Posted on 03/22/2012 7:44:32 AM PDT by Moseley
Its effect is physical. But natural selection itself would have to be understood as a type of cause. Causes are not physical things, though their effects often are.
I think you conflate cause and effect here. But they are not the same thing, epistemologically speaking.
What is causing the natural selection in the example I mentioned? It was a physical cause - causing physical death of those variations that the antibiotic could physically bind to.
What was the effect of the natural selection I mentioned? Only those variations that the antibiotic could not physically bind to were left alive.
Full retreat into semantics and epistemology is not answering my rather simple question.
Absent any knowledge on your part of what DNA is or what it does - I cannot take at face value any assertion that you make about it not being necessary and sufficient to its assigned task.
Absent ANY description of the physical mechanism of the evolution you say you believe in, I must conclude that you have no real intellectual curiosity on this subject to go along with your almost complete lack of knowledge.
So you say you believe in evolution, and that there is some underlying physical mechanism - but you have no idea how to describe it without it being a “Darwinist” argument.
That right there is real amusing!
If I believed evolution was just fine and dandy, then I’m sure I’d be saying something different regarding theology, too. It’s hard to say which is the cart and which the horse under any other theology, but coming to believe in evolution will cause a man to adjust his theology. It would be illogical not to.
It's not a question of being "fine and dandy", but being the best explanation we have for the evidence that was put in front of us.
Whether it makes you "adjust your theology" is going to depend on what your theology was to start with.
All Christian theology must start as biblical theology.
Is this where you tell me that I’m reading it wrong, and try to convert me?
Nope. This is where I tell you that biblical theology must deal initially with the plain literate sense of the text and of any biblical episode. After that is when we do interpretation, doctrine, etc.
Otherwise, it would be just fine to do a term paper on “The Old Man and the Sea” without ever having read the book.
You’re very good at doing what you’re not doing.
Actually, I think you are a literate person, and I’ve a whole string of posts from you to prove it.
You know what the plain sense of a story is. What a paragraph is. What a sentence is.
Christian theology must begin as biblical theology. It’s only after you do that work that you can branch into interpretation.
That’s no different than any other interpretive task with any other writing.
I also know impossibility of the Book of Genesis being a first-hand account of events.
But you have to deal with the plain sense story first.
It’s not fair for me, for example, since I believe in capitalism, to approach the bible with the intent of having it support capitalism.
The truth is that there are hints of capitalism in some of the stories of the bible, but mostly what we see are theocracies and empires with their fingers in the commercial pie, too, just like they had control over everything else.
“A decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that the entire world should be taxed.”
What does that mean? In the context of the "plain sense of the story" it is immediatly apparent that whoever wrote it could not possibly have seen it happen. It's a good story, but there's no basis for any assertion that it's an historically accurate account of events.
You are interpreting before you even analyze the story.
Until you interpret - convert sequences of symbols to ideas - there's nothing to analyze.
You’re just not familiar with theological lingo.
The interpretive step is that step dealing with meaning.
In the study of languages, we can quibble over the meaning of translation and interpretation. But we’d not be talking the same thing as meant by the theological interpretive step.
The first step is the text and what IT says.
Does the text not describe events that happened before the existence of anyone to observe and record them?
The text itself would have to answer that question.
I prefer a methodology that produces answers and clarity, rather than evasions and obucation.
That’s not an obfuscation.
There’s a narrator/storyteller in Genesis. It says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” Then it goes on.
Does the narrator identify him/her self?
That IS the text whether we like it or not.
What does the Declaration of Independence say, and is credit given in it to the author(s)? Who were they?
Does the author’s name CHANGE any of the verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc., that comprise it?
You could easily have answered the question about it describing events that happened before anyone existed to witness and record them. Instead we have to play "20 questions" and make it like pulling teeth.
Why would I possibly want to adopt a methodology that results in that?
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