Re: [asa] YEC--What can we offer them?

At 08:30 AM 7/11/2007, Don Winterstein wrote:

>"...Experience is (or can be) truth, but as soon as we try to
>express it symbolically, much of the truth of it escapes
>articulation. .." ~ Don

@ "... If (Dawkins) should ask, "what, don't you believe in
evolution?," my response would be, "what, don't you know about God?
You're kidding, right?" And if he says, "but God is not great," I
would ask, "tell me what you know about God. No, not about what other
people say or do. Tell me what you personally know." To which, if he
were honest, he would have to respond, "oh, nothing."

That being the case, he would be compelled to change the title of his
book from "God is Not Great" to "I Know Nothing" -- or perhaps "I Am
Nothing," which is what a human being unarguably is in any
materialistic paradigm.

To be completely accurate, the materialists [[ like "Barbara Forrest
of Kitzmiller fame", et.al.]] must affirm that "I Am Nothing, and So
are You," for in the end, atheism is nihilism, and a nihilist is just
an atheist with the courage of his absence of convictions: there is
no truth and everything is permitted. ..

"...there is no possible metaphysical grounds for something wholly
random, transient and accidental to know the Immutable. Or, if it can
know the Immutable, then we must revise our assessment of the
transience of this entity, for there is something absolute about it,
something which mysteriously touches the eternal, something which
cannot be surpassed. In reality, there can be no species above or
beyond the human being. It is inconceivable. We are evolutions's end.

"....Of course there is continuity between animals and human beings,
just as there is continuity between matter and life (or humans and
God, for that matter).

Nevertheless, there is also a radical ontological discontinuity
between matter and life, something "present" in life that could never
be seen in its constituent parts.

Naturally, being that we are alive and conscious, we are privileged
to bear witness to countless fascinating spiritual hints and clues
embedded in, and radiating through, matter, which "looks" at us with
its outward forms of inexplicable beauty and "speaks" to us with its
extraordinary inner mathematical elegance. But to suggest that this
means that matter is just as spiritual as the divine consciousness
that contemplates it is basically stupid, just a sort of exalted
flatland Spinozean pantheism that is superficially appealing to a
certain kind of middlebrow intellect, but ultimately blind to the
true hierarchy of being.

In the paradigm of natural selection there can be no absolutes, no
end states, no final accomplishments. Everything is a work in
progress, minus the progress.

Thus, the inability to explain how natural selection has produced the
perfection of the human archetype, something which is an absolute end
and cannot be surpassed. Anyone who looks into the eyes of his child
realizes this.

Yes, it is hypothetically possible -- no, inevitable -- that natural
selection will continue to tinker at the margins of this archetype,
but this archetype cannot surpass itself any more than perfect beauty
or absolute truth can surpass itself.

This is what it means to say that human beings are in the image of
their creator: that they are in their own way absolute, only in
reflected form -- as above, so below. Thus, they are absolute, but
only relatively so. This makes much, much more sense than the
opposite -- that we are really reflections of matter, or absolutely
relative: as below, so above.

Despite the fact that this preposterously upside down metaphysic
makes no sense at all -- for how could relativity be absolute without
immediately refuting itself? -- it is what you must believe in order
to be a self-consistent doctrinairre Darwinian.

Let's be honest: either we are a random, transient, and therefore
meaningless organization of molecules, or we descended from something
which surpasses us.

Woe to the impoverished soul incapable of intuiting our source and
ground in that which surpasses us.

And woer still to the beasts in human form who admit hierarchy but
who substitute their own imaginary mind parasites for the reality of
the One. .." ~ Absolute Truth and False
Absolutism http://tinyurl.com/2zmcu6

~ Janice ...."... political correctness is nothing more or less than
an intellectual burqa to cover up various anxiety-provoking
truths." http://tinyurl.com/2adnfb

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Received on Wed Jul 11 09:26:46 2007