Doubting Darwin

Theos have now published their final report on Darwinism in 2009. The report Doubting Darwin - Can be read here. It investigates the thinking of creationists and evolution sceptics in the UK, and is suprisingly balanced in its approach, although a bit dry at times.

There is also an interesting debate here Have we misunderstood Creationism

Paul Bickley writes; "The first myth is that there is such a thing as a movement which we can legitimately call ‘creationism’." Undoubtedly that is correct, although there are as many views amongst those who hold to evolution. Undoubtedly also there is some bitter disputes, but I would suggest mainly at the fringes. Most creationists I know seek dialogue in a respectful manner.

"The second myth is that evolution sceptics are, in the words of Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, “…anti-science…" Again quite right, most creationists are not anti-science, as even Ron Numbers has pointed out.

"The third myth is that the way to take the wind out of creationist sails is fierce rebuttal and public derision in the mode of Richard Dawkins or Harry Kroto. On the contrary, if evolution scepticism could ever be moulded into a movement, it would be due in no small measure to the galvanising effects of Dawkins’ rhetoric:" Again a good point, although the report does note that many creationists feel like a minority under attack.

"Bickley finishes with this useful statement,"If the public debate on faith and evolution is to move beyond its stale polarities, we could do worse than starting with rigorous analyses of the protagonists’ respective positions. The evolution-sceptical community is not really what reputation would make it. Listening carefully – knowing who ‘creationists’ really are and what they really think – is a first step to understanding the roots of their antagonism. In time, this understanding could undergird strategies which improve public engagement with science."

Guardian 'Comment is Free' on ID

A 'Comment is Free' item on the Guardian website has stoked a great deal of interest with over 1500 responses. Clearly the item, by former schools inspector Alistair Noble, has stirred up a hornets nest.

Intelligent design should not be excluded from the study of origins - Complex biological systems have not been explained by neo-Darwinian processes

From the blog profile "Dr Alastair Noble is an educational consultant and lay preacher, and a former teacher and research chemist."

Children in Dawkins' atheist ads are from Christian family

The Times is reporting that the happy, smiling children on an atheist ad campaign are in fact from a Christian, evangelical family. An interesting irony perhaps.

Children who front Richard Dawkins' atheist ads are evangelicals

The ad calls for children to be brought up without having religious labels placed upon them by their parents. Of course while the humanists don't want parents to instill their values within their own children, they really want children to turn into humanists without any religious belief - why else would they fund these adverts?

It is an interesting question what right parents have to instill their beliefs upon their children (I would suggest it is in fact a duty to bring children up to love and respect others, and the best basis for that is within a Christian ethos) But I would ask, what right does Dawkins and friends think they have to force their beliefs upon other people's children? Absolutely none!

While they have a pretence to respect children's freedom to believe, the humanists are engaged in a campaign to remove traces of religion from public life in Britain and America. Secular education for instance has an undercurrent of humanist beliefs. Charles F. Potter wrote in 1930 (in Humanism: A New Religion), 'Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school's meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?'

The 'program' of Dawkins and friends is not about freedom and respect at all, but about control - their control.

But perhaps the message of the smiling children in the ads, is that if you want your children to grow up happy, then bring them up in a loving Christian environment where they learn about values. About their own values and the value of others.

Darwin and school shootings

A friend has alerted me to this book and article in The Times online.

Charles Darwin and the children of the evolution

The headline makes the statement "The naturalist outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists. Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers."

Read the article here by Dennis Sewell

The book is available "The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics" (Picador, £18.99) by Dennis Sewell is available at the BooksFirst price of £17.09, including p&p.
"The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics" at www.amazon.co.uk

IVP book now advertised + some more news

IVP have now published their latest catalogue advertising the book edited by Norman Nevin

Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

Andrew Halloway has a couple of news items of note on the Lifebite website. Firstly Andrew responds to the claim that the language of Genesis does not indicate God's direct creation from nothing, then he comments on Richard Dawkins refusal to debate intelligent design proponent Steve Meyer following the publication of his new book.

God not the Creator, Says theologian --- Dawkins Dodges Design Debate
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Should Christians Embrace Evolution? – new book edited by leading geneticist

There is a new book coming out in November Should Christians Embrace Evolution? published by IVP edited by Norman C Nevin

From Amazon.co.uk

I picked this link up from Pandas Thumb it may be a bit out of date – about Norman Nevin

“Professor Norman Nevin: Norman C. Nevin is Professor of Medical Genetics, Queen’s University of Belfast and Head of the Northern Regional Genetics Service. He has held the positions of secretary, vice-president and president of the UK Clinical Genetics Society as well as serving on various national and international committees notably the Human Genetics Advisory Commission. He is a member of the European Concerted Action for congenital abnormalities. Professor Nevin was a founder member of the UK Gene Therapy Advisory Committee (GTAC) and is currently its’ chairman. His research interests have resulted in over 300 peer reviewed publications on various aspects of genetics, especially single gene disorders and congenital abnormalities.”

