Posted on 07/08/2002 12:26:11 PM PDT by Khepera
Could it be the evolutionists who are being irrational?
About a year and a half ago, I gave a response to an article in the L. A. Times about a book called The Moral Animal--Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright. This response resulted in my commentary called " Did Morals Evolve? " There are some interesting things in this book I want to comment on. Wright's argument is that it is possible to explain all of man's mental and moral development in terms of evolution, "survival of the fittest," and natural selection. One thing he acknowledges is essentially the same point of view held by one of the world's most famous evolutionists, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins makes the point in his watershed book, The Blind Watchmaker , that the world looks designed. He asserts it looks designed--but isn't. He believes natural selection can be invoked to account for all of the things that appear to be consciously design.
Robert Wright unabashedly makes the same point. He uses design language in his descriptions all of the time. He talks about nature wanting certain things and natural selection designing particular things, but then is careful at different points to add the disclaimer that this design is just a manner of speaking because Mother Nature doesn't actually design anything. Natural selection doesn't design anything. There is no mind behind this, no consciousness. It just looks that way. However, since it looks designed, he feels comfortable using design language to describe natural selection as a designer, which is no conscious designer at all.
I think his work might be more honest if he didn't use design language, but it's interesting that he is at least willing to acknowledge that nature does look designed.
Incidentally, I am one who believes that natural selection is a legitimate explanation for many things. I think we can see natural selection at work in the natural realm that does influence the morphological distinctives of populations. The shape of the body is ultimately going to be determined by the genetic makeup of the creature, but whether that phenotype gets passed from generation to generation will be determined by environmental factors--natural selection. And that will then begin to characterize larger groups of the organism.
Basically I believe in what is known technically as the Special Theory of Evolution, or micro -evolution, because it has been demonstrated without question to have occurred. We can observe it happening. This doesn't go against my Christianity or my conviction that God created the world. Darwinian evolution requires macro -evolution, or trans-species evolution.
Any design creationist of any ilk, whether old-earther or young-earther, can hold to this. For example, a population of mosquitoes can be almost entirely wiped out by DDT, except for those few who may be naturally and genetically resistant to that strain of DDT. Then they reproduce a whole strain of mosquitoes that are resistant to that strain of DDT. But this is unremarkable. When I hear these kinds of descriptions of minute changes and small variations within a species attributed to natural selection, I have no problem with that in itself.
The so-called scientific argument is sustained simply by a bald assertion that nature did it, and not by evidence that God could not have done it.
I do have another question regarding the assessment, or acknowledgment, that the world looks designed. If it looks designed, it could be equally explained by either the unconscious "design" of natural selection, as the author argues, or the conscious design of a Creator. If someone looks at the natural realm and observes that it looks designed but thinks that it can be accounted for by natural selection, then they are identifying empirical equivalency between two different explanations. Empirical equivalency means the observable data can be explained by two alternatives equally. In this case, the observation of design can be attributed to natural selection or conscious design. The evidence is equal for both. That's what it means to say that the world looks designed but natural selection can account for it. My question is, why opt for the evolutionary explanation if there are two different explanations that will equally do the job? When you have a question that needs resolution and two empirically equivalent solutions, you must look for some other information to adjudicate between the two. Is there something that can be said for one system over the other that would cause us to choose it as the paradigm which better reflects how the world came to be? What is the compelling evidence that would cause us to opt for a naturalistic explanation over some kind of theistic explanation? Frankly, I know of none. There is only a predisposition to look for a naturalistic explanation that leaves God out. If that is the case, then it needs to be acknowledged.
Why go for natural selection rather than for God? Because God is religion and natural selection is science. Science is seen as fact--and religion as fantasy. If we have a set of physical facts that can be accounted for by a theistic explanation, then you have to have some other information that may cause you to want to dismiss the theistic option. I'm asking "where is the evidence that makes the God option an intellectually untenable one, without bringing in a mere philosophic assumption (namely naturalism)?"
One might rightly ask, where is your evidence that God did it? I can give lots of it. I could give independent evidence that is unrelated to religious authority claims. I can give other evidence why it is reasonable to believe and would be intellectually and rationally compelling to believe that there is a conscious mind behind the universe. I could give cosmological and moral arguments that God is the best explanation for the existence and nature of the universe. Many of these rely on scientific evidence.
Given two options to explain the apparent design features of the universe, one seems to be a bald-faced authority claim -- the non-religious, so-called scientific one.
We have two options--one scientific and one religious--that equally explain the observation of a designed universe. The so-called scientific argument is sustained simply by a bald assertion that nature did it and not by evidence that God could not have done it. However, the design claim that I am making can be further substantiated by other evidence for the existence of God. When push comes to shove, if you are rational, it is more reasonable for you to adopt the conscious design explanation--the God claim. Most people are not going to do that because it is not scientific.
