Posted on 10/03/2011 5:29:32 AM PDT by spirited irish
Karl Popper (1902-1994) was a British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. Because he is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, what Popper had to say about Darwinism is of utmost importance to the desperate political struggle fought between creationists and methodological and ontological naturalists. This is because the America of the Founding generation is firmly grounded in the Genesis account of creation, Old and New Testament morality and Christian theism, yet the original meaning and intent of U.S. law — as now controlled and defined by anti-God naturalism — has been radically changed so that it now reflects the doctrinal decrees of imperialist atheist evolutionary naturalism.
Whereas the Founding generation esteemed the Bible and used it to teach their children to read, comprehend and think logically as well as to properly train them in morality and self-discipline, in contemporary America, God, Bible, and moral absolutes have been banned in favor of evolutionary science, atheism, moral relativism, and self-gratification. The still-unfolding consequences of all of this are destructive and terrible, adversely affecting every level of society from the individual to the family, community, and cultural institutions to local and national politics.
In post-Christian America atheist evolutionism is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience, especially within the progressive liberal community. Evolution not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic disciplines as well.
Evolution-believers range from atheists and scientists to esoteric Free Masonry, Hollywood insiders, occult New Age spiritists, Satanists, powerful Transnational Progressives, and large numbers of people who call themselves Christian. Among this last group are Liberal Christians, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Emergent Church leaders Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, growing numbers of the Evangelical contemporary Church, and an increasingly vocal community of Christian scholars and scientists such as Dennis Venema. Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile the Bible with evolutionary science, and as a consequence teach that humans emerged from apes.
Evolutionary naturalism is poisoning and destroying America's traditional foundations, and when the foundations have finally been destroyed, all that is built upon them will be destroyed as well.
Americans have been deceived, and are needful of learning the truth about Darwinism — and all other evolutionary theories, by whatever name they are called.
Evolutionism: Spiritual...not Empirical
Though Popper esteemed evolutionary theory and natural selection, he also forthrightly stated that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but rather a metaphysical research program. By this he means that not only is Darwinism metaphysical (spiritual), but so are its' two most important foundations, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science that grew out of it.
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that contradicts itself by asserting that human knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience rather than the mind while observationalism asserts that human knowledge and theories must be based on empirical observations....instead of the mind. For this reason, Popper argued strongly against empiricism and observationalism, saying that scientific theories and human knowledge generally, is conjectural or hypothetical and is generated by the creative imagination.
In other words, all three theories originated in the mind, a power of which is imagination. As mind is a power of soul, then Darwinism, empiricism, and observationalism are spiritual. In short, all three theories are frauds. They claim to be what they are not in order to obtain an advantage over the Genesis account of creation by imposition of immoral means.
In Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, soul and imagination are respectively defined as:
1. Soul: "The spiritual, rational and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason."
The Founding generation knew that mind is a power of soul, and imagination the power by which mind conceives:
2. Imagination: "...the power or faculty of the mind by which it conceives and forms ideas of things communicated to it by the senses....The business of conception (and the) power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones so as to form new wholes of our own creation...(imagination) selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature."
In conclusion, evolutionism is an invention of imagination, an invention more terrible and more destructive than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature. It imagines that God is dead, that life somehow emerged out of nonlife, that man is not created in the spiritual image of God the Father but is rather a soulless, mindless ex-ape of evolution. It imagines there is no sin, no "hell below us, and above us only sky."
Evolutionism is an invention of imagination, and it has taken the post-Christian West by storm.
copyright 2011 Linda Kimball
Science assumes that any observation hypothesis or theory may be in error - that is why scientific models keep changing in the face of new information.
Being a creationist means never having to let a silly little thing like evidence change your opinion about something.
Are you also familiar with Einstein’s time dilation theory due to gravity and objects at-rest vs in-motion?
Another good read on this subject is:
‘Starlight and Time’ by Russell Humphreys
To argue that evolution is not God's way is to insist that the temporal view from within the material universe of the process of creation must look like the view from God's perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The contrary view, that they may look very different, is supported Scripturally by at least "My ways are not thy ways, saith the Lord." What appears random temporally, may be purposeful sub specie aeternitatis.
Nor are genuinely random elements in a creative process indications of lack of intent, design, or purpose even within the temporal realm: both hardened metal and annealed metal are produced by thermal, and therefore at a molecular level, random processes, but finding a bit of hardened or annealed metal will lead an archaeologist to suspect it of being a fragment of an artifact, a purposeful creation.
It seems a rather poor view of God's sovereignty, to hold that he who framed the laws not only of nature but of reason, including mathematics, including probability, cannot harness things governed by probabilistic laws to accomplish His All-Holy will.
It is useful to meditate on these things because that brings you closer to God. If you are satisfied with your understanding you put the question on the shelf and go on to other things. Which would be unfortunate.
If you prayerfully struggle with the question of what is God’s nature He will over time reveal Himself.
