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Originally Posted by Calgaryborn
...Can you tell me his religious affiliation...
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He is a professor at an evangelical liberal arts university.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calgaryborn
This of course is a departure from the question being discussed. You responded to a challenge to the validity of the scientific theory on the origin of life with an attack on christian views on the origin of life.
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That depends. I suppose I should apologize for opening a can of worms with my "design" post, but you claimed that a creationists problem rests with the invalidity of his supposition that something can come from nothing. It has already been pointed out numerous times in this forum, and even in this thread that this declaration misunderstands the mechanisms of evolution. I would rather concede that my departure was nothing of the sort. To understand the dogma of creationism one must understand the history which preceeds it. I only sought to (very briefly) demonstrate that there are philosophical and historical underpinings of the hyper-rationalistic doctrine of inerrency, and that it is this doctrine which served to establish and reinforces the concept of "scientific creationism".
Quite frankly, there is no challenge to the validity of the scientific theory of the origins of life from ancient Christian literature, simply by virtue of the fact that such literature is incapable of mounting a rebuttal of any science because it is all pre-scientific. The doctrine of inerrency would choose to ignore this very sustainable fact, and it does so for no better reason than to attempt to reconcile an extreme form of rationalism with a very wooden concept of divine inspiration and revelation. In the end, the debate that creationists would choose to engage should not really about science. It is wholly a philosophical and theological dilemma which has long since been soundly debunked.