A Christian blog (yes I occasionally look at those too) recently touted a list of stumpers to ask the evolutionist in your life. These gotcha questions are supposed to shut down any lingering doubts on the invalidity of evolution. I decided to take the creationtoday.org test myself to see if my non-belief would come falling down around me. From: 10 Questions to Ask Evolutionists http://creationtoday.org/ten-questions-for-evolutionists/ 1. Where did the space for the universe come from? Space is a vast emptiness with the occasional bits of matter (relatively speaking) interrupting its enormous reach. It is in essence nothingness. So you are saying God created the nothingness? Maybe He created a lack of something? 2. Where did matter come from? We don’t know exactly. We have theories based on some pretty solid observations, the Big Bang for example. Then this unsatisfied blogger would then ask,“who created the Big Bang?”. You might as well ask who created God too. 3. Where did the laws of the universe come from (gravity, inertia, etc.)? Confusion of cause and effect. Calling them the “Laws of the Universe” is an archaic flashback to a time when science attempted to explain religion and the Bible was an acceptable scientific source. It’s not. The earth is not flat. Germs, not demons, cause pathological disease. “Laws of the Universe” presupposes a design or a plan. They should be rightly called “Properties of the Universe” because they just happen to be how things work. It’s like asking why an orange is…well…orange. I guess because God decided not to make it purple. 4. How did matter get so perfectly organized? Matter is not so perfectly organized. A lot of what’s observed does not have purpose or make sense. It just is. The question implies that Intelligent Design nonsense that the Dover School Board tried selling the gullible public a few years back. That didn’t hold up in the court of reason either. For that matter, life is not perfectly organized as well. You can point to a throng of examples, junk DNA, the backward engineering of our eyes, disease mutations, etc. 5. Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing? This presumes that energy is here to organize. Yes, it does take energy to organize matter. But I refer to my last answer – it just is. There’s no evidence for an organizer or an energy maker. To try to assign intention to every flicker and fart is just the hopeful nonsense of some people’s need for purpose. Somewhere between now and Einstein’s time, a theologian came up with the idea that God was the energy in E=MC~2 equation. God created matter and somehow the speed of light was involved. Einstein’s equation evolved (excuse the word) into scientific “proof” of the creator’s existence. 6. When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter? Once again, we are not sure. There are three major theories that have laboratory support, but nothing concrete. We don’t know. We think the first cell (the protocell) developed about 3.6 billion years ago. But being soft ephemeral single-celled organisms, they didn’t leave a lot of evidence behind. Creationists have but one answer, God did it. It’s simple, it’s convenient, and there’s no way to prove it. When asked to defend the nonsense in their Bibles or the cruel apathy of God, creationists can cop out by saying we don’t know God’s plan and we are not supposed to. 7. When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself? This is a repeat of number 6. 8. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce? What? Are we looking for genitalia here? You naughty creationists! Sexual reproduction begins with the exchange of genetic information between two separate organisms of the same species. It developed in the early oceans with advancements in eukaryotic cells. This was an evolutionary leap as the exchange of DNA gave offspring an assortment of genes to deal with their changing environment. As strategies to transfer genes to others in the species developed, some animals eventually sported more advanced delivery systems (e.g. the penis and vagina). Even some bacteria “do it” via hair-like pilli in what is called conjugation. Single-celled organisms reproduce by copying their genetic information, building up materials and then splitting in two. This process is advanced or hindered by the available resources. How the very first cell reproduced is a matter for conjecture fed by loads of laboratory evidence to suggest different means. 9. Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of its kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival? (Does the individual have a drive to survive, or the species? How do you explain the origin of reproduction?) Plants and animals don’t want (anthropomorphic bastardization) to reproduce and can’t see the big picture. Evolution tweaks (again with the anthropomorphic language) DNA not for the survival of the individual, but for the survival of the species. Genes are passed on which make successive generations better able to adapt to the challenges of competition, changes in their environment, predation, etc. Natural selection weeds out the less genetically fit and unlucky. As far as the origin of reproduction, again, see number 6. 10. How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.) This is intellectually insulting as it’s an apples and oranges argument – it makes no sense. First of all genetic code runs on the same four nucleotides (A’s, G’s, C’s and T’s). A mutation is a change in the arrangement of those same letters. Of course recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books. You can recombine English letters to create Spanish or French books – all three languages use the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Chinese books use a completely different set of characters. And once and for all, evolution is not a theory. It’s an observable fact, reproducible in the lab. Some of its tenets are theories only because we haven’t discovered the answers yet. Science is a dynamic, self-policing and self-correcting process through which we become more knowledgeable, unlike religion. |
0 Comments
In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth over an unfathomably long period of time; and the Earth was round and not the center of the Universe.
