Scientific American threatens AiG : Demands immediate removal of Web rebuttal

AIG ^ | 2002/07/11 | AIG

[ZGuy]

The prominent magazine Scientific American thought it had finally discredited its nemesis—creationism—with a feature article listing ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’ (July 2002). Supposedly these were the fifteen best arguments that evolutionists could use to discredit the Bible’s account of Creation. (National Geographic TV also devoted a lengthy report to the article.)

Within 72 hours, Dr Jonathan Sarfati—a resident scientist at Answers in Genesis–Australia—had written a comprehensive, point-by-point critique of the magazine article and posted it on this Web site.

So Scientific American thought it would try to silence AiG with the threat of a lawsuit.

In an e-mail to Dr Sarfati, Scientific American accused him and AiG of infringing their copyright by reproducing the text of their article and an illustration. They said they were prepared to ‘settle the matter amicably’ provided that AiG immediately remove Dr Sarfati’s article from its Web site.

AiG’s international copyright attorney, however, informed Scientific American that their accusations are groundless and that AiG would not be removing the article. Dr Sarfati’s article had used an illustration of a bacterial flagellum, but it was drawn by an AiG artist years ago. AiG had also used the text of SA’s article, but in a way that is permissible under ‘fair use’ of copyrighted materials for public commentary. (AiG presented the text of the SA article, with Dr Sarfati’s comments interspersed in a different color, to avoid any accusations of misquoting or misrepresenting the author.)

Why the heavy-handed tactics? If AiG’s responses were not valid, why would Scientific American even care whether they remained in the public arena? One can only presume that Scientific American (and National Geographic) had the ‘wind taken out of their sails.’ Dr Sarfati convincingly showed that they offered nothing new to the debate and they displayed a glaring ignorance of creationist arguments. Their legal maneuver appears to be an act of desperation. (AiG is still awaiting SA’s response to the decision not to pull the Web rebuttal.)

[Dominic Harr]

Saying that a one celled creature becoming a human being is merely "adapting to their environment" is a preposterous lie.

How so?

Millions of small changes over billions of years would make the end result completely different from the start.

If you believe species evolve, then you're an evo.

[Dominic Harr]

Dominic Harr -- who do YOU say that Jesus was?

I'm afraid I'm not a Christian, altho I respect Christians very much.

I don't believe in *any* of the many books written by men that claim exclusive knowledge of god.

[Dominic Harr]

Actually, he's what got me onto this point.

He ran from that question like a little girl once already.

This point has real power, I think!

[f.Christian]

Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

This is once more a lot of bluff by the atheist Doolittle, or at least poor reading comprehension. He cited recent experiments showing that mice could survive with two of the components of the blood clotting cascade (plasminogen and fibrinogen) eliminated. This supposedly showed that the current cascade was not irreducibly complex but clearly reducibly complex. But the experiment really showed that the mice lacking both components were better off than one lacking only plasminogen, because the latter suffer from uncleared clots. But the former are hardly as healthy as Doolittle implied, because the only reason they don’t suffer from uncleared clots is that they have no functional clotting system at all! A non-functioning clotting system (despite possessing all the many remaining components) is hardly an evolutionary intermediate that natural selection could refine to produce a proper clotting system. Rather, this experiment is evidence against this, because the next step (i.e. from lacking both plasminogen and fibrinogen to fibrinogen only) would be selected against because of the uncleared clots. For more information, see Behe’s In Defense of the Irreducibility of the Blood Clotting Cascade.

Complexity of a different kind—‘specified complexity’—is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.

Dembski’s argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.

Talk about blind faith! But in practice, as Dembski points out, specified complexity in all cases but biology is used as evidence of design, including the SETI project. Since biological complexity is the only exception proposed by evolutionists, it smacks of special pleading. See Information: A modern scientific design argument.

[EBUCK]

Good luck and happy hunting. I'm off to play softball. It was fun watching them all squirm under the terrible weight of evidence for a while...

EBUCK

[Spiff]

The shield/WALL between state and religion(evolution/atheism) is gone... this is chernobyl---radiation poisoning--- NUCLEAR SOCIAL ANTARTICA/AMERICA!!

I can see that you're still not making any freaking sense!!! Up the dosage. Where's the ignore/squelch button?

[Right Wing Professor]

Polly want a cracker?

[Dominic Harr]

I don't think there's to be much hunting, I'm afraid.

This one question completely drives them away, no matter how politely I ask it.

Cognitive dissonance.

I've found the 'slam dunk' of the debate, I think.

[JediGirl]

[Right Wing Professor]

Moderator! She's giving me the bird!

[Dominic Harr]

Just think about it.

If you believe species evolve, then you're an evolutionist.

Powerful thought, eh?

Cognitive dissonance, indeed?

[berned]

They were well used to allegory as a means of illuminating complex truths; they wouldn't have considered Genesis false, even if they *were* aware of the vastly more complex ways the process really occurred. So why should we?

Well, that's interesting because in the Gospel of Luke, (who, by the way was a very learned "university educated" physician, and considered one of the most thorough and meticulous historians in all of recorded history) anyway, in the Gospel of Luke, there is geneology that traces a direct line of birth succession from Jesus straight back to -- ADAM. It begins at Luke 3:33.

