-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
For those not familiar with William Lane Craig (WLC), he is a Christian apologist and a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He debates atheists and he usually wins. He doesn’t win on the merits of his arguments but he is a skilled debater, while his opponents are not.
Tootie:
“The flush toilet was invented, what, about 3,000 years ago? The Roman’s invented just about everything we moderns invented and then some, except for the combustion engine and electricity.”
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The Romans also practiced human sacrifice, slavery, and were aggressive imperialists and militarists — traits I don’t think we want to emulate. Most Roman inventions are primitive by today’s standards and improvements have come aplenty to their basic inventiveness which was admittedly prodigious especially in the building arts.
On matters philosophical, we can do much better than the unintellectual musings of desert Bedouins, whom the Romans themselves found ill-refined, and “mischievous” as Suetonius explained. That the Romans adopted Christianity as a state religion says more about the astuteness of it leadership in promoting myth and manipulating its population with it, than about any acknowledgement of a deep seeded revelation into spirituality.
More bullshit doesn’t equate to a cogent argument against Darwin, Tootles. And as far as “intellectual tyranny” goes? You’d best not be throwing that stone, you old theocratic glass house you.
“The Short Proof of Evolution by Ian Johnston
Retired Instructor and Research Associate at
Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC
We live, we are constantly told, in a scientific age. We look to science to help us achieve the good life, to solve our problems (especially our medical aches and pains), and to tell us about the world. A great deal of our education system, particularly the post-secondary curriculum, is organized as science or social science. And yet, curiously enough, there is one major scientific truth which vast numbers of people refuse to accept (by some news accounts a majority of people in North America)–the fact of evolution. Yet it is as plain as plain can be that the scientific truth of evolution is so overwhelmingly established, that it is virtually impossible to refute within the bounds of reason. No major scientific truth, in fact, is easier to present, explain, and defend.
Before demonstrating this claim, let me make it clear what I mean by evolution, since there often is some confusion about the term. By evolution I mean, very simply, the development of animal and plant species out of other species not at all like them, for example, the process by which, say, a species of fish gets transformed (or evolves) through various stages into a cow, a kangaroo, or an eagle. This definition, it should be noted, makes no claims about how the process might occur, and thus it certainly does not equate the concept of evolution with Darwinian Natural Selection, as so many people seem to do. It simply defines the term by its effects (not by how those effects are produced, which could well be the subject of another argument).
The first step in demonstrating the truth of evolution is to make the claim that all living creatures must have a living parent. This point has been overwhelmingly established in the past century and a half, ever since the French scientist Louis Pasteur demonstrated how fermentation took place and thus laid to rest centuries of stories about beetles arising spontaneously out of dung or gut worms being miraculously produced from non-living material. There is absolutely no evidence for this ancient belief. Living creatures must come from other living creatures. It does no damage to this point to claim that life must have had some origin way back in time, perhaps in a chemical reaction of inorganic materials (in some primordial soup) or in some invasion from outer space. That may well be true. But what is clear is that any such origin for living things or living material must result in a very simple organism. There is no evidence whatsoever (except in science fiction like Frankenstein) that inorganic chemical processes can produce complex, multi-cellular living creatures (the recent experiments cloning sheep, of course, are based on living tissue from other sheep).
The second important point in the case for evolution is that some living creatures are very different from some others. This, I take it, is self-evident. Let me cite a common example: many animals have what we call an internal skeletal structure featuring a backbone and skull. We call these animals vertebrates. Most animals do not have these features (we call them invertebrates). The distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates is something no one who cares to look at samples of both can reasonably deny, and, so far as I am aware, no one hostile to evolution has ever denied a fact so apparent to anyone who observes the world for a few moments.
