Irreducible complexity is a undeniable fact

Sadly, I have found myself at this same impasse many times in the past when talking with Young Earth Creationists. (I don’t know Otangelo’s position on the age of the earth, but his reasoning certainly fits with popular YECist thinking on this.)

I was part of the Young Earth Creationist movement for many years but I certainly never promoted this position and I can’t remember anyone else in the early creation science movement of the 1960’s doing so. Perhaps I’ve forgotten but I just can’t recall Drs. Gish or Morris talking this way. So perhaps there are a few modern day YECist arguments that are relatively new.

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As Gordon Glover has said, The evidence is here."

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…and now!

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I guess the hard-working scholars who tell us about Pompeii aren’t really scientists. They’ll be crushed to get this news from Christians on the internet.

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We’ll break it to them gently, of course.

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I really want to understand my Christian brethren who think in that way but I have not been successful so far. I understand trying to protect one’s religious traditions no matter what. But to deny common sense in the process absolutely stumps me.

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It’s a section heading in his book, p. 304. I know that it makes no sense, because the RNA World hypothesis is about substituting proteins for ribozymes.

I think the point is not whether they work just fine, but which kind works better. I suspect you know that and are being evasive.

Why would your Designer use a ribozyme?

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Science is about testing predictions, not repeating or reconstructing phenomena.

This is a very, very basic point that you are missing.

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@Socratic.Fanatic

You will be happy to know that @Otangelo_Grasso1 has not yet made up his mind on these matters. But I think we can be 90% sure he just won’t be able to accept the idea that Earth is millions of years old. That would be too amazing to be possible.

We cannot know the atmospheric conditions when life began. We can make hypotheses. As at a murderscene, one investigator can arrive at conclusion X, another at conclusion Y, but since none of them presenced the crime, in most cases, their conclusion is a APROXIMATION of what most probably happened. in operational science the event can happen in front of your eye, and you can observe it in real time happening. All you can do, is report about the event precisely what was observed. If we could test historical events in the same manner, there would be no dispute and various interpretations about the age of the earth etc…

First, all that you’re doing over and over is pointing out that history is non-repeatable. Yes, everyone understands that time flows only in one direction. But if you follow your argument to its conclusion, you inevitably arrive at a point where it is logically impossible for us to know anything about the past. This has direct implications for interpretation of the Bible, by the way, so it’s really not a good argument for a Christian to promote.

Second, the implication of your argument is that the only things we can really “know” or trust as facts are those things that can be tested and reproduced in a laboratory experiment. All other knowledge is merely an approximation or an educated guess, at best. Whether you realize it or not, this places science – although only certain types of science – in a privileged position of determining what we can say is “true” or “false.” This type of thinking is actually destructive of faith. Philosophers called it “logical positivism.” Here’s a short wiki definition: “Its central thesis was verificationism, a theory of knowledge which asserted that only statements verifiable through empirical observation are cognitively meaningful.” Since nothing about Jesus Christ (or any religious statement) is “verifiable through empirical observation,” statements about him “are not cognitively meaningful.”

In short, your apologetic line of argument here is not helpful to your cause.

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Another complicating factor in all this is that memory can be very unreliable.

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