The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Six Days and a Rib

Posted on | January 31, 2011 | 51 Comments

Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Paradise, Alexandre Cabanel, 1863

Perhaps seeking to stir the pot in Allahpundit’s absence, Jazz Shaw put up a Hot Air post entitled, “Evolution, Creation and Politics,” to which I appended a comment:

I’m a six-days-and-a-rib kind of guy — a fundamentalist Bible-thumper — because (a) the Bible is true, and (b) saying so makes liberals’ heads explode.
One of the things that the Darwinist laity fail to recognize is how much of their supposed “evidence” of evolution is actually man-made. For example, go to the natural history museum and look at that display illustrating the alleged evolution of the horse. The fossil skeletons are all lined up in a row, purporting to show a direct line of ancestry.
But no such thing is proved by that display. This narrative of “ancestry” is imposed as an intepretation. Various skeletons of horse-like creatures have been unearthed in separate locations, assigned a place in the externally-imposed narrative, and then arranged to suggest that the “primitive” horse was somehow the sire of the slightly-less-primitive horse and so forth, up to the present day. It takes a strongly skeptical mind to recognize that one is being presented with a “just so” story that is certainly not the only possible interpretation of the record.
Extinction does not prove evolution. I can’t say that often enough, because it summarizes the essential error made by common Darwinists. Since childhood, their teachers have dazzled them with despictions of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures and said, “See? Evolution!” But the fact that dinosaurs once existed, and are now extinct, does not prove that any modern creature is “descended” from dinosaurs.
The dodo bird is extinct and if, ten thousand years in the future, its fossilized remains were unearthed, no future paleontologist would be justified in remarking a resemblance between the dodo and a still-extant bird and claiming the dodo as that bird’s evolutionary “ancestor.” Nevertheless, this laughable confusion between extinction and evolution is at work when we find ourselves constantly being told by Darwinists that everything living today is descended from now-extinct evolutionary “ancestors,” an assertion for which there is really no evidence at all.
The Darwinists begin by assuming evolution, and then fitting the available evidence to support that assumption. And when you point out their basic error of logic, the Darwininists then accuse you of being irrational.

In his book, Reason in the Balance, Phillip Johnson describes the basic assumptions of Darwinism as philosophical naturalism, which is one of those ideas that have consequences.

Having spent quite some time studying the arguments over evolution, it has for many years struck me that while the scientific priesthood of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in astrophysics, paleontology and anthropology often disagree vehemently over their own theories and interpretations, they are united by one major agreement: The Bible is wrong.

On that point, they are quite fanatical, and one need not debate fanatics. Merely demonstrate that they are fanatics — occasionally point out their more obvious errors, provoking their predictably intemperate responses — and you will discredit them in the eyes of reasonable people.

The Christian need not assert perfect knowledge of what happened in prehistory, nor be able to dispute every criticism offered of the Bible, in order to maintain his own belief. Indeed, the Bible-believer is exhorted toward a philosophy of humility: “For now we see through a glass, darkly” — our knowledge is necessarily imperfect.

We are also reminded of Paul’s warning to Timothy to avoid “profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.” Many were those who, in the apostolic age, sought to reconcile the Gospel to the scientific and philosophical theories of the time, thus stumbling into all manner of heresies.

Truth endures. Truth is eternal and transcendant. Our knowledge of this transcendant and eternal Truth is necessarily imperfect, but this ought not embarrass us or cause us to accept the “profane and vain babblings” of those who assert the superiority of their “science falsely so called.”

Category: Religion, Science

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