Post Author: Bill Pratt
In this 4 minute video clip, biblical scholar N. T. Wright explains how the deistic views of 19th century Europe allowed the ideas of Darwinism to flourish. Thanks to my friend Wes for sending this along. Take a look.
Tag Archives: Darwinism
Do "Missing Links" Prove Evolution?
Post Author: Bill Pratt
Seldom a month goes by that a major announcement isn’t made about a fossil that demonstrates the evolutionary lineage of some animal. These announcements have always fascinated me because of the bold claims that are made.
But something I have struggled with for a long time is understanding exactly how paleontologists can make decisive claims about lineage based on the fossil record. Recently, Greg Koukl, of Stand To Reason, wrote a fascinating article about this very topic. In particular, he was addressing the fossil dubbed “Ida,” which is supposedly a missing link in the human evolutionary chain. According to one scientist, “Ida is an example of a transitional fossil between primitive primates and the prosimian and anthropoid branches, the latter of which eventually led to humans. . . . She is the earliest, and one of the most significant links, ever found.”
Koukl explains the way paleontologists label a fossil a “missing link”:
If a fossil is midway in development between two other specimens (if it shares physical characteristics of both) and falls between them in time, it is considered transitional even if the distances in time are very great. This is the empirical situation paleontologists actually face when surveying the fossil record.
Since Ida existed 47 million years ago, and modern humans were found in the fossil record 100,000 years ago, there is a huge time delta between the two. Paleontologists need to fill in the blanks between the two fossils of 46.9 million years. There are, indeed, a handful of hominid fossils before modern humans, such as the well-known Lucy, which is one of the earliest hominid fossils ever found. Lucy existed 3 million years, but that still leaves a 44 million year gap to Ida.
According to Koukl, “Simply because Ida’s bodily characteristics (morphology) rest between two groups on the Darwinian tree of life, she is immediately declared the common ancestor – the missing link – between both groups,” regardless of the massive amount of time separating them.
Koukl asks the reader to imagine the Darwinian tree of life as a series of roads and highways leading from east to west in the continental US. If you have access to Google Earth, you could see the highways all interconnected from satellite photos. But sometimes there are clouds that block your view and you cannot see all the roads as they are interconnected. Imagine further:
A massive front covers the continental U.S. save for occasional gaps that allow you to glimpse short pieces of highway every few hundred miles. Your task is to determine which sections of road connect with each other to form routes from the east to specific destinations in the west like L.A., San Francisco, or Seattle.
Would you be justified in inferring a connection if one section in west Texas fell between a length of highway in central New Mexico and one in southern Arkansas as long as each section ran roughly in the same direction?
I think you can immediately see the peril of this approach. Clearly, there would be no way to tell from the empirical evidence alone which sections of road connected with other segments of highway to lead you to a specific destination. In the same way, how can we have confidence that one specimen in the fossil record is the ancestor of another specimen that is millions of years removed from it in time?
The lesson here is simple: You must first know that the highways link up before you can trust that any particular segments of the roadway connect the route. By parallel, you must first assume that evolution is true before you can place alleged transitions in their “proper” evolutionary pathways.
In other words, missing links can never answer the question as to whether common descent has really occurred. Only after you assume that common descent is true does it make sense to try and make these ancestral connections between fossils. The fossil record cannot prove that humans are descended from a creature that lived 47 million years ago.
If all the clouds cleared away, and we could see the millions of small transitions that occurred between Ida and Lucy, and then Lucy to modern humans, then we would have a compelling case for claiming that we know the ancestry of humans. But the fossil record is fragmentary, leaving gaps of millions of years between fossils, which represents millions of transitional forms.
As long as large clouds block our view (i.e., the fossil record is fragmentary), we cannot know, and it is extremely disingenuous of scientists to tell us that they do know these things. The data does not allow for that kind of confidence.
Americans are Skeptical of Darwinian Evolution
Post Author: Bill Pratt
Poll results like these demonstrate the failure of proponents of Darwinian evolution to provide persuasive scientific evidence for their viewpoint. Worse than that, the attempt to squash the intelligent design movement is seemingly back-firing. Americans overwhelmingly support academic freedom on the issue of the origins and development of life.
