Doubting Darwin

Eric Metaxas recently interviewed Dr. Stephen Meyer on his Socrates In The City. Dr. Meyer is the author of the excellent Darwin's Doubts.

A Dwindling Consensus?

From Patrick Chan at Triablogue:

In the prologue of his recent book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Stephen Meyer cites several books and articles from scholars in relevant scientific fields which "express[...] doubt about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely, the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism." Meyer notes these are just a few examples. BTW, I filled out the citations a bit so people can look them up more easily (although I left out page numbers which Meyer did cite in several cases), but they're hardly to the standard one might see in a scientific journal. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I could have made a mistake here or there (e.g. publication year). I've added links to the resources as well; I just hope they won't become broken in the future.

• Arthur, W. (2000). The Origin of Animal Body Plans: A Study in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.
• Becker, H.A., & Lönnig, W.E. (2005). Transposons: Eukaryotic.
• Carroll, R.L. (2000). Towards a New Evolutionary Synthesis. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
• Conway, M.S. (2009). Walcott, the Burgess Shale, and Rumours of a Post-Darwinian World. Current Biology.
• Davidson, E.H. (2011). Evolutionary Bioscience as Regulatory Systems Biology. Developmental Biology.
• Eldredge, N. (1995). Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory.
• Erwin, D.H. (2000). Macroevolution Is More Than Repeated Rounds of Microevolution. Evolution and Development.
• Goodwin, B. (2001). How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity.
• Kauffman, S. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.
• Kauffman, S. (1996). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.
• Kirschner, M., Gerhart, J., & Norton, J. (2006). The Plausibility of Life.
• Koonin, E.V. (2009). The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?. Trends in Genetics.
• Lönnig, W.E., & Saedler, H. (2002). Chromosomal Rearrangements and Transposable Elements. Annual Review of Genetics.
• Lynch, M. (2007). The Origins of Genome Architecture.
• Müller, G., & Newman, S. (2003). Origination of Organismal Form: The Forgotten Cause in EvolutionaryTheory. In Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology.
• Raff, R. (1996). The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form.
• Shapiro, J. (2012). Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.
• Schwartz, J. (1999). Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species.
• Sermonti, G. (2005). Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?.
• Theißen, G. (2006). The Proper Place of Hopeful Monsters in Evolutionary Biology. Theory in Biosciences.
• Valentine, J. (2006). On the Origin of Phyla.
• Valentine, J.W., & Erwin, D.H. (1987). Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record. In Development as an Evolutionary Process.
• Wagner, G.P. (2000). What Is the Promise of Developmental Evolution? Part I: Why Is Developmental Biology Necessary to Explain Evolutionary Innovations?, Part II: A Causal Explanation of Evolutionary Innovations May Be Impossible, and Part III: The Crucible of Developmental Evolution. Journal of Experimental Zoology.
• Wagner, G.P., & Stadler, P.F. (2003). Quasi-independence, Homology and the Unity of Type. Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• Webster, G., & Goodwin, B. (2011). Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology.

Intelligent Design

Thanks to Justin Taylor for posting R.C. Sproul's interview of Dr. Stephen Meyer on the subject of Intelligent Design. The following is the first part of that interview.



Check out the following titles:
Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer
Should Christians Embrace Evolution? Norman Nevin ed.
Who Made God? by Edgar Andrews
Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson
Redeeming Science by Vern Poythress

Adam and the Gospel

Al Mohler led a helpful discussion on the importance of an historical Adam to the Gospel narrative. In addition to Dr. Mohler, the panelists were Jim Hamilton, Tom Schreiner, Chad Brand, and Steve Wellum. Download it audio HERE and video HERE.

Enns, Evolution, and Al Mohler

Dr. Jim Hamilton has written two helpful posts (here and here) responding to some recent comments from Peter Enns on evolution and the reliability of the Bible. Along the way Dr. Enns takes issue with Al Mohler's commitment to the reliability of the biblical record of origins.

The sterility and bleakness of evolution

Al Mohler calls our attention to a USA Today article by Michael Shermer. Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine is an enthusiastic atheist and, therefore, evolutionist. In the article referred to by Mohler, Shermer seeks to explain how such deep love as that of a parent for a child is explained by evolutionary development.

Mohler writes:

Shermer has now experienced the “empty nest syndrome” for himself, as his daughter began her college studies just over a month ago. He clearly misses his daughter. And yet, how does he explain this experience?

