Uber Genius

Again, ironic in the extreme. You glom onto my response and critique it with a self-refuting statement that destroys all philosophical statements as ending in false conclusions. You seem to miss that Jesus, the disciples, almost every author in the Bible, all of the Church Fathers, all scholastics, in fact all writing about theology uses these types of philosophical arguments. Then you complain that while doing two work-related chores I mistakenly misspell a homonym, Or my phone autocorrected my correct spelling. Your intellectual and emotional maturity is lacking in the extreme. please engage the person that posted as I did! His name is East Sky. Uber genius with an avatar of Wiley coyote didn't give you a clue? Really? Wiley Coyote Super Genius is how his business card reads in Loony Tunes he is always blowing himself up. It is painful to see someone so arrogant and ignorant going around correcting everyone. I had a five-year old child that used to do that. It was annoying then but they grew out of it by age 8. You are older than 8 aren't you? After several requests asking you to engage generously and intelligently I have given up. Please don't engage me with any more brilliant ideas about how to engage.

Started with a philosophic argument alright and man made but you conflate Paul's use of the term. no straw man as: P1 (Major premise) Philosophical arguments that are man-made produce wrong conclusions P2 (Minor Premise implicit) you gave a philosophical argument that was man-made for evil and suffering (albeit a man-made one Christians have given since the post nicean church fathers) Therefore you ended up with a wrong conclusion (modus ponens) So the irony is you gave me a philosophical man-made argument for why philosophical man-made arguments end up with wrong conclusions! is self-refutation a good thing? are you you trying to imitate my language to appear that you have some knowledge of logic? Strange, as you would have recognized that I wasn't making a straw man at all and would have changed your claims. your faking it. And you are being disingenuous. Please start again and engage my arguments in a generous way. or ignore them and make your own point without reference to round squares, or married bachelors, or philosophical arguments that conclude that philosophical arguments "all end up with wrong conclusions."

Actually that the light has traveled a long time to get to us. One inference is that space is expanding at less The the speed of light and so although things are moving away they are visible.

You misrepresented my point, misrepresented the nature of science, didnt respond to how your presumptions not only destroy scientific inference but now you claim there is no scientific knowledge (it is fairy tale). That is a knowledge claim! It is a sweeping one. Can you give justification that: Force = mass x acceleration is false? or that the reason we seem to not float while on Earth and do float in space is called the gravitational force is false? I'm trying to help here but am not finding your responses to be generous. Further you seem to be holding to a skepticism more extreme than Hume himself. Christ, Paul, the Church Fathers all called us to be disciple who were "renewed in there minds to both spiritual and non-spiritual things." Augustine if in many ways the father of philosophy taking over where the Greeks left off. The monastic traditions all saw themselves as studying God's design and his ways by studying science and engaging in philosophy. Science was in fact very much a product of Christianity in the West. Newton, Bacon, Liebniz, Boyle, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes were all so the father's of modern scientific method, modern physics, modern math, modern chemistry, astronomy, biology, genetics(Mendel)were all Christians who believed that God had revealed himself in his creation and had made a world that was discoverable to man! Just as Paul relates in his revelation in Roms. 1:19-20.

Yes. That is what I presumed. You equivocated. Let's avoid that and use scientific evidence leading to an inference in the proper context. That is a scientific one (as redshift is clearly a scientific evidence) and we were talking about a scientific debate over cosmogony or the nature of the beginning of the universe. So it seems that scientific inference is the only way one can take my statement.

Seems to be a typo here. the reason they fail to see it is it can't be seen. Therefore it can't be dismissed. Evidence by definition has to be known otherwise there is no evidence. Therefore it can't be dismissed. But it never existed. Here we need context and word study, especially for the Greek word pistis. But we can make some sense of the passage on faith. It is a function of testimony, and men's memory of their experience of God. Things unseen are thoughts we have about how God made the world from nothing by his word. (GEn 1-3) So based on testimony dating back 1500 years by the elders (probably a reference to authors and those testifying about God in OT, and in combination with our God-given faculty of rationality telling us the universe must have had a beginning (thoughts, testimonies, God's creative act via his words, are all unseen, but not unrational.) and a beginner that transcended the Creation.

