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?
Your inability to actually address the questions is duly noted.
Heck, your inability to give a grammatically coherent response is duly noted as well.
Testy, testy.
I was just having a little fun with ya.
I was simply pointing out that the definition of life is dependent upon the object in question.
The definition of life for a virus is different than life for a human.
And He very well could have made the world in six days, and it still could be consistent with evolution. Let me know if you want to know how this could be. It's a pretty involved explanation. (It has to do with relativity and big bang cosmology, and it is difficult to comprehend since it's one of those results of science that flies in the face of intuition and common sense.)
BTW, I thought it was in GENESIS that it states that God created the world in six days, not Exodus.
It is absolutely not a niggling little detail. When you say "humans are descended from chimps" you are led directly to the question of why then aren't new "races" of humans being born to chimps today? You also mislead people into thinking that the common ancestor of both humans and modern chimps was some extinct creature that was "chimplike", rather than one having both features similar to those of modern chimps and modern humans. It is actually from the study of such "niggling little details" that you handwave away that much of the mountainous volume of evidence for evolution is found.
Refer to post #380.
The difference is now that Prof. Protsch's work has been shown (by evolutionists, BTW, not creationists) to be fraudulent, you won't see his work being used as evidence in favor of evolution. When a creationists "work" is shown to be fraudulent (also usually by evolutionists, not creationists), you will usually see it pop up again and again in these debates in support of creationism.
ape is correct, since modern chimps and modern humans are both classified as apes. Monkey and chimp are not correct classifications for the latest common ancestor of humans and chimps. Monkeys diverged much earlier and chimps were one branch that diverged from this ancestor, so calling it a chimp is not correct. The devil is in the details, and it does nothing for your credibility or for that of anyone else to continue to use incorrect terminology after it's been pointed out to them that they have been using incorrect terms.
Speaking strictly in terms of what the theory of evolution actually says, and not the opinions and beliefs espoused by some individual evolutionists, where exactly is the assertion that there is no intelligent designer in the theory of evolution? Much is made, erroneously, of the formulation that evolution occurs via RANDOM mutation and natural selection, but the mutations need not be random (and very well may not be even in the absence of a designer; nonrandom biochemical and biophysical processes might in principle be used to predict what mutations are likely to occur.) Randomness of mutations is not an important or inherent feature of the theory of evolution. Evolution works just as well with nonrandom mutations which undergo natural selection. Heck, with an intelligent enough designer, the selection need not even be natural; a designer might very well tailor the environment to favor the variants that he wants to favor. In either case, evolution as an explanation of the diversity of life still holds.
Again, it wasn't as if the scientific community knew that Protsch's work was fraudulent and then waited 30 years to punish him. Nobody, (other than Protsch, and possibly some of the people working with him and complicit in the fraud) knew that his work was fraudulent. If someone is murdered and 30 years later a murderer is caught and punished, is this evidence that the criminal justice system doesn't work? Hopefully you see the difference here. Harrub's "work' is known by all to be fraudulent. Yet creationists still cite it in debates with evolutionists.
First of all, there have been some pre-cambrian fossils found, so the universal common ancestry of cambrian creatures does have some physical evidence to fall back on.
However, even lacking such physical evidence for common ancestry of cambrian flora and fauna, we do have physical evidence for the common ancestry of a large number of organisms that existed in the time after the cambrian era. If we can show that the evidence points toward the common ancestry of these organisms, we can extrapolate backward and conclude that the cambrian organisms also share a common ancestor. Such extrapolation is done all the time in science, no more so in evolution than in any other area of science. For example, we have determined the existence and the size of planets orbiting stars other than our own in the absence of a direct observation of such planets simply by observing the motion of the star itself.
How can we do so? Namely by extrapolating Newton's law of gravity to objects that we have never observed to obey it. We are fairly confident that, within the proper scope (ie. we're not too near a black hole and bodies don't have relative speeds approaching c), that Newton's law is valid for stars that are tens of light years away. We are confident because of the large amount of evidence we do have that Newton's law is valid in our local area of the universe. We extrapolate to unobserved territory with confidence when it comes to gravity, so why not do the same with evolution? Does this mean that our extrapolation is necessarily valid? No, but if you deny the ability of evolutionary biologists to extrapolate their observations, you should deny the ability of ALL scientists to do so, and science immediately becomes much less useful, and probably not worth pursuing.
Point taken, and my apologies for questioning. However, it's usually within the context of Genesis that the argument for a six day creation is made.
For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Maybe you should actually read that chapter. This is the chapter where God is giving them the 10 commandments, not where he is creating the heavens and the earth. He is telling the creation story to them again for reference so that they will understand why he is commanding them to rest on the seventh day.
I've seen some bad bible misquotes on threads like these, but never one quite like yours. Wow.
Because you claimed that the story of creation is in Exodus. While Moses references the story of creation in Exodus to make a point in regards to the Commandment that requires the people to rest on the sabbath, the book of Exodus is not the source of the story.
If I write something that uses a reference to provide evidence for a point that I am trying to make, is it proper to then quote my quote of a reference as a reference as if it were the original source? You said 'the creation story in Exodus'. The creation story is not from Exodus, even though part of it is repeated in Exodus to emphasize a point.
I would like to make a correction. I actually have seen worse misquotes. That part of my statement was an exaggeration, and I apologize for that. Sometimes I need to actually read what I am about to post one last time before posting.
That's an easy one. The egg came first. Dinosaurs (and a host of other critters) were laying eggs long before chickens showed up.
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