Feedback for October 2000

Agnosticism is not a religion. Neither is evolutionary biology. That it does not confirm or deny the existence of a god is an absurd criterion for calling it a religion -- plumbing, typewriter repair, and diesel mechanics are also fields that do not take a stand on god's reality. Are you going to equate them with agnosticism and religion, too?

Glenn Morton has a page that argues that it was not the basis for the Noachic Flood. Even the Answers in Genesis site rejects the view that it is Noah's Flood.

On chance and proof:

Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution

Evolution and Chance

On definitions of evolution:

What is Evolution

Introduction to Evolutionary Biology

These should address your concerns. Even if you cannot imagine how things could occur without intelligence, that is no argument that they do not. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, see this post of mine for reasons why.

The bible isn't the oldest book on the face of the earth.

And how do you know it reveals things that you don't even know of?

Numbers, Ronald L. 1998. Darwinism comes to America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Eugenics is an interesting topic - it was by far wider than Nazi Germany, and in fact was most popular in Britain and America, allied with all kinds of faux psychology and genetics. You can read more about it in the standard work:

Kevles, DJ. 1995. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Revised ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

and also

Adams, Mark B. 1990. The Wellborn science: eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, Monographs on the history and philosophy of biology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Your suggestion doesn't make much sense. This is a site dedicated to rational, reasonable, mainstream views; creationists do not have those. Instead, there is an extensive collection of links to other sources. If you meant that it should have documents written by Christians, it already has many such articles.

Paternity tests are done with yet another procedure. Differences in the DNA mean that restriction enzymes (enzymes that cut DNA at specific sequences) will chop up people's DNA in different ways. The fragments that result from snipping up my DNA will have a slightly different size distribution than those from your DNA, but will more closely resemble the distribution in my children's DNA.

1. The "discovery" was actually a hoax. See our articles on Sun Pictures and the Noah's Ark Hoax.
2. Even if a large boat had been found, that wouldn't necessarily mean there had been a globe-covering flood. There are many more problems with a global flood than that. See our Flood Geology articles.
3. Why would we ever expect to find an Ark anyway? If I were Noah, and I had just survived a massive flood that scoured the Earth, why wouldn't I tear down the Ark to use the lumber for building new houses, a new barn, and so on?
4. The story of Noah is derived from the older Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

In its time, China's Grand Treasure Fleet was a marvel of naval architecture. The large, multi-storied ships with their high overhanging stern galleries dazzled all who saw them. The largest vessel in the fleet, the gigantic Treasure Ship,baochuan, measured 444 feet from bow to stern, had a beam of 180 feet and captured the wind with massive sails mounted on nine masts. The Horse Ship, the Supply Ship, and the Billet Ship descended in size to the smallest ship of the fleet, the Combat Ship, a five-masted vessel nearly 180 feet long with a 68 foot beam. The ships were built with a series of vertical partitions that divided the ship's hull into separate compartments to prevent the spread of either fire or water through the ship. Although watertight bulkheads were a novelty in ships of contemporary European design, it was a common feature of Chinese ships. Equipped with mounted batteries of four large cannon, twenty smaller guns, twenty rockets and ten bombs, the sixty-two specially designed long-range junks of the first expedition reportedly displaced about 500 tons each and could make about six knots in a good wind. Compared to the Portuguese fleets that entered the Indian Ocean under Vasco da Gama near the end of the fifteenth century, Zheng He's Grand Treasure Fleet was an armada from another world.

More information is availabe on Chinese naval skills at this site, too. It appears that you are correct, but I note that mention is made of watertight compartments in Admiral Zheng's ships, which meant leakages and holing were least dangerous. The Ark then would need to have been compartmentalised into watertight sections if it was any bigger.

On the other hand, it could also be that the size of these ships was exaggerated due to a mistake in measurement systems, in which case the length would have been more like 390 to 408 feet long, still the largest wooden vessels built.

There have been some remarkable paradigm shifts within mainstream science, to be sure; but I do not see the relevance of this observation. I would not recommend holding your breath until a paradigm shift comes about which reverts back to old and disproved ideas about origins. A paradigm shift invariably involves a new idea which wins out on the basis of empirical support.

Scientific creationism is founded on the idea that the creation stories in the bible can be read as a literal account of events in history. This is not a new paradigm. It is an old and disproven paradigm. That is not, by the way, a rejection of the bible. It is rejection of one particular mode of interpretation of the bible.

