It has been a failure of all us atheistical Darwinists intent on dragging the world, kicking and screaming, into the 1860s, and out of the clutches of the religion-be-deviled proudly ignorant dark-age-living creationists. A failure of nerve or conviction perhaps, a kind of naive apolitical strictly scientific honest-to-a-fault response to people who have been made brain dead by one of the most ruthless and dishonest brain-washing operations ever seen.
You will all be familiar with the sequence, indeed it is the kind of ritualised blog ballet that has developed over a whole range of questions in the last few years (climate change and Iraq being just two of the other most obvious). One of us who regularly writes about evolution will mention some new fossil discovery, or explain a particular aspect of evolution, or a new hypothesis about some evolutionary mechanism, or some outrage about teaching children creationism instead of science, or will simply pour scorn on some ignorant man with staring eyes and odd sexual tastes who loves guns and war and hates gays and who is ranting that the problem with the world today is Darwinism. We will calmly and rationally outline the scientific proposition, and then at some point a poster will say, well, it's all very well talking about how viruses mutate, or bird beaks in the Galapagos, but you have to admit that evolution has nothing to say about the ORIGIN OF LIFE.
Now at this point I tend to be very rude. Many years since I have suffered fools gladly (well, to be honest I have never suffered fools gladly, but I used to be a lot more patient than I am now). But many of my colleagues on the creationbusters team do tend to be polite, and they will metaphorically shuffle their feet at this point and write a response along the lines of, "yes, you are quite right, evolutionary theory doesn't address the origins of life, just everything that has happened since". And then, in a gotcha moment equivalent to the response Hannity might make to Obama saying "yes, yes, I am a socialist", the fundamentalist fool at the keyboard will say that this means god created life. And, as the first night follows the first day, if god created life, it logically follows that he could have chosen to create man as a separate event, and for other species could have been dabbling in DNA ever since,
No, I don't know why they do it. Well, some of it is the natural politeness which us Darwinists have evolved as a defense mechanism against idiots. But the rest of it I think is a case of not understanding the rough beast we are up against. It is a kind of scientific good manners, in which those of us who work on say reptile evolution, or demonstrating that chimpanzees are the closest thing we have to a living long lost brother, defer questions about origins to those who actually look at ancient rocks, or investigate exobiology, or who carry out experiments in abiogenesis and so on. That is their field, and if they want to write about it they can, but those of us in other biological specialities would be treading on toes if we tried to comment.
I guess in practical terms there is some kind of division between those who work on origins and those of us who study the fact of evolution that followed, but there is no theoretical division at all. natural selection works just as well on non-biological materials as on living organisms. In fact I would argue that you couldn't evolve life without the process of natural selection operating to gradually favor collections of chemicals with a structure that could survive more than a short time, and then favor the structures that could reproduce themselves. The point at which this process produces things we might call "life" is a matter for academic debate, but is irrelevant to the realty of the process. Structures that last longer than other structures will become more numerous, structures which can reproduce themselves will become more numerous than those that can't. It is impossible to visualize life emerging without a process of natural selection to act as midwife. And that truism, incidentally, means that any planet that has water could potentially produce, could potentially have produced, life. It need not necessarily have done so, many a slip twixt the complex chemical and the primeval slime, but the chances are that not just all over the universe, but even just all over the galaxy, there are creatures who have their own Darwins replacing primitive mythologies about their origins.
So no more Mr Nice Biologist - natural selection doesn't just help life evolve, it creates life in the first place. Not to insist on that, at every possible opportunity, would have been like Killer Kowalski letting his opponents up from the mat, dusting them down, and giving them a free shot at him. Life evolved on this planet by a mechanism that is simply a tautology, and the planet having burst into life, its subsequent history was a matter of carefully refining its characteristics by that same tautology, and multiplying its forms by geographic separation. There is no mystery here, no outstretched finger breathing life, nothing to puzzle over except the minor details of when and where and precisely how the chemicals changed from inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry. Life evolved. In both senses of that term.
My last Huffington post, suggesting a vaccine against religion, to be used on children, was picked up by blogs all over the world, and visitors came flooding in to see what other rude things were said about religion on the Watermelon Blog. Now they can check out all the other rude things I say about creationists too.
Follow David Horton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/watermelon_man
1.) The controversy actually resides within the ranks of the religious pseudosciences.
ID states that, according to Behe (ID's leading advocate), that the earth is indeed 4.6 billion years old (as reflected in his testimony in the Dover, PS trial). Which flies directly in the face of YECs (young earth creationists) and the inerrancy of the Bible which says (via theological calculations) the earth began in 4004 BCE, 6000 years years ago.
Yet, earlier this year in the case, Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al., Behe stated that science books like 'Biology for Christian Schools' are perfectly good science textbooks.
However, these books declare on the very first page:
A.) "'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take. . . ."
B.) "If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them."
