Many of us will say you can believe in Christ or Science. However, whether one would like to believe it or not; there are athiest and Christians I know that believe in evolution for the same reasons. My friend told me the other day, "If one believes in evolution then you may not believe in Christ". I am writing this blog as a repost from facebook. Many don't understand how I can be a Christian who believes in evolution and the geological view of the age of the universe and the earth. I will simply as possible address evolution. Geological views deserve a blog by itself, but I may or may not depending on response. Note that I am not a writer, so expect so grammar mistakes.
For years Christians have been in every aspect of science; whether it is biology, geology, chemistry, etc... Science deals with the natural world, looking for natural causes for natural phenomenon. It's not a perfect system, yet it is the best means that we have to find the true nature of nature. In science, we like to say that we will try to prove something by running sets of tests,analyze data, so on,and so forth (you get the idea). The term prove comes from the latin "probare" meaning to probe. Thus, we probe the truth in search of truth: we are very aware of our perceptive faculties, and our flaws, so you may often see error bars in science . These bars will give an approximation to maximum error, but not the actual error. As I stated earlier, science isn't perfect, its simply the best proposed mechanism we have. The central dogma of science is that there is no central dogma, because the outcomes from scientific studies can be overturned. Uncertainty and doubt are essential to science. It accepts that we as humans have flaws and addresses it correctly. All advancements come from previous advancements. Until I knew the rock of ages, I only knew the age of rocks. I simply desired to explore my geological environment.
Truth does not contradict truth.God is not a deceitful God; "Why should God be so clear in the Bible,and so obscure in the world?"- Carl Sagen. If the God you believe in works by deception, maybe you should re-evaluate what type of God you are worshipping. Is this the God who the Bible says is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14:33)? Or would this be Satan as Christ addresses? (John 8:44)
John Burroughs, a writer and naturalist, once said "A stone teaches more than it preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral." . We have to realize some important things in regards to religion and science. Science addresses the natural things that may be tested naturally. Religion address the supernatural. Another way to say it could be that religion tells you how to go to heaven while science tells you how the heavens go (heavens meaning sky for all you nitpicky people). Thus, it cannot test things that are supernatural, so the "creationist" science is actually not science at all. Science approaches the world with reason. Religion approaches the world with faith. I realize that some Christians may give me crap about this, but in science you have to have faith as well. Science is from the latin "scientia" meaning knowledge. It is roughly the process that organizes knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses. That is the big reason why "creation science" is not science.
I would like to take a moment to discuss the logical fallacies that I have seen when people address evolution. I love to hear about the many ways to come to address situations like evolution, religion, and etc. The problem that I hear a lot is that as soon as someone hears something they don't like such as evolution, then the logical fallacies fall like hail from the sky. A logical fallacy is roughly an error in logical reasoning. Fallacious reasoning keeps us from knowing the truth, and the inability to think critically makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those skilled in the art of rhetoric. Now, I say these things, yet know that I am encouraging others to respond to me and reveal to me any logical fallacies that I may have not previously seen. By far the most common logical fallacy that I hear of when evolution is addressed is the logical fallacy of personal incredulity otherwise known as the argument from ignorance. "I can't understand how evolution can happen",or "I don't understand your mechanism, so your proposed mechanism is wrong. I will replace your proposed mechanism with (whatever), because I can understand or I like (whatever)." Just because you can't understand something that happens doesn't mean that it can't happen. If you are one of those people then I would encourage you to think about this. Saying evidence isn't there is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. The evidence is substantial, so just because there are some things that aren't understood that doesn't mean that the whole concept is false. If you do this you throw out the essential and the inessential. This concept is an act of misleading vividness in which a very small number of particularly dramatic events are taken to outweigh a significant amount of statistical evidence. These types of arguments simply hold up.
A large part of the reason why many creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is because they don't address evolution, but rather argue against a set of misunderstandings that people are right to consider ludicrous. They wrongly believe that their understanding of evolution is what the theory of evolution really says, and declare evolution banished when they haven't even addressed the topic of evolution. There are four common misconceptions on evolutions. The misconceptions build on another logical fallacy known as the straw man fallacy. The straw man fallacy is roughly an argument that is based on a misrepresentation of an opponents position. This sort of reasoning is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position. So, if you hear anyone making any of these, chances are excellent that they don't know enough about the real theory of evolution to make informed opinions about it.
