Pope's astronomer dismisses ID and says Church was "spectacularly wrong" in its treatment of Galileo

[tonyrey]

There is no optimal point per se.

Indeed there is. The existence of rational beings with a capacity for love is the optimal point. The fact that we exist does not imply that we must exist. You are attributing necessity to events with no justification for doing so. Simplicity is the best guarantee of existence - as you have pointed out. Physical complexity is a disadvantage. The greater the complexity the greater the likelihood of failure!

… if the population is somewhere near an optimum, changes will be much more likely to be deleterious or neutral…

A fact which greatly reduces the likelihood of progress.

…a theoretically optimum is a moving target that even fast-reproducing populations can’t hope to keep up with.

A fact which further increases the odds against the existence of human beings. It is a miracle that we exist…

 

[reggieM]

You’d be surprised how much you learn, and how much contempt the sources you do rely on have for your mind.

I understand your point of view but what I’ve found is that the primary sources (or those that are deemed such by the evolutionary-establishment) have a very profound contempt for my mind. I don’t want to open up more of a debate on this, but creationists are not the only critics of Darwinian theory who have found contradictions, double-talk, cover-ups, outright frauds and other such tactics coming from credentialed evolutionary scientists.

We could speak philosophically about the materialist denial of the mind itself, or at least its accidental, purposeless origin also. Mr. Darwin was troubled about that thought himself.

But the ecological niche idea, as you explain (I think) is not predictive. It does not indicate or predict what the environment will do, but rather it’s a speculation on what the environment, supposedly, has done.

Given that the environment exists and species live in different environments, niches tell us nothing about what evolution will do. The idea of optimization is the same.

Q. When does a species reach an optimum?
A. When the species exhibits stability and long periods of time with no evolutionary change
Q. Why does the species exhibit no evolutionary change for a long time?
A Because it has reached it’s optimum.

The environment is a random variable but it occupies certain predictable limits. As such, the results of environmental pressures should also be limited and predictable.

However, when we discover that there are 500,000 different species of beetles, all of which faced the same, limited environmental factors – then there appears to me to be a big problem with the claim that the environment promotes and rewards change.

The same is true with the example given of the finding of a 250 million year old bacterium. In that stretch of time it faced different environmental conditions, but we discover that it retains the same genetic composition as modern bacteria have today.

So, I see that as a falsification of Darwinian theory. The explanation, after the fact, that these organisms reached optimization really adds nothing to our knowledge.

 

[rossum]

But the ecological niche idea, as you explain (I think) is not predictive. It does not indicate or predict what the environment will do, but rather it’s a speculation on what the environment, supposedly, has done.

The Arctic environment is a) cold and b) white landscape. Are you saying that the animals we find in the Arctic environment cannot be predicted to be a) adapted to deal with the cold (as with fish having anti-freeze in their blood) and that b) land animals will be camouflaged against a white background (as with white fur)? By observing the niche we can make reasonable predictions about what we might find there.

Q. When does a species reach an optimum?
A. When the species exhibits stability and long periods of time with no evolutionary change

Incorrect. A species that shows no change in a changing environment is probably not at an optimum. You fail to include the factor of the amount of change in the environment/niche.

Q. Why does the species exhibit no evolutionary change for a long time?
A Because it has reached it’s optimum.

Again incorrect. Because it has reached, or is very close to, its optimum in an unchanging or very slowly changing environment/niche.

In both cases you have failed to include the factor of the changing environment.

However, when we discover that there are 500,000 different species of beetles, all of which faced the same, limited environmental factors – then there appears to me to be a big problem with the claim that the environment promotes and rewards change.

There are a great many different niches which beetles occupy. Ladybirds eat aphids. Scarabs live in a dry environment and use animal dung to lay eggs. Death watch beetles eat rotten wood. Those are three very different environmental niches occupied by three very different beetles.

The same is true with the example given of the finding of a 250 million year old bacterium. In that stretch of time it faced different environmental conditions, but we discover that it retains the same genetic composition as modern bacteria have today.

