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

Island Man said:

<< If we're to take seriously the kind of gymnastic special pleading reasoning that SBF and other apologists are using, we might as well throw logic out the door altogether and naively believe any preposterous claim no matter how contradictory. There's no position that cannot be justified - no matter how ridiculous and contradictory - with the kind of reasoning being employed by apologists. That is a huge red flag suggesting that there's something definitely wrong with their reasoning. >>

Exactly. William Lane Craig is among the most vocal of Christian apologists, and if you listen closely to what he argues, you find that much of it is special pleading. He even continues to repeat bad or false arguments that were defeated by his opponents years ago, such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

I admit to having a hard time reading the writings of such apologists, but a memorable one was Alister McGrath, a theologian who in 2007 published the book "The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the denial of the divine" in response to Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". It's not memorable for good arguments, but for its incessant, gobble-de-goop claims that to the ignorant seem to be arguments, but not to anyone who carefully parses his sentences. I read a number of paragraphs up to three times, and still could not figure out what he was trying to say. I'm a professional editor of technical material, and have often been responsible for rewriting obscure papers to make them readable. I'd be hard pressed to do that with McGrath's book. Slimboyfat's writing is similarly obscure. I've often wondered if such obscurantism is a product of thinking muddled by an emotional need to uphold childhood beliefs, or is deliberate. I'm convinced that many JW apologists, including JW leaders, suffer from both problems.

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 said:

<< I will have a look out for the book you mention, "A People For His Name: A History of Jehovah's Witnesses and An Evaluation", and see if I can't find it in a library. >>

Good luck with that. There were only a couple of hundred printed. Right now Amazon has an original for $240, and a facsimile (by Tony Wills, the author's real name) for about $24.

I perfectly well understand your desire to believe in a God of some sort. I don't, but I understand why most people do. There are many things in the world that seem better explained by an intelligent cause, but many more that seem better explained by lack of one. And of course, there is always the problem of where the intelligent cause came from, for which no theist has an answer. "God has always existed" is just as good or bad as "the universe has always existed".

As for most everything about a god being a matter of faith, I long ago realized that faith -- belief without real evidence -- is generally a product of childhood learning. A child absorbs the culture, and is often deliberately indoctrinated with religious belief, without being given solid reasons for it. This persist into adulthood, and it's very hard to shake.

As for JWs being God's chosen people -- no way! Even if the God of Bible exists, he is supposed to be the God of Truth, but JWs, from the lowliest rank-and-file member to Governing Body members, are no more interested in Truth than they are in building spaceships to the stars. They give lip service to the Truth, and they sometimes make a show of devotion to Truth, but in practice the leaders are gross liars, concerned mainly with maintaining their traditions and their membership rolls, and the rank-and-file are perfectly happy with this. They're only too happy to disfellowship anyone who points out where they've not conformed to the Truth. Furthermore, there are dozens of biblical teachings that the JWs do not conform to. When someone points them out, a JW will shout, "apostate!"

You misunderstood my example of being burned to a crisp -- it was ME, not a friend, who claimed to have been burned up. So there is no way to make excuses for my claim, because you're in front of me and I'm speaking directly to you.

What you say about being able to prove or disprove the existence of the Christian God is technically true, but not very practical, in my view. We decide what to do about most things in life based, not on strictly logical or mathematical proof, but on weight of evidence. Since we don't get to chat with God, that's the best we can do. Alan and I have weighed the evidence, as I described above, and made our choice as to what the facts are. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

"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. . . In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."

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 said:

<< I have also said that both the argument from incredulity and the argument from the law of non-contradiction are subjective. >>

I disagree with the latter. The universe, so far as we have observed, contains no self-contradictions. Two plus two equals four, period. It does not equal three or five or anything else. Things cannot be in two places at one time. God cannot create a square circle -- BY DEFINITION. These facts are not subjective and they are not mere opinions.

It is often said by biblical apologists that God is outside space and time. How do they know that? Certainly not by any scientific means. And it is arguable that they know it even by biblical means. The Bible says nothing specific about space or time in the sense that we moderns understand them; it merely implicitly assumes that they exist in the primitive sense understood by Near Eastern peoples thousands of years ago. What these apologists claim is really just the accumulated speculation of several thousand years of religious speculation.

On the subject of whether a loving Christian God exists, I agree with cofty:

<< I am talking about the god of xtian theism the god and father of Jesus. This god is love. Love means what we do to promote the well being of others. >>

The God of the Bible is clearly modeled after the kings of the Near East such as Nebuchadnezzar. As such, Richard Dawkins, in "The God Delusion", describes this God thus:

<< The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. >>

It's easy to find several biblical passages justifying each of these charges. Do these facts in any way describe a God of Love? I think not. Such actions on the part of God are the exact opposite of promoting the well being of others. What they promote is the well being of God.

