Bob's right. It is a good question.
Unfortunately, Mr. Pastore's arguments are weak.
He starts with an argument of appeal to authority: "Aristotle, Aquinas," etc.-but doesn't offer any of what they had to say on the subject, only that they made things difficult for him. At this point, as a scientist, it's worth pointing out that the "father of the scientific method," Aristotle, was guilty of many simple mistakes, like the observation that male humans have more teeth than females, or that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. While it's impossible to discount the importance and meaning of his work, he's hardly an "authority" worthy of appeal...
He then proceeds to delineate his "four big bangs." His lack of understanding of the first one is not surprising: people here on MT often have expressed their difficulty in grasping the idea of "nothing." That he makes this an either/or proposition in terms of a deity is a basic mistake-just as it is with the other three "big bangs," that demonstrate less and less understanding as he progresses.The idea that it all just "banged" isn't what the "big bang" theory really says at all, and we can see evidence of transitional stages in the universe's development through astrology-by looking at objects and events that are further away from us, we are literally looking further and further back in time toward the initiating events of the universe, and seeing evidence of the transitions that Mr. Pastore claims do not exist in his understanding of the theory.
I'll leave his muddled understanding of biology to a biologist like Empty Hands to really dissect-I'll just point oput that he's wrong:
artificial life was created in the laboratory two years ago. Of course, it's entirely possible that he filmed this segment before this took place.....in any case, he's wrong.
His "anthropological" big bang could simply be attributed to evolution, and usually is-he needs to take a look at some of the work being done in evolutionary anthropology.
His psychological big bang also could be attributed to evolution. Funnily enough, his argument that animals don't do art is, again, simply wrong: ele
phants do art. Who is Mr. Pastore to make humankind the exclusive arbiters of beauty and truth on the planet? What does he know of whales and their-undeniably beautiful-song? What truths, given the chance, could they tell us?
HE closes by saying that we're confronted with a choice: "faith" in "four big bangs," or "faith in a Creator," when, in fact, there really doesn't have to be a choice at all. One can believe in a Creator
and accept current scientific theory-the two are neither mutually exclusive nor set in stone-even the believer has doubt:
]
Mark 9:24 Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I
do believe;
help me overcome my unbelief!"
