Top Ten Creationist Arguments

[AsianDream]

No amount of intellectual gymnastics can reconcile the idea of a “nice” all powerful God with the way in which evolution actually works.

Sure, but I don't see how doubt and faith are in any way in conflict. Actually, it doesn't take that much in the way of intellectual gymnastics at all. You're really just restating the old "problem of evil." There are four propositions: 1) God is all knowing. 2) God is all powerful. 3) God is all good. 4) There is evil in the world. One of these four must be rejected. The traditional answer (as far as I know first articulated by Augustine) is to reject the fourth proposition -- there is in actuality no evil in the world. What appears to us, in our limited capacity, as evil is in fact good in God's grand scheme. Hence the old saying "God works in mysterious ways."

I'm not necessarily defending Augustine's argument here; all I'm saying is that the workings of natural selection in no way poses a unique dilemma in the terms you state.

The concept of God doing “bad things” does pose a dilemma in terms of most people’s understanding of what a “benevolent” God means.

The workings of natural selection are not a unique dilemma – but do clearly demonstrate that the “mysterious” ways in which a universal God works can’t be all good.

So you have the paradox of a God that is supposed to be good that does bad things – sometimes really bad and nasty things.

The argument for God allowing “Evil” to exist as a “by-product” of free will does not take into account “Acts of God” (Natural disasters), So while God has a “get-out” for the Holocaust (Human Evil) he/she has no excuse for a Tsunami.

This is where intellectual gymnastics do come into play.

I clearly don’t like the idea of a God that is half good and half Devil – luckily there is no evidence whatsoever for any sort of God

So I hope the much more self evident and clear truth – that there is no God - is how reality really is.

There's obviously nothing in nature that needs to have had any intervention by any sort of God for the world to be as it is now - nor is any devine intervention needed to explain the existance of human beings. So I think we're probably better off without a God that would have to be quire a "nasty person" - or else be "mysterious" in quite a bad way (at least as viewed by mere human values)

 

[Zingerific]

So you have the paradox of a God that is supposed to be good that does bad things – sometimes really bad and nasty things.

That's not really giving the argument its due. The bad and nasty things only appear so to us. In our limited capacity qua finite beings, we cannot comprehend the ultimate good of God's plan, blah blah blah. I don't really have it in me to really argue for this point, but I do think that anything based on human perception of "good" things and "bad" things doesn't really answer the argument.

There's obviously nothing in nature that needs to have had any intervention by any sort of God for the world to be as it is now - nor is any devine intervention needed to explain the existance of human beings.

I more or less agree, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "obviously." I think Dan Dennett does a good job showing how the argument from design, while never logically rock solid, seemed the only plausible explanation of order in the universe until Darwinian natural selection came along.

 

[Kulindahr]

I don't mean to be a pedant - but what about the resistance of organised religion to the ideas of Copernicus, Galiilao, Darwin and almost every other scientific discovery ever made?

The Copernicus and Galileo situations were matters of scientific dispute, not of religion. There were religious people who endorsed the prevailing scientific view and were threatened by its overturn, but that doesn't make it a religious issue. Darwin somewhat qualifies as a religious issue, but it wasn't one about the nature of concept of God, only about how He did what He'd done.

"Creationist Arguments" is an Oxymoron - there are no logical Creationist Arguments - just assertions of unfounded ideas.

Funny, but the folks I knew back in Intelligent Design (pre-hijacking) would just laugh at that, since they'd almost all been led to believe in a Creator by their pursuit of science.

The more interesting thing being that the passion with which people hold ideas is almost exactly inversely proportional to the likelihood that these are true - so the more strongly people beleive something - the less likely it is to be true.

So a very good test to determine if an idea is false - is to look at how much "Faith" people have in this idea - the more "Faith" and commitment they have - the more likely it is that they are wrong.

