Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22).
“And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1)
In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who,
"Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the powers of hell against the churches of Christ."
John identifies antichrists, in this case clergy who serve the devil rather than Christ, sequentially. First, like Bultmann, Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Funk, Paul Tillich, and John Shelby Spong, they specifically deny the living, personal Holy Trinity in favor of Gnostic pagan, immanent or Eastern pantheist conceptions. Though God the Father Almighty in three Persons upholds the souls of men and maintains life and creation, His substance is not within nature (space-time dimension) as pantheism maintains, but outside of it. Sinful men live within nature and are burdened by time and mortality; God is not.
Second, the specific denial of the Father logically negates Jesus the Christ, the Word who was in the beginning (John 1), was with God, and is God from the creation of all things (1 John 1). In a pre-incarnate theophany, Jesus is the Angel who spoke “mouth to mouth” to Moses (Num. 12:6-9; John 9:20) and at sundry times and in many ways “spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all…” (Hebrews 1:1) Jesus the Christ is the incarnate Son of God who is the life and light of men, who by His shed blood on the Cross died for the remission of all sins and bestowed the privilege of adoption on all who put their faith in Him.
Therefore, to deny the Holy Father is to logically deny the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hence,
“…every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist . . . and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).
According to Peter (2 Peter 2:1), falling stars will work among the faithful, teaching damnable heresies that deny the Lord, cause the fall of men into unbelief, and bring destruction upon themselves:
“The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief.” Many thinking people came at last “to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief. Having made God more and more like man---intellectually, morally, emotionally---the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man.” (James Turner of the University of Michigan in “American Babylon,” Richard John Neuhaus, p. 95)
Falling Stars and Damnable Heresy
Almost thirty years ago, two well-respected social science scholars, William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark found themselves alarmed by what they saw as a rising tide of irrationalism, superstition and occultism---channeling cults, spirit familiars, necromancers, Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, goddess worshippers, 'gay' shamans, Hermetic magicians and other occult madness at every level of society, particularly within the most influential--- Hollywood, academia and the highest corridors of political power.
Like many scientists, they were equally concerned by Christian opposition to naturalistic evolution. As is common in the science community, they assumed the cause of these social pathologies was somehow due to fundamentalism, their term for authentic Christian theism as opposed to liberalized Christianity. Yet to their credit, the research they undertook to discover the cause was conducted both scientifically and with great integrity. What they found was so startling it caused them to re-evaluate their attitude toward authentic Christian theism. Their findings led them to say:
"It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions. On the contrary...they are much more likely to accept the new superstitions. It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today." ("Superstitions, Old and New," The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. IV, No. 4; summer, 1980)
In more detail they observed that authentic ‘born again’ Christians are far less likely to accept cults and pseudoscientific beliefs while the irreligious and liberalized Christians (i.e., progressive Catholics, Protestant emergent, NAR, word faith, prosperity gospel) are open to unscientific notions. In fact, these two groups are most disposed toward occultism.
As Bainbridge and Stark admitted, evolution directly contradicts the Bible, beginning with the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo. This means that evolution is the antithesis of the Genesis account. For this reason, discerning Christians refuse to submit to the evolutionary thinking that has swept Western and American society. Nor do they accept the evolutionary theism brought into the whole body of the Church by weak, tepid, indecisive, or apostate clergy.
Over eighty years ago, Rev. C. Leopold Clarke wrote that priests who embrace evolution (evolutionary theists) are apostates from the ‘Truth as it is in Jesus.’ (1 John2:2) Rev. Clarke, a lecturer at a London Bible college, discerned that evolution is the antithesis to the Revelation of God in the Deity of Jesus Christ, thus it is the greatest and most active agent of moral and spiritual disintegration:
“It is a battering-ram of unbelief---a sapping and mining operation that intends to blow Religion sky-high. The one thing which the human mind demands in its conception of God, is that, being Almighty, He works sovereignly and miraculously---and this is the thing with which Evolution dispenses….Already a tremendous effect, on a wide scale has been produced by the impact of this teaching---an effect which can only be likened to the…collapse of foundations…” (Evolution and the Break-Up of Christendom, Philip Bell, creation.com, Nov. 27, 2012)
The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed ‘mouth to mouth’ by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ. But how horrible a travesty of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry to see church leaders more eager to be abreast of the times, than earnestly contending for the Faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). It is high time, said Rev. Clarke, that the Church,
“…. separated herself from the humiliating entanglement attending her desire to be thought up to date…What, after all, have custodians of Divine Revelation to do making terms with speculative Biology, which has….no message of comfort or help to the soul?” (ibid)
The primary tactic employed by priests eager to accommodate themselves and the Church to modern science and evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when we see Genesis, especially the first three chapters, in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is the argument embraced and advanced by mega-church pastor Timothy J. Keller.
