In my last post I asked atheists to talk about their relationship to their guilt.
And man, oh man, did they ever respond.
Turns out atheists are quite the … cyber-communicators.
It also turns out that atheists — or the many from whom I heard, anyway — care just as much as we Christians do about loving and doing right by others.
Curse the atheists! Why couldn’t they be the craven sensory-hounds they’re supposed to be? Must they reject God, and be intelligent and sensitive?
How are we to tolerate these people for whom toleration is a tenant?
Anyway, they got me thinking. (Another reason not to like them.)
I could no sooner imagine what it would be like inhabiting a consciousness devoid of the constant awareness of God than I could what it would be like to be a … Venusian cannibal.
Right? I have no idea what it’s like to be a cannibal from Venus.
Be pretty lonely, I’d guess. Or pretty full.
Point is: Mystery. Can’t imagine it. Just like I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an atheist. Even before I was a Christian — for just about every second of my waking life, in fact — I was intensely aware of what to me was the fact of God. It’s never even occurred to me there isn’t a God.
Atheists, of course (and insofar as such generalizations have merit), can’t imagine that there is a God. (Well, of course they can imagine there’s a God. They just can’t imagine why anyone would give themselves over to what to them is so obviously a fantasy.)
So we Christians are over on our side of the fence, and the atheists are over on theirs.
And we keep lobbing Bibles over the fence at them. And (alas) they keep lobbing them back at us.
We Christians want the atheists to come over to our side of the fence — to join us, to become one of us. They would much prefer it if we would quit wanting that, and leave them be. They would naturally prefer it if we could actually respect them for, say, their intellectual (not to mention moral) integrity — but they aren’t exactly holding their breath waiting for that to happen. Because they know that Christians believe atheists to be at best lost, and at worst damned.
And let’s face it: If you know the best someone can think about you is that you’re lost, you’re hardly inclined to, say, invite that person to your birthday party. Ever.
Hence the fence.
I hate that fence! What is it doing there?
Listen, Christians: I hate to be the one to say it, but can we all just admit that all the good music is coming from the other side of the fence? Can we at least give the godless folk that?
Anyway, here’s what the atheists have taught me: We Christians need to listen to them. And not just because they have all the good music. (Okay, that’ll be the last of the “Christian music always sounds like soggy white bread” line of humor, which I realize is just totally obnoxious.) We need to listen to the atheists because … well, because we never do. We try to listen to them, but we fail. And we fail because while we’re listening to them, we’re secretly thinking how they really, really need to become Christian.
And it’s just about impossible to really, really think something about someone and not, in one way or another, really, really communicate what that something is.
And then before we know it: No birthday party invites for us! Again.
So I say: Let’s every once in a while put aside our Christian Agenda (none of us are thinking that we don’t have one too, right?), and just listen to atheists. Let’s just hear what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and why they’re saying and thinking whatever they are.
Let’s actually respect them. Why not? How could such a thing possibly hurt us?
Who knows? If we listen to the atheists long enough, isn’t it just possible that we might actually learn something from them?
Hey.
Miracles happen.
Some related posts o’ mine: “Are The Great Commandment and the Great Commission Incompatible?”, “More on The Great Commandment vs. The Great Commission” , “To My Recent Commentators” , and “Adults Aren’t Children–and None of Us is God.”
(If you like my stuff, you can be of true help to my ever-burgeoning writing career by simply joining my Facebook group. Thanks a lot.)
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![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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"If birds evolved from reptiles, where are the thousands of generations between scales and feathers, or between reptile’s solid bones and bird’s hollow ones?" – Marcy Muser
I suggest you check out the recent discoveries of partially feathered dinosaurs (birds evolved from dinosaurs) – which their anatomy shows could not fly – the feathers were probably for insulation and/or display; and the far older discovery of Archaeopteryx – a bird with teeth and a bony tail. Many intermediates between major groups are indeed there (see some of the other examples I gave above), and ignoring them won't make them go away.
"I was intensely aware of what to me was the fact of God." – John Shore
John, facts are facts, There is no such thing as a fact "to me".
"I agree 100% that the Bible describes the creation of a single human species. But I have never seen a single shred of evidence that supports the idea that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal are any species other than Homo Sapiens, modern man." – Marcy Muser
So, how about Homo erectus? Homo habilis? The various Australopithecus species? Orrorin tugenensis We have a nice set of examples, all the way between modern humans and what is, effectively, a bipedal chimpanzee (and at that, Orrorin also appears to have been a tree-climber, so was not an obligatory biped). Which of these were descended from Adam and Eve? By the way, when was this "creation" of which you speak? Adding up the lifetimes of Biblical patriarchs suggests about 6000 years. On the other hand, scientific evidence shows that the Neandertals died out around 25,000 yers ago, recent sequencing of the Neandertal genome suggests modern humans had a common ancestor with them perhaps 300,000 years ago, Orrorin lived around 6 million years ago, the first land animals lived around 400 million years ago, life itself was already flourishing 3 billion years ago, Earth is 4.65 billion years old, and the universe around 13.7 billion years old. to believe in the Genesis fable, you don't just need to junk evolutionary biology (which means, in effect, all biology). Most of physics and astronomy and much of archaeology needs to go to. Not to mention Biblical scholarship, of course: I know of no reputable Biblical scholar who considers Genesis (or indeed, most of the Bible) to be literal truth.
