An Unfortunate Relapse; More Dissent from Darwin

So dishonest people aren't liars, and deceived people aren't deluded? You really have a way with words mark.

If I am taken in by "the spirit of the age", then pray tell what this spirit might be?

Perhaps it is the denial of the existence of God - but I believe God exists. Perhaps it is the denial of supernatural miracles - but I believe miracles happen and I have witnessed them firsthand. Perhaps it is the denial of the inspiration of the Bible - but I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired and in fact the text leads me to reject creationism as much as scientific facts do. Perhaps it is the denial of orthodox doctrine - but I am a Calvinist Trinitarian and people far more fundamentally creationist than me have propounded far worse heresies than I have.

The fact is that if this "spirit of the age" has left me a Bible-believing, miracle-trusting, Trinitarian Christian, then perhaps it is not much of a spirit at all. Perhaps the dogmatism is only in your head.

Really? You are not the enemy? But you have said yourself:

You can embrace the Scriptures as redemptive history or you can embrace Darwinism as a substitute, you can't have it both ways because Darwinians won't have it.

Well to me, if I embraced the Scriptures as redemptive history (and I do), then anyone who did not would be an enemy to me in some way, since they are enemies with God to reject His Scriptures. And if I believed that all Darwinism was predicated on rejecting the Scriptures as redemptive history, and I believed that all who rejected the Scriptures as redemptive history were enemies in some way, then I would have to believe that all Darwinism was an enemy to me, and that all Darwinists are.

You are right that I am not your enemy. But it is only precisely because I embrace the Scriptures as redemptive history. Doesn't that throw a spanner in your tidy dualism? If Darwinism is antithetical to Christianity, how can I be a Darwinist and yet not your enemy?

In any case, my "stubborn refusal" to accept Creationism is really just a reasoned view of the evidence at hand. You and your views have consistently failed to explain almost all the physical evidence surrounding evolution, whether they be cranial capacities or genetic traits. Even creationists when they try, by "baraminology", to separate animals into kinds, cannot avoid lumping humans with apes - they can only separate them on shoddy theological bases instead of biological facts. I was once a creationist too. Physical evidence has brought me where I am, and physical evidence will get me out - if only you had any!

Of course God did indeed act in a special creation event: God used evolution to create humanity.

What's "Darwinism"? Do you mean "evolution" or "neoDarwinism"? Because no one subscribes to Darwinism anymore. There's a difference, believe it or not.

And with all these recent appeals to the movie Expelled (which no one here has even seen yet, to my knowledge), I'm starting to wonder if the YECs here are aware that the door swings both ways:

http://evanevodialogue.blogspot.com/...evolution.html

Not to mention many of the evolutionary creationists who have been dismissed from the communion table for their beliefs. I make no bones about the fact that I was dismissed last year. I no longer held to the tenets of my church. If those martyred professors don't hold to the tenets of science, why should they expect to be kept on (and given tenure, for that matter)?

That this happens as you infer is pretty much a lie. See Expelled. That is not how Darwinism is studied and written about. Its not how creationism is evaluated. Unless you want to admit that Darwinism doesn't work in several fundamental areas, as Altenburg proves. But, the TEs are all too chicken to just face it.

From a trailer of a film that hasn't been released you can with full authority state that the scientific process is a lie, well that's remarkable.

Nonsense. Your books are cooked from the start. See Altenburg.

You go first and explain why your math rules out the "common designer" as the reason for the snow flake, the spin or quarks or your cilia. That is, show that your predictive model arises from a particular cause, not just that the calculation works from a given point of beginning.

Oh you can't or won't or don't like my question? Well, then i guess I win. (That is how we play this game, right? I am learning from you after all.)

You go first and explain why your math rules out the "common designer" as the reason for the snow flake, the spin or quarks or your cilia.

For example, given that an aquatic creature has scales and fins, and assuming that it is Intelligently Designed (and nothing else), what is the probability that it has gills?

I don't think you are deluded, just mislead and on the wrong horse. I don't really know why you pursue this so zealously, nor do I care.

In a word, 'Darwinism'.

It's you attack on Creationism that I think is ill founded. You say that you believe in this and that but I don't see you all the interested. I don't think the theistic evolution even qualifys as a heresy because it has no marks of theology of any kind. I don't know what you believe about God but I have often seen God defined in very different terms then I would recognized as traditional Christian theism. My problems are either Scriptural or Scientific, I don't blend the two.

That's great that you survived the Darwinian attack on religious conviction which leads me to wonder why you attack fellow Christians with such a passion.

