Evolutionist: Larry Moran is Correct!

In my previous post I discussed Larry Moran’s undefendable claim that the vitamin C pseudogene is powerful evidence for evolution and common descent. In response an evolutionist in the know commented that I had it all wrong and Moran’s claim is quite correct:

We can calculate the likelihood of those mutations being shared via common ancestry. This likelihood is much higher than the likelihood you get under the hypothesis that the mutations were independently acquired by chance. This is strong support for the common ancestry model in the usual way that statistics are used to support hypotheses throughout all hypotheses in science.

It is worth elaborating on this argument to reveal the depths of evolutionary thinking. For this argument dates back centuries (at least to 1734 when Daniel Bernoulli used it) and hinges on, like all evolutionary arguments, deep metaphysics.

The term “likelihood” here refers to the probability of the evidence (the vitamin C pseudogene patterns in this case) we observe given a hypothesis of how they arose. So the likelihood of common descent, in this case, is the probability of the vitamin C pseudogene patterns given that they arose via the process of common descent.

Now the trick evolutionists use is to compare this likelihood of common descent with the likelihood of random design (or as our elite evolutionist puts it above, “independently acquired by chance”).

Don’t worry if you haven’t understood a word of this explanation. Here is the plain English version: Evolutionists claim that similarities (and in particular similarities that are harmful) between species are powerful evidence for their theory because it is obvious that such similarities did not arise by chance.

This certainly is the Mother of all false dichotomies. When put into plain English it is astonishing.

To be sure, who would disagree that most similarities between species—including the vitamin C pseudogene patterns—probably did not arise by chance? That seems reasonable enough.

But evolutionists then claim that, therefore, their unlikely theory is compelling.

In other words, simply put, it’s either evolution or chance. Those are your choices. That’s it. This argument is prima facie absurd and it is astonishing that evolutionists are serious. But they are, and that makes it important. Until you understand the depths of these fallacies you will not understand evolutionary thought.

Of course what evolutionists have actually shown is that their theory is better than origin by pure chance. That’s what their argument reveals—one silly theory is more likely than another silly theory. And they call this science? Sorry but this does not make evolution a fact. In fact, evolution and common descent still have all the monumental problems they had before evolutionists made the argument. None of those problems went away just because of the non random vitamin C pseudogene patterns.

But this argument is typical, and it speaks volumes. Evolutionary thought is not merely science gone wrong. It is not the consequence of a faulty experiment or flawed theorem. It is an utterly ridiculous mandate, tracing back to antiquity, that the universe and everything in it must have just happened to arise spontaneously. The scientific absurdity of the idea is exceeded only the evolutionist’s certainty it is true. Religion drives science, and it matters.