It seems pretty far off topic to elaborate any more than I have here. I’ll P.M. you.
I believe consciousness is divided into a part that is under our control though mediated and a part that does the mediation which is not under our control. I suspect prayer consists of addressing our conscious thoughts to that which is greater which mediates our experience. I am unsure that this is all there is to God but I do think it is as close as we can get to knowing God if there is a god. So I don’t think of even God as being a consolidated being apart from us. But as I think more on it, it occurs to me that there still might be something more beyond this intra-psychic connection which might account for bringing it about. Could be. It is mostly this question about which I am simply agnostic.
But looked at in this way I can see no justification for the existence of a separate Satan being. Of course I could still be wrong but I dismiss the idea of a separate being who is somehow responsible for spreading evil. One can always be mistaken but I find no rationale great enough for claiming agnosticism on Satan’s account.
Oh well I was intending to PM this to you but I’m on my phone now and probably cannot do so. Suffice to say I do not feel obliged to respond to questions or comments by anyone but @Joshua_Wagner.
My friend,
Thank you. I will quote what you have said in a PM that I send to you, that way we don’t take stuff off-topic. 
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What is meant above by scientism? Not this obviously: ‘Scientism is the view that science is the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values… the term was originally defined to mean “methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist”’
(I find the OP strange. There’s nothing spiritual about YEC. Even the lying. Lying for the greater good, for the truth in fact, is normal rhetoric in politics, law and of course religion and all self justification.)
And this is where I suspect your position differs from a Christian position.
Whose? Which Christian position?
Well - yes - I think that pretty well covers it! In fact, Klax, if I’m not mistaken, I do believe you might qualify as a poster-child of Scientism in these here parts. It is characterized by the person’s stated “certainties” (a condition you suffer from in spades) that science is the only worthwhile way of knowing anything - You won’t recognize it because you’re in the center of it. You would need the proverbial philosophical mirror to recognize (like most of the rest of us do) what’s going on there.
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Speaking of the spiritual battle in general, and defending the YECs with which i have some very significant sympathy, even if some significant disagreement as well…
i would humbly observe that there are an ever increasing numbers of topics in recent years where i am told that some obvious, straightforward biblical command, principle, or belief is a “lie” l because “science” has proved something to be an absolute fact.
Here’s just one example of legion i could cite from the pages of “Scientific” American…
Thus, in theory, a devoted YEC proponent could imagine some Christian believer, similarly (mis)informed by “science”, similarly asking, “what might be the spiritual origins of the seventh commandment?” and then, informed by “modern science”, claiming…
After all, the idea that adultery is a sin is a lie. Its proponents know they are not qualified to speak on the matters they speak on. Yet they do it anyway. That’s lying. And it’s a lie that absolutely harms the commandment to evangelism…
It is not as far fetched as it sounds… there seem to me countless areas now in the modern world where “science” has proven some traditional Christian belief to be wrong, outdated, or factually wrong.
“Science” tells me all sorts of things about sexual ethics that i know are wrong…
“Science” also tells me that believing the resurrection of Jesus to be entirely wrong-headed…
There are many, many, many aspects of life wherein i discount the claims of “science” (broadly defined), because i realize that scientists have an agenda., and i choose to trust Scripture rather than the results of their biased and (literally) godless agenda.
I humbly assert that it is not whether, but to what extent, a Christian must defer to the Bible instead of embracing wholesale the claims of modern science.
And as someone who discounts modern evolutionary theory both because of the scientific issues involved, and because i recognize a similar problematic agenda, (i.e., " Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist"), I tend to have at least some sympathy with YECs whose instinct is to follow Scripture rather than “modern science”, even if i disagree with certain particulars.
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Matthew 22
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Paul elaborated quite a bit but here is the essence. Yes it is absolutely the norm for people to lie in order to serve themselves. This deeply tied in to Christian concepts of sin.
I’m too far gone Mervin. And which philosophy do I lack? That of Hayeck? Or Bunge and Edis?
So we agree. So what’s the problem?
When it comes to social “sciences” and popular “science” publications I share your doubt. It’s a shame really that trust in natural sciences has been eroded by the poor track record of much more speculative endeavours. A worthy point to raise.
Edit to add, that was a bit dismissive of me. But I do think you are looking at obviously speculative and potentially ideological stuff, and seeking to equate its methodical flakiness (“survey says…!”) with actual hard science.
