Monday, November 28, 2016

So CR Ministries has decided to make a "Chick tract" like post about me...and like "Chick tracts" they make a completely fallacious argument (as well as get what I do think wrong.)

1) I do think just about everything they put up in their images is seriously lacking in scientific awareness, but promoting a fallacious argument against evolution does not falsify evolutionary theory. We have an evolutionary niche that allows us to have a complex form of linguistic communication...other species have communication as well. Some forms like the pheromone secretion of trees travel miles and miles which is vastly superior to our communication method. Does that make trees more special than us?

2) They assert science is "extremely biased". This is just a subtle way of saying that actual scientists do not want pseudoscience being published in their journals. If young Earth creationists could actually demonstrate just one of their claims truly indicated a young Earth, they would be taken seriously. They can't...and they aren't.

3) I am not certain that the universe is 14+ billion year old...I am however certain that the best current estimate we have place it around 13.77 billion year old ±.059 bya. Not a major fubbery of course, but still shows that CR ministries doesn't really know even what the actual modern consensus is for the age of the universe.

4) I do not believe life was created by happenstance, and nowhere have I ever made such a claim. I believe life is governed by very complex physics and chemical reactions, along with an emergent properly we call consciousness.

5) I too believe life was designed, in fact it is an important discovery by Charles Darwin that life could have been teleonomically designed by nature...and the evidence does tend to support teleonomic design rather than a teleological design. But that does not mean either one is not possible, and it would be nearly (perhaps even totally) impossible to distinguish one from the other.

6) Dawkins admits things appear to be designed, because to him as a biologist things are designed...but by nature, not by an Intelligent Designer. "Appearance" of design is just that, an "appearance". Random waves from the ocean can make very complex intricate wave patterns along the beach, but that does not mean an intelligent force was behind them...or even the formation of a snowflake can be thoroughly explained by physics and meteorology, no reason to invoke an intelligent agent. Many things that were a mystery 200 years age, are now explained by science. The "Intelligent Design" argument is really nothing more than a veiled God of the Gaps argument than actual science.

Thoughts?