This geneology came from the historical birth records kept by Jewish historians. Jesus believed that He was a descendant of Adam, the first man, who God CREATED. The Holy Spirit allowed this geneology to be recorded and to stand for all who came along after to read it. The same exact Holy Spirit who gave the Genesis account to Moses.

There is no allegorical value to a long dry geneology. It is presented as historical fact.

[f.Christian]

from the article...

This energy input is necessary but not sufficient. The proverbial bull in a china shop produces disorder, but if the same bull was harnessed to a generator, this energy could be directed into useful work. Similarly, living organisms have machinery to direct the energy from sunlight or food, including the ATP synthase motor. But machinery presupposes teleology (purpose), which means that the machinery must have had an intelligent source.

Who's a cracker?

[JediGirl]

Who's a cracker?

*looks at her skin* I am! (eep...was that racist of me?)

[f.Christian]

Do you know what this means...

---000% evolution(LAME)?

You are a quack...if you think micro a/o macro 'evolution' exists---proves anything!

I think your needle is stuck---spinning!

[Right Wing Professor]

You're identifying macroscopic disorder with entropy. That is incorrect. Entropy is a thermodynamic function that is produced by the flow of heat. Check out any decent physical chemistry text.

I wasn't saying you were a cracker, I was saying you're Polly. JediGirl has posted a picture if you don't understand the allusion.

[Right Wing Professor]

The Jews had histroical records that survived the flood, the fall of the Tower of Babel, and the various captivities? I find no record of that in the Bible.

[f.Christian]

Rennie’s summary (in bold text originally)
‘Creation science’ is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

Now we get to the key issue. It’s not about scientific facts at all, but self-serving materialistic Rules of the Game by which the facts are interpreted by the evolutionary establishment. So it should be instructive for people to understand what’s really driving Rennie and his ilk—a materialist or naturalist agenda. This is not a tenet deducible by the experimental method, but a philosophical assumption from outside science. This conveniently ignores the creationist contributions to the founding of science.

Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover—their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics.

What has this to do with evolution? As I’ve mentioned, creationists agree that the particles would not behave arbitrarily, because they were created by a God of order. But an atheist has no philosophical justification from his underlying religious premise, i.e. ‘God does not exist’, for a belief in an orderly universe.

In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?)

Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life’s history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design.

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We don’t speak for all advocates of intelligent design. For instance, we don’t advocate just any ‘designer’ who may or may not be capricious. Rather, we identify the Designer with the faithful Triune God of the Bible. So we base our science on the Biblical framework of history, which provides much information about when and how the Designer performed special acts of design. That is, during Creation Week about 6,000 years ago, He created distinct kinds of creatures. Shortly after that, Adam sinned and brought death and mutations into the world. About 1,500 years later, God judged the world by a global Flood that produced most of the world’s fossils. But two of every kind of land vertebrate (seven of the few ‘clean’ ones and birds) were rescued on an ocean-liner–sized Ark. After they landed on the mountains of Ararat, the Ark animals migrated and diversified, adapting to different environments—including some speciation events. Mankind disobeyed God’s command to fill the Earth, and migrated only when God confused the languages at Babel about 100 years later. This is why human fossils are higher in the post-Flood fossil record than other mammals.

Instead they pursue argument by exclusion—that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.

This is simple logic, called the Law of the Excluded Middle (see again my Logic paper). Evolutionists from Darwin to Gould have used the same tactic, i.e. ‘God wouldn’t have done it that way, therefore evolution must explain it.’

Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are.

Actually, the arguments are based on analogy, a common scientific procedure, about what we can observe being produced by intelligent and unintelligent causes.

Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.

But Rennie has no objection to substituting (and confusing) his own atheistic religious ideas for scientific ones!

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape.

Again, all Rennie’s examples are in the field of real operational science, but evolution is a question of origins science which is really about history. It’s also notable that creationists made precisely the advances Rennie mentions! Isaac Newton discovered the spectrum of light, James Clerk Maxwell discovered the laws of electromagnetism which led to the prediction of electromagnetic radiation; Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease and disproved spontaneous generation, Joseph Lister pioneered aniseptic surgery; Raymond Damadian pioneered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that is a vital tool in brain research.

Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.

Again, an assertion, in a willing ignorance concerning the contributions made by creationists to the major branches of modern science in general (see our Creationist Scientists page), and to his own magazine in particular.

[Elsie]

There is skullduggery afoot here!

 

 

 

 

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To the tune of War: what is it good for?)

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Opposable thumbs: what are they good for?

Since the Evos like to claim that we DIDN'T 'descend' (ascend then?) from APES, but from a 'common' ancestor, my two-fold Question is this:

Did our 'ancestors' have opposable thumbs on their FEET and we Humans DEVOLVED them, or,

did our 'ancestors' NOT have opposable thumbs on their FEET and the ape line EVOLVED them?

[berned]

The Jews had histroical records that survived the flood, the fall of the Tower of Babel, and the various captivities?

Oh, you believe Genesis account of THE FLOOD!!? How do you know the Flood was not just an allegory? How do you, as a catholic, know that "upon this rock I will build my church" was not just some vague allegory that doesn't at all mean what the Vatican says it does?

If the Holy Spirit allowed Luke to write a geneology that was nothing but a bald-faced lie, then how can we rely on ANYTHING in the Bible, Old Testament OR New?