Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darrel Falk: You’re nothing but a pack of neurons and you must accept that

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Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, responds to BioLogos (= Dawkins’s scissors, applied to Bible in Jesus’ name):

Then, after chiding the church for paying too much attention to anti-evolutionary voices, he offers a sentence which, taken seriously, represents a breathtaking intellectual commitment:


Scientific knowledge is not seriously flawed and we cannot allow ourselves to be led down this pathway any longer.


That is nothing less than a manifesto for scientism. Science, as a form of knowledge, is here granted a status that can only be described as infallible. The dangers of this proposal are only intensified when we recognize that “scientific knowledge” is not even a stable intellectual construct. Nevertheless, these words do reveal why BioLogos pushes its agenda with such intensity.


[ … ]


Dr. Falk ends his essay with a paragraph that includes this key sentence: “If God really has created through an evolutionary mechanism and if God chooses to use BioLogos and other groups to help the Church come to terms with this issue, then three three huge challenges will begin to melt away as God’s Spirit enables us to look to him and not to ourselves.” I will simply let that sentence speak for itself.

Yes indeed. Let all mortal flesh keep silence.

Especially wise to keep silent when we consider that only a flawed understanding, not corrected by the truth of science, leads us to believe that there is a Holy Spirit. Just as the overwhelming majority of evolutionary biologists are pure naturalists (no God and no free will) and really believe in their rag and bone shop, the overwhelming majority of neuroscientists believe that the sacred calling identified for BioLogos is simply a meaningless dance of neurons in Darrel Falk’s brain. So why hasn’t he accepted the verdict of science yet?

Scientific knowledge is not, remember, seriously flawed.

Comments
Pardon, Falk.kairosfocus
January 6, 2011
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Mrs O'Leary: You are right to highlight the difference between Mr Mohler and Mr Farrell. I think we need to draw a key distinction within scientific studies: studying he world as a going concern, and studying the origins of that world. Operations vs origins. For, while operational science studies can address direct observation, we are forced to project from the present to the remote past when it comes to origins. So the degree of possible warrant is inherently quite different. Consequently, origins science theories will be inherently less strongly warranted than operations ones, and of course it is origins issues that are freighted with the contentious issues over worldview commitments. Further to this, the key design inference that is at the pivot of much of the debate, is based on a much stronger degree of warrant than say the claim that by extrapolating micro-evo, we can arrive at macro-evo. Namely, we have very strong and direct observation based reason to see that functionally specific complex information, especially digitally coded and linguistic or algorithmic information, is the product of design. So, on projecting that present to the past, we have every right to see this as a credible signature of design. Which immediately points to DNA as an artifact of design, and the associated protein manufacturing system. Which lies at the heart of how the cell works. Life in the cell is credibly designed. That puts us in a very different world from what the Lewontinian a priori evolutionary materialism advocates (and especially the canonical darwinists) would like to put us. So, whatever the age of the earth and whatever the age of the cosmos, and whatever the mechanisms involved, we have good reason -- pace the declarations of the a priori materialists -- to infer that life is designed. Going beyond, and on other lines of evidence we have reason to see that our cosmos as we observe it is also designed and set up carefully to facilitate Carbon chemistry cell based life in sites like ours. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
January 6, 2011
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