A long time ago I decided that discussing biology with creationists or Intelligent Design believers was just a waste of time. Back in my schoolboy days, the Jesuits made clear that you can believe in God and accept biological science, but only if you reject occasionalism. God was the watchmaker, perhaps, but not the cause of all things in a direct, active sense of causality.
In fact, we were taught that human understanding of God had evolved and that was evident in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament was active and involved in the affairs of man, no different than the pagan gods of Greece, Rome and Mesopotamia. The New Testament showed a more mature understanding of God as a first mover, but otherwise not constantly tinkering with creation. The laws of nature were fixed and discoverable.
Many people calling themselves Christian think Catholics are all wrong and a corruption of Christianity. Many Catholics, maybe most, think the Jesuits are nothing but troublemakers and heretics. That all may be true, but the point they taught me is still correct. If you believe God is tinkering with the natural world and the direct cause of everything we see, then you have no choice but to reject science.
Bear in mind that I think most people can get along just fine believing God is watching over them, directing their lives and helping them win football games. A world in which everyone accepts Intelligent Design would look just like the world today, because most everyone, whether they know it or not, believes in God the fiddly watchmaker, who is always tinkering with creation. Otherwise, no one would pray.
You’ll note I never say I believe in evolution. To my way of thinking, that’s akin to saying I believe in gravity or I believe water is wet. These are not things that require a leap of faith. I believe I will die having sex with a super model. That requires a leap of faith. I know water is wet, gravity is 9.7536 m / s2 and evolution is the best explanation of the fossil record.
What I have always found odd is that some (many?) ID’ers have made a fetish out of Darwin. It’s as if they think Darwin is the Moses of the Church of Evolution. If they can somehow discredit this false god, they will bring down the whole evolution business. What’s even nuttier is they seem to think that discrediting evolution automagically makes their flapdoodle into accepted science.
You see that from the writer John C Wright in this post I stumbled upon a while back. The implied claim that Darwin thought man evolved from apes is a popular bit of nonsense from these people. I guess it makes them feel good, but it is simply not true. Go back far enough and we share a common ancestor with apes. Go back further and we share an ancestor with goldfish. No one thinks humans are goldfish.
Wright did not have to mention Darwin to make his point, but his brand of Christianity has an obsession with Darwin. They imagine he is not just the beginning of evolution, but the end. If you look at the ID’er sites they are shot through with “proof” that Darwinism is a false religion. Some guy wrote a book influential with ID’ers that claims Darwin was the original L. Ron Hubbard.
This post from the Fred Reed the other day is a good example of the other bit of weirdness with the anti-Darwin people.
Let us begin with Samuel Johnson’s response when asked whether we have free will. He replied that all theory holds that we do not, all experience that we do. A similar paradox occurs in the realm of Impossibility Theory. Many things occur in biology that all science says are possible, while all common sense says that they are not.
Fred’s argument is basically backwoods occasionalism. It sounds pleasing and folksy, but the central claim is that the natural world is unknowable. Science is bunk and therefore Fred’s crackpot theories are just as plausible as genetics or the carbon dating of fossils. It’s a weird blend of paganism and nihilism that is always under the surface of certain flavors of modern Christianity.
For me, at least, it is the deliberate ignorance at the heart of this brand of Christianity, if you can call it Christianity, that I find so weird. It’s as if the adherents believe ignorance is next to godliness. Like rhinos stamping out fires, they run around trying to make themselves and everyone around them dumber by casting science as religious cult with Charles Darwin at the head.
The trouble with science is not science per se, but rather the eternal and immutable arrogance of some scientists (the ones that get all the press, it seems) and the idiots who follow them (who are legion). I’m an engineer, I know how science works, I practice it daily. Engineering wouldn’t exist without the scientific method and discover-able, repeatable physical laws that govern the way the natural world functions. That said, no real scientist can ever say “This is how X works for certain, end of story forever.” because that’s not how science actually works. Pretty much anything reported in… Read more »
How the fuck is it that some of you can format your posts properly, while mine end up as nothing but huge walls of text?
I assure you, they were not submitted that way.
For example, the preceeding sentence should have been separated from this one and the one that came before it by a hard return and a blank line, yet none so appear.
What am I missing here? Does this place require HTML tags for formatting, or am I just not one of the cool kids who gets to have properly formatted posts?
Well fuck me sideways, THAT post retained the formatting, kind of.
