Five Canard Stud (taking down the Darwinist canard table and pulling out the chair)
In the comments thread of my last post a back and forth broke out between me and creeper which boiled down to accusations of deception and eventually I considered that creeper had thrown down the gauntlet with his false accusations and complete fabrications (from my point of view) and I needed to step up to the challenge. In the words of creeper, "Have at it." So I shall, in two posts that will first pull the foundations out from under Darwinism and then directly refute it.
Darwinists in present days remind me of President Clinton when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. First came dismissal, then denials, then vehement denials ("I did NOT have sex with that woman!") and then finally the lame admission of guilt. In terms of Darwinism and the evidence, they are up to the vehement denial stage. Their desperation was revealed by the IDA-is-the-missing-link hilarity, a specimen of Lemur that had been in hand for 26 years that suddenly was a magical missing link!!!!! Only, it wasn't anything of the sort. It was simply a Lemur, a particular species of Lemur that is now extinct. Like a Dodo Bird or a Passenger Pigeon. Just another animal that didn't make the final cut. Lately Darwinists have been pulling this kind of prank on the public but in the end their desperation is revealed as Don Batten mentioned in the above linked article:
"And just to cap it off, in this “year of Darwin”, they named the creature after the atheists’ hero, Charles Darwin: Darwinius masillae. (One wonders what Charles Darwin would say now, if only he could (cf. Luke 16:26–31).) As Richard Dawkins said, Darwin enabled him to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”. That is the reason for all the hoopla over Darwin, which seems to be at fever pitch in this “Year of Darwin”.
The claim that Darwinius ‘could finally confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution’ tacitly admits that it has not yet been confirmed
I don’t think I have ever seen such blatantly over-stated claims on a fossil find, and I have seen a few, including one by a major co-author of this paper: Philip Gingerich’s claims for Pakicetus back in 1983. Gingerich had a couple of scraps of a skull of a mammal from Pakistan and claimed it as the evolutionary precursor of whales. He embellished the story with an artist’s drawing of what Pakicetus (“whale from Pakistan”) looked like, with legs becoming flippers, a tail fluke developing and the imaginary creature diving for fish. Cute. Gingerich claimed it was “perfectly intermediate, a missing link between earlier land mammals and later, full-fledged whales”. With such a strong, confident claim from the fossil expert, who could doubt that evolution was true? Seven years later, other paleontologists published a paper describing the rest of Pakicetus and the now almost complete fossil showed that Gingerich’s imagination had really run away with him and the animal was not the missing link he thought it was. See: Not at all like a whale.
Apparently many paleontologists appreciate this sort of over-the-top, publicity-seeking behaviour in support of evolutionary story-telling, because they recently elected Gingerich the president of the American Paleontological Association."
Darwinists are in trouble as it is, so this is kind of like shooting ducks in a barrel. Darwin Duck?
Uniformitarianism, which was a fundamental foundation for Darwinism, has been falsified by the nature of the hundreds and thousands of feet of sedimentary rock layers which have been shown to be associated with catastrophic events. The cell, once thought to be a simple mechanism, is rather remarkably complex, far beyond the complexity of any machine or device imaginable during the time of Darwin. Careful examination of DNA shows it to be a blueprint for life with more information in one strand than Darwin could find in the biggest library in London. Gene mapping has revealed that structures that appear to be similar in differing organisms often come from different locations on the gene, thus presenting yet another in a series of hurdles for Darwinism to surmount. I could go on and on but first we will take off the legs of the Darwinist table, which are the naturalistic materialistic assumptions that underpin Darwinism. Then we will pull out the chair. Then, in my next post, I will reveal why the meal Darwinists try to serve to the public is rotten to the point of being hazardous. But first let us take out the table legs and the chair.
FIVE CANARDS
1) The Universe has a natural cause. This is a fallacy according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that nothing is being either created or destroyed. If nothing gets created or destroyed in the natural world, how do you attribute the creation of all things to natural processes? In the world of today, this kind of logic is called "Epic Fail!" Naturalistic materialists say that by some chance...CHANCE? It somehow happened by some miraculous unobservable chance event. Despite the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Now, allowing for the supernatural one could conclude that a supernatural entity superior to the temporal and natural Universe created that Universe. It may require faith but it does not strain logic. It also does not violate the First Law. Nothing is being created or destroyed because God made all things and contained them within a boundary of logical and understandable laws, including a conservation of all things He created. Only God can create and only God can destroy.