He writes: “Why does it hurt so bad? Science has an answer: We are social mammals who experience deep attachment to our fellow friends and family, an evolutionary throwback to our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer days of living in small bands.”

You read that right. Shermer reduces the love of a parent for a child to “an evolutionary throwback.” He adds to this a physiological theory:

We parents can’t help feeling this way, and neuroscience explains why. Addictive chemicals such as dopamine and oxytocin surge through the brain and body during positive social interactions (especially touch). This causes us to feel closer to one another. Between parents and offspring, it cements a bond so solid that it is broken only under the most unusual (and usually pathological) circumstances.

He concludes with words that can hardly be described as sentimental. “Each of us parents makes one small contribution to the evolutionary imperative of life’s continuity from one generation to the next,” he suggests.

Rarely is the sterility and bleakness of the evolutionary worldview displayed with such candor. The love of a parent for a child is reduced to an evolutionary factor that works through a physiological process of chemical interactions in the brain.

If evolution is true, it must explain everything. Michael Shermer’s article demonstrates just how unsatisfying that explanation is.

Bleak indeed.

And yet Shermer is consistent. If evolution is true then it must explain everything. It must explain even our feelings of love which in the end are only the results of chemical reactions in the brain.

The disastrous worldview of scientism...

In the past, Stephen Hawking has been rather ambiguous about his thoughts regarding the existence of God. However, in his newest book The Grand Design, Hawking states explicitly that there is simply no need for God in the universe. That is, there is nothing in the universe that requires the mind or hand of a Maker. Quite honestly, I have a difficult time distinguishing Hawking's view from that of Biologos. But that is another story.

Of Hawking's worldview and new book, Al Mohler writes:

The major thrusts of The Grand Design are the magnificence of the universe and the glory of theoretical physics. Hawking is committed to what he calls “M-Theory,” a “super-string theory” that encompasses a host of theories and predictions about the nature of matter and time. Most importantly, this theory allows Hawking and Mlodinow to advance Hawking’s theory that space and time have no boundary. If such a boundary did exist, Hawking allows that God might be a necessary or allowable theory of how all this began. But, if there is no boundary, there is no reason for God at all — the universe is self-explanatory...

Stephen Hawking’s worldview is based in positivistic scientism. He really believes that science holds all the answers. “Philosophy is dead,” he asserts in this newest book. Why? “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”

In his 1980 inaugural address, given as he was installed as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Hawking proposed that the great project of theoretical physics might be concluded by the end of the twentieth century. “By this I mean that we might have a complete, consistent, and unified theory of the physical interactions which would describe all possible observations.”

That statement speaks profoundly to Professor Hawking’s intellectual ambition — to explain the universe and all of its “possible observations.” That is nothing less than titanic in scale of ambition. Indeed, it is the quintessential audacity of a brilliant secular mind.

Professor Stephen Hawking is a remarkable human being. His courage and tenacity are an inspiration to all. His work on the theory of gravity has changed the way the field of physics is taught. But, when he crosses that border from science to theology, his worldview leads him into abject disaster. The Grand Design is yet another attempt to celebrate the universe’s breathtaking design, while denying the existence of a Designer. It will not be the last.

Read Mohler's entire article HERE.

Update:

James Anderson has a helpful post on Hawking's new book HERE.

Al Mohler responds to Karl Giberson

As I posted last week, Karl Giberson of Biologos apparently thought it was a good idea to write an article attacking Al Mohler over at the Huffington Post. The tone of Giberson's article, his failure to actually respond to Mohler's thesis, and his remarkably poor choice of venue are worth further conversation. However, I am happy to say that Dr. Mohler has responded in a way that will hopefully help Dr. Giberson to stay on the subject at hand: Is human evolution compatible with biblical faith?

I understand why Giberson wants to avoid that thesis. It is a monumental, indeed impossible, task to prove that a mythical Genesis record with an accompanying denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall is compatible with biblical orthodoxy. But this seems to be the clear program for Biologos.

The article begins by demonstrating that Giberson's criticism of a statement made by Mohler in a recent address was overstated.

I have read your posting several times, and it seems that your central complaint comes down to one or possibly two sentences in my address to the 2010 Ligonier Ministries National Conference. Indeed, you provide a link to the transcript of my address that was posted at the BioLogos site. You point to this section of my address: “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.”

