Continuing the discussion from [Tim Keller is not an Evolutionary Creationist]

[dga471 (Daniel)]

Before we can proceed, I’d like to clear up a few things first. I can argue with someone who disagrees with me, but not someone who makes false claims.

@Jonathan_Burke

…someone who doesn’t believe in the scientific revolution, who thinks scientists don’t know much…

I didn’t say anything like that. Please get offended at what I actually write.

Both of these claims are demonstrably false. You clearly accused me of those two things:

Exhibit 1: claiming that I (and Josh) don’t believe in the Scientific Revolution

@Jonathan_Burke

It built the Scientific Revolution, and laid the foundation of the Enlightenment (I just realized you might think both of those were shockingly bad ideas).

Exhibit 2: claiming that I think scientists don’t know much

@Jonathan_Burke

But you sound like the kind of physicist who will turn around and say “Of course we physicists are just big sillies playing with numbers (and what are numbers? we still don’t even know!), we don’t really know much about reality, we have all our fancy ideas and such, but we don’t really know if they’re true and we have no way of knowing, so we can’t say for example that YECs are wrong, they might be more right than we are!”. You sound like the kind of physicist who thinks we don’t even know what reality is.

You should retract your false claims that you have not said these things. Otherwise I think it not worthwhile to proceed.

@Jonathan_Burke

For example, when you tell me that you think theologians are authorities on reality, I assume you mean they are authorities on reality. Apparently now you want to qualify that somewhat?

Nope, it’s just that you assume your personal definition of “authority on reality” is not what I am referring to. I never said that theologians are authorities on all of reality. They’re authorities on what they study, which is God.

@Jonathan_Burke

I wrote “speak authoritatively”. You have swapped this for “have authority to speak about”. I don’t know about you, but to me these are completely different statements.

I do not agree with you that these two statements are very different, at least in terms of what I meant. This is EXACTLY the kind of nitpicking semantics which I think is unproductive. When I say that “scientists/theologians have authority to speak about science/theology” I simply mean that they are more likely to have knowledge about science/theology, such that we should listen carefully to what they have to say about their subjects. I don’t mean that we have an obligation to accept everything they say without critical thinking or understanding their reasoning. You’re ascribing some huge connotations to the word “authority” that I’m not using at all here.