By that token, being an atheist today would be equally unfulfilling intellectually because intellectual honesty demands an explanation for the very existence of life in the first place.
Besides, contextually, that's not possible. Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker as a direct response to Paley's argument, and the entire point of the book is to prove that a designer isn't really necessary to explain the existence of life, but that the "blind" forces of nature are sufficient in an evolutionary context to explain how it came about. I believe his arguments are misconstrued as a result of his initial premise--that God could not exist except as a fantasy--but that is in fact his argument.
Far from being an answer to "everything that the theist points to God for," evolution through natural selection provided the answer to the one big, giant, glaring, obvious thing that the atheist had no answer for at that time.
Properly and narrowly defined, that's true. And strangely, I don't have a real problem with the theory of evolution, though having studied the issue, I don't believe that the evidence for it is nearly as strong as it's made out to be.
For example, Darwin himself put forth a falsifiability test for his theory: He was troubled by the lack of transitional fossils--that is, we see numerous fossils of one animal form and numerous of another, but not a smooth, continuous change over time. He supposed that this was due to the fact that paleantology was in its infancy in his day, and believed that if his theory were true, further digging would provide the smooth transitions.
Guess what? We're still lacking those transitions, causing many scientists to posit that evolution from one form to another takes place so quickly that it doesn't get captured in the fossil record. Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory designed not on the basis of the evidence, but to explain away a lack of evidence while retaining the evolutionary paradigm.
Now, do I deny that things change over time? Not at all; clearly, there are many animals that once existed that no longer do, and others that appear later in the fossil record than the first forms. Microevolution--evolution within a type--is a fact of life, proven by thousands of years of breeding dogs. Strangely enough, though, despite all our breeding, dogs are still dogs, and fruitflies are still fruitflies (the latter after thousands of generations).
Here is where we must separate, far more carefully than we do, the Theory of Evolution (an attempt to explain speciation) from the Religion of Evolution. The Theory of Evolution plainly admits that it has no solution for abiogenesis, for the Cambrian Explosion, for the lack of continuous change over time in the fossil record, no fossil evidence directly linking Man to other primates, etc. If that were all that was being taught in schools and shown on government-funded PBS specials, I don't think you'd hear nearly as much objection from my side of the issue.
However, what we do is blur the line between Theory and Religion. In the Religion of Evolution, the universe emerged spontaneously from the Big Bang, evolved without direction for billions of years, that life "evolved" from muck, and then evolved into all the modern forms. It goes further and speaks of the "evolution" of morality (which is to suggest that the "old" morality of all other religions has been superceded by its own "do as thou wilt").
I'm a youth minister, among my other duties. I recently had some of the kids in my group come to me, disturbed because they were taught in their science class that it had been proven that life could "evolve" spontaneously from the so-called primordial soup with just a strike of lightning. Fortunately, having done my homework, I could show them that they had been . . . misinformed . . . by their textbooks.
The fact that evolution on the one hand dodges the question of abiogenesis and on the other claims that life "evolved" into being (depending on which is more advantageous for the particular conversation) frankly bugs the heck out of me. I don't care if the classrooms teach ID per se, so long as they and the textbooks are frank in saying, "We have no idea how life came about," and explaining the current problems evolution has as a theory.
The fact that those on the evolutionist side of the debate demand that IDers and Creationists publish peer-reviewed research while making it impossible for anyone to do so (at least without sacrificing their reputations and careers) also bugs me. It's frankly hypocritical, and it actually retards scientific progress.
For example, Darwin himself put forth a falsifiability test for his theory: He was troubled by the lack of transitional fossils--that is, we see numerous fossils of one animal form and numerous of another, but not a smooth, continuous change over time. He supposed that this was due to the fact that paleantology was in its infancy in his day, and believed that if his theory were true, further digging would provide the smooth transitions.
Darwin also convincingly explained the reasons for the lack of fossils. p>The discovery of a random fossil is highly unlikely, a specific fossil, moreso, almost impossible. The likelihood of the discovery of a sequence of fossils, although not zero, is incredibly close to zero. However, even given that low likelihood, many sequences of transitional fossils have been found, some with relatively large gaps between the specimens and other sequences showing short but roughly gradual and more or less complete transitions (check bivalves). Unfortunately the short sequences can not show an evolution from one higher taxon to another, as this would require literally millions of fossils each of which is within the main species lineage.
