...And at times you struggle with an empty void? So did George Noory from Coast to Coast.
Please give Pat your heart. Please give him one more chance. He'll ply you with milk and cookies until you break.
Posted on 01/27/2007 4:40:50 PM PST by balch3
One of my favorite early Steve Martin routines went something like this: "Would you like to make a million dollars and pay no taxes? OK. First, make a million dollars. Now, just don't pay any taxes; and if somebody from the IRS asks you about it, just say … 'I forgot!'"
Nonsense? Sure. But funny, especially as Steve delivered it? You bet.
But there's some absurd nonsense, not especially funny, being taught our school kids every day, in almost every school in America.
Darwin's theory of evolution.
(Column continues below)
"But it's science," you say. No, not really. Certainly, not yet, if it ever will be. It's a theory, an extremely farfetched, unproven theory and – at its base, its fundamental core – terribly unscientific!
To me (and I'll explain, so stay with me) this theory is exactly like Steve Martin's joke. It starts with a wish, a desire, proceeds through a ludicrous construction or process, and leads to a preposterous conclusion.
But this unfunny joke has been taken very seriously by a host of scientists, and now most educators, and it has been universally accepted as "fact" by most universities and school systems. And woe to the teacher, from grade school through college, who dares to question this improbable, unproven theory. If he or she dares to suggest or present the alternative theory of Intelligent Design – the vastly more plausible notion that this incredible universe and all living things point logically to a Creator with an intelligence far beyond our feeble comprehension (no matter how many Ph.D. degrees we might have among us) – lawsuits and intimidation will surely follow that teacher.
In one of his many excellent and substantive mailings, D. James Kennedy drew my attention to Tom DeRosa, who grew up Catholic in Brooklyn and spent his high-school years at a Catholic seminary. He was voted "Best Seminarian" in 1964, but one year later, instead of taking vows to enter the priesthood, he became an atheist.
His encounter with Darwin in college led to that decision. "There was a point where I became so rebellious that I yelled out, 'No God!' I remember saying, 'I'm free, I'm liberated,'" DeRosa recalled. "I can do what I want to do; man is in charge! It was pure, exhilarating rebellion!"
That rebellion soured after a while, and after 13 years as a respected public-school science teacher, he experienced a spiritual awakening that completely changed his perception of existence – and science. He's now founder and president of the Creation Studies Institute and author of "Evidence for Creation: Intelligent Answers for Open Minds."
Did his IQ leak out his ears? Did he cease being a scientist? Far from it; he became a real scientist, an honest seeker after truth who could look at facts without a predisposed belief and actually see the obvious all around us.
As a real scientist, he looked again at what he'd gullibly accepted in college. And, examining the prevalent claim that life "evolved" from molecule to man by a series of biological baby steps, tiny mutations over millions of years, he realized there is no historical evidence for that claim. He writes, "Millions upon millions of fossils have been collected to date, but there is no evidence of transition fossils, that is, fossils of organisms in an intermediate stage of development between steps on the evolutionary ladder."
Had you thought about that? If all life on this planet were actually in a process of "evolution," would every species evolve in lock step, regardless of different environments? Or wouldn't there be all the intermediate steps still in evidence, at various places around the globe? Wouldn't there be plenty of evolving apes, tending toward homo sapiens, in the jungles and rain forests, possibly developing verbal skills and capable of elementary math and reasoning?
None such. Ever. Nada. Apes have always been apes, and humans always human (though some of us less so than others).
I wonder if any science teachers today ever share with their students that Charles Darwin acknowledged "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe … as the result of blind chance or necessity." If the originator of the theory of evolution and the author of "The Origin of Species" (the book which later students eagerly used as an excuse to leave a Creator out of the picture) couldn't imagine everything we see and know happening without some design and purpose – why should any of us?
Why indeed?
Could it be that this whole evolution idea has grown out of a deep desire to escape the implications that necessarily accompany the concept of an infinite Intelligence, a Creator? If humans want to prove some theory, no matter how farfetched and self-serving, they will inevitably find some "evidence" that they can wedge into their theory.
Some years ago, Johnny Carson had a lady on his "Tonight Show" who had a large collection of potato chips, each of which she said resembled some famous person. And if you looked at the chip from a certain angle, and maybe squinted just right, you could see what she was referring to. While she bent down to carefully select another chip, Johnny removed one she said looked like George Washington, and replaced it with one he had under his desk. Then, when she had straightened up, he "absentmindedly" picked up the substituted chip and put it in his mouth, crunching loudly. The horror on her face was a huge laugh for the audience, and Johnny quickly relieved her, handing back the George Washington potato chip, intact.
This decades-long scavenger hunt, in which intelligent and educated seekers keep digging up artifacts to "prove" an unprovable and patently unscientific concept, is very much like the potato chip lady on "The Tonight Show": You see what you want to see. Whether it's there or not.