Yes, and from our pserpsective, there is chance, which is what confuses some.
Were chance any part of any equation, it would not be science.
There is lots of chance in science. Quantum Mechanics is all chances. Evolution involves some chance, in the case where the DNA replicating machinery makes mistakes, that we view as governed by chance. That is not chance from God's perspective, though. It a purposefully designed alteration to what is, so it might become what may be, and that is what most people miss. Without these mistakes, genes could not develop, and we could not move towards the purpose God designed us for. We're like Ants in an Ant farm, contemplating the glass. I suspect this is a case of "we agree, but our arguments keep failing to convince each other of our own positions."
Indeed, despite many Creationists having a big bugaboo about randomness - we see randomness all over the place in nature.
Moreover this betrays a rather ignorant view of God - that somehow HIS power stops at the Casino door.
In contrast, the Bible teaches that “the dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord”.
“vocabulary of a bronze age shepherd”
That bronze age shepherd was a prince of Egypt. You know Egypt, the society that built the great pyramids. You know the pyramids, that our society can’t seem to explain how they did it.
For you to think you are more intelligent than early man is pure hubris.
In theory, this is true. In practice, when an "accepted" theory is being challenged, the old guard defends it to the point of slandering those that would espouse an alternate theory. Look at the history of relativity and quantum mechanics. These were not dispassion men saying, "OK, you are correct, we accept the new." No, they were fights of immense egos and bitter disputes. Also, new information is sometimes disregarded when it doesn't fit the the current theory, as opposed to disregarding the theory.
Being a creationist means never having to let a silly little thing like evidence change your opinion about something.
Creationist start with the postulates that God created everything and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, neither of which can be proved by the scientific principle. However, neither can the scientific principle cannot be proved by itself.
I will repeat myself: science is being practiced by fallen man, and will always have presuppositional biases. Anyone claiming to be a dispassionate scientist lies to others and to himself.
In Acts the Apostles cast lots to pick a replacement for Judas.
dispassion men = dispassionate men
Should read:
However, neither can the scientific principle be proved by itself.
While it is true that it is difficult to present evidence that a problem with a cherished theory exists, if you do so successfully you are a hero and your career is made. So there IS motivation to disprove a theory.
In theory AND practice the “old guard” in science have almost always been either eventually convinced - or ignored and left in obscurity as the “new guard” makes discovery after discovery based upon the new theory that the “old guard” refused to accept.
Creationists start with the postulate that THEY (fallen men all) interpret the Bible absolutely correctly without question and any and all evidence that contradicts this must be explained away, ignored, or the belief of the person who brings the information must be assaulted.
Nothing in science is ever “proved” - it is either well supported by the evidence or it isn’t.
Evolution through natural selection of genetic variation is a theory that is well supported by the evidence and helps to explain and predict data.
In those days a prince’s vocabulary was as inadequate to describe deep scientific facts as a shepherd’s was.
There is some scientific evidence that human intelligence has been declining over the past 20,000 years or so if you correlate brain size with intelligence.
Again, it is the interpretation of the evidence that is the key. Also, you have intertwined two separate theories together as one: "Evolution" and "natural selection of genetic variation". The second can readily be shown through adaptation and stands on its own, but the transformation from one species to another is far harder to prove.
Darwin gave evolution a bad name.
Not in the least. What is a poor view is to tell God that His creation happened by random chance. Since we were made in His image, I interpret that to mean we were designed. To establish evolution as the manner with which we were created insists that God Himself relies on chance. This further insists that, since we were an accident, that we are not in need of a saviour. Otherwise evolution lives and preaches the fantasy of random chance and natural selection.
You mention that mutations are predictive of adaptation. Science merely attempts to rationalise observation in order to make interpretive extrapolation from the evidence. If mutations are predictive, tell us precisely what evolutionary biology has predicted? What medicines have they created that have allowed we humble organisms to adapt to our environment? Are we able to cure even the common cold? No. No disease has been eradicated, no ailment has been cured. We cannot re-grow the central nervous system, nor the optic nerves. We cannot re-grow a limb or an organ. As the top of the proverbial food chain, we should be able to do all of these things were we to believe as the evolutionary biologist say. Yet, we simply cannot. What evolutionary biology has discovered can be just as easily explained through observation and adaptation.
Further, please do not misuse scripture. The quote from Isaiah is actually: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD." and speaks of His spirituality and our carnality.
Oh yes it is SO much harder to describe ‘one thing changed over time into another thing’ than it was to say that ‘each thing was created to reproduce after it’s own kind’. You have definitely convinced me. ;)
There are abundant clues in nature that point to a young earth as well, or are you not aware of those and basing your assertion on the small slice of the pie that you’ve studied?
Did you read the potato peeler analogy by Dr John Morris, that I posted earlier?
How old was Adam 1 second after he was created?
Yep, that’s pretty much it -
the assumption that man is fallible in one area and not in another, depending on your preference (ie, on your Ultimate [extrabiblical] Authority).
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