Answer to a comment about the intrinsic evils of the theory of evolution

Update Feb 9:  Comment in from "Bob" at the post on the K-T Boundary, which I just answered.  http://evofantasy.blogspot.com/2011/05/k-t-boundary-fairy-tale.html

============================
Hey Michael Jeude:
Thanks for all your comments on my various posts, you seem to be a serious thoughtful guy and you aren't insulting to us creationists as so many with your basic mindset are, so I really appreciate it and have been trying to give you some thoughtful answers in return.  If you didn't keep the URLs to the various posts you may not find them and I don't think I could find them myself at this point either, unfortunately, but they're out there somewhere.

I still have a few to get to, but I thought I'd bring this one up front, just because it gives me an opportunity to say something in what I hope is a clearer way than usual, so if you see it you'll know I answered at least this one, which you posted on my entry titled Evolution, Racism, Conscience-Free Murder etc.

Since I'm bringing it up front I'm going to give a new answer to it here, hopefully a better one. 

Here is M. Jeude's comment:

Christianity: Crusades, witch burnings, corrupted religious figures, and I'm sure a fair about of random killers. All who adopt the name and methods of your religion for evil purposes. It is the same for every religion or philosophical belief, the vast majority abide by social norms. Granted back in Medieval Europe witch burnings where considered acceptable, crusades against any "non-believe" and other "holy" wars are acceptable by the group carrying them out, and some how killers allows rationalize why they kill, even saying "It was gods will"

I find the argument to lack depth, how is atheist less moral than a christian? On an individual bases I've met "Christians" who acted less compassionate, open, and calm than myself. I've also met other Atheist who I wanted to knock the chip on their shoulder off and contemplated worst.

How I personally have focused on this topic is what virtues create a "good" society. A society where everyone feel they can be open, calm, free, respected, and that they are the only limitation to what they can achieve. I'm sure with more thoughts we could end up with a excellent description of a Utopia, but then the question is what virtues should a person have to be "good". Both have the flaw that its from perspective what "good" is, and that varies by cultures, regions, experiences, and belief/philosophy. As a question what do you think are the virtues of a "good" person?

How evolution, a frame work of natural process of biological change, is any more dehumanizing than the bleak, dark nature that humans are capable of I do not comprehend. Neither evolution nor atheism states anything about obliterate, ignore, punish, all who are not like you. Just like your Bible never says go forth and kill in my name.

Everyone is always eager to point out the evils others do, and fain the purity and innocence of those of like mind or other sociological factors. They only focus upon the light they wish to see in themselves that we forget about the fact we are capable of dark and terrible things as well.

You've raised many issues here that I didn't get to in my comment at the blog post, but the main thing I want to say is the same thing I said there:

I'm not talking about individuals here although it's often hard to keep the distinctions clearly in mind.  I agree with you that "the vast majority abide by social norms" and not a strict understanding of the implications of their religion or atheism or evolutionism and so on.  We're not talking about your average atheist or believer in evolution here who don't necessarily base their lives on these philosophies, but about the serious philosophers and world shapers who use them very very seriously indeed to justify conclusions that most people wouldn't even dream of.  

Two Philosophical Systems
The difference between the serious implications of Biblical Christianity and evolutionism is really enormous when you do attempt to follow their precepts strictly.  Biblical Christianity teaches that all human beings are descended from one human pair, all are made in the image of God, morality is built into us by God Himself, and death is not natural to God's creation, which gives human beings a very high status, a sort of noble status.  This is a very different thing from the implications you can draw from a theory that says we're the product of mindless chemical processes which somehow accidentally made us moral creatures and not reliably so at that, of no more intrinsic value than those processes etc etc and so on. 

This makes it easy to dismiss the unborn human being as just a piece of tissue you can throw away at will, and makes eugenics on the level of doing away with "undesirable" genes through euthanasia something to seriously and scientifically consider if you want to "improve" the human "stock," and so on. 

Also although Christians have certainly been guilty of racism you can see there is no justification for it if we're all descended from one pair of parents, while evolution with its heavy emphasis on stages of development from one form to another does invite racist thinking. 

