Jerry Coyne visited the University of Alabama last week to explain why evolution is true. Of course the "truth" of evolution comes from religious conviction. With religion one can say that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity. The claim makes no sense from a scientific perspective. It is not that evolutionists have made an error. They did not make a mistake in their calculations or misread a scientific observation. Their claim that evolution is as obvious as gravity is not really a mistake at all. It isn't even wrong--it simply is not scientific. Evolution is as obvious as gravity just like astrology is as obvious as gravity. These people clearly are playing by a different set of rules.Don't take my word for it--read the evolution literature. Evolutionists agree that their theory is a fact as obvious as gravity, and when they go about proving their claim (usually they just assert the claim) they bring out their religion.
Coyne's recent book Why Evolution is True is a good example of this, and so was his talk at the University of Alabama. Amidst the ambiguous and contradictory evidences, Coyne made the usual metaphysical arguments about bad designs and unnecessary features. These are the powerful arguments that persuade evolutionists.
In fact these arguments seem so compelling and obvious to evolutionists they don't even realize they are metaphysical. Like the proverbial fish that isn't aware it is in water because that is all it has ever known, evolutionists are unaware of the metaphysics they swim in. Those most reliant and committed to metaphysics are those least aware of it.
As Alfred North Whitehead once observed, our most crucial assumptions "appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”
And so we have this bizarre, Emperor's-new-clothes, world of evolutionary denialism. Evolutionists at one moment make their religious pronouncements and the next tell the audience they are the scientists.
As Coyne explained with a straight face, he is all about the science of evolution whereas skeptics are driven by religion. Did you think Alice in Wonderland was make believe?
Excellent points. Evolution has indeed become a religion, with blind faith and proclamations of truth replacing the scientific method. Evolutionists have redefined the terms fact and theory to suit their favorite ideas, to the point where just about any notion can qualify as scientific fact—so long as the evolutionists approve of it.
ReplyDeleteIn the forest of evolutionary theories, each scientist will proclaim his favorite theory the "only" correct one and explain that "everyone" agrees with him or "no credible" disagreement exists. In a recent issue of Scientific American two back-to-back articles illustrated this problem. The first declared that natural selection plays a minor role in evolution and everyone agrees on this fact. The next article proclaimed natural selection the driving force of evolution and—guess what—everyone agrees with that idea too. Unanimous consensus cannot exist for both ideas, yet the magazine published these contradictory articles with no explanation or even mention of the incongruity.
Evolution may have become religion, but unlike most churches evolutionists don't preach tolerance or compassion for nonbelievers.
Lisa A. Shiel
author of The Evolution Conspiracy
EvolutionConspiracy.com
Coyne made the usual metaphysical arguments about bad designs and unnecessary features.
ReplyDeleteSurely these are arguments against Creationism, not for evolution? It's not that one excludes the other, as people like jerry will happily tell us at UD that ID says nothing about the designer.