Doubting Darwin

I am not sure you answered my questions.

Prove you wrong? Wrong about what? I can only guess what you are trying to say, please tell me more.

Do you mean prove you wrong in your apparent statement that the context of a verse does not matter as long as it is in the Bible? (and that is context enough)?

Are you saying that the context of a verse does not matter?

I agree that the Bible is truth, but if you do not allow the Bible to interpret itself by the context the Bible itself gives you, you may be missing the truth.

EvolutionPing

A pro-evolution science list with over 230 names. See list's description at my homepage. FReepmail to be added/dropped.

the Vatican has said it finds no conflict between Christian faith and evolution. Neither does Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Institute at the National Institutes of Health and an outspoken evangelical. He wrote recently of his view that God, "who created the universe, chose the remarkable mechanism of evolution to create plants and animals of all sorts." It may require some metaphysical juggling, but if more people could take that view, there would be fewer conflicts like the one in Dover.

Anyone can claim to be an outspoken evangelical, but Collins is obviously a theistic evolutionist, which is a rejection of the Scriptural view of creation. As to the Vatican's view on evolution the following article by Jack Cashill should shed some light on that:

Why Kansas Catholics Opposed The Teaching of Evolution By Jack Cashill, Ph.D.

Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs.

Willfully or otherwise, the science educators misconstrued the Pope's position. This disturbed the Catholics at Topeka to be sure, but it did not surprise them. What has surprised them, shocked them really, are the dismissive editorials by their fellow Catholics who understand the Pope's position only superficially and who understand the science educators' not at all.

For the record, Pope John Paul II and the U.S. Bishops have no objection to certain theories of evolution as long as they allow for God's creation of the world and the special creation of man. This is a shrewd posture on the part of the Pope as it allows for the Church to adapt to new scientific discoveries without a challenge to the faith.

Unfortunately, the Church's position does not wash with evolutionary biologists of any repute or ambition. They may avoid conflict with the Vatican by either ignoring or misquoting the Pope, but in fact, Catholic teaching is antithetical to their own, and they know it. A little background here is in order. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This elegant and timely work made two basic claims: One is that living things experience what Darwin called "variations" or what we call "mutations"--genetic changes that occur randomly. The second is that a process he called "natural selection" preserves favorable variations and rejects harmful ones.

The best evidence Darwin could cite for this theory was the breeding of domestic animals. These obvious changes within a species--called microevolution--no one could deny then, and no one denies today, certainly not the Church, nor the much maligned Kansas Board of Education.

The question Darwin had to ask himself--the tough question--was whether this theory could account for macroevolution, the presumed bridge from one species to another and the mechanism he thought responsible for the vast diversity of life.

Darwin and his philosophical heirs answer an unequivocal "Yes." Richard Dawkins, today's most influential evolutionist, describes natural selection as "a blind, unconscious, automatic process" that is "the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life."

That's a quote. The explanation. All life. What room does that leave for, well, say, God? Not much.

"In the evolutionary pattern of thought," said Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, "there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved."

No need. No room. And Huxley's sentiment is the rule, not the exception. The renowned biologist Stephen Jay Gould praises Darwinism as "a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution." Darwin made it possible," boasts Richard Dawkins, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

These are their own words. As to the inescapable ramifications of Darwinism, distinguished Cornell University Professor Will Provine, evolutionary biologist and neo-Darwinian, happily cites the impossibility of either free will or life after death.

The larger philosophy is often called naturalism, nature is all that there is; or materialism, matter is all that there is. In its most extreme forms, scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the terror of Nazi eugenics and the tyranny of communism. Wrote Marx to Engels of Darwin's The Origin of Species, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

Pope John Paul II has preached often against materialism and specifically so in an evolutionary context. Aware of this, the Catholics at the Topeka hearings objected not only to the undeniable connection between today's science establishment and the eugenics movement, but also to the implicit materialism of the proposed science standards themselves.

For all its harsh consequences, materialism would present a real challenge to the faith only if its own particular creation myth, Darwinism, was irrefutable. But Darwinism is hardly that. There is, after all, no evidence of existing transitional species as Darwin presumed there ought to be. None. There's no hard evidence of the same in the fossil record. Most species haven't changed at all. The major animal groups did not emerge gradually as Darwin predicted, but they exploded on to the scene. Nor did they die out gradually as Darwin said they would. Those that vanished, vanished in a geological heartbeat.

It gets worse. In one of his bolder moments, Darwin said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Darwin knew nothing of the electron microscope and cellular biology. His champion, Richard Dawkins, knows a lot. As Dawkins notes, the nucleus of each cell contains more information than all 30 volumes of the encyclopedia Brittanica put together, complex, specific and perfectly ordered.

