Burden of proof

Darwin wrote:

…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

He's got it round the wrong way. What he, and evolutionists in general, have to demonstrate is that it could plausibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. That might be the hypothesis; it only needs a counter to undo it, but lack of a biochemically plausible pathway renders it a work of literature, not science; and fiction at that.

And all we have is stories such as Dawkins concocts pointing to all sorts of creatures with all sorts of eyes. But that tells us nothing and is certainly not science.

Theological Death

It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.

Religious vision

‘Darwin’s vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision.’

James Moore (Darwin's biographer)

Truth, but not as you know it!

Dr. Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC, said,

“What Darwin showed in his work on evolution and natural selection is that we don’t need to invoke any supernatural force or power to account for the development of life through time on earth.”

At an Alpha meeting question time I recently attended, one of the course members asked about Adam and Eve...clearly wanting to know if we believed that they had existed, or how we took them.
One of our Bible teachers, a learned and godly man whom I'll call Joe, gave a multi-pronged reply that I'll summarise and comment on here.

I'll aim to be brief, as its all been well rehearsed before, for example, in my posts on Pahl's similar comments.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Joe told us:

1. I believe that God is creator
2. Genesis is picture language, like the picture language of other ANE origins accounts but tells us truth
3. When you compare Genesis 1 to other texts in the Bible, you can see that it is picture language
4. Science tells us 'how' but not 'why'. Genesis tells us 'why'.
5. The Bible is not a book of science
6. The order of events is wrong: light comes before the sun.

 Comments

1. If the content of the only direct reference to God being creator is denied, then I wonder how Joe sustains his belief that God is creator. All the biblical references to God's chief credential as creator rely on Genesis 1, and can only work coherently if Genesis 1 is grounded and shares the same event frame with those references and our own experience of the world. The alternative is that it is a story disconnected from the real and throws into question what the real is...not much different from paganism with identical epistemological challenges.

It strains credibility that God can not or would not describe his creation in terms that authenticate it in the world that resulted. There seems to be a disconnect that God created the world, but the terms of the creation account have no real connection with that very world. Absurd is the word.

2. 'Picture language' means 'imagery', I suppose, but I wonder if the authors of the pagan tripe such as Enuma Elish regarded their work as imagery. Even a rough comparison of EE and G1 shows a huge divergence; the main one that EE is a theogony, it presupposes a cosmos, and not creation out of nothing. We have to wonder what sort of world it is about, then. Moreover, it has evil as a part of the world in the 'creation phase'. This would line up with evolutionary dogma, but not the creation in G1. The difference is vast, and unbridgable. A more plausible relation between the two is that EE is a corrupted derivation of G1, rather than the other way. But then, if G1 is merely a competing story, how would an account of what did not happen persuade anyone? 'Your story...my story'; both just stories. It's like trying to stop a tank with a picture of a rocket!

3. The claim of G1 being imagery fares poorly with other passages in the Bible. It is nothing like the imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation, for example. The ordered, sequenced and delimited event segments in G1 are more like the lists that occur in other passages; Numbers 7 springs to mind.

4. The why only emerges from the how, and in this case the asserted 'how' is at odds with the 'why'. Any attempt to sever the two relies on a pagan ontology and not a biblical one, and stems more from an external philosophical idealism than the concrete-realism of the Bible and its unified approach to reality. Indeed, the flowering of modern science was brought by the approach to the Bible, and indeed the world, that the 'how' and the 'why' are intimately connected; as is sensible. To split them apart means that you reference an alternative real world to the one you are in where different aspects of the unified world we live in can only be explicated by their locus in different 'fields' of being. In fact, can't be done!

5. The Bible is the account of relations between God and his creation, specifically man, and God's work to restore us to fellowship with him. The creation is the essential and definitive starting point and it shows who God is, as loving author of creation, who we are, in this created world, and that relations are grounded in what really happened, not in some disconnected fantasy that attaches to nothing. It also teaches that the material world is ontologically continuous with God's effecting word.
But, where the Bible touches the physical world it is relevantly accurate, because it is about what really happened!

6. Light is produced by the sun, not created by it. Energy is basic to the material world and it is unsurprising that it was created early. Perhaps the order that G1 is relating is that first a basic 'stuff' was created, then it was energised. So, I read the creation of light as the formation of the general energy field: perhaps including the known forces: the strong and the weak atomic forces, gravity and electromagnetic forces; all of which must have prior existence for production of light by a particular body.

Mousetrap yanking

A friend's response to McDonald's mousetraps, kindly e-mailed to me:

Didn’t think much of the mouse traps but, probably, 25 years ago, would have really enjoyed the pot you smoked in order to dream up such nonsense.

But, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so prematurely critical. Maybe if you could intelligently CREATE one of those mechanical devices and let me see how it actually works I might be impressed.

In the mean time, inhale some more mate.

Mousetrap stories

On his otherwise wonderful website, John McDonald says:

To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.

Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.

Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.

Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.