Posted on 09/20/2001 8:46:10 AM PDT by aculeus
The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism
by Phillip E. Johnson
InterVarsity Press, 192 pp., $17.99
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong
by Jonathan Wells
Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
by Michael J. Behe
Touchstone, 307 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design
edited by William A. Dembski
InterVarsity Press, 475 pp., $24.99 (paper)
Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology
by William A. Dembski
InterVarsity Press, 312 pp., $21.99
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism
by Robert T. Pennock
Bradford/MIT Press, 429 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution
by Kenneth R. Miller
Cliff Street Books/HarperCollins,338 pp., $14.00 (paper)
1. It is no secret that science and religion, once allied in homage to divinely crafted harmonies, have long been growing apart. As the scientific worldview has become more authoritative and self-sufficient, it has loosed a cascade of appalling fears: that the human soul, insofar as it can be said to exist, may be a mortal and broadly comprehensible product of material forces; that the immanent, caring God of the Western monotheisms may never have been more than a fiction devised by members of a species that self-indulgently denies its continuity with the rest of nature; and that our universe may lack any discernible purpose, moral character, or special relation to ourselves. But as those intimations have spread, the retrenchment known as creationism has also gained in strength and has widened its appeal, acquiring recruits and sympathizers among intellectual sophisticates, hard-headed pragmatists, and even some scientists. And so formidable a political influence is this wave of resistance that some Darwinian thinkers who stand quite apart from it nevertheless feel obliged to placate it with tactful sophistries, lest the cause of evolutionism itself be swept away.
As everyone knows, it was the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 that set off the counterrevolution that eventually congealed into creationism. It isn't immediately obvious, however, why Darwin and not, say, Copernicus, Galileo, or Newton should have been judged the most menacing of would-be deicides. After all, the subsiding of faith might have been foreseeable as soon as the newly remapped sky left no plausible site for heaven. But people are good at living with contradictions, just so long as their self-importance isn't directly insulted. That shock was delivered when Darwin dropped his hint that, as the natural selection of every other species gradually proves its cogency, "much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."
By rendering force and motion deducible from laws of physics without reference to the exercise of will, leading scientists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment started to force the activist lord of the universe into early retirement. They did so, however, with reverence for his initial wisdom and benevolence as an engineer. Not so Darwin, who saw at close range the cruelty, the flawed designs, and the prodigal wastefulness of life, capped for him by the death of his daughter Annie. He decided that he would rather forsake his Christian faith than lay all that carnage at God's door. That is why he could apply Charles Lyell's geological uniformitarianism more consistently than did Lyell himself, who still wanted to reserve some scope for intervention from above. And it is also why he was quick to extrapolate fruitfully from Malthus's theory of human population dynamics, for he was already determined to regard all species as subject to the same implacable laws. Indeed, one of his criteria for a sound hypothesis was that it must leave no room for the supernatural. As he wrote to Lyell in 1859, "I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."
Darwin's contemporaries saw at once what a heavy blow he was striking against piety. His theory entailed the inference that we are here today not because God reciprocates our love, forgives our sins, and attends to our entreaties but because each of our oceanic and terrestrial foremothers was lucky enough to elude its predators long enough to reproduce. The undignified emergence of humanity from primordial ooze and from a line of apes could hardly be reconciled with the unique creation of man, a fall from grace, and redemption by a person of the godhead dispatched to Earth for that end. If Darwin was right, revealed truth of every kind must be unsanctioned. "With me the horrid doubt always arises," he confessed in a letter, "whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind...?"
[snipped. Go to site for the balance.]
I guess this means that there are uninformed Darwinists, lurking about somewhere, too..........
Cows must have 'dumbed down' since then. Now, when the water rises, they just go to higher ground.``With these new discoveries the whale fossil record is now so complete,'' Hans Thewissen, of Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, said. ``It shows us so well how whales became aquatic that it is probably the best, or one of the best, examples of evolution where these major changes are documented with fossils.''"Macro" evolution has been shown yet again. There is no intellectually honest person who can say otherwise. Creationists are liars, and ID-iots are looking for God in statistical noise.
Oh, maybe that's just USoA cows. The cows in Africa tend to be eaten by croc's if they linger in the water too long.
Oh wait: croc's evolved after cows; didn't they?
What we know is that we exist. What is the scientific answer as to how and why?
1. Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.
2. He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men.
3. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, `Grant me justice against my adversary.'
4. "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, `Even though I don't fear God or care about men,
5. yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!'"
