With only a few posts to go...

With only a few posts to go...

  • Bob Enyart

    Votes: 57 64.0%
  • Zakath

    Votes: 32 36.0%

  • Total voters
    89

bmyers

BANNED BY MOD
Banned by Mod
Having only recently joined this forum - and in fact my joining up here was prompted by my hearing about this debate - I wanted to put my $0.02 in....

First, I think it needs to be acknowledged that the basic question supposedly being discussed has yet to be addressed by both parties. The debate seems to have very quickly gone from "Does God exist?" to "Does Bob Enyart's notion of a God exist" - which is a considerably different question. (And one that I think has already been quite clearly answered in the negative.) It's too bad that the discussion has wound up with such a narrow focus, although I have to admit that most such efforts are doomed to the same fate.

Having said that, if we simply consider the question of who's "winning", I don't think there's any doubt that it's NOT Enyart. Contrary to some comments made here, he has yet to provide any real evidence or reasoning - just unsubstantiated assertions and distortions of his opponent's position. All in all, I have found Enyart's "arguments" - if they can be called that - to be disingenuous. Few, if any, are original, and instead consist merely of parroting some very old notions which have in general already been discredited, and are no longer considered by serious debators on either side of this issue.

An excellent example is his recent argument based on how much time would supposedly be required to form certain molecules necessary for life - in this particular case, proteins. Enyart first claims that he will "show" how it is impossible for such things to arise out of "random" processes within any conceivable time span that would be allowed within the age of the universe - but he does no such thing. He does not present either the assumptions or the reasoning/calculations that would lead to this conclusion. All he really does is make the assertion, and then hopes that no one will notice the lack of support for it.

Given that lack of evidence, one can only assume that he's presenting basically the same argument as has been advanced by the "creationist" side of the origins debate for decades - that given X number of different sorts of atoms, we then could assume Y possible combinations of those atoms, and given the complexity of a protein molecule, you perform some basic probability calculations and come up with a truly impressive number for the time required for that molecule to come about "at random". The argument, though, is flawed right from the start, and the flaw would be apparent to anyone who had managed to comprehend high-school-level chemistry. Atoms do NOT combine "at random" - they are constrained to combine only in certain limited ways, and combine preferentially with some types of atoms over others. The generation of something like a protein molecule turns out to be not nearly as unlikely as simplistic calculations such as this would make it seem. The flaw is actually even more obvious - by this sort of argument, such a thing as a diamond should be impossible, as it requires literally trillions of atoms to positions themselves in an extremely precise array (and surely such a thing could not have arisen "by chance"!). But the same forces that constrain carbon to form such crystals - essentially, giant single molecules - under certain conditions also constrain the formation of all other chemical compounds.

What's truly disturbing is that this flaw in the argument has been known for almost as long as the argument itself has been advanced, and one would think that anyone familiar with the field would know this - and if they still thought the argument correct, would also offer the reasoning that showed this. Enyart has not done this, and so we can only assume that he is either not particularly well-informed in this area, or else he is being deliberately deceptive in this presentation. If the former, then Enyart is not qualified to engage in this sort of discussion. If the latter, then I would have to seriously question the "truth" of any position which requires such practices of its defenders.

In either case, I find Enyart's arguments to be an embarrassment to the theistic position.
 
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