The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Scientists thought it was settled. The universe, they had decided, is about 20 billion years old, and Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than three billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than four million years ago. Homo sapians itself—the present human species, people like you and me—has walked the earth for at least 50,000 years.

But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old; that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine Creator as eternally separate variations of beings; and that there has been no evolutionary process.

They are creationists—they call themselves "scientific" creationists—and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view, and in others, strong movements are gaining momentum. In Arkansas, a law requiring that the teaching of creationism receive equal time was passed this spring and is scheduled to go into effect in September 1982, though the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of a group of clergymen, teachers, and parents to overturn it. And a California father named Kelly Segraves, the director of the Creation-Science Research Center, sued to have public-school science classes taught that there are other theories of creation besides evolution, and that one of them was the Biblical version. The suit came to trial in March, and the judge ruled that educators must distribute a policy statement to schools and textbook publishers explaining that the theory of evolution should not be seen as "the ultimate cause of origins." Even in New York, the Board of Education has delayed since January in making a final decision, expected this month [June 1981], on whether schools will be required to include the teaching of creationism in their curriculums.

The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the head of the Moral Majority, who supports the creationist view from his television pulpit, claims that he has 17 million to 25 million viewers (though Arbitron places the figure at a much more modest 1.6 million). But there are 66 electronic ministries which have a total audience of about 20 million. And in parts of the country where the Fundamentalists predominate—the so called Bible Belt— creationists are in the majority.

They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning—as the creationists do—and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies.

Yet, though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even in intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions.

To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reveling of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the "science" that makes their views "scientific"? Here are some of them:

A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creationists. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left it there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed, spontaneously, from the sands of the desert.

By analogy, then, if you consider humanity, life, Earth, and the universe, all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it "just happened." It, too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more-than-human hands—in short by a divine Creator.

This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used (even though not often explicitly expressed) ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to prescientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might have well gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer.

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.

Some creationists point at that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surly this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.

General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as "just myths."

The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale—two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam-and-Eve-in-Paradise story, with man created first, then animals, then women. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days, with animals preceding man, and man and woman created together.

These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing: There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.

Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.

A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.

For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the "cell theory"); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the "theory of gravitation"); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the "quantum theory"); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the "theory of relativity"), and so on.

All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is "only" a theory, that is all it has to be.

Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence, in the scientific sense, that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as "only a myth."

Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationists beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.

Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insists, for example, that evolutionists cannot true transition states between species in the fossil evidence; that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain; that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible and so on.

Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.

To an extent, the creationists are right here: The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor is the process finished. it can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.

The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?

Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horses, since our engine theory is imperfect?

However much scientists argue their differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory, or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself.

Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.

In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder—that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationists argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.

Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.

To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"—that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.

Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in a line with the dictates of the second law.

Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system — the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually — moves downhill (as it does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to cease shining, evolution would stop and so, eventually, would life.

Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationists distortion.

There are many other "scientific" arguments used by creationists, some taking quite cleaver advantage of present areas of dispute in evolutionary theory, but every one of then is as disingenuous as the second-law argument.

The "scientific" arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, and, while they discuss geology, paleontology and biology with correct scientific terminology, they are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative.

Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exist other than the word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy not to use.

Some creationists putt all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The Creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for eons-long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radio activity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion.

Of course, this argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. it is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes age, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory; you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning—which you had not really read.

What kind of Creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and the development of life on Earth. Why?

Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?

The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. To the average creationist this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics, an atheists who are not satisfied with the clear word of the Lord.

The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would make their argument a religious one, and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science, no matter how badly it fits, and call themselves "scientific" creationists. They also speak only of the "Creator," and never mentioned that this Creator is the God of the Bible.

We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their "scientific" and "philosophical" points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had.

It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.

Even if I am right and the evolutionists' case is very strong, have not creationists, whatever the emptiness of their case, a right to be heard? if their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why, then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?

First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance — even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.

The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas, in thousands of subtle ways: in the nature of holiday observance, in expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. At the present time, even the current President of the United States has expressed his creationist sympathies.

