Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Islamic Creationism, and Hope

I just received a forwarded link to a website where Muslims now trumpet the anti-evolution propaganda.

http://www.harunyahya.com/

I'd find this website funny, except that Muslims won't. As if things weren't bad enough in the Islamic world! Now, the culture that needs the social and democratic freedoms which come with secularization is doing its best to have scientific reasoning, the heart and soul of secular culture and human freedom, undermined.

How many times have freedoms in our own country been trumped by religion? Didn't the Comstock laws of the late 1800's try to ban Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass?' Didn't the Catholic Church get laws banning contraception on the books? And that's just in America! Imagine what Islamic extremism could do! If evolution is successfully smeared to the point where few acknowledge it, I fear for the survival of our species.

Fortunately, there is hope. My friend Mike Morrison, the lead guitar player in the band I sing in (the band which, I'm sad to say, occupies much of my time in preventing me from doing more for M.E.L. and this blog site), pointed something out to me which is profound. If you have faith, he says, you shouldn't have to denounce scientific evidence. All the science in the world shouldn't be able to shake you. You'd believe it, and that's that. But because creationists attack the scientific evidence, it betrays how insecure they are in their beliefs! Deep down, they recognize that science trumps them. So they fight to change that, and in so doing, send a very distinct message: "Our faith is weak!"

So, let them be weak, and I'll call them on it. It's that thought which gives me hope.

Thanks, Mike!

Eric

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Tax Returns Going to Creationist Groups?

Okay, I just have to vent about something.

Yesterday, I received a postcard-sized fundraising pamphalet from Answers In Genesis. It pictured a typical tax return form, and the caption read, "How will YOU spend it?"

Now, I didn't bother to read the rest, as it sickened me. But I've got to admit, it's a tactically brilliant move by AIG, and it goes without saying that a whole lot of yahoos are going to give generously as a result of this mailing. That means that a lot of people who don't deserve it are going to get wealthier, and a lot of people who worked hard for that money are going to be blissfully poorer. It made me wonder, though. What right do they have to nag people who have been patiently waiting all year for this important financial break in their lives? Why should they be guilt-tripped into donating part of their tax refund to a tax exempt organization which tries to hijack public funds and/or resources? Come to think of it, why should a portion the money that their free government gave back be relegated to a religious organization whose sole purpose is to violate American religious freedom?

Oh yes, it happens every year. You anticipate your additional check, and dozens of crediters and charities tap you on the shoulder, and with their open hands oustretched, utter a large "Ahem!" In a free society, you can't prevent this, any more than you can prevent fools from spending their money foolishly. But the mere presence of the creationist hand so outstretched simply makes me want to smack that hand with a ruler as hard as I possibly can!

Eric

Finishing Off Tom Phillips

Yes, it's been awhile since I've posted. But it's long overdue. Time to mop up the Tom Phillips rant I began months ago, and then I'll get to my next post about an odd piece of mail I received.

**The fossil record disproves evolution. If the first life form changed into another, higher form by gradual gene changes, and so on down the line, accounting for all life then, quoting Darwin, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great."
**The whole world would be awash in the remains of "infinitely numerous connecting links." It isn't. Darwin conceded that fact, calling it "the most obvious and serious objection" against his theory. He attests the "sudden appearance" of species, complete and distinct, in the fossil record - just as if God created all life individually.**

Lack of fossils was certainly a concern -- back in Darwin's day. Since then we have indeed been buried in infinitely numerous connecting links, and the creationist response is to deny that they exist. They call Archaeopteryx everything from a fraud to a genuine bird which isn't a connecting link. They ignore the transitional forms between reptiles and mammals, such as cynodonts. They deny the clear fossil ancestry that can be drawn which shows how cats, dogs, bears, hyenas, and weasels can all be traced back to a common ancestor. They pretend that the bones of transitional forms between land mammals and whales aren't truly transitional, and insist that the bones showing clear ancestry from wolf-like land predators are too fragmentory - displaying blissful ignorance of how the inner parts of skulls act as a biological fingerprint. They think that the fossil ancestry of horses doesn't count somehow. The list goes on and on.

**Evolution is scientifically preposterous. Laws of probability are real scientific laws.**

And your understanding of those laws make you such a great scientist. Oh, that's right, you're NOT a scientist!

**Our DNA is unique because the odds of another person having our exact DNA are so remote we can dismiss that possibility altogether. Likewise with evolution.
**Nobel laureate Francis Crick calculated nature's chances of producing one small protein: 1 in 10 to the 260th power. Crick reminds us there are only 10 to the 80th power (1 followed by 80 zeros) atoms in the whole universe; he concludes even the elementary components of life "cannot have arisen by pure chance."**

Except life didn't begin with one small protein, did it? Protein is a chain made of amino acids, which formed beforehand. Complex and simple proteins are END products of evolution. So Phillips is not even comparing apples to oranges -- he's comparing apples to cinderblocks.

**Mathematician Emile Borel states an event will never happen when the odds are less than 1 in 10 to the 50th power.
**Sir Fred Hoyle, mathematician and astronomer, calculated nature's chances of producing the 2,000 enzymes found in life: 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. He states: "The Darwinian theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong" and concludes, "Life cannot have had a random beginning . . . but must have come from a cosmic intelligence."
**Nobel laureate Ernst Chain said, "To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts."**

Emile Borel was right, Fred Hoyle was spectacularly wrong. What Hoyle did was calculate, not the 2,000 enzymes known, but the odds of one enzyme with 200 amino acids forming by chance. There are 20 known amino acids, so any combination of them would have a probability of 1 in 20, times 1 in 20, times 1 in 20, and so forth, 200 times. This produces a spectacularly huge number, probably greater than the number of atoms in the universe! Since a simple enzyme has roughly 400 amino acids, Hoyle maintained that no enzyme could have formed by chance, and evolution was therefore wrong.

The problem? Enzymes didn't form by chance! They too, are the END products of evolution. Speculating an enzyme could have formed spontaneously by chance is as ridiculous as speculating that a holstein cow could have formed sponteneously by chance! Hoyle's calculation is therefore as useless as it is irrelevant. What was/is needed is a calculation of the odds of an enzyme forming from an earlier ancestor, and to do that, we need to know what that ancestor was, and how it might have changed. That calculation is currently pending.

**Albert Einstein said, "I want to know how God created this world." Einstein knew the universe didn't happen by chance.**

And why, pray tell, didn't the brilliant Einstein knowingly declare that God made the universe in six days?

**Atheism and evolution are dead. Science destroyed them.**

Just like science destroyed the notion of the parting of the Red Sea? Or destroyed the literal interpretation of a man named Jonah living inside the belly of a big fish for three days with no food, water, or oxygen, and not dying? No, science did not destroy either atheism or evolution. Science did destroy fundamentalism, even though the sociological forces which continue to prop it up are proving formidable -- though slowly eroding. And it is agnosticism, not atheism, which is endorsed by evolution. Get that straight.

**Those claiming evolution is scientific must demonstrate that life can come from non-life by purely material processes and that one life form can turn into another, higher form.
**Science demands it. Put up or shut up.**

True, science hasn't made life forming in a test-tube yet. When it does, you'll deny it just as you deny Archaeopteryx. But science also demands you prove how a man can rise from the dead after being crucified, and how this transaction can somehow legally translate into absolution without it being two wrongs making a right.

Your turn: Put up or shut up.

Eric