jeudi 2 février 2012

            The Series:A Man not at all prejudiced against God is criticising Creationism (not me, we'll get back to who it is)
Further to the Geoscience Major at Texas University
Lost In Translation
AronRa linked to someone actually trying to prove evolution.
AronRa, did I mention you are worthless on history?
My Motivation for Arguing Against FFoCr Series
Verifiable Does Not Equal Material and Natural
I Like "Miacis Cognita."
A Letter Arrived from AronRa
Here beginneth our essay:

Further to the Geoscience Major at Texas University*:
George Harrison, the guitarist for the Beatles was a Bhakti Hindu. He believed in a personal god, and he said that if one chants the mantras with devotion, Lord Krishna would visibly appear and speak ,to him in an audible voice. Many pagans are similarly convinced of having met their deities too. For example, a cat fancier in Texas insists he began worshipping Bast only after the Egyptian goddess dramatically appeared physically manifest, having personally chosen him to become her disciple. ... So its not like any “one true god” is really guiding all these people they way they all insist he/she/they, or it is.**
  • We believe the devil exists.
  • George Harrison and the Bast worshipper probably do not believe the devil exists, and they are probably noy insisting all people receiving Theophanies receive them from God rather than the devil.
If any god exists, and it happens that there’s only one of them, then surely every spiritually enlightened and visionary holy man from any nation or tribe should be able to sense it, if men can sense such things at all. And their scribes would write the scrolls seeking to make sense of it –however feeble an attempt that may be.
  • Thank you for mentioning Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
  • Sensing something is however different from witnessing a Revelation by the one true God.
  • Which is why we put Revelation above Greek Philosophy.
Perhaps that’s why there are so many different religions; because no man can know the true state of God.
  • By himself no - except for the One Who is himself God,
  • But by God, yes.
There can only be one truth, and only one version of it. But rather than coming together, as everyone’s search for the one truth should, religions continuously shard further and further apart into more divided factions with mutually-exclusive beliefs, -and there are as many wrong interpretations as there people claiming theirs as the “absolute truth”.
  • Or as many, minus one.
Which brings us to the third foundational falsehood of creationism; the assertion that any human's understanding of their various internally-conflicting and inter-contradictory beliefs should, -or even could- be considered infallible or inerrently accurate.
  • If God does reveal himself, He does so accurately, and guards His revelation accessible in an infallible and inerrant way.
  • We believe that is precisely what God has done.
  • We believe the evidence goes far beyond George Harrison, far beyond the Bast worshipper, far beyond the dialogue between Arjuna and his charioteer, as far as evidentiality is concerned.
  • Gassing on about how many have how differring views with far too little evidence does not change that in any way whatsoever.
But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things. Seeing is believing. But seeing isn’t knowing. Believing isn’t knowing. Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.*
  • Seing, under conditions where hallucination and subjectivity are reasonably excluded, is not just believing, but knowing.
  • For the rest of us, we believe those who have seen, whether it be Christ Resurrected or the skull of Lucy being digged out by Leaky.
  • And, no, there are no more reasonable possibilities for Apostles Hallucinating than for Leaky hallucinating - even if he was not taking the drugs appropriate to the Beatles song that he named Lucy after.
  • Being convinced that the skull of Lucy was digged out, and that Jesus of Nazareth was seen alive after dying, I nevertheless find a certain difference in ulterior evidentiality, also known as good logic, between the two: a resurrection involves a miracle very clearly, a skull with very little Carbon 14 (or none at all) does not as clearly involve 3 millions of years.
Most people really don’t understand science; what it is, how it works, what hypotheses and theories are, or even the purpose behind it. Sadly even those on your school faculty or state Board of Education often need an education themselves before they can be trusted to govern how or what our kids will be taught, and that’s why I thought I should speak up and do what I can to help.***
  • How generous of this knowledgeable person to help us out then?
  • What about letting each pair of parents decide for themselves if they want their children to have the one or the other or neither kind of science when it comes to human and animal origins?
Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned.
  • Claiming unearned degrees - sounds like Hovind. Or what he is claimed to be, by his opponents, by the people putting him in jail.
  • Feigning knowledge they cannot really possess - sounds like Evolutionists. To me and to anyone else, who is not an evolutionist.
  • Our Texas Geoscience Major* has made the point that the Six days, at least before creation of man, are no eyewitness accounts.
  • They are certainly no eywitness accounts by men, because men were not created yet.
  • But if angels seing it reported to Moses, it is pretty impressive, and not in the wrong way, if Moses delivered a people from virtual slavery - working miracles to glorify the Lord.
  • Neither does the billions of years involved in fish turning into amphibian, turning into ... et c. ... turning into one ape, et c. ... turning into man rely on eyewitness, either human, or, as reported, angelic either.
  • Divine testimony is stronger than lack of human or divine testimony:
