Posted on 08/21/2009 10:59:11 AM PDT by big black dog
Preposterous. Evolution means change in the gene pool of a population over time, not what creationists want it to mean.
“I’ve given this quite a bit of thought and have come up with the following qualities a belief system must have to be a religion:”
Marxists like to redefine words in order to push towards their political objectives as well.
EPIC FAIL.
Of course evolution is a RELIGION!
The premise is there is no god.
Even Christians, er Humanists believe in evolution. Those that claim to believe in Evolution aren’t Christians since the premise is there is NO GOD and they totally deny His teachings in the Bible.
Religion is an invention of man.
Evolution is religion only if you redefine religion.
If you'd bothered to read your own blitherings, you would have noticed that you just shot down your own assertion.
A religious non-religion! What fun we can have in the thread!
Evidently, you didn’t read far enough
**
Evolution has happenings that cannot in principle ever be seen or examined by scientific principles and practices. This is because biological evolution happened long before man appeared. So did stellar evolution and the evolution of religion. The macroevolutionary changes demanded by evolution cannot be observed, nor can evolution from ape to man.
The lack of transitionals was brought to everyone’s attention in a recent edition of Time magazine.
The more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton’s laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. “What Darwin described in the Origin of Species,” observes Queen’s University paleontologist Narbonne, “was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods and that’s where all the action is.”(9)
This article is not the only one to bring attention to some of the inadequacies of evolutionist theory. Francis Hitching has tested current evolutionary theory and found it not compelling. He finds creationism also lacking, although he finds that everything found in nature fits creationist theories perfectly. Hitching wishes to put in its place a science of new discovery.
The new biology is looking afresh at living things — at their shapes, their patterns, their dynamics and their relationships. If, after more than a century, natural selection has been tested and found wanting, and if we are left once again with a sense of ignorance about origins, Darwin would not have minded. Science is a voyage of discovery, and beyond each horizon there is another.(10)
Sometimes evolutionists make frank admissions that evolution is extrapolation from micro to macro changes, as Hitching has done. Apparently what we do not understand with our science is how macroevolutionary changes occurred and we do not have the ability to understand them. They are beyond our science and hence the supposition the changes happened via natural processes is as much an article of faith as anything Christianity can offer.
The lack of evidence for evolution is most apparent in the change from apes to mankind - especially concerning the adoption of language. John Klotz lists several experiments done with apes, experiments meant to demonstrate that they could learn and master language.(11) In the 1960s there were attempts to teach chimpanzees. One chimpanzee learned to make and recognize 125 signs. A chimp named Koko is reported to have learned more than 400 signs. Many psychologists and anthropologists recognize that these apes may have learned these signs as a mechanism for getting rewards from the humans training them. If the ape does what the human tries to teach it, the ape will get rewarded. Thus, the actions by the apes are ones of stimulus-response without comprehending the language.
Robin Dunbar, evolutionist, after listing experiments with teaching apes to speak, comes to roughly the same conclusions as Klotz.
However, despite all the effort devoted over the past three decades to training apes to use language, none of them has progressed convincingly beyond the simple two and three-word sentences typical of two-year-old human children. (12)
Here is a clear example of the possibility of proving or disproving evolution. If Christianity would have to subject itself to evidence this scant, atheists would pronounce it false on that basis. They don’t do this to evolution, of course, because evolution is much more than science. It is religion in the disguise of science.
Clearly evolution is unfalsifiable because there are so many events that make up the concept of evolution that one can always select what might “prove” evolution and discard what might damage faith in this belief. This is not the end of it, though. Evolution sports as evidence, micro changes such as the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. But when evidence of changes are lacking, it supposes the changes were large as in the suppositions of punctured equilibrium. The evidence is lacking because evolution often leaves no evidence, so the argument goes. Sometime we find that evolution is so crafty and wise that it can create the most intricate organs, such as the eye. This is why Dawkins has dubbed evolution “the blind watchmaker,” an admission that evolution can create biological organs as intricate as a watch. When we find, however, that terrible chaotic things happen, as in a bus that crashes and kills children, Richard Dawkins argues that this, too, is an example of evolution. (13) Evolution is capable of creating and doing anything, but such capabilities mark the dividing line between science and pseudoscience.
