Yeah, I’m not sure if we can know the actual reason but Nefarious put a great spin on it. The whole movie is mostly a conversation between a psychologist and a demon possessed man in prison the day of his execution. I thought it was absolutely brilliant and well written. I suppose if someone thinks demons are fake and made up and Jesus just accommodated/deceived people/himself in casting out demons, the movie won’t hit as hard. But Christians who believe in spiritual warfare of this sort will eat it up. It was on Prime last I checked.
This is the scene where he talks about why they rebelled and God wanting “eternal gratitude” and viewing themselves as slaves…. I thought it was brilliant.
It strikes me that Richard’s plaint is little different than a fish complaining that God made it dependent on water. It almost makes me wonder why he doesn’t complain about us being dependent on food, water, and air.
This is what it amounts to from our perspective. I always really try to understand other people’s points of view and I think he is viewing our presentation of God as if He is some human that forces people to worship Him or else they suffer or are punished. Sure, such a human is evil and hardly worthy of worship. But that is just not understanding how goodness being tied into God’s nature works and it treats God like he needs us. As noted above, creation is a free gift of overflowing love. Chris Baglow phrases it this way:
Creation ex Trinitate is the heart of the Christian doctrine of creation. Nothing is unless it is created, and everything created exists because of God’s inexhaustible, merciful love. Machinists sometimes create because they have some need, as do some playwrights. But God had no need to create, no hunger to fill by creating. Rather, the universe is the product of love overflowing, and merciful love is therefore the foundation and deepest meaning of all things, which is the same mercy with which the world is redeemed by Christ on the Cross.”
I don’t always agree with Wayne Grudem but these thoughts from his Systematic theology seem helpful:
“When we affirm that God created the universe to show his glory, it is important that we realize that he did not need to create it. We should not think that God needed more glory than he had within the Trinity for all eternity, or that he was somehow incomplete without the glory that he would receive from the created universe. This would be to deny God’s independence and imply that God needed the universe in order to be fully God. Rather, we must affirm that the creation of the universe was a totally free act of God. It was not a necessary act but something that God chose to do. “You created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
God isn’t flexing or pining for our approval as if He has some psychological need to be worshipped like a power-hungry human. And Richard seemingly views “good” as something external to God’s being which is just one of the horns of Euthyphro’s dilemma which calls into account God’s authority and omnipotence. This dilemma was addressed above.
It has just moved, the premise of conflict has been actively promoted.
I think you have taken me out of context, and perhaps this is my own fault for using the loaded word “crime”, in which case I am sorry for writing it that way. I gave some reasons why arguments for ID and IC fail, and ID in general amounts to nothing more than apologetics. Clearly defending one’s faith is not a crime, or lack of faith for that matter.
But if you seriously think that being an atheist is a crime, then I really don’t have anything more to say to you.
I should be angry but i am not I am sad, because this what biblical and “hard” Christianity does.
I coud try and tear apart the above dicsussion about me by @Vinnie and @St.Roymond but it is a waste of time. Once they have set Scripture above both reality and respect for the rest of humanity there is no trurning back.
I apologise for my "Christian " brothers. They mean well, they have faith, but they have lost their humanity, preferng sirituallity instead.
Of course it is a legitimate to be atheist. That is the whole point of not making us automatic worshippers and slaves. There is no point in offering freedom and then punishing people for not availing themsleves of it.
What upsets me the most is this notion that if you are not recognising or worshipping God you cannot be good or understand what Good is. Scripture says otherwise but they conveniently ignore such minor details.
Your best course of action is,as you said, not to engage them.
Luke 6
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full
There are lots of gradually evolving phyla. The Cambrian faunas have many intermediates between different phyla. Characteristics of phyla gradually accumulate. The idea that the Cambrian is a problem for evolution is a myth. Keith Miller has written some summaries available on the BioLogos website.
We recognize phyla based on very deep divergence with other members of a kingdom. But that means that ancestral forms without the key features will be rather generic and not easy to recognize. Despite that, many early fossils place between current phyla.
The burden of proof should be on one making a claim. Have ID advocates done an adequate job of proving that something is truly irreducibly complex? Can one prove that nothing irreducibly complex exists? Those put the burden of proof in different directions. Claimed examples of irreducible complexity are not good. That does not prove that better examples or better arguments might not be found. But it does indicate that the ID movement tends to claim too much.
it is a concept. The concept can be proven within modern frameworks but applying it to historic evolution is not provable or demonstrable. If scientists wish to decide it didn’t exist there is no way on this earth to prove otherwise.
No, don’t agree. It’s arguable, as we are doing here.
Big E Evolution attempts to tie together the data with a set of plausible stories. ID does the same. Neither is testable at the level needed for clear confirmation. You cannot demonstrate that microevolution is adequate to produce all macroevolution.
Your story asserts that a long series of tiny changes can produce all the changes we see over time. To me it’s like suggesting that Fun with Dick and Jane can morph into every book ever written one word change at a time, and always be coherent. I don’t share your faith in that story at that level.
Then “Evolution” evolves when a “prediction” proves false, the story changes. No experiments needed. So it’s not falsifiable.
IMO Evolution needed help. Quite honestly, I don’t care one way or another, but that’s what it looks like to me.
