How does "Intelligent Design" account for ...

Great Debates
121

First of all, concerning the End Times, Jesus, Himself, said He didn’t know the day and hour of His return, only His Father in heaven. He also said this in Matthew 24:23-28:

Therefore, when anyone tells me “We’re living in the End Times”, this Christian will obey the command of her Lord and Saviour and disbelieve them.

Besides, I don’t hold with the “Look busy! The Boss is coming!” attitude which seems so pervasive throughout End Times theology. If I am so weak and inadequate a Christian that I need the lash of hellfire and eternal damnation to serve God, rather than doing so out of love and joy, as He commands me, then perhaps I’d better find another religion. I’m doing no service to Christianity.

As for Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creation in particular, here’s my take on it. Christ specifically said the Greatest Commandment was to serve God with all our minds as well as all our hearts. Most of His teachings are recorded in the form of parables, a form of teaching which requires critical thinking, and He is recorded in the Bible as encouraging people to think critically. He has created a world full of wonders and puzzles, not to mention marvelous hints. The theory of plate tectonics came about when someone looked at the coastlines of Africa and South America and noticed they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. The theory of evolution came about when Charles Darwin noticed the myriad forms birds had evolved into and wondered how it came about. I have no doubt whatsoever that God was present in every aspect of evolution and continues to be so. I like to think of the famous Manchester moths as being a hint to us that we’re on the right track with evolution and areas like the Grand Canyon and the cliffs of Dover which leave the history of the earth exposed for us to puzzle over as clues He’s given us as to how He created this marvelous world of ours.

As for telling me that light coming from stars 10,000 light years away and other such things are tricks intended to test my faith, why would God do that? He knows me. He created me and knows me better than I possibly can myself. I don’t recall Jesus entrapping His disciples or testing their faith. When St. Thomas doubted, Jesus didn’t condemn him, but came to him specifically. When St. Peter denied Him outright, Jesus still kept him as His chief disciple. Thirteen years ago tomorrow, I was lying in a hospital bed, insane and out of touch with reality in the aftermath of a Category 5 hurricane. God restored my life and made my faith irrevocable by what I consider a miracle. If He didn’t want me pushing keys on a keyboard and arguing in favor of evolution, He could very easily have left me there. For reasons I still don’t understand or expect to understand, He didn’t. If God is such a cruel trickster that He would set traps for those who want to believe and follow Him, then I am truly destined for a lake of fire because I cannot shut down my questioning mind. I tried to 13 years ago. God had other ideas.

Love God with all your mind. Question what you know and measure it against the commandments Christ gave us. Look with awe and wonder at this bounteous creation and know that when God created it, He called it “Good”. This is what I know, although not all of it. If I can take pleasure in solving a jigsaw puzzle, why can’t I take a similar joy in watching my fellow men solve the larger scale jigsaw puzzles of cosmology and creation? I own a few cable-knit sweaters; I bought them whole and their quite nice. I’ve also knit a couple for friends, and seeing the patterns grow under my hands until several balls of yarn become a finished product that will give friends joy for years gives me a hint of how I think my Creator may have felt as geologic processes transformed the earth from a ball of rock to the verdant planet it is now. My knowledge of evolution, plate tectonics, and cosmology enhances my joy and wonder of creation and leaves my heart singing praises to God and all His wondrous works, just as my voice shall be doing in a couple of hours. Since this is Sunday morning and I am every bit as religious, as Christian as anyone arguing in favour of Young Earth Creation and the End Times, I will not deny my faith and finish as I intended. Alleluia! May God be praised for all His wondrous works. With all my soul, Alleluia!!!

Here endeth this Sunday morning’s sermon. :wink:

Respectfully,
CJ

122

What a convenient out this is. I don’t think the apostles viewed it that way. They thought he was speaking directly to them.

Plenty of examples of people who were certain that they were the last generation. What makes you so sure that this is the one?

Unless they happen to not embrace the faith, in which case they can burn in Gehenna for eternity. How does this square with a doctrine of love?

Nonsense. How do you define stability? Not changing? If that’s true, you’re correct, because life on this planet is dynamic and appears to always be changing. “Stability” is the exception, not the rule.

As they have been since the beginning of human history.

And if he does not with this generation or the next, we’ll still be left with the task of undestanding our world as best we can and resolving our problems based on our efforts.

