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