Johnson can't be demolished with any intellectual honesty because he uses the admissions of Darwin and the Darwinists to prove his case. He is not a scientist, but a logician and lawyer. He needed nothing but the words of the founder of the creed and the preeminent current believers of Darwinism and logic to demonstrate that Darwinism as currently defined is bunk.
Johnson works with the theory of evolution that states that species adapt to changes in their environment through gradual genetic mutation that makes them fitter to survive in that environment than their competitors. This mutation over time turns a species into an entire new species and then into another and into another and on and on. It follows that the fossil record, writes Johnson, should look like the frames of a movie, with very subtle differences. And even if many frames were lost, one should still find sufficient frames to demonstrate the gradualness, the great, glacial-like slowness of the changing of one species into another. Yet, after nearly 200 years of searching, Man has yet to find a single fossil record demonstrating such gradual change.
Johnson then goes on to note that the phrase so important to the Darwinists "survival of the fittest" is a mere tautology, or circular reasoning. If the animal survived, it was fittest. If it was fittest, it survived. When in fact, many species much more fit to survive on earth than those that now exist may have come and gone without our notice for any number of reasons. And there may be many species alive that have never been the fittest to survive. Obviously, every gene pool would have tended toward the same form had there been a form that was fittest to survive. So the phrase means nothing.
All Johnson does is demonstrate that evolutionists must believe in great leaps in the evolutionary process that are unrelated to the environment and that occur on at least the scale of two, male and female, at a time and within a distance that they can find each other. And to believe this, that the Salamander gave birth to the frog in one giant leap of evolution while her neighboring salamander gave birth to a female frog within a near distance and time frame requires faith, like a religion.
To anyone that wants to know the true state of the evolution debate, I strongly suggest Phillip Johnson's, "Darwin on Trial," which is very readable and soundly strips bare the theory of gradual adaptation with the writings of the evolutionists themselves. They admit that their theory is flawed, but don't want anybody to find out until they can resolve the flaw. And resolving the flaw may well be something they cannot do. This is why it is time to start making sure that students are exposed to both the apologists for evolution and its critics. I think creationism is BS, so I am not urging that it be taught, but certainly Johnson should be taught along with Darwin. And finally, it is interesting to read Darwin himself, who foresaw many of the problems that have developed with his theory and discussed them at length. He knew his theory was incomplete, and could only be sustained if a complete fossil record in minutia detail could ultimately be found.
Johnson can't be demolished with any intellectual honesty because he uses the admissions of Darwin and the Darwinists to prove his case. Lots of Luddites do that, which makes it easy to point out that they can and do weave all kind of silly false pictures with their selective editing of reality. Creationist Quotes and Misquotes.
He is not a scientist, but a logician and lawyer.
Well, a lawyer.
It follows that the fossil record, writes Johnson, should look like the frames of a movie, with very subtle differences.
You mean Smooth Change in the Fossil Record?
And even if many frames were lost, one should still find sufficient frames to demonstrate the gradualness, the great, glacial-like slowness of the changing of one species into another. Yet, after nearly 200 years of searching, Man has yet to find a single fossil record demonstrating such gradual change.
Actually, many frames are lost because pressures on a population to change to change its adaptation aren't continuous. They're acute in times of crisis, but are entirely absent for long periods of history. You have to model with the real world.
And that's what we increasingly do. Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium.
Another willful dumbdumbism by a shady lawyer. It's the joint operation of variation and natural selection that produces change in a population. Lawyering Luddites always attack the two parts separately. "Randomness doesn't go anywhere!" "Survival of the fittest" is a tautology. Variation creates the menu. The ebb and flow of events takes things off and leaves others on. The joint operation of both is not random and not a tautology.
All Johnson does is demonstrate that evolutionists must believe in great leaps in the evolutionary process that are unrelated to the environment and that occur on at least the scale of two, male and female, at a time and within a distance that they can find each other. And to believe this, that the Salamander gave birth to the frog in one giant leap of evolution while her neighboring salamander gave birth to a female frog within a near distance and time frame requires faith, like a religion.
It doesn't work that way. No non-creationist out of high school believes that it does. The population genetics change over time, but the population never loses internal mutual compatibility.
Think about the argument you/Johnson just made in your above paragraph and how I answered it. The argument you rebutted isn't what anyone seriously believes. That should not be happening, but it is.
If you think what you said above is how evolution works, you don't know what you're talking about. But if you don't really think it works that way, you're pretending that you do. And why do I care which it is?
but certainly Johnson should be taught along with Darwin...I would have said along with Johnnie Cochran, in a rhetoric or logic course. When he's actually added something to the store of knowledge, then, maybe, he would deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Darwin and other great scientists. Until then, he's just a demogogue/lawyer