With a position paper Keller published with the theistic evolutionary organization Bio Logos he joined the ranks of falling stars (Catholic and Protestant priests) stretching back to the Renaissance. Their slippery-slide into apostasy began when they gave into the temptation to embrace a non-literal, non-historical view of Genesis. (A response to Timothy Keller’s ‘Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople,” Lita Cosner, Sept. 9, 2010, creation.com)
This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this damnable heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of the Origenists. Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics,
“…let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)
As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40)
In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to reduce the Revelation of God to allegory and myth is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.
Scenarios commonly proposed by modern Origenists posit a cleverly disguised pantheist/immanent nature deity subject to the space-time dimension and forces of evolution. But as noted previously, it is sinful man who carries the burden of time, not God. This is a crucial point, for when evolutionary theists add millions and billions of zeros (time) to God they have transferred their own limitations onto Him. They have ‘limited’ God and made Him over in their own image. This is not only idolatrous but satanic.
Additionally, evolution inverts creation. In place of God’s good creation from which men fell there is an evolutionary escalator starting at the bottom with matter, then progressing upward toward life, then up and through the life and death of millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by millions of years until at long last an apish humanoid emerges into which a deity that is always in a state of becoming (evolving) places a soul.
Evolution amputates the entire historical precedent from the Gospel and makes Jesus Christ unnecessary as the atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically points out:
“The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus…into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity.” (“Atheism vs. Christianity,” 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)
None of this was lost on Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1985). Huxley was thoroughly familiar with the Bible, thus he understood that if Genesis is not the authoritative Word of God, is not historical and literal despite its’ symbolic and poetic elements, then the entirety of Scripture becomes a collection of fairytales resulting in tragic downward spiraling consequences as the Catholic Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation makes clear in part:
“By denying the historical truth of the first chapters of Genesis, theistic evolutionism has fostered a preoccupation with natural causes almost to the exclusion of supernatural ones. By denying the several supernatural creative acts of God in Genesis, and by downplaying the importance of the supernatural activity of Satan, theistic evolutionists slip into a naturalistic mentality which seeks to explain everything in terms of natural causes. Once this mentality takes hold, it is easy for men to regard the concept of spiritual warfare as a holdover from the days of primitive superstition. Diabolical activity is reduced to material or psychological causes. The devil and his demons come to be seen as irrelevant. Soon ‘hell’ joins the devil and his demons in the category of antiquated concepts. And the theistic evolutionist easily makes the fatal mistake of thinking that he has nothing more to fear from the devil and his angels. According to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of Rome, there is a tremendous increase in diabolical activity and influence in the formerly Christian world. And yet most of the bishops of Europe no longer believe in the existence of evil spirits….To the Fathers of the Church who believed in the truth of Genesis, this would be incredible. But in view of the almost universal acceptance of theistic evolution, it is hardly surprising.” (The Difference it makes: The Importance of the Traditional Doctrine of Creation, Hugh Owen, kolbecenter.org)
Huxley had ‘zero’ respect for modern Origenists and received enormous pleasure from heaping piles of hot coals and burning contempt upon them, thereby exposing their shallow-reasoning, hypocrisy, timidity, fear of non-acceptance, and unfaithfulness. With sarcasm dripping from his words he quipped,
“I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value unless they possess the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh; if the “ten words” were not written by God’s hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the stories of the regal period of Rome—what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands?” (Darwin’s Bulldog---Thomas Huxley, Russell Grigg, creation.com, Oct. 14, 2008)
Pouring more contempt on them he asked,