The logical contradiction is obvious: a God of Love MUST promote the wellbeing of others; a God who does not is not loving. Therefore, a loving God does not exist -- by the Bible's own descriptions of its God's actions and by what we can infer from 600 million years of pain and suffering due to predation in the animal kingdom. A deistic god, or some other supernatural god might exist, but not the omnibenevolent biblical god.

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 hadn't intended for the OP to veer off into such an interesting topic, but now that it has I'll add more two cents.

I think that arguments about the existence of a deistic god are pretty useless, in the same sense that arguments about the existence of Russell's Teapot are useless. Since there is no definitive evidence either way, non-belief rests on lack of evidence in favor of existence, and belief rests on faith -- belief without evidence -- and not much more can be said. Kenneth Miller's book "Finding Darwin's God" is a good read on this.

Slimboyfat speculates that perhaps the Christian God might be able to reset time back to the beginning, and work things such that the universe contained no suffering or evil. There are all manner of what I think are fatal problems with that, especially for Bible believers.

First, the Bible nowhere contains the faintest hint of such an idea. It defines evil basically as doing what God disapproves of -- not as the modern philosophical notion of "things that cause suffering". Since any sentient creature can at any time do something that God disapproves of (note how the Bible fuzzily indicates that Satan and Adam and Eve did this), evil is built into the basic structure of God's universe.

Second, the way JWs explain it (and most Christians accept some form of this), evil came into the world of mankind when God made a bet with Satan that at least some humans would try to obey God no matter what nasty things Satan did to them. The story of Job is the prime example here. Humans will experience the downside of this bet -- the effects of evil -- until God says, Enough! I don't know about you, but I resent being forced to experience all manner of unpleasantness merely because two gods made a bet. It seems to me that an omnipotent, omniscient God could do better.

The JWs teach that God has allowed Satan to test mankind for thousands of years in order to prove to all potential onlookers for all time that sin/evil -- disobeying God -- leads inevitably to disaster. That's a lousy test, though, because it assumes that no supernatural beings, including God, really understand human nature. God, as the Creator, should know every detail of how humans will act in all possible situations because he knows that nature. According to Genesis, "the sons of God" (apparently supernatural angels, whatever they are) took on human form and reproduced with human women. If they knew enough to do that, then they must know the details of human nature as intimately as God does. So all that these supernatural beings need do to understand what people will do in all situations is refer to the architectural plans for humans. No need for testing -- not by all-knowing supernatural beings.

Third, to be able to "reset time to the beginning" would destroy the notion of free will. The reason takes some explaining.

In 1884 Edwin Abbott published the tongue-in-cheek science-fiction novel "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" whose main character lived in a two-dimensional universe called Flatland. All inhabitants were two-dimensional geometric figures, such as squares, circles and lines. They had no conception of our three-dimensional universe. Now imagine that God takes snapshots of each instant in the Flatland universe and stacks them up next to one another in a three-dimensional space, infinitely close together. Then he constructs a time-slice motion picture machine that looks at each slice of the stack, one after another, and projects them onto a big two-dimensional viewing screen. What God would see on the screen is Flatland going through "time". The stack would appear to be a sort of giant, three-dimensional worm sitting statically in a three-dimensional space. As the time-slice projector cycles along, the slice of the stack it's projecting is "the present".

Now extend this idea by one more dimension. Here, our three-dimensional universe is the equivalent of Flatland, and each slice of it would exist in four dimensions. We can't picture this, of course, but many authors have written humorous or serious stories along these lines. Time would then be a fourth spatial dimension, and there would be a four-dimensional time-slice machine looking at each three-dimensional slice of the four-dimensional stack and projecting it on a three-dimensional viewing screen -- our own universe.

For this four-dimensional thing to work, the time-slice stack would have to be a static construction. In other words, at the beginning of our universe, God would have to construct the stack as a structure that cannot change, because "time" is actually the time-slice machine running through each slice of the stack. This gets back to the widely discussed philosophical notion that, if the universe is really a clockwork construction, cycling on via the operation of set physical laws, then the entire history of the universe was fixed at the instant of creation. In other words, the operation of physical laws through time corresponds to our time-slice machine moving through the time stack.

Quantum mechanics throws a monkey wrench into the mix, though. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle indicates that physical reality, on the finest scale, is inherently uncertain. In practice this results in the inherent randomness of radioactive decay and many other sub-atomic actions. Therefore, while the universe appears to have statistically certain operations, specific details are often random. The philosophical implication seems to be that free will exists because of this randomness, because if everything that happens was fixed at the instant of creation, then free will cannot exist and is an illusion.

