Why trust science in a post-truth age?

[St.Roymond]

@adamjedgar

My notion of reformed is what Martin Luthers’ version of it portrayed

“Reformed” as a theological reference means Calvinism. It was a deviation from Luther’s Wittenburg Reformation, being more radical.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@St.Roymond

“Reformed” as a theological reference means Calvinism. It was a deviation from Luther’s Wittenburg Reformation, being more radical.

I struggle a bit with some of the major areas of Calvinism…in that salvation by faith through grace seems distant to the Calvin denominations habits

that his arm of Christianity… “agonized over the signs of election. For Calvin there were three tests: the profession of faith; a rigorously disciplined Christian deportment; and a love of the sacraments, which meant the Lord’s Supper, since infant baptism was not to be repeated. Persons who could meet these three tests could assume their election and stop worrying.” Calvinism | Description & History | Britannica

[knor (Kai)]

@RichardG

The concepts of “random”, and “irreducibility” to name but two.

Everything point s to a direction, or development. But there is no reason for anything to develop philosophically. .There is no reason for the right adaption to appear at the right time, or a sequential development of a feature such as wings or even a heart. Even Ocham suggested that the simplest solution is probably the best. Human physiology is anything but simple.

Thinking about development and direction: the alternative to directional change (‘development’) is that nothing changes, or that there only happens small changes around the origin, more or less randomly to different directions and then back to origin. I do not see that these alternatives are somehow more logical or rational than directional change. In fact, that nothing changes is a poor option in a situation where the environment changes.

If there happens a directional change in a population and our perspective is retrospective, we get the impression that the change was to ‘the right direction’. Our conclusion could be the same even if the change had happened to another direction because our perspective of ‘the right direction’ is where we are now. Even a drift to a random direction would look like a movement to ‘the right direction’ because of this observer bias.

Directional change itself is a rational alternative in a changing environment, what remains an open question is what is ‘the right direction’? Are the directional changes and adaptations rational responses to changes in the environment, or movement towards a speculative future goal (would need a guiding planner), or are they just blind, meaningless changes towards random directions?

Both ID and basic ToE predict a directional change and we may not always have means to separate these two alternatives. If God uses in the ongoing creation natural processes and mechanisms, potentially with an occasional little push, the historical development would look superficially identical to what ToE without the ID element predicts. Only if the time frame is radically different, billions of years vs. less than 100’000 years, the alternatives would give very different predictions.

The text above hopefully shows that there are no logical, rational reasons why the development as predicted by ToE could not be true, even if God would be directing the process towards His goal. Denying the findings of evolution research would only be logical if we deny the possibility that God could use the process of evolution in the ongoing creation, or if the age of the Earth or the age of life is very short.