06.17.07
Creation Versus Evolution
It’s going to happen, so I might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.
The Great American Dilemma: Creation, Evolution, or Something Else?
There has been a huge unnecessary amount of drama over this subject in the news and on people’s blogs – all over the place. It’s not exactly the prime tenet of Christianity (nor Judaism, nor Islam, so far as I know) and it’s not even really all that important. One can be a perfectly fine Christian (or Jew, or Muslim) without believing in Creation as accounted by the book of Genesis.
With that said, I don’t believe in either one, but not on the basis that you might think. Evolution (and by that I mean Neo-Darwinian Evolution) has its serious flaws that aren’t exactly publicized, and its devotees also have their flaws. Creationism also has its serious flaws, and its devotees their imperfections.
Humans, I have observed, have this tendency to identify “position” with “person” – ie, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, Sanford’s Biolistics Process. When people can’t, for whatever reason, attack or deconstruct a person’s position anymore, they begin attacking the person: “Well, you must be a moron,” or, “Your credentials are bogus,” etc. The movie “Thank You For Smoking” was a wonderful example of this – distracting people from discussing the position to something entirely different.
Evolutionists do this. So do Creationists.
It isn’t, obviously, very loving. And in the case of the Creationists, it certainly is the farthest thing from Christ-like. As Biblical Christians (for the most part) in the public spotlight lately, Creationists should be doubly aware and doubly on guard to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing. (Romans 12)
I am more familiar with the inner workings of the Creationist research facilities than I am with the Evolutionist ones, and have met many of the big names in person, and talked with them. (I live very close to the Institute for Creation Research) They are, at the very least, sincere in their work, and go strictly by the scientific method. In terms of scientific integrity, they are no worse and slightly better than the majority of Evolutionists out there.
True Science doesn’t care where you got your starting observations and hypothesis, so claiming that Creationism isn’t real science is about as legitimate as claiming that Einstein wasn’t a real scientist (Creationists get theirs from the natural world and the Bible, Einstein got his from “thought experiments”). All True Science cares about is repeatability and falsifiability. You can apply the method to anything, regardless of it’s starting philosophical assumptions.
The fact that Creationist papers aren’t in “standard” academic, peer-reviewed journals says more about the prejudices of the editors of those journals rather than the standard of Creationist work, I would say. If you can’t get anyone to read your work, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is bunk, just that no one will read it (which is the other person’s problem, not the Creationists’). If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it really make a sound? Physics tell us yes.
On the other hand, a great many Creationist organization list in their mission statements that part of their goal is to deconstruct Evolution (with the goal, one would imagine, of leaving Creationism the only viable alternative). This is not Biblical. They quote verses like 2 Corinthians 10:5 : “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
As a corporate policy (ie, more than an individual basis) this is not helpful in the current ideals of the culture. If you want to deconstruct evolution on an individual basis, fine, go ahead – That is living love, and that is Biblical. But as a corporate policy, all it serves to do is to allow the Evolutionists one more reason to dismiss them. (“Scientific creationism is 100% crap. So-called “scientific” creationists do not base their objections on scientific reasoning or data. Their ideas are based on religious dogma, and their approach is simply to attack evolution.” -TalkOrigins.org) If you take away Evolutionists’ ability to dismiss you on the basis of your approach, they must look deeper in your work to find some reason to dismiss you.
I’ve heard some say that we must fight Evolution because it is Satan’s influence on the world to turn people from God. Even if that’s true, they miss several important Biblical facts: Satan is still God’s Devil – he’s on a very short leash. And, we know that words alone will never convince someone anyways, it takes An Act of God (quite literally) to do so. 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5
“1When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. 4My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.”
There are also huge differences in kind of science that Creationists and Evolutionists do versus, say, the kind of science that an Engineer does. Operational Science provides us with nifty tools like laptops, phones, fiber optics, electric scalpels, vaccines, etc. Historical Science doesn’t provide us with anything but theories, because it cannot be replicated (Big-Bang Cosmology is Historical Science.) It is still falsifiable, but completely non-repeatable. Its predictions, however, can be tested.
For the most part, both Creationists and Evolutionists deal in Historical Science, which has far more subjectivity than Operational, and is more open to varying starting philosophical assumptions. (ie, Positivism, which in its most simplistic form basically says that so long as a new theory fits all available data and doesn’t impact any other theory, it has to be considered.)
Practically, however, Science can’t be divorced from the worldview of the scientist, or that of the peer-reviewers, or academic climate. Just as no man is an island, neither is anything he creates or develops. They’re all interconnected and influence each other.
