There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.
He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic
within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.
But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.
But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?
. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.
I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.
But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.
Abstract:
That sounds like one of the more absurd forms of OEC, which Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge calls “Gap creationism”, the belief some or all life was magically poofed into existence (usually(?) more-or-less as in its current form) quite recently on an old planet. There are other forms of OEC, all silly, but this one is exceptionally silly, and only manages not to be as supersilly as YEC since, unlike YEC, it does, at least, accept the age of Earth.
Who else skimmed the first sentence and thought it read “STEPHANIE Meyer”
I wouldn’t doubt for a second if she has wrong-ass creationist views, but I’d also think it was weird for anyone to ask her.
truism:
“how you look at the evidence” is the key. Look at each piece completely separate and independent and easy to think they all just poofed into existence simultaneously, with all the similarities in our minds only, cuz we like to “fit together puzzles”.
I’ll not read the rest of that bamboozler;
Is he then concluding from that “observation” (the truism above), that both views are equally valid, that it means there is just as much reason to conclude old earth as new earth? That facts are just “the way we look at stuff”? That everything we deduce from evidence, regardless, are equally valid? I guess I’m extrapolating that truism beyond where he took it. Can’t get anywhere with what I think he’s saying. Does that make me equally correct? It’s how I looked at it. eh?
I am biased toward trying to use the evidence to construct a model of how the evidence came about and testing if new evidence fits into the model without jiggering it very much.
but me just like to solve puzzles. tsk tsk.
“humans were spontaneously created by ENGINEERS much more recently than is believed.”
Fixed it for you.
Of course, the scientologists believe stuff is even more ancient than it really is (Hubbard played around with logarithmic scales when he was drunk, or something).. So now we have weirdos scattered all over the timeline.
I’ve not really followed Steven Meyer for a while, let’s be honest the Twilight books were terrible, but have they really a abandoned any semblance of secularism? Is he really saying that the ID people can’t progress because a religious community doesn’t like the implications of the ID “scientists'” research?
Stupid person’s idea of smart person.
Yeah – I loved the way he backs off from using the word “congenial’ and translates casus belli for us slower members of the flock, just to make it clear that he’s, you know, hip with the kids (but, like, still groks Latin an’ that all that important science stuff).
What a vacuous windbag.
OK, I give. 3 minutes and 36 seconds is enough. He lost me when he started citing ancient gibberish (Romans 1) as if it’s an authority about anything. Even theologically, I don’t see any reference in Romans 1 to the issue of the reality of god. The writer…or writers…clearly assumes some god (your guess is as good as mine if that’s the same god as in other writings of the Bible). The bulk of its message is that the writer’s god is punishing everybody for not seeing the reality of god by making them have unnatural sex…whatever that is. Even their women! for heaven’s sake. As often noted, whoever wrote this and other letters in the Pauline canon certainly had a hang up about sex. In any case, hardly an exposition on the question of whether god is real or imaginary.
Strangely, I am getting a little intoxicated, but it may be the beer I’m having…
My interpretation of the statement that the Earth is young vs. old was with regard to theological importance. I can certainly understand how the age of the Earth might be an unimportant issue theologically.
Scientifically I think it’s a very interesting issue (and important for understanding the deep history of the Earth), and it’s revolting how willing many Christians are to entirely disregard scientific evidence, or perhaps worse to cherrypick and lie about evidence to push a particular point of view. But it’s not really a question that has any significant impact one way or the other on how Christianity should be practiced or interpreted.
Of course, perhaps Meyer was also arguing from the perspective that theological questions are the only ones that really matter, which is pretty horrible in and of itself.
Where did god come from and, much more important, how did god learn? You just can’t poof knowledge!
@birgerjohansson, #5
we will just have to be carefull not to travel too far downwhen
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