Spiritual Particles of Empirical Substance?! I debate Immune to Indoctrination

By Michael David Rawlings

(For the entirety of Immune to Indoctrination's argument, see comments below "Abiogenesis:  The Holy Grail of Atheism".)

I admit I don't have the biology knowledge to refute the details of your argument. I have seen many creationists who grossly misused and skewed scientific fact to mislead those with less knowledge. Usually I can spot this easily but in your case I'm going to have to give you the benefit of the doubt.   —Immune to Indoctrination

Hmm. That's odd. I know the science very well and while I have run across many blunders made by Creationists, the vast majority of these were the errors of laymen with little or no real scientific training—a matter of ignorance, not dishonesty. Laying aside the assertions made by young-earth Creationists, with whom I disagree, I don't think I've ever encountered any serious or calculatedly dishonest errors made by progressive Creationists trained in the sciences. The only kind of routine "errors" made by the latter of which I am aware are those attributed to them by evolutionists who merely reassert their presupposition and its dogma as if these things did not constitute the very essence of the dispute! For an example of this sort or thing, see my refutation of Labsci's assertion.

"Intelligence" isn't the issue here. "Supernatural" and/or "spiritual" is. Of course it's obvious that the concept of the supernatural is completely incompatible with science in most cases. —Immune to Indoctrination

Spiritual concerns are not incompatible with science. They are transcendental. That's all. Science simply cannot address them in any case whatsoever. And that's why science is the weakest of the three major branches of human inquiry. Theology is king. Philosophy is queen. And as the rational precedes the sensorial, science is contingently based on the former and cleans up the leftovers as directed. Your materialistic apriority is open. You might want to zip that up.

. . . imagine if scientists did deny abiogenesis. —Immune to Indoctrination

Real scientists don't deny things, they falsify them. Creation and ID scientists have justifiably concluded that the results of nearly sixty years of prebiotic-chemistry research resoundingly falsify abiogenesis. The Pasteurian axiom that omne vivum ex vivo, i.e., all life is from life stands. Nature's prebiotic, organic materials are monomeric dead ends. As for the pseudoscientists of materialism, they are welcome to go on with their fantasies.


After that you get all tangled up with some very odd notions. Scientific definitions of God? Spiritual particles of empirical substance? Once again, science is not equipped to deal with spiritual or theological matters. Arguing that because spiritual entities are not empirical—a truism—spiritual entities do not exist is neither rational nor scientific. Your premise is AWOL, your conclusion is absurd. State your premise and then prove it empirically.

Got reductio ad absurdum?

The idea that science must necessarily assume an abiogenic origin of life is hogwash. That's merely the stuff of a Darwinian naturalism run amok. Has it not ever occurred to you to question the rather awkward, scientifically unconventional practice of arbitrarily displacing an established law of biology with a body of research premised on a mere supposition. When did the rather shaky hypothesis of abiogenesis falsify Pasteur's theoy of biogenesis? According to your account of things, I must have somehow missed that in my reading.

Contrary to the claims of evolutionists, Creation scientists do not impose any theological construct as such on science, nor are they obliged to do any such stupid thing. They simply reject evolutionists' self-serving imposition of an ontological naturalism on science, whereby the latter then proceed to politicize the matter. (And in their typically fascistic fashion, evolutionists have been quite successful in convincing stupid and corrupt judges and politicians to overthrow natural and constitutional law in our public education system.)

Creation scientists abide by the conventions of a traditional methodological naturalism and faithfully distinguish the essential difference between the inferences they make about the constituents of empirical phenomena and the assertions they make about the potentialities of the transcendent. Their axioms (Pasteurian biogenesis and irreducible complexity) are rock solid.  They are doing nothing different today than what most of the great scientists had been doing since Copernicus . . . until Darwin came along.

Science deals with the empirical. Theology deals with the transcendent. Creationists do not confound the distinction. We leave that sort of foolishness to materialists.

The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself—in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does. —Dr. Wilder-Smith

And again. . . .

Ultimately, the essence of this perversion is a Darwinian naturalism run amok: mere theory elevated to an inviolable absolute of cosmological proportions, which displaces not only the traditional conventions of methodological naturalism, but is superimposed on the discipline of science itself. Never has so much been owed to so little. —Michael David Rawlings

See Je ne sais quoi: the debate with Immune to Indoctrination continues. . . .