In conclusion, I suppose, I personally don’t believe fully in either, based on the imperfections of Man’s wisdom. I take the entirety of the body of evidence, and leave it at that, without attempting to wring meaning out of it. That is, I suppose, the only truly honest thing to do, and that is what I would encourage the rest of you to do.
Zhai’helleva,
Raeliyah
religionandatheism said,
June 18, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Here is why scientists claim that Creationism or Intelligent Design are not scientific:
The philosophy of science (which is a massive and expanding branch of philosophy) has for a long time attempted to formulate what science actually IS. As philosophy never accomplishes any final conclusions, nothing has been settled, but a few things have been acknowledged and taken up by both philosophers as scientists alike. If you would like to read some books about philosophy of science you can get plenty of good introductions (e.g. The Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, by Samir Okasha – ISBN 0192802836). Philosophers you might want to read or at least read about are Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
It is at present understood that what differentiates science from other fields of inquiry are the following broad principles:
- that an investigation of the natural world and its phenomena is possible.
- that the investigation should proceed on the assumption that a rational understanding is possible of these phenomena.
- that theories proposed benefit from supporting evidence.
- that the quality of evidence is greater if the same evidence can be found on repeating a study, investigation or experiment.
- formulations of experiements ought ot include the possibility for repetition (where possible).
- a scientific theory ought to make testable predictions.
- evidence found to contradict a proposed theory requires that the theory is either modified or abandoned.
- the evidence and conclusions drawn from it ought to be open to peer-review and scrutiny by other scientists.
Creationism fails by this criteria. It does not, for a start, have any predictive power. Evolution does. I won’t go into this now. If you’re interested in that, watch this video of Brown University biology lecturer Kenneth Miller:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8FfMBYCkk
Creationsists have had NO PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS in the scientific community. This is not, as some claim, because scientists want to keep them out of the loop. It is because none of the claims they make have sufficient evidence to make an inference to a creator from. There are no experiements you can run to show that a creator made any particular creature. This is in stark contrast to evolution where you can run a variety of experiments (for example in genetics).
Finally (otherwise this is going to be really a very long message), creationists and intelligent designers have to ignore an enormous amount of very silly biological design flaws. For example, human breathe and eat through the same orifice. You have a valve that separates access to the stomach from access to the mouth, but that is still a great way to choke! Alternatively, you could, as other mammals such as whales, breathe and eat through different holes – but we were not designed so smartly. What about the appendix, how is that a good design feature? Or the enlarging prostate, which causes all sorts of problems for men in old age? If you had the opportunity to rationally create, there are a whole number of things you would have differently. People are not created, they are evolved and you can see the redundancies, mistakes and successes alike as species adapted on the evolutionary path.
Check out http://religionandatheism.wordpress.com
Raeliyah said,
June 18, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Thank you for your comment!
Thomas Kuhn is one of the philosophers I have particularly studied, most notably for his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” (which I have yet to be able to find a copy of… aah, Amazon, here I come.)
The creationist research I have seen done first hand fits all of the criteria you have posted, including the predictive power. There are no criteria that involve where you get your starting assumptions from, except perhaps “- that the investigation should proceed on the assumption that a rational understanding is possible of these phenomena.”
So here are some creationist predictions I found with a casual Google search:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/predictions.html
http://www.twoorthree.net/2006/01/creationist_pre.html
http://www.twoorthree.net/2006/01/more_testable_c.html
Edit: I’m not sure why WordPress cut off half of my comment… let me see if I can re-write it.
So far as I know, creationists don’t seek to “prove” a creator – that’s already inferred in their model. What they are seeking to prove are the methods by which things may have been “created,” which are at the very least provable by prediction, as above, if not exactly replicable (practicality, like seismology).
As far as design flaws – certainly they look that way to us now. If we had the opportunity to redesign ourselves, perhaps we can do better. There is the possibility that, like “Problem of Pain,” the human design is the best possible design for the features it required and the world it was going to live in. There have been studies that suggest that the appendix has more of a role to play in immunology than previously thought, so maybe they are less vestigial and more polyfunctional whose other functions have been lost? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10776800&dopt=Citation) It is also important to understand that within a creationist worldview/model, humans and indeed the rest of our world have degraded significantly since Noah’s flood, and current genetic research would seem to lend some support to that (http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/156/1/297, or read the article I linked to above on Genetic Entropy).
So, at least to me creationism is as much a valid science as, say, psychology. It is on the fringe, certainly, and not “mainstream,” but neither was computer science 100 years ago, and now we are discussing such things on the Internet. Creationism gets overlooked except to ridicule based on its starting assumptions, which is unfair to both science as a whole and any potential discoveries that creationism may uncover (who are we to say?).
