Posted on 06/17/2002 3:10:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.
To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.
1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
CONCLUSION
"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. 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.
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. 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.
Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. 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.
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. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.
The Author(s):
John Rennie is editor in chief of Scientific American.
You made the assertion. And you very well know my belief on that subject. You cannot have belief, because you lack faith. The only answer for you is, I don't know.
Of course you are right that evolution does not say anything about religion.
However, Darwin's ideas inspired a bunch of leftist ideologues who used his ideas to debunk religion. This was especially true of the social Darwinism movement, and the Eugenics movement of the turn of the century. Darwin's ideas, that life is "only chance" and that "the fittest" survive, inspired many to take the next step: since life is only chance, there is no God. Since the fittest survive, and there is no God given right to life, we have the right to kill or sterilize untermensch.
The result is Hitler, and Peter Singer.
That is why my argument insists the problem is the RELIGION of scientism, the church of Dawinian evolution, not in evolution per se, nor in science per se.
Your Judeo-Christian God has truly been created in the image and likeness of men. He is a cruel God with much blood on his hands. He is a God of very limited imagination and capabilities.
My God is all loving and is truly omnipotent. He is nothing like the God you have put into the impossibly small box you call the bible.
Saying "I don't know" is both intellectually honest and intellectually defensible. What's your objection to that?????
That's how I do think about it.
Isn't DNA ascribed as defining the whole person. If we take mouse DNA and put it in a human egg, don't we get a mouse? I'm not sure if there is any structure to the egg.
You realize there is the 8th commandment against bearing false witness against your neighbor, right? Do you think your maker didn't intend for it to apply to you? Or do you think there are lawyerly ways around it?
I'm always curious how religionists justify their apparently hypocritical behaviors.
How do you reconcile this with the generally accepted iterpretations of quantum mechanics?
This would depend on your definition of "random." It's rather easy to generate a string of numbers with all possible substrings having the proper frequencies, for example, but most people wouldn't call it "random."
What's your definition of random?
Perhaps the pleasure from adhering to duty, honor, country, or family, outweighs the unpleasantness. Pleasure isn't all beer and skittles.
The story of the Maori is interesting, and for them Christianity was definitely an improvement. IMO, adopting Objectivism would've been a bigger improvement, but even adopting Islam would've been an improvement from a society based on headhunting!Sounds like you might want to read up on the Roman Saturnalia; headhunting would be about the only thing in the list of things I mentioned which might not have actually been included.But then you slyly try to slip in under the reader's consciousness the claim that headhunting was part of Roman culture! "Why would anybody in ancient Rome want to live that way?" So you're insinuating that in Rome, "a man had to take at least one human head before he was elligible for marriage."
Another rationale for the switch to Christianity for the Romans could easily have been to put their love lives on a rational basis.
Don't laugh too hard. Orgies and debauchery only sound like fun until you think about it a little bit or read through some of the followups of the people making a habit out of that sort of thing.
Take the case of Slick Klinton for instance.
Legacies come in many forms. Take Lou Gehrig for instance; Gehrig was one of the all-time great baseball players, and is yet chiefly remembered for having a heretofore unrecognized disease named after him. The same may ultimately hold true of Slick.
There are several inherent problems with trying to set the numeric records ala Don Giovanni and make it with literally hundreds of different women over a course of a few years. One is that the first thing which goes straight out the window is any notion of quality; you'll see these guys come home with Marilyn Monroe one night, and then Aunt Jemima (or something like Monica Lewinski which looks like the centerfold of some livestock journal) the next, with the same stupid shit-eating grin on their faces, since it's all really just the same to them.
Another problem in the case of politicians is that they make prime targets for blackmail and manipulation of themselves by conducting themselves like that. Slick couldn't get the simplest kind of security clearance which you'd need to be a janitor or a guard at the gate at any military base in America, and he's supposed to be commander in chief of our armed forces. That's insane. Another problem in the case of liberals particularly, is that it appears to be a vanishingly small step from believing oneself above man's laws to believing oneself above things like the laws of physics and the law of averages. For instance, thinking "I'm a Kennedy; there's no reason on Earth why I shouldn't be able to ski downhill, operate a camcorder, and play football all at the same time, the trees will get out of the way!" Or, in the case of Slick, thinking he could put the make on 50 different women in one day and that all 50 would be happy about it.
Something like that could lead to a psychic problem with taking "no" for an answer and, if we're to believe even a small fraction of what we read, it has. The claim which you read around the net is that the Paula Jones testimony includes something like a dozen different allegations of sexual assault and rape, that Slick has been out of control for a long time, and that a professional organization has been in place to keep a lid on this by means of bribery, intimidation, and whatever else gets the job done, and that this has invariably worked because, in each individual case, you had some poor woman on her own without any real resources up against an organization with the resources of one of the fifty states.
And then there's the problem of VD. Matt Drudge reported (11/2/98) that:
"White House intern Monica Lewinsky told Linda Tripp that President Clinton would cancel dates with her when he was flared with blisters, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned from multiple sources in and out of government..."
Ouch!!! But, bad as herpes or whatever that is might be, TCD syndrome is a lot worse (e.g. http://www.nypost.com/102798/news/5800.htm):
"...The documents also include Jones' description of Clinton's distinguishing characteristic.
'His penis_ was ... crooked and gross. You know. That was the word she used, Jones' sister Lydia Cathey said in a deposition...
My own judgement is that that sort of thing does not come from microorganisms or viruses, but rather from close encounters with doors (in this case, probably a limo door and some chick who, like Paula, didn't want to hear about it), i.e.
Kiss it?? #### YOU, you STINKING PERVERT!!!!
SLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMM!!!!!!!!
and hence the designation TCD (Tallywhacker Caught in Door) syndrome. As a child I had a cat with feline TCD (Tail Caught in Door) syndrome, and hence recognize the symptom.
As in the case of Gehrig, I suspect that Clinton's chief legacy will be having a new disease named after him, and that TCD syndrome will come to be known as "Slick Clinton's Disease".
Imagine a whole nation of people (Rome) living like that, and what the price tag for it must have been? I mean, it boils down to the same question: who the hell wants to live like that?
Nebullis is laying it out. Are you listening?
I am not objecting to it. As you can see I am the one that made the statement. The answer given, however, was an unsubstantiated claim.
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