"Please take note, evolution is the theory de rigueur but only a theory" – Ross
This statement reveals a profound ignorance of science. "Theory" in a scientific context does not mean "guess". It means "coherent explanation of a body of observed facts."
"You bring up the fossil record, but I don’t know why as it is an embarrassment to the evolutionist point of view for when we look to it we see NO transitional forms. Darwin knew this and said they just hadn’t been found yet, but give it time and they would be. Well, it’s 2007 and it/they haven’t. By the way not only should we be able to find on missing link, they should be everywhere in the fossil record." – Ross
And indeed, so they are. You can easily research this for yourself (but I'm sure you won't) – for example, look at the extraordinary sequence of fossils intermediate between fish and early amphibians. There are similar sequences for the evolution of mammals from reptiles, the evolution of whales from land-living ancestors, the evolution of humans from early hominids, and many, many more.
"Also, where are all the fossils of various creatures in intermediatory states of evolution. Where is the the half fish half horse creature for if evolution is the reason for all living things these hybrid creatures should be everywhere." – Ross
A "half fish half horse" would immediately disprove evolution.
Dirty little secret time. I belong to a Christian faith (ok Seventh day Adventist) where many members believe that Sunday keeping Christians are going to end up with the same fate as Atheists. My wife wrote a great article one time for the church newsletter entitled “You could learn a lot from a…” where she describes what she’s gained from relationships with those Sunday folks. As you can imagine, some members liked it, some didn’t. All I can say is that I’m really glad God is the final judge of humankind; Atheists, Sunday keepers and me. Now to enjoy the rest of my Sabbath…
I am an ordained Christian minister and my covenanted life partner is an atheist who finds connection and community within a Unitarian Universalist congregation. We met online when I searched for “very liberal, vegetarians with at least a master’s degree” (not that education per se was the criteria, rather it was intellectual curiosity, of which education is often an indicator). I intentionally did not include faith within my search because sadly, I found that most people who profess my faith do not share my values: justice, peace, service, community, care for others, care for earth, etc. So my narrow search brought up this very open, passionate activist/academic who professes no faith. And what we have learned is that his doubt actually looks a lot like my faith.
Rachel: That's a really nice testimony. Thanks for it.
it’s a real shame John, but i posted this very page onto Morsecode’s Godless Bible Study becayse frankly, there were a couple of obnoixious scripture quoting individuals, so i thought this would be a poigniant thing to put on there. I am sad to say that it utterly failed, as Compass1130 still insists on “throwing the Bible over the fence.” i guess we can’t all be as sane as you John
Oh and i think that you greatly overestimate secular music. i think that gospel music is very nice actually, and all classical music is christian i beleive (i am no expert on it though). Not that i don’t like Disturbed alot better than any Christian group, i still think there are moments… If you are talking about popular music, the point still stands, and that is because they are trying to “unsecularize” the music, as it were. There was a preacher at my H.S. (yes, i went to a christian private school, though i didn’t bother transfering for some unfathomable reason), and he talk about the three ways to deal with the secular society at large. Mimicry, antagonism, and… um, well i can’t remember, though i distincly knowe that both of those were wrong aswers as it turns out. You grasped the feel of that third attitude, the correct, reasonable, and respectably christian one. It was a lack of people like you that turned me off to organized religion after all.
Its so sad how people can revolve their lives around God. In the past we had gods for everything we couldn't explain. Wind, rain, droughts, etc. As we found out how rain falls and why droughts actually happen we took away those gods and turned it into science. Now how did people come to existence? We aren't sure, so what do we do? Throw another God in the situation. Also, if there is a God why do we all believe in different ones. Why donut the Muslims have the same beliefs as Christians. As an "atheist", I don't understand why God would want to create life just so you can revolve it around him and a book. Yes, it is a great idea to have people follow these laws and morals. But, just because youre not chrisitan doesnt mean you dont follow them. And if god is so "forgiving" then when we reach those "golden gates" wont he welcome us with open arms. If there is a God, the Christians in our atheist lives would go to hell due to the fact they failed to teach us. I grew up in a Christian home going to church, but when something in my life happened it opened my eyes. I dont need to rely on some supreme being to help me lead a happy life. Science is the answer, go read a real book based on facts and not a book based on stories and fantasy.
Wow! What a blog! I believe that may be the first thing in quite sometime that a christian has written that I agree with. THAT'S the love Christ was talking about. He doesn't want feel good church, nor does he want straight condemnation.
Kudos to you for your eloquence and open mind! I wish there were more christians like you in the world. If there were us Christians might actually have an impact on the world the way Christ wanted.
“Listen, Christians: I hate to be the one to say it, but can we all just admit that all the good music is coming from the other side of the fence?”
As an atheist, I can only say; Are you &%^$in’ KIDDING?
How about “Amazing Grace”? “How Great Thou Art”? “All Creatures of Our God and King”? “Gaudete”? “Adeste Fideles”? Not to mention the entire collected works of Bach.
You guys have *much* better music than us. As far as I know, atheist music consists of pseudo-folk Marxist rubbish like “Pie in the Sky” (and even that one has to steal a Christian tune!).
http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/pie.html
I mean there’s a lot of great *secular* music, but I can’t think of *any* great atheist music.
