Sheep and Goats

Category: Evolutionists

  • Endless Grad Students to Propel Evolution

    Endless graduate students propelled by endless grant dollars explore every vestage of evolution theory. No nook is too obscure for someone to make a doctorate out of. All are programmed in the purely material Few thing to break from the mold. All are proclaiming their quest for truth. All equate their decisions to chemical reactions and somehow imagine such chemical reactions can discern “truth.” Not all, I know—that is hyperbolic. But it is the overwhelming trend. Better to hold up a stop sign to a tsunami than to attempt its reversal.

    Whereas, my people, as soon as you hop onboard, they will send you out knocking on doors on the basis that we are in the last days. So I won’t find much evolution commentary in-house. The pickings will be exceedingly lean. I’ll have to track it elsewhere.

    Thing is, if we really are in the last days—and one can easily make a case for it since every day reveals a greater trainwreck of human self-rule than the day before—then knocking on doors is just the ticket. The end is indeed “just around the corner,” even if it has proved to be one heckuva corner. No matter. When the court case is at last closed, the verdict pronounced that human rule aport from God is a disaster, when the books are finally closed on the experiment and it recedes in memory—a thousand plus years from now, will humans once again get it in their heads that self-rule is the way to go? Hopefully, Mark Twain’s words will apply, that a cat which sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, it won’t sit on a cold one either. Why? Because they all look hot.

    Meanwhile, it’s not entirely unlike when, during the Vietnam War era, I sent my buddy in college a faux form letter as though from the government: “This country has enough” followed by a long list of professions requiring a college degree, of which I put a check mark by the one he had chosen. “What we need now is soldiers! Enlist now, Kevin!” So it is that the Bible think tank, though there be many things to do in life, facilites the door-to-door ministry.

    Though representing a Western field that maintains nothing is more important than “spreading one’s seed,” after which evolution doesn’t give a hoot whether you keep living or not, they have collectively neglected that task to such a degree that their world threatens to collapse. You would think they would focus on why THAT is true. Why has the Western world effectively chosen collective suicide? Isn’t it Nero fiddling while Rome burns to be pretending that their chemically-determined choices have any meaning, much less that they uncover “truth,” when the very society they live in dissipates through lack of child-bearing?

    One might prefer the model of Genesis: Jehovah made the attraction between the sexes very very strong. He did not want to come along one or two thousand years later to a barren planet only to hear Adam say, ‘Oh….yeah….You did say that didn’t you? Sorry. I guess we just plumb forgot. So it is that for thousands of years parents would warn their offspring about premature sex, not always successfully. The young person would creep ever so closer to this tantalizing new force of sexual attraction, as though a spacepod approaching a black hole. Closer and closer they creep. It is so enticing. What is all this fuss from the old people, anyway? Suddenly he is caught in its grip and pulled into a two-mile long strand of spaghetti.

    It’s not the model that prevails these days in the West, at least insofar as bearing children is concerned. Western society ignores the most basic instinct in the world, as though pulling the plug on itself is the noblest aspiration one could attain. It’s not because they don’t understand quantum mechanics that would make them do this, nor why the universe accelerates as it expands, as though having the good sense to stay away from us.

    Only the monied and comfortable atheists can occupy oneself with the ‘how’ questions of evolution, undistracted by Rome burning. Only they, in their own world, can fail to see that it is burning, as they fascinate themselves with a worldview of chance their “evidence” points them to. Only they can be oblivious to how it cuts them off from the hopes and dreams that have historically driven humanity. Long ago (1920), H.G. Wells, who turned atheist over time, observed: “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Then, connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war manifested in WWI and soon-to-come WWII: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. Not so atheist’s next generation! They gleefully saw off the branch upon which they sit, in return for the ecstasy of no one telling them what to do! Our 70-80 years, with nothingness looming beyond, seems to them a great bargain. No matter if it ends in the nursing home with someone (ideally) changing their Depends three times a day! In his time, Ronald Reagan was, arguably, the world’s most influential person. Ten years later, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, he didn’t know who he was. Does this faze the next generation? It doesn’t seem to. For the first time in human history, relative comfort and ease is possible for most of us, provided we play our cards right and aren’t terribly unlucky and live in privileged nations. We can have fine homes, fine cars, cool technology. And that’s good enough for them! What could God possibly add to that?

