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When I read blogs, I have the tendency to skim my RSS readers rather quickly and read things based on titles. You’d think that that would mean I spend time and effort on each of my post titles, but the sad truth is that I don’t. That is really a topic for a different time. Two titles on TurretinFan’s excellent blog did catch my eye, and they were very much worth the time to read and consider, as they show some interesting holes in evolutionary theory.

I don’t believe I classify as either an evolutionist or a creationist, though I suspect that many would consider me a creationist. I think that evolution is certainly possible given that it is supported well as a scientific conclusion, but the necessity of God makes evolution a moot point. It is not necessary given God, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Neither does evolution, if true, falsify God.

Even though I must admit strong scientific evidence in favor of evolution, there are certain philosophical problems with it. TurretinFan calls attention to one such problem in this post. TF cites three scientific studies that create a problem for modern evolutionists. In the first, sea sponges are found to be 70% genetically similar to humans. This, combined with the other two studies that argue against familial ties (however distant) from chimpanzees, creates some reasonable doubt among the prevailing theory of evolution.

TF says that this information will be waved away by evolutionists. I think it is more likely that evolutionists will try to discredit either the research or the researchers, in that way they can safely ignore the conclusions altogether or at least minimize the impact of the study on their beloved theory.

In the follow up to the first post, TF recounts a comment from Peter Pike that creates serious philosophical problems with the theory of evolution. Genetics are used to trace the evolution of living species, but morphology is used for extinct species. The problem? Genetics is a poor way to predict morphology. What this means for evolutionists is that they are using one method on living species, and an incompatible method on extinct ones.

One method is going to be accurate, the other method is going to be inaccurate. As there is no way to reproduce evolution in the lab (there is a way to monitor it from this point forward), we don’t know which method is more accurate. Therefore, whole evolutionary trees are going to be dead wrong and we don’t know how.

Evolutionists, please don’t argue that my last point doesn’t matter one way or the other. With a little bit of Googling, I can find quotes from other evolutionists who argue that evolution is literally the pinnacle of modern science, and all other scientific advancements, theories, and discoveries rely on the truth of evolution. The point is that it does matter. If science literally depends on how accurately we are able to trace ancestry, then science itself is falsified on this philosophical point alone.

First, there is a myth promoted by many Creationists and some Intelligent Design proponents that evolution is a random process. Completely random. Nothing orderly or scientific about it. It just happens.

That is completely false. A simple Google search on evolution and random produced several responses to this claim:

Evolution by natural selection is a two-step process, and only the first step is random: mutations are chance events, but their survival is often anything but. Natural selection favours mutations that provide some advantage, . . . and the physical world imposes very strict limits on what works and what doesn’t. The result is that organisms evolve in particular directions.

Consider any kind of creature that lives underwater and has to chase its prey, for instance. Random mutations will result in some offspring having variety of shapes. Those with shapes that allow them to move faster with less energy are much more like to survive and reproduce than those whose shapes slow them down. (source)

A 2003 NYT article states:

. . . it would seem impossible to re-evolve anything like life on earth today, given how life has been shaped by accidents large and small.

But 12 flasks of bacteria in East Lansing, Mich., are beginning to challenge such notions. In 1988, Dr. Lenski and his colleagues set up a dozen genetically identical populations of E. coli bacteria in bottles of broth and have followed their evolutionary fates.

Now, more than 30,000 bacterial generations later, Dr. Lenski and colleagues have what is becoming one of the most striking examples of repeatability yet. All 12 populations show the same patterns of improvement in their ability to compete in a bottle and increases in cell size. All 12 have also lost their ability to break down and use a sugar, called ribose.

More surprising, many genetic changes underlying these adaptations are very similar. Every population, for example, lost its ability to break down ribose by losing a long stretch of DNA from the same gene.

Other scientists studying cichlid fish have observed how the same varieties of cichlids evolve anew every time they invade a new lake. And Dr. Rieseberg and colleagues have found evidence that evolution can repeatedly produce the same species.

These scientists found that one sunflower species on sand dunes has evolved independently three separate times. And each time one of the species newly evolves, genetically it appears to turn out much the same. ”With these species, there seems to be only one way to do it,” Dr. Rieseberg said. (source)

The article notes that many of the changes observed in the laboratory were similar, but not exactly the same. But it does seem as though there is tremendous repeatability within the framework of evolution.

