The Religious Cult of Evolution Fights Back

PostItNews.com ^

[postitnews.com]

HARRISBURG, PA-The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and attorneys with Pepper Hamilton LLP filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of 11 parents who say that presenting "intelligent design" in public school science classrooms violates their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.

"Teaching students about religion's role in world history and culture is proper, but disguising a particular religious belief as science is not," said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak. "Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United Executive Director, added, "Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we must resist any efforts to make them so. There is an evolving attack under way on sound science...Read More

[js1138]

The next time you make a veiled public threat to my mother

How is it threatening your mother to repeat YOUR words to her? I'm just curious.

[puroresu]

Wanna calculate the odds that all of us are insane for spending Christmas debating this? :-)

[RussP]

Anyway, there are a number of incorrect assumptions I think you're making, and I don't have the time today to get into them all, so I'll merely list them with a brief comment as to each:

1. "Given the purely naturalistic (athiestic) view of the world ..."
I assume you believe that the scientific view is entirely naturalistic, and therefore atheistic. That's just not true. More on this another time.

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No, absolutely not. I did not say that at all. Quite the opposite. I believe that science and religion can co-exist harmoniously. But the simplle fact is that *some* scientists are atheists. I'm referring to them, or any athiest who accepts their view.

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2. "But here I am. To my way of thinking, that is a powerful argument *against* the naturalist premise we started with."
That's a good example of the fallacy of retrospective astonishment, which I described in a few prior posts.

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OK, let's go back to the coins. Suppose I find 1000 pennies lying on the ground all showing heads. If my premise is that it happened by purely random chance, the probability of finding those pennies in that state are vanishingly small. So the logical resolution is to modify my premise that they got that way by purely random chance. Too many evolutionists refuse to modify their premise when faced with this kind of dilemma.

[RussP]

"What you ignore is selection. In a long series of coin tosses there will be a thousand heads. If you ignore the heads and only report the tails, you get your series of a thousand."

No, I don't ignore selection. But what I think you and the vast majority of evolutionists do is to simply assume, with no calculation whatsoever, that "selection" can do amazing things and create the "appearance" of intelligent design. The evolutioninsts base their theory on probabilities, yet they do no probabilistic calculation whatsoever. Not even simple, first-order calculations. None. That demonstrates nothing but faith in the power of natural selection. But they don't consider it faith because it matches their *premise* of no intelligent design.

Lee Spetner discusses the probabilities in depth in his book, which I highly recommend.

[puroresu]

Aren't you being a bit "tautological" about the eyes?

You seem to be saying the chances are good that eyes could evolve because A) eyes exist and B) we're confident they evolved.

It's as if you're saying that we know evolution occurred so the odds against it must not be insurmountable.

[RussP]

I apologize for calling you names and insulting your intelligence. I have a bad habit of doing that (and so do you, by the way). When someone insults me, I impulsively hurl insults back. I still stand by the content of my posts, but I regret the insults. Maybe I'll learn someday to debate online without insulting -- even after I've been insulted myself. I can only hope. Merry Christmas.

[RussP]

How the heck did that happen? I sent my message to the wrong person. Let me repeat it.

I apologize for calling you names and insulting your intelligence. I have a bad habit of doing that (and so do you, by the way). When someone insults me, I impulsively hurl insults back. I still stand by the content of my posts, but I regret the insults. Maybe I'll learn someday to debate online without insulting -- even after I've been insulted myself. I can only hope. Merry Christmas.

[js1138]

The most important false assumption you are making in calculating odds is the assumption that the outcome has a predictable direction. Biologists never assume that chanege is goreseeable in detail. When you don't predict specific events, oddsmaking is not relevant.

I can predict that te average temperature will be lower in winter than in summer (in the northern hemisphere), but I cannot predict the daily trends more than a couple days in advance.

Predicting things that have already happened is also elusive. We cannot, for example, start with initial weather conditions from a year ago and calculate today's weather -- even though it has already happened.

Your use of probability simply isn't relevant to evolution. It's not relevant to any complex system.

[VadeRetro]

It's as if you're saying that we know evolution occurred so the odds against it must not be insurmountable.

There is evidence independent of probability analysis that evolution has occurred. It makes at least as much sense to reason backward from evidence that a thing has happened as to scream incredulity and attack strawmen.

We get people making the "half a wing" argument on these threads. "How can a forelimb turn into a wing if the halfway thing is no good for running (or climbing, or whatever) and no good for flying?" That's the same exact thing.

Now, we don't know just what pressures acting where turned forelimbs into wings, but we have all kinds of fossil evidence that dinosaur forelimbs in fact turned into bird wings.

If anything we have an embarrassment of riches, a clutter of intermediates. The evidence portrays a very bushy tree of dino-bird evolution, one that refuses to tell a linear, simple story. However, that's exactly the fossil record picture our models of evolution and geology say we should normally find. In other words, we have the evidence we would expect to have if birds are a budding, with plenty of modern representatives plus lots of extinct twigs, off of a dinosaur branch. It's silly to just wish the evidence away by refusing to know it exists or try to understand it.

Creationism can't be science because it involves staying ignorant of evidence and innocent of logic.

