RE: [asa] geological dating

  -----Original Message-----
  From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Don Winterstein
  Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 12:41 AM
  To: asa
  Subject: Re: [asa] geological dating

  Well, maybe I should say one more thing on this. I wrote, "If you have
organisms coming into and passing out of existence in the order we observe,
you have evolution, whether or not it all happened by special creation."
First of all, I was indeed thinking of "evolution" in a more general sense
than you. That goes for my initial post as well.

Yeah that's what I thought. In discussion on creation/evolution, these words
mean different things. So when you start expanding definitions way beyond
normal contextual usage, they lose meaning and yes, we start talking past
each other. The same thing happens when I comment to creationists that
evolution IS creation.

  But even in terms of ToE, the reason it would be evolution even if it all
happened by special creation is that, given what we can observe, no human
could tell that special creation was going on. That's exactly one of the
big problems people have now: If God were actively designing every organism
as it was put into existence, how could (can) anyone tell? So from the
human point of view it's evolution even if it's special creation.

Unless, of course, it really was evolution and not creation by fiat ;-).
This is the point of OECs commenting that we look at the same evidence and
just interpret it differently. Unfortunately very little interpreting is
actually occurring - no actual explaining the evidence, other than "that's
the way God did it."

  And not even geologists possess the divine point of view.

  You yourself acknowledge there'd be no detectable difference. So how it
happened is academic. What's important is how it appeared to happen. And
you yourself acknowledge that it appears to be common descent.

  Don

In lieu of any divine PoV we do have all observations beyond the fossil
record "genetic evidence" which only confirms that appearance of the fossil
record. But that is beside the point. All I was saying was that either way
it would not have any bearing on the usefulness of a fossil being considered
an "index." Whether it was brought on by actual "evolution" (common descent
by NS and mutation, etc.) It still doesn't matter for the purposes of
index"ing". Although, I do understand how you meant that in your original
post: Evolution merely meaning change, without any regard to whether the
record was brought into existence by God switching (some trial and error
method) from one assemblage to another over time - a "poofing into
existence," if you will, with no relation in lineage at all, or by actual
evolutionary mechanisms.

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Don Winterstein
    To: asa
    Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2009 9:22 PM
    Subject: Re: [asa] geological dating

    We're even: I missed your points and you missed mine. We'll have to
talk past one another again sometime.

    Don

Indeed.

-Steve

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Received on Mon Oct 19 12:00:12 2009