FINALLY!! Some Christianist admits to having an agenda! I tell you, I fear for my safety in this country every day, as politicains bend over backward to incorporate jesus into the national dialog. There is no homosexual agenda, but there is a Christianist one. Thank you for your honesty.
Oh, and I tried dating a Christian and couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get over the basic belief system – it’s so crazy. I mean, if someone (in a world not indoctrinated with Jesus-talk) walked into a psychiatrists office and said, “I believe the world was made in six days and man is man because a talking snake” and on and on – they’d get a BIG dose of happy drugs at best, or locked up.
It’s like they live in fantasy land, and need the rest of us to go along in order to bolster their faith. no thanks.
Comment on comment 57
Most Christians do not believe that judgment and hell are a simplistic proposition (Christian heaven/not Christian hell). God is fair, and judges people according to their individual context. It is possible that one person’s honest disbelief is more pleasing to God than another person’s cynical Christianity.
There is a lot of biblical support that that says someone who does believe is saved. I don’t know of any bible passage that clearly addresses the fate of non-believers. (Those that are bad to the poor, however, should definitely watch out). There is also a lot of thought among Christians that Hell is not a physical place of eternal torture but rather a (spiritual) place that is simply not in the presence of God.
A lot of Christian’s believe in both God and evolution. He created the world, and the vehicle he used was evolution. After all the bible does say we were made from DIRT; and nothing describes the big bang like the Genesis story. Pretty accurate description of our current scientific understanding for a book written 4,000 years ago.
I say this even though no one should forget that the bible is not a supposed to be science textbook.
Science is great; after all it sheds light on His wondrous processes.
Another great post. Thanks John. As and agnostic/atheist – I appreciate your comments and am glad to have found this re-freshing blog.
Thanks, Man. =)
~smj
John, any chance of getting an answer to comment 57 ?
Thanks,
Ben
I very much appreciate this call to understanding. I am an atheist and I have certainly felt toward Christians the way that John describes (e.g., lobbing Bibles around).
I had only one point to make. I think it was more fair to say that atheists cannot imagine that there is a God than that atheists cannot imagine why anyone would want to believe in one. On the contrary, I cannot even understand what it means for there to be a God, except perhaps insofar as “God” is just nature, as described by Spinoza. I think that “God” is a very confused term, except where people have merely stipulated a definition for what they personally mean by “God.”
If more people were like you, I doubt that I'd have to spend twenty or more hours a week volunteering to help keep the church and state separate. What a wonderful world it would be if we could live our lives in peace, and you could live yours in peace, and maybe we could play cards every once in a while, or have a cookout.
You seem like a thoughtful, respectful, moral person, John. You'd have made a good atheist. (Sorry… couldn't resist….)
Seriously. Great piece, and very astute observations. You, sir, are one Christian I'm quite happy to share the world with. Believe me, I wish I could say those words more often. I really, really wish that.
Hey….thanks for the reasonable post.
I’m an athiest….but you couldn’t tell by looking at me. (I file down my horns).
Can’t we just all get along.
For all of the Christians out there worried about my salvation…..you don’t need to….I’ll deal with whatever comes my way. You don’t have to spend any time on me. You don’t have to pray for me or cry for me or throw your books at me. Spend your time with your families and friends and like it was said so eloquently in the post ” They would much prefer it if we would quit wanting that, and leave them be. ”
Thanks again John
Bad, I think it’s brilliant that you took that much time and effort to explain taxonomy and evolution to everyone hear. It was a brilliant comment and so well-written. I sincerely hope that everyone here, especially the theists who don’t understand evolution, will take it in and understand it.
Kudos.
In the hopes that my previous comment will someday be readable, I’ll continue explaining a bit.
Words like fish and reptile basically have ambiguous and confused usages for the purpose of biology, and these sorts of words developed prior to good taxonomy and knowledge of evolution. They really only make sense in the present, referring to groups of creatures that are distinctive from each other today. When applied to ancient species, they often become inapt.
Take fish, for example. There is no coherent taxonomic group that equates to “fish.” The smallest group that contains all the different things we today call fish (and even then leaving out real outliers) are the vertebrates. However, we humans, as well as all mammals, birds, reptiles, and so on, are all also vertebrates. Our skeletal structures are all just modifications to the same basic vertebrate template.
Forget common descent for a second: even without it, you are left with quite a problem if you want to create objectively defined groups wherein you define “fish” in such a way that it includes all the things we call fish, but also excludes land animals. You can’t do it: not systematically anyway (of course, you can make up some sloppy definitions about slimy bullet shaped things in the sea, but none of that seriosuly looks at the underlying morphology and gauges the real differences and similarities: you could do the same with “warm blooded flying things, and end up putting bats and birds in the same group, just as sloppily).
Long before evolution, for instance, taxonomists (who were all creationists back then, by the way) faced this problem. This is why even they put human beings in with the great apes (remember, still, as creationists and believers, with no hint of evolution or the idea of common descent): there just wasn’t a way to biologically define what an “ape” was that didn’t also describe human beings. And to be sure sure, human beings are different from other apes. But then, gibbons are different from gorillas: they are all subvariations of a basic basal “ape,” which itself is just a subvariation of a basic primate, which is just a subvariation of a… and so on.
