By Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Some things bother me more than others. Those are generally things parading around as common sense, but with dangerous hidden agendas, especially when they make untrue and misleading claims about science. Mister Reed wrote one of those and, even though I am not a scientist, I felt challenged to deal with it. Let common sense prevail. Naive humanity needs that.

I was about ten when I began to think about evolution. I was just then beginning to accept that school was not quite all boring and some things sounded a lot more sensible than the early crap I had been handed by my parents and their approved Sunday School teachers. I discovered evolution after an especially sleep-inspiring day when I chanced to tell my mother what I had heard that day in science class.

The origin of life had never interested me. “God done it, and that was that.” Simple, plain, and scary. Almost as scary as Mom’s reaction to the science teacher’s statement that life had risen out of the sea and evolved to one day become us. The way she took on about it, I expected I’d get soap put on my tongue, and wondered which of the words I’d said had been the naughty one.

I saw no reason to doubt anything the grownups told me. When they argued with each other, Mom was always right, even if she had to throw a shoe at somebody to prove it. She threw a shoe at dad and made him change his mind about taking her to the schoolhouse so she could deal with them for teaching her boy those awful, evil things. I saw no reason to doubt her. After all, I had known her for a lot longer than I’d known the science teacher.

Remember, I was ten, or thereabouts.

In those days, I read my schoolwork, stuff like Huckleberry Finn I could get at the library, and those little Seventh Day Adventist books my dad would sneak home until the day Mom caught me with one. I noticed a difference in their stories about God and the Bible, after listening to their arguments for the longest time. About then, people from other churches would talk to me sometimes. They all had different stories, and a holier-than-thou view of my folks. I had known my folks a lot longer than any of them, and had no reason to doubt they’d always tell me the truth. Still, there was a difference in what they believed, and I knew I’d be made to choose some day.

Meanwhile, back in school, I began hearing more strange stuff. After Mom’s row with the principal and the science teacher, I had learned to keep my mouth shut. We had what they called “religious education” back in those days. We could hear about evolution in science class, then go hear about how God had created everything at church two days a week. I discovered a bunch of the guys had learned to cut that class without getting into trouble. They taught me how to smoke. One day, though, before that, I asked our church teacher where God came from and how old He was. “He lives forever,” she informed me, “with no beginning and no end, just like a circle.”

Well, I had no trouble picturing a circle in my mind. There was God, riding around on it, his whiskers blowing in the winds of time. He waved at me. I decided I liked God. He looked just like my Gran’Pa.

I knew God must not be lonely, what with all those people begging things from Him. It was the frequent shifting of ground that bothered me. If God really had made all those creatures, and human beings starting with Adam and Eve, why did we need to evolve? Some people said we came from monkeys. Other people claimed we still are monkeys. We went to the zoo to see the monkeys. A baboon had a penis about the size of mine, but a whole lot redder. One of the teachers fainted when she saw it. I thought the monkeys looked like some people who lived on one of the dirt roads, but not like most people. I started worrying about all the puzzle pieces forming in my head with no way to fit them together. Something had to go and maybe something would get to stay. How could I choose?

If God invented life and made the universe, I wanted to know who God’s parents were, and where did they come from and if they were still alive. I got told that was a stupid question, and so was the question I asked when I demanded to know why. Eventually, I learned how to spell "Smartass" so I could write it down. I was the first one I had ever heard called that, and I felt proud.

I never went to college. That was for the rich kids whose parents had lots of money. That's what made them rich, I suspected. To my folks, it was a waste of effort. The world would end soon, Jesus would whisk us all away, and everything we learned about the world would have no meaning.

I waited with anticipation, posing questions quietly to myself, and digging wherever I could for answers. I learned that Ellen G. White, the original prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, had muffed her guess and been forced to come down off her roof when Jesus didn’t show up in 1852. Her followers must have liked her explanation, and stuck with her to form the church. Their take on the Bible, my Mom’s take on the Bible when she’d argue with the other relatives, and all the neighbors around us all had different understandings of what the Bible meant to be true in life, what we should believe, and how we should behave.