That 250 million year old bacterium was further from its modern descendants then a mouse is from us. Both us and mice have the same genes: four limbs, two eyes, jaws, teeth, gut, lungs, heart, haemoglobin, hair, uterus etc. Would you say that a mouse has the same “genetic composition” as we do?

rossum

 

[reggieM]

The Arctic environment is a) cold and b) white landscape. Are you saying that the animals we find in the Arctic environment cannot be predicted to be a) adapted to deal with the cold (as with fish having anti-freeze in their blood) and that b) land animals will be camouflaged against a white background (as with white fur)? By observing the niche we can make reasonable predictions about what we might find there.

We can predict that the animals that we find surviving in certain environments are the animals that survive in those environments. But that doesn’t really say anything.

Q. Why do those animals survive in those environments?
A. Because they have adapted to survive in those environments.
Q. Why did they adapt to survive in those environments?
A. Because the environment made them capable of surviving.
Q. How do we know that the environment enabled them to survive?
A. Because they are surviving in that environment.

There’s no prediction there. It’s merely an attempt to explain something by fitting the observations into a categorization scheme.

Polar bears are white, supposedly as camouflage. Their prey, seals, are not white. Other artic animals are not white. So, bears needed camouflage but seals didn’t.
That’s not a prediction, but is simply story telling after-the-fact.

It would make no difference to evolutionary theory if seals were white also. That would be explained as an evolutionary prediction. Or, if bears stayed brown and evolved a different diet, like artic moose have – that wouldn’t change anything either.

There are a great many different niches which beetles occupy. Ladybirds eat aphids. Scarabs live in a dry environment and use animal dung to lay eggs. Death watch beetles eat rotten wood. Those are three very different environmental niches occupied by three very different beetles.

True, as I said there is a limited range of environmental conditions. You noted three. We’d still need nearly a half-million more to explain the variety.

That 250 million year old bacterium was further from its modern descendants then a mouse is from us. Both us and mice have the same genes: four limbs, two eyes, jaws, teeth, gut, lungs, heart, haemoglobin, hair, uterus etc. Would you say that a mouse has the same “genetic composition” as we do?

The difference between mouse and human genetics is less than 20%.
I think this opens open many more problems than what we’ve dealt with already.

I’ve stated that I don’t want to get into a debate about evolution, so please don’t interpret my avoidance of the discussion as a lack of interest.

I appreciate your opinion on these matters, even where I disagree.

 

[Betterave]

Here I disagree. Archaeologists study designs by known designers with known powers. I have already used the example of an aluminium cylinder block as something which cannot have been designed by palaeolithic man.

With an unknown designer of unknown powers we are unable to say with any certainty whether or not that designer did, or did not, design the aluminium cylinder block. It is the inability to say “the designer did not design this” that is one of the barriers between current ID and being science. Darwin was able to give examples of things that could not possibly have evolved. So far ID has not been able to give any examples of things that could not possibly have been designed. As currently constituted ID cannot distinguish between Paley’s watch and the heath on which it is lying since both could equally have been designed by a designer with unspecified powers.

We also have direct knowledge of the designers: their bones, their descendants etc. For the ID designers we have nothing.

But archaeologists know that palaeolithic man couldn’t design aluminum cylinders how? By an independent assessment of palaeolithic man himself? Obviously not. You seem to be denying the obvious here: Archaeologists can be baffled as to how an ancient civilization did something (e.g., designed and built the Egyptian pyramids), without there being the least doubt about the fact that it was done.

It makes ID unfalsifiable. How can we make an experiment to falsify ID? What X can we look for so that we can confidently state “X was not designed”?

Well apparently we already have the answer to that question: Weren’t some of the claims in Behe’s DBB falsified??

It is not “hard and fast”, but it is there. Science does have fuzzy boundaries and you can probably find a part of science that drops one or other of the usual criteria. ID pretty much drops all of them. Different sects of Christianity can drop small parts of the general consensus, but if I put together a new sect that dropped everything that at least one other sect also dropped then what would be left would not be recognisable as Christianity. ID does something similar with science.

ID proposes a general hypothesis but at the moment it does not proceed any further. It needs to develop the implications of its hypothesis and make predictions. It needs to do the experiments to test those predictions. It needs to modify its hypothesis in the light of the results of those experiments. So far the only example I am aware of is Professor Behe who modified his hypothesis about Irreducible Complexity in the light of experimental results. Even in this case, IC is not a hypothesis for ID but a hypothesis against evolution. It does not deal with the default position in science of “we don’t know”.

rossum

This is all generalized assertion which appears to contradict itself on significant points. Falsifiability either is or is not a hard and fast criteria for ‘real science’ (it is not). ID theories either are or are not falsifiable (they are - they have been falsified). Care to explain?

