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?
Those chickens that travel the middle-of-the-road end up getting run over.
"Darwinism has to stand totally in a separate domain from that if ID"
You have done two things here that are logically suspect.
You are conflating the tools and processes used in science to simplify experimentation with the formalized attempt to identify potentially intelligently created phenomena. Just because ID can use the same techniques as other science does not mean that the techniques are ID.
You attempt to create a syllogism using the above false premise.
Do you bother to critically examine the philosophies of the authors you quote?
...Speaking of embarrasing problems, not to mention behavior, care to explain to me just what your logical basis is for assuming the existence of a soul absent special creation?
Interesting.
Did your Priest / Pastor / Minister convince you that you're descended from dirt?
Maybe you can get your degree from them.
(BTW not 'descended from a chimp.' but rather :'I and chimpanzees share a common ancestor'.
They're your cousins)
Hey! Watch your language in front of the youngsters.
Did your Priest / Pastor / Minister convince you that you're descended from dirt? Maybe you can get your degree from them.
Yes....this response is very interesting in light of Patrick Henry's statement on reason, since,essentially, it is the view of science, and in particular, biology, that organic compounds such as carbohydrates, ammonia, quinones, amino acids, lipids, glyceraldehydes, and globulins, were synthesized from frozen protoplanetary nebulous dust.
It seems both our positions require a handful of dust, and arguably, a certain level of faith....although in your case, you can pretty much, quite literally, say that you're descended from dirt.
You should construct your pejorative arrows with a little more thought next time. Hopefully though, you'll decide just to be reasonable and not only show a little class, but display this enlightening command of reason I keep hearing about.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing.
I'm not sure that Ellis's assertion still holds in the face of recent observations. If the Milky Way were at the center of a spherically symmetric distribution of matter, we would observe the outward velocities of the distant galaxies to be slowing down over the lifetime of the universe, but that's not what we see. They're speeding up.
Furthermore, while the universe would be geometrically flat here in the Milky Way, it would not be at the largest scales, because the universe as we see it (i.e., our Hubble volume) is very close to its own black hole density. Just recently we have been able to measure the geometry of our universe on the largest scale, and it's exquisitely flat.
Finally, I know of no model that gives you both a spherically symmetric distribution of matter AND a cosmic microwave background with the properties we observe. That's an extremely difficult hurdle for the model to face, as the Big Bang model gives an incredibly detailed, quantitative prediction for the structure of the CMB, which is borne out by detailed measurements. The spherically symmetric model as to do at least as good a job of reproducing that before anyone is under any obligation to take it seriously.
But don't worry: I waive all of those objections ,because they don't affect the statement of mine you quoted. Even that spherically symmetric distribution, insofar as it matches a bare handful of the observational facts of the universe, conflicts irreconcilably with the cosmology of Genesis. My comment still stands.
Which would be incorrect.
Evolution will occur with or without a god. In that sense it's agnostic.
The Cosmic Egg (big-bang) theory, on the other hand, was proposed by a Jesuit priest, Georges Lemaître, to counter the prevailing belief of a steady-state universe.
A universe with a beginning (and presumably an end) was welcomed by many religious groups that felt that a eternal, infinite, always-was and always-will-be universe left no room for God.
It wasn't until 1948 when the work of Alpher, Gamow, and Herman showed that a god is irrelevant to making a such a universe. So the "big-bang" universe is also agnostic.
And hopefully, you might understand the argument first.
The point (that you missed) was that you learn chemistry from chemists, biology from biologists, and physics from physicists.
If you reject the teaching of the professor in his field, instead holding to a teaching of a religious leader, then maybe you ought to study for a theology degree.
I see that you are a creationist. That's your choice; fine with me. But to answer your question ... No, I don't care to explain to you. I no longer take the time for such futilities. I do, however, present information from time to time, which is available to everyone. That's all I can do for you.
"I don't know who your Alpher, Gamow, and Herman are but I reject their work (as I reject the work of the best minds in the 3rd Reich when they concluded that Jews were sub-human).
The implication in this is that those scientists and mathematicians are related to the scientists of the 3rd Reich and by some sort of twisted association in your mind are as evil as well.
Because you feel them to be evil, thus falsifying their science, this allows you to justify making the statement - 'I reject your reality and substitute my own'.
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