    Sean Carroll waxes ecstatic over the notion of chance being the driver of our lives, with no sense at all at being cut off adrift. It’s another of his books, a more recent (2020) offering than The Making of the Fittest. This one is entitled A Series of Fortunate Events, the subtitle reading Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. “Fascinating and exhilarating!” someone chimes in on the cover. Readable though the book is, that won’t be my chime. Mine will be more along the lines of the guillotine joke. For greater sadistic effect, the executioner one day had decided that candidates ought be placed on their backs looking up at the fearsome blade. Twice the machine had inexplicably failed. Twice the prisoners had consequently been released. But as the third candidate was fastened in place, looking up, he exclaimed, “Hey! I think I see what is wrong with the thing!”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Sean Carroll and the Den Yers – Mystery Solved After 15 Years: Part 2

    (See Part 1)

    After 15 years I solved the problem of why Sean Carroll again and again calls those who deny evolution “denyers.” I did it, not the science way of devising hypotheses and then testing them. I did it the religious way, by awaiting new light from a higher authority. In this case, the higher authority is AI.

    15 years after the dilemma appeared, 15 years after devising hypotheses which were all lame, I asked newly developed AI why Carroll said “denyers” throughout his book. AI’s answer was that he didn’t.

    I was not prepared for such an outright denyal. I pressed it. It pressed back. Maybe he said it once or twice for some quirky reason, it said, but in general, he didn’t. I told it to get off its fat transistors and do a little digging. Whereupon, it said:

    “I checked available sources, including excerpts from the book. A widely circulated PDF version of The Making of the Fittest (from around the original 2006/2007 Norton publication) explicitly uses phrases like:

    • “denyers of evolution today”
    • “evolution’s denyers”
    • “The principal means for evolution’s denyers to circumvent…”

    This matches what you’re describing—it appears repeatedly in discussions of anti-evolution arguments, tactics of denialism, and contrasts with DNA evidence.” (The source AI cited was pdfcoffee*com)

    I believe this is called a vindication. Can any lessons be learned?

    To a people who are accustomed to pulling lessons out of anything, the answer is yes. First, note that the answer was almost lost to history, Inaccurate PDFs have a way of being taken down in time. Had I made my inquiry just a few years later, maybe AI’s answer would have been ‘He never sad it! What have you been smoking?’

    Moreover, though I had been asking questions—was it an offbeat Scrabble variant? a British spelling? a mutation itself? a taunt on those he considers dummies, as though putting words in their mouth—I had not asked the right question. The right question was, ‘Am I actually reading a true copy of his book?’ I mean, it was a “widely circulated PDF version of The Making of the Fittest.” Who would have imagined it would be wrong? I’ve produced PDF versions of my books. They faithfully reproduce every word. So even this AI answer 15 years later is a little squirrelly, but I guess I will accept it as what actually happened.

    The problem wasn’t what I thought it was at all. The problem was the medium. Maybe there are other areas in which the problem is the medium. Maybe there are other areas in which the correct questions have not yet been asked, and the hazy questions that have been asked produce nonsense. Over the past 100 years, the gaps of science from which the credulous, it is charged, create a “god of the gaps,” is not shrinking. It is growing. Or perhaps it is shrinking, but only if you accept seeming nonsense as the proper fill of those gaps.

    ..to be continued.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Sean Carroll and the Den Yers: Mystery Solved After 15 Years: Part 1

    It took me 15 years to solve this mystery! 15 years of constant toil and nighttime tossing and turning! 15 years trying to solve the conundrum of the ages. At long last, i have solved it. Sometimes you find yourself asking the wrong questions. Sometimes you must wait for new light.

    The vexing question unfolded thus, in my post of 2011:

    He’s a smart fellow, Sean Carroll is, author of The Making of the Fittest. Nobody here is saying otherwise. I’ve said kind things about his  book, for the most part, and may in time say more. But—hang it all—how come he can’t spell deniers? He takes aim in the latter portion  of his book at those who deny evolution, and again and again he misspells the word.

    It’s not d-e-n-y-e-r-s!

    It’s d-e-n-i-e-r-s!

    Any schoolboy knows this. Why doesn’t he? 

