"Is Genesis History?" producer responds to BioLogos

Indeed, such a foolish argument. Dawkins is admitting that there had to be an initial intelligence. If you keep going back to the original intelligence, then you have to ask what caused that intelligence to exist? Answer: Some form of intelligence had to always exist, and now you just confirmed the existence of God.

A better argument would be entropy and long odds somehow bubbled us into being and we are all just bio-based robots, with really no choice, and we have developed the intelligence to stumble onto truth through the pleasure versus pain model as mentioned by Plato.

in the end, the moral code and the way taught by Jesus with his miracles and resurrection are what finally blow the bio-based robot argument to pieces which leads to your own relationship with God, and the real choice which is doing it our way or God’s way.

Neal

Science stays away from metaphysics as much as it can. As you hint at, science is methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism. The conclusions of science state that the observations made are consistent with a natural process with XX.X% certainty. That’s it. Science doesn’t pretend to have absolute knowledge of anything which is why all theories are tentative and open to falsification, and even the observations themselves are open to debate.

I would agree that we should always encourage people to come up with different interpretations and see if those interpretations stand up to testing. That’s what science is all about. The problem, however, is that many in the ID/YEC community are either inventing observations or ignoring observations. You can’t have a fair debate if you refuse to acknowledge evidence that contradicts your interpretations.

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I did not see the movie, “Expelled”, but I do not believe the Dawkins/Stein interview occurred as you describe it. Dawkins may have admitted that science presently has no viable theory of how Life began on this earth (and repeated Crick’s tongue-in-cheek speculation that it was seeded from outer space), but he surely did NOT retreat from his belief that evolution best explains how it then developed. Can you direct me to a source for the interview itself?
Al Leo

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Well, if their position is evolving, then you can be sure that it is only the microevolutionary kind of change and categorically not, I repeat not the macroevolutionary kind! There may be substantial speciation and rapid adaptation of their views, but don’t ever suggest that this will ever amount to a real change!

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That was what I thought when he said it. There is a skeptic on this site questioning whether Dawkins said such a thing. I saw the film via DVD a couple years back. As I recall, this segment was somewhere near the end of the movie. And yes, he did say we were seeded by some dying Universe and was asked a follow-up question by Stein. I went back and re-watched that part – at the time – because it just struck me as interesting. I suppose the movie can be found in the local library.

If he spoke tongue-in-cheek, then it was not presented that way in the movie. I saw it several years ago and recall going back over that bit of it to be sure I had heard what I heard. It was, I think, near end of movie. You can probably find it in your local library which would be where I found it. I did not know Crick had made such a speculation as well – though tongue in cheek.

You must have misread my post. Francis Crick spent the last half of his career studying how Life could have arisen on earth abiotically; i.e. out of unliving chemicals. You can bet your life that neither he nor Dawkins ever found a scientifically valid replacement for the theory of evolution of Life (including humans) via natural selection.
Al Leo

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It appears that the Is Genesis History author, like several YEC writers, is focused on the (American) Grand Canyon. Ignoring apparent mistakes in interpreting geologic record of that area, he seems to ignore the rest of the earth. Regular geology seems to be able to account for the geologic features of every place on earth to the extent that it is studied. So far as I have seen the YEC people don’t do this and probably can’t. While the whole earth is
a time consuming challenge, perhaps they could start with a) the Adirondack Mountains b) Charleston West Virginia Area, South Florida and Hawaii. From my physics training, it can be said that one with one data point one can eliminated very few hypotheses., with 2 points with reduce the n umber of possible hypotheses 3 still more and so on.

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I am trying to understand Purifoy’s argument here, in his “In Genesis History?” Linebacker piece, under “Upsportsmanlike Conduct” (I think he mean “Unsportsmanlike.”). Can anyone tell me what he is talking about? What “insult” were Davidson, Duff and Wolgemuth forced to retract?

In the original review, the authors end their diatribe against Dr. Austin with this final demeaning comment: “The global presence of the Great Unconformity exists only in Dr. Austin’s mind.”

The problem is, they’re wrong.

There really is a Great Unconformity, and almost all professional geologists know it. In fact, not long after publishing the article, this was pointed out to them and they were forced to retract the insult.

How is it possible that three geologists would overlook something so basic to their profession?

This “interregional unconformity” has been widely known ever since Lawrence Sloss published his famous 1963 paper “Sequences in the Cratonic Interior of North America” describing it. In fact, Harry Wheeler, Steve Austin’s professor in college, worked closely with Sloss in establishing sequence stratigraphy.

Paging @davidson, who can explain.

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