Truth
Evolution for Fundamentalists 3.3
Abstract
Biologists are unanimous in concluding evolution is a fact. The evidence… adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record.Pulitzer prizewinner, Professor Edward O Wilson, a brilliant biologist, brought up a creationist!
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Special Creation Theory
The evolutionary process has apparently led to many dead ends. Evolution would certainly constitute the most wasteful, inefficient, cruel method God could have used to create. The concept of evolution is thus totally inconsistent with the attributes of God as revealed in scripture.D T Gish
Dear, dear! That is some serious problem Christians have to deal with. Professor Burke, who is a Christian, but not one that believes in the literal truth of Genesis says that if the creationists want their own ideas to supplant evolution:
They have to come up with a thoroughgoing explanation that deals adequately with all the scientific evidence and is consistent with their reading of Genesis 1.
No one can expect them to highlight their own inadequacies on their web pages because they are not scientists but Christians, and so are always willing to subsume honesty to faith. In fact, they criticize science for the features that make it work, its corrigibility, its skepticism, its fruitfulness, adaptability, and constant exchange of views over developing areas, but the creationists cannot be consistent over what their basic theory is.
TMV itself is made of 2130 identical proteins each made up of 158 amino acids. It forms a helical protein sheath 300nm long and 18nm across wrapped round a coil of ribonucleic acid (RNA, the little brother of DNA) made up of 6400 nucleotides. It is a single molecule, but a large and moderately complicated one.
Once it has been isolated from the plant where it has been reproducing, and crystallized out, TMV can be broken up into its component proteins and the RNA. These are simpler chemical compounds, which have no ability of themselves to reproduce in the tobacco plant. So, the TMV has apparently been killed.
The virologist can reconstitute the virus in the laboratory from its inactive component parts. The reconstituted virus is just like the one that was broken up, but can it reproduce? It can! It is just as infective as the original virus before it was broken down and apparently killed.
already make life!
What is special creation? Is it literally Genesis 1-3. Christians, if they want to claim that creationism is scientific have to take Genesis 1-3 to be a scientific theory, in which case the world must be only 6000 years old and was made in six ordinary 24 hour days. Many creationists have tried to maintain this stance, but with such huge difficulty they have had to abandon science. Others look for some modifications of Genesis. The world does not have to be exactly 6000 years old. It can be older. How much older? Well, now you’re asking—10,000 years, 20,000 years, maybe a lot longer because the first day was not actually 24 hours but a very long time. Oh! Right!
The fundamentalist believers that accept Genesis as literally true are called the “young age creationists”, but there is another variety of them who join with scientific critics of the young age creationists because they find it unreasonable to maintain that the earth is only 6000 years old against the huge amount of contrary evidence. They have no trouble accepting that it is quite impossible for people 3000 years ago to know what we know today, and so inevitably the bible, however inspired it might be cannot be perfect scientific truth. After all, the world is not perfect, so how can anything in it be? That is certainly the teaching of the rabbis—some Christians claim that Jesus was a rabbi—and could never have thought the Jewish scriptures were perfect. Christians must think that, because they say Jesus abrogated the law of Moses, even though the Jewish scriptures say it was God’s own immutable law.
Science has to analyse before it can synthesize. In other words it has to disassemble before it can assemble, reverse engineer before it can engineer. It shows that the common accusation that science is reductive—the accusation that scientists cannot comprehend that the whole is more than the sum of its parts!—is false.
In a sense, the creation of life was seen to be possible 50 years ago when Stanley Miller made amino acids, essential for the formation of proteins and life, from water, ammonia and methane, by exposing them to electricity or UV radiation, both meant to simulate conditions possible in the atmosphere. Making a living cell from scratch has yet to be done. Much more needs to be understood before that will be possible, including epigenetics, the ways in which the basic DNA code is modified in cell assembly according to its local environment, and the machinery of cell replication, metabolism, and so on. For a long time, bits of the cell will have to be taken from already living cells, as Ventner did, an a sort of analytical assembly process, where bits will be investigated for their role in cell structure.
The creation of this living organism promises a new industry, generating synthetic bacteria for cleaning up pollution, producing new forms of green chemicals and fuels, capturing CO2 in designed algae and providing vaccines against disease. Human evolution will be hugely changed as a new metalife emerges from better methods of synthesizing life, and finding commercial applications for it.
