Checkmate

By Michael David Rawlings

Continued from Je ne sais quoi . . .

See the entirety of Immune to Indoctrination's argument:  Part I, Part II.

P-K4

I did not change the meaning of your statement.  I merely inserted a phrase by way of clarification in order to wake you up to what you were saying.  Fine.  We'll go with precisely how it is written.

Talking about the science and nothing else but the science, I write:

Creation and ID scientists have justifiably concluded that the results of nearly sixty years of prebiotic-chemistry research resoundingly falsify abiogenesis. —Michael David Rawlings

Directly under this, you write:

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable, complete with beings who reside in separate realms to avoid detection and are openly contrary to logic and reason. —Immune to Indoctrination

It's not me who keeps confusing things!  The only one who confounded meaning is you.  But your confusion doesn't end there.  Why in the world would you be talking about the falsification of supernatural things even if I had been talking theology? The potentialities of human consciousness that reside beyond the boundaries of empirically demonstrable idealizations are not subject to scientific falsification or verification; rather, they are subject to refutation or affirmation in accordance with the rules of logic and the imperatives of pertinent facts. And two pertinent facts that have been established beyond all dispute are (1) biogenesis is subject to falsification and (2) the claim that it has been falsified or is ''obviously false'' is bogus!

KB-QB4

There's a big difference between the way that young-Earth Creationists and an old-Earth Creationists approach science. The former's approach entails a battery of certain hermeneutical apriorities, which, in my opinion, are presumptuous, erroneous and ill-defined. The latter simply employ a methodological naturalism; hence, their theological biases are irrelevant. They are not doing anything different than what scientists have always done, once again, before Darwin came along. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Pasteur—all of these guys were Creationists. Bacon and Newton were Christian theologians as well. So what? None of these guys confused the difference between that which can be inferred in accordance with the rules of science and that which can be rationally asserted by Judeo-Christianity. Obviously, they did not impose their religious views on the scientific method or on their interpretations of the empirical data insofar as science is concerned. This approach rejects both the young-earth Creationist's a priori imposition of a semi-theological naturalism and the materialist's and/or the Darwinist's a priori imposition of a philosophical naturalism.

I've established the scientific facts of prebiotic chemistry and what the conceptually legitimate construct for science is. Neither I nor anyone else is beholden to the gratuitous extrapolations of a philosophical naturalism with which the materialist thinks to displace the standard rules of scientific inquiry and evidentiary substance as if no one would notice. These are the very things you keep trying to assert against an unremitting torrent of unassailable imperatives. Once again and for the last time:  ontological/philosophical naturalism is no more subject to scientific falsification than any other philosophical or theological construct.

What was that you said again, you know, when by mistake you essentially changed my scientific observation about abiogenesis into a theological argument?

I bet it's fun to falsify things when your beliefs were specifically designed to be unfalsifiable. . . . —Immune to Indoctrination

And so you go on about an authentically scientific solution, as if you had one: something about mindless chemicals eventually achieving self-awareness all by themselves. Whoop dee doo. That's not science. That's story time, just another scenario among many that derive from the potentialities of human consciousness, the stuff of philosophy. And that's all Darwinism is or ever was—from chemical evolution to a common ancestry. Creationists who abide by the standards of classical empiricism are not reactionaries. That's the narrative of your worldview. They are the realists of a methodological naturalism and see Darwinism for what it is. Yank Darwinism's ontological presupposition out from under it, and it comes crashing down—a broken pile of junk comprised of ancient prejudices and pretentious.

Q-KB3

You're quibbling with me over semantics? Assumption or faith? Have it your way then, assumption. I don't care which of these two essentially synonymous terms you use. You're still not talking about science, but the underlying metaphysics and rational formulations on which science is contingently based, as you insinuate an obvious non sequitur, i.e., that faith necessarily precludes logic or reason or evidence. Error. Your defining blind faith, not faith. You forgot the modifier. And Judeo-Christianity, for example, emphatically denounces the former, not merely because it is foolish, but because it is wantonly sinful, habitually indifferent, for example, to the meaning of words and the truth. Further, Judeo-Christianity holds to the epistemological construct of a balanced rational-empirical realism against the irrationalism of pagan and materialist systems of thought. Your's is a distinction that makes no difference, just one of the many silly pretensions of atheism.

