Actually, even though I happen to agree with your stated conclusion (being, for the nonce, a Big Bang Creationist) logically speaking God could decide to create however he wished, even if that made more work for Him. Being omnipotent, He wouldn't want just to sit around for the rest of time, would He?

That is, you have an unstated premise, that we are fully aware of all of God's motives and reasons.

Being omnipotent and omniscient and everlasting he has already been around for all time. In fact time probably has no meaning for such a being.

But we are getting into angels dancing on the head of a pin territory.

Any way my answer always makes the creationist types sputter so I'm sticking with it. :-)

Someone wrote a letter to the Seattle Times recently (in response to a column by some guy from the Discovery Institute), basically suggesting that if we are the result of an intelligent designer, our design would be simple, not "too complex to have been produced by random selection." Then again, an intelligent designer is not necessarily sensible; perhaps he/she digs complexity. Making everything simple and straightforward might be too boring, or something (LOL)...

Time has no meaning to me. Maybe I am more godlike than I ever imagined?

I surely hope so, because I have no intention to learn how to dance on the head of a pin.

The 6-Day creationists have picked this hill to die on for reasons that elude me. Most Christian thinkers have little trouble integrating the idea of evolution in with God. Another group of Christians - or at least Christian Culture Sympathizers - is convinced that the whole Bible collapses if the first chapter of Genesis isn't read entirely literally. Because they really see it as an either-or proposition, most discussion is useless.

I sent my sons to Christian schools some years, and this often came up. From my point of view, it was an excellent place to talk not only about science, but how to deal with controversy, authority, reason, etc. But then again, I was willing to put in that energy.

Or better yet, I was more willing to engage that discussion with my children than the public-school equivalents, such as the Chief Seattle speech. There isn't anywhere you can go where you don't have a lot of clowns and jokers. You just get to choose which ones you deal with.

Ergh. Why do I even bother?

Look, you keep your opinions on how the universe came about to yourself, and I'll do the same with mine. Let's both agree that only repeatable, empirical, testable natural science be taught in bio/chem/phys classes and the rest of it, including YEC, OEC, ID, macro-evolution-we-evolved-from-some-amino-acids-due-to-energy-input-from-sun-in-a-reducing-atmosphere-some-4.6-billion-years-ago, panspermia, and the-FSM-did-it-all-hail-the-god-of-pastafarians in the religious studies classes. How's that?

Or, let's get down to specifics. I have a real problem with non-life to life evolution, with asexual to sexual reproduction evolution, from plant to animal evolution, from gills to lungs evolution. I have a real problem with an information codec system coming into being via random, natural, undirected processes. I have, in short, many, many problems with the current model of macro-evolution as it stands.

I am a YEC, and no regrets about having shifted from the theistic evolution side.

Enough is enough. All we're asking is for some equal time. Why is this so hard to get? Even the Aborigines in Australia get their Dreamtime mythologies put in museums and school syllabi; why can't Christian models have the same treatment? I don't think anybody has a problem with natural selection, change over time and allathat. It's this damned in-your-face insistence that the universe is some 13 billion years old, and the Earth is some 4.6 billion years old, and that the Genesis account is fullacrap that I have a REAL PROBLEM WITH!!! Despite the fact that I once swallowed all that nonsense.

/Deep Breath

Why do some Christians feel this way? Well, maybe it's because we believe that insofar as the Bible we have currently reflects correctly the original autographs, it is infallible and 100 reliable, and while it is not a textbook on any specific subject, whatever it touches on is to be taken to the bank. If this is not so right from the start i.e. Genesis, then nothing can be relied on in the Bible. Nothing. Including Christ's death and resurrection. God is made out to be a liar when He says in plain Hebrew, "On the 7th yom, God rested."

This is not anything a conservative Christian can swallow. So, yes, we start out with an axiom straightaway - namely, that Creation was accomplished within 7 days of ~24 hours each, that until the expulsion from the Garden from Eden, there was no death, and that Man existed very nicely with dinosaurs, and that at least 2 of every non-aquatic vertebrate of its 'kind' went on board the Ark Noah had built.

Bearing in mind that origins science by its very nature is non-repeatable and non-observable, and that only indirect inferences can be drawn from whatever evidence is available, why is this not a model that can be put forward?

Mr Simon, you, sir, are deliberately offensive. Which is fine by me. I won't call you a douchebag, having been called that myself. However, I would encourage you to cross to the dark side and examine the claims of YECs with an open mind. And see if it is not understandable why we believe why we believe. I do not ask you to say it is reasonable, just understandable.

Mr AVI: I hope the above allows you to understand why some of us choose to defend this Masada to the death. It is one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith. Think about it. Why did Christ die? For our sins, and to give us eternal life. Implying that we once had eternal life, and somehow lost it. Why are we sinful? Because of Adam. Which implies that Adam and Eve were real, and they were in the Garden of Eden, and that they disobeyed God etc etc etc. And if that's all true, then why not the beginning of Genesis? But if right from the start Genesis is bullshitting us, how can we trust anything else the Bible says? Make no mistake; even children can see this. If I told you that Rome wasn't built in a day, you understand that to mean a plain, 24 hour day. So when God says He did something in a day, then that's likely what He meant too.