I'm grateful to Joseph Farah and the editors here at WND for letting me take this space each week. This topic, I feel, is so important – and I've got so much to say about it – that I'll pick up here, in this space, next week. I hope you'll stop by.
Related special offers:
"The Case Against Darwin"
"Tornado in A Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism"
Pat Boone, descendent of the legendary pioneer Daniel Boone, has been a top-selling recording artist, the star of his own hit TV series, a movie star, a Broadway headliner, and a best-selling author in a career that has spanned half a century. During the classic rock & roll era of the 1950s, he sold more records than any artist except Elvis Presley. To learn more about Pat, please visit his website.
Besides the following you mean?
Ardipithecus ramidus
Australopithecus anamensis
Australopithecus afarensis
Australopithecus africanus
Australopithecus garhi
Paranthropus aethiopicus
Paranthropus boisei
Paranthropus robustus
Homo habilis
Homo rudolfensis
Homo ergaster
Homo erectus
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo sapiens
But the more transitional fossils there are, the more gaps there are without transitional fossils to fill them, so evolution is fighting a losing battle.
Where? at the centers for leftist thinking AKA colleges , pubic schools, etc. By whom? By the professoriat fascists.
You didn't know this? Where have you been?
The miracle of evolution could have only come from God. Why is this an issue? Its all part of Gods master plan..
"Evolution has never been falsified."
Yes! Precisely, because it cannot be. Thank you for proving my point.
Evolution cannot be a scientific hypothesis because it cannot be falsified. Falsifiability means in order for a hypothesis to be scientific there must be some test that could be made that will prove the hypothesis false, if it is false. There only must be such a possible test. It is not necessary that it be carried out for the hypothesis to be a valid scientific one. (Sometimes the test is not yet technologically possible without further development, for example.)
from here: http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/permanent/fallacies.php#falsff
In science, a proposed hypothesis is not considered valid if there is no experiment that can be performed that would, if the hypothesis is incorrect, fail. If such an experiment can be performed, and it "fails to fail," it is proof (or at least very good evidence) the hypothesis is correct.
No doubt the prejudice against this very useful objective method lies in the name, "falsifiability." It does not mean the scientist must attempt to prove a hypothesis false, but the very opposite. "Falsifiability," is the method by which a hypothesis may be proven true. It also does not mean that a hypothesis must be assumed correct until it is falsified.
The idea of falsifiability protects the field of science from being obliged to entertain as, "possible," any wild hypothesis on no other basis than it cannot be disproved. If a hypothesis is correct, there will always be a test or experiment that it would fail, if it is incorrect, which when performed proves the hypothesis correct by not failing (or incorrect by failing).
If no test can be devised for testing a hypothesis, it means the hypothesis has no consequence, that nothing happens or doesn't happen because of it and nothing depends on it being right. If this were not true, whatever depended on the hypothesis could be tested. There is absolutely no reason to entertain a notion that has neither purpose or consequence.
"But why not perform experiments to verify rather than falsify?" In fact, all experiments performed to test a hypothesis are attempts to verify it. If such a test could "pass" even if the hypothesis were incorrect, passing the test would prove nothing. Passing a test is only, "proof," if passing is only possible when the hypothesis is true, which means the test must fail (the hypothesis will be falsified) when the hypothesis is untrue. A test which cannot falsify a hypothesis, if it is incorrect, cannot prove it, if it is correct.
To say a hypothesis is not falsifiable means that it cannot be proved (or disproved), and, therefore, is unacceptable as a scientific theory.
It is very unfortunate that this concept is misunderstood by many who are otherwise quite rational and objective. The principle not only applies to science, but almost all complex or abstract concepts. The attempt to verify any conjecture by means of a method that cannot discriminate between those conjectures which are true and those which are false can never discover the truth. Only a method which distinctly demonstrates a conjecture is false, if it is, can verify those conjectures that are true.
The concept of falsifiability sweeps away mountains of irrational rubbish masquerading as science, philosophy, ideology, and religion. One question that must be asked about any doubtful proposition or conjecture is, "how can this be disproved if it is false?" If there is no way to test if the proposition is false, there are no rational grounds whatsoever for assuming the proposition to be true.
Hank
And humans share 60% of their DNA with chickens. And? Nothing is proved by that.
Darwin's proposition is that nature acts like a breeder. That all life is descended from that elusive single cell and random (not designed) mutation has led to the diversity we see in the present.
Fossil finds do not support a gradual change from one species into the next. In fact just the opposite. Fossils show sudden change, fully formed new creatures, and no evidence of any kind of subtle change.
Darwin himself doubted himself before he was turned into a god by the secularists.
PLUS! ... PLUS! I say, Genesis gives a thoroughly evolutionary account of creation. First the cosmos, then the earth, then plants, then animals, then man ... Evolution! Come on!
