Lee Harris argues that the unenlightened masses that find evolution an impossible pill to swallow reject it because apes and gorillas are loathsome to most people.
Proponents of evolution remind me of the slightly dumb class clown who thinks people are laughing with him, while all the time they are snickering as he makes a goofy spectacle of himself.
Since they hold a materialist view of the world, evolutionists must have a materialist answer for everything from lust to love. It quickly reaches absurdity.
For example, why are men – at least some men – attracted to women with slim waists and flaring hips? Well, because it indicates the ability to pop out babies. Preservation of the species, you know. Of course, that fails to explain why some prefer the emaciated runway model look.
Examples of this foolishness are endless. But recently, a theory to explain why the majority of the public rejects the theory of evolution exceeds any previous preposterousness by an order of magnitude.
Writing for TCS Daily, Lee Harris comes to this conclusion: The unenlightened masses that find evolution an impossible pill to swallow reject it because apes and gorillas are loathsome to most people.
Yes, we just cannot abide the thought that our forebears were ugly, grunting, grub-eating hominids pooping in public and picking lice off one another.
Harris says the rejection of Darwinian babbling has nothing to do with the Bible and its story of creation. He writes: “The stumbling block to an acceptance of Darwin, I would like to submit, has little to do with Christian fundamentalism, but a whole lot to do with our intense visceral revulsion at monkeys and apes. This revulsion, while certainly not universal, is widely shared, and it is a psychological phenomenon that is completely independent of our ideas about the literal truth of the Bible.”
Furthermore, says Harris, “This visceral revulsion against monkeys explains why so many people prefer to hold on to the far more flattering mythology of man's creation as it was presented in Genesis. It is not Genesis that turns them against Darwin; it is Darwin that makes them turn to Genesis.”
Is that so? Well, here is an alternative theory: People reject evolution because it fundamentally is an illogical – make that irrational – concept.
We are to believe that billions of years ago in the great nothingness the Big Bang spewed out an incomprehensibly large volume of matter. Somehow, the laws of nature just happened. Some matter became stars. Some, planets.
Frankly, I am more inclined to believe in the Tooth Fairy. I would rather sandpaper a bobcat’s butt in a phone booth than completely jettison rational thinking, which is what the cosmic leap of faith necessary to believe this fairy tale requires.
But it gets more absurd. After the requisite billions of years passed, a truly remarkable thing happened: A microscopic cell popped into existence. What caused it? Oh, just the random interplay of electricity and various chemicals, akin to the first microchip sprouting under a mushroom in Silicon Valley.
Not only did this cell survive, but it also managed to thrive. Somehow, it got nourishment from its soupy, primordial environment, and then it “learned” how to multiply. How long did that take? A second? An hour? A million years? The latter seems improbable, because even the longest-lived creatures on Planet Earth live a few hundred years, at best.
So, it must have been that this brand-new life almost immediately learned to multiply. Then, it “adapted” to its surroundings.
Then . . . well, the story just gets loonier and loonier. To believe it one must function at a high order of gullibility.
Here are the facts: Human DNA is enormously complex, with 20,000 to 25,000 genes and three billion chemical base pairs. A cell is a veritable factory, with individual components performing myriad complex tasks.
DNA is computer code far more complex than anything mankind has developed. A computer program requires a programmer, and to conclude that what we see in life and the cosmos was designed, and thus requires a designer, is perfectly logical. This is what Intelligent Design postulates. ID is not creationism, that is, literally interpreting the Genesis creation account, as is dishonestly maintained by evolutionists.
What is not logical is to say that perfect order came unaided from utter chaos. What is clear is that evolution is little more than a poor attempt to justify the rejection of God.
My rejection of evolution has everything to do with rational thinking and nothing to do with my supposed revulsion for apes and monkeys. In fact, I find chimpanzees and their cousins immensely amusing – almost as amusing as people like Lee Harris and his sublimely preposterous theory.
somehow, made up stories/conjecture with a materialistic basis about how things work are considered science by these folks – merely because the stories reject any spiritual reality.
The argument that people reject evolution because they don't like monkeys is, of course, silly. But Mr. Campbell shows the real reason why people reject evolution: it's counterintuitive. Fortunately, like other counterintuitive notions such as Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, evolution is supported by a huge amount of data. Common descent, for example, is about as established as anything can possibly be in science. Here's a key line of evidence:
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere…" This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution.
Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected – that of DNA. This really is a 'text' being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life – like that of cytochrome C – have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology – "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue…" – conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees… and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or… common ancestry is actually true.
(Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.)
And, just for fun, here's another way that DNA analysis provides solid evidence for common descent: http://vwxynot.blogspot.com/2007/06/endogenous-retroviruses-and-evidence.html
Evolution is counterintuitive, but it does work. I myself have played with it and seen that random mutation plus non-random survival can, and does, lead to increasing sophistication and complexity: http://ingles.homeunix.net/software/minev/intro.html
Feel free to play with the software yourself if you like, it's available for download there.
Don't let the word 'random' throw you. Molecules of water vibrate around randomly, but water still flows downhill. Randomness is only part of evolution – not even the most interesting part – and biological evolution has nothing to do with cosmological models of the history of the overall universe.
Obviously if Mr. Campbell cannot understand or imagine how evolution works, then it must not be true.
If a hand-copied book has minor errors and variations in successive "generations," are the later books superior to the earlier ones?
If an intelligent designer can write a computer program that allows one to experiment with random processes, are the processes that result really random?
Mountain Man – Given a few trillion books and a few million years, sure. We can see some of that today – Google for "fortuitous typo" and see how new words and amusing connections are made and later propagated by occasional mistakes.
As to the other point, one can write a computer program to model weather, or plasma flow, or electrical currents, and get interesting and even surprising results that are confirmed by later analysis. Just because it takes intelligence to set up the simulation doesn't mean that the process it is simulating requires intelligence.
To put it another way: For the purposes of argument, I am willing to stipulate for now that there's a God that constructed the universe, imposes its laws from moment to moment, and placed the first cell upon the Earth directly, in perfect analogy to my experiment (which followed on a lot of other work and which has been quite superceded by later work). What about any of that would make evolution not work? Given those conditions, it's clear that evolution (that is to say, mutation plus selection) is capable of doing creative work, and even coming up with techniques that I, the author, did not expect and had difficulty understanding – and thus could not have 'programmed in' from the beginning.
The evidence of common descent that I posted indicates very strongly that whatever gave rise to the variety of life that we see today, it was either an evolutionary process or something very closely akin. Current evolutionary theory may not be correct in every detail, but any theory that supercedes it will have to include that data, and make very similar predictions at least in the cases we've examined so far. (Earth isn't a perfect sphere, for example – it's an oblate spheroid, bulging out a bit around the Equator – but the difference between a flat Earth and either a sphere or a spheroid is much larger than the difference between a sphere and a spheroid. Relativity explained why Newton's laws of motion didn't quite work for Mercury's orbit, but the difference was only 43 seconds of arc per century.)
So, tell me more about the Copyist (leaving out the Author, for the moment) whose work is creating greater and greater sophistication. And also, draw into the equation the fact that the presence of the Copyist (or perhaps, other sentient beings) is required in order to interpret the content of the books and assign value and context to what the books contain. How do they know it is more sophisticated, i.e., "better?"
And finally, the interpretation of the book precipitates understanding, and, depending on the message of the book, may require action. Indeed, the action is then evaluated according to how well the implementation is pursued as compared to the Author's intent.
So many intelligent interventions into the process have left us with the inescapable conclusion that this is not an undirected process. Your analogy fails its most basic intent.
No analogy is precise in all respects – it wouldn't be an analogy if there weren't differences, too. The usefulness of an analogy is in the similarities it points out – and the more similar the processes involved, the better. In the case for common descent, the book analogy is very, very accurate. The textual analysis involved doesn't depend on the subject or even, to a large extent, the language of the book – the same principles have been applied to Plato, the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, and both together), and numerous other ancient works. It is entirely uncontroversial there; why – specifically, please – would it not apply to DNA? Why are the twin nested hierarchies of morphology and DNA so markedly coincident, when chance coincidence is at least as staggeringly improbable as any number seen in creationist calculations of abiogenesis probability?
The book analogy is limited in terms of the 'inventive' nature of evolution because of the sharply limited population size of ancient texts – at most thousands of copies, and even then only a few dozen 'generations' at most, compared to biological populations and numbers of generations in the billions. However, the other model I pointed out – the one I decided to re-implement myself – illustrates that inventive process quite well. Look up the 'Lorenz Attractor' – a very simple set of differential equations, almost a crude mockery of the convection currents that make up much of weather. And yet, they displayed surprising behavior that was clearly more than possible in real weather systems, and forced a rethinking of several principles of meteorology.