WikiAnswers gets in on the game with the answer to the question, “Is Evolution Random?”

No. It is far from random, there is nothing random about it. If I were to race my three year old nephew I would win, easily. I am faster and stronger and I have more stamina. The outcome of the race would not be random, it would be inevitable. Evolution is the same. The organism that is better equipped to reproduce will have more success and therefore become dominant and potentially drive other strains or species out of existence. The only random element is the mutations that cause one animal to be more fit than another. Most are harmful and die out in a generation or some, some are neutral and make no real difference (these are the variations we look at for DNA tests in court) and a few are beneficial. The good ones are passed down and over time an accumulation of good changes causes the organism to become a different sort of organism. This could be likened to poker. One hand is clearly better than another but the cards are dealt at random. Still, the best hand wins and the worst player is out of the game the soonest. (source)

So, we’ve agreed that this isn’t a random process. So, what does the Atheist Camel say that I found so ironic? This:

To the Creationist religionists of today, just as it was with the ancients, the orderly guiding hand of a Super God King who made all, sees all, controls all and must be obeyed is still the great comfort. The chaos, randomness, and uncontrolled actions by mindless physical forces of the natural universe is the antithesis of orderliness and comfort… a horror that must be shunned and denied.

Hmmm… seems he needs to re-think the proposition that evolution is random, because most of his ilk would deny that.

Dr. Hunter calls us to contemplate the fuller mystery of God.

However, he does rightly recognize that if we mythologize parts of the Bible, then how are we to understand other parts of the Bible? Are they also allegory? If the creation story found in Genesis 1 is only a myth constructed by Bronze Age herdsmen who don’t have a lick of scientific sense in their bodies, then can’t the same argument also be applied to the Resurrection?

We’re pandering to culture here. And as Christians, we should be better than that! How can we be salt and light to the world if, by our beliefs and actions, we are just like the world?

This video, from YouTube user AntitheistAtheist, has the critical praise of numerous atheists in the comments found below the video. Examples:

• I like your style kid, keep on thinking. Think bigger and further.
• we [sic] dont [sic] surely know how the universe gets here, nobody does and it has to be accepted. the [sic] mistake that theists do is to explain everything that cant be explained with god of somesort [sic]
• Maybe that’s it God created us who was created by a larger God and so on and so on in an ever expanding universe.
• [S]cience has answered all of the greatest questions up to date, coming up with the only reasonable answers. Religion has answered nor prooved [sic] anything. It is absolutely reliant on “faith”, that is an integral part of the deal “Just believe!”. It may never be answered, but if it ever is, zou [sic] can bet science will find the answer and not faith.

The last commenter, in typical atheist style, presents an alternate definition of faith that is not what faith really means. I’ve advocated the death penalty for this before, and I think the law is on my side.

Anyway, why is Who designed the designer? still so popular among atheists? There’s an easy answer to the question. Here it is, from philosopher William Lane Craig:

Notice that Craig laughs about the objection. Like me, he finds it absurd.

The Big Bang

I’ve read enough atheistic material to make the (I hope) accurate generalization that atheists are impressed by evidence and that they refuse to leap to any unwarranted conclusions.

For example, Hemnant Mehta (the Friendly Atheist) asked, “If a miracle came, would it convince you [that God exists]?” In the comments section, the virtually unanimous answer was an emphatic NO. A commenter named Drew even said this:

So, as much as I feel like a humbug, it would take quite a bit. And, if something like this rearrangement of stars happened, without some personal contact with God, I’d be wary that it is an illusion– after all, how many people have said the same prayer as I and not been answered? God would have to show me why he preferred to answer my prayer to millions of others.

MorseCode, who comments on this blog as well, said this:

Moving stars is certainly impressive. Unfortunately, it only serves as evidence for something that can move stars.

So, for all practical purposes, most agree with this fellow:

At this point in my life, I honestly can’t think of anything that would make me believe in God, expecially the God of a particular religion. I don’t think I’m closed minded, but after 47 years of searching and exploring these issues, I think it’s fair to have come to a pretty solid conclusion.

So, based on this information, it is fair to say that atheists do not leap to unwarranted conclusions, nor would they be convinced by material that does.

Unless the unwarranted conclusions are in their favor.

