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
Your example is not analogous.
I don't believe that there is any point of Christian doctrine or any event described in the Bible that required the Earth to be flat. Please correct me if I am wrong.
However, there was a time when one interpretation of Genesis suggested that the entire universe (and not just the Earth) must have been created within the past 6,000 years or so. When it was discovered later that the light reaching Earth from some stars appears to have been traveling for billions of years, this scientific theory was in direct contradiction to at least one interpretation of Genesis.
There are still people (Freepers included) that believe that the entire universe was created within the past six to ten thousand years. When confronted with the scientific theory they claim either that there is something wrong with the theory (perhaps the speed of light was much faster a few thousand years ago?) or that in His infinite and impenetrable wisdom God decided to create a universe that although only thousands of years old appears to contain photons that have been traveling for billions of years.
The belief that God created photons that appear to be billions of years old in a universe that is only thousands of years old is similar to the belief that God created fossils that appear to be millions of years old in a universe that is only thousands of years old.
Such theories have been around for over a century. Christians have severely criticized such theories. These theories clearly imply that God is deceitful and no true Christian could believe in a deceitful God. However limited is man's knowledge and reasoning faculties, it is a simple mental task well within our ability to declare that a supposed god that created photons that appeared to be billions of years old or fossils that appeared to be millions of years old in a 6,000 year old universe would surely be a deceitful one.
The only two reasonable responses to such theories is that either the photons and fossils are in actuality less than 6,000 years old and the science needs work, or that Genesis has been interpreted incorrectly and billion year old photons and million year old fossils are consistent with the story of Genesis when properly understood.
There have been some interesting and mighty attempts to try and show that photons from distant stars and fossils under thousands of feet of solid rock are less than 6,000 years old. These attempts so far have failed to convince the scientific community, a large number of which are practicing Christians.
The more profitable route seems to be to assume the universe is as old as the evidence suggests and read the Bible accordingly.
Thanks for the ping.
Imagine that God is quite more than whatever your religion pretends.
Christians believe that God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent. St. Anselm even defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be imagined" and created a rather amazing proof for His existence starting from that definition.
How can we imagine anything "quite more" than that?
” We don’t need the permission of the founding fathers, founding generation, or anyone else in order to obey the King of the Universe.”
I agree with you entirely. That said, it remains that however imperfectly it was done, the founding generation chose for instance the entirely unique Biblical view of man created in the spiritual image of God the Father as the foundation stone of our unalienable rights, ie., freedom of conscience. Our temporal rights are the manifestation of our created condition.
For this reason, the author was correct in pointing out the Biblical foundations of this nation in order that those who are truly seeking the truth of the matter may find it....and perhaps faith as well.
“Science must, as a necessity, remove the miraculous and capricious interactions of any supernatural entity - even God.”
Spirited: Oh foolish one, you make altogether too much of one branch of science. You revere it as a god, measure all things by it and worse, demand that all things reduce to and conform to it.
Science is nothing more than the means of acquiring knowledge of how things may possibly work based on observation and trial and error.
By science man has discovered that all shapes, no matter how complicated or convoluted they appear will ultimately reduce down to circle, cube, cone, square.
By science man has discovered that the distance between man’s eyes is equal to the length of the eye(corner to corner) and that by using the measurement of the eye he can map out the entire face of man. The neck of an animal, when measured from behind the ears to the top of the collar bone is equal to the length of the head and when multiplied by half to the length of the body;, by two to the length of the legs and so on.
Again, by observation man has discovered that all colors ultimately reduce down to three primary colors: blue, red, yellow.
Now all of this is absolutely wondrous to some people and speaks to them of the Wonderful Mind..the Majestic Designer while to pedestrian plodders it must mean that somewhere back beyond time there must have existed the original shape, pattern and color from which all shapes, patterns and colors descended.
When man speaks, his words are sequential. One word follows another word and so on. Man is incapable of speaking multiple words. And so it is that when man in search of power invents a theory of everything as scientific naturalists have done that it is a mirror image of the plodding manner in which his thought and speech patterns work.
“Imagine that God is quite more than whatever your religion pretends.”
Either God lives, is personal, and transcends nature, or He does not. Either there is an unbridgable fixed gulf between the living transcendent God or there is not, meaning that the gods, goddesses, forces of nature and man share a common substance: as above, so below.
Who or what God is really is not a multiple choice question. There are only two choices:
Men will either worship and serve the living, transcendent Creator of creation or they will worship and serve creation by the myriad versions of nature religions and natural philosophical systems that have sprung into existence since the post-flood days of Noah.
“The concept ‘metaphysical’ is not equivalent to the concept ‘spiritual’. Plato’s theory of forms, for example, is a metaphysical theory which is not spiritual in nature.”
Spirited: Only on the surface do your claims sound good, even reasonable. Digging into them reveals them to be built on shifting sand.
In the first place, Plato did not dispute the existence of soul. And it is precisely because he did not that he asserted the existence of form-—idea, logos. The important connection is between soul and idea. Without soul there can be no form. Idea originates in soul and nowhere else.
By whatever term we apply to idea it is first and foremost a movement of spirit.
In this light, the term metaphysical does not stand in isolation from spirit, for it is merely a way to categorize certain ideas.
A final note: though Plato posited soul, it was his belief that it was Chaos,the one-substance of which all gods and men share in common that was in error.
Bears repeating......
Sure. Everyone is wrong but you. You are only an evo in quasi-creationist clothing.
You've been spewing nothing but evo talking points on this entire thread.
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.
Do not answer a fool in his folly.
“A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.”
Spirited: The first victim of pride is truth for pride hates truth. And where there is no truth there is only resentment, deception, coercion, and double-talk.
I simply don’t “cotton” to the tactic of “I’m smart and you’re dumb because you don’t believe what I do.”
I saw that crap WAY too much when frequenting “mixed” message boards that had libs and cons on it.
By science man has discovered that all shapes, no matter how complicated or convoluted they appear will ultimately reduce down to circle, cube, cone, square.....and triangle.
Science has provided useful information for the manipulation of our physical world to provide creature comforts. It has done NOTHING to address the real issues with which all of us as human beings, grapple on a daily basis.
It is totally useless in addressing the problem of pain, healing relationships, providing significance and meaning to life, answering questions of why we’re here and where we’re going when we die.
It’s totally inadequate to address the real issues that give life real meaning. The only really important things in life the those things which cannot be seen, which are the supernatural, which are the true reality and the only things that give life any significance and real meaning.
To try to elevate to the place of God and scorn those who don’t agree with that position to which science has been raised, it the height of hubris.
Science is a TOOL, a useful tool at that, but not a means to an end and not an end in and of itself. Science cannot meet the basic human needs.
“Science” is another one of those conflated terms, like “evolution” that has been extrapolated to mean something that it does not.
The basic argument you get is that if you reject their historical claims of origins and age, you must also reject the advances that “working” science provides in our modern lives.
That’s like saying if you reject arson, then you must reject heating your home in winter.
If I could imagine only evolution I could also imagine someone like Stalin as its highest achievement but both notions are the stuff of nightmares.
So they thought. And then came Mandelbrot.
Well, Metmom, I simply can not agree with such a blanket statement. Science has been the impetus for so many many improvements that are easy to take for granted.
Health knowledge [including chiropractic, drugs, vaccines, and surgical improvements] is probably foremost and at the other end is the advances in communications that allow us to share so much so freely with most of the civilized world. I look forward to meeting you and many freepers someday - maybe in the here and now but most definitely in Heaven. and I expect in Heaven we’ll truly see the weight and impact of all our good deeds and even our prayers.
God Bless for all my friends and foes!!!
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