Creation "Science"

ID theorists, young-earthers, old-earthers, and creationists, in general, use what Barbara Forrest calls the "wedge-strategy" against not only strict Darwinists but all competent evolutionary biologists. In short, this means "divide and conquer," or, better still, "conquer by division." Of course, not all good evolutionary biologists are strict Darwinists. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, to name one, is a departure from strict Darwinism. But evolutionary biologists who believe in punctuated equilibrium should still be taken serious. Creationists, on the other hand, are another matter entirely.

Some of you might be surprised that there are real evolutionary biologists who are not Darwinists. Creationists would like you to believe that all biologists in mainstream academia are materialistic, atheist hedonists, who, perhaps because they are the pawns of the devil, insist on infecting our public schools and higher education institutions with their venom. "Design or Chance!" is the creationist battle cry; it is also a flase dichotomy. Natural selection is not chance, for reasons I won't get into now.

The creationists say that evolution is a theory. There are two things wrong with this. First, evolution is a fact, a fact that is contained in our fossil records. What the creationists really mean is that natural selection is a theory. But so is General Relativity. A theory organizes the evidence into a cohesive whole. What the creationists really mean is that natural selection is an hypothesis. Phrased in this way, they are right.

But this is still misleading, and that's what the creationists are trying to do. They want things to appear as if there are two equal but opposite sides to this debate, and that each has equal claim to being the truth. This is false. There have been many alternatives to Darwinism. Some, such as puncuated equilibrium, are still on the table. Others, such as Lamarckianism or vitalism, have long been refuted. These were once viable hypotheses but are no longer so. Creationism was never a viable hypothesis. An hypothesis, by definition, must be falsifiable, which creationism is not. Yet still, the creationists maintain that their views must be given an equal share of time as Darwin's in the public schools. By that rationale, shouldn't Lamarckianism and vitalism be given an equal share, as well?

Some people once thought so. In the USSR under Stalin, Trofim Lysenko promoted a form of Lamarckianism that was soon adopted as the official biology of the Soviet Union. Lysenko promised massive yields from wheat crops if his experiments, such as shocking wheat seeds in ice-water, were implemented as the status quo. Consequently, millions of people starved.

In cases such as this, when politics interferes with science, the results are dangerous. Add religion into the mix, and things just get worse. Creation science is not only no science, it is dangerous.

 

I can not argue for the creationists since I do not see the logic in it, but if they wish to believe so without passing judgement let them. They are just afraid to step out of their basic set of beliefs, or they just don't see the point in discovering how we came to be.


The idea behind scientific theory is that it gives an approximate answer to the truth. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and even darwinism are used to describe our reality. But they do so approxiamately.

My question is this; what good does it do to argue for any of them? If evolution is true, then teaching that it doesn't exist doesn't hinder the process. We will still adapt and change with our surroundings. And what has our insatiable quest to discover the fundamentals of relativity and quantum physics done for us? We have spent the past century arguing over these theories with only little progress or application of either. GPS systems are nice toys, but they aren't necessary, unless you plan to put a bomb directly on top of somebody.

But as for evolution, many religious people are coming around. Which takes more intelligence, creating a universe in a matter of days, or willing existance into being step by step in perfect harmony? I believe the arguement is compelling.

But I fully understand your conviction to profess the truth.

 

Many of them are not at all willing to do that. Passing judgment is what they're mainly about.

I agree that we will still evolve whether we believe in evolution or not. However, if the teaching that evolution is false is accepted by the school systems, our children will be deprived of a plausible alternative to simplistic Biblical literalism. Would that make a "practical" difference? I can't prove that it would, but the consequences of faulty thinking are unpredictable. I'm a Christian, but I tend to agree with Dawkins that belief in the literal truth of the Bible is intellectually impoverishing. Since I also believe that enlightenment is the whole point of human existence, I think it would be tragic if generations of young people were raised in a belief system that discourages critical thinking. (By the way, an equally strong argument could be made against teaching dogmatic Darwinism in the schools).

 

I agree. There are many plausible problems with teaching that evolution doesn't exist and simplicity in interpretation is a dangerous thing.


But what if teaching evolution causes more people to become oblivious to the spiritual world, in turn extending their stay in the physical world? I'm not going to stand by this argument adamantly, because all occurs as it should, but it is the other side of that coin.

I believe evolution should be taught because we can be confident in its validity, but it doesn't actually affect our fate.

 

It could, or more accurately, bad or inadequate science education could affect our fate. Creation Science and Intelligent Design are not science. They are not refutable, & have generated no empirically validated hypotheses that are subject to peer review. They consist almost entirely of critiques of Darwinian theory. While I think it's useful for students to be familiar with Darwinian theory, it's inappropriate to call them an alternative "science". I think it's likely that a faulty idea of science could adversely impact scientific and technological progress, nor do I think that good science necessarily encourages a materialistic world view. I think a case could be made for including a philosophy course in the high school curriculum that would explore the pros and cons of a materialistic world view. Besides, isn't it part of a materialistic world view to say that truth doesn't matter unless it has practical consequences in terms of gadgets and widgets?

