Hi Storch,
It seems to me we've been around this particular Mulberry bush on the board about a hundred times with little or nothing to show for it. At the end of the day, the Darwinians simply discount any evidence one produces that shows that Darwinian evolution isn't just a theory full of holes, but holes expertly sewn together. They do this based on the presupposition that Darwinianism is true and logical, and that theism is false and irrational. Therefore, if you are opposing Darwinian evolution, you must be an ignorant, uneducated religious fanatic, and that any evidence you produce must be religious mumbo-jumbo. After all, if the evidence you were presenting were true, then it would support Darwinian evolution, and you wouldn't believe in Creation. This is the presumption even if the evidence you present happens to be generated by an Atheist or Agnostic scholar, or even a life-long opponent of religion and Creationism like Stephen J. Gould.
That you may once have been an advocate of Darwinianism yourself, also doesn't matter, because if you aren't any longer, the only explanation that makes any sense for your changing your mind is that you drank the stupid juice. In what Stephen J. Gould called
Darwinian Fundamentalism you are dealing with an faith that will not tolerate dissent and which uses anathematization as a weapon.
You simply may not question this dogma if you wish to continue to teach, have tenure, or any academic credibility. In a recent case the EEOC found that the Smithsonian used almost medieval tactics to run out a man simply for allowing a peer-reviewed article to be published which questioned whether Darwin's theory does in fact explain the bio-chemical information explosion in Cambrian explosion (and bio-chemists know that Darwinianism - which preceeded biochemistry - simply cannot account for a host of facts about the nature of DNA).
Ultimately it's not a new argument though, and its not really even about Science, its about God. For millennia, men have been searching for a way to be rid of his "pernicious" oversight and influence on their affairs. He is like a parent who embarrasses and enrages his children so much that they'd much rather tell people
"I'm an orphan actually". But for centuries, that was as far as they could go, they might maintain with Nietzche that their Father was dead, but they always had the embarrassing fact of their creation to deal with. Their own existence was continuing evidence of their First parent. It wasn't until Darwin came on the scene that they could do away even with that fact as well, and simply smugly answer the question, "Actually, I didn't have parents at all. Once there was nothing, but now there is me, and if you have me, why would you want a Creator anyway?"
I was reading Josephus (a first century Jewish Historian) the other day, and was reminded that he dealt with the same kind of attitude from the Epicureans and Stoics of his day, men who refused to acknowledge Divine providence in governing the world
(yeah, we haven't blown ourselves up only because we are all such nice, good, rational, self-created slime descendents - not to mention "lucky") and pointed out how the prophecies of men like Daniel showed that there was in fact a God ordering the affairs of men and were life really the mechanical process or driverless car they imagined we would long since have been destroyed -
And indeed it so came to pass, that our nation suffered these things under Antiochus Epiphanes, according to Daniel's vision, and what he wrote many years before they came to pass. In the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government, and that our country should be made desolate by them. All these things did this man leave in writing, as God had showed them to him, insomuch that such as read his prophecies, and see how they have been fulfilled, would wonder at the honor wherewith God honored Daniel; and may thence discover how the Epicureans are in an error, who cast Providence out of human life, and do not believe that God takes care of the affairs of the world, nor that the universe is governed and continued in being by that blessed and immortal nature, but say that the world is carried along of its own accord, without a ruler and a curator; which, were it destitute of a guide to conduct it, as they imagine, it would be like ships without pilots, which we see drowned by the winds, or like chariots without drivers, which are overturned; so would the world be dashed to pieces by its being carried without a Providence, and so perish, and come to nought. So that, by the forementioned predictions of Daniel, those men seem to me very much to err from the truth, who determine that God exercises no providence over human affairs; for if that were the case, that the world went on by mechanical necessity, we should not see that all things would come to pass according to his prophecy. (From Antiquities of the Jews By Flavius Josephus)
Nothing New Under the Sun, Storch. Same argument, different day.
- SEAGOON
