This is a year to celebrate Charles Darwin and evolution. In order to start off on the right foot here are some simple1 thoughts from our Intelligent Design Creationist friends over at Uncommon Descent [TEN THOUGHTS DARWINISTS NEED TO PONDER BEFORE BREAKFAST].As we head into the new year and the impending Darwin bi-centennial on February 12th, we’re sure to be regaled with story after story of the wondrous things that Darwinian evolution hath wrought. A friend e-mailed the following to me, and with his permission, I reproduce it here below the fold. Perhaps pondering some of these questions might bring some balance to what is otherwise sure to be a lopsided Darwin love-fest for the next couple of months. The original of this can be found at the University of California Santa Barbara Veritas Forum website.All these questions, and more, will be answered at the Darwin 2009 Festival in Cambridge, July 5-10, 2009. Speakers include Sir David Attenborough, Dr. Matt Ridley, Lord John Krebs, Professor Steve Jones, Dame Gillian Beer, Lord Robert May, Richard Dawkins, Professor Dan Dennett, Ian McEwan and AS Byatt.
- Evolution by natural selection is more plausible in a theistic world than an atheistic world.
- Darwin never accounted for the arrival of the fittest. Naturalism’s god-of-chance is always called upon to do the job.
- Science rules out the possibility that natural processes might prevent major evolutionary change simply by definition because biological stability and conservation would imply that creation events had taken place since the creation of the universe.
- Creation preceded Evolution anyway.
- Edward Blyth described the process of natural selection well before Darwin and Wallace. He concluded that it acted as a force of conservation eliminating deterimental variations from populations.
- Darwin admitted that based upon the data published in his Origin of Species, one could come to “directly opposite” conclusions. For example, natural selection can prevent major evolutionary change from occurring on a gradual step-by-step basis by eliminating useless transitional stages thus explaining the lack of transitional sequences leading to all of the major body plans (phyla) in the fossil record.
- Natural selection better describes biology’s “ordinary rules of stability” than major evolutionary change.
- Darwinian theory predicts a pervasive pattern of natural history that is upside-down from the pattern found in the fossil record.
- Natural history is more compatible with progressive creation than Darwinian evolution.
- The ultimate origin of Nature itself cannot be natural. Either Nature or a Natural Law Giver has always existed. Nature has not always existed. What do you conclude?
Is anyone from North America interested in going?
1. I use the term very literally.
6 comments :
Darwin never accounted for the arrival of the fittest.
Do you think this is a typo, or a surprisingly clever reference to the fact that Darwin didn't know the source of the variation that natural selection acts upon? You know, genetics having been in a somewhat rudimentary state back in the 1850s.
Interested in going? YES. But unless things change drastically for me, I won't be able to.
Is the omission of a professional title for Dawkins intentional?!
Yowza. That looks like a marvelous conference...I'm going to have to scrutinize my finances very carefully (I go on half pay next year while I'm on sabbatical), and see how many pennies I can squeeze out of the piggy bank.
Maybe I can do something controversial, get the page hits up, and get airfare that way.
No need to go all the way to the UK. U of T is doing its own Darwin conference:
http://www.hps.utoronto.ca/darwin/
As you stroll around the upcoming Darwinist conference, ask each other "What one thing do we know with certainty to be true about Darwinism?" Listen carefully to the answers. Every one will be an assertion without evidence:
"Oh, we know it's true because we all say it's true."
"Why, everybody knows it's true!"
"We've been teaching schoolchildren that it's true for decades; therefore it's true."
And so forth.
The fact of the matter is that Darwinism is a grand leap from the evidence of evolution (i.e. fruit flies changing into minutely different fruit flies but remaining fruit flies, not becoming butterflies) to an assertion that evolution accounts for species changing one into another. Sadly for Darwinists, there is absolutely NO proof of Darwinism. It is only a theory that serves to deny the Creator of the universe, which appears to be its main purpose.
If you want to read a good novel on this subject, see http://tinyurl.com/4d79yt.
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