The Case to Design - Fine Tuning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY7iCkK2Kqw

http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/quotes/universe.html

The Implications of Naturalism: No Free Will

The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will. […]  as living systems we are nothing more than a bag of chemicals.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full.pdf+html

The limits and domain of Science

The difference between physics and metaphysics. . . is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. (Carl Sagan)

YEC (Critique)

For a larger defence of Young Earth Creationism (and a response to the question, why does the Universe look old.) Albert Mohler (Pres Southern Baptist)

http://biologos.org/resources/albert-mohler-why-does-the-universe-look-so-old/

One of three questions asked by Karl of BioLogos

http://biologos.org/blog/how-should-biologos-respond-to-dr-albert-mohlers-critique-karls-response/

3. You speak of the apparent age of the universe as a logical necessity and I fully agree with you, up to a point. Certainly, if we were to wander into the Garden of Eden two weeks after the creation was completed, we would see two adults who looked at least 18 years old. But there are many other indicators of age that don’t lend themselves to this sort of explanation. Why would God create radioactive elements in the proportions to suggest the earth is 5 billion years old? Why would God create stars with half of their nuclear fuel already used up? Why would God pepper the heavens with debris that looks exactly like it came from stars that exploded billions of years ago? Why would God create continents that look exactly like they were joined millions of year ago?



Notes:

“How can an institution of higher learning permit the teaching of an aberrant misinterpretation and what I would consider an intolerable representation of the truth?” asks Swan. “What we’re faced with is a very interesting intellectual morass. What do you do with a professor who has gone wrong?”

For Swan, academic freedom is no defense for teaching creationism.

“If this is academic freedom, almost any bucket will go in. I can talk absolute nonsense to my class.”

“Do geologists allow a flat-earth advocate to teach? Would astronomers like astrologists? But this (creationism) differs because the evidence for it is not scientific, it is religious. Does a professor have the right to teach anything he wants? Can society afford to deny science?”

Creationists’ attacks on the holes in evolutionary theory enrage Swan who claims they employ a “You don’t know, therefore God” argument.

Douglas Post, professor of ecological and systematic biology, agrees, saying, “I don’t think there is any positive evidence to prove creationism. They rely on negative evidence. Their main argument is that you can’t prove that Darwin is correct. But I don’t think that just because you can’t prove Darwin you can automatically conclude that creationism is correct.”    http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2010/07/dean-kenyon-a-y.html

http://scepsis.ru/eng/articles/id_2.php

All the more interesting, then, to read his personal testimony in In Six Days. It is actually quite moving, in a pathetic kind of way. He begins with his childhood ambition. Where other boys wanted to be astronauts or firemen, the young Kurt touchingly dreamed of getting a Ph.D. from Harvard and teaching science at a major university. He achieved the first part of his goal, but became increasingly uneasy as his scientific learning conflicted with his religious faith. When he could bear the strain no longer, he clinched the matter with a Bible and a pair of scissors. He went right through from Genesis 1 to Revelations 22, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific worldview were true. At the end of this exercise, there was so little left of his Bible that

... try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=8816

The Galileo Challenge

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. Galileo Galilei

Faith and Science (Links)

Has Science Made Belief in God Obsolete? (1 of 4) by JP Moreland (Easily Digestable for the Non-scientist.)

The claim that "there is no knowledge of reality outside of the hard sciences", is self refuting. (Since Science itself cannot support this claim.)

part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwI6KX_XJqM&feature=related


Argument that the Universe had a beginning, from the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Fine Tuning of the Universe.

Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVh5w7UfJEc&feature=related
Biological Evidence:  Biological Information

Part4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Md28jmhCw&feature=related
Conscious thought
(this claim seems the least credible to me...I tend to think of mental processes as anchored in physcial realities, undo the physcial, undo the conscious.

Science and certitude

"You’d think that, for a website devoted to reconciling faith with the facts of science, the idea of Genesis as inspirational fiction would not be negotiable. If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis can’t be true."

Faith and Reason Part 2

What is the role of reason in the acquisition of wisdom?
What is reason?
What are the limitations of reason?
Is reason the sole means by which we seek to discover truth, or is it part of a bundle?
What role does reason play in our reading of holy writ?
What role does reason play in apprehending faith?

What is the role of faith in the acquisition of knowledge?
What is provisional assent? How does faith differ from provisional assent?
What roll does faith play in giving credence to reason?
What role does faith play in taking us beyond reason?
What distinguishes good faith from bad faith? (Is all Faith equal?)
Is it possible to reason righty, or fully without Faith?
Faith occupies a realm which does not intersect with reason -- or NOMA


Most scientists, believers and nonbelievers alike, probably agree with the Non Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) view articulated by recently deceased Stephen J. Gould. In this view, science and religion should confine themselves to different domains. Science should deal with material world, while religion should deal with morality.

Richard Dawkins has pointed out that



• A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

He also notes that

There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. On the one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific criticism: these are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science. But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are unaccountably ready to let them.

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Incompatibility.html

Faith is not reasonable (nor desirable)

Faith is not reasonable (but is desirable)

Faith is something to be held in opposition to Reason

Case Study: Soren Kierkegaard.

Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/

“One should expect, if one is a believer, that with God all things are possible, even things which are physically and logically impossible (Anderson 48).”

But while having faith is tremendously difficult, Kierkegaard stands in awe of it: “to be able to lose one’s reason, and therefore the whole of finiteness of which reason is the broker, and then by the virtue of the absurd to gain precisely the same finiteness – that appalls my soul, but I do not for this cause say that it is something lowly, since on the contrary it is the only prodigy (Anderson 60).” (Philosophic 271).

It is difficult to find flaws with Kierkegaard’s argument and description of religion, since he is not speaking in rational terms, and not trying to convince his audience through the methods of logic. He does seem to be taking faith as a prima-facie good, and since the whole of his argument basically stems from the idea that faith is inherently worthwhile and beneficial, it’s a bit of shaky ground to be on. But that’s not really the point: faith, like Abraham’s situation, cannot be mediated, simply because it is by definition irrational and inexplicable. If I had not had direct experience with the kind of faith that Kierkegaard is talking about, I doubt that I would be able to understand him at all. But I know what it is to gain something by giving it up, and I know how you have to lose yourself in order to find yourself. It’s all subjective and it’s all irrational, and it’s something you’ll just have to take my word for. My word and Kierkegaard’s at least.

Faith and Reason (Questions)

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal