Theos-Talk Archives (January 2006 Message tt00209)

1/17/2006 3:53 AM



Dear Odin:



Finally: Now that is worth reprinting.



But I would like to have the source references of these mighty
"authorities."



Thanks,



Dallas



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-----Original Message-----
From: Odin 
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 
To: 



Subject: THINK AGAIN: CHARLIE DARWIN'S ANGELS



JPost.com > Columns > Article



http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1
<http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1136361067333&pagename=J
Post%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull>
&cid=1136361067333&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull





Jan. 16, 2006 



THINK AGAIN: CHARLIE DARWIN'S ANGELS



By Jonathan Rosenblum



A federal district court judge in Pennsylvania ruled last month that a

few brief paragraphs read to schoolchildren informing them that there

are holes in the Darwinian theory of evolution and that an alternative

theory of Intelligent Design exists violated the US Constitution's

establishment clause. Judge John Jones did not consider, however,

whether Darwinism might itself be a form of religion, or

anti-religion, based largely on a priori assumptions.



In the apt phrase of Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson, Darwinism

is the "creation story of scientific naturalism" - the doctrine that

everything can be explained by natural, material forces.



For tactical reasons, Darwin's scientific supporters often prefer to

minimize the clash between traditional religion and the Darwinian

vision of all life developing via trillions of random micro-mutations

sifted by natural selection. Many, however, candidly admit that Darwin

leaves no room in human affairs for God.



Darwinian evolution, writes Oxford University's Richard Dawkins, makes

it possible "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."



For George Gaylord Simpson, Darwin shows that "man is the result of a

purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."



Darwin's mechanistic universe establishes further, according to

Cornell's William Provine, that there are "no moral or ethical

laws..."



Yet, as the brochure for the British Museum of Natural History's 1981

exhibit on Darwin noted, "evolution by natural selection is not

strictly speaking scientific because it is established by logical

deduction rather than empirical demonstration." When the museum's

chief paleontologist Colin Patterson asked the members of a graduate

seminar in evolutionary morphology at the University of Chicago to

tell him just one thing that they knew to be true about Darwinian

evolution, based on empirical evidence, the result was a long and

embarrassed silence.



Karl Popper famously DEFINED A SCIENTIFIC THEORY AS 

ONE THAT CAN BE FALSIFIED. 



When Einstein propounded his General Theory of Relativity,

for instance, he made a series of bold predictions based on the

theory.



By contrast, Darwinists proceed by assuming the truth of the theory

and then seeking empirical support. 



Studies of the fossil record that fail to buttress the theory are deemed 

"failures" and never published.



The search for Darwinian common "ancestors," according to Gareth

Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History, proceeds on the

assumption that those ancestors exist and then selecting the most

likely candidates.



The mechanism by which nature is alleged to have fashioned a single

ancestor into both whales and man has never been observed. Indeed, its

existence is based on a wild extrapolation from the commonplace

observation that within a single species different traits provide a

survival advantage in certain circumstances - e.g., black moths fare

better vis-a-vis predators against a sooty backdrop and light moths do

better in a clean environment. That's a long way from creating new

species.



Nor can Darwinists explain how complex systems, such as human sight,

none of whose component parts would alone provide any advantage, could

have come into being by a long series of micro-mutations. The best

Darwinists can offer in response are what Harvard professors Stephen

Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin call "just-so" stories about how each

of the postulated (but never observed) changes in each part of the

system conferred some advantage.



FACED WITH these challenges, the Darwinist response is largely

confined to rhetorical efforts to shut up the questioner: "You're

advocating specific creation" or "What's your alternative?" The latter

question, Philip Johnson notes in his invaluable DARWIN ON TRIAL, is

like telling a criminal defendant he can't offer an alibi until he can

produce the perpetrator. And the force of the question derives

exclusively from the fact that all elements of design have been ruled

out of consideration a priori, as failing to conform to scientific

naturalism.



The fossil record fails to provide evidence of the millions of

transitional species that Darwin's theory assumes have existed. Their

absence, writes Stephen Jay Gould, is the "trade secret of

paleontology." The fossil record is largely one of species and groups

of species coming into existence fully formed, remaining unchanged

throughout their history, and becoming extinct by virtue of some great

catastrophe, not because they were replaced by better-adapted

descendants. Nor, according to paleontologist Stephen Stanley, does

the fossil record provide a single example of "major morphological

transition."



Admits Niles Eldridge: "We paleontologists have said that the history

of life supports the story of gradual adoptive change, all the while

knowing that it does not."



Faced with the poor fit between the empirical facts and Darwin's

theory, scientists face the unpalatable choice between maintaining the

theory, despite its poor fit with the observed facts, or introducing

the types of major leaps, or "saltations," that Darwin rejected as

incompatible with his theory. Those leaps, whether in the form of

geneticist Richard Goldschmidt's hypothesis of stable macro-mutations,

or Otto Schindewolf's suggestion that the first bird hatched from a

reptile egg, or Eldridge and Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium,

are, as Darwin recognized, as supernatural as God's hand. Worse, as

Eldridge puts it, they require the "embrace of a rather dubious set of

biological propositions."



Even if Darwinian theory were in better shape than it is, the

scientific naturalists' project of eliminating all elements of design

from nature would still founder ON THE CREATION OF LIFE ITSELF.

Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle once compared the chances of forming

the simplest one-cell bacterium from pre-biotic soup as roughly

equivalent to that of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and

producing a Boeing 747. Even a one-cell organism makes a spaceship

look low-tech by comparison.



Hoyle also discovered that carbon, the basis of all organic life,

could have only been fashioned in the original solar furnace because

of the perfect nuclear resonance between two sets of simpler elements.

His conclusion: "[A] superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well

as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth

speaking about in nature."



IT IS TIME TO STOP TEACHING OUR CHILDREN THAT SCIENCE HAS ANSWERED ALL THE
QUESTIONS AND ELIMINATED GOD FROM THE COSMOS.



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