2) Life came from non-life. This violates the Law of Abiogenesis. No one has ever observed life coming from non-life and no scientist has been able to even conceive of and express a scenario in which such a thing might occur. Science actually has no definition for what life itself consists of, for there is no structural or chemical difference between a living person and a person who has just exhaled his last breath. All structures and organisms and systems will be exactly the same, they just have no more spark of life...which science cannot define or segregate from the organism itself. Darwinists just say that somehow, by some chance, it just happened, okay?
God claims to have given life to creatures and within breathing animals the Bible says there is within them the "breath of life." A supernatural Creator capable of creating the entire Universe is not going to find the invention of life to be much harder.
3) More complex life came from simple life. This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything is moving from hot to cold, from organized to disorganized, from energy to entropy. (Technically these laws are stated by beginning with "It is impossible that..." and what follows is usually a bit more boring and less descriptive so I use more common phrases. But I am capable of dealing with the original language of any of these laws if you insist upon it, commenters.) Your hot soup cools off, your neat room gets messy, your smooth skin gets wrinkled, your deck needs to be stained again and so on and so forth. Darwinists claim that macroevolution is causing organisms to go in the opposite direction of the natural movement of all natural things. It is the water that runs uphill, it is the rock that unripples the pond, it is a canard. The Darwinist begins by saying that "by chance mutation..."
God the supernatural being capable of making simple life forms could have and did create complex life forms. It is logical and it fits what we observe in the world today. We can see no way for complex life to have just happened, we never see it happening, but if God created all animals then what we see today makes perfect sense.
4) Information entered into organisms by natural means. This violates the Law of the Conservation of Information.
Richard Dembski excerpt concerning Complex Specified Information: Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information: Dembski, William A.
The Law of Conservation of Information
Evolutionary biology has steadfastly resisted attributing CSI to intelligent causation. Although Manfred Eigen recognizes that the central problem of evolutionary biology is the origin of CSI, he has no thought of attributing CSI to intelligent causation. According to Eigen natural causes are adequate to explain the origin of CSI. The only question for Eigen is which natural causes explain the origin of CSI. The logically prior question of whether natural causes are even in-principle capable of explaining the origin of CSI he ignores. And yet it is a question that undermines Eigen's entire project. Natural causes are in-principle incapable of explaining the origin of CSI. To be sure, natural causes can explain the flow of CSI, being ideally suited for transmitting already existing CSI. What natural causes cannot do, however, is originate CSI. This strong proscriptive claim, that natural causes can only transmit CSI but never originate it, I call the Law of Conservation of Information. It is this law that gives definite scientific content to the claim that CSI is intelligently caused. The aim of this last section is briefly to sketch the Law of Conservation of Information (a full treatment will be given in Uncommon Descent, a book I am jointly authoring with Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson).
To see that natural causes cannot account for CSI is straightforward. Natural causes comprise chance and necessity (cf. Jacques Monod's book by that title). Because information presupposes contingency, necessity is by definition incapable of producing information, much less complex specified information. For there to be information there must be a multiplicity of live possibilities, one of which is actualized, and the rest of which are excluded. This is contingency. But if some outcome B is necessary given antecedent conditions A, then the probability of B given A is one, and the information in B given A is zero. If B is necessary given A, Formula (*) reduces to I(A&B) = I(A), which is to say that B contributes no new information to A. It follows that necessity is incapable of generating new information. Observe that what Eigen calls "algorithms" and "natural laws" fall under necessity.
Since information presupposes contingency, let us take a closer look at contingency. Contingency can assume only one of two forms. Either the contingency is a blind, purposeless contingency-which is chance; or it is a guided, purposeful contingency-which is intelligent causation. Since we already know that intelligent causation is capable of generating CSI (cf. section 4), let us next consider whether chance might also be capable of generating CSI. First notice that pure chance, entirely unsupplemented and left to its own devices, is incapable of generating CSI. Chance can generate complex unspecified information, and chance can generate non-complex specified information. What chance cannot generate is information that is jointly complex and specified.
