Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:40 pm
...species were created fully fleshed out by God at each point in history....
In my earlier comments, I pointed to the fact that the theory of Evolution has bad implications for fields like Biology and Psychology, if it turns out, as Nagel says, that it's really an incorrect or incomplete paradigm imposed on science itself. It would harm our ability to investigate the world scientifically, of course. That would be bad for everyone.
But it has no implications for theology whether God used a short or a longer timespan for the creation of particular species, ("day" can mean either) so it's theologically an unimportant question. What IS theologically important is the part of the theory that deals with the alleged "ascent of man," which, if true, would undermine Biblical Theism. For the Bible describes mankind as being the product of a unique creation event, separate from the animals, and in special relation to God, including moral relationship... a thing which no animal has...and spiritual relationship...another thing which no animal has...and with obligations of stewardship, which, again, no animal has, and finally with a unique salvation history, in which animals have no active role at all.
So that's where the debate needs to begin.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 4:41 am
I'm just asking for your honest view of the thing, Gary. I'm not going to challenge you; I just want to know how it looks to you when you open your eyes to it. What's your starting intuition?
As far as how it "looks" to me, all I see is what I see today. I don't see how it looked millions or billions of years ago, I don't see it being created nor evolving I just see what is here now in its current form. therefore I just go off of what I read in books.
Okay, that's all how most people operate, most of the time...at least, today. But not historically; for the very simple reasons that there have historically been no books to tell them, and Darwinism's only a hundred and some years old.
So I'm just asking, if you were looking at the World and its various species, including yourself, which hypothesis would first suggest itself to you? Would you be inclined to say, "What marvelous chance!" or "What created this?"
To be honest, the world looks no more "created" to me than it looks like it evolved over time.
That's what I'm looking for, Gary. Just an honest opinion. And I think it's the general opinion, if people are honest, and the preponderance of people histoically have manifestly come to the same conclusion.
In fact, even ardent Atheists (like Dawkins), when they have had an honest minute with themselves, have arrived at the same conclusion...Creation
looks created.
But what
makes it look created to us? There are a couple of definite factors that make our intuition very reasonable. One, we know that complex things...and especially extremely complex things, are far more likely to be the product of design than of chance. In our daily experiences, we never see chance resulting in anything but disorder; and things are very orderly here.
Secondly, things around us specify stuff. Things aren't piles of random happenenings: they form coherent entities, such as objects and species, laws and regularities, events and consequences, and all that. There is a profound rationality written into the operating and existence of all things around us, even when we admit we don't know the precise meaning of it all. It's as if we find ourselves in the middle of a cosmic story in which we've suddenly appeared as (perhaps) a minor character, and nobody's explained our role exactly, and nobody's told us where the story's going, but we sense it's going somewhere.
Thirdly, we are aware of the operating of a mind in us. This is something no Evolutionist can come close to explaining, as Nagel pointed out. They all lapse into attempted accounts (really no more than just-so stories) about the development of the physical brain, because they can't even locate the entity within the physical form. They know nothing of mind, ironically, since they pride themselves on being "intellectual." But an intellect is nothing in a strictly causal, physical world. However, you and I have minds, and we live through them every day. So that, also, is a further intimation of meaning, purpose, direction and design.
And consider your own existential longings, Gary. You're a guy who longs for fairness, for justice, for kindness, for purpose, for meaning...but why? If Evolutionism is true, there were never any such things in the universe, and never will be. The question is not why you long for them irrationally, since they cannot exist at all, but
how you even formed a desire to think you wanted them in the first place. How would purely random processes produce in you a longing for these things?
So for all these reasons, and for many more as well, people naturally gravitate to the design hypothesis first. And it actually takes a process of willfully resisting the evidence to bring about the perception that maybe it's all random. No wonder it took up until Darwin to even find a rationale that made it look plausible to anyone: it's profoundly counter-intuitive. It takes a herculean act of will to convince oneself there's no evidence for design; what there is, in fact, is overwhelming
prima facie evidence for it. Interestingly, Dawkins himself admits that's how it is.
Now, is that mass of suggestive evidence enough to form a firm belief on? No, of course not. The counterintuitive option could plausilby turn out to be true, despite the evidence to the contrary. But it's a starting point when one realizes that honest leads us toward design, not randomness as the right explanation. And it means that the burden of proof is on any contrary hypothesis, no on our intuition of design.
I'll pause. I'm more interested in where your mind goes from here than anything, so I'll wait for what you want to say next, okay?