Posted on 07/28/2013 3:57:08 PM PDT by spirited irish
American Christian author Dr. Frank Turek notes that Cambridge-trained Ph.D. Stephen Meyer's New York Times best-seller, "Darwin's Doubt," is creating a major scientific controversy. Because Darwinists absolutely hate it, Meyer's well-reasoned argument that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the evidence at hand elicits irrational accusations that Meyers is anti-scientific and guilty of endangering sexual freedom everywhere. (Darwin's Doubt, Turek, Townhall.com, July 09, 2013)
Meyer writes,
"Neo-Darwinism and the theory of intelligent design are not two different kinds of inquiry, as some critics have asserted. They are two different answers – formulated using a similar logic and method of reasoning – to the same question: 'What caused biological forms and the appearance of design in the history of life?'" (ibid.)
The real issue here is not "anti-scientific" intelligent design or for that matter, the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo ("special creation" as evolutionary materialists call it) versus "scientifically enlightened reason and science," but about creation account vs. anti-creation account (Darwinian materialism).
The reason Darwinists on one hand, and intelligent design and Genesis account proponents on the other, arrive at radically different answers is because Darwinists are neo-pagan materialists and the other two are not.
While intelligent design proponents are open to intelligent causes (just like crime scene investigators are), Genesis account creationists hold that our Creator, the living, personal Triune God, the Divine Source of life who exists outside of the space/time dimension is Jesus Christ, the angel who spoke with Moses at Sinai.
Foremost of His miracles is creation out of nothing – six days of creation rather than the billions of years of evolutionary process out of already existing or spontaneously generated matter:
"The first moment of time is the moment of God's creative act and of creation's simultaneous coming to be." (Philosopher and New Testament scholar William Lane Craig, quoted in "If God created the universe, then who created God?' by Jonathan Sarfati, Creation Ministries International)
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)
As all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the Triune God, it logically follows that each male and female is a trinity of being – of soul, spirit, and body:
"The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the soul that he loves....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)
For fifteen hundred years, Christendom and then later Protestant America had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming that all men are three part spiritual image-bearers of the transcendent Triune God (Gen. 1:27). This unique view of man was affirmed by the brilliant French economist, statesman, and author Frederic Bastiat. Man as God's spiritual image-bearer is the precious gift from God, which includes the physical, intellectual, and moral life:
"He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. Life, faculties, production – in other words, individuality, liberty, property – this is man (and) these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (Bastiat, "How Evil Works," David Kupelian, p. 8)
Vishal Mangalwadi, India's foremost Christian scholar, writes that this unique concept of man as God's spiritual image-bearer gave birth to the "belief in the unique dignity of human beings," and this is
"...the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights." (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)
Neo-pagan, anti-human God-haters
Darwinian materialists are anti-Triune God:
"The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity – omnipotent chance...." (T. Rosazak, Unfinished Animal, pp. 101-102, 1975)
They hate the very thought of Him as their Father and seek escape to a nowhere land, an impersonal, collective communal unconscious where man as God's spiritual image-bearer, immutable truth, order, moral law, sexual ethics, authority, hell, heaven, angels, demons, meaning, and purpose do not exist. For these reasons and others, such as Original Sin and the two created sexes, they fiercely reject intelligent design but viciously hate creation ex nihilo, and choose rather to embrace evolutionary and materialist conceptions. The truth of this can be seen in the following quotes:
"The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary...reasons for holding doctrines of materialism...may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie...or predominantly political as they were in the case of Karl Marx." (Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means," p. 315, from Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, E. Michael Jones, p. 27)
"...one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched.... The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories." (One Long Argument, 1991, p. 99, Ernst Mayr (d. 2005), Professor of Zoology at Harvard University)
"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." ("Billions and Billions of Demons," Richard Lewontin, PhD Zoology, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University)
Metaphysical nihilism: everything and nothing
Metaphysical nihilism (all that exists is matter and energy) is the metaphysics of both physical materialism and nonphysical materialist conceptions.
What chiefly separates these two is whether matter is physical or nonphysical. If physical, then the Triune God, heaven, hell, soul/spirit, angels, and demons do not exist. But if nonphysical, then for example, spirits, ghosts, divine sparks, Transcended Masters, intra-cosmic deities, Orobouros, astral planes, divine impersonal mind, and Christ consciousness exist but the material world is an illusion.