 

[NE_Catholic]

guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/17/pope-astronomer-baptise-aliens?CMP%20=twt_gu

"Consolmagno curates the pope’s meteorite collection and is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican’s observatory. He dismissed the ideas of intelligent design – a pseudoscientific version of creationism. “The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn’t originally mean at all. It’s another form of the God of the gaps. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.”

…

The pope’s astronomer said the Vatican was keen on science and admitted that the church had got it “spectacularly wrong” over its treatment of the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo confirmed that the Earth went around the sun – and not the other way around – and was charged with heresy in 1633. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Tuscany. Only in 1992 did Pope John Paul admit that the church’s treatment of Galileo had been a mistake."

How does a thread begin on such a clear subject spin into a referendum on the existance of GOd?

Evidently the pope’s astronomer has an opinion on Galileo and he expressed it.

 

[Betterave]

The Arctic environment is a) cold and b) white landscape. Are you saying that the animals we find in the Arctic environment cannot be predicted to be a) adapted to deal with the cold (as with fish having anti-freeze in their blood) and that b) land animals will be camouflaged against a white background (as with white fur)? By observing the niche we can make reasonable predictions about what we might find there.

Incorrect. A species that shows no change in a changing environment is probably not at an optimum. You fail to include the factor of the amount of change in the environment/niche.

Again incorrect. Because it has reached, or is very close to, its optimum in an unchanging or very slowly changing environment/niche.

In both cases you have failed to include the factor of the changing environment.

There are a great many different niches which beetles occupy. Ladybirds eat aphids. Scarabs live in a dry environment and use animal dung to lay eggs. Death watch beetles eat rotten wood. Those are three very different environmental niches occupied by three very different beetles.

That 250 million year old bacterium was further from its modern descendants then a mouse is from us. Both us and mice have the same genes: four limbs, two eyes, jaws, teeth, gut, lungs, heart, haemoglobin, hair, uterus etc. Would you say that a mouse has the same “genetic composition” as we do?

rossum

I think that Leela and TS’s criticisms of ID actually apply much better here: the notion of an ‘optimum’ is purely a posteriori: whatever is stable in a stable environment is simply labelled ‘optimally adapted.’ Evolutionary theory doesn’t make predictions about this though, it doesn’t tell us in advance what an organism optimally ought to look like given a particular environment, it doesn’t give us any tools for assessing whether an organism will be ‘optimally adapted’ to a particular environment or not - does it?

 

[reggieM]

How does a thread begin on such a clear subject spin into a referendum on the existance of GOd?

Evidently the pope’s astronomer has an opinion on Galileo and he expressed it.

I think because there are two parts to the topic. One is Galileo and the other is ID.

The ID topic often goes towards the question of the existence of God.

 

[rossum]

In 2002 Dr Dembski gave the keynote address at the RAPID Conference. He called it Becoming a Disciplined Science: Prospects, Pitfalls, and a Reality Check for ID. Here is an excerpt from that speech where he proposes tests for how well ID is doing as a science:Objective Measures of Progress
How do we gauge how well we are doing in developing ID as a scientific research program? We need some objective measures of progress. Rather than lay out such measures in pedantic detail, let me indicate what they are under four rubrics, each followed by a series of questions:

