Darwinism a la Geocentrism

In a strange case of history repeating, the whole debate about origins seems to quite neatly align with another old debate about nature; the workings of the solar system.

Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe was rather simplistic in that it assumed that all the celestial bodies moved in a uniform circular path around earth. While the retrograde motions of the planets were certainly known to Aristotle, he had no way to incorporate it into his model.

It wasn’t until Apollonius and Hipparchus came on the scene that the idea of epicycles was injected into Aristotle’s model to make it fit the actual observations. When Ptolemy came along, he took the idea of epicycles to a whole new level, compounding epicycles upon epicycles in a desperate effort to make the Aristotelian model fit observations.

It wasn’t until Copernicus and Kepler finally came upon the scene that the whole Aristotelian system was thrown out in favor of a totally new, and far more accurate, model; heliocentrism.

We can see in this whole narrative some quite striking parallels with the current debate over origins:

Darwin’s evolutionary model of the origins of the species is rather simplistic in that it assumes that all species evolved from one common ancestor by only a natural process. While problems were well known to Darwin such as a lack of model for the origin of the first life-form; lack of transitional fossils; and known limits to genetic change in breeding, he had no way to incorporate these into his model.

Intelligent Designist’s eventually came on the scene and injected the ‘god of the gaps’ idea into Darwinism in a desperate effort to make the Darwinian model fit observations.

It wasn’t until Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb Jr. finally came on the scene that the whole Darwinian system was thrown out in favour of the new, and far more accurate model of Biblical Creationism (or Young Earth Creationism).

The overturning of the Aristotelian model in favour of heliocentrism was a long drawn out and tortured affair. The stalwarts of the old model simply didn’t want to let it go and thus admit that they were totally wrong. They used every tactic in the book to stall the rise of the new model, even the highest powers in the land resorted to ‘roughhousing’ tactics.

It took the compounding of evidence and the slow dying off of the ‘old guard’ before the revolution truly took over.

The same is certainly true of today’s origins debate. The adherents of the old Darwinian model of origins are just as stubborn and dogmatic as the old geocentrists. Darwinists are demoting or sacking those in academic circles who disagree with them, even resorting to the courts in a desperate attempt to stall the rise of Biblical creationism.

But just as the ‘old guard’ was unable to stem the rise of revolutionary heliocentrism, the evidence against evolution is mounting, the evolutionary dogmatists are aging and the tide is inexorably turning in favour of the new revolution; Young-Earth Biblical Creationism.

The God Delusion

Having read The God Delusion this second time, I have come to appreciate much of what he says. While there is no doubt that much of the content is intellectual drivel, most of his criticisms of the church hit the nail on the head. The God Delusion to me seemed to act as a very efficient ‘Occam’s’ razor to various religions, and various practices within religions. I really think that if the Christian church implemented this razor to their theology and to their general practices, they would come out much stronger and fitter as a result. Though this is certainly not Dawkins intention!

The thing that shocked me the most was how surprisingly short on scientific evidence it was, while being long on speculation. Page and page went by where Dawkins indulged in fantastic speculation as to the origin and possible Darwinian reason for religion, yet he never substantiated any of his arguments with anything remotely resembling empirical data. It is for this reason alone that religious people can simply ignore this book and it’s claims, because they are nothing more than spectacular speculation.

Most people seem to think that this book is an argument against the existence of a god, specifically the Christian God. This is certainly how it is portrayed. Yet this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The basic argument that Dawkins uses against the existence of God falls in to the trap of the Genetic Fallacy; the denigration of the origin of an idea or the people who believe it, does not disprove it’s existence. For example, if I were to call Dawkins and imbecile, this wouldn’t invalidate his arguments. It may or may not be true, but it has no impact on his actual arguments.

Dawkins quite rightly bemoans the ill that religious people cause, but wrongly assumes that just because some religious people do bad things, that God mustn’t exist.

The second argument that falls into the Genetic Fallacy is Dawkins’ attempt to explain the belief in God as being just a delusion in the human’s brain. But yet again, speculating as to the workings of the human mind doesn’t even begin to address the actual existence of God Himself.

The main bone that I have to pick with Dawkins is his extreme intolerance towards those who disagree with him. He seems to be a hardcore anti-pluralist. He seems totally unwilling to even consider the idea of just living with people who disagree with his own worldview.

In critiquing religion, his chosen method is to throw the baby out with the bath water. He isn’t interested in live alongside even the many religions which shun all forms of violence. Instead he tarnishes all religions with the dirtiest brush that he could find, and proclaims that even the most benignly pacifist religions must be eliminated. This type of dogmatic intolerance sadly reminds me of the oppression techniques of communist China and Russia where everybody who disagreed with the rulership was systematically eradicated. Dawkins rhetoric is shockingly similar to this horrible time in history.

It is disconcerting that this book is in the hands of the pleb. While I recommend it to those who are properly educated in religion (specifically Protestants), ‘The God Delusion’ is a dangerous propaganda tool in the hands of those people whose only real knowledge of religion is from these types of biased books. These people are totally unable to critically evaluate Dawkins claims, and balance them against what the Bible really teaches.