Sure, it was all right there in the Ten Commandments, but I had to move to the south before I even met anybody with a donkey. Rather than go to church on the wrong day, I started to play it safe by not going at all. After all, there’s still another church where I learned that our bodies are temples and it’s right there in the Bible. If I’m a temple, why do I need another temple to carry my temple to? Time passed. The more I learned, the less sense I could make of it. Time had made me dumber, not smarter. I didn't like that. I had to know the truth, once and for all. I would have to find a way to tell the truth from all the stuff. Otherwise, I would stay dumb all my life. I wouldn't like that, I knew.

I learned, as time went on, that to avoid offending folks I had to divide people into two categories, the science folks, and the churchly folks. I could ask the science folks about stuff like evolution and body functions but not God and angels; I could ask the churchly folks about some parts of God and angels but evolution and body functions would get me threats of hellfire and soap on the tongue.

What concerned me a lot was that I could ask science folks most anything about science and get back reasonable, reasoned answers. The questions I’d ask churchly folks often got back anger, threats, or a miscellany of opinions, no two of which would agree with others on the same questions. I had to pose things like moral certainty against moral relativism, or objective science against anecdotal referents, or selfish idealism against altruistic self-denial. I didn’t know what to call all those positions. I didn’t even know they had names! Something, I thought, did not work in their picture.

I still think that. A lifetime of searching out what best poses as truth has only increased my moral certainty that some of my relatives, neighbors, and others who deign to inflict on me their role as my advisors have diligently scissored their pictures of reality until not much is left of them.

Churchly people sometimes claim an interest in science, but their views of it do not match those the scientists present. That, I have begun to believe, results from the active usage of the scissors, wherein parts of science that do not match their churchly doctrines have been eradicated. All that they will talk about, and use for making their decisions, is the little bit they allowed to remain. I have not noticed much of the same in the other direction, except the science-loving folks may emphasize some portions of churchly doctrines that the churchly folks would rather use their scissors on.

I have also observed that those churchly folks who complain most about moral relativism are the ones who do the harshest, most copious cutting. It would seem that if someone wanted to live and experience life according to what is most true, such emphasizing (on the one hand) and eradication (on the other) would act to cause their avoidance of what may be the most important facts. It would seem such information should be assessed according to the standards that bear it, what works, and not according to its best fit with the past mistakes one has made.

So, when someone poses religious questions about matters of science, or scientific questions about matters of religion, the only thing that really works is to recognize who is doing the asking, and what his vested interests are. That way, you can predict what parts he doesn't want to hear. When someone asks of scientists, “Did we, I wondered, really know of what the early seas consisted?” or “Had creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory?” and decides the answer is “No” I need to know from where those questions arose. Did they come from religion? Did they get asked as red herrings to avoid our recognition of a commercial vested interest? Did a scientist ask them so he could tell us how he found the answer?

If it’s not a scientist asking scientific questions, then we must discover what the asking of them is intended to keep hidden. Are they red herrings, posed to denigrate scientists for what they freely acknowledge: that science is a process of wondering about things, and then refining what you find out about them until you find increasingly better answers? Is there an agenda of some kind behind them, so that the poser is seeking support for something he wants us to assume is true without questions? Are they really about the subject he claims they represent? Creating a cell from scratch, it seems to me, is abiogenesis, not evolution. Evolution is about how the world works, not how life got started. Are we supposed to be able to figure out in a week or two, what it took Nature millions of years to accomplish? The religious venue becomes apparent when we question the unquestionable, and the shifting ground feels like a tsunami has just washed over it.

I have also learned to observe that science grows in a process of asking questions, and religion dies from its hard insistence that answers be immediate even for questions wrongly asked. It is not up to evolutionists to know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about. No, we didn't, and don't, but it is not necessary to know answers for questions never investigated about how things got started, but only about how they work. Evolutionary biologists and the medical industry know how evolution works, and put it to use daily. They may not have the tools necessary to build a single cell (just like the poser of such questions cannot build an automobile engine from scratch), but they can take one apart and reassemble it to suit an increasing number of their own purposes.