Some think that the processes of geology can be explained by the physical properties of rocks, viscosity, density, tensile strength, being different, 6000, or 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, or maybe a lot longer—whatever time corresponded to day 3, when the world was pummelled into shape by the eternal potter. Some Christians accept that the world is much older, accepting too that the bible is not correct in its claims in Genesis because the people who wrote it knew no better, and God could not make them do or know anything without making free will a more serious biblical lie. They accept that the geological processes going on in the world of erosion, sedimentation, metamorphosis, folding and lifting, and plate tectonics require time scales of millions or even billions of years to mould the earth into the form it is now in. Their quibble then becomes “how old?”, on the grounds that each day of Genesis is shorthand for a fixed period of millions, or whatever, of years. Otherwise, they see nothing wrong with the position taken by professor Berry:
Evolution is the method God used to fulfil his purpose.R J Berry, Professor of Genetics, University College, London
But professor Berry also writes that “Christians accept the authority of scripture”, thereby denying that neither he nor his fellow Christians can be scientists, because science rigorously depends on observation and testing, not on authority. So, they want Genesis to be allegorically true so that anyone knowing the key to the allegory could translate it into truth. They cannot persuade themselves that the whole of it is a primitive myth intended to explain to simple untutored folk the answers to questions that occurred to them as inquisitive human beings with brains in their heads. It is scientific speculation from a pre-scientific age, but need no longer be believed even for religious purposes because there are better scientific answers, which Christians can still consider as speculations if they wish, because science is corrigible, and today’s ideas might be corrected with better information. There is no sound reason why ancient science should be considered better than modern science. Its replacement by better ideas is a feature of science, but religionists insist on sticking to fixed formulae like obsessives. That is, of course, what they are.
Special creation theories purport to be scientific hypotheses, like the hypotheses of evolution. Accordingly they must be assessed by scientific reasoning and evidence. Inasmuch as special creation or its baby, Intelligent Design, claims to be scientific, it must be judged scientifically. Yet, if the bible is thought to be inerrant, then nothing in it need be tested. It is true anyway. Many creationists seem to want both worlds, but their own fundamental beliefs interfere with their desire to put forward a scientific theory. Their special creation theory cannot be both rigorously biblical and rigorously scientific at the same time. Some principles on one side or the other have to be abandoned if they are to be commensurate. No scientific principles could be abandoned without abandoning the objective of being scientific. It is the inerrancy or immutability of the bible that has to be abandoned. It is, in any case, purely arbitrary, and untrue as any analysis of biblical texts proves.
If biblical necessities were used in science, then science becomes a branch of theology. That is indeed what Christian fundamentalists want, and is the reason why creation should not be allowed into science classes. Theology is not discovering anything new. Theology is religion’s way of papering over its cracks. It is studied precisely because the bible is not clear on many even religious issues. The plethora of Christian sects is testimony to the failure of the inerrancy of the bible. Christians cannot agree on women, divorce, ordination, baptism, marriage, divorce, homosexuality, just and unjust wars, even whether killing is a mortal sin, despite what seems a clear commandment. Against these trivia of life, they think the creation of the world and humanity is clear and certain. And beyond a Christian science, we must expect to see a Moslem science, an Hindu science, a Buddhist science, and so on. Which will be true? Answer, none of them!
The different views of the Christians and creationists are because it is quite impossible to get a theory out of Genesis consistent with the evidence in Nature. Something has to be changed to improve the fit of the theory to the data, and different Christians want to change different parts of the story. Even then they only get a poor match, and many more problems have not even been considered. If the lion laid down with the lamb in paradise then when did lions start to eat lambs? Why did they? Where are the fossils of the lions that did not eat lambs? Why did God make them with carnivore teeth, or did He? Why didn’t lambs start to eat lions? Were there diseases and parasites in paradise? Were they active, if they were there all along? If not what did they live on, or were the parasites immortal too? If they were not in paradise, when were they created, and why?
