In the thread "The Skeptic's Worst Nightmare" ( http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/96102/2.ashx ) Shining One gave a link ( http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=2464 ) to an ICR (Institute for Creation Research) artcle titled "Evolution--Impossible to Embarass Its Believers" by the ICR's founder Henry Morris. The article is a typical YEC diatribe against all of science, and contains a full complement of the usual graspings at straws and misrepresentations. Here is a critique of it.
Morris starts off with a logical red herring, setting the tone for the rest of his silly article:
Creationists have often pointed out that evolution is unscientific because it can never be proved by science to be true.
This is a logical red herring, because nothing can be proved by science to be true. Rather, all scientific theories are provisional, since new information might come to light that requires a theory to be revised or even scrapped. As Stephen Jay Gould said, with regard to theories that some people view as fact:
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
It is not happening at present
Demonstrably false. Evolution has demonstrably occurred in the very recent past. When Europeans began to colonize the Americas, a certain species of fruit fly that lives and mates exclusively on the fruit of mulberry trees hitched a ride to North America. Over the next several hundred years, this fruit fly split into two species, one continuing to live on mulberries, and the other on apple trees. That this is a new species is proved by the fact that the two species do not interbreed in the wild, breed at different times of the year, and keep to their respective fruit trees even in areas where plenty of mulberry and apple trees exist in the same place.
Furthermore, fruit flies have radiated from one or a few original species to more than 800 in a few million years in the Hawaiian Islands. Young-Earth Creationists have no choice but to invoke radically speeded up evolution to account for them. In perhaps a million years, cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria in Africa have radiated from a few to hundreds of species, all with quite different body plans and life styles. There are plenty of other examples of demonstrably recent evolution.
In view of these facts, Morris' claim, therefore, is a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.
and without a time machine, they can never be sure that it happened in the past.
The same thing applies to things like events described in the Bible. Talk about hypocrisy!
Regardless of how much an organism looks like it had been intelligently designed, evolutionists (without even sounding embarrassed) will insist that natural selection has the power to make it look like it was designed, even though it wasn't.
Anything that functions in some sense -- in particular, functions by interacting with an environment -- is going to look designed, by ordinary human standards. That doesn't mean it was actually designed by some creative intelligence. An appearance of design doesn't necessarily imply design by an intelligence.
But Morris is again being hypocritical. If all life is designed, then all predators are designed. This contradicts the notion of a loving God who is so concerned with the well-being of his creation that he knows when a mere sparrow falls to the ground. A obvious conclusion from simple observation would be that this God enjoys watching his creatures suffer by being eaten.
Furthermore, no matter what fossil they find out of its accepted place in the evolutionary "record," the evolutionists can "explain" how it got there.
There are no such fossils. Morris cannot present any real examples.
The fact is, if there really were such examples, the science community would be in an uproar trying to figure out what's going on.
Of course, YECs have traditionally jumped on various supposed finds of out of place fossils before, and ended up having to eat crow. A good example is the famous Paluxy River, Texas, dinosaur tracks. Back in the 1930s, some enterprising Texans carved a few human footprints into the rock next to real dinosaur tracks, and generated some revenue by charging visitors to come on their land to see them. By and by, YECs began inisting that some of these faked footprints were real. By the 1980s, they were forced to admit the truth, but then some of them, including the ICR, began insisting that certain blurry dinosaur footprints were really human ones. But by the 1990s they were again forced to admit the truth. So it has gone with every claimed example of "out of place" fossils.
The recent discovery of the intact flesh of a Tyrannosaurus rex with its "blood vessels--still flexible and elastic after 68 million years--and apparently intact cells" 1 is a case in point. It would seem impossible for such soft structures to be preserved intact even for 6800 years, but evolutionists accept it on faith.
This is yet another outright distortion. The article Morris cites, which is about a 2003 discovery, contained several disclaimers:
But don't fire up the sequencing machines just yet. Experts, and the team itself, say they won't be convinced that the original material has survived unaltered until further test results come in.
Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cautions that looks can deceive: Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in 225-million-year-old amber, but geochemical tests revealed that the nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds. Even the resilience of the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial marine organisms called graptolites have been recovered from 440-million-year-old rocks, but the original material--likely collagen--had not survived.
[The article's author Mary] Schweitzer is seeking funding for sophisticated tests that would use techniques such as mass spectroscopy and high performance liquid chromatography to check for dino tissue. As for DNA, which is less abundant and more fragile than proteins, Poinar says it's theoretically possible that some may have survived, if conditions stayed just right (preferably dry and subzero) for 68 million years. "Wouldn't it be cool?" he muses, but adds "the likelihood is probably next to none."
So what Morris claims, is in fact nothing more than an unconfirmed preliminary result. Furthermore, his statement that "intact flesh" was found is an outright distortion of what the article actually said. This is shown by the following informative comments:
Why was the soft tissue preserved? Normally, following death, the remains are destroyed through scavenging and decomposition. However, during fossilization, hard materials are replaced with minerals. Normally, bacterial enter into the center of bones through breaks or through the holes through which blood vessels and nerves pass. The soft tissue is usually destroyed within a short period of time. In this instance, the soft tissue seems to have been preserved through dehydration and sealed from the presence of water and further decomposition. Contrary to the claims of some young earth creationists, the tissue is obviously not fresh, since it exhibits coloring that is not characteristic of fresh tissue. Fresh blood vessels and connective tissue are nearly transparent (except the blood cells themselves), which is why the ostrich tissue had to be chemically stained to produce the pictures used in the article. Another difference between the ostrich tissue and T rex material was the requirement to use collagenase to release blood vessels from ostrich bone matrix. This fact indicates that much of the collagen from the T rex sample was already degraded. The primary author indicated that the bones have a distinct odor, characteristic of "embalming fluids."2 Therefore, it is possible that the bones landed in some chemical stew that preserved the soft tissue inside from decomposition. For example, peat bogs produce chemicals that have preserved human bodies for thousands of years. It is likely that some similar rare process has preserved the soft tissue inside some T. rex bones.
Conclusion
The new study reveals that the cortical bone within T. rex femurs may, under certain conditions, retain cellular and subcellular details. Under normal conditions, fossilization replaces living material with minerals. In this case, the soft tissue was protected from degradation, possibly through some chemical process, then desiccated to prevent further changes. Upon treatment with water and dilute acid, the tissue was rehydrated, returning to an appearance similar to how it originally looked. Since no molecular studies have yet been done with the specimen, it is uncertain if the specimen contains original organic material or if the material was replaced by some mineralization or other chemical process. [ http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/dinoblood.html ]
Of course, Morris' argument is easily turned around on him:
Soft tissues have been found on fossils tens of thousands of years old, and DNA has been recovered from samples more than 300,000 years old (Stokstad 2003; Willerslev et al. 2003). If dinosaur fossils were as young as creationists claim, recovering DNA and non-bone tissues from them should be routine enough that it would not be news. [ http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC371.html ]
Since it's incredibly rare to find fossils in the amazingly good state of preservation that the Tyrannosaur bones in question were found, and fossils of relatively recent animals and man have been found to contain bits of soft tissue and even DNA, it follows that recent animals died under quite different circumstances from dinosaurs. Thus, the ICR's entire structure of young-earth "Flood Geology" is disproved. So, even if the Tyrannosaur fossil proves to contain somewhat intact flesh, that still doesn't prove, or even indicate, that it's only a few thousand years old, as Morris claims.
See this link for more information about YEC distortions about "fresh blood in T-Rex bones" with respect to a similar 1997 discovery:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html
Similarly, Silurian fossil ostracodes supposedly 425 million years old have been found recently in England virtually identical to their modern-day counterparts and containing "a jaw-dropping amount of detail," 2 but this discovery does not phase evolutionists. They still believe it was buried 425 million years ago!
