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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: West Virginia creationism
Date: Wed, 15 May 2024 09:59:19 +0200
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On 2024-05-14 20:25:06 +0000, William Hyde said:

> Burkhard wrote:
>> Ron Dean wrote:
>> 
>>> Vincent Maycock wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 10 May 2024 14:43:42 -0400, Ron Dean
>>>> <rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Vincent Maycock wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 9 May 2024 18:51:52 -0400, Ron Dean
>>>>>> <rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Vincent Haycock wrote:
>>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>>>> I was a young-earth creationist, so my reading of geology and
>>>>>>>> paleontology led me to the conclusion that flood geology is a cartoon
>>>>>>>> version of science with nothing to support it.
>>>>>>> Around the same time,
>>>>>>>> I became an atheist since Christianity didn't seem to make any sense.>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> So, you turned to atheism and evolution, not because you first found
>>>>>>> positive evidence for evolution and atheism, but rather because of
>>>>>>> negative mind-set concerning the flood and Christianity.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> No, that's backward.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> That's the way you put it. Your first mind-set, as you stated it. You
>>>>> became disillusioned with the flood and Christianity.
>>>> 
>>>> I said "because of my reading of geology and paleontology."
>>>  >
>>> Ok, thanks for clearing that up.
>>>> 
>>>>>   I developed a negative mind-set concerning the
>>>>>> Flood and Christianity because of positive evidence for evolution and
>>>>>> non-Christianity (which, in the United States is a huge first stepping
>>>>>> stone to atheism per se).  And of course, as I said, I found negative
>>>>>> evidence against the Flood to be voluminous, which is why I said it
>>>>>> was cartoon-like.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> The fact of the matter is, intelligent design says nothing about
>>>>>>> either the flood story nor Christianity or any religion or God for that
>>>>>>> matter.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Yes, like I said I was a YEC, but the way you phrased it allowed for
>>>>>> me to focus on that and not old-earth-creationism or Intelligent
>>>>>> Design or any of those other "compromise" viewpoints that I never
>>>>>> subscribed to.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> ID stands on it's own, it's not a compromise between anything.
>>>> 
>>>> Right, but that's how we were taught when I was growing up.  My
>>>> comment was supposed to be historical, not normative.
>>>  >
>>> There is a difference between Creationism and intelligent design, in 
>>> that ID does not subscribe to the Genesis narrative, Both YEC  Old 
>>> Earth creationism does. However, both creationism and ID both point to 
>>> the same apparent flaws in Evolution and observe the same empirical 
>>> evidence.
>>>> 
>>>>>>> ID observe essentially the same empirical evidence as
>>>>>>> evolutionist do, but they attribute what they see to intelligent design
>>>>>>> rather than to evolution. Both the evolutionist and the ID est
>>>>>>> interprets the same evidence to _fit_ into his own paradigm.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> How does your paradigm explain the nested hierarchies that turn up in
>>>>>> phylogenetic studies of living things?
>>>>>> 
>>>>> This is an example of interpretation to fit into a paradigm.
>>>> 
>>>> So fit it in to your paradigm, then.  Why would the Designer create
>>>> such an over-arching and ubiquitous phenomenon that is precisely what
>>>> we would expect from evolution?
>>>  >
>>> This is a excellent example of the point I've been making nested 
>>> hierarchies have been mutually seen as  strong empirical evidence for 
>>> either Evolution or ID. The concept was was first conceived by a 
>>> Christian who thought that an intelligent God would arrange animals and 
>>> plants etc in an orderly   harmonic, systematic, logical and rational 
>>> manor: and this he set out to find. This man was a Swedish scientist, 
>>> Carolus Linnaeus. He organized organisms into groups which was known at 
>>> the time and he characterized organisms into boxes within boxes within 
>>> boxes IE groups. His nested hierarchies are incomplete by today 
>>> standard, But the concept was his,  which he saw as evidence of  his 
>>> God.
>>> So, it appears the concept was appropriated by evolutionist from a 
>>> creation concept.
>> 
>> again, pretty much wrong in every respect. Let's start with the last
>> sentence:
>> 
>> yes, all science is cumulative, that is new theories are always built
>> on old theories, and incorporate those parts that stood the test of 
>> time. Which is why eg. Newtonian mechanics is now a proper part of
>> the theory of relativity. And the same held true for Linnaeus, who did 
>> not invent the concept of nested hierarchy, he merely applied it with
>> particular rigour, and more data than anyone before him. The concept 
>> goes back to Aristotle's categories and traveled to Linneaus via
>> the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry. Who, funnily enough, was also 
>> the author of a book titled "Against the Christians". So you could say 
>> he
>> appropriated a pagan and/or atheist concept.
>> Linnaeus did not just apply the schema to biology and living things, but
>> also to minerals, rocks, mountain formations and planets. But there it 
>> didn't work and now is all but forgotten.
>> And there we have the next problem for you and
>> your use of Linneaus. Linneaus believed of course that God had created
>> everything, not just living things. Yet the nested hierarchies that we
>> find in biology don't work for minerals. From an evolution perspective,
>> that is of course no surprise: descent with modification will always
>> create natural nested hierarchies, and few other things will. But if 
>> nested hierarchies were also what we should expect from creation by God,
>> then the absence of natural nested hierarchies in the rest of the world 
>> should indicate that they are not the result of design, so Christianity
>> would be disproven.
>> 
>> Generally, Linnaeus SO doesn't work for you, on pretty much every 
>> level. First, he grouped humans among the apes,these among quadrupeds, 
>> and these in animalia. Yes, that worried him from a theological 
>> perspective, but when attacked for it, he was adamant that that was 
>> just what the data showed. He challenged his critics to find one 
>> objective fact that would allow them to distinguish humans from other 
>> apes (Carl Linnaeus to Johann Georg Gmelin, letter 25 February 1747) So 
>> going back
>> to your nonsense about the alleged moral implications of nesting humans
>> among other animal groups, Linneaus did this long before Darwin.
>> Oh, and as we are at it, unlike Darwin he also introduced subcategories
>> (albeit as variations, not species) for humans, and not only that, he 
>> ranked them. So Black africans according to his schema were:
>> from their temperament phlegmatic and lazy, biologically having dark hair,
>> with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women
>> with elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely and from their
>> character Sly, sluggish, and neglectful. White people by contrast were by
>> temperament sanguine and  strong, biologically with plenty of yellow 
>> hair; blue eyes, and from their character light, wise, and  inventors 
>> etc.
>> Modern scientific racism has its origins here rather than in Darwin.
>> 
>> Now, did he as you claim consider the nested hierarchies as evidence for
>> God? Not quite, though that is an easy mistake to make for modern
>> readers, who look at him through Paleyan lenses. But he didn't, and the 
>> reasons are interesting. He was not a natural theologian in the Paleyan 
>> mold, and the inference does not run from: "we observe nested 
>> hierarchies, these are what we should expect from God's design, 
>> therefore God" The
>> problem with this inference was always that it is inconsistent with 
>> God's omnipotence - God could have created differently had he so 
>> chosen, which means we can't use His contingent choice as evidence for 
>> anything.
>> What Linnaeus does is reasoning in the other direction. He takes God's 
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