Posts by jukief

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

Vidiot said:

<< Oh yeah, they don't even come up with anything really original; they just crib the others. >>

Exactly. Up through about 1960, they borrowed from crackpots like Isaac Newton Vail and George McCready Price. About 1965 they started borrowing from "The Genesis Flood" by Morris and Whitcomb. After Henry Morris formed the Institute for Creation Research they borrowed from them. About 1980 they figured out that young-earth creationists were completely whacky and dropped Morris and his young-earth creationist ideas. During the 1980s they seem to have realized that their tradition of 7,000-year creative days was the product of 3,000 years of Pagan-cum-Jewish-cum-Christian tradition and dropped it in favor of avoiding the topic altogether. In the 1990s they started borrowing from the Intelligent Design community, even personally interviewing Michael Behe. After Behe was largely discredited in the 2005 Dover ID trial, they started using ID notions without crediting any ID believers. But they not only borrow or even plagiarize creationists of all stripes, they often quote-mine them, or they don't understand what they read.

One of AlanF's favorite quotes is from a 1969 book by ex-JW Alan Rogerson ("Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of Jehovah's Witnesses," p. 116, Constable, London):

<< A long acquaintance with the literature of the Witnesses leads one to the conclusion that they live in the intellectual 'twilight zone.' That is, most of their members, even their leaders, are not well educated and not very intelligent. Whenever their literature strays onto the fields of philosophy, academic theology, science or any severe mental discipline their ideas at best mirror popular misconceptions, at worst they are completely nonsensical. >>

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

I don't mind that this thread has gone a bit off course -- they always do. I think the off-course discussion is much more important than what I brought up in the OP.

My main point is how the Watch Tower Society, in its Creation book, dishonestly quoted a scientist through TWO LEVELS of bogus sources -- a young-earth creationist and then a paranormalist. Then in 2004, after 19 years of the book being in circulation, and who knows how many complaints to the Writing Department, the Society finally corrected HALF of the misquote. My husband AlanF was appalled and amused when he found this back in 1992. JWs have been stunned when we've pointed this out. Either they deny that there was any misrepresentation, or they run away.

The Society is notorious for misrepresenting authors, and its reputation has suffered. Such constant misrepresentation is good evidence that, on some level, Watch Tower writers usually know when they're misrepresenting something, because it's almost always accompanied by weasel language designed to cover their tracks if they're called to account. AlanF has documented nearly a hundred such instances in the Creation book alone ( https://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-1-disagreements-about-evolution.html ).

ip1692 mentioned that JWs do accept evolution -- albeit sped up by a factor of a million after Noah's Flood -- but they almost never think far enough to realize it. We have yet to find any JW or other Fundamentalist who even tries to tackle this problem.

As for "The Argument from Personal Incredulity", a book reviewer for Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker" said ( http://www.2think.org/tbw.shtml ) that the argument "is where one attempts to make a case from a proposition on the basis of our inability to fathom or to explain a certain phenomenon or set of phenomena." Of course, Dawkins had in mind serious scientific disputes such as the case where creationists deny the Theory of Evolution based not on real science but on personal prejudices such as religious belief, and perhaps other cases of carefully thought disagreement.

Dawkins certainly did not have in mind silly cases like "I can't believe in Santa Claus!" He had in mind cases where solid scientific evidence points to certain conclusions, like evolution by natural selection, but some dismiss that evidence by merely saying, "I can't believe that!"

This brings up the definition of atheism. As Dawkins pointed out in "The God Delusion", one can make a scale of belief ranging from 100% certain belief in gods on one end, to 100% certain disbelief in gods on the other end. Since no one knows everything, an atheist cannot logically be 100% certain that NO gods exist. He can, however, be 99% certain of that, based on his perceived lack of evidence for the existence of any gods.