Enter the website Christianity Disproved. I only looked at two pages and I knew that this website is a complete waste of my time. First, I read their page on science. After a brief Astronomy 101 discussion of how to calculate the age of the universe and a series of YouTube videos detailing Evolution 101, the essay abruptly ends like this:

Science has revealed to us that the Universe is 13.7 ± 0.14 billion years old (Dick 2008), that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old and that life emerged on Earth around 3.5 billion years ago (National Academy of Sciences 2008). The Genesis account of creation is a myth; it is inaccurate and has been disproven.

How, exactly? I read that essay carefully and I didn’t see any attempt to disprove Genesis, only a (very) basic introduction to science.

Next up, I read the page on the Bible. The writer showed us several passages of the Gospels that tell (apparently) different sides of the same story at various points in Jesus’ life. These passages seem to be mutually exclusive–which isn’t uncommon when dealing with eyewitness testimony, by the way. Ask any police officer who has done a traffic accident investigation.

After that, the writer correctly states “In Matthew the stone is rolled away whilst Mary Magdalene is present, in John the stone had been rolled away prior to Mary Magdalene’s arrival at the tomb.” Then incorrectly concludes, “Once again, at least one gospel is making content up because they can’t both be correct.” Going against the grain of most traditional Christian apologetics, I actually agree that they both can’t be right. But why does anyone have to be making content up? Instead, what about this reasonable hypothesis: Matthew talked to someone who recollected the situation differently than John. That would also fit the evidence, but is never even considered or discussed.

After that, they wax philosophical:

The Christian God is omniscient/all-knowing, in 1 John 3:20 it says that “…God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Let’s be clear here, the Christian God knows everything. This means that the Christian God cannot make mistakes because if you know everything, you know everything.

The Bible contains mistakes therefore it cannot have been written/inspired by the Christian God.

I agree that God can’t make mistakes, but we can. God has entrusted us fallible humans with the preservation of his word. And we have made mistakes with it. We, as Christians, believe that the Bible is only inspired and inerrant in the original autographs. What we have today has the human element of copyist errors introduced into it. A basic knowledge of textual criticism yields the fact that we can be as close to sure as you can get that the word of God was well-preserved.

They anticipated that I would say that:

You also can’t say that the Christian God gave us his Word originally but it got corrupted. The Christian God is all-knowing, if he existed, he would have had the foresight to write his Word in a non-degradable material such as stone or metal. An omniscient/ all-knowing (1 John 3:20; Job 37:16) , omnipresent (Psalms 139:7-12), omnipotent (Genesis 18:14), eternal (Deuteronomy 33:27), infinite (Revelation 22:13; Psalms 102:25-27) God would not and could not, make such mistakes.

Again, why must God take all responsibility upon himself? He charged us with the responsibility of teaching his word to future generations (Lev 10:8-11), which includes the accurate preservation of his word. There are things that God will do, but there are also things that he expects us to do (Deut 29:29).

I’ll end this with some words of wisdom that won’t sit well with most sue-happy Americans: Take responsibility for your own actions! If God expects you to do something, do it. Don’t wax philosophical about how it should be God’s responsibility because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. No philosophy of religion has ever declared that the all-powerful and all-knowing aren’t allowed to delegate. Delegation, in fact, is the key to a successful management strategy, and God (who is all-knowing) would know that!

But you say, they proceed empirically, by experimentation. Correct — experiments resting on mountains of unproven and unprovable assumptions. The whole notion of “experimentation” assumes a continuity to the universe that they have no right to assume, on their premises. Do a test, and X occurs. What have you proven? That X occurred once. Repeat the test 300 times, and X occurs each time. What have you proven? That X occurred 300 times. Nothing more, nothing less.

Further, you don’t really know what caused X to occur. The whole notion of causation is itself an assumption, unproven and unprovable.

Scientists can only ever have confidence that something will happen a certain way, but they can never really know for certain.

I think that the difference between the scientist and the Christian is that we at least accept that it is not our place to know everything.

Here

Did all you atheists know that there is a whole month the god botherers are dedicating just to pray for us to jump aboard the crazy train of delusion? I didn’t know about this till I saw it on an old classmate’s Facebook profile! The god believers have dedicated a whole month “and beyond” to “Pray for an Atheist”.

Listen you god believing fools, it ain’t gonna do any good. Your god doesn’t exist and no matter how hard you wish, no matter how many magical incantations you say, there will still be an ever-growing population of atheists in this world.