You complain that this was a misrepresentation of Darwin, and you answer that with considerable bombast. In your words: “Of course, Mohler may simply have made a mistake. He is, after all, a theologian and not a historian. He could have gotten this wrong idea from any number of his fellow anti-Darwinians. However, I don’t think so. In his address he read from my book Saving Darwin, in which I took some pains to correct the all-too-common misrepresentation of Darwin he presented. So, unless he was just cherry-picking ideas from my book that he wanted to assault, he should have known better. But let us bend over backwards here and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his only real encounter with Saving Darwin was an instruction to an assistant to ‘find something in Giberson’s book that I can ridicule in my speech.’”

No, I can assure you that my encounter with Saving Darwin comes through reading the book quite thoroughly and more than once. You are at great pains to present an understanding of Darwin that will appeal to conservative Christians who are committed to biblical Christianity. You have a great challenge in this respect, and I seriously doubt you will make much headway. You are determined to convince biblical Christians to accept evolution. I seriously doubt you will make much progress through your book.

In making my argument, I did not need to “cherry-pick” ideas from your book. Nor do I need to misrepresent Darwin and his views. I would be most interested and concerned to find that I have in any way misquoted or misrepresented you. I am confident that your larger problem with the Christian public is in being understood, rather than in being misunderstood. You are straightforward in your celebration of evolution, and you utterly fail to demonstrate how an embrace of evolution can be reconciled with biblical Christianity. Your rejection of an historical Adam and Eve is one precise point at which the Gospel of Christ is undermined, and your proposed “new and better way to understand the origins of sin” is incompatible with the Bible’s clear teaching.

The theory of evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures. Darwin’s historic role in the development of evolutionary theory is central and significant, but the theological objections to evolution are not centered in the person of Darwin, but in the structure and implications of his theory of natural selection.

Mohler continues by pressing the antithesis between evolutionary theory as advanced by Biologos and biblical Christianity. He challenges Giberson's thesis that Darwin had been an orthodox Christian. Mohler shows quite clearly that Giberson has at best erred in casting Darwin as a conventional Christian believer.

And if a misrepresentation of Charles Darwin is the central issue, I must insist that it is you who offers the truly dangerous misrepresentation. In Saving Darwin, you attempt at great lengths to present Charles Darwin as a rather conventional and orthodox Christian, prior to his later loss of faith. You state that he was “born to a well-to-do British family who, despite having some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible, raised him in the Anglican Church, educated him in an Anglican school, and put him on the train to Edinburgh to study medicine.”

This hardly seems adequate or straightforward. The “some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible” included both his father and his paternal grandfather. His mother’s family was Unitarian in belief, rejecting the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Even as Charles Darwin was nominally involved in the Anglican Church, largely through the influence of his sister and brother-in-law after the death of his mother, his involvement and exposure appears to me largely incidental to his life. He later married a woman of Unitarian convictions as well.

It is certainly true that Charles Darwin was directed to become an Anglican clergyman by his unbelieving father, but this was a social tradition for second sons of the developing British middle class. As Randal Keynes, Darwin’s own great-great-grandson explains, “His idea was to become a country parson, caring for his parishioners but living for natural history.” And, as the authoritative biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore recount, “Dr. Darwin, a confirmed freethinker, was sensible and shrewd. He had only to look around him, recall the vicarages he had visited, [and] ponder the country parsons he entertained at home. One did not have to be a believer to see that an aimless son with a penchant for field sports would fit in nicely. Was the church not a haven for dullards and dawdlers, the last resort of spendthrifts? What calling but the highest for those whose sense of calling was nil?”

Of far greater concern is your tendency to appear to agree with some of Darwin’s complaints against biblical Christianity. You claim that he “boarded the Beagle with his childhood Christian faith intact,” but then add, “although he had begun to wonder about the historicity of the more fanciful Old Testament stories, like the Tower of Babel.” This is insignificant? Are we to understand that you, too, see that biblical account as “fanciful”? You explain that Darwin, “like most thoughtful believers,” began to distance himself from the doctrine of hell — a doctrine you describe as “a secondary doctrine that even many conservatives reject.”

If your intention in Saving Darwin is to show “how to be a Christian and believe in evolution,” what you have actually succeeded in doing is to show how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender in order to accommodate itself to evolution. In doing this, you and your colleagues at BioLogos are actually doing us all a great service. You are showing us what the acceptance of evolution actually costs, in terms of theological concessions.

I stand by my address in full, and only wish I had been able to address these issues at even greater length in that context. I plan to do that over the next few months. I greatly regret that you have committed yourself to a cause that I can see as incompatible with the Scripture and destructive to the Christian faith.

