Now let’s talk evolution. The issue is this: Darwinism has been set up as some sort of competing religion against belief in God(s). High-schools teach children to believe in Darwinism, but not to understand Darwinism. Few kids graduate understanding Darwinism, which is why it’s invariably misrepresented in mass-media (X-Men, Planet of the Apes, Waterworld, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, etc.). The only movie I can recall getting evolution correct is Idiocracy.
Also, evolution has holes in it. This isn’t a bad thing in science, every scientific theory has holes. Science isn’t a religion. We don’t care about the holes. That some things remain unexplained by a theory doesn’t bother us. Science has no problem with gaps in knowledge, where we admit “I don’t know”. It’s religion that has “God of the gaps”, where ignorance isn’t tolerated, and everything unexplained is explained by a deity.
The hole in evolution is how the cell evolved. The fossil record teaches us a lot about multi-cellular organisms over the last 400-million years, but not much about how the cell evolved in the 4-billion years on planet Earth before that.
I can point to radio isotope dating and fossil finds to prove dinosaurs existed 250,000 million to 60 million years ago, thus disproving your crazy theory of a 10,000 year-old Earth. But I can’t point to anything that disagrees with your view that a deity created the original cellular organisms. I don’t agree with that theory, but I can’t disprove it, either.
cringe
I’m a recovering atheist, and I occasionally have flashbacks. I’m still an atheist, but I’m a recovering one too.
Usually it’s due to a creationist, but lately the worst regressions come from people who should know better. As a wicked smart and logical person, Rob Graham is one of those people.
Let me just take these as bullets rather than in-line like I did with my response to his Security and Obscurity piece.
- Darwinism isn’t a tangible thing anymore. What we teach is the theory of evolution through natural selection.
- Natural selection isn’t a religion, and it’s not taught as such. It’s a working model of how the world works based on evidence, also know as a theory. When you find overwhelming evidence against a theory, the theory dies. That doesn’t happen with religion.
- The reason few kids understand “Darwinism” is similar to the reason few kids know why we entered World War II, or how to articulate an opinion as an essay. It’s bad education, and it has nothing to do with natural selection.
- Evolution has holes in it the way your online picture albums have holes in them. Why is January 2003 to August 2004 missing? Why are there no pictures from then? Should we infer that you didn’t exist during those times? Or that all the other pictures of you looking older or younger should be discarded?
- Evolution doesn’t have holes so much as gaps. They’re different. Holes are flaws in the theory. They’re contradictions. They’re signs that it may be incorrect. Gaps are areas where we don’t yet understand or where we lack data. These are very different things.
- Science actually has plenty to say about how cells evolved. It’s not anywhere near complete of course, but I think his information is simply out of date.
And here’s the worst one:
I can point to radio isotope dating and fossil finds to prove dinosaurs existed 250,000 million to 60 million years ago, thus disproving your crazy theory of a 10,000 year-old Earth. But I can’t point to anything that disagrees with your view that a deity created the original cellular organisms. I don’t agree with that theory, but I can’t disprove it, either.
My god man.
You can’t point to anything that disagrees with it? With the claim that an all-powerful and invisible being created the universe?
How about my claim, which I’ll make right now, that we’re all inside a Mormon VMware instance running out of Salt Lake in the year 2247? What does the fossil record tell you about that theory?
Claims and theories are not the same thing.
A theory is when you have millions of pieces of evidence for natural selection, both in the fossil record and in our DNA that all validate descent with modification, and we’ve yet to find an exception. It’s a dual-nested hierarchy.
That’s a theory.
Saying an invisible god created the parts of science we don’t yet understand is a claim. You’re not helping anyone by raising religion to the level of theory, or lowering natural selection to the level of claim.
As one of the good guys, you should know the difference.
