Uber Genius

Two errors there. First Catholic doctrine remains open. One can accept or reject the evidence for evolution, and remain in good stead as a Catholic. Even if a Pope or theological commission should express an opinion, it is not doctrine unless given ex cathedra, or by the bishops in council. Second, the evidence for macroevolutionary theory, as even informed YE creationists admit, is very good. Referring to what is being taught in Catholic Churches not what is the official set of beliefs that MUST be affirmed by every Catholic. Must you STRAWMAN every comment? Here you took a general meaning of "doctrine," "what is being taught," and applied a techical, equivocal meaning, "what must be taught." tricky, but not generous, or clever. The pedantic nature of your posts is wearing thin. I have yet to ignore someone on WCF, please try and engage my content and not straw men.

I do think it is so now? Absolutely! do you think it has changed just because of one conference in the UK where they engaged the serious challenges of the Darwinian inference? Please...

"So when Franscis Collins came out with his book, "Language of God," and showed how some genes in non-coding regions of our DNA" these non-coding regions are the gaps between the genes so why are you suggesting that I am referring to working code? You seem to be agreeing with me all the while claiming to correct me. That is not the first time I have seen you STRAWMAN people's posts out here. it has been around 15 years since I read Collins' book, I will go look at it later when I get back in town over the weekend. By by the way it is no part of "Science" to append "by natural selection," as it begs the question. Every time science backs off of its pronouncements it tries to backfill with these types of slogans which have nothing whatsoever to do with science.

That is not Collin's point at all. It is that on evolution we would expect more accumulation of mutations in the non-coding regions and Would predict ancestors with similar "junk DNA" in these regions as oppossed to the genes. So humans would look much more like say chimpanzees and mice than birds or fish.

Typing on my phone while on the way to the airport. Yes OBVIOUSLY WE DONT COME FROM MICE.

I am willing. And like Aquinas, am up to the task of accurately representing the best evidence for each view. I don't use many of the various frauds such as haesckel's embryos, peppered moths, Darwinism tree of life, piltdown and other frauds, I also don't use appearance of age arguments, or decry accuracy of radiographic dating methods. Alternatively, we could ask people to weigh in on the toughest argument against their view. So when Franscis Collins came out with his book, "Language of God," and showed how some genes in non-coding regions of our DNA were 99% similar to that of mice, including errors of transition, it made no sense if mice weren't the ancestors of humans. Luckily for me a couple years later Collins came out saying we now know that what we thought was junk actually has significant function so instead of residual non-functioning code we had working code that was useful to both organisms currently. But if Collins had passed away before the second edition then we would have a powerful argument in favor of Evolution.

I was actually suggesting that you argue a view other than the one you hold. In turn other would argue your TE view. I have used this approach in seminars since 2002 with some good results.

I'm just jumping in here after a sabbatical. So i didn't know your view. Further, I am a believer that God can reveal things to us personally through the work of the HS. However, when I'm arguing for a view I try to argue from premises on which my opponents tend to agree with me. example: P1 anything that begins to exist has a cause outside of itself P2 the universe began to exist from 1 and 2 therefore the universe has a cause outside of itself. science agrees with both premises generally. Philosophy agrees with both as well. Therefore when engaging atheists from either field I am able to gain agreement for my premises and proceed to my argument that the cause of time, space, matter, energy, the laws of physics (which define our universe) must transcend those elements. Only abstract objects or God fit the transcendent cause category. Abstract objects are causally effete. Therefore God is the cause of the universe. when we incorporate extreme minority views such as light NOT being a constant, we are already somewhat on our back foot. When we argue from personal revelation, again we may be correct but our argument will be uncompelling.

There are creation accounts dating back 1500 years before the Genesis account. These are largely from the Mesopotamian regions (SE Turkey travel SE to the Persian Gulf via the Euphrates 100 miles north and south of that river.) Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian cultures.

