Post by Jeff on Nov 11, 2005 8:45:53 GMT -5
captadam said:
...as for Macro-evolution I and the bible do disagree. This doesn't make me foolish unless you really do believe that way. As far as I can see you have to have as much if not more faith to believe in Macrco-evolution as I do to believe in the bible and Jesus.Adam, I love you. You gotta know that.
First, science never claims to have the enduring answers, to produce certainty. Rather, science claims that so far its reigning theories are not demonstrably false. So, the claim is that macro-evolution has never been falsified. Today’s intelligent design theorists tell us that evolution is compatible with God’s direction of nature. So thoughtful IDers agree that macro-evolution occurs. Old school creationists are the ones who denied macro-evolution. And here there is a choice to be made since they say macro-evolution cannot happen and evolutionists and IDers say it does. Gotta pick one since you are involved in a contradiction.
Is one foolish to pick creationism? Well, there is a body of evidence that has arisen over the last one hundred and fifty years that would suggest such a conclusion. Of course, I cannot catalogue all of it, but I could recommend some reading. Here is a pretty good place to start: www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ . I think you will like this site as it takes creationists very seriously. Here is the wiki write-up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution
You might also want to take a look at wiki on
Creationism: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
And Intelligent Design: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
(Brief anecdote: On the first day of my job here at STC, the chair of my department took me over to visit with a biology professor. The idea of creationism arose, and I talked about how at OU the philosophers generally addressed creationism head-on in the philosophy classes. They both gave me shrugs. “Isn’t that a colossal waste of time?” “Why bother with a view so thoroughly demolished?” I think this is the general attitude among intellectuals. My point is this: It might be hard to find contemporary works that answer your questions, Adam, because they were answered to the satisfaction of most scientists before the turn of the last century.)
On a final note, here is something that you almost never hear when Creationists and IDers are making their case, and since no one reads the old philosophers anymore, most people don’t know. David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion takes on the design argument and points out many of its unwelcome consequences. Here is a partial list of his observations:
A. No argument from experience can ever establish a certainty. The most that experience can yield is a probability. So even if this kind of argument is good, it does not give us more than a probability that God is analogous to a human.
B. If we look at the world as a whole can we say that God is perfectly good? That is pretty hard to believe. Think of all the terrible things that exist. Given these, even if God created the world, we don’t have much reason to think of Him/Her as perfectly good. That is, this argument doesn’t tell us that God has the characteristics He/She is traditionally conceived to have. For example, we don’t know that God is omnipotent simply by looking at the world. All we know is that He/She had enough power to create the world as it is.
C. A number of unintended possibilities arise with this analogy. 1) Many people cooperate to make machines. The world, too, could have been the production of not one, but many gods. 2) Wicked and mischievous people make machines. The world, too, could be the result of a wicked God. 3) Machines are made by mortals. God, too, might be mortal. 4) The best clocks are a result of a long history of trial and error and slow improvement. Similarly, many worlds might be botched and bungled as God hones His/Her ability to make worlds. How do we know that ours isn’t one of these lesser worlds?
D. Finally, how much can we learn from an analogy that generalizes from a single case? The world is entirely singular. Why should we think anything at all is analogous to it or its production? As Hume puts it:
“It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause. If experience and observation and analogy be, indeed, the only guides which we can reasonably follow in inferences of this nature; both the effect and cause must bear a similarity and resemblance to other effects and causes, which we know, and which we have found, in many instances, to be conjoined with each other.” (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Section IX)