5) Evolution is just bad science
Let me just start by saying that I'm surprised evolution is even given the time of day by anyone other than evolutionary biologists. It is a useless theory. It makes no predictions, has led to no advances in technology, and has zero impact on any other branch of science. I'm trying to find something just as useless to which I can compare it but I really can't think of any other trivia that's quite as useless. Maybe if someone studied the relationship between the names given to frogs in jumping contests and their number of wins, you might find something close except that there would at least be value to the owners of frogs if a correlation were found. He he he.
Remember too that most scientists who believe in evolution practice a brand of science where only natural explanations are ever considered for any phenomenon. According to them, miracles cannot happen. Period. This doesn't include just the creation, it also means there was no virgin birth, no healing of the sick, no feeding of the multitudes, no walking on water, no calming a storm, and no resurrection! Christians who compromise on Genesis often believe they are making Christianity more appealing to the masses. Maybe it does – but only by removing the omnipotent God who is the object of our worship and replacing Him with an impotent god who is a slave to the physical laws he supposedly created and is indistinguishable from dumb luck. To an evolutionist, believing God guides evolution is akin to saying gravity is accomplished by angels dragging the planets in their courses. Christians gain no credibility with unbelievers by trying to impose godless theories onto the Scriptures.
I know that people cannot ordinarily walk on water. When Jesus walked on water, it demonstrated that even physical laws like gravity are subject to His will. Miracles are evidence that there is a God and I know when a miracle has occurred precisely because I understand science. All secular explanations of our origins are simply feeble attempts to mask the obvious miracle of the creation. The supposed billions of years, the Big Bang, and biological evolution are fraught with difficulties – so much so that if any theory in a different field of science had similar problems, it would be laughed at.
I wrote a series a few months back where I detailed 10 observations that are best explained by a miraculous creation. I highly encourage you to read those but, for the sake of brevity, I'm going to borrow just a few points from there and offer some examples of where secular theories fail miserably to explain what we observe.
According to evolution, all the different species on earth have a common ancestor. In other words, people, parrots, palm trees, and piranha are all descended from the same, single-celled creature that allegedly lived 3.5 billion years ago. Darwin supposed this “simple” cell was little more than a gelatinous blob of amino acids. For a single-celled creature to evolve into something else, it must acquire novel traits. To turn a dinosaur into a bird, you would have to add feathers. Get it? To turn a molecule into a man, you would have to add new features, generation after generation for millions of generations: skin, blood, bones, organs, hair, etc. For evolution to even be possible, we should see new traits arise in populations fairly often. We don't. It's been more than a century since Darwin and evolutionists have less than a handful of questionable examples. A theory which requires creatures to acquire novel traits flies in the face of what we actually observe happening.
Next, there is the appendix. Though it's often cited as evidence for evolution, I believe the appendix is strong evidence against common descent. If the appendix were leftover from some distant ancestor, we would expect all mammals who have an appendix to also have a common ancestor. The truth is that the appendix exists in about 60 species of mammals with no discernible pattern. It appears in some species of primates, rodents, and even marsupials, but is absent from the intermediate groups that supposedly link these species. It's not at all what we would expect if comment descent were true.
Among secular scientists, the Big Bang is the commonly accepted explanation of the universe's origin. However, the theory is so plagued with difficulties that physicists have to constantly invent incredible stories to even make it work. They propose things like dark matter, dark energy, multiple universes, a finite universe with no center, and a period of hyper-inflation where the universe expanded million of times faster than the speed of light. Many of these are things that we cannot observe or test with the scientific method; they are merely hashed out in peer-reviewed journals where scientists expended great effort showing how such things could work on paper.
These are just a handful of examples of how secular theories of our origins simply fail to explain the evidence. Biological evolution and Big Bang cosmology are plausible sounding theories at first but they cannot bear scrutiny and so are constantly being propped up with ad hoc sub-theories. Unbelievers cling blindly to them not because they are so compelling but rather that the only alternative – special creation – doesn't fit in their there-is-no-god paradigm.