I am not denying that there have been false theses held for centuries. I am denying the likelihood of certain foundational theories such as the second law of thermodynamics, or speed of light. Remember that I argued from 100 years of modern discovery, a time where we have created supercolliders and broad spectrum telescope, and where falsifiability is very possible. How are you examples of ether analogous? I suggested over forty different sources of experiment all of which could have falsified big band cosmology. So your claims don't appear to be analogous at all. But I grant that all scientific knowledge is provisional, but some is just a hypothesis that is hardly testable or untestable, others such as our understanding of the strong and weak nuclear forces, are unlikely to change.

Good question. answer: It is figurative speech which uses concepts and objects in our world that we understand (human bodies) and relates them to concepts or beings we don't understand (an immaterial God). We find figurative language to be as frequently used in ancient literature as there are stars in the heavens! Here is a book that identify and classifies 100s of such Biblical examples written in the late 1800s by a man named Bullinger. https://books.google.com/books/about/Figures_of_Speech_Used_in_the_Bible_Expl.html?id=CNrNBgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description Here is a site that has all 217 figures of speech classified with examples of their occurrence from various scriptures. https://levendwater.org/books/figures_of_speech/index.htm hope these help.

Lol. Barbar, did you look at the avatar? Does it remind you of anything? Ever heard of a literary technique known as irony. Look up Wile E Coyote and it may help. agreed that Catholic doctrine has swung over to the TE side recently, despite greater evidence to the contrary. It is a problem to read back current science into a book that had little to do with science, and when it does present things regarding the natural world does so with the view in mind of God operating outside the physical constraints. But I do think TE is a live option and as science progresses and the strangle-hold on academia is loosened, we can solve serious problems rather than driving out the researchers that attempt to publish discomfirming results.

You mean, "Yes, I agree Darwin struggled with both those issues." We do not have a huge amount of transitional forms, further the Cambrian explosion is a disaster for gradualism of neo-Darwinian evolution. This is why we saw efforts at modifying that thesis with punctuated equilibrium. Not sure why you would cherry-pick YEC references since these experts have a storied history of misrepresenting scientific data.

Great point. I tell those I disciple, "We will all stand alone at the bema seat judgement, I won't be there and neither will your pastor, now do you really want to outsource your Christian thinking to either of us?"

Seems straight-forward, build disciples that operate the way Jesus thought and acted and his disciples also thought and acted as found in Acts and elsewhere in scripture. Must be able to teach sound doctrine. Must be able to administer others with various spiritual and natural gifts. If people have been sitting in your church for years and can't tell you the basics about God's nature or, Jesus' nature, or salvation or assurance of salvation, have knowledge of how to study the Bible in line with the rules for interpreting any ancient literature, can't give an account of the hope that is in them, then you should step down immediately as pastor. If I'm a tennis coach and my team can't serve overhand, I should resign. if I am a basketball coach and my team can't dribble and take the ball the distance of the court, I should resign. I am constantly running into Christians who don't know what Christianity teaches much less why. In fact the Christian Pastors that can tell me four views on providence or name the four views on say assurance are less than one in 50. Even in the weightier matters of Jesus' nature I hear things like he is "half God and half man" or "JEsus emptied himselve of his divine nature to become man." I'm serious. Heresy taught from the pulpit of mega churches. I vote that we reverse the 150-yr trend of dumbing down Christian practice and make it a requirement that every leader have at least a master's in Biblical studies degree from an accredited college. All those pastors currently practicing without that background could demonstrate effort to achieve that degree within 3 years. The centuries of feeling called and being a natural public speaker as tests to determine pastorship should end. Let's raise the bar to that of a k-6 teacher.

This is not correct and in fact not held by any Christian that I'm aware of in the last 1600 years! You are misinterpreting your passages above due to your misunderstanding of how the Biblical authors use figures of speech! "Anthropomorphisms also attribute human form and shape to God. God redeems Israel from Egyptian bondage with an outstretched arm ( Exod 6:6 ). Moses and his companions see God, and they eat and drink with him ( Exod 24:10-11 ). Other texts refer to the back, face, mouth, lips, ears, eyes, hand, and finger of God. The expression, "the Lord's anger burned" ( Exod 4:14 ) is interesting. A literal translation of the Hebrew is "the nose of the Lord burned." For more on this topic see:https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionaries/bakers-evangelical-dictionary/anthropomorphism.html God doesn't have limited knowledge. He also doesn't have a face, wings, a nose, fingers, white hair. He is in fact immaterial, a mind without body! You have been misinterpreting passages. I would get a Bible in your first language if it is not english, and I would study figurative language and how it is used by the Biblical authors.

