Posted on 04/04/2009 12:10:35 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Biblical creation impedes evangelism? Plus yet another uninformed atheist.
Published: 4 April 2009
First, Matthew P, a Christian evolutionist from the UK asserts that young-earth creation is harmful to evangelism. Dr Jonathan Sarfati shows the opposite, and explains the baneful consequences to the Gospel of denying its foundation in Genesis. Then Nigel H, an atheist from the US, hurls elephants about science and asserts that God deceived us and set up Adam and Eve to fail. Dr Sarfati explains some of the science and why God did NOT entrap the first couple...
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
The Bible doesn’t spell out how old the earth is?
First, may I ask you: Even though you never met him, did your great-great-great paternal grandfather exist? What about his great-great-great paternal grandfather? Is there any doubt he existed, even though you knew him? Obviously, and only to make a point, both existed or you wouldn’t be here.
Now, my point is this: the Bible gives us a pretty good idea of how old the Earth is as shown for example in the Gospels where, in their infallible glory, Jesus’ lineage is detailed all the way back to Adam. The people listed there, just like your great-great-great grandfather, existed and while we don’t know each’s age, it’s not unreasonable to approximate.
The other point is that God had created Adam by the time by the time He rested on the seventh day, and there is no basis to believe the seventh day a different duration than the other six. The Bible I believe teaches 6 literal days of creation, but even if they weren’t, each day of creation could not have been longer than the number of years old Adam was when Cain was born.
Don’t misunderstand: I realize the Bible does not state the age of the Earth, but the information it does provide tends to support and teach a young Earth position. Best, A
“Was there ever nothing?” NO. How could SOMEthing come from NOthing? God always was. We are creatures of time. God is timeless. The question men and women should occupy their minds with is why God would love us enough to give His Son to die for us.
I’m actually going to see Hitchens and William Craig Lane debate tonight :o)
I would think/hope the evangelist would preach his message on the basis of believing it to be correct not on whether it was accepted or rejected by the world at large or somehow made his message less palatable.
How does one believe in a doctrine that rejects a Creator and at the same time accept a doctrine that demands one? Christian evolutionist? Why not Christian atheist?
Righttttt.........
Please read the linked articles. That is exactly the point they make, and it is done in a winsome manner. I think you will enjoy them!
Some people claim to take the Bible literally even though some of the ideas they are most insistent on have never figured in the creeds and confessions of historical Christianity. Now be prepared to be called an atheist, or a backslidden Christian, justifying your sinfullness by explaining away the Bible, or you will be called an ignorant person who does not understand the Bible or science.
I can see the Andromeda galaxy with my own eyes and marvel that it is almost three million light years distant. I can also marvel that to God three million years must be nothing, yet He knows when a sparrow falls. Other people, I suppose, might see a distant star or galaxy and imagine elaborate conspriracy theories to fake the speed of light. Who am I to judge what others find inspirational? I can also read the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint, admittedly with difficulty, so I often have to fall back on English or German, so I am not what some people jokingly or not-so-jokingly call a "spiritual giant."
==I would think/hope the evangelist would preach his message on the basis of believing it to be correct not on whether it was accepted or rejected by the world at large or somehow made his message less palatable.
Amen to that!
I’ll give you full report either tonight or tomorrow. All the best—GGG
I don’t consider ID a religion, although it can lead to religion. Simply recognizing design in nature does not change a heart from worshiping creation to worshiping the Creator. Only God the Holy Spirit can do that.
And as you say God pronounced his creation “good”, not just slightly better than yesterday.
Th reason I've gone to some effort in discussing the length of the creative days (the age of the earth I think is uncertain)is that I think the answer has import beyond just debating hours versus years.
“That, in my humble opinion, is the real question.”
You mean when standing for judgement, the length of the creative days won't be part of the examination?
Someone who believes in God instead of a religion will recognize the Truth of His Church, the Catholic Church.
Others will throw spitballs and hope to distract the weak.
Thanks for the ping!
What you "consider" it to be, and what it IS are two completely different things. "Intelligent Design" is metaphysics, not science. As a Catholic and a scientist, I know the difference. "Intelligent Design" brings nothing to science, and science brings nothing to the debate about God. Occam's Razor just isn't sharp enough.
Is Intelligent Design Theory Scientific?
If you’ve ever participated in online debates about the theory of evolution, you know the standard arguments used by evolutionists. Their “trump card” is the claim that Intelligent Design (ID) theory is simply outside the realm of science. This claim is not that ID has insufficient empirical corroboration, although they often make that claim too. This particular claim is that ID is not even a valid scientific theory because it is “unfalsifiable.”