You and others may not take evolution as far as to treat human beings as expendable chemical experiments, but it's certainly implicit in the theory and Hitler and Margaret Sanger among others DID take it to these logical conclusions.  Such implications are inherent in the theory itself.

Again this isn't about individuals, it's about a system of thought that most individuals who supposedly subscribe to it don't pursue to its logical conclusion.  I often have to try to clarify this distinction when I'm talking about Roman Catholicism, which is a topic I am pursuing lately, because there I'm talking about the Vatican itself and its historical actions and its written documents which most Catholics don't have a clue about, who just go on living according to the gospel as they understand it.

The Crusades you mention were a Catholic enterprise for instance.  I used to defend it as Christian but the more I learn about this the more I understand they were strictly a Roman effort to take the "Holy Land" for the Pope, something I want to do a post on soon, and Protestants down the centuries have condemned the Pope as Antichrist himself,.  Which may not mean anything to you, but at least it ought to get across that Romanism was rejected all through history by "Bible believers" or Protestants as not Christian at all.  Not something you'll hear about if your sources have been affected by the Romanist point of view. 

So my point isn't that "an atheist is less moral than a Christian."  Some atheists have a very strong conscience (a remnant of the image of God in all of us) while some Christians who have been saved by the grace of God may have such a history of sin they take a long time to overcome it, and we're all still vulnerable to falling into new sins if we don't daily renew our faith.  

This isn't about individuals at all but about systems of thought, philosophical systems.

So my point is that, while we're all sinners who may do terrible things, only one of these two philosophical systems can be used to JUSTIFY those terrible things.

A note to those who have recently written comments here

Sorry that I've taken so long to get to the comments on this blog.  Thanks to new formatting at Blogger I didn't see them.  I'm just now going through the collection and trying to answer them.

More on UK Creationism

Turns out there are Creationist organizations in the UK, such as the Biblical Creation Society which is described by Wikipedia as ===

... a United Kingdom-based creationist organisation founded in 1977 by Scottish minister Nigel M. de S. Cameron and a group of evangelical students, who were concerned about the popularity of theistic evolution among conservative Christians, but were repelled by the "wholly negative" attitude of the Evolution Protest Movement. Although inspired by the scientific creationism of John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (authors of The Genesis Flood), it refused to limit its membership to only Young Earth creationists, and in its name rejected American attempts to separate scientific creationism from its Biblical roots (a separation rendered unnecessary by the lack of constitutional barriers to teaching creationism in the United Kingdom).[1] The organisation is based in Rugby, Warwickshire.

I'm not entirely sure what this paragraph is saying (in whose name rejected what?) but I gather at least that their beliefs are disputed by other creationist organizations.

Here's another UK-based organization called Biblical Creation Ministries which the site explains is an offshoot of the organization above. This one is headed up by Paul Garner, whose talk on the Grand Canyon I've embedded in the post below.

British creationist Paul Garner's analysis of the Grand Canyon as Evidence for the Flood

OK, I think I'm going to post some creationist stuff that I like for a change. My main use of my blog is for thinking things through for myself because that's FUN and I think I've come up with some good stuff in spite of my obvious handicaps and amateur status. Most of it ends up being in accord with creationist thinking out there and that's certainly a good sign but I also have the chutzpah to think I have some original ideas of my own. Well, that's a lot of what makes it fun.

I've been watching this film at You Tube of a talk by creationist Paul Garner about the formation of the Grand Canyon. GREAT talk. You'll never find this sort of information at EvC.

The talk is all about the evidence in the Grand Canyon for catastrophic deposition of the layers as opposed to deposition over hundreds of millions of years.

He presents a creationist division of the layers into pre-Flood, which is the Precambrian or basement rocks of the Canyon, Flood-deposited, which is the main body of the strata above that to the rim at the Kaibab Plateau, and post-Flood, which is those strata which can be seen in the Grand Staircase but no longer exist over the Grand Canyon. (I was very happy to see him affirm that the layers that constitute the Grand Staircase to the north are understood to have originally covered the Grand Canyon area as well.) 

