HOW LIFE WORKS (immutable laws of life point to Creation/Intelligent Design)

Journal of Creation ^ | Alex Williams

[count-your-change]

I'm happy with having science taught and leaving religion to parents to provide for. What I find objectionable is evolution, which certainly has the characteristics of religion as much as intelligent design does, being force fed with no counter arguments permitted.

That makes it indoctrination of dogma, not science despite the reverence paid to Saint Darwin.

And you still haven't said how having a federal judge dictate to a local school board what is or is not religion in a local somehow is acceptable under the rubric “limited government”.

[allmendream]

Evolution is science. It contradicts your scriptural interpretation just as much as Geology contradicts belief in a global flood, Astronomy contradicts belief in a young universe, and gravity contradicts belief in geocentricism. Contradicting someones scriptural interpretation doesn't make something implicitly religious.

Judges need to enforce the limitations of government when those bounds are exceeded. Ruling that religious doctrine cannot be taught (and ruling that I.D. is a religious doctrine) is perfectly compatible with limited government.

Government deciding what religious precepts are correct and teaching religious belief and particular scriptural interpretations, at any level, is incompatible with the nation of religious liberty our founders envisioned.

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There is a variety of opinions in science within the same disciplines too. but your your question seems to imply that rejection of evolution is tantamount to rejection of science as a whole. Is that what you're saying?

And everything called science is not accepted everywhere and never has been, not even by scientists.

[allmendream]

The vast majority of scientific findings are accepted by the vast majority of scientists and are not at all controversial among the scientific community; that is what I mean when I say that science is accepted worldwide. Moreover there is are processes in science that can iron out these differences of opinion in light of new findings. There are no “findings” that will ever iron out the differences between religious sects, nor is there an agreed upon mechanism to come to any sort of agreement.

If your rejection of the theory of evolution is due to religious objections then you HAVE rejected science as a means in preference for dogmatic scriptural interpretation.

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Under what theory of limited government can a federal judge rule on what belief is or is not a religion? and claim that it is due to supposed “antecedents”?

And it is not the contradiction of some interpretation of Scripture that gives Darwinism in all its varieties a religious flavor, it is its proponents belief that it can address metaphysical questions.

[allmendream]

I accept the theory of evolution and do not think it has any metaphysical properties.

Care to expound upon the metaphysical questions you think the scientific theory of evolution addresses; or are we both in agreement that it doesn’t actually address metaphysical arguments?

[count-your-change]

I don't think evolutionary theory can address metaphysical questions but that attempts are made to have it do so.

But going back a bit to your statement that having a federal judge declare to a local school board what is or is not religion is an example of “limited government”, could he (the judge) not just as reasonably declare any teaching about heterosexual marriage to be a religious teaching or teaching that abstaining from premarital sex is morally right a religious teaching and therefore verboten?

What teachings could he NOT declare to be religion?

I'm not ignoring your present question but I'd like to explore this just a bit more since I think it touches on it.

[allmendream]

It depends upon the argument used I suppose.

If one established a curriculum that argues against gay marriage (why would this be being discussed in school, I wonder) using religious arguments; then the argument is religious. If one argues against it using legal and social arguments then the argument is not religious at all.

Judging that “cdesign proponentists” were promoting a religion was hardly a stretch of judicial reasoning.

[count-your-change]

You re-framed my question but it appears there is nothing that a judge couldn't declare a religious teaching then.

Evolutionary thought attempts to deal with any purpose in life's formation by saying there cannot be any since life as we know it is the result of chance and circumstance and that the material is all there is to reality.

Or as Carl Sagan put it, ‘the cosmos is all there was, is or will be’.

[allmendream]

Science cannot deal with nebulous things like “purpose” without going all metaphysical. Metaphysical “science” is no more useful than metaphysical anything else.

Do you, as a Christian, believe that “chance” precludes the involvement of God?

Prov 16:33 The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord

[count-your-change]

Prov. 16:33 expresses confidence that the results of casting the lot is from God.

Chance would not be chance if the outcome is controlled by someone. The Bible speaks about creation being positively, actively done by God not in a passive sense.

If science and evolution cannot deal with purpose then it should not try, but try it does.