Category: Evolutionists

There is much evidence that can be cited in support of evolution.

But it doesn’t add up to much. It may imply its conclusion, but it hardly proves it. Its like a huge mound of pennies: substantial in its bulk, but you’re not going to retire off it. To make up for the lack, factual evidence in support of evolution is complemented by a liberal dose of emotion, and the two in tandem account for evolution’s dominant position in popular thinking. Is not emotion, rather than factual evidence, the more influential of the pair?

Science, by it’s very nature, is ill-equipped to reach conclusions regarding our origin. It is too constrained by its own scientific method, the self-imposed modus operendi of scientists:

Observe what happens; based on those observations form a hypothesis as to what may be true; test the hypothesis by further observation and experiments; and watch to see if the predictions based on the theory are fulfilled. If they are, your hypothesis is strengthened. If not, you’d better rethink your hypothesis.

The emphasis is on things that can be observed. And manipulated. And experimented upon. Experiments should be repeatable so that others can verify any conclusions. These requirements lend themselves to physics and chemistry and such, but they don’t suit the search for our origins very well, for that search is a matter of history. History can’t be repeated, it can’t be experimented upon, it can’t be observed. Sure, clues can be examined and probed a bit….some tentative conclusions can be drawn….but science is left without it’s most treasured weapons.

Americans today watch a lot of CSI television shows. The steel-resolved (but attractive) heroes of those stories come armed with microscopes and lasers and test tubes and God knows what else. They solve whatever riddle and always nail the villain. If high tech cops can catch crooks this way, surely, scientists can do the same with our origins, viewers figure. But alas, our origins are infinitely more complex and clues are contradictory.

And if the scientific method cherishes repeatable experiments, it also disdains testimonials and anecdotal evidence. This type of evidence is inherently unreliable, say those champions of the scientific method. Yet what is history if not testimonials and anecdotal evidence? And again, our origin is history.

As to the emotional content of evolution, is it not revealed in this comment of H. S. Lipson? (Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol 31, p 138, and reproduced in one of the Watchtower publications, which collects such statements) He discusses some dilemma or other regarding origins and concludes: “The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory if the experimental evidence supports it.”

He uses a curious word: anathema. Is it a Freudian slip? It’s a word you might not expect a scientist to use. Are not members of that group coolly unemotional, unswayed by feeling, moved only by hard facts? “Anathema,” however, conveys intense emotion. Accursed, detested, and loathed would all do nicely as synonyms.

The primary support for evolution is emotional in nature, not factual. That’s not to say that facts cannot be garnered in support of evolution. They certainly can be. But those facts are not weighty or substantial enough to account for evolution’s rapid ascendancy and its present iron grip on modern-day thinking. Emotion accounts for it. Specifically, the emotion of anathema Lipson spoke of…..anathema towards religion with all its sordid history.

If creation is correct, then it puts religious leaders in the driver’s seat, and they are a smug, abusive, sometimes ignorant bunch. The times they enjoyed most authority is the time history records as the “Dark Ages.” They brought us the Crusades. They brought us the Inquisition. They brought us a virtual ban on reason and discovery. We all know the opposition Copernicus and Galileo encountered when they ventured that the earth was not flat and was not the center of the universe.

Of course, clerical ignorance was not the Bible’s ignorance. The Bible’s statements on earth’s position and shape are up to date:

He is stretching out the north over the empty place,
Hanging the earth upon nothing……He has described a circle upon the face of the waters, to where light ends in darkness…….Job 26:7,10

No reasonable person wants to cede authority back to these guys. Coming into more modern times they preached unqualified support for World Wars I and II.

Moreover, had they stuck with the Bible’s reasonable explanations regarding deathand suffering, they might have had something with which to counter the present “age of reason.” The Bible explanations may not be scientific, but they certainly make sense. But no! religious leaders long ago jettisoned such appealing teachings for doctrines that are incomprehensible, if not repugnant: doctrines like trinityand hellfire.