Some will argue for the old aphorism that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". But that is not always applicable, because in some cases where there ought to be evidence but there is not, that lack is certainly evidence of absence. If I claim that last week I was burned to a crisp in a house fire but survived, but you look at me and see nothing but my beautiful pink face, you'd know that I most certainly was not burned up last week. What would you attribute my claim to? Certainly not that I was burned up but somehow miraculously got better. Most likely that I was pulling your leg or deliberately lying or just plain mad. This is a case where your arguing that my skepticism about your burning is just an argument from personal incredulity would be just plain silly.

Applying all this to the argument for the existence of the Christian God, who according to the New and Old Testaments is the Supreme Creator, no one can point to any solid evidence for his existence. That he exists is certainly stated in the Bible, and is believed by billions. But without solid evidence, that is nothing but hearsay, a claim based on faith without real evidence and on religious feelings solidified mainly in early childhood. This is possibly THE classic case where absence of evidence is strong evidence for absence. It's also a case where claiming that the so-called "design of life", etc., is evidence for God and against the Theory of Evolution is just "The Argument from Personal Incredulity".

Given the complexity of the universe, one would EXPECT there to be lots of evidence of the Christian God if he really exists. But what we observe is at best faint footprints of a Creator, footprints emphasized by the Intelligent Design community and their young-earth creationist forebears, footprints claimed to be found in "the design of life" by theistic evolutionists, and so forth. But the best one can get out of this is some kind of Deistic god or creative entity -- far from the God of the Bible believed in by Christians and Jews.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence against the notion of any intelligent creator at all. What sort of intelligence would insert genetic defects like ERVs (Endogenous RetroViruses) into virtually all genomes? ERVs are the buggered remnants of viruses that at some point infected a sperm or egg cell and managed to become inserted into the genome of the fertilized egg, which then managed to survive and pass the buggered remnant into all descendants. In the line of humans and chimps, for example, there are dozens of ERVs in exactly the same place in the DNA. The farther back you go in the primate lineage, the more differences there are in what ERVs there are, and where they are. This points solidly to evolution by natural selection, which has the random component of mutations. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HBMWfRqSA for some fascinating details. An intelligent creator would have to be a very sloppy biological engineer to come up with such results over the roughly 60 million span of primate existence. Yet Genesis says that everything God made was "very good".

As for the existence of a loving God according to biblical notions (God is love), that contradicts both the description of God in the Bible itself (see Dawkins' take: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/23651-the-god-of-the-old-testament-is-arguably-the-most ), and the events of some 600 million years of the existence of multicelled life. I think that the notions are completely irreconcilable -- just as irreconcilable as my claim of being burned up last week and your observation of my fresh pink face. Predation has existed for virtually the entire 600 million years, along with the associated pain and suffering accompanying being a prey animal. A creator of such conditions obviously is unconcerned with pain and suffering by his creation, which directly flies in the face of the notion of "the God of love". That God, after all, is supposed to know when even a sparrow falls to the ground. Again, such a creator is consistent with the existence of some kind of deistic god, but not the supremely loving creator God of the Bible.

This fact, that if a creator exists, he is a monster by all human standards, is hated by most theists, because they can't resolve it logically. I've seen theists argue that animals feel no pain and cannot suffer. The classic theist rejoinders are "Who are you to question God?" and "God works in mysterious ways." These are no more than excuses and special pleadings.

I don't think anyone can rightly accuse me of using "The Argument from Personal Incredulity" in the above.

Finally, Earnest said:

<< jukief raised a very interesting question as to whether an atheist can be logically consistent in acknowledging that "the apparent perfection of organisms" is the "chief evidence of a Supreme Designer"? It would be interesting to get some views on that. >>

Here is my take: It is entirely consistent for an atheist to acknowledge that an atheist can be so logically consistent, because all she is doing is acknowledging that some people hold views at odds with science. Not exactly rocket science, that.

That said, as Richard Lewontin explained in his 1978 "Scientific American" article, and as countless writers on evolution have explained, "the apparent perfection" of organisms is an illusion on several levels. For one thing, organisms are in no sense perfect -- they are merely "good enough" in an engineering and survival sense. Think about ERVs, for example. For another, Lewontin used "apparent" to emphasize that the "design" is actually just an ILLUSION of design produced by long ages of trial and error by mutation and natural selection. He probably should have used "seeming" rather than "apparent", since the latter can be (and has been) misunderstood.