It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.

But only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence.

Then, too, in schools, students are not required to believe what they learn about evolution—merely to parrot it back on test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two.

In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters, taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists, who control the church and the society they live in and to face the public-school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possible favorable way, find they cannot stand even so minuscule a competition and demand "equal time."

Do you suppose their devotion to "fairness" is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches?

Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want threir "equal time." In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationism, placing myth above reason, refused to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.

If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.

This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness—even an actual fear—of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary—an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are his particular concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.

Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.

There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousands of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.

In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.

We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.

( Isaac Asimov, "The 'Threat' of Creationism," New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1981; from Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 182-193. )

Err... careful. Just because I say it isn't perfct doesn't mean I would use descriptions like "quite incomplete". I'm a physicist. My idea of a 'perfect' theory is Quantum Electrodynamics. (http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna/Cracks/QED.html Ignore the bit about not converging. I mainly wanted to show how disgustingly well proven this theory is.) Evolution may not fall into that category, but not many theories do. I think it's a wonderful description of how life most likely propogates on this planet. That said, I'll certainly take you at your word that you aren't a creationist. I don't really have a problem with creationists anyway, unless they try to force their ideas into the classroom. I do have a problem with people who don't think. I can't debate someone like f.Christian, but I can debate you, however much I may disagree.

Moving on.

I'm going to have to let someone more up on the current trends in evolution debate you on natural selection. I really don't know what other major possibilities there are. Guess I've had my head stuck in a laser cavity too long.

This part DEFINITELY intrigues me, though:

" have another question. What's the benefit to reproducing at all? You get your genetic material passed along, but what does that get you? Our whole belief system of evolution is based on the idea that getting your genes into the next generation is the be-all and end-all of an organisms purpose here on earth. Well why? That's not the lowest energy state. That's not the most energetically favorable state. A ball of rock with some primordial soup was the closest thing to equilibrium that this planet has seen. IMO this is one thing that evolutionists don't address at all. Whats the point?"

"Passing on your traits to future generations" sounds like a very hollow motive indeed. We do have a desire to reproduce, though. In fact, I think the technical definition of "life" is something that can self-propogate and reproduce. If you don't want to reproduce, that's fine, but your lack of desire to do so will get bred out of the population. Those who do reproduce will have wanted to. I've heard it said that only our DNA is actually active, and we are merely the vessels by which it propogates. Certainly not a high position for the human race, and I'm not sure I agree with it, but then we've thought the universe revolved around us before.

The last part of your statement sounds VERY close to the old "Second Law of Thermodynamics" argument. The law is this: "elements in a closed system tend to seek their most probable distribution; in a closed system entropy always increases." (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/SECOND_THERM.html) The translation in English is: In a closed system, things will always tend toward disorder. I can see this at work in my desk on a daily basis. Left to its own devices, it accumulates crap and becomes VERY disordered, VERY quickly. This sounds like an indictment of evolution. Life is obviously a more ordered state than random dust, so why be flesh and blood instead of dust? Why go through all the work of reproducing when it is far easier to sit on your butt and decompose? Doesn't evolution, which seems to favor more complex life forms over more disordered forms, violate this?

First off, Evolution, and natural selection in particular, don't favor complexity. They favor survivability. Viruses are quite simple, yet they survive just fine so there is no reason they should go extinct in favor of some other life form. Insects, as you point out, are every bit as likely to survive than humans. More so in fact. Roaches might well survive a nuclear war, while I doubt we could pull that off.