David Anderson has posted the Preface online

“In the face of the new atheists’ claim that evolution has rendered faith utterly redundant there is a flood tide arising that demands that Christians must embrace evolution or acknowledge that they are opposed to science. This book believes that this is a false premise. It is written to set out a clear theological framework on the relevant issues and to confront the questions that this gives rise to. It is written with a compelling conviction that science and faith are not in opposition. It is written by theologians who are committed to the authority of Scripture and to the exercise of careful exegesis. It is written by scientists who are fully persuaded of the importance of rigorous scientific investigation but who are dissatisfied with the arbitrary exclusion of possible conclusions and the failure to follow the evidence wherever it leads. This is not written for a select readership that already has expert knowledge of the subjects. It is written for ordinary men and women, who have the capacity to weigh the information, seek further clarification and draw their own conclusions.”

‘God is not the Creator’, claims academic

The Daily Telegraph has reported the work of a Dutch academic who claims the first verse of the Bible has been wrongly translated. Why we should believe a 21st century academic over traditional biblical teaching, where the writers were understood the Hebrew language much better than westerners do, I don’t know.

The paper reports Prof Ellen Van Wolde as claiming that the Hebrew verb "bara", does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate". The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth" according to her.

There is incidentally a lot of harmony with this view and pagan beliefs, where Plato’s demiurge was for instance said to have created the world out of a pre existing chaos. Traditional scholars consider that Genesis was written in a style by Moses that was diametrically opposed to the beliefs of the pagan nations that surrounded Israel at the time, thus giving ‘clear blue water’ between the work of the one true God, and the gods the other nations considered to be divine. Genesis presents an ordered creation spoken into existence at God’s direct command.

Old Testament scholar Alistair McKitterick writes; “The word 'bara' certainly does mean create, if you read it in the context of the rest of the Bible. There is a perfectly good Hebrew word for 'to divide', namely the Hiphil form of the verb 'badal', which occurs a number of times in the first chapter of Genesis. What Professor Van Wolde seems to be doing is to take the Ancient Near Eastern myths and try to squeeze the Genesis account into conformity with them. But if the only way you can do this is to distort the Genesis account, then it is a pretty good sign that the endeavour is doomed to fail.

Genesis is different to the ANE accounts. God is certainly depicted as creating everything from nothing in the first verse, and that is the kind of thing that the Biblical God does. It is much better practice to read Genesis 1 in light of John 1, where we read that through God the Logos 'all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.'

If Prof Van Wolde were interested in the Biblical teaching about creation then she should have turned to the rest of the Bible to help her understand the meanings of such words, rather than to a collection of polytheistic texts. Polytheism will forever have a problem with creation because they will always have difficulty answering the important question 'which god came first?' and 'which god made the other gods?' The Bible has no such difficulties; it is the consistent teaching of the whole of Scripture that the one holy Lord God made all things.”

Source: Richard Alleyne, God is not the Creator, claims academic, Daily Telegraph, 8th October 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6274502/God-is-not-the-Creator-claims-academic.html

Mega-hyped 'Missing Link' quietly dropped

Back in May the BBC trumpeted its ‘missing link’ fossil documentary as “the exclusive story behind a scientific discovery that could revolutionise our understanding of human evolution” – but already the ‘Ida’ fossil is being relegated to the backwaters of evolutionary discussion.

The flagship BBC1 60-minute documentary ‘Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link’, presented by David Attenborough, was shamelessly promoted as revealing a devastating discovery for evolution-doubters.

Dr Jørn Hurum, leader of the scientists analysing the lemur-like fossil, confidently asserted: “This is the first link to all humans.” The media jumped on the evolution bandwagon, proclaiming Ida as a ‘ground-breaking’ find.

Before even having seen the programme, I predicted in a report on Lifebite that once all the hoopla had died down, Ida may well turn out to be a lame duck. I said: “Be wary of the media when you see TV programmes or headlines that deal with evolution – someone might well be making a monkey out of you.”

On the eve of the broadcast, some commentators were even then beginning to have qualms about the claims for Ida. Times science writer Mark Henderson said: “I am baffled as to how they [the scientists] could stress the significance of this fossil without undertaking the requisite research to support their hypothesis.”

In July, only two months after the headline-hitting documentary, America’s leading science journal, Scientific American, let the cat out of the bag.

