- By Dr. Frederick Liewehr
- 11/26/2013
- Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
Let us look at just a couple arguments against macroevolution
Our society is so blinded by political correctness, by the compulsory but erroneous and disproven dogma that passes for "knowledge", that we have become incapable of thinking or evaluating arguments. We have replaced rational discussion with jingoism and ad hominum attacks, where cries of "Racist!" or "Homophobe"" substitute for discussion. Subjects are closed; the decisions have been made by the self-anointed, and there is to be no questioning those decisions, no "hate speech" allowed. Political correctness, as taught in our schools and increasingly mandated by our government, is destroying our nation.
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RICHMOND,VA (Catholic Online) - It seems that every day we read another instance of the current administration having made grave miscalculations, or having deliberately lied about one issue or another. The latest scandal is that Obama & Co. knew perfectly well that many Americans would lose their health insurance under Obamacare, that those who could keep it would see large increases in its cost, and that few would be able to see the doctor of their choice. When one considers how the ACA is structured, this is entirely predictable, and simply another example of why Milton Freedman famously said, "There is no such thing as a free lunch", yet those who supported Obama and his plan seem to have been taken completely by surprise.
In the past, when the government was a manageable size, what it did was not a matter of grave concern on a daily basis. People could live their lives and plan for the future without considering the relentless "change" being effected by executive order, by legislation, by the courts, and by the alphabet soup of Federal agencies. Today it is a different story, and if citizens cannot discern which ideas are economically or morally sound, the wrong people will wind up in Washington.
So why do we continue to fall for schemes that have not and cannot work as promised? That voters, and often the majority of voters, are being continually duped is becoming obvious because a new term has been coined to describe these folks: "low information voters". The problem is not the intelligence, or lack of it, of the voters, but rather their lack of information. In many cases it is not only the result of a lack of information, but of disinformation that they have been fed by the schools, by the media, and by the government.
This disinformation has been labeled "political correctness", which consists of saying whatever the self-proclaimed "intelligentsia" has deemed is correct in a given circumstance, without any reference to reality. Political correctness denies the truth and is not susceptible to change due to factual errors. Errors are ignored, denied, or suppressed by the elite; the truth simply makes no difference.
Examples abound, and would serve, and have served, as the subject of countless books. I simply wish to touch upon one simple example - macroevolution.
I was reading an article in the current edition of Popular Science about a jumping spider that can jump 25 times its body length to grab its prey. That would be the equivalent of my jumping nine car lengths. I personally couldn't jump one car length even when I was young, and I don't know of many folks who could.
What intrigued me was that, according to the article, German biologists have "determined that the sticky feather-like hairs at the end of the leg, called setae, evolved from hairy pads that originally helped the spiders wrangle food." How exactly did they "determine" this? They did it by "comparing the legs of 330 species".
This is fascinating, because they did not look at an evolutionary change in these features, but rather compared a large number of contemporary species, and simply assumed this evolutionary process. This would be like looking at 100 different breeds of dogs, finding different muzzle lengths, and concluding that longer jaws are better for carrying, and indeed capturing and killing, prey, so bull dogs evolved into Dobermans.
There are many problems with that logic, of course, only one of which is that one could equally make an argument that it is the bull dog that has evolved from the Doberman, and not the other way around, perhaps because they are so adorably ugly that they are seen as less threatening to humans and thus more likely to be adopted. The point is that it is logically impossible to see "evolution" by comparing existing members of a species. Nevertheless, "evolution" must be invoked to get their "study" published.
Evolution depends for its theoretical basis on the notion of "survival of the fittest"; that is to say, members of a species are subject to random aberrations that affect their genotype, or genetic makeup, with resultant changes in their phenotype, or how that genetic makeup is realized. So dogs may randomly be born with longer or shorter muzzles. The theory postulates that dogs with the more favorable length of nose survive and the others don't. If the food bowl is very deep, for example, the dogs with the long noses can eat to the bottom, whereas the dogs with the short noses would be out of luck. While appealing, and certainly reasonable, this mechanism fails to explain why we still have both Dobermans and bulldogs. The bulldogs should have died out long ago.