It is time for Darwinists to quit saying “Evolution is a fact” and actually provide some compelling scientific evidence that supports the position that random mutations and natural selection are the engines that drove the development of all life on earth.
How Does Atheistic Darwinism Explain the Origin of Language?
Post Author: Bill Pratt
Not very well, unless you believe that fairy tales from evolution’s past count as evidence. This excerpt comes from A. N. Wilson in a recent article he wrote for the New Statesman.
The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
Well put, I think.
Does a 4.5 Billion Year Old Earth Prove Evolution is True?
Post Author: Bill Pratt
No, even though I often hear Christians talk as if it does. Many believe that if you interpret the “days” in Genesis to be long periods of time and you accept the current scientific consensus that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, then you are “siding” with evolution.
The ironic thing is that when scientific evidence started showing that the universe is only billions of years old and not infinite, some bemoaned the fact that there just wasn’t enough time for the Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection to work. They had been assuming a practically infinite amount of time. Billions of years was not a boon to evolution; it was a serious problem!
In fact, one of the greatest challenges for Darwinian evolution in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion, where over 95% of known animal phyla suddenly appeared over a period of 5 to 10 million years. According to the fossil record, evolution had to work in an extremely short period of time for these animal phyla to appear, so the situation is even worse than billions of years – they have to deal with only millions of years!
Bottom line: whether it is thousands of years, millions of years, or billions of years, it doesn’t matter. The random process of Darwinian evolution needs far more time to manufacture the biological complexity and diversity we see on earth. Whether evolution is true or not has little to do with the age of the earth being 4.5 billion years.
When thinking about creation, learn to decouple evolution from the age of the earth. They are two completely separate issues that need not be considered together. It absolutely does not follow that a 4.5 billion year old earth or 13.8 billion year old universe lead inexorably to the truth of Darwinian evolution.
Does Atheist Richard Dawkins Believe Aliens May Have Designed Biological Life?
Yes, that’s exactly what he said in the movie, “Expelled.” As long as the intelligent designer isn’t God, Dawkins is happy. Check out the movie clip at Wintery Knight. It’s well worth the visit.
Can Naturalistic Evolution Yield True Beliefs About Reality?
Post Author: Bill Pratt
Philosopher Ken Samples, in a recent “New Reasons to Believe” (Vol 1 , No 1) publication, argues that naturalistic evolution cannot explain how human beings can have true beliefs about anything. Naturalistic evolution posits that there only exists the material, natural world around us.
Everything that exists is the result of random, material processes working over billions of years. According to naturalists, the ultimate result of those natural processes is the wonder of the human mind. So why doesn’t this theory make sense?
Samples offers three reasons. First, “Naturalism postulates a nonrational source for man’s rationality.” Naturalists believe that nonrational, impersonal, unintelligent, and purposeless processes produced rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful human minds.
But, as Samples argues, every effect must have a cause greater than itself. This is exactly the opposite of what the naturalists would have us believe! The effect of the human mind is orders of magnitude greater than its alleged cause, the matter of which it is composed. Samples concludes that the naturalist “is assuming a trustworthy reasoning process only to conclude that his reasoning is is ultimately untrustworthy.”
Second, Samples argues that “evolution promotes a species’ survivability, not its true beliefs.” Natural selection, the primary evolutionary mechanism, only selects for survival. But having true beliefs about the world is not always required for animal survival. One can think of examples where an animal’s beliefs about its surrounding environment are irrelevant to its survival.
Human beings survived for thousands of years without knowing about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics or the DNA double helix. Are knowledge of the laws of logic and geometric proofs necessary for humans to reproduce? Our knowledge about the world seems to be complete overkill for evolutionary survival.
Third, Samples reasons that “false beliefs illustrate evolutionary naturalism’s epistemological unreliability.” Many atheists today argue that mankind’s beliefs about God, morality, and life after death are mere evolutionary vestiges that must have served some survival purpose in the past.
It seems that almost all of humankind, through recorded history, has held that God exists. Evolutionists admit this, but answer that this belief was necessary in the past, but is no longer necessary. It is left over from man’s earlier evolutionary stages.
