Posted on 07/22/2005 4:46:53 AM PDT by Nicholas Conradin
In a recent TCS essay ("Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate") I attacked what I regarded as the excesses of both sides of the evolution-creationism debate. There were angry responses in the mail and the blogosphere from both the creationist and the evolution sides, which pleased me, since there were clearly oxen on both sides that felt they had been gored, and caps in my piece that were felt to have, uncomfortably, fit. The angry evolutionists were especially interesting, as they often wound up admitting implicitly that their real agenda was atheism -- while denying that there was any social policy message in that agenda.
In the essay I did state flatly that the theory of evolution had been proved. I wanted it to be clear where I stood. Much of the mail I received protested about that statement. I hold to it, and hold to it not as my own opinion, but as a fact, like the existence of Australia, which is not my opinion but a fact. But I do know that there are many who sincerely, and given their range of knowledge, rationally, do not believe in the theory of evolution.
By the theory of evolution I mean the origination of new species from common ancestral forms by an iterated process of genetic mutation, natural selection, and hereditary transmission, whereby the frequencies of newly altered, repeated, and old genes and introns in a given lineage can cross ecological, structural, and behavioral thresholds that radically separate one species from another. In one sense, this can be summed up in a syllogism, which must be true if we make the basic and essential act of faith that logic itself is true: survivors survive. Given enough time, variation among the genes of individuals, variations in habitat in space and time, the process by which genes translate into proteins, tissues, and organs, and the thresholds that define biological species, all of which can be observationally verified, the principle of the "survivors survive" syllogism must bring about a huge branching of different kinds of life.
The above summary statement of the theory will not convince opponents, who will be able to pick philosophical holes in it (which holes have been sewn up by countless scientists and philosophers in the last 150 years). But what opponents of evolution do not perhaps realize is what they are up against in terms of sheer human and civilizational achievement based on the evolutionary paradigm. This is not a proof of evolution, any more than the four-thousand year history of the survival of the Jewish people is a proof of Judaism or the worldwide congregation of Christianity is a proof of that religion; but it is an indication of the kind of scholarship that would be needed to refute it.
There are at least 50 major journals in the academic field of biology. All accept without question the theory of evolution as I outlined it above. They are not attempting even to prove the theory, any more than math journals attempt to prove that the sum of the internal angles of a plane triangle is 180 degrees, or engineering journals revisit the existence of gravity. But they would be nonsense without the theory of evolution, just as engineering would be nonsense without gravity. Each of those journals is published about four times a year; several of them have been in existence for over a hundred years. Each journal contains at least ten articles of about 2-20 pages, and each of those articles represents several months' or years' work by a team of trained biologists whose most compelling material and moral interest would be to disprove the work of all their predecessors and to make an immortal name by doing so. The work of the biological teams is required to be backed up by exhaustive experiment and observation, together with exact statistical analysis of the results. There is a continuous process of search through all these articles by trained reviewers looking for discrepancies among them and demanding new experimental work to resolve them. Since every one of these articles relies on the consistency and truth of the theory of evolution, every one of them adds implicitly to the veracity of the theory. By my calculation, then, opponents of evolution must find a way of matching and disproving, experiment by experiment, observation by observation, and calculation by calculation, at least two million pages of closely reasoned scientific text, representing roughly two million man-years of expert research and perhaps trillions of dollars of training, salaries, equipment, and infrastructure.
But the task of the opponent does not end here. For biology is not the only field for which the theory of evolution is an essential foundation. Geology, physical anthropology, agricultural science, environmental science, much of chemistry, some areas of physics (e.g. protein folding) and even disciplines such as climatology and oceanography (which rely on the evolutionary history of the planet in its calculations about the composition of the atmosphere and oceans), are at least partially founded on evolution. Most important of all for our immediate welfare, medicine is almost impossible as a research discipline without evolutionary theory. So perhaps the opponent must also throw in another 4 million pages, four million man-years, and ten trillion dollars -- and be prepared to swallow the billions of human deaths that might follow the abandonment of the foundations of medical, mining, environmental, agricultural, and climatological knowledge.
If what is at stake is a proposition in the theology of biblical interpretation that is not shared by a large minority or possibly a majority of Christians and Jews, perhaps it might be more prudent to check the accuracy of the theology, which, after all, is a human creation even if scripture itself is conceded to be divinely inspired. Might not God's intentions be revealed better in the actual history and process of nature, his creative expression, than in the discrepancies we might hope to find in its self-consistency and coherent development?
Did God create probability waves?
The lineage that resulted in gibbons (Hylobates) split off from the common ancestor about 18 million years ago. The orangutan lineage (Pongo) split away at about 14 million years ago, followed by the gorilla lineage about 7 million years ago. The human and chimp (Pan) lineages diverged from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
Modern day chimps are no less removed from our most recent common ancestor than are modern humans.
You are not descended from some primate and what you believe doesn't change the facts.
Because God creates. Man doesn't "create". Man uses to "create" what God already gave to us for a resource. Calculus is just a measuring tool - it is not an explanation of how the earth started or life.
