How Much Longer Can They Sell Darwinism?

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 1/4/09 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

All across the country, archeologists, paleontologists and biologists are taking part in what is perhaps the greatest example of political correctness in history – their adherence to Darwinism and their attempts to ostracize any scientist who does not agree with them. In doing so, they are not only ignoring the vast buildup of recent scientific discoveries that seriously undermines the basics of Darwinism, but they are also participating, due to politically correctness, in a belief system that indirectly resulted in the deaths of millions of people – those slaughtered by the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Maos, the Pol Pots and others who took their cue from Darwinism’s tenets.

[schaef21]

****I think I’ve explained this before. Most Christian churches teach something called “theistic evolutionism,” which basically says, “evolution is God’s plan.”****

I really don’t care what “most Christian churches” teach. A lot of denominations have strayed from the truth of scripture. If they are saying, as you infer, that “evolution is God’s plan” then they are claiming to know the mind of God.

Scripture tells us how God created. I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. I don’t come at that blindly, I come at that by studying the historical accuracy (verified by archaeology) and the prophetic accuracy (verified by history) of the Bible.

Any Christian denomination that professes theistic evolution is aberrant.

I hit your link to Wikipedia and looked at their “Giraffes” page. There is a problem with it. The section marked “Taxonomy and Evolution” didn’t start out with the words “Once Upon a Time”.

****Now, as for your delightful giraffes, remember, according to science, giraffes began to evolve around 50 million years ago, starting as a deer-like creature, so we are talking about tens of millions of generations of proto-giraffes, each slightly different from the one before.****

A few questions on the above. Was there anybody around 50 million years ago to observe the original “deer-like” creature evolving into the next “proto-giraffe”? Did they record it somewhere in antiquity so we can access it?

Look, BroJoe.....

Paleontologists can make bones sing any song they want. There is no way of knowing any of that, other than conjecture based on a predetermined evolutionary paradigm.

If we didn’t have rats, squirrels and gophers around today but we had some fossils any paleontologist worth his salt could make the argument that it was an evolutionary series.

Spare your breath on the geological column. They put together evolutionary series all the time that violate the column. One example is the horse.

This is from an article written by Jonathan Sarfati who holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry:

As the biologist Heribert-Nilsson said, ‘The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks,’ and the famous paleontologist Niles Eldredge called the textbook picture ‘lamentable’ and ‘a classical case of paleontologic museology.’ As shown in a detailed thesis by Walter Barnhart, the horse ‘series’ is an interpretation of the data. He documents how different pictures of horse evolution were drawn by different evolutionists from the same data, as the concept of evolution itself ‘evolved.’

This especially applies to reconstructing the animals from fossil skeletons, which are usually very incomplete. The evolutionist Gerald Kerkut wrote:

‘It takes a great deal of reading to find out for any particular genus just how complete the various parts of the body are and how much in the illustrated figures is due to clever reconstruction. The early papers were always careful to indicate by dotted lines or lack of shading the precise limits of the reconstructions, but later authors are not so careful.’

Informed evolutionists now realize that the picture, even in their own framework, is not a straight line at all. While they still believe in horse evolution, the modern view of the horse fossil record is much more jumpy and ‘bushy.’

Yet horse evolution is a staple in our textbooks.....why?

****So, in answer to your question, did these features all evolve at the same time? Now of course not, why would you imagine they did?****

BECAUSE THEY WOULD HAVE TO!!!!

Please put aside your “I believe everything science tells me” hat for a minute and wear the one that says “logic” on it. The point of my description of the giraffe is that there are four parts of the giraffe’s morphology that would have had to evolve at the exact same time. I’ll give you a trillion years if you want them, it doesn’t matter.

Here’s a cut and paste of part of what I wrote:

In other words, the morphology of the giraffe requires that:

1. A jackhammer heart
2. A 6 foot long neck
3. Valves in the arteries that close when he’s bending (except the last one) and open when he’s standing.
4. A sponge under his brain

all be present at the same time or he’s dead meat.

