I'm beginning to think that creationists and proponents of intelligent design suffer from yet another philosophical fallacy that I had not previously considered. My opinion on the relationship between biblicism (or bibliolatry, or however you want to describe a religious conviction to the doctrine of biblical inerrency) and rationalism from which these ideas stem has been well documented. But I believe there may be another contributing problem: the misappropriation of logic and propositional thinking.
I will borrow from one of my current favourite anti-evolution apologists: Mr. Ravi Zacharias, who says that the logical conclusive result of evolution allows for total moral unaccountability, and the devaluation of human life that leads to genocide. This has been echoed by many other Christian apologists, but every single proponent of this idea without exception has failed to illustrate this consistently. The reason for this, and a serious problem for all who endorse this position is that they fail to recognize that humankind almost never behaves consistently and purely logically. Furthermore, any philosophical connection between the larger body general scientific theory and patterns of thinking and behaviour is non-existent. Put another way, whether or not the theory of evolution should make us think or believe certain things can never be proved, and even if it could, there is no guarantee that people will always respond as they ought.
I don't know much about the discipline of logic, but from what I understand, it is built upon propositional thinking: Premise A plus Premise B will always result in Conclusion C. The problem in applying this sort of thinking to human behaviour is that almost no one organizes his/her thoughts and decisions strictly according to this model. I will use my own moral grid as an example. According to the anti-evolutionists, I am being logically inconsistent in my insistence that it is important to be moral person, in light of the fact that I believe that evolution assumes no moral purpose. This may be correct, but so what? If this is indeed a logical inconsistency, it does not necessarily prohibit me from being moral and believing that "morality" is largely biologically irrelevant.
My point is this, and I ask peter12 and Calgaryborn in particular take note of this: humanity, society, history and behaviour does not conform to logical propositions. People believe what they believe and behave the way they behave for a huge variety of reasons, and can almost never be reduced to how we "ought" to act or think because of what we have chosen to believe for whatever reasons. This kind of inconsistency I have demonstrated in previous posts in which I have suggested that biblicists are actually hyper-rationalists. The biblical inerrency movement was born out of a reaction to rationalism, and yet the movement's methodology is notoriously rationalistic. It is a logical inconsistency, yet biblicism persists and perhaps continues to grow.
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