It begins to sound like that after a while:
At almost every step in Darwin’s theory of evolution someone has to pull a rabbit out of a black box. Darwin’s theory of evolution might as well be called Merlin’s theory of evolution. It is long on fantastic narrative and magic tricks and short on empirical evidence. So far no substantial and enduring evidence of one species evolving into another species has ever been produced.
But Darwin’s theory pleased many men. It freed them from guilt and fear of a God they preferred to ignore and reject.
Many others, however, found Darwin’s theory implausible. They just couldn’t accept Darwin’s fantastic creation narrative of fish flopping on a sandy beach until the fittest developed suitable lungs and became reptiles or of lizards falling out of trees until the fittest developed wings and became birds. They just couldn’t see how unguided mutations resulted in lungs or wings instead of dead fish and lizards. It did not mesh with common sense and a basic understanding of probability. Still others recognized that the theological implications of Darwinism were incompatible with revealed religion and any solid anchor of right and wrong.
Mike Scruggs, “Darwin’s Magic Evolutionary Ideology ” at The Times Examiner
Whatever one might think of Scrugg’s religious theories, he is right to focus on the essentially magical character of Darwinism. For one thing, it is immune to probability issues. When brand new complex systems are found in living organisms, no matter how many of them or how complex and interlocking they are, well, we are told, that just shows the awesome power of natural selection acting on random mutation.
When life forms of great and probably irreducible complexity appear at over half a billion years ago, that just shows the awesome power of natural selection acting on random mutation.
The Darwinian may as well have said, that just shows the awesome power of magic.
It’s a point of view anchored in an enforced ideology (powerful Darwinists can wreck the careers of critics), not in a strong sense of reality. Nor in any need for a strong sense of reality.
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
And then leading practitioners of the Darwinian arts can make statements like this while being seemingly impervious to the irony:
i like this guy (Mike Scruggs)
let me quote him once again, this is so well said:
"At almost every step in Darwin’s theory of evolution someone has to pull a rabbit out of a black box. Darwin’s theory of evolution might as well be called Merlin’s theory of evolution. It is long on fantastic narrative and magic tricks and short on empirical evidence. So far no substantial and enduring evidence of one species evolving into another species has ever been produced. "
Those of you who already know me, know, that i have used basically the same words in my previous posts…
e.g.
“Do biologists believe in miracles? ”
or
“Most miracles happen in biology” – i am using this sentence very often at my StuffHappens.info blog.
I can only agree with Mike Scruggs, moreover, you don’t have to be a Nobel price laureate to see that 21st-century-biologists really do believe in miracles/magic. And these biologists are very smart and well educated people… so what to expect from an everyday, uneducated lay Darwinian atheist (e.g. Seversky) ?
from the article: ” … fish flopping on a sandy beach until the fittest developed suitable lungs and became reptiles or of lizards falling out of trees until the fittest developed wings and became birds. ”
not to mention, that Darwinian biologists are death-serious about the claim, that lungs and wings evolved not once, but, that that magic happened many times independently in evolutionary unrelated lineages/species …
Yes!!! Darwinian biologists claim, that lungs evolved many times independently !!!!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15547792
Yes!!! Darwinian biologists claim, that wings also evolved many times independently in unrelated species (e.g. insects, birds, dinosaurs, mammals)
Think of a thing, and i can assure you, that it evolved many times in various species.
For more magic/miracles check out my blog at:
http://www.stuffhappens.info
As to,
And indeed, Darwinists do believe in the “magic”. And their magician is “chance”.
Small problem for Darwinists in their appeal to ‘pure chance’ as their magician, chance is not the cause of anything.
In fact, instead of ‘chance’ being a known cause for anything, when Darwinists say that something happened by ‘chance’ they are, in fact, appealing to our ignorance of a known cause instead of appealing to any known cause. Charles Darwin himself admitted that his appeal to ‘chance’ is to “acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause “,
As Dr. Egnor recently pointed out, there simply can be no definition for ‘chance’ unless it is defined against a backdrop of purposeful, i.e. teleogical, events. As Egnor succinctly put it, “Chance presupposes design.”
I never heard of Aristotle’s definition of chance before, but I realized that Aristotle, (and Egnor) are right. It simply would be impossible to tell if something happened by chance in a cell, (or in the universe), unless, as Stephen Talbott observes in the following article, it happened against the backdrop of the Intelligently Designed ‘highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes’ of the cell.
For ‘chance’ to have any rigid scientific definition at all it must first be mathematically defined against the backdrop of a purposely designed context and/or purposely designed universe, in which that ‘chance’ event can be said to occur in a mathematically defined probabilistic manner, After all, randomly choosing a card from a deck, by “chance”, necessarily presupposes a intelligently designed deck of cards to choose from! Not to mention presupposing somebody to choose the card from that intelligently designed deck.
Darwinists, since they refuse to acknowledge any backdrop of purposeful design in life, or in the universe, simply have no way to provide a rigid mathematical definition for ‘chance’ so as to make their application of ‘chance’ scientific.
As Wolfgang Pauli noted, “In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.”
Moreover, when scientists try to rigidly define ‘chance’ in the context of a mathematically defined probability, Darwinists run into insurmountable problems for their theory.
In 1966, MIT mathematicians and engineers met with eminent biologists (Darwinists) at the Wistar Institute to discuss problems with evolutionary theory. The meeting angered many of the eminent biologists, (Darwinists). and it angered them for good reason:
Paul Nelson describes what happened at the Wistar symposium, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.”
In the paper entitled, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory”. Murray Eden of MIT stated that “It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
Basically, Murray Eden and company were saying that Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a scientific theory in the first place. I can see where ’eminent biologists’, (Darwinists), would be a little perturbed with the realization that, in so far as they cling to Darwinian theory, they are not even to be considered scientists in any meaningful sense. since they don’t even have a theory that can be considered scientific.
Moreover, the mathematical problems for Darwinian evolution have only gotten far worse for Darwinists since the Wistar symposium in 1966.
Thus, in conclusion, Darwinists certainly do believe in magic. And their magician is ‘chance’. Moreover, since ‘chance’ does not even exist as a known cause for anything, but ‘chance’ is actually ‘our ignorance’ of a known cause, then Darwinists actually believe in magic minus any magician to perform their magic.
A magic show without any magician to perform the magic is certainly one hell of a magic show for Darwinists to believe in.
Verses:
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…