Well I have grown bored of Steve Jobs and the Apple iPhone so I decided to go back to my old personal feud with America’s creationists. One of the favorite creationist’s canards is to trot out the old tired argument about Darwinism being a religion. This excerpt is from Radar at Radar Active: http://radaractive.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-to-be-intellectually-satisfied.html and is a bit of an oxymoron.
It is easy! Simply believe the Biblical account of human history and look at the actual findings of modern science without listening to the idiotic Darwinist spin. Life is obviously designed, the rock layers are a testament to the Flood and a fallen world would naturally be filled with sin and disease and pain and woe. Everything you see in Earth and in the heavens fits precisely what the Bible says. All a Young Earth Creationist needs to do is know his Bible and keep up with science and think critically. After all, a Darwinist has to start with a belief in random and inexplicable *poofs* that began and/or designed whatever there is that can be observed in the material world. We believe God created the heavens and the Earth. Darwinists have had to build a mythology over time.
Reminding on and all about the concept that Darwinism is a religion:
“There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilities not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let’s hear from some of them:
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist.” – Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption … For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” – Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. “Confession of Professed Atheist.”}
“We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.” (more to come)
For those of you who have perused this blog before, you are aware that there is something of an ongoing dialogue between me and a group of Darwinist commentators, with a few of my fellow believers in an Intelligent Designer joining the conversation on a regular basis since the beginning of 2006. My last post on Wednesday would be instructive to catch up to where the blog has gone. For those of you who are new, and to remind regular readers, this blog is primarily concerned with the subject of worldviews. Whether you can even conceive of it or not, you have a worldview. This definition will come from dictionary.com along with their cited sources…
“worldview.” n. In both senses also called Weltanschauung .
- The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
- A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.
Radar seems like a nice enough guy and he is in the tech industry so there is some common ground. That said, I do have a bone to pick with him. First, the standard definition of religion is:
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
It’s deceptive to confuse a so called worldview with religion. Darwinism, i.e. natural selection, is not a religion but instead is a scientific theory and thus as a scientific theory it can be readily disproved. That’s the nature of scientific theories. They hang around until someone or something disproves them or provides a better explanation. The Theory Evolution and Natural Selection have undergone numerous changes over the years particularly with the addition of genetics.
So how do you disprove Darwinism as a theory? Simple, to disprove evolution all you have to do is to find that elusive bunny rabbit fossil in a Precambrian rock. That single find alone throws out all of the underpinnings of Darwinism and we can discard everything the fossil record has told us to date. If you believe in a young earth then it would be caveman skeleton curled alongside a T-Rex skeleton. Simple and conclusive, right? But guess what, to date we have uncovered literally thousands of tons of fossils, a few of which I have found myself and nobody has found the smoking gun or should I say smoking bunny to disprove the theory evolution. Then again, as the creationists tell it, we are lying about the fossil record.
Assuming you can treat god as a scientific theory how do you disprove god?
You can’t, can you? I can’t even think of a single rational test to disprove god. I read some sophist attempts to debunk god and there are some neurological studies that define our affinity for the infinite but they really don’t work. Why? It’s a simple matter of faith and conversely you can’t prove the existence of god. And that ladies and gentlemen is the difference between a scientific theory and a religion. A belief in god is religion and requires faith whereas a belief in Darwinism or natural selection requires one to adhere to the rules of scientific theory. Darwinism has little to do with religious dogma.
Survival of the fittest and the theory of evolution fit the fossil record just fine. Sure there have been some surprises but our living planet has numerous fossil relics such as horseshoe crabs living alongside the latest naturally engineered species. Moreover; DNA research has added additional information to our knowledge of evolution. Yet the more evidence we find supporting the mechanism of evolution the more Americans as a whole insist on getting stupider about the subject and embrace Creationism as if it was some comfort soul food.
Here’s more from Radar: You see, if the Universe didn’t just *poof* into existence, if life didn’t just *poof*, if information and DNA and, well, we could be pointing out *poofs* all day long. A belief in Darwinism requires a suspension of common sense in favor of a myth. In fact, I believe there is far more evidence in favor of creationism than there is for Darwinism.
