@gbrooks9: another incoherent mess masquerading as an ‘argument’.
I found your final two paragraphs particularly silly:
Why is the view that “evolution is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement” any more “atheist”/“antitheist” than the view that “geology is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement” or that “Ohm’s Law is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement”?
Likewise must we “tolerate some speculative discussions of the divine … as PART of a geological view of the Universe” or “as PART of Ohm’s Law”?
If not, then why is evolution different from the rest of science? This whole thing seems to be nothing more than a special pleading fallacy, wherein you are “cit[ing] something [evolution] as an exception to a general or universal principle [the treatment of fields within science], without justifying the special exception.”
Also, as you seem to think that multiple exclamation points give more weight to your ‘arguments’ than logic does, I will concluding be wishing that you will …
Ah, so your argument is that PS must adopt a position out of political expediency without regard to its scientific validity. This may not go over well with the scientists here, regardless of their religious views or lack thereof.
I will add that you confuse toleration with advocacy and science with religion. Both of these confusions compromise your position.
The difference is the great majority of English-speaking Christians have already accepted the geology and evolution of a 4+ billion year earth.
You seem quite intent to do whatever you can to “mug” and “rob” Christian evolutionists of their “Christ”. Not only is this not necessary… but it is downright harmful to the goals of Peaceful Science.
Remember the key point of P.S.? It is to accept the tiny miracle of Adam & Eve’s creation (or adoption) by God to clear the way for accepting evolution as the tool used by God to create pre-Adamite humanity.
So is it your intention to hijack Peaceful Science and to pillory Joshua for accepting or tolerating Christian evolutionists who have already blended divine Christology with scientific Old Earth evolution?
PS was founded on the expediency of this blending. P.S. was not founded on the non-peaceful criticism of mainstream Christianity!
Again, you are confused over the difference between toleration and agreement. I don’t think anyone is demanding that Christians reject God or even divine intervention in evolution. But your demand was that divine intervention (of a vague and unspecified nature) in evolution should be the official position of PS. Is there not a difference between “tolerated” and “mandatory”?
There is no hijacking, and there is no pillorying. And you’re the only one trying to enforce non-toleration.
PS should CENTER itself on the discussions between
Christians who accept Evolution
VERSUS
the Christians who reject Evolution.
Then, when an atheist arrives and says “evolution works without the existence of God”, it can be simply pointed out that P.S. takes no position on Godless Evolution.
The thing is, while this Florida Man rails against an imaginary atheist takeover of PS (the mission of which he is determined to stipulate on his own) and while he gibbers about Divine this and that, he IMO obscures a point that is worth making. That’s a point that is actually about “political expediency” though I would call it cultural engagement. Namely (again, this is just my view): linking atheism to evolution is problematic in many ways and one of them is cultural. In a previous life I reviewed a nice little book by a Christian named Gordon Glover, called Beyond The Firmament, and I explicitly underlined the fact that helping Christians to come to terms/peace with evolution almost always has to come “from within.” This is, I think, a general and crucial principle for cultural engagement on any topic. All I’m saying is that when a Christian complains about too much “Atheism” on PS while worrying that this could hinder someone from taking the first few steps away from religious science denial… we should listen. And no, we don’t have to take a single step away from scientific validity.
Do I think George makes this point clearly? No. Do I think his ranting makes him look like an ignorant crank, a quintessential Florida Man? Yes. Does it matter if PS looks like a place for atheists to debunk creationist BS and roll our eyes at dishonest Christian trolls? Yes I think it does. I don’t have suggestions but I do think this matters.
To those readers: consider visiting the thread I linked, to see what you probably already have guessed: George is laughably wrong about mission/intent for PS.
Would someone kindly confirm that this is the key point of Peaceful Science? I have looked through the mission statement, and for the life of me cannot detect it. Perhaps this is hidden someplace else, someplace more suitable to express the key point of P.S. than the post specifically written to express its mission and values? It can’t be that you are just making it up, @gbrooks9, can it?
Why? Why, in your opinion, should it do that? And why, in your opinion, is expressing it in some random thread more conducive to this ambition of yours than petitioning forum staff do deliberate on whether they wish to pursue narrowing the permitted or encouraged discussions on this forum to ones held by individuals matching one of these specific descriptions?
Personally, I think that if comments from non-Christians are not welcome here, this should be stated more prominently than not at all. And if they are and you wish them to not be, then the most effective course of action towards that goal, in my opinion, would be to make a case in favour of this change to the forum administration. Best of luck.
I don’t speak with authority here but a few years ago I wrote a piece to “invite” unbelievers to the conversation at PS. The thread I liked above, along with that piece, utterly contradict George’s claims. He’s just telling us what he wants, and we should all encourage him to go find it (or build it) somewhere else. It seems to me that Biologos is the perfect/obvious place for that.
But I hasten to add that we all should try to avoid equating the goings-on in this discussion forum with the organization called Peaceful Science and its mission. The conversation that I allude to in my old piece is — I think, and this is really for @swamidass and his team to decide — the one that happens in and among the big pieces on the PS site (not here in the forum). In short, I think that @Dan_Eastwood and the team would agree that the forum and PS are not the same thing, and that sometimes they may act at cross purposes.
