Tag Archives: Atheism

Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?

I made you all suffer this week by reading two long posts on the origin of life:

So now I’m going to be nice and let you learn about the Cambrian explosion through videos! Yeah! Because it’s Friday.

What is the Cambrian explosion?

Same story as always. Primitive tribes of atheists living during pre-scientific times naively attributed the diversity of life to the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendage, working over billions of years. But then science progressed, discoveries were made, and all rational people accepted that virtually all the basic body plans emerged, fully-formed, in a 3-5 million year period, about 540 million years ago. And no new body plans have emerged since.

The best explanation of the sudden origin of nearly all animal body plans in the blink of an eye is that an intelligent designer provided the required software code for all of these brand new body plans. New instructions, like new Java code or new English sentences, require an intelligent cause. Period.

Part 1: (7:50)

Part 2: (3:25)

Yes, the people in the videos have Ph.Ds from Cambridge, Yale, Berkeley, etc. They are much smarter than any atheists, and they win any debates with atheists that dare to debate them. (Which is why atheists prefer censorship instead of debate, and blind faith instead of evidence)

Don’t worry, if you are an atheist, I’m sure that the noodly appendage of the hopeful Flying Spaghetti Monster will eventually overturn decades of scientific progress very soon, and then you can be comfortable avoiding moral obligations, being self-centered, thinking you are better than other people, and pursuing happy feelings at the expense of the liberties and rights of other people.

Further study

Advanced students can read more about the Cambrian explosion a published peer-reviewed book chapter (Michigan State University Press, 2003) or in a peer-reviewed research paper (Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 2007).

If you are totally lost on the question of origins, you can watch two DVDs that are now online at Youtube. Both videos are by Illustra Media. This is the place for complete beginners to get started.

Here are the 2 playlists:

Richard Dawkins debates John Lennox: Does God Exist?

Audio of the debate is hosted by my buddy Brian Auten who operates the Apologetics 315 blog.

You can download the full MP3 audio here.

I listened to this debate and thought that Dawkins did well against Lennox. It is a very short debate. This is not a rigorous academic debate, as neither participant argued in a formal manner. Dawkins came across as firm, but gracious, and he does a lot better than Hitchens did in his recent debate against Craig.

This debate is recommended for beginners to get a bird’s eye view of some of the issues before moving on to professional academic debates featuring analytical philosophers such as William Lane Craig, Walter Sinott-Armstrong, etc. They don’t really go into complicated details.

My favorite academic debate is this one featuring William Lane Craig vs Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on the problems of evil and suffering. Another great debate featuring Bill Craig and Austin Dacey is here (video) and their re-match is here (audio).

A huge list of other William Lance Craig debates is here, courtesy of ChristianJR4.

What are the real goals of environmentalist radicals?

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from In Haught Pursuit! Thanks for the link!

Today I’ve been listening to the audio book version of Christopher C. Horner’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism”. And I thought that I would share with you some quotations from the environmentalist radicals to shed some light on their real motivations.

In the audio book, Horner is tracing the evolution of the modern environmentalist movement back to two failed groups: 1) people who predicted overpopulation and 2) people who advocated for communism. Both of these groups failed, but their aims (mass murder) live on in the abortion and environmentalist movements. Let’s take a look at the real views of environmentalists.

Economist Walter Williams puts it this way:

The authors of the study don’t quite reach a conclusion that I’ve reached about environmental activists, whose agenda calls for private property confiscation and control over the lives of ordinary citizens. Back in the 60s and 70s, America’s leftists called themselves socialists and communists. They were the people who paraded around college campuses singing praises of support to tyrants like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot. Today, the communist system and its promises have been revealed as both a miserable failure and a system of unprecedented brutality. Thus, communism and socialism have become an embarrassment, so environmentalism is the name for an old agenda.

Here is an article by Mr. Horner from the National Review to help us with some actual quotations by environmentalists.

1. Radical environmentalists hate capitalism because it helps the poor.

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy… would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,” says green godfather Paul Ehrlich. Oh, the horrors of subjecting millions to affordable heating, lighting and cooling, transportation, and other freedoms.

the greens [affirmed] their agenda at the August World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg… Among their projects: impeding technology that increases agricultural abundance, even the shipment of food to famine-stricken countries like Zimbabwe; lamenting the pernicious influence of indoor plumbing; and complaining that the poor shouldn’t want (or get) such comforts as electricity because there are larger, Gaia-centric considerations at play.

2. Radical environmentalists favor mass murder of the poor, and not just by abortion and technological regress.

  • “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.” Lamont Cole (as quoted by Elizabeth Whelan in her book Toxic Terror)
  • “This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.” Charles Wursta, Chief Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, commenting on the likelihood of millions dying from a global ban on DDT (also quoted in Toxic Terror)
  • “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.” Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace (quoted in Access to Energy, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1982)
  • “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.” Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
  • “The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species [man] upon the rest of the natural world.” John Shuttleworth, Friends of the Earth manual writer

And In the Walter Williams article I cited earlier, he adds a couple more:

Then there are statements like those of David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, and former executive director of Sierra Club: “While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.” David M. Graber, research biologist with the National Park Service wrote, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.” John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal, says, “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Davis also opined, “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”

These people have an abiding contempt for humankind. They seek to accomplish their agenda with useful idiots in and out of government and make use of what H.L. Mencken warned us about, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Environmentalism is really about controlling others. And when your kids go to public schools to be taught by the left, they are indoctrinated to have these environmentalist beliefs: that humans are bad and that we need to die. The mass murders that emerged from the secular-left are not aberrations – they really do believe in killing hundreds of millions of innocent people with communism, abortion DDT bans, etc.