Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Sarfati v. Craig

I think this is a mixed bag, but in general, Sarfati has the better of the argument against Craig:

http://creation.com/william-lane-craig-vs-creation

35 comments:

  1. Sarfati does a good job showing some of the problems of the Day-Age Theory. I lean toward the Day-Age Theory, but clearly it doesn't perfectly align with the Genesis account.

    Doctrine of Creation: Excursus on Creation and Evolution by William Lane Craig (videos 1-21)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elZ2V715cqc&feature=share&list=PLIpO3BUiq2IFry-4WVT76GJIlQREcrzge

    Christian Interpretations of Genesis 1 (book) by Vern S. Poythress http://www.frame-poythress.org/christian-interpretations-of-genesis-1/

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    1. PCA Report of the Creation Study Committee (from the PCA Historical Center) http://www.pcahistory.org/creation/report.html

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  2. Steve, (or anyone else)
    What do you think about Ray Comfort's film, "Evolution vs. God" ?
    I thought it was very good, but wanted to hear your thoughts on it.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ

    Wouldn't we all (all views of Creation - Evolution) agree that Darwin demonstrated micro-Evolution (adaptation within kinds- the Galapolos Finches), but did not demonostrate or prove Macro-evolution?

    Does WLC believe in soul-less hominids that existed before Adam and Eve and God created those slowly over millions of years, etc. ?

    Why do old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists accept carbon 14 dating as reliable ( or is it reliable ? - I have heard a lot that it is unreliable; but I don't enough in science realm to understand that issue)

    Why do old earth creationists and theistic Evolutionists and it seems, ID proponents like Behe, Debenski, Philip Johnson (it seems) [maybe Steven Meyer, I don't know; have only seen small segements of his talks against Naturalistic Darwinian Evolution, but apparently all of these, like John Lennox, accept the old age/old earth view] accept suppossed examples of fossils of "ape-men" that we evolved from?

    Are all examples of suppossed "missing links" definitely refuted?

    I know Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, etc have been refuted, but are all the examples that Evolutionists bring to the argument refuted?

    Have you read Hank Hanegraaff's book, "The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution" ? If so, thoughts?

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    1. i) I ignore popularizers like Hank Hanegraaff and Ray Comfort. They have no expertise in the field.

      ii) Behe is a theistic evolutionist whereas Dembski is an old-earth creationist. To my knowledge, Dembski opposes common descent and macroevolution. I believe Behe accepts macroevolution, but he also thinks that unguided evolution can't bridge some key transitions in the evolutionary progression.

      iii) Contemporary YEC usually accepts microevolution but rejects macroevolution.

      iv) I don't know if WLC believes in pre-Adamites. Sarfati is imputing a position to WLC by implication. Given old-earth chronology, some dated hominid fossils must antedate Adam. But he doesn't quote WLC saying that. So I don't know if WLC would accept that imputation.

      v) The identity of missing links is equivocal. For instance, semiaquatic creatures are "intermediates" between marine species and terrestrial animals. But that doesn't make them transitional forms. Rather, that's due to their habitat.

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    2. Hi Ken,

      I haven't seen Comfort's film, and I haven't read Hanegraaff's book. So I can't comment on those.

      I did want to say a quick word or two about the following though:

      Why do old earth creationists and theistic Evolutionists and it seems, ID proponents like Behe, Debenski, Philip Johnson (it seems) [maybe Steven Meyer, I don't know; have only seen small segements of his talks against Naturalistic Darwinian Evolution, but apparently all of these, like John Lennox, accept the old age/old earth view] accept suppossed examples of fossils of "ape-men" that we evolved from?

      1. As Steve points out, many ID proponents are OECs (e.g. Meyer, Dembski).

      2. I think answers probably vary for each individual listed, but in general OECs including many of the ID theorists argue fossilized humans like the Neanderthals are not a separate species but in fact Homo sapiens like we are. Or that they're other primates (possibly extinct in certian cases) that are not related to humans by common descent.

      3. Have you seen Meyer's recently published book Darwin's Doubt? It's about the Cambrian explosion, not "ape-men," but it's well worth reading to see the ID perspective in general.

      Wouldn't we all (all views of Creation - Evolution) agree that Darwin demonstrated micro-Evolution (adaptation within kinds- the Galapolos Finches), but did not demonostrate or prove Macro-evolution?

      1. I think that's the idea in general. Although evolutionists would say macroevolution can occur mainly as the result of the accumulation of many microevolutionary changes. There's a threshold for when this occurs, according to evolutionists.

      2. I'm not sure it's best to frame the debate in terms of microevolution vs. macroevolution. I guess it's okay as far as it goes.