Did Adam and Eve have sexual organs in paradise? If so why? If not, when did they get them? Why did God make a woman as Adam’s companion instead of another man? If Adam is made in the image of God, why does he have so much in common—his anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and some of his behaviour—with other animals? Even if it is argued that the “image of God” meant his spiritual image, the questions remain. An almighty God could have made Adam truly unique, yet chose to make him a naked ape. Leave out the bible, and there is no reason in the least why human beings are not considered simply as a refined type of animal. Why? There are hundreds of questions that Genesis and any pseudo science attached to it can never answer. It is a futile exercise but one that is necessary to preserve Christianity.
Once you begin to question the bible, a myriad questions spring to mind, and that is why creationists are so desperate to hold a line of defence at the bible being inerrant, as they call it. They do not want Christianity to be questioned at all because they know they cannot answer serious questions, and so draw a line in the sand at Genesis 1:1, and no Christian, they say, should question anything thereafter. Unfortunately for them, the tide has never been stopped by any line drawn in the sand, and theirs will fare no better. Their next tactic, as before, will be to find ways of stopping people from questioning by coercion and duress. “We ask the questions”, will be their next line, as it was in the Inquisition. There are signs enough that torture has returned to what claims to be civilization. And who has introduced it—Christians!
An Evolutionary Basis of Morality
People unable to understand Darwin’s theory think that somehow a new behaviour has come from nowhere. It was incipient in the population through the variety of genetic behaviour in it—the distribution of behaviour—and comes to dominate the population in its particular environmental situation. The “Darwin Awards” for species threatening human behaviour are based on the notion that behaviour so stupid that you die young, such as driving while drunk, plainly demonstrate that selection works in such obvious cases. An inclination for young people to drive off cliffs will be eliminated from a population. But the same mechanism works when the behaviour is much more subtle. Assuming heroes are marginally more likely to take unnecessary risks than cowards, and heroism is genetic, then the population will be likely to get more cowardly. What was just the tail of a normal distribution may be enhanced into a general trait, or be eliminated, according to what sort of behaviour it leads to in a particular environment. Natural selection simply amplifies or eliminates tiny dispositions that are not neutral in respect of the environment, whether physical appearance or behaviour.
The New Scientist reports that evolutionary biologists have begun to expose the origins, purpose and biological basis of morality. Morals evolved. Non-human species, particularly primates, have elements of morality including a sense of fairness, and codes of conduct that underlie their social interactions which evolved because cooperation and conflict resolution in the group were advantageous. Morality is not a function of reason or religion, but of natural selection.
So, “Is there a “Christian position” on moral issues?”, Michael Brookes asks. He answers that Christians who say their faith somehow gives them special authority on modern questions of ethics could not be more wrong. They are less well placed than everyone else because they do not consider issues purely on their merits, but are obliged to consider whether they are also compatible with their beliefs. Their belief has introduced a potential conflict of interest.
Brookes highlights the statement in 1980 of British Catholic bishops that what exists from the time of conception is “not a potential human being, but a human being with potential”. There is no scriptural authority for this statement, so the bishops are speaking ex cathedra for their flocks. Catholics, of course, accept that the bible is not a guide to everything, and accept arbitrary judgements by their bishops, but the leaders of the Church have their own vested and doctrinal interest, and cannot be objective about these matters.
It is not just that Christians appeal to authority, whether of the bible or the arbitrary judgements of supposed holy men, but scientists who take the contradictory and illogical position of also being believers in the Christian revelation—on no scientific evidence—will claim that being a person of faith and of science gives them a double qualification to judge issues of ethics. Brookes says they are no more enlightened than anyone else, whatever their beliefs. No ancient faith tradition can help in deciding on complex modern issues the ancients could never have imagined.
Brookes had been bribed by the Templeton gold to study the interface between science and religion. Though he found it stimulating, he is honest enough despite it to admit science and religion have little to say to each other. Attempts like those funded by Templeton to reconcile science and religion are built on shaky ground. Even if the bible was inspired by God, Christians cannot agree on what the inspiration consisted of, and to what degree it left the bible authoritative.
Scripture is not a collection of glibly applicable rules, or even necessarily the best available collection of transcribed human wisdom. We have plenty more insights into the human condition and the state of the world. University libraries are crammed with them.Michael Brookes
There is no reason why the bible should be considered more reliable in judging modern human issues than the treatises of modern scientists and moral philosophers unencumbered by irrational belief. Of course, ethical questions are not purely rational, and science is beginning to show that morality has an emotional evolutionary base supplemented by rational social necessity. Jonathan Haidt, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, is finding moral judgements come from more basic “moral intuitions”, emotional responses that guide behaviour. Thought plays only a limited role in moral judgements. They are either conditioned by evolution, or by socialization. Emotions are beginning to be understood in connexion with instinct and intuition.
