Oh brother!! where to start with this lot.
Well it is patently clear that there is a distinct lack of rigorous thinking around these parts. I could honestly care less whether somebody claims to have 'academic qualifications' on one hand or 'personal revelations' on the other, the problem that concerns me is with the status quo. The evidence at hand and the level of nativity regarding that evidence. Also with respect to the creation vs evolution debate itself, it always seems to get rehashed and the same lame points are revisited in utter, blissful ignorance of the huge volumes of material available to each of us, which provides concise explanation of the supposed mysteries and paradoxes.
Too many people are content to wallow in their own ignorance and proclaim that because they don't understand something there is no possible explanation, at least without resorting to some kind of supernatural cause. The interesting thing about this kind of thinking, is that it does at least ultimately require that any plausible explanation, should ultimately be predicated on cause. We are all prone to assuming that every effect must have some kind of cause. At some point however, we must assume that this chain of cause and effect breaks down. Why? because if everything must have a cause then that cause must have another cause and so on ad infinitum. Meet the infinite regress people.
Creationists wish to circumvent this dilemma by proposing that a supernatural being exists, that has the power to create the entire universe in all of it's splendid glory. I might just as well propose that the universe itself is just a supernatural event or at least, its spontaneous creation out of nothing, is such a supernatural event. I won't trouble you with that speculation (although I kind of already have
), oops... never mind, I know I will never get an intelligent response to that dilemma from any creationist because it is more logically problematic than the very dilemmas that they set out to explain by invoking their God. Likewise they will never explain why their supernatural benefactor, should just be let off the hook in terms of cause and effect relationships. It is indeed an incredulous complaint that nature itself can not exist without cause and yet super-nature can. if you are trying to explain things without scapegoating, then supernatural beings which have no rational explanation for existing in the first place simply will not do.
Contrary to several things that have been stated here. Biological evolution by means of natural selection is not only a viable explanation for the existing empirical evidence we have to hand, but it is a logical necessity of it. Knowing how genes propagate from one generation to the next. carrying traits as they do, it is inevitable that natural selection must act on them, to weed out any unsuccessful genes in the gene pool. Genes themselves know no boundaries between species, so speciation events must also be seen as inevitable. Specious arguments, about macro vs micro evolution, seem to always come from those, who seem to have little comprehension of evolution and almost no knowledge about biology. The assumption (and let's be clear about this: An assumption is exactly what it is) that complexity and order, can not come from simplicity or disorder - or that organization can not come from disorder if necessarily false. If we have order or organization, enough to warrant an explanation, then surely it comes from somewhere. Anybody can invent a fictitious entity called God and propose that it solves the problem of where order and organization comes from. I'm so sorry creationist folk, but it doesn't. I will simply point out that your supernatural creator is orders of magnitude more complex ordered and organized, than any artifact of nature which you employ such a God to explain away.
It is obvious to the point of being purely trivial, that there is another clear motive, for arguing the existence of such a supernatural creator and that has nothing what so ever to do with, attempting to explain the apparent organization in nature. a purely psychological motive, is the real explanation for creationist zeal and tenacity, in contriving ever more specious arguments in favor of a supernatural creator, it is simply this. Creationists do not want to believe that they will simply die and cease to exist, body and soul (whatever that is). they have been promised a place in Gods kingdom, eternal life in heavenly bliss, and like children who never quite grow up, they can not throw the shackles of the immortal promised land of heaven.
The problem with much creationist rhetoric is the banal assumption that if they can pick a flaw in evolution (or big bang cosmology) however contrived or based on bad logic it may be, that if it were a valid argument, the next best explanation is the puerile bronze age mythology of creationism. Creationist ideas are nearly always based on poor logic and scientific ignorance, but to suppose that even if there were an element of truth to them, that they have brought mainstream empirical science crashing to it's knees, is the essence of absurdity and wishful thinking. To go one step further and propose that the alleged discrepancy in science, therefore vindicates the idea of supernatural creation, is blind arrogance and dogma in all of it's plain stupidity.
Should I dare give you an example of such ignorant stupidity? Well why not. This is not my opinion. The facts I will speak of are not speculative or in any way conjectural. The creationist plaint however, it isn't based on clearly thought out rational reasoning, it is just base ignorance and stupidity about how evolution works. I am talking about the idea that if humans evolved from something else then why does that something else still exist. It's hard to find a stupid question that more clearly points out the biological illiteracy of the proponent.
Firstly I will digress, as the worst form of this complaint, takes the form of "If humans evolved from monkeys why do monkeys still exist". The point about biological illiteracy is driven home by the first rate ignorance that modern day monkey species have nothing whatsoever to do with the recent appearance of '
*person*-sapiens'. Where ever did these ignorant creationists get the idea that humans evolved from monkeys? Their inability to draw distinctions between modern species is bad enough, but to stupidly assert that one modern species evolved from another according to evolutionary science is lamentable indeed.For starters, monkeys are not a species and therefore not the kind of taxonomic group, that any individual species can sensibly be said to have evolved from. Monkeys are hot even a part of the super family Hominoidea but rather primates who's common ancestry predates any of the modern ape species. This biological ignorance is obviously based in a basic lack of any capacity (or simple understanding of nature), to make a distinction between monkeys and apes. So if you hear a creationist rabbiting on about how humans supposedly evolved from monkeys, you should immediately hear alarm bells and realize their ignorance of basic biology is abysmal. What anybody so hopelessly ignorant of basic paleoanthropology, could help to contribute to a more complete understanding of human origins is non-existent.. It mounts to just so much worthless noise.
