The evolutionist’s comical dogma

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM The evolutionist’s comical dogma Exclusive: Alan Keyes highlights irony of Darwinists’ ‘it just happened’ explanation Posted: December 18, 2009 1:00 am Eastern By Alan Keyes I am continually impressed with the incongruity of our situation as Americans. We live in a country where the form of government (a constitutional republic framed to secure unalienable rights by implementing the principle that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the people) logically and historically depends upon an idea of human justice that appeals to the authority of the Creator. But it is also a country where the most widely accepted and enforced paradigm for human knowledge (empirical science) is held to require the exclusion of creation as a rational explanation for the existence of human life. I again experienced this impression recently as I read an article about the controversy in which Stephen Meyer’s book “The Signature in the Cell” continues to simmer. Meyer is an expositor of the challenging questions DNA-related advances in the scientific account of biological mechanisms pose to those who have used evolutionary theory as the preferred WMD in their war against God, or what their atheist polemarch-in-chief has attacked as “The God Delusion.” In his book, Meyer gives an account of the path of rational inquiry along which he encountered the questions he explores. They appear to be inherent in the peculiar characteristics of living matter that give rise to the distinction between physics and biology, and so far continue to justify that distinction even in the presence of the reductionist implications of contemporary nuclear physics. According to Meyer’s account, it was not his faith in the existence of a Creator that gave rise to the questions. Rather, it is the rational cogency of the questions that impels him and others like him toward the hypothesis of a “master programmer” whose intelligent predispositions would account for the complex encoding of material substances now identified as the key to explaining the activities of even the simplest living organisms. The theory that fooled the world – read “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design” At the very least, the deep encoding of matter that appears to underlie the mechanisms of life appears to cast a shadow over the significance of the supposedly wonderful achievement represented by Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to the evolutionists, this achievement involved empirically accounting for the panoply of life, the crowning glory of the intelligently ordered and consummately coordinated phenomena of the natural world, without positing the existence and will of a consummately intelligent being as the source of that order. But a dogmatic emotionalism seems to drive those who ridicule and seek to ban any consideration of the “intelligent design” hypothesis. This thoroughly unscientific dogmatism feeds the suspicion that the pride and satisfaction many of its admirers take in Darwin’s supposed breakthrough has nothing at all to do with its contribution to the progress of science. After all, biology is not the only natural science that greatly benefits from the assumption that natural events don’t “just happen” but instead reflect an ordered relation of cause and effect governed by a discoverable rule. Aristotle was probably right to see this assumption of intelligibility in nature as the key first step toward natural philosophy. It may in fact be the prerequisite for any and all scientific knowledge in the strict sense of the term. Yet the evolution theorists have succeeded in imposing the view that the epitome of scientific understanding lies in accepting the notion that, given enough time, things just happen – marvelous things that seem to be the result of intelligence and intention but are in fact just random events. It has obviously proven useful to mark out fortuitous moments (stretches of the space-time continuum) in which a certain appearance of rule-governed order is allowed to contradict the reality of prevailing chaos. Indeed, the activities and inventions made possible by doing so are in other contexts the solid basis for praising and promoting scientific endeavors. But the predictability and precision that allowed people to fashion rocket ships and ride them to the moon; build electrical devices to make certain aspects of life vastly more convenient and comfortable; or devise electronic engines that digest and transmit vast quantities of data in a few instants; these are not the sine qua non of scientific validity. Instead, the true scientist must recognize the hallmark of scientific rigor as adherence to an understanding that reduces our explanation of the meticulous and orderly patterns we increasingly find, even in what we once thought to be the entirely random and unique flotsam and jetsam of natural events (like snowstorms or hurricanes or the lives of a cell), to the profound observation that, given enough time, an intricate, deeply improbable order of things just happens. (Column continues below) There is something comically irrational about this kind of dogmatism, something that reeks of the sort of willful intention that clouds and impairs rational analysis. It bespeaks a state of mind quite the opposite of the selfless reflectivity that keeps careful account of what happens so as to understand what is happening. This is what distinguishes scientific experiment from mere experience, and the achievements of human scientific knowledge from the merely cunning prowess of the less intelligent animals. The general theory of evolution purports to explain the causal origin of life. But it does so ironically, as it denies both the external ordering essential to the concept of causality and the inward causality essential to the concept of life. The very idea of evolution implies arrangement toward a goal. Why, then, do evolutionists insist that in order to be scientific, one must deny that, as such, the goal exists? It exists, they might respond, but only as a convenient matter of perception. But if this convenient perception is the essential feature of scientific knowing, what is science but a convenient delusion, distinguished from other useful delusions mainly by the warrant it denies to Divine power? Perhaps, as Erwin Shrodinger’s example implied at the conclusion of his examination of the question “What is life?”, the true aim and achievement of evolution theory is this very denial, which makes way for the assertion that the only order worth knowing is the one we ourselves, all godlike, impose upon an otherwise pointless chaos. But if this is the aim, then the theory of evolution isn’t science after all. For the aim of science is to perfect what we know, not to assert, against all the evidence of our mind and experience, what our ambition drives us to become.

