PureX:
But Bob isn't really talking to Zakath, he's talking to his minions. He has no argument, anymore, but it won't matter to the minions as long as he keeps saying what they want to hear. And what they want to hear is Bob use lots of big words and some scientific jargon to make the "atheists" look foolish. Winning the argument, or establishing any semblance of the truth was never really a consideration.
Yeah, I liked it when he just flat out said Stephen Hawkins was wrong because he didn't take basic physics into account. Stephen Hawkins may well be wrong, but it's going to take more than Bob Enyart saying that he is to demonstrate that. I notice that Bob hasn't explained his assertion (for that is what it was) any further.
Atheists act as though science cannot close a gap. We easily find the motive for such a denial by observing that this function of science has the potential to doom atheism. If science ever openly admitted that natural processes could not produce the universe, biological life, or consciousness, then atheism is ruined. (But of course, godlessness would then get a boost, since men rebel even more fiercely against blatant truth). Thus for their own survival, atheists must deny science its voice, wherever its voice may prohibit natural origins.
So if I understand this right, atheists can't possibly admit that natural explanations are insufficient (even though we don't nearly have enough data one way or another yet), because it will destroy atheism but promote godlessness.
Also, Bob's "Giants of Science" list, while very interesting, is equally intriguing for comparative paucity of major contributors post-Darwin. Sure, there were a few, but no Einsteins, Diracs, Feynmanns, Ledermans, Lees, Mills, Schrodingers, Rutherfords, Cricks, Plancks, Paulis, etc. Not, I hasten to add, that all these were atheists. Far from it - there are Jews and Christians among this august group. Nevertheless, none of these that I am aware adopted anything close to the fundamental position adopted by Bob.
I might also play the devil's advocate and point out that once Pascal came out with his rationalization of religion, he pretty much quit contributing anything else useful to natural science or mathematics (if I recall rightly). But I'm open to correction on this.
I am one of those atheists who believes theism and science are not necessarily incompatible. It is possible to be a well-reasoned Christian who is not anti-science, just not your kind of Christian. Furthermore, a lot of the pre-Darwinists on your list weren't biologists and, although they were all brilliant men, they can be fallible outside their own areas of research just the same as the rest of us. I'm sure you wouldn't approve at all of Newton's hermetical leanings in later life. In fact, Newtonian dynamics do make the idea of a solar machine analogous to a clockwork machine quite appealing. Nevertheless, Newtonian physics are 'wrong', in that they don't tell the whole story, they were just an accurate approximation for what we can observe, plenty good enough to get a satellite into geosynchrous orbit. However, once you move out to the extraordinary (but experimentally tested) approximations of Einstein, the idea of the clockwork universe evaporates along with the aether.
Bob Enyart wrote in his post:
Pasteur expanded on Redi’s work by experimentally disproving the spontaneous generation of microbes, thus disappointing atheists.
Oh? Which atheists? I'm not saying there weren't disappointed atheists at the time but Bob's credibility has become sufficiently strained in the last couple of rounds that I feel I have to ask for a reference or references. Otherwise I fear that I must conclude that Bob is treating unsupported assertions that he hasn't even checked out himself as if they were evidence. After all, he didn't know if it was Pasteur or Redi, but he
knows that atheists everywhere were confounded.
Actually, I'll save him the bother.
In spite of his well-executed experiment, the belief in spontaneous generation remained strong, and even Redi continued to believe it occurred under some circumstances...
...In 1745, John Needham, an English clergyman, proposed what he considered the definitive experiment. Everyone knew that boiling killed microorganisms, so he proposed to test whether or not microorganisms appeared spontaneously after boiling. He boiled chicken broth, put it into a flask, sealed it, and waited - sure enough, microorganisms grew. Needham claimed victory for spontaneous generation...
An Italian priest, Lazzaro Spallanzani (1770), was not convinced, and he suggested that perhaps the microorganisms had entered the broth from the air after the broth was boiled, but before it was sealed. To test his theory, he modified Needham's experiment...
... [However,] the ensuing controversy...reached the level of open acrimony, mutual charges of dishonesty, and claims of observational deception as the century progressed. Needham and Spallanzani, fellow clerics beginning from a point in the 1750s of mutual respect, ended all communication in 1780 in a spirit of distinct bitterness....
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Origin of Life/spontaneous_generation.html
Question for Bob; H1 subsection B:
What did Needham - a post-Redi believer in spontaneous generation - do for a living?:
a) Lesbian feminist philosopher
b) post-modernist lecturer
c) member of clergy
A more detailed account can also be found here:
http://www.asmusa.org/mbrsrc/archive/pdfs/6304p193.pdf
Still no mention of atheistic opposition... I look forward to learning something new about this case, courtesy of Bob.
Question for the reader: A4.3:
Is Bob Enyart:
a) purporting to hold truth in the highest esteem while presenting topics as historical truths to prop up his fallacy that atheists are against truth and anti-science when really he only has a superficial understanding of the issues he's using to prove his case or that hasn't really bothered to research them before presenting them?
We shall see.
Bob may be approaching this debate with the understanding this his amoral opponent is okay with lying and cheating to make his case. This means that he has lifted up the cross of a higher standard, so compounding any 'sins of omission' with the unpleasant stink of hypocrisy. If the truth is apparently more important to Bob than it is to those lousy atheists, then why is he doing such a sloppy job in presenting it? I prefer to imagine that it's just a cavalier disregard for accuracy (perhaps he's in a hurry) than a deliberately malicious sin of omission calculated to make atheists look anti-scientific.
So let's have the references, Bob. Prove me wrong. Or you can admit that you were presenting something you hadn't bothered to check out as if it were part of the truth you say you hold so dear.
Also Bob wrote:
For the two models for origins, the theist and atheist, both make significant predictions, and so far, science has confirmed many creationist predictions while confounding the atheistic ones. (Would you like to challenge me to a duel on examples of this?)
Dunno about a "duel" but why don't you post them anyway? I'm always interested in learning about predictions made by Creationists.