I look forward to Dr. Mohler's continued interaction with the theories flying about at Biologos. I hope that their contributors will show better judgement in their responses that has been so far demonstrated by Dr. Giberson.

Where rejection of biblical orthodoxy ultimately leads

Michael Dowd is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a graduate of Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also enthusiastic about the rise of the new atheists. A self-proclaimed "evangelist" for evolution, Rev. Dowd's words seem eerily similar to some of the postings at Biologos about God, evolution, and inerrancy. I point this out because many of Dowd's views would, at this point anyway, be rejected (I suppose) by some of the scholars who post at Biologos. My question is "why?" Once the criteria for whether or not I will accept what the Bible says is my own moral sensibilities or what happens to be "intellectually satisfying" to me then everything in the Bible is up for grabs.

One of Dowd's recent comments was indistinguishable for some recent comments from an Old Testament scholar at Biologos. Dowd rejects God as He is revealed in the Bible as "brutal, cruel, vindictive, and genocidal." It seems inevitable. Let a man reject the full trustworthiness of the Bible as God's Word and he will then make a god in his own image; a god that will be satisfying to his intellectually autonomous self.

Al Mohler has written an article commenting on some of Dowd's recent pronouncements.

Michael Dowd argues that Christians should thank God for the New Atheists. A self-styled “evangelist” for evolution, Dowd recently preached a sermon in Oklahoma City in which he called for nothing less than a rejection of biblical Christianity and the embrace of a spirituality rooted in an embrace of evolution and a rejection of the supernatural.

A few weeks ago, a reporter called me for comment after Dowd had made a similar argument on his Web site, “ThankGodforEvolution.com.” In more recent days, Dowd has responded directly to my comments. Without doubt, his argument deserves a closer look.

In his 2007 book, Thank God for Evolution, Dowd recounts that he, along with his wife, Connie Barlow, decided in 2002 to go on the road as “evolutionary evangelists.” As he explains, “We offer a view of our collective evolutionary journey that frees the imagination, touches the heart, and leaves people wanting more.” An ordained minister of the United Church of Christ and a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Theological Seminary), Dowd now finds his passion in spreading his message of “the epic of evolution” or “the Great Story.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Is darwinian evolution compatible with Christianity?

Mark Jones has written two excellent articles (Here & Here) on the compatibility of darwinian evolution and Christianity. The articles were spurred on by the recent dust up at RTS over Bruce Waltke's video for the Biologos Foundation.

Darwinists like [Francis] Collins claim that evolution is a fact. They are not content to admit that it is a theory. Richard Dawkins posits, “no serious biologist doubts the fact that evolution happened, nor that all living creatures are cousins of one another.”[14] Not only are all living creatures cousins of one another, but the Darwinian synthesis also argues that we can extrapolate how single-celled organisms came to produce human beings. Like Religion, science is not neutral, despite its claims. An inherent philosophical presupposition guides evolutionary thinking. And though disagreement exists among a number of leading evolutionists concerning the mechanisms of evolution, they are all in agreement that a supernatural being (i.e. God) must not be invoked to help out with the difficulties. For this reason, evolution is fundamentally atheistic. Professor of biology at Cornell University, William Provine, candidly admits that embracing evolution makes atheists of people: “One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”[15] The famous Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin, provides further evidence that fully naturalistic evolution is atheistic:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[16]

Lewontin makes these comments because of his a priori commitment to naturalism. Naturalists operate on the assumption that science would not be science if a non-matieral cause were invoked to explain any part of the theory. The influential American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson insists that the phenomena of life “can be explained by purely naturalistic […] factors […] Therefore, man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”[17] Fully naturalistic evolution and God can only co-exist if God acted as a first cause who retired from activity after establishing the laws of nature and setting the natural mechanism in motion. Of course, on this model, even “God” would have been surprised by how things were turning out; after all, creatures developed from purely material forces without any purpose or goal.

"Non-Overlapping Magisteria"

Mark Jones has written a good piece on the recent controversy over statements made by Pete Enns' unsurprising and Bruce Waltke's rather surprising comments concerning evolution. Moreover, Jones offers some helpful thoughts on the effort to harmonize evolution and biblical faith.

