Agnostic, here (in semantics only). Evolution should have a zero effect on the non-believer. Evolution, along with science, says nothing about whether a deity exists. There is nothing to suggest that a would-be god doesn't have evolution, chemistry, astronomy, physics, etc in his/her/it's tool box. I say again: science has nothing to say about any of the thousands of deities that have existed in the story books over the aeons.
Please understand: Science is not religion to the unbeliever. Furthermore, there is nothing sacred about evolution and furthermore, we do not pray to Charles Darwin. The atheist would gladly abandon evolution tomorrow if it were proven to be untrue. What a breakthrough in the pursuit of knowledge!
I think creationist have a complete misunderstanding of science and the atheist/agnostic. We're not satan-worshipping, boogeymen hoping to crush religious belief. We are searchers trying to find a truth no matter where exists the evidence. Furthermore, if one of the many religions that exist today (or in the past) could only prove their position, then the atheists/agnostics would be turning out to worship in droves.
I find it funny. In any other human institution, if there is no evidence for a thing; then we assume it doesn't exist until evidence suggests that it does. Only religion assumes an answer(that god exists and created the universe) and tries to fit the evidence to make their beliefs true. Lost on the religious believer is the realization that the Universe, life, and morality all work without the assumption of any deity at all.
You prove the point. Your entire argument proceeds from methodological naturalism. Which says: there is no God, and we will allow no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence of Him.
Evidence can be indirect. And the most common evidence known to science is evidence of intervention. If the odds against a thing "just happening" are longer than nineteen to one, we reject the null hypothesis, which is the non-intervention hypothesis, and accept the alternative hypothesis, which is the intervention hypothesis.
The odds against abiogenesis are a googolplex to one. And what's more, Rex, you know it, I know it, Judge E. Jones III knows it, Darwin knew it, and everybody knew it. Charles Lyell was at least honest enough to say that something had to make life. Charles Darwin was not. And neither are you.
And until life begins, it cannot exist, much less change, either over time or all at once.
And if you think morality works without the assumption of a God, then tell me: what is your standard of value? And can you defend that standard of value against any other standard of value?
Did Darwin personally discover antibiotics? I was under the impression that Alexander Fleming made the first discovery of a compound that killed bacteria. And here's another fact that might be a trifle inconvenient, or might not be: Alexander Fleming was a member of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences. Now I'm not so sure that the Vatican, in those days, would have welcomed a proponent of evolution into that particular assembly.
And here's an article debunking your implied claim that without the theory of evolution, we would not have antibiotics.
Besides which, antibiotics are overused today.
Submitted by Derpity Der (not verified) on
Darwin didn't discover antibiotics. I should've been more clear. His findings have a great deal of weight in biology, and that includes many forms of treatments and medicine.
Biology would have gotten along swimmingly without him.
Submitted by Rex B (not verified) on
Well, the logical fallacy in your argument is that if one natural cause(abiogenesis/evolution) is ruled out, then we 'must accept the alternative hypothesis'(which is creation). You're argument is that if science can't yet explain it, then god must have done it.(God of the Gaps) In your mind the god hypothesis wins by default. In theory, even if you could rule out evolution; there could be another natural, yet undiscovered, causal agent. The point is, you must actually prove creation.
Next, I don't say there is no god. I have to simply suspend that decision-making process until it is confirmed by experiment and observation. There have been too many claims of invisible deities throughout the ages. Non-existance and invisibility look the same! What's a thinking person to do? Personal stories of vicarious redemption and anecdotal evidence simply will not suffice. You have to be sure you're not under a delusion. Then there is still the little problem, that if you can prove a creator...which god is it? God of the Old Testament, the Koran, the Norse gods, the Egyptian Gods, the Viking God, Greek Mythology, et al...
On abiogenesis, I'm fairly certain your creationist researchers are making some broad-based assumptions about the origins of life which are neither consistant with that which is taught by bio-chemistry or evolution. No matter what the odds against life's origins are as a chemical reaction, you still have to prove special creation to win the debate. Either one believes that life began as small simple steps over unimaginably large swaths of time, or we are to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing deity popped himself into existance. We do have a fossil record. We do have many independent sciences that have confirmed evolution. With religion we have a stone aged storybook, confimed neither in science nor history.
On morality, what moral thing can a religious person do that a non-believer can not? Religion does not hold the monopoly on morality. A non-believer can make the same conscientious moral decision without consultation to a Supreme higher power. It's not needed.
I hold that so many null hypotheses have failed to qualify, that no pretended, perceived or claimed Master Bridge Builder of Science would have either authority or just cause to forbid any scientist to consider supernatural intervention in the affairs of nature.
We then could turn to which text has stood the test of time better than any other, by every measure of reproducibility and quality control. Answer: the Tanakh, that contains the Genesis story.
You did not answer my question. What is your standard of value? And how do you set it?
Submitted by Paul Burnett (not verified) on
Did you mean the title to be "Without Darwin, whither faith?"
All you're saying is that without Darwin, someone else would have stepped in. Not immediately, however.
But if you want to talk about apologizing for facts that don't fit someone's pet dogma, I assert that today the evolutionists are guilty of that fault.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Evolution is not a dogma, it is a theory that has broad and deep acceptance in the world of science. That doesn't make it right, of course; there was a time when, for instance, the preponderance of doctors believed in blood-letting, too. I understand this. However, a true scientist is dispassionate about facts and accepts verifiable new data as it comes; a believer does not have that luxury. If you accept the verbal, plenary inspiration of scripture, then scripture must be proven inerrant in all aspects. You then must of necessity have a base assumption that all data must somehow fit the Biblical account, and the more literal and conservative our interpretation of the Bible, the harder that job becomes. On the other hand, an evolutionist only has to be consistent with current understanding of available data.