"Guess what? We're still lacking those transitions, causing many scientists to posit that evolution from one form to another takes place so quickly that it doesn't get captured in the fossil record. Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory designed not on the basis of the evidence, but to explain away a lack of evidence while retaining the evolutionary paradigm.
Actually Punk Ek is simply an expansion of Darwin's gradualism which was not about the speed of evolution or even the consistancy of the speed, but about the stepwise accumulation of changes, and specifically targets the lack of smooth intraspecies evolution. Gould had no problem with the sequence of transitionals spanning higher taxa transitions. Most sequences of transitional fossils are collections of snapshots taken every few million years during the cumulative speciation that we as the irrepressible categorists we are, tend to place in separate classes. Those morphologically evidenced lineages proposed by the paleontologists that discover the fossils are reinforced by the linkages found in the genomes of extant species. For example, the link between artiodactyls and cetaceans is backed not just by the morphological evidence of fossil sequences but by the genomic evidence of a link between modern artiodactyls and modern whales.
What is missing, and what Gould and Lewontin were concerned with, is the lack of fossils that show the gradual stepwise change within the 'jumps' between fossils. We have significant DNA evidence that the morphological sequence is correct so Punk Ek is not necessary to 'prove' the cetacean-artiodactyl link. What it does explain is the reason some sequences of fossils are difficult to find, especially those from the distant past.
"Now, do I deny that things change over time? Not at all; clearly, there are many animals that once existed that no longer do, and others that appear later in the fossil record than the first forms. Microevolution--evolution within a type--is a fact of life, proven by thousands of years of breeding dogs. Strangely enough, though, despite all our breeding, dogs are still dogs, and fruitflies are still fruitflies (the latter after thousands of generations).
Yet if we ignore our observation of the gradual changes from a wolf to a Great Dane and from a wolf to a pug, we would surely consider them (Great Dane and Pug) to be different species. All of the changes in domestic dogs have been directed by us where weird jumps that could possibly result in dramatic changes to the species are eliminated (selected out). We not only speed up the morphological changes in Canis familiarus we restrict the development of new species from those same animals. We are a form of natural selection that is much narrower and constrained than what we observe in nature.
I've heard quite a few claim that dogs are still dogs so do not show evidence of evolutionary mechanisms in action, yet I have never heard any of those same people list off the mophological differences between the two most disparate sub-species and justify why they should be considered the same species. Are the morphological differences between a wolf and a Cheetah more dramatic than the differences between a Great Dane and a Pug?
As far as drosophilia is concerned, flies do not have 4 wings, they have two (Diptera). It can be convincingly argued that a 4 wing drosophilia is no longer a fruit fly but a member of Hymenoptera.
This is not said to claim that we have indeed artificially created a new member of Hymenoptera but to show that limiting observed evolution to that of the much misused and abused category of micro-evolution is an artificial and ill-founded construct.
By that token, being an atheist today would be equally unfulfilling intellectually because intellectual honesty demands an explanation for the very existence of life in the first place.
I think one can certainly be a fulfilled atheist, in the sense that Dawkins meant it, with the current state of knowledge about abiogenesis. Prior to Darwin, there was not even a theoretical foundation for an idea as to how the diversity of life arose. The equivalent is not the case regarding abiogensis today. Although there are many questions in this area of research (probably more questions than answers), the answers which we do have point the way towards an eventual understanding.
Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory designed not on the basis of the evidence, but to explain away a lack of evidence while retaining the evolutionary paradigm.
Punctuated equilibrium was the theoretical explanation for an observed phenomenon in the fossil record. It was based on evidence, and advanced the idea that an establish part of the evolutionary paradigm: allopatric speciation. Eldridge and Gould's original paper on punctuated equilibrium makes this perfectly clear. It was simply proposed as an alternative to phyletic gradualism.