Genetics tells the exact same story. The very same logic that is used in paternity tests for human beings can be applied to different species, and by seeing the amount of differences and similarities, you can build a family tree in exactly the same way. Amazingly, that family tree matches the exact same one we get from looking at morphology (both modern and fossil). And more than that, this technique is generally looking at neutral mutational variations in the genes (i.e. changes to DNA that still code for the same protein, or proteins that are functionally identical): there is no REASON why they should build a family tree of nested clades, let alone this particular family tree. But they do. When we look at, say, chickens, their closest non-bird relatives genetically are crocodiles. Birds, however, have a special tissue layer in their bones that no other non-birds have, including crocs. And yet, when we examine T-rex fossils, we find this layer was in their bones as well: they had it, and now birds, which other evidence suggests are their last living descendants have it. Why, if not for ancestry? Why is this same pattern seen everywhere, over and over, in every respect? Can creationists explain such things in a systematic way? I’ve never seen it.
All these different lines of evidence, converging…
I don’t understand how anyone can miss the transitions here. When you line up all the fossils we have in any group over time, there are very very obvious transitions there. No, not every single feature is represented in every single step, because the fossil record is simply a very tiny, quasi-random sample of past life. But that’s entirely irrelevant: the overall changes and progressions are very clear. And the pattern of descent with modification is universal. In other words, everything we have is consistent with evolution via common descent. Complaining about gaps in the record misses the point entirely: we have no expecation of a complete fossil record, and any new fossil discovery that fills in a gap just creates two more gaps for creationists to complain about in any case.
As for information, you still haven’t defined what you mean by it. I’m not trying to be difficult: defining information in biology is very difficult and ambiguous. But it’s important for getting a grasp on why geneticists and biologists don’t find the information objection very credible.
In human beings, a minor mutation in a man who lived about a century and a half ago granted his descendants immunity to the bad effects of LDH cholesterol, which is a common problem in modern diets. As a result, his (now many) descendants, most of them still living in the same village in Italy, have a greatly reduced risk of heart attack and stroke compared to other people who eat the same diets. Isn’t this an increase in information, in any sense of the word? And this is just one example from just human beings, just recently, discovered via genetic study. Most mutational changes aren’t as dramatic. A slightly shorter leg, a slightly longer arm, a joint shifted by a degree, and so on: all just natural variation that crops up in any population, but then screened through by the environment.
So, yes, over time, the early tetrapods (four legged land animals) diversified into reptiles and mammals (and modern amphibians). And in doing so, their genomes became different, and different in functionally relevant ways to their increasingly different lifestyle. I leave it up to you to figure out whether that implies an increase in information or not, but it happened, and it happened by changes to genes, which are mathematically inevitable based on the observed rates of mutation and population genetics.
None of it involved anything becoming radically different from its parents, or something that its parents were not: the changes were variations on a theme, not rejections of the past. Even radical changes in body shape or lifestyle, like land animals back into the sea as whales and dolphins, still bear all the hallmarks of their past: mammalian features and body structures, modified for the ocean. All the tell-tale features of this ancestry are there: even back legs, which appear in the embryo stage before being re-absorbed (a process which sometimes fails to fully complete, leaving whales with silly little back legs!)
Most of evolution is different populations drifting apart over time, away from each other until the usually unheralded point where genomes or lifestyle no longer matched up enough for reproduction to be possible. Hence, new species.
I still struggle to understand how anyone finds that implausible, given an understanding of genetics and basic population biology.
“I agree with you that the descendants of fruit flies will always be fruit flies – but so far as I can see that contradicts evolution rather than supporting it.”
Well, then that’s a pretty significant problem in your understanding of what evolution is saying.
“Sure, you can argue that we are “still apes, still mammals, still eukaryotes.” But if the theory of evolution is true, then at some point in time, a eukaryote had to be a descendant of a single-celled organism.”
Eukayrotes can be single celled organisms, and the first ones to appear on earth almost certainly were.
“At the point when it became a eukaryote, it ceased to be whatever it had been before, since by their very definition eukaryote has more than one cell.”
Well, first of all, That’s not the case. Second of all: things in evolution never “cease to be” what its ancestors were.
The core organizational structure of life on earth is nested clades: that is, branching groups within groups. Every trait pattern of lifeforms on earth over time matches this very distinct pattern, and it is a pattern distinctive of ancestral relationships. But the upshot is that all of something’s descendants will always still be more like their ancestor than anything else on earth, and thus be rightly classified by that ancestry.
“If mammals descended from reptiles, then at some point the first mammal ceased to be a reptile and became a mammal.”
The problem you re having here is that terms like “fish” and “reptile” are largely modern words for modern animals: when used to describe taxonomic groups, they are actually paraphyletic. That can be confusing, which is why it makes sense to stick to taxonomic descriptions instead of layperson words.
I’ll explain more when I get back from work today.
I should note first before I go that science is not done by quotations: collecting a bunch of quotes that sound like they support your position is no way to try and understand a subject. Worse, creationists are also legendary for grossly quoting things out of context or having no idea what relevance or scope a certain claim has.
