We will have to agree to disagree. I think your post was misleading and I’d already corrected you on it. Dawkins in that quote wasn’t stating his own opinion but the hypothetical opinion of an hypothetical person in the past. Moving on…

I had gone back and read the Ben Stein thing. In it, Ben is also purposely misleading, or his brain is scrambled. He’s saying Dawkins is not opposed to intelligent design, as if cats and dogs weren’t evolved from a common ancestor. He’s baiting Dawkins and then when Dawkins talks about a hypothetical ID panspermia thing, he latches onto it to say Dawkins is a hypocrite because he acknowledges ID. It’s false. Dawkins still asserts all life on earth that we know of has a common ancestor, and he explicitly states no one knows where that common ancestor came from or how it came about. The panspermia thing is at best a hypothesis.

I don’t understand why the theist can’t separate biological evolution from the origin of life. It’s two totally separate things. Biological evolution is an observable and testable fact of nature. Could life have started due to random chance in a chemical goo? Could life have been seeded by aliens? Could it have been a “god” from another dimension? A sufficiently advanced alien species would be perceived as gods anyway. Even if life started by a “god”, it still couldn’t have been from any of the many deities described in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, and the life still evolved through natural selection that definitely wasn’t guided in any way by any higher power.

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Posted by Prodigal Son

Member since May 2023

726 posts

Posted on 4/23/24 at 1:26 pm to Squirrelmeister

quote:
We will have to agree to disagree

It appears so.

quote:
I had gone back and read the Ben Stein thing…

Do you consider yourself to be open minded? Unbiased? Do you even realize, that every time an opposing view is expressed- you automatically assume the person is ignorant or intentionally misleading? Can’t you see that that’s due to the unbearable consequences of your worldview being false? Again , what does each of us, with opposing worldviews, stand to lose if one of us is wrong? I don’t think Ben was misleading. I do, however, agree that he baited Dawkins into a confession- that he is not opposed to intelligent design; he is opposed to God being the Designer. Like you, Dawkins cannot afford to be wrong. It’s tragically comical how you don’t see that. Such animosity towards something you both swear doesn’t exist.

quote:
I don’t understand why the theist can’t separate biological evolution from the origin of life. It’s two totally separate things.

They do. Look up James Tour for origin of life research. He’s one of the best in the business. Look up Stephen Meyer for solid arguments on Darwinian evolution vs Intelligent Design. Also one of the most intelligent people on the planet. And do not pretend like it’s only theists who lump them together- unless you’re willing to say that God is the cause of the origin of life, and then evolution took over. I’d say that a natural explanation for the origin of life is equally important for a materialistic worldview as it is for a theistic one.