“When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that "the Flood came and destroyed them all," did he believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? It seems to me that, as the narrative mentions Noah’s wife, and his sons’ wives, there is good scriptural warranty for the statement that the antediluvians married and were given in marriage; and I should have thought that their eating and drinking might be assumed by the firmest believer in the literal truth of the story. Moreover, I venture to ask what sort of value, as an illustration of God’s methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of “Wolf” when there is no wolf? If Jonah’s three days’ residence in the whale is not an “admitted reality,” how could it “warrant belief” in the “coming resurrection?” … Suppose that a Conservative orator warns his hearers to beware of great political and social changes, lest they end, as in France, in the domination of a Robespierre; what becomes, not only of his argument, but of his veracity, if he, personally, does not believe that Robespierre existed and did the deeds attributed to him?” (ibid)
Concerning Matthew 19:5:
“If divine authority is not here claimed for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a “type” or “allegory,” what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology?” (ibid)
And concerning Cor. 15:21-22:
“If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive “type,” comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul’s dialectic?” (ibid)
After much thought, C.S. Lewis concluded that evolution is the central, most radical lie at the center of a vast network of lies within which modern Westerners are entangled while Rev. Clarke identifies the central lie as the Gospel of another Spirit. The fiendish aim of this Spirit is to help men lose God, not find Him, and by contradicting the Divine Redeemer, compromising Priests are serving this Spirit and its’ diabolical purposes. To contradict the Divine Redeemer is the very essence of unfaithfulness, and that it should be done while reverence is professed,
“…. is an illustration of the intellectual and moral topsy-turvydom of Modernism…’He whom God hath sent speaketh the Words of God,’ claimed Christ of Himself (John 3:34), and no assumption of error can hold water in the face of that declaration, without blasphemy.” Evolutionary theists are serving the devil, therefore “no considerations of Christian charity, of tolerance, of policy, can exonerate Christian leaders or Churches who fail to condemn and to sever themselves from compromising, cowardly, shilly-shallying priests”---the falling stars who “challenge the Divine Authority of Jesus Christ.” (ibid)
The rebuttals, warnings and counsels of the Fathers against listening to Origenists (and their modern evolutionary counterparts) indicates that the spirit of antichrist operating through modern rationalistic criticism of the Revelation of God is not a heresy unique to our times but was inveighed against by early Church Fathers.
From the scholarly writings of the Eastern Orthodox priest, Fr. Seraphim Rose, to the incisive analysis, rebuttals and warnings of the Catholic Kolbe Center, creation.com, Creation Research Institute, Rev. Clarke, and many other stalwart defenders of the faith once delivered, all are a clear, compelling call to the whole body of the Church to hold fast to the traditional doctrine of creation as it was handed down from the Apostles, for as God spoke and Jesus is the Living Word incarnate, it is incumbent upon the faithful to submit their wills to the Divine Will and Authority of God rather than to the damnable heresy proffered by falling stars eager to embrace naturalistic science and the devil's antithesis--- evolution. But if it seem evil to you to serve the Lord,
“…you have your choice: choose this day that which pleases you, whom you would rather serve….but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15
Truly, when we suggests the mind/soul/spirit is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain he is left with no logical basis for personal responsibility, judicial systems, etc.
And that, as you mention, is because an epiphenomenon cannot cause anything to happen. So it had to be the brain's fault. LOLOL!
"The Mind is as the brain does."
This is a most sweeping claim. So I just need to ask you a question: How do you know that? On what evidence do you depend to come up with this conclusion?
Use drugs and drink booze if you want to test that conclusion.
Please give me a thorough briefing on this matter. for I find your statement totally perplexing.
I'm not your personal secretary or researcher.
Do you believe that the evolution of human beings is essentially random?
Nope.
That the only power in nature that can establish anything new in biology is environmental pulls of Nature itself ("natural selection"), acting on accidents of mutation? (Which are usually fatal to organisms afflicted by such mutations?)
If non-fatal mutations are insignificant, why don't we look alike?
Do you believe there is any such thing as human nature itself?
Yes. We act on our preprogrammed instincts.
Human Nature... ...not a product of some (fictitious) evolutionary process?
What? Does that mean that everyone has the same family size?
If you check the history of the human race, you will find that, over thousands and thousands of millennia (judging from the historical record), that human beings qua human beings do not change much over time.