Richard Dawkins imagines the cell as a Xerox machine, capable, he says, "of copying its own blueprints," but "not capable of springing spontaneously into existence." So picture Dawkins on the brink of infinity, pumping what Darwin called "secretions" from his barely evolved brain, trying desperately to figure how this this wonderfully complex machine came to be. His best guess? No joke: "sheer, unadulterated, miraculous luck." It must have slopped itself together, he surmises, from some imagined chemical soup.

Luck indeed, it's a task scientists have never been able to duplicate in the lab. Not to be outdone, Nobel laureate Frances Crick argues that these first primitive life forms might have come to earth, hang on, in a spaceship sent by a dying alien civilization.

In truth, neither Dawkins nor Crick have a clue where these first cells came from. Neither do their peers. Indeed, when biochemist Michael Behe searched the scientific journals looking for a Darwinian explanation, he found instead "an eerie and complete silence."

Said Darwin , "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent." One wonders how he would feel about utterly whimsical "additions" like spaceships or luck.

Still, America's public school teachers can present this goofiness in class as science but can not even address the rational possibility of a willful, intelligent creation of life. And the editorialists, even the Catholic ones, cheer on this kind of teaching, fearing to be cast among the anti-Darwinian few whom Dawkins calls the "ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked."

Ironically, the loud, spiteful resistance from the establishment bodes well for the future. It is a sign not of confidence but of confusion. It may even portend a genuine shift in the paradigm.

Richard Dawkins himself admits that "the beauty and elegance of biological design" gives us "the illusion of design and planning." But trapped by a lifetime of scornful pride and self-congratulation, he will abandon his weary materialism no more eagerly than the Soviets abandoned theirs.

The very Catholic (9 children) Michael Behe is not so trapped. "Over the past four decades," he writes in the ground breaking book, Darwin's Black Box, "modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell." "The result," he adds, "is a loud, piercing cry of DESIGN." In Behe's opinion, this observation is "as momentous as the observation that the earth goes round the sun."

Try as they might, the science establishment and their friends in the media cannot suppress this kind of news forever.

Jack Cashill, Ph.D., has written and produced an hour long documentary, The Triumph of Design and The Demise of Darwin, in collaboration with Phillip Johnson. Jack is a Fullbright scholar and a regional Emmy Award winner. See Jack Cashill News: America's Conservative Information Resource.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006220

The Branding of a Heretic
Are religious scientists unwelcome at the Smithsonian?

BY DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Friday, January 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.

The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." Here was trouble.

The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms--such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells--are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.

Mr. Sternberg's editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy--and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: "I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career."

The offending review-essay was written by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology. In the article, he cites biologists and paleontologists critical of certain aspects of Darwinism--mainstream scientists at places like the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. Mr. Meyer gathers the threads of their comments to make his own case. He points, for example, to the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, when between 19 and 34 animal phyla (body plans) sprang into existence. He argues that, relying on only the Darwinian mechanism, there was not enough time for the necessary genetic "information" to be generated. ID, he believes, offers a better explanation.

Whatever the article's ultimate merits--beyond the judgment of a layman--it was indeed subject to peer review, the gold standard of academic science. Not that such review saved Mr. Sternberg from infamy. Soon after the article appeared, Hans Sues--the museum's No. 2 senior scientist--denounced it to colleagues and then sent a widely forwarded e-mail calling it "unscientific garbage."

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Mr. Sternberg's supervisor. According to Mr. Sternberg's OSC complaint: "First, he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. . . . He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; . . . he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?' " The supervisor (who did not return my phone messages) recounted the conversation to Mr. Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."

Worries about being perceived as "religious" spread at the museum. One curator, who generally confirmed the conversation when I spoke to him, told Mr. Sternberg about a gathering where he offered a Jewish prayer for a colleague about to retire. The curator fretted: "So now they're going to think that I'm a religious person, and that's not a good thing at the museum."

In October, as the OSC complaint recounts, Mr. Coddington told Mr. Sternberg to give up his office and turn in his keys to the departmental floor, thus denying him access to the specimen collections he needs. Mr. Sternberg was also assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution. "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Mr. Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out." Neither Mr. Coddington nor Mr. Sues returned repeated phone messages asking for their version of events.

Mr. Sternberg begged a friendly curator for alternative research space, and he still works at the museum. But many colleagues now ignore him when he greets them in the hall, and his office sits empty as "unclaimed space." Old colleagues at other institutions now refuse to work with him on publication projects, citing the Meyer episode. The Biological Society of Washington released a vaguely ecclesiastical statement regretting its association with the article. It did not address its arguments but denied its orthodoxy, citing a resolution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that defined ID as, by its very nature, unscientific.