It logically follows that these pieces all have to be present at the same time....you can not slowly evolve one, then the other, then a few million years later another. If they are not all present at the same time the species goes extinct.

Logic would dictate that the Giraffe was created. That’s not to say that there aren’t some variations within the species....there most certainly are. It is to say that there is no way it could have evolved. The odds against a random process producing all four of those elements by happenstance and all at the same time defies logic.

There are many examples of species that couldn’t have evolved....mussels, woodpeckers....a personal favorite of mine is the bombardier beetle who mixes chemicals in a combustion tube, causing them to violently react and explode boiling hot gas through a mini-”cannon” that he can aim into the face of a predator.

How many chemicals do you figure he went through (blowing himself up each time.....oh wait a minute, that would make him extinct) before he found the right chemicals? And how did he get the mechanism to manufacture those chemicals? And how did he keep the chemicals separate so they wouldn’t blow up before they got into the combustion chamber? And how was that combustion chamber able to withstand the heat of the chemical compound? And once they were in there, what good did they do him without the “mini-cannon”? And what good was the mini-cannon if he could not aim it? And here’s a great philosophical question....how did he even know he could do that once all the pieces were in place?

Man....what a can of worms. You’d have to have great faith to believe that all came together by random process and that the species didn’t kill itself off.

[schaef21]

****But I said the geological column shows evolution from primitive to more advanced. In other posts, I’ve explained that we never find elephants mixed in with dinosaurs, or dinosaurs in Precambrian rocks.****

The only place the geological column actually exists is in textbooks. Rock layers that are said to be “millions” of years old sometimes have polystrate fossils that immediately prove that to be bunk. Tree trunks, as an example, have been found going through multiples of rock layers that supposedly took thousands/millions of years to lay down.

Wouldn’t the trees have rotted away first? Just askin’.

Geology is stuck with their Uniformitarianism philosophy that will not allow that Catastrophies are the best explanation for what we see. As an example, we observed, at Mt. St. Helens in 1980, nature doing in a few days what science has been telling us takes millions of years....canyons, rock layers....it’s extremely interesting...and we observed it, you know, like in real time where nobody could put their spin on it to make it say what they think it ought to say.

****DNA analysis shows that virtually all species share much in common with every other species genetically. And evolution tells us that the more similar the DNAs, the more recent was the split in species.****

DNA similarity is not an argument either way...I’ve made this point before. Similar DNA would indicate design just as it could common ancestry.

****This importantly implies that much basic structure of our DNA was in place back before life began the Precambrian “explosion.” To me, that is an awesome thought.****

It wasn’t a “Precambrian explosion” it was the Cambrian Explosion...and since you brought it up, here’s what it was:

From Zoologist Ariel Roth:

“The Cambrian explosion is not just a case of all the major animal phyla appearing at about the same place in the geologic column. It is also a situation of no ancestors to suggest how they might have evolved.”

Huh? No Ancestors?

From Time Magazine article, “When Life Exploded”, Dec. 1995:

“In a bust of creativity like nothing seen before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom………..Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant in geologic time all around the world. What could possibly have powered such a radical advance?”

From David Berlinski’s book “A Tour of Calculus”:

“There is no question that such gaps exist. A big gap appears at the beginning of the Cambrian explosion, over 500 million years ago, when great numbers of new species suddenly appeared in the fossil record.”

Suddenly appeared? What happened to that Simple to Complex deal you were talking about?

Look, BroJoe...do yourself a favor and instead of taking the word of a monolithic science cabal unwilling to go against the orthodoxy...check some of these things out for yourself.

You may indeed still come down on the same side of the fence...in fact you probably will...but you’ll be a whole lot more savvy and it might even poke a few holes in your belief system.

