As one poster on Panda’s Thumb likes to say, Intelligent Design is an idea doomed to fail because it’s proponents can’t keep quiet about ID being religion, not science. A letter in the Greenville News today (from Dime Hollingsworth) illustrates the point rather nicely.
Recently, two writers have claimed that “to say evolution of the species did not happen is very disappointing for an educated person” and that evolution has “massive evidence from every corner of serious scientific study.”
However, neither writer presents any actual evidence to make their case. As an educated person, I used to believe in evolution because I was taught to believe it. But I have since found much more scientific evidence supporting creation rather than evolution.
The writer believed evolution “because [he] was taught to believe it”? This would certainly be evidence that evolution (and science) education in the state is in need of improvement – and certainly not be weakening the science standards in ther ways proposed by South Carolina’s EOC. But I digress …
The writer’s claiming that no evidence exists for evolution. How much does he want? We have
- the fossil record
- genetic similarities between organisms
- numerous examples of selection at work
- observation of new species
- synthesis of life’s precursors from simple chemical compounds (Miller-Urey type experiments) – more relevant to abiogenesis than evolution
- etc., etc.
And of course, you can find lots more evidence for evolution conveniently tabulated at talkorigins. What more does he want? But he’s already given his motivations away – even as he’s trying to frame his letter as scientific – with that lovely term “creation”. Expect something about Genesis to follow.
Creationists do not deny that organisms “change” over time, and are sometimes even classified as new species. We only deny that these changes can go beyond the basic genetic makeup of the organism’s DNA.
This argument always amuses me. Creationists have been whacked on the head so many times by evidence for evolution that they will say “Okay, okay … things evolve. But they can’t evolve that much“. It’s sort of like saying “Okay, I believe that we can send a man into Earth’s orbit, but it would be impossible to send him to the Moon!”
The only changes to DNA occur as mutations or copying errors. A copy machine cannot make a new intelligent sentence no matter how many times you make a copy. Likewise, mutations do not lead to more complex information, much less more complex organisms. No mutations have ever been proven to lead to more complex life forms; thus, evolution of species from one-celled organisms to humans over time would be impossible without intelligent intervention.
What does the writer mean by “complex”? What is meant by “intelligent”? For that matter, what about sex and its ability to shuffle genetic material around?
And why, even if evolution as we currently understand it were somehow to fail to describe what the writer is complaining about, wouid the idea of “intelligent intervention” be supported? This is a false dilemma, since there might simply be another means of natural genetic variation we haven’t discovered yet. To hammer home the point, let’s say that I tell you my name is not Steve. Does that mean my name has to be Fred? Of course not. There are more than two choices. The writer’s argument has the same basic problem.
All educated people should take a good look at scientific evidence on both sides of the creation/evolution debate. I have found the scientific evidence to be consistent with creation by God as described in the Bible.
And at the end of the letter, we arrive back to the first sentence of my post. Our writer has revealed his true colors – and that his argument is really about his religion and not about the scientific facts. (I really would like to see some scientific facts that support “creation”, because these sites contain nothing of the sort.)