Monday, December 07, 2009

Is Evolution a Hoax?

I realize that if you're not a flat-earther...I mean if you're not a Biblical creationist, then anything a Creationist has to say is just bunk. But after watching Clash of the Dinosaurs last night on the Discovery channel, I was reminded how this Global Warming hoax is just a microcosm of the entire theory of evolution.

Years ago I remember reading a quote supposedly by an Evolutionist arguing that evolution must be true since creationism is ridiculous. In this article, an evolutionist tries to defend Dr. Wald's position by quoting him properly.

The original quote is probably in reference to this,
We tell this story to beginning students in biology as though it represented a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity". It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
To which Dr. Wald responds,
I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a hypothesis of spontaneous generation. What the controversy reviewed above showed to be untenable is only the belief that living organisms arise spontaneously under present conditions. We have now to face a somewhat different problem: how organisms may have arisen spontaneously under different conditions in some former period, granted that they do so no longer.
Why does Dr. Wald think a scientist has to approach the origin of life through the hypothesis of spontaneous generation? Because in his mind, Louis Pasteur only perpetuated a myth of creationism. Pasteur was rejecting a "common-sense a belief as that in spontaneous generation".

In the conclusion of the article, Dr. Wald is quoted as saying,

The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at lest once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.

Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two [sic] billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles.

So hey, give something enough time, and something magical will happen. This is called reason over mysticism. Sorry, folks. This is as religious as anything I have read. We didn't observe it. We don't know how it happened. We don't know where it happened. We don't know really much of anything. But we are here, so it must have happened.

I think the misquote by some over zealous creationist got the spirit of the presuppositions correct.

8 comments:

RichardS said...

Howard, how can you miss the point in this postmodern age? We can accept contradictions now without worrying about some objective trut. What is wrong with believing that we are headed into an ice age at the same time we are going through global warming that is caused by man? The acts of man in causing global warming is just setting the march toward the ice age back some. But of course if we can stop all of this global warming, wouldn't that lead to the feared ice age? Or we could say that it is by going toward an ice age that has led to global warming which will lead to the next ice age. Maybe you are right after all. Maybe it is about money and power. Could it be that global warming is a moral issue after all?

RichardS said...

My previous post was, I thought, entered under your Global Warming post. Nevertheless, the two can be seen together. If anything is possible given enough time, and knowing that hot water freezes faster than cold water, global warming will spontaneously erupt into an ice age and all scientists will become frozen creationists.

Howard Fisher said...

Richard, you are a character.

:-)

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Human Ape said...

Years ago I remember reading a quote supposedly by an Evolutionist arguing that evolution must be true since creationism is ridiculous.

Creationism, also known as magic, is most definitely a ridiculous childish idiotic idea, which is why uneducated morons believe in it.

Evolution is true, but not because some ancient religious myth is false. Evolution is true because it has evidence, tons of evidence, extremely powerful evidence, evidence that continues to rapidly grow every single day as new discoveries are made in molecular biology and other branches of science. Evolution is an established truth.

In my blog I talk about why endogenous retroviruses are one of the most powerful evidences for evolution.

Of course no matter how strong the evidence is, no matter how overwhelming the evidence is, god-soaked evolution-deniers are willing to ignore it, lie about it, or just fail to understand it. Creationists always claim they know more about molecular biology than all the world's molecular biologists, when the truth is creationists don't even know what science is.

Why do creationists pretend to be knowledgeable about subjects they know absolutely nothing about? Could it be because they're the most bloody stupid people in human history?

Howard Fisher said...

Well then, Mr Ape,

I am certain you will be able to reproduce life coming into existence from non-life by demonstrating it through purely naturalistic methods. I look forward to your Nobel Prize for discovering "how it happened".

I am a Creationist for a lot of different reasons, one of which is the most obvious...or should be.

One reason is simple. In every aspect of your life, you live like a Creationist. You assume Creationism as part of your everyday world. You look at cars and think about how they were designed. Some cars you might say, "That designer was an idiot." Others you will say, "That designer was brilliant." One thing you will NEVER say is, "What a series of wonderful accidents brought about through natural selection and mutations and...."

Sir, the evidence is not the problem for the creationist. The problem is your rebellion against your Creator and your desire to suppress the truth of God in order to remain in your sin, guilt free.

Your presuppositions start with this irrational hatred of God as can be seen by your comment. So you must borrow from the Trinitarian Christian worldview in order to make yours even begin to work so that you might condemn the very system that allows your to exist.

The fact that you define science your way in order to clear the playing field is simply a method to scare everybody from admitting the truth of the creation around us. I guess you must be God since you get to define the rules of what is and what isn't, thereby winning the debate before it even begins.

I reject all of your false premises and false assumptions. Therefore, you don't get to automatically win.

RichardS said...

Human ape sounds like a chimp off the old block of Darwin. Everybody else is so ignorant, but of course his view cannot account for rationality and morality. Or, as you said, in every aspect of his life he lives like a Creationist. His problem, then, is not that he does not believe in God, but that he has hardened his heart and been hardened so that he hates God so much he tries to deny Him. But in his protestations against God he is demonstrating that he has been created in the image of God as well as how true the Fall is. So sad.

Howard Fisher said...

Richard,

You should check out his Blog. It is nauseating. I would ask very simple questions and was only ridiculed for asking them.

He has no idea that he has presuppositions. He has no idea how to answer the morality question. The most I got was "common sense" is the basis for morality. He think Creationists reject Natural Selection simply because we don't accept it as a method for how life came into existence.

I did offer a poor layman's answer to the interpretation of the Chromosome 2 "dilemma". However poor it may have been, he did not answer because (I think) if he did, it would show that he is arguing interpretations and not the evidence.

Anyway, I have the feeling that he really can't be for real. I have met many vitriolic and down right mean atheists. But he is nothing short of a Fundamentalist of the worst kind.