[schaef21]

****For a scientific theory to be confirmed, it must predict something which can be verified, and one of the most important predictions of the evolution theory is that the geological column will show fossils of increasing complexity, from most ancient to modern.****

As mentioned before, try reading something besides Eugenie Scott.

Even evolutionists, caught in a weak moment, will admit that the geologic column does not show what you say it does:

Stephen J. Gould, from an article in Natural History magazine, Feb. 1984...

“I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling facet of the fossil record”

Tom Kemp, from an article in New Scientist Magazine, Dec. 1985:

“In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be ‘wrong’. A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well it would, wouldn’t it?

Here’s my take, BroJoe....sometimes they use the fossils to date the rocks and sometimes they use the rocks to date the fossils....it depends on which one is more convenient.

If you’d like to discuss the methods used to date the rocks or the fossils, let’s have at it. In fact, consider this question:

The volume of ice in a glass of water is twice as much as the volume of water. How long did it take from the time the glass was filled until now to reach the current state?

Is it possible to answer that question without more information? Obviously not.

Here’s another one. Potassium decaying to Argon is one of the commonly used dating methods, so lets see if we can solve this problem:

Black rock was examined that had been formed as a result of lava flow from a volcanic eruption. There is twice as much Potassium as there is Argon in the sample. How long did it take to reach the current state?

It’s really the same question, isn’t it. You need more information to answer it. In this example however, since science doesn’t have it, they will go ahead and assume the following:

The starting volume of potassium
The starting volume of argon (usually assumed to be zero)
Decay rate is constant (they can’t know that...argon, as an example, is a gas and can diffuse.)
Nothing has been added or subtracted from the sample.

These are all assumptions that have to be made....you can’t date a sample without these assumptions...because that information is not available to them empirically.

****I’ve said it this way: you will not find elephants mixed with dinosaurs, or dinosaurs in Precambrian rocks — not ever. And, so far as I know, that is an undisputed fact.

Note this carefully, schaef21 — if that prediction of evolution theory were ever proved untrue, it would completely overturn the biological sciences as we know them. But to my knowledge, the prediction has never even been challenged, much less proved wrong.****

Not only is it not undisputed, it’s got more holes than a 10 lb. block of swiss cheese. I suggest you do some more reading on it.....would you like some suggestions?

[schaef21]

****Schaef21, if we agree on that much, then the rest of this discussion is a very friendly debate, imho. ;-)****

Do I take that to mean that I’m no longer considered a liar?

[schaef21]

****Take, for example, the word “species.” It is a totally arbitrary definition, where the line between species is usually drawn at the ability to successfully interbreed. So we consider a horse and a donkey are two different species, because their offspring — a mule — cannot reproduce.****

Since most species are asexual, I reject this definition of species. Although you are right about one thing. It is totally arbitrary and changes between disciplines...entomologists will call just about anything a new species.

****But to your point here: micro-evolution verses macro-evolution. Scientists say there is no difference — that macro-evolution is nothing more than micro-evolution continued on and on for millions of generations.****

They have to say that because they have no evidence of macroevolution other than forensically putting their interpretation on fossils that can just as easily be(and in fact are) intrepreted differently. Worldview constitutes interpretation and I’ll say that is the case on my side of the argument as well. The evidence matches what scripture tells me about “created kinds”. As I’ve said before, I believe scripture to be inerrant.

****To me this all seems obvious. Why not to you?****

I fail to see your argument here. My paradigm would explain this just as well as yours....as with your DNA argument, it is not proof either way.

****Finally, on “removing God from the equasion,” I’ve said before, by definition that’s what science is and does. And it has been that way since ancient times.****

That’s a false statement. Notice I didn’t call you a liar. Go back and research this and you’ll find that you are mistaken.

I’m glad to see that you’ve put away the rancor and at least are discussing these subjects rationally. I appeal to you to look at some of these constructs from a standpoint of logic rather than taking the word of the science orthodoxy. You might be surprised at the conclusions you come to.