*cough* Whites, Blacks, East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, Aborigines, Lactose Tolerance, Carbohydrate Tolerance differences...
I find it positively striking that whether you are consulting records from ancient Egypt, through classical philosophy, through Judeo-Christian writings, or just reading the 14th-century writer Boccaccio (See: The Decameron), the same human problems and concerns always emerge as the same over all historical time.
Let's consult some congo records... Oh wait, they don't have any! Hmmm...
So, how does Darwin's theory help us to understand ourselves? Answer: It doesn't.
Really? Would you rather take a midnight stroll in Honey Boo Boo's white trash neighborhood or Shaniqua Jackson's ghetto neighborhood? Heard of the phrase "alpha ****s, beta bucks"?
It [evolution by natural selection] says there is no human "nature."Man is "unfinished business," just leave it up to Nature to "complete" him.
"The theory of evolution by natural selection: Natural selection is the gradual natural process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment.
For a given environment, assuming that the living population already exists and that there is a variation of genetic traits in that population, those traits that enable making more babies than the other traits become more common. Split the population in two and put the the two groups in different environments, you'll end up with two different sets of traits being selected for."
You should read my posts before you reply to them.
The next thing you know, the way things are going, is that Man will "evolve" into a machine, or "devolve" into a sub-human, vicious predator.
Looks like your idea of "evolution" is the same as a progressive's idea of "evolution"... pokemon evolution.
Humans are vicious predators. You should start reading history and you should actually read the Bible instead of parroting what your pastor says.
And as long as we can blame his "brain" for doing all this, then Man is not responsible for what happens to him or to his species or the very world around him, which he profoundly influences by his thoughts ands actions. "Nature did it!!!"
Have you heard of the saying, "The stupid shall be punished"?
And oh, by the way, where did DNA come from? Is that an "accident" too, just another evolutionary process?
The theory of evolution by natural selection assumes that life already exists in order for it to work. Not only should you actually read my post, you should read other posts that already answered this.
YHAOS: I take it that your thesis is that “Gnostic dualism” denies free will
Spirited: Irenaeus described Gnostics as very proud (narcissistic), conceited individuals who make up something new every day. Whatever they imagine, desire, hate or covet at any moment is the measure of ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’
So for example, if in order to evade personal accountability and save face Gnostic Mullahs of scientism declare their innocence on the basis of “genes” and “grey matter” (Gnostic fatalism/determinism) this is unquestionably and authoritatively “true” and “real” on the basis of science. But if it happens that something they say or do seems quite brilliant in their eyes then they’ll loudly toot their horns in public in expectation of universal adulation.
Fascinating, dear sister in Christ, thank you for your insights.
To “see” one must look. In the first instance Dawkins represents his opinions as scientific fact and refuses to acknowledge that his opinions are religious. You may twist and turn at your pleasure. Nonetheless, Dawkins states that the “question” of whether there exists a supernatural creator is “scientific” and that his answer is “no.” He does not qualify his response as his “opinion.” He makes his statement as an unqualified assertion, knowing full well it enjoys the notoriety of his reputation as an evolutionary biologist and author (for whatever that is worth).
See Debate/Interview excerpt between Professor Dawkins and Dr Collins, conducted at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30, 2006:
TIME: “Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?”
DAWKINS: “The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”
In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins not only declares The Judeo-Christian God to be nonexistent, but also questions the mental state of any practicing Christian (maligning religious people - particularly Christians - as delusional, and worse - misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent). The book’s title likewise makes it manifest that the existence of a god is what he considers them to be delusional about.
See: David Quinn & Richard Dawkins in an interview with Ryan Tubridy on the Ryan Tubridy Show: The main subject of contention was Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.
From the transcript:
Tubridy: “. . . Let’s just talk about the word if you don’t mind, the word delusion, so put it into context. Why did you pick that word?”
Dawkins: “Well the word delusion means a falsehood which is widely believed, and I think that is true of religion. It is remarkably widely believed, it’s as though almost all of the population or a substantial proportion of the population believed that they had been abducted by aliens in flying saucers. You’d call that a delusion. I think God is a similar delusion.”
Professor Dawkins grounds his reasoning in Science.
