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Rennie is wrong in many of his opening statements. He accuses Philip Johnson of wanting to inject "God" into the science classroom. Phil is interested in injecting truth into the classroom; yes, even the kind that questions Darwinism. If that truth leads some to wonder about God, then so be it.
Rennie’s overall approach is a two-faced one. His "fact of evolution" falls directly out of his faith in methodological naturalism. Can there be any observation that contradicts the fact of evolution? No, his faith forbids the thought. So when he claims that evolution also sits atop a huge pyramid of observational evidence, he should forgive readers like me who question his objectivity.
Point 1.
The fact of evolution? I like facts. Show me.
If Rennie is really unafraid of "indirect evidence" as he claims, then why object to the possibility of an "intelligence" behind biology? The connection between information and intelligence is well documented, as even Carl Sagan, the inspirer for the SETI Project, acknowledged. Yet the origin of the information on the DNA molecule is without a naturalistic explanation. Why not regard it as "indirect evidence" for an intelligent source?
Point 2.
Natural selection, a concept first expressed by a creationist who preceded Darwin, really does occur. So what? Does variation in beak size among a population of finches really tell us anything about the origin of the finch in the first place? Rennie does not answer this question.
Point 3.
Microevolution. Big deal. You breed dogs and get different varieties of dog. When has this ever been an issue for creationists? But try to turn a fish into a human ("macroevolution") and you’ve got some real problems. Why not discuss them?
Rennie claims a "succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern". When I look at the fossil record I see apes (including australopithocines) and I see humans (including all in the genus Homo, that are hardly more diverse than today’s tribes), side-by-side, in deposits that are embarrassingly "old" [3] for the evolutionist. To the uninitiated, it looks a lot like apes have always been apes, and people, people.
Point 4.
The reason creation scientists don’t submit papers on Creation Science to most scientific journals is the same reason black-skinned people don’t attend KKK meetings. They are not welcome and they know it. Rennie also knows that he will quickly flag for rejection any draft to Scientific American that so much as questions the sufficiency of natural causes in the origin of the entire universe. Will Rennie deny this? He seems to admit as much.
Point 5.
A beauty pageant that features only the assets of its contestants, and not their liabilities, can produce a winner of only superficial beauty. In the same way, Rennie eschews a public airing of disputes among evolutionists such as those between the late Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, lest "the fact of evolution" suffer a loss of credulity. Yet if Gould’s revisionism and Dawkins’ fundamentalism really do exhaust the evolutionary possibilities, and their debate raises some unflattering facts that leave both contestants looking like hags, then the whole pageant looks bad. Rennie wishes to avoid this.
Point 6.
Rennie does Darwin an injustice. His book had more to say about competition and obsolescence than about "splinter groups". New creatures arise, in part because old ones die out due to obsolescence, according to his theory. So, if it is true that greater cleverness had something to do with Homo out-competing the apes for a given food supply, then the question of why there are still apes is not such a stupid one. (Note: Rennie uses "monkeys" to make his straw man easier to knock down).
Point 7.
It is arbitrary for Rennie to throw up his hands regarding the origin of life, and to be dogmatic regarding the "fact" of macroevolution. Why abandon so quickly the tenet of methodological naturalism? The reason is plain. Naturalists frequently abandon their philosophy at this point, because they themselves know the shabbiness of the "just so" stories of how life arose from non-living chemicals. Rennie, poor chap, is no exception.
Point 8.
Rennie makes a masterfully unsupported statement, "As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times". If he could produce one example of this, he could silence all creationists very easily.
To claim that natural selection is governed by something other than chance is to suggest it is somehow a directed process. What shadowy entity would he propose? "Selective forces" are ultimately subject to either chance or intelligence. Rennie can’t have it both ways.
His Shakespeare-writing computer program that "generated phrases randomly" did so by "preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed". That can only be done if the computer is first programmed to recognize "correctly placed" letters. His computer is rigged, in other words. Evolution must operate without the benefit of such an intelligent programmer.
Point 9.
