Commentary

Three logical prerequisites for biological evolution to work

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Hummingbird in flight
Hummingbird in flight

Biologist, blogger and super-mom Lindsay has written a post that explains what supporters of Darwinian mechanisms have to prove in order to explain the origin and diversity of life.

Here are the three things that Darwinists must demonstrate:

  1. It is possible to add biological information.
  2. There are more upward steps than downward steps (or at least a way to get more upward steps than downward steps at least some of the time).
  3. There does exist a gradual genetic pathway that can be climbed in tiny, incremental steps.

So first of all, the main two arguments for intelligent design and against naturalism are the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. Both involve massive infusions of new biological information. So Lindsay is right to focus on whether Darwinism can add new biological information. But I wanted to focus on number three, because I really think that her post is about the burden of proof on Darwinists more than it is about our burden of proof. And we do need to get used to asking Darwinists for the evidence for their view.

Take a look at the detail on number three:

In order for evolution to be true, not only does information have to be added over time, but each successive change must occur in a living organism and it must be conserved by being passed on to offspring. Thus, the change cannot kill the organism or seriously disable it, or the change will not be passed on. This must be the case for EVERY step in the entire evolutionary sequence, no matter how small. At every step you must have a functional organism. Thus, the changes must be gradual enough that the tiny upward steps (if they exist) can achieve each new level without killing or disabling the organism. To use a simplistic analogy, if one tries to change from one word to another by changing one letter at a time (cat to cot to dot to dog, for example), there must, at every step, be an actual word that can be reached by changing one letter. In the Mount Improbable analogy, this means that there can be no upward jumps in the trail. If the maximum possible upward step is 6 inches, then there can be no 6 foot cliffs along the trail, or even 7 inch steps. If ever there is a step which requires more information than unguided evolution can provide, then evolution is falsified in that instance. It cannot account for the change in information if that is the case.

Now I have never seen a gradual genetic pathway from one body plan (phyla) to another body plan (phyla) in any peer-reviewed paper. What I need to see to believe in the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to drive change from one body plan to another is that sequence of changes at the genetic level. And I don’t just need to see the steps, I need to see the probabilities of getting the correct sequence of changes at the genetic level within the time available by chance. That’s what Darwinists assert in their theory – that’s what they need to prove. Talking about how one creature looks like another creature is irrelevant. My car looks like my Dads car, because we drive the same model, but different model years – and both cars are designed.

When people ask our side for evidence for our claims, we are able to produce the evidence to substantiate our claims, e.g. – cosmic fine-tuning factors or protein sequencing probabilities. I would like to see the other side do the same, and not just tell me a story. When I question people in the arts who accept Darwinism, they seem to be terribly disinterested in the details, and just want to jump to the conclusion shared by the smart people without thinking hard about all the steps in between. That’s intellectually lazy. The same thing happens with global warming with the non-scientists – they are more concerned about jumping to the “smart people” position, so you think that they’re smart. They aren’t really interested in hearing both sides, or looking at the evidence. I think people need to take it slow and look at the evidence, instead of deciding what to believe based on how other people perceive them. No need to rush to agreement to build up your self-esteem without doing the hard work first.

If you are looking to understand what the other side has to prove, and in a concise way, read her post.

News

Harvard Law Review: Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen and is eligible to become President

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Donald Trump with his buddies, the Clintons - I think that's Trump's third wife on the right
Donald Trump and his third wife pose with his radical leftist Democrat friends

Donald Trump has been questioning whether Ted Cruz is eligible to run for President because he was born in Canada. I thought it might be worth it to look at the circumstances of Cruz’s birth, then get an opinion from some legal experts.

So as far as I can tell, there are 3 people on the planet who think that Cruz is not eligible to run for President. Donald Trump, Rand Paul and Ann Coulter, a famous celebrity comedian who supported Mitt Romney, and now supports Donald Trump. She is very fond of getting attention by saying outrageous things, which she later claims are “jokes”. This week, she wanted to have the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, deported. She later said she was joking.

Ted Cruz’s mother was born in the USA

So, let’s start with the facts:

Eleanor Darragh, mother of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), was born in Delaware on Nov. 23, 1934, establishing her citizenship by birth–and, according to U.S. law, that of her son, even though he was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Dec. 22, 1970.

You can look at her birth certificate on Breitbart News. This is the thing that all the birthers on Daily Kos and Democratic Underground denied the existence of, until it appeared. There is no doubt that Ted Cruz’s mother is an American citizen, and she met the residency requirements to pass on birthright citizenship to baby Ted.

Ted Cruz’s mother passes the residency requirement to pass on birthright citizenship

Former assistant U.S. attorney, and law professor Andrew McCarthy explains in National Review:

Under the law in effect when Cruz was born in 1970 (i.e., statutes applying to people born between 1952 and 1986), the requirement was that, at the time of birth, the American citizen parent had to have resided in the U.S. for ten years, including five years after the age of fourteen. Cruz’s mother, Eleanor, easily met that requirement: she was in her mid-thirties when Ted was born and had spent most of her life in the U.S., including graduating from Rice University with a math degree that led to employment in Houston as a computer programmer at Shell Oil.

Ted’s mother registered baby Ted with the U.S. Consulate in Calgary. Cruz moved back to the USA when he was 4 years old. Cruz was able to get a U.S. passport to travel abroad in 1986. The U.S. government does not hand out U.S. passports to non-citizens.

A legal opinion from the Harvard Law Review

Now, I didn’t think this topic was worth writing about. It was actually my friend Robb who urged me to do it.

