Here we go again. I just keep taking the bait and need to stop eventually. Jerry Coyne popped up again as I was cloicking through You tube so of course I had to listen. An interview about his book faith Versus Fact, how religion and science are incompatible or something like that.
Thereare confusions in this topic that need to be sorted out eventually and I don't thinkk I'm up to it, at least not now. I certainly don't defend the kind of faith that denies a child a blood transfusion and that sort of thing, and I don't see that as a legitimate sort of faith either. Biblcial Chrisitianity is quite rational it seems to me and true faith is very appropriate to navigating its revelations, and I would never think of faith as applicable to any kind of scientific question. In fact I do accept the historical understanding that science became possible in the west because of the bible and would otherwise have never developed, and that's because the bible and the bible's God IS rational and points to a lawful physical world that can be emprically studied.
Coyne is a spokesman for evolution and that's where the trouble comes in . Evolution is simply not a science in the sense I'm useing the term here. There is really nothing that can be ointed to that amounts to a genuine factual evidence for it. Nothing about evolution can be witnessed or studied as say the law of gravity can or the fact of bacterial infection and all that sort of thing. Coyne makes no such distinctions of course. He really thinks he's talking abourt science when he talks about evolution and he really thinks the facts he pints to as evidence for it really are evidence for it.
So off we go with the first kind of evidnce he points to which is not evidence of evolution and that is the fact that there is great variation within any given species, that populations change ovcer time. this continues to amaze me. All that variation is so clearly guilt into the genome of the species and he himself must know that as it's common knowledge that it just continues to be inexplicable to me that they can think such variation can just go on producing change that change the species itself into something other than that species.
He really thinks that great degree of variation is evidence for such neverending change. And so does Richard Dawkins. But of course they neve rever try to demonstrate it, try to show how it works genetically, they just keep pointing back tot he mechanisms that are built into the genimome as if they could somehow jump ship as it were and start producing something that isn't that species. this idea is so entraenched I guess I'll just be called crazy for trying to make a case out of it. Sigh.
then there is the fossil record of course. And over and over here I keep trying to explain how that is an illusion, which will jut succeed in getting me another dismissive chortle by many. Butg again, all the fossil recod amounts to is a plausbile observation that mentally arranges the fossils in the geological column from simple to complex and declares it a fact that one evolved from the one earlier in the stack although there isn't one shred of evidence that this in fact actually ever happened. they are relying entirely on an imaginative construct that seems plusible and that is really all there is to it and yet they call it fact.
but beyond that I've also tried to point out that the sedimentary layers in which the fossils are found , thjat are taken to reprensent time periods on this planet of tens of millions of years per layer in most cases, couldn't possible ever have been formed by normal processes at any time on this earth. Getting somehoone to think this through may be impossible, I don't know. the strata re tabletop flat when they are laid down and remain so in many parts of the world where they stayed more or less intact, such as in the Grand Canyon. Tabletop flat ove may thousands of square miles, covering the entire north american continent in the case of those seen in the walls of the Grand Canyon. Think think think, there is no way this earth was ever covered by a cthick layer of one single sediment ove such a huge area tabletop flat. Think think think. One single sediment, say sand which got compressed within the geologial column over time to sandstone, or limestone formed in the same way, a single sediment, just one. Neither at the bottom of the ocean nor on the surface of the earth nor even some distance beneath the surface could such a sdedimentary layer have formed by normal means.
Change in populations isn't evidence of evolution, and neither is the fossil record. What else. Well I cover all this in other posts and don't feel up to repeating myself right now. It's just so discouraging . Yes of course you'd think if these things were true that serious scientists woudl have noticed. Of course. that's why I'm so astonished that they don't seem to have noticed. I don'tknow why nowt. And I suppose that they have some kind of answer to snap aback at me but I really don'tknow what it is because I can't see that coudld be an snwer.
Anyway. Fatih is the way Christians know God and His revelation, His word to us, we don't use to it to understand gravity or bacterial infection or atoms and molecules and so on. hThat is what empriical science is for. But the confusing thing, again, is that evolution is taken to be science when it really is not science in the sense that is amenable to that sort of empirical study.
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