The computer model I worked on (which it's not clear you've actually looked at yet) is small, but that's actually an argument for its utility. If that kind of behavior can be displayed in such a simple environment, then even more complex behavior will be possible in a more expansive environment.
[...] Another Loony Theory from the Wonderland of Evolution My rejection of evolution has everything to do with rational thinking and nothing to do with my supposed revulsion for apes and monkeys. In fact, I find chimpanzees and their cousins immensely amusing – almost as amusing as people like Lee Harris and his sublimely preposterous theory. [...]
I surprised I have to explain this to you, knowing you are a person of thoughtful intellect.
Why would it not apply to DNA? Because DNA is a complex, interrelated system that must be interpreted to have any value. In other words, the code, the interpretation, and the implementation into a huge array of systems must function together in a way that does not degrade the organism. Errors are bad. Vestigal processes are not retained.
In the transcribed book, copying errors are just that, errors. They inpugn the integrity of the original, representing decay, increasing inaccuracy, and lowered utility.
That is the natural trend of things, and we instinctively know this. I build a house, and I have to continually maintain it because it would decay into the ground otherwise. It takes my intervention to simply maintain the status quo, let alone improve things.
Everything runs down. We have professional athletes today who far exceed their predecessors in speed, strength, and skill. However, they, like their fathers, will degrade over time.
What is wrong with the computer program? It is predicated on a theory that contravenes common sense and observed data.
Again, the question is not change, per se, it is advancement. The successor must be superior, not just different.
Mountain Man – there are two different analogies going on here, and so far as I can tell, you are confusing them. The first is what we're calling the 'book' analogy – some copies have accumulated certain typos, other copies have different typos, and when you put them together you get 'family trees' that show descent-with-modification. Again, there is absolutely nothing controversial about this when applied to texts. It's used all the time in literary history and archeology and so forth – and, indeed, Biblical scholarship uses this as a major tool. When applied to DNA – purely as strings of codons, without regard to their function – we also see the exact same kinds of patterns, which fit descent-with-modification too well to be chance, by clear statistical measures. Moreover, the tree we deduce from this process matches, to he limit of the precision of data we have, the other "tree of life" deduced over centuries from entirely different functional and morphological considerations. Again, if this is not staggeringly good evidence for common descent, then what is it? A truly mind-boggling coincidence, or a Designer that wanted it to look like things had evolved?
The entire point of this is to demonstrate that, whatever process produced the life we see on Earth, it had to involve a process of descent with modification. Now, one could still argue that each individual mutation along the line was hand-picked by an 'intelligent agent', but that would not affect the brute fact that descent-with-modification happened.
The question now is, can natural selection account for the complexity we see or not? I presented a completely different analogy where mutation plus natural selection – pure differential survival and reproduction rates – leads to objectively increased sophistication and complexity. If the computer program is wrong, please explain why it is wrong. Where do the improved algorithms come from? I know darn well I didn't put them in there (I had trouble figuring them out when they appeared) and anyone can verify for themselves from examining the code that there's no 'secret optimizer' in there. It's not even particularly complicated code – I was a fairly new programmer then and I'm slightly embarrassed by some of the techniques I used. Indeed, my code is a from-scratch reimplementation – purely from the descriptions in published papers – of another simulation. I changed several features in my version, and yet the same behavior manifested itself. Seriously, where is the complexity coming from, if natural selection isn't developing it?
Dennis Campbell is obviously not familiar with the Halls of Academia but I'll bet he knows a lot about Bible "colleges"
“For example, why are men – at least some men – attracted to women with slim waists and flaring hips? Well, because it indicates the ability to pop out babies. Preservation of the species, you know. Of course, that fails to explain why some prefer the emaciated runway model look.”
Nature vs nurture. One can largely be found where there is a lack of outside influences, i.e. advertising and the fashion industries pushing of unnatural body shapes. Look back to the seventies and early eighties and you will see more natural body shapes in the media. Since then, artificial images of an ideal shape have been pushed on people (arguably with political ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable as well).
I hope your arguments do rest on this weak initial statement…
Obviously if Stedes cannot understand or imagine how creation worked, then it must not be true.
