Re: Kurt Wise to replace Dembski at Southern

At 08:05 PM 4/14/2006, Dawsonzhu@aol.com wrote:
>Janice posted the following quote from Kurt Wise:
>
>>"I am a young-age creationist because the Bible
>>indicates the universe is young. Given what we
>>currently think we understand about the world,
>>the majority of the scientific evidence favors
>>an old earth and universe, not a young one. I
>>would therefore say that anyone who claims that
>>the earth is young for scientific evidence
>>alone is scientifically ignorant. Thus I would
>>suggest that the challenge you are trying to meet is unmeetable."
>
>
>Of course I disagree with the YEC part, but on the face of it, this sound
>like an honest response to the challenge of scientific evidence.
>
>But the news blip that Louise pointed out has the following statement.
>
>"We need to train Southern Baptist pastors to
>equip young people to engage Darwinism from
>elementary school on. We also need to train
>Southern Baptists to recognize Darwinist
>thinking in ways that are subtle that they don't even recognize." ..."

@ We would have to first find out what they mean
when they use the term "Darwinism" before we can
decipher the above statement. ~ Janice

So You Want to be an Anti-Darwinian
Varieties of Opposition to Darwinism
Copyright © 1998 by <mailto:john.wilkins@bigpond.com>John Wilkins
[Last Update: December 21, 1998]

Summary

M
Many different people oppose some or all aspects
of Darwin's thinking, or the views that have
arisen since and go by the term "Darwinism". This
essay distinguishes and names the major varieties
of anti-Darwinism. It does not attempt to defend
or reject any views, just to provide a map to the conceptual territory.

Caution to the Reader
Every one of these viewpoints, although it has a
name and often a number of defenders, is only a
notional position, and is not held by anyone as
bluntly as stated here. People can and do hold a
variety of these positions and see no conflict
with each other or Darwinism. Just because
someone flies a banner doesn't mean there's an
army underneath it or a war to fight. The world
of science is not a formal logical system, and
schools of thought do not resolve most of the
time into exclusive camps. Or to put it another
way, borders on maps are often arbitrary.

Introduction

If you wish to disagree with Darwin, it is
important to know what aspect of Darwin's
thinking, and more importantly of modern
evolutionary theory, you are disputing. Many
opponents of Darwinism seem to think that because
one disagrees with, say, the role of natural
selection in evolution, that one automatically
disagrees with the idea of evolution itself.
Creationists especially seem to slide from
"disagrees with some aspect of synthetic
Darwinism" to "rejects evolution". One of the
more dishonest versions of this tactic lies in
the use of comments made in one context (for
example, Colin Patterson's talk on the relevance
of cladistic methods to reconstruct evolutionary
trees in the Symposia on Systematics at the
American Museum of Natural History) in an
entirely different context (the supposed
rejection by Patterson of Darwinism in total,
despite his having written a book on evolution
accepting Darwinian theory [1], see
<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs//faqs/patterson.html>Patterson
Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites' FAQ).

What Darwinism actually is, is of course at
issue. It is a term that has many different
meanings, depending on the field in which it is
being discussed [2]. In, say,
<http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/galist/>artificial
life research, Darwinism tends to mean natural
selection (in the form of what are called
"genetic algorithms"). In
<http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad4.html>systematics
it means the reconstruction of ancestral forms
and historical sequences of species. In
bacteriological research it means the evolution
of drug-resistant strains by selection. In
organismic biology it means the evolution of new
forms of life. In genetics it means the so-called
"<http://esg-www.mit.edu:8001/esgbio/dogma/dogma.html>central
dogma" of the inability of information about the
state of the body to be reverse transcribed back
into the genes, because that view was first
proposed by an arch-Darwinian, August Weismann,
in the 1880s. And in fact, all of these are just
tendencies that vary according to where the
researchers are, who you are reading, and the
period in which those people lived. "Darwinism"
according to Wallace in 1890 [3] is very
different to Darwinism according to Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins.

So, to overcome this confusion of meanings and to
ensure that both notional Darwinians and
anti-Darwinians alike know what it is they accept
and what they object to, this essay covers the
varieties of anti-Darwinism, including opposition
to transmutationism, common descent, undirected
variation, randomness, selection, Weismannism, and monism.

Theses of Darwinism [snip] Click here to
continue: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/anti-darwin.html
Received on Fri Apr 14 20:36:49 2006