So I think we need to back up and explain relations between evidences and inferences and arguments. evidences such as redshift have various explanations. Science works by gathering evidence of phenomena such as redshift and then tries to explain how that phenomena could occur. Several hypotheses are formed to explain cause had effect. They are then tested to see if they can predict causal relations. All science moves from evidence in support of causal inferences that are then tested that lead to theories or are abandoned as false. So we are not moving from evidence to opinion, which is one definition of the word inference. We are moving in a process from a phenomena to a description of one or more hypotheses that could cause that phenomena. So definionally, hypothesis can be used in a technical sense to be a general inference (causal explanation of the data or evidence or phenomena, etc., or as a reasoable guess. So redhsift is the phenomena, interaction with spacetime interacts with photons to shift their light to the red spectrum over long periods of time.

This is the very issue I'm bringing out. if God says, "All men everywhere are without excuse (because the created things give clear evidence that any sinful human with the bare minimum of intelligence inside the functional range, could understand using only men's fallible logic." These men are reprobate. these men are trapped in their sin. They have a very limited non-saving revelation by the HS. So are you arguing that Paul is wrong about that inference?

Wow. So I just quoted every major Christian Father's response to the problem of evil. You reduce it and eliminate it. P1 (major premise) Truth is a correspondence between a statement and reality. P2 (minor premise) Jesus claimed to be the messiah was a true statement. Argument: Therefore Jesus is the messiah in the real world. David1701:"Jesus is not the messiah in the real world because the argument is based on man-made philosophy." Apostle Paul argued for the resurrection using man-made philosophy in Athens, (see Acts 17 Mars Hill) and in the synagogues (see Acts 13-19), and in 1 Cor 15 Premise 1 (major premise) If there is no resurrection then Jesus didn't raise from the dead. Premise 2 (minor premise) Jesus did raise from the dead. argument: Therefore, there will be a resurrection from the dead. David1701:"Paul's arguments in Athens and Ephesians, And his conclusion that there is resurrection from the dead must be false becase the argument is based on man-made philosophy." read Matt 22:23-33. Here Jesus give the following argument: Major premise God is the God of the living Minor premise GOd is the God of Abraham, Isaaic, and Jacob argument therefore Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive! Something the sadducees denied! here there is a even more powerful revelation. "God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Is a motto that the sadducees were famous for. So Jesus uses there central motto to give a philosophical argument based on a premise they took to be true and central and reason to a conclusion they held to be false historically (namely they didn't believe in resurrection or even life after death, or angels. David1701:"Jesus' argument with the Saaducees is meaningless and his conclusion that there is resurrection from the dead must be false becase the argument is based on man-made philosophny." Your premise that we can't use philosophy to express ideas (where you use philosophy to convey that idea), is incoherent. It is self-refuting and lead such us to reject scripture because of its continual use of man-made philosophy! what has gone wrong with your thinking? well firstly you misdefine the phrase "man-made philosophy." It is used in scripture to mean arguments raised up against the knowledge of God. Not philosophical arguments in general. This is known a strange equivocating - or using an alternative definition for a word that misrepresents its meaning. Then you are creating a strawman out of that misrepresentation. A strawman is when you extend an claim or statement well beyond its original meaning and then attack that extension as obviously absurd hoping no one will notice that you were the inventor of the absurdity.

Great question and the answer is straightforward. Men have free will. GOd doesn't want a world full of robots programmed to love him because that is not love! Secondly, God does not choose individuals to go to hell, God loves all the world and wants everyone to come to a knowledge of him. He doesn't want any to perish. But men ultimately don't like God's requirement of unconditional surrender to him. As the famous atheist Richard Dawkins claims, even if I knew God existed I would never bow the knee to him. So Richard freely chooses hell. Nothing "unfair" here, "unwise" maybe, but not unfair. He had all the info he needed to make a wise decision, further Billions across history with less intellect, and much less knowledge of the evidence have chosen to follow God, so Richard is without excuse.

