Re: 100 Questions-9 year old finds new bones
Ok, I'm back.
I do want to say up front that I don't want you to feel like I am attacking you, because I'm not. I've been passionate about these issues most of my life, as I'm sure you are about yours. Hopefully we can get together someday and talk more over an adult beverage of some sort.
One more thing for point 1). Anthony Flew, one of the HUGE philosophers of the 20th century, argued that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. In 2004 he said that he had become a deist, which means he believes in some sort of creator being, though he is not a Christian. He said he did this because of the arguments for design were much stronger with all of the recent scientific discoveries (
http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/index.cfm). He has been viciously attacked because he said that it was better evidence and arguments (my terms) that led him to this modification of his worldview.
A lot of what led him there segways to point 2) and the rest of your statement. Biologists with a Naturalistic worldview assert that life generated spontaniously from nonliving chemicles by natural laws without any intelligent intervention. They believe that it was the simple one-cell amoeba. However, when Watson and Crick discovered DNA in 1953 the simplicity vanished. The DNA in an amoeba contains genetic information expressed in chemecal form that Dawkins said has as much information as 1000 Encyclopedia Britannicas ("The Blind Watchmaker" 1987). No one has come up with an experiment that has been able to get life, much less this type with this much information, from nonlife through natural processes. By the 1970s the Miller-Urey experiment was shown to start with a faulty hypothossis and has been disproven by science. Molecular biology shows that the so-called "simple life forms" contain irreducible complexities (cilliem, bacteria flagellum), in that the parts can't be reduced back to a stage where you would only have a partial-working molecular machine until enough time with slight modefications resulted in its current form.
There is no good working theory at this time in the scientific world that shows how life resulted from non-life, or DNA resulted from decent with modification. And it is a very difficult delimma: which came first, the proteins that rely on DNA for its production, or DNA that relies on proteins for its existence?
This is a small portion of the scientific situation and evidence that leads people to believe that an Intelligent Being started the whole process. Now, is this the God of the Bible, Islam, or some other view? That's where the debate is. Scientifically it seems that the evidence indicates that there is some kind of Creator, now the answer is Who? And the answer is not going to come from science, per se, because science only deals with the physical world. Science may provide info that correlates with a view, but God, Jesus, etc. is beyond the scope of science. Science cannot "disprove" the idea of God, they can only provide confirming or contradictory physical evidence to a specific religion's claims.
I've shown that scientists DO attempt to prove their idea with cherry-picked info. Theologians and philosophers do as well. What matters is a rigorous peer-reviewed and open investigation into the information, and then a healthy, passionate, and curtious debate on what explination ultimately provides the best answer.
This will always be difficult because there are people who hold their views with religious fervor, whether or not they themselves are religious. No one wants to think that they have been living their life based on an incorrect view of how reality works. What also matters is what do you do when presented with an alternate view that explains reality better than the one you have, even if you really like yours more?