Mr. Ingles,
I would be more impressed if your computer program had created itself
unaided by you. Since you had to design the initial program, that would
seem to lend more credibility to ID than to Evolution.
Leigh
You might want to check "The Wisdom of Crowds". It explains your idea.
But, why do we have this either/or thing with Darwin and God? Is there a genetic explaination for the choice of black or white and the rejection of gray?
No, you rejected something that you mistakenly claim is evolution. Based on this article, it appears that you are not sufficiently familiar with evolution to sensibly critique it. You also made comments about the big bang and abiogenesis that show that you are unfamiliar with both of those scientific concepts.
Just to clarify this discussion a bit:
1. Do those who reject "evolution" as an explanation for species change reject all evolution, or just "human evolution"? In other words, is this discussion about the impossibility of evolution period, or the belief that humans did not evolve the way other species did?
2. For those who expressly reject the notion of human evolution: is this because in your understanding of science it is impossible for humans to have evolved? Or, is it because of a belief that modern science, in proposing evolution as an explanation, is doing this to deny the existence of God and/or challenge basic religious beliefs?
3. Assuming that your religious beliefs come from the Bible, and that the translations of the Bible into English are 100% accurate (both the words themselves, and the context in which the words are used), is it impossible to believe that the story of creation is a metaphor instead of a literal description of historical events? In other words, why is it impossible to believe in God, believe that God acts purposefully, believe that God created man, and that this creation occurred through an evolutionary process?
Those of you who know me from my previous writings know that I’m not raising these points to ridicule any belief. I’m simply attempting to clarify exactly what is at debate in this discussion.
Burlap – see the third paragraph in comment #6.
Thank goodness so many of you can see that Dennis' comments are unhindered by any knowledge of the subject.
I am surprised such a FunDumbMental article was printed here. This is the kind of thing that shows up on message boards that ban you as soon as you open your mouth.
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity of this sort.
I'm not exactly sure who has the lock on stupidity here. Those who present a legitimately debatable issue, or those who foment rather than debate in the guise of offering a response?
Actually, I am sure. I can disagree with someone without basing my entire disagreement on slander and personal attack, and anti-religious bigotry. Those who can’t reinforce the very stereotypes that cause this issue to be raised in the first place.
Phil,
I've converted to atheism because of owlafaye's powerful logic. He pursuaded me to give up theism on the strength of his arguments.
He's now my hero, so I will not tolerate you insulting him.
…"those who present a legitimately debatable issue, "…
You're right. Putting "loony theory" in the title, "dumbass class clown" in the introduction, and "sublimely preposterous" in the conclusion is a demonstrably effective method of engendering quality debate.
Felix, I read the article and I didn't see the word "dumbass."
Where are the observations of one species evolving into another, completely
different species? The AIDS virus is the fastest-mutating on earth, yet with all
its myriad mutations it remains a virus.
MM
I too, would convert if I knew which side of this debate owlafaye is on. Unfortunately your hero is neither clear or clearly sarcastic
Ivan,
I understand your confusion, but because of my conversion I am not inclined to be sympathetic or even genial. That is not owlafaye's style, so it cannot be mine either.
However, I have yet to be fully cleansed of my theistic tendencies, so I just can't bring myself to belittle you, call you names, or go off on irrelevant tangents. You see, I'm still learning what it takes to be this kind of an atheist.
I must say, it is an attractive thing being an owlafaye atheist, because I all I have to do is belittle those who disagree with me. I really don't even have to read their posts or respond to what they write, because theists are obviously stupid, superstitious, and caught up in fairytales. This relieves me of any obligation to consider their ideas or respond to them in a civil manner.
You ought to try it.
Trekker,
Animals have been mutating for millions of years, yet they remain animals.
Among animals, species tend to diverge from each other (while rare, plants are more likely to crossbreed), an excellent example of such divergence is in canis where dogs are changing from wolves and each other at an extraordinary rate. Variation is not a problem for evolution. It has been observed and the mechanism has been identified.
Dogs and wolves have only changed in characteristics. They are still dogs and wolves. This is a very poor argument to support evolution.
You'll be happy to know that humans are merely defective versions of single-cell organisms, using your description of the process. Variation in genetics is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Of course, natural selection has been working ever since there were enough organisms to be competing for resources, so we can look at the outcomes and say that some few variations have been successful, while most were not. As organisms became more specialized, variations were less likely to be positive, but they died out, the selection bias of natural selection tends to catch many variations that cause the organism to become more fit for its niche and make the others disappear over time. In the analogy, all of the books with copy errors that make the book useless disappear, only the improved ones go on.
