"Why, soitainly!"
Posted on 08/30/2002 4:19:55 PM PDT by jennyp
AiG continues to impress me. They are definitely the most principled and insightful of all the major doctrinaire YEC organizations. This critique of the ID movement does not disappoint.This critique of the ID movement is much more respectful than their "expose of Hugh Ross" and his old-Earth "progressive creationism", which they published one week ago. In that critique they practically called Ross a CINO - Christian In Name Only. But AiG's problems with Ross almost entirely pertain to differing interpretations of Scripture. For different reasons, Weiland is just as worried about the dangers of the ID movement as he is about Hugh Ross.
I, an atheist evolutionist, recognize the ID movement as stealth creationism, or what I call "fabian creationism", after the fabian socialists of the early 20th Century. IDers' strategy is to avoid a full-frontal attack on secularism, but instead tries to erode the mainstream's confidence in methodological naturalism in subtle ways, concentrating initially on evolution. At the same time they are careful to distance themselves from any argument that's based on any specific religion or holy book. But AiG is afraid the ID movement will end up bringing stealth naturalism in to the creationist movement!
Because of IDers' stealth creationism, they are forced to mount purely scientific or logical arguments against naturalism generally and Darwinism specifically. But AiG's Carl Weiland recognizes that this is a double-edged sword. First, it forces creationists into a purely negative stance because a positive description of what they do believe would necessarily bring in a religious-based "story of the past":
Since the only thing in their platform which comes close to being a commonly-shared presupposition is a negative (naturalism is wrong), they can provide no coherent philosophical framework on which to base the axioms necessary to interpret evidence relevant to the historical sciences (paleontology, historical geology, etc). So they can never offer a ‘story of the past’, which is one more reason why they must continually limit the debate to one of mechanism—and then only in broad, general terms (designed vs undesigned).But that's not the essential danger to creationists:They generally refuse to be drawn on the sequence of events, or the exact history of life on Earth or its duration, apart from saying, in effect, that it ‘doesn’t matter’. However, this is seen by the average evolutionist as either absurd or disingenuously evasive—the arena in which they are seeking to be regarded as full players is one which directly involves historical issues. In other words, if the origins debate is not about a ‘story of the past’, what is it about?
This is a fascinating analysis of the "philosophical air Darwin breathed". And at first it seems surprising why Weiland would be concerned about this, until you remember that AiG needs conventional macroevolution (even above the speciation level!) to be true, in order to fit the Biblical story of Noah into such a short time ago:The ‘natural theology’ approach (using design, but keeping the Bible out of it) by the deists of former centuries led to an increase in deistic belief, i.e. ‘a different god’ ... with its attendant rejection of the Bible and the Gospel. The deists’ driving force was the rejection of God’s Word and, concomitantly, His right to exercise rule over our lives.
Urged to deduce the existence of the Creator God from ‘design alone’, and thus leaving out the Fall and the real history of the world, thinkers concluded that any creator God must be cruel, wasteful, etc. Charles Darwin himself wrote in exactly that vein. He also provided another example of the negative effects of leaving the Biblical history out of the discussion. When he came across obvious examples of adaptive radiation from mainland populations onto islands, the only ‘concept’ of creation he had in his mind, in association with most of his deistically-influenced scientist contemporaries, was in situ creation, which his observations spoke so strongly against. But of course if he had built into his thinking dispersal of all land vertebrates from one central point after the global Flood, the alleged problem would have vanished. So, intelligent design arguments that ‘left the Bible out of it’ actually aided and abetted, in a major way, the rising rejection of the Bible. Far from countering atheism, it actually pushed thinkers into a non-design explanation, hence further into naturalism and atheism.
I think Weiland is correct to be afraid of the ID movement, and that's something I didn't realize until reading his critique. The ID movement, in trying to use society's respect for mainstream science against itself, really does risk harming creationism further. Weiland is right to be afraid that "Christians who play ‘let’s pretend the Bible isn’t part of it’ risk alienating the culture still further."Poorly-informed anti-creationist scoffers occasionally think they will 'floor' creation apologists with examples of 'new species forming' in nature. They are often surprised at the reaction they get from the better-informed creationists, namely that the creation model depends heavily on speciation.
It seems clear that some of the groupings above species (for example, genera, and sometimes higher up the hierarchy) are almost certainly linked by common ancestry, that is, are the descendants of one created ancestral population (the created kind, or baramin). Virtually all creation theorists assume that Noah did not have with him pairs of dingoes, wolves and coyotes, for example, but a pair of creatures which were ancestral to all these species, and probably to a number of other present-day species representative of the 'dog kind'.
