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To: metmom; Texas Songwriter; betty boop
Everyone DOES put their faith in something. It's not a matter of *if* they have faith, but what their faith is in.
Everyone has something they consider to be reliable and trustworthy, reliable and trustworthy enough to influence their decision making and life choices.

To the extent this is true, it's a reflection of the multiple senses of the word "faith." Let's say I have the kind of faith in science that you and TS assert that I do. If so, it's because it has worked and continues to work; it produces results that lead to predictions of future results, which then are borne out (or the predictions are revised). It's reliable in that sense--in the sense that my Saturn is a reliable car, and I trust it will get me where I want to go.

Is that really the kind of faith you have in Christ--that He will dispense reliable results if you push the right buttons? I doubt it--if so, I'd call that (to borrow betty boop's term) a "low-quality faith."

Faith in God does not require real-world results and so is an entirely different thing than faith in science. It suits your purposes to elide that difference so you can imply that I've replaced faith in God with faith in science. But in fact, it's why the two can co-exist: one can have faith in a transcendent God who loves us and willed the universe into being, as well as faith that science is able to discover how that universe works.

111 posted on 07/26/2013 10:27:56 AM PDT by Ha Ha Thats Very Logical
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To: Ha Ha Thats Very Logical; metmom; Texas Songwriter; Alamo-Girl; TXnMA; MHGinTN; YHAOS; hosepipe
Faith in God does not require real-world results and so is an entirely different thing than faith in science. It suits your purposes to elide that difference so you can imply that I've replaced faith in God with faith in science. But in fact, it's why the two can co-exist: one can have faith in a transcendent God who loves us and willed the universe into being, as well as faith that science is able to discover how that universe works.

"Real-world results" are the consequence of God's act in the beginning. That is my "faith." I have known this since I was a small child, even before I started going to school, just from observing the world around me.

I have "faith" in science, too — so long as it is operating within its proper sphere of competence.

What I do not have faith in, however, is any form of materialism or physicalism as an exhaustive explanation for the world we see all around us.

As my friend the astrophysicist puts it,

The central thesis of physicalism proclaims the causal closure of the physical. Ashby's Law and Kahre's Law of Diminishing Information stated that physical systems cannot produce more information at their output than was present at their input. This means that for physical systems, complexity jumps are simply not possible.

Or, to put it more crudely, a living system — an "open" system — cannot "emerge" from a causally closed system as defined by physical, material, or mechanical presuppositions. Something else is required for life. And as increasingly recognized these days, that something else is information — which is not a tangible, material thing.

To the extent that Neo-Darwinist theorizing restricts itself to physicalist/materialist presuppositions, it cannot explain the emergence of life. Period. End of story.

116 posted on 07/26/2013 11:48:47 AM PDT by betty boop
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