As a Protestant young earth creationist, I found that virtually no criticism of Dawkins was applicable to my worldview. I could almost feel the bullets rapidly bounding off of me!

Virtually all of his attacks were directed against various Catholic doctrines and practices which clearly don’t apply to Protestants.

His other major point of attack was against the various inconsistencies that arise by trying to amalgamate belief in God with the theory of evolution- and again, none of this applies to the YEC worldview.

For me, I came out the other end of this book smiling. Dawkins razor was only ever directed at the dross that prevents Christianity being a credible alternative to atheism. If you eliminate all that Dawkins recommends, you get YEC; a worldview tempered in the crucible of Dawkins vociferous attacks; a worldview, by virtue of Dawkins tempering, that is immune to all weapons that he has in his arsenal.

YEC, ID and the God of the Gaps

Atheist Fairytales

The ‘God of the Gaps’ idea (hereafter abbreviated as gotg) is commonly used as a disparaging epithet against anyone who denies that only natural causes have been in effect in the universe’s history. Wikipedia defines it as:

“a view of God as existing in the "gaps" or aspects of reality that are currently unexplained by scientific knowledge, or that otherwise lack a plausible natural explanation….a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account.” [Emphasis added]

I will ignore the non-sequitur logical fallacy of the gotg argument that, just because you can imagine a plausible natural explanation for an event in the past doesn’t mean that it actually occurred that way. Instead I want to focus on it’s common application to the two worldviews of Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and the Intelligent Design movement (ID).

It seems to me that the idea of filling the explanatory gaps in the naturalist theory of origins with ‘god did it’ is most applicable to ID. To explain why this is so, a brief explanation of what ID is, is necessary. Wikipedia defines ID as the:

“proposition that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

This means that ID basically accepts every single part of the atheistic model of evolutionary origins, except where atheistic evolution fails to explain how something happened, like the commonly cite bacterial flagellum. So whenever naturalism fails to provide a plausible explanation of how something could have occurred naturally, ID says “god did it” (or to be more accurate: “a designer did it”). So we see that the definition of what ID is, inherently includes the essential logic of the ‘God of the Gaps’ idea.

YEC on the other hand, rejects all forms of evolution (be it atheistic, theistic, deistic etc) totally and utterly. YEC has a totally different model for the origin of life. It completely rejects the idea that all life has commonly descent from bacteria via any form of evolution. YEC rejects the theory that all life has a common ancestry as merely a figment of the imagination, and as a false interpretation of the empirical data that the earth’s rocks provide.

I would consider YEC immune from the gotg allegation, as opposed to ID (or any other variation of theistic naturalism), because YEC doesn’t actually attempt to insert supernaturalism in the gaps of the atheistic framework, but inserts supernaturalism in place of the whole atheistic framework itself!

Thus, if the YEC theory rejects the actual whole fractured framework of evolution, than any accusation that the YEC theory is a gotg type theory is inapplicable since the YEC model rejects the actual framework and thus the gaps that gotg thinking is employed to plug.

Because of this rejection of the atheistic evolution of all species, and the rejection of the corollary gaps in the model that ID tries to fill, YEC is free to interpret nature through supernatural means, immune to the gotg epithet.

It is for this reason that YEC avoids the whole gotg trap that ID inherently falls head-first into.

Interpreting Scripture

It is generally agreed by laymen and Biblical scholars alike that the best way to interpret the meaning of Scripture is to compare it to itself (that is, cross-referencing with itself), and that a good rule is that the Bible should be taken as literal unless it obviously means otherwise, as is obviously the case with Psalms or Revelations.


Yet when the topic of Creation and the Flood is discussed, the rules suddenly change and we are told that Scripture should also be interpreted by "science" whenever the two disagree.



Essentially what is implied-consciously or not- is that the Christian worldview is to be subordinate to all other worldviews, particularly the currently reigning secular worldview. Whenever there is a disagreement between these two, the Bible is always the one that is reinterpreted. It is claimed that the “science” of the secular worldview is the acme of human knowledge and as such all other forms of knowledge must be subservient.



But what is meant by the term 'science'? It seems that the two terms ‘science’ and ‘naturalistic evolution’ are used synonymously. It is certainly true that most of the public have the fallacious impression that ‘science’ inherently means naturalistic evolution to the exclusion of all other worldviews such as YEC, OLC, theistic evolution etc. And vice versa it is believed that naturalistic evolution has exclusive rights over the term ‘science’, to the exclusion of all other worldviews (Hence why so many religious people feel compelled to reject all ‘science’ outright; they wrongly think that in order to reject evolution they must also reject ‘science’).

Science certainly is a powerful explanatory tool for acquiring knowledge. Therefore because naturalistic evolution claims exclusive rights over ‘science’ it is wrongly assumed that ‘naturalistic evolution’ must similarly be regarded as just as powerful and authoritative by synonymous association alone. Thus, it is claimed that the philosophical worldview of naturalism must be the rule to which all other worldviews conform.

It is for this reason alone that the Biblical account of origins is demanded by secularists to be subservient and must genuflect to their own worldview of naturalistic evolution.





