Kenneth Heathley posted this excerpt from Grudem’s “Systematic Theology”.
Excerpt:
Wayne Grudem appears to be as tired as I am of fights between young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists. In his Systematic Theology, he states:
“How old is the earth then? Where does this discussion leave us? [Davis] Young’s arguments for an old earth based on many kinds of scientific data from different disciplines seem (to the present writer at least) to be very strong.
“Although our conclusions are tentative, at this point in our understanding, Scripture seems to be more easily understood to suggest (but not to require) a young earth view, while the observable facts of creation seem increasingly to favor an old earth view. Both view are possible, but neither one is certain.
“Given this situation, it would seem best (1) to admit that God may not allow us to find a clear solution to this question before Christ returns, and (2) to encourage evangelical scientists and theologians who fall in both the young earth and old earth camps to begin to work together with much less arrogance, much more humility, and a much greater sense of cooperation in a common purpose.
“Progress will certainly be made if old earth and young earth scientists who are Christians will be more willing to talk to each other without hostility, ad hominem attacks, or highly emotional accusations, on the one hand, and without a spirit of condescension or academic pride on the other, for these attitudes are not becoming to the body of Christ, nor are the characteristic of the way of wisdom, which is ‘first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity,’ and full of the recognition that ‘the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace’ (James 3:17-18).”–Wayne Grudem: 1994, 307-08
The peppered moth story is familiar — even overly familiar — to most readers of ENV, so I will summarize it only briefly here. Before the industrial revolution, most peppered moths in England were light-colored; but after tree trunks around cities were darkened by pollution, a dark-colored (“melanic”) variety became much more common (a phenomenon known as “industrial melanism”). In the 1950s, British physician Bernard Kettlewell performed some experiments that seemed to show that the proportion of melanic moths had increased because they were better camouflaged on darkened tree trunks and thus less likely to be eaten by predatory birds.
Kettlewell’s evidence soon became the classic textbook demonstration of natural selection in action — commonly illustrated with photos of peppered moths resting on light- and dark-colored tree trunks.
By the 1990s, however, biologists had discovered several discrepancies in the classic story– not the least of which was that peppered moths in the wild do not usually rest on tree trunks. Most of the textbook photos had been staged.
In the 2000s the story began disappearing from the textbooks. British biologist Michael Majerus then did some studies that he felt supported the camouflage-predation explanation. But before he died of cancer in 2009, he only managed to publish a report of his study in the Darwin lobby’s in-house magazine Evolution: Education and Outreach. Now four other British biologists have presented his results posthumously in the Royal Society’s peer-reviewed Biology Letters. In an accompanying supplement, the authors presented their version of what they call “the peppered moth debacle.” And a debacle it certainly is, but not in the way they think.
According to Charles Darwin, natural selection has been “the most important” factor in the descent with modification of all living things from one or a few common ancestors, yet he had no actual evidence for it. All he could offer in The Origin of Species were “one or two imaginary illustrations.” It wasn’t until almost a century later that Kettlewell seemed to provide “Darwin’s missing evidence” by marking and releasing light- and dark-colored moths in polluted and unpolluted woodlands and recovering some of them the next day. Consistent with the camouflage-predation explanation, the proportion of better-camouflaged moths increased between their release and recapture.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, researchers reported various problems with the camouflage-predation explanation, and in 1998 University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent and two colleagues published an article in volume 30 of Evolutionary Biology concluding “there is little persuasive evidence, in the form of rigorous and replicated observations and experiments, to support this explanation at the present time.” (p. 318)
The same year, Michael Majerus published a book in which he concluded that evidence gathered in the forty years since Kettlewell’s work showed that “the basic peppered moth story is wrong, inaccurate, or incomplete, with respect to most of the story’s component parts.” (p. 116) In a review of Majerus’s book published in Nature, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne wrote: “From time to time, evolutionists re-examine a classic experimental study and find, to their horror, that it is flawed or downright wrong.” According to Coyne, the fact that peppered moths in the wild rarely rest on tree trunks “alone invalidates Kettlewell’s release-and-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks.”
In 1999, I published an article in The Scientist summarizing these and other criticisms of the peppered moth story, and in 2000 I included a chapter on peppered moths in my book Icons of Evolution. Then, in 2002, journalist Judith Hooper published a book about the controversy titled Of Moths and Men. Hooper accused Kettlewell of fraud, though I never did; my criticism was directed primarily at textbook writers who ignored problems with the story and continued to use staged photos even after they were known to misrepresent natural conditions.
