Faith's Participation in EvC

I suppose I should give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you were merely expressing an extreme view as an illustration, but I have to say I utterly disagree with this "solution". Have you considered the implications of this? After you eliminate everyone but the five or six people who are "qualified" to debate by these standards, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Let's see, that would leave you for Biblical historicity, Arach for exegesis and translation, WK for biology, cavediver for cosmology/physics, a couple of folks for geology, and RAZD to round it out. If the intent here is to create a "debate" or "discussion" forum, then such an elitist policy as you outline would be inherently self-defeating. You can't have a discussion with only one side. As the title suggests: elitism sucks because only elites get to play, generally with themselves.

Faith, much as I would hate to see you "disappeared" from EvCForum, this is precisely the problem you face if you wish to continue: the ONLY way this outlook can be sustained in productive discourse is to substantiate the Biblical claims with external referants. In other words, you are free to take the Flood as literally true, but then you MUST find supporting evidence to support it. In science, this is usually done in the form "if...then...". Restating it with your favorite example, if the Flood is true, then we should see evidence in the form X, Y, Z. Then you could look for it in the relevant literature. If you DO see X, Y, and Z, then the Flood is supported. If you see X and Y, but not Z, then maybe the Flood is only weakly supported by the evidence, or perhaps your expectations of what would be found need to be revised. If you don't see X, Y, and Z, then there may be another explanation, but most likely the (lack) of evidence suggests that the Flood may not be the best explanation of what the rocks actually show.However, in your case, you are almost always in the position of not seeing X, Y, and Z or anything else in the real world. Moreover, you are in the position of having to account for A, B, C, D etc, that simply COULDN'T be the result of a Flood. You have to take all those things into consideration. However, rather than re-evaluating your position, you simply repeat your initial premise. This has been your tactic in all three of the most recent bio threads in which you participated. You make assertions without foundation - pure speculations - ignore any attempts to show you that your assertion may not be valid (including refusal to read articles provided for your benefit and then deny that the articles say what your opponent claims it says), and in the end throw up your hands and refuse to participate further.This latter has been especially frustrating to me personally. Even after I went way out of my way to actually show where you were right AS WELL as where you were wrong, you never even bothered to comment. Percy is correct: you need to truly re-evaluate your participation in certain threads. Edited by Quetzal, : clarification

Well put. Unbelievable as it may seem - I agree with you. (Which, in some circles, makes one instantly suspicious that we are both wrong>) What do you think of the approach I outlined in post 239 of this thread? The "X, Y, Z" would refer to the evidence itself - unambiguous and not open to philosophical spin; the facts, if you will. Faith doesn't appear to like that approach, because the corollary is that if the evidence is against whatever particular philosophy or idea or concept or whatever, then intellectual honesty requires one to admit that.