And do you deny that a large and (currently) dominant faction in the scientific community have set themselves the task of establishing, once for all, that God does not exist, and that we are all a cosmic craps shoot?
Furthermore: when you have a historical record, does that not take precedence?
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Most atheists are agnostic atheists and are not interested in establishing the non-existence of god(s) as fact. I would not be swayed by the relatively small contingent of provocateurs and media hounds who seem to be, and sometimes are, gnostic or "hard" atheists. That said, science does seek to operate independent of all preconceptions, theistic or otherwise.
The Bible Itself. It is more than Literature. It is History. No one has ever proved It false.
You say that science "seeks to operate independently of all preconceptions." Then you must condemn methodological naturalism as violative of that "seeking."
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Yes, it was Joshua, although that is beside the point, which I stand by -- it it had been Clyde that the sun was said to stand still for, it is still un-(dis)provable including not being proven simply because it cannot be disproven. As an example: I claim that I was born of a virgin. You can't disprove it. Does that make it true?
I don't think a priori assumptions are inherently wrong to have as they direct our limited resources to purposes that are most likely to produce valid results. No scientist, in developing or validating theories or doing research, is open to any random thing as a possibility to account for. Where would that end? Are oncology researchers, for example, to spend significant resources on researching the possibility that cancer is caused by sin or demonic influences, even assuming there were some way to do so, or that we could all agree on a definition of "sin"? Are we to investigate the Law of Attraction as a factor in traffic accidents, or leprechaun activity as a cause of economic downturns?
Science deals with the natural world which is assumed to perform in accordance with natural laws and forces. Naturalism is therefore the focus of science because it is observable, measurable, and frequently, reproducible.
My disagreement with science, such as it is, is that it cannot and will never answer all questions. Reductionism has its limitations. My disagreement with religion is that "we don't know" is a valid answer and learning to sit with uncertainty is a mark of maturity. Any god worth knowing deserves better treatment than to be used as a placeholder for our current ignorance and the limitations of our intellectual and perceptual equipment, especially when it's been demonstrated repeatedly that to the extent we can fill gaps in knowledge it always comes via empirical observation and the scientific method.
Not all theists believe science must conform to dogma, even counter to a preponderance of evidence and research. The Dali Lama, for example, believes the inverse. But most religions don't allow for dogma to be fallible. At least not in the main. You probably don't force women to be silent in church or treat your slaves well or stone people for touching a menstruating woman, and you probably don't insist on speaking in tongues -- but for some reason, you cannot take the creation story as anything but literally true. I don't understand the willingness to adapt in some areas, yet the attachments in other areas.
I can tell you what end methodological naturalism has come to: that it must invent, without evidence, certain processes that had to succeed against such odds that any Power Ball player, playing that lottery with the kind of system that would win at those odds, would soon win enough money to buy out every man, woman and child on this planet many times over.
At least you admit that science can't find all the answers. Science can never prove anything (at least, not "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty"); it can only show a thing as most likely. And that's the gag. We deal here with the origin of life, the odds against which are nothing short of astronomical. On the other hand, we have a Historical Record of events that we can check.
And it is no act of "placeholding" to observe, and admit to observing, abundant evidence of a catastrophe, worldwide in scope, the description of which appears in the written log of three of the only survivors of that event.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
We currently have a very skewed view of life and the odds thereof because we have not yet gotten much of a sense of how (un)common life is in the universe. If we find life in several places in this solar system (e.g., the Martian poles, the underground seas of a Jovian moon), it might change the length of the odds of life generally. So far we have only exotic organisms living in extreme environments on earth to go by. Even if we do not find life in this solar system that doesn't mean it's not fairly common in other solar systems.
But even if we invent starships and find no evidence of life within ten parsecs of Earth, and begin to think we may be alone in the universe or very nearly so, all it means for sure is that the odds are long and we won the lottery. From there it's a very long way to "a god did it" and even further to "my particular god did it". In fact there is no actual relationship at all to draw that inference from other than an argument from incredulity based on the human tendency to want to tidily explain everything that happens in some simple way ,especially if it happens on large scales of time and distance or has emergent complex outcomes.
I leave it as an exercise for the truly curious to research the chronology of the flood story in the Bible and its origins in other, earlier flood stories from other cultures (or for that matter, the relationship between the Biblical creation account and other creation legends). And whether this constitutes anything resembling a "ship's log" written directly by the survivors that serves as a firsthand account. Or whether the flood, even if granted for the sake of argument, adequately explains the fossil record.
But we are departing from the point of this particular thread here, which is whether science is wrong to default to empirical, naturalistic assumptions. You've asserted a great deal but offered no evidence for those assertions other than more assertions.
This morning the street outside my house was wet. Am I wrong to assume it rained or do I need to posit divine activity or some other baroque explanation? If the Bible said, "When the grass is wet, god did it as a sign of his presence in the world", would you be obliged to argue for that despite our thorough understanding of meteorology and the water cycle?
Your argument assumes that what is found on another world (or more bizarrely yet, a moon), grew, sprouted, spawned, or otherwise began there. The Hydroplate Theory, to name just one, has a way by which the earth itself might have seeded a few extremophiles on these other places.
Concerning whether science is wrong to "default" to the natural explanation: that is not what methodological naturalism does. If that was all it did, many creation investigators, Dr. Brown among them, wouldn't quarrel with that. It would enforce a rigorous economy of miracles, and stop them from invoking miracles at every turn.
