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Objective Religions Studies
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Debunking Creationisms

Why Religion and Science Don't Mix

Posted by Jack Fisher on Sunday, July 19, 2009 8:52:31 PM
It's remarkable how often religious zealots play the victim. And who could blame them? It's easy to play the victim. It saves people the trouble of actually having to defend their position with rational arguments. Whenever some other group comes along, secular or religious, and says something they don't like, they rush to classify it as an issue of religious bigotry. As if any opposing viewpoint or differing opinion is somehow an insult to their way of thinking. It isn't just irrational. It's downright childish.

But that doesn't stop men like Ken Conner from writing articles that accuse scientists of all people of religious bigotry.

Science Theists Need Not Apply

The cores of Conner's article centers around Dr. Francis Collins, who President Obama picked to head the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a controversial figure because he's not just a scientist, he's a devout evangelical Christian who often tries to integrate his work as a scientist with his beliefs as a Christian. He's written various books such as "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." He was also featured in the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" which presented a dubious case that the scientific community was anti-god and anti-Christian.

This notion is not only completely false, it's rediculous. Collins isn't criticized for his religious beliefs. Nor is he criticized for his work. He is a target because he is violating one of the most important aspects of science. He is trying to thrust the supernatural world of god, satan, angels, and miracles into the strictly rational process that is science. It is a major fallacy that any rational minded scientist is quick to point out. It's called 'violation of the philosophy of science.' It is a tenant as old as science itself. One cannot appeal to the supernatural or the spiritual when making a scientific claim. That is because science is inherently rational. It requires evidence, testable hyopothesis, and logic to prove points. To put any kind of god into the mix be it the Christian god or the Aztec god is to negate the very tenants of what makes science work.

Conner doesn't understand this and neither does Collins. They rely on emotional appeals that pain the scientists as cold, uncaring, and prejudice. They will gladly point out that some of the greatest minds of all time like Plato, Aristotle, and Newton were all devout believers. This is true, but never at any point did these men use the supernatural in their work. They never appealed to god or spirits of any kind to present justification for their claims. In science, one's personal beliefs are completely irrelevant. It does not matter of a scientist is a devout believer in god or is a worshipper of the sun. What matters is the claims they make and the evidence they use to back it up. It is the evidence that trumps personal beliefs. It doesn't matter where it came from or who it came from. If it can be verified and vindicated, it is worth just as much as any work from a devout believer.

Conner will also argue without god, science lacks ethics. But this is a completely false assumption. It assumes people need god to make good moral decisions. This is a complete misnomer considering people have had god for years and used it to justify violence, prejudice, racisim, slavery, murder, and genocide. Conner and Collins try and make it seem as though without religion, science is somehow evil. But science is not evil. It can't be evil. Only people can be evil. Science by it's own definition is objective and unbias. It is the human beings who use it.

When it comes to the debate between religion and science, the issue is clear. Science is inherently rational and based on evidence, logic, and reason. Religion is inherently irrational and based on faith, superstition, and the supernatural. One cannot be used in the context of the other without destroying the premise of the other. Men like Conner and Collins are destroying their credibility by trying to have their cake and eat it to. There's nothing bioted, prejudice, or bias about it. It's irrational, illogical, and flat out wrong. Plain and simple.
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Darwin vs. Jean Baptiste Lemarck

Posted by Jack Fisher on Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:34:31 PM
When discussing the debate over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, many misguided moral crusaders will cry fowl by claiming schools and universities are not hearing out alternative views. The most common alternative view they push is creationism/intelligent design (they're really the same thing). But these religiously motivated theories had been disproven long ago because they could never hold up under peer review and could not explain anywhere near the phenomenon that evolution explained. Since it is drawn from the annuls of bronze age mythology, it can't be tested or verified. It can't even be taken seriously. Only evolution has been able to explain the vast biodiversity of life on Earth. That is why no alternative is taught. But that doesn't mean there weren't any.

One alternative that most religious zealots never even mention is the evolutionary theory of Jean Baptiste Lemarck. His theory, which is similar to Darwin's, hypothesized that individuals of a species could gain attributes in their lifetime that would favor their survivability and hence pass them to their offspring. He called this 'aquired characteristics.' For example, if a man worked as a blacksmith most of his life and developed big, strong arms then under Lemarck's theory he would pass the trait of big strong arms to his offspring.

History of Jean Baptiste Lemarck (1744-1829)

This theory, which came before Darwin, was tested by science and eventually disproven by Mendal genetics. Darwin later got it right when he hypothesized that populations evolved, but not individuals. Lemarck was discredited, which is part of why he is rarely mentioned in science today. But what also goes unnoticed is how his work would later influence the debate over evolution.