Brooks Alexander, the founder of The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP), an evangelical ministry and think-tank in Berkeley, California, identifies both physical and nonphysical materialist conceptions as the two sides of pagan monism. Because they are from the same root, they tend to cross-pollinate and mingle,
"...producing a brood of offspring that exhibits the genetic heritage of its parents in a confused and confusing array. Soon it becomes impossible to say whether a given movement, trend or school of thought is a secular impulse that has absorbed Eastern/occult values, or an Eastern/occult teaching that has dressed itself in secular language." (The Rise of Cosmic Humanism: What is Religion?" Brooks Alexander, SCP Journal, 1981-82, p. 2)
In other words, for many years secular-human physicalists have been quietly crossing over into spiritual or cosmic conceptions of matter and embracing for example, Zen Buddhism and Teilhards idea, which leapfrogs off of Darwin's theory.
The apostate French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) taught that an impersonal god-force emerges from spontaneously generated matter. According to Teilhard, this evolution of a god-force results in evolution becoming "conscious of itself" and ultimately, in the transformation of all physical matter into nonphysical divine matter defined by Teilhard as "Christ consciousness" or "pure spirit." Teilhard called this final stage of evolution the "Omega Point" and "the cosmic Christ."
You can be as God
The perennially persuasive Big Lie underlies both physical and nonphysical conceptions. This thought is expressed openly in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and Dr. Beverly Galyean, leading exponent of occult Luciferian New Age confluent education:
"The Buddhists and the Jains do not depend on God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion: to evolve a God out of man." (Inspired Talks, Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center, 1958, p. 218)
"Once we begin to see that we are all God, that we have the attributes of God, then, I think the whole purpose of human life is to reown the Godlikeness within us...So my whole view is very much based on that idea." (Galyean quoted by Francis Adeney, Educators Look East, Radix 12, No. 3, Nov-Dec. 1980, p. 21)
This same idea expressed in secular terms such as self-realization and self-actualization (a term coined by Abraham Maslow) underlies many contemporary psychotherapies.
Nihilism: You are of nothing
"Behold, you are of nothing, and your work of that which hath no being: he that hath chosen you is an abomination." Isaiah 41:24
Though evolutionary materialists congratulate themselves for being scientifically enlightened, cutting edge 'elite' free thinkers, the truth is otherwise, meaning that materialists, whether of the secular physical or occult spiritual school are miserable self-deceived nihilists for whom there is neither source for "self" (conscious life, psyche, individual mind) nor for meaning and purpose in life. They are "of nothing" and the unreality of their own existence is the devastating price they have paid the devil, the father of death and nihilism, for "saving" them from the living God.
The misery inducing "salvation" of "nonself" is not something new but something ancient. It began with Buddha who craved God-like power to deconstruct and reinterpret the soul. Taking power not only requires the murder of God but the teaching of lies.
Jesus to Buddha,
"....you took God away from them (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made...You turned from Hinduism because it said there was an essential self, which they called the atman." (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp.59, 67)
Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if all that exists is matter then the human self cannot exist either:
"Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one's psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one's being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman). You don't exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)
If all that exists is matter and energies working on and through matter, then it logically follows that there is no source for life, conscious life (soul, spirit and will), the two sexes, human dignity and worth, or for unalienable constitutional rights beginning with the right to life, liberty, and property. Without the Triune God, meaning drains into meaninglessness and man is reduced to less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Marxist Communists attempted to scientifically re-engineer human beings after the fashion of metaphysical nihilism.
"Thought crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for awhile....but sooner or later they were bound to get you." George Orwell, 1984
After seizing control of Russia, Marxist materialists utilized propaganda of the lie, re-education with major emphasis on Darwinism, revision of history, and other confusion-inducing, mind-and-thought-control techniques in connection with brain-altering drugs, electro-shock therapy, terror, and other brutal measures to
"...liquidate all expressions of individual identity in favor of an impersonal collective, communal consciousness." (The Book that Made Your World, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 74)
Following in Buddha's footsteps, Western and American evolutionary materialists took our Creator away and replaced Him with nihilist Darwinian materialism. Then they conceptually reduced His spiritual image-bearers to less than nothing, taught monstrous lies as scientific fact, morally corrupted Westerners and Americans, and brutally ridiculed and demonized anyone who dared speak truth to their lies. By these means they set Western and American civilization adrift in infinite nothingness.