Biologists by and large do not dispute this claim. Most agree that pure chance-what Hume called the Epicurean hypothesis-does not adequately explain CSI. Jacques Monod (1972) is one of the few exceptions, arguing that the origin of life, though vastly improbable, can nonetheless be attributed to chance because of a selection effect. Just as the winner of a lottery is shocked at winning, so we are shocked to have evolved. But the lottery was bound to have a winner, and so too something was bound to have evolved. Something vastly improbable was bound to happen, and so, the fact that it happened to us (i.e., that we were selected-hence the name selection effect) does not preclude chance. This is Monod's argument and it is fallacious. It fails utterly to come to grips with specification. Moreover, it confuses a necessary condition for life's existence with its explanation. Monod's argument has been refuted by the philosophers John Leslie (1989), John Earman (1987), and Richard Swinburne (1979). It has also been refuted by the biologists Francis Crick (1981, ch. 7), Bernd-Olaf Küppers (1990, ch. 6), and Hubert Yockey (1992, ch. 9). Selection effects do nothing to render chance an adequate explanation of CSI.
Most biologists therefore reject pure chance as an adequate explanation of CSI. The problem here is not simply one of faulty statistical reasoning. Pure chance is also scientifically unsatisfying as an explanation of CSI. To explain CSI in terms of pure chance is no more instructive than pleading ignorance or proclaiming CSI a mystery. It is one thing to explain the occurrence of heads on a single coin toss by appealing to chance. It is quite another, as Küppers (1990, p. 59) points out, to follow Monod and take the view that "the specific sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule of the first organism came about by a purely random process in the early history of the earth." CSI cries out for explanation, and pure chance won't do. As Richard Dawkins (1987, p. 139) correctly notes, "We can accept a certain amount of luck in our [scientific] explanations, but not too much."
If chance and necessity left to themselves cannot generate CSI, is it possible that chance and necessity working together might generate CSI? The answer is No. Whenever chance and necessity work together, the respective contributions of chance and necessity can be arranged sequentially. But by arranging the respective contributions of chance and necessity sequentially, it becomes clear that at no point in the sequence is CSI generated. Consider the case of trial-and-error (trial corresponds to necessity and error to chance). Once considered a crude method of problem solving, trial-and-error has so risen in the estimation of scientists that it is now regarded as the ultimate source of wisdom and creativity in nature. The probabilistic algorithms of computer science (e.g., genetic algorithms-see Forrest, 1993) all depend on trial-and-error. So too, the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection is a trial-and-error combination in which mutation supplies the error and selection the trial. An error is committed after which a trial is made. But at no point is CSI generated.
Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.
This last corollary is especially pertinent to the nature of science for it shows that scientific explanation is not coextensive with reductive explanation. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many scientists are convinced that proper scientific explanations must be reductive, moving from the complex to the simple. Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 316) will write, "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." Thus Dennett (1995, p. 153) will view any scientific explanation that moves from simple to complex as "question-begging." Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 13) will explicitly equate proper scientific explanation with what he calls "hierarchical reductionism," according to which "a complex entity at any particular level in the hierarchy of organization" must properly be explained "in terms of entities only one level down the hierarchy." While no one will deny that reductive explanation is extremely effective within science, it is hardly the only type of explanation available to science. The divide-and-conquer mode of analysis behind reductive explanation has strictly limited applicability within science. In particular, this mode of analysis is utterly incapable of making headway with CSI. CSI demands an intelligent cause. Natural causes will not do.
A million monkeys typing for a million years actually don't wind up writing Romeo and Juliet. Shannon's theory was an attempt to quantify amounts of information but it doesn't understand the content, only the volume. As Karl Steinbuch said, according to Shannon a "kilogram of gold has the same value as a kilogram of sand." As Jean Cocteau famously remarked, "The greatest literary work of art is nothing but a scrambled alphabet" if one only measures the amount of information. Life is packed with information and that information must have an intelligent source.