The emotional appeal of evolution is that, in one blow, religious leaders lose their authority. The rug is pulled out from under them. No longer are they the Guardians of Ultimate Truth. Instead, they become Guardians of Children’s Stories and Fairy Tales. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch. But alas, so thoroughly have religious leaders identified religion with God that people cannot separate the two, a point of constant frustration, though not necessarily surprise, to Jehovah‘s Witnesses.

So long as evolution maintains its grip in explaining our origins, religious leaders remain relatively toothless….a mere shadow of what they once were. The teaching will remain dominant for that reason. Any supporting facts will be sung to high heaven. Any non-supporting ones will be shunted aside, if not shouted down. Nobody wants to bring on Dark Ages II.

 

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The bookstore

We’ve all seen those lineups of our evolutionary roots…a parade of characters emerging from the slime. The first figure’s barely slithering with butt yet in the water, but each successive fellow is more and more erect, till finally, there’s the guy in the front with briefcase and tie. Sometimes, when satirists are illustrating the backward evolution of something, say….the American school system, they turn the whole troupe around and march them back into the muck.

But the ancestors in the lineup aren’t so orderly as they appear. Since the parade’s inception, for example, the apelike homo habilis has been faithfully tailing the manlike homo erectus, and heaven help you if you were to question that order. But in 2005, scientists in Kenya found fossil specimensof each within walking distance of the other. Moreover, they were dated equally ancient. They weren’t ancestor-descendent at all, but contemporaries, more like Clint Eastwood and his orangutan!Evolutionists muttered about it some in scientific journals, but I never saw a word in the popular media. Ah well, they seem to say….if it wasn’t that slobbering ancestor, then it must have been some other.

The marcher who really takes the cake, though, is Piltdown man. He snuck into the lineup in 1912 and remained for forty years before he was unmasked as a fraud in 1953 and kicked out!

It was a laborer who discovered the bones at the small English village of Piltdown. In time, the place would yield forty separate discoveries. He turned them over to Charles Dawson, a local lawyer, who trotted them off to the museum. They sure looked old. Yes, they represented the missing link, proof that Darwin’s fifty year old theory applied even to humans! The find was announced to the scientific world, which swooned in ecstasy.

But forty years later they began to smell a rat. Weren’t those bones merely chemically stained so as to look old? And hadn’t they been filed here and there in order to mimic the passage of time? More tests were made and…..sonuvagun….it was just a pile of old bones, largely a run-of-the-mill contemporary ape with some other critters fused in! Someone had made asses of the world’s most respected evolutionists! “It really was a horrible, nasty, vicious piece of work!” grouses Andy Currant, featured on the NOVA documentarychronicling the farce.

Who would play such a mean trick?

Suspects were not few. Even Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator Sherlock Holmes, was considered! He lived nearby, he was a medical doctor, he collected fossils, and he was a showman. He even had motive. See….he believed one could communicate with the dead. He took photographs of ghosts, but when he showed them to scientists, they laughed at him. “Frauds, double exposures,” they declared, “easily faked!” “I’ll show you what a fraud is,” he supposedly schemed, and so planted evidence that would give him the last laugh for forty years!

(This better not happen again, Romulus Crowe, If it does, I’m on to you!)

The lawyer Charles Dawson also emerges as a suspicious character. When his Piltdown man was revealed as phony, researchers tested his other ancient treasures on display at museums. They were all forgeries!

Still another fellow comes to light….were they all in cahoots? Martin Hinton, a staff scientist at the British Natural History Museum (where Piltdown was housed) died in 1961. When they found his trunk decades later in a museum storage room, it contained all the chemicals and tools required to create the hoax. Moreover, there were bones doctored similarly, as if he were practicing for the great joke. (or was he only recreating the deception?) Mr. Hinton’s motive? He was peeved at toiling in obscurity, annoyed that his Museum superior passed him over for promotion, denying him fame and money! “I’ll plant a phony caveman,” he supposedly reasoned. “The ass will discover it, parade it as genuine. Scientists will see right through it, and laugh him into oblivion” What he didn’t reckon on was that evolutionists, desperate for any scrap proving human evolution, would lap it all up uncritically….just as they have in modern times with homos habilis and erectus!

