Dan,

Thank you for the respectful response to my post.
This debate often (usually) gets heated... which is what makes it interesting to me.

Personally I have no problem with saying that God created all that there is but to me that neither makes the Genesis stories literally true nor contradicts evolution as I understand it.

Similarly with the Intelligent Design argument I would say that life as we know it, and the Cosmos we live in, point to the Divine but that is as far as I can go with that argument.The ID argument, as such, seems to me to logically flawed.DNA is not a 'coded message'. It is simply a complex chemical displaying regular patterns and having certain, albeit remarkable, properties. It has been described as a'coded message',even by scientists,but only,as far as I am aware, in popular literature as an informal way of describing the chemical and its properties.So you see,while I am comfortable with the language of creation I remain sceptical,as all good scientists should be,about all scientific explanations of the mechanism.

You have indicated that you do not dispute'microevolution'(that shifts can occur in a gene pool).You stopped short of excluding the next step that microevolution might,possibly,lead to species differentiation.You obviously reject the organic soup model of biogenesis.

My problem with creation is that it takes the Genesis stories too literally(indeed that it takes them literally at all).They are, quite obviously, mythic in nature and adapted from pre-existing Babylonian creation myths.They deserve to be read for what they are and mythical literature is never intended to be read literally(any more than poetry is meant to be taken literally).You need to remember that Hebrew language is metaphorical to its very core and that the Hebrews were very sophisticated creators of literature and totally innocent(we are talking 500BCE here)of the strictly evidential,scientific approach which is the way we do history in the twenty first century.

They were good at literature.Give them credit for that and when reading their literature lets honour that by applying literary techniques appropriate to whichever genre we are dealing with.

George, you make a fine point,
“As I understand it, it points to the limits of philosophical sophistication in theology, not to its uselessness”.

And to further add...
I guess many theologians of the church never lose sight of their inherited conviction that faith should precede and transcend knowledge, and that no knowledge is often valid which does not accord with traditional beliefs – this approach is now also a limit to theology. Thomas Aquinas remarked, there are mysteries of faith which are above reason, yet the natural mind is itself the servant of faith. Thus, if one is to recognize both “the light of natural reason" and "the light of divine revelation," we are to subordinate the former to the latter. Here, a ‘supernatural’ mind can rule supreme over the mind of man, or in the words of Anselm: "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand..”. Perhaps an extravagance of faith can occur where a credo quia absurdum (to believe in the absurd) might potentially or dangerously apply where reason is lost.

It seems, the opinions of the ancient philosophers, even when admired by Christian scholars, had to be redeemed from the ‘curse’ of the natural world. A sophisticated analysis said this Greek wisdom had in reality been a Christian revelation faintly disclosed by the divine Logos operating outside of Hebrew territory, or else it had been pilfered from the Old Testament by the demons who had taught it to the Greeks in order later to embarrass the Christian missionaries. All true wisdom, after all, was of a supernatural origin. Christianity, therefore, could freely receive into full fellowship any Greek philosopher who knocked at its doors. But it appears, again ironically, it was the letter rather than the spirit of the older Greek intellectualism that Christianity thus acquired.
cont'd...

...cont'd
That spirit of scientific research which had gradually developed among the Greeks seemed to have failed, initially, to find a home in the Christian intellectualism of the ancient church, just as it had failed to dominate the later pagan philosophy of the imperial age. What was pivotal during the ‘enlightenment’ has rekindled an original spirit – more manifest today than ever. It is not just the same archaic form of religious belief that once again challenges this but also the same old fears.

Dan,

It's just plain silly to say that my claims of dishonesty are “personal attacks” when...

1. I have made it clear to you before that I don't think you're inherently a dishonest person – just a casualty of the dishonest “Creation Scientists”;

2. I am always able to give examples of why what you post is dishonest.

You know very well that my arguments don't depend on claims of dishonesty. For every falsehood, half-truth, misconception and over-simplification you've ever posted, I've countered it with the facts – whether I post them or provide links.

It's very easy to avoid the accusations though... Don't use the dishonest tactics that Creationists so often use. Admittedly this would be hard though, considering Creationism relies entirely on dishonesty.