In ‘Weak Link: Fossil Darwinius has its 15 minutes: Skepticism about a fossil cast as a missing link in human ancestry’ (Scientific American, July 21, 2009), Kate Wong described the original hype: “In an elaborate public relations campaign in which the release of a website, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her… Ida’s significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her ‘the eighth wonder of the world,’ ‘the Holy Grail’ and ‘a Rosetta Stone’.

“The orchestration paid off, as Ida graced the front page of countless newspapers and made appearances on the morning (and evening) news programmes… And Google incorporated her image into its logo on the main search page for a day.”

Wong also described the subsequent scientific downgrading of Ida: “Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids [the line leading to humans]. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group…

“Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. ‘I am utterly convinced that Darwinius [Ida] has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,’ he declares.”

In other words, the so-called great missing link in human evolution is no more. But will BBC1 be broadcasting an hour-long documentary to rectify their mistake and let the public know that what was proclaimed as evidence of human evolution is no such thing? Will they heck.

As I said in my article in May: “Anyone who keeps a critical eye on the overblown claims of evolutionists has been here before. It’s certainly not the first time that a so-called ‘missing link’ has been hyped to the media as the holy grail of evolution, only later to be quietly debunked in the back corridors of academia away from the media’s prying eyes.”

The real story that the media should be reporting is that scientists rushed prematurely into publicising a ‘missing link’ to humans because they are desperate for proof of evolution, and came a cropper – yet again. Perhaps they need the PR to keep their evolution research budget fed, and perhaps the TV channels and newspapers are just too eager for evidence to support their own liberal, atheistic opinions.

Meanwhile, truly ground-breaking evidence for the Intelligent Design (ID) behind life is ignored by both scientists and the media.
Leading ID theorist Dr Steve Meyer has a new book out called ‘Signature in the Cell’ which is described by a review in The American Spectator as “a defining work in the discussion of life’s origins and the question of whether life is a product of unthinking matter or of an intelligent mind. For those who disagree with ID, the powerful case Meyer presents cannot be ignored in any honest debate.”

The review explains that the chance of life arising by itself, with no input from a Designer, is less than the chance of accidentally finding one atom in the entire galaxy: “It has been calculated that the mathematical chance of producing a functional protein of a modest length of 150 amino acids long, is about one in 10⁷⁴. Since the number of atoms in our galaxy may be estimated to be 10⁶⁵, it would be a billion times easier to find a single marked atom in the Milky Way by a completely random search than to produce functional proteins 150 amino acids long by chance.

“Historically, those advocating that life could arise from random combinations of molecules typically have invoked lengthy time periods that would permit such unlikely results to occur. In the 1950s, a biochemist quoted by Meyer explained that, ‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot…Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain.’

“Well, no. Life on earth, according to most scientists, developed within the first billion years or so after earth’s formation. A billion years (nine zeros) seems like a long time, but any scenario relying on chance is hopelessly, pathetically, impossibly inadequate when confronted with probabilities such as 1 out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (74 zeros for the modest protein just mentioned).”

And that’s just for one protein. There are many more needed for life to arise, and they must all work together in an extremely complex symphony to produce a cell with its own encoded information and mechanisms for reproducing itself. All by chance. All before evolution can even begin to have any influence on life.

What will it take for our media to begin to give an equal hearing to scientists who have a more plausible theory about life’s origin?

By Andrew Halloway - first published at www.lifebite.co.uk

Have we evolved to believe in God ?

The Sunday Times, September 6, 2009, 'We are born to believe in God' by Jonathan Leake and Andrew Sniderman

Apparently: "The idea has emerged from studies of the way children’s brains develop and of the workings of the brain during religious experiences. They suggest that during evolution groups of humans with religious tendencies began to benefit from their beliefs, perhaps because they tended to work together better and so stood a greater chance of survival."

Similar arguments have been made for belief in design which seems hard wired into children, even those of atheistic parents. But there is a gapping hole in this argument for evolution. It is pertintent to ask. 'If I have evolved to believe I have not evolved, then does not evolution produce in me false beliefs? In which case how can I know I have evolved?

Science clearly works best in the context that there is a creator God who has brought order to nature.
Andrew Sibley

Realism and Climate Change

Mike Hulme asks us to become more realistic about climate change. Instead of seeking to eradicate it we need to come to terms with it.

Mike Hulme in the New Scientist

"... they will not "solve" climate change. This does not imply passivity in the face of change, however. Nor does it allow us to deny that our actions on this planet are changing the climate. But it does suggest that making climate control our number one political priority might not be the most fruitful way of using the idea of climate change.

The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence."

Posted by Andrew Sibley