What’s going on here guys? The results don’t seem to be repeatable.
Your posts are evolving.
Touche’ sir.
Nunya, if your comment is long enough, the commenting software compresses the post until the reader clicks the “read more” link. Then you see the uncompressed post with all its formatting.
Ahhhhh, that’s an answer that makes sense.
Thank you.
Agree, science is making the best guess we can with what we have at hand. The 6,000 year Creation is a great example. An honest Scottish scientist asked an honest question- “How old is the world?” The best available evidence he had then was the Bible, so he counted and estimated the lineage listed therein, and came up with “Adam was made in 4004 B.C.” Six thousand-year days sounded good and proper in those times, as surely we live in the last Day. It was an honest question, with an honest an answer as he could get. Definite A grade… Read more »
Darwin was taken up as the new religion by atheists. Christians than defended their religion by attacking atheist. Darwin had no dog in that fight. The first (and last?) atheist to criticize Darwin’s theory was Henry Adams, who worked at the American Embassy in London during and after the War Between the States. A page from his autobiography– “He felt, like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no more concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection… Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a vast stride.… Read more »
If evolution is a science it should be able to to predict not only the future but also the past. But I keep reading how scientists are “astonded” at this or that new fossil from long ago and have to rethink everything. If each new fossil requires a rewrite maybe there is something wrong with the theory. The main problem of course is that there is no feedback mechanism, it’s all random. And if it is random then new polar bears are born in the tropics and die, but only random polar bears (again) born in the Arctic (both a… Read more »
There seem to be a lot of closed minds on both sides. Evolution as it is currently taught in schools has some massive holes in it but also has adherents who take it as Gospel. We have much more to learn.
The “Theory of Evolution” is an absurd waste of time. It’s pretty easy to work out logically the fact that God exists, and from that, that God created the Universe, and from that, that God created life, and from that, that God created human beings. What we can’t work out is HOW God created all these things, because we simply lack the faculties to understand it. And honestly– who gives a shit? Assuming we could ever access that knowledge–which we can’t– how would that affect us regarding our day to day lives, or our relationships with each other, or the… Read more »
That’s what I tried to touch on. The answers you seek do not answer the questions posed by others. Both sides end up frustrated and angry because they get no true explanation that satisfies from the other. Enough. This War must end. You are both trying so hard for the good, to find what is right. Sorry I’m so far behind, but reconciliation is far more than possible. As an “atheist”, let me assure you, my brother, you’re belief in God is the most natural thing in the world. Atheists react emotionally because it does not answer their questions in… Read more »
A pretty good book that helps to explain Christian skepticism regarding Darwin is Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson. A second book, Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe , helps the mind stay open to all possibilities. The first is written by a Berkeley law professor who became a Christian and approaches the topic as a trial lawyer, as in, if evolution were a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict. The author of the second, though making no claim to Christian faith that I am aware of, gives us boatloads of info on the biology of our… Read more »
Selection ‘debunked’? Doubtful but interesting. Guess I’ll ogle fat, weird chicks instead of fit, healthy ones then.
Where do fat, weird chicks come from?
Can you tell me what exactly Darwin “discovered”? I have read “On the Origin of Species” and can’t find anything in it that any farmer (or parent) doesn’t know. This is not a comment on evolution itself, just Darwin’s contribution (or lack thereof) to science. Pasteur gave us vaccine theory; what did Darwin give us?
Fun fact: Pasteur recanted germ theory on his deathbed. Well, maybe “recanted” is a little strong. Better to say, he acknowledged the validity of germ theory’s opposite number– the yin to it’s yang, if you will. If you are sceptical about modern western medicine– and you should be if you are even half aware– it’s worth your time to investigate this line of reasoning further.