    Check it in your shelf dictionary. Check an on-line dictionary. Check a Scrabble dictionary: if anyone can stretch a word for acceptable spelling variations, it will be a Scrabble player. Google the odd spelling, if you like. It doesn’t matter where you check. One who denies something is a denier, not a denyer! Let’s be honest. You can’t read that word without thinking…… “den’-yer? ‘What the heck is that?”

    Well, maybe denyer is the British spelling of the term (notwithstanding that Carroll hails from Wisconsin) – I admit I’m grasping at straws. We all know Brits can’t spell properly, just as they can’t pronounce properly. Or maybe, in that rarefied scientific world Sean inhabits, they have dispensed with plebian spellings, in favor of lofty revisions more appropriate to their scientific status. Or maybe it’s a deliberate misspelling, his attempt at tweaking the idiots, those, in his view, who do deny evolution. But that seems a bit mean-spirited, and I don’t think he’s that kind of guy. Plus, it seems an inside joke that even most insiders would miss. Or—you don’t suppose that Carroll’s quirky spelling is just an application of his own theory? Has the ‘i’ mutated into a ‘y’?

    None of these hypotheses make much sense. They’re all lame. And don’t misunderstand.  It’s just spelling. It’s not that big of a deal. It really isn’t. But—blast it all—IT IS! It’s like the pebble in my shoe that doesn’t seem big at first, but drives me crazy (is that the purpose?) the more I walk on it. Sean Carroll’s been to college. And grad school. And doctorate school. How come he doesn’t know to spell? And what about his editors? What good are they if they can’t catch something so blatant? The Ministry School guidebook counsel keeps nagging at me: if you are incorrect in some detail, no matter how obscure or irrelevant, invariably someone will pick up on it and say “Huh! He doesn’t know that?” And from there it’s just a tiny hop to “Maybe he doesn’t know anything else, either.”

    When I go to his web page, I see he introduces himself with the same Michael Ruse snippet with which I introduced him: “Of all the scientists in the world today, there is no one with whom Charles Darwin would rather spend an evening than Sean Carroll.” The first thing Charles Darwin would do is tell him what a donkey he is for not spelling the word right! Evolution books like his written post-genome-mapping advance their case in a powerful way. Why mess it up with a spelling blunder that any orangutan would get right? This makes no sense at all.

    Ah well, Harley, get over it. Figure it’s a mystery. Like the Trinity. Just accept it.

    Okay, I will. Enough said.

    But it’s HARD to just get over it because he repeats the error so many times! Carroll likens his book to a full course meal, served in courses (just like Jehovah’s Witnesses are wont to describe their meetings as “spiritual meals,” their assemblies as “spiritual feasts!”). His after-dinner dessert conversation, it turns out, consists of a strategy session on how to counter the denyers, some of whom (gasp!) are to be found within his own ranks: “There are some individuals with scientific credentials who doubt or deny certain elements of evolutionary science that are widely accepted by the scientific community; some may even doubt the entire theory,” he observes. “But getting a doctoral degree and making negative arguments are relatively easy – making new, verifiable discoveries is an altogether different matter. The denyers specialize is rhetoric and the mining of quotes, not in laboratory research. (pg 218)

    I’m not so sure I agree with his premise. Note how not going along with the crowd is portrayed as traitorous. Anyone else can be dismissed as suffering from Dunning-Kruger—just call them stupid and be done with it—but one with “scientific credentials” must be dealt with separately. Even if making “negative arguments” really is “relatively easy,” that does not mean those arguments are not useful. Must everyone be out turning over rocks and growing stuff in petri dishes? Is there not a place for someone to review the conclusions of the discoverers, much as attorneys review evidence collected by the police? They don’t just accept police conclusions. Frankly, whenever folks are running herd-like in any discipline, the arguments of those who oppose are always worth looking at closely. You don’t just sneer at them because they are the minority.

    I’ll bet he’s taking aim primarily at Michael Behe, king of all the denyers with scientific background, who was even interviewed by Awake! magazine back in September 2006. Behe certainly has “scientific credentials,” and he “doubt[s] or deny[s] certain elements of evolutionary science that are widely accepted by the scientific community.” Behe doesn’t doubt that the mechanics of evolution took place, and are taking place still. He has no problem with mutation and gene duplication and fossilized genes. It’s hard to have a problem with these since scientists today can grow goo and slime and algae, life forms which reproduce very quickly, and can track each and every gene. They can spot which ones reproduced faithfully, and which ones did not. They can spot which ones build with successive generations, and which ones do not. They can then compare with the genomes of prior life forms and try to piece together how evolution has progressed through generations.