It may or may not be, but surely the matter can be debated on scientific grounds, responded to with argument instead of invective and stigma. Note the circularity: Critics of ID have long argued that the theory was unscientific because it had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Now that it has, they argue that it shouldn't have been because it's unscientific. They banish certain ideas from certain venues as if by holy writ, and brand heretics too. In any case, the heretic here is Mr. Meyer, a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, not Mr. Sternberg, who isn't himself an advocate of Intelligent Design.

According to the OSC complaint, one museum specialist chided him by saying: "I think you are a religiously motivated person and you have dragged down the Proceedings because of your religiously motivated agenda." Definitely not, says Mr. Sternberg. He is a Catholic who attends Mass but notes: "I would call myself a believer with a lot of questions, about everything. I'm in the postmodern predicament."

Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.

Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.

Mr. Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, is the author of "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus," to be published by Doubleday in March.

The Restitution View. This draws a radical divide between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3, placing all events and phenomea taught by geology in between. The six-day restitution" begins in verse 3, wherein God makes the earth inhabitable for man.

Not to be nitpicky, but the restitution view (aka gap theory) actually puts the gap between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2, not Gen 1:2 and Gen 1:3.

...it must be concluded that the creator is a poor engineer.

Why run a sewer through a recreational area?

Soon thereafter, I.D. burst into public awareness with the publication of "Darwin on Trial" by Phillip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who underwent a midlife conversion to evangelical Christianity. As a scientific theory, I.D. is making only slow progress in overcoming evolution's 150-year head start. . . .

This sums it all up.The objectives are: 1) to attack and discredit a scientific theory (evolution) and, if necessary, attack and discredit science in general (by calling it a religion); 2) forcefully promote the teaching of a specific religious belief (ID/Creationism).

On the one hand attack science (or a scientific theory) as invalid and equivalent to a religion to justify the teaching of an alternative religious belief. On the other hand, try to make a religious belief look like science to justify teaching it in a science class.

Thanks for the ping!

Excluding stuff that is flagrantly off the wall, this is one of the most biased articles I have ever read. Obviously you want to believe this, so let's agree to disagree and leave it at that.

If you are interested, you can find the entire saga here:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000484.html

It will give you a much better perspective on what really happened.

Excluding stuff that is flagrantly off the wall, this is one of the most biased articles I have ever read. Obviously you want to believe this, so let's agree to disagree and leave it at that.

You want to leave it at that after trashing an article. Yes, I know how opened minded the Darwinists are when educating our children, NOT. Here is an article which exposes their biased religion.

A Reality Check from Oz

In 1995, the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) accurately states the general understanding of major science organizations and educators:

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

Or in the words of the famous evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless, and natural process that did not have him in mind."

How do they know the process was unsupervised?

How do they know the process was mindless?

How do they know the process was purposeless?

Their statements are problematic in that they are unscientific. It cannot be proven that evolutionary processes are "purposeless" or that humans were "not in mind." Science cannot demonstrate these assumptions either way ... and that's the problem with their position. They become proponents of a religion of atheism; I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ... just as much as OUR conclusion is faith. Clearly, their definition is diametrically opposed to any concept of a personal creator being involved in the evolutionary process.

To be fair, as was reported by Brendan Sweetman, Ph.D. in a letter to The Kansas City Star August 21, NABT removed the language after it was pointed out by the philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, and the theologian Huston Smith, that their guideline was really an implied atheism and went beyond what the scientific evidence for the theory could show. However, the concept of natural selection (absent a creator) remains the central tenant of evolution as taught in the classrooms. The definition of natural selection includes unsupervised, mindless and purposeless. Clearly, in defining evolution they have left the world of science and entered the world of philosophy and theology, and established atheism (a religion) in our classrooms.

A 1991 Gallup Poll found that 87% of the public believes in God. According to the poll, of the 87% who believe in God, 44% accept the Creation model, and 43% the theistic evolution model. This implies that only one in ten Americans accepts NABT’s purposeless, mindless atheism, which is being taught in our classrooms. Teaching intelligent design differs from literal Biblical creationism in that it is silent regarding who the designer might be, when the designing took place, how it was done or for what purpose. It simply purposes that life was designed.

We can only speculate as to why two young men at Columbine High School gave up all hope and went on a rampage. Do you think that maybe they were taught their world is mindless, purposeless and unsupervised?

As a scientific theory, I.D. is making only slow progress in overcoming evolution's 150-year head start. . . .

Perhaps it's making slow progress because there's no evidence in favor of it. ID proponents can only point to their claimed doubt of Evolution which gives them their faith that there must be a God.

There is no positive evidence for ID, only disputed evidence against Evolution.

