HAVING MENTIONED and praised the intellect and impressively commendable hard work of the philosopher and evangelical Christian apologist, with whom I have some very important differences, William Lane Craig, I will mention another brilliant mathematician and Christian apologist with whom I have some important differences, John Lennox. I bring him up because I recall during one of his debates, I seem to remember it was the one he had with Peter Singer, he stated that he had some problems with evolutionary theory, very careful to reassure the audience he didn't mean with anything Darwin "discovered" and then went on to talk about the Achilles heel of scientistic-atheist-materialism (which I will shorten to SAM) of a materialistic explanation of the origin of life on Earth.*
I can understand the political expediency of a Christian apologist not taking on the popular atheist's saint, the Charles Darwin constructed by pop-science, the BBC and PBS and as venerated cluelessly in many a Christian church on "Darwin Sunday" but for a Christian apologist to not realize that by doing that they are venerating a man whose entire claim to fame overturns not only the Gospel of Jesus but the Law of Moses and, so, the entire reason for the existence of Abrahamic monotheism is something that not only should but must be admitted and dealt with because the consequences of it are quite capable of rotting out Christianity and Judaism and, I would bet, Islam AND EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY from within.
You cannot hold both with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and natural selection in the human species - an idea, which as I hold - which absolutely negates the moral basis of it. Slavery such as that which begins the history of the Children of Israel, is certainly not discouraged by natural selection, Pharaoh, in the opening Chapter of Exodus declares his eugenic intent of wiping out the male line of the Hebrews by murder, infanticide (infanticide is given as a means of race improvement by Darwin in The Descent of Man and his cited colleagues), and it certainly doesn't think anything like social justice and economic justice, in fact, Darwin, in the strongest of terms, says that such things will be a catastrophe for the human species in the same book.
To accept the theory of natural selection means you not only fully embrace a theory of inequality, you fully embrace a theory in which it is a good for the strong to destroy the weak, the wealthy to destroy the poor, the good of the murder of the least among you and that the result of that undoing of creation would be good, in fact, better than good. It was the origin of eugenics including Nazi eugenics, it is the basis of Trumpian "herd immunity" which has so recently led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands here and in benighted enlightenment loci such as Sweden. It is the foundation of most of the scientific racism in the subsequent period, beginning almost as soon as people like Thomas Huxley read On the Origin of Species. Natural selection was a boon for scientific racism and it still is, right now.
The Christian idea that they can not only tolerate but cooperate with the theory of natural selection may have been a cowardly capitulation to the academic respectability which Darwinism was granted by the almost exclusively white, male, either wealthy or aspiring to be wealthy scientific, academic establishment. I will note that one of the earliest critics of the kind, the formidably intelligent Victorian era radical Frances Cobbe, was far more insightful than the latter day opponents of Darwinism on the basis of its refutation of a naive reading of Genesis, so early that Darwin condescendingly and hypocritically brushed off her well-founded and informed objections on the basis of its destruction of morality in the most condescending of terms. I believe she's the one and only Woman addressed in the book, though it's a while since I trudged through that book, again. Today, I think "Darwin Sunday" is a product of the successful but false clean-up of Darwinism made in the post-WWII period when it was useful to natural selection's proponents to lie about its inventor and what he really said about it. No one in the period before the exposure of the Nazi eugenic genocides ever denied what natural selection really meant. That lie is the common received deception of the vast majority of college credentialed peoples in the English speaking world.
No, either one is right or the other one is, either we should provide food, clothing, housing, medical care, means of becoming educated, means of having a peaceful, decent, healthy life to the least among us or we keep them in destitution and poverty, allow them and their children to die of illness or starvation, let them get killed by those who are bigger and stronger and more psychopathic or, as the Supreme Court majority would maintain, those with an automatic rifle or other gun, or we do what Jesus most radically said we were to do and if not that then what Moses said was to be done for not only the poor but even to the slave held by members of The Children of Israel.
I think that's a basic choice that cannot be left unaddressed by Christaims. And it's not only controversial in regard to biology but within Christianity, itself. The white-evangelicals and even evangelicals of color who are allied with Republican-fascism are, if anything, more slavish upholders of a version of Malthusian natural selection today than is currently acceptable in scientific talk (they let people like Charles Murray, the so-called social-sciences and economists do that for them). The Republican-party is the home of that kind of parody-christianity which will rail against Darwin while putting his most dreamed of cruelties and injustices and indifference into practice, degrading and earning the hostility for the Gospel in ways that late 19th century Brit atheists could have only dreamed of doing.