But methodological naturalism forces people to assume facts, and processes, not in evidence, on no other ground than to avoid a miracle. When in fact any physician worth his shingle will tell you that miracles, being events (being chiefly recoveries from intractable disease) for which the natural has no explanation, do occur. Methodological naturalism denies this, with all the stern, even vituperative demeanor of a Communist dictator.
Submitted by Rex B (not verified) on
What is bizarre about life on a moon? Moons can be earth-sized or greater, have internal heat (due to the gravitational pull of the mother planet), have water, and retain an atmosphere. Did you think our moon is the only kind of moon possible? If so, this tells me a great deal about the 'honesty' of your intellectual pursuit.
On miracles.... Again, no Supernatural intervention or miracles are needed. The universe works without those assumptions. The only would-be miracle needed is for a deity to birth himself into existance.
Miracles are so pre-19th century!
Good day, Terry. I'm finished harassing you. It would be interesting if the Creationist/Science debate had some substance, but it is a sham, I feel. -Regards
I don't understand your argument that methodological naturalism would never have taken hold without Darwin. It's like saying that the slaves never would have been set free without Lincoln. It might have taken longer or happened differently, but both outcomes were inevitable. The US was the last civilized nation on earth to free its slaves (just like we will no doubt be the last to have rational gun control laws or equal marriage rights), because it had already become apparent to thinking people that slavery was bad for society (even if some religious people attempted to justify and defend it). Similarly, science was already on a trajectory toward empiricism and if Darwin hadn't done it, someone else would have emboldened scientists to not apologize for facts when they are inconvenient for someone's pet dogma.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Methodological naturalism is a reasonable default, and will be supplanted by something else if something else evidentially proves a better default. What is the alternative anyway ... methodological supernaturalism?
The assertion that the Bible has "never been proven false" as an historical document is true insofar as it can be neither proven nor disproven that, say, the sun stood still for Gideon. This is like saying that the fact Jesus or Jehovah or Odin or Thor cannot be disproven empirically makes them real or even likely to be real. You cannot empirically disprove Odin, yet (as far as I know anyway) you lack belief in Odin. For the same reasons, I cannot prove or disprove most aspects of the Bible's historicity, yet lack belief in most of it as I think it highly unlikely. Therefore, claiming the primacy of the Bible as a factual historical account is never going to sway science.
"Methodology" should assume neither a priori. That it does today is a testament to the power of propaganda.
By the way: it was Joshua, not Gideon. Gideon was the Judge who selected a tiny elite force to defeat a much larger force.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Hydroplane Theory is a hypothesis conceived, not by a geologist or paleontologist or an astronomer, but by a mechanical engineer who is a creationist. Even some other creationists have reservations and disagreements with him. I am surprised that (1) you are threatened enough by the possibility of extraterrestrial life that you'd (2) quote such a weak source in speculating against it.
Medically speaking, there are recoveries that exceed typical experience and for which we don't have a specific explanation, from which I draw just that -- nothing more nor less than an idiopathic trajectory for a recovery. Divine intervention is unlikely as an explanation because whenever we pray for something that can't happen naturally, such as growth of a missing limb, it NEVER happens. Unless you want to argue that amputees are not on god's pharmacopeia for some reason, it seems unwise to apply the label "miraculous" only to edge cases that may or may not have happened on their own.
Gabby Giffords is an example of someone who "should" be dead and her survival, even with partial impairment, is something we might hyperbolize as "miraculous" but the truth is that the calibre, path, and spin of the bullet combined with the best medical treatment available and her physical and mental constitution was sufficient to spare her life and, by all accounts, her mind. I have no doubt that many would be eager to invoke divine intervention on her behalf and they would be even more eager if she were a conservative / literalist Christian. However, this is, again, only an assertion. Saying something doesn't make it so.
So ... does science go out of its way to "avoid" miracles? Does it jump through rings of fire and eat little pieces of glass to explain things that more easily and naturally are explicable as miracles? I guess that is what you are saying, but that is rather like saying that suggesting my street was wet this morning because it rained last night is a contortionist act to deny and naturalize away the more "obvious" explanation that god specifically sent the rain. If objecting to inserting god into that situation is being "stern and vituperative" then I plead guilty.
Methodological naturalism does indeed jump through rings of fire and eat glass to invent feeble attempts at explanations that defy logic. Such as how enough information to fill ten Libraries of Congress could write itself — for that is the anmount of information in the nucleus of a single cell. And not even a human cell. The cell of a protozoan.
Or how the first-ever cell ever self-assembled from nonliving parts. Or even how any of its parts self-assembled.
Wait and see, said Darwin and the Huxleys. Then Michael Behe came along and said the obvious: "Never could have happened. Not even in a trillion years."
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
I am well aware that scientists are not merely dispassionate men in white lab coats. They are human, and have their own prejudices and agendas tenures to protect, etc. It's been famously said that new ideas are first ridiculed, then grudgingly accepted, then deemed self-evident. In recent history for example the Australian gentleman who discovered the connection by H. Pylori and stomach ulcers went through exactly this cycle of bucking accepted thinking.
But the thing is, science ultimately does change in response to new data. It's dogged insistence on substantiation and proof is both the reason why the discoverer of the true cause of stomach ulcers was at first dismissed as a crackpot, and the reason why we now treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics. It's also why we no longer bleed the sick or use leeches. Science, for all its inbred conservatism and academic cliquishness, eventually goes with the facts, every time.
This does not mean that all, or even most, or even many challenges to accepted theory will end up as game changers. No doubt this is your hope for creationism, but in my view, for a theory as long standing and pervasive and peer reviewed as evolution to be described as "feeble attempts at explanation" requires a conspiracy theory to support it. That millions of scientists in lockstep tow an artificial party line contrary to empirical evidence for a century and a half strikes me as a combination of wishful thinking and projection.
