November Apologetics Conference — We need more than good arguments
| September 21, 2008 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
Announcement immediately below plus my commentary afterward:
The Nation’s Leading Christian Apologists to Speak
at The National Conference on Christian Apologetics,
November 7th and 8th in North CarolinaContact: Deborah Hamilton, 215-815-7716
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina, Sept. 10 /Christian Newswire/ — The nation’s leading Christian apologists will speak at Hickory Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC on November 7th and 8th to present The National Conference on Christian Apologetics, presented by the Southern Evangelical Seminary. The theme of this year’s conference is, “A Summit On Defense of the Biblical Worldview.” Plenary and elective sessions will provide solid apologetics content, touching on how the Christian worldview relates to the home, the church, and the culture.
This year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. James Dobson. Other speakers include Chuck Colson of Breakpoint and Prison Fellowship Ministries; Josh McDowell, radio host, author and evangelist; Lee Strobel, journalist and best-selling author; Dinesh D’Souza, author and former senior policy analyst during the Reagan administration; Dr. David Noebel, worldview expert and founder of Summit Ministries; Del Tackett, leader of Focus On the Family’s “The Truth Project”; Erwin Lutzer, best-selling author and pastor of Chicago’s historic Moody Church; William Dembski, author, scholar, educator and expert on intelligent design and many others.
It’s nice to be in such distinguished company as indicated in this press release. I’ll certainly make my usual ID arguments. But I’ll also be pointing out that our opponents, the materialists and their cronies, are now battling principally for political rather than intellectual control. Indeed, the materialists have lost the intellectual battle.
**Remember how computers were going to become more intelligent than us and that we would be luck if they deigned to keep us as pets?
**Remember how humans were the third chimpanzee, only to find that some dogs and birds are smarter than chimps at various tasks?
**Remember how it was only a matter of time before the Miller-Urey experiment could be extended to explain the origin of life? (For the sheer hopelessness of OOL research, see my forthcoming book with Jonathan Wells, due out next month — How to Be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not).)
The list of vapid materialist promises that show no sign of ever being fulfilled keeps growing and growing. But losing the intellectual battle no longer matters to materialists. Hence Richard Dawkins has no problem endorsing THE GOD WHO WASN’T THERE, a movie that denies Jesus even existed. Imagine what you want to be true and then enforce its acceptance — that’s the “new scholarship.”
It should have been obvious that Marxist economics did not work, but the Marxists took over dozens of countries after, not before, the famines of the twenties and thirties. And ran those countries with an iron hand until the mid-eighties. Yes, we still need good arguments for the faith. But we also need to pay attention to the rapid growth of liberal fascism (check out Jonah Goldberg’s book on the topic here).
There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a client seated across from his attorney. The attorney remarks, “You’ve got a great case Mr. Smith. Now, how much justice can you afford?” We’ve made a good case. What we need now are good legal and political strategies.
98 Responses to November Apologetics Conference — We need more than good arguments
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Paul Giem
The best positive evidence of either an old universe is a Hubble photograph of a large galaxy that was hit by a smaller galaxy. It sent out a shockwave like a pebble hitting a puddle. The speed of the shockwave is easily calculated and so is the diameter within small enough margin of error to yield a time interval from initial impact to current diameter of the shockwave – a hundred million years. Plus the galaxy itself is millions of lightyears distant so we couldn’t even see that galaxy if there hadn’t been hundreds of millinos of years for the light to get here.
It isn’t that there’s just one bit of evidence like this pointing to an old earth, there are a million layers of annual snow deposition in arctic ice cores, there are a million layers of salt deposition in a US saltmine near the great lakes. Speed of continental drift is easily measured and there’s no doubt S.America and Africa were once a single continent and they took millions of years to drift apart where they are today. The earth’s beginning is well enough modeled that we know it was molten and had to cool down for tens of millions of years before liquid water could exist. The list of things congruent with an old earth are truly legion and come from virtually every natural science.
DaveScot, trying to prove that the universe/earth is old to a YEC by pointing to the overwhelming evidence is a thankless task. Everyone, everywhere understands that the evidence points to a universe/earth that are millions if not billions of years old. The YEC’s have an answer to all of that: 6,000 years ago God created the universe/earth with the “appearance” of great age.
Now here’s the kicker. God, being God, can create a universe that appears to us to have great age if He wants to. Thus, this YEC argument cannot be refuted in principle.
I do not see how the two sides on this will ever come together and, therefore, the point of discussing it.
Barry
I don’t have a problem with in-place creation of a world that merely looks old. Anything is possible for an omnipotent creator. God could have set up the stage then put the players on it of course. The problem I have is when people think they’ve found flaws in the props that reveal it’s just staged to look old. The depth and breadth of contrived hypotheses explaining away the myriad contrary observations are collectively ludicrous. If God wanted the universe to have a consistent appearance of being very old He did a perfect job of it. One shouldn’t expect any less than perfection. It seems rather a dimunition of omnipotence to suggest otherwise.