It amazes me to see folks who believe that all significant learning stopped more than 2,000 years ago and filter all other information acquired since then through this lens. The Bible also can be used as a justification for stoning criminals, owning slaves, and beating your wife and children if they look at you cross-eyed.

You don’t have to lose all sense of spirituality or wonder or awe to be a scientist. But it does demand that you reason based on the evidence before you that others have equal access to and can independently verify.

As for me, I think the universe makes just as much sense, and is no less wonderful, if there is not an Intelligent Designer and no Grand Plan or Destiny that governs every choice we make. I’m not saying that I know the answer one way or the other. But if I leave out that Designer, a life on a plane orthogonal to this one after I die, and all its implications, the world I see around me still makes sense and is worth being here for.

Wait, God just whispered something in my ear: He said that narrow-minded zealots have been misinterpreting what He said for centuries and He wants them to stop immediately. He loves Jews and Buddhists and Hindus just as much as Christians.

Don’t believe me? Take it on faith, because I said so.

%

123

Clear something up for me, if you will. Isn’t the probability of an event happening that has already happened 1?

124

This is a bit out of place in this thread.

125

Actually, there’s a wonderful book by Steven Weinberg entitled “The First Three Minutes” that runs the movie backwards to the first three minutes of the universe and describes how it might have gone. There’s no “refusing to bend” in that.

What he doesn’t do it try to extrapolate science beyond what it can do. Whether or not there was a time zero or God’s action in those first three minutes is scientific speculation, so he rightly leaves that out.

If you’d like to inject an Omnipotent and Sovereign Being into that singularity, or hypothesize about what happened before, you’re welcome to do so. It won’t change what has been observed since, and it’s not science.

How so? How is science being destructive?

We used to believe that illness was God’s way of punishing those who strayed from the path. Science taught us that microbes and cancer were not God-sent plagues and had nothing to do with behavior. How is science being destructive in that case?

Neither fascinating nor convincing. The argument always consists of “You’re wrong, I’m right, God is the reason for all of it. No, I can’t present any evidence beyond my argument from authority and it predicts and explains nothing.”

This might be true. As more and more of society buys into your irrational views, it might be true that the Darwin camp will shrink. We can only hope that society will do its best to remain rational and not retreat to being dominated by a Christian Taliban.

%

126

In a way I guess, but you can’t really talk about probability in connection with things that have already happened.

What ID and other creationists do is say that an exceedingly low advance probablity means that the event couldn’t have happened by chance which is ridiculous on its face.

127

Sorry. Drunken stupor.

128

Creationists have been claiming the imminent demise of evolution for nearly two centuries now; it’s known as the longest running flasehood in Creationism

129

Is there a non-coincidental correlation between fundamentalism and inability to quote correctly, or is it just me?

That is my point exactly. The Bible itself would support an interpretation of 6 distinct “phases” of creation, with a definite beginning and end. For someone who grew up in an ancient Egyptian culture (such as Moses), the best way of describing it may have been a “day”. However, the Bible does not support a literal 24-hour day.

Without a frame of reference, that the Earth is even rotating would be impossible to distinguish.

Fair enough. But then any small imperfection that we could find with any organism today would then be similarly inconsistent with an omnipotent God.

And there would be many who would jump on that.

Exactly. God neither explains it, nor does he attempt to, in the Bible. The Bible was meant as a description of WHY the Earth was created, not HOW. Many times the Bible favors scientific inaccuracy in order to make the point more clear – for example, Jesus called a mustard seed the smallest of all seeds (Mark 4:30-32), when, in fact, it is not literally the smallest of all seeds. It’s unsurprising that Jesus didn’t stop in the middle of his story to explain that there were smaller seeds in the tropical rain forests of Brazil, which was located on a continent across an ocean they had never seen. Likewise, it’s unsurprising that God wouldn’t have explained to Moses the concept of a radiation-dominated universe or how at one point top quarks may have existed.

That YEC’s use observable processes to support their beliefs is not being criticized – that they are using it incorrectly is.

The complaint is not that YEC’s can’t use magnetic field decay to measure the age of the Earth, the complaint is that nobody (evolutionists, creationists, or anyone else) can do so because the data are not amenable to such an analysis.

There are many current, observable processes which give the age of the Earth, among which is the radiodating of mixed minerals in rocks (isochron dating). Each of these processes gives the same age of the Earth, and it is not 6,000 years old.