Then again, I don’t believe in either discipline, I simply attempt to take in the facts and evidence without a worldview attached to them, so take what I write as you will. Now, I am going to watch the video that you have posted, it sounds interesting at the least. =)
Raeliyah
religionandatheism said,
June 27, 2007 at 12:31 am
I think you’d probably be interested in 3 things: the “science” or “intelligent design” categories in my blog (which will be expanding shortly) and the interesting videos that are already there (the blog is quite young yet). And a book by Kenneth Miller called “Darwin’s God”. Miller is an evolutionist Roman Catholic. There are some very interesting videos of his up on YouTube.
http://religionandatheism.wordpress.com
Anonymous said,
August 19, 2007 at 3:32 pm
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Luke said,
August 26, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Hi
Where science gets is founding axioms for any theory is of no relevance, and neither does it matter who proposes a new theory (the truth content of a theory does not depend on, say, qualifications or experience). So there you are correct. Otherwise, Creationism is not scientific at all. The predictions to which you give links above are generally without foundation and little explanation is given. How, for instance, do we get from a creator God or a Genesis account of creation to the prediction that “Fossils of land animals, not just shallow-water plant fossils, will be found in and near trenches”? This is pure whimsy. No reason, no rhyme (certainly none are given).
The appendix is the most frequently given example of redundancy in human physiology, but it is not the most convincing one. A little thought reveals a multitude of other problems. Why, by design, would you create a prostate that enlarges for men as they grow old? Would a creator will men to have problems with urinating late in life? Or take complications in childbirth, which give rise to women sometimes suffering from rectovaginal fistulas (you can read about this awful affliction here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fistula_of_vagina_to_large_intestine). These, we are to understand, are the characteristics of enlightened divine design?
It might seem presumptuous to suppose that the creator intented for his creation to be perfect. After all, an engineer, should he so wish, is able to factor in flaws into his designs, right? (This is done frequenly nowadays in a multitude of products to compel us to buy new models/versions.) So there is nothing to say that God (or the creator) intended for our bodies to function perfectly well. And indeed, that would not be a problem, except that intelligent design advocates and creationists in general frequently argue from the perfection of the design. (“Look at the eye, all those components working together perfectly – nature couldn’t have done this without a design”. The irony of being told this by someone who wears glasses wouldn’t, I hope, be lost on you.) So by far the more viable option is to argue for that the creator’s wish was to accommodate imperfection in what he made. The problem with that is that at that point the claim about divine design becomes completely redundant. For biological systems the theory of evolution provides an elegant and simple theory (and let’s not forget: one backed by plentiful evidence from paleontology, genetics and so on…) which has the added bonus of not having to rely on untestable metaphysical claims about an invisible creator. Which neatly places me to make my last point:
The assumptions of natural science include the supposition that the material world is what is under scrutiny, that all phenomena are describable at that level and that a rational investigation and description of all this is possible. So far, we have not been disappointed. The crucial thing is that science does not admit metaphysical claims of the sort the ID people need to even propose their hypothesis. So that is one departure from natural science. Another is the question of predictive power. There is no predictive power in ID which accounts for the will of a creator. What will he make next? Evolution does have such predictive power. Recently bacteria have been discovered which digest synthetic plastics on waste dumps. The genetic mutation that permits them to do this is a part of evolutionary theory, which predicts that species will adapt to their environments (in this case a lot of plastic found its way into to the bacterias’ environment). Intelligent Design cannot account for this. It has to borrow from macroevolution to explain small observable changes, which constitutes a plagiarism if ever I’ve seen one. On the large scale it offers nothing: it makes no predictions as far as macroevolution is concerned.
You wrote that ID is on the fringe of science. It is not. It has no presence in the scientific community at all. ID is creationism which was rebranded after it was deemed in the US that teaching creationism in schools was unconstitutional. The motive behind ID is religious and ideological (and even political) and not scientific. There have been no peer-reviewed papers produced by ID advocates in any scientific journal. The reason for this is that to publish in such a paper (as I have, in fact) you have to have evidence which withstands scrutiny. ID has no such evidence. It has no evidence other than saying “oh look, it must have been designed”. It has been amply demonstrated that Michael Behe’s biological irreducible complexity is fallacious (for the blood clotting cascade, for the bacterium flagellum and so on…). I could go on, but I’m sure you get my point.
