From Michael
There is a movie hitting theaters in February called Expelled . It focuses on the current scientific culture that religiously persecutes any scientist who does not support Darwinian evolution. It's supposed to be pretty damning stuff, with plenty of examples of teachers and researches being denied jobs and tenure and funding just because they didn't tow the Darwinist line. Even worse, many research programs which require grants to continue to exist have shelved research conclusions that were not consistent with a Darwinian view of nature in order to protect their grants. If you are unfamiliar with Darwinian evolution or the Intelligent Design movement then I suggest you check out Reasons To Believe for a broad treatment of Science/Faith issues and I recommend Darwin's God for a full blooded treatment of the evolutionary debate in particular.
The movie will be hosted/narrated by Ben Stein who is probably most famous as the teacher in Ferris Beuler's Day Off who says "Beuler....Beuler....Beuler" while taking role. However, Stein is apparently the smartest guy in Hollywood (is that saying much?) with multiple PhD's and a long storied involvement in American intellectual and political life. He also believes God created everything (who knew?) and he therefore brings a zeal to this project that is both culturally hip and quite smart. Anti-Darwinist's have gotten a lot of bad press (unfairly), so it will be nice to inject a little pop culture mojo into our side of the debate.
My own distaste for Darwinism probably comes from my intense need to be an ideological rebel. I just assume the elite status quo is always wrong, unless proven otherwise. I'm not saying that I will ever support a logically untenable position, but I start my thinking on every popular doctrine by saying , "this is what I have always been told, so that must be wrong." Once you start actually requiring evidence for evolution you learn that there isn't much evidence, and what evidence is there is foolishly dealt with. I like to say that if forensic science was like evolutionary science, no one would ever get arrested. The folks of CSI would examine the bloody knife next to the dead body and say "what a coincidence that this knife got splashed with blood and left here the same day this guy suddenly dropped dead from a hole in his back."
But in fairness to the Darwinists, nobody gives up a belief they hold dearly until a much more compelling belief is presented. That was true for hundreds of years as every astronomer worth their salt held up Ptolemy's model of the universe with the earth at the center. Never mind that the model was unbelievably complex and "ugly" as each new cosmological observation was shoehorned into the model. It wasn't until Kepler introduced elliptic orbits, with the earth going round the sun, that a competing model began to take over Ptolemy's. Even then, many men of science complained about a model in which the earth "moved", because obviously we aren't standing on a moving object... right? And if the earth isn't the center, why are we all drawn towards it's core (this was before the concept of "gravity")? Darwinists have a theory that they believe "explains" the development of life, even if it proposes extremely unlikely events. Even if each new piece of data has to be shoehorned in, making the Darwinist model very ugly. Creationists must present a natural process that explains where life came from before Darwinists will consider such "religious nonsense". Right now, Intelligent Design only proposes to prove the presence of design, if such a thing can be proven. Where that design came from and how it came to be is still a matter of faith.
The only thing I ask of the Darwin establishment is the humility to admit that we may be sniffing up the wrong tree. If we can say with confidence that design is evident, then any explanation of the formation of life without a designer is an incomplete or incorrect one. Science should fundamentally be interested in the truth, at the expense of any dogma. Ironically, it's not monotheistic dogma standing in the way right now. It is the dogma of atheism that clings desperately to a godless theory whose time is passing. All I ask of my fellow believers is to honor the age old tradition of Science to embrace a bad idea until a competing idea is presented. If they want to hold on to evolution, they should be allowed to do so like all of Ptolemy's disciples until we can say more than "God did it".
Monday, February 11, 2008
Expelled
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3 comments:
From Michael,
I realize I have barely scratched the surface of this debate. It's just too much to deal with on this lowly blog, and I am probably not the one to deal with it.
One of the barriers in this debate is that being a competent participant sort of requires that you know ALOT of obscure data. For instance, I shouldn't talk about fossil evidence if I don't have a specific knowledge of which fossils I am talking about and what techniques are used to interpret those fossils. This keeps most of the debate well out of my reach.
The parts of the debate I can reach are enough to compel towards something beyonds Darwin's idea of natural selection. Here are a few of the high points that have influenced me.