Secondly, and more important for the second law bit: There are two critical words in the definition I just gave. "Closed system". A closed system in which there is no outside source of energy. Entropy is a measure of how much disorder there is in a system, Energy is defined as the capacity of a system to do work, which can be thought of as a means to fight this disorder. (To physicists out there, I know this sounds wierd, but I think it's a reasonable analogy for my puposes here.) A car motor with a full tank is a closed system so long as no one refills the tank. Eventually it runs out of gas and goes from an ordered state of running efficiently to just sitting there and rusting. My desk is a closed system, provided I don't bother to do work (expend energy) and clean the damn thing. The universe itself seems closed, implying that there is a finite amount of energy available and eventually everything will cool to nothingness (the old heat death idea). The Earth, at present at least, is NOT a closed system. The Sun provides a constant, abundant source of energy and thus the capacity to create order. Sure life is not an energetically favorable state as you put it, but it doesn't have to be. We've got pleanty of fusion powered energy available. Will it continue forever? No. But has continued long enough to allow the generation of self-propagating life, at least for the time being.

The energy argument against evolution just doesn't hold water.

*gasp* Okay. Done with that. Hope I wasn't putting words in your mouth, by the way. It's just that I've heard this particular argument elsewhere so I thought I'd post it anyway, even if it's not what you meant.

Seeing as how it's you, general, how could I resist?'^)

I like it. You're a brave fellow. ;)

I've reviewed what you propose for the rules, but this seems to me to be the criteria you plan to use to determine design in some object. Thus, it's not quite what I had in mind for the rules of the game - how you determine design is strictly up to you, with the caveat that the inference is expected to be both defensible and actively defended, as you say it can be.

So, I propose to post ten pictures, of my choosing, of artifacts, objects, or structures. What I would like for each one is for you to first state your verdict - designed or undesigned - and then explain how you inferred that, in as much detail as you like. There's no time limit, and no space restriction - take as much time and space as you need to properly explain each one before moving on to the next. I won't interrupt you or post any commentary until we complete all ten, and at the end, we'll discuss the cases.

Now, by way of a disclaimer, I have no interest in pulling a "fast one" on you - I don't plan to post ten pictures and then say "ha ha, they're all JPEG pictures, designed by humans - you lose". I will try to choose pictures or illustrations such that the object or structure of interest should be obvious, and it is those things to which you can infer design or no design.

However, the claim has been advanced that design can be inferred strictly from the inherent qualities of a thing, without reference to historical or other external information, and I do expect you to hold to that in defending the inferences. That being said, please feel free to investigate the objects pictured further if you so wish, so that you might fully understand the qualities and attributes of the objects in question, although I ask that you note when you have done so. Also, please feel free to solicit advice or assistance from others if you wish - I don't want to debate a committee, though, so I only intend to address information or arguments that you present, even if you have formulated them with help from others. Ask for all the help you like, so long as you're prepared to defend what you post.

The above being stipulated, I would also like to have an EVOLUTIONARY INFERENCE TEST in which I posit pictures of irreducibly complex biological machines and you have to deduce and defend how such a thing could have come about without a designer - and the big rule here is that you have to explain how the irreducibly complex machine was helpful to the creature before it became what it is now. (WHY play your 'game' if you won't play mine?;^)

I accept, but on the condition that we not play simultaneous games. We'll go through mine, and then you can present yours. I will try to defend evolutionary propositions as best I can for examples of structures or organisms or such as you present, according to the same basic rules I have presented for you. Fair enough?

My goal is to show you that your arguments against design are not just unscientific, but at heart an effort to avoid responsibility to the One who designed you.

I understand. Personally, my goal is to show that the design inference fails by its own criteria. Let us see who is more correct ;)

Except for the fact that you don’t appear to grasp my point WRT the “artificial split,” we do not seem to be disagreeing about much here. The “artificial split” is not a property of nature per se; it is a property of mind intending objects. There is a part of reality that seems to be intangible – mind, consciousness; but I never said it was “apart from reality.”

Fine, then we agree there is no supernatural source for consciousness. THAT was my point.

Evan Harris Walker, in his book The Physics of Consciousness, describes consciousness as real, but non-physical -- i.e., as intangible or, in common street parlance, "immaterial."

It wasn't the definition I had a problem with, but you seemed to be saying that since it was 'immaterial' it must have some 'other source' than the natural world. If I have this wrong then we agree.

