david_84 said:
The same has been done by at least one evolutionist:
"I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution."-Dr. George Wald, professor emeritus of biology at Harvard, 1971 winner of Nobel Prize in biology.
("Origin, Life, and Evolution," 'Scientific American' 1978)
First, we appear to have another made up quote. The Scientific American article that Wald wrote was in 1954. It was entitled "The Origin of life" Scientific American vol. 191(2) August 1954.
In that article, Wald said
"We tell this story [about Pasteur's disproof of spontaneous generation of life] to beginning students of biology as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact it is very nearly the opposite. The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity." It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewd with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing."
This seems to have morphed into the quote you used.
Second, if we take the quote at face value, we don't have an "evolutionist" here, but an atheist. Equating those terms is a particularly silly thing to do in
this forum.
Third, by 1978 we knew that abiogenesis was
not impossible. That it was indeed possible. Wald had stated this in the 1954 article.
"The important point is that since he origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, The possible probable, And the probable virtually certain, One only has to wait: Time itself performs the miracles."
Not only did we know of time, but by 1978 Fox's work with protocells and the RNA world were supported hypotheses and Wald would have known of them.
For this I would refer to the popular argument that when Jesus fed the five thousand, the fish looked as if they had lived, been caught, died, and been placed in the basket to be distributed. Obviously, this was not the case but it's doubtful that Jesus was being dishonest by performing that miracle.
Not the same thing. The fish
were dead and looked dead. In essence what we have are photocopies of the fish. In the Appearance of Age argument we have something completely different. We have a universe that
could easily look just like what creationists say it is: young. The only reason to make it look old is to deceive us. In duplicating the fish and bread, Jesus was making copies of something that really had gone thru the process of living, being caught, and dying. Just like photocopies of a paper look like they had been originally composed, edited, and printed on a printer. But the photocopies are still copies and there is no deceit in that. The fish were copies.