Why does that matter? Because science knows the answer. How do they know the answer? Because God doesn't exist. How do they know that? Because nature did everything. But how do you know that?
That is the question we are trying to ask and there are no rationally sustainable answers forthcoming.
But of course all features are useful throughout. You're making a point of misunderstanding and not remembering what people have been explaining to you daily for probably 10 years now....
Even the little system for turning the flight feathers, venetian-blind fashion, so that the air flows through the wing on up strokes?? Come on, PH: tell us all what purpose that could possibly serve before the velociraptor actually turned into a flying bird, or why that should evolve WHILE (as Reep claims) the wings and flight feathers were developing, all merely via mutations and "natural selection" of course...
You're stuck on this SHAZAM model in which a dinosaur turns into a bird in one day. You've been knocking it over for 10 years and you're not going to get unstuck now.
When does your feather-turning system have to appear? By the time it's necessary, it's there, because it was helpful at an earlier phase. At any given time, you're only building on what you have.
But there's no stopping you from doing strawman models based upon sheer ignorance. It's your whole game.
I mean, it's not really hard to comprehend the rational for making name-calling into the art form you evos have; I couldn't come up with any sort of a rational way to defend anything that stupid myself.
The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.
The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
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 aspect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
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 A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional 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 them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...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?
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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.
Consider the "proto-bird" (TM), a favorite amongst evolutionists.
This poor little creature is supposed to have somehow survived a thousand generation process during which it had neither functional arms, nor functional wings, during which it had enough flight feathers to look weird and be laughed at, but not enough to fly, a light enough bone structure to be kicked around on beaches, but not light enough to fly, and was generally an outcast, pariah, ugly duckling, and effortlessly free meal for every predator which ever saw it for 1000+ generations before it ever succeeded and flew.
An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.
Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??
Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???
They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.
According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.
But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features are fatal burdons, and the bad flying capabilities do not suffice to save them.
Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.
Proto-bird (TM) is supposed to have evolved into birdhood via a process which lasted 10,000 generations during which, of course, he had front appendages which were not useful for running, jumping, flying, grasping prey, or anything else since they were in a process of transition while, presumably, living on welfare for 10,000 generations in the days of Alley Oop.
Evolutionists would have you believe that arms are really not all that necessary, and that having arms be disfunctional for ten thousand generations or so is really no big deal.
What about having your BRAIN be 100% disfunctional for a thousand generations or more (granted evolutionists brains are disfunctional, but that doesn't count since we assume they live off charity)?
Rick Lanier notes:
Some of the problems of Whales evolving from Land "urchins":
The cochleal bones of whales are made up of three membranes. This leads to great dexterity in the acoustic deciphering needed for low frequency navigation. The spriral formation of these 'ears' creates acoustic sensory organs much more sophisticated than any land mammal. The US Navy during the 60's - 80's conducted research using pilot whales and dolphins, for among other things, position tracking of torpedos and submarines. The findings were more astounding that seemed possible. The marine mammals could locate torpedos 5 times faster than navy divers using the most advanced acoustics the Navy had.
Why is low frequency important ? Low frequency only makes sense when used over longer distances, which take advantage of a perculiar characteristic of deep water,
Deep Sound Channels. Deep sound channels form because warm water above reflects down, cold water below reflects up. DSC's in between can carry sound great distances by use of these channels. The US Navy has been protecting your country for years by utilizing this fact, along with the triangulation effect of the SOSUS underwater 'hydrophones'. Now to the point, How could whales 'evolve' deep water frequencies while staying in shore? And the paradox, how could they survive in deep water without the echolocation mentioned. The documentary "Deaf Whale, Dead Whale" recently shown on Science Frontiers (Discovery) bring out the point of whale dependance on echolocation for its survival. In this documenatry they discuss how a whale was tracked througout the Atlantic using the SOSUS network. They were surprised to see how this particular whale was using the island of Bermuda as a navigation beacon., from great distances. The use of these frequencies by whales was the main reason that enviromental groups protested the planned use of Acoustic Termo Measurement (Using low frequency sound waves to measure temperature) in the Atlantic. The tests were cancelled.
Some would say that whales just went from shallow to deep water. Yet they have the acoustics for both. The high frequency 'clicks' used for in close sonar, and communication, and the deep water low frequency echolation used for navigation.
Remember, the sperm whale has been seen at depths up to 20,000 feet.
Whales need this echolocation for their survival, how could this have evolved from creatures not possessing the hybrids of these mechanisms, while it was in the water.