Nihilism is spiritual, moral, intellectual, and cultural suicide. It is the devil's inferno here on earth, the void of everything and nothing in which death is life, evil is good, lie is truth, up is down, male is female, female is male, rolling in filth is good clean fun, bad is good but evil better, and the father of nihilism is god.
Choose eternal blessing and not cursing
The unreality of "self" is a waking nightmare fueled by horrors of conscience, obsession with death, and hellish terrors of mind that make suicide, murder, abortion, euthanasia, and genocide into virtues.
"...I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life...." Deuteronomy 30:19-20
"Thou hast brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit." Psalm 30:3
The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Living Word become Flesh, Jesus Christ the Physician, came to heal the spiritually sick and dying, to save their immortal souls. Just as we are on the verge of going down into the pit, ready to depart to the unseen world, if we will repent and turn back to Him, then by His providence and grace our Lord will revive our souls and deliver us from those accursed horrors of conscience and ghastly terrors of mind which by reason of our sin are as hell searing itself into and possessing our very minds. (Psalm 116:3)
But whoever rejects the Physician, the Divine Source of life and soul, rejects His prescription, thereby destroys him or herself. So we ought to turn back to Him right now, before it is too late.
Your finish (not much of a flurry): "I hold that we don’t need to know everything in order to know that what we know is right. That is the power that logic gives us. Now can you make a rational argument for the existence of a god."
If you have read those three sentences again, do you start to get the hint of a duplicitous perspective? IF 'we' don't have to know everything to know that what we know is right, who is to say which 'we' is right in this stand-off? You cite the power of logic, but immediately eschew using that very powerful tool because you don't like where 'we' believe it leads!
The five easy ways to use logic in pressing the issue of a Creator (I know Him as I AM, by His chosen name) seem to escape your application of 'logic'. Why? Because that trail does not lead in the direction you have already chosen to place faith in as the ' right' direction. You then use a deceitful step to demand that someone 'provide a rational argument' when you have just rejected several rational arguments which you cannot refute so you just immaturely dismiss them.
So long as you fritter about in such a duplicitous state, 'we' cannot help you one way or the other. So we will bid you leave and say to you 'Have nice day'.
A albioninian question to ponder...
Prove for me with rational explanation that Love exists.
Prove for me with rational explanation that Love exists..
Ah! LOVE!.. Love is a perceived thing.. it’s all in the perception..
I define (the nebulous [english] word of) Love as “sacrifice”...
For what you “love” you will sacrifice for.. and what you do not love you will not sacrifice for.. (in degrees)..
Love seems to be “an Act” not merely a concept..
You can love your mother, a car, a Taco, or a song...
Art, a person, a drug, or even a dog..
Loving “God” could be a problem though...
You could “Love” the idea of God, a replica(idol) of one, some perceived imagination of a God, but loving “the person” of God takes faith.. You can only love what you perceive God to be..
What you sacrifice for.... you love.. according to my definition..
When I see sacrifice I see evidence of Love.. therefore it is REAL..
Like Alby... he sacrifices his wits for his logical perception of “science”..
Love(sacrifice) may be a First reality.. that bleeds into many second reality’s..
And is the BASE for many things.. therefore it exists..
“you can’t talk about what god does or does not do until you prove he exists.”
Spirited: We can play this silly game too: “You can’t say God does not exist until you prove He does not exist.”
You would be absolutely right if I were making a claim that God does not exist. Then I would have to provide evidence to prove my claim. I can’t say that no God exists. I can not be called upon to prove a negative. That is a rule of logic. So that is not a rational argument for a God. I am not required to believe in something until it is dis-proven. That would be absurd. When someone comes up to me and says “albionin you are going to rue the day. You are going to burn for all eternity.” my response is I don’t believe you prove it. I can not prove that you won’t get cancer in the next year either but it doesn’t make it true. You don’t say I can’t prove I won’t get cancer either I better go get on chemotherapy. So if you want to play the silly game of asking me to prove a negative you need to take logic 101.
