Why do people think Darwinism is a perfect creation? (the unabashed bigotry of staunch Darwinists)

The Telegraph ^ | Feb 20,2009 | Christopher Booker

[SeekAndFind]

As an old hand at tangling with Darwinists, I was well aware that a howl of furious protests would greet my item last week describing their curious inability to recognise just how much of the story of evolution Darwin's theory cannot explain, For pointing out that they rely on no more than an unscientific leap of faith to believe that an infinite series of minute variations could bring about all those extraordinary leaps in the evolutionary story, such as the emergence of the eye and countless others, I was derided as "stupid", "idiotic" and "scientifically illiterate". Clearly I was unaware all these riddles had been solved by genetics and the decoding of the human genome.

The trouble is that, as my colleague Dr James Le Fanu has lucidly set out in his admirable new book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered The Mystery Of Ourselves (Harper Press, £18.99), the unravelling of the genome has done nothing of the kind. When mice, men and chimpanzees all turn out to be made of almost identical genetic material, the unknown factor which determines why the same building blocks should give rise to such an astonishing variety of different life-forms leaves the Darwinian thesis as full of holes as ever. To believe that genetics have solved the riddle relies as much on a leap of faith as that Biblical â Creationism' which causes the more fanatical Darwinians to foam at the mouth.

Last Tuesday various eminent figures from the scientific establishment wrote to the Daily Telegraph, prompted by the remarkable finding of a poll published in this newspaper two weeks ago that only 37 percent of those questioned agree that Darwin's explanation for evolution is â beyond reasonable doubt'.

[CowboyJay]

It’s sad what public schooling does to people.

[bluejay]

> I suppose I’m close-minded and thuggish because I don’t think physics classes should be forced to recognize the divine intelligence behind falling objects.

Actually you are close-minded because you fail to ask “why does gravity make the objects fall?”

[garjog]

Researching the 2.5 million reference to microtubules I found this neat page:

"The following is a quote from Ernest Haeckel:

“ ‘not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simplehomogeneous matter … nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combination of carbon.’[3] ”

On the other hand, 21st century technology reveals that although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 grams (or 1 picogram)[4], the entire cell is incredibly integrated and each part works as part of a team.

Cell biology illustrates overwhelming evidence of intelligent design; in particular, due to the many irreducibly complex molecular machines. Cells are so tremendously complicated that we are only beginning to understand their internal workings, and indeed many functions within the cell still remain a total mystery.

An analogy sometimes used, is the comparison of a cell to a city. For instance, the workers can be compared to the protein, the powerplant to the mitochondria, the roads to the actin fibres and microtubules, the trucks to the Kinosin and Dynein, the factories to the ribosomes, the library to the nucleic acid, the recycling centre to the Lysosome, the police to the chaperones, and the post office to the golgi apparatus.

As technology increases, science continuously opens black boxes within already opened ones, and as more and more of these are being exposed, the phenomenal complexity of the whole system pushes evolutionary theories to breaking point."

From: http://creationwiki.org/Cell_biology

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"Actually you are close-minded because you fail to ask “why does gravity make the objects fall?”
22 posted on Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:44:31 PM by bluejay

You're not supposed to ask questions which raise doubts about scientific materialism. Although clearly Newton was very interested in such things.

[ks_shooter]

The best scientific data indicates that the universe had a beginning. Logic dictates that something cannot create itself. This leads inexorably to a intelligent force beyond the confines of the known physical universe. Call it what you want, but it exists. It HAS to.

Given this fact, what purpose is served by intentionally ignoring, or actively arguing, against it? It is logically impossible and scientifically unsupportable to contend, as Carl Sagan famously did, that “the universe is all there is, and all there ever will be”.

Pressed hard, a Darwinist will relent concerning the origin of life, but the subtle subliminal argument made daily by advocates of Darwin is identical to Sagan’s ignorant assertion. Once this fairy tale is established, it is used to try and shame and intimidate “non believers” into conforming to the assertion that our lives evolved out of nothing, for no reason, and cannot hope for any lasting significance once the universe reaches its heat death.

Should a person ever truly believe this, for what reason would they want to draw another breathe?

[CowboyJay]

The great scientists were great because they questioned convention and sought truth. Einstein recognized the hand of the divine in science. Natural law is no less God’s creation than anything else.

It’s closed-minded and thuggish to pound into a child’s head that they are, without question, apes. Once convinced of that ‘truth’, they’ll not be apt to question anything. ‘Monkey-see, monkey-do’. They’ll buy just about anything they’re taught or shown by self-appointed intellectuals. It’s a force for stagnation and de-humanization rather than enlightenment.

Secular humanism is an oxymoron. Science losing its’ humility and humanity proscribes death. Find me a ‘scientist’ stumping for death, and I’ll show you somebody who has replaced Darwinian theory for religion.

[NicknamedBob]

"When mice, men and chimpanzees all turn out to be made of almost identical genetic material, the unknown factor which determines why the same building blocks should give rise to such an astonishing variety of different life-forms leaves the Darwinian thesis as full of holes as ever."

It is astonishing how people will view the same evidence and reach diametrically opposed opinions about it.

The "almost identical genetic material" described above is precisely what Darwin was discussing in suggesting that minute changes in it would have dramatic effects. They do.

[NicknamedBob]

"Do you think inert matter causes consciousness?"

Is that any different from thinking that consciousness causes matter?

Isn't either just as much a "miracle"?