It's all life. Different organisms have different characteristics but we all have the same chemistry. As populations speciate, they do so without radical changes. Humans are still great apes, even though we are no longer of the same species as chimpanzees, bonobos or gorillas. Cats and dogs are still carnivores, even though they are separate species and separate families. Speciation happens at first by reproductive isolation, whether the speciation we see happening between dogs and wolves because most dogs are kept away from wolves, or because behaviors that make certain subpopulations unwilling to or unable to interbreed with other subpopulations.
Pleased though I am at Mountain Man's 'deconversion', the timing is so inconvenient. I was really looking forward to getting my questions answered…
MM-
Don't forget that in your analogy of the book copyists, that the books that are not successful, whatever that happens to mean, are discarded and all new copies arise from the successful books only. If, at some point, the copyists were not allowed to compare notes (isolation of populations) the new generations of books would diverge.
MM-
Following your book copyist analogy, you need to remember that the copyist errors are variation and throwing away the 'unwanted' books is natural selection. If we add in a point where the copyists cannot compare notes, we have handled reproductive isolation.
Freelunch, those are quite remarkable statements, especially since you offer not a shred of evidence and have never observed what you state as fact.
Mr. Ingles,
In like fashion, I also was waiting for atheists to answer my questions. However, answers were not forthcoming. But as an owlafaye atheist, answers are no longer needed. Being complete assured of my own superiority, Such issues only need to be swatted away, much like a rhetorical fly meeting its end.
Having no need for a diety any longer, all I need to do is appeal to extraordinary lengths of time operating in conjunction with undirected forces. These alone produce remarkable results, far greater than my now-abandoned diety.
Without all that theistic baggage, I am now free to enter the rarified air of the scientific clubhouse. Having relieved myself of the duncecap, I can find acceptance and belonging amongst my atheist peers.
Yup, quite inconvenient. Ah, well, guess I'll have to look elsewhere for the intellectual conservatives.
Please start at Understanding Evolution to find out the basics of science's discoveries about evolution. If you want to learn something about why the intelligent design and anti-science creationists are wrong, you can start at the TalkOrigins Archive. If you have specific questions about evolution, please ask them.
Trekker
You didn't say that, please say you didn't say that…………..
Laughter, lots and lots of laughter…that qualifies for a year end award of some kind…possibly: "One who had NEVER caught the brass ring"???
Maybe: "He wasn't on time even when he was Born"???
I can see I have stumbled onto a few really dumb people here…who wants to be first?
So long as we're recommending books, David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone" is a very good read, and should help allay some of the concerns of those who may oppose evolution for ideological reasons…
Ohhhhh free lunch…you think you know everything and you talk about wolves and dogs like poodles evolved from wolves when everyone knows they were tamed wild poodles.
You are first in line, Owlie boy. Take the bouquet. Take the garland. Wear it proudly. I have never seen anything posted by you that contained even the slightest bit of logic or intelligence. You are the Chief Babbler. I salute you. You are the king of dumb. Bow, accept your reward, and go back to the sewer in which you surely must live. I would say you are amusing, but that would be a lie. I want to say I am laughing, but pity is more appropriate. What a curious name, Owlafaye…let's see…owl, owl…of course! The wisest of the birds! A wise birdbrain! I suppose you would say that you and I are descended from monkeys, and you know, you almost have me convinced that you are half right. But, Owlie boy, the monkey in you seems to have attained ascendance. So, what are we left with? A bird-brained primate! Boy, you are in a bad way. However, the inner monkey in you is a bit amusing, but in fact, a real, live chimpanzee is much more so. Oh, Owlie, you are running around in your underwear, oblivious to the fact that you are a laughing stock. Well, maybe I
am laughing after all! Oh, pitiable you, and so unaware of your pitfulness.
Extraordinary lengths of time occupied by undirected forces…exactly.
Nature is undirected insofar as the limits of elemental properties. The wind blows according to topographical, temperature, oceanic and river currents, and altitude influences amongst others.
We are talking 100's of millions of years here folks, not 6000.
What Darwin observed is quite obvious in the ability of various infectious agents to withstand medical efforts by evolving into new forms that counter these efforts. Just one of the many proofs of evolution.
