Posted on 12/29/2001 5:05:05 PM PST by cantfindagoodscreenname
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 21, Number 4.
Creation “scientists” have more need than most of us to parade their degrees and qualifications, but it pays to look closely at the institutions that awarded them and the subjects in which they were taken. Those vaunted Ph.D.s tend to be in subjects such as marine engineering or gas kinetics rather than in relevant disciplines like zoology or geology. And often they are earned not at real universities, but at little-known Bible colleges deep in Bush country.
There are, however, a few shining exceptions. Kurt Wise now makes his living at Bryan College (motto “Christ Above All”) located in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famed Scopes trial. And yet, he originally obtained an authentic degree in geophysics from the University of Chicago, followed by a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard, no less, where he studied under (the name is milked for all it is worth in creationist propaganda) Stephen Jay Gould.
Kurt Wise is a contributor to In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation, a compendium edited by John F. Ashton (Ph.D., of course). I recommend this book. It is a revelation. I would not have believed such wishful thinking and self-deception possible. At least some of the authors seem to be sincere, and they don’t water down their beliefs. Much of their fire is aimed at weaker brethren who think God works through evolution, or who clutch at the feeble hope that one “day” in Genesis might mean not twenty-four hours but a hundred million years. These are hard-core “young earth creationists” who believe that the universe and all of life came into existence within one week, less than 10,000 years ago. And Wise—flying valiantly in the face of reason, evidence, and education—is among them. If there were a prize for Virtuoso Believing (it is surely only a matter of time before the Templeton Foundation awards one) Kurt Wise, B.A. (Chicago), Ph.D. (Harvard), would have to be a prime candidate.
Wise stands out among young earth creationists not only for his impeccable education, but because he displays a modicum of scientific honesty and integrity. I have seen a published letter in which he comments on alleged “human bones” in Carboniferous coal deposits. If authenticated as human, these “bones” would blow the theory of evolution out of the water (incidentally giving lie to the canard that evolution is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific: J. B. S. Haldane, asked by an overzealous Popperian what empirical finding might falsify evolution, famously growled, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”). Most creationists would not go out of their way to debunk a promising story of human remains in the Pennsylvanian Coal Measures. Yet Wise patiently and seriously examined the specimens as a trained paleontologist, and concluded unequivocally that they were “inorganically precipitated iron siderite nodules and not fossil material at all.” Unusually among the motley denizens of the “big tent” of creationism and intelligent design, he seems to accept that God needs no help from false witness.
All the more interesting, then, to read his personal testimony in In Six Days. It is actually quite moving, in a pathetic kind of way. He begins with his childhood ambition. Where other boys wanted to be astronauts or firemen, the young Kurt touchingly dreamed of getting a Ph.D. from Harvard and teaching science at a major university. He achieved the first part of his goal, but became increasingly uneasy as his scientific learning conflicted with his religious faith. When he could bear the strain no longer, he clinched the matter with a Bible and a pair of scissors. He went right through from Genesis 1 to Revelations 22, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific worldview were true. At the end of this exercise, there was so little left of his Bible that
. . . try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.
See what I mean about pathetic? Most revealing of all is Wise’s concluding paragraph:
Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.
See what I mean about honest? Understandably enough, creationists who aspire to be taken seriously as scientists don’t go out of their way to admit that Scripture—a local origin myth of a tribe of Middle-Eastern camel-herders—trumps evidence. The great evolutionist John Maynard Smith, who once publicly wiped the floor with Duane P. Gish (up until then a highly regarded creationist debater), did it by going on the offensive right from the outset and challenging him directly: “Do you seriously mean to tell me you believe that all life was created within one week?”
Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence. This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a mind capable of such doublethink. It reminds me of Winston Smith in 1984 struggling to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother said so. But that was fiction and, anyway, Winston was tortured into submission. Kurt Wise—and presumably others like him who are less candid—has suffered no such physical coercion. But, as I hinted at the end of my previous column, I do wonder whether childhood indoctrination could wreak a sufficiently powerful brainwashing effect to account for this bizarre phenomenon.
Whatever the underlying explanation, this example suggests a fascinating, if pessimistic, conclusion about human psychology. It implies that there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence. Depending upon how many Kurt Wises are out there, it could mean that we are completely wasting our time arguing the case and presenting the evidence for evolution. We have it on the authority of a man who may well be creationism’s most highly qualified and most intelligent scientist that no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.
Can you imagine believing that and at the same time accepting a salary, month after month, to teach science? Even at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee? I’m not sure that I could live with myself. And I think I would curse my God for leading me to such a pass.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. An evolutionary biologist and prolific author and lecturer, his most recent book is Unweaving the Rainbow.
