Re: Unwillingness to listen

From: David F Siemens (dfsiemensjr@juno.com)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2001 - 21:53:05 EST

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    Allen,
    What a crock of sh--! I'm trained as a philosopher and recognize the
    assumptions that underlie various systems and activities. I am not a
    naturalist or materialist, and do not build my philosophy of science on
    these assumptions. I am uncompromisingly a creationist and insist on the
    continual need of all creation for God's total support. However, on this
    basis I have to agree wholeheartedly with Glenn. He discovered, as I did,
    that YEC wanted a naturalistic explanation for geology and the Flood. To
    do this, they selected only those matters in empirical data and science
    that fit their predetermined results, and distorted and misrepresented
    the rest. They further come up with cockamamie suggestions in a hopeless
    attempt to make their inanities plausible.

    I thank God that, when I first discovered the duplicity, he held me true.
    He showed me that the problem was not with his Word, but with what people
    claimed it said. That is what Glenn found also.

    Finally, let me bring Augustine's statement up to date and sharpen it. I
    hold that YEC has sent a multitude of people to hell. They have believed
    that the Bible teaches the YEC nonsense and rejected God's Word because
    of it. Therefore I hold that YEC is one of Satan's master strokes.
    Dave

    On Mon, 8 Jan 2001 11:48:26 -0700 "Allen Roy" <allenroy@peoplepc.com>
    writes:
    Glenn Morton wrote:
    "Having jumped back onto the list today, I am jumping into the middle of
    this, but that won't stop me. As a former young-earth creationist of
    some infamy, I can tell you why I didn't listen. I placed my
    interpretation of the Bible as the utmost metaphysical truth. By doing
    that, all contradictory data simply had to be wrong. Thus when faced with
    clear evidence and logic that my viewpoint was wrong, I did the only
    reasonable thing--I ignored the data or assumed that there was some way
    to discount and ignore it. There was also an emotional reason not to
    listen to contradictory arguments. They challenged my world view and
    made me extremely uncomfortable. Since I could not doubt my ultimate
    metaphysical truth--the YEC paradigm without thinking I would become an
    atheist which I didn't want to do--I would flee from the truth."

    No, you were not faced with clear evidence, you were faced with
    interpretations of data from within the religious philosophy of
    Naturalism. You had not been educated in the pervasiveness of the
    underlying assumptions within which all standard geologic interpretations
    are being done. You had not been shown the religious nature of
    Naturalism and its corollaries of Abiogenesis and Actualism (i.e.
    non-uniform Uniformitarianism) within which geologic science usually
    functions. You had been taught the falsehood that Science stands alone
    without philosophical assumptions.

    In geology, interpretation of sedimentary rock according to the
    actualistic assumption that there are ONLY 3 allowable depositional
    environments -- marine, non-marine and transitional -- automatically
    precludes interpretation within a global flood catastrophe environment.
    Thus all those "facts" of geology demand that there could not be a global
    flood catastrophe.

    Creationists START with the assumptions that God's natural laws are not
    violated and that there was a global catastrophic event as told us by
    God. Within these assumptions, Creationary geological science studies
    and interprets nature's facts.

    Yes, the Bible is the utmost metaphysical truth because we know we can
    trust the God of the Bible to tell us the truth. Naturalism is a
    metaphysical belief based on blind faith in the rationality of human
    imagination. Abiogensis and Actualism must be true because according to
    Naturalism, nature -- matter, energy, etc. -- is all there is. There is
    no God. There is no Creator. There is no one but us to tell us about
    the past.

    We have the choice to believe God and the Bible and interpret nature
    within it's assumptions, or we can choose to believe in Naturalism and
    interpret nature within it's assumptions. You were not fleeing from the
    "Truth," you were fleeing from false religious teachings.



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