In other venues Dawkins has gone so for as to propose that parents should not be allowed to teach their children in religious practices and that any who enroll their children in church should have their children taken from them by the state.
“Darwinism” is purely a political system, advanced as a “scientific” theory in an effort to provide a justification for various Socialist/Marxist ideas, and an effort to undermine, or otherwise subvert, Judeo-Christian and Capitalist ideals.
You may as well have a neon sign slapped on your forehead, flashing TROLL.
Now, what is the expiration date on your memory? When will you again not remember what Dawkins has said and need to be reminded? Your defective memory (and that of many of your calumnious associates) is the greatest reason for my reference to “great billowing clouds.”
“Sorry, but the “great billowing clouds” were your hors d'oeuvres”
If you grow weary of my “great billowing” description, abandon and renounce your tactics.
“ there are no such “fans” posting of Free Republic, except in the projections of your own rather fertile imagination.”
Really?! I, and many others of my acquaintance, know differently. We know with whom we are dealing when we encounter correspondents on FR who deny the existence of God, who opine that morality comes only from human heads according to their narrowly defined interests; that any idea to the contrary is the product of childish adults; or when they insist that talking donkeys, talking snakes and other Biblical “fantastic stories” are central to Biblical Instruction. These “fans” mock Christians with sneering references to “Demonic” possession and accusations of the adoption of the principal that a lie, told often enough, acquires a semblance of truth by virtue of sheer repetition. Your blatant denial of the patently obvious is so irrational as to be comedic.
“So far as I know, Aquinas never addressed questions later raised by, for example, Galileo Galilee -- when findings or theories of science seem to contradict scripture.
What?! When Aquinas, in his work Of God and His Creatures, states “Since therefore falsehood alone is contrary to truth, it is impossible for the truth of faith to be contrary to principles known by natural reason” he is telling us that if faith and “principles know by natural reason” appear contrary to each other, then it is obvious that our understanding either of faith or truth (or both) is faulty.
A case in point: Into my late twenties, Science seemed to be quite convinced that the Universe was in a “steady state” and was eternal (some scientists - such as Einstein - suspected this was not exactly accurate as early as the twenties, but this suspicion did not find its way into the general public’s knowledge (or public school text books) for some forty years. But, in the meantime, bible scoffers were pleased to heap scorn on the opening phrase of Genesis, “In the beginning”), claiming that obviously there was no beginning.
In another example; for a very long time a great many people believed that the Biblical phrase “the four corners of the earth” was “proof” that the earth was flat.
We now know that both beliefs were erroneous (although ever since the discovery of the red shift, Einstein’s relativity, and the background noise of the “Big Bang,” Scientists have desperately been trying to walk back the discovery that there was a beginning, which philosophers (including Aquinas), for an uncountable time, had known.
Aquinas cannot be read as though his writings are lab report in a peer-review research paper (nor can the Bible).
“Of course, "science" by definition cannot "prove" any such thing.” (That Science “proves the nonexistence of God.”
Of course. So why do you continue to tell me something you know I know?
“but I've never seen that argument made by posters on Free Republic.”
You strain credulity. Again, to “see” one must look.
My thoughts are hardly worthy of consideration.
But, I think that you ask questions that no Materialist (Naturalist, Socialist, Marxist, Darwinist, Democrat, 0bamatron, Repubic, ad nauseum) can answer. Any more than can they deal with the issues of Free Will, Human Liberty (they are all for the liberty of Apes, dogs, & cats), or Unalienable Rights. Such issues exist beyond the boundaries permitted by their cramped, dehumanized understanding.
Apologies for the tardiness of my reply. Family celebrations intruded.
Oh, I’m sorry. And you did so want the last word. Very well, you may have the last word.
YHAOS: Issues "great billowing clouds" of smoke which in no way address the point.
YHAOS: "If you grow weary of my “great billowing” description, abandon and renounce your tactics."
Abandon the truth? Renounce exposing nonsense?
Never!
B-)
quoting BJK: "...there are no such “fans” posting of Free Republic..."
YHAOS: "These “fans” mock Christians with sneering references to “Demonic” possession and accusations of the adoption of the principal that a lie, told often enough, acquires a semblance of truth by virtue of sheer repetition.