The entire area of macroevolution is far too broad and complex to debunk in a short essay like this one, and nobody argues that change cannot occur within species over time, randomly or by selective breeding. That there are so many different kinds of dogs is ample testimony to that fact. The problem with evolution as it is taught is that this process, microevolution, cannot be extrapolated to inter-species macroevolution. What is needed is to look objectively at the evidence and to employ critical thinking. This skill, unfortunately, is not taught because it poses a grave danger to political correctness.
Let us look at just a couple arguments against macroevolution. The Darwinist looks at the dogs, sees what change can occur over a short time, adds his own time frame of millions of years, and constructs elaborate schemas based upon pure speculation, which have been called evolutionary "Just So stories" after Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name.
Charles Darwin himself was a master of Just So stories, and invoked them whenever he needed to fill in the gaps in his theory. For example, he saw no problem with bears evolving into whales. "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale" (On the Origin of Species, first edition). He may have had no difficulty with this, but the discerning reader should.
The problem is that there is no evidence for this speculation. Dogs can be bred with longer or shorter snouts, but they are still dogs. Dog breeders have yet to "create" horses, pigs, or anything else other than dogs from dogs. Experiments with genetic manipulation of fruit flies, which have an extremely short life span so can breed very quickly, still only turn out fruit flies, and generally crippled ones at that.
Actually, the breeder example is an argument for, rather than against, Intelligent Design. Breeding is not random mutations, which are generally harmful or fatal; it is purposeful, intelligent manipulation. With all that intelligence, man still can only make dogs from dogs. If we cannot do it, why do we assume that some random, never observed, process can?
Another example was Darwin's famous observations of the finches, the proportion of which possessed large, strong beaks was greater in dry weather when seeds were hard than in wet weather when the seeds were soft. The problem is that when the weather changed, the proportion of large, hard beaks changed as well. This is simply cyclical change, not unlike "global warming". If only the birds with the large beaks survived the dry weather, why were birds with small beaks predominant when the weather again turned wet? And why were there some of both kinds in either condition?
Obviously in any event the theory fails to explain where the finches, or dogs for that matter, came from in the first place.
"Oh, but all this takes place gradually by successive approximation over long periods of time", say the evolutionists. Unfortunately, the intermediary forms have not been found, and generally would not be viable, due to the concept of irreducible complexity. In short, successive approximation, or gradual evolution, would be like changing the engine of the airplane in which you are traveling from propeller to jet in small increments while the plane is flying. Imagine changing only one small thing, like removing the propeller, while the plane is in flight. What would be the result for the passengers?
Biochemist Dr. Michael Behe put it succinctly. "The idea of Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on science. There is no publication in the scientific literature - in journals or in books - that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either die occur or even might have occurred. Since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster."
Without going into the many other arguments against macroevolution, a balanced viewpoint would certainly be that the subject is certainly not closed. But that is not what is taught in the schools, or what has permeated what we call "science", as seen in the magazine article. Evolution is taken for granted, and for the materialists who are in charge, it is a matter of faith.
Evolution is vital to the world view of the materialists because it eliminates God. If the Darwinists can rationalize creation as somehow a spontaneous, uncaused cause, they can also jettison the moral teachings that come with the concept of God as Creator. After all, if God created the world and man, He must have had some idea of how man should comport himself as well. That idea might be Natural Law, and its revelation might be the Ten Commandments and Jesus' teaching.
If Darwinists admit God, they must admit that their secular humanism is not valid, and much of it is sin. That is why their "science", the basis of which is supposed to be observation and the search for truth, relies instead on Just So stories and lives in a dream world of political correctness. It is indeed tragic for our society that this is what is being taught in our schools.
Back in the 1960's Paul Simon wrote a song called Kodachrome, which began as follows:
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all.
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall."
It is painfully obvious that Simon was right, and that our society is so blinded by political correctness, by the compulsory but erroneous and disproven dogma that passes for "knowledge", that we have become incapable of thinking or evaluating arguments. We have replaced rational discussion with jingoism and ad hominum attacks, where cries of "Racist!" or "Homophobe"" substitute for discussion. Subjects are closed; the decisions have been made by the self-anointed, and there is to be no questioning those decisions, no "hate speech" allowed.