The pre-fossilization epoch of life is far longer than the fossilized period. For the couple of billion or so years leading up to the Cambrian, life on Earth essentially of microscopic squishies that would leave no structural fossilization, and we have little idea of the specializations and diversity over that expanse of time. Given that, as multicellularity and preservable structures developed in the Cambrian, what would you expect the diversity of life to look like?
That is always the question I bulk at. Why do I /we need to expect anything other than what we see? We are not changing the data or adding new data. We question the reasoning and assumption (Hypothesis!) Evolutionary theory relies on everything being able to be made piece by piece and develop slowly over time. it is inbuilt. ID or IC does not allow for that means of construction. it is as simple as that. Why should there be any evidence other than what we have? How can we prove something that happened millions of years ago, It happened.
No need at all. ID could just not assert there is too much diversity to be explained by evolution.
If the claim is that there is more diversity than would be expected by evolution, then the question is what other is expected. If there is no other expectation, why does ID make the claim to begin with?
Id does not claim anything about Diversity, nor does IC. All it claims is that there need to be some sort of mechanism to construct complex systems, either self contained or interactive, because small steps won;t cut it. We are reluctant to suggest what those mechanisms aught to be, and are not ruling out natural ones.
However, the current evolutionary model struggles with how new organs and structures can just appear, fully functional and with the ability to use them.
If it was a computer you would claim “plug and play” but that would seem to be a little far fetched in nature.(without intelligent oversight or assistance)
The point being that we are not claiming answers. We are only claiming that science does not have all of them yet.
No. In the case of true stalemate, then ID should not claim that irreducible complexity is proven and others should not claim that it is disproven. ID makes a lot of claims to have demonstrated things scientifically, but the “proofs” are often rather problematic. There is also the semantic question of whether “science does not explain this” is exactly scientific proof.
But the arguments to demonstrate irreducible complexity do not hold up well. As already noted, many complex structures in society developed gradually over time but now depend on many specific parts. Specific multistep biochemical systems can be observed evolving step by step in the lab.
Many of the Cambrian “priapulid” worms prove, on closer examination, to be intermediate, ancestral forms relative to the modern phyla Priapulida, Loricifera, and Kinorhyncha. Armored lobopods are intermediate between Onychophora and Arthropoda. Resources - BioLogos has a few articles relating to this, including The Cambrian “Explosion”, Transitional Forms, and the Tree of Life - Article - BioLogos The picture of the Cambrian diversification given in popular ID and young-earth sources is not accurate. There are varied Precambrian fossil animals; the Cambrian does not come out of nowhere. The Cambrian representatives of modern phyla are significantly different from and more primitive than later representatives, in addition to the many intermediate forms present. There are further myths that Walcott tried to hide the purported problems for evolution by tucking the fossils away in museum drawers. In reality, the fossils were reported not just in many technical publications but also National Geographic. The purported problems for evolution are that they appear relatively rapidly and that there are so many different kinds of organisms. But Walcott did not have any idea how long the Cambrian was, nor any good data on what was older. He did not recognize that the fossils did not all fit into previously known categories; the key techniques revealing details were developed beginning in the 1970’s.
The Cambrian diversification and Precambrian fossils have received extensive research over the past few decades, yet none of this work gets cited or acknowledged in claims about problems for evolution.
A more fundamental problem with the claims about irreducible complexity, specified complexity, etc. is that ID is painting a target around the arrow after it already hit the side of the barn. What is the probability of inventing an automobile? 100%. It happened. Given a planet with similar natural resources to Earth and a culture of organisms similar to Neolithic humans, what is the probability of an automobile being invented? Although it is quite unlikely that Thag would look at a lump of iron ore and a tar pit and think “I could build a ‘56 DeSoto!”, the chance of eventually building some sort of self-propelled wheeled transport is much higher. Similarly, the claim that a particular biochemical system is improbable neglects the question of how many possible biochemical systems could achieve a similar effect, or whether there are alternative systems that avoid the need for that particular effect.
The similarities between some of the tRNA genes suggests that the present system of protein assembly is built from simpler antecedents. Of course, there remains a sizeable gap between a simpler version of protein synthesis with fewer amino acids and less strict precision and abiogenesis. But the very fuzzy edges of that gap make it seem imprudent to claim that it could not possibly be spanned by further studies and discoveries.
The very choice of complexity as a focus is problematic. For information systems, the most complex things are random. The shape of a tree is much more complex than that of a lamppost. Simplicity is a better indicator of intelligent design than complexity when it comes to bureaucracy, paperwork, etc. ID seems to have looked for possible similarities between biochemical systems and human-made systems, rather than investigating what distinguishes designed and undesigned systems.
Of course, it is not possible to prove every single detail of what happened in the past. But the ID claims that evolution has gaps have not been of good quality. Nor is the theology good. God is at work in all that happens. Looking for random gaps in evolution is not good evidence for Christianity, or even proof of theism - the Raelian connections to ID highlight that. Expecting gaps in evolution also is in tension with the idea that God created all the natural laws so that the universe would work properly. Why didn’t He figure out evolution?
You’re right that the mostly absent evidence pre-Cambrian leaves us with “little idea…”. However your use of the word “developed” tips your hand. What we know is they “appeared” in the Cambrian. How they all got there without leaving a record is a matter of opinion.
What I’d expect? Given that there are Ediacaran soft bodied fossils in what was soft ground at the time, if the Cambrian phyla “Evolved” via gradualism, there should be evidence of some kind of precursors leading to the Cambrian fauna phyla. Wouldn’t you also expect that?