Demonstrating that speciation can happen in nature, especially where it can be shown to have happened rapidly, is thus a positive for creation theorists. A commonly heard objection is that, surely, speciation is evolution, and that the creationists are postulating even more rapid post-Flood evolution than evolutionists do!
[Weiland salvages his creationism by claiming that these rapid speciations involved a "loss of information", and so didn't really count as macroevolution.]
Carl Weiland, Speciation Conference Brings Good News for Creationists, AiG, 1997
Token "non-Christians"? Oh yes, this is an honest group. (/sarcasm)
"Why, soitainly!"
The actions of any sufficiently subtle and omnipotent God are indistinguishable from naturalism.
Ignorant Luddites always harm themselves most of all.
Very well said, thank you!
The logical consequences of this idea are interesting. Before the flood, there were no dingoes, wolves, or coyotes -- only a "generic dog-like animal."
What other animals were missing from the pre-flood world?
Holy quote-mining, Batman!
I while back I half-comically suggested that as speciation was increasingly observed in nature, creationists would move from talking about "microevolution" vs. "macroevolution" to talking about "mesoevolution" vs. "macroevolution". Little did I suspect that the switch was already underway!
Think how much effort could have been avoided in arguing with certain unnamed posters with this bludgeon er, quote.
The fall of man and the resulting curse by God is a central issue that cannot be ignored. Otherwise nothing makes sense as the present creation without the fall and curse shows God to be rather inept. Of course this charge is one of the favorites of the die hard Darwinists but it is unfair if he is referring to the God of the Bible. There, that God clearly shows the reason for a now corrupt creation.
<a href="http://www.puretolerance.com/>The Blind Atheist</a>
Of course. That's called "letting the chips fall where they may", and when one does that, one is risking that the truth turns out to support their ideology (or that they would follow the truth even if it means rejecting their ideology).
Which frankly, I encourage.
Of course, it helps that I've already seen the math involved for natural/unaided abiogenesis, and the Base 4 mathematical coding of DNA likewise points to a conclusion readily favorable to my own ideology.
But even ignoring the math involved, the lesser "proofs" of Evolution fall on their face, as well.
Natural Selection, for instance, merely culls an already existing population. In and of itself, it fails to contribute any new biological features, even in theory.
To make up for that massive theoretical failing, Evolutionists have resorted to claiming that random, unaided mutations propagate, and that such propagations are then culled by natural selection, forming new species.
Yet we never see reports that two-headed snakes have two-headed offspring, much less that two-headed snakes overtake the single-headed snake population due to natural selection.
Knowing that such obvious examples disagree with the above-mentioned tactics, this forces Evolutionists to drop back yet another level, claiming that the random/unaided mutations are too small to notice (or that many unoticed mutations finally combine to manifest themselves singularly at later dates), etc. And so it goes. With each disproof of Evolution by the evidence at hand (e.g. above), Evolutionists back up yet one more step. Ergo arguments with Evolutionists can last ad infinitim, with no end ever reachable with them.
To their credit, there ARE some examples where we see a form of speciation in nature. Cross-breeding comes to mind. One must give even the Devil his due. Cross-breeding can produce new species, it seems.
But where cross-breeding fails is that it can't explain the very first two species of life.
Consider:
1. A completely sterile planet,
2. then (per any unaided/non designer theory) a species spontaneously forms from inanimate matter (and figures out how to survive and propagate successfully),
3. then the first species morphs into a second species (with some examples of the first species surviving.
Clearly cross-breeding is only possible AFTER step 3 above (you need TWO species to exist before cross-breeding is possible, after all), which means that cross-breeding can't explain how the first two species evolved.
And without being able to show how the first two species evolved, the theory of evolution is pretty worthless, in my opinion.
Your mileage may vary, however...
They generally refuse to be drawn on the sequence of events, or the exact history of life on Earth or its duration, apart from saying, in effect, that it ‘doesn’t matter’. However, this is seen by the average evolutionist as either absurd or disingenuously evasive—the arena in which they are seeking to be regarded as full players is one which directly involves historical issues. In other words, if the origins debate is not about a ‘story of the past’, what is it about?Now that AiG has said it, will The Flock listen? Or will the E-siders still encounter the same disingenuous attempts to deflect the question when we ask the ID-ers, "So what's your version of events?"
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