Evidence is the enemy:
In their more candid moments, some leading lights in the evolutionary community admit that the Darwinian worldview comes complete with a set of blinders. They even urge the wearing of the blinders. The great biophysicist Francis Crick, for example, said, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”1
Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin was even more explicit. In an essay he wrote for The New York Review of Books, he defined science as ruling out, by definition, the possibility of God intelligently designing life — never mind that belief in a rational, orderly cosmic Creator was the soil from which modern science sprang.
Jonathan Witt, “Darwin’s Silver Chair” at Evolution News and Science Today
Most theories in science have not needed court judgments to cement their rule, come to think of it.
An important question is answered by a new study. How do cavefish lose their eyes? Unsurprisingly (by now) it’s epigenetic. A gene (also present in humans) turns off the blood supply to the developing eyes in the embryo when the fish have been living in darkness.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/uom-gft060120.php
No, but for some reason court judgments were needed to prevent religion sneaking itself into the science classroom disguised with a white coat.
Speaking of blinders…..Sev you ok? You sound like you need a little help getting over it. The Dover trial didn’t kill off ID.
In his article, Witt quotes Lewontin as such
Witt wonders,,,
Witt then speculates that perhaps Lewontin is talking about,,,
Witt also speculates that perhaps Lewontin was talking about the fossil record,
And Lewontin very well may have been referring to those things, but the “scientific claims that are against common sense”, when we forced to assume materialism as being true, go well beyond unsubstantiated just-so stories and the fossil record.
Specifically, not only is the primary premise of materialism not an intuitively true premise to start off with within a deductive argument, but the conclusions that are deduced directly from that primary premise of materialism are, to quote Lewontin, “counter-intuitive” and “mystifying.”
Here are a few instances of just how ‘counter-intuitive’, and ‘mystifying’ the deductive conclusions can be when one is forced to draw conclusions by assuming materialism as your primary premise in a deductive argument.
Thus the problems with assuming materialism, (and/or methodological naturalism), as our starting premise go will beyond just-so stories and the fossil record.
Indeed, assuming materialism as our primary premise undermines all of reality itself.
This finding that materialism undermines reality itself really should not be that surprising to find out. Any coherent definition of reality that we may put forth simply requires us to assume consciousness, not materialism, as our primary premise.
As William J Murray explained,
And unlike Darwinists who have no empirical evidence to substantiate their grandiose claims, the Christian Theist has numerous lines of empirical evidence to substantiate his claim that consciousness, not material, must be primary:
Here are eight intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness must precede material reality (Double Slit experiment, Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, as well as the recent confirmation of the Wigner’s friend thought experiment, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect, Quantum Information theory, and the recent closing of the Free Will loophole.)
Putting all these lines of evidence from quantum mechanics together, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Verse;
seversky:
And yet atheism is in the science classroom disguised with a white coat. For some reason people seem to think that is OK.
@Seversky: Interest since then:
https://tinyurl.com/yayyjbca
Thank you, Born Again. Great stuff, as usual.
“Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby”
Seversky if you are so gung ho that Theology be strictly forbidden from science class then, to be consistent, you should also demand that Darwinian evolution itself be stricken from science class.
Although Darwinists often falsely claim that theology has no place in science, ( even though Christianity itself, and the presuppositions therein, gave rise to modern science), it turns out that evolutionary biology itself is crucially dependent on faulty theological presuppositions.
Darwinists, with their vital dependence on faulty theological presuppositions, instead of on any actual scientific evidence, in order to try to make their case for Darwinian evolution are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.
Atheism is faith-based. And it doesn’t belong in science classrooms. Atheism violates the establishment clause as well as any religion.
I mean, sounds pretty genetic to me?
Education at all levels has not been about education in a great many years. Schools have become little more than indoctrination centers with the purpose of warping the mind. The original argument for evolution to be taught in schools was not to replace anything, but to give an alternative to what was being taught. Once Darwinists got their foot in the tent, they kicked everyone else out.
