Secular Sunday: Case for a Creator, Chapter 4

I finally could no longer continue putting this off, so here we are. 

Getting through a chapter per post is pretty much out the window at this point. Creationist arguments are kind of like oil slicks. They take only seconds to occur but can take exponentially more time to clean up.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I can save you the time of reading this post with the following: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But unfortunately, I can’t just leave it there, lest I open myself up to accusations of attempting to dodge the issue because I have no genuine response. And worse, someone may assume that just because I don’t know the answer, science doesn’t have an answer. 

Two of those people, clearly, are Lee Strobel and the subject of this chapter’s interview, Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D. (Emphasis technically mine, but you know Strobel wants you to notice.) If FACEPALM wasn’t enough, most of this chapter I have already addressed, and can address with the restatement of the simple phrase Science Doesn’t Work That Way. But again, I wouldn’t want to be accused of dodging the issue, even when the issue is blatant, professional-grade ignorance/stupidity. 

Secular Sunday: Case for a Creator: Chapter 3, Part 5

I’m sure that you have all seen this image: 

The image has been reprinted, parodied, and has otherwise become so ingrained in the public consciousness that people think that this is an accurate representation of the theory of evolution. 

I honestly think that this single image has done more damage to scientific progress — not just evolutionary theory, but science — than almost anything else. With the exception, of course, of religious dogmas. 

 

 

Secular Sunday: “Intelligent” Design and the Evolution of Whales

Almost done with Chapter Three of Case for a Creator, but before finishing it out I want to go back to something that I wanted to spend more time on last time I posted. I had to kind of brush over it because I wanted to get more of the book done, but it’s important to address both for the previous discussion of common descent, and for the following and closing discussion of “transitionary fossils.” These two concepts are closely intertwined, so it’s important to understand what they mean and why they are accepted as fact by people who actually look into them.

Going back to something Wells said, that I touched on briefly last time:

“[Homology] is just as compatible with common design as it is with common ancestry. A designer may very well decide to use common building materials to create different organisms, just as builders use the same materials — steel girders, rivets, and so forth — to build different bridges that end up looking very dissimilar from one another.” [page 55]

Let’s look at some steel bridges.

Secular Sunday: Case for a Creator: Chapter 3, Part 4

Moving on to the next icon of evolution, number three: Haeckel’s embryos. As a refresher: Ernst Haeckel proposed that many animals in their embryonic stages look indistinguishable from each other, which is evidence of common descent. Haeckel’s work was put forth in a series of drawings showing the developmental stages of the animals. 

The short version of Wells’ argument, again, is a long-winded “nuh uh.” He states that the drawings faked the similarities, and that at the early embryonic stages animals look nothing alike. 

It is true that Haeckel did exaggerate the similarities between the embryos in his drawings, and so his drawings should not (and consequently do not) appear in modern scientific texts. But Wells would like to claim that embryology does not support common descent at all if you actually look at the embryos. 

So let’s see. Below is a dolphin, cat, and human embryo, not in that order. Can you tell which is which?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Nuff said?

No? 

Secular Sunday: The Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 3

Picking up in Chapter Three, still in the Wells interview, we address “icon of evolution” number two: “Darwin’s Tree of Life.”

In brief, Wells makes the assertion that, while the ever-branching tree of life, where everything flows and diverges from a common ancestor, is a good representation of Darwin’s theory, it isn’t supported by the fossil record.

This is, in a word, a lie. Part of it is Wells’ denial that any “transitional forms” exist in the fossil record (but we’ll get to that when he starts in on archaeopetryx), and the other part of it is the Cambrian explosion:

“The Cambrian was a geological period that we think began a little more than 540 million years ago. The Cambrian Explosion has been called the ‘Biological Big Bang’ because it gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal phyla that are still alive today, as well as some that are now extinct.” [page 43]

Okay, this part is admittedly not a flat-out lie. The issue is more in the presentation — once again, he clearly expects people not to know and not to do any research.

The Cambrian has been called the Biological Big Bang, but unlike the Big Bang, it isn’t theorized to have occured suddenly, at an instant in time. Wells, in using the word “sudden,” makes it sound like it happened in a very brief period of time, but the Cambrian period is actually a period of about 80-90 million years. An eye-blink in geological time scales, sure; but in terms of the process of evolution, it’s more than enough time for life forms to diversify.

He then states that it “gave rise to…most of the major animal phyla that are alive today.” I think that he knows people will read “most of the major animal phyla” and understand it as “most of the animals.”

Secular Sunday: Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 2

So there’s this asshole Christian asshole by the name of Jack Chick, who has produced evangelical tracts for several decades, but who has only come to most peoples’ attention since the advent of the internets. These “Chick tracts,” freely available on his site, are by turns misogynistic, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, and just about any other -ist, -ic, and anti- you can think of (except, of course, atheist or agnostic).

Also, everything is Satan’s fault. Chick is basically The Church Lady, except he’s serious.

The tracts are supposed to be little comic-book stories that you can hand out to people, they read them, and, thoroughly convinced, they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

If that sounds a little too pat, that’s apparently how easy it is in Jack Chick’s mind, because that’s how it always works in the tracts. This is how most of the Chick tracts go:

Unbeliever: Religion is stupid!