I've suggested to you once before that you should check the facts first by looking at both sides of the story. But you don't, and I guess that's because it would be too confronting. While this would explain how you still believe in Creationism, it still doesn't explain your immunity to facts when they're presented to you. Which after reading your life story (which wasn't boring – thanks for sharing it) still remains a mystery to me.

Perhaps HarryG is on to something when talks of the triggers for religious faith? My family's experience with faith confirms HarryG's suggestion...

When I was a child, my family started attending church when I was 11. It wasn't until a few years ago that I learned that months before we started going to church, my father had done something very bad.

It didn't take long for me to put two-and-two together and realise that he became a Christian (and still is) because he found the ultimate forgiveness in his belief of a forgiving divine being. In my late teens, my brother and I tried to reason with him about his religious beliefs. But it's apparent to me now, that no amount of reasoning would have done any good since religion, to him, was like an escape from the guilt – like a drug I guess.

Moving on...

Continued...

...Continued

<<Materialists will probably argue against the first line.>>

And provably so.

This is not evidence of an 'intelligent designer'. Natural Selection debunks this assertion.

<<They will argue that in DNA we have finally arrived at an exception to everything we have observed and experienced before. >>

No they don't.

Complexity does not imply design. There are complex things that form naturally, and there are simple things that are designed. Simplicity is one of the main goals of design.

But I've already explained this to you. Why do I have to repeat such simple logic?

<<Though this runs counter to generally accepted information theory...>>

Oh dear. Another Creationist misconception.

Information Theory does not apply to evolution because change in evolution is not necessarily bad. Any bad changes that do occur are weeded out via Natural Selection.

This misconception comes from the fact that both the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and Information Theory, both have a quality called “Entropy”. But in Information Theory, Entropy can freely increase or decrease, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply to evolution because it only applies to Isolated Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system), not Open Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(systems_theory).

Information Theory does have a slight degradation principal, because it implies that information is irreversible. But this doesn't apply to evolution since DNA can be used to trace ancestry.

You see, Dan... No claims of dishonesty needed.

<<This is why intelligent design theorists are not so bothered about making that jump. For the moment they’ll settle for any name, believing that they have already unhinged the materialistic neo-Darwinism.>>

Wrong for two reasons.

1. As I have demonstrated many times before, Intelligent Design advocates have NOT unhinged evolution.

2. The reason Intelligent Design advocates don't mention “God” specifically, is to get around the Separation of Church and State laws. Which so far, they have failed to do. Thank goodness!

Very slippery behaviour indeed!

<<...but [God] left enough clues behind to point to who did it [created the universe]>>

Name one...

The “coded information” argument has well and truly fallen over with science (Natural Selection) and logic (complexity does not imply design).

relda,
I can only agree and learn from your insightful thoughts about Christian scholars and Greek wisdom.

>> Here, a ‘supernatural’ mind can rule supreme over the mind of man, or in the words of Anselm: "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand..”.<<

I do not think Anselm had the “supernatural mind ruling supreme” in mind. Anselm (or was it already Augustine?) is also known for his phrase “fides quaerens intellectum“ (faith seeking understanding). I think the translation “fides” as “faith” (rather than beliefs) is correct here, although I am not sure Anselm would have understood the difference.

I once wrote a paper (not in English) explaining the difference between faith and belief, a distinction that most of the continental languages do not have (in German, both are Glaube, similarly in Slavonic languages). [I explained the difference thus: I can have faith in you, just by knowing you well, but I can believe you only after you have made a statement I am supposed to believe.] Paul Tillich was aware of this difference, when he distinguished between what he called fides or assensus (belief) and fiducia (faith minus assensus) in his Dynamics of Faith.

One cannot seek understanding of anything unless one starts from some presuppositions - science usually starts with the belief in the existence of a world perceived through our senses but independent of them, the belief that our senses indeed provide some information about this “outside wortld”, etc., often without bothering to define precisely the term “exists”, “information” etc. So do other people, except for solipsists.

Faith is a state of mind, rather than just a belief, assensus as Tillich calls it. You can assent to propositions only if you already understand the terms involved. When you seek to understand the beliefs underlying your a priori faith you have to start by accepting basic terms like “exists”, “God”, etc. only intuitively, which for centuries (in case of Christianity) was not a problem, since there was a general agreement about them. (ctd)