The final point in the case for evolution is this: simple animals and plants existed on earth long before more complex ones (invertebrate animals, for example, were around for a very long time before there were any vertebrates). Here again, the evidence from fossils is overwhelming. In the deepest rock layers, there are no signs of life. The first fossil remains are of very simple living things. As the strata get more recent, the variety and complexity of life increase (although not at a uniform rate). And no human fossils have ever been found except in the most superficial layers of the earth (e.g., battlefields, graveyards, flood deposits, and so on). In all the countless geological excavations and inspections (for example, of the Grand Canyon), no one has ever come up with a genuine fossil remnant which goes against this general principle (and it would only take one genuine find to overturn this principle).
Well, if we put these three points together, the rational case for evolution is air tight. If all living creatures must have a living parent, if living creatures are different, and if simpler forms were around before the more complex forms, then the more complex forms must have come from the simpler forms (e.g., vertebrates from invertebrates). There is simply no other way of dealing reasonably with the evidence we have. Of course, one might deny (as some do) that the layers of the earth represent a succession of very lengthy epochs and claim, for example, that the Grand Canyon was created in a matter of days, but this surely violates scientific observation and all known scientific processes as much as does the claim that, say, vertebrates just, well, appeared one day out of a spontaneous combination of chemicals.
To make the claim for the scientific truth of evolution in this way is to assert nothing about how it might occur. Darwin provides one answer (through natural selection), but others have been suggested, too (including some which see a divine agency at work in the transforming process). The above argument is intended, however, to demonstrate that the general principle of evolution is, given the scientific evidence, logically unassailable and that, thus, the concept is a law of nature as truly established as is, say, gravitation. That scientific certainty makes the widespread rejection of evolution in our modern age something of a puzzle (but that’s a subject for another essay). In a modern liberal democracy, of course, one is perfectly free to reject that conclusion, but one is not legitimately able to claim that such a rejection is a reasonable scientific stance.”
Buddha:
You wrote:
There’s your problem right there. A non-expert discussing technical subjects he clearly has no grasp of is often wrong.
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In the interest of transparency I provided you with that information about Hanegraaff. You are quite welcome.
What is worse than a non-expert discussing technical subjects he clearly has no grasp of?
Answer: An expert discussing technical subjects he clearly has no grasp of.
Like Darwin, for instance.
Of course, it is always the Christian who is ever to be more condemned for errors and blunders. Few were dissuaded from pursuing evolutionary theory despite the fact that scientists lied for decades about Java Man, Piltdown Man, and Peking Man. These bald-faced lies were used to prove evolution was true. But just have Aunt Myrtle make one wrong move and all of Christianity is to be discredited.
And let a scientist who says he is a Christian say something other than the status quo and the godless will laugh him or her to scorn.
You will note I USED quotes from a “real” “expert” [Colin Patterson] who clearly has the grasp of the subject. And I did that because I already knew ahead of time that (without any ever so clever discovery on your part) that I wasn’t an expert. Are you saying that Patterson never said those things just because Hanegraaff quoted them?.
To say that we cannot discuss something just because we are not experts is to kill learning and communication. That, of course, is nuts.
If we refer to experts (as I did with Patterson and all the experts HE conferred with) and we are careful about our discussion, we have every right to enter into any and all of the greatest discussions mankind has to offer. I’d say even if we weren’t that careful we’d have that right.
From where I stand you are taking the same stand the Church took against Copernicus, Galileo, and the regular folks who were interested in them. You act like I ought not to discuss things I’m not authorized to discuss.
Screw that and all other forms of intellectual tyranny.
By the way, the reason Gould tried to fix evolution with punctuated equilibrium [hahahahahahahaha] is in large part because HE recognized Darwinian evolution was in trouble.
Like we see here:
http://www.icr.org/article/darwins-evolutionary-tree-annihilated/
or here:
http://www.icr.org/article/real-nature-fossil-record/
You are going to have to look somewhere else. Just like the new generation of scientists will look once they break away from the old farts who are spewing nonsense and fairy tales to fit in with their goals to kill God.
Silly mortals.
Saying that there is no evidence for evolution and natural selection based upon the ravings of a Christian non-scientist comes to mind as evidence that you don’t UNDERSTAND science or know much about it, your amorous misapplications and outright non-scientific lies aside, Tootles.
