Intelligent Design Clobbered Again

by AlanF 47 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Narkissos
    Narkissos

    Thanks AlanF for this very interesting thread.

    I raised a side issue at http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/136447/1.ashx

  • hillary_step
    hillary_step

    TopHat,

    Why did God create a Universe where everything feeds on everything else to survive?

    For population control....what else....DUH!

    Forever happy to fill the position of dense Board plank I see. It is hard to imagine that ignorance of the depth that you display really exists, but sadly you prove with dismal regularity that this is the case. Let me illustrate my point in a way that you might be able to grasp, though I hold out no real hope. Cancer is a parasitic host that adapts in the most astonishing way to feed on its host. Does your God use cancer to control the population? If so, how does this display the actions of a loving Creator? What about the virus, arguably the most amazing of all 'creation'. Why did God create viruses that destroy hundreds of millions of his human 'creation' each year? Was this to control the population? Is this Satan at work? I have tried to simplify this argument so that even you might understand it - second time around that is. If I have failed, perhaps others might be able to explain it for you better than I. HS

  • hooberus
    hooberus

    Hooberus,

    Many of us have asked this question of you on numerous occasions, without an answer as of this moment.

    Why did God create a Universe where everything feeds on everything else to survive?

    From the smallest microbe, to the largest of mammals everything traps and feeds its prey to survive. Think of a virus or parasite, as it struggles to survive in its chosen host, the fly. Think of a spider sucking the life from its paralysed prey, the fly. Think of the sparrow which picks at the spider and eats it alive. Think of the cat that stalks and captures the sparrow. I think you get my drift.

    I guess I thought that if any one sincerely desired an answer (from a biblical creationist perspective) on matters such as these [e.g. death, suffering, parasites, viruses, cancer, germs, fangs, claws, etc.], then they could: 1). simply consult any one of several introductory creationist books: (such as listed here: http://www.trueorigin.org/books.asp or here: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4884/113 ) or 2).use thesearch function on any major scientific creationist website.

    Given the fact that many of the evolutionists here constantly lecture others about speaking about things before study one would think that they themselves would be a little more well versed on all the origins subjects that they speak of.

    Why did God create this self-perpetuating and brutal horror? How does the 'creation' make the 'fool' conclude that God is Love?

    Do you have a scripture says that the present 'creation' is to "make the 'fool' conclude that God is Love"?

    Furthermore, how can atheists even claim that there is necessarily anything evil or wrong about such things, given that their own belief system doesn't provide an objective means of determining evil, or wrong [that is if such items even truely exists under such a system to begin with]:

    It’s often useful to ask a questioner to justify the validity of his question under his own belief system. For an atheist to complain that the Christian God is ‘evil,’ he must provide a standard of good and evil by which to judge Him. But if we are simply evolved pond scum, as a consistent atheist must believe, where can we find an objective standard of right and wrong?

    Our ideas of right and wrong, under this system, are merely outcomes of some chemical processes that occur in the brain, which happened to confer survival advantage on our alleged ape-like ancestors. But the notions in Hitler’s brain obeyed the same chemical laws as those in Mother Teresa’s, so on what grounds are the latter’s actions ‘better’ than the former’s? Also, why should the terrorist attack slaying thousands of people in New York be more terrible than a frog killing thousands of flies? http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3774

  • Liberty
    Liberty

    Oh hooberus you must know that most of us have studied your Bible, extensive apologetics, and Christian beliefs till we are blue in the face. The fact that most of us have also bothered to study science and really learn about evolution puts us ahead of you since we know the arguments inside and out from both sides.

    There is NO scriptural answer for the problem of suffering in the world apart from imaginitive apologetics from centuries of Christians trying to make sense of their contadictory and confusing Bible, hence your reference to Creationism books. Books about what people think the Bible means are NOT the Bible or God, they remain simple human conjecture. That the Universe, as we all know it, is cruel and chaotic is a fact, and only we humans have ever attempted to answer why it is that way. Your God remains silent about the issue.

