Summations Only

And yet the fruits of creationism do not make a particularly edifying spectacle. If we are to know people like Gish and Hovind and Chick by their fruits, then they don't seem particularly Christian.As for you ... well, unless you have a note from your doctor saying that you only have one cheek, I think you could get a little more obedient to Jesus.As you say yourself: So, those are the fruits of creationism, are they? A malicious desire to avenge an injury to your pride? That's not what Jesus actually advocated is it? And yet you "tend to remember the Biblical phrase by their fruits shall ye know them", and you adjudge yourself a true Christian.Well, you're not quacking like one, are you? That's the funniest thing I've heard all day.Have you ever wondered why so many of these fallacies have Latin names? Hint: it's not because they were dreamed up in liberal universities for the benefit of liberal atheists.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Surely the whole not-being-at-all-true thing makes it something less than logical?

People have been saying that two twos are four for years, and that hasn't gotten any more true either. It doesn't magically erase the flocks of flying pigs circling overhead either. OK, that may be even funnier than your rantings about logical fallacies. Perhaps you don't find the history of life interesting, but why suppose that everyone else would naturally your brutish philistinism concerning this subject?And if the sole interest of this fascinating subject was (as per your fantasy) contingent on its imaginary historical relationship with atheism, then why would it fascinate non-stupid theists as well?

Well, I'm not sure about that. After all, there are religious people, even Christians, who have never bothered to read the Book of Mormon. Now perhaps you'd think "anyone who is the slightest bit religious, anyone but the most militant of atheists, should show some interest, however slight" in the possibility of a fresh divine revelation. And Christians in particular, on being informed that there's another gospel of Jesus Christ, should surely be all agog to look into it. And yet for some reason the general reaction even from supposedly devout theists --- even from supposedly devout Christians --- has largely been "meh".

Wait, I've not finished mocking you yet. This post is a gold-mine. Why don't you try applying this criterion to the members of whatever church you belong to? After the service is over, pick a few of your fellow-congregants at random and ask them to name one book by William Dembski or to summarize one argument of Michael Behe.I think you'll be surprised at how many of them are "the most militant of atheists" who "show no real belief in any type of religion". Presumably they're just there for the free bread and wine, I can't think why else they'd show up.

I disagree.First of all, there are lots of popular books about particle physics. How many books do you think are being written right now about the Higgs Boson? They sell, too.And evolution, is by comparison, much easier to understand. Also, it has a plot, making it more interesting than most science. It's a history, things happen, they happen for reasons, the reasons are the things that happened before.Then again, there's a market for popular books about biology that hardly mention evolution.Finally, if the abiding interest in evolution was because of the controversy, then everyone wishing to write a popular book about evolution would make it popular by writing about the controversy. It would be 50% evolution and 50% pointing out how dumb creationists are. I could write such a book myself, but I doubt whether it would be popular. Creationists are not interesting unless one takes a particular interest in the psychology of being wrong, which is a whole different subject from evolutionary biology, so any such book would only appeal to someone who was interested in both subjects.

