I think it is premature to state that creationism is just a religious dogma.
Well, what else is it then?
The evidence we have been able to observe so far does not lead us to hypothesize Biblical Creation.
When we look at the world around us, the
only source for the idea of Biblical Creationism is the Bible itself. Therefore, it
is nothing but religious dogma,
even if it's correct, because we cannot possibly derive it from anything
else.
Did you ever see 2001, a Space Odyssey? One of the main plot points is the discovery of a black obelisk on the Moon. Now, obviously, we don't have any real-world evidence, no observations, that would lead us to currently hypothesize that there may be a black obelisk on the Moon. Therefore, the obelisk is nothing more than a plot device in a work of fiction,
even if it later turns out that there is such a thing on the Moon.
If I roll a die and make a random guess, my guess is still nothing mroe than a random guess regardless of whether or not my guess turns out to be correct or not.
Do you see where I;m going here? What source,
other than religious dogma, leads us to Biblical Creation?
If there is no other source that leads us to that hypothetical scenario, how can we call it anything other than religious dogma?
I don't see how you can state that w/certainty when the Origin of life is not known.
For instance if the origin of life was not random then you may have Creation.
Biblical Creation is rather specific. But let's examien the logic of your argument here:
You say that we cannot exclude Creation as a possibility for the origin of life because the origin of life is not known.
You have no way of knowing where I am located. Should you then include the possibility that I'm on the Moon? Sicne my location isn;t known, you cannot exclude the possibility, right?
Of course not. Biblical Creation is always a possibility, just as it's conceivably possible that we're actually plugged into the Matrix. There is always the possibility that everything we think we know is wrong, that the maps we've drawn of reality were all based on faulty information.
But given what we observe and experience, what we predict and test, we can establish that
some hypotheses are
more likely to be true than others. It is
more likely that I am located in an English-speaking region on Earth than on the Moon. It is fantastically more likely that I am on Earth than on Jupiter.
Current hypotheses regarding the origin of life run the gamut from religious explanations to aliens seeding Earth with life to abiogenesis. With the information we currently have available from what we are right now able to experience and observe and test, abiogenesis is the
most parsimonious explanation. Other hypotheses are lacking - Biblical Creation, for example, lacks a
mechanism of any kind beyond "magic" in the form of an "omnipotent God," which means it isn't really an explanation of anything at all.
My question to you is can you state with certainity that Creation is not plausible at this time in our existence?
Yes. At this specific time, Biblical Creation is not at all plausible. It only becomes plausible if we assume that
everything we know about biology, geology, physics, ecology, and a dozen other fields are completely and utterly wrong. It is
conceivably possible that this is so...but I doubt that any of us, including you, would wager that our understanding of antibiotics is wrong, or that electricity doesn't really exist, or that Uranium isn't really a radioactive substance that decays into lead over time.
If you teach Biblical Creationism in a school, then you need to also teach
every other conceivable possibility with a similarly small probability of accuracy, knowing full well that each and every one contradicts direct observational evidence. At that point, why teach anything at all?
™ Version 4.2