Mineral crystals grow by mere repetition of the symmetry that already exists at the molecular level. This involves no new information. Brute energy alone cannot produce a mousetrap, because, unlike a snowflake, a mousetrap contains purposeful information. So do all organisms. Rennie does not address how information can arise in a non-intelligent way. He could convince a lot of creationists if he could.
Point 10.
"Biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations". Since when has this been contested? Show me one mutation that has ever introduced an innovative design change into an organism that actually benefited the organism. Now that would be a change worth talking about, but such a thing is unheard of in biology today. The mixing and matching of Hox genes does nothing to bring about the kind of net information increase needed to drive evolution. Where does the needed information come from? Darwinism will go shipwreck without an answer to this question.
Point 11.
Natural selection might explain the origin of new species, depending on how the term species is defined. However, a new population of creatures that has lost its will or ability to reproduce with its parent population (i.e., a new species), is no problem for the creationist. It would represent a loss of function, not a gain. Such change does nothing to establish the truth of macroevolution, for the traits that typify the new population were also a part of the original gene pool. Nothing new is created, in other words.
Point 12.
Creationists are not afraid to discuss the evidence for speciation. So what if foxes, wolves and coyotes are species derived from a common genetic dog stock? Does this do anything to justify the extrapolation that dogs are descended from tapeworms?
Point 13.
At the risk of being impudent, I would challenge Rennie with the following. Show me a single sedimentary rock outcrop with a succession of fossil creatures, in which an organism in the lower part can be traced through perhaps a half-dozen intermediates into a fundamentally different kind of creature in the upper part. Given the billions of fossils discovered, this should not be an overbearing request if macroevolution is really true. Archeopteryx and the other examples of intermediate forms cited by Rennie are convincing only to the already convinced, but not to a skeptic.
Point 14.
William Paley may have actually stated, "the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine intervention". Paley was widely respected at the time, and he could have afforded to use the word "must". How refreshing it would be to hear so much as a "maybe" out of one of today’s PBS nature programs.
Point 15.
It is my understanding that Behe is not opposed in principle to macroevolution, and so it is wrong for Rennie to portray him in militant terms. Rather, Behe seems to argue his case for "irreducible complexity" in the same way as Sherlock Holmes, who once said, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.". In suggesting intelligent design, Behe is certainly guilty of violating the tenet of methodological naturalism. But is he in violation of truth?
In conclusion, Rennie rails on his opponents by saying, "intelligent design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand" I don’t think so. Rather they invoke the necessity of a sufficient cause. The identity of that "cause" can be discussed on another day.
http://www.icr.org/news/rennie.html
Is God Falsifiable? if not, then he does not belong in a science classroom. along with truth, beauty and other such niceties.Dayton said:15 Answers to Evolutionist Nonsense
(emphasis mine)
Rennie is wrong in many of his opening statements. He accuses Philip Johnson of wanting to inject "God" into the science classroom. Phil is interested in injecting truth into the classroom; yes, even the kind that questions Darwinism. If that truth leads some to wonder about God, then so be it.
Rennies overall approach is a two-faced one. His "fact of evolution" falls directly out of his faith in methodological naturalism. Can there be any observation that contradicts the fact of evolution? No, his faith forbids the thought. So when he claims that evolution also sits atop a huge pyramid of observational evidence, he should forgive readers like me who question his objectivity.
because a prior design would predict things that are not seen. the algorithmic design predicts things too, and these things are seen. of course the prior intelligent designer could be a liar. if so, this does not paint God in a good light.Point 1.
The fact of evolution? I like facts. Show me.
If Rennie is really unafraid of "indirect evidence" as he claims, then why object to the possibility of an "intelligence" behind biology? The connection between information and intelligence is well documented, as even Carl Sagan, the inspirer for the SETI Project, acknowledged. Yet the origin of the information on the DNA molecule is without a naturalistic explanation. Why not regard it as "indirect evidence" for an intelligent source?
the tired microevoltion vs macroevolution argument. there is plenty of fossil evidence and so on behind the development of birds.Point 2.
Natural selection, a concept first expressed by a creationist who preceded Darwin, really does occur. So what? Does variation in beak size among a population of finches really tell us anything about the origin of the finch in the first place? Rennie does not answer this question.
a repitition of point 2, with dogs and humans replacinf finches.Point 3.
