15 October 2020

Moreland on apologetics

Moreland has an interesting and largely helpful talk on apologetics on Utube.

There are a few points that I want to enlarge upon at the given time points:

24:41 - in his list of examples he mentions 'science' telling us about unused frog organs. This sounds a bit like the shallow darwinism of 'vestigial' organs.

38:12 - "John loves Mary" an example of complex ordered symbols denoting language. What JP leaves out is that this complex ordered set only contains information in the English language. His parallel to genetic information would be strengthened by this. The gene has complex specified order. The order is nothing to do with chemistry as all sorts of orders are possible on the same chemistry. Its a code. But a code can only be read in the language of that code. Language is immaterial and independent of its coding.  So we have order > reader > code > language > information.

41:00 also relies on this concept.

53:14 - heaven tourism has to deal with Hebrews 9:27. Also Luke 16:30 bears considering.

1:07:12 - evolution is open to fundamental criticism such that it is on shaky ground. It poses no threat to the information in Genesis 1 because it has no explanation for any of its claims or conjectures. Behe's work is strongly critical of it at every level. Too often the obvious changes in creatures ('evolution' as  mere change within a kind of organism) is conflated with information-increasing change driving organism variety across 'kinds'.

He also mentions somewhere (found later; 5:42) - I couldn't find it in my brief scrolling through the talk - that science tells us that amphibians came from fish, or similar. Of course, it doesn't; it hypothesizes on a number of contestable grounds, and like most of evolution commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Besides it does not tell us how. No analysis of the microbiology that could achieve this within the combinatorial space of the required chemical and genetic changes is given.

One error in the talk is at 49:39. CDs are optical, not magnetic. But the illustration still holds water.

The work of Stephen Meyer, and on theistic evolution, Jonathan Wells and William Dembski are good references on this point, along with John Sandford.