[BroJoeK]

"But that is hardly a declaration that Christian philosophy is not embedded in our founding experiences and documents."

It sounds like we agree on this subject. ;-)

I think Adams and Jefferson are both considered Unitarians with Deistic leanings. Hamilton & Madison fall into that same category.

Washington was a sincere Christian, a leader in his church, but also a Mason, which means he had very good relationships with Jews, and even on occasion attended Roman Catholic services. He was not in any sense doctrinaire or orthodox in his beliefs.

Benjamin Franklin, of course, was your preeminent arch-typical scientific American. He literally gave money to help build every new church in Philadelphia, including a Synagogue. His funeral was attended by the ministers and congregations of every denomination. He was also a self-acknowledged sinner, who worked his entire life to overcome temptations. ;-)

These are absolutely men after my own heart -- to me they define what it means to be "American."

[BroJoeK]

"When someone starts off by declaring that he’s going to “straighten” me out, a smiley face doesn’t make it all better."

If I didn't think I might "straighten you out," I wouldn't waste my time here. It's obvious to me that you are confused, disoriented and very angry -- that's why you put as much effort into insulting me as into your silly arguments.

Indeed, you used the term "alpha male" as if you yourself resent being challenged in that role. Well, sorry pal, but I'll warn you to control your anger, least you end up like Coyoteman -- banned for misbehavior. ;-)

Richard Dawkins: “The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no” (emphasis mine).

YHAOS: "In response, you run away and hide, excusing your behavior on the shibboleth “personal opinion.”

Your real problem is, you can't learn anything -- I've repeated the facts here over and over again, and yet nothing sinks into your thick skull, does it? Well, pay attention this time, I'll repeat it yet again:

BY DEFINITION, "science" deals ONLY with the physical, material natural world, not with the supernatural or metaphysical. So, if you ask a scientist a scientific question about God, he must NECESSARILY say that scientifically, by definition, "my answer is no."

This is not a problem, it is not a surprise -- it's a fact. So get used to it, and get over it!

Now if you angrily resent the fact that scientists occasionally hold news conferences where they pronounce their personal opinions on non-scientific subjects, then you might consider that EVER DAY, many thousands of ministers hold forth in public, on the radio, TV, in publications and the Internet their theological views that these scientists are full on nonsense.

So I don't think the voice of religion is being stifled in any way shape or form.

[BroJoeK]

"I thought I was carrying on a conversation with a fellow FReeper. I should have known I was talking with a Barney Frank who will use anything to political advantage. Oh well, the monkey never learns. "

I would call this a pure insult, without any serious argument, and would hope it makes you a candidate for banning. Watch yourself there, fellow.

[BroJoeK]

"It seems to me (see para. 3 of the Preamble) that John Adams definitely thought we are a nation "under God." The Massachusetts Constitution was written under His "auspices" — while invoking His Power to sustain the government the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts created, in ratifying Adams' magnificent handiwork."

We seem to be intensely agreeing with each other, on this at least.

As to whether John Adams eventually became a Congregationalist-Trinitarian, or a Unitarian or in some sense Deistic, I can only go by what the scholars say, and they all seem to say "Unitarian-Deistic." But, of course, if you can quote someone who argues differently, I'd be interested to learn that.

[BroJoeK]

BroJoeK:"”Again, I'm doubtful if you understand what you're really arguing against.”

YHAOS: "More smoke. I know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what bothers you."

BroJoeK: ”Of course I understand your concerns”

YHAOS: "You understand nothing about me. You dare not understand anything about me."

Sorry, but I see what passes for your argument as confused, disoriented, angry and insulting -- in short, the responses of a troll, worthy of banning for lack of serious content, if for no other reason.

[BroJoeK]

"BroJoeK, it seems you have started with a conclusion about Adams, and are trying to fit evidence (from Wiki?????) into it to make your case.

"Remember, it was you who brought up the issue of the difference between how people are characterized and how they are in actuality.

