Evolution of creationism: Pseudoscience doesn't stand up to natural selection

Daytona Beach News-Journal ^ | 29 November 2004 | Editorial (unsigned)

[PatrickHenry]

In a poll released last week, two-thirds of Americans said they wanted to see creationism taught to public-school science pupils alongside evolution. Thirty-seven percent said they wanted to see creationism taught instead of evolution.

So why shouldn't majority rule? That's democracy, right?

Wrong. Science isn't a matter of votes -- or beliefs. It's a system of verifiable facts, an approach that must be preserved and fought for if American pupils are going to get the kind of education they need to complete in an increasingly global techno-economy.

Unfortunately, the debate over evolution and creationism is back, with a spiffy new look and a mass of plausible-sounding talking points, traveling under the seemingly secular name of "intelligent design."

This "theory" doesn't spend much time pondering which intelligence did the designing. Instead, it backwards-engineers its way into a complicated rationale, capitalizing on a few biological oddities to "prove" life could not have evolved by natural selection.

On the strength of this redesigned premise -- what Wired Magazine dubbed "creationism in a lab coat" -- school districts across the country are being bombarded by activists seeking to have their version given equal footing with established evolutionary theory in biology textbooks. School boards in Ohio, Georgia and most recently Dover, Pa., have all succumbed.

There's no problem with letting pupils know that debate exists over the origin of man, along with other animal and plant life. But peddling junk science in the name of "furthering the discussion" won't help their search for knowledge. Instead, pupils should be given a framework for understanding the gaps in evidence and credibility between the two camps.

A lot of the confusion springs from use of the word "theory" itself. Used in science, it signifies a maxim that is believed to be true, but has not been directly observed. Since evolution takes place over millions of years, it would be inaccurate to say that man has directly observed it -- but it is reasonable to say that evolution is thoroughly supported by a vast weight of scientific evidence and research.

That's not to say it's irrefutable. Some day, scientists may find enough evidence to mount a credible challenge to evolutionary theory -- in fact, some of Charles Darwin's original suppositions have been successfully challenged.

But that day has not come. As a theory, intelligent design is not ready to steal, or even share, the spotlight, and it's unfair to burden children with pseudoscience to further an agenda that is more political than academic.

[KTpig]

"The Bible is a collection of different books from different time periods cobbled together all at once."

The Bible was inspired by God and was written over thousands of years by many men. This makes the unity of its message profound. It is written in many different literary styles, this is confusing to those who don't take the time to understand this important message to us from our Creator.

"you can produce striped animals by having the parents mate while looking at a specific pattern."

Do you consider yourself an animal and did you give that pattern thing a try?

[Right Wing Professor]

Which is to say, we have an innate sense of how design might have caused this or that biological feature, and it often makes a lot of intuitive sense to think that way.

Can you give me another example of an 'intuitive sense' which has scientific validity, but yet can't be expressed algorithmically?

And when you're done, explain to me why the putative designer so often made completely independent designs for functionally very similar parts in different groups of animals, while simultaneously using similar designs for functionally very different parts within the same group.

[the invisib1e hand]

the action of natural selection doesn't rule out --- in fact, argues for --- intelligent design.

[Dimensio]

If creationism is being posed as being an alternate view on the subject, then obviously the subject is on origins -- which is actually what is taught in schools when they talk about evolution.

He quoted Lewis on a "Creator". Evolution does not actually state that there is no "Creator", so I have no idea why he brought the quote up. Of course, there's also that CS Lewis wasn't a biologist, and thus really has no authority on the subject of evolution.

[r9etb]

Creationism, OTOH, does imply perfection (unless you believe in a God who isn't perfect).

You've got a double strawman going there. First, Creationism and ID are not equivalent. Second, ID does not imply perfection.

[UseYourHead]

> Then again, maybe Hitler was right, if you tell a lie often enough people will believe it Thus explaining the Creationists.

No reason to resort to DU tactics - unless...

[KTpig]

"I have enjoyed every last one.(haven't seen any of them refuted either)"

Good point, they prefew to name call.

[Mogollon]

According to the evolutionists, the universe and life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and has no purpose.

[newgeezer]

Perhaps you wish to deny the basical sperical nature of Mars, too?

Again, I have no quarrel with natural selection. But, can you show me a mutation that established a species? How about ones that established a genus, a family, an order, a class, and a phylum?

I'm always dismayed to see that there are self-professed Conservatives who will believe such utter rubbish.

"Utter rubbish." How sad. Look all around you at the order in nature, and tell us all how there is no Designer. Since you're so wise, go ahead and thrust your middle finger in the air at Him.