You might be interested in a couple of books about Intelligent Design and the claim that it is scientific:
1. Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism, by Petto
2. Unintelligent Design, by Robyn Williams
The second of these is light-hearted and much more brief. The first is a serious commentary. You might also want to look at another book:
3. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, by Ronald Numbers
That’s all for now. Good luck!
Raeliyah said,
August 29, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I will give you that the links I gave didn’t have much supporting information – they were from a first-sweep google search and I didn’t spend a lot of time looking for an in-depth page – the previous poster simply asked for examples of predictions. If you would like I can do a more in-depth search and find the ones with the equations and supporting math/information intact – just because the links I posted didn’t have their supporting evidence/reasons attached doesn’t mean they do not exist. However, if you are even passingly familiar with creationist theories, then you would probably be able to infer that the prediction you cited is related to the Flood.
The assertion above that creationism is not scientific directly contradicts your earlier statement that where a science gets its foundations from is of no relevance. If the founding axioms don’t matter, then why is creationism not scientific? It has predictive power (as shown by the fact that there are predictions given); it follows the scientific method – observation, hypothesis, experiment, revision of hypothesis, etc; it has
simply waiting to be discovered. Brushing something off as vestigial is ignoring an opportunity for science/research to be done.
You seem to be confusing ID and creationism, which, I assure you, are totally different. You may just approach ID as a “secular”, “rebranded” or “dumbed-down” form of creationism, but ID leaves out several creationist tenets which explain a lot of the “imperfections,” most notably the Fall and the Flood – both of which, according to creationist theories, had a major impact on god’s original design and spurred (or catalysed) genetic degradation. ID is not creationism, even if their roots are similar (or identical). The fall resulted in aging, death, illness, etc, and encompasses all those problems you just mentioned – In the garden, Adam (according to creationist theory and scriptural support) was perfect – so he probably didn’t have any problems with his prostate. Maybe after he was kicked out of the garden and lived to the age of 930 he may have developed some of those problems.
No, actually, since I wear contacts/glasses myself – all that reading in badly lit library corners and the established degradation of the genes in my parents’ eyes kicked in around sixth grade. Even with my imperfect eyes, however, the fact that I can see at all is pretty cool.
You are confusing ID and creationism – creationism includes the tenet of Fall, where things that were perfect were made imperfect by entropy started by humanity’s sin (ie, disobediance to god); and the tenet of the Flood, which caused even more entropy (if you’ve ever looked at a Biblical geneology, you’ll notice the sharp decline in lifespan after the Flood).
For the rest of your comment I’m simply going to substitute ID with creationism, since that is apparently what you are referring to, even though you are using an incorrect pointer.
You are correct – science assumes that the physical, material, natural world is logical and rational investigation is possible. Naturalistic Science “…is the belief that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws. If all things were explainable through natural laws, it does not mean God does not exist, since God is, by definition, outside of natural laws since He is the creator of them.” (CARM.org) A “ will ” (second entry) by definition being a non-physical thing means we cannot have any direct evidence for or against – the only thing we can measure is god’s (or other supernatural beings) interference with the physical world in such a way that physical traces are left – this is what creationists believe about the flood – God poked at something, caused some sort of disturbance in the normal running of the natural laws, and voila, the Flood resulted, and _that_ you can test for.
Actually, it is borrowing from _micro_evolution, which creationists and ID’ers alike acknowledge as observable fact and the method by which many species arose from the few “kinds” or baramins present on the ark after the flood. So, not even a plagiarism, as they are not passing off another author’s work as their own – they are acknowledging the validity of other’s research. Creationism predicts about macroevolution that it is _extremely_ rare (I can find the exact statistics if you would like, or you may look it up yourself), and certainly not prevalent enough to produce the genetic variety we see today. In the 400 or so years humanity has been observing the natural world, we have observed one instance of new trait information arising from genetic mutation – that being the Flavobacterium and nylonase you mentioned above (polymer by-products dumped into waste water surrounding a Japanese factory, here). On the other hand, we’ve seen hundreds of extinctions and genetic degradations (cheetahs, for one).
Modern evolutionary theory, also called Neo-Darwinism (if you’d like to discuss symbiogenesis or any of the other alternate evolutionary theories, we can take that up in a different article), predicts that “genetic variation in populations arises by chance through mutation (this is now known to be sometimes caused by mistakes in DNA replication) and recombination (crossing over of homologous chromosomes during meiosis). Evolution consists primarily of changes in the frequencies of alleles between one generation and another as a result of genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection. Speciation occurs gradually when populations are reproductively isolated, for example by geographic barriers.” (wikipedia.org) What this is usually interpreted as is that genetic mutation causes the arisal of new information into the genome.