11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. The verse I posted (1:11) gives us 2 interesting views here. (1) one is clearly able to see that [bring forth grass] is a process of seedling erupting into tender vegetation and possibly continuing till maturity. (2) is quite the opposite. The [fruit tree {yielding} fruit after "HIS" kind {{whose seed is in itself}}. Clearly one is able to see the Fruit trees here are beginning at maturity and their fruit provides the next seedling. That would give the new saplings protection from the matured trees. It provides sparks of clarity. Maybe God is speaking in [past tense] here to Moses. Something I was clearly pointing out. Thanks for catching that. God clearly states no man is around to till the ground. 5And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. We then read, 6But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. So God cures the water issue with a "mist" and then cures who is to till the ground, 7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. But yes, water clearly was needed for the vegetation. So your point where Godmstates no man to till the ground is an important one. It is hard for the Theistic evolutionist to deal with the text here. There is no interpretation that allows for advanced hominids of the type they infer for they are surely able to till the ground. Special creation seems to be what the text has in mind, and I don't see why special Creation isn't how God create vegetation as well and then the rain and sun and co2 continue to produce more vegetation.

Something I was clearly pointing out. Thanks for catching that. Yep. I should have been more demonstrative and said that your point was certainly correct. But I find it to be correct for philosophical reasons as well as textual. It would be a strange thing indeed for God to create eggs that are fertilized but don't have chickens to incubate them. Seeds are more self sufficient. But one would need seeds, soil rich in nutrients, sunlight, and carbon dioxide.

Surely! point being the use of the word yom is not a literal day, something affirmed by most YEC view holders.

Great question.But not an easy answer. Lots of bad teaching since the early 1960s on this subject. I will try to unpack it as best I can on my 15-minute break. firstly why would God use such a deceptive practice given that in Romans 1:19&20, Paul argues that God uses his Creation as a testimony to God's own invisible attributes, namely his omnipotence, omniscience, his externality, his Godimmateriality, his goodness? Paul suggests that the testimony is so powerful that "all men are without excuse!" Jury is in, you all are obviously guilty. But wait there is a claim of false evidence. God has offered fabricated evidence and just created "The appearance of age," so the judge throws out the evidence and the guilty are free and can claim they didn't know there was a God. excuse the dramatic presentation but the ramifications of this view are incoherent with other scriptures. Now for the "short" answer. It is not possible to create a faked 4.5 yr old earth because God could plant false evidence en mass. But did he also do this for Big Bang cosmology with over 40 lines of evidence, and what about red shiftwhere light traveling over time increases its wavelength. The phenomenon has been measure since the 1920s I think and may have been discovered by Hubble (?). Anyways it takes photons three million years traveling at light speed (a constant) ))in order to produce cosmological redshift! But wait, God could fake that evidence. So add that last sentence to all statements requiring evidence. That is all non-properly basic beliefs. Your memory of the past could be false if, God planted false evidence in your mind. Your senses that perceive the external world could be falsely God faked the sights, smells, tastes, sound, and touch sensations between your brain Andy your soul. The ramifications of the last two inferences leads one to doubt any testimony (most of scripture), and even the scripture hand-written (30 or so word in the original Ten Commandments) of a small percentage of the prophetic writings that were dictation (No scholar supports the notion that God just dictated all the scriptures while mindless men copied what they heard (well, except for Joseph Smith)). and why trust God even if there was dictation since he has a storied history of forging evidence?

Agree. But on all three views that hold to God's Creation (YEC, intelligent design, and theistic evolution), Adam and Eve are considered adults in the garden. However, what does it mean in Gen 1 when instead of "God created" the text changes to God said "Let he Earth bring forth vegetation." Do you envision the earth bringing forth vegetation and seeds in time-lapse or do you see vegetation appearing instantly (something the earth can't do), or is the earth not doing the bringing forth but this isn't just a prosaic way of describing a fully formed vegetation appearing and from that time on producing seeds? The latter fits your view above I believe. Gen 2:4 is the begging of a new account of Creation from a different perspective that chapter 1 -2:3. In 2:4 what strikes me is that the word yom is used here differently than in the Chiasm in the previous chapter where yom means day (whether literal of metaphoric), here yom means age! However, we do appear to have the answer to the age old riddle, Which came first, the chicken, or the egg? Biblical answer chicken! fruit trees come first then produce seed. But also in gen 2 Creation account in verse five we have no vegetation because God hasn't caused it to rain. This hardly seems pertinent if rain is coming on the next day or two! Shoot some plants do better if only watered weekly, some monthly or quarterly. So whatever process God uses to create vegetation it appears to be long enough a process so that it requires the water cycle. Or have I missed something? Do you invision