Says Giles Oakley, son of the man who uncovered the fraud, “Egotism, pride, ambition, rivalry, these things affect [gasp!] even scientific judgments.”

Incredibly, nationalism even played a part in fooling the “great men,” as the NOVA documentary makes clear. British evolutionists were frustrated in the early 1900’s. The Germans had discovered Neanderthal man. “Prehistoric” men had also been found in France and Spain, and yet the Brits had squat. But these were the days of the British empire, on which the sun never set. Surely they must also be the cradle of civilization! Piltdown man put the Brits on the map scientifically, and British scientists were the last to acknowledge that they had been duped.

Sigh…..how to sum up? Shouldn’t we really defer to the words of Malcolm Muggeridge:

Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.

Alas, there is little sign as yet that anyone’s amazed.

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When scientist Tom Tombaugh quit the Carriertom Into-Wishen Research Institute, it was said that he just felt lonesome for like-minded companionship. He would sit in the lunchroom and long for intelligent discussion on some learned matter of science, for example, how boisterous belching or earth-splitting flatulence evolved over the eons, since our ancestors who didn‘t carry on in that way failed to scare away predators and were thus eaten. Alas, his religious lunch mates would attribute it all to Adam and Eve and our fall into sin!

That was a joke. Evolutionists have not yet attributed flatulence to survival of the fittest.

But if anyone believed the report, they can be forgiven. Assertions only slightly less asinine are routinely dispensed from on high, and are eagerly lapped up by us, the ignorant masses.

For example, can you spot a shapely woman two counties away? Where does that knack come from? Naturally, from your cavemen ancestors! For when you drool over a pretty girl, you’re simply responding to evolutionary mathematics embedded in our very genes. You unconsciously calculate the waist hip ratio! 0.7 is what you’re looking for, and diversely weighted woman such as Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy, Sophia Loren, and Kate Moss have all sported that ratio. (Guys should be 0.9) It turns out that women of the golden ratio are healthier, more fertile, and they have convenient shelves for carrying babies. Natural selection favors them. A 1:1 woman, for example, will drop all her babies and kill them, which impedes species survival. How this perfect ratio gets locked in our heads and converted to notions of “attractiveness” I’ve not yet heard, but evolutionary psychologists are convinced that it does.

Consider another example. Toward the end of the twentieth century, career types were disheartened to realize they couldn’t hold a marriage together to save their lives. But they didn’t want to be disheartened, they wanted to feel good about themselves. So it became essential to come up with a explanation and, above all things, that explanation had to totally absolve them from responsibly, blame or guilt….all antiquated notions unfit for modern humans. Again, the cavemen delivered!

You see, those cavemen had to spread their seed if they wanted to win the survival game, so it was no good staying in one relationship. You had to move on! But you’d better not move on too quick. No, you have to hang around four years, to ensure that your toddlers don’t get eaten by predators! After that, the woman can ensure it while you go in quest of the golden waist hip ratio. Again, the evolutionary psychologists, who are taken seriously and not laughed off the planet as they ought to be, assert that this behavior got locked into our genes, to be passed on to progeny.

I don’t much care for this notion, but recent discoveries seem to support it. Out in the wilds somewhere, anthropologists have recently unearthed fossils of Yabbadabba Man, a boring ancestor if ever there was one. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are thought to be members of this species. They had one or two kids apiece and just hung around afterwards plunked in front of the TV, until even their own wives got fed up with them and tossed them out on their ear, though alas, too late in life for them to start anew and spread their seed. As you might expect, that bunch died out.

Then there was Slambang Man, another recent find. These Romeos were forever moving on in search of shapelier babes. They each had hundreds, maybe thousands of kids, but they left them all to predators so they could go out carousing, and every last one of them was eaten. This species, too, died out, though they are eternally reborn with each new generation.

Of all branches of science, evolutionary psychology seems the most ridiculous. Is there any proof to support it’s conclusions? Or is it not simply the case that its advocates have already accepted evolution as the rock solid unquestionable base from which to work. and are determined to link every eccentricity of human behavior to that base? While the layman can usually follow their reasoning, is it not pure speculation on their part?

 

******  The bookstore