Religious posers of scientific questions also demand to know, “If we don't know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can't reproduce an event in the laboratory, and can't show it to be statistically probable, why are we so sure that it happened?” as though mathematically sound occasions of inference are useless. The same process of inference that supports the defeasibility principle, and the principle of parsimony, as well as all the rest of the principles in Newton’s Rules of Reason denies the feasibility of such doctrines as Creationism, and the Intelligent Design now attempting to parade itself disguised as science.

Whoever cannot see the evidence for evolution must be blind, or simply unaware of current events. Whoever insists we must know how life came about for evolution to be accepted as factual has no other explanation to offer for why evolutionary theory functions at all, let alone become the basis for many new fields of medicine. Whoever insists that such answers must be known for a subject to be truthful, stands on the shifting ground even moreso than those whose good works he seeks to downgrade, for everything he believes is derived from a source whose most basic premise cannot be proved, nor its origination be demonstrated.

I have seen that question posed many times on my quest for truth. I at first thought it to be legitimate. It is not, but exists as a particularly odious red herring, something I have discovered I must watch for as I walk along this treacherous pathway created by my fellow mankind. The asking of such a question, once more, assumes that it will be accepted without question. It sounds plausible upon the voicing of it. Evolution is, after all, about evolution, about events that must have or might have occurred along the span of time that passed from away back when until the present. It is about how life got from there to here. Other science seems to be about what we can hold in our hands and measure, compare to something else, and make predictions about. As our knowledge grows, evolution becomes increasingly like that.

Early on, I noticed three things about religion that had begun its decline from credibility in my own life. First, plausibility about anecdotal stories is accepted as being equivalent to tangible, verifiable evidence, or to surpass it in value. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again churchly people assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to works of a demon. Asking for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persistent, hostility.

As an example, it seems plausible to churchly believers that life arose by an act of a Creator who was, Himself, already alive for no apparent cause at all— a clear violation of the ¹principle of parsimony, the ²defeasibility principle, and ³Newton’s Rules of Reason. A clear violation of the logical principles Appeal to Consequences, Fallacy of Relevance, Consensus Gentium, Argumentum ad Logicam, Audiatur Et Altera Pars, Bad Reasons Fallacy, Bandwagon Fallacy, Petitio Principii, Bifurcation Fallacy, Black/White Fallacy, Causa non Causa, Circulus in Probano, Speculative Argument, Denying the Antecedent, Exclusion Fallacy, False Cause Fallacy, and False Question Fallacy, along with many more that I will list if too many insist. Some of the fallacies are self explainable, others can be found by Googling on the Internet. If you demand that I explain them to you, I already have and you can purchase that from Naya at http://www.lulu.com/content/309396  ^. Look for How to Argue and Win.

That represents the second reason for churchly decline in my life. The more facts I discovered and learned to understand, the less logical support remained for religion in my life. A third reason, a distant relative to the first two, is my declining ability to justify belief in the churchly edicts and any relationship between churchly moral doctrines and reality.

 Overcoming that proved very hard for me. Churchly edicts were ingrained, almost a tangible aspect of my nature and myself. Others would query my reasoning about many things and, one by one, I realized I had no believable reasons for most of them, but nothing with which to replace them.

I chased across the gamut of beliefs to rectify that, and came up empty-handed. Most of it showed itself to be empty of promise and reasoning. I found nothing in which to believe, and no reason for my own sense of justice and morality. People are too attached to their religious ideas to question them or to even think they should. They would demand a mathematical precision from me, and provide none for themselves.

Consequently, religious discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion or circular argumentation. God created the universe because the Bible says so. God inspired the writing of the Bible because those who wrote it said so. This seemed plausible at the start. But, a person dedicated to knowing the details of how it all came about cannot be satisfied with self-referencing explanations, especially when they accuse their foes of what they are, themselves, too obviously guilty.

But...is any of this established? Have the churchly doctrines made any inroads into medical practice (other than voodoo and “faith”, both of which fail all tests in spite of what the churchly literature claims)? Have any of them proved useful or productive, except by their own claims? Are they advancing humanity’s survival and ability to cope with the future, or are they actually parasitical? All questions, these and more of the same, only served to lessen the churchly grip that stifled my heart.

