Re: Elsberry a "creationist" (= obvious deception).
- From: "Wesley R. Elsberry" <welsberr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 23:32:12 -0400
In <7ff4224b-b86c-46f6-813d-3011e42f032d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on
Saturday 02 August 2008 03:00 pm, Ray Martinez wrote:
On Jul 29, 5:31 pm, "Wesley R. Elsberry" <welsb...@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ray Martinez wrote:
[...]
RM> And Phillip Johnson is not a "non-scripturalist creationist anti-
RM> evolutionist." He accepts Scripture. Simply read his books. Elsberry
RM> should do the same before making these types of egregious errors.
[...]
WRE> Ray should read to the end of the page before claiming that there are
WRE> errors. The classification isn't whether the person "accepts
WRE> scripture", but rather on how they present their relationship to
WRE> evolutionary science.
RM> In "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds" (1997) Johnson quotes
RM> Scripture (John 1:1) against evolutionary theory.
RM> By labelling Johnson a "non-scripturalist creationist anti-
RM> evolutionist" early on, in your essay, this equates to a definitive
RM> announcement. Now, here, you are going to argue that there was an
RM> invisible asterisk next to said label?
I don't see Johnson saying that his interpretation of scripture is his
*reason* for disputing evolutionary science. Can you make your point
explicitly and support it?
[Quote]
Williams uses the novel Don Quixote as his example of the matter-information
duality. A computer operating system like Windows 95 would provide a
similar example. A book or a computer program contains complex information
recorded in matter, whether the matter be ink and paper or a silicon disk.
The information can be switched from one medium to another, or even stored
in the human brain. The content of the book or the computer program is not
specified by the physical or chemical laws governing the medium. If it
were, all books would be alike--or perhaps would differ according to the
qualities of the ink and paper used to write them. In fact the content of
the message is independent of die physical makeup of the medium. Don
Quixote loses nothing of its meaning or literary quality if it is printed
on the cheapest paper, and a trashy romance novel does not improve in
quality if it is printed on expensive silk. The medium and the message are
two entirely different kinds of things. As Williams explains,
"You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms
because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can't do
that with information and matter. Information doesn't have mass or charge
or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn't have bytes .... This
dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate
domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own
terms."
That way of describing reality brings to mind the biblical description of
how the world began. The Gospel of John begins with the memorable statement
that "in the beginning was the Word." That, is exactly how we would
describe the creation of a literary work, or a computer program, or a
building. In the beginning was the concept and the working out of that
concept in the mind of the author or designer. Thereafter the concept was
recorded, or realized, in matter. Matter is important, but secondary. The
Word (information) is not reducible to matter, and even precedes matter. If
only matter existed in the beginning, then the first verse of the Gospel of
John--and the worldview of the Bible--is false. In the beginning were the
particles, and everything else came only from them. A reductionist
understanding of the universe leaves no room for God, much less for the
Word of God.
[End quote -- http://members.aol.com/Mszlazak/Intelligent.html ]
Johnson's approach in Darwin on Trial and elsewhere, including his plenary
talk at the 1997 NTSE conference that I presented at, have been consistent
in asserting that evolutionary science fails based on analysis of the
science. The passage above certainly is not evidence for a claim that
Johnson is using scripture as his basis for attacking evolutionary science.
[...]
--
"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." -- Dorothy Parker
.
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