Re: [asa] Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution

Bernie,

I have come to appreciate your posts. No matter how much I may disagree with
them. I find your candor refreshing.

The view you just put forth is what millions of students have arrived at.
Please note your conclusion - the idea that God made humans is to be
rejected. Well, that is certainly not a theistic evolutionists viewpoint
(as I have come to understand TE).
As far as I can tell you seem to have separated human origins from theism.
It seems very clean cut.

On the door to my private study is a sign. It reads,

"If people, like rocks, are mere occurrences, then they can have no more
meaning than rocks".

And you are correct that the thin veneer of humanism layered on top of the
cold hard truth is just there so we can pretend we feel better.

But what if the atheist worldview is wrong? What if humans are more than
rocks? What if they have a future destiny that is non-natural?

This is where the TE worldview has failed to fill in the blanks. A
pre-loaded universe only makes sense if it explains what your personal
unique meaning is to the creator, and also explains your destiny, where
you are going. It makes no sense to say a creator pre-loaded the universe
to produce Bernie, and then have nothing to predict where Bernie is going.
Let me put it this way: rocks on the beach are not going to be spending time
with their children one million years from now. But the resurrected
Christians will be doing so. See the difference? What I am getting at is:
a viable theory of origins contains a viable theory of destiny. Atheism,
the worldview you seem to be endorsing Bernie, has no theory of destiny.
Neither do deistic theories. This is why deistic Christianity isn't
convincing. It isn't theologically complete enough to compete with
traditional Christian approaches.

From my admittedly ignorant viewpoint, some TE theorists I have read on
this list attempt to solve this gap by putting a ghost in the machine - by
invoking souls and theistic action that isn't physical. I've been wary of
this idea for quite some time. Seems to me (and I could be wrong) it makes
them a modern version of "immortal deist" as opposed to "mortal deists" who
would deny there is any destiny or any soul. Or it makes them a certain
form of theist who believes God cannot affect the physical but only affects
the soul. The right wingers (YECs/OECs/etc) reject all that. They say God
can touch the physical any time He wants. He operates in the universe. He
terraforms solar systems the way a painter mixes paints. The painting is
both natural and non-natural. It would not exist without the painter mixing
up the paint.

So Bernie, you seem to moving in the direction that there is no painter
because the paint just gets mixed naturally. And indeed a great deal of it
does. But doesn't this just make Bernie (and indeed all of us) one more
accident in a maelstrom of accidents? I don't think science says that at
all. I think its naturalism (and I don't mean Christian naturalism) which
says that.

-Dave

PS - I didnt even get to the problem with conflating cosmological evolution
with other forms of evolution. They have totally different meaning - but you
have conflated them together as a principle. This is what the leftists on
the state science standards committees want you and all our children to
believe. In your case Bernie they seem to have convinced you.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>wrote:

> Actually- after accepting evolution- my whole worldview has changed.
> Accepting evolution makes me understand things in a better way (designing
> products, competition for resources, jobs, etc). We put a human layer on
> the top of it to soften it, but the layer is only a layer, and not the real
> underpinnings of the machine. All of science is important, but evolution
> maybe even more important as it helps us to understand how the world runs
> and operates (from cosmological evolution, chemical evolution, biological
> evolution, etc.). I’m still researching and understanding evolutionary
> impacts, and much of it has to do with unlearning some Christian doctrines
> (such as humans made ‘de novo’ (as Lemoureux would say) by God).
>
>
>
> …Bernie
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *From:* asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] *On
> Behalf Of *Schwarzwald
> *Sent:* Thursday, July 30, 2009 9:59 AM
> *To:* asa@calvin.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [asa]
> Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution
>
>
>
> There's a small point I'd add to Moorad's observation here.
>
> As I've said before, I personally am very at home with evolution, and
> what's more, I always have been. But in the past few years, what I've
> started to find odd is the insistence that evolution is the single most
> important scientific claim in town. I cannot name a single other scientific
> topic that has so many educators collectively wringing their hands,
> wondering how they can get more students (or even adults out of school) to
> accept it. Why is there no comparable concern to promote the understanding
> of, say.. quantum mechanics, and how it differs from our common sense view
> of the world? (Indeed, if the authors of Quantum Enigma are right - and I'm
> not saying they are - the actual hope is that scientific laymen pay no
> attention to that topic.) What about geological processes, or chemistry, or
> any other number of topics? Why so much focus on one, and far and away only
> one, scientific issue? And why does that same focus suggest that
> understanding evolution is secondary to professed belief in it? And more
> than that, professed belief with as little room for speculations on
> guidance, purpose, intelligence and otherwise as possible?
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Douglas Hayworth <
> becomingcreation@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> FYI and FWIW, I commented briefly about this in one of my blog posts:
>
> http://becomingcreation.org/2009/03/like-it-or-not/
>
> Doug
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Alexanian, Moorad<alexanian@uncw.edu>
> wrote:
> > The central issue
> >
> >
> > The central issue of the essay is the need to teach biological
> evolution</wiki/Biological_evolution> in the context of debate about
> creation and evolution in public
> education</wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education> in the United
> States.[2] The fact that evolution occurs explains the interrelatedness of
> the various facts of biology, and so makes biology make sense.[3] The
> concept has become firmly established as a unifying idea in biology
> education.[4]
> >
> >
> >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > It is interesting that it does not say "as a unifying idea in biological
> research."
> >
> >
> >
> > Moorad
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> > "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
> >
>
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
>
>
>

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Received on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:56:44 -0500