Believer: But Jesus died for your sins.

Unbeliever: No one ever told me! Praise His holy name!¹

You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Go read them. You’ll see.

You can tell that Chick has never met a true unbeliever — certainly he thinks that everyone actually believes, they’re just “rebelling” — and so he only imagines, poorly, the way such people talk and think.

I bring this up not to specifically go off about the Chick tracts; they’re morbidly amusing, but don’t really deserve a detailed response. Most folks, even religious, can see that the arguments presented in the tracts (such as that Catholicism came after Protestantism, and is a perversion of Christianity as opposed to, you know, its origin) are absurd. And those who cannot are clearly either stupid, insane, or sociopathic, and deserve nothing more than to be pointed and laughed at.

No, I bring it up because the continuation of Chapter Three, the Jonathan Wells interview, plays out essentially like a Chick tract. Strobel has cast himself in the role of skeptic, but he has never been one, and doesn’t know what the word means, and so his performance is shockingly poor.

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Three, Part 1

It’s been a while since I had the stomach for this book — and given I only got through discussing two chapters and reading the third, that’s saying something.

But with the holidays looming and the religious right braying about the imaginary “War on Christmas,” and with the blog and much of what I have to do either having slowed or taking lots of render breaks, I thought I should come back to this and try to get at least another chapter out of the way before the end of the year. I do still intend to get through the whole book. Eventually.

If you missed the previous two chapters, you can find them here:

Chapter One
Chapter Two

And now we move on to Chapter Three: Doubts about Darwinism.

The Case for a Creator: Chapter Two

Remember yesterday, when I said that it seems that Strobel seems very concerned with telling us about himself, and how very very atheist he was? Chapter Two begins thusly:

Rewind history to 1966. The big hit on the radio was Paul McCartney crooning “Michelle.” On a television show called I Spy, Bill Cosby was becoming the first African-American to share the lead in a dramatic series. Bread was nineteen cents a loaf; a new Ford Fairlane cost $1,600.
As a fourteen-year-old freshman at Prospect High School in northwest suburban Chicago, I was sitting in a third-floor science classroom overlooking the asphalt parking lot, second row from the window, third seat from the front, when I first heard the liberating information that propelled me toward a life of atheism. [page 17] 

I check the cover to make sure the subtitle is, in fact, “A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God,” and not “The Pointlessly Detailed Life of Lee Strobel.” Maybe they teach you to pad your word count with “colorful details” in the papers, Lee, but I was told that this was going to be an investigation of scientific evidence that points toward God. It would be great if you could get on with that.

It’s clear throughout this chapter that Strobel really wants to hammer home just how he was “toooooootally atheist, guys! Like seriously!” Like Durin pointed out yesterday, I can’t shake the feeling that this is setting up an implicit Argument from Authority. I mean, if someone THAT atheist could be convinced, this MUST be good evidence.

It in fact has the opposite effect — I begin to wonder if Strobel was actually ever an atheist at all. The atheism Strobel describes is a standard Christian caricature of atheism, as evidenced below:

I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God’s moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs. [page 25] 

It is this statement in particular that leads me to think that Strobel was never actually an atheist; rather, he is attempting to convince me that he was an atheist so that, as I said above, I will be compelled by his radical conversion. Having never been an atheist, he instead describes how he thinks atheists think, which will convince those who already believe (also having likely not been atheists themselves), but actual non-believers will have to conclude that if he ever was an atheist, he was a grotesquely stupid one.

The Case for a Creator: Chapter One

I begin my reading of Strobel’s The Case for a Creator with, appropriately, Chapter One: “White Coated Scientists versus Black-Robed Preachers.”

My first impression upon reading this book is one of surprise. Considering Strobel is supposed to be a journalist, he doesn’t strike me as a very good writer (in the very first sentence, he describes the atmosphere of a newsroom as being “carbonated with activity”). But maybe he’s just being overzealous in trying to create a narrative and draw the reader in; after all, this book is presumably more about factual evidence than anecdotal experiences.

The first portion of the chapter is devoted to descriptions of said newsroom, filled with newspaper jargon that I guess is intended to reassure me that he did, in fact, work at the Chicago Tribune. He talks about how his boss sends him, a fresh-faced new-to-the-beat reporter, to West Virginia to cover a brouhaha:

“Crazy stuff…” he said. “People getting shot at, schools getting bombed, all because some hillbillies are mad about the textbooks” [page 8]

Strobel — the one in the narrative — demonstrates significant contempt for Christians and Christianity. On the back of the book is a quote by Strobel which I suppose will be in the text: “My road to atheism was paved by science…but ironically, so was my later journey to God.”¹

The back cover also provides me with the first red flag as to what I’m reading here, where it says the following:

In recent years, a diverse and impressive body of research has increasingly supported the conclusion that the universe was intelligently designed. At the same time, Darwinism has faltered in the face of concrete facts and hard reason.

I suppose from the title it should have been obvious that this was a creationist tome, and it will apparently be playing the “intelligent design” concept. The flag, moreso, is referring to the theory of evolution as Darwinism.