I have the highest regard for your posts because you have just gone into all of the information, and directly answered me with rational exposition, and you did it without stating things about mike or his eyes!
Evolution and its cousins, are no different - you focus on evolution because it is YOUR God it affects, YOUR God whose biggest/defining miracle is being 'explained away'. A philosophically consistent response is outrage at all scientific theories, or none.
That's it. But I disagree that these theories do not rule out a special creator. There are certain theological conundrums that make it clear that you have to rule out the literalism of the scriptures, such as the problem of evil.
Example; If death and suffering were always there, then when God said, "behold, it was very good", in the beginning, then God sees death and suffering as good, and Christ died on the cross not to claim the victory over death, as the NT expounds, but for a mythical morally "nice" metaphor. And what about Revelation, "neither shall there be any curse any more, no more pain, no more tears", (paraphrase). What's that? A nice poem? This is not satisfying to my mind, Mod!
Logically, I do not reject theories that do not require that I dispose of biblical literalism BECAUSE if you look at those theories, they explain the rules, but they don't say that the system produced the system. They don't impinge on a special creator.
Mod', there is no point in saying that evolution, chemical and biological, don't rule out a special creator. They do so great a harm that they render Him the weakest irrelevant entity, that surely doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
It's because you start out with a natural idea, and then add a natural method which GUARANTEES a naturalist answer.
The next post is general, to you and everyone, as my final thoughts. I hope you consider it.
The reason to assume metaphysical naturalism is so that you can go onto explore possible epistemologies that extend from doing that. From there, a methodology might come about to gather knowledge which would be methodological naturalism. We can then consider the merits of this methodology, its limits, and any flaws with it.
That sounds nice, but the fact is that in a natural universe, you will find natural explanations, as this is self-evident. Does this mean we can step into the dark, and declare that our powerful but small light vanquishes it?
There is a difference between repeatable, experimental, factual observational, parsimonious theory, and theory that makes grandiose assumptions pertaining to the big picture.
I see no observable proves of any kind of evolution whatsoever. I see the equivocation of mutations adapting as a very weak example, when the claim is that every design came from each other, after coming from the ground, after the ground coming from nothing.
There are no new designs in nature. I agree on the facts, not the hypothetics which strike me as , well - hypothetical., look at a cladogram! Dino to bird. Sure, nice bit of art but do we assume it happened then?
It gets to the point now where people are so convinced evolution is true, that they will ad-hoc any contrary explanation, because afterall - we know evolution happened, right?
I go back to my red-ball theory definition of evidence. I have now collected 2 trillion red balls. 1 green ball will spoil my theory. But we all know that red-ball theory is true, so that green ball you picked up is really red!
(Bye for now, best regards,..)
Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.