However, this is your blog, and I suspect your purpose is not really to debunk evolution or to gain an equal footing for creationism so much as it is to provide rationalizations for Christians who are aware enough to need some sense that there is a sound scientific and/or intellectual basis for belief in a young earth created in six days and a subsequent literal worldwide flood -- a position rejected both overtly and covertly even by millions of your fellow Christians. It also provides a circle-the-wagons mentality that gives people a sense of identity as a persecuted and misunderstood minority holding fast to orthodoxy.
Christians need to be careful, however, that they are not on the wrong side of history. When anesthesia was invented, some Christians opposed it as an unnatural intervention in human suffering contrary to the will of God -- a position that today Christians, as well as the rest of the world, rightly finds preposterous. The literalist interpretation of the creation and flood legends is in my view both unnecessary to support your theology and doomed to either outright failure or permanent marginalization on the fringes.
Science is supposed to change in response to new data. And operational science, or "the knowledge of how things work," does so change. As an aside: I know all about Helicobacter pylori, having examined for it often enough in stomach biopsy specimens during my training in pathology.
But origins science is locked solid in this "Grand Craps Shoot" paradigm that Charles Darwin and the Huxleys steered it into. Julian Huxley frankly admitted that this paradigm, by obviating God, removed from their minds any consideration that Anything They Did Might Be Taken Down in King of Kings' Evidence. And in particular, Julian Huxley mentioned sexual chicane.
"Peer review" is subject to subversion. The Grand Evolutionary Paradigm, the trident of uniformitarianism, abiogenesis, and "common descent," is one of two examples I can cite. The other is "anthropogenic global warming." For your information, I am the semi-pro journalist who took the Climate-gate Archive out of the narrow corner of the blogosphere and into a spot where the Big Boys could see it, take it, and run with it. Without me, you would never have heard of Climate-gate. You would never have known that Phil Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK, once made this dead-to-rights incriminating statement:
I just completed Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real-time temps to the [proxy] data set...from 1981 onwards, and from [the Nineteen Sixties] from Keith's to hide the decline.
Note the publication involved: Nature. The very journal founded with the precise intent to obviate God.
The Creation Science Hall of Fame is no mere blog. It is a non-profit corporation, founded and registered according to all applicable statutes in the State of New Jersey. It has applied for recognition of tax exemption (and tax deductibility of contributions) by the Internal Revenue Service as per Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. (That application is pending.)
And of course we seek to remind Christians everywhere that, before Darwin and the Huxleys, the considered position of scientists everywhere was that the world is a mere six thousand years old (give or take two hundred), that we are standing on the silt of a worldwide flood that happened about 4500 years ago (give or take five hundred; the LXX seems to imply that it was longer ago by that number of years, and we are still checking the records), and the history of the world from its beginnings is as the Bible states. In the frenzy of the turning-away-from-God for which Darwin is responsible, people even forgot that such a civilization as Assyria ever existed. That is, until archaeologists discovered the ruins of Nineveh.
In conclusion, you have made quite free with your unsolicited advice. Let me offer some advice of my own in free and fair trade: take care that you do not stand on the wrong side of history. Certain institutions have come to exist that the Apostle (and Revelator) John predicted, in uncanny detail. Like a "smart chip" that will in fact be tantamount to stamping human beings as if they were cattle. Not to mention the widespread acceptance of murder (cf. the willful ignorance by most media outlets of the case of People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Kenneth Gosnell MD), drug abuse, sexual chicane (see above), and theft. The Bible is as right about those things, and about Creation and the Flood, as it is about the Assyrian Empire, once forgotten and then re-discovered.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
It's very impressive that you've done biopsies on stomach tissue and are a famous journalist, but neither point is germaine to the discussion or provides credibility to your arguments.
Nor do you do yourself any favors suggesting that pre-Darwin, either scientists or Christians believed overwhelmingly in a young earth. In fact during the half century leading up to that book's publication, the idea of an old earth was increasingly popular among Christians, including no less than conservative theologian BB Warfield, who laid the groundwork for modern dogma on Biblical inerrancy. Darwin did not, after all, invent the idea of evolution; it was gaining acceptance before he came on the scene, and Christianity was not even close to uniformly hostile to it (nor is it today for that matter).
The first American scientist to study and support Darwin's theories was a devout Christian, Asa Gray.
So it seems that you are several generations out of step with fellow believers, much less with science.
I refer you to the long list of deceased inductees here on the site. I suggest you read their accounts, going all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, and then decide whether you ought to withdraw your statement.
And even if I were "several generations out of step with fellow believers," I don't give an unripe fig. I stand for truth, and I speak truth to power, and to mobs. So do all of us at the Creation Science Hall of Fame.
And if you don't like it, get off this comment space and stay off. I grow tired of your annoying, repetitious, and ultimately incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial cross-examination.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Predictably, we close with appeals to authority and insults. But don't worry, I am no more interested in endless talking in circles than are you, and this is your playground, not mine, so I think we are done with this topic as it serves neither of our interest to continue further. I do salute you for the engagement, however.
Richard Lewontin is no "authority." He is a material witness. A dead-to-rights material witness who dropped a bombshell. Your side is "busted," and you know it.
You're the one who left the insult. I described it accurately.
32 Comments
Submitted by Rex B (not verified) on
Agnostic, here (in semantics only). Evolution should have a zero effect on the non-believer. Evolution, along with science, says nothing about whether a deity exists. There is nothing to suggest that a would-be god doesn't have evolution, chemistry, astronomy, physics, etc in his/her/it's tool box. I say again: science has nothing to say about any of the thousands of deities that have existed in the story books over the aeons.
Please understand: Science is not religion to the unbeliever. Furthermore, there is nothing sacred about evolution and furthermore, we do not pray to Charles Darwin. The atheist would gladly abandon evolution tomorrow if it were proven to be untrue. What a breakthrough in the pursuit of knowledge!
I think creationist have a complete misunderstanding of science and the atheist/agnostic. We're not satan-worshipping, boogeymen hoping to crush religious belief. We are searchers trying to find a truth no matter where exists the evidence. Furthermore, if one of the many religions that exist today (or in the past) could only prove their position, then the atheists/agnostics would be turning out to worship in droves.
I find it funny. In any other human institution, if there is no evidence for a thing; then we assume it doesn't exist until evidence suggests that it does. Only religion assumes an answer(that god exists and created the universe) and tries to fit the evidence to make their beliefs true. Lost on the religious believer is the realization that the Universe, life, and morality all work without the assumption of any deity at all.
Submitted by Temlakos on
You prove the point. Your entire argument proceeds from methodological naturalism. Which says: there is no God, and we will allow no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence of Him.
Evidence can be indirect. And the most common evidence known to science is evidence of intervention. If the odds against a thing "just happening" are longer than nineteen to one, we reject the null hypothesis, which is the non-intervention hypothesis, and accept the alternative hypothesis, which is the intervention hypothesis.
The odds against abiogenesis are a googolplex to one. And what's more, Rex, you know it, I know it, Judge E. Jones III knows it, Darwin knew it, and everybody knew it. Charles Lyell was at least honest enough to say that something had to make life. Charles Darwin was not. And neither are you.
And until life begins, it cannot exist, much less change, either over time or all at once.
And if you think morality works without the assumption of a God, then tell me: what is your standard of value? And can you defend that standard of value against any other standard of value?
Submitted by TheDiggPatriots (not verified) on
Without Darwin, the world of science, and faith, would look different. But science would foster complacency as it... http://t.co/SDc8Qwz7lW
Submitted by Derpity Der (not verified) on
We might not have antibiotics. But then again, Darwin wasn't the only one to make those discoveries at the time.
Submitted by Temlakos on
Did Darwin personally discover antibiotics? I was under the impression that Alexander Fleming made the first discovery of a compound that killed bacteria. And here's another fact that might be a trifle inconvenient, or might not be: Alexander Fleming was a member of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences. Now I'm not so sure that the Vatican, in those days, would have welcomed a proponent of evolution into that particular assembly.
And here's an article debunking your implied claim that without the theory of evolution, we would not have antibiotics.
Besides which, antibiotics are overused today.
Submitted by Derpity Der (not verified) on
Darwin didn't discover antibiotics. I should've been more clear. His findings have a great deal of weight in biology, and that includes many forms of treatments and medicine.
Submitted by Temlakos on
Biology would have gotten along swimmingly without him.
Submitted by Rex B (not verified) on
Well, the logical fallacy in your argument is that if one natural cause(abiogenesis/evolution) is ruled out, then we 'must accept the alternative hypothesis'(which is creation). You're argument is that if science can't yet explain it, then god must have done it.(God of the Gaps) In your mind the god hypothesis wins by default. In theory, even if you could rule out evolution; there could be another natural, yet undiscovered, causal agent. The point is, you must actually prove creation.
Next, I don't say there is no god. I have to simply suspend that decision-making process until it is confirmed by experiment and observation. There have been too many claims of invisible deities throughout the ages. Non-existance and invisibility look the same! What's a thinking person to do? Personal stories of vicarious redemption and anecdotal evidence simply will not suffice. You have to be sure you're not under a delusion. Then there is still the little problem, that if you can prove a creator...which god is it? God of the Old Testament, the Koran, the Norse gods, the Egyptian Gods, the Viking God, Greek Mythology, et al...
On abiogenesis, I'm fairly certain your creationist researchers are making some broad-based assumptions about the origins of life which are neither consistant with that which is taught by bio-chemistry or evolution. No matter what the odds against life's origins are as a chemical reaction, you still have to prove special creation to win the debate. Either one believes that life began as small simple steps over unimaginably large swaths of time, or we are to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing deity popped himself into existance. We do have a fossil record. We do have many independent sciences that have confirmed evolution. With religion we have a stone aged storybook, confimed neither in science nor history.
On morality, what moral thing can a religious person do that a non-believer can not? Religion does not hold the monopoly on morality. A non-believer can make the same conscientious moral decision without consultation to a Supreme higher power. It's not needed.
Submitted by Temlakos on
I hold that so many null hypotheses have failed to qualify, that no pretended, perceived or claimed Master Bridge Builder of Science would have either authority or just cause to forbid any scientist to consider supernatural intervention in the affairs of nature.
We then could turn to which text has stood the test of time better than any other, by every measure of reproducibility and quality control. Answer: the Tanakh, that contains the Genesis story.
You did not answer my question. What is your standard of value? And how do you set it?
Submitted by Paul Burnett (not verified) on
Did you mean the title to be "Without Darwin, whither faith?"
Submitted by Temlakos on
All you're saying is that without Darwin, someone else would have stepped in. Not immediately, however.
But if you want to talk about apologizing for facts that don't fit someone's pet dogma, I assert that today the evolutionists are guilty of that fault.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Evolution is not a dogma, it is a theory that has broad and deep acceptance in the world of science. That doesn't make it right, of course; there was a time when, for instance, the preponderance of doctors believed in blood-letting, too. I understand this. However, a true scientist is dispassionate about facts and accepts verifiable new data as it comes; a believer does not have that luxury. If you accept the verbal, plenary inspiration of scripture, then scripture must be proven inerrant in all aspects. You then must of necessity have a base assumption that all data must somehow fit the Biblical account, and the more literal and conservative our interpretation of the Bible, the harder that job becomes. On the other hand, an evolutionist only has to be consistent with current understanding of available data.
