That seems self-contradictory, understanding your “the purely horizontal plane” to mean the purely physical or earthbound. Of course God’s interventional M.O. includes the “vertical” but physically undetectable causality. Jesus calming the storm on Galilee is an example – were any natural laws broken? But the timing and placing of the events were, shall we say, notable? God’s providential M.O. at work.
Well I don’t think science is atheistic, religious or agnostic. It’s like asking is a cooking class those things and it’s just irrelevant.
The scientific method does a fantastic job at vetting things out and correcting it overtime. But you can be any of those things and accept science. Hence this group of mostly Christians who accept the scientific consensus
But there are a lot of people that though not dumb, don’t understand the basics of science and so they create these false paranoid ideas.
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Please explain the apparent self contradiction a little further.
In what sense can the the calming of the storm be viewed as ‘undetectable’ causality?
Words were spoken- the environment responded.
‘Well I don’t think science is atheistic, religious or agnostic. It’s like asking is a cooking class those things and it’s just irrelevant’.
…
As you say, ‘science’ itself as ‘science’ i.e. ‘that which can be objectively measured’ is not of necessity athiestic, religious or agnostic. I don’t believe anyone here has made the proposition that it is. However, each individual scientist, according to his own persuasion, will proceed to interpret his or her experimental findings according to his his or her a priori philosophical or religious assumptions. The assumptions come first the actual ‘science’ follows after.
I was responding to the very first sentence of the very first post.
You said that providential interventions should not be understood “solely as intervention on the purely horizontal plane”. How can anything be understood as an intervention ‘from above’ on a ‘purely horizontal plane’ in the first place? Providential intervention denotes not merely horizontal, materialistic causality, hence the contradiction, unless you mean something different by “horizontal plane” than I am inferring you to mean.
A man in a boat said something during a storm. The storm stopped. There is a materialistic causality between words spoken and the weather? What natural laws were broken? None, but it was providential timing and placing to the extreme, the same M.O. as other cases noted in ‘objective evidence’ linked above, the same sovereign God not “divorced from His eternal being” and while fulfilling his eternal decree.
I was at a lake once when the wind was kicking up the waves, bending the trees along the shoreline, and sending debris all over. All of a sudden, it just stopped. Like a switch was thrown, literally in seconds, all becalmed. No taper off. No little gusts. Just stillness. At the time, I literally thought of the disciples in the boat.
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So there can be no measures of evolution. What level have you studied biology?
So there can be no measures of evolution. What level have you studied biology?
Why limit evolution only to biology? Evolutionary theory is embraced across a whole range of disciplines such as cosmology, geology, paleontology, anthropology, zoology, psychology, the arts and humanities, including politics, ethics and across the whole range of social and behavioural sciences etc. No one is an expert in all of them as far as I am aware and in many cases ‘evolution’ is assumed on the basis of institutional consensus and accepted rather like the man in the street does. I studied Geology up to degree entry level but didn’t go that way.
I was taught evolution at A’level as though I should accept it on no other basis than ‘this is what the text books say’ and ‘they are written by the experts’. I passed my exams by learning the stuff by rote and regurgitating ‘parrot fashion’ without hardly understanding a thing about how it was all meant to work. It’s easy to pass exams this way. All you need is a reasonably good memory. So ‘levels’ don’t necessarily mean a whole lot when it comes to the truth of the matter.
Even so, I have read and studied the works of professional biologists who question evolution and remain far from convinced. I see Neo-Darwinist evolution as an extrapolated ideological belief system rather than objective science. A kind of religion of certainty.
However, if you are a biologist and want to convince me of why I should accept evolution and provide me with some scientific measurements then by all means give it your best shot, Klax me ol’ mucker. Give me your silver bullet. 
So you know nothing of evolutionary biology from disinterested biologists beyond 6th form. Nothing of measured rates of evolution from the fossil record to molecular biology. And yes I have put my honours degree in biological sciences, obtained from a proper university despite my then being a creationist, to professional use.
OK- Carry on. I’m listening.
To what? Read Dawkins. And Nick Lane.
I have have done, and also listened to his lectures.
So how could you know nothing about the measurement of evolution?
I wasn’t convinced by his arguments. What did I miss?
The vast growing wealth of disintetested literature on the subject. You know, ‘science’.
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I was watching one Dawkins presentation recently. I think it was one of the Christmas lectures he did some time ago. (Probably at the level you might think I might grasp😀). He brought out a microscope and told the audience- 'This microscope…no one could possibly mistake this for an object which just happens to be the way it is. It is a designed object (This was because of its obvious complexity and utility).
He later brought out a boa constrictor and then proceeded to tell the audience that the boa constrictor is designoid (i.e. not designed). ‘Just looking at the outside of ‘squeeze’ (the boa constrictor) gives us no real idea at all of what an extraordinarily complicated structure he and all other living creatures are. A living thing like the boa constrictor is not just more complicated than the microscope… it is a billion times more complicated than the microsope’.
Now you really have to admire that kind of counterintuitive logic.
Needless to say I didn’t find his argument at all convincing.
So what are the very best reasons for believing in neo-Darwinian evolution from your perspective? Give me your clinchers that I might think them through.
So who are the top three biologist, or people who studied evolution academically, that don’t accept it?
So eye I have a really simple question for you.
Can you explain another interpretation, other than provided by the theory of evolution, to explain the development of species through morphological development as divergent traits moves dirtier and further away from the original basal form within the superimposed geological layers?
Hi Neil
I recommend Sean B. Carroll’s Making of the Fittest, for a friendly and popular introduction by an evolutionist without that pervasive contempt for all things faith. The Serengeti Rules is also very good.
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