Any positive evidence in favor of ID would be evidence of God. And I doubt that He want's us to actually build that "God-o-meter" so we can read His presence in the laboratory. There would be no need for faith if we had such a thing.

Any way you boil it down, signaling pathways in the human body are too complex to be explained by a stupid and outmoded theory such as evolution.

I love the way you've selectively chosen to believe certain things claimed by science, but rejected others such as Evolution.

I suppose consistency isn't your strong suit.

Unfortunately the Vatican is behind the power curve on this one. The reality of the situation is that if evolution occurred as humanists today contend that the entire story of Genesis is a complete and utter fraud.

The Vatican is wisely hedging their bets. Since they've lost every other battle with science (Copernicus, Galeleo, etc.), it's a wise move. It's too bad today's Evangelicals have tied their faith to creationism, because they will lose too.

God created the world, and He gave us the Bible. The world contains massive evidence for Evolution, even despite the creationist naysayers.

So either 1) God "lied" to us when He created the world by salting it with an incredible amount of evidence for Evolution. Or 2) some minority of Evangelical Christians are mis-interpreting a few hundred words in Genesis.

Since it's very hard to get a perfect picture from mere words, I prefer to interpret the world created by God, when the question is about that world itself (how the species were created).

God does not lie, either in His creation, or His word. It takes a human to interpret one or the other of them wrong. There is no conflict between science and Genesis, only humans who refuse to admit they are wrong.

Let me jump in here

I think mc's point is that once you start litterally interpreting every single verse in the Bible, you've then got to swallow every one of them.

Genesis cannot be litteral, because it conflicts with itself in the two different creation stories of Gen 1:1 vs Gen 2:4.

Gen 2:4 is a bit more subtle and has been wrongly interpreted as being a summary of the creation in Gen 1:1. But the story beginning at Gen 2:4 contains sequences ("B" had not happened because "A" had not). Therefore it is an independent creation story with sequences, that unfortunatly do not agree with the sequences in Gen 1:1.

And we get into the unexplained things in Genesis, such as why there were "days" before there was a sun, and where the did light come from before the sun, moon, or stars were created? Where did the other people come from? Yes, convoluted explanations can be concocted to explain these discrepancies, but once you demonstrate you're willing to convolute the words in Genesis, then why not allow for Evolution as well?

Bottom line, Genesis is not litteral. The evidence in Gods creation points heavily to Evolution, and I do not believe God lies in His creation. Evolution does not negate any other meaning the Bible, so why fight it?

This creationism fight is damaging for believers, and damaging for religious conservatives, which have much more important things to do. This is why I believe these stories are being written, in a continuing attempt to hang the albatross of creationism around the neck of George Bush and conservative Republicans. We must reject it.

Are you prepared to give some context to those passages, for I have a couple of passages that may interest you.

Mat 27:5 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

Luk 10:37 ... Go, and do thou likewise.

Unfortunately the Vatican is behind the power curve on this one. The reality of the situation is that if evolution occurred as humanists today contend that the entire story of Genesis is a complete and utter fraud.

Nonsense. It would mean Genesis uses metaphorical and allegorical language, common to ancient peoples, to express basic divine truths. There is no evidence the book was meant to be taken literally.

Besides, evolution is not the only science that makes a literal reading of Genesis untenable. To believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, you'd have to chuck out geology. To believe that night and day preceeded the creation of the sun, you'd have to chuck out astronomy. And where exactly is the canopy of water in the heavens? How come we haven't found it yet?

A theory in which millions of years of death and change led to the ascent of man is mutually exclusive with a document which states unequivocally that death did not exist prior to Cain murdering his brother.

Nowhere does the Bible say there was no animal death before Cain's murder. Romans 5 speaks only of HUMAN death. Accepting evolution only requires accepting pre-human ANIMAL death.

The weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints is born out of attempting a merger of the two.

The weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints is born out of taking literally an obviously poetic and allegorical text whose literal reading is not only contradicted by mountains of readily observable, empirical data, but in fact contradicts itself.

Just because charaltan biologists like Dawkins claim evolution leaves no room for God does not make it so. When they make statements like these, they are leaving science and venturing into metaphysics, which is outside their area of expertise. Hence their opinion on such matters carries no more weight than that of a philosopher pontificating on biology.

Nonsense. It would mean Genesis uses metaphorical and allegorical language, common to ancient peoples, to express basic divine truths. There is no evidence the book was meant to be taken literally.

Mar 10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.

I have more trouble than you doubting Jesus' knowledge of creation events. He made a statement that is quite literal.

Scripture is always the best commentary on scripture.

I have more trouble than you doubting Jesus' knowledge of creation events. He made a statement that is quite literal.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how Jesus's statement in any way implies Genesis 1 must be taken literally. Can you elaborate please?