Re: Creationism, Intelligent Design and Vendanta

On 8/14/2024 10:52 AM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 14/08/2024 14:45, RonO wrote:

On 8/14/2024 5:08 AM, Burkhard wrote:

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 0:57:13 +0000, Chris Thompson wrote:
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Burkhard wrote:

On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 16:24:30 +0000, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
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On 06-Aug-24 09:46, RonO wrote:

I found an article on creationism, intelligent design and Vendanta. Even
though Kalkidas came out as a normal Biblical creationists there have
been Hindu sympathetic to Scientific Creationism and the ID creationist
scam on TO.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802803/
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The author thinks that science is a search for truth.  I have never
considered science to be a search for truth.  It is just the best means
we have of developing a working understanding of nature.  This
understanding may not be the "truth" but it could be close, and allows
us to improve our understanding of nature and expand a functional
understanding of the reality that we exist in.
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I do not recall Kalk ever stating how intelligent design supported his
hindu beliefs, and vice versa, but he did quote the Vedas from time to
time.
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A section of the paper compares Vendata to the ID creationist scam.

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Huh. I missed Kalkidas coming out as a fundamentalist Christian
creationist. Did he have a conversion experience, or was he a Christian
all along and lying about it?

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neither, as far as I can tell. Though of course conversions, while
comparatively rare, do happen. But as far as I'm aware, he always was
and  still is a follower of Vaishnavism.
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He only ever objected to certain labels (with some good reasons I'd say)
so
the use of the exonym Hinduism
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Either way, I'm not all that surprised. For a lot of folks, denialism
isn't about what is, but rather what ISN'T: Moon landing denialists will
gladly accommodate flat-Earthers, orbit-onlyists,
fake-landings-real-pictures, fake-pictures-real-landings, and even
"secret nazi base on the far side of the Moon" crackpots, as long as
they all agree that the official account is somehow bogus.

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Well, that's possibly closer the issue, as you, me and pretty much all
other contributors to TO on the science side are dead, we just
did not get the memo yet - the bioengineered Covid vaccine killed
us all, as planned by the oligarchs, for reasons unknown. Or so
Kalkidas
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Wasn't it Nando who was sure we'd all be dead by now? Was he an
alter-ego of Kalkidas?
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not alter ego, and of course much worse, but somewhat disappointingly
in case of Kalkidas, he also predicted imminent doom. To
rephrase Chesterton's dictum (on victorian atheists), When a
person stops believing in science they don’t then believe
in nothing, they believe anything.
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I think Eddie was a JW or was bounced from the group, and they had a dooms day theology.  Their profit or leader claimed to have calculated the end times.  At that time they were day for ages creationists that believed that each day was 7 thousand years long and that the final 7 thousand years was set to end in the 1970's, but it didn't happen, and the guy kept revising his calculations until he died, and his last predicted date came and went.  Apparently some JW believe that the world actually ended as predicted it just is not that noticeable.  The Scientific Creationists at the ICR initially accommodated their 50,000 year age of the earth (at one time the ICR was claiming that the earth had to be less than 50,000 years old, but currently they are claiming less than 20,000 after the defection of the JW) because the JW were one of the main supporters for scientific creationism in the 70's and 80's, but when Eddie put up their current creationist theology where each day can be any length of time, and they reinterpreted when the sun and moon were created.  I do not think that Eddie had been aware of how his theology had changed within the last few decades and pointing out how drastically his creationist beliefs had changed seemed to be something that Eddie couldn't deal with.  Eddie was impervious to any rational reasoning, but the fact that his biblical literalistic views had changed so drastically seemed to destroy his fervor to support the current creationist claims.  After that he wasn't as active as a poster.  Eddie quit posting, probably, within half a year after putting up his then current JW creationist alternative.  He seemed to have self destructed by finally understanding what he was supposed to believe.
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Ron Okimoto
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 As I understand, one Christian millenarian position is the universe will last seven thousand years, each thousand years corresponding to one of the seven days of creation. According to the pre-tribulationist faction the Rapture occurs after 6,000 years, to be followed by a thousand years of tribulation. Adopting Usher's 4,004 B.C. date, that places the rapture at 1997.
 

There is a theology of each day of creation lasting 1,000 years, but they are still YEC.  The JW had 7,000 years for each day for some reason.  Their leader thought that the earth was destined to last for 49,000 years after the beginning of creation.  You don't see much about this theology any more, and the JW seem to be pretty standard day for ages old earth creationists like the Reason to Believe creationists. Each day was a period of time that could span billions of years.  The issue that Reason to Believe has run into is that the evidence doesn't fit the Biblical order of creation.  In this reality land plants do not evolve until long after the Cambrian explosion of various sea creatures, and the crop plants (angiosperms) do not show up in the fossil record until long after there were land animals.  Dinos were running around before the first angiosperms evolved.  The Reason to Believe guys also have some weird belief that whales had to be created with the first sea creatures (at the same time as Cambrian fauna) but they obviously did not exist until land mammals had evolved.  They have a "recreation" model where kinds are recreated a little differently that makes it look like they evolved, but whales don't fit in and would have had to be recreated land kinds long after the initial sea creatures were created.
After the Dover fiasco and the destruction of the last of the scientific creationist junk along with IDiocy (The Top Six are the same god of the gaps denial arguments used by the scientific creationists) I noted that some YEC groups were trying to convert their followers to old earth creationism.  The Assembly of God church was the largest such YEC group to try to change.  The AIG had an article on the proposed changes and were against it.  Most of the ID perps were old earth creationists, and when even they failed some YEC groups acknowledged that YEC just was not tenable any longer.  The best science put up by the ID perps were supposed to be designs of the flagellum that occurred over a billion years ago.  Pat Robertson was not against the YEC Dover efforts, and then the Dover rubes were lying about their creationist intent.  When the newly elected Dover school board said that they were not going to teach ID before the court decision was rendered Pat Robertson came out with his famous quote about the Dover residents rejecting God, but after the decision he had to speak out about his own old earth creationist beliefs, and had to deal with the YEC science denial.
The ID scam became the last refuge for the anti-evolution biblical creationists, but nearly all the TO IDiots quit supporting the ID scam because they did not want to believe in the designer that filled the ID perp's top six gaps.  That order of creation is not bilbical, and definitely not YEC friendly.  My guess is that if the NCSE could  get the West Virginia rubes to acknowledge that fact, that they would not want to teach the ID scam in their public schools.  Denton and Behe had already told the rubes 2 decades ago that not much could be expected to change with any ID scientific successes, and that biological evolution was a fact of nature.  Behe has claimed that he is looking for his 3 neutral mutations that have to occur within a limited amount of time, and would have to occur in these genes over a billion years ago for the flagellum and around half a billion years ago for his adaptive immune system and blood clotting.  He has also stated that whale evolution is the type of evolution that can be accounted for by Darwinistic mechanisms because it is really devolution (evolution by breaking things).
Ron Okimoto