See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
The chapter I’m reading in Total Truth has to do with the natural materialistic a priori assumptions of evolutionary theory. Last night as I researched plate tectonics for world-building, I watched a video called something like “How Creationism Taught Me Good Science.”
The video confused me because the speaker gave a report of the history of the development of the plate tectonic theory. (By the way, said theory is that the crust of the earth is broken into pieces, called plates, that move around. That movement develops geographical features like trenches, rifts, mountains, volcanos, and earthquake zones.) At the end of the video, he proudly announced that such peer-reviewed development of an idea is what is meant by good science. Creationism is bad science, he said, because it tries to use legal methods to gain acceptance rather than the scientific method he had described.
There was nothing about any of the science he described that a creationist would have rejected. What the creationist would have rejected would be the assumptions and the conclusions that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with the philosophy known as natural materialism.
What he doesn’t discuss is the fact that what he calls science doesn’t follow the process he described to wherever the evidence leads. It only permits what is in accordance with good science, and good science equals natural materialism. The only hypotheses, theories, or laws permitted are those that support the exclusion of God.
Darwin admitted this. His goal in presenting evolution was to remove religion from the equation. One didn’t need to agree with him about the mechanism of evolution as long as one rejected the idea that God was involved. What all of this means is that the business of science today isn’t science. It’s the protection of a specific philosophical view. In other words, the business of science is all about doing precisely what the Pope did to Galileo all those centuries ago.
Some scientists will claim that a spiritual being is outside of the realm of scientific purview. However, if that is the case then it is just as outside of science’s prevue to declare anything about a deity, whether positive or negative.
I’m not convinced it is outside of the purview. I think they use that as an excuse. I have asked more than once for people to consider what would constitute evidence for the existence of a nonphysical life from. A similar question was proposed by Nancy Pearcey. She wrote that at least one of the issues at hand is whether we live in a closed system or an open. How would we determine the answers to these questions?
Two more questions. There are more than twenty factors that are critical to the very existence of the universe, and to our presence. How is it that all those bits of fine-tuning took place? The best answer we have from scientists at the moment is “Multiple Universes and we happened to hit the jackpot.” Have those universes been found? Explored? Proven? Well, no.
There are also things in the universe for which there is no evidence for how evolution could have succeeded. A very specific example is the flagellar motor of bacteria. But it’s not alone. A specific number of pores in the shell of a chicken’s egg are necessary in order for the check to develop. It’s reasonable to suspect that the same is true of all bird’s eggs. So how did the supposed earliest birds get it right within one generation? How many eggs would they have to lay to get one that was viable, in one generation?
The answer, over and over, is what an evolutionist once declared in a program about evolution. He said, “I don’t believe in evolution. It happened.” And that’s my problem with evolution – without any specific historical proof, without any verifiable proof that the increases in the information required for evolution having ever taken place (“Just look around” doesn’t qualify) we’re supposed to accept that chance waved its wand and “it happened.” And that is science, but God is not?
The video confused me because the speaker gave a report of the history of the development of the plate tectonic theory. (By the way, said theory is that the crust of the earth is broken into pieces, called plates, that move around. That movement develops geographical features like trenches, rifts, mountains, volcanos, and earthquake zones.) At the end of the video, he proudly announced that such peer-reviewed development of an idea is what is meant by good science. Creationism is bad science, he said, because it tries to use legal methods to gain acceptance rather than the scientific method he had described.
There was nothing about any of the science he described that a creationist would have rejected. What the creationist would have rejected would be the assumptions and the conclusions that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with the philosophy known as natural materialism.
What he doesn’t discuss is the fact that what he calls science doesn’t follow the process he described to wherever the evidence leads. It only permits what is in accordance with good science, and good science equals natural materialism. The only hypotheses, theories, or laws permitted are those that support the exclusion of God.
Darwin admitted this. His goal in presenting evolution was to remove religion from the equation. One didn’t need to agree with him about the mechanism of evolution as long as one rejected the idea that God was involved. What all of this means is that the business of science today isn’t science. It’s the protection of a specific philosophical view. In other words, the business of science is all about doing precisely what the Pope did to Galileo all those centuries ago.
Some scientists will claim that a spiritual being is outside of the realm of scientific purview. However, if that is the case then it is just as outside of science’s prevue to declare anything about a deity, whether positive or negative.
I’m not convinced it is outside of the purview. I think they use that as an excuse. I have asked more than once for people to consider what would constitute evidence for the existence of a nonphysical life from. A similar question was proposed by Nancy Pearcey. She wrote that at least one of the issues at hand is whether we live in a closed system or an open. How would we determine the answers to these questions?
Two more questions. There are more than twenty factors that are critical to the very existence of the universe, and to our presence. How is it that all those bits of fine-tuning took place? The best answer we have from scientists at the moment is “Multiple Universes and we happened to hit the jackpot.” Have those universes been found? Explored? Proven? Well, no.
There are also things in the universe for which there is no evidence for how evolution could have succeeded. A very specific example is the flagellar motor of bacteria. But it’s not alone. A specific number of pores in the shell of a chicken’s egg are necessary in order for the check to develop. It’s reasonable to suspect that the same is true of all bird’s eggs. So how did the supposed earliest birds get it right within one generation? How many eggs would they have to lay to get one that was viable, in one generation?
The answer, over and over, is what an evolutionist once declared in a program about evolution. He said, “I don’t believe in evolution. It happened.” And that’s my problem with evolution – without any specific historical proof, without any verifiable proof that the increases in the information required for evolution having ever taken place (“Just look around” doesn’t qualify) we’re supposed to accept that chance waved its wand and “it happened.” And that is science, but God is not?
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