Robb sent me this article from the Harvard Law Review, which is what made me decide to go ahead and write about it.

The article is written by two experts in the law:

Neal Kumar Katyal is an American lawyer and chaired professor of law. He served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States from May 2010[2] until June 2011… Katyal was the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the lead counsel for the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. While serving at the Justice Department, he argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court.

Paul Drew Clement is a former United States Solicitor General and current Georgetown University law professor. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on March 14, 2005 for the post of Solicitor-General, confirmed by the United States Senate on June 8, 2005, and took the oath of office on June 13. Clement replaced Theodore Olson. Clement resigned on May 14, 2008, effective June 2, 2008, and joined the Georgetown University Law Center as a visiting professor and senior fellow at the Supreme Court Institute.

The article says:

The Constitution directly addresses the minimum qualifications necessary to serve as President. In addition to requiring thirty-five years of age and fourteen years of residency, the Constitution limits the presidency to “a natural born Citizen.” All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.

While some constitutional issues are truly difficult, with framing-era sources either nonexistent or contradictory, here, the relevant materials clearly indicate that a “natural born Citizen” means a citizen from birth with no need to go through naturalization proceedings. The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law and enactments of the First Congress. Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.

“Natural born” means no naturalization process. Ted Cruz’s mother was a citizen by birth. She meets the residency requirements to pass on birthright citizenship. We have her birth certificate. We also have Ted’s birth certificate with her name on it as his mother. This ends the issue for all the people who are governed by reason and evidence.

Commentary

Finally! Details about Michael Licona’s new Oxford University Press book

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Investigation in progress
Investigation in progress

Here’s a new interview between Sean McDowell and Michael Licona about his new book. The new book is coming out in 2016, and it’s going to be published by Oxford University Press – probably the top academic press on the planet.

I found the interview on Sean McDowell’s blog.

It says:

Michael Licona is one of the world’s leading experts on the historical evidence for resurrection. I use his book The Resurrection of Jesus in my Master’s Level course atBiola. For the past few years, Dr. Licona has been working on some cutting-edge research related to Gospel contradictions. His research is both fascinating and groundbreaking. He answers a few of my questions:

SEAN MCDOWELL: Mike, what got you interested in the question of Gospel contradictions?

MIKE LICONA: Back in 2008 and 2009 I was publicly debating Bart Ehrman on the resurrection. He brought up Gospel contradictions as one of his major objections to the Gospels. I have noticed that this genuinely bothers many Evangelical Christians. As a result, I decided to look into it in more depth. I wasn’t so much concerned about resolving them, because I understood that if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true, regardless of any errors that might be present in the Bible. So, even if there are contradictions in the Gospels, it wouldn’t negate the truth of Christianity. But it does bother a lot of Evangelicals, so that’s what got me interested in the topic. And to be honest, it did make me question the historical reliability of the Gospels.

MCDOWELL: What makes your approach to Gospel contradictions unique?

LICONA: Most approaches involve trying to harmonize various passages to see if all the details can fit together. This can be a legitimate practice. But many times it can go way too far. Both Richard Burridge and more recently Craig Keener have shown that the Gospels belong to the genre of “ancient biography.” If this is correct, it would be plausible that we would see the same amount of flexibility in the Gospels as we observe in other ancient biographies. So, I wanted to learn what those flexibilities were. By carefully reading ancient biographies written around the same time as the Gospels and comparing how they tell the same stories differently, I began to recognize that some of the differences resulted from compositional devices. Then when I went to the Gospels, I could see that the authors were probably employing the same compositional devices as other ancient biographers; specifically Plutarch. I began to realize that the differences across the Gospels are not so much contradictions but the result of compositional devices that were the standard practice in historical writing of that day.

So, this analysis of the genre of “ancient biography” might give us some useful tools for resolving passages that seem to be in conflict. For some reason, non-Christians want to ignore the main body of accepted facts about the historical Jesus, and focus on these minor details that seems to be in conflict. So I guess we need a book that explains them, and no one better than Mike Licona to do it.

On the other hand… I was actually talking about this with my best friends from my home town over the Christmas holidays. Before we broke out the Pandemic boardgame and the “Keep Talking and No One Explodes” computer game, Jen and Andrew wanted to know what was the most common thing that I was seeing from non-Christians. The most common thing I am seeing is that non-Christians are woefully out of touch with knowledge related to the worldview of Christian theism that are accepted by the broad spectrum of scholars.

To illustrate, I quoted from atheists who admit to the creation event, to the fine-tuning, to the problem of the origin of life, to the problem of the Cambrian explosion, to early dating of the gospels, early dating of the Pauline letters, minimal facts about the life of Jesus, and even minimal facts for an argument for the resurrection. I told Andrew and Jen the skeptics I encounter are intellectually dishonest. They don’t accept the things that mainstream atheist scholars accept about science and historical Jesus and philosophy of religion. And yet they feel comfortable about being on the fringe, because they justify their fringe view by pointing to nitpicky details like apparent Bible contradictions. I.e. – they point to disagreement about one or two angels at the discovery of the empty tomb, and they turn that minor point into support for their fringe view that the gospels were made up completely in the second and third centuries.

So, I guess we do have to be ready to respond to this nitpicking, and Licona’s book will help with that. But I also think that we need to be ready to haul skeptics back to reality. There is a lot we can know about science, philosophy and the historical Jesus that supports Christian theism, and we should disagreements about details get people away from those main points that scholars across the board accept.