• Intellectual Vitality. Have we become boring? Have we run out of things to say? Is the fount of fresh ideas drying up? Are we constantly repeating ourselves? Are people who once were excited about what we’re doing no longer excited? Or do we have the intellectual initiative? Are we setting the agenda for the problems being discussed? Are we ourselves energized by our research? Is there nothing we’d rather be doing than work on intelligent design? Are our ideas strong enough to engage the best and the brightest on the other side?
• Intellectual Standards. Are we holding ourselves to high intellectual standards? Are we in the least self-critical about our work? Are we sober or immodest about our work? Do we demand precision and rigor from our each other? Do we examine each other’s work with intense critical scrutiny and speak our minds freely in assessing it? Or do we try to keep all our interactions civil, gentlemanly, and diplomatic (perhaps so as not to give the appearance of dissension in our ranks)? Does the mood of our movement alternate between the smug and the indignant – smug when we hold the upper hand, indignant when we are criticized? Do we react to adverse criticism like first-time novelists who are dismayed to discover that their masterpiece has been trashed by the critics? Or do we take adverse criticism as an occasion for tightening and improving our work?
• Exiting the Ghetto. Do we refuse to be marginalized within an intellectual ghetto or second-class subculture? Are scholars and scientists on the other side actually getting to know us? Once they get to know us, do they still demonize us or do they think that we have an interesting, albeit perverse, point of view? Is intelligent design’s appeal international? Does it cross religious boundaries? Or is it increasingly confined to American evangelicalism? Who owns ID? Are we trying to get our ideas into the scientific mainstream? Are we continuing to plug away at getting our work published in the mainstream peer-reviewed literature (despite the deck being stacked against us)? Or are we seeking safe havens where we can publish our work easily, yet mainly for the benefit of each other? At the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, for instance, we encourage contributors to the society’s journal also to submit their articles to the mainstream literature. John Bracht, for instance, recently had his lengthy design-theoretic appraisal of Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, Investigations, accepted in the Santa Fe Institute’s journal Complexity. This is precisely what needs to happen.
• Attracting Talent. Are we continually attracting new talent to intelligent design’s scientific research program? Does that talent include intellects of the highest caliber? Is that talent distributed across the disciplines or confined only to certain disciplines? Are under-represented disciplines getting filled? What about talent that’s been with the movement in the past? Is it staying with the movement or becoming disillusioned and aligning itself elsewhere? Do the same names associated with intelligent design keep coming up in print or are we constantly adding new names? Are we fun to be around? Do we have a colorful assortment of characters? Other things being equal, would you rather party with a design theorist or a Darwinist?

As I see it, ID has failed to meet these targets, set eight years ago. Taking them in order:* Intellectual Vitality: ID has indeed become boring and has run out of things to say. Behe’s IC and Dembski’s CSI are old hat now and nothing new has emerged. ID research is very thin on the ground. Specialist ID Journals are moribund. PCID has not published for years and the JoEI was announced and disappeared into the ether leaving nothing behind.

• Intellectual Standards: ID does not gladly accept criticism. I will except Professor Behe from this but I have seen very little of it from other ID luminaries. Draft articles may be amended slightly, but substantial criticisma are not often addressed. For example, Dr Dembski has mentioned the problem of Apparent Information appearing to be Specified Information some years ago, but has not so far produced any way of distinguishing AI from SI. If AI cannot be distinguished from SI then it is impossible to tell whether the result of an evolutionary process is AI or SI. That is a major flaw in the ID argument yet there has been no apparent effort to address it.
• Exiting the Ghetto: ID seems to have retreated from science and confined itself to theology and politics. The volume of scientific work coming out of ID is far smaller than the volume of theological work and press releases. ID seems to be retreating into the ghetto rather than trying to get out into the mainstream.
• Attracting Talent: When was the last time a scientist of the calibre of Dr Dembski or Professor Behe joined ID? I would rather party with P Z Myers.

ID has not made much progress in the scientific goals it has set itself. Guy Consolmagno was right to dismiss ID.

rossum

 

[Betterave]

This argument seems so clear. I don’t understand why people don’t get it. It goes back at least a hundred years to William James. Sure, some things appear designed and some things do not, but if we are talking about God as the possible designer, no matter what we observe, it could have been designed to look exactly that way. Nothing could ever look more or less like it was designed by God since God can do literally anything. People don’t look more designed by God than the particular arrangement of wreckage from an airplane crash. If either one looked completely different, it would still look just as designed by God. There is no way to rule out the hypothesis of divine design, but then for that reason there is also no way to make use of it, no reason to keep it from a scientific perspective. It may be good for other things, but it doesn’t help us do science.

It’s clear about one thing: God can do anything. He could design anything that exists to look exactly the way it does.

Then it appears to advance a groundless assumption: God is not human, so God and man have nothing in common and man cannot know anything about God. Therefore, man cannot recognize divine design because divine design has no analogy to human design.