Q-KB7, Checkmate

Now that's the debate I was looking for. Please lets shift our focus to how you reached that conclusion. —Immune to Indoctrination

So your intent was to discuss the validity of philosophical or theological accounts of origins all along? Yet you have incessantly imposed the intellectually stifling constraints of an ontological naturalism on the counterargument as if materialism were an objectively verifiable fact.

Okay. Fine. But now we would be weighing arguments that are strictly rational in nature. They are not bound by the limitations of scientific inquiry. Theology, for example, encompasses not only the constituents of any given religious system of thought, but those of any given philosophical system of thought and the asseverations of science. That's why it's King, by the way.

So, yes, beyond the science, all things considered, I am ultimately asserting creation ex essentia. So what? We have moved beyond science now and into the realm of the potentialities of human consciousness. And my article is properly structured. The introduction defines the dispute as being one that is both scientific and philosophical/theological. The body of the article deals strictly with the science. The conclusion summarizes the state of the science and reveals the actual nature of the materialist's assertion and its weaknesses in the face of the stronger argument that God must be.

Your entire argument rests on the asseveration of materialism, a philosophical construct, nothing else and nothing other.

Your argument:

Major Premise: The only substance that exists is matter.

Minor Premise: Life exists.

Conclusion: Life arose out of non-living matter.

Other than the faith-based assumption that the limits of sensory perception necessarily constitute the limits of existence, despite the universal and objectively self-sustaining idealization of transcendent origins, what is the substance of your major premise?

*Crickets Chirping*

On the other hand, we have my argument:

Major Premise: All biological life is from life.

Minor Premise: Biological life did not always exist.

Conclusion: God created biological life.

And what sort of things do I rally in support of my major premise? Well, looky here: they're scientific. You know, like the indisputable facts that spontaneous generation has been falsified and the conjecture of chemical evolution defies explanation. Biogenesis stands.

Sorry, but repeating this irredeemingly disfigured rash of madness gets you nowhere fast:

If you don't buy the Big Bang at all then I'd point out that no creator I've ever heard of qualifies as life, so biogenesis, exactly as stated, is still false. —Immune to Indoctrination

What does the Big Bang have to do with anything? The God of Judeo-Christianity, for example, is not biological life? So what? Your observation is pointless. Biogenesis does not attempt to address origins. It merely refutes the erroneous notion of spontaneous generation and pronounces the extant state of biological systems, nothing more. With regard to origins, its limitations as an explanation is due to the limitations of scientific inquiry only. These things have no force beyond science. None! Pasteur could not have pushed the evaluation of the experimental data beyond "all life is from life" without exceeding the limits of science. Where has life ever been scientifically observed to arise from anything but life? Pasteur's axiom is not false.

Arguably, science can legitimately ask the question how did life begin? But it doesn't appear that it can answer it even on its own terms, and only philosophy or theology can answer it in any ultimate sense.  What's wrong with you?

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead. . . . Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened (Rom 1:20-21).

And again . . .

It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. —Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1627), Of Atheism

Please let[']s shift our focus to how you reached that conclusion[, i.e., that God must be]. —Immune to Indoctrination

But I've already addressed that, here in this debate and in the article "Abiogenesis: The Unholy Grail of Atheism". I don't have the time to write everything all over again. It would be much easier if you were to just reread the article and review the defeat of your arguments in this debate.

As for the Big Bang theory, click link.

As for Summa Theologica . . . good luck with that.  It's a tome.  Actually, let me recommend instead that you read The Gospel of John first.  Ultimately, my words are nothing, just those of another imperfect, half-blind creature scratching at the surface with hand and the pimples on his arse with the other.  It's not that any of things I've told you aren't true.  It's just that they're less than a fraction of the things that really matter.