God knows every event that will occur in history and every event that could have possibly occurred before creation. the passages that you quote are just a fashion of speaking. Psalm 147:5 "Great is our Lord, and mighty on power, his understanding is infinite." Acts 15:18 "known to God from eternity are all his works" proverbs 15:3 "the eyes of the LORD are in every place, keeping watch on evil and good." So spend some extra time exegeting any passage that denies God's foundational nature (omnicience).

I had hoped for some research into the topic instead of false dichotomies, and circular arguments. If one goes out to Stanford.plato.edu one can type "the moral argument" and get an approximation of the material available. Evil is the privation of good. It is like the word "nothing" which means the universal negation of "anything." Your examples attempt to demonstrate an incoherence between good through ethical dilemmas. But they fail due to the fact, on atheism there is no evil. So eating other people is not a problem. In fact eating other people's or our own baby for the fun of it isn't evil on atheism. So when we look at the origin of our moral intuitions, the inference that they are delusions of social engineering runs into our everyday perception that killing and eating babies for fun is wrong and always so. While the theist can ground this intuition in the existence of a creator who is the definition of goodness and who has given all men everywhere a sense of moral truths, the atheist has to collapse and say there intuition is a delusion, a social convention that is merely temporary. if Adolfo Hiter had won WWII and managed to convert the rest of the world into antiemetic socialists (go Bernie), and they voted that we round up and kill the few million remaining Jews, on your socially constructed subjective morality, they would be virtuous. The moral arguments for God focuses on our moral experience that there are objective truths such as don't kill innocent people that are not person or societally-relative. Until we have a defeater for those moral intuitions we are justified in believing them! this is the same way we are justified in believing that there is an external world, there are other people in the world, the past is real. We could alas be a brain stuck in a vat being manipulated to think every thought but why think that? So we justify moral intuition in the same way we justify most of our beleifs, as properly basic.

TE seems to make two general claims: The Genesis account of creation is true in regards to God creating the Universe. The evolutionary account of life on Earth is broadly true. I assume that some in the TE community would allow for some special creation (ID)/intervention when it came to the creation of souls. while all TE are evolutionists none are naturalists (philosophically speaking). So to support there position exegesis of Gen 1-2 would have to support a figurative account of the narrative, falsifying a literal view, and uphold a evolutionary account, falsifying ID or YEC. Now one could argue abductively that TE gives the best accounts of both the scientific data and the scriptural data. That goal seems like a huge undertaking in and of itself. What if each were to argue the most salient case for the other position? That would take out some of the vitriol.

Why is a discussion on the evangelical benefits of a design argument from the existence of sudden complex specified information being subverted into an epistemic discussion about the out working of Cartesian skepticism? Seems like a non-sequitur. God in monotheism is eternal (aseity). No beginning, no end.

This is not the way to represent the argument! It is setting up design arguments as arguments from ignorance and they are NOT! the argument from the appearance of complex specified information is made based on our uniform and repeated experience that information of this type ONLY comes from intelligent agents. Forensic science, and computer science (algorithmic complex specification) work off the premise above. So so all design arguments give three inferences (explanations) for any effect: 1- necessity (laws of physics produce that effect always), 2- chance 3- design p1 - effect x was either caused by chance, necessity, or design p2 - effect X was not caused by chance or necessity, A - therefore X was caused by a designer. I agree that the atheist may not find the argument compelling. Further, there is no silver bullet. But in combination with cosmological, other teleological, transcendent, and moral arguments, certainly the reasonable atheist can be softened.

