Posted on 01/18/2005 9:49:17 AM PST by Laissez-faire capitalist
Top flight scientists have something to tell you about evolution. Such statements will never be found in the popular magazines, alonside georgeous paintings of ape-man and Big Bangs and solemn pronuncements about millions of years for this rock and that fish. Instead they are generally reesrved only for professional books and journals.
Most scientists are working in very narrow fields; they do not see the overall picture, and assume, even though their field does not prove evolution, that perhaps other areas of science probably vindicate it. They are well-meaning men. The biologists and geneticists know their facts, and research does not prove evolution, but assume that geology does. The geologists know their field does not prove veolution, but hope that the biologists and geneticists have proven it. Those who do know the facts, fear to disclose them to the general public, lest they be fired. But they do write articles in their own professional journals and books, condemning evolutionary theory.
Included below are a number of admissions by leading evolutionists of earlier decades, such as *Charles Darwin*, *Austin Clark, or *Fred Hoyle. The truth is that evolutionits cannot make scientific facts fit the theory.
An asterisk (*) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the set of books this encyclopedia is based on (see BOOKSTORE), only 164 statements are by creationists.
(Excerpt) Read more at pathlights.com ...
Here's the real joke. A big part of the creationist "no evidence" mantra is "no transitional forms." But because more and more of the world is coming under the "pickaxes and shovels" of the paleontologists, the last 20 years have been huge for long-predicted transitional forms, especially land animals to whales [theretofore missing] and dinosaurs to birds [missing with the spectacular exception of archaeopteryx]. Other finds in the same time frame included important hominids, a legged sirenian ancestor, and additions to the fish-to-amphibian and reptile-to-mammal series.
How do you make that look like an argument for "no evidence?" Your post quoted above. That's the joke!
But much of the evidence I was talking about in post 314 isn't from paleontology at all. Much of it is molecular and genetic in nature, with additions from embryology and other areas of evolutionary developmental biology.
Most of science has undergone a huge increase of knowledge in the last 20 years, so your Luddite screech would apply just as well to Physics or Astronomy. You don't like science, period, and you want into science class only to sabotage the teaching of it.
Now let me, Darwin-style, anticipate a point which is bound to be coming from somebody or other if not you. The situation is nothing like mirror-image symmetrical, as creationists try to paint it. ("Evolution is a religion and they're just doing what we're doing, defending their 'faith,'" Blah! Blah!) If it were, Satanic Materialist Atheist Commie Faggit Eeevoloooshunists would be demanding a voice in your Sunday School classes to make sure all sides get presented. They would be demanding your church's tax-exempt status be revoked if this is not done.
But nobody out here gives a rat's butt what your preacher preaches or what your Sunday School teachers teach. That's your religion, after all, and it has nothing to do with science class.
So you are looking for 365 people who are making a career as Creationists?
There are hundreds of new scientists who are contributing to the Creation Science side of the debate. Because you are not a church goer, I would not expect you to realize the organizations that are being established by church going scientists, as we speak.
Try doing a search on Creation seminars. Many of the workshops are hosted by local scientists that volunteer their time to produce curricula and seminars for various organizations.
It quite literally is a phenomenon.
P.S. A majority are volunteering their time to the cause.
If we were to compare the advances based on using evolutionary theory against the brilliance of intelligent design scientists of the past, there would be no contest. The advances we have seen in medicine and technology have been on the backs of Creationists, despite the mind hampering evolutionary theory. The Theory of Evolution fossilizes the brain, just barely leaving the host alive.
Evolutionary theory is absurd.
You do realise that creationists have been predicting the imminent collapse of ToE for the last 150 years, don't you. And that they've been maintaining for the last 100 years (since science made its mind up, pending contradictory evidence) that scientists are flocking to the creationist cause.
Ah well, you maintain that these people exist. Fine. Pity they don't contribute here. The scientific comprehension on the creationist side in FR is zip. If these scientists joining the creationist side exist then why aren't they publishing their refutations of evolution? And why doesn't anyone who understands science post here on the creationist side?
Can you name a single technical achievement of the last 100 years that has come from a creation scientist and is rooted in creation science and which conflicts with mainstream scientific understanding? I thought not.
Well, thats told 99% of practicing biologists then. Where are all the wonderful achievements of MODERN creation scientists. What use is made of their counter-to-mainstream work in any industry? According to you these guys have all the advantages. Where are their wonderful new drugs? Where are the mineral deposits that creation geologists have found by ignoring mainstream geological beliefs? Ah, there aren't any. That's right.
>>You see, these evolutionists think science and knowledge trump all else, where I, as a Muslim, believe faith in Allah trumps all else.
All Fundamentalism is the same<<
No, it is not. If one group says that 2+2=22, another says 2+2=5, and yet a third group says 2+2=4, the third group is not wrong simply because the first two are. Unfortunately, this is how missinformation is used to discredit authentic information.