Correspondingly, the Big Bang is a thoroughly creationist theory of the universe. When I was in grade school, the idea that the universe had a BEGINNING, as in "In the Beginning", was considered wild-eyed at best.
"Everything's cool. Everything's very cool all the way around." - Woodstock
Where did you acquire the notion that evolutionary theory is about origins? It's about why and how species differentiate into sub-species or entirely new species. Now please listen carefully -- I am not claiming that in fact they do or do not. I am merely pointing out that evolutionary theory isn't like cosmology, simply because it does not address ultimate causes, even within the more narrow scope of biological forms. That's why Darwin called his book 'Origin of the Species' and not 'Origin of Life'.
As for your comments in post 33, you mention transitional fossil evidence as if that were the only leg on which evolutionary theory rests. You fail to mention
1) mass extinctions of species (more species have lived and perished than currently exist)
2) embryonic development in higher life forms exhibits stages in which archaic, biologically useless characteristics manifest, such as tails and gill slits in human embryoes.
3) Parallel evolution, as with crocodiles and alligators, two distict species that are nevertheless remarkable similar and well-adapted to survive in similar environments. Or were those Florida alligators here all along, BEFORE the land subsided into the Carribean Ocean, just waiting (out in the desert or in the forests?) for the ideal environment to evolve? How did they survive in the meantime?
If you admit that the earth's environment has changed drastically many times over the eons, and that most creatures are fashioned to survive well in a specific environment but would quickly die out in a different one, then it seems undeniable that new species appeared to take advantage of new conditions. In other words, some biological emergence must have taken place.
Now hold on, because I happen to agree with you that there is ample room for skepticism regarding the 'received' doctrine of evolution as currently held and taught by the scientific establishment. But I will argue that evolutionary theory nevertheless is much more than a mere hypothesis. There exists quite a lot of supporting evidence, and it IS scientific to choose among the best possible explanations among competing theories. Even when the evidence is incomplete.
But I also criticise the hubris of scientists, especially Richard Dawkins and Jay Gould, who make a religion out of their 'non-religious' convictions. I think evolution should be taught, but its tentative nature should be emphasized.
Reconciling evolution and creationism is quite simple-God dreamed up amino acids and let them run wild..
I know.
Look, I don't care if you want to use archaic Biblical terms like "laws" for what scientists call "theories." If that's all you were cencerned about, I wasted my time. I thought you were really unfamiliar with Newton's theory, oh, ah, "laws". (Now, if you are really as obtuse as you are pretending to be, Newton's theory is that those "laws" describe how gravity behaves.)
In what way did Einstein disprove Newton's theory? As far as I know, leaving out the relativistic factor (which is nothing but a refinement of newton's "values", not the essential theory), in all practical cases, Newton's formulas work just as well as Einstein's. There is one other point--Einstein would have been hard pressed to develop his theories without Newton's work as the basis.
Hank
Thanks for the article.
Evolution cannot be falsified, any more than a theory that all life is actually created by little green men in another dimension that we cannot see can be falsified. I therefore equally doubt both.
Hank
"No. The scientific definition of evolution is a change of allele frequencies over time."
First, is this the definition of evolution given by Darwin? I doubt it.
Second, your "scientific" definition of evolution would apparently include the origin of dogs and other domestic animals, which are obviously cases of artificial selection, not natural selection, which is what Darwin was thinking of.
Well said, amchugh. I wish I could be as concise.
It may be refuted or modified, but science is not an absolute discipline. It's chief virtue is that it is self-correcting. Otherwise, we would still be stuck with Ptolemaic cosmology. Yes, that was a scientific theory, since it was based on careful observation (not careful enough though!) and provided a reasonable explanation of preceived phenomena. Right up until Galileo provided a better one. Then Keppler stepped in. And so on.
Hank Kerchief seems to want science to rely only on incontrovertible truth. But no such thing is ever to be found in empirical science. We begin with total ignorance and mystery and proceed step-by-step to uncover new knowledge.
They may be fossils alright, but they're not transitional from apes to humans etc.
People see what they want to see in rocks.
quote: The bottom line is that evolution is a tool of the left, used to destroy the notion that our rights don't come from a creator and are inalienable, but that they stem from human reason and understanding and thus are flexible and able to be subverted.
More like a tool of the anti-God, anti-Christians.
You could hardly be more wrong. Newton codified our intuition of absolute space and absolute time as Axioms, and derived his results as theorems from this and other "Axioms, or Laws" of motion.
Einstein exploded the entire axiomatic basis of Newtonian Mechanics, and this was the reason he caused such a sensation.
On the other hand, you are quite right that this hardly diminishes Newton's achievement. It just places it in a larger context. Einstein appreciated this more than anyone, as one might perhaps imagine. He made certain remarks which make it seem that he had an awareness that he had attained an intellectual peak where Newton was his sole correspondent.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.