Theos-Talk Archives (February 2006 Message tt00092)

Here's an interesting commentary with reference to the ongoing controversy 
between Intelligent design and scientific evolution or Darwinism.   I wonder 
whether my "unscientific" (since, non "falsifiable" - using that method) ABC 
theory could effectively counter both sides of this argument (since they also rely 
on unprovable premises) and give them both a common ground of agreement that 
plugs all the holes in Darwin's theories, and knocks the religious 
creationists personal God into a cocked hat?   

Leon Maurer
http://www.tellworld.com/Astro.Biological.Coenergetics/

In a message dated 1/17/06 7:18:33 AM, dalval14@earthlink.net writes:
> 
> -----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&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.
>   
>  --------
> 



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]