Fossil shells virtually identical to modern ones! Whoopee! What a disproof of evolution!
The fact is, nothing in the current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution demands that organisms evolve. If an organism is extremely well adapted to its environment, then any deviation from its body plan will likely make it less able to survive. Thus it remains stable. This is a basic prediction of Darwinistic evolution, and here we find it observed.
But Morris knows all this perfectly well, so his claim here is another deliberate distortion.
Another thing: Morris fails to note what the article clearly stated: the ostracode innards were completely mineralized. This contrasts with his grasping at straws with regard to the Tyrannosaur bone he'd like to be able to claim is perfectly preserved, flesh intact. Once again we find a YEC ignoring inconvenient facts.
Morris' next paragraph is a fine piece of stupidity:
On another front, one would think that geophysicists would be embarrassed by their repeated failure to find the so-called Mohorovocic Discontinuity (except by inference from seismic waves) at the boundary between the earth's "crust" and "mantle." Since the supposed evolutionary history of the earth is theoretically related to this "Moho," scientists have been trying to confirm its existence, along with the assumed nature of the mantle, by drilling deep holes in the crust. This has been going on since the early sixties without success, the latest such attempt having failed earlier this year.
This is an extremely stupid bit of commentary for several reasons.
First, the fact that a theorized thing has not yet been found says nothing about whether it will ever be found. Science abounds with theorized things that were looked for for a long time, and eventually found. For example, black holes were theorized decades ago, but only recently was their existence confirmed, such as a huge one at the center of our galaxy. It was long theorized that planets existed around other stars, and in the 1990s the first was confirmed. Now several hundred have been reported.
Second, that a boundary between crust and mantle exists is not a mere bit of fluffy theory. We observe rocks on the surface; we observe that volcanos erupt with hot, liquid magma; we observe that continents drift with respect to one another at one to ten centimeters a year. The inescapable conclusion is: there's a boundary between the solid rock and the hot magma below. Furthermore, this boundary allows the rock-hard continents to drift over the underlying soft magma. This boundary is simply labeled the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, after the scientist who first proposed it in the 1930s.
Third, the science of plate tectonics, which goes a long way toward explaining the "supposed evolutionary history of the earth" that Morris objects to, is extremely well confirmed. Continents observably drift today, and the fit of today's continents one with the other proves that they were once all part of one great continent. The drift rates correspond extremely well with the distance the continents have drifted over hundreds of millions of years. Morris is talking out of his ass here.
The Bible long ago prophesied that it was not possible that the "heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath" (Jeremiah 31:37). Nevertheless: "Undaunted, oceanographers are ready to try again." 3
This sounds a lot like the Watchtower Society's claim in a 1940s book that man would never be able to get above the atmosphere.
You'd think that Morris would have learned a lesson from the ICR's other critical failures. For example, for a couple of decades they criticized the theory of atomic physics that has to do with how the sun produces energy by hydrogen fusion. A by-product of this fusion is a massless or extremely light particle called a neutrino. Now, neutrinos are observed in physics labs to come in several varieties. The problem that the ICR pointed out was that the observed rate of the production in the sun of the particular type of neutrino that theory predicted was too small by a significant margin to correspond with the theory. So, argued Morris and company, this showed that all theories of physics that had to do with stellar evolution should be rejected. But in the last couple of years, physicists found experimentally that the type of neutrino emitted by the sun could easily transform into another type of neutrino. And guess what! When physicists looked for this other type of neutrino coming from the sun, they found exactly the right amount to account for the other "missing" type. So Morris and company have had to eat crow.
Morris likely would have made similar complaints about the state of science in 1900, when there were many phenomena that simply could not be accurately described by current theories. But in 1905, Einstein introduced the Special Theory of Relativity, which revolutionized physics and explained a great deal. And Morris would have eaten crow.