      I think it'd be better to tackle the fundamental concepts modern evolutionary theory is based upon, and see if they hold up under logical and scientific scrutiny. I'm mainly thinking of natural selection, gradualism, speciation, common descent. Of course, we'd also have to look at other related aspects including the fossil record itself and the molecular and cell biology including genetics (e.g. mutations) since the debate over evolution these days occurs at the molecular and cellular level as well as higher levels like fossils. I'm guessing that's why Meyer, for example, published two books - Signature in the Cell which is primarily focused at the molecular level, while Darwin's Doubt which primarily targets the macro levels like the fossils (although it also covers the molecular again since that can't be avoided).

      For example, someone like Jerry Coyne would hold to natural selection as the principle mechanism which drives evolution. However, a creationist or ID theorist could say they subscribe to natural selection, but they don't place it in a central role let alone a role which leads to speciation (and they wouldn't necssarily define "species" in the same way an evolutionist would). Sure, they might say, natural selection occurs, but hardly to the degree or in the exact way championed by modern evolutionary theory. Depending on how, for instance, we define "species," it's hypothetically possible for a creationist to accept "macroevolution" to some degree. (Google for "the species problem" for starters.)

      Or take gradualism. That's the mainstream view. However, even among fellow evolutionists, there's debate. Stephen Jay Gould famously or infamously (depending on your perspective) plugged punctualism.

      Or take common descent. A creationist or ID theorist could easily accept common descent between dogs and gray wolves without accepting other alleged instances of common descent like between humans and chimps or universal common descent.

      Anyway, just some off the cuff thoughts for the time being.

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    3. >>in general OECs including many of the ID theorists argue fossilized humans like the Neanderthals are not a separate species but in fact Homo sapiens like we are. Or that they're other primates (possibly extinct in certian cases) that are not related to humans by common descent.

      For the record, some YEC believe Neanderthals (and some others in the Homo category) are humans too. And some OEC, like Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana, reject Neanderthals as being human.

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  3. Thanks Steve!

    What do the best YEC say about the understanding of what those pre-Adamites (as Hugh Ross says, "soul-less hominids") are?

    iv) I don't know if WLC believes in pre-Adamites. Sarfati is imputing a position to WLC by implication. Given old-earth chronology, some dated hominid fossils must antedate Adam. But he doesn't quote WLC saying that. So I don't know if WLC would accept that imputation.

    That seems to be what all YEC do to all OEC and ID and TE - but the OEC are usually silent on that issue. Most YEC (that I have heard) pretty roundly condemn all other views, but those other views also seem to imply: (but they are usually silent on these issues with Christians)

    OEC and ID and TE imply these things:
    a. Animal death before the fall.
    b. Local flood and not worldwide flood.
    c. Room for pre-Adamic hominids
    d. Acceptance of dating methods and millions of years
    e. Popular explanations of Dinosaurs (Smithsonian Institute; most High school textbooks in last 60 years, long time gap between them and man, etc.)

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    1. In general, YEC regards non-human hominids as great apes or monkeys, not prehumans. OEC can take the same position. There's no reason to assume that primates are related to humans by a common ancestor. They can just be animals. Animals like us in some respects, but unlike us in other respects. That's consistent with creationism.

      There are varieties of OEC, but progressive creationism can be a form of fiat creationism, spaced out. God creating natural kinds, but not all at once.

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  4. Patrick,
    Thank you very much!

    I have the DVD "Darwin's Dilemma" with Steven Meyer, about the Cambrian Explosion, which features Meyer and may be either based on his book, or was a pre-cursor to his book. I have not read the book. The film is from 2009. The film is very good.

    I remember reading about Stephen Jay Gould's "punctualism" in Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial.

    What do any of you make of John Sailhamer's view of Genesis? (Genesis Unbound; that Gen. 1:1 describes God creating everything, and verses 2 and following are seven consecutive days, of preparation for the land of Israel, not the whole earth; but they are forming/molding from matter that is alread there - sort of new take on the gap theory.

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    1. Cool, thanks for asking, Ken! :-)

      Meyer talks a bit about the DVD Darwin's Dilemma in his book Darwin's Doubt (see chapter 4 "The Not Missing Fossils").

      Steve (and others) can surely answer the Sailhamer question better than I can! I'm afraid to say I've never read Sailhamer's book, or in fact anything else he's written. Plus, it sounds like it's primarily an exegetical argument, I take it based on the Hebrew term for land/earth (ha eretz?) or similar, but I sadly have zero training in biblical anything let alone exegesis or OT or Hebrew or the like. Sorry about that, Ken. :-(

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    2. I think Sailhamer's position is eccentric. Also, unless he's a theistic evolutionist, what's the point? Does he agree with the whole evolutionary narrative?

