We Know He's Right, Just Ask Him

I recently went to Hot Springs South Dakota and visited the Mammoth site. It is quite impressive. Many fossils of mammoths are still being uncovered at a working museum in progress.

Although going around and watching the workers unearth these massive creatures from the past is impressive, I wonder if these CSI investigators have ever had their worldview challenged?

I heard several stories explaining how many of the mammoths ended up buried at this site. The presuppositions that went into these stories were in my mind just insane. On the surface, they sounded good, but the fact is, we have no real idea of what really happened. There were no eye-witnesses. Yet to challenge these stories would be anathema if one were to approach the same evidence from a Biblical creationists viewpoint. (Even if one were to approach from a biblical creationist viewpoint, we still would never really know as can be seen here).

In this morning's blog post, Dr. White quotes from Richard Dawkins' book while interacting with his article from the TimessOnLine.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

This quote reminds me of a debate between a biblical creationist and an atheist that I listened to many moons ago. In this particular debate, the creationist cornered the atheist/evolutionist and forced to admit that,

"We know evolution is true because we are here. Therefore evolution is true. We are simply trying to discover the mechanism by which it occurred."

At the end of the article cited by White (read here) Dawkins concludes,

The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

This is why I am a Presuppositionalist and not merely and Evidentialist. Dawkins assumes what he is trying to prove. He starts with his assumptions and presuppositions as being unquestionable. In fact, he does not even bother to defend such views. They are simply basic even though he can not even begin to justify his beliefs.

This in conjunction with irreducible complexities and information issues simply will not allow Dawkins' arrogance to go unchallenged. His comments resulting in his conclusion that to deny evolution is to be a holocaust denier is simply a method to shut up and marginalize opponents of his view.

Dawkins says the theory is not a tautology. He even argues that evolution is as true as the holocaust with the eye witnesses. I wonder how many people watched their eyes evolve.