Posted on 01/13/2003 10:33:14 AM PST by Heartlander
Darwin Central, always on the alert.
Perhaps you'd favor us with a few lines from scripture that support the doctrine of testability, verification/falsification.
Creationists believe that God made current life-forms from scratch. The ID movement takes no position on how life got here, and many adherents believe in evolution. Some even grant a role to the evolutionary engine posited by Darwin: natural selection. They just deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum to us."
Surprise! There is such a passage, but it's in the OT, not the NT. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it's very close. To my knowledge, it's unique in all of scripture, and it's hardly evidence that God instructed anyone in the scientific method, but it's something:
judgesSee, I didn't spend all my youth hanging around in pool halls.
6:36 And Gideon said unto God, If thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said,
6:37 Behold, I will put a fleece of wool in the floor; and if the dew be on the fleece only, and it be dry upon all the earth beside, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said.
6:38 And it was so: for he rose up early on the morrow, and thrust the fleece together, and wringed the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of water.
6:39 And Gideon said unto God, Let not thine anger be hot against me, and I will speak but this once: let me prove, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece; let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew.
6:40 And God did so that night: for it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground.
I have no interest in entering the evo-crevo bloodsport, which so far as I can tell in hundreds of threads has caused no one to change their beliefs, but the statement above is not accurate insofar as it was intended to apply to Darwin's theories.
The notion that the earth and human society are an organic whole evolving over time was commonplace in early 19th century intellectual circles, then dominated by Hegel's philosopy. Many suspected the theory could be applied to biology, including Spencer, who also applied evolutionary theory to society, so-called social Darwinism.
Darwin's theory of evolution is an application of Hegel's dialectic to biology. Instead of synthesis and antithesis clashing to produce a new synthesis, species and mutation compete in the struggle of the "survival of the fittest" to produce a new species.
Imbued with the ideas of his age, Darwin found the evidence to support the theory. Indeed, he rushed his first work into print when he feared he was about to be beaten by a rival. I'll wager you that had Darwin lived in Newton's time, before the evolutionary ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries became au courant, he could have looked at the same evidence and would not have produced the same theory.
You might read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Even though science is based strictly on verified and observed facts produced by the scientific method, it changes.
And Intelligent Design is focused on defending essentially nothing, which is entirely it's point. ID serves as a "big tent" for the creationism/antievolution movement in which differences can be glossed over. The article here engages in its own abuse of terminology, btw. "Creationism" is not limited to "a literal reading of the Genesis account." Strictly speaking, "creationism" refers to any view that includes an affirmation of the doctrine of creation, and this would include theistic evolution. Conventionally, however, it is often restricted in its denotation to antievolutionary versions of creationism, but this still encompasses a staggeringly broad, and often mutually contradictory, range of views.
At the extreme conservative end you would have the hyperliteralism of the flat earth cosmology. Slightly more liberal are the (tychonian) geocentrists. Then there are the young earth creationists (the Henry Morris ICR types). There are also the gap theorists, who hold that the earth is ancient, but that the flood and the present creation is recent (there was also a seperate "pre-Adamic" organic creation). More liberal still are progressive creationists. Some of them vociferously oppose evolution. Others come close to theistic evolution. Then you have theistic evolutionists who reserve special creation for the human form, and then those that reserve it for the human soul, and so on.
In short some of these views contradict each other as drastically than they do conventional evolutionary views. ID is effectively a kind of non-version of creationism. It simply claims that "some things are designed" by "intelligence," while purposely avoiding any contention (or even examination) as to how this "design" was actually effected, when it was effected, if it is still being effected, and so on.
Which is universally and correctly denounced as a non-scientific application by all evolutionist freepers so far as I can tell (even those who are themselves atheists).
Didn't you hear? He already has returned, some 1800 years ago at the least. He is directly quoted in the bible assuring his followers that he will return in His Glory and His Kingdom before some of them "taste death." Therefore we are all the elect! Good for us. Enjoy the millenium!
| Non-creationist | Hardcore creationist |
| Creationists believe that God made current life-forms from scratch. The ID movement takes no position on how life got here, and many adherents believe in evolution. Some even grant a role to the evolutionary engine posited by Darwin: natural selection. They just deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum to us." |
In all of these instances [of observed rapid speciation], the speedy changes have nothing to do with the production of any new genes by mutation (the imagined mechanism of molecules-to-man evolution), but result mostly from selection of genes that already exist. Here we have real, observed evidence that (downhill) adaptive formation of new forms and species from the one created kind can take place rapidly. It doesn’t need millions of years. Shouldn’t evolutionists rejoice, and creationists despair, at all this observed change? Hardly. Informed creationists have long stressed that natural selection can easily cause major variation in short time periods, by acting on the created genetic information already present. But this does not support the idea of evolution in the molecules-to-man sense, because no new information has been added. Selection by itself gets rid of information, and of all observed mutations which have some effect on survival or function,15 so far even the rare ‘beneficial’ ones are also losses of information. The late-maturing, larger guppies resulted simply from a re-shuffling of existing genetic material.16 Such variation can even be sufficient to prevent two groups from interbreeding with each other any more, thus forming new ‘species’ by definition, without involving any new information. The Biblical account of history not only accommodates such rapid changes in body form, but actually requires that it would have happened much faster than evolutionists would expect. As the animals left the Ark, multiplying to fill the Earth and all those empty ecological niches, natural selection could easily have caused an original ‘dog kind’ (e.g.) on the Ark to ‘split’ into wolves, coyotes, dingoes, etc. Because there are historical records showing some of these subtypes in existence only a few hundred years after the Flood, this means that there had to have been some very rapid (non-evolutionary) speciation. So it is encouragingly supportive of Biblical history when some such rapid changes are seen still occurring today.17 And this is being repeatedly confirmed. |
Wieland is blind, of course, to gene duplication as the mechanism for adding new genes to the genome. (Willfully, IMO, since he's a bright guy and surely knows better.) But this example illustrates what creationists always say: Any change over time (including speciations!) that is proven to have occurred by natural means is merely "microevolution", and therefore the new species must have evolved from the same Biblical baramin. In other words, creationists "deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum to us."
This is wrong. Atheists only deny that someone started it all. Something starting it all would be perfectly compatible with what we see about the natural world, & therefore compatible with atheism.
Strangely enough, science, starting, as it does on the assumption that we live in an ordered universe, where causes can be determined by observation, had its historic roots in the believe that an orderly God made things rational.
IMO this is basically true historically, but it's also non-essential. We know through observation & valid inference that the world is an ordered universe. You don't need to tack on a mythical person who willed it that way in order to understand that it is that way. Just like you don't have to tack on Apollo & his chariot pulling the Sun across the sky in order to understand that the Sun moves.
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