Wednesday, October 14, 2009

What Happens When You Confront Religion With Evidence?

Over at No Apologies, things got even more interesting in the discussion of Mr. Buterman's firing after my last look at the thread.

One of my favourite bloggers, Zoe Brain came along and tried to present the denizens of No Apologies with actual science around transsexualism and Intersex conditions here, here, here, here and here.

Which commenter "RRC" tries desperately to dismiss in his comments - first by stating:

Your Matthew 19:12 citation is not about being intersexed. And, respectfully, you need to understand that a sovereign Creator created and governs the field of biology and is not in a separate realm from God’s creation of morality. That is philospher Immanuel Kant’s unproven assumption.


Nice attempt at a dismissal - he doesn't even bother to answer to anything that Zoe has raised in her first post. His second post attempts to dismiss Zoe by arguing that she has violated his notion of hermeneutics.

It's this attempt at a rejection that actually makes me laugh:

Zoe,
Anyone has a “fraudulent agenda” who doesn’t start with the Creator God and his ethical system, his “Law” as I’ve said. I already made a defense for the intelligible pre-conditions of evidence. Zoe, you can’t have raw evidence devoid of a worldview foundation. God-less presuppositions in evidence always end up in futility. That is the fraud. So I’m way thru all your researchers.
If you don’t accept my opinions I guess we’ll have to go our separate ways.
Good day.


This boils down to one thing - he's rejecting the evidence that Zoe has thoughtfully cited in her posts on the basis that he disagrees with the worldview that scientific inquiry is based on.

This isn't a lot different than the three year old having a temper tantrum because their parents won't give them the candy they've decided that they want. RRC hasn't actually refuted anything - he's just said that he can't be bothered to examine the evidence because it might make him re-examine his assumptions about the world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sigh.

I see no 'conflict' in terms of the 'agenda' at all.

Presumably, those who honestly 'start with the Creator God and his ethical system' and accept 'that a sovereign Creator created and governs the field of biology and is not in a separate realm from God’s creation of morality' are still interested in the truth.

Unless we prejudge or second-guess God's Own Purposes, we are going to have to treat all medical disorders the same, from a moral point of view. If we insist on interpreting any of these conditions differently, we need some specific hermeneutical 'evidence'.

It seems to me that Gender identity Disorder is much the same as congenital heart defects, spina bifida, and cleft palates—they are medical conditions that in many cases require surgical intervention. Any other perspective requires evidence; even hermeneutical 'evidence'.

Exactly what part of any religion excludes the following 'hypothesis': God created human beings with the possibility of being born with congenital defects, like Gender Identity Disorder, for His own purposes? It seems to me that much the same argument is made in various religious contexts with respect to the other congenital defects.

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