I am not a biologist but I can show you with plain geometry how astronomers know that the light we see from some objects was either emitted more than 10k years ago, or at least (since we don’t have a time machine to prove it) was made to look like that by some elaborate hoax. I can also trace back further in time, convincingly, through billions of years, to explain actual astronomical observations. Actual hard science, not “survey says”. (Also can show the Earth is not flat, there’s not waters below, a firmament above, etc.)
What I have read of evolutionary biology convinces me they employ the same rigor, and are not at all like people who pen salacious, speculative rubbish about how quantity and variety of sex makes people feel good. It belongs more in Cosmo than Sci.Am but this is the age we live in.
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I have no idea - given that I don’t know who those people are. But the phrase that you are “too far gone” is probably the one seed of hope - not just for you, but for any of us. So many of us (I include myself solidly here) have not come completely to the end of ourselves yet to stare into that void of desperation as we must.
True, and thanks… but my point isn’t to make a distinction between hard or natural sciences and social sciences, but what i notice is that when any scientific endeavor begins to have either moral or theological consequences, that is when i start to be increasingly cautious about the endeavor.
Are many scientists so committed, for moral or theological reasons, to believing in an old earth that they would fall victim to confirmation bias , jumping to conclusions, making unwarranted assumptions, ignoring contrary data, and the like in their observations of the light from distant galaxy? I hardly think so.
Are many they so committed to believing that human life, in all its exquisiteness, actually could be the result of blind natural forces to which we have no responsibility, rather than a personal creator to whom we must give an account…? I do in fact think so.
I’m not a trained biologist strictly speaking either, but it was my major for a time in college until i followed a different path, so i am at least conversant with the material batted around… and i fear i do see continual wishful thinking, unproven assumptions, blind assertions, and question begging all over the evidence for evolution, myself. So for me personally, i am a Darwin skeptic primarily for scientific reasons, but i also recognize the tremendous social or worldview pressure of many scientists… Christian or believing scientists aside, it simply is not lost on me that many (most?) scientists do in fact have a deep need to arrive at a naturalistic conclusion… i.e., that there is a natural pathway wherein human life could be the result of blind, undirected processes.
(this is especially true when i examine the literature around origin of life questions.)
No significant disagreement, and i see no such unwarranted leaps in this endeavor as i find in the biological realm. not significant enough to mention here at least. Hence why i don’t fit neatly into the YEC camp myself. also
of note, though, i am perfectly willing to side with Scripture over science if and when i am utterly convinced i have understood scripture rightly. ( The “firmament” question, for instance… i firmly believe this to be a way people spoke or conceived the world,a figure of speech… i seriously doubt they would actually have believed in such a solid thing as many seem to think they did, in a rigidly scientific manner. otherwise i am baffled how birds flew through this supposed solid substance…) . but my main issue with many YEC claims is that they require certainty that we have interpreted many debatable interpretations correctly.
Here at least i cannot agree. granted, there are many rigors in the biological scientific realm. but i find far too many leaps of faith, assumptions, wishful thinking, desperate reaches, and trust in what appears to me downright “magic” in the biological realm… often they seem arbitrarily conceived approaches designed specifically to avoid the conclusion of intelligent design. granted, these are mixed with some very good research, and illuminating truth and new data.
A favorite example… it isn’t lost on me that the same person whose scientific rigor and brilliance led to discovery of the structure of DNA - when later confronted with apparently insurmountable problems with life developing naturally on earth - seriously proposed (in a scientific journal no less) intelligently purposed directed panspermia via a special long-range unmanned spaceship…
all obviously intended to avoid even considering the obvious alternate hypothesis of intelligent design by God.
One will forgive me if i think Dr. Crick may have been slightly biased in his scientific endeavor at this point…
I beg to differ my friend. Along with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and… I see the void. I feel the void. In my gut.
I fully agree that we need a literary, discursive, subjective approach along with science, especially in mental health, morality, politics et al, and their - i.e. science, natural and social, and the humanities - intersection in phenomenology.
Abrahamics and other supernaturalists attacking science for correctly rationalizing morality and therefore politics show their weakness in a nasty light.
I’m all for Love being the ground of being.
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I may be so bold as to suggest that to the extent you have Love, you lack nothing.
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Is this systematic bias, though?