Your blatant denial of the patently obvious is so irrational as to be comedic."
I've seen nothing remotely resembling your description here.
Indeed, mocking comes from the other side, as if science in general and evolution specifically were invented by Nazis to justify the Holocaust!
YHAOS: "[Aquinas] is telling us that if faith and 'principles know by natural reason' appear contrary to each other, then it is obvious that our understanding either of faith or truth (or both) is faulty."
Thank you for confirming my observation that Aquinas never specifically addressed questions about: what, when they appear to conflict?
He merely asserted that they must not.
YHAOS: "So why do you continue to tell me something you know I know?"
Because all your great billowing clouds of smoke strongly suggests you are confused and in doubt on this subject, FRiend.
It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.
- Thomas Jefferson
Darwinism, secularism, materialism -- these are notions that have seduced a lot of otherwise clever people into thinking we can simply spend what we received from our forefathers without ever looking to the bottom line.
- From:Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design
How would our Declaration of Independence read?
We hold no truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are evolved based on chance, that they are endowed by a mindless chemical process from a mindless universal algorithm with circumstantial alienable rights that among these are a delusion of life, materialistic determinism, and the pursuit of happenstance.DNA has the following:
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware? – All rhetorical questions…
Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code.
To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.
In living cells, information-carrying molecules (such as DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery that reads that information and converts it into proteins is like the DVD player. As in the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them.
This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. Not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered, biologist Frank Salisbury explained the problem in a paper in American Biology Teacher:
It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:
The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.From: Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories
Examples of beneficial human mutations in evolutionary literature :
1. Sickle Cell Anemia
2. Cystic Fibrosis
3. Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency
4. Tay-Sachs Disease
5. Autism
6. Rape
7. Murder
8. Stupidity
Hmmm... That changes?...
How could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware? - (no longer rhetorical questions)
Indeed. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear YHAOS!
“I think that you ask questions that no Materialist (Naturalist, Socialist, Marxist, Darwinist, Democrat, 0bamatron, Repubic, ad nauseum) can answer. Any more than can they deal with the issues of Free Will, Human Liberty (they are all for the liberty of Apes, dogs, & cats), or Unalienable Rights. Such issues exist beyond the boundaries permitted by their cramped, dehumanized understanding.”
Spirited: At bottom, evolutionary materialism is a spiritual, religious worldview attempting to answer the Ultimate Questions.
1. Does God exist? They say no
2. Is there an afterlife? They say no
3. What is the cosmos? They say it is void, matter and evolutionary energies working in and through void/matter
4. What is wrong with man and why does evil exist? They say that creation itself is fallen because matter is evil hence what is wrong with man is genetic and chemical, meaning chemical imbalances in the brain.
5.What can be done if anything to redeem man? Answers according to Marxist materialists: Pavlovian conditioning which includes psychological and physical terror; application of brain-altering drugs in order to control, conform and properly channel thoughts; and for the genetically unredeemable, euthanasia, abortion, genocide (60,000,000+ men, women, children).
Lenin kept the statue of an ape on his desk to remind him that the people being ruthlessly butchered by his bully-boys weren’t human beings like himself but unevolved apes.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
The working analogy is the story of Flatland. Or, if you prefer, the dimensional framework / tesseract explanation offered by Carl Sagan during one of his COSMOS episodes.
Ah! the five questions any self respecting Socialist would ask their-selves.. and instinctively know the answers to..
BUT you never claimed on this thread to be very smart...
And any accusing you of it.. may be projecting..
Its a hard thing for a human to admit considering the deep things of life is a bit too deep for him..
him being like a primate inspecting a Rolex watch.. it don’t tick and he can’t figure out WHY?..
I asked you: Do you believe there is any such thing as human nature itself?
And you answered: Yes. We act on our preprogrammed instincts. Later on, you gratuitously added: Humans are vicious predators. You should start reading history and you should actually read the Bible instead of parroting what your pastor says. [Oh really???]
Here’s what I wonder about: Is Darwinist theory actually telling us that at the very top of the biological hierarchy we find a vicious animal — that is, man? That man is entirely shaped by blind natural processes, rather than that man is shaped by his heredity, the natural environment, and his particular cultural environment?