The day that some hurricane actually smashes together a 747-400 (or an A380 nowadays, I guess, must keep up with the times) out of scrap parts, including a SIA logo, stewardess uniforms and all the computer systems necessary is the day I renounce Christianity and hail the almighty Undirected Random Processes and Its Prophet, Charles Erasmus Darwin. Won't even have to provide the stewardesses in the uniforms. Well. Out of uniform would be better, of course. :)

Feel free to edit for clarity.

Gregory,

Of course I'm deliberately offensive. It is my lot in life.

BTW if you can show proof of an intelligent designer (you know something in a lab) I'd love to see it.

With species that have short generation time we can actually show evolution in the lab.

With DNA and taxonomy we can show the branching and looping of the tree of life. I find that more satisfying than the "now here the Intelligent Designer does some magic".

In any case as we learn more there seems less and less need for the big guy except to start everything in motion.

But I will leave you with one last point. You need a more powerful god that is so smart that he can just set things in motion and they work out right. A god that needs to always be dicking around is a puny god indeed.

But you know - to each man his own god. I think that is in the Communist Manifesto or something. Maybe Jefferson. I forget.

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -Thomas Jefferson

You can have as many of whatever kind of god you want. If it isn't falsifiable it is not science.

Your small ideas run the risk of: if we find a pathway for the currently inexplicable we have proved there is no god. Do you really want that?

Next thing you will tell me is that there is no way to prove there is no god. Gotcha - you have admitted that the god idea is not science.

Have a nice day.

Gregory,

You are positing the hurricane in a junk yard theory.

Actually we have a hurricane in a magnet factory. The magnets are specially shaped so that if they get banged together just right they fit in unique ways. You know chemistry and biochemistry. Surely you have heard of those.

We keep up this learning thing and pretty soon you will be left without a god. The Catholic Church understands that. Which is why they accept evolution. They don't want a reduction in business with the next scientific discovery. The whole Galileo deal wised them up.

Mr Simon: you, sir, are correct. God is not science/natural philosophy. God resides outside the realms natural science operates with - namely, the physical, material world composed of matter and energy, while also operating within it.

But allow me to provide you some context about creation. Dawkins, I believe, came up with the WEASEL program to 'prove' evolution. However, the source code for the program did not simply evolve. Nor did the compilers used to render the source into assembly. Nor, for that matter, the language the source was written in. In fact, not even the microprocessors and supporting technologies evolved; they were designed by a whole bunch of engineers (in all llikelyhood, Intel ones) and fabricated in plants (likely ones in Penang, too) that themselves were designed.

Understand that I do not disagree with natural selection. However, to jump from mutations that may have some beneficial qualities in specific circumstances or the selection of already existing traits beneficial in a specific environment to the evolution of a completely new structure from something else requires a leap of faith I simply cannot take due to lack of evidence.

You would like proof of an intelligent designer; hmm, would proof of intelligent design do? I refer you to the DND/RNA transcription system used during mitosis. A language composed of only 4 characters (AGTC) is somehow able to code for structures even our best efforts right now cannot recreate. Spider silk, for instance.

When you say that evolution has been proven in labs, to what do you refer? The evolution of an entirely new species with new structures coded by new chromosomes derived solely from the old species? If so, I would indeed be most interested in seeing the academic paper, since this would be news of great import. And I would have missed it and that's not good.

Look, there are a bazillion arguments and one (or maybe two) that both evolutionists and creationists or IDers (or, for that matter, world-on-turtles-type guys) marshal at their side. I do not propose to recreate the gazillion and one (possibly three) debates, arguments and flamethreads that are already existing on teh intarweb.

What I would like is an acknowledgement that this position is an understandable one, even if you believe it is not reasonable, and that I am at least semi-rational in my discussion.

In the meantime, I believe that this blog leans somewhat libertarian, so should that not apply to my personal beliefs?

Gack, PIMF and shades of the Great Gygax.

DNA, not DND. Although that, too, is a magnificent creation. :)

I understand your position.

It depends on this particular time being the end of understanding.

As more understanding is gained your position will look foolish. Just as the Catholic Church looks foolish for having doubted the solar centric ideas of how the cosmos works.

Just because you can't currently conceive of how isolated populations can through genetic drift morph into new species does not mean the rest of us who can see how that might happen ought to have a non-scientific theory (by your own admission) foisted on us in science class.

Your difficulty is that ignorance makes you uncomfortable. I, being more scientifically based, revel in it. Ignorance is my home. I like it. By being comfortable in ignorance I can figure out what pieces of knowledge will fill the gaps to get me the results I want.

It is very hard to learn something new (some would say impossible) if you are not comfortable with ignorance.

For most people comfort with ignorance ends around age 20. I'm now 63. I hope I never get old.

What has kept me young? 50+ years designing, engineering, trying (and some times succeeding) in making things work. I'm good enough at it to have worked my way up from bench technician to aerospace engineer.

I have no problem with your beliefs. If they salve your ignorance, fine. They just don't belong in science class.

Mr Simon: Seeing as both of us are wedded to our respective philosphies, and that the chance of either of us convincing the other of the correctness of our position are slim to none, I propose that this is where we let it lie, then. I only jumped in because I didn't like your snark all that much. I understand the humour behind it, sure, used it myself in other contexts.

I hope this is an acceptable proposition, because, boy, I'm hard to stop once I start, and this one will lead neither of us anywhere, really.

Back to semi-lurk mode for me.