Those who refer to themselves as theistic evolutionists need to be pressed on “the blind watchmaker thesis” that is so crucial to Darwinism. As noted in the previous chapter, Richard Dawkins has explained the idea of the “blind watchmaker” and its implications for how we view the theory of evolution: “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.”[15] The blind watchmaker thesis explains the philosophical implications of evolution, which cannot in any way be squared with what the Bible says about creation and providence. Phillip Johnson claims that he has found it “very difficult to get theistic evolutionists to discuss the blind watchmaker thesis.”[16] No wonder. How can a Christian, in any meaningful sense of the word, admit that life, generally speaking, has no purpose? Plus, to insist that God would choose natural selection as his undirected creative method seems to require more faith than the idea that God created animals of their kind (Gen. 1:24). Darwinian evolution cannot guarantee that humans would have come into existence. Of course, a theistic evolutionist could maintain that God intervened from time to time to provide the required mutations to ensure that humans would eventually evolve, but this becomes mere philosophical speculation, and technically not science. Indeed, this position is neither Darwinism nor Christian theism. Collins assumes the truth of Darwininsm and then he constructs his own form of Christianity that will not contradict his understanding of evolution.

Historically, Reformed theologians have addressed the relationship between science and theology by beginning with the idea that the God of the Bible is a personal God who knowingly and willingly decrees all events. In other words, they begin with God, not Darwin.[17] Darwinism appeals to naturalists because, at present, it remains the most suitable explanation for explaining the diversity of life assuming that God had nothing to do with the process. That is a big assumption, of course. But the Christian can point to defects in the fossil record, the origin of life problem, the irreducible complexity of organisms, and many other problems in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, to rest secure that Darwinian evolution has not provided a better alternative to the Bible in explaining how the present world came to be. Collins admits that modern science still cannot explain the origin of life, but “this is not the place for a thoughtful person to wager his faith.”[18] Coming from a supposed theist this comment is interesting. Collins argues for God’s existence based on moral life (i.e. altruistic behaviour among humans), but he urges extreme caution for God having anything to do with creating life. Moreover, Collins finds the Darwinian explanation for the moral law unsatisfying and therefore bases his belief in God in part on the argument for moral law. Yet, his reasoning about the origin of life problem should be equally applied to his reasoning for the moral law. Perhaps Darwinians will one day provide a satisfactory explanation for a moral law? Indeed, a number of scientists have done their best to explain altruistic behaviour among animals (which, for them, includes humans).[19]

In the end I expect that Darwinians will not find [Francis] Collins’ synthesis sufficiently convincing; nor do I expect Christians to be overly enamored with his various proposals. Theistic evolution is basically a contradictory worldview, and Collins’ synthesis should be rejected with fervor. And yet Bruce Waltke has explicitly embraced Collins’ version of evolution, which is Darwinian evolution, not evolution which can be empirically observed. Of course, Waltke has theological commitments that he cannot abandon. The problem for him, at least, is that he cannot maintain with any consistency his theological commitments and his appreciation for Collins’ work.

Read the entire article HERE.

More on "Ida"

Man, I hate saying, "I told you so."

Check out this story from Times Online.

Q: Are there lessons to be learned about making over-bold claims in documentaries before research has been published?

ES: Absolutely. Documentaries are extremely important for public understanding of science, so scientists and the media need to work together to make sure that they have their facts straight, and that they are portraying a balanced view of the evidence. I think that the most responsible approach would be to create documentaries well after publication of scientific results, so that other members of the scientific community have a chance to weigh in on the issue with the data in hand, and provide alternative viewpoints if they do exist.

Evolution is God's Pink Slip

So says the world's most lovable atheist Richard Dawkins.

From Al Mohler:

The Wall Street Journal may be an unusual venue for theological debate, but this past weekend's edition featured just that -- a theological debate of sorts. The "of sorts" is a necessary qualifier in this instance, because The Wall Street Journal's debate was not, as advertised, a debate between an atheist and a believer. Instead, it was a debate between two different species of atheists.

The paper's "Weekend Journal" section front page for the September 12-13, 2009 edition featured articles by Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong set in opposing columns. The paper headlined the feature as "Man vs. God: Two Prominent Thinkers Debate Evolution, Science, and the Role of Religion." Well, the feature at least looked interesting.

Dawkins, after all, is probably the world's most famous atheist. At the same time (and not coincidentally, he would insist) he is also the world's foremost defender of Darwin and evolutionary theory. Karen Armstrong is a popularizer of works on world religion. She takes a basically benign view of religion, arguing that the different religions of the world are avenues toward the same quest for meaning. A former nun, she has written several books on themes and figures related to Islam, and she is a critic of what she terms "fundamentalist" religion. She is a critic of "fundamentalism" on whom the media can depend for comment.

