Posted on 04/25/2008 11:30:50 AM PDT by lainie
An evolutionist professor from Antelope Valley College on Wednesday conceded the strong probability of intelligent design in life's earliest forms.
The announcement came at the end of a 3-hour presentation at the LPAC by scientists from Reasons to Believe, a Christian ministry that creates and tests scientific models based on the Bible.
Matthew Rainbow, a biology professor with a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry, told a crowd of several hundred that he had been persuaded to change his view of the origins of life about six months earlier, after reading books by the evening's two Reasons to Believe presenters, Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana.
Rainbow helped organize Wednesday's event in connection with a local Reasons to Believe chapter.
The professor described himself as a "flag-waving and card-carrying evolutionist and, about half the time, an atheist," but said evolutionary theory has not explained how the first living cells came into being.
"I now believe with about 60% certainty that the first living things were intelligently designed by a creator," Rainbow said.
"For 50 years, the best scientific minds on the planet have tried to show where the first cells came from and we failed miserably to demonstrate that. If you try hard for 50 years and fail to show something, that's pretty strong evidence - the old theory of a prebiotic soup now appears to be kaput."
He referred to what many would know as the "primordial ooze," which some evolutionary theorists described as the birthplace of the earliest and simplest forms of life, leading to the evolution of all other forms.
Ross and Rana, and now Rainbow, contend that no such "soup" existed, primarily because no chemical evidence of it can be found, even in the oldest rock formations that bear evidence of early organic life.
(Excerpt) Read more at avpress.com ...
It limits it to one specific God if you follow the evidence...and the Bible has more evidence to back it up than any other document in history. I tend to think you have not yet done the research or you could never reach any other conclusion. There is one God. He is the God of the Bible.
I’m only going by the 10 Commandments. Something about, “I am the Lord, your God, you shall have no other gods before Me.”
Given that logic, I have nothing to worry about from Dawkins either.
YEC INTREP
BeepTT
Even more ironic, perhaps, is that both Gould (an open marxist) and Darwin were reported to be agnostic. In my opinion, atheism is every bit 'faith-based' as traditional religion, since one must believe, beyond a doubt, that no god exists. How can anyone possibly 'know' that to be the case.
likewise
Sure. One must always consider where people of influence are coming from politically. Both the late S.J. Gould and Niles Eldredge were/are profoundly influential in the field of evolutionary biology.
Then this biblical research group is in bed with the Marxists, by their association with an evolutionary biologist who's been influenced by Gould and Eldridge.
"About 40% of me still has guarded hope that we will still be able to show how life evolved spontaneously according to the laws of normal physics and chemistry," he said. "I still believe, even though God appears to have specially created the first life, I still believe that I can powerfully defend that pretty much all the rest of life still evolved."
Then this biblical research group is in bed with the Marxists, by their association with an evolutionary biologist who's been influenced by Gould and Eldredge.
Is that your conclusion? It's certainly not mine. Anyway, I posted that piece as more of an FYI item regarding two very prominent evolutionists, although Gould at least admits his ideology swayed him towards one particular model of Darwinian evolution that he and Eldredge happened to come up with.
"The close affinity between Marxism and Darwinism continues to be evident in the currently popular evolutionary speculation called 'punctuated equilibrium.' (This declares that evolution occurs by sudden lucky-leaps forward, separated by long periods of essentially no change.) Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, who first popularized this notion, recently pointed out that: 'Hegel's dialectical laws, translated into a materialist context, have become the official "state philosophy" of many socialist nations. These laws of change are explicitly punctuational, as befits a theory of revolutionary transformation in human society. In the light of this official philosophy, it is not at all surprising that a punctuational view of speciation, much like our own, but devoid of references to synthetic evolutionary theory, has long been favored by many Russian paleontologists. It may also not be irrelevant to our personal preferences that one of us learned his Marxism, literally, at his daddy's knee'"
--Paleobiology, Vol. 3, Spring 1977 (pp. 145-146), Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould
I asked if we were supposed to connect those dots. If the two aren't related, why is the article posted in this thread?
Correction: Gould and Eldredge didn’t ‘come up’ with the idea of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, they were the ones who first ‘popularized’ it.
*nod*
It was to show that possible political agendas must always be considered when evaluating various claims made by 'experts', especially those made in areas which are too complex for most of us to fully understand, such as 'evolutionary biology'. So instead we rely on 'faith' that they are telling us the truth or, rather, the whole truth.
How about the possible political agenda of the biblical research group? Doesn't that need to be considered, too? Particularly in light of them having this suspicious evolutionary biologist in their midst?
I guess you've never read the Bible...
Isa 45:5 “I am the LORD, and there is no other; Besides Me there is no God. I will gird you, though you have not known Me;
This claim is repeated frequently in the Bible and is fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity. The Judeo-Christian view is call “monotheistic” for a reason.
I'm not an expert on Communist theory, but I understand that Mao raised objections to Marx's dialectal theory of history because of the teleology implied in it. I think Mao argued for a more random view of history than Marx, while Marx's conviction that history moves inexorably towards a pure proletarian state hinted too much at ID.
That's the 'dot connection' you were asking about, although, in his case (the evolutionary biologist who worked with the group), it doesn't neccessarily mean he is now more inclined to believe in one particular religion or another, but rather that he may now find it more conceivable that SOME sort of creative force or 'intelligence' is behind things. I actually didn't read the article yet, but will now.
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