Darwin and Wallenby gave us the idea that the world is ancient, and that it changes, albeit with glacial slowness, concepts which inform all the natural sciences, especially those that arose after Darwin, such as Mendel’s genetic maths, molecular chemistry, or cosmology. The original argument was not how things began, but whether things changed at all. Also, when a Christian asked, “how did we get here?”, he’s not asking about the mechanics. Those hold no emotional meaning for him. What he’s really asking is “Why did He put us here?” Let me tell you then what God is, and why… Read more »
Oh, and the Bible, or holy books? Whole other thing. The Bible is a political history of two great kings- Lord Ham of the OT, who resurrected a shattered world after a 400 year dark age and took in the refugees who had desperately preserved it’s cultural fragments, and of Good King Jesus, a royal bastard and reformer rejected by a corrupt ruling class, whose message needs no magic to be valid. (Paul, a spy for the secret police, had a mission: the King was dealt with, but the rebellion remains. Uncover the leaders. The Jews would not have him… Read more »
The problem with the theory of evolution can be summed up in two worlds: Information Theory. DNA is information. Information does not just “happen”. It REQUIRES an intelligence. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean “God” as in the Judeo-Christian modality. In fact, I rather doubt that this is the case. But I also KNOW that it’s not possible that a bunch of dead, non-intelligent “stuff” just happened to randomly do this and that, given enough time, and produced beings who can do Tensor Analysis, build space craft, computers and submarines and compose symphonies. My personal belief is that the entire universe… Read more »
I agree that evolution best explains the fossil record and that the DNA record represents an accretion of genes that are additive from the most primitive micro-organisms to the most complex animals and plants. I also agree that the clever use of statistical techniques enables us to generally understand when different species split off from one another. But what really fascinates me is the reception that Darwin received during the period between the publication of Origin of Species and 1914. I don’t know how many biographies there are of men who came of age during that time frame which attest… Read more »
The elites are anti-Darwin too, nowadays.
You can’t separate multiple populations of moderately intelligent animals for 2,000+ generations, put them in wildly differing environments, and expect them not to differ physically and cognitively.
If they don’t understand that (and they very angrily claim not to), they don’t understand evolution.
I think they’re telling the truth. I think they’re stupid.
Great, great comment. Damn.
I’m not sure what “brand of Christianity” you are talking about here, but John C Wright is a Catholic convert.
I didn’t know what occasionalism was, so I Googled it. Here’s something from something called the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Occasionalism In the minds of most philosophers with a passing familiarity with early-modern philosophy, occasionalism is typically regarded as a laughable ad hoc or ‘for want of anything better’ solution to the mind-body problem, first opened up in Descartes’ Meditations. As typically presented in philosophy textbooks, the doctrine (usually identified exclusively with Nicholas Malebranche) certainly seems laughable: beginning from the assumption that the actual transmission of anything between body and mind is impossible, occasionalism holds that, for example, when my… Read more »
What is not understood by the vast majority of people who like to participate in these discussions, is that the complexity of biological organisms is almost beyond comprehension. To truly understand the process of DNA replication in the cell, the effect of single point mutation in a gene, the nature of three dimensional protein configuration that holds shape based on the weakest of electrostatic charge, the process of conformational change in a protein based on receptor binding…one who is honest with himself realizes that such a system cannot randomly create and modify itself. Both the origin of life itself (discussed… Read more »
Jesus, look at these desperate idiots.
The thing that gets me about creationists is their dogged refusal to engage with what biologists are actually saying. All straw men, all the time.
I figure if they really cared about science and the truth they’d behave like it.
But maybe they’re just stupid.
They are limited in what they can conceive, what they can sustain in terms of reality. They are as they were made 🙂
I see what you did there. Ha!
They use their processing capacity for other things, or differently.
It’s a dialect, a language that speaks to them in a way they like and understand.
It makes sense to the way they view and predict the world. Their language for themselves.
When people speak to me in, say, Tagolog or Welsh? I get a bit confused.
If it’s in Albanian, Russian, or Italian, I also get a bit anxious…!
Wilbur, you really should understand that when someone says “show me,” there is an intelligence at work.
You can’t even engage honestly with a 30 word blog comment. Why should anybody waste his time on you?
If you cared to learn, you could easily learn. I think you refuse to learn because you’re afraid you’ll find out how silly creationism is. God knows why it’s an issue; it’s got nothing to do with Christianity. I thought humility, on the other hand, did — but I’m just an old lapsed Catholic and I could be mistaken.
Z was right: It’s a complete waste of time to try to communicate with creationists.
My question to you then would be this: What grave damage is being done, in the real world at this very moment, by someone believing something which you find to be silly? Why can you not simply let them believe whatever it that they want, and worry about “fighting” them only when their silly belief causes some real world harm to you? For not having a religion, atheists do an awful lot of proselytizing. If those who think differently than you be fools, let them be with their foolish notions, and bypass them on your way to ever greater heights… Read more »
There is nothing more arrogant or self-assured than an atheist.
