Commentary

Review of the Meyer-Sternberg vs Shermer-Prothero debate

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UPDATE: The audio is here.

This review was e-mailed to me by a friend who attended the debate. I’ve posted it anonymously below.

Recall that two pieces of evidence were up for debate on Monday night: 1) the origin of life and 2) the origin of diverse body plans. The ID advocates had to argue that only intelligent causes can account for new biological information in the origin of life and in the origin of diverse body plans. The naturalists had to argue that there was a naturalistic explanation for both of the origin of life and the origin of diverse body plans. So how did they do?

My friend wrote:

In all fairness, Shermer and Prothero were given an impossible task: to defend the spontaneous generation of life and the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to account for its diversity and disparity.

It is no wonder that Shermer avoided the issue. Having said nothing positive about neo-Darwinian mechanisms, he said all there was to say. What was surprising was Dr, Prothero’s smokescreen of irrelevant and/or obsolete high school textbook arguments that were presented as timeless truths in a changing world of science. Their emotionally charged presentation gave the audience all the evidence it needed to conclude that their arguments were being driven by something other than empirical data.

Discussion of the empirical data would have to wait for Dr. Sternberg who gave a compelling argument against the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to even account for a limited number of evolutionary changes within mammals. Using one of the best series of evolutionary change known to paleontologists (wolf-like mammal to whale) Dr. Sternberg enumerated a substantial list of differences between the beginning and ending species in the series and went on to explain why neo-Darwinian mechanisms did not have sufficient time in the 9 million year window to generate the necessary changes. His presentation alone was worth the price of admission.

Dr. Sternberg identified himself as a “structuralist” rather than an ID advocate. While he will have to unpack the meaning and implications of that view, I would encourage him to enrich our understanding of why nature’s structures (e.g. everything from DNA replication systems to animal body plans) have remained fundamentally unchanged since their first appearance. Stasis and conservation are purely natural and are subject to the natural sciences. Their evolution or sudden appearance in the history of life, on the other hand, may or may not have been natural.

“How many times did God intervene?” was a question asked repeatedly by Michael Shermer. The simple answer is “at least once …  when he created everything in the physical universe.” After 1 rather major miracle is there any reason for rejecting the possibility that subsequent minor miracles did not take place?

“Who created God?” was another one of his favorites. The simple answer to this one is that “either the physical universe or its non-physical creator has always existed .. and it’s not the universe.

The “textbook” examples of evolution used by Prothero were things like the Miller-Urey experiment, where they sparked the wrong gasses to make amino acids, but did nothing to solve the problem of how the amino acids can be chirality-filtered, properly-sequenced, and peptide-bonded into a functional biological sequence. Not to even mention things like the sugar chirality or the interfering cross-reactions or ultraviolet radiation, etc. etc. etc.

I think that if these naturalists cannot understand the difference between an intelligent cause and a miracle, then they shouldn’t be debating. Maybe Shemer and Prothero need to read books written by their opponents. Shermer thinks science is a game you play where you aren’t really after the truth but just trying to explain things without God. So, he has no explanation for things like the big bang or the fine-tuning, for example, and probably tries very hard not to think about it. As for the origin of life and the origin of biological diversity, he had no explanation.

One bad thing about Meyer and Sternberg is that their slides were very hard to read – small print.

I’ll let you know if I get any more reviews of the debate. I’m also watching to see when the video comes out.

You can see other debates with Meyer and Shermer:

These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video)… and appeared together on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire program (video here).

News

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer ever year in the UK

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Story from the left-wing Guardian. (H/T Legal Insurrection via ECM)

Excerpt:

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer every year because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government’s director of cancer services. The figure is twice the previous estimate for preventable deaths….

Britain is poor by international standards at diagnosing cancer. [Prof. Mike] Richards’s findings will add urgency to the NHS’s efforts to improve early diagnosis….

Richards found that “late diagnosis was almost certainly a major contributor to poor survival in England for all three cancers”, but also identified low rates of surgical intervention being received by cancer patients as another key reason for poor survival rates.

Research by academics at Durham University led by Prof Greg Rubin has identified five types of delay in NHS cancer care: “patient delay”, “doctor delay”, “delay in primary care [at GPs’ surgeries]”, “system delay” and “delay in secondary care [at hospitals]”….

I followed the link on Legal Insurrection to this Medscape Medical News story, which talks about studies on cancer survival rates in European countries.

Excerpt:

One of the reports compares the statistics from Europe with those from the United States and shows that for most solid tumors, survival rates were significantly higher in US patients than in European patients. This analysis, headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2002.

The age-adjusted 5-year survival rates for all cancers combined was 47.3% for men and 55.8% for women, which is significantly lower than the estimates of 66.3% for men and 62.9% for women from the US Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program ( P < .001).

Survival was significantly higher in the United States for all solid tumors, except testicular, stomach, and soft-tissue cancer, the authors report. The greatest differences were seen in the major cancer sites: colon and rectum (56.2% in Europe vs 65.5% in the United States), breast (79.0% vs 90.1%), and prostate cancer (77.5% vs 99.3%), and this “probably represents differences in the timeliness of diagnosis,” they comment. That in turn stems from the more intensive screening for cancer carried out in the United States, where a reported 70% of women aged 50 to 70 years have undergone a mammogram in the past 2 years, one-third of people have had sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy in the past 5 years, and more than 80% of men aged 65 years or more have had a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. In fact, it is this PSA testing that probably accounts for the very high survival from prostate cancer seen in the United States, the authors comment.

I think that the breast cancer and prostate cancer numbers are significant, because it makes me think of the video in which Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn and Sue Myrick were talking about how Obamacare will limit diagnostic exams for breast cancer, because they are so expensive. When the government pays, they have to keep costs down to make sure that they have enough to pay for the elevated salaries of all the government workers who decide whether you live or die. And prostate exams would undoubtedly also be restricted because of costs.

What this Tom Coburn, M.D. video and he’ll explain. (H/T Hugh Hewitt)

He’s a medical doctor, so he knows what he’s talking about.

News

Is pre-suppositionalism a Biblical way of defending the faith?

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I’m a classical apologist, so I do use pre-suppositional arguments to question my opponents about whether their non-Christian worldviews can ground rationality and objective morality, etc. But I also use evidential arguments from nature and history. Some people think that evidential arguments should not be used and that they are not as persuasive as pre-suppositional arguments.

When I look the Bible, I don’t see any Biblical support for the view that pre-suppositional apologetics is the only approved way of defending the faith. Instead, the standard method seems to be evidentialism.

In Romans 1, Paul writes that people can learn about God’s existence from the natural world.

Romans 1:18-23:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

And in Acts, Peter appeals to eyewitness testimony for the resurrection, and Jesus’ miracles.

Acts 2:22-24, and 36:

22“Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

23This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

24But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

And finally from the same chapter:

36“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

So, I see that God uses nature and miracles to persuade, which can be assessed using scientific and historical methods. Can anyone find me a clear statement that states that only pre-suppositional arguments should be used? I could be wrong, and I am willing to be proven wrong.