The real foundational problem, I have not touched upon just as yet, That is, putting aside the irrelevance of our biological kinship with monkeys for the moment. The basis of the claim that one thing should not evolve 'into' another in such a way as the original ancestor continues to exist. Now where does this ridiculous and preposterous claim come from? You would think that biologists themselves would be all over each other in the first instance, if nature in anyway suggested that the divergence of new species were some kind of problem.
Now I will generalize my argument, because this issue happens to fit many of the baseless creationist plaints that exist. If a scientific idea is faulty, then it is the job of other scientists to debunk the idea and call it to reason. If there were any credibility in creationist complaints, then you would have to ask why scientists in the interests of intellectual honesty, have not torn them down. If I understand anything about science, it is that it is self correcting and it won't stand for irrational nonsense. You can propose a fabulous idea in in science that has no merit based on what is clearly understood and fails to fit with carefully studied, reasoned knowledge, but you can't expect it to survive the onslaught of other scientists who will gladly tare it from limb to limb as the nonsense it may very well be.
So if it doesn't stand to reason and if there is no merit in it then it will surely get torn down. It certainly won't rise to prominence as the best explanation of the known evidence. It will rightfully be torn apart and thrown aside as useless conjecture. The point is, considering how carefully studied the science of biological evolution by natural selection is, and supposing that there were some fundamental flaw in it, so simple that an uneducated (nay - ignorant) layperson could understand and bring forward, then why would the thousands of well educated experts, who are on the front lines of biological science, not be the first to come forward and take the flaws in the popular theories to task?
To answer this we need to postulate three things:
1) That mainstream biological scientists are (approximately) as stupid / uneducated (naive) as the creationists adversaries who challenge them and that most if not all of them simply did not think of the obvious misconceptions and inconsistencies in their popular models of mainstream biological science.
2) That science is involved in a huge conspiracy to confabulate a mainstream scientific theory called evolution by natural selection. Many thousands of scientists, who are trained to hold each others scientific ideas up to the light of reason and who have a process of pier review, that constantly works in every other area of science to purge mainstream science of bad ideas, are nearly unanimous, in a world wide conspiracy to maintain this cockamamie idea called evolution which disagrees with nature.
3) That evolution by natural selection, is a fully vindicated scientific theory, that completely stands to reason with veritable mountains of conclusive evidence that confirms it beyond a shadow of doubt. That further to this, creationists are just a whiny group of religious zealots, who don't want to believe it for the true fact of nature that it is, because it gets in the way of a literal interpretation of a barbaric bronze age, supernatural creation myth. But not only do creationists not want to believe this irrefutable fact of biology, they don't want others to believe it and they don't want it being taught to children in school.
Considering that creationists reject the last proposal out of hand and claim that evolution is a false theory, then we have to go back to the second and first proposal. Either highly educated mainstream biological scientists, don't know what they are doing and just happen to come up with an addle brained crazy theory that doesn't stand to reason, or they know very well that their preferred explanation for biological diversity and the origin of species, is false and are all involved in a massive conspiracy to prop it up. It is as if mainstream professional science were involved in doing pseudo science, replete with confabulation, misrepresentation and willful deception of the wider public.
The problem with the second proposal, is that it is fundamentally ignorant of how science is done. The scientific method of biology is the very same principal used in physics, chemistry geology and every other mainstream science. If science in general didn't have some reliable way of getting it's thinking straight, then it couldn't succeed at producing reliable knowledge that is used in space travel, manufacturing pharmaceuticals and that masterpiece of technological wizardry you are using right now, called a computer. In any case for biology to be confabulating a fraudulent theory, many other areas of science would also have to be implicated in the conspiracy. Biological evolution after all is massively supported by geology, with its massive timescale, its geological stratum and plate tectonics. None of evolution by natural selection, would have made any sense, except by virtue of the geological underpinnings of a very very, old world and of the precise methods developed, to scrutinize the age of rocks etc... That in turn, implicates physics into the conspiracy, because geologists rely on physicists having gotten their facts straight about the decay of radioactive isotopes, and that in turn implicates mathematics in the conspiracy because the physics borrows so heavily upon mathematical knowledge. Without biological evolution by natural selection, paleontology would also lay in ruins, for lack of any coherent model of organization to categorize and correlate mountains of fossils that have remained in the earth for millions of years.