    Michael Behe endorses all of this. He simply maintains it doesn’t add up to what Carroll and most others say it adds up to, that there’s an edge, the “Edge of Evolution,” per the title of his 2007 book, beyond which pure Darwinian randomness cannot carry developing life. And—man!—is he ever castigated for not holding the party line! His book, critics rail, is a blatant attempt to bypass scientific peer review! He takes his case directly to the unwashed masses, unlearned dolts who are in no way qualified to render an opinion! No such objection is made to Carroll’s own books, since his represents the majority view.

    Now, you know I’m going to be sympathetic to Behe’s position, since it is much like Jesus’ position. Jesus didn’t first present his case to religious leaders of his day to secure their prior approval, since he knew their only interest would be to shoot it down. He went over their heads, directly to the common people. And did he ever catch heat from those leaders! Listen to them grouse (and note their contempt for the regular folk):

    “Not one of the rulers or of the Pharisees [us] has put faith in him [Jesus], has he? But this crowd that does not know the Law are accursed people.”

    Look what happens when one of their number—a first-century Behe counterpart?—breaks ranks:

    Nicodemus, …..who was one of them, said to them: “Our law does not judge a man unless first it has heard from him and come to know what he is doing, does it?” In answer they said to him: “You are not also out of Galilee, are you? [a big-city Jerusalem slur against the stupid bumpkins from the rural hills of Galilee]  John 7:48-52

    Now—15 years later—I have solved the mystery. What is it? Please forward me 100 dollars and I’ll tell you. Or stay tuned till tomorrow.

    ******  The bookstore

  • We Must Not Make a God of the Gaps

    We Must Not Make a God of the Gaps

    “It was a dicey proposition introducing a monotheistic God in a polytheistic world. Could it be that the early Hebrew writers softened the blow by telling their tale in terms of already existing accounts? If so, this would be exactly what the apostle Paul did at the Areopagus in Athens, as related in Acts chapter 17. There, he too embarked on introducing a monotheistic God to a polytheistic people, which was also dicey and possibly illegal. He did it in terms of referring to a certain statue in their midst dedicated “to an unknown god”—they had gods for everything and didn’t want to miss one. ‘This is the god I am here to tell you about,’ he said. It was such an adroit approach that by the time his audience figured out that they didn’t like it, some of them did, even if it did imply changes to their way of life.

    “We need not second the explanation above, but perhaps we can roll with it if need be. It would explain some Genesis similarities to the legends and histories of other peoples. Borrow from their language, dress it up a little, update this or that, and you are good to go. Is that what happened? Maybe. On the other hand, academic opinion can turn rapidly. Maybe everything is just as written. One must always be ready for the next headline proclaiming, ‘Everything you thought you knew about such-and-such is wrong!’ But, for now, the time has long passed for scholars to take ancient Bible history literally. Instead, they regard it as though a product of an ancient Mark Twain turned deist: religious men telling tall tales. Can they be accommodated?” (From: A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen)

    In the same speculative vein, let us suppose, just for the sake of argument—you don’t have to believe it, we’re just playing here—that with God it is not the Michelangelo painting of Him stretching out to touch Adam’s finger, thus imparting life. Say instead it is like Tom Cruise lighting the fuse that sparks Mission Impossible, the mission in this case to establish life in all the earth. Say it unfolds the way the evolutionists insists it does, like one of those books featuring a 3D pop-up diorama. A lot of work goes into those books so that when you slowly open the page you behold the layered scenes sequentially unfolding, rising, and coming raging at you. Say life came about like that.

    Then, at a certain point, God says of the seeds he planted long ago, ‘Okay, how did that garden turn out? Hmm. Here’s one I can work with”—at which point he elevates, enhances, upgrades—call it what you will—a certain Adam, and loads him up with all the additional accoutrements to decisively separate him from the animals and enable him to respond to more intense cultivation.