The notion that Intelligent Design theory is fundamentally “unscientific” is based on the philosophy originated by Karl Popper (1902-1994), who postulated a set of rules for science known as “Falsificationism.” The main idea is that a hypothesis or theory does not qualify as “scientific” unless it is “falsifiable” (which is independent of whether it is actually “true” or “false”). Popper is revered by evolutionists, but certainly even they would agree that we should not blindly accept his word as revealed truth. So let us consider some of the implications of his “falsifiability” criterion.
Consider first the hypothesis that “extraterrestrial intelligent life does not exist.” If a spaceship landed on earth carrying aliens from another planet, this hypothesis would obviously be disproved or “falsified.” If an intelligent message were indisputably received from a non-man-made source in space, that would also disprove the hypothesis. Hence, this hypothesis clearly meets the falsifiability criterion and is therefore “scientific” according to Popper’s definition.
Now consider the opposite hypothesis, namely that “extraterrestrial intelligent life exists.” How could this hypothesis be falsified? The only way to falsify it would be to prove that absolutely no intelligent life exists anywhere in the entire universe other than on (or from) earth. Because that is obviously impossible to prove, this hypothesis fails the falsifiability criterion and is therefore “unscientific.”
According to Popper’s criterion, therefore, the hypothesis that “extraterrestrial intelligent life does not exist” is “scientific,” but the opposite hypothesis, that “extraterrestrial intelligent life exists,” is not. But wait a minute ... if the former “scientific” hypothesis is disproved, then the latter “unscientific” hypothesis is obviously proved! Hence, a hypothesis about the natural world can be proved true yet still be “unscientific” according to Popper’s criterion. Popper’s definition of science is therefore misleading at best.
Popper’s followers readily concede that what they call an “unscientific” hypothesis can be true. For example, the hypothesis, “nutritional supplements can improve a person’s health,” is “unscientific,” yet it is also certainly true. The problem is that their misleading technical definition of science is used by evolutionists to deceive the public about Intelligent Design theory. Hence, many have been fooled into believing that, because ID theory is “unscientific” (according to Popper), it must also be untrue or somehow bogus.
Several years ago the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project was initiated. Large radio telescopes were set up to receive radio signals from space, and massive computing facilities were used to analyze those signals in search of “intelligent” messages that could be presumed to have originated from an “intelligent” life form. Apparently, nobody informed the SETI team that their motivating hypothesis — that “extraterrestrial intelligent life exists” — is “unscientific.” Or did SETI go to all that trouble and expense only to corroborate the hypothesis that extraterrestrial intelligent life does not exist?!
Suppose an apparently “intelligent” message were detected by SETI. The first question would be whether the message really originated from space and not from a man-made source, but suppose a man-made source could be ruled out. The next question would be whether the message really originated from an intelligent source, or whether it was merely a statistical fluke that only appeared to have come from an intelligent source.
Suppose the message contained the first 100,000 binary digits of pi, repeated indefinitely. Now, one cannot “prove” with absolute mathematical certainty that such a sequence cannot occur by random chance, but most reasonable people would agree that the probability is extremely low. In fact, most would agree that the probability of a such a signal originating from an “unintelligent” source is zero for all intents and purposes.
The repeating pi signal coming from a non-man-made source in space would therefore conclusively prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and it would prove it even if the location and identity of the source were never determined. But according to Popper’s falsifiability criterion, the hypothesis that “extraterrestrial intelligent life exists” does not even qualify as “scientific.” Thus, SETI would be in the strange position of having proved a truly monumental — but “unscientific” — fact about the universe!
The hypothesis of extraterrestrial intelligence can shed some badly needed light on the philosophical debate over whether or not intelligent design theory is “scientific.” The philosophical question is not about how much order or complexity is needed to reasonably prove the existence of Intelligent Design; that is a scientific and mathematical question. The philosophical question is whether any amount of evidence for ID could be enough to get evolutionists to concede that ID is even a possible explanation. Apparently the answer is no, because they have ruled ID “out of bounds” from the start.
Evolutionists often point out that Intelligent Design theory “makes no testable predictions and explains nothing.” But what “testable predictions” can be made based on the hypothesis that extraterrestrial intelligence exists? None. So, what do evolutionists say about the potential for intelligent messages from deep space? Do they insist that such messages wouldn’t prove anything and should simply be ignored? Of course not — yet that is the logical equivalent of the evolutionist position on ID. The irony is that evolutionists would probably be the first to embrace the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence because it would transform the origin of life from a “miracle” to a “statistic,” as Carl Sagan once explained. Indeed, most or all of the SETI participants probably are evolutionists!
