Perhaps it was a temporal anomaly caused by a rupture in the space time continuum. It is not without precedent:
Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
Freudian post of the day.
We sleep with God on darkest night, to go with Satan at first light.
I am aware of Steven Jay Gould's opinions on the matter. I am asking how the theory of evolution itself makes such an implication, especially given that an "immortal soul" is a supernatural concept, and it is impossible to draw conclusions regarding the existence of supernatural entities from scientific theories.
Perhaps it was a temporal anomaly caused by a rupture in the space time continuum. It is not without precedent:
The Future as History placemarker. I do think it is a bit unfair to require creationists to understand the concept of time. It's too hard.
Depending upon one's orientation it most certainly can.
Cataloging the differences between and among species does not address the actual process or cause involved. Natural selection is not a mechanism, per se. It has, to our knowledge, no impetus of it's own. We only see its results, and from those results we give it a label. It is an arbitrary ascription. The only way one may assert change without limits from one species to another is through conjectural extrapolations, not direct observation.
Fester physics: phenomena lacking an impetus of their own are not really mechanisms.
I consider gravity to be a product of intelligent design, not an agent of intelligence. Maybe you consider natural selection to be a product of "nature." Does that make you a better scientist than someone who considers it to be a product of "intelligent design?" Of course if you're not getting paid for your pronouncements and subscribe to the authority and accuracy of the biblical texts there is no way you could be a scientist in the first place, let alone study science.
Yes they are.
No...they're not. I believe in God and I believe that God created the universe and all the laws of nature, including gravity, weather systems and the evolution of life.
Who are you to tell me what I believe and what I don't believe? And who are you to tell me that I can't believe in both God and evolution. Since I DO, your statement doesn't wash.
Huh? The God that you believe in is so weak that he couldn't grant immortal souls to intelligent apes if they evolved that way, but only if He created the first one and the first one's wife ex nihilo? That is one weak God.
Occam's Razor. Maybe feathers fall to the ground slowly because their air resistance is high compared with their gravitational attraction to the earth. Or maybe they fall to the ground slowly because invisible fairies don't like them falling quickly (these fairies require minute amounts of oxygen and therefore cannot survive in a vacuum). The thing about the arbitrary female choice as opposed to the arbitrary choice of deity is that it doesn't involve an additional unnecessary entity.
Alter Kaker is relating the bizarro worldview of SirLinksalot, not expressing his own opinion on the matter.
You are attributing intention to inanimate objects.
And evolution predicted where to look for the recently found fish fossils, and what to expect. No other explanitory hypothesis can do that.
Do you have a cite for that 80 million number?
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