Tony Sid:
You wrote:
“If you really liked science, Tootie, you wouldn’t go to such extreme lengths to deny the well established findings of scientists where and only where those findings contradict your biblical beliefs.
You have to lie about the findings of science, so that after excluding what you don’t agree with you can say, with some creative licence, that science supports your religious beliefs.
It’s transparent, it’s not something anybody reading your posts is likely to miss. It’s what you do.”
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A correction right off the top: I LOVE SCIENCE. That is why I can go on at length about it.
Please, prove to us all what lie I have made.
The only lie going around seems to be that I don’t like science.
mespo:
The flush toilet was invented, what, about 3,000 years ago? The Roman’s invented just about everything we moderns invented and then some, except for the combustion engine and electricity.
I reckon you might err in thinking we are smarter than they were since they had less time to practice the sciences than we do now and they thought these things long before we did. They also didn’t have the kinds of communications we have. Yet, the ancients showed a great genius and sophistication which only a modern barbarian could dismiss.
You wrote:
“If we are endowed by our creator with discriminating minds, then I believe we are entitled to use them to critique and reject the foolishness of Iron Age men seeking to run our lives from the past using their ancient “holy” books fulls of lies, superstition, and outright debauchery.”
Please let me discriminate as well.
If time is your criteria for determining who or who not to listen to, then please let me join in. Your comments to me were at 9:03 am.
Times up. I don’t believe what people say more than 2 hours ago.
If you can set time limits on who you will believe in the great conversation running throughout the human race that spans the many millennium, then so can I. The only difference is where we draw the line. You draw your lines where you wish and I draw mine where I wish.
Isn’t this fun? We get to dismiss people according to when they spoke.
Thank you all.
One lives to be of service.
NAL
I’m glad you don’t hate him.
Buddha wrote:
“The Bible is no more the literal truth than another collection of tales: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Which are also the second hand retelling of tales cobbled together by a couple of guys. Only their agenda wasn’t to control Christendom, but rather to entertain children. Which, come to think of it, really isn’t that different from the agenda of the Council of Nicaea.”
There’s that “breath of fresh air” again…
” The Bible is no more the literal truth than another collection of tales: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Which are also the second hand retelling of tales cobbled together by a couple of guys. Only their agenda wasn’t to control Christendom, but rather to entertain children. Which, come to think of it, really isn’t that different from the agenda of the Council of Nicaea.”
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… and damn good reading! Bravo Buddha
” The Bible is no more the literal truth than another collection of tales: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Which are also the second hand retelling of tales cobbled together by a couple of guys. Only their agenda wasn’t to control Christendom, but rather to entertain children. Which, come to think of it, really isn’t that different from the agenda of the Council of Nicaea.”
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Adroit, astute, and unassailable.
Tootles,
I’ll get off the floor about the time you start to make sense. And what have you got against dogs? Aside from the fact that they often make more sense than you do?
“Hank Hanegraaff (a Christian lecturer, and not a scientist).”
There’s your problem right there. A non-expert discussing technical subjects he clearly has no grasp of is often wrong. It’d be, oh I don’t know, almost like a theocratic zealot talking about secular representative Constitutional democracy as a rationalization for religious law.
“In other words Darwin had no clue how complex the interior world of organisms was when he established his theory.”
Too bad DNA only corroborates the process of natural selection.
More Hanegraaff nonsense: “We have even fewer example of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”
Really? Accept for molecular biology which has shown that DNA and RNA actually keep records of transition that can be measured to show the degree of divergence in organisms.
Oh, and the discovery of fossils like the shallow water Tiktaalik which show anatomical evidence of the transition from water to land animals in their skeletal structure and Archaeopteryx which ties birds to theropod dinosaurs. And the discovery of new hominid species like homo floresiensis. And and and . . . I could go on, but Hanegraaff is simply full of crap about their being less evidence for evolution and the process of natural selection because there is indeed quite a bit more than in Darwin’s time. There is not only more fossil evidence, there is more chemical evidence.