The possibility of mammals in the sea without coming from land would cause evolutions to take a powder, they need something that could possibly be an anscestor to be found on land....... Yes, that's it the Herbasaurus, er, Basilosaurus................................
I.e., during any period of evolving the mental functions which whales absolutely require for their day-to-day existence, their brains would be disfunctional.
Likewise, any rational person watching insects fly can understand that on the day that the first bat ever snagged the first insect using echo-location, the echo-location had to work perfectly, and that such a capability could not possibly evolve.
Consider what life must have been like for the evolutionists' "proto-bat", attempting to develop echo-location over a multi-thousand- generation span:
This creature's life would almost certainly have been one continual, bad hallucination, from dawn to dusk and then back again, from the day he was born to the day he died.
Picture being stoned out of your mind on every hallucinatory drug at the same time, and then trying to watch and make sense of the very worst television broadcast you've ever seen, you know, the sort of thing you see for about 20 seconds before the "Technical Difficulties" screen comes up. That's all that that poor little evolving bat ever knew of our world.
And yet, evolutionists would have you believe that this fatally afflicted little creature prospered and thrived and survived for thousands of generations, in such a state.
Whenever you see or hear somebody expounding upon evolution, or trying to indoctrinate kids in the "fact" of evolution, think about this poor little dinged-out bat flying around in circles, flying into walls, trees, the ground, his mind trashed either because he met up with Raoul Jose-Domingo Tokovar and they toked down a box of Columbian spliffs, or (effectively the same thing) because he was trying to EVOLVE echo-location, and was only 80% there...
Let's call this little bat Splifford. Some years ago, somebody rescued a little bear from a forest fire, and that little bear became a metaphor for the national effort to preserve our forests from careless acts and the tragedy of large-scale fires.
Similarly, Splifford should become a symbol of the national will to save American culture, American society, and the youth of America from the mind-destroying evil of corrupt ideological doctrines.
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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.
If someone from a primitive tribe were to stumble upon an arch, they could honestly claim that only God could have created such a complex object. Remove one stone, and the structure will fail and fall upon the ground.
This structure would be impossible, and the probability of random stones assembling themselves into such a structure is impossible.
What this primitive tribe did not know about was a very important aspect. What they never saw or witnessed the scaffolding during it's construction.
While it was being built, each stone was fully supported by this scaffolding and was an independent and sound structure.
Biology works the same way. Today, we are amazed at the complexity of the eye and other organs. But each and every step had it's own scaffolding as it was being developed.
Today, we see the complete arch or organism without the scaffolding, are are amazed at the complexity.
But just like the arch, it is not that complex when you study each item in detail.
Hey Medved, I have missed debating with you lately!
Including:
Obviously the list is not exhaustive, but that is the 10 most wanted list of mind-f@#$ing degenerate, sociopath-creating mindsets and ideologies.
I hold the classical liberal vision of a one world united in a free, liberal global society. A world in which there are no "free nations versus slave nations." Government will always act against having a peaceful, productive and free global society so of course I don't want a one world government. Less government everywhere, not more. The only one world governments will come when we have monoethnic colonies on other worlds. The Earth will never be peacefully united under anything more unified than a confederacy.
The classical liberal goal was always to use nations like the US as building blocks with which to remake the world according to the liberal plan: secular law based on natural law, inalienable property and personal rights, equality for all members of society and a rational social framework. What many have never understood is that freedom in the US will never last if the average person can be shown there are few, if any, nations freer than us. Hence the liberal plan to create a global free society (note: not free republic). That way it would extraordinarily difficult for politicians to suck off of the patriotic teat whenever they want to justify a new police power increase like what they did with the USA PATRIOT Act, a wholey unnecessary piece of legislation. Anyone with a brain knows things like that don't do jack other than let federal agents be sloppy.
Yes indeed, they cannot come up with evidence to refute his statements so they insult him. It has been more than a dozen years since he wrote Black Box by now and his claim that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex still stands. In fact, the discoveries of science in the last dozen years, clearly imply and in many cases prove with certainty that just about every single trait in an organism is irreducibly complex due to the complex interrelationships between every single part of the body and the dependance of every single trait and function on numerous other traits and functions.
... which nobody reads. Millions have read Behe's work and to say that it has not been examined by people in the scientific community is absolute nonsense. Are you claiming that the articles against him are by morons whose words should not be accepted as scientifically sound??????
You, a human, dare to question how I created this world?
Did you not read all the teachings I have taught all of you humans over the last 10,000 years? Ok, it tooks a little while for you to finally comprehend the idea of a written word.
Humans are not the smartest critters around, but I do enjoy playing with them. Eventually, they may figure it out, dispite their best efforts to blindly obey what other humans tell them.
What other assumption is there besides the silly materialist one that if we do not see it, it does not exist?
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