That's right and I stand by that statement. I don't think you are as friendly to Christian theism as you pretend to be. There are just no many conflicts that arise when you just say, I believe it, so what? I have known people who believe the serpent in the garden was a literal snake. I generally listen politely to their thoughts and share what insights I can about it being a proper name. I certainly don't dog their steps and join the crowd in attacking them on nit picky points like you have done me in the past.

By the way, still think an uncorrected transcript error is not a mutation?

What you attack or reject in the privacy of your own thoughts is your buisness. What you do on these boards is simply to attack people and never without a group of supporters. I'm really not impressed with your statement of what you believe because I know how semantics work. If you really are as fundamentalist (Calvanists are die hard fundamentalists by the way) then you should understand that a literal understanding of Genesis is the most common interpretation.

Darwin certainly thought it was possible. The man was an agnostic his whole life and considered his view as not having any affect on a persons religion whatsoever. Still it is the seemingly benign aspects of Darwinism that makes it so dangerous and apparently you don't see the danger.

First of all the burden of proof is on evolutionists, not me. I ask fundamental questions about the genetic mechanism for the most highly conserved genes affecting vital functions like the brain and there is no substantive response. The logical course would be to look at known genetic mechanisms for adaptive evolution but you guys can't even do that. Darwinians just keep chanting the mantra of 'mutations with beneficial affect' and it's absurd when looking at something as highly conserved as the human brain.

One other thing that has raised my incredulity to critical levels, you do the same thing to the Scriptures. When the text doesn't line up with your worldview you simply ignore it or distort the clear meaning. These generality neither confront me nor impress me, you forget, this isn't my first rodeo.

That is not special creation, there you go again.

Snowflakes are hexagonal because they were designed to be hexagonal, and because the tetrahedral arrangement of electron groups in a water molecule lends itself during hydrogen bonding to hexagonal arrangements far better than any other.

Electrons in atoms have spins because they were designed to have spins, and because applying the boundary conditions of a harmonic oscillator well on the wavefunction of an electron causes quantization of the z-magnetic moment.

Hadrons are made of quarks because they were designed to be made of quarks, and because quark triplets are one stable arrangement of quark-gluon combinations.

Cilia have variable filamentary structure because they were designed to have variable filamentary structure, and because they were diversified via evolution from their initial TSTS-like precursor.

See, the reason we take offense with ID is not because it has an intelligent design. It is not as if we want to look at the world and scour clean any trace possible of God. No, certainly not! God be praised in all ways for all things. Rather, we take offense with ID precisely because it prevents us from praising God in all ways for all things. For again, take a look at the way you posed that question:



And take a look at the way I posed my question:



Intelligent Design is scientifically useless even if the universe is intelligently designed for the simple reason that it doesn't predict anything, doesn't exclude anything, doesn't support anything, doesn't refute anything. The universe could be Intelligently Designed and be devoid of life (certainly seems intelligent considering all the damage humans have wrought), could be Intelligently Designed and have a biota that looks exactly like it evolved, could be Intelligently Designed and chock-full of hippogryphs, centaurs, unicorns and lightning-scarred wizards running around waving wands, could be Intelligently Designed and filled with swarms of nanomachines intent on remaking the universe into more copies of themselves, could be Intelligently Designed and ... whereas our biosphere, if indeed it evolved, can only look the way it is, with respect to the twin nested hierarchy and the observable characteristics of allele distribution and its change over time.

Furthermore, Intelligent Design believes that natural hypotheses and mechanistic explanations rule out an Intelligent Designer. Anything that evolved can't possibly be designed; therefore evolution tells us that there is no God and this materialistic nihilism must be countered with anything, even if it is with pseudo-scientific hogwash that has been admitted by its own founders to be on par with astrology. But see? They have prevented us from praising God in all ways for all things; it is no coincidence that ID publicly distances itself from Christianity and uses the offend-nobody term "Intelligent Designer" instead of "God". How can anything so ashamed of His name and His gospel ever help us praise Him? By contrast we see God as much in the mystery of evolution and an evolved biota as we would if we were surrounded by centaurs and mermaids; we are able to praise God under the microscope as we praise Him anywhere else - something that the ID people will never be able to do if their wedge is broken and they are proved wrong.

Interesting. Going to take some thought to respond.

The underlying assumptions about where one is going and what one is resisting require much sifting.

Oh, take your time. It's probably going to end up being placed two posts above mine or something anyway so it will look like you responded to me even before you saw what I wrote. ^^