You cannot have socialism and belief in God. Society can either worship the state or worship God. Worshiping the state has brought about the greatest travesties in all of recorded history.
in 21st century, when we see all the discoveries (especially molecular biology),
Darwinists must wear blinders … OR… be completely insane (mentally ill)
especially, the educated Darwinists (e.g. mainstream scientists)
You can’t blame a common lay Darwinist (e.g. Seversky), he is not educated enough, basically, he does not know what he is talking about and what he BELIEVES IN …
Seversky:
Merriam-Websters defines religious as relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity. Take careful note of the or at the end. Notice it does not say reality and deity, but reality or deity, which means no belief in a deity of any kind is required to be defined as religious. Darwinists believe macro-evolution, along with all that goes with it, to be fact. There is no room for any other reality, except that which is portrayed by Darwinists.
If Darwinism were based on science, it would never be referred to as fact. Hypothesis and theories are based only on what is known at any given point in time. As more evidence is discovered and observed, various theories that once held a great deal of merit are no longer considered theories. A theory must be observable and must be able to replicate what is observed.
Since macro-evolution has never been observed and the results never replicated, which is required for a hypothesis to become a theory, Darwinism cannot be based on science. It is religious by definition. Remember, there is no requirement for a belief in any deity for something to be defined as religious. All that matters is the belief in an ultimate reality.
Contrary to what Seversky would prefer to believe, modern science owes its origins to Christianity and to Christianity alone.
If we ask ourselves, “What was the crucial element and/or belief of Christian theology that enabled the rise of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe, the crucial element that was missing from ancient Greek culture and that was also missing from all the other various religions that failed to make the crucial leap into experimental science?”, we find that that crucial element and/or belief of Christian Theology that enabled the rise of modern science was the Christian belief that the universe not eternal but that the universe was created by God and that the universe itself is therefore not self existent but is contingent and/or dependent upon God for its existence.
Within the Medieval Universities, which the church founded, ancient Greek philosophy was vigorously discussed and debated. As the following article notes, during the 12th to 16th Century, “Scholasticism is best known for its application in medieval Christian theology, especially in attempts to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers (particularly Aristotle) with Christian theology.
During the period of intense discussion and debate in the Medieval Christian universities about the similarities and differences between Greek philosophy and Christian theology, one of the main conflicts that was found to exist between ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology was the realization that Greek philosophy held to, basically, a deterministic and necessitarian view of creation wherein the universe itself was considered to be eternal, whereas in Christian theology it is held that the universe was created by God and that the universe is contingent, and/or dependent, upon God for its existence.
As the following article notes, “Aristotle,,, believed in the eternity of the world,,,, This view conflicted with the view of the Catholic Church that the world had a beginning in time. The Aristotelian view was prohibited in the Condemnations of 1210–1277”
And in fact, it was this necessitarian and/or deterministic view of the universe in which the universe was held be eternally existent that prevented the ancient Greek philosophers from ever making the crucial leap into experimental science.
As the following article makes clear,
In fact, it was only with the Church’s quote unquote, ‘outlawing’ of Aristotle’s deterministic and necessitarian view of creation, in which the universe itself was held to be eternally existent, that experimental science was finally able to find fertile ground, take root, and eventually flourish in Medieval Christian Europe,
As the preceding article goes on to explain,
This shift from the Greeks’s necessary view of the universe, in which the universe has always existed, and whose order could be deduced from first principles, to the Christians’s contingent view of creation, in which the universe was created, and whose order must be discovered via a posteriori investigation, represented a major shift in the types of reasoning used by each culture. Specifically it represented a shift away from the ‘top-down’ deductive reasoning that was predominant among the ancient Greeks’s, and which was even used by Aquinas himself, a predominate form of reasoning in which these philosophers “pronounced on how the world should behave, with insufficient attention to how the world in fact did behave.”,,,,
,,,, to the new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of Christians in which the order of creation had to be discovered via a posteriori investigation.