That's an interesting faith-based position. If we pursue it, we find that the existence of God is almost certainly true, given the rabid irrational determination to oppose it exhibited by such people as Dawkins. Further, it would indicate that Obama was never in the least qualified to be president, given the great numbers of people who believe(d) in him so fanatically they refuse(d) to see any failings in him at all.

 

[Kulindahr]

I guess my problem is with the framing of the whole question: the very idea of proving God's existence. Perhaps I'm being too much of a Kantian here, but it seems to me that if you *prove* something, then it's not something you *believe* anymore; it's something you *know*.

That is to say that faith, properly understood, can only apply to things that are unknowable -- if it is knowable, it is the proper province of reason (or science, or whatever you want to call it). So if something is unknowable by definition, then reason doesn't have anything to say about it one way or another.

So *proving* God's existence seems to be something of a fool's errand. If you prove God exists, then you don't really believe in God anymore -- and if you have faith in God, you are already acknowledging that God's existence is beyond the province of proof.

You're making a sharp dichotomy where the actual situation is more complex. Take for example the atheist I knew who became a Deist because of his studies and research. He didn't have "proof", but he had indications -- kind of like a detective who can tell from the evidence that the crime was done by one of four people: he can't prove who did it, but he has an indication. That's where Intelligent Design (pre-hijack) comes in: there are indications, but they aren't sufficient for proof.

So there are things which are partly knowable, not just knowable or unknowable.

Sure, but I don't see how doubt and faith are in any way in conflict. Actually, it doesn't take that much in the way of intellectual gymnastics at all. You're really just restating the old "problem of evil." There are four propositions: 1) God is all knowing. 2) God is all powerful. 3) God is all good. 4) There is evil in the world. One of these four must be rejected. The traditional answer (as far as I know first articulated by Augustine) is to reject the fourth proposition -- there is in actuality no evil in the world. What appears to us, in our limited capacity, as evil is in fact good in God's grand scheme. Hence the old saying "God works in mysterious ways."

I'm not necessarily defending Augustine's argument here; all I'm saying is that the workings of natural selection in no way poses a unique dilemma in the terms you state.

I'm reminded here of an argument I arrived at and only later found it had been advanced before (though never became popular): that Hell exists precisely because God loves us, that it is His way of granting many people their wish not to have Him around. It is Hell not because He set it up to torment people, but because that's what happens when He goes away.

As for the four propositions, the first problem is that when thinking in Latin you get these legal-type absolutes, thus making the situation more stark and black-or-white than the Greek or Hebrew originals would make it. But apart from that, as a Benedictine monk once explained to me, there is a position drawn to a certain extent from ancient rabbis that there really is evil, but when seen "from the other side" it turns out also to be good. He used the illustration of light in a prism: seen through a slit, we may see blue, or red, or yellow, and say that if light is really light it has to be the color we see -- but when seen from a different slit, it's white.

The problem there is that Western/Latin thinking rejects paradox -- which another Benedictine monk pointed out to me is rather silly, considering that science today is made up of quite a number of paradoxes, not least of which is the wave/particle duality.

 

[Kulindahr]

And as far as Copernicus and Galileo go, the hostility of the Church was not monolithic -- it took twelve years for the Pope to get around to putting Galileo on house arrest, and that was only after he started writing on theology. He was poaching on the Pope's territory, after all

Yes, and that's the point at which one of his friends among the Cardinals, the man who said, "The scriptures tell us not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven", came and told him that this time there was nothing they could do; the pope would not listen to any defense when Galileo had invaded the realm of the Curia.

Many of the Cardinals were entirely aware that until that point the issue had been a scientific dispute between the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican -- but when it actually became a theological dispute, the whole game changed. Some of them tried to intervene to get the scientific issues thrown out of Galileo's trial, but since Galileo had ventured into theology, they were throwing everything they had at him.

Of course it didn't help that in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems he poked fun at theologians and the pope took some of it as referring to himself.....