Well, not me. But then, who’s to say that specifically located individual consciousness is not itself also an “inherent property of the universe?”

Yes, precisely. I see no reason to make the distinction.

In making a choice from among a set of possibilities, we set up a cascade of events that extends well beyond the securing of our intended goal, events that run invisibly away from us, like ripples spreading over the surface of a pond….

What lovely poetry you write.

The dualistic idealism that you seem to attribute to me is not the last word about how I conceive of this issue. I have already confessed to be a “closet monist!” :^)

Whether it is 'dualistic idealism' or not I don't really know or care. Sometimes I think people are too quick to name other people's beliefs, so that once they get that 'handle' on it they now know everything about it, and are then free to ridicule it. Happens to me all the time. I don't really want to go back and drag up the words where you were questioning me about how consciousness could arise in the purely material natural world, but for me 'purely material' begs the question that it is 'purely material' and this was the point I was making. If you agree it isn't necessarily purely material then fine.

"So we at last find that reality is the observer observing. It is the two parts of our great separation coming together. There is a separation. There is a dreadful and vast separation. But there is no space and really no matter to die but that our own minds did not first come together to create it. Our observation – our coming together – created matter. Observation is the stuff of the space that reaches out past the vast clusters of galaxies. Reality is the fruit of love’s embrace."

This was along the lines expressed by Jung when first observing the vast African plain with its writhing mass of wildabeasts, zebras, lions, elephants, giraffes, gazelles and all the rest. He said this was why we existed in the first place, because without an observer none of that would have existed either.

As for the quote itself, it is fine as poetry. First he says,There is a separation. There is a dreadful and vast separation. then he says, "Our observation – our coming together – created matter." which is an utter contradiction. If it wasn't 'created' then there wasn't anything to 'come together' and if it was created by observation, then it cannot be separate from the mind.

Then there is, Observation is the stuff of the space that reaches out past the vast clusters of galaxies. Reality is the fruit of love’s embrace." The first sentence is sheer poetry, meaning it has no discernable meaning, but it sounds pretty, and the second is an unwarranted conclusion derived from nothing. There is no connection between this last and all that went before.

First you say your not saying there is a separation then you give me a quote from a guy who says there is a separation.

Oh, and proper meditation is silent. Maybe that is the problem, you ever stop thinking about the unthinkable?

Well, I'm not sure what to comment on. I found Boop's story interesting. What I'd want to know was all of the things she had been reading and contemplating prior to this experience. What had she been supercharging her brain with?

Like the story of the guy discovering the benzine ring, (I can never remember the details like names anymore - too much stuff) if one fixates on something long enough, one will dream about it. If we are going to start taking dreams of evidence explaining reality . . .

Going back to the thread this came from was more interesting though, and reminds me of why I have all but quit writing.

You say things like,

Like the evolutionist researchers, I'm not fettering this principle of purpose to the exclusivist error of objectivism and logical positivism.

Oh, so you're fettering it to the subjectivist error of undemonstrable inclusivity? You Beg the Question it is an error, you Beg the Question of existence of that which has no demonstrable existence.

So the thread contains statements like,

the public face of Western Science would drop its insistance upon neutrality toward the existence of a Vastly Superior Intelligence, of God, the evidence being so massive, crushing, overwhelming.

Of which, without that error of subjective inclusivity, there would be no evidence at all. To consider it evidence of a Vastly Superior Intelligence, of God one must presuppose the existence of that very being. It is a Smuggled Premise that must exist before it can be considered 'evidence' of a 'Vastly Superior Intelligence.'

If the evidence were so overwhelming, then the issue wouldn't be in dispute. What it is, is a breakdown in logic, in reasoning, that permits the Smuggled Premise, the Begged Question, to be an unexamined premise upon which the conclusion that reality and life 'must be' created by God depends. This breakdown in reasoning you termed, the exclusivist error of objectivism because to remain objective means that you have to admit there is no such evidence.

One thing that I have had pounded into my head here is that logic and reason take a back seat whenever it is a choice between them and belief and faith. In that sense you're right, objectivity will always be considered error ridden. It is an either/choice, because the two will always conflict.

