Blogging Against Theocracy Silliness
In "honor" of "Blogging Against Theocracy," a.k.a. "Marginalizing Christianity on its Most Sacred Holiday", a post on creation science, its scientific validity, and whether it constitutes an element of theocracy.
I recently read an evolutionist who said that because all life on earth shares similar DNA, this is proof of evolution, proof that we all evolved from a common ancestor.
I know how to program in several computer languages, including HTML, ASP, Java, and SQL database programming. Because I know these languages, I can change existing applications that are built in these languages (just as all life on earth is built in the language of DNA). I can also create entirely new applications using these languages.
Consider for a moment a web page at CNNs website and a web page at CBSs website. If you open them up in code view, you’ll find many things in common: they will both have HTML tags, paragraph tags, header tags, table tags, and so on. Is this proof that one evolved from the other, or that they both evolved from a common web page? Of course not. It only proves that they both make use of the same programming language.
The same is true with donkeys, aardvarks, monkeys and men: God used the same “programming language” of DNA to build all of us. He just used the same programming language in different ways to create different organisms.
Some say that because monkeys and humans DNA is mostly the same, this is proof that we evolved from monkeys. The similarity in DNA structure is no more proof of that than two web pages that are mostly the same, but one plays MP3s embedded in the page, while the other plays videos embedded in the page.
The reason evolutionists and creationists look at the same evidence but reach two very different conclusions about it is because of “worldview.” Contrary to accusations, creationists don’t deny the existence of any evidence we observe in the universe, they just interpret differently how it came to be as we see it.
Everyone, no matter how open minded, approaches life with a set of presuppositions. These presuppositions essentially color and shape how we see the universe. Just as if you literally wore rose-colored glasses, you would see the world with a red hue. Or if you wore glasses with the wrong prescription, you would see the world out of focus. Or if you wore binoculars, you would see everything in the world much closer than it actually is. These things that affect our perception of the universe, these glasses, are called a “worldview,” and everyone has one.
The creationist holds a presupposition that God preceded everything in the universe, and that he has the power to create the universe and everything in it. The creationist believes that God communicated with humans and told us a little about himself and how he created the universe, and that this communication is written down in the Bible.
The evolutionist holds a presupposition that there is no force or intelligence outside the universe, that no one intelligently designed the universe, that the universe and everything in it came into being and came to be as we see them through spontaneous, random occurrences.
Now, regardless of what set of presuppositions are held, the intellectually honest person, whether a creationist or an atheist, will examine the evidence and take it wherever it leads him.
The thing is, the atheist will look at evidence that indicates an intelligent design and utterly reject that hypothesis, no matter now much sense it makes, no matter how much the alternative is clearly impossible. Examples of this include irreducible complexity (the mechanics of some organisms are so complex that they could not have evolved over time—they would not function at all until all pieces were in place at the same time), life from lifelessness (Gregor Mendel proved over 100 years ago that life does not spontaneously spring from nothing, as atheists claim happened), or the big bang (all matter coming from no matter—without cause—denies every natural law known to man).
But while the atheist has a myriad of insurmountable problems with his theory of how the universe came to be as we see it, the creationist has relatively few problems.
Creationists claim that God created the universe from nothing some 6000 or so years ago. The evolutionist says, “Aha, this creative act violates all scientific laws, so it couldn’t have happened.” Well, if God is the Master Programmer—meaning he controls the programming laws and is not controlled by those laws as we are—then he can do that if He wants to. (A web page can’t change itself or create another web page…but a web programmer can). Meanwhile, the atheist has just condemned his own argument as impossible, since his theory allows for no outside “master programmer,” so he must explain how those scientific laws got violated with no outside intelligent designer.
Atheists also look at supernatural events like the global flood of Noah, or the supernatural works of Jesus, or any of the other miracles of the Bible and say, “These things couldn’t have happened: they violate the laws of science. You Bible thumpers just believe in fairy tales that couldn’t have happened.” Again, if I as a programmer build a web page, and later I want to change—even temporarily—how it functions, I can go into the code and do that. I can add a picture to the page, or I can delete a table, or I can just for today make the web page pop up a box that says “Hi” that won’t show up tomorrow. If you’re not a web programmer, you might look at the web page and say that, because of the programming present in it, it would be impossible for these new things to happen. But if I’m the programmer, I can change it and make it do whatever I want. Just like God did when he flooded the entire earth, or when Jesus healed a blind man or raised Lazarus from the dead.
The atheist looks at the universe and the life in it and surmises that, if there was no supernatural force involved, it must have taken a long, long time for an infinite number of random chances to result in the organisms we see today. Accordingly, if we need that much time to evolve complex organisms, then the earth, the stars and everything else must be commensurately old, too.
So they look at things like the decay rate of elements and try to determine the age of rocks and other elements. In doing so, they assume that the current rate of decay of things like potassium, argon, etc. HAVE ALWAYS DECAYED AT THIS RATE. This is a part of the doctrine of UNIFORMATARIANISM which says processes in the universe have remained UNIFORM since the Big Bang (this is, of course, contradictory to other theories they hold, since the natural laws as we observe them are completely insufficient for things like star formation, matter formation, spontaneous generation, etc.). These assumptions they make about the rate of decay of elements assume that the rate of decay has always been constant, and that no external factors (e.g. water, air pressure, cosmic rays, the presence of other elements, etc.) can or did affect that rate of decay.
In doing so, they come up with ages of rocks that are millions or billions of years old. But then those flies get in the ointment like the reading of the 25-year-old lava dome at Mount St. Helens that was dated at 2.8 million years. The explanation: well, something affected that reading and made it unreliable. But your reading of that rock that we can’t empirically verify the age of…well, somehow we know that nothing affected the reliability of that reading. Uh huh. If your child made wild assumptions like that, you’d correct them. But if some guy in a white coat and some letters after his name makes illogical assumptions like that, well that’s called “science.”
Tell me: is it unscientific to look at a clock and assume someone created it? If you found a watch out in a field, miles from any human habitation, would it be “scientific” to conclude that this watch evolved from the dirt to reach its current state of complexity, just because a potential creator of the watch was not immediately visible? Would that be “scientific?” Of course not. So why do we consider this approach “scientific” when we look at the wondrous complexity of a tree, a human being, a star, or a galaxy?
While there is much more that could be said on this subject, it comes down to intellectual honesty. If the majority of the evidence said the universe is far too complex to have come about by random chance (and the evidence does say that, and a number of atheistic scientists have come to that conclusion), then is it intellectually honest to continue pretending it’s impossible…just to satisfy an attractive worldview that tells you that you aren’t accountable to a Supreme Being for your conduct?
Whether you agree with the presuppositions, whether you agree with the conclusions, creation science is NOT theocracy. It does NOT violate the First Amendment and it doesn’t constitute “Congress [making a ] law respecting an establishment of religion.”
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Saturday, April 07, 2007
BATS: Is Creation Science "Theocracy?"
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