Who makes the bigger error? The young-Earth creationist or the naturalistic evolutionist?

Mysterious Jonathan writes this on his Facebook page:

Who makes the greater error, he/she who wrongly believes that the world is only 6-10 thousand years old, or he/she who wrongly believes the world is just the product of chance and necessity?

I wrote this: (slightly edited)

First, it’s important to be clear that the naturalist who affirms no designer is doing so for philosophical reasons, and not based on science.

Consider atheist Richard Lewontin: (and by “science” he means “naturalistic science”)

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our own a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, not matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin in New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28)

I think that the latter (the naturalist) makes the worse error. The age of universe makes almost no difference to the way we live our lives except in one respect: a young universe person thinks that the universe is designed, that there is a Designer who is knowable. The old universe naturalist thinks that the universe is not designed, that there is no Designer who is knowable.

Since theists and atheists alike agree that morality, free will, purpose, moral significance and moral accountability are impossible in an undesigned, materialistic universe, it is a much greater mistake to say that the universe is undesigned than to say that the universe is young.

Here’s an example:

“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. “
– Cornell University evolutionist William Provine, in a debate with Phillip E. Johnson
Source: http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm

Thinking this makes an enormous difference to the way that people live our lives. If, as theistic people believe, the Designer of the universe expects us to know him personally and be in a relationship with him, then the young universe person can meet the obligation with their false belief. But the old universe naturalist cannot meet that obligation with their belief.

The old universe naturalist is forever in the position of tweaking the science and speculating to avoid acknowledging the existence of the Designer. Not only must they speculate away the origin of the universe with an unobservable, untestable hyper universe, but they must speculate away the fine-tuning with an unobservable, untestable multiverse, and speculate away that Cambrian explosion with unobservable, untestable precursor organisms, and speculate away the origin of life with unobservable, untestable aliens who seeded the Earth with life at some unknown time in the past. And so on. This makes a mockery of science. It’s unscientific to allow a philosophical commitment – naturalism – to deform and distort what science tells us about the world. And the reason why naturalists do this is nothing more than the desire to seek pleasure without accountability. That’s what drives the delusion.

And that’s a worse mistake than the young universe person. Trust me – I have converted young universe people to old universe creationism and it is MUCH EASIER to get them to give up their anti-science views than to get the naturalist to give up their anti-science views. The former is not motivated by the desire to sin, but the latter is. The former has no lifestyle changes to make, the latter has to re-prioritize their entire life and give up their selfishness and pleasure-seeking. The anti-science deluding is the same in both cases, but the mistake of the young-Earther is much easier to fix than the naturalist, because the naturalist is motivated by selfishness to disbelieve in science.

Then someone replied and said that I was wrong when I said this:

Since theists and atheists alike agree that morality, free will, purpose, moral significance and moral accountability is impossible in an undesigned, materialistic universe, it is a much greater mistake to say that the universe is undesigned than that the universe is young.

So, I added these quotes:

Consider these prominent atheists:

The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

Then Jonathan said that I was generalizing about the motives of naturalists, so I wrote this:

Jonathan, I am generalizing for effect, it might be more like 51% to 99% who are driven by concerns like personal autonomy (sex) or professional concerns (promotions) or financial concerns (grants), ideological concerns (abortion, redefining marriage), concerns about intolerance (religious pluralism, postmodernism), etc.

I’m not making this up:

“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
(“The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937

This article gives a pretty good example of how naturalists have to resort to speculations in order to escape the good science that shows that the universe is designed.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument

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