    Any evidence for this? None. But then, people are enthralled with the Space Odyssey movie these days in which beneficent aliens did the same, so we cannot treat this speculation with less open-mindedness. One of the theories taken seriously today to account for the infinitesimally small likelihood that the universe would have developed to be amenable to life is that we are living in but one of a virtually infinitesimal number: a “multiverse” I mean, if this crock of insight is taken seriously, there is no reason that mine should be laughed off the table. “Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King pleaded to the LA rioters before their continued actions indicated they couldn’t. That’s all I’m trying to do here. Besides, maybe my suggestion will soften out with context the brother at the Kingdom Hall razzing his Esau-like counterpart behind the now-phased out literature counter: “George, George, we try so hard to teach our kids that we didn’t descend from the apes, we read scriptures, we explain the pictures. We works so hard and we just about have them convinced—and then they look at you and they’re not too sure.”

    Still, as farfetched as the multiverse theory may seem, it is an attempt to come to grips with the crazy odds that would favor nothingness over the present universe. Even if it represents a solution more crazy, it is still attempt to solve a problem. You don’t want to be like the guy before the firing squad of 100 crack riflemen, all of whom miss, and you never stop to think that circumstance a little odd. With many scientists, that’s exactly what they have done. “Ah, well,” they say, “if they didn’t all miss, I wouldn’t be here. Let’s just leave it at that.” It is a remarkably incurious attitude from those who are supposed to have boundless curiosity. It is as though they take an original miracle for granted, then endeavor to explain everything from that point on.

    So then, at a certain point, per my musings, Jehovah injects some leaven into the top results of his evolution experiment, the hominids, and infuses all the additives to make the Adam and Eve scenario hold up. Work it through. Do what the mathematicians do in proving the square root of 2 is an irrational number. They start by assuming just the opposite!—that it is rational. Then they work it through to see if contradictions arise. One does. So they conclude the opposite of their initial assumption must be the answer. So work this revised Adam and Ever scenario out, too. Do contradictions arise? No. Does it leave plenty of gaps? Oh, yeah!—you can drive a truck through some of them. But gaps are perfectly permissible in science. You are not allowed to make a god out of them. Very well. Neither can they make a god out of ours.*

    *”the god of the gaps”—what a stupid expression! It doesn’t occur to these characters who employ it that one can turn it on its head and apply it the opposite way. Or insert it in a totally different context. Let’s say you are trying to prove your case in court but it is overruled because it has significant gaps in it. Trust me on this: it will not advance your cause if you ridicule the judge for making a god of those gaps.

    ******  The bookstore

  • ‘The God of Truth Always Fulfills His Purpose’-Part 2

    See: Part 1:

    The article appeals to those who like simplicity, who instinctively know that things reduce to simplicity. The common farmer knows it. The common factory worker knows it. But Einstein also knew it, with his E=mc2. Newton knew it, with his f=ma. Kepler knew it, with his laws on the planetary orbits. Smack dab in the middle of his scientific treatise, he burst out in praise of God, as though one of the psalmists:

    “The wisdom of the Lord is infinite; so also are His glory and His power. Ye heavens, sing His praises! Sun, moon, and planets glorify Him in your ineffable language! Celestial harmonies, all ye who comprehend His marvelous works, praise Him. And thou, my soul, praise thy Creator! It is by Him and in Him that all exists. that which we know best is comprised in Him, as well as in our vain science. To Him be praise, honor, and glory throughout eternity.”

    Even Theodosius Dobzhansky knew it, the fellow who corralled all American education onboard with evolution. His essay for American Biology Teacher (March 1973) titled, ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’ set the permanent course for those teachers to follow—no ifs, ands, or buts. Yet even in that essay, important though he thought his topic was, it plays second fiddle to one he considers more important. The lesser dominates the greater, of course, since the five page essay is dedicated to the lesser. But that does not change what he considers the greater.

