>Of course one can come up with a reasonable picture of the universe in which God is not an add on and we are
>a product of a well designed system as a whole. But that's different from taking the assertive position
>that "we have the facts and you punks better listen".
But see, if we don't go out there and use the evidence for design which exists in the anthropic principle, in evolution etc, then we are yielding the field to the naturalists. And they like this. Of course we can't go to them and say you punks better listen (this may sound strange given my rants of the past few days). But we can say with pride, our position is on an equal footing as yours. We can say to them, "y'all postulate an infinitude of unobservables and we only postulate one unobservable. This isn't an ockham's razor argument because it isn't saying that one is better than an infinity. BUt it is saying that what the naturalists are being reduced to is no better than what we have been doing for centuries. We all are faced with postulating something outside the realm of science. They have unobservable universes and we have unobservable gods or a God.
I'm not even sure it is possible to prove that scientism
>is false, although taken to the reductio ad absurdum, it might be. I surmise that the best we could aim for a
>philosophical position, but that is basically weak compared to the assertive grandstanding that politics
>relies on.
I think it is incredibly solid ground to stand on when I argue with atheists that they are doing what they complain about in religion. They have traded an unobservable God for an infinitude of unobservable universes. Why is that a weak position? Telling them that they are no better off than I with my strange religious views is something they don't want to hear, but which they really can't argue with because I keep asking them, like I ask Dave tonight, SHOW ME WHAT YOU WILL DO TO OBSERVE THESE UNIVERSES AND MOVE THEM FROM THE REALM OF FICTION TO THE REALM OF SCIENCE. They can't ever tell me that.
>I accept your scolding me about not standing up for some form of design, and complaining about a letter
>in Nature, but that is different from really finding some solid ground to stand on.
Look, I don't really enjoy the rants of the past few days. It is not my desire to have to do this. But I can't stand there and see an organization I like and to which I belong and to which I have submitted numerous articles, do something which is so counterproductive as to deny that there is design. I know I am going to take lots of flack for this but what am I to do? I find the apologetical positions offered to me so incredibly incoherent and illogical that often I find myself wondering if all this effort is even worth it. Maybe I should throw the towel in and leave Christianity. Maybe what is offered is really all that there is! If that is the case, then Christianity is self-delusion or ignorance. I can't logically accept YEC, ID or this concept that the Bible doesn't say anything real about nature--yes, to say that the bible isn't scientifically correct is equivalent to saying that it says nothing correct about nature. I stand gob-smacked that adults would believe any of what is offered in the way of apologetical schema.
I think the position
>of religion is very weak, and that is the first thing we have to admit.
No we don't. It is no weaker than the postulation of a gazillion unobserved universes.
We cannot offer a mechanism that
>people can test, and we cannot detect what is not material.
Neither can they! Tell me what experiment you would run to deterime the properties of a neighboring universe? How would you tell whether or not it even exists? Shoot, even if they find the Higgs boson and higher dimensions, that in itself is no proof of the existence of the multiverse. I certainly won't say the multiverse is scientific and then say it is unscientific in the very same post, like some here!
There is some way to work around historical evidence, but
> the events are not reproducible in a way we can test. It does not necessarily mean we are wrong to believe in God
>and the resurrection, but neither can we go out there shouting "turn or burn".
No, it does not mean we are wrong to beleive in God. But it does mean that the untestable and unreproducible is a poor choice for the starting point of an apologetic. It is like building a house on quicksand. That is my point about what is wrong with apologetics. We start with the assumption that Christianity is true. Then we derive an apologetic deduced from that assumption. That is simply a poor procedure. It leads to the two great apologetical ruts we are stuck in. We drive ourselves to either reject science and evolution, or we drive our selves to the point where we say that the Bible can't tell us anything about tangible reality. And thus we remove the Bible from reality. No wonder only 2% of people go to church in Europe. And the US is headed that way, we are just slower about getting there.
I had written:
>>There is no proof, but there IS evidence.nbsp; As to Paley, I like what an author of a book I recently read said.nbsp; If >>one finds a watch in the field one certainly has the right to ask who designed the watch making factory! ; God
>>designed the evolutionary system--the factory which makes us--the watches.
>You have a point. Howard Van Till put it bluntly as an issue of sovereignty. _Who_ writes the rules: the molecules or >God?
To hear many here they are rooting for the molecules, or at least they are embarassed by the thought of saying in mixed company that God is writing the rules.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed May 25 2005 - 09:49:45 EDT