Seems that ID is the latest half-baked, backward reasoned theory from Creationists to attempt to partially explain what they can't explain about the body of evidence that supports evolution.
ROFL! You have freep mail BTW! :)
As they say, 'many geniuses throughout history were called crazy....but so were a lot of crazy people"
The problem is the insularity that such a situation engenders. Much like an unquestionable monarchy or ideology. Groupings like those will experience entropy (hey, there's that word again!) unless acted on by an external stimulus.
We aren't asking any Evo's to use 'Creationist' methods. We're asking them to be true to their own methods and to stop throwing out incovenient evidence, invention mechanisms for which their is no proof and for ejecting whole scientific laws from their formulations. Dont convert to our side - be true to the foundational aspects hat you claim to believe on your own side.
This is not true at all. We update the models as new data comes to light. Personally I would love to be able to prove evolution was false. Would be pretty neat to have a Nobel Prize! :)
The really big lie which is implicit in all evolutionist arguments which I ever see is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. It isn't; the dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. To be an evolutionist, you have to be willing to take everything we know about modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic, and flush them down the toilet.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some axpect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed et. al.
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter F (Fornicator), D (Democrat), W (whatever), or I (for IDIOT), you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the former choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
People often talk at cross purposes about evolution for failure to define terms. The theory of evolution as I know it posits that there is no god. That certainly is the theory that Dawkins presents. Thus the existence of God and the theory of evolution are inconsistent. My remarks do not apply to any other theory.
From your reply, I take it that you regard any event the outcome of which cannot be predicted is an event occuring by chance. I do not think this is a satisfactory definition. It is the same as saying that "chance" is the name we give to our ignorance. Among the objections to this definition is that chance will differ according to the sophistication (e.g., intelligence, knowledge of computation algorithms) of the observer. Also according to the observer's stock of empircal information.
I regret that I have to sign off at this time. If you reply, I may see it later.
Nice try at lumping evolution in with the liberals as if there is some sort of weird connection there. From what I see, there is next to NO free speech when it comes to Creationists and their literal interpretations of the bible. That's OK by me as long as it does not disrupt valid science. But of course if the Creationist had their way they would bring Book Burning to high art and scientific discoveries would have to pass a board of self-appointed religious clerics that would deliberate if the science in any way conflicts with the bible.
Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.
You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:
HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"
What's wrong with that?
The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:
Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...
Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.
The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:
"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?
Archive Post (from a discussion on talk.origins)
To a very close aproximation, all change these days is due to cultural evolution (memes). Any biological change will be through genetic engineering as you say. Genetic engineering is a result of cultural evolution. Overpopulation will be curbed by either mass culling of the population by starvation, which genetically would be almost a random cull (there's no correllation between genes and wealth/power) Or else by cultural evolution leading to population control by changing breeding patterns. Id prefer the latter. In a deep sense it would be humane to supply aid to fund payments for voluntary sterilization all over the world.
Consider the following as an alternative:
Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about what he saw as the next step in human evolutionary development, the uebermensch; everything pretty much EXCEPT a believeable plan for developing or breeding him. I now know how that can be done. At the very least, I have a plan which would dramatically improve the genetic pool of the entire human race in one generation.
The plan requires what I would term an Infinitely Stupid Ideological Doctrine, or ISID for short which, while modeled on evolutionism, the only real-world example of an ISID, could not be evolutionism itself since that would weight the program in favor of the offspring of religious groups, rather in the desired direction of the uebermensch.
Nonetheless, a religiously neutral ISID would be devised using evolutionism as a model, i.e. the doctrine would require belief in an infinite number of impossible/zero-probability occurances as evolutionism does, require infinite expanses of time as an enabling mechanism for believing in things which cannot be made to happen in real life as evolutionism does, and generally be unfalsifiable as is evolutionism.
Moreover, to students at all K12 levels, the new ISID must appear to be supported in entirely the same manner as is evolutionism. It must appear to be backed by every organ of American government at nearly all levels, supported by hosts of "experts" with PHD degrees and no common-sense or judgement, defended by vicious attacks upon the intelligence and judgement of any would-be doubters, and in fact the new ISID must appear to be part of a winning program for the final victory of light over darkness, good over evil; people opposed to the new ISID must be cast as mindless "staroveriyeh", people who want to bring back the dark ages.
The truth and beauty of the new ISID must be drummed into the heads of every child in America from the day he is born until the day he graduates from high school by every facet of his existence, school, MTV, radio, the movies, mod clothes, beer cans... all should bear witness to the grandeur and beauty of the ISID.