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

The above material brings up the idea of "the design of life" and "the apparent perfection of organisms" and the fact that Richard Lewontin said that "organisms have morphologies, physiologies and behaviors that appear to have been carefully and artfully designed". What did he mean by the word "appear"? Does the Creation book accurately reflect Lewontin's meaning? Clearly not.

English can be fuzzy when terms such as "design" and "appear" are used. One can refer to "the design of a snowflake" without any intention that some intelligent entity actually designed it. One can refer to the appearance of something, and imply that that appearance reflects reality or is just a seeming appearance of reality. It can be ambiguous: "John appears to be intelligent".

In his SA article, Richard Lewontin clearly argued that "the design of life" is an illusion that has been well explained by Evolution by natural selection. He also argued that the "apparent perfection" and seeming "artful design" of organisms is merely an illusion. He certainly never intended his audience to think that he himself viewed these things that way.

This brings up an interesting question: Can an atheist be logically consistent in acknowledging that "the apparent perfection of organisms" is the "chief evidence of a Supreme Designer"? Carl Sagan said that the fossil evidence "could be consistent" with that, and I agree. But I will also argue that such evidence is far from conclusive in favor of a Supreme Designer, because it basically amounts to "The Argument From Personal Incredulity".

In other words, I argue that one can accept that certain things are evidence in favor of some claim without in any way accepting, or even admitting, that such a claim is one's own view, or that it is true.

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

Earnest and cofty, your answers are spot on. Parker most certainly misrepresented Lewontin's views. But in his 2006 book, Parker fairly quoted Lewontin, because the reader was not led to believe something false about his views.

Of course, Parker had already been criticized by Lewontin and others for his 1980 quote-mining.

Parker's original quote-mining led to a series of entertaining quote-mines that involved the Watch Tower Society. Here is Parker's quote-mine again:

<< As Harvard's Richard Lewontin recently summarized it, organisms " … appear to have been carefully and artfully designed." He calls the "perfection of organisms" both a challenge to Darwinism and, on a more positive note, "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." >>

In 1982 paranormalist author Francis Hitching published a book "The Neck of the Giraffe", in which he criticized the Theory of Evolution partly by misrepresenting scientists' views. In a section "Scientific doubts" he argued that Darwinism is full of dead ends, and that Richard Lewontin supports this claim (pp. 83-84):

<< Nowhere is this more true than in the biological enigma we come to next: what Darwin called 'organs of perfection'. To quote Richard Lewontin of Harvard again, who provided the keynote admission at the beginning of this chapter that almost nothing is known about the genetic changes involved in species formation, many organisms 'appear to have been carefully and artfully designed'. It is, he says, both a challenge to Darwinism and 'the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer'. >>

It's obvious that paranormalist Francis Hitching quote-mined Lewontin's Scientific American article by way of young-earth creationist Gary Parker.

In 1985 the Watch Tower Society published its book "Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?", which used "The Neck of the Giraffe" as a major source of its argumentation, having directly quoted him thirteen times and indirectly many more times. On page 143 the Creation book quote-mined Lewontin by way of Hitching by way of Parker:

<< Zoologist Richard Lewontin said that organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully designed." He views them as "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." >>

The Watch Tower Society received a lot of flak over this bit of quote mining, via letters and emails, complaining about the misquote. My husband AlanF went into Bethel in 1996 and personally confronted the author, Harry Peloyan, about it. Peloyan was Editor-in-chief of Awake! magazine for decades. He denied any misquoting of Lewontin or any misquoting elsewhere in the book.