But that means that evolution can produce false beliefs about reality. Naturalistic evolutionists strongly urge that religious beliefs are false, but they also believe evolution produced these beliefs. Samples asks:
If evolutionary naturalism can cause a person to believe that which is false (such as religiously oriented beliefs) in order to promote survivability, then what confidence can evolutionists muster that their convictions are reliable, true beliefs? And if evolution cannot guarantee true beliefs in a person’s mind then how does one know that belief in evolutionary naturalism itself is a true belief about the world?
Maybe naturalism is just evolution’s false belief du jour. There is no way for evolutionists to know! Now that is some serious irony.
Christians, on the other hand, are able to easily explain the human mind and its ability to have true beliefs. A rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful God is the source of our rational, personal, intelligent, and purposeful human minds.
Samples concludes, “Such conceptual realities as logic, mathematics, knowledge, and truth flow from a supremely intelligent divine mind.” In this case, the cause more than adequately explains the effect.
Do We Need Darwinism To Advance the Biological Sciences?
Post Author: Bill Pratt
Dr. Philip Skell (now deceased), in an article posted on Forbes.com, says “no.” Skell correctly separates the study of origin science from experimental sciences in the world of biology. These are two distinct realms which Darwinists have become completely blind to.
Skell writes that Darwinists “overstate both the evidence for Darwin’s theory of historical biology and the benefits of Darwin’s theory to the actual practice of experimental science.”
Experimental science, in biology, has “dramatically increased our understanding of the intricate workings within living organisms that account for their survival, showing how they continue to function despite the myriad assaults on them from their environments.”
These advances, however, have little or nothing to do with explanations of Darwinian origins. They “are not due to studies of an organism’s ancestors that are recovered from fossil deposits.” The study of fossils “cannot reveal the details that made these amazing living organisms function.” Skell summarizes the point:
Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today’s cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions. It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.
Darwinian evolution, as a study of the origins of species, cannot make specific predictions about the future of any species. The theory can only tell us that species will pass on helpful genetic traits which further survival. Ask a Darwinist to tell you in which direction an animal or plant will evolve, and they are rendered speechless.
No matter how a plant or animal changes in the future, a Darwinist will always claim that it is evidence for Darwinian evolution. There is no change in biological organisms that could ever falsify Darwinism, because the claim will always be made that whatever change occurs must have furthered survival fitness. But the truth is that the theory cannot make useful predictions. Skell notes this failure of Darwinism:
For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year’s more virulent strain. That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.
Skell argues that the fantastic findings of the 20th century owe nothing to Darwinism: discovery of penicillin, discovery of the structure of the double helix, the characterization of the ribosome, and the mapping of genomes, to name a few. Skell goes so far as to say that “studying biohistory is, at best, an entertaining distraction from the goals of a working biologist.” He cites examples from his own professional career where he has discussed these very issues with experimental biologists, who agree.
One must be careful in taking Skell’s point too far, however. It is true that in the field of biology, the importance of the Darwinian theory has been vastly oversold to the public, who are told that all of biology will collapse if we fail to accept Darwinism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The study of origins, though, is important in determining the way a biologist approaches an experimental study. If he believed that an organism is undesigned and produced through chance and selection, he may make assumptions that significant portions of the organism may be “junk” or useless.
This is exactly what happened when biologists labeled portions of DNA, “junk” DNA. They could not initally find a function for it, so they figured it must be a useless pile of genetic material left over from long years of evolution. Today, we know that “junk” DNA is not junk at all, and it does have purposes (e.g., genetic switching). The acceptance of the “truths” of Darwinism delayed these findings because scientists, for the most part, weren’t interested in studying something their colleagues relegated to evolutionary garbage.
On the other hand, if the biologist believed that DNA is designed, he would be far less inclined to draw such a conclusion, and, in fact, proceed with great effort to discover the designed function of all DNA. In this sense, biologists’ beliefs about origins do matter.
