10/27/08

Excellent Anti - Evolution Resources

Evolution - Excellent Comprehensive Article

Creation Ministries International

Revolution Against Evolution

Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Creation Science

Anti Evolution Articles
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Posted by Ken
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13 comments:

  1. James MoreyOctober 28, 2008 at 12:28 AM

    Just to get this out there...

    You do know that evolution is foundational to all modern biology, right? That more or less all of the work we do simply could not happen were the mechanisms that drive evolution not in place?

    I'm assuming that you reject even the usual counterclaim that "microevolution" happens, but not "macroevolution," given that the "excellent comprehensive article" you posted rejects those ideas as well.

    There are no alternatives that have contributed anything to the various fields of biology. Note that the Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, and the Center for Science and Culture, as well as other pro-ID groups, do no actual science. I have never seen any bit of ID-published research that offers a testable question or a practical application.

    All ID has to offer is easily answered criticisms of evolutionary theory that have already been identified, examined, and either accepted or rejected by mainstream science.

    I know that I'm not going to convince you on points if you really think that Conservapedia has a "comprehensive" argument against evolution. The best that I can do, I think, is to tell you that ID and Creationism have contributed nothing practical to our understanding our world - regardless of whether either is true.

    Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, has led to repeatable, practical advances in medicine, botany, entomology, zoology, anthropology, and untold other fields. Again, we have achieved things that could not possible have been achieved were evolutionary theory not true.

    Until ID can produce something similar, or explain why everything happens as we would expect it to by way of evolution, you'd be better off with theistic evolution.

    If even that irks you, we need to have some words about literalism in holy texts.

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  2. zilchOctober 28, 2008 at 2:04 PM

    Ah yes, what we all need: more anti-evolution resources. I went to your first link, what you call an "excellent comprehensive argument". Well, it is comprehensive: just about every fundamentalist misunderstanding of evolutionary theory I've ever heard was represented there. But "excellent" it was not; and calling it an "argument" (in the sense of using logic to come to a conclusion) is a big stretch. One sample:

    The great intellectuals in history such as Archimedes, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Lord Kelvin did not propose an evolutionary process for a species to transform into a more complex version. Even after the theory of evolution was proposed and promoted heavily in England and Germany, most leading scientists were against the theory of evolution.

    How is this an argument against evolution? All of the men listed, with the exception of Kelvin, lived long before Darwin; I could just as well argue against the General Theory of Relativity by exactly the same reasoning. And Kelvin was undoubtedly brilliant, but he was peeved that Darwin claimed the Earth must be older than Kelvin thought it could be, based on his ideas of how long the Sun could burn. Darwin was proved right, of course: a rare example of biology scooping physics on its own territory. Kelvin also famously claimed that "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible", just seven years before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, so I wouldn't necessarily use him as a model of inerrancy.

    But that's not really the point: Darwin made mistakes too. The problem with this list of great intellectuals who didn't think up evolution is that it is an Argument from Authority: since these people are Great Authorities, so the argument goes, then what they think is right. This is indeed the way that religious people think: the Bible is, of course, the Ultimate Authority for Christians. But science doesn't work that way, and if the good people of Conservapedia want to argue against evolution, they will have to do some science, not just throw around names.

    As far as the second part of the quote goes- while it's true that most leading scientists were against evolution at first, that's not surprising: it was a revolution and required a lot of rethinking. Within twenty years, most scientists accepted it, and today, of course, most scientists continue to accept evolution. That's not because Darwin said it was so, but because it fits the facts better than the competition.

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  3. DuaneOctober 28, 2008 at 2:43 PM

    I would also add:
    http://www.creationsafaris.com/
    and their often witty news feed:
    http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm

    Duane
    http://home.people.net.au/~DuanesMind/wpblog/

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  4. ReynoldOctober 28, 2008 at 9:17 PM

    And, to add balance: Some pro-science resources.

    Panda's Thumb

    Index of Creationist Claims

    Pharyngula. For extra edification, put "Conservapedia" into the search engine of that blog.

    Come to think of it, you could put it into the search engine of the main scienceblogs site itself and see what you get.