I have seen efforts by so-called Neo-Darwinist sociobiologists to explain human culture as an evolutionary development in itself. But why would material Nature care about human culture, if Nature purportedly is only interested in the survival of the fittest sexual reproducers, who all boil down to be exclusively material entities? (And yet, doesn’t this in itself imply a final cause at work? See more below.)
On your account, it seems Darwin’s theory leads us to conclude that human beings are preprogrammed to be vicious. Still, I note that not all human beings are “vicious predators.” If that is the case, the ones who are not vicious predators must be doing something to overcome the alleged “preprogramming.” I also note that Darwin’s theory really has nothing to say about the source of the alleged “preprogramming.” It is just “there,” an epistemically prior commitment which is yet totally inexplicable on Darwinian theoretical grounds.
For if something is preprogrammed, two issues instantly arise: (1) A program is constructed to enable a machine to achieve an end, goal, or purpose. But this would be a final cause — something strenuously rejected by materialist science. (2) Programs do not construct themselves: They have a designer; and designers do not reduce to purely material entities.
Seeing the difficulty, Darwinism refuses to grapple with the problem of design in Nature. Rather, Darwinists prefer to speak of apparent design. Which to me is like admitting that Nature is constantly fooling us with a persistent illusion.
This seems to be mantra which you are fond of intoning:
Natural selection is the gradual natural process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment.How do you reconcile the apparent discrepancy between “preprogramming” and natural selection, which is a alleged to be, as Jacques Monod put it, a purely “natural” process evolving by means of “pure, blind chance,” to no purpose at all?For a given environment, assuming that the living population already exists and that there is a variation of genetic traits in that population, those traits that enable making more babies than the other traits become more common. Split the population in two and put the two groups in different environments, you'll end up with two different sets of traits being selected for.
To me, Darwin’s theory is fundamentally incoherent and self-contradictory through and through. It is not science, but a dogmatic philosophical commitment, an outgrowth of philosophical materialism and the misapplication of Newton’s laws of motion — and it seems the eternal desire of some people at least to escape from God and His Providence (not to mention His Judgment)….
Furthermore, I regard Darwinism itself as a sort of fossil: This is mid-19th-century “science.” Darwin never heard of, for example, Max Planck (who discovered the quantum); Albert Einstein (who discovered the photon and Relativity theory); Gregor Mandel (father of the science of genetics, not to mention he was an Augustinian friar); Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, et al. (the pioneers of quantum mechanics); Georg Cantor (father of set theory and the famous incompleteness theorem); Georges LeMaitre (who first conceived of the Singularity, not to mention that he was a Jesuit priest of monsignor rank); Alan Guth (father of the Big Bang/inflationary universe model); Claude Shannon (father of information theory); the list of the great ones goes on and on, but space prohibits extension here.
In short, since Darwin, two great scientific revolutions have occurred — relativity theory and quantum theory — and we are on the threshold of a third great scientific revolution, the information revolution. And yet none of these revolutions have put so much as a dent in Darwinian orthodoxy. Like Ol’ Man River, it just keeps rolling along….
But to me, this is an act of profound denial of some of the greatest achievements of science that have absolute relevance to biology. The late great Harvard evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, was evidently aware of this, and seemingly it troubled him deeply. So deeply, that he made a proposal that biology ought to be regarded as a separate, sovereign science in itself, of a stature equal to physics, but with its own sovereign laws.
But I find such a proposal ridiculous; for biological organisms have a physical basis. It’s just that they don’t entirely reduce to their physical basis. [Which is why I think your statement that “the mind is what the brain does” is pretty lame.] To explain them requires more than physics and chemistry. But you can’t come up with a complete description of biological organisms without physics and chemistry.
And you certainly can’t get to a complete description via Darwin’s evolution theory. It explains less than meets the eye, and defies common sense in the process. I gather this has something to do with a penchant to be satisfied with seeing things as they appear, not as they actually are.
But evidently, its acolytes will defend it to their dying breath.
This attitude is not good — for science. IMHO, FWIW.
Welcome to FreeRepublic, R7 Rocket! Thank you so much for writing.
Spirited irish, you didn’t read my post where I actually stated the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Arguing with YEC’s is like arguing with progressives/feminists.
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