Both professional and amateur evolutionists will continue to arrogantly assert that Intelligent Design theory cannot possibly be “scientific.” If a famous philosopher said it, apparently that’s all the “proof” they need — common sense notwithstanding. And that’s just the start of their many dubious assertions. After explaining that ID is “unfalsifiable,” many evolutionists then proceed to explain that it has indeed been falsified anyway! “It can’t be done, but we did it anyway just for good measure!” And the significance of the fact that their premise and their conclusion are identical apparently escapes them.
Another popular evolutionist canard is that Intelligent Design theory is nothing more than a cover for Biblical creationism. Never mind that many ID advocates were originally evolutionists before they studied the matter in depth. By the same “logic,” evolution could be considered a cover for atheism or communism, of course. Karl Marx himself wrote, “Although it is developed in the crude English style, this [Darwin’s On the Origin of Species] is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.” Both atheists and creationists may indeed be biased, but attributed biases are never directly relevant to the actual validity of any scientific theory. The validity of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is completely independent of whatever personal biases he may have had!
In any extended online debate over evolution, some genius will inevitably declare that Intelligent Design is meaningless until the actual “Designer” is physically located and identified. That is logically equivalent to claiming that an intelligent message from deep space would not prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence until the source of the message was explicitly located and identified. It is the logical equivalent of claiming that a computer program cannot be considered intelligently designed if the identity of the designer is unknown. It is also logically equivalent to claiming that police cannot conclude that a murder was committed until they identify the murderer.
A related and equally absurd notion is that purely naturalistic evolution must remain the accepted theory until the “Designer” can be understood and explained scientifically. That is the logical equivalent of a prosecutor claiming that a criminal defendant must be presumed guilty unless or until another culprit is found. The truth is that, just as a criminal defendant can be exonerated before an alternative suspect is identified, purely naturalistic evolution can be disproved before an alternative theory is fully understood or even available.
The ultimate irony here is that, given Popper’s definition of science, the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution itself is based on an “unscientific” foundation. How did the first living cell come to be? If Intelligent Design is categorically rejected, then that first cell must have come together more or less by random chance. Mathematicians and physicists have argued (and claim to have proved) that the simplest conceivable living cell is far too complex to have come together by random chance, but evolutionists always reply that, given enough time and space, “anything” can happen. In this case, the evolutionists are correct: proving that the first cell could not have formed by random chance is impossible. It would be like proving that the full text of the Gettysburg address never spontaneously appeared on the Sahara desert due to random winds. But that is just another way of saying that the purely naturalistic hypotheses of abiogenesis is unfalsifiable, hence “unscientific” according to Popper’s falsifiability criterion. [When cornered with this undeniable fact, evolutionists usually claim that abiogenesis is “separate” from evolution. But that’s not quite true: evolution depends on abiogenesis. Evolution obviously could not have occurred if the first living cell had never come into existence!]
The point here is not that Intelligent Design theory is true and purely naturalistic evolution is false. The point is that reasonable people can disagree on the issue, and both positions should be respectfully permitted to co-exist in the spirit of free and open inquiry. Alas, that is far from what is happening today. A misleading definition of science is being used to exclude ID a priori. A judge recently ruled that even mentioning ID is prohibited in the science classes of a particular public school system. That kind of censorship is certainly more in the spirit of the Soviet Union than of the United States. Professors have been publicly censured by their peers for espousing ID. One can only wonder if Isaac Newton would be censured today for his professed belief in the intelligent design of the universe.
Centuries ago the church was the ultimate authority, and dissenters from orthodoxy were excommunicated and punished for their supposed heresy. But science and the church have reversed positions in modern times, and secularized scientific institutions now have the upper hand. Scientists who deviate in their public writings or teachings from the prevailing naturalistic orthodoxy are now ostracized, ridiculed, and sometimes even denied tenure or research funding. Those dissenters are modern day Galileos who are standing up to the Neo-Darwinian dogma and the misleading attacks by its believers, who fear the truth just as the church did centuries ago.
Nice long-winded creationist propaganda. All bullshit, of course. The simple fact is that “intelligent design” is not science in ANY sense. It is a philosophical construct that belongs in philosophy classes, not science classes.
Why do I doubt that you read and understood a single word of it? Maybe because you did not debate a single point?
You guys never cease to amaze me — trying to claim the mantle of “science” without making a single rational point. “We hereby declare that ID is unsientific and evolution is pure science, by definition. No discussion necessary.” Yeah, right.
The only question in my mind is whether you have really fooled yourself or you are just trying to fool others.
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