Intelligent Design (ECP forum rules apply)*

There are many christians who believe in evolution and it doesn't necessarily imply nihilism.  It tends to be fundamentalists who don't because of Genesis saying that God made all the creatures after their own kind.

This is because their thinking is rather unclear - they don't understand Darwinism. Darwinism is plainly a sort of ultimate materialism since it says that all of life including human beings arose via a purposeless undirected mechanical process using random changes as the only "creative" inputs. Human beings are hypercomplex organic machines with no soul whatsoever - mind is brain. Darwinism automatically rules out the existence any sort of spiritual order, absolute morality, an afterlife of any kind, and so on. Theistic evolutionists have a bankrupt belief system, though they wouldn't admit it, since they are actually postulating at the most a distant God who set up the Universe ahead of time to produce Man as a natural unguided process through the very foundations of the laws of nature.

This is because their thinking is rather unclear

No, yours is.  You are so certain of your position that you won't take a neutral look at anything at all.  You make bold claims about things you know nothing about and hand-wave away any evidence that contradicts your position.  I resent your comment here and as I have mixed with many christians in my life as a christian, I feel I have a better foundation in these things than you do.  You are dogmatically anti materialist and dogmatically anti-christian and just generally dogmatic!  A classic New Ager!

No, yours is.  You are so certain of your position that you won't take a neutral look at anything at all.  You make bold claims about things you know nothing about and hand-wave away any evidence that contradicts your position.  I resent your comment here and as I have mixed with many christians in my life as a christian, I feel I have a better foundation in these things than you do.  You are dogmatically anti materialist and dogmatically anti-christian and just generally dogmatic!  A classic New Ager!

I'm curious. Please indicate the flaws in my description of Darwinism. Please consider the famous distillations of the clear implications of Darwinism written by leading evolutionist William Provine"

“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.”

...................................

"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
.....The first 4 implications are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists that I will spend little time defending them"

This is because their thinking is rather unclear - they don't understand Darwinism. Darwinism is plainly a sort of ultimate materialism since it says that all of life including human beings arose via a purposeless undirected mechanical process using random changes as the only "creative" inputs. Human beings are hypercomplex organic machines with no soul whatsoever - mind is brain. Darwinism automatically rules out the existence any sort of spiritual order, absolute morality, an afterlife of any kind, and so on. Theistic evolutionists have a bankrupt belief system, though they wouldn't admit it, since they are actually postulating at the most a distant God who set up the Universe ahead of time to produce Man as a natural unguided process through the very foundations of the laws of nature.

I'm far from a scholar on this, but isn't this more of a neo-Darwinism position?  I always felt like Darwin's actual work didn't presuppose a no God, no "clockmaker" metaphysic.  (i.e., "God" created the universe and created man but did it through the seemingly random phenomenon of NS/RM)

I'm far from a scholar on this, but isn't this more of a neo-Darwinism position?  I always felt like Darwin's actual work didn't presuppose a no God, no "clockmaker" metaphysic.  (i.e., "God" created the universe and created man but did it through the seemingly random phenomenon of NS/RM)

Besides, my post was concerning evolution, not specifically Darwinism, whatever that is.

I'm not sure if wikipedia is something to ever reference, but I found this on a quick search:

While Darwin came to heavily dispute the dogmatic prescriptions of the Anglican Church and Christianity in general, later in life he clarified his position as an agnostic in response to a letter from John Fordyce:
"In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."[1]

That doesn't seem to jive with what Provine asserted.  Seems more his views projected onto Darwin's work vs Darwin himself, no?

I'm far from a scholar on this, but isn't this more of a neo-Darwinism position?  I always felt like Darwin's actual work didn't presuppose a no God, no "clockmaker" metaphysic.  (i.e., "God" created the universe and created man but did it through the seemingly random phenomenon of NS/RM)

Provine's well-known remarks about the implications of naturalistic evolution are regarding what has been the consensus of the evolutionary biology community, which indeed has been called "neo-Darwinism". Neo-Darwinism supposedly perfected the theory by incorporating population genetics statistics, done in the 1930s. Now it is crumbling though still supported by the academic community and the media for various societal and psychological reasons. Neo-Darwinism with a lot of complicated elaborations is currently still being promulgated and taught as the truth. That is what I was talking about.

Besides, my post was concerning evolution, not specifically Darwinism, whatever that is.

Neo-Darwinism is the only worked-out theory of evolution and the only attempted explanation for the fossil record, other than young-Earth Fundamentalist Biblical special creation, or ID (the last being a combination of intelligent intervention plus Darwinistic RM+NS). In most common parlance and literature in our society the word "evolution" is taken to mean the same thing as "Darwinism" - they are synonyms of each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdvTPrxn4OE

I don't think that anyone here denies evolution. This is not a biblical-literalist/young-earth creationist group.

It is the mechanism of evolution that is in dispute and that is Darwinistic in the sense that it is based upon Natural Selection from Random Mutation. Further, it is particularly the RM part of that because Natural Selection is also self-evident if not as dominant in the evolutionary tool box as has been taught.

What irks those of us here who would argue with NS/RM is the insistence on a strictly materialist explanation - the reasoning being that science does not and can not consider "supernatural" causes (i.e. intelligent design). This is something scientists and academics refer to as Methodological Naturalism which does NOT state that there are no supernatural entities, merely that science can only investigate the natural. The problem is that many (probably most) scientists conflate methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism which DOES state that there is no such thing as the supernatural (i.e. that which we would refer to a God, soul or spirit).