Evolution as a Religion (part 5)

These are various quotes from The Journal, Summit Ministries, January 2003

"Here [in Secular Humanism] are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant."

John Dewey, A Common Faith [1934], p.87

"As Colin Russell tells it in his book Cross-Currents: Interactions Between Science and Faith, the idea of a war between science and religion is a relatively recent invention - one carefully nurtured by those who hope the victor in the conflict will be science. ... Huxley ... Though secularists, they understood very well that they were replacing one religion by another, for they described their goal as the establishment of the 'church scientific.' Huxley even referred to his scientific lectures a 'lay sermons.'"

Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science, p. 19

"one day while browsing through a library in Colorado Springs, [Julian] Huxley came across some essays by Lord Morley in which he found these words: 'The next great task of science will be to create a religion for humanity.' Huxley was challenged by this vision. He wrote, 'I was fired by sharing his conviction that science would of necessity play an essential part in framing any religion of the future worthy of the name.' Huxley took up Morley's challenge to develop a scientific religion. He called it 'Evolutionary Humanism.'"

Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopdia of Christian Apologetics, p. 346

The impossibility of Evolution

The very simplest life form ... would be comprised of 239 protein molecules, each of these containing an average of 445 amino acids of a least 20 different types and all 445 precisely slotted into position. The probability that such a simple creature would come together by chance (and none so simple has been found yet to exist) would be: 1 x 10 to the 137,915 power.

Furthermore ... each amino acid must first be activated by a specific enzyme, multiple special enzymes are required to bind messenger RNA to ribosomes before synthesis can begin or end, and with the exception of glycerin, only amino acids with left handed configurations can be used in protein synthesis. When you take all of these factors into account, the chance that a simple form of life could arise spontaneously by chance is: 1 x 10 to the 15,000,000,000 power.

Hugh Ross, Genesis One: A scientific Perspective

from The Journal by Summit Ministries, August 2006

Evolution as a Religion (part 4)

"We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scientism’s shamans who command our veneration … scientists [are] the premier mythmakers of our time. … [evolutionism is] courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and … is providing spiritual sustenance."

Michael Shermer, “The Shaman of Scientism,” Scientific American (June 2002), p. 35

Quoted from Evolutionary Arrogance
By Henry M. Morris
Back to Genesis, No. 170, February 2003
Institute for Creation Research

"The humanist left knows the only way it can create substantial numbers of new ideological and social robots eager to follow in their failed footsteps is to imprison substantial numbers of children in government schools where they are force-fed liberal ideology and lied to about sex, about history and about a whole lot of other things at taxpayer's expense".

Cal Thomas, The Colorado Springs Gazette, August 31, 1999, p. N7

Evolution as a Religion (part 3)

"My area of expertise is the clash between evolutionists and creationists, and my analysis is that we hae no simple clash between science and religion but rather between two religions."

Michael Ruse

The Evolution-Creation Struggle, p. 287

All of the above were quoted from The Struggles of Michael Ruse
By Henry M. Morris
Back to Genesis no. 206, Institute for Creation Research, February 2006

Evolution as a Religion (part 2)

Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.

O.S. Wilkins, “Evolutionary Processes,” BioEssays (vol. 22, 2000), p. 1052, Quoted by Skell (below)

… my own research with antibiotics received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. … I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: “No.”

Philip S. Skell, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?” The Scientist (vol. 19, august 29, 2005), p. 10.

Evolution as a Religion

Michael Ruse
From the prologue in his book The Evolution – Creation Struggle

"In particular, I argue that in both evolution and creation we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith – rival stories of origins, rival judgments about the meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies – pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind." (p 3)

Evolution - some notes and thoughts

What are the minimum number of amino acids required to support life?
What is the probability of their forming?

I have read that the minimum number is "20."

How many amino acids are required for the simplest of proteins? (and simplest of life forms?)
What's the probability of that chain forming? (only left hand, not right hand)

I have read that, theoretically, the simplest organism that can self-replicate would have 124 proteins of 400 amino acids each. The simplest one KNOWN has 625 proteins.


WHAT IS THE PROBABILITY OF ONE PROTEIN OF 400 LEFT HAND AMINO ACIDS FORMING if there was a "pure" mixture of left and right hand amino acids of all types?