I do not envy you your task.
Submitted by Temlakos on
And do you deny that a large and (currently) dominant faction in the scientific community have set themselves the task of establishing, once for all, that God does not exist, and that we are all a cosmic craps shoot?
Furthermore: when you have a historical record, does that not take precedence?
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Most atheists are agnostic atheists and are not interested in establishing the non-existence of god(s) as fact. I would not be swayed by the relatively small contingent of provocateurs and media hounds who seem to be, and sometimes are, gnostic or "hard" atheists. That said, science does seek to operate independent of all preconceptions, theistic or otherwise.
What historical record are you talking about?
Submitted by Temlakos on
The Bible Itself. It is more than Literature. It is History. No one has ever proved It false.
You say that science "seeks to operate independently of all preconceptions." Then you must condemn methodological naturalism as violative of that "seeking."
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Yes, it was Joshua, although that is beside the point, which I stand by -- it it had been Clyde that the sun was said to stand still for, it is still un-(dis)provable including not being proven simply because it cannot be disproven. As an example: I claim that I was born of a virgin. You can't disprove it. Does that make it true?
I don't think a priori assumptions are inherently wrong to have as they direct our limited resources to purposes that are most likely to produce valid results. No scientist, in developing or validating theories or doing research, is open to any random thing as a possibility to account for. Where would that end? Are oncology researchers, for example, to spend significant resources on researching the possibility that cancer is caused by sin or demonic influences, even assuming there were some way to do so, or that we could all agree on a definition of "sin"? Are we to investigate the Law of Attraction as a factor in traffic accidents, or leprechaun activity as a cause of economic downturns?
Science deals with the natural world which is assumed to perform in accordance with natural laws and forces. Naturalism is therefore the focus of science because it is observable, measurable, and frequently, reproducible.
My disagreement with science, such as it is, is that it cannot and will never answer all questions. Reductionism has its limitations. My disagreement with religion is that "we don't know" is a valid answer and learning to sit with uncertainty is a mark of maturity. Any god worth knowing deserves better treatment than to be used as a placeholder for our current ignorance and the limitations of our intellectual and perceptual equipment, especially when it's been demonstrated repeatedly that to the extent we can fill gaps in knowledge it always comes via empirical observation and the scientific method.
Not all theists believe science must conform to dogma, even counter to a preponderance of evidence and research. The Dali Lama, for example, believes the inverse. But most religions don't allow for dogma to be fallible. At least not in the main. You probably don't force women to be silent in church or treat your slaves well or stone people for touching a menstruating woman, and you probably don't insist on speaking in tongues -- but for some reason, you cannot take the creation story as anything but literally true. I don't understand the willingness to adapt in some areas, yet the attachments in other areas.
Submitted by Temlakos on
I can tell you what end methodological naturalism has come to: that it must invent, without evidence, certain processes that had to succeed against such odds that any Power Ball player, playing that lottery with the kind of system that would win at those odds, would soon win enough money to buy out every man, woman and child on this planet many times over.
At least you admit that science can't find all the answers. Science can never prove anything (at least, not "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty"); it can only show a thing as most likely. And that's the gag. We deal here with the origin of life, the odds against which are nothing short of astronomical. On the other hand, we have a Historical Record of events that we can check.
And it is no act of "placeholding" to observe, and admit to observing, abundant evidence of a catastrophe, worldwide in scope, the description of which appears in the written log of three of the only survivors of that event.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
We currently have a very skewed view of life and the odds thereof because we have not yet gotten much of a sense of how (un)common life is in the universe. If we find life in several places in this solar system (e.g., the Martian poles, the underground seas of a Jovian moon), it might change the length of the odds of life generally. So far we have only exotic organisms living in extreme environments on earth to go by. Even if we do not find life in this solar system that doesn't mean it's not fairly common in other solar systems.
But even if we invent starships and find no evidence of life within ten parsecs of Earth, and begin to think we may be alone in the universe or very nearly so, all it means for sure is that the odds are long and we won the lottery. From there it's a very long way to "a god did it" and even further to "my particular god did it". In fact there is no actual relationship at all to draw that inference from other than an argument from incredulity based on the human tendency to want to tidily explain everything that happens in some simple way ,especially if it happens on large scales of time and distance or has emergent complex outcomes.
I leave it as an exercise for the truly curious to research the chronology of the flood story in the Bible and its origins in other, earlier flood stories from other cultures (or for that matter, the relationship between the Biblical creation account and other creation legends). And whether this constitutes anything resembling a "ship's log" written directly by the survivors that serves as a firsthand account. Or whether the flood, even if granted for the sake of argument, adequately explains the fossil record.
But we are departing from the point of this particular thread here, which is whether science is wrong to default to empirical, naturalistic assumptions. You've asserted a great deal but offered no evidence for those assertions other than more assertions.
This morning the street outside my house was wet. Am I wrong to assume it rained or do I need to posit divine activity or some other baroque explanation? If the Bible said, "When the grass is wet, god did it as a sign of his presence in the world", would you be obliged to argue for that despite our thorough understanding of meteorology and the water cycle?
Submitted by Temlakos on
Your argument assumes that what is found on another world (or more bizarrely yet, a moon), grew, sprouted, spawned, or otherwise began there. The Hydroplate Theory, to name just one, has a way by which the earth itself might have seeded a few extremophiles on these other places.