On the heavenly front, the same unembarrassed evolutionary cosmologists will evidently continue trying to "explain" the evolutionary history of the cosmos. Theories abound, and change frequently, the rising favorite being "string theory," involving multiple dimensions of space and even multiple universes of space/time. However, as one evolutionary astrophysicist admits: ". . . the universe unveiled by the hellishly complex mathematics of super-string theory is not even remotely close to what string theorists anticipated." 4
This is supposed to be an embarassment? Talk about grasping at straws!
This is precisely how science works. People make observations, and then they try to tie them together with general theories. Some turn out right and some wrong.
Theoretical physics is really in its infancy, and naturally there are a huge number of things left to be explained. Does that mean they never will? Of course not. So Morris' implication is simply a stupid grasping at straws.
Another cosmologist insists, however, that "string theory possesses a virtue for which many physicists are willing to accept these seeming absurdities: It can reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity." 5 But then he admits that "the theory itself continues to grow more complicated and mysterious." 6
So what? Any scientist with scientific common sense understands perfectly that these mathematical theories might or might not have anything to do with reality. Physicists are a very long way from a fundamental "theory of everything". Furthermore, on occasion a theory that contains a number of "seeming absurdities" can actually be incredibly powerful in explaining and predicting physical phenomena. Quantum mechanics, for example, sounds wildly absurd in many ways, but it's among the most successful theories of all time in terms of predicting and explaining how atomic-scale particles behave. The same goes for Einstein's theory of relativity.
Its main virtue is that it can explain the cosmos without God.
As if God couldn't design the universe according to a complex mathematical theory! LOL!
As Gardner insists, ". . . the fundamental credo of science is that deep mysteries like these will someday, if only in the distant future, succumb to rational explanation." 7
That's simply the positive thinking of scientists. And they have every right to be positive, given their track record.
And what about human evolution? A recent statistical study of the genetics of human populations revealed,
<<the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. . . . In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models. 8>>
As is so typical of Morris and the generations of YECs he taught, this quotation is completely out of context and therefore completely misleading. The article's abstract actually said:
If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. However, the random mating model ignores essential aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups.
So there are a number of problems with a simplified model of population growth, which the article's authors actually deal with in some detail, but which Morris completely ignores.
A careful read of the article shows that the growth model presented is a purely mathematical model based on a number of fairly reasonable assumptions, but admittedly cannot account for every actual historical occurence.
But the main problem for Morris' use of this article is that, being a purely mathematical model, and being adjusted to more or less fit today's observed population distribution around the world, it applies equally well to either a creationist or an evolutionist view of population growth and human ancestry. In other words, the article has nothing whatsoever to say in support of or against creation or evolution. Thus, Morris' use of it is another irrelevant red herring.
The writer avoids mentioning the "Adam and Eve" explanation, of course.
Of course. Religious myth has no place in science.
Nevertheless, he also notes that: "And a few thousand years before that, . . . the ancestors of everyone on the earth today were exactly the same." 9
As I mentioned above, all of this applies equally well to YEC and to evolutionary claims.
One would think that analyses such as this, made by evolutionists on the real data of genetics and human populations would be embarrassing to evolutionists who commonly postulate an approximately million-year history of human existence on earth.
Actually, Morris' total missing of the point here should be extremely embarassing for him. But Morris has embarked upon far more embarassing journeys in times past, so why should one expect anything different now?
But even if there were people living all during the past million years, how come they all kept the same genetic makeup until just a few thousand years ago?
The fact is that they didn't. The fossil record of man during the past couple of million years shows a gradual progression from early Homo erectus forms, to laters forms, to Archaic Homo sapiens forms, to several branches including Neandertals and modern Homo sapiens.
The Biblical record would seem at least relevant to the discussion!
What record? The Bible has nothing whatsoever to say about the form of human ancestors.
