Ohio's Critical Analysis of Evolution

Critical Evaluation of Evolution ^ | March 2004 | Ohio State Board of Education

[Elsie]

What I believe and what I can invoke in scientific research are two different things.

Head Doctors have a word for this condition....

---

---

---

---

Deuteronomy 32:36-41
 36.  The LORD will judge his people and have compassion on his servants when he sees their strength is gone and no one is left, slave or free.
 37.  He will say: "Now where are their gods, the rock they took refuge in,
 38.  the gods who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings? Let them rise up to help you! Let them give you shelter!
 39.  "See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
 40.  I lift my hand to heaven and declare: As surely as I live forever,
 41.  when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me.

 

 

2 Samuel 7:22
   "How great you are, O Sovereign LORD! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.

 

 

1 Chronicles 17:20-24
 20.  "There is no one like you, O LORD, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.
 21.  And who is like your people Israel--the one nation on earth whose God went out to redeem a people for himself, and to make a name for yourself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt?
 22.  You made your people Israel your very own forever, and you, O LORD, have become their God.
 23.  "And now, LORD, let the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house be established forever. Do as you promised,
 24.  so that it will be established and that your name will be great forever. Then men will say, `The LORD Almighty, the God over Israel, is Israel's God!' And the house of your servant David will be established before you.

 

 

Psalms 14:1a
   The fool  says in his heart, "There is no God." 

 

 

Isaiah 44:6
   "This is what the LORD says-- Israel's King and Redeemer, the LORD Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.

 

 

Isaiah 45:5-6

 5.  I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me,
 6.  so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the LORD, and there is no other.

 

 

Isaiah 45:21

  Declare what is to be, present it-- let them take counsel together. Who foretold this long ago, who declared it from the distant past? Was it not I, the LORD? And there is no God apart from me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none but me.

 

 

1 Corinthians 8:4-6
 4.  So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one.
 5.  For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), 
 6.  yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

 

 

Mark 12:32-34
 32.  "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him.
 33.  To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
 34.  When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

[Elsie]

What is the evidence outside of the the tendency of creationists to marvel at the world and simply tell themselves,

    "God must have done this."

 

As opposed to the tendency of Evolutionists to gaze at the world and simply tell themselves,

    "Chance must have done this."

[VadeRetro]

As long as "infinity" remains an abstract rather than concrete (i.e., with evidence) concept, it is not rational to invoke it scientific research.

Infinities should not turn up as real physical quantities. A death-knell for 19th-century classical physics sounded when a once perfectly good thermodynamics model was shown to predict that hot objects should radiate an infinite spectrum of energy. This was an obviously wrong prediction. People checked the work over and over. The math was fine. The model had been working up to then. For all that, it was wrong, as Max Planck finally showed in 1900.

In this century, Richard Feynman's Nobel was for "renormalizing" the equations of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) so that they did not generate infinities. I don't remember much more than that about it, but my point is that infinity is more of a math concept than a physics one. If you start getting infinities in physics, you start wondering why you haven't been noticing them in the world around you.

[js1138]

A momentary lapse on my part. It is interesting that the subject of the "propaganda teaching" was physics, not biology. A rather clear demonstration that biology should not be singled out for lessons in critical thinking.

I posted this article because it demonstrates my contention that those who are upset about evolution are, in fact, opposed to all of science, and all of the methods and assumptions of science.

If you read the whole article you will note that the author regrets that there isn't time in any science class to build the conceptual framework and assemble all the facts necessary to prove current scientific ideas from the ground up. Education necessarily requires trust.

I took a little heat from "my side" for admitting that I was rebellious in school. I think most conservatives have had a few times when they didn't accept or trust what was being taught in school. I think, however, that the issues being discussed on the crevo threads go far deeper than whether teachers are liberal or whether a curriculum is biased toward some political objective.

The ideas being argued here are whether there is any point in studying the world and trusting our senses. Most FReepers are pretty much on record as finding the "will of Allah" school of thought ludicrous. Most of us believe that our actions have real effects in the world, and that what we see and touch and hear is real. Most of us believe it is our responsibility to feed and clothe our children, and not treat them as lilies of the field. Most of us believe in medicine, and believe that we should use our minds to protect and maintain our bodies.

These things may seem terribly elementary and obvious, but they are in fact hotly contested by lots of people. Historically, there have been people of all faiths who objected to medicine because it attempted to bypass the will of god. There is a rather large segment of Americans who actively promote this belief.

On a rather more narrow point, there was for many years, an objection to allowing women to have anesthesia during childbirth, specifically because the Bible declared that women should suffer in childbirth.

I mention all these things because they are all of the same fabric. They assert that there is some higher view that has priority over knowledge acquired by mucking about in mere dirt. This higher view asserts that discoveries in all sciences must be subordinate to a literal interpretation of a religious text.

The immediate issue that starts these discussions is generally the topic of evolution, but that is just the skin of the onion. Evolution is intertwined with physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and every other physical science. They all interlock in their methodologies and assumptions. There is no special exemption in biology for evolution. There are no get out of jail free cards issued to those who study evolution. It's all part of the same reasoning process that exists in all of science.

Which is why we continue to get absurd arguments about the age of the earth, the speed of light, and so forth. You can't limit the debate to whether you are a monkey's nephew. You accept science or you don't

It would be lovely if everyone could spend their whole life accumulating the entire database of science, every detail of every observation and every experiment. But this is ridiculous. You either trust the accumulated authority of hundreds of years, or you don't. You either teach science as it is or you don't teach science.

