I read on here someone paraphrasing from Evolution Versus The New World the quote in this post's title where a scientist is quoted as saying the theory of evolution is "much further from being proved than men are from flying to the moon." (a quote used in 1967 taken from a LIFE magainze article from 1950 - and of course men flew to the moon 2 years after this booklet was pubished by the WBTS).
For those interested in the quoted scientist actual words, you can read them at google books . Of course the author, a chemist, is refering to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, something he refers to as "percise theory," as opposed to "vague thoery," the latter he is describing the easy-to-see evidence that evolution has happened. In short, he is attacking how it happened, not that it has happened. Prior to saying what he did as quoted above, in the preceding paragraph in the article he says this:
The question at issue with the percise theory of evolution is whether God gave things a sort of evolutionary shove every now and then (or perhaps all the time), or whether he just wound things up in the beginning and let them rip.
And two paragraphs preceding farther back we see him saying:
The vague theory has been abundantly proved, with an overwhelming mass of evidence.
Cleary, he wasn't supporting the idea that evolution has not been "proved," or better worded is not a fact (as the WBTS asserts, but he seems to instead support thiestic evolution, the very thing that Evolution Versus The New World blasts as being just as bad as accepting evolution atheistically!).
Anyway, out of curiousity I looked at the context of that quote in Evolution Versus The New World and noticed that the logic employed is full of logic fallacies. I will post some of the passages from the book and thought it would be fun to see how many logic fallacies we can enumerate. Thought this could be a fun game! For a nice list of fallacy canidates see here or here.
To start I notice the following fallacies about the the Anythony Standen quote:
- Appeal to Authority (he's a Chemist, not a scientist in a life sciences field)
- Fallacy of exclusion (i.e. cherry picking/quote mining/quoting out of context/misleading quotations)
- Faulty Comparision (i.e. weak analogy especially since men did fly to the moon)
- Non Sequitor (the analogy presented as reason not to accept evolution is irrelevant and adds very little support to the conclusion ex ante, and works against the reasoning ex post (now that men have flown to the moon))
So here is the context of the quotation in Evolution Versus The New World (page 61):
So do not be stampeded in the name of science to worship at the altar of evolution. As Anthony Standen warns, science has become "the great Sacred Cow of our time". This scientist with a refreshingly uninflated ego declares that the precise theory of evolution is "much further from being proved than men are from flying to the moon". — Science Is a Sacred Cow, pp. 34, 103.
The theory of evolution is old-fashioned, a pagan religious teaching of ancient nations, philosophized about by the Greeks, fervently believed by totemist savages, reeking with fairy tale transformations. It was old when Christ trod the earth, but he did not follow it. He scorned such traditions of men that voided God's Word. It was part of the wisdom of the Greeks, which was foolishness to God. It was part of the philosophy and vain deceit Christians were warned to beware of. Shun "profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called", cautioned the apostle Paul...
In case you are wonder what the last paragraph is refering to... (pages 26-28):
Evolution was taught in the fifth century B.C. The Greek philosopher Empedocles (493-435 B.C.) has been called "the father of the evolution idea", believed in spontaneous generation as the explanation of the origin of life, thought that organisms evolved gradually after much trial and error, and taught in rough form Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) claimed that "man is the highest point of one long and continuous ascent". — See The Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 10, p. 606, 1942 edition.
It has been suggested that the Greek philosophers gleaned their evolution ideas from the Hindus, who have the soul transforming from one animal to another till it reaches the perfection of nirvana. Six hundred years before Christ the Mayan culture began, and its religion taught a streamlined evolution, saying that the rain-god made man in this order: a river, a fish, a serpent, and then man. And did you know that savage tribesmen scattered throughout the earth have believed evolution from ancient times? They have totems, and the totem of a clan is generally a species of animal or plant. On this subject the Encyclopcedia Britanmca, vol. 23, pp. 467, 476, edition of 1894, states:
The members of a totem clan call themselves by the name of their totem, and commonly believe themselves to be actually descended from it. Thus the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are descended from a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight of its shell in walking, contrived by great exertions to throw it off, and thereafter gradually developed into a man. The Cray-Fish clan of the. Choctaws were originally cray-flsh and lived underground, coming up occasionally through the mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, and, treating them kindly, taught them the Choctaw language, taught them to walk on two legs, made them cut off their toenails and pluck the hair from their bodies, after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their kindred, the cray-fish, are still living underground. . . . Prof. Sayce finds totemism among the ancient Babylonians.And is it not the evolutionist that is the gullible gobbler of fairy tales? Is it not the fairy tales that deal copiously with physical transformations? that tell of children turned into spiders and back again? of mice becoming horses and lizards becoming men to serve Cinderella? Of course, the evolutionist's transformations are fables more cunningly devised, and instead of popping in on the wings of a witch's spell or the wave of a fairy's wand they steal in so slowly that in comparison a snail's pace would appear as the lightning's flash. Nevertheless, evolutionist W. Beebe writes in The Bird, page 97: "The idea of miraculous change, which is supposed to be an exclusive prerogative of fairy tales, is a common phenomenon of evolution." Dr. McNair Wilson, formerly editor of the Oxford Medical Publications, observed that evolution is "a theory which is as full of ogres, mermaids and centaurs as any fairy tale".
Hence it is the evolutionist that is stuck with a superstitious myth out of the dim past, as unprovable now as it was then. Why do most scientists accept this theory out of the bogs of antiquity? Because it is their religion, the orthodox belief of scientists, and they fear what fellow scientists would think if they did not conform to it. Unproved and unprovable, evolution is a faith, a faith in fossils that do not exist, faith in missing links still missing, faith in vestigial organs not vestigial, faith in embryological evidence that is imaginary, faith in blood tests that refuse to behave and in comparative anatomy that proves nothing. It is a blind, credulous faith, a dead faith without works, a faith induced by fear, fear of what a smart world saturated with evolution might think. To prove orthodoxy many scientists become unscientific, and embrace the religion of the college-bred class of this twentieth century — evolution.