In 2004 the Society did a bit of revision to tone down the worst of it. Compare the pre-2004 version of Creation above, with the post-2004 version:

<< Evolutionist Richard Lewontin admitted that organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully designed," so that some scientists viewed them as "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." >>

The later version corrected "he views them" to "some scientists viewed them". Of course, the quotation loses all of its punch without the misrepresentation.

Of course, it's easy to see that even the revised version misrepresents Lewontin's article by failing to point out that Lewontin's "admission" was merely a statement of what SOME 19th-century scientists believed, and that Lewontin himself rejects the view that organisms really are designed, but merely SEEM to be designed.

Some JW apologists have argued that this is unfair criticism of the Watch Tower's misrepresentations of Richard Lewontin's article in Scientific American. But here are some statements from Lewontin himself complaining about the selective quoting done by creationists such as Gary Parker of his SA article:

<< Partly through honest confusion, but also partly through a conscious attempt to confuse others, creationists have muddled the disputes about evolutionary theory with the accepted fact of evolution to claim that even scientists call evolution into question. By melding our knowledge of what has happened in evolution with our doubts about how this has happened into a single "theory of evolution," creationists hope to challenge evolution with evolutionists' own words. Sometimes creationists plunge more deeply into dishonesty by taking statements of evolutionists out of context to make them say the opposite of what was intended. For example, when, in an article on adaptation, I described the outmoded nineteenth-century belief that the perfection of creation was the best evidence of a creator, this description was taken into creationist literature as evidence for my own rejection of evolution. Such deliberate misuse of the literature of evolutionary biology, and the transparent subterfuge of passing off the Old Testament myth of creation as if it were creation "science" rather than the belief of a particular religion, has convinced most evolutionists that creationism is nothing but an ill-willed attempt to suppress truth in the interest of propping up a failing institution. But such a view badly oversimplifies the situation and misses the deep social and political roots of creationism. >> -- Laurie R. Godfrey, Scientists Confront Creationism, p. xxiv, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1983.

Lewontin also complained about the practice of misquoting scientists, in the magazine Creation/Evolution, Fall 1981, on page 35 (see pages 35-44 for more details):

<< Modern expressions of creationism and especially so-called "scientific" creationism are making extensive use of the tactic of selective quotation in order to make it appear that numerous biologists doubt the reality of evolution. The creationists take advantage of the fact that evolutionary biology is a living science containing disagreements about certain details of the evolutionary process by taking quotations about such details out of context in an attempt to support the creationists' antievolutionary stand. Sometimes they simply take biologists' descriptions of creationism and then ascribe these views to the biologists themselves! These patently dishonest practices of misquotation give us a right to question even the sincerity of creationists. >>

My husband tells me that, when he was researching the above quote-mining back in 1992, he came to realize the level of incompetence of the entire creationist community, especially of the Watch Tower's Writing Department.

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

Carl Sagan's remark brings up a related instance. In 1978 evolutionary zoologist Richard Lewontin wrote a Scientific American article "Adaptation" ( https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwju752x5vHYAhVC-mMKHbJhBG0QFggpMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdynamics.org%2F~altenber%2FLIBRARY%2FREPRINTS%2FLewontin_Adaptation.1978.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2ZNdeinrKEjSk8hpWf9RcZ ). On the first page he wrote:

<< The manifest fit between organisms and their environment is a major outcome of evolution. . .

The theory about the history of life that is now generally accepted, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, is meant to explain two different aspects of the appearance of the living world: diversity and fitness. . . By the time Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 it was widely (if not universally) held that species had evolved from one another, but no plausible mechanism for such evolution had been proposed. Darwin's solution to the problem was that small heritable variations among individuals within a species become the basis of large differences between species. . .

Life forms are more than simply multiple and diverse, however. Organisms fit remarkably well into the external world in which they live. They have morphologies, physiologies and behaviors that appear to have been carefully and artfully designed to enable each organism to appropriate the world around it for its own life.

It was the marvelous fit of organisms to the environment, much more than the great diversity of forms, that was the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer. Darwin realized that if a naturalistic theory of evolution was to be successful, it would have to explain the apparent perfection of organisms and not simply their variation. . .