Microevolution. Big deal. You breed dogs and get different varieties of dog. When has this ever been an issue for creationists? But try to turn a fish into a human ("macroevolution") and youve got some real problems. Why not discuss them?
Rennie claims a "succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern". When I look at the fossil record I see apes (including australopithocines) and I see humans (including all in the genus Homo, that are hardly more diverse than todays tribes), side-by-side, in deposits that are embarrassingly "old" [3] for the evolutionist. To the uninitiated, it looks a lot like apes have always been apes, and people, people.
this is conspiriacy theory talk. If there was any real empirical evidence against evolution it would have come to light by now. it has not. scientists are often willing to accept that they are wrong... sometimes not often enough, but if they weren't, we wouldn't have Quantum Mechanics and modern day physics.Point 4.
The reason creation scientists dont submit papers on Creation Science to most scientific journals is the same reason black-skinned people dont attend KKK meetings. They are not welcome and they know it. Rennie also knows that he will quickly flag for rejection any draft to Scientific American that so much as questions the sufficiency of natural causes in the origin of the entire universe. Will Rennie deny this? He seems to admit as much.
Point 6.
Rennie does Darwin an injustice. His book had more to say about competition and obsolescence than about "splinter groups". New creatures arise, in part because old ones die out due to obsolescence, according to his theory. So, if it is true that greater cleverness had something to do with Homo out-competing the apes for a given food supply, then the question of why there are still apes is not such a stupid one. (Note: Rennie uses "monkeys" to make his straw man easier to knock down).
Point 7.
It is arbitrary for Rennie to throw up his hands regarding the origin of life, and to be dogmatic regarding the "fact" of macroevolution. Why abandon so quickly the tenet of methodological naturalism? The reason is plain. Naturalists frequently abandon their philosophy at this point, because they themselves know the shabbiness of the "just so" stories of how life arose from non-living chemicals. Rennie, poor chap, is no exception.
Point 8.
Rennie makes a masterfully unsupported statement, "As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times". If he could produce one example of this, he could silence all creationists very easily.
To claim that natural selection is governed by something other than chance is to suggest it is somehow a directed process. What shadowy entity would he propose? "Selective forces" are ultimately subject to either chance or intelligence. Rennie cant have it both ways.
His Shakespeare-writing computer program that "generated phrases randomly" did so by "preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed". That can only be done if the computer is first programmed to recognize "correctly placed" letters. His computer is rigged, in other words. Evolution must operate without the benefit of such an intelligent programmer.
abiogenesis argument again. the reason mineral crystals grow, is not repetition of symmetry, it is what is energetically favourable. this is the reason that there are such things as flaws and dislocations in crystals, because the energy favourability is not a perfect process. when proteins fold, they fold into the most energetically favourable shape (hence why all proteins of a given type fold into the same shape from a long string of amino acid) life is fundamentally, an energetically favourable process.Point 9.
Mineral crystals grow by mere repetition of the symmetry that already exists at the molecular level. This involves no new information. Brute energy alone cannot produce a mousetrap, because, unlike a snowflake, a mousetrap contains purposeful information. So do all organisms. Rennie does not address how information can arise in a non-intelligent way. He could convince a lot of creationists if he could.
the ability of bacteria to eat nylon. now nylon never existed before humans, so it really is a case of adapting to a changing environment.Point 10.
"Biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations". Since when has this been contested? Show me one mutation that has ever introduced an innovative design change into an organism that actually benefited the organism. Now that would be a change worth talking about, but such a thing is unheard of in biology today. The mixing and matching of Hox genes does nothing to bring about the kind of net information increase needed to drive evolution. Where does the needed information come from? Darwinism will go shipwreck without an answer to this question.
I fail to see this conclusion.Point 11.
Natural selection might explain the origin of new species, depending on how the term species is defined. However, a new population of creatures that has lost its will or ability to reproduce with its parent population (i.e., a new species), is no problem for the creationist. It would represent a loss of function, not a gain. Such change does nothing to establish the truth of macroevolution, for the traits that typify the new population were also a part of the original gene pool. Nothing new is created, in other words.
repetition of macroevolution argument again, with the introduction of a pointlessly large gap between species that followed two entirely different branches from a very very very old common ancestor.Point 12.
