n his useful little book
Better Thinking and Reasoning, Ron Tagliapietra gives a good introduction to how one should approach evidence and draw reasonable conclusions. But he unwittingly gives an even better example of how one can be completely misled by starting with erroneous information to reason about. There are two topics in particular, dear to the hearts of secular
humanist scientists, which have been used repeatedly to "refute"
the Bible—topics on which it is difficult to find genuine, unbiased, undistorted information. Unfortunately most Christians have not taken the trouble to search out the truth in either case, possibly because they have never realized they had been fed red herrings instead of real meat.
Evolution
The prime example is, of course, evolution, which was no more than a dubious hypothesis when
Darwin popularized it.
Here we see the great variations in dogs' sizes, their shape, and their ears yet...
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It has needed to be repeatedly propped up by half-truths, fraud and self-deception—as peddled by
Ernst Haeckel,
Teilhard de Chardin, Henry Fairfield Osborne, and numerous others—to maintain that status. It is being supported today by refusal to face hard facts of well established science such as the second law of
thermodynamics, of informatics, and astounding findings of microbiology.
....
ernican Revolution
It is even more difficult to find the truth when it comes to the second favorite topic, the story of the Copernican revolution. It was such an important milestone in the fight against the Bible that few secular humanists are keen to allow the facts to actually emerge, and all is usually so skillfully disguised by half-truths, ridicule and obfuscation that even reasonably serious scholars like Ron Tagliapietra have been kept from even suspecting the reality. We see the first red herring in the very first sentence of his discussion:
Copernicus is credited with the heliocentric theory. He proposed that the sun is the center of the solar system.
Now the solar system is a recent concept which
Copernicus never mentioned. Neither did Galileo, Ptolemy, or any of the other players in the drama. The solar system is irrelevant to the discussion. The Bible makes no mention of the solar system. It is a concept which could only be proposed once Newton's theory of gravity made such an idea possible.
The solar system can be thought about, but never actually isolated. One can write equations about it, but nothing absolute can be verified about their conclusions. One can make models of it, but they are deficient models, they ignore the vastly more massive and gravitationally important remainder of the universe.
Biblically it is foolish to talk about the "solar system" as any kind of reality since we know that Jesus is "upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). To examine the solar system and see how it would work on its own we would have to take that part of creation out of his hands. From a purely "scientific" point of view it might well collapse if it could be removed from the surrounding universe.
One can, however, convince oneself quite easily that in a purely hypothetical mathematical model of the solar system (where the rest of the universe is of necessity ignored completely) the sun would be at its center and the rest of the system, the earth included, would revolve around it.
Why is the irrelevant solar system sneaked in to the Copernican discussion at all?
Copernicus held that the sun was the center of the entire universe, as did Galileo and the rest of the protagonists.
Scientists assuredly do not believe that today. To admit that the heroes of the fight against Biblical inerrancy were wrong would not be good for the cause.
The next and equally popular deception passed off upon us comes in Tagliapietra’s next sentence:
The competing geocentric (or Ptolemaic) theory that the earth is the centre of the solar system.
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