    ScienceBlogs has other good sites too. Evolution Blog, Afarensis, ERV, etc.


    Anyway, about that first link that Mariano gave out from Conservapedia, you may want to look at where anti-semitism really came from as opposed to where they claim it did.

    I talk about that a little here

    You'll find that Darwin's book was actually banned by the Nazis, while Hitler sucked up to the religious right of his time.

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  5. ModusoperandiOctober 28, 2008 at 9:39 PM

    *Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

    *The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution

    *Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo

    *Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design

    *The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America

    *Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

    *Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

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  6. GarageDragonOctober 28, 2008 at 10:01 PM

    Nice! Some of those links support Young Earth Creationism.

    This year on March 21st a supernova was filmed just as it exploded. Well, not just as it exploded, the light had been traveling for 88 million years, so actually the event occurred in the late Triassic period.

    At that time, dinosaurs had been roaming the earth for 200 million years, and had about 23 million years left before KT.

    So, humans have been around maybe 200 thousand years. When that star exploded, dinosaurs had been around 1000 times longer.

    Or maybe not. God just spoke and whoop there it is.

    Also, he would have created the light in transit that gave the appearance of an explosion that never occurred to a star that never existed.

    Which of the two stories is more magnificent? Which is more compelling?

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  7. zilchOctober 29, 2008 at 1:17 AM

    [about the recent supernova] Also, he [God] would have created the light in transit that gave the appearance of an explosion that never occurred to a star that never existed.

    Unbeguiled, I've just been rereading Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse. He proposed exactly that idea, that the Earth was created with the appearance of great age, already in 1857, two years before the Origin of Species was published. He was widely ridiculed for this, from both scientists and clergy, for making God out to be a "trickster", but that was not how he saw it at all.

    The difference between Gosse and most modern YEC's is instructive: not only does he write clearly, but he obviously had a good understanding of science. He knew his geology from personal research and reading, he corresponded with Darwin, and it was clear to him that the evidence for an old Earth was incontrovertible. Even by the mid-nineteenth century, it was obvious, from the fossil record, known rates of deposition, and geological strata, that the Earth looked much older than the Bible allowed.

    But instead of ignoring data, cherrypicking, and inventing byzantine scenarios to reconcile appearances with Scripture, as most modern YEC's do, Gosse bit the bullet and conceded the obvious: the Earth looks very old. His explanation for God's having made it that way, less than ten thousand years ago, is that everything lives in cycles: birth and death, creation and destruction, and God had to start the Creation somewhere in these cycles; so He not only created Adam with a navel (whence the title of Gosse's book) to indicate the cycle of human life, but created the whole Earth in the middle of all of its cycles, which necessarily gave it the appearance of great age.

    A bizarre idea, to be sure; but I have to admit a grudging respect for Gosse- unlike most modern YEC's, he did not ignore science when it did not serve his purposes. It wouldn't hurt Dembski, Behe, and Johnson to read Omphalos (along with William Paley's Natural Theology) for a taste of intellectual honesty from a Creationist.

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  8. TaxandrianOctober 29, 2008 at 4:38 AM

    Bwahahahahahahaha wat a joke!

    So I went to the 'Creation Science' site from the list, and clicked on a link there called 'Test Your Faith In Evolution'.

    First two questions deal with the Big Bang and physical laws.
    Well, of course! Every serious scientist knows that the evolution theory has everything to do with the Big Bang and physical laws like gravity, electromagnetic forces and conservation of mass and energy.

    I mean, really guys...

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  9. GarageDragonOctober 29, 2008 at 4:32 PM

    Now is a good time to remind everyone of Poe's law:

    It is impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake the parody for a genuine Creationist.

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  10. ChadOctober 30, 2008 at 10:12 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. zilchNovember 1, 2008 at 10:43 AM

    *** deafening silence from the anti-evolutionists ***

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  12. GarageDragonNovember 1, 2008 at 10:18 PM

    Chad,

    The supernova exploded 88 million years ago. The distance the light traveled is 88 million light-years.

    A light-year is a unit of length (or "distance" as you put it).

    A year is a unit of time.

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  13. ChadNovember 6, 2008 at 9:22 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

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