Nothing about churchly doctrines is established in the real world where we live and deal with each other. Nothing about their covert Creationist presence in Intelligent Design can show itself to be worthwhile, productive, or in any way to be a boon to humankind, or to have any kind of roots in reality, nor any positive effect or influence upon it. It all lives fueled by obfuscation, red herrings, and major fallacies of all kinds.

Of all the sciences, only evolution remains to threaten Creationism (including its disguised presences in all their forms). Other branches of science have made their forays through all the resistance, jailings, tortures, stake burnings, and survived. Younger than those branches, evolution strives the same path, made better for the fight, and stronger for the exercises. Intelligent designers know almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard, especially when the basic questions are avoided, and the ones asked are about the wrong subjects.

Intelligent Designers seem obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, from which they imagine themselves to be unique and separate. This is peculiar to them. Note that other religions, such as Buddhism or Hinduism, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Buddhists pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except those upon whom the creationists direct their attacks. We are dealing with competing memes – overarching explanations of accretion versus creation. Thus the fury of creationist response to skepticism and the power of demonstrable truth.

ID’ers find it pointless to deny their own Creationism. It’s too apparent. They try hard not to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) – of truth, of religion, of God or Jesus, and regressionism.

This tactical demonization is not unique to Intelligent Design. "Creationist" is to Intelligent Designers what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Political correctness is deemed to be wrong by those who choose to lie, bludgeon and terrorize to have their way, unless they, being absent of much else, can manipulate it to serve for their own defense.

The Lair of the Beast

I avoided the Internet for a long time, thinking it useless and the province of governmental agencies, software manufacturers, and the elite of academia. I was wrong, and discovered factual, demonstrable knowledge abounds freely available in may places, especially from colleges and universities. Not being formally educated, hungry to know what all the fusses in religion and politics are about, I discovered discussion groups of all sorts by the thousands. I have been on several groups on the Internet that deal with matters such as evolution, creationism and religion, have studied what they’ve written on the subject, and have discussed evolution with various of its enemies and proponents, and have visited many of the college and university sites, as well as accessed the works of great scientists in the field.

Writers for and against have frequently been very bright indeed, often Ivy League professors, with names you would recognize. They are not amateurs of evolution or high-school principals in Kansas eager to prove their modernity. I asked them the questions I asked of everybody else. I knew more answers as I progressed, including pros and cons (a telling word in this case).

From the scientific side, I gathered calmly presented information and many links to more of the same, once they felt convinced my only mission was to learn. From their opponents, I got everything but answers. They told me I was an angry crank, implied over and over that I was an Atheist, said that I was an enemy of religion (someone who insists upon evidence is an enemy of religion, including Intelligent Design). They said that I was trying to throw down God and Jesus (if you ask questions about any aspect of religion, you want to pull down Jesus, God, the Ten Commandments and vote for taxation on churches). They called me a know nothing (that's why I was asking questions), and that I was too illiterate and unindoctrinated to understand (the validity of a question depends on its source rather than its content).

Rather than answer my questions, they ducked and dodged and evaded. After fifty years of inquiring of both enquiring and extinguished minds, I know ducking and dodging when I see it. I held no court room for cross-examining hostile witnesses. Trying to force the issue only raised ires and the level of threats, with still no straight answers to questions I had learned to direct straight to the point. Some even go so far as to accuse science of being a religion. Some would threaten me with the fires of hell, and too many ordered me to go there.

This is the behavior not of possessors of any kind of truth, but of zealots, the kind of people who accuse all others of extremism and of not being centered. They see themselves as centered, no matter in what direction their extremism has taken them. From where they look out at the world, it appears the horizon is uniformly far away in every direction. I used to think that religion was about having answers, not about defending things you didn't really know. Science, I thought, was the other way around. I am sorry I was wrong.

A few things worry those who are not doctrinaire religionists. (Incidentally, it is worth noting that by no means all involved in religions are doctrinaire.) To many of them, Intelligent Design seems to promote a kind of hokiness they worry about. They envision flying saucers, Von Daniken’s gods from outer space, humanoids from unknown planets being invoked to wipe all the meaning away from their own beliefs. Wily ID’ers deny that, of course. It does not serve their purposes to have their own kind voting against their political agendas.