This dividing of the layers into time units is the sort of system I've always found hard to accept because I see no difference in the presentation of the layers themselves to the naked eye that would suggest any reason to attribute different mechanisms of deposition to them. But the "PreCambrian" basement rocks do present a different appearance so I can see how they can be thought of as a separate kind of deposition that pre-existed the Flood.  .

He organizes his talk to address five kinds of evidence demonstrated in the canyon for its formation by the Flood of Noah:

1. Fossils of marine organizsms high above sea level
2. Rapid burial of fossil organisms
3. Extraordinary extent of the sedimentary rock layers
4. Rapid or no erosion between the layers
5. Many strata deposited in rapid succession

On the subject of rapid burial of fossil organisms, item No. 2, he spends quite a bit of time on the nautiloid layer in the Redwall Limestone, spelling out the research by Steve Austin on that layer that demonstrates that the nautiloids had to have been rapidly buried. 

On No. 3 He gives the evidence of the enormous horizontal extent of the different layers, the lowest Tapeats sandstone that rests on the basement unconformity, for instance, extending across the entire continent of the US and up through Canada, also being found on other continents although he doesn't give an illustration of that. Same with the Redwall Limestone, which has an enormous range across the North American continent, and he mentions that the same basic formation can be found in England as well. The Coconino sandstone covers the Southwest into Colorado and Texas, as deep as 800 feet in some places. Such a huge extent of the layers is evidence that they were not laid down by any processes known to be occurring today, which is the usual claim.

Addressing No. 4 he points out the knife-edge contact between some layers conventionally explained as unconformities which assumes there to be layers missing between them.  He also discusses the erosion between the Great Unconformity and the lowest horizontal layer that rests on it, the Tapeats sandstone, as having to have been PHYSICAL erosion. He says there is no evidence of the chemical erosion of weathering that would have occurred if the lower layer had been exposed as land surface for millions of years, which is the usual theory, and he shows an embedded boulder that suggests the erosion was caused by a rapid catastrophic debris flow that "simultaneously broke up and transported blocks of the underlying precambrian rocks in a matrix of sandstone."

I've had my own theory about this boundary as the level at which the force of the underground volcano along with the tectonic force which triggered it, met the resisting weight of the more-than-two-mile depth of wet layers that were at that time all laid out above. I see this collision of forces as having formed the basement rock, including the metamorphic rock or schist and of course the granite, and the Great Unconformity itself, all confined beneath the stack above under great heat and pressure, the force being enough to uplift the stack above into its current position, cracking the uppermost layers which permitted the rushing in of the water which scoured out the canyon.

EVIDENCE that the strata were all in place when the uplift occurred is the fact that the strata conform to the curved sides of the uplift instead of butting into them, which is what would have happened if they'd been laid down at any time afterward.  THEREFORE the tectonic-volcanic action that caused the uplift came after all the strata had been deposited, or at or after the end of the Flood.

The abrasion at the boundary between the basement rocks and the Tapeats layer would have been violent in the extreme, easily accounting for the kind of erosion he's talking about.

His analysis is great just as it stands, but I still like my explanation for how the canyon got cut in the first place as a result of the tectonic-volcanic uplift from beneath, which also explains how the uppermost layers got broken up and washed away, their also being the major agent of the scouring of the canyon as they went, and it's also another way of explaining the erosion between the Tapeats and the Precambrian rocks that he explains in terms of a catastrophic debris flow. His explanation has a different cause and different timing but is the same kind of violent physical action I pictured.

He observes that the bend in the whole stack of strata over the East Kaibab Monocline is evidence for their simultaneous deposition, which I've also observed in north-south diagrams of the conformation of the whole stack over the uplift. The conformation of the strata as a whole stack to any such curve is evidence for rapid deposition. So I'm showcasing this as both a great well documented thoroughly scientific presentation of the evidence for the Flood that is so nicely exhibited in the Grand Canyon, and a confirmation of some of my own ponderings on the subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNlb3lFhFM

Evolution theory as God's judgment? Hutton and Darwin as God's judgment?