I wrote a while back about a website called Genesis Veracity Foundation. It attempts to defend the Bible but it has a peculiar characteristic of constantly referring to Atlantis. Yes, I mean the lost city mentioned by Plato. I can't figure out why anyone would think it was necessary to defend the Bible with such dubious evidence when the existence of the thing in question isn't really relevant to the Bible anyway. That's the same way I feel about theistic evolution. Why would anyone want to reinterpret the Bible to make it compatible with such an irrelevant and unscientific theory?
t is a useless theory. It makes no predictions, has led to no advances in technology, and has zero impact on any other branch of science. I'm trying to find something just as useless to which I can compare it but I really can't think of any other trivia that's quite as useless.
ReplyDeleteI would think that evolutionary theory has led to myriad predictions. For example, creationist debater Duane Gish used to claim during debates that human albumin was more similar to frog albumin than to chimpanzee albumin. This was false (human and chimp albumin are identical), but certainly he understood that evolution predicted that humans and chimps be more biochemically similar than humans and frogs. Any evidence that might disconfirm evolution implies a prediction: the theory leads us to expect this rather than that.
And I'm curious as to why you don't include creationism as equally useless. The test of a scientific theory is its ability to explain (as in, say why it is the way it is rather than some other conceivable way) and predict data, not its ability to generate marketable technology, but surely evolution cannot do worse in the latter regard than creationism.
Remember too that most scientists who believe in evolution practice a brand of science where only natural explanations are ever considered for any phenomenon.
Scientists who believe that life and "kinds" originate by miracles also practice a brand of science where only natural explanations are considered; their creationist activities are evangelism and apologetics, not science. Or did you think that, e.g. Raymond Demadian's work on CAT scanning depended on magic? There have been scientists who were creationists, but invariably their actual contributions to science depended on finding explanations for phenomena in terms of natural processes.
An "explanation," as noted above, is an explanation for a phenomenon in terms of the powers of, and constraints upon, a given set of causes. A cause without limitations, operating according to no known rules, cannot "explain" why things are one way rather than another: presumably a sovereign Creator could create a world where life did not depend on complexity -- or one where solid iron masses floated on pure liquid water naturally. Explanations come with constraints on their causes: i.e. with "natures" according to which the causes they postulate operate.
Miracles are evidence that there is a God and I know when a miracle has occurred precisely because I understand science. All secular explanations of our origins are simply feeble attempts to mask the obvious miracle of the creation.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations; you've just explained why lightning, up until quite recently (and indeed lightning is not yet fully explained in naturalistic terms) was evidence for the god Thor. As David Hume pointed out, to know that a miracle had occurred you would have to know both that all hypotheses of a mistaken observation were less probable than the hypothesis that the story was just a fiction, legend, or error, and that your scientific knowledge is so complete as to rule out the possibility that there is some unknown natural explanation for the observation. I do not think you can meet either criterion; the vast lacunae of scientific knowledge are not evidence that they are filled with supernatural causes.
To turn a molecule into a man, you would have to add new features, generation after generation for millions of generations: skin, blood, bones, organs, hair, etc. For evolution to even be possible, we should see new traits arise in populations fairly often. We don't. It's been more than a century since Darwin and evolutionists have less than a handful of questionable examples.
Well, you can question anything. You can question why it's unlikely that Jesus was born both during the reign of Herod the Great (died 3 BC) and when Quirinius (assumed office in Syria 6 AD, and busy in Asia Minor during the one period when we don't know who the governor of Syria was). You can question radiometric dating, although one of the things an omnipotent Creator ought to be easily able to do is cause all radiometric dates to yield accurate results (the conjoined hypotheses of a recent creation and a Creator Who wants his creation to be an honest witness of His deeds ought, e.g. to include no C-14 dates older than ca. 6000 years, and effectively no dates greater than zero for, e.g. U-238 dating). You can question whether the ability to see stars more than 10,000 light-years away is a reason to suppose they must have existed more than 10,000 years ago. You can question the assumption that, e.g. identically-disabled pseudogenes in different species are any reason to conclude that they shared a common ancestor, and posit a Creator with a really perverse sense of humor. And so forth and on.