There is an evolution-based monolith in the scientific community because, not surprisingly, most scientific evidence points towards evolution. That isn’t to say that there aren’t Christians in the sciences - only that they (read:we) regard you with a fair amount of disdain. There is no reason in the Bible to assume that the Earth was created in six literal days.

There are two ways of arguing against the evolution-dominated landscape:

(a) Admitting that science does support evolution, and then declaring science invalid on the basis of bias. This is undoubtedly the argument of choice. Christians choose to exclude themselves from science because scientists are evil, then they complain about there being an overwhelming anti-Christian bias among scientists. :rolleyes:

(b) Aruging that science does not support evolution. This line of argument seems to be increasingly common – take a process, assume it’s linear, extrapolate to absurdium, prove the Earth cannot be older than 6,000 years old, get laughed out of the scientific community, resort to presenting your “findings” to non-scientists who are easily fooled. :rolleyes:

The greater amount of Lies that is proclaimed, the greater amount of opposition is encountered as well.

On what Biblical basis do you base that belief? Is there a Biblical reason why Adam could not have lived 1,000,000 years ago and the geneologies skipped thousands of generations?

130

Is there a non-coincidental correlation between fundamentalism and inability to quote correctly, or is it just me?

That is my point exactly. The Bible itself would support an interpretation of 6 distinct “phases” of creation, with a definite beginning and end. For someone who grew up in an ancient Egyptian culture (such as Moses), the best way of describing it may have been a “day”. However, the Bible does not support a literal 24-hour day.

Without a frame of reference, that the Earth is even rotating would be impossible to distinguish.

Fair enough. But then any small imperfection that we could find with any organism today would then be similarly inconsistent with an omnipotent God.

And there would be many who would jump on that.

Exactly. God neither explains it, nor does he attempt to, in the Bible. The Bible was meant as a description of WHY the Earth was created, not HOW. Many times the Bible favors scientific inaccuracy in order to make the point more clear – for example, Jesus called a mustard seed the smallest of all seeds (Mark 4:30-32), when, in fact, it is not literally the smallest of all seeds. It’s unsurprising that Jesus didn’t stop in the middle of his story to explain that there were smaller seeds in the tropical rain forests of Brazil, which was located on a continent across an ocean they had never seen. Likewise, it’s unsurprising that God wouldn’t have explained to Moses the concept of a radiation-dominated universe or how at one point top quarks may have existed.

That YEC’s use observable processes to support their beliefs is not being criticized – that they are using it incorrectly is.

The complaint is not that YEC’s can’t use magnetic field decay to measure the age of the Earth, the complaint is that nobody (evolutionists, creationists, or anyone else) can do so because the data are not amenable to such an analysis.

There are many current, observable processes which give the age of the Earth, among which is the radiodating of mixed minerals in rocks (isochron dating). Each of these processes gives the same age of the Earth, and it is not 6,000 years old.

There is an evolution-based monolith in the scientific community because, not surprisingly, most scientific evidence points towards evolution. That isn’t to say that there aren’t Christians in the sciences - only that they (read:we) regard you with a fair amount of disdain. There is no reason in the Bible to assume that the Earth was created in six literal days.

There are two ways of arguing against the evolution-dominated landscape:

(a) Admitting that science does support evolution, and then declaring science invalid on the basis of bias. This is undoubtedly the argument of choice. Christians choose to exclude themselves from science because scientists are evil, then they complain about there being an overwhelming anti-Christian bias among scientists. :rolleyes:

(b) Aruging that science does not support evolution. This line of argument seems to be increasingly common – take a process, assume it’s linear, extrapolate to absurdium, prove the Earth cannot be older than 6,000 years old, get laughed out of the scientific community, resort to presenting your “findings” to non-scientists who are easily fooled. :rolleyes:

The greater amount of Lies that is proclaimed, the greater amount of opposition is encountered as well.

On what Biblical basis do you base that belief? Is there a Biblical reason why Adam could not have lived 1,000,000 years ago and the geneologies skipped thousands of generations?

131

You’re quite wrong on this, you will see in those passages that Jesus was referring to a comparison of the seeds sown by men in a garden and not with all seeds which might be growing wild in the earth. In the creation account, on the third day God created all the vegetation that “the earth brought forth” (Gen1:11-12), but He withheld the herbs and plants of the field which required a man to sow and tend them, these He created the same day Adam was formed (Gen2:5). The parable Jesus told was about a man who sowed the smallest of seeds in a garden and that is precisely the mustard seed. Wild seeds which need no sowing or tending are excluded from the parable. There are no scientific inaccuracies in the Bible and Jesus, being the Truth, cannot err.