Why isn't evolution yielding at all to the arguments against it?  I got to pondering this recently.  On the one hand I think Why should it?  The arguments against it aren't really very good when you look at the whole range of creationism out there, especially when you look at the creationist arguments at a site like EvC.  But on the other hand I do think there are some very good arguments that should be compelling, should cause some stopping and thinking even among people committed to evolution, instead of the predictable wall of objections. 

After some thoughts about how the nation is under judgment, that I wrote about last night, the idea that evolutionary science itself is judgment started forming more clearly in my mind.  Our current political situation is God's judgment, and it's judgment first of all on the Church for our compromises, as Chris Pinto was talking about the last couple of days, compromises with the apostate churches, the false churches that teach a distorted gospel, with pseudoChristianity such as Mormonism, with Catholicism, compromises that come down to a failure to separate ourselves from the world and from false teachers, a failure, in a word, to maintain holiness.  So if evolution is judgment it too is judgment on the Church.

And some things I've written here before pretty much say that.  The creationist explanations in geology and biology in Hutton's day and later in Darwin's day were not biblical, explanations for the fossils and the Flood for instance, and later particularly the idea that God went on creating new species long after the Bible says He rested from His creative work.  Such denials of His word would in themselves be enough explanation for why He allowed Hutton to come along with an idea about an old earth that completely eclipsed the Biblical timetable of a young earth, and why He later allowed Darwin to come along and answer the unbiblical notions about species formation with his denial of the Biblical account of God's creation of the separate Kinds, and his supposed evidence that man was made in the image of animals rather than God.

I think we should think of these developments as God's judgment on the Church along with the subsequent developments that have only entrenched these ideas all the more firmly in the scientific and public mind.  And if that's what they are then creationists need not so much to keep producing arguments that challenge the scientific establishment but repentance from our abandonment of God's truth.

The creationism I've seen at EvC is a serious breach of God's revelation.  How many of the people there who argue on the side of creationism are really Christians is a question to begin with but most of them present themselves as Christian even if they believe some awfully distorted ideas of what the Bible teaches.  Their arguments deny the timing that's given in the Bible and some of them get into some really bizarre ideas that have to relation whatever to anything biblical OR scientific.  But I don't keep up with them for that reason, so I can't really characterize them except to say that a departure from a biblical perspective is the norm among creationsts at EvC, and there's where repentance should start.

It should be expressed in identification with the corporate church as a whole, all of us praying as one body no matter who in particular is guilty of what aspect of the problem, but as if we all are guilty as the corporate church.   I think we all need to stop arguing for anything at all, which certainly applies to me, stop saying anything at all, just stop and seek the Lord and pray for His will to be revealed and we all be brought into conformity with it.

Amen.

BBC Video Part 2: a whale on the ark, a chimp, skulls, dinosaurs, bacteria etc.

I'm just going to tick off the rest of my objections to the ridiculous excuse for a "scientific" presentation in that video, Creationism Road Trip,.

They got evolution writer Jerry Coyne to answer the claims about Noah's ark as being able to contain all the animals.  The usual stupid misrepresentation is the assumption that all the creatures called "species" TODAY would have been on the ark, which is ridiculous.   All the supposedly new "species" since the ark are really just what used to be called varieties, or breeds.  Yes, even when they can no longer breed with the parent population.  So there have been 4300 years during which the various creatures on the ark have split into many new populations of varieties or breeds, hundreds in some cases from the few represented there.

So I have no idea where Coyne got his claim that it would have had to accommodate "16,000 animals"  but since that number has to be made up of breeds that developed since the ark, in the dozens to hundreds to possibly thousands in some cases, and probably even including sea creatures (which were not taken on the ark), or even plants, since I've seen them listed as species in other debates on this subject, the number is bogus.

But the stupidest thing said in this connection was his "challenge" about how a WHALE could have been accommodated on the ark.  

Creatures that live in the water were NOT accommodated on the ark.   Why would they need to be?  And why didn't any of the creationists know that?  They all looked a bit stunned it seemed to me.  Maybe the idea was just too absurd.  Or maybe they were just intimidated, as in "This guy is a hotshot scientist, so maybe he knows something we don't."