    The problem is that people mistake the Bible (and the Koran—Dobzhansky opens his essay by considering the objections of a sheikh) for primers of natural science. Are they? No. The idea is “ludicrous,” he asserts. (This is not too far from what Watchtower sources have long stated: that the Bible is not a scientific textbook; only that it is accurate when it happens to touch on matters of science.*)

    Instead, those Holy Scriptures “treat of matters even more important: the meaning of man and his relations to God.” Okay? The “meaning of man and his relations to God” is not less important than the considerations of evolution. It is “more important.” Though education since has blown away this aspect of Dobzhansky’s essay, as though a sign of his “irrationality,” it should not be so blown away. Irrationality is on the number line, plain for anyone to see. The hypotenuse of a right triangle with legs of 1 is √2, an irrational number. Pi (π) is an irrational number. The Golden ratio (φ) is an irrational number. Irrational numbers are by far the most numerous of real numbers. The underpinnings of science depends upon them. You miss a lot if you blow them off as nothing.

    That is why Dobzhansky states in his essay: “It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives,” before declaring, “I am a creationalist and an evolutionist.” He is not being “irrational” in saying this. He is being real. “Evolution is God’s, or Natures’s method of Creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way,” he afterward states. And again, it is not too different from the Watchtower acknowledging years ago that the creative days of Genesis can be viewed as “epochs,” with the earth and heavens themselves established “eons” ago.

    An important qualification from Dohzhansky follows on the nature of the Holy Scriptures: “They are wrote in poetic symbols that were understandable to people of the age when they were written, as well as to peoples of all other ages.” The first phrase of the sentence is obvious. The second is as necessary, but more subtle; the poetic symbols are also understandable “to peoples of all other ages” (such as ours).

    In stating this, he is assuming people will not make themselves obtuse. He is assuming that people will not ban irrational numbers from the real number line, thus undercutting the science on which they claim to depend. He is assuming that people will not say, “since it is poetry, it is valueless.” Rather, they must incorporate such poetry into their lives if they are to be complete. You shouldn’t have to be a microbiologist to know and serve God—just as you shouldn’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. It is a specialized field in which not everyone need go.

    Thus, we are in position to tackle the asterisk following the Watchtower statement regarding the Scriptures being accurate should touch upon science, though that be not their specialty. The Holy Writings” are in language “poetic.” Alas, some become so demanding of precision in their language as to be impervious to poetry. Ideally, when they read the exhortation to not “beat around the bush,” they do not go demanding evidence of the bush. When they read the expression “crocodile tears,” they do not conclude that the one so emitting them is a crocodile. But they do take the biblical “pillars of the earth” as literal, “four corners of the earth,” and the “days” of creation. In their own way they are just as dense as religionists who take as literal texts that, if seen in any other context, they would instantly dismiss as figures of speech. Most support for the trinity and hellfire teaching is of this nature. Indeed, most church doctrines are not taught in the Bible. It is the effort to read them in that causes people to abandon the book in frustration, for some, in disgust.

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  • Macro and Micro-Evolution: From Where do the Terms Arise?

    The terms “microevolution” and “macroevolution” were coined by an evolutionist. They were not coined by a creationist in an attempt to “divide and conquer.” It was an evolutionist who first suggested that you can’t take the abundant evidence supporting micro and assume that it proves macro. The chasm is too wide. The variation it must account for is too great. In short, macroevolution is not fully reducible to microevolution. The two are qualitatively distinct to some degree.

    Russian geneticist Yuri A. Filipchenko (1882–1930) first proposed the terms microevolution and macroevolution, for the above reasons. He was the mentor of Theodosius Dobzhansky who would go on to produce for American Biology Teacher an essay entitled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” The intent was to get all those teachers on the same page. Make sure none of them go teaching creation. ‘If you teach biology without evolution, it’s like teaching chemistry without the periodic table’ is the parallel he draws.

    Dobzhansky makes no reference to macro and micro as his mentor did; he rams the two together as do most evolutionists today. But, for my money, it is like ramming similar poles of a magnet together. You reach a point where you’re just kidding yourself if you think you’ve done it. They repel. What proves one does not suffice to prove the other. There is abundant evidence of evolution cited Dobzhansky’s essay, but the specifics are all for micro. It is but educated speculation to apply it to the epochs of macro. It will apply to a degree, but to what degree is the question. It’s not likely “all the way,” as modern evolutionists are apt to say, confusing tonnage with substance.