 

[Leela]

I think that Leela and TS’s criticisms of ID actually apply much better here: the notion of an ‘optimum’ is purely a posteriori: whatever is stable in a stable environment is simply labelled ‘optimally adapted.’ Evolutionary theory doesn’t make predictions about this though, it doesn’t tell us in advance what an organism optimally ought to look like given a particular environment, it doesn’t give us any tools for assessing whether an organism will be ‘optimally adapted’ to a particular environment or not - does it?

Right, evolution does not ensure the greatest possible flourishing of a species or anything–just so long as it can reproduce. In fact, one of the things that evolutionary theory predicts is that we ought to be able to find instances where the “design” is far from optimal. And as a matter of fact we do find lots of examples of “unintelligent design.”

For examples, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design

 

[rossum]

Q. Why do those animals survive in those environments?
A. Because they have adapted to survive in those environments.

Reasonably correct. It is not they that have adapted, but the population of which they are part.

Q. Why did they adapt to survive in those environments?
A. Because the environment made them capable of surviving.

No. Because in that environment their ancestors had more viable offspring that other members of the population.

Q. How do we know that the environment enabled them to survive?
A. Because they are surviving in that environment.

It was their ancestors, and the environment that their ancestors lived in. That is why the speed of change in environments is important. If the change is too fast then populations go extinct. If a change is slow then populations can adapt to the change in time.

Polar bears are white, supposedly as camouflage. Their prey, seals, are not white. Other artic animals are not white. So, bears needed camouflage but seals didn’t.
That’s not a prediction, but is simply story telling after-the-fact.

Please read what I said very carefully, I included a word specifically to cover this point. Look back at my post:

The Arctic environment is a) cold and b) white landscape. (Emphasis added)

Polar bears are land animal that spend a small proportion of their time in water, so they are camouflaged as land animals. Seals are sea animals who spend the bulk of their time in water so they are camouflaged appropriately – dark above and pale below. Seals have to avoid Killer Whales as well as Polar Bears. You will notice that seal pups, who do spend the bulk of their time on land, have white fur and are camouflaged as land animals. Another easy prediction from that environment. Land → land camouflage; sea → sea camouflage.

I’ve stated that I don’t want to get into a debate about evolution, so please don’t interpret my avoidance of the discussion as a lack of interest.

I also wish to avoid closing this thread, hence my recent long post about ID.

rossum

 

[NE_Catholic]

I think because there are two parts to the topic. One is Galileo and the other is ID.

The ID topic often goes towards the question of the existence of God.

I would agree save Leela cherry picked one quote from the article and then the thread turned into a referendum on God’s existance. Why not debate this quote:

“The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world,” he said. “We need good historians and philosophers and economists, but if the account they give of human life within their particular field is too narrowly focused, they can lead us seriously astray.”

That, IMO, is the actual best part of the article.

 

[Leela]

It’s clear about one thing: God can do anything. He could design anything that exists to look exactly the way it does.

Then it appears to advance a groundless assumption: God is not human, so God and man have nothing in common and man cannot know anything about God. Therefore, man cannot recognize divine design because divine design has no analogy to human design.

Whether or not man can know anything about God is a whole other issue.

The fact that God can make anything look like anything just means that no conceivable evidence could ever look more divinely designed than any other conceivable evidence. IDers claim that certain observations validate the design hypothesis. But if the particular observations cited in such cases had been completely different than they actually are, they would still be no more or less consistent with the hypothesis that they were divinely designed to be exactly that way. All the ways that they aren’t (no matter what we imagine they could have been like) would look just as divinely designed as the particular way that they are. So in what sense could it ever make sense to say that a particular observation validates divine design when nothing imagineable (even if we imagine a completely different world) could ever invalidate it?

 

[rossum]

But archaeologists know that palaeolithic man couldn’t design aluminum cylinders how?

Because we have never found any aluminium objects, even very simple ones, associated with other Palaeolithic remains. Because we have never found any signs of Palaeolithic man mining for aluminium ores, as we have found of them mining for flint. Because we have never found any sign of aluminium smelters dating from that period. Because we know that until the late 19th century aluminium was a rare and precious metal; you can find aluminium jewellery in antique shops sometimes and we have never found such jewellery in palaeolithic deposits.

Well apparently we already have the answer to that question: Weren’t some of the claims in Behe’s DBB falsified??

