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To: AmericaUnited
Blue State = "I evolved from a Slime Puddle or a Monkey"

Red State = "I am fearfully and wonderfully made"

Red State = "I am a fallen creature; one who was created by a Superior Being for some purpose."

Blue State = "I evolved form a primeval Slime Puddle, but through blind chance, I am now fully evolved. You, however, are still unevolved -- blind chance hasn't favored you as well as it has favored me -- so I appoint myself as your Guardian. Hand over your money and your liberty. Trust me.

Many well known scientists and philosophers have claimed that Darwinism is bunk: Sir Fred Hoyle, Sir Francis Crick, David Berlinski, Michael Behe, Soren Lovetrup, Sir Karl Popper, Hubert Yockey, David Bohm. With the exception of Michael Behe (a biochemist at Lehigh University, and a practicing Roman Catholic), none of these thinkers is a literal creationist. It's perfectly possible not to be a biblical creationist and not to be a Darwinist at the same time.

I recommend Behe's 1997 book, "Darwin's Black Box," which shows that modern biochemistry poses irreconcilible problems for Darwinism. Mathematicians like David Berlinksi and Hubert Yockey (and Fred Hoyle, who was an astronomer) have shown that the math in evolution doesn't add up. For example, there's not enough time in the entire universe since it's supposed beginning to account for a SINGLE MOLECULE of cytochrome-C to have evolved by chance; yet, without it, there can be no life.

Behe begins his book with a breathtakingly clear explanation of how human vision works on the biochemical level. It's a sort of Rube Goldberg operation, in which a single photon impacts an enzyme in the retina, deforming its shape; this sets up chain reaction (the "vision cascade") that eventually triggers an electro-chemical reaction in the optic nerve. Behe points out that even if ONE chemical step were missing -- or if the order of the chemical steps were slightly different -- the end result is nothing; no vision. Darwinism claims that this chain reaction must have evolved in small, incremental steps, each step increasing the chances of survival of the organism. This assumes that the cascade must have comprised fewer steps at some point in the remote past, each additional step having been added to the cascade by chance, and accidentally leading to a greater chance of survival. As stated before, a cascade with fewer steps has NO survival value, because it leads to a biochemical dead-end: no vision. To be valuable to the organism, the vision cascade must have evolved all of its steps simultaneously; yet this is precisely contrary to Darwinism, which argues that nature evolves from the simple to the complex, and always in small, incremental changes, each change being slightly more useful to the organism. Behe argues for the idea of "irreducible complexity" in biology; the idea that certain structures and processes are only useful in their entirety, and therefore could not have come about in a blind, step-by-step fashion.

9 posted on 12/05/2004 4:29:36 AM PST by rhetor
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To: rhetor

Yup, only an idiot would think the incredible complexity of the human body somehow evolved by accident.


13 posted on 12/05/2004 6:02:19 AM PST by AmericaUnited
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