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  5. I don't remember Sailhamer commenting very much on Darwinian Evolution or what happened between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2 - except I think he says that this saves us from having to justify the bible with the conclusions of modern science as to age of the earth, etc. and preserves Adam and Eve as real historical people, and it presevers the "day one" to "day six" as real 24 hour solar days; so Genesis 1:2 begins the point of about 6,000-10,000 years ago, but it could have been millions of years between Gen. 1:2 and 1:1. (says "be-rosheet" ברשית "in the beginning" is an unspecified period of time that could be millions or thousands of years; but he affirms that Genesis 1:1 is teaching God created eveything ex nihilo out of nothing. )

    He mentions the so called "hominids" but says that they are not related to Adam and Eve, they disappeared suddendly, and that there was no "pre-Adamic" race of humans.

    "Whatever kind of creatures they were, we can say with some confidence today that those creatures were not the immediate genetic ancestors of human beings. If their progeny were alive today, they would not be human beings. They disappeared without a trace, just as human beings appeared on the scene without a trace. Today both science and the Bible agree that human beings did not descend from any known form of "pre-human" creatures. There was no "pre-Adamic" race of humans." (Genesis Unbound, p. 171)

    But the use of the word "immediate" may give him some wiggle room.

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  6. Sailhamer also mentions that his view that in between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, this allows for the long period of the Dinosaurs to florish and then die off, and we don't have to explain how they fit into day six and how they suppossedly lived at the same time as humans, and how died off.(p. 29)

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    1. Old-earth creationism doesn't require his gap theory. As far as that goes, old-earth creationism has several hermeneutical strategies.

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  7. The basic problem with his analysis is that the distinction between global and local creation isn't between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2ff, but between Gen 1:1-2:3 and Gen 2:4-2:25.

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  8. [Sailhamer] "Today both science and the Bible agree that human beings did not descend from any known form of "pre-human" creatures."

    To the contrary, that's precisely what evolution asserts. Modern humans evolved from earlier hominids, which, in turn descended from prehuman animals.

    He selectively agrees and disagrees with mainstream science. But in that case, his concordism is arbitrary.

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  9. It's shortsighted to accommodate evolution. Taken to its logical conclusion, evolution dynamites morality and rationality. Although some Christians think rejecting Darwinism is intellectual suicide, accepting Darwinism is intellectual suicide.

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  10. Do you think long day / OEC and ID accomodates Darwinian Evolution? (even though some of them say they do not)

    It seems that all views that allow for millions of years accomodate Darwinian Evolution, even if they claim they don't. We see this, it appears to me, in a way, in the way Peter Enns, Tremper Longman, Kent Sparks (it seems by implications of some of what I have seen), and Bruce Waltke argue against Young Earth Creationism/6 day 24 hour day creation.

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    1. Ken said:

      Do you think long day / OEC and ID accomodates Darwinian Evolution? (even though some of them say they do not)

      Michael Behe sort of thinks so. Well, Behe accepts universal common descent. But he rejects other traditional tenets of neo-Darwinism such as natural selection as the principle mechanism for evolution and the fact that humans are essentially no different than other organisms on Earth.

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    2. Ken said:

      It seems that all views that allow for millions of years accomodate Darwinian Evolution, even if they claim they don't.

      You'd have to battle a very irate Stephen Meyer and a whole bunch of other ID theorists to prove this! ;-)

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    4. The day/age theory doesn't accommodate Darwinism. To begin with, Gen 1 sequence is different than the sequence postulated by Darwinism.

      In addition, more important than the sequence or the amount of time, are the specifics of the evolutionary narrative. It presents a very different view of natural history. Different events, different processes.

      It's not like you have the same things happening on both views, only spread out over millions or billions of years. Rather, you have two very different plot-lines. Simple to complex. Many false starts.

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  11. The problem with saying ID theorists and old-earth creationists are "compromisers" or "accommodationists" is that you have folks to the right of Sarfati. Christian geocentrists (e.g. John Byl) think Sarfati, Snelling, Wise, &c. are "compromisers" by espousing heliocentrism.