 

Evolution is for people who don’t believe in God, so that they can have something to believe in, so they won’t feel left out.

For those who believe in an Omnipotent Omniscient God realize what that means.

It means that if God wanted to, he could have created the whole universe last night while you thought you were asleep. That could include you and the fossil record you’re so proud of and the all the memories of your life up till now and there is no way to prove that he didn’t.

 

I agree.

Materialism is a subject well discussed among the youth today, along with many philosophical topics. This is no doubt a direct effect of how easily accessible information is now. I enjoy discussing philosophy with younger people to see how far they've come in their enlightenment. But the problem is that even though they reach these issues in there journey at earlier points, they don't place enough value on them. It is as if the more time they have to think about the metaphysical world, the more numb they become to its application.

 

But I take my belief in God from the Jainists. I do not believe that it is a judging, acting entity in terms of its ability to control reality. It is reality and therefore never loss control. It flows and if it had to act to reveal itself, then it would be an entity that was looking for affirmation, which would not make it omniscient. To many believers associate God with humans, and give it human characteristics. The reason the bible does so is because it was written at a time in our evolution when people could not fathom anything more advanced. It was a way to describe in some form of truth what God is and was properly applicable. Now, not so much.

 

I just had to respond to this one because it's so crazy.

OlderWaterBrother's position seems to be a version of Occasionalism, a dead neo-Cartesian philosophy, used to support a version of creationism, that we could call really young-earth creationism. I'd heard of this position before, but I honestly thought it was a joke or parody on young-earth creationism.

The idea is this: If God is omnipotent and free, then he could spontaneously create (and recreate) the world at any (and all) times. So, God could have created the world, say, five minutes ago, furnishing us with all our memories of the distance past, filled the pages of history books, etc. The view is unfalsifiable and so unscientific. But in case anyone wants a metaphysical refutation, as if it needed one, here it is.

I am arguing to this conclusion: One is never justified in believing in miracles. Special creation is an instance of a miracle. Now, it is the business of science to search for universal, naturalistic laws of nature, that is, to find order in the world. Now, if God's will is free, then his actions are, in some sense, arbitrary. He can create whatever he damn well pleases. But worse still, God is omnipotent. So, he can create, in an absolute sense, anything. Miracles, then, obviously do not have the form of a universal law. Really young-earth creationism is only a very extreme instance of this. Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in any miracle. Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in special creation.

 

Question: what if evolution and speciation WAS God's plan to create Earth? Why does a belief in evolution mean that one could not also believe in a Christian God? Because the Bible doesn't explain the Creation that way? If we were still believing the Bible literally, then the Earth is about 6,000 years old, the Earth is flat, and Hell is located beneath our feet.

Peace and love

 

And it is! Televangelist Jack Van Impe reported that geologists drilling deep into the center of the Earth heard human screams. But seriously...a number of respectable scientists who are also Christians agree that evolution is God's plan: Dr. Francis Collins, head of the genome project; Dr. Kenneth Miller, professor at Brown University; and of course the late French paleontologist and Jesuit mystic, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard thought evolution was the very centerpiece of God's plan for creation, although he didn't believe in natural selection. Collins and Miller do believe in natural selection, and have been leading defenders of Darwin against the Creationists. Miller specifically addresses the argument brought up by OlderWaterBrother--either evolution happened or God has gone overboard to trick us--and if that's the case, we might as well give up trying to figure anything out!

 

Pope JP2 also fits into this camp of Evolutionary Creationists, and suprisingly so does Billy Graham...

 

Why does it have to be a christian god?

 

Hi Common Sense,

Thanx, it’s nice to know I’m still crazy after all these years.

I was wondering if you could help me with a few points from your argument?


I am arguing to this conclusion: One is never justified in believing in miracles.
(OK, give it a go)


Special creation is an instance of a miracle.
(What is your definition of Special creation and miracle?)


Now, it is the business of science to search for universal, naturalistic laws of nature, that is, to find order in the world.
(For the sake of the argument, OK)


Now, if God's will is free, then his actions are, in some sense, arbitrary.
(This doesn’t seem like a true statement, please explain.)


He can create whatever he damn well pleases.
(I wouldn’t have said damn but yes he could)


But worse still, God is omnipotent.
(Why is it worse still?)


So, he can create, in an absolute sense, anything.
(Yes he could)


Miracles, then, obviously do not have the form of a universal law.
(Whoa! Where did this come from? It doesn’t follow from anything you’ve stated so far and it’s far from being obvious.)


