Tag Archives: Darwin

News

Denyse O’Leary and William Dembski author new book on theistic evolution

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Here’s a post by Denyse on Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian (“survival of the fittest”) evolution.

[…]In the authors’ view, no accommodation is possible. More to the point, accommodation is not even necessary. There are good reasons for doubting Darwin and good reasons for adopting other models for evolution – or for deciding that there is not enough evidence to make a decision.

Dembski and O’Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

Denyse’s blog on intelligent design is here.

My regular readers know that I consider theistic evolution to be equivalent to atheism. If a Christian thinks that we can’t detect God in the world using science apart from subjective opinions, then they might as well be an atheist. Christianity is a knowledge tradition, not a blind-belief tradition.

Commentary

The logical contradictions in Richard Dawkins’ worldview

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From Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

In River out of Eden : A Darwinian View of Life Richard Dawkins wrote:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

In a 2007 New Scientist/Greenpeace Science debate, Dawkins said:

Far from being the most selfish, exploitative species, Homo sapiens is the only species that has at least the possibility of rebelling against the otherwise universally selfish Darwinian impulse . . . If any species in the history of life has the possibility of breaking away from short term selfishness and of long term planning for the distant future, it’s our species. We are earth’s last best hope even if we are simultaneously, the species most capable of destroying life on the planet. But when it comes to taking the long view, we are literally unique. Because the long view is not a view that has ever been taken before in whole history of life. If we don’t plan for the future, no other species will . . .

Well, which is it? Is there right and wrong or isn’t there? Are we selfish or aren’t we? Do we have free will or don’t we?

Is this why Dawkins refuses to debate William Lane Craig? Is his schtick just about selling books to gullible atheists who don’t understand the laws of logic?

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Learn more about intelligent design

News

The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive

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A story on the Cambrian explosion from the radically pro-evolution BBC. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.

They called it Nectocaris pteryx – a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today’s octopuses.

The new survey’s results were presented in the journal Nature.

The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.

Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.

“We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said Mr Smith.

Yes, isn’t it amazing how naturalistic mechanisms like “evolution” can create brand new complex body plans out of nothing, in the blink of an eye? And isn’t it amazing that this evidence doesn’t falsify naturalism at all! Oh, no no no no no no, it doesn’t – because naturalism is a blind faith commitment. Evidence is irrelevant to a blind faith commitment. The entire physical universe can pop into being out of nothing, but naturalism is still true – because they want it to be true. All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

The more body plans that appear suddenly, the less plausible evolution becomes. You can’t have a massive infusion of biological information appearing out of nowhere without an intelligent agent to sequence the individual characters. New software requires a software engineer.

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