Anyone who studies Christianity and it's history and compares it with any other religion on the planet will find it compellingly unique.
All fundamentalism is NOT the same.
Oh yeah? Over the last three years my car has been transforming itself into an increasingly imperfect copy of its former self (with help, of course, from me and the local salvage yard.)
His analogy also fails because you cannot construct a temporal tree of car models with nested hierarchy, but you can construct a temporal tree of biological species with nested hierarchy. So he ends up if anything showing the opposite of that which he intended.
When do you think bondesrv is going to come up with a single achievement of modern creation science (which should be very easy considering the claimed number of adherents)? Are we holding our breaths while we wait? I hope not.
I am glad you said unique, not convincing.
All religions are unique, but fundamentalist religions share certain attributes. The absolute certainty in their own moral and spiritual authority. Rejection of information that contradicts their worldview without considering the evidence. That kind of thing is often in common even if not a univerally held set of views.
I agree that religions have their problems. Christianity is not a religion. Catholicism, Lutheranism, et-al are religions. It is not The Truth that is the problem, it is how us flawed humans attempt to apply it where the problems crop up.
Then again, if we were able to apply the tenets of Christianity perfectly, we would have no need for it's foundation, the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ as perfect atonement for our many sins. The promise contained there is infinitely more valuable than all the gold, knowledge or wisdom within the capabilities of all the human race.
Imagine, if you will, that that last sentence is really true. Let it sink in for a while...
If you believed it (and all that it implies) with all your heart, how would you respond to this Evolution/ID debate? Do you see how it could dilute the Christian message? Do you see how it could create Hitlers?
Many bad things have been done over the centuries in the name of Jesus. We will be held accountable, no doubt, but an eternity with Him still awaits us. And many of the "bad" things done will turn out to have not been bad at all, and conversely, many of the "good" things will, when exposed to the light of His perfect will, show themselves as the evil they were.
It is actually in the Human Instruction Manual, AKA The Bible. Of course, a lot of people are prone to go forward without reading the instructions...
So you are denying what I said here.
There are hundreds of new scientists who are contributing to the Creation Science side of the debate. Because you are not a church goer, I would not expect you to realize the organizations that are being established by church going scientists, as we speak.
Try doing a search on Creation seminars. Many of the workshops are hosted by local scientists that volunteer their time to produce curricula and seminars for various organizations.
It quite literally is a phenomenon.
Where do you think the boldness to challenge the establishment is suddenly coming from. People are being educated by experts in their fields at how the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
If you are truly interested let your research into the phenomenon begin here & here & here & here.
These sites continuously add publications by new Creation scientists in their respective fields of study. They are very serious about how they present the information, because they know the skepticism they must endure.
I doubt that. 2 school boards in the past year versus two state boards(where it was shot down each time) in the year previous looks to me like people are figuring out that ID is a collapsing house of cards.
Nice try at the scaremongering though. I predict in the coming years you'll still be crying at how unfair it all is as nothing will change.
A majority of Christians belong to churches/sects that believe that accepting evolution doesn't dilute the Christian message. They believe (as St Augustine did) that to reject scientific knowledge makes Christians look foolish, and dilutes the Christian message.
I am still waiting for you to name a single technical achievement of a modern creation scientist that contradicts mainstream theory, say in the last 30 years. It should be really easy for you to produce. You claim there are loads of such scientists and that they have all the advantages through not being saddled with evolutionary blinkers.
Elegance by Accident? Chance as the Master Architect? - by Chuck Missler
The Myth of our Age
Jesus warned us, "Take heed that no man deceive you." 1 And we do, indeed, live in the Age of Deceit. Our entire society is totally driven by many myths, none more basic or insidious than the convictions of Evolution, the religion of our age. (Dismissing for this discussion the observations of microevolution, the variations within species, but rather using the term in its connotative sense, referring, in fact, to biogenesis: the notion that we are all the result of a series of cosmic accidents.)
The ancient cultures worshiped gods of wood and stone. It is difficult to comprehend the insanity of paganism: who can tally the blood that has been spilled on the altars of the gods who are not and the demons who are! We, however, in our contemporary paganism, have invented the most insulting "god" of all. Instead of ascribing the awesome magnificence of the Creation to any of the false gods of the past, we have chosen to ascribe it all to randomness, or chance. That has to be the most insulting ascription of all: we have decided that no Designer was necessary - it all "just happened." "First there was nothing. Then it exploded!"2
The premise that we are all simply the accidental result of random chance underlies our entire culture, not just biology: the fields of psychology, our social and political sciences, our media, our entertainments, and, of course, the forced inculcation of our children in the government schools.
But there is a glimmer of good news.
