To: Sea Otter who wrote (77621 ) 4/11/2000 7:44:00 AM From: Neocon Respond to
I raised this in this first place as a political issue: freedom of conscience entails the right to raise one's children as one's sees fit, within certain broad limits, and social peace is threatened should parental authority be undermined. Therefore, one should ameliorate such confrontations as much as possible. In the case of evolution, there are possible alternative explanations, although none particularly support literalism without serious fudging. However, those who support "creation science" don't insist upon the Biblical time frame and other elements of strict literalism. Anyway, my point is that the assumption that there must be a purely physical explanation is as unfalsifiable as the alternatives, and therefore, is just as much a matter of faith. Furthermore, Occam's razor does not apply in a circumstance where the explanation of cell specialization and how incremental change produces structures that do not function until assembled is not lucid, and must be seriously fudged by science. That was my point, if you read further, in talking about the Big Bang: by the time one gets to a virtual vacuum preceding time/space, one may as well believe in God existing eternally outside of time and space. It makes more sense, in fact, in my opinion, since God is something, and therefore it is less "ex nihilo" than the alternative. The upshot: at least we should acknowledge that science restricts itself to the search for physical causes, and therefore some sort of mechanistic evolutionary theory was foreordained. If one is permitted broader speculations, one might come to a different conclusion.......