400 - 20 = 380
400 total amino acids needed, less 20 (glycine only comes in 1 form) = 380 acids

1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 380 times is the probability of getting only left hand amino acids to combine
This equals 1/2^380 = 1/10^114

Remember, this does not take into account the information content (sequence), but only the validity of the amino acids.

To get 124 such proteins for self-replicating life, we would multiply the above result (1/10^114) 124 times.

1/10^114 * 1/10^114 * 1/10^114 (124 times) = 1/10 ^ 14,136

Folks, we've only begun to look at the improbability of proteins forming by chance and we've hit a wall. There is NO WAY that a chance of 1 in 10^14,136 could be realized.

There are 10^9 electrons in the universe. If I could pick one, color it red, release it somewhere in the universe - could you randomly pick an electron and have it be the correct one? You'd have to correctly pick the special electron 179 times in a row to equal the probability / improbability of just getting left hand amino acids to form a long chain!

The limits of evolution

The Acts & Facts of September 2008 had some interesting quotes from Werner Arber
The following are quotes from the article without added comments. (The footnote numbers have been deleted from the body of the text but are cited at the end.)

The most recent replication is by Lenski et al, who evaluated the changes in over 30,000 generations of E. coli, concluding that millions of mutations and trillions of cells were needed to produce the estimated two to three mutations required to allow cells to bring citrate into the cell under oxic conditions. This corresponds with Michael Behe's deductions that if one mutation is required to confer some advantage to an organism, this event is likely; if two are required, the likelihood is far less; but if three or more are required, the probability rapidly grows exponentially worse, from very improbable to impossible. Evolution by mutations for this reason has very clear limits.
…
Regarding major evolutionary questions, such as the origin of the information required for natural selection, Arbor wrote in his Nobel Prize speech that the answers so far proposed are often trivial or avoid the major questions facing Darwinism. He gave the example of using meaningless phrases such as "evolutionary driving forces" to explain how life evolved. As Arbor wrote, the claim that "more intensive research is needed to understand the apparent complexity of nature" is actually an admission of ignorance about the origin of complexity in the living natural world.9
…
For his study of mutations, Arber selected bacteria because they have short generation times (20 minutes vs. 20 years for humans) and therefore reproduce enormous numbers of progeny in only a few days. They also do not have sophisticated genetic repair mechanisms as do eukaryotes, allowing far more mutations to be expressed in their offspring. One of Arber's studies evaluated 10,000 generations of E. coli under various conditions, finding that "tremendous diversity accumulated within each population." The phenotypic change was very rapid for the initial 2,000 generations, but far slower for the subsequent 8,000 generations, conforming to the research on viruses that found the rate of fitness gain "decelerated significantly over time," as did the rate of nucleotide substitution.11 Arber concluded that genetic variety has definite limits, a finding carefully documented by Behe.7

This evidence indicates that the changes he observed in bacteria resulted almost solely from transposition and other types of chromosomal rearrangement, not mutations as required by macroevolution. This study provides clear evidence that the putative evolution observed in microorganisms is primarily, if not totally, a result of built-in mechanisms designed to produce genetic, and thus phenotypic, variety.

References
7.Behe, Michael. 2007. The Edge of Evolution. New York: The Free Press.
8.Arber, W. 1996. Molecular Mechanisms Promoting and Limiting Genetic Variation. In Di Castri, F. and T. Younes (eds.), Biodiversity, Science and Development: Towards a New Partnership. Wallingford, Oxon (UK): CAB International.
9.Arber, W, D. Nathans, and H. O. Smith. 1992. 1978 Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Lectures: Physiology or Medicine 1971-1980, 469-492.
10.Arber, W. 1991. Elements in Microbial Evolution. Journal of Molecular Evolution. 33: 4-12.
11. 11.Papadopoulos, D. et al. 1999. Genomic Evolution During a 10,000-Generation Experiment with Bacteria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. 96: 3807-3812.

The logical conclusion of Darwinism is a-morality

The following quotations are directly from “Darwinism: Survival without Purpose” from found in the November 2007 issue of Acts & Facts, written by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. (Bold added to highlight the a-moral nature of Evolution)


Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life...life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA...life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins
Scheff, Liam. 2007. The Dawkins Delusion. Salvo, 2:94.


Darwin "was keenly aware that admitting any purposefulness whatsoever to the question of the origin of species would put his theory of natural selection on a very slippery slope."
Turner, J. Scott. 2007. The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 206.