Not true. In the Bible, a day is used in prophecies to mean a year (ex: Num14:34, Ezek4:6, Rev2:10), and can sometimes be 1000 years (Ps90:4, Hosea6:2, 2Pet3:6), but in the Creation account the time period is specifically stated as consisting of an evening and a morning; one literal day. Other misinterpretations of Scripture have occured when the 24 hour designation was ignored. For instance, the followers of William Miller calculated the 2300 day prophecy of Dan8:14 as 2300 prophetic days (ie 2300 years) and calculated Christ’s return to be in 1843. Their mistake was that the 2300 days were clearly stamped as consisting of 2300 evenings and mornings. These were not prophetic years but literal days, and so are the 6 days of creation.
.

God was the only one there (until day 6), and He didn’t need reference points to know when the earth had completed a revolution.

No, when sin was introduced by the Fall, then death and corruption immediately overtook man and the rest of creation. We don’t know what God’s original plan might have been because it was interrupted by the Fall, after that, the earth was cursed (famine, sickness, death, imperfections,etc)

In the first week of creation God created many things in their final mature form including Adam, animals, trees, rocks etc. If you went back in time, no matter what scientific method was used to analyze them, it would not yield the correct age of between 1-7 days because God supernaturally bypassed the natural development process. Although Adam and those animals are gone, the rocks and the universe He made are still here - and our scientific methods still won’t be able to date them correctly because they were created outside of natural processes. Science must adjust to Reality or remain in darkness and frustration.

As stated previously, the days are composed of an evening and a morning. Exodus20:11 also states, “For in six days the Lord made heavens and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.” Your disdain is actually for the Bible’s declarations of Truth, I just happen to be an innocent bystander who has told you what it says.

The genealogies in Gen5,11; 1Chron1:1-28 and Luke3:34-38 are consistent enough and detailed enough for me personally (some disagree of course) to place the time of creation right at 4000BC. But the plain fact is, you can give yourself a million years or a million generations and that chair you’re sitting in isn’t ever going to get up on its own legs and walk out of the room, yet that’s a better possibility than what the evolutionary theory expects us to believe.

132

ummm… no, it isn’t - mustard seeds are actually on the large side, compared against the seeds of very many garden plants.
I suppose it could be argued that nobody in first-century Palestine actually grew any of the huge range of vegetables, herbs and flowers that have seeds smaller than that of mustard, but I think that would be a bit of a desperate thing to claim.

133

So you still hold that God is a liar? He created a world of objects that are all designed to appear as though they were created at widely differing times, just so He could trick us into unbelief?

Pretty nasty God you believe in.

(Remember, we’re not addressing the red herring of your mature living beings having been created alongside immature beings. We are looking at the fact that the formation of stones, the background radiation of the universe, the ways in which the continents have been shown to have drifted, levels of trapped gasses in ice cores from the poles, and hundreds of other phenomena all provide a consistent record of the age of the Earth or the ages of events upon it. For God to have done that, He needs to be a sneaky little trickster who deliberately planted false evidence throughout the world simply so that He can stand back and laugh at the people who accepted all the evidence He gave them rather than accepting a literal interpretation of a book when even its believers cannot agree on its meanings.)

Now, you repeatedly make the false assertion that the (Neo-Darwinian) Theory of Evolution (by Natural Selection) is not scientific and that it cannot be true, yet the only thing you offer against it is a dishonest god and repeated assertions with no foundation. If you have actual evidence that there is anything unscientific about the Theory of Evolution, please produce it or quit making your false assertion.

134

Where?

Then there was a mountain high enough in Israel for Satan to point out kingdoms in North America (Mayan kingdoms) as well as Asia (Chinese kingdoms), according to Matthew 4? Or was is there a more rational explanation, that the phrase is figurative?

Why is it then that Genesis 2:4-7 states that “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up” when mankind was created, when in Genesis 1:11-13 it clearly states that plants were created on the third day?

To take the Bible as a science textbook presents an overwhelming number of logical problems.

I agree with the assertion, but neither the Ezekiel quote nor the Psalm quote nor the 2 Peter quote (3:8, not 3:6) is prophecy.

In addition, neither the Hosea quote (3000 years ahead of ~750 BCE = 2250 CE) nor theRevelations quote have been fulfilled yet (so it is Biblically unclear whether it is a literal or figurative day).