I should restate that sentence that you quoted to say “If you start talking about the attributes of God without first proving there is a god then you are begging the question.”
As you start to walk with him, the whole argument falls away as he reveals himself continuously over the course of your life. One of the purposes of life is to come to know him, and he'll do a lot of the work in making himself known. You just have to walk, watch, and listen.
This isn't grist for a scientist's mill; but he will inform and guide the scientist's life as surely as anyone else's. Since he is the source the scientists seek, whether they know it or not, the science only gets better and more satisfying as they dig for answers in the physical world that reflect back on the mind that created it. But a scientist isn't only a scientist; he is a living soul with an earthly trajectory and an eternal one that springs from it.
Do you like the world the way it is today?
Your words are so to the point: “One of the purposes of life is to come to know him, and he’ll do a lot of the work in making himself known. You just have to walk, watch, and listen.” That’s why I like to use the verb form of Faith, to faithe. It is the characteristic of one in whom God has placed the earnest of our inheritance in Glory. Faithing is to walk with God. And in that walking, He, God, will transform the one exercising faith in Him.
“are”... ‘-)
LOLOL! You are absolutely right, of course. Duh...
Hi Alamo Girl I haven’t forgotten I just am so busy with my business right now that I only have snatches of time here and there to post.
I did word that sentence poorly so it could have sounded like a command. I should have said that you can talk about what the attributes of God are without first proving he exists but if you do that you are begging the question which is a logical fallacy.
I see a problem with your correlation of the chronology of the big bang theory with scripture. You write that 300,000 years after the big bang that the universe was a hot watery soup. This is not what the big bang theory proposes. According to the theory and the physics the universe was composed of plasma. It was much like the atmosphere of the sun. It was composed of Hydrogen nuclei and some of those had fused because of the heat to form Deuterium and a little helium and a tiny amount of Lithium and there were electrons wizzing around free of the nuclei . These are the first 3 elements on the periodic table. So in no way was there anything that could be construed as a watery soup. There was no water because there was no Oxygen around to bond with Hydrogen to make it. That element and all the other heavier elements were formed in the first stars which didn’t start to form until about 100,000,000 years after the big bang. So far from proving the accuracy of scripture if you accept the big bang theory then you have just proved that whoever wrote genesis really didn’t know anything and just made it up. Also the Earth did not form until around 5 billion years ago so there was no earth at the beginning. I think that in misstating the theory to fit the scriptures you have eviscerated your own argument and proved the opposite of what you set out to prove.
Now I want to discuss this concept of spiritual eyes and ears. This is another fallacious argument called the sixth sense argument. It is very common and is easy to refute. If you really have a sixth sense that allows you to see something I can’t then you would have to prove it. If a blind man said to me you are a madman talking about these visions you have which I don’t see I could prove to him in terms that he could verify with his 4 senses that I had a fifth. I could tell him for instance to turn to his right and walk 3 steps and you’ll come to a chair and it has a soft cushion and a pillow and there is a book on the armrest and the arms are wide and smooth and he could verify it with his touch. We could do this over and over until he was satisfied that I really had a fifth sense that he doesn’t. You can’t do that with your sixth sense and in fact the information you get with it contradicts the information of all 5 of mine. So that is not a valid argument because I would have to take your word on faith.
I get to this point in every discussion with believers where they have failed to make a rational argument and they say well I can’t make you see it if you don’t want to and you just have to have spiritual eyes. That is just another invalid argument.
Finally I want to remind you that you told me in another post that scientists couldn’t know reality so why are you using the theory of the big bang to try to prove he veracity of scripture. That is a massive contradiction.
Hosepipe that is not faith as the bible defines it. You can safely assume that I am a real person because you regularly experience people talking to you via the computer and every so often there is a bot program so those are two choices that you could assume without faith. If you said now I know that people regularly converse with me over the computer and occasionally I suspect that I am seeing a bot program but I don’t want to assume it is a person but Bigfoot on the other end. Now that would be faith because you have no reason to believe that Bigfoot can type or knows English. In the same way you don’t have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow because you have a reasonable expectation based on the fact that it has come up every morning since time out of mind. That is not faith. If you believe that two suns will rise tomorrow that is faith.