Those claims were not claims about ID but claims about evolution. The original claim was “Evolution cannot produce Irreducible Complexity”. That is a falsifiable claim about evolution which was duly falsified. It was not a claim about ID.

This is all generalized assertion which appears to contradict itself on significant points. Falsifiability either is or is not a hard and fast criteria for ‘real science’ (it is not). ID theories either are or are not falsifiable (they are - they have been falsified). Care to explain?

I shall go back to my Christian analogy. Arians reject the Divinity of Christ, but accept most of the rest. Nestorians reject the humanity of Christ but accept much of the rest. The Marcionites rejected all of the Old Testament and big chunks of the new. The MCC rejects the restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples. Many churches reject the traditional restriction of male only vicars. All of these are rejecting part of the general consensus of Christianity.

ID is like a new sect which rejects all of the individual things that each of those other sects reject: Christ is neither divine nor human. Much of the Bible is ignored. Gay marriage is allowed as are women priests and bishops. Would that new sect be Christian? Yet it could point to a different sect of Christianity to justify each of its rejections of the consensus.

ID has rejected too much of the consensus of science to be considered science.

As to falsifiability, where ID has made some specific statements they have been falsified, though often those statements are about evolution rather than about ID itself.

At its heart ID theory is something like: “A designer (or designers) with unknown powers did something at some time in some place.” Until there is a lot more detail added to that it will be very difficult to falsify ID.

rossum

 

[Leela]

I would agree save Leela cherry picked one quote from the article and then the thread turned into a referendum on God’s existance. Why not debate this quote:

“The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world,” he said. “We need good historians and philosophers and economists, but if the account they give of human life within their particular field is too narrowly focused, they can lead us seriously astray.”

That, IMO, is the actual best part of the article.

I agree that the scientific outlook has been far too narrow in excluding the ethical dimension of life from its view. Sam Harris has recently published a book to encourage us to broaden our scientific view to consider understanding the causes of human well-being and misery as part of our ever-expanding understanding of the world.

I hope anyone interested in discussing Harris’s book “The Moral Landscape” will join me here:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=501032

 

[NE_Catholic]

I agree that the scientific outlook has been far too narrow in excluding the ethical dimension of life from its view. Sam Harris has recently published a book to encourage us to broaden our scientific view to consider understanding the causes of human well-being and misery as part of our ever-expanding understanding of the world.

I hope anyone interested in discussing Harris’s book “The Moral Landscape” will join me here:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=501032

I saw that thread, commented on it

 

[Anselm33]

I agree that the scientific outlook has been far too narrow in excluding the ethical dimension of life from its view. Sam Harris has recently published a book to encourage us to broaden our scientific view to consider understanding the causes of human well-being and misery as part of our ever-expanding understanding of the world.

I hope anyone interested in discussing Harris’s book “The Moral Landscape” will join me here:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=501032

This poster has said that tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused by Catholic priests and that priests have gang raped orphans and has refused to give evidence for these wild claims. She is hardly the person to make any moral assertions in a Catholic forum.

 

[Leela]

This poster has said that tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused by Catholic priests and that priests have gang raped orphans and has refused to give evidence for these wild claims. She is hardly the person to make any moral assertions in a Catholic forum.

I haven’t refused to give evidence, I’ve just repeatedly asked you to start a new thread if you want to discuss this separate issue. How does *that *disqualify me from making moral assertions? Since the facts of the Catholic sex abuse scandal ought to be well-know to you by now, I don’t think I am out of line is refusing to allow you to derail a thread on what science may teach us about values to discuss it. I hope you won’t continue to tryto derail this and other threads and just start a new one on clergy sex abuse if it is a particular interest of yours.

 

[edwest2]

It’s clear about one thing: God can do anything. He could design anything that exists to look exactly the way it does.

Then it appears to advance a groundless assumption: God is not human, so God and man have nothing in common and man cannot know anything about God. Therefore, man cannot recognize divine design because divine design has no analogy to human design.

Uh, the Bible tells us about God’s intentions. Read Genesis. To say that God did not know what was going to happen ignores the words of Jesus.

“man cannot know anything about God”? He has spoken through the prophets, he was born by a virgin and appeared as Jesus Christ.

God bless,
Ed