A main problem with this film is that they got "creationists" who don't know much, apparently either about science or about the Bible.  So they should have confronted them with science students rather than professors if they had any interest in being fair and balanced. 

So no whales on the ark.  Duh.

=================
Then there was the idiotic presentation of a chimp as human ancestor and the focus was on how everybody FEELS about being related to a chimp.  When I believed in evolution I had no objections whatever.  Why would I?  I believed it so I accepted it, hardly gave it a thought.  Who CARES how anybody FEELS about such a thing?  This is supposed to be SCIENCE, so the questions should be about claims that we ARE related.

We aren't.
==================

Bacteria at some sort of fountain in the desert was supposed to prove WHAT?    Scratch that one, it made no sense whatever.

==================

The interpretation of evolution through those supposedly pre-human to human skulls, that were found in the fossil order from least to most human from the bottom up, depends on the assumption that the fossil order represents TIME.    But if it only represents the fossil contents of layering as a result of the Flood then the position of all the skulls is accidental.

===================

I was recently reminded that according to the Bible people ate no meat until after the Flood.  While I've never seen any problem with humans occupying the planet with dinosaurs since we share it with other predators, but still it would be easier to live together if they also ate no meat.  They were originally created to eat plants, and it's not clear when they became meat-eaters, at the Fall which was the first drastic change in the world, or after the Flood when people also started to eat meat. 

===================

If such an excursion is to make any sense at all it should involve people who are both STRONG Bible believers and know a fair amount about science as well.  Getting together a bunch of average Christians who have been taught a smattering of creationism, not a lot of Bible, no science, and have no experience with the debate about these things, proves nothing at all.

JoJo is no Bible believer, she's for gay rights and easily caved in the face of the so-called "evidence" because she really doesn't know the Bible.  She has a sentimental form of "Christianity" which isn't Christianity at all. 

Bronwyn seems to have a strong faith but not necessarily a lot of Bible knowledge.  NOBODY carried a Bible that I noticed, I thought that telling.  She has the right attitude, however, that when you know the Bible is God's word you know the evidence against it is false.

Phil seems like a strong believer but he didn't seem to know any science or even have much of a grip on the usual creationist arguments.  He's right that it's not fair to pit an evolutionist geologist against a bunch of nonscientists.

I couldn't make much out of Sam.  Except the sense that he like Bronwyn was depending more on a determined grip on a blind faith than on a real grasp of either Christian principles or science.

Ahmed made some good points.  He was right to say the skull argument was nothing but conjecture even in the face of the claim that it's "evidence."  Because the assumption that the fossil record reflects millions of years of time is conjecture.

BBC video attempt to undermine creationist faith, Part 1, HOW THE FLOOD CREATED THE GRAND CANYON

There's a thread up at EvC to discuss a BBC-produced video, Creationism Road Trip, about an attempt to present five British creationists with scientific evidence for evolution, by taking them on a bus trip to various locations in western America where scientists present their case for evolution and against creationism.  The creationists are five "fundamentalists," made up of four Christians and one Muslim. 

The poster found the video to be "both entertaining and enlightening."  I watched it and found it to be a maddeningly misbegotten project. 

The first leg of the trip is from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon and is titled
Theory One:  The Grand Canyon Was Made By Noah's Flood, in which creationist Phil is to be confronted about his belief that the canyon was formed by the Flood of Noah something over 4000 years ago.  Phil has made it clear that he believes the Bible is THE authority on all things.

At the rim of the Canyon the five creationists and the producer are met by geologist Don Prothero who starts out by rather defensively informing them that he's a scientist and that scientists "deal only with natural forces and things that we can observe and test in nature."

He goes on to say

You can see the layers of the Earth piled up one on top of another in a place like this better than just about anywhere else.  Immense amounts of time are required to deposit that, cement it into hard sandstone and shale, tilt it, erode it.  Your miniman estimate is hundreds of millions of years.