But that is difference between science and faith; one can be disproved the other can’t. Plus once again we have a misstatement of what Darwinism represents. Darwin makes no comment about the start of life; his theory simply provides a mechanism for natural selection and then the evolution of species. There is no concern about the start of life nor any commentary regarding the creation of the universe. Creationists think they have the answer to everything in god and they are always looking for complete answers in other theories and debunk them all if they come up short. However, that is the problem with ignorant lay people taking on scientific theory. They don’t want to play by the rules of the game and reject scientific methodology altogether.
What really amuses me is that the creationists have no problem embracing and using the very same technology created by scientific theory. I won’t get into the numerous medicines and foods that have been created by gene manipulation and no doubt have been consumed by creationists and non-creationists alike. What I find more amusing is how Quantum Mechanics Theory should be construed as a fundamental challenge to all religious thinking: at its core it basically disproved Einstein’s assertion that god doesn’t play dice with the universe and that there is randomness to events in the universe. In effect, quantum mechanics put an end to the old Newtonian deterministic universe that could be inherently controlled by a creator. This fact the creationists ignore as they blithely go about using the very same quantum technology in their PCs to blog about the heathen atheists.
Why do they ignore this challenge from Quantum Theory? Simple answer, the Bible does not mention particle physics so there is no context to have a debate within whereas it does mention creation via Adam & Eve. Or as Radar put it,” All a Young Earth Creationist needs to do is know his Bible and keep up with science and think critically.”
It would be fun to watch fundamentalists spin quantum mechanics and string theory but I think that is beyond their capabilities; plus that’s kinda of my point. We don’t need to continue the dumbing down of Americans now that George W. is finally out of office. Witness the OJ Simpson fiasco where the prosecution took for granted that the jury’s ability to understood DNA evidence when in fact most of the jury couldn’t spell DNA. Ignorance rules in America and politicos love to exploit stupidity particularly if it comes wrapped in a voting block.
The timing of this stupidity couldn’t come at a worse time. There is some scary stuff going on as biohackers play god with the genomes of different animals and, as for example, go about creating the blueprint for a living dino-chicken. I am not sure how creationists explain this away, but biohackers have already figured out how to turn on the genes that control the growth of teeth and scales in chick embryos. Now the prospect of dino-chick doesn’t exactly scare me despite the prognostications of Jurassic Park but biopunks playing with flesh eating bacteria ought to scare the hell out of any intelligent thinking person, Darwinist or not.
So while creationists and the average American keeping think god is behind the controls of our evolution some idiot bio-hacker, who desperately needs the favors of a girlfriend, is locked away in his room or in a corporate lab mucking away at the very engine of human evolution: our genes. In other words, as our politicans pander away to fundamentalist creationists groups and continue to dumb down America in our classrooms we are ignoring some serious ethical decisons that should be made regarding bioengineering. And, as with all ignorance, there will be a price to pay especially if one of these bio-punks suddently decides to become a Jihadist! But don’t worry you can bet that the creationists will blame the Jihadist on Darwin!
My Response – You’re right if you assume god had a certain sensibility regarding landscaping but the presence of marine fossils on the top of certain mountains indicates that they were once at sea level and with their present rate of accretion that had to be more than 6,000 years ago.
And lets take this out of the realm of the earth for a moment. Look at the lunar landscape with its myriad craters that you can see with your naked eye. Now if you follow the Bible the moon was also created six thousand years ago, actually after the earth on the fourth day according to Genesis and all of those meteorite and asteroid collisions had to occur in that tiny time frame. Why isn’t the earth pockmarked to the degree the moon is? Why? Because those impacts occurred billions of year ago and the forces of atmospheric erosion, which are lacking on the moon, eroded most of their presence on the earth over that time.
If you don’t believe in an old earth you now have to account for the moon being created at a different time before the earth and I don’t believe that is the normal reading of scripture. Or you have to create a scenario in which god bombarded the moon but chose to spare the earth, you know one of “his” miracles. Not to be blasphemous but god was pretty liberal with his miracles during biblical times but you have to admit “his” modern day miracles have kind of paled in comparison. Or just maybe god likes craters and he created the moon that way just to mess with us. Funny, we just witnessed a comet collision with Jupiter during our lifetime though so that thinking is a bit suspect. Kind of convoluted thinking in any case wouldn’t you say? Sorry, you have to face it, the Bible makes for a very poor science book.