Posted on 11/03/2003 12:05:39 PM PST by Heartlander
Science is predicated on a creator. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
You said: For bible believing Christians, the word of God is the unique revelation of God to his creatures. What would you have them believe? You would ask them to take the word of man or the world, over the revealed word of God. What kind of a "christian believer" would do that?
The revealed Word of God transcends all and in no way do I propose that any mortal interpretation of Scripture is to be preferred. Our eyes must read the Scriptures, but the Spirit within us reads the Word.
Christ chose twelve very different personalities for His disciples. He could have made them all alike, that fact the He did not is significant.
And the disciples did not all agree on the interpretation of the Law and the Prophets. Acts 15 describes such a dispute and how the negotiation with Peter at Jerusalem helped in the ministry to the Gentiles – and how the difference between Paul and Barnabas helped spread the ministry to the Gentiles by their splitting. We see also in Revelation 1-3 where the churches each were accepted and noted for their individual strengths and weaknesses.
My point in all of this is that God permits certain differences which He uses to accomplish His will. If my Christian brother and I disagree on some interpretations of Scripture – other than the deity of Christ and the authority of the Word and the Scriptures themselves, the Great Commandment, etc. – then I defer to the wisdom of Gamaliel in Acts 5.
ROTFLMAO! I was think of a different end of the anatomy!
The statement still holds true.
Actually, I'm very fond of CobaltBlue's suggested compromise for public schools: teach evolution but also teach the known weaknesses in the theory.
Of course, I'd rather publicly-funded schools spent more time on teaching kinds how to research, think things through on their own, etc. But that is a general complaint about public education - kids need this for all subjects, e.g. History, Math, Science, English, etc.
Indeed, that is a big difference - that SETI is searching for intelligence within the existing universe v. Intelligent Design which is searching for signs of intelligence in the design of the universe, biological life, physical laws, etc.
Science doesn't pretend to argue about ultimate causes, but it does attempt to analyze currently effective causes. The research program that would support ID is indistinguishable from one that would support evolution. There would be no difference in the materials or methods of research. ID proponents might choose different topics on which to spend research dollars, but they would have to have the same goal.
And that goal would be to find the natural chain of causes for phenomena. You cannot assert that something is designed without attempting to rule out natural causes. If and when you get down to bedrock causes -- the theory of everything -- then you can have a deep discussion of why things are the way they are.
If those claiming this stipulated the existence of a creator a whole lot of hostility and suspicion would go away.
Just to add to your excellent points, a couple more points. We have no other concrete examples of a design from which attributes of the designer cannot be inferred. The best example of designs from we infer attributes of the designer are early Renaissance paintings, which are often anonymous, but whose characteristics similarity of style, brush strokes, composition, etc., generally allow them to be assigned to ,e.g., 'the Pisan master'. Most of the time we don't have to do this, but if one thinks, for example, of the oeuvre of Picasso, we can certainly conclude even if we knew nothing of him, that we could learn a great deal about the man simply from his work. So why can't we say something about the designer from ID?
I think I understand Betty boop's relucance to do this. If one focusses only on the positive aspects of putative design - the complexity and interconnectedness of some biological organelles for example - one can happily contemplate the benignity and the intelligence of the creator. However, if one looks at the whole picture - to take just one example, genomic elements which seem to exist only to propagate themselves, occasionally causing horrible congenital ailments as a mere byproduct - one is forced to adopt a much more morally equivocal picture. A Manichaen son god. powerful and creative but possessing also vices, would fit the bill, but not the incorruptable, omniscient divine being of Christianiaty post 400 AD.
Obviously, I don't believe in ID, anyway; I'm just taking their argument to its conclusion. But this strikes me as being a result of a fundamental logical problem with Christian theology -they have papered over the problem of evil. Even without science, there has been no credible explanation of why a good creator would allow the magnitude of suffering and ignorance and malignity that has always infested the earth. You don't need to torture billions just to test free will; a good reducing diet will do that. Well, there is evil lurking in the human genome; and unless you let the Devil have a hand in its design, you've got problems.
So there it is; even if you abandon naturalism, science is necessarily logical. Christianity has never been able to square itself with fundamental logic; it has always relied on the ineffability of the Creator. The abandonment of naturalism required by ID isn't in tiself sufficient to reconcile science with religion; one is forced to also abandon reason. And stripped of naturalism and reason, how can what is left be called science?
Thanks for the morning chuckle. :-)
What is there to stipulate? Science is not going to stipulate to any specific attributes of a creator. Nor any attributes that conflict with evidence, such as a 6000 year old earth or a recent global flood. So what exactly are "they" supposed to accept, prior to demonstration?
I would never say that science has reached an unknowable. Whatever lies beyond the present day frontier is simply unknown.
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