Fred Hoyle (former astronomer-royal, first to propose of stellar nucleosynthesis, coined the term ‘Big Bang’) also believed in panspermia, and wrote a book arguing simultaneously for that and a kind of self-intelligent self-designing universe.
My comments related to the reliability of scientific consensus rather than the reliability of every scientist. Some of them, despite being brilliant in some ways, simply fly too close to the Sun and go unhinged in random directions.
Here’s another one, Kary Mullis. Co-inventor of PCR. Also ate too much homemade LSD and became an AIDS denier, a climate change denier and a believer in astrology.
None ot that makes PCR or DNA or stellar nucleosynthesis fake… Or AIDS or the Big Bang or climate change or an old universe or evolution fake…
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His directed panspermia hypothesis specifically?
No.
His unwillingness to consider God’s involvement as even a possible hypothesis, begging the question that any acceptable answer must be entirely materialistic in nature, and thus willing to entertain practically any materialistic solution no matter how desperate or far-fetched rather than allowing consideration of direct supernatural agency?
Yes, absolutely.
Understood. but if interesting: once I started noticing the entirety of the scientific establishment embracing, sharing, and repeating obvious patterns of fallacious, question begging thinking, i myself began to suspect a kind of “groupthink” that takes over.
to take an example from another field… C.S. Lewis once critiqued the “anti-supernatural” bias of the “scholarly consensus” of biblical critics…
Here is an example of the sort of thing that happens if we omit the preliminary philosophical task, and rush on to the historical. In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St Peter. ‘A book’, thinks the author, ‘cannot be written before events which it refers to’. Of course it cannot—unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person who wants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on grounds which he never communicates to us. This book is intended as a preliminary to historical inquiry. I am not a trained historian and I shall not examine the historical evidence for the Christian miracles. My effort is to put my readers in a position to do so. It is no use going to the texts until we have some idea about the possibility or probability of the miraculous. Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts: we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.
In essence, it doesn’t matter how many, or what kind of broad consensus, existed in the minds of how many ever biblical critics… if they all shared the same fallacious presuppositions and faulty methodology, then the value of their “consensus” was essentially worthless, if in fact they all followed the very same “question-begging” method.
I find, essentially, the exact same problem in biology. The procedure of practically every scientist in this realm is, “First, assume no supernatural intervention. then, explore what options remain, and then pick the best of those to be the best answer.” Now, for many, many areas of science and biology, this procedure will not necessarily effect the results (does DNA exist? how does it work? how do viruses replicate? etc.) but for such core questions such as, “are natural selection and mutation, alone, adequate explanations for the great complexity of life?” then the “methodologically naturalistic” approach absolutely begs the question and taints the results. When those are the questions I am asking… and someone tells that the scientific consensus is that undirected processes are an adequate explanation… well, to borrow Lewis’s words, “Those who assume that the results cannot be the result of miracles are wasting their time by looking into the biology: we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.”
And the very fact that even Christian organizations such as Biologos have explicitly embraced and defended this anti-supernatural approach in their methodology (i.e., “methodological naturalism”), affirms to me that what I’m seeing is indeed “systemic”.
Hoyle was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1971–1973). Not Astronomer Royal. Genius commonly exacts a price. God is fair.
This may be far more than you were asking, but I’ll share if interesting to you…
if i could be so bold to offer this example… (and if not personal to home to share on the Biologos site, I hope and trust this doesn’t appear an ad hominem…), but a prime example of my concerns was Darrel Falk’s review of Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell… I read Meyer’s book some years ago, and was also interested to read the best critiques in order to “fact check” Meyers’s arguments. i’d read Meyer’s book and found it compelling, but wanted to see what others more experienced and studied in biology saw in terms of holes or counter arguments in Meyer’s case that i wasn’t seeing…
i’m afraid Dr. Falk’s review confirmed to me the very concerns i had been seeing elsewhere:
One of Dr. Falk’s main critiques / counter examples was in critiquing Meyer’s claim that
Meyer suggests that the two different conditions for making two of the key building blocks that characterize an RNA molecule are incompatible… As he was writing these words, however, some elegant experiments were taking place at the University of Manchester that showed there is a way, a very feasible way that both building blocks could have been produced through natural processes (emphasis mine).