C.) "Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible." (Phillips Decl. Ex. B, at xi.)
(continued)
Biologist PZ Myers wrote "the judge pointed out that the books which Behe approved flatly state that Christians must accept creationist conclusions—unlike our biology books, which don't demand any religious litmus test of their readers—and were therefore perfect examples of exactly the problem he was complaining about."
Hypocrisy, anyone?
3.) ID is based on religion: The Wedge Document. The ID movement is orchestrated by the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a subdivision of the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle. The CSC’s purpose consists of two points:
A.) Challenge the validity of scientific evolution
B.) Replace it with ID
In this document, the Discovery Institute states that the center's long-term goals are nothing less than the "overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies," and the replacement of "materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
(continued)
http://www.botany.org/outreach/evolution.php
As the above link states:
"Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life."
Check your head, you'll have proof.
Commentary at Darwiniana:
http://darwiniana.com/2008/12/07/if-you-call-creationists-stupid-dont-be-stupid/
That is an understatement.
Some readers may want to pursue the scientific basis for your position on selection operating on pre-animate matter to produce viable biologics. One of my favorite authors on the subject is Harold Morowitz. Two of his books on this subject are: "The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex", and "Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis" which works backwards from metabolism to show how simpler chemical processes could have led to the more complex ones such as the Krebs cycle.
For more mathematically astute readers his book "Energy Flow in Biology" is a must read classic. There have been several more modern attempts to show that the flow of energy through a complex mix of chemicals (such as the pre-biotic earth) drives the incessant recombinations of chemicals in both physical (e.g. convective) and chemical cycles, while at the same time applying selection pressures to produce the most stable compounds.
No one has yet produced a convincing demonstration of abiogenesis, but there are multiple paths that have been demonstrated that place a strong argument on the idea that life arose quite naturally from the fulment that was the primitive earth.
Even non-atheistical Darwinists have had it up to here! You might enjoy this recent post. It makes a new point about creationism/ID being poor theology as well as fantasy science. Some of the guest comments tell your whole story again:
Intelligent Design Rules Out God's Sovereignty Over Chance
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977514804
“What proponents of so-called intelligent design have cynically omitted in their polemic is that according to Biblical tradition, chance has always been considered God's choice as well.”
Why they feel that they need bible stories taught as science is beyond me.
Also, why do you not capitalize the word God in your title or in your text? Even if you do not believe in him/her/it/whatever, can you not at least humor the poor folk who are not as smart as you?
And as for capitalizing the g in god, why should we? We don't think that he's divine, or even exists, so why would we take the extra time to hit the shift key just to humor the very people that we said we aren't going to humor anymore???
Of course until someone created life in test tube, it will be denied by many; but that will be so even if it does happen in a test tube.
I love evolution as one of the most elegant world-views to come out of science. It's ability to explain the tremendous variety of life that faces us every day from such a simple set of principles is the exemplar of science. The fact that Darwin devised the theory before we knew about DNA amazes me, as does the theory's ability to dovetail nicely into all subsequent findings.
Given that, I find it distressing, that those who support evolution have somehow decided that this is a struggle between Religion and Science. It isn't. It is a struggle against using the wrong worldview for the wrong questions.
Dawkins likes to quote Douglas Adams who complained that Religion doesn't allow you to ask certain questions. But Science also has questions that we're not allowed to ask. "What happens to us after we die." The scientist will say that there is no way of knowing. Fine. But the question remains.
"What happens to us after we die?" I'd really like to have a framework for thinking about this question and questions like it. That Framework is Religion, and its ridiculous for scientists to try to tear it down.
Given that Mr. Horton has stated for the record that he intends to be rude, my personal opinion is that he's being relatively polite, certainly much more so than such REAL "evangelical atheists" as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, whose pugnacious stances I do NOT think help the "cause."
I've lost a lot of respect for Dawkins. I loved the Blind Watchmaker and I'm about to read "The Extended Phenotype" but then I start wondering whether I want to spend time on a book from someone who seems to have gone off the edge.
If you had it to write again, would you?
Calling it a question that science "doesn't allow us to ask," is a mischaracterization -- there is no basis for even formulating it. And to those of us whose brains are oriented entirely on reality, the question doesn't remain; it never existed and has no reason to exist.
My point is that the question "What happens after we die." has validity outside of a scientific context. You are trying to say that science is the only context. This is an unnecessary limitation of our worldview.
"What happens after we die" is an important question. It is not a scientific question. But that doesn't make it a "non-sequitur." It certainly isn't like asking "where are all the unicorns hiding" because we have no empirical evidence of unicorns, but we do know that we die.
My point is simply that the atheistic worldview is not a complete worldview. It's only a method for creating self consistent explanations of the observable universe. It is not intended to provide meaning or solace. That's the job of religion.
Neo-athiests are just as bad as fundamentalists when they think that their worldview is the only valid one.