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Creation, Fall, and Redemption: Three Views

Byhenry

Yesterday I wrote about the significance of the theory of evolution for the view of evil, particularly whether physical death is the result of human evil. Understanding Christian views on this topic requires some knowledge of the doctrines of creation and the fall, and secondarily of redemption. One of the most contentious issues in the…

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Theisms, Creationisms, and Evolutionisms: An Exercise in Definition

Byhenry

The debate about labels is one of the most interesting aspects of the creation-evolution controversy to me, and at the same time one of the most frustrating. Since my primary training is in Biblical languages, and by my own efforts in linguistics, the way words are used simply fascinates me. There is plenty of influence…

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Defining my Position on ID and Creation

Byhenry

A couple of questions have arisen about my position on these issues, and though I’ve stated all these things before, they have generally been in longer presentations. So I’m going to try to state my position. I see three easily demarcated positions on design: The universe is designed as a fully functional system, and the…

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Where Teaching the Controversy is Prohibited

Byhenry

I have suggested many times before that before one believes what IDC (intelligent design creationism) advocates say about their goals, one should look at the way they handle the matter where they are in control. I’m sure that I will be accused of unfairly lumping ID and creationism together, but if they don’t want that…

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Absolute Theology; Flexible Science

Byhenry

One of the interesting things I note about creationists of various stripes is that they display a tremendous flexibility in interpreting physical data, they generally take hold of one approach to Biblical interpretation and nothing can move them. One of the clearest explicit statements of this position comes in the first three chapters of Kurt…

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Social Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution

Byhenry

Science Avenger has an excellent article on the connection, or rather lack of a logical connection, between the theory of evolution and social Darwinism (for the third time today, HT: Dispatches). Evolution is a scientific theory. It explains why many facts are what they are. It can never tell us what we should do about…

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Natural Production of New Information

Byhenry

One of the key arguments for Intelligent Design (ID) is that new information cannot be produced by natural processes, and thus there must be intervention by an intelligent designer for this new information to appear. That’s a crude statement, but it covers the ground pretty well. One problem I saw with the argument when I…

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Is there such a thing as a theistic evolutionist?

Byhenry

Panda’s Thumb writer Pim van Meurs gave an irony award to Salvador Cordova whom he quotes as saying: Darwinian TE (Theistic Evolution) just doesn’t cut it scientifically. That is ironic, considering that young earth creationism makes many assertions that contradict archeology, not to mention geology. Young earth doesn’t even match the written record. But this…