Clearly we need to focus on whether objective moral values and duties exist or not. As our original poster points out some objections from the idea that the origin of moral actions is exclusively environmental and NOT a function of herretity or a faculty of moral intuition. In fact I claim that my moral experience of knowing right from wrong is similar in nature to my knowing that I'm not stuck in the Matrix right now waiting to follow the rabbit. My moral experience can be defeated but not by the moral conundrums you have offered in your post. My self-existence, existence of a physical world, existence of other people, belief that the universe is not 5 minutes old with the appearance of age, are all similar in nature to my belief in moral experience. in fact atheist Louise Antony suggests that the argument for skepticism of this type of moral experience and intuition, "Rests on premises that are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties themselves." So we will have a hard time ridding ourselves of this belief. Further naturalistic "evolutionary" accounts of any beliefs has proven dubious. IN fact there is not a credible evolutionary account for moral beliefs offered in the scientific literature. It is the stuff of internet infidel legend.

Two things: I'm sorry if I falsely inferred you are a young earth creationist. Appearance of age is central to all versions of same and so since you are unfamiliar I have misread you somewhere Secondly I am no inferring evolution at any point. My comment about Romans 1:19,20 is that God uses Creation as a testament to his nature that he will use to hold men accountable table. This has to do with the fact that all men across time intuit that anything that begins to exist must have a cause sufficient to create that thing. The universe is therefore a product of a timeless, all-powerful, all-knowing being that transcends nature. The our solar system is designed for life, as is our planet, as is our universe, provide three spectacular arguments for God's design. i don't believe for a minute that we are here do to evolution or that God created a universe that took 14 billion years of fine-tune to then quit his creative activities and just watched man evolve from dirt. (LEt the gentle reader recognize that I understand that the neodarwinian inference doesn't have anything to do with abiotic biogenesis but combining those concepts doesn't get at the naturalistic grand Creation story and "from dirt" is rhetorically fun). So evolution is not feasible on scientific grounds. But as I just realized that you have no interest in this discussion, I will honor your wishes. Best of luck. s

This doesn't address the appearance of age. Secondly it performs eisogesis rather than exegesis or "reads into rather than pulling out of the text." This is an approach where one read an interpretation back into a text rather than trying to gain the understanding of the original author and audience and make sure the text say something that no one would have ever understood it to say historically, before Henry Morris Henry Morris was the father of modern young earth creationism. I think he ad a book called "The Genesis Flood," that appeared in the early 1960s that held that the flood and other factors had produced the appearance of age (Biblical catastrophic) and that a 6000-8000 year-old universe appeared to be much older due to the age-conflating aspects of the flood. Later similar arguments were given to suggest that the universe wasn't 13.8B years old, by his son John and a colleague named Duane Gish suggesting that the universe wasn't expanding and that God created the universe with "an appearance of age. From there, Ken Ham and KentmHovind adopted similar arguments. Morris founded Institute of Creation Research and the Creation Research Society.

Is this concept associated with the concept introduced by Henry Morris known as, "The appearance of age?" If so then God is fudging the evidence to give the appearance of age and from Romans 1:19 -20, "For what can be known about God is plain to them (non-believers), because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things hat have been made. So they (non-believers) are without excuse. So on one hand you would argue God has falsified the record of creation with the appearance of age (if that is accurately what your reference to "God maturing," represents. on the other hand the Apostle Paul is giving a cosmological arguments and perhaps a teleological one that creation serves as evidence of God! But God lied about the evidence! he faked it on the appearance of age inference! Mr. Morris unwittingly gave atheists a reason to doubt God's veracity, or the Bible's veracity, or Paul's, pick one, or two, or all three!

So to the question, "Does Understanding the Magnitude of {DNA} in Its Entirety Prove "Intelligent Design?" NO. SORRY FOR THE FOLLOWING TECHNICAL GRAMMAR SPASM But I'm being technical in my answer. If we are going to argue from scientific evidence to a particular inference we should use the proper language I think. The reason being that so much misrepresentation of science has found its way into the Evangelical vernacular that we should be careful to accurately explain premises and arguments (statements like "it is only a theory" conflating the meaning in an non-technical text meaning hypothesis, and in a technical scientific context meaning not a hypothesis but rather proven hundreds of times and meeting a very high standard of scientific knowledge). Similarly proof or to prove something in court means something completely different in science and different still in philosophy. So DNA complexity and specification of information is such a great "evidence" in support of the premise that many things in our world exhibit the features of complexity, tight specification, and function as information. Further these things are best explained as either a function of chance or necessity or design. They are not necessity or chance therefore they are design. So DNA is evidence in support of a premise that in turn supports a design argument. Or DNA supports an abductive inference (argument to the best explanation) pointing to an intelligent designer. Once again, with the internet producing such a rich trove of infidels who will jump on technical inaccuracies in order to lead the conversation away from its enormous persuasive force, why not poison the wells to such childish attempts?