Then there are the recent research findings by ICR scientists and others working on the RATE project that have uncovered many new evidences that the earth is young, including the ubiquitous presence of radiocarbon in coal beds and even in diamonds.
Given the abysmal track record of "ICR scientists" in general, and the fact that they've published nothing at all in the regular literature to date, I suspect that this is completely bogus. You can bet that, if radiocarbon really has been found in diamonds and coal beds, normal geologists would be beside themselves trying to figure it out.
For years, of course, creationists have been pointing out that no real evolution has taken place during the several thousand years of human history
Which false claim ignores the facts about recent fruit fly evolution and other facts that I pointed out above.
and also that there are no legitimate series of transitional forms in the fossil beds of the past,
Note that little weasel word "legitimate". All it means is, "We don't accept what real scientists say." The fact is that literally hundreds of "transitional forms" have been described in regular scientific literature. Online references are easy to find, such as "The Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ" here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html .
plus the negative effects of mutations and the testimony of the laws of thermodynamics
No normal scientists agree with the ICR's, um, unique claims about "the laws of thermodynamics". Visit the talkorigins.org website and do a bit of searching to find lots of commentary.
--all of which seem to make any macroevolution extremely unlikely, if not impossible.
Except that in the ICR's view, radically rapid macroevolution since Noah's Flood has resulted in millions of species of beetles, most of which are quite different from one another. I could fill pages with other examples, but it isn't necessary.
Yet evolutionists continue to control the scientific and education establishments,
As opposed to American Fundamentalist religion like the Evangelical Baptists that Morris is a member of controlling it. That separation is a fundamental precept of the American Constitution. Obviously, Morris wants to go back to the days of the Puritans, when religion could dictate the life and death of any citizen.
insisting that total evolution is a scientific fact and creation is religion,
What? Creation isn't religion? Since when?
so only evolution can be allowed to be taught in public schools and colleges. They gloat over the alleged fact that "an unprecedented 14 percent of Americans tell pollsters that they are atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, or simply disinterested in religion." 10 Even if this figure is assumed to be correct, it still leaves 86% of the population who believe in God.
Sure. And near 50% of the population believes in astrology. And plenty of them are Christians.
And they express surprise that so many people have somehow come to believe in creation despite all the brainwashing in schools.
I still express surprise that so many people have somehow come to believe in astrology despite all the brainwashing in schools.
The point is: the fact that a lot of ignorant people believe something doesn't make it so.
The editor-in-chief of the premier magazine Science, recently moaned in a lead editorial that:
<<Alternatives to the teaching of biological evolution are now being debated in no fewer than 40 states. Worse, evolution is not the only science under such challenge. In several school districts, geology materials are being rewritten because their dates for Earth's age are inconsistent with scripture (too old). 11>>
The editor of Science should moan about such stupidities. Even a great many old-earth creationists have written excellent debunkings of YEC claims.
Next we find Morris indulging abundantly in that well-known YEC practice of complete misrepresentation of a source reference. This should be familiar to all ex-JWs, who know how well the Watchtower Society routinely misrepresents sources to "prove" some point. In the following commentary we find Morris falsely claiming that an "evolutionist" made some telling comments against the theory of evolution.
A few evolutionists do seem to have at least a glimpse of why we object to their insistence that evolution be considered a scientifically proven fact. The following commentary on evolutionary science was in a recent issue of Geotimes.
<<Evolutionists have "Physics Envy." They tell the public that the science behind evolution is the same science that sent people to the moon and cures diseases. It's not.
