On Sat, 04 Jul 1998 13:06:42 +1000, Arthur Witherall wrote:
AW>Hello
>
>I am completely new to this.
Welcome Arthur. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, so we
know where you are coming from?
AW>I happened to notice that most people in this group are either
>creationists or sceptics about fully naturalistic evolution. I would
>love to know why.
I can't answer for the others, but I am a "creationist" and a "sceptic
about fully naturalistic evolution" because I think the *evidence* for
it is somewhere between weak and non-existent, as Dr Gareth J.
Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History admitted in the
preface of a creationist book:
"Mr. Bird is concerned with origins and the evidence relevant thereto.
He is basically correct that evidence, or proof, of origins-of the
universe, of life, of all of the major groups of life, of all of the minor
groups of life, indeed of all of the species-is weak or nonexistent
when measured on an absolute scale, as it always was and will always
be..." (Nelson G.J., "Preface," in Bird W. R., "The Origin of Species
Revisited", 1991, pp.xii-xiii).
AW>It seems to me that there is no inconsistency whatsoever
>between theism and evolution.
That used to be my view. Indeed in my very first post to the
Australian Creation vs Evolution Fidonet echo, on 15 February 1994,
I posted following:
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"Why must it be Creation versus Evolution? Genesis 1 - 2 has a lot of
process in it "Let the earth bring forth...". One of the key themes in
the Genesis account of Creation is "separation". "And God
separated... light from darkness" ... "water from land" ... "day from
night", etc. If forming by separating means making something new
out of something existing, then it doesn't seem far from evolution to
me.
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I soon learned that this attempt to have my cake and eat it too is
self-delusory. The problem with this is that it rests on a fundamental
misunderstanding of what "evolution" means to scientists today, as
Johnson points out in his book "Defeating Darwinism," in the first
chapter titled "Emilio's Letter":
"Unfortunately, this much-too-easy solution to the problem rests on a
misunderstanding of what contemporary scientists mean by that word
evolution. If they meant only a gradual process of God-guided
creation, then Emilio might be on the right track. A God-guided
process is not what modern science educators mean by "evolution,"
however. They are absolutely insistent that evolution is an unguided
and mindless process, and that our existence is therefore a fluke
rather than a planned outcome. For example, the 1995 official
Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology
Teachers (hereafter NABT) accurately states the general
understanding of major science organizations and educators:
`The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an
unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of
temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural
selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing
environments.' (National Association of Biology Teachers, 1995
Statement on Teaching Evolution)
...biologists insist that evolution must be unsupervised and why God's
purposes are not listed among the things that might have affected
evolution....this claim is not one they can afford to abandon, because
their whole approach is founded on naturalism, which is the doctrine
that "nature is all there is." If nature is all there is, then nature had to
have the ability to do its own creating. Darwinian evolution is a
theory about how nature might have done this, without assistance
from a super natural Creator. That is why "evolution" in the
Darwinian sense is by definition mindless and godless. Pretending
otherwise is an evasion of the conflict, not a resolution of it. Yet
many Christian theologians and educators take this evasive approach
because they are hoping to find an easy way to avoid coming to grips
with a very difficult problem."
(Johnson P.E., "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds",
InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove Ill., 1997, pp15-16)
AW>G. K. Chesterton said it best when he said that a creationist
>believes that God created mankind, but he doesn't have to specify
>how long it took God to do this, nor exactly which mechanism was
>employed.
This is true, but if God did any creating, then it wasn't evolution. It
was creation.
Also, this desire to harmonise theism with evolution is fundamentally
misguided because it implicitly assumes that evolution is true. But
that is far from being the case. Naturalistic evolution is having
*huge* problems with the evidence at the detailed *mechanism* level
and survives only because the majority of scientists are non-theists.
Before we rush to harmonise theism with evolution, we should first
be sure that evolution is *true*:
"When I discuss the subject of my book [Darwin on Trial] with
people who are followers of a theistic religion...there's one problem I
always run into....I'll tend to sort of say, "I have this question about
whether the Darwinian version of evolution (the theory of evolution
that is currently accepted), is true. And then they'll tend to say in
response, "Well, we found a way to reconcile it with belief in God",
or "we found a way to reconcile it with the Bible", or something like
that". And what I always then have to say is, "Wait a minute! That's
not the first point", you see. "Before worrying about whether one
thing can be reconciled with another, let's first look at the question of
whether it's *true*. Whether we need to worry about it at all". And
my argument is, insofar as this vast creative power is claimed, for
mutation and selection, it's not true." (Johnson P.E., "Phillip Johnson
and Eugenie Scott," 2 tape set, Wisconsin Public Radio, Access
Research Network, 1992)
AW>Am I missing something about the relationship between these
>two theories - that is, theism and evolution - which everyone else
>has grasped?
You are not alone. There are many (including some on this Reflector)
who think that "theism and evolution" are compatible. But they aren't.
What some theists call their belief in "evolution" is not the same thing
that non-theists believe in: Here is what leading Darwinist Richard
Dawkins thinks of theistic evolution:
"The Duke of Argyll, for instance, accepted the evidence that
evolution had happened, but he wanted to smuggle divine creation in
by the back door. He wasn't alone. Instead of a single, once and for
all creation in the Garden of Eden, many Victorians thought that the
deity had intervened repeatedly, at crucial points in evolution.
Complex organs like eyes, instead of evolving from simpler ones by
slow degrees as Darwin had it, were thought to have sprung into
existence in a single instant. Such people rightly perceived that such
instant 'evolution', if it occurred, would imply supernatural
intervention: that is what they believed in. The reasons are the
statistical ones I have discussed in connection with hurricanes and
Boeing 747s. 747 saltationism is, indeed, just a watered-down form
of creationism. Putting it the other way around, divine creation is the
ultimate in saltation. It is the ultimate leap from inanimate clay to
fully formed man. Darwin perceived this too. He wrote in a letter to
Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his day:
`If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of
natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish...I would give nothing
for the theory of Natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions
at any one stage of descent.' (Darwin F., ed., "The Life and Letters of
Charles Darwin", John Murray: London, 1888, Vol. II, p210).
This is no petty matter. In Darwin's view, the whole point of the
theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-
miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. For
what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For Darwin,
any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not
evolution at all."
(Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", [1986], Penguin: London,
1991 reprint, pp248-249)
The correct term for theists to use for God making and maintaining
His living world is not "evolution" but "creation"!
Steve
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."
--- Dr. William Provine, Professor of History and Biology, Cornell University.
http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/1998/slides_view/Slide_7.html
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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