Here is where we must separate, far more carefully than we do, the Theory of Evolution (an attempt to explain speciation) from the Religion of Evolution. The Theory of Evolution plainly admits that it has no solution for abiogenesis, for the Cambrian Explosion, for the lack of continuous change over time in the fossil record, no fossil evidence directly linking Man to other primates, etc. If that were all that was being taught in schools and shown on government-funded PBS specials, I don't think you'd hear nearly as much objection from my side of the issue.
What I see here is the religious community reacting to those portions of the theory for which they are 1) ill informed or 2) uncomfortable with because of the impact those parts have with their faith. I've noticed again and again on these threads that often times statements about evolution are made by evolution doubters and I know (even as a lay reader of evolutionary science) that the assumptions these people have based their arguments on are absolutely false. Not for nothing, but the things you think that "[t]he Theory of Evolution plainly admits that it has no solution for,"--the theory of evolution does have solutions for these things. (Of course, some of these solutions are only partial solutions.) Some people just don't accept or like them.
I think sometimes the problem is that they are looking for a different kind of answer, one that science can't give. Will we be able to identify the exact structure and composition of the first self-replicating entity which is the ultimate ancestor of all life on Earth? Doubtful. In fact, it's probably impossible to do so. That, however, doesn't mean abiogenesis didn't happen or make a religious explanation any more valid. It just means that the answers that science is able to give are not always the kind of answers that some people want.
For example, when I read someone arguing against evolution by pointing out the fact that fruit flies in a lab haven't evolved a higher taxon in a few thousand generations, I know that they don't really and truly understand evolution, the theory, and what it's about. There are times on these threads when I'm dumbfounded by posters who assert that the science of evolution is false, that these highly educated men and women are perpetrating a scam, but the posters don't know the difference between an ape and a monkey. That's astounding to me.
I'm a youth minister, among my other duties. I recently had some of the kids in my group come to me, disturbed because they were taught in their science class that it had been proven that life could "evolve" spontaneously from the so-called primordial soup with just a strike of lightning.
If students aren't being taught the science correctly, then the problem is with the teaching, not the science. Alternately, if these kids are being taught science properly, but are making unwarranted inferences, because of their faith is affecting them, then they need to have explained to them the limits of religious thought and the fact that sometimes religious beliefs do not conform with the natural world.
The fact that those on the evolutionist side of the debate demand that IDers and Creationists publish peer-reviewed research while making it impossible for anyone to do so (at least without sacrificing their reputations and careers) also bugs me. It's frankly hypocritical, and it actually retards scientific progress.
Not at all. It is part of the scientific process. Look, if there was any scientific validity to these ID or creationist theories, then having articles published following the normal protocols of peer review is the minimum that they need to do to have these things established as science. Because that's what science does, that's how it works. And if these theories can't stand up to scientific analysis, then they aren't science. You can no more expect science to embrace non-science than you can expect Christianity to embrace monotheism. The problem with ID and creationism is that they simply are not scientifically valid.
In the days since you and I used to swat this around, I noticed there's a standard template these conversations take. I'm curious to know what you think of it.
Then we can see how you do. I tend to disagree that the transitionals Darwin predicted 147 years ago have not turned up. I'd say he should be credited as being either a seer or the most incredibly lucky charlatan to ever publish a bad theory.
- Tap-Dancing Science-Denier declares that the fossil record lacks instances of things changing in an orderly series from some Thing A to Thing Z. As this kind of evidence is to be expected, the lack of it must weigh against evolution having happened. By the very statement of this objection we are invited to believe the Tap-Dancing Science-Denier would accept such evidence IF ONLY IT EXISTED but the thing is it doesn't exist.
- Someone who disagrees demonstrates many instances well known in the literature of fossil series intermediate in form and time between some Thing A and some Thing Z.
- The Tap-Dancer then declares fossil series evidence to be irrelevant. How do we know ... various things? The dates of the fossils? Whether fossil A lies exactly on the ancestral line of fossil B?
But wasn't the evidence valid when it was supposedly missing?
But first I'd like to know if you'd accept fossil evidence for transitionals IF ONLY SUCH EVIDECE EXISTED.