 

[Kulindahr]

The argument for God allowing “Evil” to exist as a “by-product” of free will does not take into account “Acts of God” (Natural disasters), So while God has a “get-out” for the Holocaust (Human Evil) he/she has no excuse for a Tsunami.

This is where intellectual gymnastics do come into play.

No mental gymnastics required: according to the Bible, when man by free will sinned, the universe -- up till then supervised by sinless man -- started misbehaving.
I wish I could remember how a Franciscan monk I once knew put that into a mundane temporal frame...

I clearly don’t like the idea of a God that is half good and half Devil – luckily there is no evidence whatsoever for any sort of God

So I hope the much more self evident and clear truth – that there is no God - is how reality really is.

There's obviously nothing in nature that needs to have had any intervention by any sort of God for the world to be as it is now - nor is any devine intervention needed to explain the existance of human beings. So I think we're probably better off without a God that would have to be quire a "nasty person" - or else be "mysterious" in quite a bad way (at least as viewed by mere human values)

When a doctor sticks a hypodermic in a child, that strikes the child as a mean and nasty thing. When a coach drives a young athlete to excel, and there is pain involved, the strikes the young athlete as painful.

But the athlete has the better view: the pain is for his own good, to make him stronger, faster, more limber.


My brother the mathematician once pointed out that the movements of an object through a half dozen dimensions would look awfully mysterious to a being who operated only in three. The mystery lay, then, not in the object, but in the gap in the number of dimensions.

 

[Kulindahr]

That's not really giving the argument its due. The bad and nasty things only appear so to us. In our limited capacity qua finite beings, we cannot comprehend the ultimate good of God's plan, blah blah blah. I don't really have it in me to really argue for this point, but I do think that anything based on human perception of "good" things and "bad" things doesn't really answer the argument.

Quite. What comes to mind here is another mathematical analogy: there are shapes in higher numbers of dimensions which when projected onto/into lower number space can't be projected back and necessarily get the original shape because others can make the same "shadow", e.g. a circular shadow on a piece of paper can come from a sphere, a lens, a cylinder, or a cone, or some strange configuration that casts a round shadow. So people in 2D-land would have no way of knowing what is casting the shadow from 3D-land.

The point is that when we see a shadow that looks "bad" here, there's no telling what shape (good, bad, whatever) the event had in whatever number of dimensions God functions in.

I more or less agree, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "obviously." I think Dan Dennett does a good job showing how the argument from design, while never logically rock solid, seemed the only plausible explanation of order in the universe until Darwinian natural selection came along.

But Darwinian natural selection doesn't explain the order in the universe, nor does it put paid to the argument from design. Claiming it does is like learning how to build a car and saying that therefore it wasn't designed.

 

[Zingerific]

But Darwinian natural selection doesn't explain the order in the universe, nor does it put paid to the argument from design. Claiming it does is like learning how to build a car and saying that therefore it wasn't designed.

Well, it's been years since I've read Dennett, so I can't really do his thesis justice. From my understanding, his argument is that natural selection provides a mechanism for higher degrees of order to arise from lesser degrees of order, something which hitherto had been considered impossible. If anyone is interested, here's the book: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Dangerous-Idea-Evolution-Meanings/dp/068482471X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267647050&sr=8-3"]Darwin's Dangerous Idea[/ame].

You're making a sharp dichotomy where the actual situation is more complex

Perhaps, but to borrow Fire's terminology, sharp dichotomies are heuristically useful.

Anyway, my main point was that I find framing the question in terms of a stark opposition between faith and reason unhelpful.

thinking in Latin you get these legal-type absolutes, thus making the situation more stark and black-or-white than the Greek or Hebrew originals would make it.

Now that's an interesting proposition (if a little far afield). I recall Heidegger's rants against English -- he claimed it was a "philosophically poor" language. In his mind, German and Greek were the best, mostly because of "middle voice," if I recall. Although, if that's the case, I wonder why Wittgenstein, intensely aware of language, ended up at Oxford.