“I would still expect to find transitional forms in the fossil record between the original ape (or ape-like) ancestor and modern man. Is my argument flawed here?”
The problem is that they are all there, and you simply refuse to see them. Or you ignore what’s there and demand to see the links between THOSE particular forms, missing the big picture of the pattern they all fit into.
I mean, you simply cannot honestly look at the history of hominid fossils over time and NOT see transitional changes. No, we do not have every single fossil, every single step. But there’s no reason to believe that every such fossil is preserved. What we have is a sort of quasi-random sampling, and when you put together everything we do have, it is more than enough to establish what is going on. All of it fits that nested clade pattern, and we see stady modification between some traits and others in ancestral lines all over the place! This is exactly what transitional forms are: legs forming from lobed fins, digits forming, skeletal structures adapting over time for upright postures, and so forth. No amount of uncredible claims about rickets can possibly handwave this stuff away.
The same goes for, say, birds and dinos (and yes, I would say that birds are the last of the dinosaurs, but again, dinosaur isn’t a well-defined scientific term). You can deny all you want that there are no transitional forms, or that archy isn’t one. But the fact is, fossils like archy have traits that are unique to dinosaurs AND to modern birds. No amount of handwaving or trying to change the subject changes that or what it implies. All the sorts of things you ask for: rebalancing of skeletal structures, transitional steps in between one thing and another are all right there staring us in the face. Creationists can try to fool you with comforting random quotes, but it doesn’t make anything go away.
More fossils found are always great, but not necessary. And, in fact, fossil evidence (which creationists seem to obsess most about) isn’t really even the most importantly or compelling. We’re lucky to have such a rich fossil record that conforms, in every way possible, to the evolutionary picture. But if fossilization never happened, we’d still be able to show what had occurred.
“I simply don’t have the time or the energy at this point in my life for the kind of thought and study this topic requires on a sustained basis.”
Then how can you assume that you have good grounds to judge anything? All of this stuff depends very crucially on understanding the evidence, and it’s not simple stuff: it’s complicated. It’s not beyond anyone, but it does take time and work to understand all the relevant science and how the evidence fits. If you don’t have time for it, then making claims about evidence contradicting science isn’t very fair. How can you know?
John…help…we're..drowning…in…excursive…evolutionary…speak
Take back your blog, I beg of you (you must have enough word count to publish the driest text book on evolution conceivable)
Plus I miss my daily laugh…and everybody knows logic and humor are poor bedfellows (aren't you just dying to make us chuckle)
love ya man, get back to work
bad:
"still struggle to understand how anyone finds that implausible, given an understanding of genetics and basic population biology."
And there's your basic problem. People who find evolution implausible simply do not have a good understanding of science in general, or the scientific method, let alone the finer points of genetics and biology. I was a creationist when I was a Christian and I can tell you, they are reading creationist materials and adopting creationist arguments (often simply cutting and pasting) rather than doing the research for themselves, listening to science lectures, taking courses and going to museums to see transitional fossils first hand. They are blinded by ideology, rather than informed by discovery and information.
When I started objectively informing myself about science, my creationist arguments fell apart very quickly.
LPalm:
"Why would anyone even think that (who at one time they ‘believed’ to be) their creator and Heavenly Father could possibly strike them down dead for doing exactly what he created them to do?"
Errrrmmmm … the part about the lightening was an attempt at lightheartedness and humor in explaining what was really a difficult and long journey. I would have thought that was rather obvious, but I guess not.
John seems to have a finely tuned sense of humor, so I'm going to guess that he got that I wasn't literally expecting god to strike me dead for questioning his existence.
ES, if you come back here a good site is http://www.de-conversion.com, assuming you haven't found it already.
Bad,
“Common descent means what it says: the descendants of fruit flies will always be fruit flies in the just the same way that we are still apes, still mammals, still eukaryotes. ”
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that there’s something wrong with this argument. I agree with you that the descendants of fruit flies will always be fruit flies – but so far as I can see that contradicts evolution rather than supporting it. Sure, you can argue that we are “still apes, still mammals, still eukaryotes.” But if the theory of evolution is true, then at some point in time, a eukaryote had to be a descendant of a single-celled organism. At the point when it became a eukaryote, it ceased to be whatever it had been before, since by their very definition eukaryote has more than one cell. This required the addition of genetic information (basically DNA – I’ll get to a more formal definition in a minute.)
Evolution also argues that the first mammal descended from some other life form. If mammals descended from reptiles, then at some point the first mammal ceased to be a reptile and became a mammal. Whatever organism mammals descended from, at the moment we begin to call an organism the first mammal, it is no longer whatever its parents were. The transition from non-mammal to mammal also involved a gain of a significant amount of genetic information (I realize an evolutionist will say the gain happened very slowly over time – nevertheless, over time, there must be a very real and very substantial gain in genetic data.) The whole argument of the theory of evolution hinges on the argument that incredible amounts of new genetic data – information – were gained over time. In other words, at some point in the past, a one-celled organism must have become or given birth to a two-celled organism; a single strand of DNA must have become more than one strand of DNA, and that must have become a chromosome, and that must have become more than one chromosome. You don’t get humans – or even fruit flies – from amino acids without adding enormous amounts of genetic information.