Concerning whether science is wrong to "default" to the natural explanation: that is not what methodological naturalism does. If that was all it did, many creation investigators, Dr. Brown among them, wouldn't quarrel with that. It would enforce a rigorous economy of miracles, and stop them from invoking miracles at every turn.
But methodological naturalism forces people to assume facts, and processes, not in evidence, on no other ground than to avoid a miracle. When in fact any physician worth his shingle will tell you that miracles, being events (being chiefly recoveries from intractable disease) for which the natural has no explanation, do occur. Methodological naturalism denies this, with all the stern, even vituperative demeanor of a Communist dictator.
Submitted by Rex B (not verified) on
What is bizarre about life on a moon? Moons can be earth-sized or greater, have internal heat (due to the gravitational pull of the mother planet), have water, and retain an atmosphere. Did you think our moon is the only kind of moon possible? If so, this tells me a great deal about the 'honesty' of your intellectual pursuit.
On miracles.... Again, no Supernatural intervention or miracles are needed. The universe works without those assumptions. The only would-be miracle needed is for a deity to birth himself into existance.
Miracles are so pre-19th century!
Good day, Terry. I'm finished harassing you. It would be interesting if the Creationist/Science debate had some substance, but it is a sham, I feel. -Regards
Submitted by Temlakos on
I'll hold you to that last.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
I don't understand your argument that methodological naturalism would never have taken hold without Darwin. It's like saying that the slaves never would have been set free without Lincoln. It might have taken longer or happened differently, but both outcomes were inevitable. The US was the last civilized nation on earth to free its slaves (just like we will no doubt be the last to have rational gun control laws or equal marriage rights), because it had already become apparent to thinking people that slavery was bad for society (even if some religious people attempted to justify and defend it). Similarly, science was already on a trajectory toward empiricism and if Darwin hadn't done it, someone else would have emboldened scientists to not apologize for facts when they are inconvenient for someone's pet dogma.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Methodological naturalism is a reasonable default, and will be supplanted by something else if something else evidentially proves a better default. What is the alternative anyway ... methodological supernaturalism?
The assertion that the Bible has "never been proven false" as an historical document is true insofar as it can be neither proven nor disproven that, say, the sun stood still for Gideon. This is like saying that the fact Jesus or Jehovah or Odin or Thor cannot be disproven empirically makes them real or even likely to be real. You cannot empirically disprove Odin, yet (as far as I know anyway) you lack belief in Odin. For the same reasons, I cannot prove or disprove most aspects of the Bible's historicity, yet lack belief in most of it as I think it highly unlikely. Therefore, claiming the primacy of the Bible as a factual historical account is never going to sway science.
Submitted by Temlakos on
"Methodology" should assume neither a priori. That it does today is a testament to the power of propaganda.
By the way: it was Joshua, not Gideon. Gideon was the Judge who selected a tiny elite force to defeat a much larger force.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Hydroplane Theory is a hypothesis conceived, not by a geologist or paleontologist or an astronomer, but by a mechanical engineer who is a creationist. Even some other creationists have reservations and disagreements with him. I am surprised that (1) you are threatened enough by the possibility of extraterrestrial life that you'd (2) quote such a weak source in speculating against it.
Medically speaking, there are recoveries that exceed typical experience and for which we don't have a specific explanation, from which I draw just that -- nothing more nor less than an idiopathic trajectory for a recovery. Divine intervention is unlikely as an explanation because whenever we pray for something that can't happen naturally, such as growth of a missing limb, it NEVER happens. Unless you want to argue that amputees are not on god's pharmacopeia for some reason, it seems unwise to apply the label "miraculous" only to edge cases that may or may not have happened on their own.
Gabby Giffords is an example of someone who "should" be dead and her survival, even with partial impairment, is something we might hyperbolize as "miraculous" but the truth is that the calibre, path, and spin of the bullet combined with the best medical treatment available and her physical and mental constitution was sufficient to spare her life and, by all accounts, her mind. I have no doubt that many would be eager to invoke divine intervention on her behalf and they would be even more eager if she were a conservative / literalist Christian. However, this is, again, only an assertion. Saying something doesn't make it so.
So ... does science go out of its way to "avoid" miracles? Does it jump through rings of fire and eat little pieces of glass to explain things that more easily and naturally are explicable as miracles? I guess that is what you are saying, but that is rather like saying that suggesting my street was wet this morning because it rained last night is a contortionist act to deny and naturalize away the more "obvious" explanation that god specifically sent the rain. If objecting to inserting god into that situation is being "stern and vituperative" then I plead guilty.
Submitted by Temlakos on
Methodological naturalism does indeed jump through rings of fire and eat glass to invent feeble attempts at explanations that defy logic. Such as how enough information to fill ten Libraries of Congress could write itself — for that is the anmount of information in the nucleus of a single cell. And not even a human cell. The cell of a protozoan.
Or how the first-ever cell ever self-assembled from nonliving parts. Or even how any of its parts self-assembled.
Wait and see, said Darwin and the Huxleys. Then Michael Behe came along and said the obvious: "Never could have happened. Not even in a trillion years."
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
I am well aware that scientists are not merely dispassionate men in white lab coats. They are human, and have their own prejudices and agendas tenures to protect, etc. It's been famously said that new ideas are first ridiculed, then grudgingly accepted, then deemed self-evident. In recent history for example the Australian gentleman who discovered the connection by H. Pylori and stomach ulcers went through exactly this cycle of bucking accepted thinking.
But the thing is, science ultimately does change in response to new data. It's dogged insistence on substantiation and proof is both the reason why the discoverer of the true cause of stomach ulcers was at first dismissed as a crackpot, and the reason why we now treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics. It's also why we no longer bleed the sick or use leeches. Science, for all its inbred conservatism and academic cliquishness, eventually goes with the facts, every time.