The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic. Because evolution took place in history, its scientific investigations are after the fact--no testing, no observations, no repeatability, no falsification, nothing at all like physics. . . . I think this is what the public discerns--that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science. 12>>
Morris reference "12" (John Chaikowsky, "Geology v. Physics," Geotimes (vol. 50, April 2005), p. 6) suggests that the reference is to an article written by evolutionist John Chaikowsky, who is somehow a maverick in claiming that his evolutionist colleagues have a sort of inferiority complex -- are suffering from "Physics Envy" and as a result are somehow deceiving the public. But a check of the reference shows that this bit from Chaikowsky is just a letter to the editor of Geotimes, published in the "Letters" section along with other letters, under the subtitle "Geology v. physics" and with no other letters on the topic. Chaikowsky is nothing more or less than a random person who wrote a letter to the editor, and has no apparent credentials in science. Anyone at all could write such a letter. Here is the letter in full:
<<Chuck Berkstresser in his January 2005 letter laments that the teaching of macroevolution (evolution) has experienced a setback in the last two decades because the creationists and intelligent designers have pretty much won the hearts and minds of the public. He wonders how evolutionists can convince the public that "scientific theories are determined in a manner different and more rationally than other theories."
I've heard this same complaint from physicists and chemists leveled at the evolutionists. Evolutionists have "Physics Envy." They tell the public that the science behind evolution is the same science that sent people to the moon and cures diseases. It's not.
The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic. Because evolution took place in history, its scientific investigations are after the fact -- no observations, no testing, no repeatability, no falsification, nothing at all like physics. They are like the people on CSI, only the crime scene is much older.
I think this is what the public discerns -- that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science.>>
Here is the letter from the earlier issue of Geotimes to which Chaikowsky objects, again from the "Letters" section, under the subtitle "Creationism, again" (Geotimes, vol. 50, January 2005, p. 6):
<<More than two decades ago, the late Walter Kupsch and I wrote letters, which were published in Geotimes, about creationists seeking equality with scientists. Our effort brought out quite a few letters in response -- some argumentative, some supportive, some combative. So here we are in the 21st century, besieged by creationists, intelligent designers and other anti-scientific types.
It seems to me that it is not so much that the scientific community has failed; it is that some religious groups have their own interpretation of (pseudo) science, and have managed to be dominant in school board elections, and in some cases, gubernatorial elections, thus affecting state school policy.
So it seems overall that we have had a set back. How can we convince the otherwise rational public that scientific theories are determined in a manner different and more rationally than other theories?
Charles F. (Chuck) Berkstresser>>
It should be painfully obvious that Chaikowsky's objections are nothing more than stupid. First, any scientist who claimed that evolutionists have "physics envy" because their science is forensic rather than empirical would be drummed out of the science community for gross incompetence. Second, forensic science is indeed a proper science, and has all the usuall trappings of science including observations, testing, repeatability and falsification -- all within the limitations of the discipline. Forensic science is the very basis of much of the criminal justice system, and so to dismiss it as this moron Chaikowsky does is to dismiss the entire criminal justice system. This system regularly sends people to jail, and even executes them in the U.S., so it's obvious that a great many of the very people who Chaikowsky claims object to "forensic science" as opposed to "physics" go along in principle with this lamentable forensic-style science.
Next, Morris goes on to another ridiculously stupid misrepresentation:
Another evolutionist makes an interesting admission. He says: "Contrary to their public image, scientists are normal, flawed human beings." 13 They are as capable of prejudice, covetousness, pride, deceitfulness, etc., as anyone.
First, such a statement, taken by itself, is trivially true, and therefore doesn't say much of anything. "Scientists are human." Duh. The standard Hollywood stereotypical image of a scientist is rapidly fading.
Second, Morris' citation again suggests something far more than the reality warrants. His citation suggests that an article titled "Conduct Unbecoming" was written in the science journal American Scientist by one David Weatherall, showing why scientists ought not to be trusted because, after all, they're only flawed human beings. I'll leave the unwinding of such "logic" to the reader. Suffice to say that, when the same logic is applied to religious belief, such as is espoused by Morris and others of his ilk, we have the same result: Christians are as capable of prejudice, covetousness, pride, deceitfulness, etc., as anyone. Does that really tell us anything? Of course not. No more does Morris' citation really tell us anything.