In this scenario, to "reset time to the beginning" would require God to destroy the existing time stack and make a new one. This requires the existing time stack to be fixed, which means that free will does not exist.

The notion of free will seems to be fundamental to the God/Satan bet described in Job. After all, if God knew for certain what Job would do, then the test/bet would have been unnecessary. Thus, human actions are not set in stone, and according to the Bible, free will must exist. All of which shows that slimboyfat's speculation contradicts the Bible. And if one uses the Bible as a basis for one's beliefs, what, then, is the point of unbiblical speculations?

Stephen Jay Gould wrote about a similar speculation with his idea of "rerunning the tape of life". If one could somehow reset conditions back to some beginning, and watch how the evolution of life unfolds, it's unlikely that one would find the same situation as exists today, because all manner of microscopic and macroscopic contingencies would change things. This can involve the "butterfly effect". But according to quantum mechanics, this effect is somehow built into the basic structure of the universe.

Given the above considerations, I think that slimboyfat's speculations are useless. If God can change the history of the universe, then free will does not exist, which contradicts the Bible.

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

Diogenesister said:

<< This is rarther frightening and the more cynical types will see it as evidence that Watchtower leaders know exactly what they are doing. >>

I have no doubt that many of them do know exactly how they're deceiving their followers. But many are largely taken in by their own lies. It's a great example of Orwellian society.

Earnest said:

<< For those who believe in direct creation of each type of animal according to its kind, it is very difficult to argue that a god of love created animals of predation with the means and nature of causing pain and suffering to others. The same goes for parasites of various kinds. >>

Exactly. Alan told me about a recent Scientific American article on the bite force of crocodilians. If you take a Design point of view, it's obvious that these animals -- predators all -- were DESIGNED to be effective predators. The biggest of today's crocodiles can bite with a force equivalent to some 1500 kilograms. The author extrapolated back to the biggest fossil form, some 15 meters long, with about 10,000 kilograms of bite force. Their other characteristics are finely tuned to sneak up on animals at the water's edge and grab them. Is this *really* the product of a Loving Supreme Designer? I think not. If it's Design, it's a Deistic Designer. If not, it's evolution by natural selection producing the illusion of design.

<< To argue that a god of love is responsible for the pain and suffering from natural causes is less clear. If you believe in the OT view that God causes drought as punishment, he brings the rain, he causes the sun to stay in the sky ... he has a direct hand in natural events then the argument is good. Not everyone who believes in a god of love holds to that view. >>

That view is from religion's infancy, and is rooted in the strong tendency of children to give agency to inanimate objects. A child might think that the waving of trees makes the wind blow. A JW might think that God worked events such that a bolt of cloth in a fabric store was left with exactly the right amount of cloth to provide curtains for a Kingdom Hall. It's not far removed from animism.

Most Christians, and the JWs especially, believe that the universe is basically a nice, warm, fuzzy home for humans. But it is far from it. The universe is really an extremely violent place, full of massive explosions that outshine our entire galaxy. Many authors have pointed out how many ways our earth might be wiped out by the impersonal forces loose in the universe. The only way such events could be deflected from the earth is by a hugely powerful god-like entity that had humans' welfare in mind. But if such an entity exists, then judging by his lack of interest in human affairs today, one would not expect him to intervene in a bigger disaster.

Here are a couple of videos I stumbled upon that deal with what we're talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrjE-8fm9Uw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqPJ5hEvf1w

It sounds like your own belief, Earnest, is more or less deistic, but not in the classic sense. The semi-famous author of high-school books on evolution, Kenneth Miller, is a practicing Catholic but pretty much a Deist. His God takes no part in any of the universe's affairs, having set things in motion a very long time ago. That view avoids the obvious contradictions with reality of believing in a Loving God, but is anathema to the majority of Christians, who believe in a God who is very active in the universe's affairs.

Rogerson's book is one of the best ever written on the JWs. Another is "A People For His Name: A History of Jehovah's Witnesses and An Evaluation" (Timothy White, 1967), now available only in facsimile. I just love Rogerson's dry, understated British humor.

TD mentioned a few examples of the sort of popular misconceptions and outright nonsense once taught, or still taught, by the JWs. Many of those things are nothing more than the misconceptions popular in Fred Franz's youth. Franz was obviously the driving force behind many of them, and he was extremely good at finding sources equivalent to The Weekly World News and other tabloid material to support his crazy ideas.

I particularly remember the nonsense back around 1971 where the Society portrayed the physical heart as the seat of emotions, the brain as the seat of intellect, and that these two actually carried on conversations that determined a person's conduct. They actually put on a District Convention skit where there was a giant green brain on one side of the stage, and a giant red heart on the other side. They "conversed" and lit up when "speaking". That made me embarrassed to be a JW.

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.