Darwin Defenders Lash Out at Creationist Origin of Species
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Lots of Darwin defenders responded to my post about the new Creationist edition of Origin of Species. Needless to say, they're not pleased.
Here's Rick K:
Do the ends justify the means?
Is it acceptable to openly lie, so long as it is in defense of your particular religion?
Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have chosen to defend their narrow version of Christianity by lying about evolution.
An obvious example is the statement: "the absence of any species-to-species transitional forms".
If you say, over and over again, to everyone you can, that "The Moon landing was a fake", some people who haven't bothered to look into the matter will accept what you say. It works for any falsehood. How much money and effort were spent saying "cigarettes are not bad for you." It's a lie, some people may believe the lie, but it's still a lie.
"There are no species-to-species transitional forms" is just such a lie.
The fossil record is FULL of transitional or intermediate forms. Evolutionary theory and geology have advanced so far that we can figure out where a potential "missing link" would have lived, when it would have lived and where fossils might be found. We then go to that place, dig, and find them. Google "Search for Tiktaalik" for an example of this.
We have so many transitional forms between reptile and mammal that for many of them, we can't tell if they are reptile-like mammals or mammal-like reptiles.
Divine Creation has no need of transitional species. Evolution demands them.
So the statement "there are no transitional forms" is a lie.
Is lying acceptable, if it is in defense of your image of god?
Tom Hammond writes:
um, Einstein is being repeatedly used by creationists as an example of someone with 'faith'... but he did not believe in god:
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"
Einstein did not believe in creationism. he also believed in a deterministic universe (i.e. predetermined by natural laws) . . . a belief he later questioned when quantum mechanics became an ever more legitimate science. anyway, Kirk fails to really explain why educational institutions—especially universities—require non-atheist teachers/professors. If I am learning how to save someone's life, or how to design a building, I want the best teacher possible—his religion or lack thereof does not concern me.
And Dr. G. Hurd makes the case for Christians embracing Darwinism:
There are "transitional" or "intermediate" fossils literally by the ton. Museums and museum warehouses are stuffed with them. If we look for the tiny gradual changes over time in fossils, we need to look at the tiny organisms that preserve these sorts of changes. Examples abound in the marine sediments filled with foramifera, and ostracods. But, when we look at the large familiar critters, the tiny variations that added up over generations to new species are lost against the greater similarities. The scientific definition of many species today is difficult for the scientist, but easy for the sexually active members of the species. A recent example would be the "discovery" that the California Two Spotted Octopus was really two species. This was not news to the octopi. The physical difference, a two centimeter variation in their reproductive organs, would never leave a fossil in the first place. And finally, we do observe new species emerging, both in nature and in laboratory experiments.
Creationists like Ray Comfort harm Christianity by making it seem absurd. This was warned against by Thomas Aquinas (c.a. 1225-1274) who wrote, ". . . one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty to be false, lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing." Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Q68. Art 1. (1273).
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Reader Comments
Liars and cheats
Doesn't it figure that in order for so called ID proponents and creationists to make their point they have to LIE and CHEAT if only by omission of important chapters a book. After all, like all good Christians and Muslims, they are so sure in their own minds that God or Allah will forgive them that they can actually justify killing innocent women ind children in the name of God!! What a joke religion has played on the gullible enough to believe it.
For Natalie
I'm not trying to provoke the wrath of god fearing Americans here (of which there are many), but you really can't use the Bible as evidence. First off, the Bible is not consistent. It doesn't even portray Jesus consistently much less provide a working description of the cosmos. In one Book Jesus is knocking over tables in a Jewish temple and scaring the living daylights of his followers, in the next he's a kitten, spreading love and happiness. In one Book Jesus preaches the empowerment of women, in another, he casts them down. Which is it? I'm seriously wondering?
The problem with the Bible is that it was written by (in the opinion of the worlds most respected scholars) SEVERAL different people and over the span of at least 50 years not to mention many, many years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth (possibly 100+). So tell me, are the authors (human beings) really so infallible that they simply get everything right 100 years after the death of Jesus without consultation with either themselves OR God? It's a book written by MAN. Man is capable of not only deceiving and being deceived, but of believing things that have no basis in reality. The Bible itself is a theory. Now, what can we do TODAY to prove the theory of Genesis in the Bible. As far as I understand: nothing.
"Some things have to be taken on faith" Fine. I have faith that certainty is more important than belief. You can BELIEVE in anything, but you can't support an argument with evidence that doesn't exist. When I have this conversation with my Christian friends they say "How do you know God doesn't exist" I say "I don't. But I also don't know if I'll be able to fly someday." It's IMPOSSIBLE to prove I CAN'T do something (for certain), but entirely possible (and indeed necessary) to prove that I CAN. (For example: "I can jump over that ravine." "No you can't." "Prove I can't." - Does this logic work in everyday life? Of course not.)
So now, if God revealed himself so readily 2000 years ago, why is he so shy today? Can't we collect some NEW evidence to support the existence of God? If you can't there is no real reason to believe he exists. I know it's scary to think that your parents, your grandparents, and your great-great grandparents COULD have been mistaken about God, but instead of defending their beliefs so blindly, why not HONOR them and try to discover the truth? I'm not saying that I have the truth, I'm simply saying that I need evidence to even make a claim for truth.
I have traveled to many different countries in this world, and spoken with successful, intelligent, KIND people who barely even ponder the existence of God. It seems strange that the quality of their character could be so great having never heard the wisdom or guidance of God. Not only that, I find it even more curious that the best Christians in the entire world, who happen to live in Africa, and pray harder every single day than you ever have, seem to have nothing to show for it. They die of Ma
For frustrated bio student
It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.
If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin's natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or "intelligent design," you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":
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.
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His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called "blind chance":
Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …
Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. "The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"
The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a "pathway" that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?
Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:
Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.
I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable; also "The Blind Cave Fish's Tale" in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor's Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.
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