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To: Stultis

Actually, I was not talking so much about anti-evolution as about opening oneself to God. I, personally, grew up in a communist country, was indoctrinated in marxist-leninist ideology, including and especially evolution, because my PhD work was in the field of biological sciences, but at the end, if you are really open to exploring the possibilities, the evolutionary theory doesn’t quite cut it. I realize, that to atheists, questioning evolution seems like attacking their religion, but so be it.
The reason I usually don’t post on these threads is that they turn very ugly real fast, and generally it’s not the believers in creation and ID that start it.
I appreciate you staying polite and will be praying for you.


167 posted on 07/19/2009 7:47:50 AM PDT by 05 Mustang GT Rocks
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To: 05 Mustang GT Rocks; Ichneumon
but at the end, if you are really open to exploring the possibilities, the evolutionary theory doesn’t quite cut it

I happened to go in almost exactly the opposite direction.

I was open to exploring the possibilities. This would have been somewhere around 1980 or '81, I think, I had read one or two creationist books. I wasn't really convinced to adopt a fully antievolution view, but I did think that the creationists probably had some objections that were sound. (In the posturing and presumption common to young men, I then smugly considered myself an "anti-Darwinian" evolution skeptic, even though I had only read about Darwin, and never Darwin himself, nor any really important scholar of Darwin.)

So, anyway, I got my hands on some more creationist material, read it very carefully, picked out some of what seemed to me the most promising arguments, and then headed to the library (actually a couple local university and medical libraries) where I spent about two or three weeks tracing all the footnotes out to original research sources.

Although it turned out to be a valuable and enlightening experience for a young man, at the time I was shocked by my results. Not a single one of the seemingly promising objections I investigated had a scintilla of validity. They were all based on multiple and egregious misrepresentations of fact and theory. (See Ichneumon's #169 for an absolutely representative example of the kind of thing I found, although IIRC I only looked at one or two examples of a young-earth argument. One, though, also involved xenoliths. In this case the creationist, Henry Morris, didn't do his own dating, but simply lied about what a mainstream scientist did, i.e. suppressing the fact that xenoliths were the intentional target of the dating and pretending it was the surrounding lava that was dated.)

So, ironically (as it seemed at the time) I came out of my in-depth encounter with creationist literature with a fairly high confidence, which I did previously possess, in the essential soundness of modern evolutionary theory, and a perception of antievolutionism as pathologically dishonest.

171 posted on 07/19/2009 12:16:42 PM PDT by Stultis (Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia; Democrats always opposed waterboarding as torture)
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To: 05 Mustang GT Rocks

“Actually, I was not talking so much about anti-evolution as about opening oneself to God.”

Evolution and all faiths, including Christianity, are perfectly compatible. Evolutionists are open to God. All but a few noisy, cultish Christians are open to evolution.


173 posted on 07/19/2009 4:00:29 PM PDT by Buck W. (The President of the United States IS named Schickelgruber...)
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