On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Glenn Morton wrote:
> Hi Lloyd,
>
> I'll bite,
>
> At 11:31 PM 12/11/97, Lloyd Eby wrote:
>
> >1. The earth and living things on it are much older than 6000
> > years. (This means that the so-called "young earth theory" -
> > - held by a few religious fundamentalists or Biblical
> > literalists -- is denied.)
>
> many Christians deny this statement.
True, but some people also deny that there's any link at all between
cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Do you really think either of those
claims deserves any attention at all, except perhaps as examples of either
total ignorance or else some form of spiritual pathology or bad faith?
> >2. Living species did not appear on earth all at once. (This
> > claim can be further stated or specified as:)
Here I must rely on your account of Behe. The view seems implausible to
me. Behe would have to hold, as I understand it, that there is no novelty
among living things. At the very least this denies the phenomenal
(observable) evidence. It also denies the evidence that at least some
amount of natural selection occurs at least sometimes.
> Even some ID people deny this in a real sense. Behe believes that all the
> information for ALL the subsequent species was placed into the dna of the
> first cell. In a real sense, Behe is advocating the appearance of all life
> at once only he does it in the form of information all at once. Yet this
> view must be wrong because there is not enough nucleotides in a 4 billion
> unit genome to hold all that information.
>
> > The error in much evolutionist thinking and argumentation comes
> >about, I think, because of this confusion: 1 through 5 are known
> >to be true. Moreover the truth of 1 through 5 offers some
> >evidence toward the truth of one or more of the statements 6
> >through 8. On that basis, many evolutionists go on to assert that
> >one or more of the statements 6 through 8 is true.
> >
>
> I think that you miss an important point in the creation/evolution debate.
> I know that your statement 1 denies the young-earth view, there is a big
> problem with large groups of christians denying all of the statement 1
> through 5. So I would say that you have oversimplified the problem. While
> evolutionists sometimes go beyond the data, too many christians don't even
> accept the data.
Here I don't understand your objection. It seems to me that all of my
statements 1 through 5 are true. I know that some Christians deny the
truth of one or more of them. But so what? They are wrong to do so. No
useful discussion can occur between groups if one group denies obvious
facts. In that sense, some Christians cannot participate in a useful
discussion of this issue, and they fully deserve the contempt and
dismissal of proponents of evolution. Do you and I disagree on that point?
It seems to me that we are saying the same thing in different terminology.
Lloyd Eby