In other words, this major shift in reasoning from a more or less purely ‘top down’ deductive form of reasoning of the ancient Greeks to this new form of ‘bottom up’ inductive reasoning of the Medieval Christians represented nothing less than the birth of the scientific method itself.
This new form of inductive reasoning, which led to the birth of the scientific method itself, apparently took a while to take hold in Medieval Christian Europe but this new form of reasoning was eventually, and famously, elucidated and championed by Francis Bacon in 1620 in his book that was entitled Novum Organum. Which is translated as ‘New Method’. In the title of that book, Bacon is specifically referencing Aristotle’s work Organon, which was Aristotle’s treatise on logic and syllogism. In other words, Organum was basically Aristotle’s treatise on deductive reasoning.
And thus in his book Novum Organum, Bacon was actually championing a new method of inductive reasoning, where repeated experimentation played a central role in one’s reasoning, over and above Aristotle’s deductive reasoning which had been the dominate form of reasoning that had been around for 2000 years at that time.
And indeed, repeated experimentation, ever since it was first set forth by Francis Bacon, has been the cornerstone of the scientific method. And has indeed been very, very, fruitful for man in gaining accurate knowledge of the universe in that repeated experiments lead to more exacting, and illuminating, conclusions than is possible with the quote-unquote, educated guesses that follow from Aristotle’s deductive reasoning.
Interestingly, the failure to use inductive reasoning over and above deductive reasoning is exactly where Darwinian evolution has gone off the rails as a scientific theory. Dr. Richard Nelson, in his book Darwin, Then and Now, has noted that Charles Darwin, in his book ‘Origin of Species’, “selected the deductive method of reasoning – and abandoned the inductive method of reasoning.”
Likewise Richard Owen, in a review of Charles Darwin’s book shortly after it was published, had found that Charles Darwin, as far as inductive methodology itself was concerned, had failed to produce “inductive original research which might issue in throwing light on ‘that mystery of mysteries.’.
In other words, Darwin had failed to produce any original experimental research that might support his theory for the “Origin of Species”.
And on top of Richard Owen’s rather mild rebuke of Darwin for failing to use inductive methodology, Adam Sedgwick was nothing less than scathing of Darwin for deserting, “after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth – the true method of induction, and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins’s locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon.”
Adam Sedgwick also called Darwin out for being deceptive in exactly what form of reasoning he was using in his book. Specifically Sedgwick scolded Darwin that “Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction?”
And it was not as if Darwin was ignorant of the fact that he had failed to follow Bacon’s inductive methodology, Charles Darwin himself, two years prior to the publication of his book, confessed to a friend that “What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.”
In short, when Darwin published his book, and in regards to inductive reasoning itself, Darwin did not do, or have, any original experimental research that would actually establish his theory as being scientifically true. i.e. Darwin had failed to use the scientific method!
And over a century and a half later the situation still has not changed. To this day, Darwinists still have no experimental research that would establish Darwin’s theory as being scientifically true,
As Dr Richard Nelson also noted in his book Darwin, Then and Now, “After 150 years of research,,, the scientific evidence is clear: there are no “successive, slight” changes in the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, or genetics to support Darwinism or neo-Darwinism.”
Moreover, on top of the fact that there is no experimental evidence to substantiate the claim from Darwinists that it is possible for one species to transmutate into another species, there are, in fact, now numerous lines of experimental research that have now falsified many fundamental predictions of Darwin’s theory as being true.
Dr. Cornelius Hunter has evaluated 22 specific predictions that are fundamental to Darwin’s theory and has found that when those specific predictions were tested and evaluated against the experimental evidence then those fundamental predictions of Darwin’s theory were found to be false.
Yet, despite the fact that core and fundamental predictions that arise from Darwin’s theory itself are falsified by the experimental evidence time and again, Darwin’s theory is simply never allowed to be seriously questioned in the minds of most Evolutionists.
As Dr. Cornelius Hunter noted elsewhere,
In short, Darwin when he first formulated his theory, and Darwinists still today, have abandoned inductive reasoning altogether. Darwin himself, as Richard Owen noted, produced no original experimental research that would support his theory. And still today Darwinists ignore inductive reasoning in that repeated experimentation, no matter how badly the experimental evidence contradicts core predictions of their theory, is simply never allowed to question the core materialistic and/or naturalistic presuppositions of their theory.
