the one where a "Truth" fish is eating the Darwin fish, and always thought they need a third, bigger fish called "Reality" right behind it.
" They're not afraid of it. They just oppose teaching it as science because it's not science."
I favor the theory of abrupt appearence myself. Regardless of how one feels about "Intelligent design" it is indeed based upon science. Someone may disagree with the conclusions and the data but saying something is not scientific because one does not agree is hardly benefical. If Intelligent design is not scientific explain why it is not scientific? I would agree with that statement where Creationism is concerned but intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism.
"You're right. Darwin's theory was oversimplified. It's been expanded a lot in the last 100 years. For instance, we now know the mechanism for variation in inhertiable traits. We understand the deatils of how speciation occurs."
Thank you but I think Darwin's theory was too simplistic from the beginning not to mention chock full of assumptions that turned out to be not true such as his speculations about controlled breeding, the role of random mutations in natural selection and his theories concerning the finches on the Galapagos. Even today mainstream scientists continue to use the breeding of dogs as an example to buttress claims of how selection could work to produce new species something which is no more than a slight of hand trick. Even with all the variations of domesticated dogs we have yet to produce an example of an animal that is not in essence a dog and even if we were able to it would say little about the natural processes and how nature really operates.
What dog breeding shows is that within creatures there is a clear range of variation that is available what it does not show is that sufficient variation exists to produce a leap to another species that is so far removed that it is unrecognizable from the source species. Even in drosophila studies we have yet to see anything more than horrible deformities at the far edges of that variability.
"Why is this a problem exactly? There's nothing in the modern theory of evolution that says the ancestor species has to go extinct. In fact, quite often, the ancestor and descendant species coexist."
It is certainly a problem. Maybe I phrased it wrong. The problem is the clear lack of transitional species in the fossil record something that Darwin thought would be cleared up with time. Jay Gould acknowledged as much and many other in the field have expressed the same questions. Why does it appear that organisms make leaps when diversifying? Gould's solution was to introduce punctuated evolution where small populations were isolated resulting in speciation through a bottleneck type process. His idea is fine the problem is still that we need to show how this occurs on an individual basis allowing for complex morphological changes to an organism without killing or impairing the organism's ability to reproduce which isn't explained in the least by isolating a population because you still are faced with the truth that for every species there was an organism zero.
I've read studies where there has been attempts to solve these type of problems in bacteria, one in particular where the common bateria Ecoli was repeatedly zapped with increasing doses of gamma radiation, those left from each exposure were allowed to reproduce and then exposed again and from this the scientists involved attempted to calculate how long it would take Ecoli to evolve radiation resistence
evolve radiation resistance on par with Deinococcus radiodurans. The calculations suggested that Ecoli would never at least not on earth develop such resistance which isn't the point. What I thought it illustrated is the limits of any organism change. Even with drug resistent bacteria we are not seeing evolution where something new is being produced but rather adaption based upon existing varibility of the inherent genome of the bacteria and those bacteria that it happens to swap genetic information with. You may respond saying that it would take millions of years for those changes to take place, yes and in millions of years a mountain will wear away, in all it says little because millions of years are composed of individual years and given that most(all) organisms do not live for millions of years evolutionary response does not normally have the luxury of millions of years to produce the traits necessary to deal with radical change in the environment.
I meant that God is independent of the universe, and before it. I also believe in His immanence and omnipresence. Rev. Burklo seems to treat God in this piece of writing as if He has no objective reality - He is all in our experience of Him. Subjective human experience can be very misleading.
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