The opposed religious are scared witless simply because they know that if Evolution is correct (and Oh indeed, yes indeed it is) it then indictes tht God does not create nor change organisms.
Evolution does not deal with creation from nothing to something as Christianity believes God does, but rather the changes in a hostile "status quo" that create new species through an evolving adaption for survival…
Evolution is quite simple.
Christians are quite complicated…starting with a "talking snake" and winding up in an obsession with toilet paper.
The whack heads run scared…beg God to intervene, and swear acceptance of His mastery over them because He swore to protect them…yet they still get whacked by Yellow Cabs.
Owlafaye, you are the king of babblers! Babble, babble, babble! Hey, boy, your underwear in slipping. Is that, is that…no, nothing is that small! (Laughter and more laughter). Why is it that fools delight in making fools of themselves? The nature of the beast, I guess….
Owlie boy, why are you so insistent on making a fool of yourself? Are you an angry midget? A self-hating homosexual? An adolescent who can't get a date? There must be some, I gag at the thought, evolutionary reason why you parade yourself around like some circus sideshow. Let us in on the secret. Why? Don't be shy, little fella. Come clean. Are you a masochist? Did your mommy refuse to breastfeed you? You sound like a toddler with a dirty diaper. What is your major maladjustment?
If you want to say something, stop wasting your time here and try to convince editors that your poetry is contemporary, significant and contributory.
Recently I was told that all dogs have evolved from wolves. This only begs one question: Where are the two wolves that spawned a saint bernard? We have a historical record of homosapiens walking the earth for over six thousand years (Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, etc.) Yet, there is still no evidence of the evolution of mankind in that time span. People are still born with non funtional deformities, but noone has learned to levitate, read a person's mind, see through objects, or even operate with more than 10% of their brains. And if you have a problem with the Bible, please explain to me how the largest sea salt deposit in the world managed to find itself over 1 mile high in the Andes mountains.
"if Evolution is correct (and Oh indeed, yes indeed it is) it then indictes tht God does not create nor change organisms."
*** This is a complete non sequitur. There’s no reason to believe that God cannot create man (or any other organism) through an evolutionary process. This is only a false statement if one or two conditions apply:
(1) An individual conflates what one religion teaches about God with the true nature of God. [Or, as a subset of this, things that a religion teaches are accepted literally when they should be understood metaphorically]. In either case, there is no malice involved here, just an effort to try and understand how and why the universe actually operates.
(2) On the other hand, believing that if human evolution exists therefore God does not exist is simple stupidity at best, and religious bigotry at worse. It's exactly the reason why certain proponents of a purely scientific explanation are looked upon with suspicion for harboring hidden agendas.
It’s interesting that many of those who defend their beliefs about the inadequacy of the current scientific explanation of human evolution have a more sophisticated view of the way the universe was created and works than some of the self-professed defenders of science who substitute personal attacks for any intellectual debate.
It’s the difference between calling someone’s ideas “dumb”, which is a criticism to be debated, and calling someone a “dumbass”, which is a personal insult.
detn8or69,
I cannot tell if you are serious are just parodying creationists.
Mr. Jackson,
As far as I am aware, there is no evidence about the true nature of God. All we have is religious doctrine. Since various religions and sects have competing, conflicting doctrines about God, there is no reasonable way to rely on those doctrines.
In my experience, we are more likely to run into an outspoken believers who reject the evidence for evolution and create the false dichotomy of "God or evolution" than we are to find those who argue that the evidence for evolution is evidence against God. I don't recall ever seeing someone from the latter group, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that science defenders also have a few ignorant hangers-on.
I'm not at all certain by what you mean by "a more sophisticated view of the way the universe was created and works". The theory of evolution is strongly supported by evidence and the discoveries over the past century and a half have consistently reaffirmed that evolution happens. They have also shown how it happens. The critics of evolution are rarely scientists of any type. They don't offer a testable hypothesis as an alternative to evolution. Non-evolutionary creationism is a religious doctrine. Intelligent design is creationism dressed in secular drag (Judge John E. Jones III did an excellent analysis of it in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. He was so annoyed with the lies told in his courtroom by the ID/Creationists, that he practically begged the local federal prosecutors to indict those who were lying to him in court. Of course, that never happened. Jones may have been appointed by Bush, but Bush could not fire him. The same could not be said about federal prosecutors).