Sure. But of course that would be a silly thing to say, in context, and nobody is actually saying it that I know of. Working without the existence of God isn’t an argument against the existence of God. It’s an argument against the necessity of God’s intervention, which is quite a different thing. God is and must be irrelevant to science, because it’s too vague a hypothesis to have testable consequences. The center of PS is of course GAE, whose entire point is to show that one bit of the bible is not necessarily incompatible with the scientific data. In effect, it makes the difference between Genesis and the usual evolutionary scenario untestable. Nobody is complaining about that. What scientists (some of the atheists, some otherwise) complain about is people who introduce hypotheses that are not compatible with the data or who claim that untestable hypotheses are supported by the data.
Yes and no. We cerainly observe conflict and cross purposes, but we also see a lot of common ground among people of diverse beliefs. I think people tend to bring conflict with them, as we had a while back with rtmcdge. Some people want religion and science to be in conflict.
I do think we could do a better job of understanding the position of others before pouncing on errors. We lose something by not fully understanding a position first, and saving argument for later. Even with someone as extreme as rtmcdge, asking questions to draw out their full opinions may reveal possibilities for common ground. In the eagerness to shoot down nonsense, we lose that opportunity.
(AND yes we should respond to nonsense, but we don’t need to be in such a hurry. )
Your claim is directly contradicted by your immediately previous post:
YECs don’t accept “the geology and evolution of a 4+ billion year earth.” So why is evolution different from geology?
As I said before, your position is “incoherent”.
Unmitigated balderdash! I have suggested nothing of the sort. I would suggest that your claim has far more to do with your own preconceptions, than with anything I have said.
Pointing out that you have failed to establish any direct relevance of Christ’s Resurrection (or his birth for that matter) to evolution, is no more ‘mugging and robbing Christian evolutionists of their Christ’, than pointing out their lack of relevance to Ohm’s Law would be ‘mugging and robbing Christian electrical engineers of their Christ’.
Neither is pointing out that “speculative discussions of the divine” have no place within science, or that a degree of randomness in observed processes is not incompatible with acceptance of divine providence.
I have always, and will continue to, assert the compatibility of Christianity with Evolutionary Biology.
This would appear to be an inaccurate caricature of what is actually said.
However if some scientist was to say:
evolution works without necessitating the involvement of the divine
I would suggest that this is no more problematical than stating:
Ohm’s Law works without necessitating the involvement of the divine
If the latter should not be taken as a denial of divine providence, I don’t see why the former should be.
In the context of biology and medicine, this is what hypotheses do, not what models do. One doesn’t need separate postulates.
That treatment is not even close to the way these terms are used in biology. Your claim that hypotheses and theories are subsets of models is nonsensical.
From that run-on sentence alone, I would describe your writing as pathologically unclear.
Refusing to use terms accrurately in context aside, have you considered trying to be concise?
Exactly. These deliberate misrepresentations are central to the ID movement’s deception of laypeople for money and power.
@Gisteron, misusing these terms provides legitimacy for ID that it does not deserve. ID is literally an avoidance of science, wrapping itself in the language of science–primarily to get creationism taught in the public schools, as detailed in the Wedge Document.
Thing is though, I make no such claim. I explicated my usage without any pretense that it aligns with what ever is the official glossary of biology. As I said,
And yet there seems to be no area in need of further clarification. My “pathological unclearness” seems to not actually get in the way of your understanding either what I say or what I mean to any extent whatsoever. As I said in the quote above, I consider my goal of communicating well met if this is all we have by the end of it.
Yes.
Which is it then, should I try to be concise, or should I be fair? sfmatheson invited us to acknowledge a separation, in concept if not in practice, between ID the movement and ID the idea, and concede that despite the character of the former one can independently consider the merits of the latter. Apparently, repeatedly condemning the dishonesty of the movement, agreeing with all of what you said in the passage I just quoted is not good enough if the nuance invited by another user is at all respected. I should have been concise instead. I should have just ignored queries for clarification people other than yourself occasionally make.
As for the political implications, allow me to put it like this: I criticize ID the idea for its poor scientific merits, and its advocates for their lies when asserting things and dishonesty on display when they defend ID. What this means for public schools is yet a third aspect of this whole discussion, yet more nuance to consider. We can do that. In fact, I believe I made rather unambiguous my understanding that ID as a movement is naught but a thin wrapper around creationism, when I responded to gbrooks9, explaining why it was a problem, even when not coupled to young-earth claims. I also remember saying in response to sfmatheson, after explaining why and how I am comfortable speaking lowly about ID both as a movement and as an idea:
So that part of its purpose is to corrupt the culture in general and education system in particular has not only not escaped my notice, but was something I myself actively referenced in the very discussion you have nitpicks about my vocabulary within.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to being criticized by you again for having expressed with respect and nuance all of the opinions you and I share.
)