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Where Chairman Mao and Teenage Nihilists Got Their Motivation

 

Nov 12, 2009 — What propelled Mao Zhedong to become the biggest mass murderer in world history?  Let a professor of Chinese history answer the question.  James Pusey (Bucknell U), writing in Nature this week for a series on “Global Darwin,”¹ was explaining the vacuum left by the collapse of the reform movement in the early 20th century.  A “group of intellectuals” found Marxism attractive.  It was the fittest ideology:

Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intellectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive.
    This was not, of course, all Darwin’s doing, but Darwin was involved in it all.  To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped).  One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a ‘racial’ struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
    Who taught Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.

The ideology that led Mao to murder 77 million of his own people (11/30/2005) began with a view of nature that values struggle and fitness over the individual.  Though acknowledging that the political currents in China were complex, with reformers like Yan Fu and Sun Yat-sen incorporating Darwinian principles without radical revolution, Pusey placed the worldview that empowered Marxist ideology squarely at the feet of Darwin.  Darwin was Mao’s ideological mentor.

    Darwinian ideas can produce murderous results in individuals, too.  The Sunday Times Online printed an article that described the Darwinian motivations behind some of the serial killers of recent memory.  “The naturalist [Darwin] outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists,” Dennis Sewell wrote.  “Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers.” 

Despite Darwin’s personal reputation as an “amiable Victorian gent,” Sewell continued, he “has been fingered as a racist, an apologist for genocide, and the inspiration of a string of psychopathic killers.”  The shooters at Columbine High School, for instance, saw themselves as eliminators of the weak.  Harris wore “Natural Selection” on his T-shirt the day of the shooting spree.  Many other artifacts gathered afterwards, described in the article, uncovered the boys’ fascination with “survival of the fittest.”

    In 2007, detectives intercepted a school shooting in Pennsylvania.  They “discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army,” the article says.  Sewell discussed a personality cult around Harris and Klebold in certain chatrooms and websites, including a computer game that lets the player act out the massacre. 

“Natural Selection” apparel is hot with these aficionados, and “‘Natural Selection’ is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another – a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence.”  Another case is the killing spree in 2007 in Finland by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who declared in his manifesto before the event that he was a social Darwinist wanting to weed out the unfit.  In his words: “It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

 Sewell acknowledged that Darwin himself would have been horrified by all this.  He knows that other great figures have been used by murderers as their inspiration.  Still, he was not ready to let the bearded old man off the hook.  “One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance…. Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved,” he continued. 

These simple (and simplistic) ideas are certainly accessible to disturbed adolescents who feel nothing stops them from taking natural law into their own hands.  And Darwin himself wrote in 1881, “Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

 Sewell is author of the book The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics.  His Times article was published on the Science page, not the Opinion page.  On page 2, he continued supporting his premise that Darwin’s views feed into the nihilism behind high school shootings – and political genocides – because it destroys all moral restraint.  One particular example shows this is not an isolated interpretation. 

He said, “Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang ‘Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free’ – lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel.”  With a gospel like that, no wonder some go beyond the mere abandonment of sexual mores taught by their parents.  “But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.” 

Sewell ended by pointing out that we cannot begin to address the issues when presented only with a “bowdlerized account of Darwin’s work” – i.e., a sanitized version portraying Darwin as a scientific saint.  He said, “The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called ‘Darwinism’ — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it – are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic].”