The description you gave above could more appropriately be applied to micro-evolution, or adaptation, which, as I have already stated, is pretty much accepted as fact in all circles. Micro-evolution could also be described as specialization – there is a loss of information. Remember those pepper-moths in England that went from white to black to adapt to the dirty conditions of the trees that they hide on? The black ones, if separated out, can’t go back to being white again – the gene for it has been lost (the black-gene being a recessive trait).
There isn’t any information on whether or not those Flavobacterium can still digest sugar-based food (their original food source) but I would hazard a guess that they can’t or at least are far less efficient at it.
The famous speciation lab experiment with fruit flies also showed a loss of information – they started with a population that could eat two types of food (starch and maltose based, I believe) and ended with two subspecies that could only eat one type of food – a loss of information. Micro-evolution really shouldn’t be called evolution at all, it’s simply adaptation. Re-shuffling of existing information does not constitute new information.
See any and all papers by Dr. John C. Sanford, who has been published in such journals as Nature, PNAS, and others. He’s a leading geneticist who invented the method by which practically all modern genetic engineering is done (the biolistic process), and holds 25+ patents on various methods, processes, and genetically engineered foods. I’m not sure if he is an “out” IDer/YEC, however I do know that he testified in court in defense of it. See also Genetic Entropy.
Johnathan Wells also has articles in peer-reviewed papers, see here. These next few are all from a first-sweep Wikipedia/Google search.
Michael Behe also has peer-reviewed papers in PNAS, here: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/78/3/1619
Dr. Gonzalez, one of the authors of “The Privileged Planet,” also has a long list of papers, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Gonzalez_(astronomer) and http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1362
Now how about some creationists:
Dr. John Baumgardner, who created the computer simulation program TERRA in use by most geologists and plate-tectonics specialists around the world, even though he created it in order to test and simulate his theory of catastrophic plate tectonics in originating the flood. Written while he was employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Papers here and here is the search string: John Baumgardner
Dr. Russell Humphreys, a nuclear physicist who has also worked at Los Alamos, and also at Sandia National Labs, G&E High Voltage Labs, among many others. Paper here, here,here, and here.
Here’s a list of scientists who specifically work with the ICR, their biographies, and their lists of both secular and non-secular publications.
Biological Sciences
Physical Sciences
You cannot claim there is “no papers” or “no evidence” for something – you can’t claim a non-existence because that would require practically infinite knowledge. In this case, it is easily refutable – there are papers, and there is evidence. Perhaps a better question is why are these scientists who have demonstrably shown their competence and intelligence suddenly treated like they have brain damage when they adopt a new position? Even Lyn Margulis has experienced this treatment, as she will tell you at length if you ask, and she still accepts adaptation, evolution, and old-earth, and is about as far from a creationist/ID as you can get.
Actually, the interesting thing about the bacterium flagellum (as talked about by Ken Miller, YouTube video) is that when you take away parts of it, you get a type-III secretory system, used for injecting toxins into cells, right? With a passing understanding of the creationist viewpoint this is evidence of the Fall – take a useful structure, break it a little, and you get a malicious structure. Blinding Light was going to have an article on how evolutionists’ evidence against is actually very good evidence for creation, I’m not sure if he has posted it yet but you can certainly email him.
I did a search for your name here, but all it is coming up with is “Linda Pilarski”… relative of yours? I’d love to read your paper if you have a link to it. I haven’t yet finished college so I can’t make the same claim. Are you doing operational science or historical/theoretical science? Or social sciences?
Thank you for your recommendations, I will look into them, however I usually stay away from petty arguments. I’m happy that you are at least discussing this.
I understand the evolutionary viewpoint very well (before I took a break from college, I was a Zoology major, and am continuing my studies unofficially on my own), however it appears from your comment that you have not critically looked at the creationist/ID/etc viewpoint or supporting evidence at all. So you might want to try doing your own research instead of regurgitating / copy-pasting what the critics say.
It’s amusing, I’ve had practically the same conversation with everyone who learns I’m researching _all_ evidence – creation, evolution, symbiogenesis, abiogenesis, panspermia, etc, all saying the same thing. Your comment is practically identical to R&A’s up there, and it is very very similar to everything on Blinding Light’s page on Genetic Entropy – repeating the same thing over and over again is tiring. I’ve answered objections practically identical to these many times over, often from the same person. So I suppose my plea to all dogmatic evolutionists is to come up with some new material!
-Raeliyah, attempting to be neutral in her approach to _all_ evidence – apologies if she failed, she is _only_ human