One of the major arguments anti-evolution crusaders often make is that evolution is a slippery slope. Teaching it leads to some kind of degradation of morality. Their favorite tactics is to associate it with the likes of Hitler and Stalin, claiming they were fervent evolutionary supporters. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Stalin, who used many cruel reasons to justify his slaughter, was NOT a supporter of evolution. He and many others in the communist party believed in Lemarck. Soviet psuedo-scientist Tromfim Lysenko denounced evolution and Mendelian genetics as a capitalist myth. Stalin took this and in his propaganda promoted Lemarck, believing that using acquired characteristics and the proper conditioning of individuals in their totalitarian state they could create a new race he called homo soviticus (the ideal communist). Those that actually pushed evolution or 'Darwinism' as they called it were sent to the gulags. These ideas were later adopted by another Lemarck supporter, Mao Zedong for the same reason. So those that say they were ardent Darwinists do not check their facts.

Lemarck and Communism

Lysenkoism and Stalinist Russia

Hitler was another tyrant who liked the appeal of Lemarck's work. It fell much more in line with his radical ideology on racial superiority. Many erroneously say he favored Social Darwinism (a perversion of real evolution anyhow), but his ideas of conditioning his people and exterminating undesireables is much more in line with Lemarck.

Hitler and Lemarck

Now just because these tyrants favored Lemarck does not mean Lemarck deserves to be associated with them. It just shows that those attempting to discredit Darwin and evolution are not checking their facts. Even if evolution were used as justification by madmen and despots, that wouldn't make it any less true. But it isn't and it's ridiculuous to assert otherwise by linking it to undesirable figures in history. Lemarck like creationism/intelligent design have both been disproven by science. That is why evolution is accepted.

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Dishonestly Discrediting Darwin

Posted by Jack Fisher on Thursday, July 02, 2009 3:10:50 PM
In the decades since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, critics and zealots alike have been looking for any way to discredit it. Recently, Townhall's own Pat Buchanan entered the frey as one who makes the age-old appeal to conspiracy.
In this article Buchanan mentions Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin and is quoted as saying "as "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain."  This kind of appeal tries to discredit something by claiming it was promoted through deceit, ignoring the actual substance of the theory itself. It ignores the actual merits of the theory, in other words, the evidence. Darwin had the evidence. Men like Huxley just tried to market it. But no matter how he pushed it, Huxley had no bearing on the validity of Darwin's theory. It was vindicated by evidence, not good PR. And it has continued to be vindicated in the decades since.
 
When appeals to conspiracy don't work, men like Buchanan will try the old slippery slope argument. He references Marx and Hitler, two of the most despised figures in the 20th century and associates them with Darwin. This 'fraud by association' is another dishonest tactic that has the same problem as the appeal to conspiracy. It does not address the evidence. It is basically an ad hominum attack. It reasons that if A is bad and B is associated with A then B must be bad. It has no bearing on the validity of a theory either. It does not matter who formulated it or what they believed or didn't believe. What matters is the evidence. So whether Darwin was an agnostic, a Christian, or a Muslim, it doesn't matter. The evidence is what matters.
 
In addition, the association between Darwin, Hitler, and Communism is sketchy at best and non-existant at worst. In Hitler's own book, Mien Kamf, he redicules Darwin's work and makes many of the same arguments creationists use today. If he had any favoring of evolution, it wasn't Darwin. It was the evolution proposed of Jean-Baptiste Lemarck, who came before Darwin and proposed a kind of evolution where variation could emerge in a single individual within a single generation. But Lemarck turned out to be wrong. Darwin proved that populations evolve, not individuals. Lemarck appealed to Hitler and Stalin because it justifed the idea of propogating physically, racially, and nationally superior humans. It meant if they could make the citizens of their country into an ideal, they would evolve above the rest of humanity. As Darwin later proved, that is not how evolution works.
 
Regardless of what one thinks about Darwin and who he associated with, his theory has stood the test of time for one reason: evidence. Since his theory was first proposed, mountains of evidence have emerged to support evolution. This evidence includes verifiable observations in palentology, biology, biochemistry, taxonomy, comparative morphology, psychology, and genetics. Some like Buchanan would argue that scientists view it through a bias perspective, but this completely ignores the fact that no viable alternative has been put forth by creationists or intelligent design proponents that better explains what is observed. The evidence fits evolution. It also completely ignores the nature of evidence. Because even from the most bias perspective, evidence cannot be made into something it is not. Evidence stands on its own merits and what is drawn from it cannot be skewed without ignoring reason and logic, which in science always gets trumped by the process of peer review.
 