If you are looking for specifically Christian creationist discussions, you are in the wrong place. The information here is neither for nor against Christianity. There are places on the net where Christians discuss these issues; here we have a more general scope. The information here is intended to be accessible and relevant to anyone who is concerned with following conventional scientific empirical methodology, regardless of their faith.

The notion that natural selection "holds Creation together" is not something I have ever heard. For Christians, God is the foundation and ultimate source of all the natural world. Many Christians find that entirely compatible with recognition of the discoveries of evolutionary biology. The problem is invariably not with evolution being incompatible with God, but with evolution being incompatible with one way of reading the bible. That is a problem you have to work out for yourself.

As for you quote for Muller -- he is not saying that man would be insane if evolution was not true. He is saying that evolution is so well established as a fact that rejecting it as a fact would leave one with no basis for thinking anything is an fact; which is an insane position. He's right.

As for the gospel message, I believe you do your gospel message a grave disservice by linking it to rejection of such obvious facts as biological evolution. Your gospel message is about God's love. I suggest you be cautious of linking that to scientific creationism. They are different messages.

In point of historical fact, religion and science are engaged in a more or less emphatic jostling match at the boundaries of their "magisteria", and this is entirely to be expected, Religion also jostles the elbows of economics, politics, history, literature and so forth. However, this does not mean that either religion or these other fields do not have "proper domains" in which they are appropriate guides.

However, so long as science represents the best way to know the natural world, any other domain, including literature, economics, politics or religion, which seeks to challenge scientific work on origins will run up against the success of science and the failure of those fields to explain origins. So if a religion wants to claim that the world is only around 10,000 years old, then as religion that maybe fine (I doubt it, myself) but as knowledge of the natural world it is in complete opposition to the facts.

Second, the "dictionary" meaning of "species" is actually, if you go back far enough "idea" - in fact we get it from the Latin translation of the Greek word eidos which Plato used for his eternal ideas. Well in advance of Darwinism, the great German botanist Albrecht von Haller wrote to Carolus Linnaeus that "We cannot in all cases, say what is a species and what a variety; at least not without culture and observations" (17 October 1766, cited in Stafleu 1971: 247) and Georges Buffon denied that any such thing as a species existed at about the same time, although he was not a transmutationist (the term for those who denied the fixity of species in the 18th century).

Arguing from a dictionary - sometimes called Argumentum ad lexicon - is no way to do science or philosophy. It is a form of the fallacy known as Argumentum ad populum or the Appeal to popularity. Merely because a lot of people use or traditionally used a word in a particular way is no reason to think that a new use doesn't reflect the way things are more accurately. "Species" is being redefined now, as in the past 250 years, because the logical categories we inherited before then fail to capture the observed realities of species.

So far as the work of Kelvin - his views were deeply in error because he did not understand radioactivity. Einstein never, so far as I know, rejected evolution. The others are pre-Darwin. Apart from two creationist web sites that make the unsubstantiated claim Faraday was a creationist, I am unable to find that he ever even mentioned evolution except in the older sense of "development" and then only in connection with the evolution of electricity to electromagnetism or hydrogen to water.

Stafleu, Frans Antonie. 1971. Linnaeus and the linnaeans. The spreading of their ideas in systematic botany, 1735-1789, Regnum vegetabile, v. 79. Utrecht,: Oosthoek.

All species have some set of features that are unique to them. Humans are no different. But then neither are the two species of chimp, gorillas, orangutans and so forth. Each is its own type of organism. If another species evolved from gorillas, for example, they would still be apes, even if they could talk like Ape in George of the Jungle. And so are we.

The second thing you could do is turn off the TV and read a book. Television has pretty much failed as a medium for promoting serious discourse, but the library is full of interesting ideas, still.

The third thing you could do is complain to your cable company. I doubt that it will do much good, since you are just one voice shouting against the tide of bozos who have had their brains sucked out by the big glass teat, but it's got to be more productive than complaining here.

Your comment is interesting. Did you know that relatively few creationist sites include any links at all to talkorigins.org, while talkorigins.org has an extensive list of creationist sites? It's right there on the main page: click on Other web sites to get a long list, and it even includes a mechanism for you to add additional page references if you want.

I think that does an admirable job of revealing the shakiness of creationist arguments, and their intellectual dishonesty.

It could be that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not bother to get articles for talk.origins on its news server.

The cure is to find either an ISP that has a decent news feed or a publicly accessible news server that does carry talk.origins. It is possible that your current ISP might add talk.origins to their list of newsgroups carried if you ask for it.

Wesley