Political correctness, as taught in our schools and increasingly mandated by our government, is destroying our nation. Our First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion are under attack as never before, and the forces of evil are winning. We must remember George Washington's prophetic warning: If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
----------
Dr. Frederick Liewehr is an endodontist who teaches and works in private practice. He converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1983, having been drawn ineluctably to Christ's Church by the light of Truth. He is a member of St. Benedict parish in Richmond, a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus and a Cooperator of Opus Dei.
---In the past, when the government was a manageable size, what it did was not a matter of grave concern on a daily basis. People could live their lives and plan for the future without considering the relentless "change" being effected by executive order, by legislation, by the courts, and by the alphabet soup of Federal agencies. Today it is a different story, and if citizens cannot discern which ideas are economically or morally sound, the wrong people will wind up in Washington.
So why do we continue to fall for schemes that have not and cannot work as promised? That voters, and often the majority of voters, are being continually duped is becoming obvious because a new term has been coined to describe these folks: "low information voters". The problem is not the intelligence, or lack of it, of the voters, but rather their lack of information. In many cases it is not only the result of a lack of information, but of disinformation that they have been fed by the schools, by the media, and by the government.
This disinformation has been labeled "political correctness", which consists of saying whatever the self-proclaimed "intelligentsia" has deemed is correct in a given circumstance, without any reference to reality. Political correctness denies the truth and is not susceptible to change due to factual errors. Errors are ignored, denied, or suppressed by the elite; the truth simply makes no difference.
Examples abound, and would serve, and have served, as the subject of countless books. I simply wish to touch upon one simple example - macroevolution.
I was reading an article in the current edition of Popular Science about a jumping spider that can jump 25 times its body length to grab its prey. That would be the equivalent of my jumping nine car lengths. I personally couldn't jump one car length even when I was young, and I don't know of many folks who could.
What intrigued me was that, according to the article, German biologists have "determined that the sticky feather-like hairs at the end of the leg, called setae, evolved from hairy pads that originally helped the spiders wrangle food." How exactly did they "determine" this? They did it by "comparing the legs of 330 species".
This is fascinating, because they did not look at an evolutionary change in these features, but rather compared a large number of contemporary species, and simply assumed this evolutionary process. This would be like looking at 100 different breeds of dogs, finding different muzzle lengths, and concluding that longer jaws are better for carrying, and indeed capturing and killing, prey, so bull dogs evolved into Dobermans.
There are many problems with that logic, of course, only one of which is that one could equally make an argument that it is the bull dog that has evolved from the Doberman, and not the other way around, perhaps because they are so adorably ugly that they are seen as less threatening to humans and thus more likely to be adopted. The point is that it is logically impossible to see "evolution" by comparing existing members of a species. Nevertheless, "evolution" must be invoked to get their "study" published.
Evolution depends for its theoretical basis on the notion of "survival of the fittest"; that is to say, members of a species are subject to random aberrations that affect their genotype, or genetic makeup, with resultant changes in their phenotype, or how that genetic makeup is realized. So dogs may randomly be born with longer or shorter muzzles. The theory postulates that dogs with the more favorable length of nose survive and the others don't. If the food bowl is very deep, for example, the dogs with the long noses can eat to the bottom, whereas the dogs with the short noses would be out of luck. While appealing, and certainly reasonable, this mechanism fails to explain why we still have both Dobermans and bulldogs. The bulldogs should have died out long ago.
The entire area of macroevolution is far too broad and complex to debunk in a short essay like this one, and nobody argues that change cannot occur within species over time, randomly or by selective breeding. That there are so many different kinds of dogs is ample testimony to that fact. The problem with evolution as it is taught is that this process, microevolution, cannot be extrapolated to inter-species macroevolution. What is needed is to look objectively at the evidence and to employ critical thinking. This skill, unfortunately, is not taught because it poses a grave danger to political correctness.
Let us look at just a couple arguments against macroevolution. The Darwinist looks at the dogs, sees what change can occur over a short time, adds his own time frame of millions of years, and constructs elaborate schemas based upon pure speculation, which have been called evolutionary "Just So stories" after Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name.
