Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Manchurian Candidates
A lot of creationists don't like the idea of evolution because they believe, for some reason, it eliminates free will. If evolution is true, they say, then we human beings are nothing more than robots who mindlessly carry out the programming natural selection has written into the computer code of our DNA.
And if we're just robots we couldn't -- or shouldn't -- be punished for our sins and that would take all the fun out of fundamentalist Christianity. After, what would life be if you couldn't dream of Richard Dawkins, or Bill Clinton, or some poor little unbaptized baby, drowning in a lake of fire for all eternity
(Denyse "Buy My Book" O'Leary -- the Hildy Johnson of William Dembski's Uncommon Descent blog -- coined the term "Darwinbot" to link this line of thinking with the Darwinian dogmatism meme ID theorists find so compelling.)
Only now it turns out no matter where we poor humans hail from -- moulded by God from the dust of the ground or evolved out of some warm little pond -- we're machines. Just simple products of the programming written into our brains.
Noting that children learn language from the parents, Pastor Rick Jackson, who writes the AiG-inspired Starke Reality blog, explains how Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, learned to speak to each other:
Bye-the-way, God also gave Adam and Eve a Frisbee so they could teach their pet dinosaur to fetch.
Helpfully, Pastor Jackson also provides a list of just a "few of the thousands of modern scientists who have accepted the biblical account of creation."
Hey, that's a lot more than the measly 700 on the Discovery Institute's list of Darwin doubters!
Hat tip to JS.
And if we're just robots we couldn't -- or shouldn't -- be punished for our sins and that would take all the fun out of fundamentalist Christianity. After, what would life be if you couldn't dream of Richard Dawkins, or Bill Clinton, or some poor little unbaptized baby, drowning in a lake of fire for all eternity
(Denyse "Buy My Book" O'Leary -- the Hildy Johnson of William Dembski's Uncommon Descent blog -- coined the term "Darwinbot" to link this line of thinking with the Darwinian dogmatism meme ID theorists find so compelling.)
Only now it turns out no matter where we poor humans hail from -- moulded by God from the dust of the ground or evolved out of some warm little pond -- we're machines. Just simple products of the programming written into our brains.
Noting that children learn language from the parents, Pastor Rick Jackson, who writes the AiG-inspired Starke Reality blog, explains how Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, learned to speak to each other:
God must have programmed them with a language so they could speak to each other, speak to God, and understand everything perfectly.Pastor Jackson also explains how Adam and Eve, never having witnessed "death or bloodshed of man or animals before sin" could have understood "what God meant when He said that Adam would die if he ate the fruit he was commanded not to."
He was already programmed with a language so that he could speak to God. Adam knew the meaning of every word perfectly from the beginning—including the word death.I know the unrepentant purists among you will wonder if knowing the dictionary definition of a word such as death is the quite the same thing as seeing it happen in person, but like so much else, you'll just have to take Pastor Jackson's word for it.
Bye-the-way, God also gave Adam and Eve a Frisbee so they could teach their pet dinosaur to fetch.
Helpfully, Pastor Jackson also provides a list of just a "few of the thousands of modern scientists who have accepted the biblical account of creation."
Hey, that's a lot more than the measly 700 on the Discovery Institute's list of Darwin doubters!
Hat tip to JS.