The Death of Darwinism
The good news is that there is a rising awareness that Evolution is bad science. Science purports to follow the evidence, relying on empirical verification for its conjectures. And it is increasingly evident that the evidence is mercilessly denying randomness as an explanation for the elegant designs embodied in the machinery of the universe. The writings of Denton, Behe, Johnson, Dempski, and Meyer have turned the thinking world upside down.3 The rebuttals have come from virtually every field of science: paleontology, physics and, quite conclusively, microbiology. Interestingly, perhaps the most compelling refutations come from one of the newest of the sciences: the information sciences, the field which has given us advanced communications and computers.
The Spectrum of the Possible
William Dempski has exquisitely profiled the spectrum of possibilities from certainty, "a probability of 1.0," to impossibility, "a probability of 0." (All events, by definition, lie between these two boundary conditions.) summarizes this spectrum:
When events are characterized by a high degree of certainty, we call them "scientific laws," such as gravity, etc. Most events, however, are characterized by some level of uncertainty, and the exploration of their likelihoods occupy the attention of statisticians, businessmen, and professional investigators dealing with the circumstances in the "real world."
When we encounter events that are extremely improbable - that is, highly unlikely to have occurred by unaided chance alone - we attribute them to deliberate design. If we walked into the kitchen and found a scattering of alphabet soup letters on the floor that spelled out a meaningful sentence, we would recognize that it was the deliberate handiwork of someone doing the spelling. Cryptography is also an example of exploring discoveries which are highly improbable to be attributed to chance as the rival conjecture.
If we encountered a series of ostensibly "random" letters, but discovered that some systematic transformation rendered them into a meaningful sentence, we would infer that someone had hidden that message there deliberately. Random chance would be deemed too unlikely to have caused that unaided.
The forensic debates in a courtroom also typically deal with rendering random chance as the unlikely contributor to the evidence which points to deliberate intent or design.
The discovery that our DNA codes are three-out-of-four, error-correcting codes, which are stored, retrieved, copied, and processed to instruct machines to fabricate the complex proteins that make up living organisms, has rendered any attribution to unaided chance as absurd in the extreme. (For those of our readers with advanced technical aptitudes, we strongly recommend the writings of William Dempski listed in the bibliography at the end of this article.)
Irreducible Complexity
Michael Behe has upset the comfort of the Darwinists by highlighting a design attribute that he terms "irreducible complexity." Consider, as an example, the familiar household mousetrap in .
This simple device consists of five essential parts: (1) a platform which holds (2) a hammer driven by (3) a spring when restrained by (4) a holding bar until released by (5) a catch. This basic design has defied attempts to simplify it further, or to reduce its complexity. The significant feature is that with only four of the five parts one cannot catch 4/5ths as many mice! Its function depends on each of its essential elements, each of which involve substantial precision in their specification. "Natural selection" cannot operate until there is something to select from.
Behe then presents an example of "irreducible complexity" from nature by reviewing the tiny motor that powers the flagellum, which propels a bacterium through the water:
: This tiny mechanism, positioned to penetrate the bacterium's protective outer membrane, consists of over 40 parts - each of which are essential to its functioning. presents a functional equivalent: with any of its 40 parts missing, this mechanism would not be functional and would be a casualty in the processes of "natural selection" postulated by the Darwinists. The bacterium, dependent upon its locomotion, would be likewise.
So how did it come about? All the Darwinists can do is assert rather than explain.
The Miniature City
Darwinists love to postulate the "simple cell." With the advent of modern microbiology, we now know "there ain't any such thing." Even the simplest cell is complex beyond our imagining.
As Michael Denton has pointed out, "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world."4
The "simple cell" turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations) manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proofreading devices for quality control.
All by chance? All without a Designer? (How do you define "absurd?")
When I was at the Ford Motor Company, one of our proudest assets was the famous River Rouge Plant in Dearborn. It was the largest totally integrated manufacturing facility in the world. With 97 miles of railroad within the plant, raw iron ore and limestone entered one end; the necessary steel, glass, and paint were manufactured within the facility. The entire cars (including the engines on automated lines) were fabricated within the plant, and new Mustangs came out the other end. Yet this entire complex pales in comparison to the elegant high order of design demonstrated in the simplest cell, which can also replicate itself in a matter of hours.
The Darwinian Bankruptcy
An elegant design is more than the parts themselves: it involves information. It requires information input external to the design itself - and the deliberate involvement of a Designer.
The Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot account for the origin of information. The technology that provides language - semantics and syntax, for example - is quite distinct from the technology of the ink and paper it may be written on. The physical features of the circuits in a computer provide no clue about the design of the software that resides within it. It is profoundly significant that the Title of the Creator is the Logos - The Word:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1:1-3
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This article was excerpted from our featured Briefing Package, In the Beginning There Was...Information.
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