From:    Bruce Salem                            
To:      All                                    Msg #84, Feb-20-93 11:11PM
Subject: Re: CREATIONISM II: Other Planets       (was Re: Evolution Vs.

Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
From: salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem)
Message-ID: <1m79vsINNqmf@morrow.stanford.edu>
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,talk.origins,talk.politics.misc,talk.religion.misc

In article <1m576gINNf79@access.digex.com> rcheek@access.digex.com (Richard 
Cheek) writes:
>To ask why is there life on Earth and not the other planets (which remains
>to be seen) and whether this was an accident or did the creation process
>just happen to place life on the right planet, etc, etc, etc shows a basic
>misunderstanding of what creationism is, or perhaps deliberate distortion
>and willful ignorance, or (I'll be generous) a poor sense of humor.
>The whole idea behind the various theories of creationism (that God did it)
>is that the Universe was *designed*, so to ask such questions that presume
>an unguided process of creation is what is absurd.

      Which all goes to give one big circular argument: We were designed
by God because we were designed by God. Substitute for the last clause:
because God loves us, etc.etc. If you can answer the matter in the very
first snetence with some possibilities that can be tested so that they can
be found to be correct or incorrect (falsifiable) with what we can find
out (decidable), you will go alot further than with the self-referential
and obviously religious dogma you recite.

      The last sentence puts all questions beyond asking, which is how
we all lived for 1500 years of Catholic domination, well OK a millenia
after Nicea. The issue is NOT the creation at all, but everything else
we can find out about the physical universe and life in it. The point is
that science can attack all these other matters, including the history
of the solar system, of earth and life on it, precisely becuase they
are not one and the same with the Creation, but events later and widely
differeing events in the hostory of the Universe.

      Why would you not know this, or even deliberately forget this?
It is because the moral authority of the creation myth is more important
than faith itself, namely that if all questions about origins can be
put off that the ultimate question for the Christian moralist, the
trancendental nature of morality, its authority being divinely given,
cannot be asailed. This is why Christian reactionaries do so froth at
the mouth at Darwin and Lyell, that there is no longer a pat story that
says God created man to live his moral code and to pay the price for
not doing so. Genesis is the ultimate plan for an authoritarian state
religion, which Christianity has been in the past in spades. The only
reason Christians talk about human rights now is not because thye
invented it, the Inquisition puts the lie to that, but because they
now have to seek the moral high ground in a secular political life
where the natural rights of man have topppled theocratic ideas like
the divine right of kings.

Bruce Salem