And then you return to the problem of what consititutes evening and morning before Day 4. If you want to be literal about interpretation, then morning is strictly defined as when the Sun rises. There is no Sun yet.

Alternatively, of course, you can argue that there is a point source of light (God?) which has a fixed location in space and that the Earth was rotating relative to that – but then the Sun is superfluous.

So, you’re saying that God created these rocks as to appear to be 4.5 billion years old, when in fact, they were only 6,000?

What kind of sick, perverted God would do something like that? Why would he create the world with direct, contrary evidence to its origin? Why would he back-date the universe if he intended all along to show us it was 6,000 years old?

For that matter, why would God create a universe that not only appears older, but appears CONSISTENTLY older? Certainly if radiodating of 10 different meteorites gave 10 vastly different ages of the Earth, that would be a far better witness to Special Creation than if 10 different meteorites gave the exact same age?

Consistent enough? The times given for each of the patriarchs even differs from version to version! The Masoretic Text, Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuchs all vary in the ages they ascribe to various people. Even worse, the variations are not random, but systematic – ages of older patriarchs were increased by 100 from text to text.

I don’t in any way endorse this site (Answers in Genesis, but it’s a site that shows even Young Earth Creationists admit that there is problems with dating by genealogy. The AiG perspective is that the Earth is somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 years old, but that different texts show different things. (It’s interesting to note that they dismiss, a priori, the radically different genealogy found in the Septuagint, despite the fact that the Septuagint is the Scriptures that Jesus would have read)

The site works against itself – it’s clear that the the Bible CANNOT be used as a trustworthy source for chronology data, and people who advocate such an approach must harmonize (a) God allowing his chronology to be corrupted, or (b) the vastly different dates involved.

There is no reason to believe that you have any understanding of evolutionary theory, not even at a high school level. You will have to demonstrate knowledge of evolutionary theory before you can make such claims.

My disdain is for the systematic desecration of the Bible’s truth by people who dogmatically misinterpret it in order to suit their ignorant prejudices.

135

Right back at ya! Your own personal prejudice is Evolutionary Theory and you have twisted the Bible to suit yourself (2Pet3:16). You keep bringing up the same questions over and over, refusing to hear my answers. That’s your choice, go back to sleep.

136

yerba buena and Bible man: both of you be sure to not step over the line to launching personal insults.

[ /Modding ]

137

It’s all a little easier to understand once you accept that God has a bit of a drinking problem. That bit with Satan and Job? Obviously a bar bet gone terribly wrong. Hiding false objects so he can laugh at us? On the Seventh Day God had a few beers while he rested. The results are perfectly understandable.

138

My prejudices are not ignorant; that is, I have facts to back up my assertions.

My personal feelings on evolution aren’t in question here – as a matter of fact, I challenge you to find a single statement that even confirms that I advocate evolution. Whether I am a hard-core atheist who believes the Bible is a work of fiction, a proponent of Intelligent Design who believes the Bible is figurative, or a Deist who believes God created the world and left it alone, no challenge that I’ve made to you is any less valid.

I challenge you to prove the Bible says that the world was created in 6 literal days. I’ve presented the problems that this strict interpretation creates, and then I’ve presented Biblical evidence that stories are often figurative, not literal.

This debate is not unrecorded – you are more than welcome to quote any question I have repeated in support of your point.

You are, of course, more than welcome to correct me in my Biblical mistakes. I have spent a considerable amount of time in order to link each verse that I cite, so that, should you disagree with my interpretation, you are free to click on the link, view the verse, and show me exactly where I have misinterpreted.

You claim that the analogy of the mustard seed is set in the context of a garden - patently untrue. You claim that the genealogies as transcribed are accurate - patently untrue.

Now, in light of the most direct questions about the literal accuracy of the Bible (Gen 1 vs. Gen 2, backdated universe, evidence of manuscript infidelity), you glibly end discussion and dismiss me as an evolutionist heretic? That seems evasive.

139

Quite obviously the Designer cares about all of His designs and doesn’t want to see streptococcus pneumoniae become extinct.

Of course that doesn’t explain why the Designer wasn’t so solicitous about the survival those of His designs that did become extinct.

140

Strictly speaking, you mean his own personal prejudices are Evolutionary Theory, Zoology, Astronomy, Geology, Archaeology, Nuclear Physics, Genetics…