The ultimate purposelessness of evolution, and thus of the life that it produces, was eloquently expressed by Professor Lawrence Krauss as follows: "We're just a bit of pollution…. If you got rid of us…the universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant."
Panek, Richard. 2007. Out There. New York Times Magazine, 56.


"undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous."
Futuyma, Douglas J. 1998. Evolutionary Biology. Third Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 5.


John Alcock, an evolutionary biologist, therefore concluded that "we exist solely to propagate the genes within us."
Alcock, John. 1998. Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 16, 609.


The pleasant outward face of nature was precisely that--only an outward face. Underneath was perpetual struggle, species against species, individual against individual. Life was ruled by death...destruction was the key to reproductive success. All the theological meaning was thus stripped out by Darwin and replaced by the concept of competition. All the telos, the purpose, on which natural theologians based their ideas of perfect adaptation was redirected into Malthusian--Darwinian--struggle.
Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, A Biography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 542.


Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins recognized the purposelessness of such a system:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Dawkins, Richard. 1995. River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books, 133.

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Some of the above quotes/Evolutionists say that we only exist to pass on our genes ("selfish genes"). Speaking from within their system, that is totally wrong!

Evoltuion has NO PURPOSE. Things, animals and people exist, but they have no purpose.

If they pass on their genes, they have offspring. That could be a measure of success. However, perhaps some humans would measure success as "having climed the most mountains."

The Evolutionary system has been built on a tautology of "Survival of the Fittest." And they deem "survival" as good. But they have no philosophical basis for this belief. It is presupposed.


Another conclusion of their "Survival of the Fittest" has lead some to conclude that rape is just another method of ensuring the passing on of genes. Refer to Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. A Natural History of Rape (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999).

"Move over Archaeopteryx"

I wonder how special we'd feel the Archaeopteryx is if we could see a South American Hoatzin up-close.



It is a beautiful, striking, bird. They have claws on their wings, allowing them to climb trees just like a monkey and helping them ward off enemies.

The Hoatzin become expert swimmers before they can fly. If a predator approaches, they can fall to the swamp below their nest and swim back to shore and climb back up to the nest.

Another unique trait is that they are the only bird known to digest their food like a cow. They have two stomachs and they ferment their food.

Lastly, molecular biologists say that it is a relative to the cuckoo. Huh, and I thought it was a dinosaur!

What's on your brain?

While the brain weighs only three pounds, it can do the work of 1,000 super-computers. It doesn't need to be connected to a power source and it doesn't overheat because it is able to make its own electricity and it operates on only microvolts of power. If you brain's 10 trillion cells were placed end-to-end, they would stretch for over 100,000 miles. Your brain has the capacity to store every word of every book on a bookshelf 500 miles long.

In order for the human brain to have evolved from a simpler brain in the time that evolutionists claim it has, the brain would have had to evolve millions of new cells every year for millions of years. A.R. Wallace, co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of Natural selection, once noted that there is a huge gulf between the human brain and that of the ape. Darwin recognized what Wallace's argument did to their theory and responded, "I hope you have not murdered completely you own and my child."

Ref: DeYoung, Don, and Richard Bliss, 1990,

Thinking about the brain, ICR Impact, Feb P.1

Scientific Red Faces

Some years ago scientists discovered human bones in California buried under thick layers of mud. Scientific authorities studied the bones and dated them at about 75,000 years old. Digging deeper, scientist discovered an old United States Army button! Was the U.S. Army around 75,000 years ago, or was the dating method unreliable? More recently an archaeological team from a Japanese university discovered drawings on a cave wall on a Japanese island. This important discovery was dated at 10,000 to 13,000 years old. When one of the local residents of the island heard about the discovery, he stepped forward to confess that as a boy he often drew on the walls of the cave with charcoal.

From an ICR (Institute for Creation Research) article, they quoted from
Jackson, Wayne 1990, Scientific red faces, Reasoning from Revelation, v. II, n. 1, Jan p.3

I trust ICR, but if anyone reads this and shows that one of these is an urban legend, I will quickly remove it from this post.

Michael Ruse - Evolution is a Religion

Michael Ruse, in Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians, National Post, May 13, 2000, B-3, Ruse said:

"Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint ... the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today."


Every worldview needs to explain how we got here.
Secular humanists need a creation story and they have developed Neo Darwinian Evolution to explain how we got here.