Re: BJU/science,religion,, part 2

A couple definitions/distinctions:

Hard
creationism: Principally headquartered out of CRI in
California--its bible (other than the protestant scriptures is
The Genesis Flood by Morris and Whitcomb, a couple of
engineers. They generally believe in a 6-10,000 year old
earth and bring up arguments such as entropy disproves
evolution. Other names include characters such as Kent
Hovind (or something like that).

Soft
Creationism: generally speaking, this encompasses anyone who
believes in some sort of a divine beginning to the
universe--an ex nihilo fiat as it were. Thus Catholics, and I
suppose just about any western religious scientist fits
in this category. 

Under this must be
mentioned the Intelligent Design people who can be in
either category and commonly use a form of the anthropic
principle. A hot name right now is Philip Johnson, the
Berkeley prof who wrote Darwin on Trial--not a creationist
text per se but rather an attempt to demonstrate that
the mechanics of evolution (especially large scale
speciation) rely on unproven and broad-ranging assumptions.
Though Johnson overstates his case, he's a formidable
advocate and rhetorician in debates and some of his points
do make logical sense (though not all).

What
intrigues me is the naturalistic argument that ID is not
science because it does not rely solely on natural
mechanisms. In contrast, one could assert that speciation
must have occurred solely by natural selection because
no other secular explanation is possible. The
problem with this line of thought is what if
hypothetically the IDer's are correct. Then it is the very
definition of science which has excluded a truth.

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