---

1.  James Pusey, “Global Darwin: Revolutionary road,” Nature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a.

You have just seen what two scholars said who were not intelligent design leaders, creationists, or Bible-thumping preachers.  If you will not listen to the latter, then listen to the former.  You heard them saying what the preachers would have said anyway.  Let’s recap the list of principles that Pusey said you have to believe in to be a Marxist:

1. Inexorable forces push mankind to inevitable progress (are we there yet?)
2. There are set stages of progress (which can be skipped; e.g., by revolution).
3. History is a story of violent struggle (i.e., violence, not peace, is the ultimate reality).
4. The struggle is between classes or races (meaning, genocide is sometimes a moral obligation).
5. The individual must be severely subordinated to the group (so you are just a pawn in a game played by forces of nature).
6. An enlightened group must lead the people for their own good (e.g., the Communist Party leaders, who lived more royally than Czars, while their people suffered in famines and cramped apartments or in prison camps).
7. People must not be humane to their enemies (or to the unfit).
8. The forces of history assure victory to those who struggle (i.e., evolve or perish; eliminate the Mother Theresas and hospitals who unnaturally prolong the life of the unfit).

Again: who taught the Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.
    What a world we live in.  On one side you have radical revolutionaries and teenage nihilists killing for Darwin.  On the other you have radical Muslims killing for Allah.  What to do?  Run not to the poorly-named Scientific Gospel, or to any self-proclaimed messiah who’s dead, but to the true gospel of the risen Lord Jesus Christ.  Run to the true Messiah who gave his life for his friends.  Run to Teacher whose two greatest commandments were to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  Notice how un-Darwinian his Sermon on the Mount is.  The truth, not randomness, will set you free.  The truth will lead to a flourishing free society based on individual responsibility and charity.  You will know teachers of lies and teachers of the truth by their fruits.
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Male and Female

http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2009/10/here-we-go-again.html

The Brilliant Charles Darwin

Original Link

When we give away 170,000 copies of Origin of Species to university students in November, I want every one of the 170,000 students to make sure they don’t stop at the Introduction. I want them to thoroughly read Origin of Species.

When I read the book I was impressed with the brilliance of Charles Darwin. If he was alive today I am sure that he would quickly rise to the top of Disney’s imagineers, or earn big bucks as a Hollywood screenwriter for science fiction movies.

Among other things, Darwin noted that black bears swam for hours with their mouths open, catching insects in the water. He believed that if they kept their mouths open all day, every day (for a long period of time), that they would acquire “larger and larger mouths, until a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”

Students can read his own explanation as to why there is no empirical evidence for his theory–that all “intermediate varieties” have disappeared–just like the Mormon’s golden plates that the angel Moroni supposedly gave to Joseph Smith. There’s one big difference though between the golden plates and the intermediate varieties. The Mormon’s say that only two golden plates are missing. Darwin says that millions of fossils (what he referred to as “innumerable”) are missing. After 150 years of searching, the missing links are still missing.

Students can read about how the giraffe’s tail evolved because it needed it to swish away flies. Think of how many millions of years the poor animal had to put up with those pesky flies before the tail evolved so that it could do its work. They can also read how Darwin wondered if the vulture became bald (over millions of years) because it kept putting its head into rotting meat. But he advised caution because “the head of the clean-feeding turkey is also naked.” Students may also notice that millions of men are bald, and hopefully doubt that it’s because their ancestors rubbed their foreheads into rotting meat.

In Darwin’s book, nothing is as God created it. God didn’t create the giraffe with a tail to swish away flies. Neither did He create the vulture or turkey with a bald head. Instead, all of creation miraculously evolved–from the bear’s mouths to the giraffe’s tail, and for some reason it has all reached the point of maturity during our lifetime, and (after millions of years of redundancy) now functions as it was intended. Move over J. R. R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clark and J. K. Rowling. These three combined don’t hold a candle to Charles Darwin. Most of their fans know their writings were fantasy. Darwin’s faithful followers don’t.

There’s a lot of anger in the atheist community about our Origin of Species giveaway. Many have resorted to asking how I would like it if Richard Dawkins published a Bible and put his own Introduction in the front. How would I like it? I would be delighted if he would go to such trouble and expense. I want to get the Scriptures into the hands of every man, woman and child on this earth, and if he would help reach that goal I would be overjoyed.

If students were given the Richard Dawkin’s Bible and they read where he speaks of God as being “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully,” they could check the Bible for themselves to see if it is true. Or when they are told that the Scriptures teach that the sun goes around the earth, or that the earth is flat, they can instantly check for themselves, because Richard Dawkins gave them a Bible.

I’m not so insecure in my belief system that I feel threatened by such a thought. Not in the slightest. Go for it professor. I will help you give them out.

Notes:
Origin of Species, chapter 6 “Difficulties on Theory.”
Ibid
Ibid