Posted on 08/31/2011 8:16:15 PM PDT by RonDog
LIBERALS' VIEW OF DARWIN UNABLE TO EVOLVE
August 31, 2011Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.
After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"
That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.
There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.
Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.
The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.
Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.
We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)
But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.") Read More
Agreed.
Why isn't there any EVIDENCE of "E" around us today?
All kinds of critters ought to have all kinds of useless parts hanging off of them, stuff that WON'T get passed on to the next generation!
Uh; type in a new one?
Indeed, the alternative is that our rights are ALLOWED to us by men/groups with more power than we have.
I already have, but you deleted the part of the sentence that validates the part you deny in the quote.
Evolution is an absolute fallacy and has nothing whatsoever to do with God.
The mistake that all evolutionary believers make is in assuming that, just because they see something in the lab, that it supports evolution. That is the fallacy of affirming the consequent.
It is foolishness to claim that effects generated by a complex biological-system have created that complex biological-system. That is begging the question.
In short, there is no shortage of logical fallacies that are used to 'support' evolution and that means that it remains firmly in the realm of belief, not fact.
OK let's examine that premise, which proceeds out of the mouths of theistic evolutionists on a regular basis.
Go read Genesis chapters 1 and 2. How many words in them deal with how the world was created, and how many deal with why it was created? In my NIV I count 30 verses of how and one verse of why (if we count verse 26 as "why," which is debatable) in chapter 1, and 2 to 3 verses of why and at least 22 of how in chapter 2. Now, certainly those two chapters are not the entire Bible, but they are typical in that God does not restrict His word to the "why" and in almost every case when "why" is dicussed the "how" is "God created them for this reason."
In other words, if God had simply pre-formed every jot and tittle of the human form in one go, right down to the last molecule, in final finished form, then the result would have been an automaton, a derivative robot with no genuine spark of self, of free will.
So, you believe God has the capability to create a human being "in one go, right down to the last molecule, in final finished form" but NOT the capability to create that same form with molecules arranged so that they would have free will?
Could you provide me with some Biblical backup for the idea that free will came from natural selection after humans diverged from a common ancestor with the apes? Scientific backup would be fine as well. What is the exact mechanism that caused natural selection to induce free will in certain arrangements of molecules?
You call God "Lord" in your post. Are you a Christian?
And, of course, we both know that rights that are "allowed" are not rights at all.
Thank you both,
Well I suppose it had to happen one day. Ann finally wrote a column that I consider completely wrong. Stick to politics Ann, science is not your forte.
BUMP!
I get my hackles up at attempts to “allegorize” large passages of the bible away.
A more conservative approach, involving comparing scripture with scripture and using historical and grammatical interpretation, keeps open the possibility if not the probability of the day-age theory, in which the creation days stand for ages or eras. But what God was doing behind the scene of the Genesis account is by definition not shown. We don’t have the knowledge to make presumptions about it. It was a time of the miraculous by any fair measure. “Punctuated equilibrium,” if geological and biological accounts actually show that, begins to look a lot like “this was planned so that production of species would neither generate a visible contingent of defective creatures nor stagnate.” Some say chance, I say wisdom.
I like where you’re going, but keep in mind that the day-age theory has two very large problems. One of them rules it out completely and the other puts a rather large hole in it right at the waterline.
1. The days of Creation Week in Genesis are contrary to current evolutionary theory and, indeed, any explanation that involves only natural processes. We see plants before there’s a Sun, birds before there are land animals, no predators or scavengers in existence and a woman is built from a rib bone and dirt, probably coming into existence days after the man as well. No series of ages involving evolution or a naturalistic cosmology could produce these events in this order as part of an age.
2. The word used for day in Genesis is “yom.” Yom can be used to express a period of time (such as “in the day of the Lord”) but it’s most commonly used to describe a 24 hour day or the time of the day when the Sun is up. In Genesis 1 each day is accompanied by the phrase “And there was evening, and there was morning”—something that makes no sense if the account is supposed to describe an age that lasted millions of years.
The day-age possibility is unworkable.
You might dig into the details proposed by day age theorists (Hugh Ross, and his www.reasons.org website, is one, that I don’t completely agree with, but answers a lot of these issues). For example if the earth from the observer’s point of view was constantly cloudy, green plants would be possible without being able to see the sun. Miracles are also possible in the midst of a more or less evolutionary process. Humans being a special creation from scratch does not tell us whether all other life forms were special creations too.