Turning to the first proposal, that biologists are just muddle-headed wackos, with crazy ideas about the origin of the diversity of life on this planet and that an uneducated layperson is just as qualified to criticize them and call them to task. Well... You won't hear me complaining that a lay person can not understand science or that academic qualifications are a necessary prerequisite to understand or even criticize mainstream scientific knowledge. There is no equivalent of 'divine authority' in science and it is fundamental to the success of science, that its ideas are expected to stand on their own merit, in the face of whatever support evidence and reason procures for them. The problem with the layperson in practice being capable of criticizing science, falls not on their lack of qualifications, but rather that in order to criticize an idea, you must first understand it. Even then, there is no elitist barrier erected to keep scientific ideas away from the layperson. I have read dozens of good popular science books, that are excellent at explaining what is understood about nature and how science has come to the conclusions it has. There are mountains of good non-technical introductions to scientific ideas on the internet.
There is no problem in principal with a layperson understanding and criticizing science. The problem is in practice, that when creationists attempt to criticize science, they do so without even a basic understanding of the ideas they are attempting to refute. The idea that humans evolved from monkeys is not false because biological science has gotten its facts wrong, it is false because it is just a stupendously ignorant misconception of what evolution tells us. Why do creationists propose such a question as if it even deserved an answer. What is more annoying than a creationists innocent naivety of science is their arrogance in proposing problems that just don't exist and which would be meaningless in light of even the slightest understanding of biology. It is simply naive to not know something. It is arrogance to assert a contradiction of well established knowledge without understanding how that knowledge is derived and it is utter ignorance to set up an idea as false based on a straw-man caricature of that idea which is complete and utter garbage and for which refutations are abundantly available. If the creationist wishes to know why monkeys still exist, "if humans evolved from monkeys", then they should be informed of these few things:
1) firstly humans didn't evolve from monkeys.
2) If you wanted to know the answer to this ill conceived question, then it would take you about one minute to find an appropriate article on the internet that thoroughly debunks not only the misconception that humans have evolved from monkeys or that biological evolution suggests that they did, but also the fallacy that speciation (the process leading to new species), requires that ancestral species must become extinct for new species to arise.
3) If the creationist has a problem with the current scientific theory, then the onus is on them to explain why they believe there is such a discrepancy and why we can not come to the conclusions we have. For instance if the creationist proposes that the emergence of a new species should logically preclude the ancestral group from continuing, then why?
4) If you want to find fault with an idea, you must first understand that idea.
This 'monkeys to humans' misconception is wrong on just so many levels. It beggars belief that anybody could be so woefully ignorant and yet so arrogant in their willingness to challenge scientific ideas. The expectation of creationists that everybody else should answer their ill conceived problems with evolution, is underwritten by a pretense that, they could even understand a flaw in basic evolutionary theory, without even the minutest understanding of the idea itself, that the objections they raise are valid or even meaningful and that those objections represent 'holes' in the scientific idea that still remain unexplained.
None of the above pretenses are worthy of the evolutionists effort to dignify with a response. It a completely ignorant fantasy, that species are required to evolve in their entirety from one species to another and nothing in biological science suggests any such thing. The only intelligent response to such a ignorant question, is 'don't be stupid, and go and learn something about evolution before you try to pick holes in it.' Why don't you just Google for an article about how the mechanism of speciation is proposed to occur? Why do you just pretend that this make believe discrepancy, has not been thoroughly debunked? Why do creationists continue to ignore abundant refutations of creationist arguments and simply restate them as if they have never been proposed and refuted before? This is particularly obvious in online communities where by virtue of the fact, that the creationist is present, it is also obvious that they have an abundance of relevant information at their fingertips. Literally in moments, they could be reading the answer to any common creationist objection to evolution and then they could move forward. Either they should accept the refutation and acknowledge this or present a more enlightened criticism based on the understandings so derived by looking into the answers generously provided for them.
Creationists don't want to know how evolution works. They don't want to believe there are explanations for their objections to evolutionary science. They don't care that their objections are simply ill conceived nonsense. They are living in a make believe fantasy world, with supernatural creators, angels, demons and miracles a plenty. Evolutionists are not permitted to compete with this fantasy because creationists are immune to reason. They expect science (quite rightfully) be held accountable to reason, as they so obviously present objections which are supposed to give us reason to doubt evolution. But they are not willing to be held accountable to that very same incumbency to reason. Their entire worldview is accountable to pure faith and no 'proof' would ever suffice to undermine that mindset which is predisposed to belief without reason. It is all a big game of make believe to creationists like preschoolers that never grew up, they are immersed in a fantasy world. Inevitably then , their approach to science takes on this form of make believe fantasy. The alleged inconsistencies with scientific ideas, are just make believe ones that are fantasized into existence, for the obvious benefits they entail in protecting their communal delusions.
The idea that monkeys should not exist because humans do, is roughly the intellectual equivalent, of proposing that if the earth is really a spheroid, there should be no such thing as Australians because we should have all fallen of the planet. I am so sorry to disappoint the 'spheroid earthers' out there, by my embarrassing continuation to exist. The world really must be flat.
Reply