Jonathan has actually written about a number of misleading things that you may mind in Biology textbooks.
On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin puts to rest once and for all the common assertion by opponents of intelligent design that there are no scientific papers supporting the claims of ID. This wasn’t true in 2005 when Eugenie Scott of the NCSE stated it on MSNBC and it certainly isn’t true six years later. Luskin discusses the most recent scientific paper, by Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson, and talks about the importance of the peer-reviewed scientific literature: “These papers collectively make a case that intelligent causation is necessary to produce the sort of biological complexity that we are discovering in the cell today.”
If you listen to the podcast, Luskin goes over some of the recent peer-reviewed papers that support ID. But much more importantly, he proves that Eugenie Scott is a liar. She is literally caught in a lie in the video above. She claims that there are no peer-reviewed papers that support ID. Stephen Meyer cites a peer-reviewed paper that he authored. Eugenie Scott claims that the paper does not mention ID. Casey Luskin reads from the paper. The paper explicitly supports ID. Eugenie Scott lied in order to defend her religion of naturalism from the scientific publication that falsifies it.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper that Eugenie Scott claims doesn’t support intelligent design:
Does neo-Darwinism or any other purely materialistic model of morphogenesis account for the origin of the genetic and other forms of CSI necessary to produce novel organismal form? If not, as this review has argued, could the emergence of novel information-rich genes, proteins, cell types and body plans have resulted from actual design, rather than a purposeless process that merely mimics the powers of a designing intelligence? The logic of neo-Darwinism, with its specific claim to have accounted for the appearance of design, would itself seem to open the door to this possibility. Indeed, the historical formulation of Darwinism in dialectical opposition to the design hypothesis (Gillespie 1979), coupled with the neo-Darwinism’s inability to account for many salient appearances of design including the emergence of form and information, would seem logically to reopen the possibility of actual (as opposed to apparent) design in the history of life.
And:
Yet it is precisely for this reason that current advocates of the design hypothesis want to reconsider design as an explanation for the origin of biological form and information. This review, and much of the literature it has surveyed, suggests that four of the most prominent models for explaining the origin of biological form fail to provide adequate causal explanations for the discontinuous increases of CSI that are required to produce novel morphologies. Yet, we have repeated experience of rational and conscious agents–in particular ourselves–generating or causing increases in complex specified information, both in the form of sequence-specific lines of code and in the form of hierarchically arranged systems of parts.
And:
There is a third reason to consider purpose or design as an explanation for the origin of biological form and information: purposive agents have just those necessary powers that natural selection lacks as a condition of its causal adequacy. At several points in the previous analysis, we saw that natural selection lacked the ability to generate novel information precisely because it can only act after new functional CSI has arisen. Natural selection can favor new proteins, and genes, but only after they perform some function. The job of generating new functional genes, proteins and systems of proteins therefore falls entirely to random mutations. Yet without functional criteria to guide a search through the space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed. What is needed is not just a source of variation (i.e., the freedom to search a space of possibilities) or a mode of selection that can operate after the fact of a successful search, but instead a means of selection that (a) operates during a search–before success–and that (b) is guided by information about, or knowledge of, a functional target.
And the conclusion:
An experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests purposive or intelligent design as a causally adequate–and perhaps the most causally adequate–explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms they represent. For this reason, recent scientific interest in the design hypothesis is unlikely to abate as biologists continue to wrestle with the problem of the origination of biological form and the higher taxa.
Those are just a few excerpts.
According to Eugenie Scott, this paper “doesn’t mention intelligent design”. She is a liar.
In listening to this podcast, it really struck me how proponents of evolution must lie in order to defend their religion – the religion of naturalism. You would think that the refutation of naturalism by the Big Bang cosmology would cause these naturalists to abandon the religion of naturalism, and be open to the reality of non-material intelligent causation. But it’s not the case. Naturalists must necessarily oppose the progress of science. They oppose the Big Bang cosmology. They oppose the cosmic fine-tuning. They oppose origin of life research. They oppose the fossils found in the Cambrian explosion. They oppose findings showing the high requirements for habitable galaxies, solar systems and planets.
It’s a case of religion versus science. The speculations of a blind-faith religion against the experimental results of scientific research. The anti-ID people have the religion of naturalism to defend, and the pro-ID people have the science. One side is willing to lie about nature, and the other side tells the truth about nature.
WINTERY KNIGHT 