To work, a theory presumably must (a) be reliable and workable and (b) consistently verifiable in Nature. No less will do. Quantum mechanics is, for example (so far as anyone knows) internally consistent, but is not at all points congruent with reality. Intelligent Design poses a great deal of elaborate, obfuscative, and often fuzzy hypotheses. How closely does it correspond to what we actually see? Do the sweeping principles fit the grubby details?

ID’ers often pose ridiculous examples to ask questions about, such as, “How did a giraffe get a long neck?” “How did a germ develop an appendage to propel itself through liquids?” “How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into one that did?” It sounds reasonable. In Intelligent Design that is enough. The problem is, they always (that means without fail) avoid telling their readers what the biologists actually say about such questions. You have to go find out these things for yourself. Very seldom does anyone, and most people are naive enough to accept the questions as legitimate and/or unanswered. That is not true.

Actually, it’s Intelligent Design that divides evolution into three parts. Scientists divide evolution into two parts, the Theory of Evolution as part one, and the practical, useful fact of evolution as applied to the fossil records, the medical applications, and the research in DNA and genetics all combine into part two.

While at the same time denying the feasibility of evolution, Intelligent Designers claim their view of evolution breaks down into at least three logically separable components: First, that life arose by chemical accident; second, that it then evolved into the life we see today; and third, that the mechanism was the accretion of chance mutations. Evolutionists, not particularly logical according to them, refuse to see this separability.

The first, chance formation of life, they say, simply hasn't been established. It isn't science, but faith. That is true. It is their (the creationists) faith, though, that we have to recognize, and their unspoken, heartily denied support for creationism: the notion that some intelligent, not present Being created all that exists, even if He (note the gender always used) only did so by stirring the soup to mix the ingredients (along with the creation of another realm that, for all practical purposes, does not exist).

The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, under the guidance of this Unknowable Intelligence. Using exceptions to demonstrate their point, overlooking a whole realm of the obvious, they pursue their creationist agenda with determined zeal.

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, is not a proposition of biologists at all, but remains with the ID’ers. Evolution is about adaptation, not mutation per se. Things that don’t make it don’t survive except if they do so long enough to reproduce. Things that thrive reproduce with greater hardiness than those barely plodding along. All kinds of variations get to be 'fit' for our current circumstances, which causes me to wonder why these guys insist there should only be one.

Human beings make a great pool of examples of that being true. We have all kinds of misfits that survive long enough to reproduce. We have all kinds of people we perceive to be very advanced that also barely engage in reproduction. We have all kinds of apparently ordinary people who carry both kinds of genes around everywhere they go, and reproduce like the animals they are.

We also have science that, because evolution is a fact, has learned to manipulate genetic structures in a (so far) rudimentary way. We have no idea to what that will lead, nor what the future will hold. Nor do we know each and every detail of what the past has held. We have very few notions about how it all began, and no way to test the ones we do have.

But, we don’t need to. Evolution is a fact that works. Evolutionary theory is simply an attempt to explain that fact, and that is something ID’ers will not talk about aloud. Like I said, the more stuff I learn, the less credence religion can maintain for me. The ID’ers, and the other zealots have chased it out from the ballpark. When you have patched a tire too many times, you start thinking about getting a new tire. Intelligent Design appears to be an attempt to replace a bad tire with one even more defective.

As previously mentioned, ID’ers depend heavily on plausibility unabetted by evidence. There is also the matter of implausibility. There is, for example, their claim that Nature has, somehow, produced the equivalent of a self-winding watch. Had that happened, I would expect one of them to show me a whole mechanical watch, with thirty little gear wheels and a little lever that said tick-tick-tick. I would have no trouble accepting that they all worked together, of course, and would expect them also to reproduce so that I, too, could have one.

 That will never happen, of course, since a watch is not a ‘natural’ device (a device produced entirely without human intervention). Intelligent Design goes out of its way to make people believe that natural occurrences are the equivalent of a cloud of hydrogen that will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum, thanks to the Grand Designer hidden deep within.