Really young-earth creationism is only a very extreme instance of this.
(Instance of what? A Miracle or not having the form of a universal law or both?)


Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in any miracle.
(Nothing you have stated up till now proves this statement and even if you had proven that Miracles do not have the form of a universal law, this statement still would not have to be true.)


Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in special creation.
(This is really the first statement that logically follows the one above it. Now if only we just had some logical reason to believe the statement above it we would be in business.)

 

Hi hippie_chick666,

Some good questions so here goes.


What if evolution and speciation WAS God's plan to create Earth?
Actually, there are many who feel this is the way it happened and it would solve the problem of the giant step from inorganic elements to organic life.


Why does a belief in evolution mean that one could not also believe in a Christian God?
Again, I think you’ll find that there are many who call themselves Christian who do believe in evolution.


Because the Bible doesn't explain the Creation that way?
That’s true the Bible does not explain the creation that way.



If we were still believing the Bible literally, then the Earth is about 6,000 years old, the Earth is flat, and Hell is located beneath our feet.
Many who take the Bible literally, do not believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, in fact the Bible is silent about the age of the Earth and it could be billions of years old. The 6,000 years you speak of is the time that the Bible says man has been on the Earth, from Adam to today.


As for the Earth being flat the Bible doesn’t really say that and it also doesn’t say that the Sun revolves and the Earth as some use to think.


About Hell being under our feet, the word in the Old Testament that was translated as hell was sheole and Strong’s says that sheole can be translated as grave, so yes; in that sense it could be under our feet. (There are some Christians who feel that the Bible does not support the concept of Hell as being a place where people are tormented for ever.)

Hope this is helpful.

 

What about quantum mechanics?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqJOIQWkfWA

This is never brought up in the ID or evolution debate... why?

I think it is the hard evidence we are looking for to prove an intelligent interconnecting force, a oneness of consciousness... that yes... evolved us over time, but not in the way darwin pruposes, or genesis (who ever really bought into that)!

but what about religion?

Well it unifies it while throwing out fundementalist literalists interpretations like the earth was created in 6 days or whatever... mystics in many religions from diverse culutural backgrounds have reached the same conclusions of radical quantum mechanics people.


So the symbols are just that symbols.


The cold hearted anti-mystic clinging to dying scientific models that reject consciousness, reject mysticism... have to face facts.

It isn't all meaningless bullshit.

And the fundies have to face fact

It isn't all about your religion being 100% right about everything jeez!

 

Sure.

A miracle is an act of God; not a universal, natural law. Special creation is just the term creationists use for the creation of the world, but the key is that, by whatever means special creation took place, things don't happen that way anymore.

You probably don't like the word "arbitrary." But all I mean by that is what I said next. And that is:

Moving on...

It is "worse" because...

The point is that a free, omnipotent being could create anything at will, with no possible constraints whatsoever (except maybe the law of non-contradiction). Universal laws of nature, on the other hand, are strictly determined. We can use them to predict future events. A free agent is, by definition, undetermined and so unpredictable. That the external world in toto is governed by universal laws is a necessary condition for science to even take place. It must be presupposed. If we find some, as of yet, unexplained phenomenon, it makes no good scientific sense to explain it away as a miracle. You'd, in effect, be saying that that event might never happen again, and if it did, it would just be because God wanted it to on a whim. And that is why...

Okay?

A miracle.

Hope that helps you get to my conclusion.

P.S. I sincerely think you should read Malebrache. You'd probably like him. Give him a quick wikipedia.

P.P.S. This is from the wikipedia article on Omphalos Theology:

The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that in order for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels (omphalos is Greek for "navel"), and that therefore no evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable. The idea has seen some revival in the twentieth century by some modern creationists, who have extended the argument to light that appears to originate in far-off stars and galaxies....

The Omphalos hypothesis contains a powerful philosophic problem, one that troubles even those who have applied it in recent times. Since the hypothesis is based on the idea that apparent age is an illusion, it is a consistent extension to then suggest that the world could have been created as recently as five minutes ago. Any memories a person has of times before this were created in situ, in exactly the same fashion that the fossils were. This idea is sometimes called "Last Thursdayism" by its opponents, as in "the world might as well have been created last Thursday." The concept is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method — in other words, it is impossible even in principle to subject it to any form of test by reference to any empirical data because the empirical data themselves are considered to have been arbitrarily created to look the way it does at every observable level of detail.

 

The Bible is silent about the age of the Earth? I thought it took God 7 days to create the world, according to the Bible. Those who say the Earth is 6000 years old not only base it on Adam to present, but those 7 days of creation. Hence, those who read it strictly will say 6,000 years at the oldest.

Yes, you have made my point for me. Now my question to you: If you have proven that many Christians can believe in both evolution and God, why have you fought the idea of evolution being valid? Is it not just as likely that all of the evidence of evolution is actually evidence of God's plan, which used evolution to create this world?