1) If I believe that God designed the world, then I have to believe that everything is the way it is for a reason. The reason may not always be obvious, but there must be a reason nonetheless. I also believe that each and every design is optimal for it's purpose. This is a daunting prediction and should be easily proved false if it was in fact false. If God didn't design everything we should constantly encounter things poorly conceived. Well, the list of masterfully composed organisms and natural processes seems impressive to me. I realize that those hostile to suggestions of a created order might fill up this blog with examples of things that appear to be poorly designed. "Appear" is the key word, because its hard to know what compromises are being dealt with in a given design. I might complain that an aircraft carrier is poorly designed because I can't haul it with my truck, or because it costs more than $20,000. A design's genius has to do with what needs the design is meant to address. The fact that nature "works" when it so easily could not have is to me the most telling proof of good design. And let's remember that God is not just an engineer, but an artist, parent, teacher, judge, conservationist and comedian just to name a few. We need to cast a much wider net when we try to guess God's reasoning behind a particular aspect of nature. (Yes, yes... I believe God made parasites and carnivores and animals that went extinct before any person ever saw them... I believe there is a reason for the consistent use of five fingers among mammals, regardless of what those five fingers are used for... I don't believe that any organ is vestigial- you just haven't watched it long enough or with the right tools... I believe there is a current reason the whale has a quadroped's bone structure)
2) Natural selection suggests millions of small changes add up to big changes, or thousands of medium size changes add of to big changes. In order to get from a single cell organism to a person, or any animal, you probably need millions of changes (who knows, but the body has trillions of cells so that number may be small). And those changes have to occur in the right order (don't need a leg before you have nerve cells to control the leg). And since Darwin posed that each change was the result of a random mutation, then each good change is probably accompanied by thousands, if not millions of screw-ups. We can round all those numbers down significantly: just 1000 changes needed, 1 out of every 2 changes is beneficial, but they all need to be in order. The result is a probability of success of 1 in 10 to the 301 power. If something occurred in the face of those odds, every rational being would assume there was a trick involved. For instance, if I had a bag full of 1000 numbered ping pong balls, and I started randomly pulling them out, and I happen to pull them out in order, how many would I have to pull out before you stopped believing it was random, and that I was somehow controlling the selection of the next ball?
3) Let's say I have a theory that explained all the forces at play when you rolled a dice, and that using my theory I could predict what the outcome of every roll would be. You say, "show me". You role the dice and I quickly predict that the result will be 1,2,3,4 or 5, but definitely not 6. The dice lands on 3 and I claim my theory is genius and I will be the next great scientific mind. The test has proved my theory. Well, not really. My theory gets weaker the more outcomes it allows, and it gets better the more specific a prediction it can make. If I picked one number every time and got it right 90% of the time, you might believe I was onto something. But predicting 5 out of 6 numbers isn't that interesting and doesn't say much about the validity of my theory. It's worse for Darwinism. Darwinism predicts that nature will select optimal designs... unless it doesn't. It also predicts that similarity of form between different species is due to evolutionary relationship... except when it isn't. It predicts gradual transitions through small changes... and transitions through large dramatic changes. It new we would get heads... and tales. So when you hear Darwinists talk about their theory's ability to predict the data, be very suspicious.
4) DNA is a code and everybody agrees with that and treats it as such. Now, that alone is enough to convince me there is a code writer, but I'll take it one step further. You need a Cell to read the instructions found in the DNA code and carry those instructions out. Where do cells come from? The instructions for building a cell are found in the DNA code. Now twist your mind around that. It would be like finding a computer disk that contained the plans for the only computer in the world that could read or write to that disk. How does such a disk just randomly evolve? How do you get the computer without the disk, and how do you read the disk without the computer?
5) I will suggest that there are systems within nature that need all the parts present before they do anything useful. Darwinian evolution currently does not propose any mechanism for producing whole systems all at once. Evolution currently requires all the parts to develop separately, being useful or useless to varying degrees, and then suddenly coming together to do something really cool that could not have in any way been predicted before it happened. Evolutionary thinking tries to imagine ways this could have happened through natural selection. Imagining is not the same thing as predicting or even explaining.
These are just a couple of issues to consider. I admit that all I am doing is calling the RANDOM development of life into question, and not really ruling out theistic evolution. I have some thoughts on that, but I'll save that for another day. I also admit that I'm not being a good scientist and presenting a competing idea. All I can say is that some way, some how God made it happen, and he made it happen just the way he wanted. That's just putting God in the gap, isn't it? Sure it is... and I have no rational problem with that at all because I don't limit my search for truth to the rules of scientific inquiry. I do hope that scientists begin to seriously consider explanations that don't involve random occurrences or gradual transitions. I think that is where the evidence is taking us, and we should be honest enough to go there.
Clearly, the Darwin establishment hasn't found me yet and this subject is of no interest at DBC. This comment section is the equivalent of crickets chirping. If you want to see what happens when people unfriendly to Intelligent Design (a much more limited version of Creationism, and much more popular) get on a blog, go to the Expelled blog. You have to do some searching, but you'll eventually find your way to about 10,000 comments in their blogging section. It is some really mean stuff. Those Darwinists are arrogant at levels I have been unfamiliar with for a long long time. Thats a testimony to the friendly people I socialize and work with. If you had any doubt this was a religious war, you will doubt no more. It also shows that anyone within the science community who wants to speak out better have really thick skin and a secure career.
OK so I'm catching up with my DBC underground blog reading... I thought it was interesting and hadn't heard of the movie. Is it hitting mainstream theaters?
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