Creationists are not afraid to discuss the evidence for speciation. So what if foxes, wolves and coyotes are species derived from a common genetic dog stock? Does this do anything to justify the extrapolation that dogs are descended from tapeworms?
I leave the presentation of extensive evidence to others.Point 13.
At the risk of being impudent, I would challenge Rennie with the following. Show me a single sedimentary rock outcrop with a succession of fossil creatures, in which an organism in the lower part can be traced through perhaps a half-dozen intermediates into a fundamentally different kind of creature in the upper part. Given the billions of fossils discovered, this should not be an overbearing request if macroevolution is really true. Archeopteryx and the other examples of intermediate forms cited by Rennie are convincing only to the already convinced, but not to a skeptic.
how this contributes to the argument, I do not know.Point 14.
William Paley may have actually stated, "the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine intervention". Paley was widely respected at the time, and he could have afforded to use the word "must". How refreshing it would be to hear so much as a "maybe" out of one of todays PBS nature programs.
Arikay said:Especially since when someone responds you just ignore the response and find another article to copy and paste.
Jet Black said:true... I shouldn't have bothered should I?
I was actually going to include that at the end of my reply.... that he should not post lists of things like that, but focus on one thing that he can make a conversation of... the problem with that though is that the analysis of his argument will inevitably be very detailed and far more likely to expose flaws his (borrowed) reasoning.
Arikay said:Nah, its good to post a reply. Until the forums started counting those who arent registered, I never realized how many non registered readers come through here. It seems to be double the amount of normal posters. So posting information that educates them is good.
Unfortunatly our friend here seems to have a pattern, he posts an entire article taken from a site (one that normally is vague and has many unfocused points), says that it shows evolution is false. Either when questioned or when the article is refuted, he posts something along the line of "I follow god and know I am right" and then that thread is dropped for another one, with another large article from another site that we have all seen and refuted a thousand times.
I would be very interested in his own opinion, both about creationism and Evolution. But so far I have only gotten short answers that dont contain much information.
Dayton said:Point 4.
The reason creation scientists dont submit papers on Creation Science to most scientific journals is the same reason black-skinned people dont attend KKK meetings. They are not welcome and they know it. Rennie also knows that he will quickly flag for rejection any draft to Scientific American that so much as questions the sufficiency of natural causes in the origin of the entire universe. Will Rennie deny this? He seems to admit as much.
pudmuddle said:Good post, Dayton
The fact is that they are attacking you personally after presenting a few feeble arguements. They don't want posts like this because it makes people aware that there are other veiws than theirs.
samiam said:It took extraordinary evidence to believe in a round earth; It took extraordinary evidence to believe that the Earth is not the center of the universe; and, yes, it took extraordinary evidence to falsify the theory of creationism. Just about every single creationist "theory" has been refuted; everything on your list has been refuted. The list consists mainly of "I can't understand Evolution, so it must not be true!"-style arguments. A lot of creationists have a bad case of "I can't understand Evolution, so it must not be true!". Creationism is not a scientific problem; it is a psychological problem. Sam
What amuses me here is that not only is the list plagiarized from ICR, but in what I assume is a futile attempt to be clever, modeled the very title of "his" article from the Scientific American article which evicerates it.Dayton said:This is a response to the biased Scientific American article, "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense".
15 Answers to Evolutionist Nonsense
(nonsense snipped)
Nathan Poe said:What amuses me here is that not only is the list plagiarized from ICR, but in what I assume is a futile attempt to be clever, modeled the very title of "his" article from the Scientific American article which evicerates them.
The article itself is a PRATT list.
Is there an original thought to be found here?
revolutio said:No, you posted a link to the website and dropped off the author's name as well as all his bibliographic sources. Considering you made no attempt to state that it wasn't your work, I would call that plagiarism.
Arikay said:I do find it interesting that some people seem to have different ideas of honest behavior. Like bad citations of works, or just recently I was talking to another person who refused to fix a quote that was misrepresenting Dawkins.
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