And then, on graduation day, the kids should be brought into an interview room one at a time and asked "Do you believe in the ISID?" The ones who reply "No" should be allowed to live.
A normal person wishing to understand what has become of academia in recent years, has several starting points, including of course DeSouza's "Illiberal Education", Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind", and a far more intense and all-encompassing book which I've referred to a couple of times in the Quirck/Bridwell book "Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class Since WW-II".
Martin Anderson's "Imposters in the Temple" is another item to add to that little list.
The basic job of colleges and universities should be teaching. There still are schools at which that holds true, but they are an exception at present. Anderson describes the trivial pursuits which have replaced teaching as the major objective of many if not most professors, in many if not most schools:
"For most professors, the surest route to scholarly fame (and some fortune) is to publish in the distinguished academic journals of their field. Not books, or treatises, for these are rare indeed, but short, densely packed articles of a dozen pages or so.Anderson, of course, is describing a sort of a ritualized and formalized version of what college frats sometimes refer to as a "circle jerk"."The successful professor's resume will be littered with citations of short, scholarly articles, their value rising with the prestige of the journal. These studious articles are the coin of the realm in the academic world. They are the professor's ticker to promotion, higher salary, generous research grants, lower teaching loads, and even more opulent office space.
"...These are supposed to be scholarly pieces, at the cutting edge of new knowledge.
"But now I must confess something. Many years ago when I read these articles regularly as part of my academic training and during my early years as a professor, I was bothered by the fact that I often failed to find the point of these articles, even after wading through the web of jargon, mathematical equations, and turgid English. Perhaps when I get older and wiser I will appreciate them more, I thought. Well, I am now fifty-five years old, and the significance of most academic writing continues to elude me."
"In recent years, I have conducted an informal survey. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I ask scholars about their academic journal reading habits. For example, I recently asked a colleague, a man with a solid reputation as a scholar, what he considered to be the most important academic journal in his field of study. An economist, he immediately replied "The American Economic Review".
"Let me ask you a question", I said. "Take, say, all of the issues of the last five years. What is your favorite article?"
"...Sure enough, he answered like all the rest. There was a silence of a few seconds, and then he cleared his throat a bit and, looking somewhat guilty and embarassed, said "Well, I haven't been reading it much lately." When pressed, he admitted that he could not name a single article which he had read during the last five years which he found memorable. In fact, he probably had not read any articles, but was loath to admit it.
"...There are exceptions of course, a handful of men and women in every field who do read these articles and try to comprehend any glimmers of meaning or significance they might contain. But, as a general rule, nobody reads the articles in academic journals anymore.
"...There is a mystery here. For while these academic publications pile up, largely unread, on the shelves of university libraries, their importance to a professor's career continues unabated. Scarcely anyone questions these proofs of erudition on a resume.
"...One reason why these research articles are automatically accepted as significant and important is that they have survived the criticism of "peer review" before being published.
"...Some of the manuscript reviews are done 'blind', with the author's name stripped off, while others are not and the reviwer knows exactly whom he or she is evaluating. Given what is at stake in peer reviewing... it would not be unreasonable to worry a little about corruption sneaking in.
"But these questions are not explored. The fact that some fields of study are small enough that the intellectuals involved in them are all known to eachother, or that friends review friends, or that reviewers repay those who reviewed their own writings favorably in the past -- all these potential problems are ignored...
The theory of evolution says no such thing. This is pure propaganda from fundamentalist Christians that want to destroy what they can’t when it comes down to scientific fact. I believe in evolution and I am also a Christian. Where is the contradiction if you believe that god created this universe of ours? The only real point of conflict is the question of when God interceded in creating life. Based on hard scientific evidence supporting evolution I believe that God created life much earlier in this world than what the Creationist believe. And the real difference is that evolution has science on its side while Creationists are left to old testament folklore that was handed down from one generation to the next verbally thousands of years before recorded history. I'd say the odds of evolution being right are astronomically higher than that of the Creationists.
Good point, I should have been more specific. I was speaking of cases (of which I believe radioactive decay is one) where the outcome of an event is fundamentally unknowable, regardless of the quantity or accuracy of any observations made beforehand.
The theory of evolution as I know it posits that there is no god.
Any theory of evolution that claims the nonexistence of God is overstepping its bounds. Evolution doesn't require a creator, but it doesn't forbid one any more than Galileo's theories of planetary motions did.
paxtecum that's the MO of these Creationists. I had one Creationist tell me not so long ago that Catholics were not true Christians. When I pointed out to the poster that it was the Catholic faith that started Christianity I didn't get any response. Most of the Creationists are impressionable people that don't have much going for them upstairs and are very insecure about it.
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