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Well, it also demonstrates that certain things in reality are beyond the model of explanation offered by scientism and scientific materialism. That means the answer lies elsewhere. The answer to what a human being is is not answered by the narrative about prehistoric monkey bones and graphs of imaginary hominids.

[MayflowerMadam]

A friend was telling us about a book, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Athiest”, which sounds interesting. Gets in to creationism, evolution, etc. We’ll be ordering it.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"It is logically impossible and scientifically unsupportable to contend, as Carl Sagan famously did, that “the universe is all there is, and all there ever will be”. Pressed hard, a Darwinist will relent concerning the origin of life, but the subtle subliminal argument made daily by advocates of Darwin is identical to Sagan’s ignorant assertion."
25 posted on Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:56:41 PM by ks_shooter

Bingo. It is a metphysical assertion and a priori truth claim of the kind Sagan & Co. protest when made by Christians or theists. There is no empirical event, lab experiment, or observation which could prove this claim, the central proposition of ontological materialism.

The modern physical sciences do not have the epistemological ability to determine with certain knowledge all of the things or beings which exist or the metaphysical structure of reality (such as claimed in obtological materialism either as a presupposition or declared metaphysical doctrine in the case of Sagan). That is ipso facto metaphysical in its very nature. It is unclear whether Professor Sagan understood what he was doing when he made such a claim. Based on other things he said and wrote one might conclude his background in philosophy was quite weak. It's such an obvious mistake.

But the advocates of scientism make these claims and errors all the time. The presupposition of scientific materialism usually just assumes this without reflection or critical examination. There simply is no epistemological foundation or any way to prove the claim that “the universe is all there is, and all there ever will be." Once that house of cards falls apart, the rest of the Weltanschauung of scientism gets pretty shaky.

[NicknamedBob]

You seem to be trying to get a lot of mileage out of deconstructing Sagan's statement. What you may be leaving out is that he is simply describing what the word "Universe" means, by definition.

Universe -- All matter and energy, including the earth, the galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space, regarded as a whole.

That is its primary definition, "all there is", and by extension from laws of conservation of matter and energy, "all there ever will be".

It isn't philosophical; it's definitional.

[Gondring]

“Darwinist” is a ludicrous label, designed to be on the same sinister par with “Hitlerite” or “Stalinist”.

Exactly right. Rhetoric, not serious inquiry and disagreement.

[Gondring]

Neat how such complexity evolved from earlier forms, isn’t it? Amazing how long hundreds of millions of years really is, isn’t it? Nearly inconceivable for some people, it’s so far out of our human daily experience.

[Gondring]

Now, for octopi ~ they are NEW as far as animal classes go.

Huh?! Cephalopods go back all the way to the Cambrian. And if you actually meant "order" instead of "class," then you can go back to the Late Cretaceous, with Palaeoctopus newboldi.

[SeekAndFind]

This comment posted on another site says it best :

I think one of the best examples of an honest man seeking the truth is Antony Flew. He was a vehement atheist for something like the last 50 years, convinced until just fairly recently that a God did not exist, that life evolved completely accidentaly, and even at one point, that humans had no free will. In other words, he was a hard-determinist).

But then, by honestly looking at the evidence, he came to the conclusion that a God had to exist (although he is a Deist and does not believe in an afterlife) and that the genetic coding within DNA is prime example of intelligence. He was also inspired by the careful balance of the cosmological constants and natural laws and this sort of thing.

As far as ever becoming a theist, he said he is definitely open to the idea and says you cannot limit an omnipotent Being except for the logically impossible (such as a round square). He says he never knows what may happen. One day he may hear God speak to him, saying, “Can you hear me now?”

If everybody was this honest, we wouldn’t have these angry, raving atheists (not all, but those such as Richard Dawkins) and evolutionists (again, a prime example being Richard Dawkins) screaming at others for doubting their faith.

[muawiyah]

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/12/the-radiation-o.html should clarify the ones I meant ~ the Antarctic cephalapods and the deep water cephalapods are REALLY DIFFERENT from all the others and were able to colonize the deep seas.

Notice the discussion of some species dispensing with red blood cells entirely.

I think these critters are sufficiently different from their more primitive ancestors who live in warm surface waters to merit special attention.

[muawiyah]

Now,now ~ Darwin didn't know beans about "genetic material" ~ he did not, in fact, have a clue. They were still figuring out the stuff about sperm and eggs in his day and weren't all that clear on it.

He spoke of "changes" not of "identical genetic material".

I think it is a very serious error to impute scientific knowledge to Darwin that he couldn't have had at that time.

Moslems do this to the point of distraction. They find a word in the Koran and then posit various scientific fields on top of it and ultimately credit that development to Mohammad.

[muawiyah]

It does you no good to pile on with your own bigotries ~ to wit, that the general population are inferior because they don't share all your beliefs.

Although the results of the survey do seem to suggest people in the UK are not up to modern standards regarding biological sciences, they also suggest in the most powerful way that the people in the UK still have a thriving CLASS SYSTEM.

Traditionally the lower classes there do not need to believe the ideas propounded by the upper classes. Sometimes you'll run into a working class guy who can elaborate on that thought for hours, if not days. Try Hyde Park ~ they show up there quite regularly.

My own thought on the results here are that lower class folks in UK probably should never be surveyed about upper class shibboliths.

[muawiyah]

The thread is actually about how people respond to polls in UK and what that might mean.

That is not religion!

When posters bring religion into such a thread, that doesn't change the nature of the initial categorization ~ for example, you wouldn't be able to change a discussion of totalitarianism as a political structure simply by noting that Joe Stalin had been a seminarian.