"Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented.
Therefore any claims person A makes will be false."
That does not relate to this essay. There is no "therefore" involved--absent of proof or reason. There is simply opinion presented. You may disagree with the opinion and you may disagree with the factual basis. But there is no exterior argument that such and such is true because so and so is truthful--OR NOT. There is the presumption, perhaps, as opinion. But there is no argument, per se. And no argument is made that evolution is true BECAUSE the Christian belief is without a rational basis. The fact of evolution stands alone and does not require the discrediting of anything for its acceptance.
The argument is NOT that such and such is false because so and so is irrational. The argument is that evolution is TRUE--PERIOD. That so and so are irrational is an opinion separate from any argument of fact.
I think the following quote is the crux of the matter. It is NOT a premise of his "argument". It is not an argument. You may certainly disagree with it. And you may certainly explain to us the contradictions between evolution and Christian dogma. And while you are at it you may explain the contradictions between Christian dogma and a thousand and one other world views. And when you are done, we may see if there is any water left to drink for anyone who is not a Christian.
But it is not the intention to prove the truth of evolution by the falsity of myths. The latter are simply commentary designed to fatten the intellectual calf and to graze the meadow.
"...a majestic and enlightening explanation that uses a creator’s power as a backdrop and is not supported by any reasonable evidence. Many religious believers firmly reject the evolutionary theory because of the faith they have in a belief that has been the foundation behind their perspective of life, but it is simply a tale created by a human group that tried to satisfy it’s search for answers and came to the point were they had to make them up."
"And on the first day God created..." Man, in his desperate search for answers,attempted to find an explanation to how he and his world came to exist. This was the motivation behind the many myths of creation that prevailed in human religions and cultures, of which the most remarkable and famous is the Biblical account ; which is simply that, a majestic and enlightening explanation that uses a creator’s power as a backdrop and is not supported by any reasonable evidence. Many religious believers firmly reject the evolutionary theory because of the faith they have in a belief that has been the foundation behind their perspective of life, but it is simply a tale created by a human group that tried to satisfy it’s search for answers and came to the point were they had to make them up.
Science, in contrast, is in search of the ultimate and most reasonable explanation supported by the evidence, where beliefs are not an influence in the search for answers. This is the only way to obtain an objective explanation that is adept to reality.
Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to "descent from an animal world"; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush - a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.
The veracity of the theory of evolution is evident when you compare it with the technological application of other laws and theories. Electrons or their equivalent *must* exist, else our machines based on the theories and ideas about electromagnetism wouldn't work. We know gravity exists because we're not floating all over the place, and so the laws of gravity maintain their standing when applied to the real world. By the same token evolution *must* exist, or else genetic engineering wouldn't work and we would be incapable of cloning and manipulating living beings, things which have been recently accomplished and apply the concepts of evolution, thereby obtaining results.
I think this might be one of the reasons why many folks consider evolution a principle instead of merely a theory. It is also a fact that life evolved, so evolution is a fact. How it evolved is not known just as it's not known how there is a "gravity". How evolution and gravity work is a theory (s). Their existence is a fact. There are laws that apply to each (some more predictable than others).
I do not think that electrons are not real or that the planets are illusions...but everything we know via the scientific method can only be accepted provisionally---and yet, our theories on electricity work perfectly---and TV, radio, and modems all work like we would expect them too.
The same can be said about evolutionary theory. Everything we expect in genomes, populations, lab experience, ecology, paleontology, all fit the model great! For the moment, we consider it to be the unifying idea in biology...in that way, it is TRUE...but true only in the loosest sense of the word!
No, a theory is not something that would be a fact or a law if only there were enough supporting evidence for it. A theory is a detailed explanation of how and/or why certain phenomena occur, usually in terms of more basic phenomena; it is neither a fact nor a law. Creationists have polluted the scientific meaning of the term "theory" by squawking that "evolution is only a theory, not a fact." But comparing theories with facts in this manner is like comparing apple trees with apples: although the objects are related, the comparison is pointless. For example, the theory of relativity explains how and why time slows down for moving objects (an observed fact). Likewise, the theory of evolution by natural selection explains why earth's life forms have changed through time (another observed fact). Theories may be modified or even overturned, but only in favor of a better or deeper or broader explanation of a body of observed facts.
Something that may or may not be important here: natural selection is just a proposed mechanism of evolution. All the evidence we have indicates that organisms have changed through time, and we know through observation that the allele frequencies of a population can change over time. This would indicate that the statement "Evolution does occur" is a fact. Proposing that it occurs via natural selection is a theory.
Primates are visual animals, and the pictures we draw betray our deepest convictions and display our current conceptual limitations. An error that artists have always made in the portrayal of evolution is painting the history of fossil life as a sequence from invertebrates, to fishes, to early terrestrial amphibians and reptiles, to dinosaurs, to mammals and, finally, to humans. There are no exceptions; all sequences painted since the inception of this genre in the 1850s follow the convention.
Yet we never stop to recognize the almost absurd biases coded into this universal mode and which we need to and have come to change in the last couple of years. No scene ever shows another invertebrate after fishes evolved but invertebrates did not go away or stop evolving! After terrestrial reptiles emerge, no subsequent scene ever shows a fish (later oceanic tableaux depict only such returning reptiles as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs). But fishes did not stop evolving after one small lineage managed to invade the land. In fact, the major event in the evolution of fishes, the origin and rise to dominance of the teleosts, or modern bony fishes, occurred during the time of the dinosaurs and is therefore never shown at all in any of these sequences - even though teleosts include more than half of all species of vertebrates. Why should humans appear at the end of all sequences? Our order of primates is ancient among mammals, and many other successful lineages arose later than we did.
We will not smash Freud's pedestal and complete Darwin's revolution until we find, grasp and accept another way of drawing life's history. J.B.S. Haldane proclaimed nature "queerer than we can suppose," but these limits may only be socially imposed conceptual locks rather then inherent restrictions of our neurology. New icons might break the locks. Trees - or rather copiously and luxuriantly branching bushes - rather than ladders and sequences hold the key to this conceptual transition.
We must learn to depict the full range of variation, not just our parochial perception of the tiny right tail of most complex creatures. We must recognize that this tree may have contained a maximal number of branches near the beginning of multicellular life and that subsequent history is for the most part a process of elimination and lucky survivorship of a few, rather than continuous flowering, progress and expansion of a growing multitude. We must understand that little twigs are contingent nubbins, not predictable goals of the massive bush beneath.
Conclusion
In our time the theory of evolution has come to be a fact and the central concept of biology, it is certain that gradual changes took place in living beings and that they are all related. What still isn’t positively known is how it takes place, is natural selection the answer ?, what other methods could the process take place with?
The only new ideas that have changed about evolution is the notion that it is guided to a subsequently higher complexity, but instead the survival of the fittest that sometimes might need to obtain superiority over other creatures by adapting properly to it’s environment, complexity mostly ensues over competitors but it isn’t always the answer.
Indeed, you only need to stop and think about how lucky you are to form part of a species that has come to explore the concept of it’s own origin and mysterious development. The only question know left to answer is the universality of evolution. If life is ever found in other planets (which it surely will) we will come to question ourselves if evolution is also responsible for the development of the alien being and if our common ancestor is non living matter, in essence the Big Bang that originated time and the universe." |
