Lui said:
I said that you IMPLY that you’re more well informed than the world’s leading experts, given that you so casually dismiss almost everything they say.
- Lui apparently thinks he can read my mind, that he could know that I "casually" dismiss what certain experts say. He doesn't stop to ask whether it took me a while to figure out what to do with their testimony. He doesn't inquire whether it was a struggle, whether it took me the years that it did take me, whether I encountered or thought of convincing counter-arguments that forced me to disbelieve their positions. Which is exactly what happened. I didn't start out as a Young-Earther, I was a hard agnostic/soft atheist who believed in evolution. Then I was a Christian who was only moderately informed in theology. Then I was fairly well-informed and an OEC/theistic evolutionist. Then I was wholly uncertain. I've only been YEC for about 2 1/2 years.
- Lui himself is guilty of precisely the same thing. Leading experts such as Alvin Plantinga, Cornelius Van Til, John Calvin, Alister McGrath, Thomas Aquinas, etc, all believe(d) in the God of the Bible. They are/were experts in their field - theology and the question of God's existence and identity. They are/were also much, much more intelligent men than Lui is. Yet here Lui "casually" dismisses them as wrong. My educated guess is that Lui believes he has encountered and made his own counter-arguments that are sufficient to overthrow these men's conclusion. Yet he calls ME out for disagreeing with experts.
- Experts are fallible humans also - do we all follow Bobby Fischer in his bizarre and near-psychotic anti-Semitism b/c he has a really high IQ and could kick all our butts in chess simultaneously?
- This "...constitutes an argument from authority, which according to Aristotle is the weakest kind of argument."
(We now remove tongue from cheek.)
- Is this really a question of being well-informed for me? Have I corrected these men in their understanding of the machinations of evolution? Not at all. Rather, I have discerned in their positions biases and more fundamental errors (ie, errors in their presuppositions) that have caused them to misinterpret the data that they have viewed. In the case of the question of evolution, they have set out, as I have said before, to take the equivalent of a 1,000,000-year-old auto accident, to disregard completely the testimony of the 100% trustworthy eyewitness who actually made the whole thing happen, and to send a forensics (CSI) team to the scene to dig around and find scattered pieces of car and glass, 1,000,000-year-old grooves and scratches, and not reconstruct but rather construct what happened in opposition to what the witness says he made happen.
