Group
Huxter has cross-posted this to both eGroups and the Calvin Reflector. My
reply will be primarily to eGroups cc. the Reflector. Again I apologise for it
being late. I am trying to wind down my debates on the Calvin Reflector,
so I will probably only respond to replies in eGroups.
On Sun, 29 Oct 2000 13:01:48 EST, huxter4441@aol.com wrote:
>SJ>Below is a report by Jonathan Wells tour of Arkansas, Kansas, Washington
>promoting his new book, Icons of Evolution, with one minor change.
[...]
HX>I wonder if this was mentioned by Wells or his admirers:
>
>Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should
>devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow
>Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When
>Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter
>a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for
>battle. J.Wells
This has in fact been "mentioned" before on the Calvin Reflector. Wells is
in fact an adherent of the Unification Church (aka. the Moonies).
The paragraph that Huxter quoted is in fact an interesting paper by Wells
on the Web (which Huxter presumably did not want others to read for
themselves?):
===================================================================
http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm
Unification Sermons and Talks
by Reverends Wells
Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.
by Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.-Berkeley, CA
[...]
As a graduate student at Yale, I studied the whole of Christian theology
but focused my attention on the Darwinian controversies. I wanted to get
to the root of the conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian
doctrine. In the course of my research I learned (to my surprise) that
biblical chronology played almost no role in the 19th- century
controversies, since most theologians had already accepted geological
evidence for the age of the earth and re-interpreted the days in Genesis as
long periods of time. Instead, the central issue was design. God created the
cosmos with a plan in mind. This affirmation is among the most basic in
all of Christianity (and other theistic religions as well, including
Unificationism). And that plan included human beings as the final
outcome of the creative process: we are created in the image of God.
According to Darwin's theory, however, the whole history of life is the
outcome of random variations and survival of the fittest. Although some
features of living organisms (such as eyes) appear to be designed, Darwin
claimed that this is only an illusion. Living things are the result of an
essentially directionless process, and we are merely the accidental by-
product of blind natural forces which did not have us in mind. When I
finished my Yale Ph.D., I felt confident that I understood the theological
basis of the conflict between Darwinism and theism.
But Darwinism was clearly winning the ideological battle in the
universities, the public schools, and the mass media, largely because it
claimed to be supported by scientific evidence. I knew enough about
biology to know that this claim was quite shaky, but few scientists were
willing to challenge it. Those who did were often lumped together with
young-earth biblical fundamentalists and thereby discredited in the eyes of
most scholars.
I eventually decided to join the fray by returning to graduate school in
biology. I was convinced that embryology is the Achilles' heel of
Darwinism; one cannot understand how organisms evolve unless one
understands how they develop. In 1989, I entered a second Ph.D. program,
this time in biology, at the University of California at Berkeley. While
there, I studied embryology and evolution.
According to the standard view, the development of an embryo is
programmed by its genes-its DNA. Change the genes, and you can change
the embryo, even to the point of making a new species. In the movie
"Jurassic Park," genetic engineers extract fragments of dinosaur DNA
from fossilized mosquitoes, splice them together with DNA from living
frogs, then inject the combination into ostrich eggs which had had their
own DNA inactivated. In the movie, the injected DNA then re-
programmed the ostrich to produce a dinosaur. Experiments similar to this
have actually been performed, though not with dinosaur DNA.
In every case, if any development occurred at all it followed the pattern of
the egg, not the injected foreign DNA. While I was at Berkeley I
performed experiments on frog embryos. My experiments focused on a
reorganization of the egg cytoplasm after fertilization which causes the
embryo to elongate into a tadpole; if I blocked the reorganization, the
result was a ball of belly cells; if I induced a second reorganization after
the first, I could produce a two-headed tadpole. Yet this reorganization
had nothing to do with the egg's DNA, and proceeded quite well even in
its absence (though the embryo eventually needed its DNA to supply it
with additional proteins).
So DNA does not program the development of the embryo. As an analogy,
consider a house: the builder needs materials (such as pieces of lumber cut
to the right lengths, cement, nails, piping, wiring, etc.), but he also needs a
floor plan (since any given pile of materials could be assembled into
several different houses) and he needs a set of assembly instructions (since
assembling the roof before the foundation and walls would pose a serious
problem). In a developing organism, the DNA contains templates for
producing proteins-the building materials.
To a very limited extent, it also contains information about the order in
which those proteins should be produced-assembly instructions. But it
does not contain the basic floor plan. The floor plan and many of the
assembly instructions reside elsewhere (nobody yet knows where). Since
development of the embryo is not programmed by the DNA, the
Darwinian view of evolution as the differential survival of DNA mutations
misses the point. At most, Darwin's theory may explain "microevolution"
within established lineages-such as minor differences among closely
related species of salamanders. But it cannot account for
"macroevolution," - the large-scale differences between shellfish and
insects, or between birds and mammals. Darwin's theory is incompatible
not only with the evidence from embryology, but also with the evidence
from the fossil record. According to Darwinism, all creatures are
descended from a common ancestor. Yet the oldest fossils show that
almost all of the major groups of organisms appeared at around the same
time, fully formed and recognizably similar to their modern counterparts.