If something looks implausible, it probably is. That’s how Intelligent Design, a position I once upheld, has gone the way of religion as it escapes across its shaky grounds.

Does the ID hypothesis, however reasonable and plausible (or not), in fact map onto what we actually see? A principle of evolution is that traits conferring fitness become general within a population. What do biologists mean by the term ‘fitness’ that ID’ers refuse to acknowledge? It can hardly be Superman-like qualities, nor genius-level intelligence, nor gorilla-like strength, even though some aspects of these things are in the gene pool. Does the biologist’s definition for ‘fitness’ differ from the normal?

We can likely consider intelligence as an adaptation mechanism for human beings. What would its relationship be with fitness? An ID’er will question why, if intelligence is adaptive – i.e., promotes survival – it didn't evolve earlier; and if it is not adaptive, why did it evolve at all? The proper question is to ask, instead, why do humans need the almost parasitical load their large brain imposes in order to survive? Why didn’t we just develop meager brains, maybe grow tails instead, and enable greater physical agility like monkeys?

Well, there already are monkeys. We would then just be another kind. Maybe we are, anyways. The fact is, humans have a large, complex brain because they can. It draws down on our resources, but it enabled us to survive because it enabled us to develop tools, wit, and to remember what animals with lesser brains would forget. We could figure things out, enough of us got the right answers, and we are still doing so.

We could survive because our brains enabled us fit to do so. That some of us are more intelligent than others has no bearing on whether a certain amount of intelligence tends toward increased fitness for that individual’s particular lineage. Individuals with massive intelligence tend to increase the ability for the species to survive with what they introduce into the mix. The intelligent individuals maximize their own standard of survival by using their brains moreso than the application of physical exertion. They benefit by their cunning development and understanding rendering the exotic into the exoteric; the larger group benefits from possession and usage of all kinds of exotic tools from beyond their ken. ID’ers pose all kinds of absurd examples of how evolutionary biologists go astray. All of them are beside the point, answerable, but red herrings all the same.

For example, ID’ers will offer exceptional physical characteristics to show how evolution does not answer to the claim of “survival of the fittest” being necessary for its process. It appears they intentionally misunderstand or misinterpret ‘fitness’. They demand to know why such exceptional characteristics do not become general within the human population.

The answer is simple, straightforward, and the same: They don’t need to. The human population is varied to suit evolutionary purposes (that is, as humans perceive them, not as a result of planning by any Grand Designer). We are a social animal that survives, in the main, by mutual cooperation. Exceptions provide and enhance that capability by providing people more fit than others to fill specific roles, some as leaders, most as followers, most as workers, a few as entertainers, police officers, technicians of all sorts, and on down the gamut of people who fit their various roles (however perfectly or erratically: Some never find their roles, also beside the point).

Like many people, especially those who support such beliefs as those pertaining to souls and spirits, the ID’ers run into the problem of consciousness, which they are poorly equipped to handle. “Do we have fossilized consciousness, consciousness preserved in amber?” “ Does consciousness have physical existence? If it does, is it electromagnetic, gravitational, or what?” “If it doesn't have physical existence, what kind of existence does it have?” “If you cannot define it, detect it, or measure it, how do you study its evolution, if any?” “How do the sciences, based on physics, handle the physically undetectable?” Such questions get posed time and again and do well in their red herring roles.

Consciousness is nothing more than an emanation of the brain at work. The large hemispheres of the brain, from where it arises, provides us the effect of consciousness as a byproduct of our ability to perceive of ourselves as unique, individually packaged animals. It is a process, much the way a computer system, or the electrical system of an automobile, is a process. They serve their necessary functions, although requiring external inputs to control them, as our sometimes self-controlled consciousness does for us. Birds and other animals may or may not have varying levels and complexities of consciousness. That remains an unsettled matter of debate, and will likely stay that way unless we somehow learn to converse with various other species.

That will not, of course, stop the ID’ers from speculating about it right along with everything else they have to present to us. Some of the asinine examples ID’ers can come with about human complexity are, “If a man is conscious because he's complex, then a whole room full of people must be even more conscious, because the total complexity would have to be more than any one fellow's complexity. The universe has got to be more complex than anything in it, so it must be humongously conscious.” Nothing like a nod toward the pantheists, but what has been proved?