This sort of unfalsifiability in evolution disturbs those who look at it with philosophical and skeptical eyes, but it does not disturb the true believers. That is because evolution, to them, is not something to be proven or disproven. It’s idea of common ancestry and descent with modification, not to mention higher organizing capabilities, is so appealing that it cannot be false. Evolution, like Christianity, looks for proof of it to give evidence for a faith in events that can never be proven or perceived. Gaps in evolution can always be explained away as gaps in our scientific knowledge so that evolution can never be disproven. It, instead, takes on a religion with the need for faith in what we cannot see.
To summarize, evolution satisfies my criteria for the definition of religion. It adopts a paradigm, or narrative, to explain life’s origins, its obligations, the origin of religion, and our eventual destiny and salvation. The events that make up evolutionist theory are so numerous that it cannot in principle in any way be falsified using our scientific knowledge. Evolution is believed for emotional and philosophical reasons, by faith. True believers can always pick and choose what events confirm belief in evolution and what events do not count as confirmation. The emotional crutch evolution creates causes its adherents to be very biased against other views of reality.
The "evolution of religion" happened long before man appeared?
That's interesting. Has science figured out how life got started?
Not yet.
Well, it also means believing in Common Descent and, by default, abiogenesis. Not religion? Have the guy who was there and can verify this call us at 1-800-GIVEUSABREAK
God created evolution.
It’s possible. Man has always been in search of answers to the unknown. If that search leads us to God in his many forms and influences, isn’t that all that matters?
Charles Darwin has rightly been described as the “Newton of biology”:
Yes, that certainly sounds like Julian Huxley.
What makes Newton so influential is not the fact that he has a logically coherent model of the universe. What makes him influenial and relevant is the fact that we can PREDICT events with a fairly high degree of accuracy.
By including relativity and quantum mechanics with Newtonian insights — even if mutually exclusive in some areas — we can both PREdict and RETROdict physical events to 12 decimal places or more.
There is nothing even remotely approaching this in Darwinian evolution: Darwinists cannot predict things with accuracy; nor can they say with any sort of confidence what definitely did occur in the past. What they do is GUESS. The many gaps in the narrative they tell are neatly filled in by pre-fabricated elements in Darwinist theory (”struggle to survive”; “natural selection”; “survival of the fittest”; etc.).
Darwinian evolution may or may not be likened to a religion; it is, however, exactly similar to a Creation Myth, in which the historically indispensible notion of an intelligent creator is replaced with “Chance” plus “Lots of Time” plus “Pseudo-Explanatory-Laws like Natural Selection.”
Until he recanted, Karl Popper — who had always believed in evolution, and was an atheist — claimed that Darwinian evolution was a “metaphysical research programme”, and NOT a true science. His recanting did nothing to convince anyone that he had suddenly proven to himself that evolution lived up to his own requirements of “science.”
Thanks for posting this. I’ve come to view the evolutionary hypothesis as a combination of mythology and science. When I poke fun at it, it is the mythology side of it, but I almost always get accused of being unscientific. I think having the mythology so thoroughly homogenized with the science in a particular field of study is bound to retard scientific inquiry and advances.
To the darwinians I suggest some exposure to Aristotle, who rightly summarized that all there is, can be explained by the following irreducible basis of causality: [matter, form, agent, end]. You can’t ignore one or more of these causes and get away with it, not if your goal is to knowledge or wisdom. If your goal is other, like dissing the Creator, well, why not just admit it?
“Evolution means change in the gene pool of a population over time, not what creationists want it to mean.” [excerpt]You have demonstrated just how beautiful Evolution really is.
It's not my definition of evolution. It's the standard definition that everyone learns in biology class (and then promptly forgets apparently).
I don't agree with your interpretation of "over time," but even if I did, I am not sure what your point is.
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