Subject: naturalism

To: George Rudzinski

From: Michael Hardy

Date: 3/22/96

-=> Quoting George Rudzinski to Michael Hardy <=-

GR> Learn something about evolution before you question it. I question evolution far more than you ever have, but I bothered to learn what questions to ask. <<<<

I know quite a bit about it, George. Studied it in school, again in college and somewhat on my own since then. Just as I complained, you assume I must be ignorant of it because I dare question it. Many creation scientists understand evolution very well, George. I've been corresponding on the internet recently with one who has a Ph.D. in paleontology from Harvard. Stephen Jay Gould was his graduate advisor. Are you going to say he doesn't know something about evolution?

MH> -- specifically, naturalistic evolution -- with a fundy-like fervor even though the facts fall far short of substantiating it, and they don't see that as equally closed-minded.<<<<

GR> What fundie like fervor? Unless you cough up a god, nature is all that is left.<<<<

But see, George, that's drawing your conclusion before fairly considering the evidence. You close the door to some possibilities. It's like sitting on a jury with your mind made up that the defendant is innocent, and then ignoring any evidence which suggests otherwise.

The problem is that you, like many, are locked into a Naturalistic philosophy. You have decided that the truth must be natural, and so supernatural answers -- no matter how well they fit the evidence -- are dismissed as "unscientific." This is a fairly recent development in the philosophy of science -- in the last 150 years -- and is, in my opinion, a mistake.

Let me offer an example to show what this mindset does. Heinz Pagels wrote the following in his book The Dreams of Reason, a book about scientific reasoning:

"So powerful is the (experimental) method that virtually everything scientists know about the natural world comes from it. What they find is that the architecture of the universe is indeed built according to invisible universal rules, what I call the cosmic code -- the building code of the Demiurge. Examples of this universal building code are the quantum and relativity theory, the laws of chemical combination and molecular structure, the rules that govern protein synthesis and how organisms are made, to name but a few. Scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge's hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an intelligence !

Whether God is the message, wrote the message, or whether it wrote itself is unimportant in our lives. We can safely drop the traditional idea of the Demiurge, for there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no evidence for a will or purpose that goes beyond the known laws of nature."

Does this make my point more clear? In one breath, Pagels waxes rhapsodic about the amazing design of the universe, the amazing hidden code, even describing it as the work of the "Demiurge," a Greek name for a god. But because this God is Himself not *part* of nature, Pagels then, in the next breath, asserts that there is no "scientific" evidence for God.

This is why science will never discover God -- by definition, God's not allowed to be part of the picture, because he is not within nature. So far, that's fine. But then many scientists further assume that God is also not beyond nature, and that nature is a closed system. THIS is not science, it is philosophy.

If the question of origins is pursued under that assumption, than any natural explanation, however inadequate, will be preferred over a supernatural one. I maintain that it is an invalid and unsupported assumption. You insist I "cough up" God, yet you deny me the means to do so by further insisting that nature is everything.

The more I study the subject, the more convinced I become that evolution is merely the creation myth of secular man. It's poorly supported by the evidence, but clung to tenaciously because any other solution requires bursting the Naturalistic bubble.

Origin: Di's Online Cafe - Mobile, AL (334) 661-8945

END QUOTE