When Darwinists rely on examples from engineering -- examples that entail purpose, intention, intelligence, and direction, you know their theory is in trouble.
Their main illustration for macroevolution is the evolution of the automobile. "[N]obody could have imagined how Henry Ford's primitive T automobile could have turned into Toyota's Prius hybrid," they write, because "it would have been impossible for the engineers at Ford to develop all the remarkable engineering necessary to turn a Model T into a Prius in one year. The electronic enhancements alone took decades to invent and develop." (pp. 45-46)
If this is the best they can do, they should just stick to declaring darwinism obviously true and
let it go at that.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
5 comments:
I've got an old 1963 GMC pickup I am hoping will evolve into a 2014 model. Haven't had much luck though it keeps wanting to rust.
This is commonly known, thanks to Philip Johnson, as "Berra's Blunder" -- named after an evolutionary biologist who wrote a book filled with engineering examples to make the case for Darwinism.
As Johnson showed, in every conceivable case for evolution, it is also possible to see it as a case for design.
As Dr. David Stove argues in his fabulous critique of Darwinian evolution, the neo-Darwinist cannot escape the teleology that seems inherent in nature, and specifically, human beings.
'63?!
Cory -- I haven't read Stowe's critique, but I've commented before on the inherently teleological language used by darwinists. It's rather odd that darwinian processes resulted in human language that can only describe darwinism in teleological terms. I suppose a good darwinist would argue that this incoherence is in itself evidence for darwinism!
Hi RKBall:
Stove was an atheist philosopher, so his tome is much more forceful in that he doesn't have a dog in this hunt, so to speak. I think he did hold to the theory in some respects, but rejected various aspects of it because they were logically untenable.
It is a fine read, and he writes elegantly. It's titled, Darwinian Fairytales.
I agree with you wholeheartedly and I do think that modern Darwinists, such as Dawkins, too often employ teleological terms precisely because organisms appear to have certain ends. It's very difficult to argue that a random process could produce orderly working organs, for example.
Right, as I've put it, everybody's a theist when they go to the doctor, e.g., the heart has a function, a purpose, and it is either operating properly or improperly. A true darwinist, a philosophically consistent darwinist, would not view cancerous cells as abnormal or bad, just nature doing its purposeless, undirected thing. And no atheist dismisses the love they feel for their child as merely an involuntary chemical response created by a mindless process and nothing more. They impute authenticity to it. Atheism is unliveable and all atheists steal from theism to live a coherent, meaningful life.
Post a Comment