1. Evolution hasn't been observed.
2. There are no transitional fossils.
3. Evolution is all random and completely by chance
4. It's only a theory. It hasn't been proved.
Evolution hasn't been observed... take 1...
Most of the argument is due to that our public isn't well informed about it. Evolution can be simply defined as a change in the gene pool of a population over time. One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides over the period of a few years. We see this today with the bedbug outbreak. If you don't believe me just google it in order to see further details for yourself. Even most Creationists recognize that evolution at this level is a fact. What they don't appreciate is that this rate of evolution is all that is required to produce the diversity of all living things from a common ancestor.
There are no transitional fossils... get jealous...
To speak from this argument, I would assume people do there homework on fossils, but I am afraid not. To state this argument is simply false. Through paleontology we have come a long way since Origin of Species was published. We have a much more extensive fossil record, but I must also state that the fossil record is incomplete due to the conditions neccessary to provide fossilization. You need optimal conditions and times of deposition and not erosion. That is precisely why we don't have dinosaur bones around Louisville. We have devonian and silurian age rock here. All of the cretaceous age rocks were eroded away. In the geological record we know this happens. For fossils, before I go into a long speech about rocks, consider the evolution of the whale. I have provided a picture below as a reference point. If you don't believe me further look up more information on facts. I still have to cover more points.
Evolution is all random and completely by chance (seriously?)
This is a complete misunderstanding of evolution. Simply stating this argument most likely means you have no clue what evolution speak about. Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance may be in the form of mutations, providing genetic variation, which is the raw material that natural selection has to work with, but from there, natural selection sorts out certain variations. Some mutations may be favorable and some mutations may be unfavorable. Less favorable mutations are selected out or weeded out. By this process you do not randomly select traits, but rather the best traits are chosen and are used.
The theory of evolution has not been proved.... really?
The actual definition of evolution is a change in allele frequencies over time. Most people seem to associate the word "evolution" mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. They are not exactly the same thing. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena"
I figured I would throw a last little picture of something you can see on artificial evolution. The domestic dog like my picture of my old dog Sage when he was 7 weeks (Canis lupus familiaris) compared to a gray wolf (Canis lupus) which was the original domesticated animal that yielded the cross breeds that we now enjoy and play fetch with today.
Intelligent Design
Just to verify. When I say that Intelligent Design has been disproven; it is implied that it is disproven as science. It could very well be true, but it is neither able to be proven nor disproven. Therefore, it is not science. It is a theol...ogical view not a scientific view.
If you are curious about the irreducible complexity issue then I would check out when Michael Behe was on trial. Check out the testimonies from both the plaintiff and the defense. You will see that Behe says that there are structures that are so complex that if you try to take away any part of them then they will fall apart and wont work. So how could you get there by gradual process? (this is a cut and dry example of personal incredulity)
He says that by irreducible complexity, I mean a single system that is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function and the removal of any one of these parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex cannot be produced gradually by slight successive modification of a precursor system since any precursor to any irreducibly complex system is by definition non-functional. Then he talks about the motor flagellum of bacteria or the immune system invertebrates.
It’s interesting in the court case he was involved with because he was asked if he had read any articles about precursors to the flagellum or the immune system by which a pathway can be seen to get the supposedly irreducibly complex systems through a natural selection process. His response... no He hadn’t read any of them. Now these are scientific journals writing on the very thing that he is saying can’t be explain, and yet in the journals it is being explained. There are 3 things that he is overlooking. There may even be more than that, but remember I am not brilliant. You can make things that seem irreducibly complex through a gradual process if certain things happen.
Improvements become necessities. I.e. Given system needs A, or it will die without A. Then a mutation happens causing B, B causes the system to work more efficiently than A alone. Now they work together. You can live without B, but you can see the value of it. Therefore, it will spread through the population through natural selection thus adding new biochemical components. There may also be removal of a function. If it’s deleterious then natural selection will of course knock it out. Let’s say a mutation occurs that removes the component that A has to do the job alone. This isn’t a problem. It’s so valuable it spreads through the population due to its value. For natural selection the 2nd mutation is considered neutral. Through neutral drift all the members of the given population will inherit it. Now, A and B are both essential, so the system is now irreducibly complex. This is one way to get an irreducibly complex system, and this process is can be multiplied. It will eventually appear to appear as a Rube Goldberg apparatus.