Even though the debates over the origins of biological life will not ultimately derail the methods of experimental biology, they are still important. After all, we would all like to know the truth about what happened millions years ago in the earth’s history. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure, and as Dr. Skell correctly argues, the march of experimental biology will continue.
Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 5
The final ethical system we will analyze is known as the immanent purpose view. This view holds that “there is no reason why something rather than nothing exists, that there is no purpose for human history, that there is no life after death, and that humans are the result of a blind process of evolution.” The major difference between immanent purpose and optimistic humanism is that immanent purpose seems to hold to objective moral virtues. Within life, there is objective good to be attained and total moral relativism is false.
The objective good, however, is not what Christian theists would consider to be the objective good. Some proponents of this view believe that values exist and are part of the “furniture” of the universe, but these values are floating and unattached to any deity. Others propose that the objective moral good can be “defined by or reduced to natural, scientific properties which are biological, psychological, sociological, or physical in nature.” The following discussion will focus on a particular view within the immanent purpose umbrella which I call survival ethics.
Followers of survival ethics claim that what is morally right is what furthers human survival; it is a utilitarian ethic which places the end (as in ends and means) of survival in the seat of absolutism. Whichever behaviors contribute to human survival are considered virtuous and whichever behaviors do not are morally repugnant. They argue that every person wills life and not death and that survival is therefore foundational to the human animal. Since all types of animals naturally reproduce and populate the earth, this behavior must be the cause of morality.
Why be moral? If we are moral, then we will survive and survival as a goal is wired into humans and all other animals. Journalist Robert Wright explains that “if within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”
According to survival ethicists, morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce. Although this view sounds almost identical to social Darwinism, followers of this view, such as Robert Wright, tend to recoil in horror if they are compared to social Darwinists. They claim that even though evolution caused morals to develop, a person has a moral duty to rise above the brutality of nature and follow a more virtuous path.
In our next post, we will examine whether immanent purpose, and in particular, survival ethics, can explain what we know about morality.
[quotation references can be provided on request]
Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 2
In the previous post, we introduced the ethical theory of optimistic humanism. In this post, we will start to analyze optimistic humanism in order to see whether it can adequately explain morality.
Many of the same objections can be cited for optimistic humanism as were cited for social Darwinism because both base their ethics on evolution and so both suffer from similar deficiencies. Optimistic humanism, though it tries to escape the logical results of social Darwinism, does not completely succeed.
First, this theory offers no mechanism to objectively judge heinous crimes such as those of Nazi Germany. We intuitively know that gassing millions of innocent Jews is morally outrageous, but how would optimistic humanism condemn these activities? When Nielsen and Kurtz tell us to adopt morality in line with our life plans and in sync with the “throb and excitement of life,” on what grounds can they call the atrocities of Germany wrong? J. P. Moreland answers:
After all, many of the Nazis found a lot of excitement in killing other humans, and this activity was obviously one to which they attached value. If an optimistic humanist responds by saying that we ought not to do this, then he is inconsistent. For now he is using an absolutist sense of ought. It even seems he uses an absolutist sense of ought if he tells us we have a moral obligation to be optimistic humanists. So optimistic humanism either fails to provide the rationale for a moral objection to obviously immoral behavior, or if it does provide such a rationale, it becomes inconsistent.
Kai Nielsen would seem to have to agree with this assessment because he states that his theory of ethics “doesn’t give you an absolutism.” But if there is no absolute wrong, then the Nazis were not absolutely wrong. Nielsen and Kurtz leave the door open for Nazi atrocities to be justified and any ethical theory which cannot categorically state that Nazi Germany was morally wrong must be in serious error.
There are additional problems with optimistic humanism. As there is no ultimate rational source for its moral dictates, there can be no prescriptive element or “oughtness” to it. Morality is experienced as a communication between two minds and it carries an incumbency. With evolution as the source of optimistic humanism, where is the transmitting mind? A communication that comes from a random process can and should be ignored. There can be no rational obligation to follow any of the ethics of optimistic humanism. According to J.P. Moreland, Paul Kurtz “admits that the ultimate values of humanism are incapable of rational justification.”
Much more analysis of optimistic humanism is to come, so please come back.
[quotation references can be provided on request]