[PatrickHenry]

Consider this link for your archive: Yahoo's encyclopedia entry for "Evolution". Not bad as an introductory link for some of the creos we get around here. The copyright stuff at the bottom says it's from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press.

[Junior]

As opposed to the tendency of Evolutionists to gaze at the world and simply tell themselves, "Chance must have done this."

Which is not something evolutionists say. Indeed, it is the quest to understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to life-as-we-know-it that was the genesis of the theory of evolution (which has nothing to do with chance, by the way).

[PatrickHenry]

... it is the quest to understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to life-as-we-know-it that was the genesis of the theory of evolution ...

One of the most difficult lessons I've had to learn in these threads is that there really are people -- many of them -- who see the OJ jury as role models. When presented with facts, they won't look at them. When they have no choice but to look, they won't see them. When the facts are both visible and impossible to ignore, they won't connect them. When the connections are explained, they reject the explanations.

[Junior]

In regards to their personal dogmas: "If the facts don't fit, they're full of ****!"

[whattajoke]

As opposed to the tendency of Evolutionists to gaze at the world and simply tell themselves, "Chance must have done this."

As one with an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology BS, I have never told myself that. I, too, marvel at the world and it's beautiful intracacies and interplay. It IS wondrous and complicated and endlessly fascinating. However, your misguided ideas of how "evolutionists" (thank you, thank you thank you for not referring to "us" as "Darwinists") think is only damaging in your own head.

[frgoff]

-In science, the theory with the MOST supporting evidence wins.-

This is simply not true. A theory which cannot make valid predictions is ABANDONED (ether as a medium of propagation for light). Another theory does NOT need to be immediately available to take its place.

The lesson describes a valid problem with a theory. The theory makes a PREDICTION that SHOULD be OBSERVABLE or REPRODUCIBLE and ISN'T. This same situation is what discredited cold fusion.

The failure to look at EVIDENCE is a charge constantly leveled at creationists. I find it interesting that supporters of evolution suffer from it, too.

A good experimental scientist never tries to prove a theory right, he tries to prove it wrong. You can prove a theory right a thousand times and all you get is it's probably true. Prove it wrong once, and you've made a major scientific advancement.

Honest evolutionary scientists should be doing everything they can to prove evolution wrong so that they can find the flaws in the theory and tighten it up. The fact that they pretend flaws don't exist and criticize anyone who points them out is very telling.

[Fester Chugabrew]

What is the evidence outside of the the tendency of creationists to marvel at the world and simply tell themselves, "God must have done this."

The existence of consciousness, intelligence, and design coupled with the inability to replicate the amount of the same present in the observed universe. Isn't that enough?

How do you arrive at this conclusion? This is belief rooted only in religious dogma.

Hogwash. It it a common fact available to common sense apart from any religious dogma at all.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Because it is useful in mathematics. However, it doesn't exist in nature.

If you do not understand that abstract concepts are intertwined with nature, and that they are essential for collecting and sorting data, how are you ever going to make a good scientist?

[balrog666]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

[frgoff]

So in the absense of a time machine, we'll just have to concede that evolution is wrong.

We don't need a time machine. This is another common misconception.

If evolution is a gradual, steady-state process, we should be able to look around us and see it occuring everywhere right now. It doesn't matter how long it takes to occur because it is occurring constantly.

Here's a couple of examples to illustrate the point. The life span of a typical G5 star is about 6 billion years. Yet, we don't have to wait 6 billion years to see the entire life cycle. Why? Because G5 stars are being born and are dying and are at every stage in between NOW. All we have to do is take a snapshot of a representative population, and we'll see G5 stars at every stage of their life.

Another example: A human being typically lives for 75 years and goes through various stages of development at that time. However, we don't have to wait for 75 years to document the life cylce of a typical human being because there are millions of humans alive now all at different stages of the cycle. All we need to do is take a snapshot of a representative population. As an exercise, go to Disney World some day and walk the streets. Within two hours, you will be able to document every stage of the human life cycle.

The same should be true with evolution. We should be seeing transitional forms NOW. We should be seeing large amounts of speciation NOW.

The funny thing is, most evolutionary biologists are aware of this serious flaw in evolution, which is why the theory of punctuated equilibrium is constantly revived (I believe it is in its third iteration right now).

Punctuated equilibrium solves the problem of not observing any macro evolution occuring because we can conveniently say we are simply between punctuations. However, the theory inevitably fails after a brief period because it has even more flaws than the steady state model of evolution.

[js1138]

#261 would go over well with the Ohio School Board. It is interesting how quickly religion floats to the surface on these threads after all the obligatory clintonese about how it's a purely scientific controversy.

[js1138]

If evolution is a gradual, steady-state process, we should be able to look around us and see it occuring everywhere right now. It doesn't matter how long it takes to occur because it is occurring constantly.

We do see evolution happening all around us, and we do see speciation happening. Check out ring species.

[biblewonk]

Good post!

[Junior]

Mathematically-abstract concepts can have concrete examples (pi, for instance). It is these that find use in science. Mathematically-abstract concepts that have no real-world counterpart (infinity, for example) are useless when it comes to scientific research.

[Fester Chugabrew]

So, would you say that any "scientific" study of consciousness would be impossible?

[Junior]

No. Consciousness may simply be electro-chemical operations in the brain; we know head injuries can cause personality changes, and that removal or destruction of certain portions of the brain can literally turn an angel into a devil. In this regard, consciousness has a concrete reality and can be studied using the scientific method.