    It will be like when my wife prefaces a question with, “Honey, do you love me?” “To a degree,” I hedge, for I am awaiting to hear what Herculean task she has in mind for me. I think evolutionists should do the same. ‘To a degree,’ they should answer, and then view the JW-authored series, ‘Was it Designed?’ and ask themselves, ‘Just what Herculean mental construction am I being asked to swallow? Am I willing to go that far? I mean, sometimes when my wife surveys the heaviest pieces of furniture in the house and wants me to move them just for the sake of doing so, I tell her no.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Substituting God for Aliens

    Twice aliens have intervened in human affairs, according to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Once they did it to jump-start evolution, to implant the notion in a certain famished apeman that he could weild an animal bone as a club to wallop the daylights out of a competing clan. Put to that use, the struggle to survive leapfrogged countless generations of natural selection in an instant. You might think strict evolutionists would cry foul to a meddling outside race putting its finger on the scales to overcome a hurdle and thereby deprive natural selection of the opportunity. But aliens tend also to be very popular with this bunch. So far as I know, none of them ever raised a peep of protest.

    Presently the head apeman had taught all his fellows to do the same—they just watched hm swinging that bone and did it themselves. Within seconds—the movie compressed it into that short a time—they had won over the water hole and food source from the other clan that hadn’t yet figured it out. Exhilarated with victory, he hurls that thigh-bone skyward. Up and up it ascends, then—(setting change)—it falls as an orbiting spacecraft. Millions of year compressed into a split second! That tiny nudge, though cheating, was all humans needed to evolve to the point of sending craft to the moon! There, they would find another nudge from those same aliens in the form of a beacon, which would send them off to a stargate just outside of Jupiter.

    Question: What if you substituted God for that early alien intervention? Would the same crowd so enthused at the first 1 x 9 x 16 dimensioned obelysk (squares of the first three integers!) upgrading that apeman be equally enthused? Of course, it wouldn’t be God nudging him on to beat up on his fellows. It would be God setting apart a certain one of them, implanting whatever he must to make that one separate and special, planting him with mate in a garden-like surrounding and a commission to spread it earth wide?

    Farfetched? Absolutely. Evidence for it? None. But those drawbacks equally apply to aliens, and they are all the rage today. Nobody calls you stupid if you suggest there must be aliens out there. They are more likely to call you stupid if you suggest there are not.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Evolution Row: A New Take on Desolation Row

    In the late 1970s, Bob Dylan went full-blown born-again, an intense period but it didn’t last. When he leaned rather hard into his producer, the guy said, “Bob, you’re dealing with a 60-year-old Jewish atheist. Let’s just make a record.” They made a fine record, with one song, “Gotta Serve Somebody” winning a Grammy.

    Now, Dylan at no time has struck me as a person who, when a scientist says “Jump!” responds “How high?” Can one spot a foregleam of his religious temperament in Desolation Row, written 15 years earlier? That song contains ten verses and run over eleven minutes. For verse eight, call it Evolution Row and try this interpretation on for size:

    At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew

    Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do

    Anyone familiar with the Bible, as Dylan is, will know who is “all the agents and the superhuman crew.” At the darkest time, they round up everyone “who knows more than they do.” Well, nobody knows more than does the “superhuman crew,” so it must be a reference to those who think that they they know more than others, who think that are very smart indeed and that take great pleasure in parading their knowledge before everyone else, who do not hesitate to talk down to the masses should the need arise, which it often does.

    Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine

    Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene

    Despite their self-heralded knowledge, they are “rounded up” and processed, as though in a “factory.” The knowledge that they take such pride in is nevertheless death-dealing, like a “heart attack machine strapped across their shoulders,” with “kerosene” thrown in for good measure. 

    Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go

    Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.

    Despite their knowledge being death-dealing—settling for a few dozen years lifespan at best and then eternal nothingness—nobody must escape this stuff. “Insurance men” see to it, descending from institutional “castles” for that purpose. Nobody escapes from Evolution Row. 

    A dimly lit street scene titled 'Desolation Row' featuring vintage storefronts, a mix of pedestrians, and moody atmospheric lighting.

