Re: Mere Creation conference
David Campbell (bivalve@isis.unc.edu)
Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:28:12 -0500>the Pike Syndrome
>
>1. Ignoring differences
>2. Assumption of complete knowledge (sound familiar mr you don't know
> anything if you don't have a ph.d steve)
>3. Overgeneralized reactions
>4. Rigid commitment to the past
>5. Refusal to consider alternatives
>6. Inability to function under stress
>
These features characterize any viewpoint that ignores contrary evidence
simply because it's contrary. Most of the claims that evolution is
contrary to religion (whichever side the claimer takes) show many of these
features, e.g., 1. "Humans and chimps have 98% similarity in DNA. So
what? A cloud and a watermelon are both 98% water."
2. Gish claiming in a debate that he knows RNA can't act as a catalyst.
Although his degree was in biochemistry, there are now several hundred
ribozymes known. [I don't have a PhD yet]
3. Evolutionists attacking the NBC "Mysterious Origin of Man" show as YEC
propaganda-in fact, YEC's noted problems with the science and didn't like
the Hare Krishna connections and claims for humans being hundreds of
millions of years old.
4. "It is of course admitted that, taking this account [Gen. 1-2] by
itself, it would be most natural to understand the word in its ordinary
sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with
facts, and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us
to adopt that other"-Charles Hodge, 1871 [a prominent evangelical
theologian].
Of course, the past may be better than the "new"-adopting every new
idea is just as foolish as rejecting every new idea.
5. "Evolution must be true because it's the only way for things to exist
without a god.."
6. Shouting matches billed as "debates".
>
"Throughout the hundreds of millions
of years the coelacanths have kept
the same form and structure. Here is
one of the great mysteries of evolution"
Jacques Millot, "The Coelacanth"
Actually, it's not that mysterious-especially under a model of punctuated
equilibrium. Basically, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Department of Geology
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315
"He had discovered an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus"-E. A. Poe, The
Gold Bug