Zatera Ul

I came across this through the Anchoress. A very good essay on being skeptical about evolution.

An excerpt:

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?

Another excerpt:

Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn’t a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had 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 science, of Darwin, of progress.

This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. “Creationist” is to evolution what “racist” is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.

And a good line:

It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam.

I don’t put much stock in the scientific theories about the origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything, because they implicitly assume that supernatural effects are zero. It’s pretty clear in Genesis that supernatural effects were very, very much greater than zero at the time of Creation. I can tell you what happens in computational atomic physics when you leave out significant effects, such as the effects of relativity in heavy atoms (because the electrons are whizzing around really, really, really fast): you get wrong answers. Sometimes so far off that the signs are wrong. Then your results are useless.

He’s not correct that most scientists aren’t concerned about creationism. I have seen a number of articles and letters to the editor in the APS News [American Physical Society newspaper] full of concern about how creationism (sometimes “disguised” as Intelligent Design) is creeping into high school science classes, and how terrible that is. For many scientists, the assumption that supernatural effects are zero carries over into their personal beliefs, and is not just a working assumption necessary for doing science. The National Academy of Sciences has put out material trying to put creationism (and religion in general) in its place. I think it would be better to teach students about the limitations of science.

I get suspicious when evolutionists start quoting the Prophet Darwin in The Origin of Species in very much the same manner as I would quote from the Bible. They don’t seem to be able to keep themselves from veering off into philosophical and religious language. It also looks like they’ve made so little progress, in the past hundred years or so, that they have nothing newer or better than Darwin to cite. In physics, it would be like citing a paper by Maxwell–undergraduate textbook stuff, nowadays.

I’ve heard Phillip Johnson of the Intelligent Design crowd speak. He says that evolution is just the modern creation myth. Hard to argue with that.

Now there’s also the Theory of the Quantum Fish.