And the Lord said, “Let there be light!” and gases gathered in one place and under immense weight and pressure created light. God made small invisible creatures which cause disease. Marrying your cousin is not a good thing. Bad stuff is going to happen sometimes – I’m not always paying attention. If something good happens, you can assume it was me. Go ahead and give thanks. You can ask for things, but you’re not always got to get them. This is called Tough Love. I don’t care about sports. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This is an allegory. You don’t need flies. Some people are going to look and act differently. It’s okay. God so loved the world He gave his only begotten son and nobody got killed in His name. Slavery is wrong. Period. No exceptions. No excuses. (You won’t find that in the original Bible). The 10 commandments #1 Be good to others who are good to you. #2 Don’t be stupid. #3 Don’t be a jerk, a jackass, a prick, a bastard or a tool. #4 Take it easy at least one day a week. #5 Thou shalt not be a sycophant. I don’t need my ass kissed. I know my limitations and feel good about myself. #6 Honor thy son and daughter. Let them think for themselves. Give them enough love and respect to make them good people. #7 Keep the planet clean because I created it so. #8 Don’t eat anything that smells bad. #9 Don’t lie unless you have to. Think white lies and that Anne Frank thing. Refer to #3. #10 You don’t have to tithe. God doesn’t need money. Religion should not be an open-ended jobs program. I’d end it with some tips about good hygiene and eating right. “More importantly, the Bible believing creationist will be careful to confine himself to speculations that are consistent with God’s Word.” - Quote from an anti-evolution website.
Those constantly questioning evolution, looking to poke a hole, keep science on its toes, providing a public service in keeping due diligence in the scientific community. The usual targets are the rapidly disappearing gaps in the fossil record or past overreaching by a single fossil hunter, corrected by peer evolutionary biologists, not creationists as they would have you believe. When this fails to create the desired incredulity, creationists resort to half-truths and outright lies, imagining that this somehow serves their side of the origins argument. I remember seeing John Agee (of Trinity Broadcasting) using a quote from National Geographic, stating that Australopithecus cannot be a direct ancestor to modern humans and using it as scientific proof against evolution. What good ole John did not do (while tossing the baby out with the bath water) was quote the rest of the article which stated that although not a direct ancestor, we surely shared a relatively recent common ancestor with this upright walking beast. It is easier to cast aspersions than to actually bear the burden of proof. What of the stories of the Bible? So often Christians offer the text as confirmation of fact without questioning its content. Biblical fairy tales like Noah’s ark, the flat earth, the starry firmament, the cause of disease and mental illness (it’s demons in case you did not know) are glossed over or ignored for emotional convenience. But when these are questioned, creationists, defend these and show your work. Real scientists do not have the luxury of saying, “accept this”, and they shouldn’t. Nor should you. Show proof of a deluge which encompassed all the land on earth -and don’t just point to the Grand Canyon and shout “see!” Thrush out a testable theory which stands up to all the science. Offer up the scientific support for a 6000 year earth. Provide archaeological evidence that the people of Israel were enslaved en mass by the Egyptians at the time of Moses. Extrapolate the physical presence of a human soul. Give us even some shred of evidence (besides stories written decades, even centuries after) of a man who performed miracles 2000 years ago in Roman Palestine. You have to convince the world that the mish-mash of weird stories delivered thousands of years ago have any basis in fact. Archaeological support, geological data, physical substantiation, something besides third and fourth hand hearsay then passed down generation to generation, re-translated, and tweaked for self-serving political expediency. Help me out here! I’d even settle for some cosmic insight into the workings of the world. Don’t just prove it to me, prove it to yourself. There are people from time to time who ask me what does it matter? Why care so much about what other people believe as long as it does not affect you? But so often it does. Not to be content believe in angels and demons in private, creationists impose their vision of the world on the rest of us. Policy makers, industrialists, social leaders, people who hold sway over vast portions of society base important decisions on this ridiculous book. Healthcare, education, the environment, the media, social equality all suffer at the hands of these self-righteous demagogues. If you purport to inflict your rules from your ancient storybook, you must shoulder the burden of proof. You and I both know that you don’t consult the book when it comes to gun control, the death penalty, immigrants and food stamps. Red state salivating fundamentalists can’t wait to pull the lever on the electric chair (WWJD?). All that love thy neighbor and forgiveness stuff goes right out the window. The argument to “believe as a child” is demagogue speak for “don’t you dare question”. Men, who did want to be challenged when setting down the rules to their benefit, claim they are handed down by an unquestionable authority. The power of the church, which even kings and emperors had to bow before (the slyest rulers claimed to be in direct contact with the Lord), is concerned with controlling the masses, keeping down dissent, getting the lower classes to fight their “holy” wars. Never question, never think, and if you did dare to, there was a ugly throng of god-fearing superstitious people to make sure your sediment was quashed along with your body. Who has the best god? I mean the real deal, the true god(s). It’s hard to tell, but there needs to be some way to assess which Supreme Being is Numero Uno. In the 500,000 million years of the modern Homo sapiens, we have worshipped a staggering number of gods, beyond the myriads of gods from the polytheistic traditions where every mountain and spring contain some sort of deity. Today’s big players are Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Krishna and Brahman (these are not in order of importance because none of them should be), and there are also millions of contemporary adherents to other gods like Baha (to the Bahá'í faith), Ahura Mazda (Zoroastrian), and Waheguru (Sikh).