Third, Morris fails to inform his readers that Weatherall's comments are actually part of a book review of the book The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science by Horace Freeland. Weatherall variously praises and castigates Freeland's writing in the review, as is perfectly normal. Naturally, fraud in any human endeavor is something we all should be horrified about, but because humans are humans, fraud is guaranteed to occur. Just as we see with this most righteous Henry Morris, who is not above committing scholastic fraud in order to promulgate his religious ideas.
So, what does Weatherall actually say? This:
Contrary to their public image, scientists are normal, flawed human beings. It should come as no suprise, therefore, that from time to time dishonest scientists appear on the scene. However, the spate of reports of cases of scientific fraud in the United States that hit the headlines in the 1980s, culminating in the much-publicized affair involving a collaborator of Nobel laureate David Baltimore, suggested that science was suffering from a veritable crime wave. Hunting down scientific misconduct became a major pastime, and it appeared that even the great names of the past -- Newton, Mendel, Darwin, Pasteur and Freud, for example -- had not been above manipulating their data when it suited them.
Weatherall goes on to describe how a variety of pressures -- the huge expansion in the late 20th century of all forms of scientific endeavor, competition for government resources, competition for funding, pressure from corporate interests, pressure from, say, pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers on government officials, and a variety of other pressures, sometimes leads to outright fraud. We have only to look at the track record of political pressure brought by the present Bush administration to see how this works out in real life.
What does all of this have to do with the subject of evolution? Nothing. And that's just the point: Morris' quotation is entirely irrelevant to the subject upon which he writes. But because he sticks it in there, as if it has relevance, he's lying to his readers.
Evolutionists can't seem to comprehend why most Americans still believe in God, creation, and the Bible, despite having the "fact" of evolution dogmatically taught to them throughout their school years. The fact is that there is an abundance of objective evidence that the Bible really is the Word of God.
Where is that evidence?
It is not just a book of religion as they argue, but a book of factual history.
Uh huh. Like the fact of a global "Noah's Flood" which has zero facts to back it up.
Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead
As proved by -- of all things -- the Bible!
and Jesus Christ really did confirm the truth of the Biblical account of origins.
As proved by -- of all things -- the Bible!
Creationists do not believe in the Bible just because they are ignorant of science.
True enough. Creationists, by and large, are demonstrably ignorant of science. But there are plenty of other reasons they believe in the Bible. The most common one is that they learned such belief at their mother's knee. That's the principle upon which fanatical Muslims blow themselves up in the name of defeating "the infidel" and getting their reward as martyrs for Allah. The fact is that the overriding factor in adult belief is what one was taught as a child. And because, as a culture, Americans tend toward religiosity and, unfortunately, sometimes fanaticism, as exemplified by the quintessential American religious cults known as Evangelical Fundamentalists and Jehovah's Witnesses, such extreme religiosity is passed from generation to generation, just as a variety of other silly beliefs are, such as astrology.
Given the above, I think we can safely say that Morris' exposition ought to be titled, "The Young-Earth Creationist's Nightmare". It's obviously impossible to embarass dishonest people like Henry Morris with facts; they really know the facts but choose to misrepresent them.
What I truly cannot understand is how people like the JWs, and like many YECS, think they can get away with such blatant dishonesty with the God they claim to worship. After all, the Bible clearly states:
Are you defending God by means of lies and dishonest arguments? You should be impartial witnesses, but will you slant your testimony in his favor? Will you argue God’s case for him? Be careful that he doesn’t find out what you are doing! Or do you think you can fool him as easily as you fool people? No, you will be in serious trouble with him if even in your hearts you slant your testimony in his favor. Doesn’t his majesty strike terror into your heart? Does not your fear of him seize you? Your statements have about as much value as ashes. Your defense is as fragile as a clay pot. (Job 13:7-12; New Living Translation)
So let me put it to you, Rex: Are you defending God by means of lies and dishonest arguments?
It's obvious that your heros, Henry Morris and his buddies, do just that.
AlanF