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Christianity will have to address the enormous heresy of the anti-egalitarian "evangelicals" who are so enthusiastic about Republican-fascism and its like. They are heretics, certainly those members of evangelical churches, Catholics, etc. who really do take what Jesus said seriously feel if not admit that there is something extremely wrong with that parody of Christianity that is pushed by the media as "Christianity." You cannot both vote for Trump or the Republican-fascists and believe what Jesus said was true anymore than you can that natural selection is true and believe in the Gospel. That house, divided like that, cannot stand.
* Once you have seen through the ruse of SAM, turning random chance-probability into their materialistic creator god, the problems involved in imagining the random-chance assembling of something so complex as even "very simple" life and trying to imagine the probabilities of that happening even once in the time available to it even in the billions of years the Earth is estimated to have had for that start, the harder it is to imagine it having happened without intelligent intent having caused it to happen.
I doubt it is at all pausiable that it not only happened BUT THAT IT WOULD HAVE HAD TO HAPPEN PERFECTLY THE FIRST TIME or it could not have happened by mere random chance. The entire thing, the life processes of the first organism maintaining itself as a living being, metabolizing, gaining what we would understand as nutrition, avoiding substances and forces in its environment that might kill it, perhaps dealing with any it took in by random chance (probably far more probable than anything else I'm describing in this paragraph) an organism which, for some unknown and unknowable reason, not only was capable of successfully replicating itself - BOTH ORGANISMS SURVIVING THE PROCESS but it and its progeny (how could you tell which was which?) going on to do all of that again and again and again before anything like mutation and evolution took place. To imagine the plausible possibility of that first assembling, then mantaining itself, the successfully reproducing itself by random chance, things just happening to come together in some early-Earth pool, staying together in the form of an organism avoiding being obliterated by radiation, poisons, etc. and THEN REPRODUCING ITSELF (I'll just mention the absurdity of thinking a splittable, self-healing membrane covering it just happening) is far less seemingly plausibly simple and elegant than the idea that it happened because God intended it to. Though, as I've pointed out innumerable times, nothing about the origin of life on Earth is susceptible to science because the evidence needed to do real science about it is not available and certainly never will be available to study. You'd have to see it have happened to explain life on Earth now and you can't see it.
The top scientists pretending they can do that are no better off than the people who wrote those chapters of Genesis. They are worse off, they are violating the very thing they pretend to uphold by pretending to study something that they have no evidence to support their study with. You can take the Gensis account any number of ways but it will be a product of the faith that the scientists deny they are practicing as they pretend they are doing science.
The one biggest clue as to origin of things we can know of in the past century, the Big Bang theory, doesn't tell you anything about the origin of life on Earth, though it gives some idea as to how long you might have for the atheist god, random-chance, to have done it and that doesn't help the atheists because it just means the probabilities against it happening as they claim rise enormously. And that great milestone in current cosmology was despised by so many scientists because it reminded them too much of what those early scribes seemed to have gotten right in Genesis, that the universe had an origin and that it evolved over time. Some of the most reputable atheist scientists railed and worked against the theory even as it gained support in physical evidence throughout the 20th century. I don't think Fred Hoyle gave up that effort even though he certainly knew what that evidence meant. The editor of Nature magazine was railing against it till close to the end of the century on that count. Imagine that, the editor of one of the most reputable scientific journals giving the game away by using his position to fight wars against religion.
Only that's not an unusual thing, so much of such science is ideologically motivated, and so is not a disinterested search for truth. Abiogenesis is little else but such an ideological game, pretending to do science about something which it has no evidence to work with. And so philosophically stupid are they that they don't understand that every single thing they come up with will, as the product of their intelligent design, only demonstrate that such things CAN HAPPEN BY INTELLIGENT DESIGN. They are incapable of demonstrating that such results could not be had without what they had to use to get it, INTELLIGENT DESIGN. For that they would need to have seen it happen and they never can. And even that would not prove that what they saw, and they would see what had never been seen by scientists before, did not happen through the intention of God.
They should require science majors to take rigorous courses in philosophical reasoning with special emphasis on its relation to science because so many of them are so clueless about even what they are doing. Try getting a uniform definition of natural selection, you won't. I doubt you could get a close to uniform listing of "the scientific method" from such scientists who reject the requirements of observation of what they claim to study. Maybe they could understand that they've tried to extend scientific method way past where it could possibly go and the results are predictably unstable, even natural selection requiring constant patching and maintenance and, now, being insisted on as something like allegiance to the articles of Anglicanism used to be insisted on to teach at Oxford. Irony is the constant companion of hypocrisy.
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