Posted on 03/01/2009 10:55:11 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
Star Children for Darwin
Feb 28, 2009 — Why should we be looking for alien intelligence around other stars when it is right behind your eyeballs? You may not have known that you are a star child, but that’s what a leading astronomer called you. As a good star child, you need to pay tribute to Charles Darwin.
In New Scientist, Lawrence Krauss called on children of spaceship Earth to “Celebrate evolution as only star children can.” In this, he tied together the International Year of Astronomy 2009, the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope on the night sky, with Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. He recounted the epochal discoveries in astronomy and biology that he feels neatly combine in modern evolutionary theory, the theory of everything:
Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the science of genetics which followed, demonstrate that humans and the rest of life on Earth share not just a common heritage, but virtually everything else. At a molecular level, the distinction between humans and bacteria seems almost superficial. All forms of life on Earth share a common genetic method of replication and energy storage. Yet it is truly remarkable that from so simple a set of molecular building blocks such diversity can arise.Krauss did not seem to consider the theistic alternative at all that explains the same evidence: the same God who created stars also created mankind from the dust of the ground. Both worldviews produce the same observations. Stars and humans are made of atoms and molecules. Actually, he did quote Darwin’s ending sentence in The Origin about “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” but he had just described cosmic evolution leading seamlessly into biological and human evolution. Somehow global politics emerged in his conclusion:
Accordingly, the two discoveries we herald this year carry an important message for our future: the intimate connections between humanity and the entire cosmos, as illustrated by both evolution and astronomy, suggest that the only sensible perspective of humanity is a global one. The need for a global perspective is of vital importance now, as we are the first generation in history that must seriously confront global limits to our future on Earth, from energy to climate change.Christians might call this a non-sequitur or a half-truth. They do not deny our connectedness, but explain it in terms of all creation (stars and humans) being the handiwork of a single Creator. And instead of seeing a global perspective as the only sensible option for humanity, they might take the very same observations and point out the duty of each individual to its Maker.
The same mythology gets repeated over and over in the media. Carl Sagan was talking this starstuff lingo back in the 1980s. It’s all glittering generalities and logical fallacies.
Darwinism and the U.N. are not the only perspectives that explain the observations. Krauss begs the question. What does the connectedness imply? If there are at least two competing explanations for that connectedness (i.e., that stars and humans are both made of atoms), he cannot simply assume that his worldview is the only sensible perspective. In what other contest does a contender declare himself the winner before competing in the race?
Don’t follow his bluff like a lemming toward socialism and global politics. Thinking is done by individuals. If you follow the global crowd after the Darwin bandwagon, and it falls into a sinkhole, you will not be able to shift responsibility to them; you took the steps. Think for yourself.
You might even think a profound thought: that thought cannot emerge from stars, or else it wouldn’t be thought at all. It would be a hodgepodge of contingency and determinism. The essence of thought is to purposely order one’s conceptual resources, independently of the material substrate that conveys them, toward principles that obey the laws of logic. Our theories and explanations of stars employ logic, but stars don’t. Do stars take philosophy and hold debates? Of course not. Then what kind of twisted logic can believe that logic is an emergent phenomenon of matter in motion? If that were so, how could any human brain have any confidence that its reasonings were true? It leads to that “horrid thought” that plagued Darwin: “whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” he said. If a monkey doesn’t have a mind or convictions, you can be sure that stars don’t. Stop thinking horrid thoughts. Think wise thoughts. Daniel the statesman wrote, “Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever” Daniel 12:3).
Next headline on: Astronomy • SETI • Evolution • Dumb Ideas
Depends how much carbon is in that clay or rock....
The material our flesh is made from is irrelevant, as no flesh shall enter heaven. It’s the living spirit, the life force given to the flesh by God that is what ultimately matters.
Rocks don’t have that living spirit in them, so they are not my cousin.
LoL! That song came out around the same time as “the age of Aquarius” way back in the sixties when the UN earthers began it’s “Gaea” earth worship campaign and began promoting it through the schools. Around 1967, think.
OK, I’m not sure I understand your 1st post then.
“Oh I think the chosen Daniel verse is excellent. But then Daniel gets all crazy with the end-times stuff and loses me.”
Daniel is such a great book.
“Like verses 11 & 12: “From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days. Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches the end of the 1,335 days.”