But by any currently observable mechanism, an organism descended from another organism either has the same amount of genetic data – the same amount of DNA – as the parent, or it has less genetic data – it has lost something. I have never heard of anyone demonstrating, by scientific experiment, that any descendant organism can have more DNA, more genetic data, than the parent organism. And yet if the theory of evolution is true, some currently occurring process must allow (eventually, over time) for the creation of large amounts of new genetic information.
I realize I still haven’t given a definition of information. Here’s how the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines it: “the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA . . .) that produce specific effects.” I’m not sure how much that helps the discussion – it seems to me the definition of genetic information is fairly well established, but if you want a formal definition, there you have it.
As for mutations, I don’t think most scientists would agree with you that “every mutation is a gain in information.” Merriam-Webster gives this definition of mutation: “A relatively permanent change in hereditary material involving either a physical change in chromosome relations or a biochemical change in the codons that make up genes.” The more common definition of mutation is “copying mistakes” – when the DNA sequence somehow gets screwed up. In almost every case, mutations involve either a confusion of or loss of existing information. They rarely involve an increase in the actual number of genes, and even when they do, the mistake almost always has a negative effect on the organism. That’s why, as you say above, a fruit fly will always be a fruit fly – it does not have any genetic information to be anything BUT a fruit fly, and any mutations will only serve to reduce the genetic information available to it. That’s also why I’m not surprised when a daughter generation (primrose, fruit fly, etc.) loses the ability to interbreed with a parent – that is perfectly feasible given a loss of information.
Incidentally, research done on the HIV virus shows that it occurs in astronomical numbers, and that its mutation rate is 10,000 times greater than that of most other organisms. In a recent interview, a prominent biochemist says that, “In just the past few decades HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world. Yet all those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little. It still has the same number of genes that work in the same way.” If the mechanism you propose to have produced the biological world around us can do that little, even under the best possible circumstances, how on earth can it have produced the complex life we see today?
You go on to say that, “Transitional forms are those which have distinctive trait patterns which show them to belong to a particular larger group, but also have trait patterns which are distinctive of a smaller descendant group.” OK. But if the smaller descendant group is actually going to be a different kind of organism, and if the mutations are indeed small and take place over a long period of time, there must be fossil evidence of the transition. If you’re going to argue that birds are descended from dinosaurs, you must be able to show transitional forms – dinosaurs with bird-like traits (scales in the process of developing into feathers, for example, or bones that are hollow or becoming so). Not only do should you be able to suggest mechanisms by which those changes might have happened; but if the theory of evolution is indeed true, you should be able to find examples in the fossil record. (And please, don’t give me Archaeopteryx as an example – Dr. Alan Feduccia, evolutionist and expert on birds at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has stated clearly: “Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.”) So where are the transitional forms, with traits of dinosaurs and traits of birds? That’s the kind of transitional forms I’d like to see – and the kind that so far have apparently never been unearthed. Again, I’m not looking for “half bird, half dinosaur” – let me repeat, I am NOT looking for half and half – I understand that those are contrary to the theory of evolution – but if the transition really took place, there should be fossil evidence of transitional forms of scales, and bones, and pectoral muscles, and so on. (Oh, and a question – would you say, then, that birds are actually ALL dinosaur? That seems an unusual way to put it, and one I’ve not seen in evolutionary literature.)
You say, “No other group of creatures on the planet, for instance, has the sorts of teeth and particular patterns on the teeth that apes have.” In that case, though, your argument becomes self-defeating, because if no other group of creatures on the planet has the sorts of teeth and patterns on the teeth that apes have, then where did the apes come from? How did they get those sorts of teeth? What kind of teeth did apes’ ancestors have, and do we have fossil evidence of the transition between the ancestors’ teeth and the apes’ teeth?
I’m willing to grant you that if the theory of evolution is true, then men are apes, and we wouldn’t find half-man, half-apes. However, given that men are a distinct KIND of ape, with certain traits that distinguish them from all the other kinds of apes, I would still expect to find transitional forms in the fossil record between the original ape (or ape-like) ancestor and modern man. Is my argument flawed here?
Over and over, it seems, evolutionary scientists are forced to admit that they have no idea how a given structure developed; it suddenly shows up in the fossil record, just as it is today. Even such a prominent evolutionist as Stephen Jay Gould has said, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.” Again, I’m not looking for chimeras – half one thing, half another – but fossil evidence of steps in the process from one major category to another – from single-celled to multi-celled, or from invertebrates to vertebrates, for example. If such a process occurred, there ought to be evidence. But as I re-read your post, it sounds like you’re arguing that the idea of common descent means somehow there would be no transitional forms – at least none that would be recognizable as transitional forms. Is that what you’re saying? And if so, how is that possible?
One last response. “You say that evidence keeps arising to contradict scientists … but does it? You can claim that, but what if those claims are actually without merit, or based on a lack of understanding, or even a willful misrepresentation of the evidence by creationists?”
First, I don’t say that “evidence keeps arising to contradict scientists.” I don’t disagree with scientists in general. I don’t even disagree with evolutionary scientists when they discuss what they themselves have observed and tested. In fact what I said was that evidence keeps arising to contradict the theories of the evolutionary scientists who are trying to resolve the problems that arise when trying to explain the development of the universe based exclusively on ordinary everyday processes. But yes, I believe evidence does keep arising to contradict these evolutionary scientists. So far our discussion has been limited to only certain aspects of biology, and so far I have not yet heard any hard evidence to show that the minor genetic changes everyone agrees occur within a given kind of animal lead to the kinds of major genetic changes evolution demands.