The only person duped here is you, Tootles.
Duped by a book cobbled together from a bunch of second hand accounts of the life of Jesus by a bunch of men with distinct political agendas at the Council of Nicaea because you think it’s the literal truth. In composition and as evidence? The Bible is no more the literal truth than another collection of tales: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Which are also the second hand retelling of tales cobbled together by a couple of guys. Only their agenda wasn’t to control Christendom, but rather to entertain children. Which, come to think of it, really isn’t that different from the agenda of the Council of Nicaea.
If you really liked science, Tootie, you wouldn’t go to such extreme lengths to deny the well established findings of scientists where and only where those findings contradict your biblical beliefs.
You have to lie about the findings of science, so that after excluding what you don’t agree with you can say, with some creative licence, that science supports your religious beliefs.
It’s transparent, it’s not something anybody reading your posts is likely to miss. It’s what you do.
Tootie:
“If you are looking for rational or scientific explanations for how we got here the smart thing to do would be to look elsewhere. But you are old fashioned and stuck in an intellectual rut unable to expand your mind about the new and myriad scientific clues around us leading away from evolution.”
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Regardless of the shortcomings of Darwin’s work, it makes infinitely more sense and enjoys more evidentiary support than the fantastic beliefs of any religion including the nomadic religions like Christianity and Islam. That is the point you enjoy avoiding.
If we are endowed by our creator with discriminating minds, then I believe we are entitled to use them to critique and reject the foolishness of Iron Age men seeking to run our lives from the past using their ancient “holy” books fulls of lies, superstition, and outright debauchery.
Tootie:
I can’t hate something that exists only in someone’s imagination.
Lottakatz:
You are confusing the ability of organisms to adapt biologically with the ability of organisms to become OTHER organisms.
You are confusing natural selection, which is the selection of genetic material ALREADY present in an organism, with the creation of NEW genetic material hitherto not present before in an organism (as described by evolution).
The bacteria (or viruses) you speak of are still the same organism. They have not become OTHER creatures, let alone other species.
This might help:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/is-natural-selection-evolution
BIL:
Please, get off the floor. That is where the dogs sit.
During Darwin’s time the human egg was thought to be merely a blob of gel. Come to find out (and come to understand the very limited knowledge Darwin actually had) the human egg is
“…the size of a pinhead, contains chemical instructions that would fill more than five hundred thousand printed pages. The genetic information contained in this ‘encyclopedia’ determines the potential physical aspect of the developing human from height to hair color. In time, the fertilized egg divides into 30 trillion cells that make up the human body, including 12 billion brain cells, which form more than 120 trillion connections.” Fatal Flaws, Hank Hanegraaff (a Christian lecturer, and not a scientist) pg 46-47
In other words Darwin had no clue how complex the interior world of organisms was when he established his theory. (This goes to show that what we see isn’t necessarily what we think it is). Had he known how complex organisms really were he might not have come to the conclusions he arrived at as they conflict with one another.
By this measure alone Darwin was nearly clueless. He only had general macro observations and wild guesses which were and remain scientifically unproven (in terms of transitional forms showing the evolutionary progress of complex organisms becoming other species).
By-the-way, if merely writing a book automatically makes a person right, then Hanegraaff is as correct as Darwin. But even Hanegraaff makes intellectual errors. No, I don’t believe that just because Darwin wrote a book that means he has to be right.
If only Darwin was as excoriated for his errors as Christians are for theirs!
More from Hanegraaff:
“Raup, curator of the Filed Museum of Natural History in Chicago, underscores this fact: ‘We are now about 120 years after Darwin, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much…We have even fewer example of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.” page 17
In other words, the more they investigate what is necessary to prove Darwin’s theory that the fossil evidence will prove him right, the worse things get.
