Reddit mentions of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)

> The more seriously credentialed creationists tend to speak over the heads of their target audience, unfortunately, which also leads to them getting less attention

Agreed, though some of us prefer not to have our science watered down, I'm sure you agree. :)

> The creationist movement loves themselves a strong firebrand

Agreed again, but to be fair this is a general human trait: e.g., Richard Dawkins is an oft-adored shock jock among atheists even as he produces awful arguments that more intelligent atheists find laughable.

> real science isn't done by preaching to the faithful, it begins with no one believing

You're referring to Methodological Naturalism, yes? So there's an interesting book Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology (Eta Linnemann) that actually offers a critique of that idea: in a nutshell, if Christianity is true, we are putting on a blindfold by ignoring what Scripture states, essentially saying, "yeah dad, I hear what you're saying, but I'm not gonna listen because I wanna figure this out on my own," which in terms of software search algorithms, results in a lot of inefficiency due to lack of pruning. The problem, of course, is if we misinterpret the text and try to read too much into it, and prune where we ought not to. Thus any pruning has got to be done with the utmost diligence, honesty, and care.

The above idea of pruning based on God's Word would obviously be rejected by anyone who denies inerrancy, so I'm not expecting you to agree, just wanted to share the line of thinking with you.

> The problem with both Todd Wood and Kurt Wise is that they argue quite heavily from the concept of inerrant scripture

Have you read any of Todd Wood's essays in The Fool and the Heretic where he goes into wonderful detail about why it's necessary to start with inerrancy of God's Word? What about this really good blog post by Ron Garret on the subject?

> The more seriously credentialed creationists tend to speak over the heads of their target audience, unfortunately, which also leads to them getting less attention

Agreed, though some of us prefer not to have our science watered down, I'm sure you agree. :)

> The creationist movement loves themselves a strong firebrand

Agreed again, but to be fair this is a general human trait: e.g., Richard Dawkins is an oft-adored shock jock among atheists even as he produces awful arguments that more intelligent atheists find laughable.

> real science isn't done by preaching to the faithful, it begins with no one believing

You're referring to Methodological Naturalism, yes? So there's an interesting book Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology (Eta Linnemann) that actually offers a critique of that idea: in a nutshell, if Christianity is true, we are putting on a blindfold by ignoring what Scripture states, essentially saying, "yeah dad, I hear what you're saying, but I'm not gonna listen because I wanna figure this out on my own," which in terms of software search algorithms, results in a lot of inefficiency due to lack of pruning. The problem, of course, is if we misinterpret the text and try to read too much into it, and prune where we ought not to. Thus any pruning has got to be done with the utmost diligence, honesty, and care. This would obviously be rejected by anyone who denies inerrancy, so I'm not expecting you to agree, just wanted to share the line of thinking with you.

> The problem with both Todd Wood and Kurt Wise is that they argue quite heavily from the concept of inerrant scripture

Have you read any of Todd Wood's essays in The Fool and the Heretic where he goes into wonderful detail about why it's necessary to start with inerrancy of God's Word? What about [this really good blog post by Ron Garret] on the subject?

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Posted by: N***g