DaveScot, I agree that God did a perfect job of making the universe appear to be very old, and that is my point. I can see no purpose in arguing with people who deny this fact or try to explain it away.
In other words, why appeal to evidence when even if the evidence goes 100% in one direction the person with whom you are arguing would nevertheless conclude the opposite. Is that not the very definition of futility?
Barry
I think we are conflating two things that aren’t necessarily the same – young earth creationism and scientific creationism. Scientific creationism doesn’t argue that God made it look old. They argue that mainstream science has it all wrong and they detail how and why. They play by rules of science but the hypotheses they concoct are possible but unlikely taken one at a time and taken as a whole become ridiculous. On the other hand someone who says God created the universe in place with the appearance of age aren’t making a scientific argument, they’re just pointing out that it’s possible without offering any evidence or justification other than revelation. I won’t argue the latter but arguing the former can be productive as everyone stands to learn a bit from the other. Scientific creationists who I know put a lot of earnest effort into their explanations. I think it’s a futile undertaking but I respect the earnest effort and willingness to engage science on its own terms in the effort.
DaveScot,
You have correctly noted a very important distinction within young earth creationism. There are those who believe that God made it look old, and therefore that scientific evidence for great age, even if 100%, is a deception sent from God. I personally have theological difficulty with this position.
There are others, which are sometimes called scientific creationists, who believe that one should play by the rules of science, at least except for the requirement made by many scientists that God cannot intervene in nature, and that when we do, eventually we will discover that the evidence points to a short age. I am much more comfortable with this approach.
Scientific creationists can be argued with. Sometimes they (we) let their prejudices get the better of them (a common failing among scientists). But in principle, at least, they can be argued with, and thank you for defending us against BarryA in that regard (I like BarryA; I just think he is partly wrong here).
I will tty to point out another subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) set of differences within the ranks of what are commonly (but slightly inaccurately) called YEC’s. Some believe the entire universe was created a few thousand years ago. These are most properly called young universe creationists (sometimes YUC’s). Some believe that only the earth, or only the solar system were included during creation week. These would be YEC’s but not YUC’s. And some believe that only the surface and atmosphere of the earth were remodeled during creation week. These might be called young life on earth creationists, or YLEC’s or sometimes YLC’s. All of them believe that the Phanerozoic strata are only a few thousand years old, and are at least theoretically vulnerable to evidence of an old age for geologic strata. But only YUC’s are troubled by an old age for galaxies.
I personally have migrated from being a YLEC to being a YEC. I still see the scientific evidence for a young universe to be very weak, and the evidence for an old universe to be very strong, and so, while I am open to YUC arguments, I presently do not believe in YUC.
So when you point out (91) the evidence of colliding galaxies, I agree with you. It is one of the reasons why I am not YUC. Unless and until there is a theory about, for example, the decreasing speed of light that can make correct predictions about physical phenomena that are not expected from more standard models, I am prepared to live with the more standard models.
Some of your other examples deal more directly with the age of life on earth, although here the arguments are somewhat weaker. Specifically, there is a reasonable explanation of ice cores from a short-age perspective. Layers in salt mines may not (probably do not) correlate with yearly intervals. Continental drift may have been more rapid in the past than it is now. Arguments regarding the cooling rate of the earth assume (a) that this information is relevant to the age of life on earth, and (b) that the earth started out as originally molten, neither of which assumptions would be valid from a short-age perspective.
However, to be perfectly fair, with my present knowledge your argument regarding the salt mine layers has some weight, as do your arguments from atolls. I do see them partly counterbalanced by such things as evidence from the erosion of mountains, for example Everest, that we discussed before, by paraconformities, and also by the fact that material up to supposedly 350 million years old still usually has detectable traces of carbon-14, which has a half-life of only 5,730 years. Those, especially the latter two, seem to me to be pretty powerful arguments for a short age at least for life on earth.
I offer that more in a spirit of learning from each other than from dogmatism. I can actually be taught. Finally, while we may at present disagree in our assessment of where the truth probably lies, we may still agree that the universe shows, and features within the universe show, highly probable evidences of design, and may unite on that. In the meantime our agreement on this principle should not be interpreted as unanimity on “creationism”, and I will be happy to point that out to those who try to charge you with being a “creationist”.
Dr. Dembski:
I just returned from the National Apologetics Conference. I wanted to thank you for mentioning it as it was the catalyst for 3 families to fly down from Toronto with our teenage kids to attend the conference. I attended both your sessions and enjoyed both of them. Several of us were disappointed that the second one was cut short and wished you had more time. Our kids enjoyed it and were challenged and strengthened in their faith.
Thanks again – Paul.