What secularists are erroneously claiming is that any Biblical idea that conflicts with science is wrong.

But what they really mean is that any Biblical idea that conflicts with their philosophy of naturalism is wrong! It has NOTHING to do with science at all!



But what mus be remembered is that science is rather like statistics; you can pick or ignore whatever pieces of science that you like to suit whatever worldview you like; YEC, OEC, IDism, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, atheistic evolution etc, the fact is that ALL worldviews have some sort of science behind them.



So in the end we see that scientific evidence actually does comport with Scripture-rather; it is only the philosophical worldview of naturalistic evolution that does not fit with Scripture. And considering that it was originally designed to oppose the Biblical model, the fact that the two conflict should come as no surprise to anyone.

The conflict is not between ‘science’ vs the Bible at all. Instead the real conflict is between the worldviews of naturalism vs the Bible, as well as between naturalistic science vs Biblical science.



So what Christians are actually doing when trying to compromise the Bible with evolution is making the Bible subservient to the most popular worldview of today in a vain attempt to avoid embarrassment in the face of ungodly man, rather than being concerned with truth in the face of God.



Should the perspicacious Word of God really be subservient to the capricious vogue of man?

Man and Dinosaurs Together?

Can you spot the Dinosaur in this ancient carving?

One contentious facet of Young Earth Creationism is the belief that humans walked the earth with dinosaurs only 4000 years ago.



This belief is rubbished by evolutionists because it is in complete contradiction with their own beliefs. They believe that dinosaurs ceased to exist over 65 million years ago.

They come to this conclusion because their interpretation of the earth’s rocks shows no fossilised dinosaurs which is dated by radiometric dating methods to be younger than 65 million years.

The dating methods that produce these dates are not the topic of this particular article, and have been adequately refuted many times by others.



The reason why this logic is fundamentally flawed is that it relies on the absence of evidence, rather than the presence of evidence. This is a logical fallacy called an Argument from Ignorance.





Even if we accept their false dates for the sake of the argument (which I will for this article), the absence of fossils from a certain period of hypothetical time does not mean that that particular animal did not live at that particular time.

Three basic ways that a species of animal could be alive and not leave fossils is if 1) it moved to an environment where the fossilization process just didn’t occur. 2) a species population size temporarily and dramatically decreased to a size where fossilization would never occur. Or 3) we just haven’t found any fossils yet! Remember that palaeontologists have only dug a few miniscule little holes when compared to the vast volumes of fossil-laden soils of the earth’s surface.



But what is even more significant is that even according to the evolutionist’s own models, it is incontrovertibly accepted that species routinely lived for vast amounts of time without ever leaving even a hint of fossil evidence!
Some gaps are so large that when put in context of the whole fossil record, the gaps turn into vast chasms, some as large as three quarters of the whole fossil record!





The fact is that, even assuming the corrupt radiometric dates of the theory of evolution for arguments sake, if the fossil record fails to record the existence of a species for such vast amounts of time, then how can we trust the alleged finely graduated sequence of evolution that is claimed of the fossil record?

Similarly, how can we really trust that dinosaurs haven’t been on earth in the last 65 million years (assuming the evolutionist’s theory) based on an absence of fossils, when other species are claimed by evolutionists to live for hundreds of millions of years without leaving any fossil evidence at all???







So when all this is combined with the corrupt dates ascribed to the fossils, we have even more reason to disregard the alleged evolutionary history as nothing more than dubious speculation.

And no amount of dubious speculation, no matter how frequently and dogmatically parroted, will ever match the veracity of the clear and omniscient word of God.

Noah's Ark

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/thinking-outside-the-box

Noah’s Ark, the Bible records this giant boat as being over 135 meters long, 22 wide and 13 meters high! People baulk at the idea of Noah’s Ark being real. They automatically think that such a prodigious structure couldn’t possibly have been built in such an ancient culture.


It is certainly easy to question the veracity of the Ark narrative when we have no physical evidence left of such a structure, but we can’t legitimately discard the narrative on these grounds alone. After all, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.



What we need to do is to look back at ancient history and look for other prodigious structures to see what ancient people really were capable of.

For example, surely the Great Pyramid of Giza could be considered a structure of similar magnitude to the Ark. The biggest of the Giza pyramids originally measured over 145 meters tall and each side 230 meters long. Such a structure required over 2.3 million blocks of stone. Still to this day- when we have the technology to send people to the moon and genetically engineer organisms- nobody knows how these giant pyramids were constructed.

Ask yourself, would anyone seriously believe historical accounts of immensely giant pyramidal structures the size of the Great Pyramid if the structure didn’t still exist? Certainly not. Scholars would certainly claim that the stories were either entirely myth or highly exaggerated accounts of much smaller structures.



I’m sure most people would agree that the Great Pyramid of Giza is considerably more sophisticated and a substantially more of a monumental achievement than Noah’s wooden Ark.

When we look at some of the amazing structures that the ancient people of history were able to achieve- giant structures which still stand many thousands of years later- then suddenly the task that Noah had in building the Ark seems quite reasonable in comparison.