Disgust stems from a response to dangerous things in the environment such as rotting food. The response, “Ugh!” embodies a lot of evolution that can be rationalized now with our knowledge of bacteria and their toxins. Animals that were suspicious of rotten meat with a prototypical “Ugh!” reaction survived to reproduce. Those that had no such reaction died and did not. Is sex between a brother and a sister morally wrong? Even if the pair do it only once, use contraceptives, and there are no consequences for anyone, most people still consider it wrong, though they cannot offer any good reason why. The general sense of disgust is quite possibly evolved behaviour that gives the advantage to those with it of not inbreeding. It certainly shows that the moral basis of it is not simply reason.
Reason is a public justification of moral judgements already reached though instinct or intuition, but reason can exert its force as a catalyst for moral change. It might be instinctual not to kill members of the same social group, but it might not extend to other social groups. Thinking about murder and warfare rationally can bring about the notion that all human beings should have the same rights. It will also emerge that slaves should be treated well because “I would like to be treated well if I were a slave”. So what was true of close neighbours in a social group, logically extends to distant fellow humans, and our own identification with them as being human. Contemplation leads to new morals, and they become an accepted part of the moral fabric of society. Though not at its base, critical thinking is essential to moral progress.
What moral knowledge is built into human biology? In one study, young infants were shown a film in which a circle tries to get up a hill, helped by a square and hindered by a triangle. Then they were shown the circle either friendly with the square, or with the triangle, the other being left lonely. The infants preferred to see the circle friendly with its helper not its hinderer. So even very young children realise that those who help us are our friends, and should not be neglected. It is central to moral behaviour in our societies.
Tests of moral dilemmas show that many people will throw a switch leading to a death, deemed necessary, but they will not readily push the victim to death in person. In modern killing technology, the killer using the technology might be miles away from the resulting deaths, whereas at one time the killer had to thrust in the sword himself. NMR imaging of the brain shows that the first case arouses frontal lobes associated with matter-of-fact decision making. In the second case of a personal act, regions of the brain signalling emotion get aroused. Technology takes the emotion out of killing and therefore the moral concerns associated with it. To use techology is simply a decision, and the outcome seems not to be uppermost in it. Moreover, the decision to push someone to death in person takes longer to make. It generates internal conflict even if it is thought necessary. Such secondary effects all suggest that killing someone directly generates huge conflict in the heads of normal people. An aversion to harming others seems to have to be overcome, but not when technology intervenes. It removes the conflict. One guesses that imagined obedience to God has the same effect.
Anyway, the alarming idea that emotional appeal is more effective than the appeal of reason turns out to be true. What is alarming is that people can be, and are, manipulated by using emotional appeal rather than reason. People need to be taught that critical thinking is essential, and must be accompanied by the required knowledge. Everyone ought to learn how to question their personal moral assumptions to test whether they are defendable. Often they are simply prejudice, and religious prejudice is still prejudice.
Some ancient religious judgements were questionable even when they were made. The Jewish scriptures were addressed to a small and weak country that was urged to multiply, and practices such as homosexuality would reduce the reproductive effort at multiplying. The trouble with mutiplying is that eventually the resources run out and people starve, first in families then as a nation. Romans controlled their family sizes by returning unwanted infants to the gods, exposing them to the cold when they were new born. Canaanites seemed to do the same when they offered up unwanted babes to their god, called Molech (Malek) in the bible. In each case, they kept their older children from starving and the family from sinking into the gutter. As soon as Christianity took over the empire, that is precisely what began to happen, and in little more than a century, Rome fell to the barbarian invaders—barbarians, but nevertheless Christians. The result was a millennium of poverty, filth and misery in Europe.
So biology can guide morality, and always did. Supposed scientists, who approach decisions on ethical questions as Christians who refuse to doubt the absolute truth of the bible, are no more than Christian lobbyists, and their scientific or other qualifications are irrelevant. Brookes concludes that religious belief is no God-given path to wisdom. Often it is the opposite. Religion is the servant of moral thinking not its master.