    What creationists always fail to see is that if there really is a Creator then He is ultimately responsible for evil in His creation. You can blame the Devil or humans all day long but the Creator remains the sole cause of His creation and as such the sole source of evil. This is a real problem for you guys and it has never been solved. We who believe in a natural Universe do not have such a conundrum because a Universe unguided by intelligence looks just as it should, uncaring, cruel, and brutal in its accidental forms. Only we humans bring a measure of morality and kindness into this chaos.

  • hillary_step
    hillary_step

    Hooberus,

    I guess I thought that if any one sincerely desired an answer

    So you have judged me as insincere, that is your right.

    The problem is that you have still not answered the same questions that I posed that were asked by those that you have not yet judged as insincere. Unless of course this is your methodology for avoiding answering the questions and you have not yet got around to judging them.

    Now, you include a number of links to websites that you suppose deal with these questions, suggesting that I am ignorant of what is contained on them. I am not, as you well know from our previous encounters on this subject. Neither of the sites that you linked deal specifically with the issues that I noted, as you well know. You have a penchant, as does the WTS of avoiding the use of specifics in preference to the broad-sweep of bluff, as they are well aware that most people prefer the path of least resitance intellectually.

    As it is, I am not interested in what other people think on this subject, my questions, oft-repeated and never answered are directed at you. If you seek to evade them on the basis that though the questions are pertinent, they are asked without sincerity, then again this is your right, but I am sure that will agree this shows more about you than you might want it to.

    HS

  • dilaceratus
    dilaceratus

    If anyone is still interested in following the Behe debacle (debatable-- the last time I looked, Edge of Evolution was sitting somewhere in the mid-500s at Amazon... perhaps the only people buying it are those tearing it to shreds), another funny, but not surprising, wrinkle has emerged.

    Keeping true with the WTB&TS and other creationist/anti-science group's practices, it has now been demonstrated that Behe is not above dishonestly quoting his sources. Jason Rosenhouse does his work here.

    -----

    There was a link on the page I referenced in my previous post, but here's the running tab> Blake Stacey has been keeping of the reviews of Behe's book.

    REVIEWS AND REPLIES:

  • dilaceratus
    dilaceratus

    More fun: http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/07/01/books/1154680128921.html?_r=1&8tpw=&emc=tpw&pagewanted=print&oref=login

    July 1, 2007

    Inferior Design

    By Richard Dawkins

    THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION

    The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

    By Michael J. Behe.

    320 pp. Free Press. $28.

    I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.

    For a while, Behe built a nice little career on being a maverick. His colleagues might have disowned him, but they didn’t receive flattering invitations to speak all over the country and to write for The New York Times. Behe’s name, and not theirs, crackled triumphantly around the memosphere. But things went wrong, especially at the famous 2005 trial where Judge John E. Jones III immortally summed up as “breathtaking inanity” the effort to introduce intelligent design into the school curriculum in Dover, Pa. After his humiliation in court, Behe — the star witness for the creationist side — might have wished to re-establish his scientific credentials and start over. Unfortunately, he had dug himself in too deep. He had to soldier on. “The Edge of Evolution” is the messy result, and it doesn’t make for attractive reading.

    We now hear less about “irreducible complexity,” with good reason. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.

    Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are “trivial” and “modest” notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as “trivial” the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?

    The crucial passage in “The Edge of Evolution” is this: “By far the most critical aspect of Darwin’s multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.”

    What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a “modest” idea, nor is descent with modification.

    But let’s follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an “edge,” beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random mutation may explain the malarial parasite’s resistance to chloroquine, but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.

    If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility.

    Don’t evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs — every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.

    If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?

    The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.

    Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford. His most recent book is “The God Delusion.”

  • hooberus
    hooberus

    Atheist Dawkins attacks ID theorist Behe, but comes short (weekend feedback):
    Antitheists argue against any challenge to their materialism, but use many fallacies to do so. Richard Dawkins is a prime example in his recent tirade against Michael Behe. More …

    http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5213

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