Consciousness described as “something” necessitates application of the fallacy of reification. Consciousness is not a “thing”; it only results from a process based in the brain. Reifications of abstract concepts seldom make sense, although they contribute to most of the mystery found in religion, including Intelligent Design and Determinism.

ID’ers use our poor sense of smell as an example of why evolution can’t be true. They do so without explaining what a sensitive nose would contribute to our existence, except make it clearer who bathed and who did not. A peacock’s tail is another thing ID’ers whine about. They claim it renders poor peacocks easier for predators to find. That would be a fine idea, if only they could make the peacock walk around like that all the time. They don’t. Like a Spanish woman, the peacock only struts his stuff when the time is right. Otherwise, he gets more streamlined than a bullet when he has to run, and predators have to get past that long tail to get at him.

When the ID’ers start worrying about disadvantageous traits that get passed from one generation to the next, they overlook how they go about getting passed: They require adults mature enough to breed. This ought to be an obvious thing, that will only lack apparency to those seeking ammunition against an otherwise insurmountable obstacle to their agendas: Traits that do not prevent survival to adulthood will get passed, especially if those traits do not otherwise hamper their bearers’ ability to survive in a social environment.

Evolution does not require anyone to “believe in it” in order to be a productive matter of fact. Science is not a project designed with religion as a specific target. Posing improperly asked questions, and then providing answers to them, proves nothing. Science is about the testable, about discovery, about the making of better tools through technology, and about finding the answers to “why?” We all survive in these times because of science, save those who must subsist without it. The only people who question the veracity of evolution as a doctrine are those who cannot comprehend it, and those with an agenda to defend against it. From this point on into the future, much of human welfare will depend on evolution for the rectitude it inherited from the scientific method, the use of which would put religion in all its forms to rest if they were to try it on themselves. They would fail to pass their own, if honest, muster.

To expect evolutionary biologists to duplicate a process whose origination must have taken millions of years to develop into the first germ of life equates with a countering expectation that ID’ers (covert and otherwise) should produce their Intelligent Designer in such a way that He/She/It can be interrogated to our satisfaction. We need expect neither to ever be done, with the exception that biologists are more apt to discover several ways for inception of life to occur than for the ID’ers to ever overcome the defeasibility principle and produce the Grand Designer.

There’s another difference: If humanity finds the key to initiating life, we can make use of that somehow. What would the ID’ers do with the Supreme Designer, once they had Him/Her/It in their hands?

Time must be invoked in evolution’s defense, because time is what it took. To expect a process millions of years in duration to be duplicated overnight is exasperatingly unfair. Time may have played a bigger than obvious role. To learn about it, pay a visit to Naya to get The Mad Poet Does Science at http://www.lulu.com/content/309396   

I gotta quit writing this, it's too long and there's still a lot more that's not true that needs setting straight. It's no wonder it feels like the ground keeps shifting. It's not science. It's not evolution. It's the people trying to pull the rug from under it. Whether or not there is some use for it, and some reason to defend it, religion is wrong, including the kinds trying to trick us into doing their proselytizing at taxpayer expense. Religion is wrong. If it wasn't, it would be science. Why do we give so much support to things that are wrong? If they were fit, they would support themselves and the bad ones would die off, if we weren't so fond of parasites.

Lloyd

2 Defeasibility Principle: Absence of evidence in support of a claimant’s statements requires their rejection to be the only feasible outcome for an inquiry.  Return

3 Newton’s Rules of Reason can be found in his Principia Mathematica. More information about this important subset of that document can be found at
      http://www.atheistlloyd.com/evilnature.html ,
 http://www.atheistlloyd.com/debunking/godontrial.html ,
http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/newton's-rules.html        Return

"We believe Reality 101 is one of the best independently published books on the market." Rec'd 3/4/06 in a letter from Airleaf Publishing and Bookselling. Buy it, read it, and see for yourself.
 

Standalone companion book for the Complete Universe of Memes