>> At 11:31 PM 12/11/97, Lloyd Eby wrote:
>>
>> >1. The earth and living things on it are much older than 6000
>> > years. (This means that the so-called "young earth theory" -
>> > - held by a few religious fundamentalists or Biblical
>> > literalists -- is denied.)
I replied:
>>
>> many Christians deny this statement.
>
>True, but some people also deny that there's any link at all between
>cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Do you really think either of those
>claims deserves any attention at all, except perhaps as examples of either
>total ignorance or else some form of spiritual pathology or bad faith?
Considering that every young earth book goes through multiple printings with
thousands of copies and the percentage of people in Christendom who believe
that the earth is only 6 kyr old, how can we ignore them? At least in this
part of the country, they are the majority.
>
>> >2. Living species did not appear on earth all at once. (This
>> > claim can be further stated or specified as:)
>
>Here I must rely on your account of Behe. The view seems implausible to
>me. Behe would have to hold, as I understand it, that there is no novelty
>among living things. At the very least this denies the phenomenal
>(observable) evidence. It also denies the evidence that at least some
>amount of natural selection occurs at least sometimes.
Behe simply believes that ALL information is put into the original cell. He
would say that the novelty is in the appearance of the trait (i.e. turning
on the gene) rather than there being informational novelty. I don't see how
he can account in his system for 4.5 billion years worth of mutations
messing up the original information.
>> I think that you miss an important point in the creation/evolution debate.
>> I know that your statement 1 denies the young-earth view, there is a big
>> problem with large groups of christians denying all of the statement 1
>> through 5. So I would say that you have oversimplified the problem. While
>> evolutionists sometimes go beyond the data, too many christians don't even
>> accept the data.
>
>Here I don't understand your objection. It seems to me that all of my
>statements 1 through 5 are true. I know that some Christians deny the
>truth of one or more of them. But so what? They are wrong to do so. No
>useful discussion can occur between groups if one group denies obvious
>facts. In that sense, some Christians cannot participate in a useful
>discussion of this issue, and they fully deserve the contempt and
>dismissal of proponents of evolution. Do you and I disagree on that point?
>It seems to me that we are saying the same thing in different terminology.
We might be saying some of the same things. But I disagree that they
deserve contempt and dismissal. Don't get me wrong, I disagree strongly
with their view but they ARE brothers in Christ, misguided though they be.
And they control much of the agenda among the laity. And from a practical
point of view, there are too many of them to ignore.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm