Darwin Still Scratching His Head

Evolutionism More and More Like Alchemy

Oh, dear.  Evolutionism is being attacked by its own.  Not intentionally, of course.  It's just that the data is falsifying the West's favorite religious belief.

Phys.org carried an article describing the shock-waves that have begun to assail evolutionism, entitled, "Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution".  The wack-a-mole conclusions of recent research undertaken by Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland can be summarized as follows:

For the planet's 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity "is about the same," he told AFP.  The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

"This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," Thaler told AFP.  That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

That's the first neutron bomb.

Most Amusing

Modern Cathedrals

Book's like David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion are a joy to read.  In this particular case, it is also most amusing.  We would recommend it to anyone wishing to make some sense of the sociological structures and forces (the "cathedral", as Berlinski would put it) surrounding evolutionism.

Berlinski's position is that when it comes to particle physics, science has reached its limits.  It is impossible for it to progress further without falling into an abyss of a thousand contradictions, antinomies, and non-sequiturs.  The science of "everything" has thus reached the point where it spends most of its time enforcing itself upon others.  Don't question.  Don't debate.  Just believe.  In Berlinski's metaphor, cosmology has become a cathedral, a monument to something ineffable, unknowable, and mysterious.

All Christians would recognise this position.

The House Rules of Secularism

Rigged Games

In the worldview of evolutionism, the world has been in existence billions of years, madcapping itself into more and more sophistication by means of brute randomization. In this worldview, simple one celled amoeba are old, ancient, early forms of life.  Human beings, because they are much more complex, had to have come later, much later.  Chance has to have time to work its circular complex glories.  Notice how the fundamental assumptions of stochasticity comprehensively shape our treatment and interpretation of the data.  A young earth is excluded from the outset as impossible.  As Van Til once put it, a fishing net is designed for the purpose of catching fish; those it does not catch are by definition not fish.   

Christians get into all sorts of trouble when they attempt to make the Scripture fit into the "science" of evolutionism.  Of course evolutionism is not a hard science.  It is not falsifiable.  It is not an experimental discipline whereby theoretical hypotheses or their implications are tested under lab conditions to see whether they prove true.  The processes of evolution cannot be subject to test tube or experimental analysis, since it's rather hard to construct experiments which are millions and millions of years in the gestation.  Evolution and its accompanying world views represent a social science--sort of like sociology.  In all such soft sciences, speculations and hypotheses rule; experimental falsification under lab conditions never so.  When was the last time you saw a sociologist in a white lab coat?

It is sad when Christians attempt to gain "air time" in the secular world by demonstrating that they take the pseudo-scientific discipline of evolutionism seriously.

Selling Out Our Souls

Confused Mess of Pottage

The modern scientific academy appears to be populated by the self-deluded.  On the one hand, particularly when it comes to the human species, there are a series of propositions about human beings which represent professional hypotheses and claims.  Then, on the other hand, there are truths which the scientists actually believe.  All too often the two never meet.

Take, for example, that doyen of evolutionism, Richard Dawkins.  Professor Dawkins "discovered" a previously unknown human gene--which, he titled the Selfish Gene.  It was such a neat idea, it took the world by a hurricane.

When it was first published, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm.  Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported.  They still are.  The idea that we are all "lumbering robots" designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things widely believed because widely believed.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009),  p.176.]

OK.  So what's the big deal?  Who could be opposed to such a great idea?  Well, it seems that everyone who espouses the idea is also opposed to it.

The Smallest Is Not the Simplest

More Time, Please

We have made reference to the discombobulation taking place in the Academy over the speculative theories of Evolutionism.  No-one takes Darwinism seriously any more.  OK--that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the greatest advocates for it these days are more likely to be non-scientists, publicists, politicians or media starlets [using the term in a gender neutral sense.]

The Chattering Classes find comfort and solace in continuing to embrace Evolutionism: scientists not so much.  One reason for the scientific discomfort arises out of the labs where electron microscopes are deployed to investigate living cells.  Electron microscopes represent a technological advance, allowing researchers to study heretofore hidden aspects of living cells.  It has produced an entirely new scientific discipline: microbiology.

The Evolutionist paradigm has (allegedly) primitive lifeforms being simple and basic.  As chance does its wondrous work, eventually the primitive life form becomes more and more complex.  Higher life forms self-evolve into being.  Amazing! said the elephant.  This just-so story, repeated endlessly and illustrated with sparkling pictures of amoeba evolving into glorious racing horses, has to be most certainly true, because it looks so marvellous, glorious, and grand.  It turns out it's nothing more than a fairy story.  But in previous generations scientists embraced it with all the fervour of religious devotees.  Besides, it helped them find work.

Now the disciplines and discoveries of micro-biology have exploded the myths.

The Truth Will Out

Child Abuse Has Becomes A Compelling Necessity

There is a logic in Unbelief which "will out".  Christian philosophers and theologians have referred to it as moving towards epistemological self-consciousness.  Epistemology is that branch of  philosophy which considers not just what we know, but how we know.  Self-conscious epistemology is achieved when the knower reworks all his beliefs and knowledge according to his favorite theory of knowledge.  This process of working towards epistemological self-consciousness can take generations, but the process itself is irrevocable.

Not that everyone willingly goes along for the ride.  Take the resident world-view of materialistic evolutionism.  This peculiar world-view has implications for knowledge, truth, and beliefs--the main one being that all knowledge is ultimately without meaning or certainty.  It is not just that all knowledge is relative; it is that knowledge and knowing is changing, adapting, and morphing into an unknown.

For generations, willing adopters of evolutionism celebrated this world-view because it liberated man from God and ostensibly made mankind the top dog.  It facilitated human pride in implying that the current generation was the biggest, brightest, and best of all.  But the more self-conscious men became about evolution, the more the radical relativism of this worldview began to impinge.

The Just-So Stories Purporting to Comfort Unbelief

Miasmic Swamps and Wilting Reeds

When Christians seek acceptance from Unbelief and unbelievers, the slope is likely to turn very slippery very quickly.  One such way to gain the "respect" of Unbelief is to adopt some version or other of the "day-age" theory of the world's existence.  This is an attempt to make the first three chapters of Genesis "conform" to secularist evolutionary theories.  Basically, the objective is to get more time into the Genesis account so that a long, evolutionary process can be accommodated.

So, the text in Genesis 1 & 2 tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, right up to the crown of His creation, Adam and Eve, in six literal 24 hour days.  That's what the text actually says.  Moreover, somewhat embarrassing for those who want to accommodate a multi-billion year evolutionary process into the text, is the Hebrew style employed in the description.  The text employs a literary form which is quite distinct: it uses what Hebrew grammarians refer to as  historical narrative--a sequence of imperfect verbs, coupled with a sequence of waw-consecutive-conjunction--employed whenever the Old Testament is describing a sequence of actual historical events.

Why would we not accept this at "face value"?  Well, science allegedly tells us something different.

Letter From the UK (About Evolutionst Fraud in Germany)

History of Modern Man Unravels

German scholar is exposed as fraud

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.  This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.  Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Until Someone Unsettles It

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

2 February, 2015

The creation account in Genesis is read in different ways. It would be easy therefore, to jump right into the Genesis text and show that I read it in one of those different ways.

I do read it in one of those different ways, and bringing out arguments accordingly would be easy. Before getting to my main set of points, let me give just one example. All sides agree that the Hebrew word for day — yom — admits of different meanings, just as the English word day does. For example, I could say, “Back in my grandfather’s day, he was a champion at picking corn, and, while it was day, could average ten bushels a day.”

Now several things are true about this. One is that my grandfather really was a champion at picking corn, but that is another story for another time. The second thing is that day has three different meanings in the course of just one sentence. Day first means time, “in my grandfather’s time.” Second, it means “while the sun was up,” day as opposed to night. And third, it meant “twenty-hour increments,” Tuesday and then Wednesday, and so on.

But the third thing to note about this is that for native speakers of English, the different uses of day do not throw us in a state of consternation. We pick up on all kinds of contextual clues that enable us to tell what is going on.

The Suicide of the Human Mind

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton ran the numbers on how the modern world has sought to dance with numerous partners--all of which have destroyed the dance itself.  There are hypotheses which end up destroying the very possibility of thought and reason.  Here is Chesterton's list of rationalist suicides, destroying the very possibility of thought:

Evolutionism

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. . . . It means there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think is you are not separate from the subject of thought.

Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."  [G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Volume I: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Blatchford Controversies.  (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 239f.]

Evolution and Cool-Shaming

BioLogos, Respectability, and Classical Christian Education

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 15, 2014

As classical Christian education has made it through our first round of trials, which threatened to make us fail through failure, we have now come to the much greater test, one that would make us fail through success. With hard work comes success, and with success comes respectability, and with respectability comes . . . spiritual heat death. As Cotton Mather once put it with regard to physical blessings, faithfulness begets prosperity, and the daughter devours the mother. Or as Moses put it, on the same topic, “Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein . . . thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). The same principle applies to the intellectual fruit of hard academic labor.