I'm tired tonight (long day of elder-care) - so I'm only going to make a few observations - perhaps more tomorrow.
The "soup" reference was drawing from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory article concerning the MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations and reporting the sound waves in the CMB. It described the conditions as follows:
At the moment of decoupling, the pressure waves left telltale traces of their existence in the form of slight temperature variations in the CMB, which in the intervening 10 billion years or so has cooled to a mere three degrees Kelvin. In 1992 George Smoot, a member of the Physics Division and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, led the team that first detected fluctuations in the CMB with an experiment aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, COBE.
Concerning spiritual perception, a person either has it or he doesn't. It is like vision, a person either sees or does not see. Cognition, however, is a different matter.
By the way, the root of the word "Logic" is Logos - the same root for the word "Word" in the following passage, a Name of God:
Yes I understand that very well. Watched a program about he sun the other night and I think that the thick layer of atmosphere between the core of the sun and the outer layer is much like what they are talking about. It is dense plasma and the photons produced by the core take over 100,000 years to travel through that region of the sun because they are basically bouncing off all the particles and electrons which are like a soup. But you said very specifically a watery soup I think to try to correlate with the passage about the waters of the deep and separating the waters from the waters and I think that is disingenuous. I do see a very superficial similarity between genesis and the big bang theory but it can easily be chalked up to coincidence. I think there are so many other contradictions between the genesis account and what we have learned about through observations of our own solar system that they overwhelm any similarities. Plus there is the fact that there are two accounts of creation that vary and there is no reason to put two accounts in there. I think that is such a red flag that we can disregard the whole thing.
It is a 'flag' alright, but not to discount. Even history outside of the Bible describes the 'hunter-gatherer' time before the onset of agriculture. Notice a big clue planted in Genesis 2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew:
for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, *AND* (the big clue) there was NOT a man to till the ground.
The Adam was formed and placed in the garden of God as the first 'farmer'. We can know this by what 'dominion' was specifically given to those created back in Genesis 1:26. The two accounts of creation are exactly that two different 'days' of creation of flesh bodies.
Yes, without hesitation, without reservation, absolutely I can say that I love this earth and existence. I don’t have enough superlatives to describe it. Have you ever eaten a slice of apple pie or been present at the birth of your child. Have you ever climbed in the high mountains and seen a crystal clear lake and felt the cool wind on your face. Have you ever had sex with someone you love deeply? I love knowing that my mind is capable of understanding the world and there is so much to do and achieve and to see. There is such joy possible to us in this world that it is almost to much to take.
At the same time I do see the evil in the world and the utter depravity that man is capable of. I have known great joy and deep sadness. My wife and I lost our first child to a severe birth defect and I can say that that was the worst time in my life. But as Ayn Rand used to say the bad things only go down so deep. They don’t shake my view that this world is wonderful and life is so very, very precious. I don’t damn this Earth and existence as so many do. I do damn and despise the moral code that is responsible for all of the misery in the world and especially those who promote it and perpetuate it. If I could be granted the powers that are attributed to God for a day I would banish from this Earth and erase all memories of two ideas: unreason and the morality of sacrifice. I think I would give the rest of my life for a year in a world like that. Those two ideas are absolutely dominant in the world today and growing more so every day and we see the results. College kids come out of school with all these notions that they can’t really know anything and there is no black and white and who can really know what’s right and who am I to think and what’s true for one person is not true for another. I give you exhibit A: Occupy Wall street. We are all taught that to live for others is good and noble and to live for ourselves is evil. We learn from an early age that selfless sacrifice to others is our highest moral duty and that need gives a man a mortgage on the lives of others. We are taught that Human good requires someone to be sacrificed for the good of others and do you know that no one in the history of he world has ever justified these principles in reason.
I would live in a world where every man and woman was a sovereign individual with inalienable rights and no man practiced human sacrifice either of himself to others or of others to himself. I would like to live in a world where the initiation of force was absolutely abolished and men traded values instead of blows. I want a world where the government protects the individual rights of the people and does nothing more. I would have a complete separation of the state and economics. I worry about my children because I have seen the world slide so much toward barbed wire fences and guns that I don’t think we have much longer. There is still a chance to move in a different direction but it is closing up fast.
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