>>Stephen:
>>I don't say "science doesn't know X therefore my religion is true!" I have
>>stated many times that I would have no problem with my religion if
>>evolution was true. In fact for about 15 years as a Christian I believed that
>>evolution was probably true and just God's means of creating.
Chris
No, you say, "if science *does* know X, then my religion *isn't* true,"
which, in practice, is nearly the same thing. That is, *your* religion can
*only* be true if naturalistic evolution is false, so it *absolutely*
depends on science not knowing that it *IS* true. It is a fundamental and
absolutely crucial mistake to make your religious belief dependent on
whether some purely scientific theory is true *or* false. In *general*, it
is a mistake to make *any* critical philosophical premise dependent on
whether any such a theory is true or false. In other words, *if* it is
possible for science to resolve a question, then any particular supposed
answer to *that* question should *not* be part of your *philosophical* system.
Why? Because it is then *not* a primarily philosophical question. It is a
*scientific* one. And, *because* it is scientific, it *cannot* have the
kind of foundation that a strictly philosophical proposition can have, and
it is subject to empirical falsification.
Philosophical claims are of such fundamentality that they cannot come in
conflict with genuine empirical fact and genuine scientific theory (this is
one of the reasons why the indeterminism of the "Copenhagen Interpretation"
of Quantum Mechanics is not scientific; it is *not* resolvable, even in
principle, by empirical observation *except* by being empirically *falsified*).
Your *religion* absolutely requires you to reject naturalistic evolution
*regardless* of the empirical facts. That's a bad, bad, *bad* mistake, in
*any* religion.
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