Neslock comments:

I’ve never met an atheist that cares whether they’re prayed for or not (outside of the desire that the person praying do something better with their time). I think this is a subtle play on the idea that “atheists” are really “satanists”; why would any atheist have a “strong objection” to being prayed for, when most atheists just consider prayer to be wishful thinking?

So, you don’t have any strong feelings about being prayed for, but you take the time to complain about it an online forum anyway?

And the author of the post says this in retaliation to a believer:

Why do we mock the believer when he fears that we are going to spend an eternity in a terrible place for merely not being able to believe due to lack of evidence that this Sky Boss really exists? It’s because of how smugly you all think that you have some superior knowledge over us, when in fact you do not. You simply choose to follow some ancient mythology, invented my human beings as a coping device for things they could not explain nor understood. Humans cling to this afterlife belief because they are afraid of death. Christianity is basically a death cult, looking to an unproven afterlife while thinking that this earthly life is somehow not good enough to have lived. (emphasis added)

WOW. It seems to me that it is the atheist who thinks that they have superior knowledge over the believer. The blog I pulled this from, God is for Suckers, is dedicated to:

Commentary, news, and rants on the evils and stupidity of belief in the big invisible daddy in the sky. Illuminating and watchdogging the widespread attempts to institutionalize the theocratic rule of the US. Making fun of believers everywhere.

The whole blog presupposes that the atheist knows something that the believer doesn’t. More irony.

Yet more irony:

Others have said plenty about how prayer can be arrogant, so I feel I should bring up one of my usual points: Faith is a monument to pride, arrogance, and hubris. It’s the act of declaring oneself to be the supreme arbiter of the universe, and the belief that gods bow to the faithful’s definitions of them.

I prefer the humility involved in science.

Humility like PZ Meyers displays?

It’s rather neat that modern scientists know more than God. (source)

If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult … some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness. (source)

I want to seize on what I think is the key phrase in that, that not believing evolution “make[s] us a cult. . . some odd group that is not really interacting with the world.”

There is no doubt that we should interact with the world. However, there is a huge danger in adopting a worldly belief system, just so we don’t seem like a cult. The apostle Paul exhorts:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:2)

James writes:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (Jms 1:27)

And later states:

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (Jms 4:4)

The apostle John weighs in as well:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 Jn 2:15-17)

The conclusion is best stated by saying that we should be in the world, but not of the world. It seems as though Warnke is saying that we should accept the scientific conclusion that man evolved from other organisms, in a branching tree of life that eventually whittles down to a single common ancestor for every life form. And we should accept that scientific conclusion so that we don’t seem so different, so set apart from the rest of the world.

Well, the Bible states that we should be separate from the world. The apostle Peter says:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Pet 2:9)

If we become like the world, how then are we supposed to witness to it? We are supposed to live a holy life, dedicated to God. If there is no difference between us and the average pagan, how will anyone see a clear difference in being Christian?

I will close with one of my favorite quotes from St. Francis of Assisi: “It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.”

The fact that there are all of these schisms in Christianity proves that there is no God. For if there actually were a God, the answer to every question about God and Christianity would be crystal clear. God would say which side is right in every debate. There would be no confusion, no questions.

The premise that there are schisms in Christianity says nothing about the veracity of the same. Further, it is illogical to conclude that there is no God from that premise alone. Of course, I’ve spent much time and effort debunking the claims of the WWGHA sister site here, so I can’t say that I’m surprised that they’re making an argument like this. Most of their arguments are shallow and fallacious. I will show why this is a fallacious argument:

The theory of evolution has many debates raging within the scientific community about some of the specifics. Most scientists, for example, think that natural selection is the agent by which evolution occurs, but some think that there may be a different agent or another acting in concert with natural selection. Some scientists think that evolution can explain the origins of life by a gradual step-by-step process, but many don’t believe that evolution is a sufficent explanation for origins. And, of course, Ida: need I say more?

Here’s the big question: Does any of that detract from the truth of evolution? Any fair-minded scientist would say “No.” Thomas would probably concur, since his blog often touts new evolutionary discoveries. Which leaves only one question for Thomas to answer: Why the double standard?

I actually want to make an informed decision about evolution. I want to know what it actually teaches so that I can decide for myself if it is an accurate portrayal of origins.

Of course, the book takes numerous swipes at religion in the first chapter alone, which makes me wonder about the objectivity of the authors.

I’m going to try to remain as objective as I can. We’ll see what I learn, and hopefully some interesting debate will result on this site.