“gravity is 9.7536 m / s2”
Almost anything can be “proven” with math. Math is a language. It’s not science.
So you can use math to change the rate at which a brick accelerates when you drop it?
Neat trick.
My Dad always warned me to avoid people who wear their religion on their sleeve.
This is sage advice. People who wear their piety like a broach are usually compensating for some concealed deficit of character.
Hence the apparent preference for ignorance. They would sooner appear dumb to the world’s mysteries than relinquish the rightous’ compensatory pose.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is an excellent post, though unfortunately I am not in a position to give it the thoughtful comment it deserves (my family is insisting on keeping the TV going full blast, you really don’t want to attempt to make points about theology while dealing with that). To address the two earlier commentators, Alexandros is correct. Much of American Protestantism is just resurrected versions of medieval heresies. A Catholic would argue that this is what happens without the magisterium. This might be an American thing instead of a Protestant thing. The old school Protestant churches that predominate among European Protestantism,… Read more »
Has this theory ever been proven? We know species do evolve; do we really know what drives this evolution? There is a kind of symmetry to nature; solar systems have a similar ‘structure’ and behavior to atoms. Planets revolve around a star, electrons revolve around a nucleus; that kind of thing. So maybe there is this same kind symmetry between how an individual evolves, and how a species evolves. An individual starts as a single cell that follows a ‘plan’ and eventually produces a complex organism with myriad specialized cells. Perhaps evolution is a little more mathematical than “random mutations”… Read more »
“We know species do evolve…” How, exactly, do we “know” this? Think about it. Can we study evolution in a lab? No. Do we have a “control earth” that we can compare our “experimental” earth with? No. Have we actually witnessed, with our own eyes, under controlled conditions, an individual unit of a species “evolving”? And don’t talk to me about fossil “evidence”. What do fossils prove? We think we can date them, but of course we have no idea if our methodologies are accurate, because we can’t go back in time and verify the results. We think they represent… Read more »
We know species evolve because of shared DNA, and the ability to determine when and where “splits” in the “tree” occur. Again, we can see members of an extended family evolving (as outside DNA is folded in through marriage), so it is not unreasonable to accept that species can evolve over time as well. My guess is that the common DNA for a species has code built-in to produce this evolution; perhaps code to produce multiple “branches” with the most successful branches continuing on. It would be interesting to know which posters here have children, and which don’t 😛
“Not unreasonable”…”my guess”…”perhaps”
Thanks for making my argument for me.
It’s a shame I can’t make your reading comprehension better, too 🙁
LOL…finishing with the Ad Hominem. The last resort of a rhetorical loser.
But it can be measured. We can trace DNA branches back, back, all the way back.
That ‘so what makes it a Theory- a body of laws proven by observed replication, such as Theory of gravity or electrical Theory; and no, we don’t exactly know what those are either.
Most use “theory” when they mean conjecture. Properly, it goes: hypothesis, conjecture, then Theory (after much testing and observation.).
Sorry, Theory of electricity, as opposed to applied electrical Science.
You can trace DNA branches…so what? The high-tech equivalent of Dinosaur bones. Just because something existed at some point in time, doesn’t explain HOW it existed.
The American thing you’re seeing comes mainly from 1844. A chance remark from the Royal Society- “all that can be known is known”- combined with the rising tide resulting from a new technology. Scots-Irish liquor distillation, a closely kept secret for cenuries, was all the poor immigrants had left to sell. Since it’s easier to get one wagon of barrels over the hill than an oxen train, whole crops were being converted to the Demon Plague. Plus, poor folk could bring a jar or jug of shine to that wagon and get actual money on the spot; try doing that… Read more »
“Many people calling themselves Christian think Catholics are all wrong and a corruption of Christianity.”
This is too weird, for me Christianity has always been the Catholic Church, I never liked Protestantism and Evangelicals. I studied in Catholic schools and learned evolution, creationism is a evangelical madness.
Early Christianity was extremely varied, there was Gnostic and Marcionist sects that denied the Old Testament and had their own version of the New Testament.
“I studied in Catholic schools and learned evolution, creationism is a evangelical madness.”
“Evangelical madness”? Really? Care to explain?
Be advised, that I don’t give a shit either way. I just find it absurd that people make sweeping, unverifiable statements like this, with absolutely no hope of backing them up logically or rationally.