"If you can cite me actual words from John Adams himself that he repudiated Christ and the Holy Spirit, I would consider that as dispositive of the matter. Short of that, I'm not willing to "speculate." "

A little googling can produce a lot of quotes. You might begin here:

John Adams quotes against religion

Or, go back to my original link, and read this:

John Adams religion

"John and Abigail Adams were active members of the First Parish Church in Quincy, which was already unitarian in doctrine by 1753.

"Although she did not sign the membership book (John did), she attended the church, supported it, and showed active concern and care for its ministry. She is a celebrated figure in her congregation's tradition.

"Abigail's theology is clearly stated in her correspondence. Writing to her son, John Quincy Adams, on May 5, 1816, she said, "I acknowledge myself a unitarian -- Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father." "There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three."

Now, just consider that Abigail Adams was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, this shows the whole family had moved a long way from it's roots, I'd say.

Do you disagree?

[YHAOS]

”Indeed, you used the term "alpha male" as if you yourself resent being challenged in that role. Well, sorry pal, but I'll warn you to control your anger, least you end up like Coyoteman -- banned for misbehavior. ;-)”

LOL! I’ll give you this: you’ve more brass than a marching band. If you find my behavior objectionable then hit the abuse button. It’s not your place to issue warnings or dictate actions. Leave that to the moderators. It’s beginning to dawn on you that you’re in over your head, I think. Is it that you’re looking for a way out, and your solution is to imitate ’yoteman and exit playing the martyr?

”I've repeated the facts here over and over again . . .”

You state the same talking points repeatedly. When your arguments are refuted, you don’t know anything better than to restate them again. You’re a one-load chamber and when your shot proves a dud, you don’t know what to do next. So you’re left with nothing but to re-chamber and again fire a dud.

By the way, when a scientist is asked a scientific question about God, since he is equipped (by choice) with nothing but a materialistic methodology, as a scientist he must necessarily answer, “I don’t know."

”Now if you angrily . . .”

Yada, yada, yada. As I predicted: great bellowing clouds of smoke and deny, deny, deny.

”So I don't think the voice of religion is being stifled in any way shape or form.”

? Context?

[YHAOS]

"Watch yourself there, fellow."

Still trying to play the Alpha Male. As I said, you're not a moderator.

[YHAOS]

". . . the responses of a troll, worthy of banning for lack of serious content"

Go back to "pounding sand." You're no better an analyst than you are a mod.

[BroJoeK]

"Would you publish something if it cost you your cushy tenured job making 6 figures with no chance (other than moral terpitude) of ever getting fired?

"A little off the point but is a big part of what we are discussing:

"ID theory and Creation are two different things. ID doesn’t put forth that God did it....just that since biological systems appear to be designed (and just about every scientist will say that they do), it is a legitimate basis for inquiry. As far as ID is concerned it could be Aliens or Goober the Trained Creator Dog. They just want to investigate design.

"Creationists, like myself, go further and get more specific.

"The God of the Bible created all things just as He tells us He did in the Bible."

You make points here that I've already answered many times, but the answers don't seem to be sinking in, do they?

Do you not understand the difference between a personal opinion or religious faith (i.e., "I believe in God"), and a scientific finding (i.e., "the earth rotates in about 24 hours")? The latter involves physics the former metaphysics.

If someone's scientific research results somehow "proves" a tenet of "Intelligent Design," that's science -- but how could ANY such "proof" ever consist of more than the statement: "since I don't understand it, it must be Intelligent Design." Sorry, but I can't see any serious scientist accepting such arguments. Not without more concrete evidence.

As for your Richard von Sternberg:

"The issue of the Proceedings in which the Meyer article appears was to be Sternberg's last before stepping down, having resigned in October 2003.

"Sternberg's decision to publish Meyer's paper and the method by which it was done prompted widespread controversy, ultimately resulting in the journal's publisher deeming the paper inappropriate for publication on the grounds that its subject matter represented a significant departure from the journal's normal content and stating that it did not meet the scientific standards of the journal;

"Sternberg handled the review process entirely on his own, without the involvement of an associate editor, in contradiction of typical editorial practice.

