On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 19:40:10 -0500 (CDT), Susan B wrote:
Thanks for Susan's feedback.
SB>Stephen Jones wrote in the Waterloo Times:
It was *Wanneroo* Times. It is an aboriginal word.
>SJ>Lex Bastian's claim (Community May 25) that "evolution is [not]...in any
>>way incompatible with the Christian faith", is misleading, because he uses
>>the word "evolution" in a way that is not used by mainstream science
>>today.
>>
>>Mr Bastian uses "evolution" in the sense of God-sustaining, but Neo-
>>Darwinism, which is the version of evolution taught in public schools
>>today, claims to be self-sustaining.
SB>Mr Bastian had written:
>SJ>It is standard Christian doctrine that God is not only the creator, but also
>>the sustainer of the universe.
SB>you misquoted a man who had been printed publicly only a few days before you
>did it! That takes amazing nerve.
Where have I misquoted Mr Bastian? Mr Bastian wrote: "God is...the
sustainer of the universe...evolution...is an essential part of His sustaining
work." I wrote that Mr Bastian "uses `evolution' in the sense of God-
sustaining".
Mr Bastian replied (as we shall see in my reply to his next letter), and did
not complain that I had been misquoted him. And none of the other correspondents
who supported Mr Bastian claime that I had misquoted him.
In my experience, evolutionists are too quick to try to dismiss creationists'
criticisms by a `shoot the messenger' tactic, rather than deal with a message
which they don't want to hear. This is increasingly counterproductive, and
it is making more and more people (like me for example) prick up their ears
and take notice.
Once I just assumed that God created through evolution, and in my first
debates in a Creation/Evolution forum, I actually argued that. But then I
noticed the pervasive `shoot the messenger' tactics of evolutionists and I
started to wonder why, if they had scientific truth on their side, they had to
resort to such dubious tactics.
Now I know why - they *don't* have scientific truth on their side!
SB>Mr. Bastian believes (along with a very large number of Christians) that
>God created the universe and he created it to evolve.
And as I pointed out in my next letters to the Editor, this is a fallacy.
First, if God "created", then the right term to use is *creation*, not
evolution.
Second, if there realli is a God who could create, then Neo-Darwinism's
fundamental assumption that *all* mutations that have ever occurred in the
3.8 billion year history of life on Earth were *undirected*, is dubious, to
say the least.
SB>I doubt many are left who care what Huxley thought :-)
Susan herself is an example of only one of the "many", who believe along
with Julian Huxley, that "Neo-Darwinism claims that `there is no longer
either need or room for the supernatural'".
If the "supernatural" was allowed to exist alongside Neo-Darwinism's
fundamental assumption that *all* mutations that have ever occurred in the
3.8 billion year history of life on Earth were *undirected*, then it would
undermine Neo-Darwinism.
That is why the leading Darwinists are so keen to discredit all forms of
creationism. That is why Lewontin said:
"It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us
to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but, on the
contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to
create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce
material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how
mystifying to the uninitiated. . Moreover, that materialism is *absolute*,
for we *cannot* allow a Divine Foot in the door." (Lewontin R., "Billions
and Billions of Demons," review of "The Demon-Haunted World: Science
as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9,
1997, p31. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19970109028R@p6.
My emphasis).
As Johnson rightly pointed out:
"Victory in the creation-evolution dispute therefore belongs to the
party with the cultural authority to establish the ground rules that
govern the discourse. If creation is admitted as a serious possibility,
Darwinism cannot win, and if it is excluded a priori Darwinism cannot
lose." (Johnson P.E. "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of
Naturalism", 1990, p8)
Steve
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"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood
perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3)
no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life
exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent." (Provine W., "Evolution: Free
will and punishment and meaning in life", Abstract of Will Provine's 1998
Darwin Day Keynote Address.
http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/1998/provine_abstract.html)
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