But we see variation in living things all the time: from amphibian species with wildly variable numbers of bones, to the emergence of novel traits in bacteria (from the ability to digest nylon to the ability to digest penicillin). We would not expect feathers to emerge in one generation, intact (and for that matter, Prum and Brush's hypothesized initial stage of feather evolution -- a single unbranched hollow spike amidst scales -- may have been primitive in dinosaurs, present in the earliest members of the group). Do you suppose anyone is cataloguing novel variations in millions of species around the globe? Is anyone doing it even in, say, grey squirrels?
These are just a handful of examples of how secular theories of our origins simply fail to explain the evidence.
ReplyDeleteAgain, it is extremely unwise to criticize the Big Bang when your preferred alternative (young Earth creationism) can't even explain why we can see 99.999+% of the evidence! There are astronomical photographs of colliding galaxies; it should take millions of years for galaxies to collide, never mind the millions of centuries for the light to reach Earth. You don't get to complain about untestable ad hoc fixes to minor details of theories when you have that particular redwood in your eye.
I've already mentioned radiometric dating (sure, creationists take stabs at arguing against it, but again, if creationism were true, it ought to support their ideas, not need to be explained away).
And a similar objection applies to creationist opposition to actual biological evolution (which is an entirely separate question from the Big Bang -- ask an old-earth creationist on the one hand, or a steady-state proponent on the other). I've asked before what, e.g. skulls like KNM-ER 1470 or D4500 are even doing in existence if humans were created as a completely separate "kind" from other animals -- but one could raise the same question about gorillas or gibbons or capuchin monkeys. God seems to have worked very hard to make us look like another branchlet on the tree of life. It seems vaguely impious to just suppose that He wrote, over the whole fabric of the heavens and the Earth and life thereon, "one vast and superfluous lie."
Steven J,
ReplyDeleteI don't have the time or space to reply to every single point you've raised. As is my practice, I will hit some highlights.
I believe the correct theory of origins has little impact on science. How the computer was invented, for example, has practically nothing to do with using a computer. If Adam were miraculously created, it would not prevent us from studying him scientifically if he were available.
We use our theories to help us understand the evidence. Of course, I believe my theory is the true account of our origins and seems to explain the evidence better than your theories. Ultimately, though, both theories are beyond scientific scrutiny because were talking about no repeatable events that happened in the past and were not observed.
Most “predictions” I've seen made by evolution are really after-the-fact applications of evolution to the evidence. It's like the prediction that most mammals have 7 cervical vertebrate due to common descent. But the theory doesn't even require such a thing because species of other classes don't have the same feature. So humans and chimps are similar because they have a common ancestor? But placental moles and marsupials are similar even though they couldn't possibly have a recent common ancestor. So similarity could be the result of common descent – or maybe it's not. That's not much of a prediction. It's not much of a theory.
The Bible says God ceased creating on the 7th day. Therefore, I do not expect to continuously see miracles happening. I do believe, though, that we can conduct science precisely because God established physical laws and those laws continue to work in the predictable ways He made them. Secular scientists, though, have no explanation for the origin of physical laws nor a logical reason to believe they have always and will always operate in the same ways. According to secular theories, the laws just poofed into existence. If so, why should I believe they could never poof out of existence or, at least, change? Your side has noticed that matter behaves in predictable ways but have no good reasons why. I say it's only because my theory is correct that we're even able to conduct science.
