Re: [asa] Re: ID without specifying the intelligence?

Peter,

I believe you deserve an answer, even if others don't. As you say, we need
light, not heat, but all too often this list just generates heat & when I
comment on it I get called a sanctimonious prig. So be it - this is the way
I wish to conduct discourse. Periodically I have also descended into
sarcasm and name-calling, and I always regret it later. I'm not pretending
I'm in any way perfect in this respect.

I believe that Science is the study of natural phenomena - the laws that
govern the way things behave. To be scientific, a theory must be able to
make predictions - and if the theory is successful, the predictions will be
verified - if they are not verified, the theory is thereby falsified. A
good example is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which predicted
that gravitational bodies "bent" space time. This was confirmed by
observations during a total eclipse of the sun of stars close by. Their
positions were deflected by exactly the amount predicted by the theory.

I therefore don't believe that Science can be used to study or prove the
supernatural. Consider answers to prayer, for example. It is not as if God
is some form of mathematical equation into which you plug a prayer and out
comes a predictable answer. Prayer is, at heart, the earnest and honest
endeavour to discover God's will. It is impossible to predict when and in
what manner our prayers will be answered. In a passage in Isaiah 55 God
states that his thoughts are higher than our thoughts - as high as the
heavens are above the earth. That being the case, how could we who are so
much lower even begin to predict "scientifically" what God will do.

Because the supernatural is concerned, therefore, with things that are not
predictable, then science cannot deal properly with supernatural phenomena,
because science deals with predictable things. That is a limitation of
science.

So I get a bit suspicious of ID because it would seem to be aiming to prove
the existence of a Designer. As I've said earlier, I think it's immaterial
whether the Designer is infinite (God) or just a sufficiently intelligent
alien being. Both appeals are unscientific, in that they make no further
predictions that can be tested.

The only other point I'd like to make at this time concerns honesty and
dishonesty. You'll frequently see creationists accused of lying (and if
Michael Roberts can provide a concrete reference to his oft-repeated claim
that Henry Morris said it was OK to lie for the Kingdom of God, then I'll
use that in any future dialogue I have with YEC's. At the moment we only
have Michael's word, which for all I know is just based on hearsay).

But it does seem to me most worrying that many YEC's don't seem to have as
high regard for the truth as they should. I gave as an example the way my
(honest) YEC friend has disproven Humphreys' White Hole cosmology and yet
no-one in the YEC camp has listened to him, and they still promote it. His
rebuttal is very clear, but no-one has acknowledged it because it's not what
they want to hear. Do you agree that's a cause for concern?

The other example is Ted today with the Billy Graham quote. Clearly BG is
not a YEC, and yet, apparently the Creation museum claims that he is. This
is something that also should cause you concern. A Christian museum should
pay scrupulous attention to the truth.

I also do find that many YEC's I've tried to reason with aren't really
willing to engage in reasoning about facts and evidence presented to them.
The usual cycle of events is that a friend writes to me and says "What do
you think of this?" (e.g. Blood cells found in a dinosaur fossil). I look
it up on the web and find the real story, which is very often one of
dreadful misrepresentation of the science, and point this out. Then what
usually happens is that my correspondent will ignore it and switch to
something else ... ahh, but what about this, and this and this. All of
these I could almost certainly find the rebuttal for quite easily, but I
simply don't have the time. [ Incidentally, with the dinosaur blood
"claims", the fact is that the researcher who made the discoveries (Mary
Schweitzer) is a devout Christian herself, and she is distraught at the way
creationists have distorted her research to suit their own ends.

In my view much of this is not so much deliberate dishonesty, as wishful
thinking. I was for a time persuaded of the YEC approach, and I certainly
didn't change my mind by being accused of being a liar. But I was engaging
in wishful thinking, whereby you just see what you want to see, rather than
facing up to the evidence with an open and honest mind. Wishful thinking is
a form of dishonesty, but I think it becomes so instinctive after a while
that the wishful-thinker doesn't even realise they are doing it.

Regards,
Iain

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Received on Sun Sep 16 09:52:36 2007