Darwin's theory predicts a "branching tree" pattern in the fossil record, yet
that pattern is nowhere to be found. The fossils provide no evidence that
all creatures are descended from a common ancestor. So the two major
claims of Darwinism-that all living things are descended from a common
ancestor and that their differences are due to random variations and
survival of the fittest- are unsupported by evidence.
[...]
==================================================================
HX>I sort of doubt it - this sort of religious claptrap would act to knock down
>his 'scientific' reasoning, it seems.....
Huxter is one of those from the Calvin Reflector I was referring to, whose
modus operandi is mostly ridicule and abuse. This is a pity because Huxter
is in fact one of the few practising biological scientists on the reflector (he
has a Ph.D in Anatomy and Cell Biology, minoring in Physical
Anthropology.
One would therefore think that Huxter's posts would be full of facts about
evolution but strangely (?) that is not the case. A prime example is Huxter's
posts about Jonathan Wells, rather than refute Well's evidence against
evolution, Huxter prefers to attack Wells personally. Huxter has attacked
Wells' for a number of peripheral things, including: 1) Wells' number of
publications in scientific journals (he has in fact had three); 2) Wells' use of
Berkeley University in his signature to imply he is still there (Wells signs his
name as at the Discovery Institute but some journalists still refer to him as
at Berkeley); and now 3) Wells' being a member of the Moonies.
His argument (if one can call it that) is that because Wells is a Moonie his
arguments for ID and against evolution should be ignored. That Huxter's
argument is a simple `shoot the messenger' ad hominem is clear because
Huxter also rejects the scientific reasoning of those IDers who agree with
Wells but are not Moonies. IOW if Wells ceased being a Moonie, but still
believed the same scientific reasoning, then Huxter would still reject it. So
Wells being a Moonie has nothing to do with Huxter's argument against
Wells and ID's scientific reasoning-it is a simple ad hominem aimed at
discrediting Wells and ID by a crude McCathyist `guilt by association'
tactic.
Huxter seems still labouring under a misapprehension that ID is a
*religious* position and therefore one's private unorthodox "religious"
opinions would automatically discredit it.
But while most (not all) IDers are religious, ID itself is not a religious
position. Evidence of this is: 1) the wide range of religious positions held
by IDers, including Christian (Protestant [Johnson, Nelson], Catholic
[Behe] and Eastern Orthodox [Dembski, Reynolds]); Jewish [Spetner,
Berlinski]; Unification [Wells]; and 2) non-religious positions held by some
IDers, including agnostic [Denton, Todd Moody].
In the case of Wells, Phil Johnson has been aware from the beginning that
Wells was a Moonie, because Wells told him upfront that he was.
Johnson could have reacted like a hypocritical `church politician' fearful of
`what others might think', but to his credit he acted consistently with his
position that ID is not a religious movement with a test of religious
orthodoxy, and he welcomed Wells into the ID movement.
In one of my posts on this I wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 06 Dec 1999 05:59:44 +0800, Stephen E. Jones wrote:
[...]
SJ>Why should the ID movement "take note of Well's religion"? It is nothing
>to do with the ID movement.
>
>GM>How would anyone know this supposedly 'well known' fact that Johnson
>>speaks of? It never appeared in any bio that I am aware of. It always
>>seemed to be omitted! Frankly, I don't think the ID movement has been
>>forthcoming and open with the Christian community in this regard.
>
SJ>I was not aware that Jonathan was a Moonie, but then why should I? I am
>not aware of what religion the other ID leaders are, except Johnson, a
>Presbyterian and Behe a Catholic. It is simply not relevant to the ID
>movement what religion one has, or even if one has a religion.
>
>Indeed it reflects great credit on Johnson that he is not a man-fearing
>hypocrite in this. Johnson knew from the very beginning that Wells was a
>Moonie because Wells was honest and up-front and told him. Johnson
>could have been like many a church-politician and calculated the PR
>problems it could cause him and given Wells the brush-off. But Johnson is
>refreshingly consistent. He says that what religion one is doesn't matter to
>the ID movement and now he has proved it!
>
>Personally it just enhances my already deep respect for Johnson. He
>*really* means what he says, and says what he means.
[...]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ironically evolutionists have made much in the past of how some
creationist organisations have required their adherents to sign a statement
of Christian beliefs, yet here we have Huxter trying to discredit ID because
it *does not* have such a test of religious orthodoxy!
As an evangelical Christian I would disagree with the private religious
positions of many of my fellow IDers. But ID is not itself a religious position,
so their private religious views are *irrelevant* to my ID position as mine are
to theirs.
Steve
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen E. (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ Email: sejones@iinet.net.au
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Web: http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Warwick 6024 -> *_,--\_/ Phone: +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, Western Australia v "Test everything." (1 Thess. 5:21)
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