The paper presented the articles by Dawkins and Armstrong in an interesting format. The article by Dawkins is headlined, "Evolution Leaves God with Nothing to Do." Armstrong's essay is headlined, "We Need to Grasp the Wonder of Our Existence."

Predictably, Dawkins begins his article with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. Evolution, Dawkins claims, has simply displaced God. "Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated," he asserts. Quoting a T-shirt, Dawkins insists that evolution "is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town." As for God, evolution just renders deity a useless and vacuous concept. "Where does that leave God?," Dawkins asks. "The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear."

Evolution, he continues (presumably less kindly), "is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip." God, who never existed in the first place, has now been fired.

Read the entire post HERE.

Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes

There is an interesting article on a recent find in South China.

Charles Choi writes:

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China's Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens - instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

"Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite," said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water - conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes.

"The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

"Moreover, we found smectite in only some locations in South China, and not uniformly as one would expect for marine deposits," Bristow said. "Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment."

Read the entire article HERE.

I'll be honest. I'm not a big fan of the creation science movement. In my opinion they tend to insist that the Bible says more about scientific matters than it truly does. For instance I am satisfied that the biblical record does not insist upon a relatively young earth. But some of my brothers in the creation science movement read the biblical genealogies in a wooden literal sense. By this standard they reason that the Bible teaches that the earth must be approximately ten thousand years old. This presupposes that the biblical genealogies are not abridged or abbreviated which in fact was a common practice.

There is also the matter of the creation account itself. Does the biblical language insist on a single week of seven 24 hour "days"? Some insist that it does. I do not believe the Bible insists on such a time frame. That said, I do not think we should be dogmatic on the issue. We certainly should not divide over the issue. I believe God created man uniquely. I do not believe mankind evolved from lower life forms (although there are godly, Bible believing people who do). Also, I believe Adam and Eve were historical figures and the garden a real place and the fall as described in Genesis a real event.

The reason I linked to the article on the discovery of ancient fossils in a lake environment is that it underscores the need for humility in the discipline of scientific research. The discoveries in South China depart from the conventional wisdom regarding evolution. Scientific paradigms seem to be in a state of frequent flux. What is "settled science" one day may have to be completely rethought the next. I offer this as a word of caution against whatever tendency we may have to subordinate the Bible to the changing paradigms in paleontology.

Is God an Evolutionist?

Gene Veith has an interesting post on the idea of theistic evolution - the idea that God used the means of evolution to bring about the world that is. I have expressed the opinion that the theory of man having descended from lower life forms is not consistent with the biblical record. I still hold to that. I don't care about the age of the earth so let's not get off on that tangent. I am unconvinced by much that has come out of the "creation science" groups such as "Answers in Genesis". I have however found much of the work from the Intelligent Design folks like Dembski to be helpful.

As stated, I do not find the evolution of mankind from bacteria and lemurs to be consistent with the biblical record. But I do not break fellowship with those who believe that it is in harmony with the biblical witness. I would like them to change their minds but I by no means despise them. I have brothers and sisters in Christ who differ with me on this issue.

That said, Dr. Veith quotes from an article in the Washington Post by John G. West:

The real sticking point is Darwin’s claim that all of life–human beings included–developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism’s undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.

The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of “theistic” evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution–including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.” While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been “a big-brained dinosaur” or “a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities” rather than us.

Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God “could” have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear “a random and undirected process.” In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn’t.

One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose” according to a 2003 survey.

While theistic evolutionists are mired in the past trying to defend Darwin’s nineteenth-century mechanistic process, other scientists and scholars are suggesting that twenty-first century science is fast making Darwin obsolete. Experiments with bacteria, where evolution can be tested in real time, are showing just how little undirected processes like natural selection can actually accomplish. Experiments with protein sequences are revealing how astonishingly fine-tuned protein sequences must be to work at all. And the DNA inside each of us is disclosing massive amounts of genetic information that points to mind, not chance and necessity, as the ultimate source of biological innovations.

Such discoveries do not “prove” God’s existence, but they do provide tantalizing evidence that life was produced by an intelligent process rather than a mindless one, a finding that certainly has positive implications for faith.

Read the entire post HERE.

When Dawkins Doesn't Like Darwinism

Check out this good post from Creed or Chaos on Richard Dawkins' self-contradictory conundrum.