And then, to emphasize even further in the footnote to that point, he adds:
Even as he [Meyer] was delcaring that no further progress would be made, the problem had been solved. (emphasis mine)
Now, to a casual reader, this is striking - proof positive that natural processes could indeed accomplish this particular said critical feat of abiogensis and stating in no uncertain terms that "the problem had been solved. Case closed, indeed! I seem to recall being struck that perhaps Meyer’s point was weak here if Dr. Falk could make such a strong statement.
But Meyer’s explanation in his surrejoinder is striking, though - he points out that the experimenter in question 1) intentionally selected non-racemic isomers of the initial compounds, 2) utilized numerous intermediate steps wherein the chemists purified the reaction, removing problematic byproducts, and 3) followed a carefully planned procedure of introducing only specified reagents and only in a specific order…
Just like in nature. 
If such a distinguished scientist can examine a carefully designed, step-by-step designed process, carefully at each step only taking those extremely precise, guided, purified, selected chemicals, at the right time and the right order… and conclude that this was “a very feasible way that both building blocks could have been produced through natural processes”…? Then an observer like me cannot help but think that there were some extra steps in his thinking between the experiment and his conclusion that this demonstrates a “very feasible way” this process can be produced by natural processes… This strikes this observer as simply wishful or fanciful thinking, not scientific conclusions following from actual data.
A second “counter-example” provided by Dr. Falk involved an experiment in which he described:
In just 30 hours their collection of RNA molecules had grown 100 million times bigger through a replication process carried out exclusively by evolved RNA molecules. So another dead-end pronouncement by Meyer was breached even while the book was in press."
Again, at first glance, given the choice of language, this sounds like a slam dunk against Dr. Meyer’s claims against RNA replication. I recall being struck that, if this is true, then it immediately debunks Dr. Meyer’s observations. But again, exploring further and reading Dr. Meyer’s surrejoinder, it appeared that Dr. Falk’s claim was, in this humble reader’s opinion, wildly exaggerated. When I read from Dr. Falk that RNA molecules grew through a “replication process” carried out by “evolved RNA molecules”, this sure sounded impressive. But what actually happened was that 1) a very specifically designed and sequenced RNA molecule catalyzed 2) a single chemical bond, thus “replicating” other RNA by 3) joining two pre-designed and already existent, essentially pre-staged, carefully “intelligently designed” sequenced RNA halves together.
While this may well have been an impressive experiment in itself, it doesn’t remotely come close to demonstrating what Dr. Falk apparantly wanted it to demonstrate. When I explored it in more depth, I realized it would be akin to showing off a monstrous, 1,000 piece exquisite completed lego set, and boldly bragging that my two-year old had built it… when in reality I had built the entire thing on my own but kept them separated in two halves only needing one last final step to snap the two halves together into one whole… then I set it up on the table, guided my two-year old’s hands carefully in place, and instructed him to push the two pieces together that would “complete” the lego set. Then boldly bragged that my two year old had, “by himself”, built that lego set.
Again, the experiment itself may well be very impressive in its own right, if limited in its claims. But the logical step from reading about an experiment combining two such pre-staged and practically-almost completed by design of the experimenter RNA halves into one by another carefully-designed RNA molecule that catalyzed a single chemical bond… to concluding that RNA can indeed “replicate” itself “exclusively by evolved RNA molecules”… strikes this reader as absolute desperation… this is a logical “leap” that is in the category of the kind Neil Armstrong made… One small step for science, one giant leap of logic…
Finally, I continually notice a striking tendency to beg the very question under consideration, and was especially struck by how Dr. Falk made this fallacy. The very question that Dr. Meyer was raising in his book was as to whether or not materialistic processes could, or could not, account for the introduction of large amounts of complex specified information in a system.
In response, Dr. Falk simply asserted:
There is no question that large amounts information have been created by materialistic forces over the past several hundred million years.
I’ll simply observe that, to someone like me who is asking if evolution is true, i.e., if information can indeed be created by materialistic forces, it is not an impressive “argument” to assert that evolution is true and therefore information is de facto proven able to be created by materialistic forces.
The entire approach looks to this observer far more like a desperate attempt to arrive at a foregone conclusion, using whatever crumbs of evidence and whatever desperate leaps of logic are necessary, to reject Intelligent Design and arrive at the pre-selected conclusion that “materialistic forces alone are sufficient,” than a genuinely scientific approach willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and only so far as it actually leads. Hence another plank in my continued skepticism.
For what it is worth.