Romans 1
¹⁸The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. ²¹For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²²Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

Don't be the fool. Acknowledge your Creator. Your time is very short.

[Dimensio]

The Bible was inspired by God and was written over thousands of years by many men.

So you assert. Can you demonstrate the existence of this "God" and show that this "God" was indeed responsible for the creation of the Bible?

Do you consider yourself an animal and did you give that pattern thing a try?

I am an animal, and the "pattern" thing is patently absurd. Are you actually saying that the image that an animal views during mating will directly affect the physical appearance of the offspring?

[Dimensio]

According to the evolutionists, the universe and life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and has no purpose.

Wrong.

If your understanding of the theory of evolution is so abysmal, no wonder you don't accept it.

[blackeagle]

bump

[Dimensio]

Okay. You said "They're already teaching one such story as if it were fact (evolution). Might as well put the other theory on the table, too."

That still implies a duality that does not really exist.

[orionblamblam]

> No reason to resort to DU tactics

I keep telling the Creationists that, but they never listen.

[GarySpFc]

The following was written by a friend of mine and I have permission to post it.

Why Kansas Catholics Opposed The Teaching of Evolution By Jack Cashill, Ph.D.

Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs.

For the record, Pope John Paul II and the U.S. Bishops have no objection to certain theories of evolution as long as they allow for God's creation of the world and the special creation of man. This is a shrewd posture on the part of the Pope as it allows for the Church to adapt to new scientific discoveries without a challenge to the faith.

Unfortunately, the Church's position does not wash with evolutionary biologists of any repute or ambition. They may avoid conflict with the Vatican by either ignoring or misquoting the Pope, but in fact, Catholic teaching is antithetical to their own, and they know it. A little background here is in order. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This elegant and timely work made two basic claims: One is that living things experience what Darwin called "variations" or what we call "mutations"--genetic changes that occur randomly. The second is that a process he called "natural selection" preserves favorable variations and rejects harmful ones.

The best evidence Darwin could cite for this theory was the breeding of domestic animals. These obvious changes within a species--called microevolution--no one could deny then, and no one denies today, certainly not the Church, nor the much maligned Kansas Board of Education.

The question Darwin had to ask himself--the tough question--was whether this theory could account for macroevolution, the presumed bridge from one species to another and the mechanism he thought responsible for the vast diversity of life.

Darwin and his philosophical heirs answer an unequivocal "Yes." Richard Dawkins, today's most influential evolutionist, describes natural selection as "a blind, unconscious, automatic process" that is "the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life."

That's a quote. The explanation. All life. What room does that leave for, well, say, God? Not much.

"In the evolutionary pattern of thought," said Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, "there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved."

No need. No room. And Huxley's sentiment is the rule, not the exception. The renowned biologist Stephen Jay Gould praises Darwinism as "a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution." Darwin made it possible," boasts Richard Dawkins, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

These are their own words. As to the inescapable ramifications of Darwinism, distinguished Cornell University Professor Will Provine, evolutionary biologist and neo-Darwinian, happily cites the impossibility of either free will or life after death.

The larger philosophy is often called naturalism, nature is all that there is; or materialism, matter is all that there is. In its most extreme forms, scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the terror of Nazi eugenics and the tyranny of communism. Wrote Marx to Engels of Darwin's The Origin of Species, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

Pope John Paul II has preached often against materialism and specifically so in an evolutionary context. Aware of this, the Catholics at the Topeka hearings objected not only to the undeniable connection between today's science establishment and the eugenics movement, but also to the implicit materialism of the proposed science standards themselves.

For all its harsh consequences, materialism would present a real challenge to the faith only if its own particular creation myth, Darwinism, was irrefutable. But Darwinism is hardly that. There is, after all, no evidence of existing transitional species as Darwin presumed there ought to be. None. There's no hard evidence of the same in the fossil record. Most species haven't changed at all. The major animal groups did not emerge gradually as Darwin predicted, but they exploded on to the scene. Nor did they die out gradually as Darwin said they would. Those that vanished, vanished in a geological heartbeat.

It gets worse. In one of his bolder moments, Darwin said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Darwin knew nothing of the electron microscope and cellular biology. His champion, Richard Dawkins, knows a lot. As Dawkins notes, the nucleus of each cell contains more information than all 30 volumes of the encyclopedia Brittanica put together, complex, specific and perfectly ordered.