So meaningful. I couldn’t possibly do it justice. I would strongly a Bible study on Daniel. Chuck Missler’s is good: http://www.khouse.org/6640_cat/biblestudy/daniel/
“Daniel is probably the most interesting book of the OT, if not the bible.”
tough call!
“The Jewish version of the Apocalypse, it was written before Christ and purports to be prophetic, but forgot the part about Christ’s birth”
Christ is ALL over the OT.
“and the subsequent (much later) expansion of Christianity.”
Paul says something about that, the Church being a “mystery”. Again, a proper study would do it justice.
The disease didn’t “evolve”. It mutated. Big difference. Evolve implies improvemnt. The disease didn’t improve, it’s still a virus, it didn’t grow arms and legs, a brain or otherwise “improve”. It just mutated into different strains. Adaptation is not evolution.
Finally! Another one who "get's it." A worldview that pretends, against the weight of historic evidence, in a "uniformity of natural causes" as a Closed System. The latter is a belief, pure and simple, based upon no further evidence than a "feeling." And that makes it a religion, and as such, it mush not be promoted by the State.
A religion of non-religion is still a religion. Just as when choosing not to decide we make a choice.
Neutrality is an illusion.
I would call “greater resistance to drugs” an improvement in fitness.
That said, Doonesbury is like the comic strip included by the OP in that neither of them is really all that funny.
One of the reasons Doonesbury’s cartoon falls so flat is that it has no basis in reality.
Louis Pasteur, who also happened to be a scientist who believed in the biblical account of creation...”discovered three bacteria: staphylococcus, streptococcus and pneumococcus. He developed vaccines against chicken cholera, anthrax, swine erysipelas, and rabies. His rabies treatment was tested on a man in 1885 for the first time.”
I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. I see no mention of Tuberculosis in your little tidbit on M Pasteur.
that cartoon sets up a straw man & knocks it down.
microevolution is a fact. no creationist would debate that with you. a germ can become a slightly different germ. we can breed dogs. particular traits are brought out in the DNA code. no new data is involved. you couldn’t go from a chihuahua to an alsation for instance. you’ve isolated such a small part of the DNA at that point.
to jump from that to say a banana is related to a giraffe is, well, dumb.
“to jump from that to say a banana is related to a giraffe is, well, dumb.”
And why is that? What’s to keep an enormous number of very small changes from adding up into a big one?
“you couldn’t go from a chihuahua to an alsation for instance”
indeed. because the alsation code has been lost. you could never get an alsation from breeding chihuahua together, because you have selected out an extreme portion of the dog DNA.
Not so, claim the wisemen of society, The Masters of the Universe. So I mock them with the expression. In the meantime, that ‘living spirit,’ of which they know not, goes elsewhere.
What do you mean when you say "Information" and "Code"? Do you mean the genetic code of a living being? The most concise definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics states:
the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time
I fail to see what this has to do with genetic information. Perhaps you could you re-explain your position.
you seem basically honest about your understanding though (just a sunday evolutionist :).
I am an evolutionist only in that I find that modern evolutionary synthesis holds the most water when attempting to describe the diversification of life on earth. There is no feverishness on my part; no deification of Darwin. That'd be silly
there are extremely good arguments against inter-special , or "macro" evolution.
Well...OK. I'd be great if you could detail some for me.
under that theory, each "mutation" would have to be superior. so for example, how would a thing evolve a blowhole?
evolutionists claim that dolphins "evolved" from some kind of COW, which "crawled back INTO the sea" (most people don't know about that part! it's the only way evolutionists can explain sea creatures having mammal-like features) so, at what point do you get a blow hole? You can't have half a blow hole, or you're dead!
Dolphins and whales do not merely possess mammal-like features, they are mammals. They possess mammary glands as well as many other features characteristic of their land bound brethren.
Is it not possible that the nostrils migrated from the end of the snout to the top of the head?
Where did you read (or see) any biologist claiming that cetaceans "evolved from some kind of cow"?
The eye is another one, which Darwin himself admitted would be the downfall of his theory.
Really? Here are Darwin's own words:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
This seems to support your claim. But he continues:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
Which does not support your assertion. Darwin had no trouble believing that the eye could evolve from a simple bundle of light-sensitive cells to the complex biological machinery with which we are so familiar. And I agree with him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.