To get down to brass tacks, it is the reason (there's that word again!) for the debate that reveals what is truly happening here. To quote Phaedrus again (and I'm not picking on you Phaedrus, you just happen to state the issue so well in the thread) We forget that the womb of Christianity spawned modern science.

Only by chance, not by reason. The fallacy here is post hoc ergo propter hoc : The name in Latin means "after this therefore because of this". This describes the fallacy. An author commits the fallacy when it is assumed that because one thing follows another that the one thing was caused by the other.

It was the womb of Christianity that kept Europe in the horror of the Dark Ages for a millenia. It only when Aquinas made the mistake of trying to logically prove the existence of God and reintroduced the world to Aristotle that science advanced. The fact of the matter is it was logic and reason, not religion that are the parents of science.

Religion has fought every scientific advance, every step along the way. Just as it does today, fighting evolution, cloning, stem cell research, certain medical procedures and all the rest that will be commonplace 100 years from now. It will just be the people that could have been saved today, that will lose. And why this opposition to science? The issue is actually control. And the means to that control? Morality.

What is the chain of logic that motivates creationists? If evolution is proven correct, God is disproven, and society will suffer as people will no longer feel obligated to follow Christian morality. And this has proven true over the ages, the more science advances the less people do feel obligated to follow Christian morality.

When Nietche observed that 'God was dead' what he meant was, the moral influence of the concept of God was falling away from Europe. This proved true and would have proven true whether Nietche said it or not. That Napoleon was Nietche's inspiration demonstrates this fact.

The next typical objection is that the loss of God resulted in Marxism, and the horror that it has brought. What is conveniently forgotten is that with the loss of the influence of religion and the rise of capitalism Marx was trying to keep alive the principle of Altruism, since it was dying as a religious principle. Marx tried to create a philosophy of altruism without the God demanding it, but on 'scientific' principles. That he abandoned logic in the exercise is why it is such an abject failure. Rather than being 'scientific' it is about as unscientific as one can get.

Thus we have the desparate situation in the US today. One the one hand we have the failed socialist altruists on the left, and the dying religious altruists on the right. In the middle of this is the abandonment of the principle that truly makes America the great nation it is, although that is being murdered by the altruists on both extremes: Capitalism.

See, the laws of logic, reason, science and economy are laws that cannot be broken without having adverse results in reality. The fact is Capitalism cannot survive in an altruistic society, it is either/or. If the principle of serving others is primary then Capitalism is 'selfishness' by definition. As someone here recently wrote to me, selfishness is evil. Period. End of discussion. You go to hell. His arrogance was truly amazing. What he didn't realize he was also saying was that Capitalism is evil.

The reason why this is significant, especially here, is that 'religious conservatives' and 'left wing socialists' have more in common than they think. They differ on issues but not on fundamental philosophy: Altruism. This is why, if you do a Google search on 'social justice,' as left wing a concept as one can have, the first twenty hits will be the Catholic Church. Thus, the conservatives and liberals are in a secret pact with one another. They actually justify the existence of one another. They are two peas of the same pod. They are just arguing details. One wants to control your uterus, the other just steal from your pocketbook. Both want control. Both use the same justification, you don't own yourself, you are obligated to society.

The only true opposition to this is Capitalism. Capitalism, by its very nature, is logical, dependent upon reason, and moral. Moral in the sense it can only operate in the truth, that only correct actions will have correct results, and if one wishes to follow it, one must take the right actions. The moral principle than one works for one's own personal gain is in direct opposition with the altruistic principle that one is obligated to place others first.

I was listening to some preacher on the radio in this town recently and he was talking about how some of us reserve that last 5% of ourselves for ourselves and our own selfish desires, and that last 5% is what God really wants, so that one is wholly in the service to others. In other words, you cannot do anything for yourself, only for others. Thus one is a complete slave to others. This is in utter contradiction to the principle of Capitalism, which holds one is responsible to oneself, for oneself.