Graduates of classical Christian schools are much sought after. They have been taught well, and it shows, and those of us in the movement have heard story after story of how this graduate got a high flying scholarship, and how that one was recruited for the honors program, and so on. We are proud of our students, and rightfully so. But one of the central tests of how we are teaching our students is going to be seen in how they respond to this praise from the world. With the arrival of this praise comes the temptation to want it in the wrong way. The respectability that got there by not caring at all what they think becomes the kind of respectability that cares very much what they think.

And I am convinced that this is one of the reasons why evolutionary thinking is starting to make a play for our community of schools.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

7 Reasons Why BioLogos Is A Threat to Classical Christian Education

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 3, 2014

Before getting into the thicket, let me briefly define my terms and say a few preliminary things about my concerns. First, by BioLogos I mean this particular project as an attempt to harmonize biological evolution and Christian faith. Second, while I believe that this attempt (however well-intentioned) is a threat to every form of Christian education, I am focusing on classical Christian education because that is where my labors have largely been. And third, nothing said here is intended to question the sincerity or niceness of any particular BioLogos brothers and sisters. I believe their vision is destructive, but if a destructive vision is being promulgated here by very nice people, it wouldn’t be the first time.

There are many places where I could launch this discussion, but I think I will start with the historicity of Adam and Eve.

“Genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand individuals who lived about 150,000 years ago. This conflicts with the traditional view that all humans descended from a single pair who lived about 10,000 years ago. While Genesis 2-3 speaks of the pair Adam and Eve, Genesis 4 refers to a larger population of humans interacting with Cain. One option is to view Adam and Eve as a historical pair living among many 10,000 years ago, chosen to represent the rest of humanity before God. Another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an allegory in which Adam and Eve symbolize the large group of ancestors who lived 150,000 years ago. Yet another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an “everyman” story, a parable of each person’s individual rejection of God. BioLogos does not take a particular view and encourages scholarly work on these questions.”

1. The first thing to notice is that while encouraging “scholarly work on these questions,” they are not subjecting their own options to any kind of rigorous or logical analysis. So genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand about 150,000 years ago? Now when walking upstream like this, one wonders why they stopped right where they decided to stop.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Pink Entropy

Posted on Thursday, February 13, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

I recently wrote on the subject of entropy here, and set off a maelstrom of comments. Some people just have that gift, and other people don’t. That appears to be just the way it is for me, and I try to be humble about it. Sometimes I think my comments section is a good example of entropy.

If I might, I would like to supplement my initial observations with a few quick follow up jabs, and see if it happens again. These are just quick responses to a couple of basic questions that were raised, and which I would like answer outside the thread.

Since I speak English, let us go with a dictionary:

Entropy is “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.”
Now I don’t see anything in my argument or illustrations that would constitute a howler when it comes to that definition.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Building Things With Sunshine

Posted on Wednesday, February 12, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

I have said in the past that I think evolution is a hoot, and moreover, I have given reasons for thinking this. One of the reasons is that the idea of evolution runs clean contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. In response to this view of mine, an anti-theist web site (read more here) has offered the following:

“To finish this argument (hopefully once and for all) I will give a similar example but in relation to life.-

In ‘open’ thermodynamic systems energy is imported to turn simple compounds into complex ones, a perfect example of this is photosynthesis in which; water and carbon-dioxide are turned into complex carbohydrates.

The energy for this is imported from the sun, because the earth is not a ‘closed’ system, it is an open one.

If evolution is impossible relating to the second law, so is photosynthesis, which is obviously not the case.”

Let me go straight to my conclusion, state the problem, and then work back to the argument. My interlocutor is trying to explain things with photosynthesis, when what he needs to do is give an accounting for photosynthesis.

Global Warming Games

More Time Please

There is a very fine line these days between science and propaganda.  Old school science--that is, science in the good old days--was largely populated by a bunch of ruthless sceptics who believed very little, challenged everything, and wanted experimental proof.

This is not to say that every scientist believed he had to "go back to the beginning" and re-work every experiment to prove for himself the laws of motion or the veracity reflected in the periodic table of the elements.  As Michael Polanyi has argued, all scientists operate within a tradition of knowledge passed on from practitioners to neophytes that represented what he called tacit knowledge.  But, let a few experiments throw up results that are not expected, and old school scientists would get a rush of blood to the head.  The labs would be booked out for months, arguments would rage, and debates would go long into the night.