Lightning is a phenomenon that occurs in the present. We can study it. Maybe we don't know everything about it but we certainly know a lot about it and it's not evidence for Thor. That's different, though, than saying God created the universe – a phenomenon we didn't see, can't study, and, frankly, your side has very poor scientific theories explaining it.
I've talked before about hominid skulls. Lubenow wrote extensively about skull 1470 in his book, Bones of Contention. I'm not too worried about the similarities of primate skulls. Our bones represent a fraction of any creature – the skull being an even tinier fraction. If we find only a skull belonging to a creature we can't observe, we might have trouble identifying it. It might resemble a human skull. If we were able to observe the living creature to whom the skull belongs, I doubt we would have any trouble identifying it as human or not.
Thanks for your comments. God bless!!
RKBentley
Most “predictions” I've seen made by evolution are really after-the-fact applications of evolution to the evidence. It's like the prediction that most mammals have 7 cervical vertebrate due to common descent.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that complaint applies to vitellogenin pseudogenes found in humans (in the same locus relative to other genes as their counterparts in chickens)(vitellogenin is a precursor to the main protein in egg yolk -- it's only needed in egg-laying animals), or to the distribution of similarities and differences in cytochrome-c amino acid sequences. And even if some "predictions" about fossils are post-hoc, I do think that, e.g. whales with hind limbs (bearing the distinctive ankles of artiodactyls), or feathered dromeosaurid fossils, are very "prediction like," to coin a phrase: they fit in much more easily with an evolutionary than with a creationist viewpoint. Even the seven cervical vertebrae of most mammals is remarkable: what explanation (I mean, an actual reason for the Creator to do it this way) can creationism offer?
But placental moles and marsupials are similar even though they couldn't possibly have a recent common ancestor.
Placental moles and marsupial moles have distinctly different dentition (counts of various types of teeth), and marsupial moles have two holes in the palate that placental mammals lack -- in both features, as in genetic sequences, marsupial moles resemble, e.g. kangaroos more closely than they do their convergently evolved placental counterparts. This is the expected pattern for convergence: similarity in adaptive traits; dissimilarity in traits that are not adaptions to a particular niche (note that some similarities -- shared with other mammals generally and probably making some evolutionary changes easier than others --do trace back to a common ancestor in the mid-Jurassic, ca. the time of Juramaia).
Your side has noticed that matter behaves in predictable ways but have no good reasons why. I say it's only because my theory is correct that we're even able to conduct science.
ReplyDeleteIt seems odd that you argue that only your beliefs about origins provide a reason for universal natural laws, when you reject universal natural laws. Again, you can't insist that radiometric decay rates have changed (undetectably!) by multiple orders of magnitude and then insist that the "theory" that accounts for that somehow accounts for any physical properties being consistent. Also, I don't see that the Bible actually does predict or describe predictable physical laws: e.g. Psalm 104 attributes oceans staying in the basins to the direct, reversible (and reversed, in the case of Noah's Flood) command of God and not to any tendency of fluids to seek the lowest possible gravitational potential.
Lightning is a phenomenon that occurs in the present. We can study it.
There's not much point to studying it if you don't assume that the same physical laws that govern it here and now, where you're making the observations, won't apply on the other side of the world (or other planets, for that matter) a thousand years from now or a thousand years ago. The assumptions of the uniformity of nature required to study lightning do not differ from the assumptions when studying mutations, inheritance, and selection, or when studying radioactive decay rates. Invoking "observational" vs. "historical" or "origins" science is just an excuse to posit that God did miracles not mentioned in the Bible to hide the evidence of several miracles that are mentioned in the Bible.
Our bones represent a fraction of any creature – the skull being an even tinier fraction.
By that argument, you could find a modern human skeleton and have no idea whether the flesh and organs that once enclosed and filled it were human or not. The evidence we have is exactly the evidence we'd expect if humans evolved from nonhuman apes -- and Lubenow wouldn't worry about it if it weren't exactly the evidence we wouldn't expect if special creation were true.