The contradictions inherent here, as in all altruism, is the real issue. And this brings us back to the importance of creationism to all this. Creationism is the rejection of science in favor of belief, logic in favor of faith. The twisting and the convolutions that creationists have to go through to seek to attempt to prove the unprovable utterly destroys the concepts of logic, facts and reason in the process. The same inability to see the fallacies inherent in creationism is the same inability to see that 'religious altruism' furthers, strenghthens and empowers the 'secular altruism' of the socialist left.

This is demonstrated by the supposedly 'compassionate conservative' President Bush coming up with a budget increase beyond anything seen in years. Giving $14 billion to Africa to fight AIDS just as the leftist liberal Bono from U2 wanted is a perfect example. Bush granted the moral high ground to the left, and thereby undercut the very Capitalism that this nation is dependent upon to survive. He will have given away the moral high ground already when they come to him with the next hike in the minimum wage. You must give to others who need it. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Altruism, religious obligation, communism. It is all the same.

This is why this nation is slowly dying and why nothing anyone does seems to change it. It is because both sides, right and left, reject logic, reject reason, and reject Capitalism. They are just two different kinds of altruists. They are only arguing about which part of the pie to control, not that there should be no control at all. Only true Capitalism asserts that. There are very few such Capitalists now. Everyone is afraid of being called 'selfish.' Being selfish being evil and all.

So we have secular altruists and religious altruists and their only point of disagreement is whether the source of the alruistic mandate is God or the state. This is where the creationism/evolution debate comes in. It determines how they divide the pie. As I have said before, even if proven true, creationism would have no practical effect. It would add nothing to science at all. Evolution actually explains how we can modify animal breeds to our purpose. It has actually been proven by the systematic breeding of farm animals.

And this brings me back to this thread. I see so many statements from ignorance. A typical example is the assertion there are no transitory forms between species. This is a specious argument, since each species is a species itself while in transition. The answer has been defined away in the assertion. Like some stated that scales and feathers are different from each other, which is precisely not true. Feathers have been shown quite precisely, and exactly how, to be modified scales. But since evidence, logic, and reason play no role, such fautly assertions are made endlessly. With no logic, no amount of discussion can convince anyone otherwise.

The heart of the creationists argument is, If evolution is proven false, creationism must be true. Faulty logic again, proving one wrong doesn't prove the other true. Each must prove itself. It is logically impossible to come up with a concept of a Supreme Intelligence creating everything, creating life, from the pure observation of the natural world. This is proven by the fact that evangelizing is necessary. If an Supreme Creator were so obvious then one wouldn't need to tell the gospel to anybody, they'd already know. That difference in languages creates differences in concept of Diety proves that it is a projection of man, not an objective fact. Vishnu, Allah, Jehovah, the Tao, on and on and on. All have the same source. All come from the human mind. They are conceptual handles for the inexplicable.

And to go back to Boop's Dream. Even if true, it would have no practical effect. Couldn't build a house with it, couldn't build a fire. Nothing. On its own it has no meaning, only within a context that this experience proves something which proves something else which means the Bible must be true. It is circular reasoning so blatant that it is silly.

But the issue here isn't to prove anything, it is to destroy reason. Let's be very clear on that point. Only by destroying reason can one defend the irrationality of Altruism and dethrone Capitalism as selfish evil. Having said that, when you succeed don't be surprised when the USA falls, for just as logic was the mother of science so too it was the father of Freedom. If one studies the philosophy of the founders, not just their religious views, one finds that they held that Reason was the gift from God that made men Men. As Ethan Allen said, 'Reason is the only Oracle for man.' Not your dreams, not my dreams, not Boop's dreams, Reason.

We are coming to crossroads in the not too distant future and the choice will be between Capitalism or Altruism. If we don't turn from the road we are on the United States of America will become a failed experiment. If we don't see that Altruism will not work, cannot work, is irrational, is illogical and is the philosophical opposite of Capitalism then we are doomed. You won't have to read Atlas Shrugged to get it, you will live it.

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