Richard Dawkins imagines the cell as a Xerox machine, capable, he says, "of copying its own blueprints," but "not capable of springing spontaneously into existence." So picture Dawkins on the brink of infinity, pumping what Darwin called "secretions" from his barely evolved brain, trying desperately to figure how this this wonderfully complex machine came to be. His best guess? No joke: "sheer, unadulterated, miraculous luck." It must have slopped itself together, he surmises, from some imagined chemical soup.

Luck indeed, it's a task scientists have never been able to duplicate in the lab. Not to be outdone, Nobel laureate Frances Crick argues that these first primitive life forms might have come to earth, hang on, in a spaceship sent by a dying alien civilization.

In truth, neither Dawkins nor Crick have a clue where these first cells came from. Neither do their peers. Indeed, when biochemist Michael Behe searched the scientific journals looking for a Darwinian explanation, he found instead "an eerie and complete silence."

Said Darwin , "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent." One wonders how he would feel about utterly whimsical "additions" like spaceships or luck.

Still, America's public school teachers can present this goofiness in class as science but can not even address the rational possibility of a willful, intelligent creation of life. And the editorialists, even the Catholic ones, cheer on this kind of teaching, fearing to be cast among the anti-Darwinian few whom Dawkins calls the "ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked."

Ironically, the loud, spiteful resistance from the establishment bodes well for the future. It is a sign not of confidence but of confusion. It may even portend a genuine shift in the paradigm.

Richard Dawkins himself admits that "the beauty and elegance of biological design" gives us "the illusion of design and planning." But trapped by a lifetime of scornful pride and self-congratulation, he will abandon his weary materialism no more eagerly than the Soviets abandoned theirs.

The very Catholic (9 children) Michael Behe is not so trapped. "Over the past four decades," he writes in the ground breaking book, Darwin's Black Box, "modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell." "The result," he adds, "is a loud, piercing cry of DESIGN." In Behe's opinion, this observation is "as momentous as the observation that the earth goes round the sun."

Try as they might, the science establishment and their friends in the media cannot suppress this kind of news forever.

Jack Cashill, Ph.D., has written and produced an hour long documentary, The Triumph of Design and The Demise of Darwin, in collaboration with Phillip Johnson. Jack is a Fullbright scholar and a regional Emmy Award winner.

[mikeus_maximus]

Non sequitur comparison. It's not guilt by association when those items were championed by mainstream macroevolution apologists for years as "scientific proof" of their theory.

To make the analogy work, you'd have to say "religious people are trying to prove the validity of their moral doctrine by using the deviance of Catholic pedaphiles." Which is of course not the case.

[NJ_gent]

"People are sick and tired of the pseudo science of evolution because it doesn't even square with the laws of science."

Really? A trip down memory lane to the Scientific Method and the definition of "theory" contained therein seems to prove otherwise.

"NONE of it has been proven"

It has not been "proven" because the theory itself holds that evolution takes place over a period of millions of years, and we haven't been observing for millions of years. The fossil record does lend credence to the theory of evolution, but it is of course incomplete (perfect preservation of all species over millions of years is unlikely given the forces of nature that act to destroy things like flesh and bone).

"It is also NO coincidence that the evolutionary "leaders: are ALL atheists."

Odd, the Pope has said that evolution is not necessarily incompatible with the Catholic faith. I guess that just brings back the old question (which I never remember being meant as a question): is the Pope Catholic?

"Then again, maybe Hitler"

Nice sneaky mention of Hitler when talking about people who believe in the theory of Evolution.

"that is egotistical people that refuse to recognize God and His infinite power."

Funny - I've always chuckled at the fact that creationists seem to think it's beyond God's power to have set up something like Evolution. If God's power is infinite, then the possibility exists that God created the forces that drive evolution, in which case, the theory of Evolution could indeed be just about right on the money. :-)

[narby]

the action of natural selection doesn't rule out --- in fact, argues for --- intelligent design.

So who designed the "intelligent designer"?

[Dimensio]

Why don't you guys stop harassing members by calling them liars?

Sorry. What would you prefer I call people who lie?

I can cite a number of instances of scientists being dishonest and lying about findings if you'd like.

Okay. Do so.

I can cite a number of instances of scientists being dishonest and lying about findings if you'd like.

Cite a lie and I'll address it. For example, you could bring up the Piltdown example (you know, that "find" that was later debunked when examined by credible biologists who saw that it clearly did not fit the evolutionary model), a case of scientists wanting to establish a name for themselves.

[narby]

According to the evolutionists, the universe and life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and has no purpose.

Evolution theory does not cover the issues you bring up.