    Naw, I don’t really think Dylan had that in mind. Other verses don’t so readily lend themselves to that interpretation. But it’s not a bad interpretation all the same. Dylan often writes in a stream of consciousness and doesn’t necessarily have any underlying message. It’s like decrypting Kafka. The tone is distinct, but the underlying words can be taken any number of ways. He is not inclined to pose as a great man cryptically recording deep truths for all humanity if they can but prove worthy by unraveling the message. Instead, he presents himself more like a modern Aaron, who throws stuff into the fire and “out came this calf.” (Exodus 32:24)

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  • Jehovah’s Witnesses—“Micro” “Macro” evolution and abiogenesis

    In the main, Jehovah’s Witnesses have no problem with “micro-evolution,” the stuff of bird beak variations that Darwin found on the islands. Where they object to it, it is because of correctly anticipating the truckloads of dogma that atheists will drive through the door it cracks open. 

    One can always argue with “macro-evolution” but there hardly seems a point. Plenty of religious people will say: ‘Yes, God created life and he did it by means of evolution.’ Better to focus on ‘abiogenesis,’ the origin of life. Did it happen on its own? Or did it require the “spark” of God? Standing up to macro is probably worth doing, but nothing gets the job done like standing up to spontaneous abiogenesis. This is what the most recent Watchtower publications do, such as ‘The Origin of Life: Five Questions Worth Asking.’ The last book to seriously take on macro was 40 years ago: ‘Life—How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?’

    I wrote a book recently entitled: ‘A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen.’ (searchable on Amazon) An appendix section examines the progress that scientists specializing in origin of life have made. As much as I would like to say, ‘just buy the book,’ most of that material is available free, in less polished form, here.

    It fits in the Workman’s Theodicy book because a successful quest to show life came about on its own makes any theodicy, even the theodicy that works, little more than a work of fiction.

    I put three appendixes into the work, all items that are relevant to the theme but don’t easily fit into the main narrative. One is the origin-of-life investigations. Then, there is an item on slavery and those who say the Bible condones it. Lastly, there is coverage of a recent book by Benjamin Labatut entitled ‘When We Cease to Understand the World.’ That piece of historical fiction curiously intertwines themes of advance mathematics, quantum physics, world war, and madness. Somehow it seemed to have a place, especially for its contention that the madness took on serious form around the time of the First World War, something that especially resonates with Witnesses. It also fits for its suggestion that when humans pour of full strength all they have to offer (mathematics, quantum physics) it does not negate the ‘man is dominating man to his injury’ verse of Ecclesiastes 8:9 but merely accelerates the chaos. That too fits into the Witnesses’ narrative that God’s universal sovereignty is the prime issue before all creation today.

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  • Did they tell Charles Darwin that God was picking flowers?

    Did they tell Charles Darwin that God was picking flowers?

    Charles Darwin’s favorite child, Annie, contracted scarlet fever at age 10. She agonized for 6 weeks before dying. Also a casualty was Darwin’s faith in a beneficent Creator. The book Evolution: Triumph of an Idea, by Carl Zimmer, tells us that Darwin “lost faith in angels.” That’s an odd expression. Why would it be used?

    Did they tell him that God was picking flowers?

    Is there any analogy more slanderous to God than the one in which God is picking flowers? Up there in heaven He has the most beautiful garden imaginable. But it is not enough! He is always on the watch for pretty flowers, the very best, and if He spots one in your garden, He helps himself, even though it may be your only one. Yes, He needs more angels, and if your child is the most pure, the most beautiful, happy, innocent child that can be, well….watch out! He or she may become next new angel. Sappy preachers give this illustration all the time, apparently thinking helps.

    The picking flowers analogy is nowhere found in the Bible. However, there is a parable parallel in all respects EXCEPT THE MORAL AT THE END. It is the one Nathan told to David after he had taken Bathsheba as a wife and killed her husband.

    “The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle,  but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
    “Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
    David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die!  He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”
    Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”             (2 Samuel 12:1-7)

    This analogy appeals to us. It is just. The man is not expected to take comfort that the king stole his wife. No, he deserves execution! So how is it that preachers have God doing the same, expecting it will comfort? Of course it will not! The man who stole the sole lamb deserves to die! Preachers make a horrific mess trying to extract themselves from the moral corners their doctrines unfailingly paint them into.

    How different history might have been had Darwin known the truth about death. Not just Darwin, but every one of his time, as well as before and after. Instead, fed a diet of phony pieties….junk food, really…..he and others of inquisitive minds searched elsewhere in an attempt to make sense of life.

    two doughnuts in brown box
    Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

     

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