These days much of this rigour has disappeared--particularly in those "disciplines" where proof or disproof cannot be offered via experimental tests.

Measuring Standard

What is your authority?

Christians who invoke millions of years cannot make their arguments from the biblical texts.

by Gary Bates CEO, 

Creation Ministries Internationsl–US

Published: 1 August 2013 (GMT+10)

First appeared in a CMI newsletter.

Is the age of the earth an important issue, really?

Pastors often love CMI speakers to take questions as part of our ministry program at their churches. These often flush out the discordant views of some members, surprising the pastors.

Q & A sessions are not always easy for our speakers. We don’t know what’s coming, or whether rabid anticreationists, some with scientific qualifications, are attending, intent on demonstrating the ‘ignorance’ of the visiting creationist. In the hot seat, we now have to be instant ‘experts’ in paleontology, biology, geology, cosmology and even theology. Of course, no one is an expert in all fields, but we do our best to show there are answers!
 
Sadly, the most hostile audience members are usually Christians agitated by our ‘young-earth’ (biblical) presentation.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Like Watching a Hummingbird Fly

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Douglas Wilson

As previously mentioned, here is my second installment on chapter two of Coyne’s book. As this chapter makes apparent, long stretches of time are essential to the project of evolutionary hand-waving, a process whereby impossible things are made more plausible to us by having them happen very, very slowly. Don’t think I can walk across that swimming pool? Watch this as I inch my way out there. Bet I can do it if a spend three months at it. Time fixes all implausibilities.

Going with Coyne’s figure of 600 million years of evolution in 4th gear, after leaving out those halcyon days of one-celled organisms just bobbing about, not to mention the subsequent time of the eukaryotes (p. 28), and not messing with leap years, we come up with, using a simple arithmetical process, 219,000,000,000 days available for evolution. Roll that around in your mind for a moment. All the marvels that evolution has wrought were accomplished in a matter of countable days. This has ramifications.

I said earlier that I was going to be offering a variation on Haldane’s Dilemma, but before getting to my version, let my brother Gordon (the scientist) explain Haldane.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

That’s A Rabbit, You Doofus

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Douglas Wilson

Comes now chapter two of Jerry Coyne’s book, called Written in the Rocks. It will take a post or two to deal with this chapter, so patience, all of you.  My first post will address the structure of his argumentation, and later I will look at the time involved in all this — my own variation on what is called Haldane’s Dilemma.

First, we may take as an indicator of how Coyne represents data generally by how he represents the position of his adversaries. He refers to the “creationist prediction that all species must appear suddenly and then remain unchanged” (p. 32). As stated, this is simplistic and wrong, and when he tries to qualify it a moment later, he misrepresents even as he qualifies.

“Even some creationists will admit that minor changes in size and shape might occur over time — a process called microevolution — but they reject the idea that one very different kind of animal or plant can some from another (macroevolution)” (pp. 32-33)

It is not “some creationists admit that changes might happen.” It is all creationists insist changes have happened. Variation within kinds, including significant variation, is not something that any competent creationist denies. Indeed, it is an essential part of the creationist model.

That said, here is the problem with the structure of Coyne’s argument.

More Headscratching Amongst Evolutionists

Darwin’s Doubt: An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer

Justin Taylor
May 30th, 2013



Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, has a new book being published June 18 by HarperOne: Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. 
(For the best discount and free shipping, you can pre-order the book here, and they’ll also send you four free eBooks on intelligent design.)

Dr. Meyer argues that the mysterious features of the Cambrian explosion are better explained by intelligent design than purely undirected evolutionary processes. He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

What is the “Cambrian Explosion”? 
The Cambrian explosion is an important event in the history of life where nearly all of the major animal body plans appear abruptly in the fossil record without any apparent evolutionary precursors.

Why is that significant?
What this means, in essence, is that virtually all of the major animal groups (called “phyla”)—vertebrates like fish, to arthropods (e.g., trilobites and shrimplike creatures), to various types of worms (e.g., earthworm-like annelid worms), to mollusks (e.g., shellfish), and many other types of animals—appear in a geological “blink of an eye,” without any direct ancestors in the fossil record. Even Richard Dawkins has observed that the Cambrian animals looked as if “they were just planted there without any evolutionary history.”