That strikes me as an extraordinarily sanctimonious statement.
Great age is woven in the fabric of nature - a pervasive canvas of colliding galaxies, shock waves and streams of gas in the cosmos, in volcanic strata separated by alluvial plains, the fossil progression and literal layers of antiquity, the decay of atoms. The only real question is whether that age is actual or forged.
The same scriptures that present the creation story puts forth the ten commandments by which those who fear God conduct themselves, and I take the commandment to not bear false witness very seriously. That includes faithfully representing another person’s words.
None of this is easy or casually considered.
If God is eternal and patient, what is 14 billion years anyways?
One can speculate. “Common design” is a possible explanation for similarity of two species, but it isn’t a possible explanation for a nested hierarchy of species. So if you’re into common design, it’s to your benefit to ignore what your theory can’t explain in favor of what it can.
Let go of MN, I reply, and consider that CA might be false, in the light of new evidence, and we can talk. Otherwise, there isn’t much to discuss.
Yes. Let’s discuss that new evidence. Is it significant? Or are Common Design advocates just straining to find fodder in a few anomalous cases? I’m not a scientist of that specialty so my question is a sincere one.
If the “new evidence” is truly groundbreaking, then there surely must be huge opportunities for some earnest doctoral student to make a name for himself/herself. I’d say blowing apart the foundations of Common Descent would be the fast-track to a tenure track.
I suppose significant numbers of ID scholars are racing to publish the definitive analysis of this new evidence in prominent peer-reviewed journals. I enthusiastically look forward to reading that seminal paper when it is published.
We have to be clear about what Evolutionists that are Christians do differently from Evolutionists who do not assert Christianity:
1] GAE, above all else, accepts a limited number of one-off miracles which allows for the metaphysics of atonement WITHOUT overturning the natural sciences.
2] If Balaam’s talking donkey was miraculously created by God, that would be a one-off event that would also be a one-time exception to Common Ancestry.
3] Believing in one-off miracles for the creation of Adam and Eve would fit in the same category.
No, but I can formulate a scientific method that incorporates DESIGN into its conclusions.
For example, we could in principle formulate a method for discerning whether a radio signal from space was sent by an intelligent agent. The method, if successful, would tell us that the signal was designed – by an intelligent agent of some kind. We would therefore know something about the universe that we did not know before – that there existed intelligent beings other than ourselves. And our knowledge would surely qualify as “scientific”, because of the way we arrived at it.
Fine. Please describe that scientific method when investigating the external conscious DESIGN of biological life. IDers have been trying and failing for over two decades. Oh, don’t bother with the usual God-Of-The-Gaps fallacy.
And materialist origin-of-life investigators have been trying and failing for over ten decades. Give ID eight more decades before you declare a winner. It’s not a fair game if each player doesn’t get the same number of turns.
The point of ID is that, in principle, we don’t have to decide whether it was a human, an alien, or a god that designed the genome in order to infer that the genome was designed. Therefore, we never have to deal with the distinction that you keep wanting to talk about.
Let’s leave the genome out of it, and go back to the radio signal from space. How would you know whether a radio signal from outer space came from God, and not aliens? The answer is: you couldn’t tell. All you could tell was that whoever sent it was intelligent. If you decided that it must have been sent by aliens, and not God, it wouldn’t be your science that told you that.
Your thought on this subject continues to be blurry. You don’t seem sure whether you want to argue (1) that design arguments so far have failed to establish the fact of design, or (2) that regardless of evidence, we must not allow any argument to establish the fact of design, because then God would sneak in the door, behind design, before the door was shut. If you’re arguing the first, your argument is in principle reasonable; it’s quite possibly true that all arguments so far have failed to establish the fact of design. But if you’re arguing the second, they you are deliberately trying to control what people are allowed to argue and how they are allowed to argue and what conclusions they are allowed to come to, because you think some of those conclusions are inappropriate. You’re trying to rig the game so that one side always wins, and the other side can never win, even in principle.
And that’s Nelson’s point: you shouldn’t be allowed to rig the game. The question whether there are supernatural, or only natural, forces in the universe should be left entirely undecided while design arguments are being considered. We should follow the argument wherever it leads – even if where it leads is not a place where we particularly want to go. Try to find out what is actually true about the universe, and to the devil with the consequences! This attitude takes great intellectual and great existential courage. But playing a game rigged in your favor takes no courage at all.