  • Especially if the divine testimony is corroborated by miracles, which was not the case with George Harrisons communication with Lord Krishna, as far as we know.
From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist”.***
  • Some people believe Rabbis using the name of the creator, can give life to a Golem,
  • Some people do not believe that, nor that the creator could give life to anything,
  • Between the two views, there is one, according to which a Creator can very well do what this Geoscientist calls magic, giving existence to what did not exist and life to what was lifeless, whereas a man, even using or abusing the name of the creator, cannot.
  • This latter view is the one of a Christian Creationists, and it is actually compulsory on every Catholic and Orthodox Christian, whether he be a Creationist or a Christian Evolutionist, whether he sells cars or teaches science at a University.
  • Remember, next time you hear someone argue against creationism by an appeal to scientific consensus, it might be the consensus of people regarding creation ex nihilo as a "Golem spell".
  • In the same essay our Geoscience Major at Texas University* also says that Geocentric intellectuals generally are not scientists, I studied, at age twelve in my own time at home, the creationist view of precisely a scientist, the first of the two mentioned in following quote:
Its first president was Edgar H. Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Materials at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a long-serving head of department and later Dean of Engineering.[7] He is described by historian of creationism Ronald Numbers as the United Kingdom's "most respected creationist scientist of the late twentieth century", a Reformed Baptist, and a convert to Whitcomb and Morris' flood geology since the 1960s. However, he rejected some elements of their views, particularly dogmatic acceptance of a young Earth (even going so far as to suggest that the first day of creation "might be of indefinite length").[8] Another prominent member, David C. Watts (Professor of Biomaterials Science at the University of Manchester),[9] went even further in diverging from the American view, described giving primacy to the question of the age of the Earth a "great mistake" and admitted the possibility that life existed before the Edenic creation. His views slowly moved to progressive creationism.[10]°
7 http://www.christianity.com/home/christian living features/11636300/page3/ 8 Numbers, Ronald (November 30, 2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press. pp. 624 pages. ISBN 0674023390. - p. 358 - note 10, same and following page. 9 Chemistry, Manchester, David Watts http://www.chemistry.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/staff/show.html?ea=David.Watts
  • British and American, US and UK people are supposed to talk the same language, except that these neighbours across the Atlantic delete a letter U from "neighbour" because they pronounce the following letter R. Very logically, especially as the Irish both pronounce the R and keep the U.
  • The Geoscience Major* nevertheless ignores the Biblical Creation Society and focusses on Kent Hovind, who is in prison.
  • Anyone care to guess if he is anything like partial?
Of the couple hundred different, and often violently-conflicting denominations of Christianity, the largest of them by far is Catholicism followed by Orthodoxy. Both of these have stated support of evolution and denounced creationism.***
  • 1 It is quite true that Roman Catholics (Latin or Uniate), or people counted as such, constitute about half of the people described as Christian. Also, Eastern Churches not Uniate consitute the largest group outside Roman Catholics, as this count goes. But our dear little big friend from Texas University has not grasped all there is to grasp about this. True, most US residing Catholic or Eastern Christians are Evolutionist. True, the Pope and Ecumenic Patriarch many of them of either group refer to, advises evolution. BUT:
  • Coptic Monophysites and Nestorians (Christians of Egypt and Iraq, excepting Catholics and Orthodox Calcedonians) are usually Creationist,
  • According to the Church lore of Eastern Orthodox, the Ecumenic Patriarch is a stand-in for the Pope, because the Pope is considered heterodox since agreeing to filioque in Nicene Creed, and so any Bishop claiming Ecumenic Patriarch is heterodox for advising Evolution can claim a precedent, some do.
  • Even among Roman Catholics, there is only so much a Pope can do. Benedict XVI may indeed "advise" evolution. But he cannot dogmatise it. And Catholics are not bound to each and every advice given by the Pope, but to Papal dogmas;
  • if on the other hand the Pope should make a bull, saying "sorry, we were wrong about Genesis, nobody can from now on take its first chapters literally" then lots of Traditional Catholics (not necessarily from US) would as Young Earth Creationists, well based on Church Fathers and on Pope St Pius X, say: "well, if he's a hardline Evolutionist, maybe he's a heretic, and so maybe he never was a Pope". To be eligible as a Pope one has to be a quite Orthodox Catholic. It's not like "Heretics need not apply" - nobody applies to be Pope - it is: should a conclave chose a heretic, quite probably there was something fishy with the conclave, but even if not, a heretic is not a Pope even if he fools a conclave.


Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Georges Pompidou
Candlemass of 2012

*See:
Fourth Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/4thFFoC.html
**See:
Third Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/3rdFFoC.html
***See:
First Foundational Falsehood of Creationism http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/1stFFoC.html
°See:
Wiki: Biblical Creation Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Creation_Society

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