"They stated that Sternberg went outside the usual review procedures to allow Meyer's article to be published,[11] and that the paper was published "without the prior knowledge of the council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, or associate editors."

schaef:"As far as ID is concerned it could be Aliens or Goober the Trained Creator Dog. They just want to investigate design."

Do you want to explain just who, exactly, is preventing precisely whom from scientifically "investigating" the idea of Intelligent Design? Who is it that wants to do "research" that's prevented from, and how are they being prevented? Who exactly has some scientific results supporting "Intelligent Design" which cannot find the light of day?

[BroJoeK]

BroJoeK:"****Obviously religiously motivated****

schaef21:"This is obviously garbage. Many secular scientists are casting doubts and asking questions. Google David Berlinski (just one example), who has no religious ax to grind and see what he says.

On your David Berlinski", here's what Eugenie Scott says about him:

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education described Berlinski's arguments in The Deniable Darwin as:[11]

". . . The content of David Berlinski's article does not differ from more traditional creation-science material, though his tone is more genteel and his writing a lot more literate. . . .

"But true to the creation-science genre, his approach consists of constructing strawmen, then knocking them down with misinterpreted, faulty, or nonexistent data as well as carefully se-lected quotations from evolutionary scientists. . . ."

As for "casting doubts and asking questions," I'd say that's what scientists are supposed to do -- it's the beginning of the scientific method. Next they design experiments intended to answer their scientific questions. So, what experiments do you suppose Berliner has conducted?

[BroJoeK]

"Logic would dictate that the Giraffe was created. That’s not to say that there aren’t some variations within the species....there most certainly are. It is to say that there is no way it could have evolved. The odds against a random process producing all four of those elements by happenstance and all at the same time defies logic."

No it doesn't, not in the least. There's no reason at all why these features couldn't have developed, little by little, over time, in the millions of years during which fossils show "proto-giraffs" were relatively small.

Of course, I would agree that only when all of the pieces you describe were finally in place could giraffs begin to grow to their present size. And, according to the fossil record, that happend around a million years ago.

But here's what seem most important to me: your argument is to reject all of the physical evidence, and ask me instead to believe your non-evidence.

Sorry, pal, but that just makes no sense.

[BroJoeK]

"Wouldn’t the trees have rotted away first? Just askin’."

If you travel through certain states out west, you can see fossilized trees laying on the ground. A fossilized tree will last as long as any other fossil. And if it was exposed for any time length (such as those we see out west), and later re-covered with sediments, then it might well extend over more than one geological level.

[BroJoeK]

"Paleontologists can make bones sing any song they want. There is no way of knowing any of that, other than conjecture based on a predetermined evolutionary paradigm."

What you here call "conjecture," a scientist would call "hypothesis." A hypothesis which has been confirmed scientifically is called a "theory," and that's what evolution is -- a theory.

"Scientific confirmation" comes from the hypothesis' ability to predict certain verifiable observations. By the way, a "verified observation" is, by definition, a fact.

One of the verified observations predicted by the theory of evolution is the sequence of fossils found in the geological column. In my simplified version, I've said: elephants are never found with dinosaurs, and dinosaurs never found in Precambrian rocks.

Of course, you can call this "conjecture" all you want, but when a hypothesis can predict facts, science calls it a theory.

[BroJoeK]

"“The Cambrian explosion is not just a case of all the major animal phyla appearing at about the same place in the geologic column. It is also a situation of no ancestors to suggest how they might have evolved.”

Huh? No Ancestors?"

Actually, there was a pre-Cambrian explosion of life, of which there is much evidence in the fossil record, including some ancestors which you claim don't exist. Indeed the earliest evidences of life are found in rocks dated to billions of years old.

Cambrian Explosion