Hanegraaff again:
“Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the prestigious British Museum of Natural History, which houses the world’s largest fossil collection–60 million specimens–confessed, ‘If I knew of any [evolutionary transitions], fossil or living, I would certainly have included them [in my book Evolution].’ His statement underscores the fact that the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. No verifiable transitions from one species to another have as yet been found…
…[Patterson says} For over twenty years I thought I was working on evolution…[But] there was not one thing I knew about it…So for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: ‘Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?’ I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long and eventually one person said, ‘Yes, I do know one thing–IT OUGHT NOT TO BE TAUGHT IN HIGH SCHOOL.’…During the past few years…you have experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith…Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.” (my emphasis) Fatal Flaws, page 30
It appears you have been duped by your school teachers. And you fell for it. You want to believe evolution is true when it cannot be. Why is that? Is it in order to kill God or Jesus? That won’t work. Someday you will bend down low and acknowledge him as creator (even if you hate him).
If you are looking for rational or scientific explanations for how we got here the smart thing to do would be to look elsewhere. But you are old fashioned and stuck in an intellectual rut unable to expand your mind about the new and myriad scientific clues around us leading away from evolution.
Your insistence on the thoroughly discredited hoax of evolution would seem to indicate that you are not interested in the truth, but only anything that could destroy Christianity or religion.
That is not very scientific.
And Stephen Gould isn’t going to save you from these problems either. The more he tried to repair evolution the higher on the kook-o-meter the guy registered.
May he rest in peace.
Gee, and I slept all night.
Tony…
My response is “You only think YOU can determine what other people really think”.
Tony Sidaway:
You said: “Tootie, you only think you like science.
And to that I say, Tony you only think can determine what other people really think.
Clearly, you must be a god.
Nal:
You wrote “There can be no accommodation between science and religion.”
This statement is a result of YOUR faith (whatever that may be).
You have no proof that there is no accommodation between science and religion. Your comment is more of an edict you issue like a King and others are supposed to bow down and obey.
Who elected you or any scientist to be this King? Yourselves?
How convenient!
How full of faith you all are!
The Priests of Science must be believed! And they say so! LOL
On the other hand I know that the foundations of the modern science we see around us today was laid in good measure by those who most certainly believed in God–and specifically Jesus Chris–and had not one bit of difficultly accommodating or harmonizing the two.
Would you rob them of their faith ex post facto just because YOUR faith that science and religion cannot accommodate each other must be the supreme opinion (even though you fail to prove it is)?
Your “religion and science” cannot accommodate business is an A PRIORI justification you wish to pass off as the result and conclusion of your testing the evidence and providing us with the proof. It is not. It is a predetermination. A presupposition.
In other words you are probably doing exactly what you are accusing me of doing: being unscientific.
It appears you brought your preconceived conclusion to the table before you began to determine if it was factually true or not. I suggest that at a minimum, the scientific method would be to assume that PERHAPS science and religion can accommodate each other in some way (no matter how small).
You started with the idea that science and religion cannot accommodate and you have (surprise!) ended with the idea that science and religion cannot accommodate each other.
“Albert Einstein wrote that the harmony of natural law ‘reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and action of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.’ Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, spoke of the ‘laws of motion prescribed by the author of things.’ Rene Descartes, who created our modern concept of ‘natural law.’ wrote of the ‘laws which God has put into nature.”…
…It was partly because Michael Faraday believed that God was the unifying source behind the design of all phenomena that he discovered the fundamental relations between light and magnetism, and he came up with the concepts that laid the groundwork for modern electromagnetic field theory. Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, wrote that in finding these natural laws he was merely ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.’ Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, and Isaac Newton both went so far as to conclude that the divine Lawgiver could ‘vary the laws of nature’ at His will. Newton said that the solar system was ‘not explicable by mere natural causes,’ and that its structure could only be attributed to ‘the counsel or contrivance of a voluntary agent’.”
Fred Heeren, “Show Me God” pages 175, 176.
The above lends itself to the idea that science and religion already do accommodate each other in some small way and that door isn’t shut.