Thus, contrary to what Seversky desperately wants to believe as an anti-Christian atheist, it is Darwinian materialism itself, and certainly not Christianity, that is ‘at war’ with science!
Verse:
Interestingly, besides Darwinists, today’s theoretical physicists have also ‘regressed’ back into the ‘pre-scientific’ reasoning of the ancient Greeks.
Another essential belief in the rise of modern science was the Christian belief that mathematics, especially any mathematics that might describe this universe, was, and is, the product of the Mind of God.
And as Paul Davies observed,
And as Ian H. Hutchinson noted in the following article on Faraday and Maxwell,
In 1619, Johannes Kepler, shortly after discovering the laws of planetary motion, stated,
Likewise in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of universal gravitation, (which has been referred to as the first major unification in physics),
Likewise in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of universal gravitation, stated that, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.,,,This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all;”
It is also interesting to note that physicists today have regressed back to the “pre-scientific” belief that mathematics has an existence that is independent of the Mind of God.
As Paul Davies further explained, “Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists (today) think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.”
That physicists today “think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships” and that mathematics is not ‘contingent’ upon the Mind of God for its existence, is, philosophically speaking, a major step backwards for today’s physicist compared to the Christian founders of modern science.
Physicists today, especially with the proof of Godel’s incompleteness theorems sitting right before them, simply have no basis for their belief that mathematics, all by its lonesome, can somehow function as a God substitute,
As the following article states, “Kurt Gödel had dropped a bomb on the foundations of mathematics. Math could not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous.”
Stephen Hawking himself, an atheist, honestly admitted that,
As well, Steven Weinberg, also an atheist, also honestly admitted that, “I don’t think one should underestimate the fix we are in. That in the end we will not be able to explain the world. That we will have some set of laws of nature (that) we will not be able to derive them on the grounds simply of mathematical consistency. Because we can already think of mathematically consistent laws that don’t describe the world as we know it. And we will always be left with a question ‘why are the laws of nature what they are rather than some other laws?’. And I don’t see any way out of that.”
In fact, there are an infinite number of mathematical theorems that could have described the universe but don’t, As Gregory Chaitin pointed out, “what Gödel discovered was just the tip of the iceberg: an infinite number of true mathematical theorems exist that cannot be proved from any finite system of axioms. ”
Mathematics, contrary to what the vast majority of theoretical physicists believe today, simply never will have the capacity within itself to function as a God substitute.
As Dr. Bruce Gordon explains,
As to, “a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them”, it is also interesting to note that ‘free will’, i.e. “a mind that can choose”, is now proven to play a fundamental role in Quantum Mechanics itself,
As Steven Weinberg explains,
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
For instance, and as leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
The Kochen-Specker theorem undermines the determinism of atheistic materialists in the most fundamental way possible in that “it would not even be possible to place the information into the universe’s past in an ad hoc way.”
As well, with contextuality we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”
Moreover, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.
On top of all that, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are (indeed) brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level, as is now required by quantum mechanics, has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts (34 trillion Watts) of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse:
Of supplemental note, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can imitate deductive and inductive reasoning quite well, yet abductive reasoning, sometimes called ‘inference to the best explanation’, will forever be beyond the scope of Artificial Intelligence since it involves a certain amount of creativity in bringing in a new piece of information into a situation in order to try to solve a problem,
Here is an example as to just how badly AI fails at this type of abductive reasoning
Darwinists are always smuggling their god-of-the-gaps into the classroom. Their god is chance and the basis for their theory of unintelligent design. Since natural selection can’t select anything that doesn’t already exist, their god-of-the-gaps must be invoked to explain the arrival of the fittest. It’s all part of their religion of naturalism. If truth in advertising applied to Darwinist, they would have to wear a pair of Apple’s upcoming product: the iPatch.