6. And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says.
7. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?
8. I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"
9. To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable:
10. "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
11. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: `God, I thank you that I am not like other men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.
12. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
13. "But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, `God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
14. "I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
I, like you am confused. Just WHY is it MORE likely?
(scientifically speaking, of course.)
FYI
No, that would be an example of "g3k" logic.
What I said was that ICR and militant fundamentalist muslims share common goals. I did not say they shared ALL goals in common.
In short, I'm not guilty of the "guilt by association" gimmick with which you and others have implicitly charged me. I merely pointed out the fact that the two groups do have some goals and beliefs in common.
It's not my fault you lack the reading comprehension that is required to notice the distinction.
Now, please prove to everyone reading this thread that you are a stimulus/response machine unworthy of conversing with, by spewing invective about how I have supposedly slimed you.
Sleep can often overcome delusions.
I do have one question though. You guys who are so quick to equate IDers with the Taliban, do you then accept the MUCH stronger link between yourselves and communist and nazi ideals? If we are = the Taliban because we agree that God (though a different God with a very different nature and Holy Book) created living things then WHY are you evos not = Nazis and commies? You all believe that THE VERY SAME evolutionary forces are responsible for all living things. Hmmmmmm?
No amount of sleep can overcome a delusion this deep.
Will you ever understand the purpose of science? Its purpose is to describe and understand natural processes.
But of course even your factual claim about Darwin is false:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
On the off chance that you or "Junior" might be having any difficulty figuring out why "Junior"'s monstrosity link thread no longer appears on FreeRepublic, you might consider the possibility that the moderator(s) agreed with me that the "Ted Holden Links" section of the thing was a clear cut case of abuse.
Until the Taliban becomes a non-issue the following will remain an issue.
That is why the struggle between the various species does not arise from a feeling of mutual antipathy but rather from hunger and love. In both cases Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens. The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything that is weak or diseased or wavering; while the fight of the male to possess the female gives to the strongest the right, or at least, the possibility to propagate its kind. And this struggle is a means of furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a higher quality of being
Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
Perhaps you can use your influence to get this one pulled too:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource v. 5.0 .
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko This guy, not Darwin, Was Stalin's biologist.
You can run but you can't hide.
First off: Yarovizatsya (Lysenko's own journal), 1937, No 2, p. 15 states: "The discussion here is about securing the further development of geneticists from the point of view of development, securing the development of genetics as a science in place of converting genetics into a service of Goebbles. Only this will make it possible to convert such science into the highest stage which, at the moment, is in its primary stages of development. Only this will make is possible for our geneticists to earn respect of all the progressive scientists in the world. For the sake of clarity we repeat that Darwinism is not against genetics. Darwinism is for genetics. Darwinism is not against genetics but Darwinism is against fascist distortion of genetics and the fascist utilization of genetics in its political aims that are detrimental to the progress of humanity."
There is it, from the horse's mouth. It refutes the LIES told about Lysenko.
What we know is that we exist. What is the scientific answer as to how and why?
Taken as an ultimate question of origins, There is none worth examining. Science concerns itself about things for which some analytical evidence of sufficient particularity to allow analytical analysis exists.
Your statement would be true except for one thing - evolution and materialism are deterministic and the Christian religion specifically states that man has free will, so you have it absolutely backwards, like most of what the Darwinists say.
Darwinism is not materialism, and darwinism is certainly not deterministic, any more than physics is, in a strict sense. Phenomena in both cases reduce to quantum effects, which can only be understood statistically, until the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principal is repealed.
Computers are purely deterministic indeed.
This is not true either. Computers produce inexplicable glitches, some of which can be attributed to quantum effects at the ragged edge of expected distributions. In fact, the design of modern computers must cater substantially to quantum random effects thru redudancy, and error detection and correction.
In fact random numbers are quite hard to achieve in computers.
This is not relevant. This is a specific incomputability problem. At any rate, it isn't difficult for stochastically sophisticated programmers and EE's to produce random numbers on a computer, it is only hard for unsophisticated programmers who don't know much about anything but code to generate random numbers.
Behe invokes laughter in the hearts of informed Darwinists.
Not at all, that is why none of them have been able to refute his statements.
Hoping no one will check, eh? Dozens of quite specific predictions made by Behe about things that would never be published in the "Journal of Micro-biological Evolution" have, in fact, come to pass. Anyone interested in the comical details of Behe's failure to benchcheck his work, should try "Finding Darwin's God"
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