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.
As Einstein said: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
The Lurkers may often be more receptive to what we offer than our primary correspondent. That is why it is so important to repeat even the painfully obvious to the hopelessly inattentive - someone might benefit from it.
I, for one, always benefit from insights from both of you. Elder-care keeps me from engaging in the discussion as often as I'd like, but please know I do make it a point to read and think about your posts!
Thank you both!
OK, I admit it, you almost got me. I had started to formulate a scathing response and then I realized that the things you said were too fantastical to not be satire. So thank you very much for the laugh but I’m not biting. You almost got my goat though. Good one.
So thank you very much for the laugh but I’m not biting. You almost got my goat though. Good one.
Satire?.... I was and am as serious AS... a thugg attack at a gated community.. i.e. Travon Martin..
Was hoping you would “try” to beat my head against some (proverbial) concrete so I could SHOOT YOU..
(you know.. metaphorically)..
Much as I did when I got your goat.. MAN-UP!...
And yet it seems many people of your camp have unlimited faith, not only in the scientific method, but in unlimited "human progress." I can't tell you how many times I have been told over the years that, "yes, it is true science doesn't have all the answers re: X problem [fill in the blank] YET; but it will at some future time."
If this isn't an example of "faith," then I don't know what it is. It is faith in an unshakeable epistemically prior conviction that the regnant scientific "methodological naturalism" approach can answer all questions — if not today, then eventually, i.e., at some future time.
That strikes me as pretty credulous. Not to mention I consider it unreasonable to reduce the world to the size of one's own presuppositions. This sort of exercise is to commit Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
FWIW albionin. Thank you for writing.
I do too. I don't think God put us here to sink back into the primeval muck. We're here to follow him to the heavens and make the stellar debris field bloom.
We've got awesome work to do.
:)
Me: It is not a lack of imagination but a lack of credulity and an inability to abandon reason and accept things on faith.
Betty boop: And yet it seems many people of your camp have unlimited faith, not only in the scientific method, but in unlimited “human progress.” I can’t tell you how many times I have been told over the years that, “yes, it is true science doesn’t have all the answers re: X problem [fill in the blank] YET; but it will at some future time.”
Me: Well you couldn’t say that anyone in my camp, Objectivism, has faith. If they did they wouldn’t be in my camp. Human beings are limited by our nature just as all things are. We can only achieve that which is in our power to achieve. We are not omniscient. It is true that science can’t answer every question right now. No one can look into the future and say what knowledge science will uncover, but we can say that if we are to have any answers to these questions then science is the only way we will get them. There is no other tool at our disposal. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I have been told that if science can’t answer some question then that means it must be a supernatural being controlling everything. Not too long ago you could have said since science can’t explain why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west then it must be caused by a supernatural being. Of course many people still believe that but science has a pretty good handle on what is going on with the sunrise. I’ll tell you what I never get from your camp: a rational argument for the existence of God.
Betty Boop: If this isn’t an example of “faith,” then I don’t know what it is. It is faith in an unshakeable (sic) epistemically prior conviction that the regnant scientific “methodological naturalism” approach can answer all questions — if not today, then eventually, i.e., at some future time.
Yes, you don’t know what faith is, or rather your definition is too broad and makes no distinction between how knowledge is gained. The bible defines faith as “the substance of that which is hoped for” and “the evidence of that which is not seen”. The substance of that which is hoped for is a wish. The second definition means that belief is evidence. That is pure subjectivism. That is consistent with the teaching of the bible of a subjective reality. Science rests on a completely opposite metaphysics and epistemology, namely an objective reality and reason and logic as the means to gaining knowledge. To lump faith and reason together is to destroy the concept of reason. So don’t equate belief based on reason and logic with religious faith. I do believe that science and methodological naturalism can answer any proper question about existence. the question of who created the universe is improper and wrong on principle because it contradicts the three fundamental axioms of philosophy: Existence, Identity and Consciousness.
Instead of attacking reason and logic why don’t you just provide a rational argument for God. That is all you have to do. Just one.
Damn Alby I take it back you did man up.. I should have bought more popcorn last time at the store.. This could get interesting.. I havnt seen a true believer like you here in a good while.. Heck, I even dally with Jehovas Witnesses from time to time to keep me on my toes.. or even a Mormon..
Interesting to me how people can re-define words and precepts in a second reality or projection.. Not all waste time with that but I like people.. and am interested their preconceptions.. and how religious the non religious can be.. Mah-Boop is a force to reckon with.. And the Alamo chick can be almost prescient at times.. I might have to save your soul and rescue you out of this thread.. Be careful of circular logic them babes will eat you up and spit you out if you do that..
Already you seem to be on the cusp of circular logic..
Projection is such a weak defense...
If you see an example of circular reasoning please point it out to me.
If you see an example of circular reasoning please point it out to me.
Sorry my face will be full of popcorn..
Others will do that with a meat ax..
I am here to watch the contest.. hoping for a fair fight..
Hoping you will be original and creative.. and honest..
I watched many many contests like this.. very few combatants were honest..
The so-called non religious have the morals of a goat.. (Usually).
Well since you’re the one who said I’m on the cusp of circular logic won’t you show me where. I am not perfect, I do make mistakes and I would love for you to point it out to me so I can correct it.
One would have to stand apart and wholly independent of the thing being observed, in this case 'reality' - in order to speak objectively.
That is a cusp of circular reasoning as hosepipe suggests.
Of course we can’t step out of reality. That does not make reality subjective. 2+2=4 no matter what anyone’s wishes are and no matter who is doing the adding. I mean that science depends on a non contradictory reality.
Incidentally if I don’t answer right away it is because I am swamped with work and I am spending a lot of hours in the shop so it may be a while in between posts.
In describing his Level IV Parallel Universe, Tegmark describes the difference in perspective as follows:
The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: The universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.
Heisenberg's Uncertainity Principle is another example.
Truly, no denizen of space/time can observe objectively.
Only God can see all that there is, all at once. He only knows objective truth. He alone speaks objective truth.
Indeed, He is Truth for when He says a thing, it is. It is because He said it.
See TXnMA's post 83 and mine at 68.
God's Name is I AM.
you can’t talk about what god does or does not do until you prove he exists. If we can’t know anything about existence then how can we know anything about something outside of existence? You pinged me to this thread to answer a question and you implied that if I couldn’t answer it and if scientists can’t answer it then we have to admit that it is the result of a supernatural cause. How is that not the argument from ignorance? I answered that question by saying that any natural phenomenon is the result of entities acting according to their nature and in accordance with natural laws that are inherent in existence. I then asked you why the simple fact that we don’t know why something exists gives us justification to jump to a supernatural, incomprehensible, unknowable being as a cause. You never answered that question. I would like an answer to that question before we proceed any further. If your just going to attack reason and give me variations of the argument from ignorance then there is no sense continuing the discussion.
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