 

[Kulindahr]

Well, it's been years since I've read Dennett, so I can't really do his thesis justice. From my understanding, his argument is that natural selection provides a mechanism for higher degrees of order to arise from lesser degrees of order, something which hitherto had been considered impossible. If anyone is interested, here's the book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Perhaps, but to borrow Fire's terminology, sharp dichotomies are heuristically useful.

I recall talking with a guy at a seminar where some colleague of S. Gould spoke. He compared the standard Creationist view of God to being finger painting, and pointed to the phenomenon of organization arising from disorder and continuing to give rise to higher degrees of order as being a mark of true creativity -- that not only does the Creator create, but the creations themselves continue to create. He felt sorry for the Creationists for having a "kindergarten God".

Anyway, my main point was that I find framing the question in terms of a stark opposition between faith and reason unhelpful. Now that's an interesting proposition (if a little far afield). I recall Heidegger's rants against English -- he claimed it was a "philosophically poor" language. In his mind, German and Greek were the best, mostly because of "middle voice," if I recall. Although, if that's the case, I wonder why Wittgenstein, intensely aware of language, ended up at Oxford.

I can't recall the substance of Heidegger's rants, but I agree that English is a really crappy language for thinking clearly in. It's not just the lack of the middle voice, but of pronouns with cases nominative, genitive, locative, dative, accusative.... and of nouns with the same, and sloppy tense structure, plus the dual number form. I bang my head against the problem constantly while writing my story "Dit for Life" in the story forum. It would be SO much easier to set down the meaning I want in Greek, but then not too many people read Koine, and I'm awfully rusty these days any more anyway.

But that points to a problem in theological philosophy, the problem of language; to an extent, anyone who hasn't faced that issue can't actually do theology at all -- he ends up finger painting instead of reaching to be an artist.

 

[AsianDream]

When a doctor sticks a hypodermic in a child, that strikes the child as a mean and nasty thing. When a coach drives a young athlete to excel, and there is pain involved, the strikes the young athlete as painful.

But the athlete has the better view: the pain is for his own good, to make him stronger, faster, more limber.

This sort of idea seems to have an appeal to religious leaders.

Where the Inquistion poked people's eyes out and stretched them on the rack - this was just for the good of their "Imortal Soul". So made their soul stronger - though maybe was also a source of "Innocent Merriment" to their interogators.

From a viewpoint that does not "pre-suppose" that God exists - the all too common religious idea that its OK to make people suffer for the good of their imortal soul seems to be a very spurious argument.

Clearly evolution has made people "stronger, faster and more limber" by the brutal process of killing off those that were "less stronger, slower and less limber".

This seems fair enough if this is just a natural process - but would not be something that a good God would plan to do.

 

[Kulindahr]

This sort of idea seems to have an appeal to religious leaders.

Where the Inquistion poked people's eyes out and stretched them on the rack - this was just for the good of their "Imortal Soul". So made their soul stronger - though maybe was also a source of "Innocent Merriment" to their interogators.

But the Inquisition, and any other religious types who take it on themselves to inflict suffering, have added an unstated premise: "I have the right to take the place of God."

So, biblically, those things God does are good for the soul, but those who take on themselves the authority to inflict pain and suffering in God's name have gone back to the original sin, "I shall be like God".

From a viewpoint that does not "pre-suppose" that God exists - the all too common religious idea that its OK to make people suffer for the good of their imortal soul seems to be a very spurious argument.

It is spurious, on biblical grounds: nowhere is there an instruction to inflict suffering on anyone else.

Clearly evolution has made people "stronger, faster and more limber" by the brutal process of killing off those that were "less stronger, slower and less limber".

This seems fair enough if this is just a natural process - but would not be something that a good God would plan to do.

That sounds to me no different than saying that hard, painful drills for athletes is fair if it's a natural process -- but that no good coach would ever do it.