[PatrickHenry]

If my premise is that it happened by purely random chance, the probability of finding those pennies in that state are vanishingly small.

Evolution is not a matter of "random chance." First, let's dispose of the comic-book version of evolution. I trust you are not one of those who imagine that evolution claims we're here because a disassociated collection of stray atoms just happened to blunder together and -- ta-da! -- here we are. That's the "creationist website version" of evolution. No sane biologist regards that with anything other than a slow, sad shake of the head.

So where's the "random chance"? Is it mutations that bother you? We know they occur. We can't really predict them, because the variables are so many, but they're governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. Like sunspots, which we also can't predict. They happen. Naturally. Not an issue.

So where does that leave us? Is natural selection the problem? Some individuals in a species succeed better than others. No secret there. Some are slow and weak, others are more robust. The better ones are likely to survive and breed the next generation, and pass their genes on (mutated or not). No secret there. Not much "random chance" either, when you think of it. Well, now and then an avalanche may wipe out some really healthy individuals. But hey -- that's a natural event, and in principle it's even predictible. If a species makes it, fine. If not, then like most of them, it's extinction city. But life goes on. This is obvious stuff. Why is it such an unacceptable scenario?

All in all, it's a largely -- maybe entirely -- determined process, although it's obviously not all that predictable.

[VadeRetro]

Biologists never assume that chanege is goreseeable in detail.

Never stopped Gore, though. He still swears he sees the future and it's all Bush's fault.

[VadeRetro]

Never stopped Gore, though.

Al Gore intended, not that other gore.

[puroresu]

Thank you for the links. I'll enjoy reading them over the Christmas break. I'm glad I'll finally have time to read the 29 evidences for macroevolution as well as the rebuttal by Dr. Camp (and the additional responses & rebuttals by both gentlemen).

Is evolution the **only** possible explanation for the dinosaur forelimbs and their similarity to bird wings? I'm certain you'll tell me it's the only SCIENTIFIC one! :-)

[RussP]

"Evolution is not a matter of "random chance." First, let's dispose of the comic-book version of evolution. I trust you are not one of those who imagine that evolution claims we're here because a disassociated collection of stray atoms just happened to blunder together and -- ta-da! -- here we are. That's the "creationist website version" of evolution. No sane biologist regards that with anything other than a slow, sad shake of the head."

You denounce the "comic-book" version of evolution, but you then immediately bring up your own "comic-book" version of the argument against purely naturalistic evolution.

I know full well how natural selection is supposed to work, but I'm telling you that its supposed power to produce complex life forms is nothing more than an article of faith.

Lee Spetner is a prof. of information theory at MIT, and he understands the concept of natural selection. What he disputes is its claimed power to produce complex life forms with the "appearance" of intelligent design.

In an earlier post, I used an analogy of a computer operating system. Imagine that Linus Torvalds decided that he will try an experiment. He will randomly flip a small fraction of bits in Linux and send out many different variations for use in the field. If a user emails back to him and says that he likes that version better, that "mutation" will be "selected." But if users are annoyed by the resulting bugs, they will switch to something else and Linux could eventually go "extinct."

Yes, its only an analogy, but I think its a pretty good one. It highlights the problem Spetner points out of trying to build up "information" by combining random changes with "selection" (whether natural or artificial is not the point here). It is extremely unlikely because the vast majority of mutations are detrimental and very few are beneficial. Furthermore, the effect of the beneficial mutations is likely to be so minor as to not propagate through the population anyway.

[VadeRetro]

Is evolution the **only** possible explanation for the dinosaur forelimbs and their similarity to bird wings? I'm certain you'll tell me it's the only SCIENTIFIC one! :-)

There's always creationism, no matter what evidence for evolution you find. Last Thursdayism is particularly convincing if you like pure, unadulterated irrefutability.

[puroresu]

Lesley Gore? She sang "It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To". But I think Al also sang that when Bush won Florida.

[puroresu]

And also ID, and also even the possibility that the explanation is something we haven't fathomed yet.

[VadeRetro]

When you look at critiques of Camp's response, don't forget the Ichneumon analysis.

Camp as a matter of strategy set out to write two paragraphs of bafflegab rebuttal to every paragraph of 29+ Evidences. He found the words but not the ideas.

[VadeRetro]

And also ID, and also even the possibility that the explanation is something we haven't fathomed yet.

Maybe gravity is something we haven't fathomed yet. Really.

But it's still pretty lawful for most purposes. It clearly causes the phenomena Newton said it causes (Kepler's Laws, for one). A lawyerly objector can sing, "Einstein showed Newton was wrong," but not about the role of gravity in celestial mechanics.

Aspects of evolution are not fully understood. Details of mechanism and history are argued over.

But it obviously is what's going on. It takes creationist levels of dogmatism to refuse to see that.

[RussP]

"Maybe gravity is something we haven't fathomed yet. Really."

Don't you just love these evolutionists. They think we understand evolution as well as we understand gravity. Unbelievable.

Has it occurred to you that gravity is just a tad but easier to test than evolution?

Then again, you have apparently swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, the claims that natural selection can create the "illusion" of intelligent design. No mathematical analysis needed. Just a good imagination, eh?