Behind our modern age lies a multitude of dead religions littering the landscape of civilization’s past. For every Ashur (Assyrian) there was Ba'al (Canaanite), competing through their respective faithful, killing each other to prove which god was the better god. And if you happen to lose the battle, well, you must have upset your god somehow to allow this to happen. Flagellate yourself, burn some old woman as witches or sacrifice some children to get back in your respective benevolent Creator’s good graces. Those gods which have been lost to time, usually when the faithful have all been slaughtered or converted, disappear only to be discovered by a sweat-soaked archaeologist digging around in hot sand millennia later. What survives of a Abrasax (Gnostic) or a Perun (Slavic) has to be pieced together in stone tablets, monuments, and (if you are lucky) papyrus, all that devotion and worship swept away by the desert winds. These were just the head honchos. A representative ancient religion had a god for phenomena, ideals, emotions, geographical entities, or even just inanimate objects. Gods of fertility, justice, revenge, punishment, security, war, wealth, sea, the sun, the moon, the constellations, grain, metals, snakes, horses, luck, poetry, death, music, wine, pleasure, childbirth, growth, love, memory, humor, flowers, fruit trees, night, day, etc, etc, so forth and so on, rule their special realms and require individual worship. Hey! Don’t the Catholic saints kind of work this way, too? Just the known list of moon gods and goddesses is extensive: Artemis, Bendis, Coyolxauhqui, Diana, Heng-O, Ix Chel, Khonsu, Thoth, Osiris, Min, Duau, Mên, Selene, Sin/Nanna, Tsuki-Yomi, and Yarikh to sample a few from across time and the world’s surface. The polytheistic religions really let their imaginations run. You can find a whole array of Super Friends in the African pantheon, the Armenian pantheon, the Aztec pantheon, the Berber, the Canaanite, the Celtic, the Chinese, the Egyptian, and the Greek Pantheons; not to mention the Guanche, Hindu, Incan, Japanese, Japanese Buddhist, Mayan, Native American, Norse, Rigvedic, Roman, Slavic and Sumerian pantheons (thank you Wikipedia). Modern polytheistic religions include Shintoism, Chinese folk religion, Thelema, Wicca, Druidry, Taoism, Ásatrú and Candomble. Then just what is the best yardstick for assessing a god? When shopping for your religion, you should never throw yourself at the first apostle who comes a-rapping at your door. Require some proof, empirical evidence to win you over. Have some self respect! Don’t drop to your knees for the first feel good deity which hands you a pamphlet. A god must be evaluated through the text since He or She must be too busy to personally meet His or Her creations, and so I think, should meet the following criteria: 1. Historically accuracy – If the word of God cannot match the archaeological and anthropological evidence then the text has no credibility. 2. Scientific insight - What does the inspired lore of God say about disease? Does it come down demons or microbes? Is the earth flat or spherical? Is the solar system heliocentric or geocentric? Has He imparted anything like Planck ’s constant to one of His prophets to share with the world? The being that set the stars in the sky ought to be up on His particle physics. 3. Prediction of events – Has the scriptures any insight into what is going to happen? Please stop trying desperately to attach meaning to those vague, weird visions of the Book of Revelations to fill this requirement. If you mean Hitler, say Hitler or at least the guy with the square moustache and not the eagle which pounces on the fish with two heads. God, any god, who can leap those hurdles, has my attention. I am His/Her/Their willing servant. But I have not found Him/Her/Them yet. As a failed Christian, I know the Bible comes up short in all three criteria. Why extraneous schemes like the Bible Code come about is that the text so often comes up short in fulfilling meaning and so devotees invent extravagant systems to get the scriptures to say more. If you look hard enough you can find something. Program your computer to look for certain words and maybe it will find that every fifth letter of each verse of the KJV of Leviticus spells “c-l-i-n-t-o-n-c-i-g-a-r”. Now I can just hear you say, “No one can measure a god’s validity by science. God has to be taken on faith.” I have heard this argument before, and not as loud as a guy at the Richard Dawkins’ book signing I attended who kept chiming his mantra of God cannot be seen through reason. Why not? I can attribute the earth and everything in it to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as well as any deity with such non-reason. I might as well pray to a rhododendron as to Jehovah, if we have no constraints of rationale. Reason is the tool by which we live and thrive. It keeps us from walking off cliffs or drinking after a poisoned dinner partner. Think about it. There’s a reason that the Scriptures command us to believe as a child – unguarded and unthinking. People since the dawn of our human consciousness have been looking up at the sky seeing that big, bright orb hanging there, needing a satisfying explanation of what’s going on up there. Without real knowledge we come up empty except for our imaginations. We created a god or gods in our own image. He- notice how many gods seem to be angry men!- has laws (conveniently reflecting the interests of the people who speak for Him), needs sacrifices and glorification, wants us to sacrifice our lives for Him, unquestioningly support His holy men, and, like George Carlin said, “for some reason He needs money!” This anthropomorph embraces our insecurities, provides a means to send us to war, pacifies to obedience, sells us politicians and political parties, and picks our pockets. Every generation or so the believers can end up killing each other over the way we worship Him. |