While the Ten Commandments certainly are helpful in conversing with others about any subject, the above can and should be edited to include the following addition: "If arrogance fills unbelievers conversation, and they demonstrate great cogent thinking devoid of logical fallacy and logic errors at one time and then try and manipulate Christians by misrepresenting scripture or science or other knowledge areas then call them on it. These are not things they misunderstand, they are lying and manipulating to strip Christians of their faith!" Jesus didn't suffer Pharisees and religious leaders attacking straw men, or trapping him with false dilemmas, or haranguing him ad hominem attacks or sweeping generalizations. Rule One should be apply these rules when actually witnessing not when engaging people who have no interest in understanding the Christian claims or evidence. You will know them by their fruit. Follow Jesus in his method, be gentle with the ignorant, crush those who are of their father the devil. Just kidding, we don't have the level of understanding of men's hearts that Jesus did. Err on the side of grace but remember that proletizing goes both ways and untrained evangelists often end up deconverting after a few years of engaging intellectual manipulation by well-trained atheist evangelists.

Physics can't prove Math is real, or that philosophical propositions are true, or that George Washington was the first US President. Physics proves PHYSICal things. Since God is immaterial therefore not physical, it is impossible for physics to prove His existence. Philosophy is where you might go to help you argue that God is the best explanation of things like the beginning of the universe, or the fine-tuning of life we find in the universe, or the sudden arrival of massive amounts of information in the earliest DNA, or the existence of moral values and duties, or the existence of free will, or the fact that there are no atheists in foxholes, or the strange effectiveness of math to discover new things about our universe (if math is just a human invention), or why there is anything rather than nothing. This is why the idea that the only things one can count as knowledge are testable by science is self-refuting! how do you know the previous sentence? Not by science or experiment. So the sentence refutes itself. Nevertheless we hear this mindless statement repeated over and over again by atheists pretending to understand basic philosophy. Science is limited to the natural world. Let's recognize the limits of scientific knowledge and utilize the correct way of knowing a topic, whether that be historiography for history of philosophy for logic or proofs for math, etc.

A large hairy audacious topic! Firstly, let's ask ourselves, "If I made the scripture align with science how often would I have to reinterpret scripture?" At least every ten years or so science is falsifying old scientific views and replacing them with new ones. "Well God meant a, no b, no c, no d, no e..." You get the conundrum right? There is a name for this type of error, it is called concordism. What is strange about the literary style of Gen 1? why is Big Bang cosmology much more "scientific," than evolutionary disciplines of biology and anthropology? Why is history so hard to replicate or falsify? We haven't even discussed the anti-intellectual forces affecting Christianity in the US since the 1830s, or the anti-supernatural forces affecting what counts as science or knowledge in the academy since the 1970s. I am dubious that we can make serious progress here. The prerequisite knowledge requirement is too high.

And yet Eugenie Scott of NAtional Center for Science Education has radically pushed for philosophical naturalism since she took the helm in 1986 and pushed for atheism in her writings. Her lectures have attacked intelligent design with mocking and derision. How is it that one can affirm atheism and not theism. Actually this is not the case, free speech includes religious speech and it is allowed at the workplace and yes, even lectures given. There is a restriction on the Smithsonian declaring a specific religious affiliation due to the establishment clause. Similarly what Scott has done is much closure to violating that clause than is someone got up and gave a design inference as an abductive inference. In fact State Universities since the mid-1970s have engaged the design inference for the fine-tuning for life of the universe. Watson and Crick have both given design arguments for the origin of the complex specified information found in the earliest DNA. As long as you are not establishing a religious affiliation, the Smithsonian is NOT able to prohibit speaking and lectures that have content with religious implications.

So you would not see yourself so much as an evangelist or someone always being ready to give an account of the hope that is in you, as a prophet? When Jesus gave his parables what value were they? Certainly the people didn't understand them, neither did the disciples. Is it important to engage an audience or person where they are able to engage your view? Have some agreement?