And there are many other issues that bring evolution into serious question, from criticisms of the Big Bang theory (even from evolutionists), to chemical hurdles in creating a living cell from nonliving matter even when strictly controlled by human intelligence, to major errors in radiometric dating on rocks of known ages, to polonium radiohaloes, to the saline content of the ocean, to the amount of helium in the atmosphere, and many more. I don’t think this is the forum in which to discuss these, and none of them is my area of expertise anyway, so I will not get into them here.
I have a feeling we are drawing to the end of this discussion. For one thing, I simply don’t have the time or the energy at this point in my life for the kind of thought and study this topic requires on a sustained basis. (I do have a life, you know?)
I will try to answer a couple of others who have asked serious questions (tomorrow!), but I don’t expect to be able to give this kind of long, drawn-out response again.
Thanks again for all the thoughts.
John , I hereby claim a fair percentage of the profits from YOUR upcoming book namely # of posts by lazy / # of total posts weighted by an appropriate factor > 1 OK ? Say yes or i ll stop posting immediately ( well ok i won't it's really fun)
Marcy you are becoming my favorite -to debate with Christian.
As i said I'm a physicist so in order to answer properly to your statements i ll have to read (and google) more. That takes time and I do have a life. But you mentioned Big Bang :
"from criticisms of the Big Bang theory (even from evolutionists)"
Well the Big Bang model is a very logical and consistent model of the universe but it is not the ultimate one. There are others like
inflationary universe, multiuniverse, cyclic , ekpyrotic etc. which are being advocated nowadays by serious cosmologists. Fact is the universe is expanding. And what cosmologists do is they try to find a model that describes such an expanding universe and is also consistent with all other observations and laws of nature.
If I could choose I would like to have a cyclic universe which blows up and goes down periodically in all eternity. But since i chose to be a scientist i have to accept whatever the one model that is consistent with the observations not the one that i like the most.
So marcy to sum it up. We are not 100 % sure that the Bing Bang actually is the right one. Does this meean that we should stop working on it and believe what is written in Genesis ?
Here are the facts:
1. Facts are true statements, regardless of consensus or opinions or lack of supporting evidence. Example of a fact: John Shore is a great writer.
2. Lack of supporting evidence for a theory does not mean such evidence is non-existent. (However: if some evidence that would disprove such theory exists, that theory is indeed false)
3. Unless two certain theories are mutually exclusive and completely cover all possibility, disproving one is not equal to proving the other.
4. The aforementioned facts are taken out directly from Logic 101, especially #1.
With such facts in mind:
+ Evolution and God Existence are not mutually exclusive. In other words, without further knowledge, the validation of one theory does not validate nor invalidate the other. Therefore, debates between these two theories are inherently flawed since no conclusion about either could be logically deduced.
+ Furthermore, neither theory can be proved or disproved logically and/or evidently. That means strict atheists should also have to take a leap of faith to believe in something that can't be reached with logical reasoning. Wouldn't it be hypocritical (for atheists) to criticize people with "blind" faith if you are no different?
+ To generalize, Science and Religion could possibly co-exist happily with the exception of Bible literalism.(My sincere sympathy to Bible literalists and equivalent fundamentalists in other religions, there are more than enough supporting evidences to show that the Earth is more than 10,000 year olds.) However, while Science relies on an ever-increasing set of facts (more facts come from verified and validated theories), Religion relies on a certain constant faith that never changes. Science and Religion will remain "friendly" until the set of scientific facts provides solid conclusion for or against Religion (this will most likely not happen in our lifetime).
No absolute conclusion on God's Existence can be made until:
+ Mankind (science) has exhausted all other possibilities (this is somewhat hopeless, since there are countless possibilities, figuratively speaking)
+ Personal death, which could result in 3 different ways:
* "God" giving the complete fact sheet, before dispatching you to your final destination.
* Nothing happens, you're death, that's it, it's over. Guess you really never find out.
* You're told you're just part of the matrix (this one is rather lame)
+ God's Revelation during which God announces that "evolution is full of crap and he/she likes Britney Spears' music". Well, what if it is Satan/Loki/Britney Spears/any supernatural being playing trick on us? Guess this is a tough one. Never mind then.
Final verdict: noone knows who's right or who's wrong. If you're sincerely convinced with your answer, you'd better hope and "pray" it's right (no puns intended). If you are unsure, my (scientific) agnostic friends, all you can do is keep trying to get closer to the answer. But tell you what, if you solely rely on science and strictly logical reasoning, good luck finding the answer anytime soon. You might as well focus on something else in your lifetime.
