Evolution: The Grand Experiment

I don't know it, and that is my exact point. I will go farther and state that you don't either; again, that's my point.
 
Realism can certainly be supported. It cannot be proven that we are not deluded, but there is justifiable certainty in the realist world view: sufficient to act on. This is the classic argument.

A mild irritation ifor me is those that throw up the non-provability of the real word act in their lives 100% of the time as if it is real. What can it possibly mean to not believe in the realism of the world? To hold such a belief, yet carry on anything like a normal life?

A postulate: No one sane doesn't believe in the reality of the world.
 
It is not reality that cannot be proved so much as certain questions about reality don't mesh with language and perception well enough to prove or disprove related possibilities. It is hard to prove a negative, which is to say, something one asserts does not exist or has not yet happened, etc.

I was always impressed with Wittgenstein's assertion that, at base, it does not make sense to doubt that the hand you raise before your eyes is your own. You need some reason to attach meaning and reliance on a different interpretation.

We can perceive reality. We seldom perceive all of reality, and we argue endlessly about how to define what we do perceive, what words to attach, etc.

I have always felt that the question of god's existence was one which didn't really have an answer. I have never heard a good argument one way or the other. I myself suspect there is nothing of the sort, but that is well short of knowing. At this point I no longer feel that the question is a point of interest. The people flittering about the question are much more of the moment.
 
It's reasonable to suggest that our sense of perception is flawed and limited.

However, it's absurd to suggest that our sense of perception is completely corrupted to the degree that it bears no relation to reality.

Our perception bears the residual stamp of reality even when the image is distorted beyond recognition.
 
Coel, you old fish with bony plates, you,

I agree.

Just think it is important to keep in mind that, while there is a reality of many constituent parts, and while our perceptions of that reality often have elements of truth, reality and truth are not the same thing, one referring to our perceptions, assertions, etc., and the other to that which is being (or not being) perceived.
 
The Bible is a piece of literature. How can it not be taken literally?

Much of it is historical narrative which means it must be understood as a plain telling of history. To not take it literally would be to misuse it.
 
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Literature can be fiction or nonfiction.












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Threads like this remind me why I loved HornFans so much. And,... why I wasted so much time here.

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Actually, most of the ID proponents I know have pretty solid scientific backgrounds and all of them clearly acknowledge that God is the designer. They have no antipathy toward science, as I said, many of them are scientists.
 
If you believe in God as a creator, then you believe in some form of "intelligent" design. But let's be clear, that ID has a specific meaning and does NOT get to tune itself to any concept. ID refers to a specific concept of speciation (note I did not call it either a theory or a hypothesis) which requires that forms appeared on earth without intermediate evolutionary stages. Things simply appeared as the as the Designer willed them to be. The designer wanted gophers, and thus there were gophers. Life is simply too precisely tuned to have been the result of a process of trial and error. If you have some other concept of what "intelligent design" means, then you need another label. Speaking to the concepts as offered, Evolution and Intelligent Design are fundamentally at odds, as Evolution is the view of biology AS intermediate stages.

As to how that relates to doctrine and dogma, if you offer the bible as the literal word of God, then it contradicts the physical evidence available in the world around us. Which is to say, we are allowed to believe either the creation itself or the story of creation being literal but not both. If you believe that the Bible is divinely offered, but does not clearly delineate what should be taken as literal or figurative, then I would argue that it is simply a poor source work for discussing naturalistic phenomena in general and should be disregarded outright on these subjects. If the source work is maliable enough to accommodate any change, then it is a poor source work.

Which brings me back to my original point... it is a mistake to try to force the square peg of religion into the round hole of naturalistic observation, just as it is a mistake to try to require that geometry be taught in spanish class... but like geometry and spanish, they are NOT contradictory disciplines, they are simply unrelated disciplines. Fundamentally ID requires the intervention of an unseen entity, which is something that science is simply unprepared to address, as it has no language to address it.
 
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