So for people like Buchanan who resort to these dishonest criticisms, they are hurting their own credibility. If they want to discredit Darwin, do what he did and use evidence rather than blatant personal attacks. Science is not the study of personalities it's the study of the natural world. The merits of an individual scientist do not matter at the end of the day. Only the evidence matters. 
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Bridging Gaps of Ignorance

Posted by Jack Fisher on Wednesday, February 04, 2009 11:42:33 AM
Recently, Marvin Olasky posted an article detailing ways to start dialogue between what he called 'darwinists' and believers like himself. The article tried to appear reasonable, but Olasky made no secret of his bias.
 
 
First off, he makes one key mistake. There is no such thing in the scientific world as "Darwinism." It isn't an ideology and it isn't a philosophy. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is just that, a theory. And a theory, which Olasky seems to confuse with blind speculation, is defined in science as a coherent explanation about natural phenomena supported by evidence. Olasky then goes onto list what he considers weaknesses of evolution, which if he did any research whatsoever would have known were illogical and disproven claims made by creationists.
 
First off, he claims there has never been an observed instance of one 'kind' of animal turning into another 'kind.' But he never gives a single explanation for what a 'kind' is. He claims nobody ever saw a dog produce a cat. Well of course! Evolution doesn't allow that. It allows for speciation and common descent from a common ancestor. And speciation has been observed in the wild and in the lab many times. Check the link below for peer reviewed evidence of it:
 
 
Then he goes onto claim DNA is like a computer and as such it needs a programmer. But this isn't what DNA is and it's a totally false dichtomy. DNA is NOT like a computer. It is product of chemistry and physics. And moreover, the origin of DNA has NOTHING to do with evolution. That would be Abiogenesis, which does have a body of evidence supporting it, but of course Olasky doesn't make that distinction. No dogmatic, anti-science creationist would. It may cause them to think too much. Moreover, DNA is not necessary to survive. Simple bacteria function just fine without it. They use only RNA. So Orlasky clearly hasn't read a high school science textbook either because anybody with a capacity to check facts would know that.
 
Lastly, Olasky makes the old irreducible complexity argument, championed by Michael Behe, a noted Intelligent Design advocate. He claims DNA and cells are just too complex to have emerged from natural processes. But once again he shows more ignorance when he says mutations can't account for such change because they're often disadventageous. This is completely wrong and any textbook will confirm that. Most mutations are completely nuetral. And it has been estimated that there are well over 100 per zygote after conception. And over time mutations do accumulate in DNA so that when conditions change, the previously neutral mutation may provide a benefit or detriment. Natural selection takes over.
 
Orlasky, like all creationists, is working off the assumption that god created everything as it says in the bible and evolution is by definition flawed because it conflicts with his beliefs. This is completely wrong not to mention self-centered. Just because a theory happens to contradict a certain story about a certain deity and believers don't like it doesn't mean that it has to be false. Evolution is true because evidence supports it. And many different fields cross confirm it including palentology, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and taxonomy. Creationism and Intelligent design isn't cross confirmed by ANYTHING. It's wild speculation from creationists who are trying ot sound more scientific. But they make the same mistake. They try to inject their spiritual beliefs into science and that violates the very definition of science. Science by its own design can only deal with natural forces. Anything supernatural is the domain of speculation, faith, and psuedo-science.
 
It's also worth noting that people like Orlasky are singling out just one theory. It's easy to forget that biblical dogma also contradicts the heliocentric theory, the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, and it also contradicts germ theory because the bible says in many passages that disease is caused by evil spirits (1st Samuel 16:14-16). So why evolution? Well evolution is easier to doubt because it deals with the past and there's always a touch of uncertainty when dealing with the past. Even when the evidence is blatently clear, that's not enough for believers. Any gap must discredit the entire theory, thus vindicating their cherished beliefs.
 
Orlasky ends his article with very dry references to these 'darwinists' he refers to. He plays the old addage that life is such a miracle and it couldn't possibly have just happened naturally. Well that's not a scientific fact. That's a subjective opinion. Science is not nearly as arrogant as Orlasky puts it. Science is willing to state that it does not have all the answers, but it always investigating. Pepole like Orlasky and other creationists adherents are so arrogant they try to make it sound as though they know what science doesn't and only ask that people suspend their reason and believe Bronze Age folklore on faith. Not only is that completely unscientific, it's an afront to human curiosity. Orlasky like every creationist before him doesn't understand what science is, but is willing to attack it if he sees it as an afront to his beliefs. He is willing to ignore all the good that science does just so he and others like him can be content in their beliefs. It is arrogant and conceit in the highest regard and deserves only the greatest of scorn.
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