A couple of serious answers.First of all, it's precisely the subject-matter experts, no matter what their religious opinions, who are going to reject this stuff. Consider, to take one example, Dembski's rubbish about the No Free Lunch Theorem. Now, I can see why this would be of interest to a non-mathematician. It would feed the self-assurance of a creationist; it might sway an agnostic; it might even convert an atheist.What it will not do is appeal to a mathematician who knows the subject that Dembski's talking about. It wouldn't appeal to such a mathematician if he was a theist; it wouldn't appeal to him if he was a die-hard creationist: it would embarrass him. The reaction from the subject-matter experts is going to be that they'll laugh at it, ignore it, or write something debunking it and put it on the internet. And the most creationist mathematicians are the ones with the strongest temptation to ignore it rather than admit that one of their own is employing arguments that are at worst dishonest and at best moronic.---Second, a theist who is also a scientist will have a different idea of what the glory of God consists in. To a theist scientist, the wonderful thing about the universe is that it works. To a creationist, the wonderful thing about the universe is that it wouldn't work without constant tinkering. While the latter is going around saying that abiogenesis is impossible, the former is crying up the Fine Tuning Argument. But these two arguments are irreconcilable^*.So, you go to a theist scientist and say: "God is awesome. He wanted a universe with life in, so he created a universe in which life was completely impossible. Then he did a miracle to make life."Well, this is like going up to an engineer and saying: "My friend Bob is both intelligent and strong. He's so smart that he's the first person ever to invent a bicycle with square wheels, and he's so strong that he overcomes this defect by carrying it with him wherever he goes." The engineer would say: "His strength I will admit, but he's also a flaming idiot, isn't he?"Or suppose I wrote a computer program to achieve some goal, and at a certain point, for want of my skill in programming, it had to stop and ask me to figure out some mathematical question for it with pencil and paper. Do you suppose you could convince a computer scientist that this was a greater tribute to my intellectual powers than if I'd written a program that just worked when I ran it?A scientist (rightly or wrongly) will admire God for being good at science; and the greatest scientific achievement of God would be to design the laws of the universe and choose the boundary conditions so that they produced the results he wanted to get. The God of the creationists is a mere blunderer by comparison. * Footnote: the fact that these arguments are irreconcilable does not prevent creationists from deploying them both, because, as I have pointed out on another thread, creationists have a collection of arguments, not a systematic world-view. So, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses gave me a pamphlet which on one page used the fine-tuning argument and on the next page claimed that the formation of stars was impossible and must be attributed to a miracle.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I'm not sure that this is true. Dennett is not a biologist, Dawkins does not mix his evolution with his atheism to any great extent, and Jones to the best of my knowledge has never said anything at all about religion. I notice that you didn't mention Gould ... why not? ... ah, yes, "NOMA". One of the most popular writers about evolution has argued explicitly that science says nothing against religion, but you were picking the ripest cherries, which includes Dennett, a philosopher with no more qualifications in biology than my ass, rather than Gould, a professional paleontologist.

My point, then. I've read that same book several times. I must have missed the bit where he says: "And therefore, God does not exist". He is entitled to do so, but he doesn't count as a biologist writing against theism 'cos of not being one. Indeed. That is hard to parse.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

They're more sort of "friends with benefits".

So's the abolition of slavery. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I think you're missing Modulous's point. He's not talking about the Problem of Evil, but about the question of attributing causes.We can always imagine a supernatural explanation for something for which we have a perfectly good natural explanation, but why should we particularly mention it? This is the background noise of epistemology.We do not, for example, teach children: "Snowflakes are formed by the crystallization of water, or maybe some of them are made by Jack Frost"; "Epidemic diseases are caused by the spread of germs, but maybe some of them were caused by witchcraft"; "Fairy rings are produced by the growth patterns of mushrooms, or maybe some of them were made by fairies dancing"; "Metamorphic rocks were formed by temperature and pressure acting on non-metamorphic rocks, or maybe some of them were made by wizards"; "If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it's either a duck or maybe it's a magic pixie using its magic powers to disguise itself as a duck."It is, indeed, precisely because we can imagine this in every case that it becomes otiose to mention it in any case in particular. We can always imagine it, we never really have a reason to think it. So why mention it in the case of evolution? As a sop to the religious?

This is arguably true of a First Cause, but not of immediate causes. Scientifically, we are obliged to (provisionally) conclude that what looks and walks and quacks like a duck is a duck and not a fairy magically disguised as a duck. The fact that we can still imagine that it's a fairy is something that one might mention in a philosophy class, but it's no reason at all for a science teacher to say that scientifically there's no way of knowing that it's a duck.

Well, I'm not talking about Christianity as a whole, but about particular speculations about what God might or might not have done. In the immortal words of William of Conches: "God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so." Except that we seem to have come to opposite conclusions.

Oh, OK then.Question for Percy: Why are you a deist?