It was an interesting and well-written post but my first reaction is: Ah, the ole "Appearence of age," gag. There have been hundreds of cosmological models thrown in the trash can over the last 100 years. While we want to understand our world to the best of our abilities, why grasp at straws in order to shore up a YEC model? If Paul is correct in Romans 1 in saying that all humans know of God as a result of God's creation, the things they have SEEN, do we really want to insert the inference that, God messes with our perception of the world by giving false appearances of the things he has created? Seems a little self-refuting. Why not say, "3500 years ago or so, scholars agree that the Genesis account of creation differs starkly from its Mesopotamian counterparts. That God appears to be the sole source of all created things. Further that man is a special creation having God's ability to know moral truths, and have agency. Finally, scholars differ on whether that process occurred in a literal 6-day period or over a longer period." Since there are 40 or so separate proofs for Big Bang cosmology why pin one's hopes on falsifying 125 years of science regarding the nature of time? And would that solve the internal textual problems the YEC view has?

Well-written post. It is not the idea of common origin that ID argues against, it is the data. There are several key differences between the work of a designer who give the appearance that all is random and there is no designer, theistic evolution, and ID. TE posits a tree of life that represents gradualism. There will be no sudden appearance of enormously diverse phyla. This is why Darwin was concerned with the Cambrian explosion (yep he knew about it back in the late 1800s). Darwin was also concerned with the lack of transitional forms, as he expected more transitions than stable fossils. Along the same lines he expected a large number of biological structures that were non functioning (in order to get modern eyes, one would have millions of generations of non-functioning light-sensing organs). Similarly, we should see no irreducible complex biological structures (Darwin was tripped up by organs like the eye). What Darwin didn't know that we now know is that life is orders of magnitude more complex than anyone knew in the 1850s or 1950s even. ID would predict rapid appearance of new forms suddenly as opposed to gradually (new body plans). ID would predict few to no non-functioning biological structures. ID would predict large numbers of irreducible complex biological structures. More specifcally on TE we would expect a relatively high chance of functional protein folds appearing randomly thereby producing many new functions for the natural selection process to sift. It is helpful to separate out the ramifications of each inference. The ID proponent argues that the data supports their inference and falsifies TE and evolution proper.

A note on concordism. condordism is defined as reading modern ideas back into an ancient texts specifically in the area of science to make the two accounts consistent. the obvious problem is that it is a known fallacy (anachronism), and secondly, modern science continues to gain knew knowledge and reject old theories(at the rate of funerals of the most revered scientist that held the view), admittedly slowly. If if we were to produce a Bible that was in concord with "modern science," we would have thousands of different textual versions of same! From an exegetical standpoint it seems we need to stop reading in modern views into the authors of ancients as if inerrancy had anything to do with God dictating scriptures with scientific revelations embedded in them. No view of innerrancy hold that view. ancient authors held ancient views consistent with cosmologies of their Mesopotamian counterparts. They are not univocal however. Ancient Biblical authors took great pains to engage the worldview of their contemporaries and set the record straight. The accounts that are similar mock the Egyptian and Mesopotamian creation notions while holding some of the same false beliefs cosmologically, such as the idea of a firmament. So what? Our current cosmological models are riddled with false beleifs. No one in science doubts that 100 years from now we will have a starkly different view of cosmology then we now have.

I have followed the debate since the seventies. I have changed my view on the topic from young earth to ID being the best inference. I have spent years investigating the "God used evolution," inference and find that, although possible, from an evolutionary evidentiary standpoint the record is wanting and arguments are fallacious often over-extending findings to the rediculous. Propaganda, rather than science seems to liter the field in a way that can't be said of other areas of science. I don't infer "monkey business," unless I find that someone's educational background is more than sufficient to be familiar with the type of fallacious reasoning I point out. Philsophers who teach logic and scientists who use probalistic models and probability, and mathematicians whom teach Bayesian logic don't get a pass but everyone else does. It took me until the middle of my third statistics course to fully grasp what was covered in my first semester. Further, in grad school, I had to refresh that knowledge in order to make proper conclusions about causal relationships in my research. This is tough stuff and there is some very convincing, albeit fallacious, articles by supposed experts on the Internet. Any engagement with the New Atheists material will expose us to scientists and philosophers whom abuse their position of authority to shield false claims. Most in our culture don't have the requisite training to do the crap-detection.