What does Theistic Evolutionist mean? Not being a smart-ass, just curious.
. . . so Theistic Evolution says evolution is real...but God Did It. Having some force behind evolution defeats the whole point of evolution, but that is apparently a logical detail left to science philosophers.
It's fence-sitting at its finest.
Though I don't hold to any notion of macroevolution whatsoever. The theistic evolutionist doesn't necessarily assert that God directly guided the processes and mechanisms of an evolutionary speciation as such. Your charge is false and, therefore, so is your otherwise logically sound criticism. I understand your point. Rather, the theistic evolutionist asserts that God created the universe in such a way that the processes and mechanisms of evolutionary speciation would naturally occur. Is that the nudge you mean? For sure, that isn't quite the same thing as Deism, for under the dynamics of the latter, the emergence of life was not a sure bet. Arguably, the theistic evolutionist is ontologically splitting hairs, but that's not my problem, for I know evolutionary theory to be unfalsifiable hokum--evidentiarily, mathematically, rationally and metaphysically.
It's a convoluted way to have one's cake and eat it too. There is such an overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution that only the intentionally self-blinded ignore it. . . .
But scientifically literate and former evolutionists like myself who eschew evolution do not intentionally disregard or ignore the supposed evidence for it; on the contrary, we deconstruct the supposed evidence as we expose the theory for what it actually is.
Why don't you actually demonstrate firsthand knowledge of the supposed overwhelming evidence for evolution, or more to the point, demonstrate that you apprehend the nature of or provide an unassailable epistemological justification for Darwinism's presupposition? It's metaphysical, you know. Or maybe you don't.
From just a few of your posts on this topic, I suspect you're all hat and no cattle, all bromides without any real understanding of the empirical and philosophical ramifications.
The fossil record has never supported evolutionary theory in terms of intermediate forms, and the chronology of speciation perfectly fits with a biological history entailing a series of creative events and abrupt extinctions. In this regard, the evolutionist merely assumes the mathematically improbable processes a biological history that's an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect via the gratuitous insertion of a theoretical model of common ancestry. As any honest evolutionist will acknowledge, we don't actually see macroevolution in the fossil record, let alone anywhere in nature today.
In response to this problem, evolutionists have asserted the unfalsifiable notion of punctuated equilibrium, for example, which explains how macroevolution might have occurred more rapidly, but pushes the already staggering mathematical improbabilities of gradual evolution light years beyond the breaking point.
Prufrock's Lair: Labsci and I Discuss Evolution
For years, so-called vestigial organs or structures were said to be the theory’s very best evidence, but in light of recent discoveries that assertion is collapsing.
Genetic mutations beyond the confines of micro-speciation do not conserve information, but degrade it, and we now know for sure from abiogenetic research that prebiotic chemical evolution, particularly in the face of the actual geological and atmospheric conditions that prevailed all those many years ago, is a pipedream, fools gold, the stuff of fairytales.
Pasture's law of biology that life comes from life stands!
So tell us, Steven, at what point did God let go and nature take over? That is to say, how are the findings of abiogenetic research working out for your godless origins? given the fact that what they actually show is the very opposite of what was expected.
http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2011/03/abiogenesis-unholy-grail-of-atheism.html
In other words, atheistic Darwinism runs into the very same problem, an untidy floor littered with split hairs of an ontological kind.
Recently endogenous retroviruses or pseudogenes were said to be the theory’s best evidence, but that hope is unraveling too in the face of recent discoveries.
Evolution's Best Argument Has Become Its Worst Nightmare
In summary, as I write elsewhere:
First, evolutionists (as they simultaneously asserted punctuated equilibrium) dismissed the naysayers who pointed out the general lack of what should be a vast array of unmistakable intermediate forms in the fossil record. Then they claimed that so-called vestigial organs constituted the best evidence for their theory, but that bit of arrogance has fallen apart in the face of recent discoveries. Recently, they have claimed that endogenous retroviruses constituted the very best evidence for their theory, but now we know that ERV's were not initially harmful or the stuff of a common ancestry at all, but elemental, viral genetic material that were passed from one well-established species to another that could not possibly be directly related via ingestion. They are in fact intricately fine-tuned components that perform vital regulatory functions . . . just like a vast number of beneficial bacteria.
This potentiality was anticipated and argued by the “flat earthers” who recognized that the evolutionist’s claim was purely teleological in nature and scientifically presumptuous.
We now know that we wasted trillions of dollars on research on that took us in the wrong direction for decades. Had we followed the advice of creationist and ID scientists, we would have arrived at this place of understanding concerning ERV’s sooner, which is very important with regard to the concerns of disease control and prevention. Gee wiz. And creationism and ID are not real science, because, supposedly, they have no real predictive power. In the meantime, the only discernibly material predictions from the proponents of a Darwinian common ancestry (which is defied by the fossil record, asserts an ambiguous tautology and ultimately rests on the metaphysical and, therefore, unfasifiable presupposition of ontological naturalism) have been systematically falsified.
The honest and astute intellect paying close attention to the various arguments for evolution will note that all of them inevitably presuppose that evolution is true relative to the evidence that allegedly proves evolution is true: essentially, what survives, survives. The theory really doesn't have any predictive power at all; it's just another story of secular modernity based on nothing more substantial than the unfasifiable presupposition of ontological naturalism.
