Replies

"TToE is science. We know about it than we do about Gravity. This is a paperwork snafu, not a "subsidy" -- or do you think they should cut funding on studies of theology, which is TRUE mythology by any definition of the word?"

Gravity is observable and therefore empiriacally verifiable. Evolution is not.

Evolution is based on faith, not science.
A) Since science requires observation and verification and no one can or has ever observed or verified evolution, evolution is not scientific.
B) Evolutionists themselves state that evolution is a religion.
C) Evolutionists start with the presupposition that evolution is “scientific fact”.

Evolutionist and senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, Dr. Colin Patterson:
“We must first ask whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific (metaphysical) … Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test.”
[Colin Patterson, Evolution (London: British Museum of Natural History, 1978), pp. 145-146

Evolutionist Harrison Matthews:
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory – is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation – both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”
[L. Harrison Matthews in the Introduction to Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1971), p. X-XI (emphasis added). As cited in Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition (Santee, California: Master Books, 1988), pp. 30-31.]

As far as the twentieth century is concerned, the leading evolutionist is generally considered to be Sir Julian Huxley, primary architect of modern neo-Darwinism. Huxley called evolution a "Religion Without Revelation" and wrote a book with that title (2nd edition, 1957). In a later book, he said:
“Evolution . . . is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth.” [Huxley, Julian, Essays of a Humanist (New York: Harper and `Row, 1964) pp. 125, 222.] http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-332.htm
Later in the book he argued passionately that we must change "our pattern of religious thought from a God-centered to an evolution-centered pattern.” [Ibid., p 222.] Then he went on to say that: "the God hypothesis . . . is becoming an intellectual and moral burden on our thought." Therefore, he concluded that "we must construct something to take its place."

"TToE is silent on God. It merely attempts to explain how the physical world works. This silly little epithet is a standard CR/IDer insult. It is not surprising to see it tossed in."

The theory of evolution is an attmept to explain how the world could could exist without God. The theory of Evolution is not silent on God. It is loudly trying to throw out any notion of God altogether even if irrational.

Since the last one liner was a insulting "silly little epithet from a standard CR/IDer", perhaps you will find some mathematical probabities of proteins and bacteria arriving solely by chance and natural process more interesting.....

a) Calculations of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe for random generation of a simple enzyme and calculations for a single celled bacterium.

Although he is an evolutionist, and an atheist, Hoyle sees the mathematical statistical difficulty in producing a single bacterium like E. coli. In his calculations of the probability of life emerging from chance interactions with chemicals, Hoyle assumed that the first living cell was much simpler than today’s bacteria. However, his calculation for the likelihood of even one very simple enzyme arising at the right time in the right place was only chance in 1020. Because there are thousands of different enzymes with different functions, to produce the simplest living cell, Hoyle calculated that about 2,000 enzymes were needed with each one performing a specific task to form a single bacterium lie E coli.

No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have a random beginning….there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (1020)2000 = 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court….the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems….cannot in out view be generated by what are often called “natural” processes, …For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly…There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago.
-Hoyle & Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981).

Chandra Wickramasinghe adds:
“The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.”

b) Calculations of Hubert Yockey for random generation of a single molecule of iso-1-cytochrome c protein.

He assigned the responsibility of amino acid selection and their polymerizing to form proteins to three Fates, acting as dei ex machina in a Greek drama. Lachesis was the caster of 110 icosahedral dice; Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life, polymerized them; and Atropos cut the thread when Lachesis assigned an amino acid to a non functionality equivalent site. Yockey asked the question: what is the probability that Lachesis and Clotho will build a chain of 110 amino acids of the iso-1-cytochrome c without Atropos cutting it?

Yockey calculated the probability was 2 x 10-44. Yockey then noted that the realistic odds are much worse what would have to form in the prebiotic soup…..

“In so far as chance plays a central role, the probability that even a very short protein, not withstanding a genome, could emerge from the primeval soup, if it ever existed, even with the help of a deus ex machina for 109 years is so small that the faith of Job is required to believe it….”
Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, p 279
“Let us remind ourselves that we have calculated the probability if the generation of only a single molecule of iso-1 cytochrome c. Of course, very many copies of each molecule must be generated to form the protobiont…I am using probability as a measure of degree of belief. It is clear that the belief that a molecule of iso-1-cytochrome c or any other protein could appear by chance is based on faith. And so we see that even if we believe that the “building blocks” are available, they do not spontaneously make proteins, at least not by chance. The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is impossible in probability.”
Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, p 257

c) Calculations of Bradley and Thaxton for random production of a single protein.

Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton calculated the probability of a random formation of amino acids into a protein to be 4.9 x 10-191. They began with the assumption that the probability of starting with an L-amino acid was .5, and the probability of starting with an L-amino acid was .5, and the probability of two L-amino acids joining with a peptide bond was also .5. They assumed that the twenty necessary amino acids existed in equal concentration in the prebiotic soup so that the probability of the right amino acid in the required position was .05.
Bradley and Thaxton were also generous towards the proponents of random processes when they also assumed that all of the chemical reactions would be with amino acids, ignoring the high probability of reactions with non-amino acid chemicals. They calculated the probability of the necessary placement of one amino acid to be .5 x .5 x .05 or .125. This, of coarse, meant that the probability of assembling N such amino acids would be .0125 x .0125 for N terms. Assuming a protein with 100 amino acids (.0125 x .0125 for 100 terms ), the mathematically impossible probability would be 4.9 x 10-191.
Bradley and Thaxton noted their agreement with Hubert P. Yockey and concluded that even assuming that all the carbon on earth existed in the form of amino acids and reacted at the greatest possible rate of 1012/s for one billion years (when actually only 130 million years were available), the mathematically impossible probability for the formation of one functional protein would be 10-65.

Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton, “Information and the Origin of Life” in The Creation Hypothesis, ed. J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, Il : InterVarsity Press, 1994), p. 190

d) Calculations of Harold Morowitz for single celled bacterium developing from accidental or chance processes.

The difficulties in producing a protein from the mythical prebiotic soup are very large, but more difficult still is the probability of random processes producing the simplest living cell which represents an overwhelming in crease in complexity. Harold Morowitz calculated the probability of broken chemical bonds in a single celled bacterium reassembling under ideal chemical conditions. He assumed that only constructive chemical processes were acting ( under natural conditions 50 percent of chemical processes are destructive ) and that all of the amino acids were bioactive ( in the natural environment 75 percent of amino acids are not bioactive ). Morowitz computed the odds against the cell reassembling eot be one in 10100,000,000,000. He summarized his computation:

“…no amount of ordinary manipulation or arguing about the age of the universe or the size of the system can suffice to make it plausible that such a fluctuation would have occurred in an equilibrium system. It is always possible to argue that any unique event would have occurred. This is outside the range of probabilistic considerations, and really, outside of science. We may sum up stating that on energy considerations alone, the possibility of a living cell occurring in an equilibrium ensemble is vanishingly small. It is important to reiterate this point as a number of authors on the origin of life have missed the significance of vanishingly small probabilities. They have assumed that the final possibility will be reasonably large by virtue of the size and age of the system. The previous paragragh shows that is not so: calculate clause of the probability of spontaneous origin are so low that the final probabilities are still vanishingly small.”

-Harold J. Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1979), p. 12.

Morowitz also calculated the increase in chemical bonding energy required in forming an E coli bacterium and the probability of such a bacterium forming spontaneously anywhere in the entire universe over a period of five billion years under equilibrium conditions. In computing the odds to be one in 1010(110), Morowitz wrote:

“What is very clear … is that if equilibrium processes alone were at work, the largest possible fluctuation in the history of the universe id likely to have been no larger than a small peptide. Again, we stress in a very firm quantitative way, the impossibility of life originating as a fluctuation in an equilibrium ensemble.”
-Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology, p. 68.

e) Calculations of Bernd-Olaf Kuppers for the random generation of the sequence of a bacterium.

Proceeding from the realistic assumption that all sequence alternatives of a nucleic-acid molecule are physically equivalent, Bernd-Olaf Kuppers concluded that the unguided, random formation of a predefined sequence ( such as the specific sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule ) is reciprocally proportional to the number of all possible combinations of possible sequences. Kuppers noted that Michael Polanyi correctly emphasized that if the reverse assumption were true and the sequence of a nucleic-acid acid molecule would not have the capability to store information necessary to replicate living matter.

In calculating the expectation probability for the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium, Kuppers demonstrated the reason mathematicians have severe problems in accepting the assumptions of random origins:

“The human genome consists of about 109 nucleotides, and the number of combinatorially possible sequences attains the unimaginable size of 41000 million = 10 600 million. Even in the simple case of a bacterium, the genome consists of some 4.106 nucleotides, and the number of combinatorially possible sequences is 4 4million = 10 2.4 million. The expectation probability for the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium is thus so slight that not even the entire space of the universe would be enough to make the random synthesis of a bacterial genome probable. For example, the entire mass of the universe, expressed as a multiple of the mass of the hydrogen atom, amounts to about 1080 units. Even if all the matter in space consisted of DNA molecules of the structural complexity of the bacterial genome, with random sequence, then the chances of finding among them a bacterial genome or something resembling one would still be completely negligible.”
Brand-Olaf Kuppers, Information and the Origin of Life ( Cambridge, Mass:: The MIT Press, 1990 ), pp 59-60.