Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution? (page 2)

sir82

The quotes are accurate but incomplete and completely out of context, not what the writers were trying to convey.

Ya think?

Evidently you were born without a functional satire-detector. Perhaps you can have one transplanted.

OneEyedJoe

Thanks, this made me happy. Given that it was the indefensible misquotes and associated outright lies in the creation book that finally broke the cult spell for me, I rather enjoyed this.

cognisonance

I agree OneEyedJoe. It was stuff like this helped wake me up:

"The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer" -- Carl Sagan

Here's the quote (emphasized), in context:

A Designer is a natural, appealing and altogether human explanation of the biological world. But, as Darwin and Wallace showed, there is another way, equally appealing, equally human, and far more compelling: natural selection, which makes the music of life more beautiful as the aeons pass.
The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the Designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament).

EverApostate

Selective Quoting from Selective Quoting !!

Darwin's, now infamous, "absurd in the highest degree" quote was the one that did it for me. The creation book used that quote (where he was using a rhetorical device to set up his explanation of how the eye could have evolved) to claim that Darwin acknowledged that the eye couldn't have been formed by an evolutionary process, but what did it for me was their statement right after the misquote - they asked "Has this problem been solved today?" and provided the unqualified answer "No." It was literally solved in the paragraph immediately following their out-of-context quote, by Darwin himself. Up to that point I was aware of a lot of things (like the 607 issue) that I could at least see their side of it being maybe sorta plausible - maybe satan had some grand conspiracy to falsify evidence or something - but in this case it was just blatant dishonesty that could not possibly be forgiven as a mistake. Once I knew that they were willing to lie in their literature, I knew they had done it time and again.

cognisonance

I agree. And I started to see their dishonesty in many places in their literature. Another one was a quote about "intellectual honesty" in the Creator book that was well intellectually dishonestly quoted...

dozy

Bizarrely , they accept evolution at a vastly faster speed than in reality as they state all animal types on earth are derived from a few species that came out of Noah's ark. For example , they claim that the over 34,000 animal species are somehow derived from maybe 1,000 or less "kinds". Evolution on this hugely accelerated scale has never been observed and there is absolutely no evidence for it.

pometerre21

Bizarrely , they accept evolution at a vastly faster speed than in reality as they state all animal types on earth are derived from a few species that came out of Noah's ark. For example , they claim that the over 34,000 animal species are somehow derived from maybe 1,000 or less "kinds". Evolution on this hugely accelerated scale has never been observed and there is absolutely no evidence for it.

This is what I wanted to say. If they believe that a global flood happened in 2370 BCE, they most certainly have to accept some mutant hyper-evolution of epic proportions. There are over 91,000 species of insects in the USA alone (Source). How these different species got to where they are today would have to have been through supernatural rates of evolution or something.

Furthermore, the animals that only exist in certain places (Amazon Rainforest, Australia, Madagascar)...how the hell did they get there and only there?? Where did Noah find the room to fit all these different animals? Why do lions, tigers, bears have sharp teeth if they were supposed to be vegetarians? Why are snakes venomous? Spiders?

Fred Franztone

What a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. The quotes are accurate but incomplete and completely out of context, not what the writers were trying to convey. However, it is convincing to those too lazy or disinterested to check the source material.

How can a person be this dense? Some people here are so messed up by this religion that they have literally no sense of humour

jukief

Most people immediately got the point of my post: it's easy to turn the tables on the Watch Tower's practice of misquoting and misrepresenting people.

The best response was from Earnest, whether that was satirical or sincere:

"What a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. The quotes are accurate but incomplete and completely out of context, not what the writers were trying to convey. However, it is convincing to those too lazy or disinterested to check the source material."

Then Earnest provided the context for each quote, proving his point that the original post misrepresented the writers' views.

I particularly liked cognisonance's citation from Carl Sagan: "The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer", cited with the implication that such a view is a startling and significant revelation from a very popular atheist. The problem with such a citation is that by far the majority of god-believers accept that view, which is often called theistic evolution. That way they get to believe in their favorite gods and claim to accept science - the best of both worlds. So citing that view as if it were a startling revelation is merely catering to the grossly ignorant.

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

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