SETI is, as you know, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. What are all those ATA listening dishes aimed outward seeking? Information! The idea is that if information is found amongst the noise reaching the Earth, it had an intelligent source. Imagine if we turned our attention inwards towards the cell? We would find DNA, we would find information integrated within life and we would understand that an intelligence designed all living things. If our logic was consistent and we were not driven by assumptions that preclude the existence of God then we would expect to see evidence of an intelligent designer, the Creator God. And we do, from within the tiniest portions of the cell on outwards we see intricate design with redundancies and contingencies built in. We find creatures that depend upon each other for existence and it strains credulity to believe they just happened to develop by chance together. In fact, just trying to imagine a way in which RNA, let alone DNA, could happen by chance is beyond any reasonable scientist. No one has presented any hypothesis that has a chance of being possible.
5) Uniformitarianism. Darwinism in all of its forms relies upon millions and millions of years of death and mutation and natural selection and the constant intervention of Chance, the Evolution Fairy to take us from simple early life to the millions of varieties of life forms we have now. Once geologists and ordinary folks figured that the rock layers on Earth were left over from the Noahic Flood, but over time as scientists and common man drifted away from the concept of a Creator God there were people like James Hutton and Charles Lyell who proposed that the rock layers are actually laid down by long-term uniform processes and represented hundreds of millions of years of Earth time written in stone.
credited to SuperpunchThis was a boon to Darwinists, for if the rock layers were evidence of many millions of years then there was an outside chance (there is that word again) that over multiple millions of years the unobserved process known as macroevolution would have happened! The fossils must therefore be a continuum of organisms evolving from simple to complex forms. It was epiphany!
It was greatly mistaken.
We now know that every sedimentary rock layer has evidence of catastrophism. We can see that most layering is obviously from some kind of major hydrological event. Some can be attributable to volcanic activities, mudslides, and avalanches but most involve water. All of these rock layers fit into the creationist scenario as part of the Noahic Flood and the events that followed the flood, including an ice age that may well have lasted a good 500 years past the end of the flood itself. Some rock layers stretch across multiple continents and are massive beyond measure. Many of them cross or alternate, as you would see in flood patterns but could not have in a uniformitarian hypothesis. There are also tree trunks that thrust through multiple layers, a phenomenon that produced some truly ludicrous suggestions from uniformitarians before they began to disperse and rethink.
We also understand that fossils are organisms that had to be buried very rapidly and then preserved away from the normal bacterial and insect population that would break them down as carrion and eventually to dust. Being buried under tons of mud and water away from direct oxygen sources during a world-wide catastrophic flood produces conditions that allow even Jellyfish to be fossilized! The idea that rock layers represent ages of time is outdated and must eventually be abandoned by honest and reasonable men.
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There are bottom-dwelling ocean creatures found in rock formations at mountaintops around the globe. There are all sorts of extinct creatures found and very few look like the animals and plants we have now. On the other hand, some fossil creatures are EXACTLY as they are found in the rock records. How could it be that some creatures evolve like crazy and some stay just the same? How can it be that all fossils found are complete organisms and plants that in no way have transitional systems that are observable and yet Darwinism demands transitions?
In my companion post to this one, I will take the reader through macroevolution, microevolution and define and demonstrate precisely what speciation is. In the process I expect to hoist Darwinists on their own petard, so to speak.
In a preemptive strike, I can tell you that some may wish to comment in protest that Darwinism does not even discuss the advent of the Universe or how first life came to be or how information was input into life. My response is that, if you are a naturalistic materialist, you must have a world view. Your world view will require that all things have a natural explanation. So -
No Universe, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created the Universe?
No first life, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created life?
No Information, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created information?
IF Darwinists will concede all of that, who needs them to explain all living things today? If God is the answer to those other questions then He makes a logical answer to the fourth question, too. If not, Darwinists need explanations for the first three. Compris?
A consistent world view has an explanation for where the Universe came from, where life came from, where information came from and how such a great wealth of plant and animal life can flourish on this planet when we can see no signs whatever of life anywhere else in the Universe.
This post has destroyed the underpinnings of Darwinism. Next post takes out the rest of it to the trash heap where it belongs.