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    1. Spare us this tired old excuse, which I've long ago dealt with (ID theorist blunders on Bible: Reply to Dr William Dembski, Galileo Quadricentennial: Myth vs fact). In any case, I am not a heliocentrist since I don't think that the sun is the centre of the universe, and I can't think of anyone who does today. I am a geokineticist in that I think that an earth-moving system in the reference frame of the solar system's centre of mass is the simplest one to understand planetary motion and Coriolis effects. However, using the earth as a reference frame is good for talking about "sunset" etc. As Einstein and Hoyle realized, the whole dispute is a storm in a teacup because it's just a difference of reference frames. Absolute geocentrism in the manner of Sungenis and Bouw is neither scientific nor biblical.

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  12. That is what Ken Ham seems to say.

    The ID folks like Meyer, Philip Johnson (Darwin on Trial; Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds), etc. are good - in combating atheistic Evolution (no designer, no creator, no intelligent mind behind it all) and they affirm creation ex nihilo and seem to argue argue against Macro-Evolution ( I don't know all the relevant sources on these issues); but YEC say that by allowing for death for millions of years, they are accomodating Evolution; they are compromising by being embarressed vy the plain reading of Genesis 1, and that is prideful and sinful; etc.

    I wonder why Enns, Longman, and Sparks (all O.T. scholars) seem to have gone on to deny inerrancy and Adam and Eve as historical (I think I read where it seemed Longman implied this.)

    Bruce Walke said something like, "Christians who don't believe in some kind of evolution or who hold to 6 day/ YEC look like "cultists" to the wider culture" (something like that, not a direct quote), but I could be wrong - ?)

    They all were conservative at first (it seems), and seemingly they were silent on a lot of these details for a while, then later when they get into the details, it seems, they accomodated to modern Darwinian theory ?

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    1. I don't know if Peter Enns was ever all that conservative. He has a BA from Messiah College, which is fairly liberal. When he was a student at Westminster, the OT department was theologically "moderate" (e.g. Ray Dillard). And then he went to Harvard. So his educational experience probably had an impact. He may have moved further left since then.

      Longman left Westminster when he felt it was moving right. So I'd say he was always a theological moderate.

      I don't know that Ken Sparks was ever conservative. From what I can tell, there's nothing in his educational background that indicates a conservative predilection or influence.

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  13. John Byl -

    I didn't know there was any serious "geocentrists" anymore, except for the Roman Catholic Robert Sungenis.

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    1. Byl is one. Martin Selbrede is another. So was Rushdoony.

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    2. wow . . . R. J. Rushdoony was a geocentrist ? The Theonomy- Reconstructionist famous guy? That's very disappointing to find out.

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  14. Waltke is a throwback to old-school fundamentalism. He was teaching the gap theory back during his Dallas days. So was his colleague, Unger.

    It was not until Whitcomb and Morris that fundamentalism became more consistently and aggressively YEC. Before then, many fundamentalists were OEC.

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  15. "It was not until Whitcomb and Morris that fundamentalism became more consistently and aggressively YEC. Before then, many fundamentalists were OEC."

    I did not know that - that Waltke taught at Dallas before Westminster.

    you mean like B.B. Warfield (many say he affirmed theistic Evolution, but I have seen some refutation of that) forward, until Morris and Whitcomb ?

    Was J. Greshem Machen and those that started OPC and Westminster seminary "fundamentalists who affirmed OEC" ?

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    1. i) Waltke started out as a dispensationalist and Dallas OT prof. I'm guessing he was originally OEC, then later shifted to TE.

      ii) People's views are often defined by when and where they were born. For Warfield's generation, Darwin's Origin of Species was a defining experience. For Waltke's generation, Bernard Ramm's The Christian View of Science and Scripture was a defining experience. For a later generation, Morris/Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood was a defining experience. For a still later generation, Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis or Behe's Darwin's Black Box was a defining experience.

      To some extent, what you believe reflects when you came of age. People often cement their views for life during their formative years (childhood, teens, college).

      iii) Warfield and Machen were Southern Presbyterians. Machen may have been OEC. I don't recall. E. J. Young was a day-age proponent.

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    2. I think for my generation it was both Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. I seem to remember both being very big at the same time. The one referencing the other sort of thing. I later got to meet Johnson in person as well. Although I think he was already retired at that point.

      I suppose for this current up and coming generation it might be Stephen Meyer's books. It'll be very exciting to see what lies ahead, to see what sort of impact his books will make. :-)

      I wonder if these books have made the same impact in places like the UK, or if there have been other influential books.

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  16. Sorry, I thought Walke was at Westminster. I see now that he was at Reformed Seminary, and now is at Knox Seminary. interesting.

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    1. After Waltke switched from dispensationalism to covenant theology, he taught for many years at Regent College, during which time he was a visiting prof. at Westminster. Then he moved to RTS. After losing his job there (although he was semiretired), he was taken in by Knox.

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