But this doesn't answer mlc9852's question as to why other scientific theories don't raise objections concerning God. What about meteorology, for example. The Bible specifically says, in the book of Amos, that "God creates the wind." The verb is a form of the same used in Genesis, which creationist fundamentalists sometimes insist only refers to creation ex nihilo.
If God "creates" the wind, why (by your own professed standards) is it not a denial of God to claim that wind is created by thermodynamically formed convection cells and other such strictly naturalistic mechanisms?
You do realize that your mommy and daddy are primates, don't you?
Well said. The left elevates its politics to that of an irrational religion, the Creationists reduce their religion to that of a pitiful politics. They both are the heads and tails of the same coin.
Oh, never mind. You probably slept through that day of class too..
The facts do not support your assertion, my friend. Belief doesn't enter into it.
I'm wondering more about the rock in your head...
Then go find a child to help you answer these questions:
1. Is a quiescent anthrax spore in a vacuum bottle alive or dead?
2. Is a human body in DHCA (Deep Hypothermic Cardiac Arrest) for two hours alive or dead? They have no heartbeat, no brain activity, the blood has been drained from their body and is in a bucket on the floor, and their body has been cooled to extreme lows. Their cells are undergoing the kind of progressive damage seen in refrigerated meat.
3. If your answer to question #2 is "alive", how about the same human body after three weeks?
4. If your answer to question#3 is "dead", then at what moment or event did they instantaneously cross the line from "alive" to "dead", and how is that instant determined?
5. Is a million-year-old pollen grain alive or dead?
6. Sperm in liquid nitrogen?
7. Frozen embryos?
8. Dehydrated brine shrimp eggs?
9. Henrietta Lacks, whose body was buried in in the cemetery across the street from her family's tobacco farm in Virginia in 1951?
10. A crystallized Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV)?
11. A TMV decomposed into its constituent parts?
12. The viral parts in question#11 decomposed into their constituent molecules?
13. The molecules in question#12 decomposed into their constituent atoms?
14. The atoms, molecules, or parts in questions#11-13 reassembled back into a virus?
In your answer for each of these questions, please state the specific reasons for your "alive" or your "dead" answer in the particular case. Make sure your criteria are entirely consistent in all cases, and are specific enough to allow them to be applied to new cases I have not yet mentioned without giving answers which fly in the face of the common sense assessment for those additional cases.
If indeed, "even a child" knows the difference, these should not be difficult questions for you to answer consistently, in an objective manner, and in a way that doesn't produce nonsense results when applied to further examples.
Thanks in advance.
I see even darker motivations here. tBw is apparently saying that "we already know that God created life, so we need not research this area, and anyone conducting such research is therefore a Godless atheist." Fortunately for mankind, such prejudices have not come to dominate, or we'd still believe demons caused disease.
Very clever and original reversal.
Seriously, I mean no disrespect. On the most pressing matters we're on the same side.
Facts are in the mind of the beholder, my friend.
I would have if you had been my teacher. But I can make up my own mind.
Just like beauty is in the eye of the beer holder. ;^)
Exactly! lol
Their faith is extremely brittle, and subconsciouly they realize this.
No. Creationists fear that society will persecute them for their beliefs, like what's happening in Canada.
Since they don't know much about science, anyone can come along and convince them that evolution is atheist religion. Then they find there's books and pamphlets for sale.
Could God do evil?
If he chose to, sure.
No, there are some things God can't do because they are logical impossibilities
Then he's not actually omnipotent. You'll have to find a more accurate word to use.
- that is not the omnipotent God embraced by classical Theists, unless your a Calvinist.
A God which actually can't do some thing is not, in fact, omnipotent. Perhaps you could settle for "very powerful".
The moment God does evil is the moment he ceases to be "God."
And why would that be? Are you saying that God could not decide to start a new covenant of some sort? What a curious notion.
Since God is infinite and eternal, and there is a point at which he ceases to be God, then it stands to reason that he was never really "God" to begin with.....and the wheel goes 'round.
You have yet to establish that deciding to commit evil would cause him to cease to exist.
But in in case, you're talking in circles -- you've now embraced the notion of omnipotence which is not omnipotent, God who is not "God", and the end of the infinite and eternal. You've now equalled Alice's record of what she can believe before breakfast.
There is no force in the universe that is beyond God's power because they are creations of God; He has absolute power over them.
Oh, so he *is* omnipotent, even though he's not omnitpotent. Got it.
The proposition that an omnipotent being would create a force that would act in a manner unbeknowst to Him would imply that an omniscient God chose to no longer be omniscient and thus no longer "God."
I must have missed the part where God is required to always exercise his omniscient abilities, even when he prefers not to.
It would be the equivelant of a man raising a gun in a crowded area, closing his eyes, firing, and then hoping for the best.
No it wouldn't, but you keep believing that if you want.
What theist worth his salt would claim a belief in such a deity?
I don't think that any would believe in *your* odd version, certainly, but that's not the kind *I* was talkinga bout.
Think carefully about your claims.
Oh, *I* have...
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