These "organs of extreme perfection" were only the most extreme case of a more general phenomenon: adaptation. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was meant to solve both the problem of the origin of diversity and the problem of the origin of adaptation at one stroke. Perfect organs were a difficulty of the theory not in that natural selection could not account for them but rather in that they were its most rigorous test, since on the face of it they seemed the best intuitive demonstration that a divine artificer was at work. >>

A couple of years later the young-earth creationist author Gary Parker wrote an article in a creationist publication where he referenced Lewontin's Scientific American article:

<< As Harvard's Richard Lewontin recently summarized it, organisms ". . . appear to have been carefully and artfully designed." He calls the "perfection of organisms" both a challenge to Darwinism and, on a more positive note, "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." >>

My question is: Did Parker fairly quote Lewontin, or did he quote-mine Lewontin?

Please explain your answer.

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

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.

131

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

by jukief in

by evolution or by creation?

"the bible is a myth" and "evolution is true".

jukief

Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?

Some people claim that JWs reject the Theory of Evolution in favor of the Bible's creation account in Genesis.

But is that really true?

Note these frank admissions in Watch Tower publications:

"Scientists have proved evolution to be true." -- Answers to 10 Questions Young People Ask (2016) p. 27

"Evolution is a fact." -- Answers to 10 Questions Young People Ask Work, Volume 2 (2016) p. 27; W13 10/15 p. 11; “Bearing Thorough Witness” About God’s Kingdom (2009) p. 141; G 9/06 p. 22; W04 10/1 p. 10; g90 1/22 pp. 8-10; g87 7/22 p. 10; Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation? (1985) pp. 26, 180, 181; G74 9/22 p. 26

"Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun." -- G 9/06 p. 13; Was Life Created? (2010) p. 18

"Evolution is as much a fact as the existence of gravity." -- Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation? (1985) p. 181

"Evolution is a fact; God is a myth." G90 1/22 p.11

"Evolution is a fact. It no longer needs to be proved. No competent scientist doubts it. All educated people believe it. Only the ignorant reject it." G87 1/22 p. 10

"There’s no question that evolution is a fact. We see examples of it every day. No responsible person questions it. It’s as much a fact as gravity and atoms!" -- G74 9/22 p. 17

"The Bible is a myth" and "evolution is true". -- W75 7/15 p. 443; W71 1/15 p. 48; G70 4/22 p. 3

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"The theory of evolution is true". -- The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking (2010) p. 9

85

My letter to Bethel about the flood

by Cornbread in

i've decided to go full public with a new username on this forum.

it's been almost a decade since i've been out and i don't care at this point who knows.

that being said, here's a letter that i'm mailing to bethel.

jukief

Cornbread,

Your plight is similar to what my husband experienced beginning more than 40 years ago. While in college, he tried to write an essay defending the reality of Noah's flood, but when he researched the Society's references in its various publications, he found mostly a series of arguments grossly ignorant of science, and even outright misrepresentations of the references. He eventually did much more research, including on ice cores, coming to the same conclusions you did. You can find the results of his research here: http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-1-general-description-of-flood.html

Don't expect an answer from the Society. They're not into admitting the truth.

Juliann

11

Does threatening to sue the individual elders really work?

by alfredjones100 in

does threatening to sue the individual elders for deformation of character really work in preventing being disfellowshiped?.

any actual experiences?.

jukief

It worked for my husband. They never disfellowshipped him, and they were sure getting ready to.

10

Brooklyn Bethel in the 1940 census

by dissonance_resolved in

jw
friends

prompted by another post, i looked up 124 columbia heights in the 1940 census.

a few interesting things: all occupants are listed as having the profession of "sell- religious books," except rutherford who is listed as an "editor.

" odd that they aren't listed as ministers.. also, all the educational levels of the occupants were provided- many had not even graduated high school and some not even grammar school.

jukief

My hubby's dad was at Bethel then. I never would have thought to look at the census. Thanks for mentioning this!