Genesis says He created the Sun on Day Four, not that it was seen then. Besides, I can’t imagine any evidence evolutionists, astronomers and cosmologists have come up with which would make the idea of a planet growing without a sun for millions of years remotely reasonable without God specifically acting to make the planet warm. So we’re rejecting the idea that God created the Earth and its biosphere in six days as a special creation for the equally “unscientific” and supernatural idea that God kept the Earth habitable for millions of years without a star to provide light and heat.
The idea of evolution among animals occurring without any predators or scavengers arising before the advent of man not only makes no sense in terms of how natural selection works, it conflicts with the fossil record in the same way that “Elvis Presley can’t sing” conflicts with his vinyl records. The idea that T-Rex evolved from the slime over hundreds of millions of years to eat grass is just as absurd as any picture of Jesus riding an apatosaurus.
And again, unless women evolved a million years or so after men, day-age is impossible.
You say that “Miracles are also possible in the midst of a more or less evolutionary process,” but then we’re left with more problems:
a. If evolution needed miracles to succeed, when did the miracles stop, or did they? Should evolutionary biologists still be looking for them today?
b. How shall scientists document and study these miraculous events?
c. If the evolution of the planet and its biosphere happened in the order that is documented in Genesis, how have evolutionary scientists screwed the timeline up so badly?
d. If they have, why should we believe they are really, really on the ball about how the natural world works except for that whole plants-before-the-sun-and-birds-before-dinosaurs thing?
e. If they haven’t, and evolution really did happen under God’s supervision, hy couldn’t God do a better job of documenting it than handing us an account that is 3 days (billions of years, presumably) off on the Sun and has birds cruising the sky before T-Rex existed?
Genesis doesn’t work as an allegory of sin, a pretty poem God wrote to make us feel good or a day-age kinda-sorta account of evolution. It is either history or a fairy tale.
You may need to pop more popcorn. See 233 and following.
Check Ross for answers to most if not all of these issues before going further with this. I normally don’t like to shunt people to websites but www.reasons.org is very clearly laid out. I do not agree with all of Ross’ theories, but he makes at least a very plausible scientific and theological case for old earth creationism.
The sun is not documented as being “created” on day #4 (the special “creation” verb is not used for setting the sun, along with the moon, in the sky as a sign).
Your “pretty poem” is a straw man.
Mentioning a theory others have proposed (that Genesis is poetry and is not meant to document any historical event) is not the same as deploying a strawman against you. I never said or implied that was your position.
I'll go look at the Ross site when I get a minute, but come on...birds before dinosaurs? No predators for millions and millions of years? Once you have to tap-dance around issues like that, the text can't be relating to real events in a real way anymore...or the real events are exactly as described in the text.
As to this...
The sun is not documented as being “created” on day #4 (the special “creation” verb is not used for setting the sun, along with the moon, in the sky as a sign).
If that's so, we would still have...what exactly? A planet shrouded in 100% overcast for tens of millions of years? Or one kept in an incubator by God while the Sun and Moon waited in the green room for their cue? So, if someone believes God set evolution on the world and supernaturally kept it overcast (or in the cosmic incubator) for millions of years one is scientifically minded, but if one believes He supernaturally created the Earth in six days, doesn't believe in the miraculous cosmic incubator and created the Sun when He says He did, one is unscientific?
The problem, BTW, is that it isn't so. The word translated as "made" in Genesis 1:16 is asahl. This same word is used to describe God creating the sky (1:7), the animals (1:25, 3:1), the entire creation (1:31), the Earth (2:4), the clothes He made for Adam and Eve (3:21), mankind (5:1, 6:6, 6:7, 9:6) and every living creature (7:4). When we compare this supposedly "special" creation verb "bara," we find that it is used to describe God making the same things, for the most part: The heavens and Earth, mankind...the account uses asahl to describe making the land animals in 1:25, but uses bara to describe making sea creatures and birds...so does that mean that the land animals were in the same waiting room the Sun and Moon were in for the first four days, or does it mean they weren't created? If the Sun was not created on day four because the word asahl is used, then animals weren't created on day six, either.
It just gets more and more absurd...and we still haven't gotten to the possibility that Jesus is descended from a fictional character.
Still waiting for your answer...
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.