Peace and love

 

Hi hippie_chick666

Ok, yes the Bible does say seven days but let ask you do feel that God’s days are 24 hours? The Bible also says of God: “For a thousand years are in your eyes but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch during the night.” (Ps 90:2,4) and also that “one day is with God as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” (2Pe 3:8). Some will say that we are still in that 7th day of rest which has been going on for some 6000 years so that each creation day could be 6000 years or longer.
Also Genesis 1:1 says: In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Which leaves the amount of time spent making the earth open ended.
Then in Genesis 1:2 start the 7 days you speak of and those days are what he did with the earth after it was created to prepare it for the creation of man.

Next, no, I haven’t made you’re point for you. I merely stated that: “I think you’ll find that there are many who call themselves Christian who do believe in evolution.” I did not say that I thought they were correct in thinking that or that a true Christian would think that.

As for why I fought the idea of evolution, for a number of reasons.

One, even if the Bible didn’t exist, I find the whole notion of evolution absurd.
Mathematically, the odds against evolution are mathematically impossible and the only answer you get from evolutionists is well it happened so it wasn’t impossible, talk about blind faith.
Logically, evolutionists say it’s all about, survival of the fittest, but I’m sorry to tell you this but during the thousands, excuse me, hundreds of millions of years it took for the mutations to develop into some thing better, those mutations where making the creature vulnerable to all the predators around it and would have been extinct faster than the Dodo bird. And as for the sexes, male and female let’s say that a man finally evolved from an ape who was he to mate with? A man and an ape can not have children so was he to wait around a million years for a woman to evolve or I’m I to believe that apes everywhere began to have human children. This would not be just for mankind but for every step of evolution along the whole chain.

Two, talk about blind faith, most evolutionists would put to shame most worshipers of other faiths. They tend to be intellectual snobs, if you don’t believe what they believe then you are ignorant, stupid and uneducated. So, I just like to play with their minds.

And last, a long time ago I saw a movie; I believe the name of it was “Something of value”. It was the story of colonialism in Africa. When the Europeans got to Africa they took away the Gods that they worshiped, that had helped them survive for hundreds of years in a land that had not always been hospitable to them, and the Europeans did not give them something of value in return to replace them. So the thought was, never take something away from someone unless you replace it with something of greater value.

My question, evolutionists take away God and worship and replace it with what? With what do they replace the void in people’s lives with? You, yourself said we should seek the divine within, how do we do that when the evolutionist have taken away all that is divine?

 

Common Sense,

I stand in awe, I have never seen such a fallacious argument in my life. I’ve actually been studying your argument to see if you left out any of the common fallacies of reasoning. I don’t know where to start, I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt in my last post but your answer just made it worse.

I mean, when I asked you to define miracle and you said: A miracle is an act of God; not a universal, natural law, that added circular reasoning to the fallacies of your argument seeing as Miracles, then, obviously do not have the form of a universal law is one of your conclusions. And I don’t agree with your definition of miracle, I would say yes a miracle is an act of God but that it falls well within the universal laws. The only reason why it seems like they fall outside of universal law is because we don’t understand those laws as well as God does and we never will. So seeing as I don’t agree with your starting premise I naturally won’t agree with any conclusions you draw from it.

Next, let’s look at some of your other statements.

Now, if God's will is free, then his actions are, in some sense, arbitrary.

This is just not true, although mankind having free will is sometimes arbitrary, God by his very nature can not be, as Einstein said: “God does not play dice with the universe.”

He can create whatever he damn well pleases.

Maybe in an absolute sense this is true but God is self limiting and has limited himself when dealing with this universe to stay within the laws of this universe.

But worse still, God is omnipotent.

What’s this, a shot at God for being omnipotent?

So, he can create, in an absolute sense, anything.

Yes and you could jump off a cliff tomorrow to your death but I don’t think your going to do it just like God could create anything but won’t because some things it just wouldn’t make sense to do.

So, with the last four statements being untrue nothing that follows has been proven true.

Miracles, then, obviously do not have the form of a universal law.

Now we get to that circular reasoning where you stated this at the beginning and now you state it as a conclusion even though you have no reasoning to support it.

Really young-earth creationism is only a very extreme instance of this. (You say that the pronoun “this” refers to a miracle)

Whose definition do we use for miracle yours or mine?

Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in any miracle.

Nothing you have stated up till now proves this statement and even if you had proven that Miracles do not have the form of a universal law, this statement still would not have to be true.

Therefore, there is no good reason to believe in special creation.

This is really the first statement that logically follows the one above it. Now if only we just had some logical reason to believe the statement above it we would be in business.



I really hope that the theory evolution is thought out much better than this. I would hate to think that people are giving up the divine in themselves for something this poorly thought out.