This does not mean that all, or even most, or even many challenges to accepted theory will end up as game changers. No doubt this is your hope for creationism, but in my view, for a theory as long standing and pervasive and peer reviewed as evolution to be described as "feeble attempts at explanation" requires a conspiracy theory to support it. That millions of scientists in lockstep tow an artificial party line contrary to empirical evidence for a century and a half strikes me as a combination of wishful thinking and projection.
However, this is your blog, and I suspect your purpose is not really to debunk evolution or to gain an equal footing for creationism so much as it is to provide rationalizations for Christians who are aware enough to need some sense that there is a sound scientific and/or intellectual basis for belief in a young earth created in six days and a subsequent literal worldwide flood -- a position rejected both overtly and covertly even by millions of your fellow Christians. It also provides a circle-the-wagons mentality that gives people a sense of identity as a persecuted and misunderstood minority holding fast to orthodoxy.
Christians need to be careful, however, that they are not on the wrong side of history. When anesthesia was invented, some Christians opposed it as an unnatural intervention in human suffering contrary to the will of God -- a position that today Christians, as well as the rest of the world, rightly finds preposterous. The literalist interpretation of the creation and flood legends is in my view both unnecessary to support your theology and doomed to either outright failure or permanent marginalization on the fringes.
Submitted by Temlakos on
Science is supposed to change in response to new data. And operational science, or "the knowledge of how things work," does so change. As an aside: I know all about Helicobacter pylori, having examined for it often enough in stomach biopsy specimens during my training in pathology.
But origins science is locked solid in this "Grand Craps Shoot" paradigm that Charles Darwin and the Huxleys steered it into. Julian Huxley frankly admitted that this paradigm, by obviating God, removed from their minds any consideration that Anything They Did Might Be Taken Down in King of Kings' Evidence. And in particular, Julian Huxley mentioned sexual chicane.
"Peer review" is subject to subversion. The Grand Evolutionary Paradigm, the trident of uniformitarianism, abiogenesis, and "common descent," is one of two examples I can cite. The other is "anthropogenic global warming." For your information, I am the semi-pro journalist who took the Climate-gate Archive out of the narrow corner of the blogosphere and into a spot where the Big Boys could see it, take it, and run with it. Without me, you would never have heard of Climate-gate. You would never have known that Phil Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK, once made this dead-to-rights incriminating statement:
Note the publication involved: Nature. The very journal founded with the precise intent to obviate God.
The Creation Science Hall of Fame is no mere blog. It is a non-profit corporation, founded and registered according to all applicable statutes in the State of New Jersey. It has applied for recognition of tax exemption (and tax deductibility of contributions) by the Internal Revenue Service as per Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. (That application is pending.)
And of course we seek to remind Christians everywhere that, before Darwin and the Huxleys, the considered position of scientists everywhere was that the world is a mere six thousand years old (give or take two hundred), that we are standing on the silt of a worldwide flood that happened about 4500 years ago (give or take five hundred; the LXX seems to imply that it was longer ago by that number of years, and we are still checking the records), and the history of the world from its beginnings is as the Bible states. In the frenzy of the turning-away-from-God for which Darwin is responsible, people even forgot that such a civilization as Assyria ever existed. That is, until archaeologists discovered the ruins of Nineveh.
In conclusion, you have made quite free with your unsolicited advice. Let me offer some advice of my own in free and fair trade: take care that you do not stand on the wrong side of history. Certain institutions have come to exist that the Apostle (and Revelator) John predicted, in uncanny detail. Like a "smart chip" that will in fact be tantamount to stamping human beings as if they were cattle. Not to mention the widespread acceptance of murder (cf. the willful ignorance by most media outlets of the case of People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Kenneth Gosnell MD), drug abuse, sexual chicane (see above), and theft. The Bible is as right about those things, and about Creation and the Flood, as it is about the Assyrian Empire, once forgotten and then re-discovered.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
It's very impressive that you've done biopsies on stomach tissue and are a famous journalist, but neither point is germaine to the discussion or provides credibility to your arguments.
Nor do you do yourself any favors suggesting that pre-Darwin, either scientists or Christians believed overwhelmingly in a young earth. In fact during the half century leading up to that book's publication, the idea of an old earth was increasingly popular among Christians, including no less than conservative theologian BB Warfield, who laid the groundwork for modern dogma on Biblical inerrancy. Darwin did not, after all, invent the idea of evolution; it was gaining acceptance before he came on the scene, and Christianity was not even close to uniformly hostile to it (nor is it today for that matter).
The first American scientist to study and support Darwin's theories was a devout Christian, Asa Gray.
So it seems that you are several generations out of step with fellow believers, much less with science.
Submitted by Temlakos on
I refer you to the long list of deceased inductees here on the site. I suggest you read their accounts, going all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, and then decide whether you ought to withdraw your statement.
And even if I were "several generations out of step with fellow believers," I don't give an unripe fig. I stand for truth, and I speak truth to power, and to mobs. So do all of us at the Creation Science Hall of Fame.
And if you don't like it, get off this comment space and stay off. I grow tired of your annoying, repetitious, and ultimately incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial cross-examination.
Submitted by mordant (not verified) on
Predictably, we close with appeals to authority and insults. But don't worry, I am no more interested in endless talking in circles than are you, and this is your playground, not mine, so I think we are done with this topic as it serves neither of our interest to continue further. I do salute you for the engagement, however.
Submitted by Temlakos on
Richard Lewontin is no "authority." He is a material witness. A dead-to-rights material witness who dropped a bombshell. Your side is "busted," and you know it.
You're the one who left the insult. I described it accurately.