What's wrong with this is something I've covered many times and I'm still astonished that people think it makes sense that thousands of square miles of flat horizontal sediments could have been built up over long periods of time and not show any sign of disturbance of their relatively neat straight horizontality.  Oh except the teeny bit of "erosion" between the layers that almost requires a microscope to see it, which is really laughable when you think about what REAL erosion does to land in even only one year.  One rain will make gullies in a flat field.  There are no gullies in these slabs of rock.  They'd be visible to the naked eye.  The sediment above would have settled into them.  No, the joints between the layers are straight and flat.  So they say well they were deposited under water.  Well, yes they were, all at once, one on top of another over at the maximum a few months during the Flood.  Not over hundreds of millions of years.

Phil the creationist then remarks that the scientist holds the assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism and Prothero answers that all scientists share those assumptions and that creationists aren't scientists, so Phil doesn't pursue that line further.

The producer then says that as he understands it, creationists believe the Canyon was created by the Flood of Noah.  They all agree and Maxwell paraphrases Prothero's answer:

If the Biblical Flood really did create the Grand Canyon, it would need to have carved out curved valleys, like here at Horseshoe Bend.  Don thinks this is impossible because flood water cuts along straight lines.

Horseshoe Bend is a typical "meander," a sharp curve in a river that I read about some time ago, that is created by differing pressures in the running water due to small obtacles and whatever debris it is carrying, such that it cuts into the shore on one side and deposits the debris on the other, and this action forms the curve.  There is nothing about draining flood water that would prevent this typical formation from occurring. 

But Prothero thinks he's being very scientific when he says:

If your flood waters drain off they're going to drain off and form a sharp straight canyon, that's simple physics.

Doesn't it depend on the surface it's draining off, how much water there is and how much time it takes to drain off, what sort of obstacles the water meets along its path and what sorts of debris it picks up as it moves? 

He gets Phil to pour a bucket of water on a downsloping piece of ground and claims that is sufficient to demonstrate what a worldwide flood would do in the draining phase. 

This is a scientist?

Here's a satellite picture from Wikipedia showing that water running on a FLAT SURFACE doesn't just flow flat and straight:

For any kind of test, what is needed at the very least, and this would hardly be sufficient to represent the draining of a worldwide flood, is a continuous stream of water over a fairly long period of time, LOTS of water, not a mere bucket full that is rapidly exhausted.  If you don't have a way to produce a sheet of water, at least get a hose and let it run down that little slope for a while.  Even a sheet of water would encounter some obstacles that affect how it flows, and as soon as it carves any kind of shape in the surface the water will begin to follow that shape and that will change its speed and pressure at various places that will further shape the surface.  But use a hose at least and see if possibly it creates some meanders, which, according to what I've read on this subject, it could well do even on a flat surface.  Here's a You Tube video about how Meandering Rivers are created.   

Meanders such as created Horseshoe Bend are VERY likely to have occurred as the Flood waters drained. 

But I think what's needed to explain how the draining Flood waters carved the Grand Canyon is my very own observation that first a crack -- or more probably many cracks -- was opened in the upper strata, caused by the volcanic eruption beneath that area after the strata were laid down to at least a mile higher than the current rim of the canyon.  The volcanic eruption could have been brought about by tectonic movement but in any case the land, the stack of sediments recently laid down in the Flood, was upraised by the force.  The upraised land is shown on all diagrams of the area I've seen.  There is a sort of mound over the area and the canyon slices right into it.  Also shown on diagrams is the displacement of the lowest layers as the volcanic force pushes them up under the whole stack, and the intrusion of magma into them, showing the effect of the underground volcano. 

As I put it together, the upraising of the land would have cracked the uppermost layers and the still-standing Flood waters would then have poured into the cracks, widening them and washing down huge quantities of the sediments from the upper layers that had been in place until the volcanic disruption.  The first rush of that enormous quantity of water must have carved out a very wide area, and as the water slowed to a mere cataract flowing in from all sides of the gap it would have begun shaping the formations such as Horseshoe Bend, moving rapidly around the various islands of still-standing strata and carving them to their present shape and so on.