Andrew and lazy,
Thanks for pointing me back to your post – it’s number 86, in case anyone else wants to look back at it. Here’s what you said:
“But all this life is linked at the morphological as well as at the DNA level. They are all related to one another. In Darwin’s theory competition in and across populations of critters in a given environment will tend to allow some to reproduce in greater numbers than those who struggle to feed themselves or attract a mate. This is Natural Selection in a nutshell. Darwin didn’t know about Mendel’s work, nor of course DNA and so he proposed a sort of blending of traits as the fuel for variation. He was dead wrong on that, but dead right on identifying how small variations and competition to survive and reproduce would affect the shape of living things over time. ”
I think this is a clear statement of what most evolutionists believe. Small changes, caused by genetic mutations, along with natural selection, accumulated over time, are responsible for molecules eventually becoming man. The problem is, the kind of speciation the article discussed does not prove this. It only proves that living things can adapt, and that eventually some of those changes can result in some descendants not being able to interbreed with their ancestors. That in no way supports the idea of one kind of plant developing into a totally different kind, much less into an animal.
I know, I know, “kind” is not a scientific term, it’s a common-sense one – but a fruit fly becoming a slightly different fruit fly doesn’t prove a fruit fly can even become some other kind of insect, let alone something more than a fruit fly. In fact, in the studies referenced by the speciation article, almost all of the new species represent a net LOSS of information from the parent species. I know of no creationist who claims there is no genetic change involving net loss of information over time. The creationist claim is that genetic change involving a net GAIN of information is almost non-existent (and most of those instances are harmful to the creature). If in fact almost all genetic change involves net loss of information, no amount of time will result in increasing organization such as molecules-to-man evolution requires; instead, this argues that the world was originally better than it is today, and organization is decreasing.
“Transitional Forms: All living things are transitional between one generation and the next. All fossils are transitional in some assepct too. There is no shortage of Transitional Fossils.”
You offer no proof of this. As nearly as I can tell, it is an assumption based on the premise that evolution is true. The transitional fossils Darwin expected to see, and those creationists would like to see evolutionists produce, are those that show development from one kind of animal into another. If you claim, for example, that reptiles evolved from fish, where are the fossils showing that development? If evolution is true, there should be thousands of transitional forms between the fish and the reptile. Where are the fossils to support this claim? Where are fish with reptile-like scales, or vice versa? Where are reptiles with eyes more like fish, or vice versa? Obviously I’m not talking about a half-cat, half-bird – you’re right that that would not be consistent with evolutionary theory, since evolutionists don’t believe cats evolved from birds. But what about the minor transitions between kinds that ARE supposed to have evolved from each other? If birds evolved from reptiles, where are the thousands of generations between scales and feathers, or between reptile’s solid bones and bird’s hollow ones?
Lazy, “The Bible presents us Adam and Eve and their descendents as allready civilized people thus totally ignoring the fact that humanity went through a lot of stages until civilizations as we know them formed.” Undoubtedly civilization went through many different kinds of forms over the years. But there’s no proof, and not even much evidence, that those civilizations actually went from “primitive” to “advanced” in stages over time. In fact, there are still places today where people live just as the “Stone Age” people did, and there are places where advanced civilizations once existed and now people live in a much more “primitive” culture.
As for Cro-Magnon man, research makes it clear he was not the brutish, club-swinging cave-dweller many have portrayed him as. It would appear he built huts, paved his floors with stones, constructed kilns and built pottery. He used tools made of bone, flint, ivory, antler, and probably wood. He had carved bone flutes, wore jewelry, sewed clothing, and apparently was involved in religious activity. And of course he developed elaborate art, including painting in brilliant colors that are still bright thousands of years later. Does this sound like an ancestor to modern man, or simply an individual culture?
There is similar research on Neanderthal man, though given that many Neanderthals had rickets, it would appear that they did not have much exposure to sunlight (perhaps they lived during the Ice Age?). First, though broken bones and other injuries were common, as was arthritis, the bones show they often kept living long after the onset of their disability – meaning others must have cared for them, even knowing they would never get better. They were good hunters. They lived in huts, which were often built in caves to keep them out of the wind. They made and used stone tools effectively. They knew how to use fire, often burning bones because wood was scarce in Europe during the Ice Age, and they cooked their food over the fire, often using stone hot plates. They wore clothes, which they made by sewing animal skins together. They had a sense of the afterlife, burying their dead with ceremonies and flowers. Among the plants discovered in these graves are a number with medicinal properties, suggesting they may have had some knowledge of medicine. Not only that, there is even evidence of a form of writing.
As I said, these people were not partially developed almost-humans – they were fully human, and lived much as many humans do today.
“So since you do trust physics and chemistry in your everyday life why don’t you find them convincing as a description of the world ?
can you please tell me of a single physical process which you don’t find convinving enough and for which you have a bible based alternative ?”
OK, OK, point taken!
Obviously I find the processes convincing – how could I not? And I find them convincing, in your words, “as a description of the world.” What I don’t find convincing are the arguments that the world we live in could have been produced solely as a result of these physical, chemical, and biological processes. From the original “Big Bang” to the existence of complex life on earth, questions and problems arise at almost every step, questions and problems that are extremely difficult to resolve in terms of ordinary everyday processes. I realize this is what evolutionary scientists spend their time doing; but no matter what new theories they develop, the evidence seems to continue to arise to contradict them. Does this clarify what I meant?
Oh, and as for convincing any atheist who arrived at his or her conclusion about the existence of god that say, Christianity is true?
Fat chance.
How likely would you be to suddenly decide that Islam was true?
Not much, eh?
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