I could speak further about the Bola spider in production with moth pheromones to attract moths, but I will not speak too much about it. There is enough information out there to find information on these things. I would encourage anyone looking at the topic of irreducible complex systems to look at scientific journals. If you don’t look carefully then you will find articles that mainly Christians put out that are filled with logical fallacies. I am not trying to belittle my Christian brothers, yet encourage them that if you are going to interpret science you should at least try legitimate scientific journals.
Another thing that Behe overlooks is what I will call scaffolding. You can think of an arch, if you take away a piece of the arch then it will fall. It is irreducibly complex. To build the arch, you first build a scaffolding. The arch is built over the scaffolding. Remove the scaffolding and the arch will stand. Nature does this. It happens over and over again. We can see this with the first creature to ever have an air bladder. A fish in the water didnt use it for breathing, but for bouyancy in the water. Through time they must have gulped extra oxygen using less and less of their gills eventually there were a spiecies that didnt even the the scaffolding here the gills. The air bladder slowly turns into lungs.
If you are curious about the irreducible complexity issue then I would check out when Michael Behe was on trial. Check out the testimonies from both the plaintiff and the defense. You will see that Behe says that there are structures that are so complex that if you try to take away any part of them then they will fall apart and wont work. So how could you get there by gradual process? (this is a cut and dry example of personal incredulity)
He says that by irreducible complexity, I mean a single system that is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function and the removal of any one of these parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex cannot be produced gradually by slight successive modification of a precursor system since any precursor to any irreducibly complex system is by definition non-functional. Then he talks about the motor flagellum of bacteria or the immune system invertebrates.
It’s interesting in the court case he was involved with because he was asked if he had read any articles about precursors to the flagellum or the immune system by which a pathway can be seen to get the supposedly irreducibly complex systems through a natural selection process. His response... no He hadn’t read any of them. Now these are scientific journals writing on the very thing that he is saying can’t be explain, and yet in the journals it is being explained. There are 3 things that he is overlooking. There may even be more than that, but remember I am not brilliant. You can make things that seem irreducibly complex through a gradual process if certain things happen.
Improvements become necessities. I.e. Given system needs A, or it will die without A. Then a mutation happens causing B, B causes the system to work more efficiently than A alone. Now they work together. You can live without B, but you can see the value of it. Therefore, it will spread through the population through natural selection thus adding new biochemical components. There may also be removal of a function. If it’s deleterious then natural selection will of course knock it out. Let’s say a mutation occurs that removes the component that A has to do the job alone. This isn’t a problem. It’s so valuable it spreads through the population due to its value. For natural selection the 2nd mutation is considered neutral. Through neutral drift all the members of the given population will inherit it. Now, A and B are both essential, so the system is now irreducibly complex. This is one way to get an irreducibly complex system, and this process is can be multiplied. It will eventually appear to appear as a Rube Goldberg apparatus.
I could speak further about the Bola spider in production with moth pheromones to attract moths, but I will not speak too much about it. There is enough information out there to find information on these things. I would encourage anyone looking at the topic of irreducible complex systems to look at scientific journals. If you don’t look carefully then you will find articles that mainly Christians put out that are filled with logical fallacies. I am not trying to belittle my Christian brothers, yet encourage them that if you are going to interpret science you should at least try legitimate scientific journals.
Another thing that Behe overlooks is what I will call scaffolding. You can think of an arch, if you take away a piece of the arch then it will fall. It is irreducibly complex. To build the arch, you first build a scaffolding. The arch is built over the scaffolding. Remove the scaffolding and the arch will stand. Nature does this. It happens over and over again. We can see this with the first creature to ever have an air bladder. A fish in the water didnt use it for breathing, but for bouyancy in the water. Through time they must have gulped extra oxygen using less and less of their gills eventually there were a spiecies that didnt even the the scaffolding here the gills. The air bladder slowly turns into lungs.
Duplication and divergence is another thing. A gene can make a copy of itself, and that copy of itself can drift of into new forms. Gene A makes into gene A’, but A or A’ can drift away from one another because A or A’ is nailing down the job that was originally designed for this biochemical. This new gene can begin toexplore new design space with new innovations that enable it to work even better.
Irreducible complexity is an intellectual bankrupt idea SCIENTIFICALLY. It’s not testable. It’s not science.
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