Charles Darwin himself was a master of Just So stories, and invoked them whenever he needed to fill in the gaps in his theory. For example, he saw no problem with bears evolving into whales. "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale" (On the Origin of Species, first edition). He may have had no difficulty with this, but the discerning reader should.
The problem is that there is no evidence for this speculation. Dogs can be bred with longer or shorter snouts, but they are still dogs. Dog breeders have yet to "create" horses, pigs, or anything else other than dogs from dogs. Experiments with genetic manipulation of fruit flies, which have an extremely short life span so can breed very quickly, still only turn out fruit flies, and generally crippled ones at that.
Actually, the breeder example is an argument for, rather than against, Intelligent Design. Breeding is not random mutations, which are generally harmful or fatal; it is purposeful, intelligent manipulation. With all that intelligence, man still can only make dogs from dogs. If we cannot do it, why do we assume that some random, never observed, process can?
Another example was Darwin's famous observations of the finches, the proportion of which possessed large, strong beaks was greater in dry weather when seeds were hard than in wet weather when the seeds were soft. The problem is that when the weather changed, the proportion of large, hard beaks changed as well. This is simply cyclical change, not unlike "global warming". If only the birds with the large beaks survived the dry weather, why were birds with small beaks predominant when the weather again turned wet? And why were there some of both kinds in either condition?
Obviously in any event the theory fails to explain where the finches, or dogs for that matter, came from in the first place.
"Oh, but all this takes place gradually by successive approximation over long periods of time", say the evolutionists. Unfortunately, the intermediary forms have not been found, and generally would not be viable, due to the concept of irreducible complexity. In short, successive approximation, or gradual evolution, would be like changing the engine of the airplane in which you are traveling from propeller to jet in small increments while the plane is flying. Imagine changing only one small thing, like removing the propeller, while the plane is in flight. What would be the result for the passengers?
Biochemist Dr. Michael Behe put it succinctly. "The idea of Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on science. There is no publication in the scientific literature - in journals or in books - that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either die occur or even might have occurred. Since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster."
Without going into the many other arguments against macroevolution, a balanced viewpoint would certainly be that the subject is certainly not closed. But that is not what is taught in the schools, or what has permeated what we call "science", as seen in the magazine article. Evolution is taken for granted, and for the materialists who are in charge, it is a matter of faith.
Evolution is vital to the world view of the materialists because it eliminates God. If the Darwinists can rationalize creation as somehow a spontaneous, uncaused cause, they can also jettison the moral teachings that come with the concept of God as Creator. After all, if God created the world and man, He must have had some idea of how man should comport himself as well. That idea might be Natural Law, and its revelation might be the Ten Commandments and Jesus' teaching.
If Darwinists admit God, they must admit that their secular humanism is not valid, and much of it is sin. That is why their "science", the basis of which is supposed to be observation and the search for truth, relies instead on Just So stories and lives in a dream world of political correctness. It is indeed tragic for our society that this is what is being taught in our schools.
Back in the 1960's Paul Simon wrote a song called Kodachrome, which began as follows:
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all.
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall."
It is painfully obvious that Simon was right, and that our society is so blinded by political correctness, by the compulsory but erroneous and disproven dogma that passes for "knowledge", that we have become incapable of thinking or evaluating arguments. We have replaced rational discussion with jingoism and ad hominum attacks, where cries of "Racist!" or "Homophobe"" substitute for discussion. Subjects are closed; the decisions have been made by the self-anointed, and there is to be no questioning those decisions, no "hate speech" allowed.
Political correctness, as taught in our schools and increasingly mandated by our government, is destroying our nation. Our First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion are under attack as never before, and the forces of evil are winning. We must remember George Washington's prophetic warning: If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
----------
Dr. Frederick Liewehr is an endodontist who teaches and works in private practice. He converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1983, having been drawn ineluctably to Christ's Church by the light of Truth. He is a member of St. Benedict parish in Richmond, a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus and a Cooperator of Opus Dei.
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Taken from: http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=53315
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