Man Under Materialism

"If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…"

Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994.

A listing of fifty or sixty such statements makes for an overwhelming indictment of that part of the scientific community which goes on trying to defend evolution and they (the evolosers) have a favorite term ("quote mining") which they use to describe that sort of argument.

Basically, every halfway honest person with any brains and talent who has taken any sort of a hard look at evolution in the past 60 years has given up on it and many have denounced it

First off, the truth of the way nature works (evolution in this case) isn't affected even slightly by the moral trappings some people choose to wrap it in.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Quote:

First off, the truth of the way nature works (evolution in this case) isn't affected even slightly by the moral trappings some people choose to wrap it in.

There actually are flavors of junk science which are relatively harmless. Evolution is not one of those; evolution is a junk science ideological doctrine with something like 200,000,000 dead human bodies to it credit.

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

EVOLUTION
The Secret Behind the Propaganda
by Margaret Helder (Botanist)

"Everybody" knows, one might suppose, that evolution is about facts and
the creation model is about belief. Certainly this was the message of the
PBS TV series entitled "Evolution." An internal memo sent to PBS stations
stated concerning evolution, "All known scientific evidence supports
evolution. New discoveries over the past 150 years have all supported the
validity of the theory of evolution." (PBS Internal Memo. 2001. The
Evolution Controversy: Use it or lose it. Evolution Project/WGBH Boston.
June 15, p. 5). The memofurther defined a scientific theory as a "higher
level of understanding that ties 'facts'together" (p. 5). As to the
creation model, the memo dismissed it as "not science. It is part of a
religious belief system . . ." (p. 6). Such statements and other similar
ones over the years have convinced many that science in general and
evolution in particular are based on observations from the natural world
and thus they are empirically or factually based. The interesting thing is
that this is not the modern understanding of science among scientists
them-selves. They have long since abandoned much concern for actual data.

The modern outlook on science is readily apparent from remarks by
scientists about their discipline. It was David Hull, a well-known philosopher
of science, who wrote as early as 1965 that ". . . science is not as
empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even
unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just
the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of
observations within the framework of a theory."t Within this statement we
see what appears to be a balance between facts and interpretation or
theory. Dr. Hull, however, had a dubious grasp of what constituted data.
The previous year, he had written concerning the concept of descent with
modification from a common ancestor (phylogeny or evolution): "The first
factor in the phylogenetic program and the only one that is of an
empirical nature is phylogeny, but even phylogeny is not a brute fact to
be discovered merely by looking and seeing. Phylogeny, the subject matter
of phylogenetic taxonomy, is an abstraction. It is an abstraction in two
respects. First, it is inferred almost exclusively from morphological,
genetical, paleontological, and other types of evidence and is not
observed directly."2 His thoughts concerning evolutionary descent, we
discover, were merely conclusions, not directly indicated by the evidence.

Views on the nature of science were actually in a state of flux at the
time that Dr. Hull wrote these papers. Karl Popper in 1934 had pointed out
that no theory in science could ever be proven true. The only altemative,
he suggested, was to try to prove that theories were false. Those
well-tested theories which had not been falsified or disproven on the
basis of experimental data, would then qualify for the designation of
scientific theory. The only catch was that many areas of scientific
research did not meet these criteria. Theories which could not be
falsified, were said to be metaphysical (belief-based) rather than
scientific. Accordingly an editorial in the scientific journal Nature in
1981 pointed out that both Darwinism and the idea that God created the
world, were metaphysical theories since "the course of supposed past
evolution cannot be rerun.3 However, such embarrassing characterizations
of Darwinism as nonscientific were on their way out. Thomas Kuhn had
published his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in 1962
thereby ushering in a post-empirical age in scientific understanding.

According to Thomas Kuhn, all science must be conducted in terms of a
unifying set of ideas. Without such a theoretical system, said Kuhn, facts
were meaningless and science nonexistent. According to philosopher of
science, Del Ratzsch, in his recent book, Science and its Limits, this
primacy of theory over data has had enormous implications for the practice
of science. The result is that empirical data are not that important to
science anymore. According to Dr. Ratzsch: "in arguing that we have no
paradigm-independent access to some ultimate reality and that paradigm
choices are in part value choices made by scientists, Kuhn is moving the
ultimate court of appeal concerning correct pictures of reality away from
the world itself [data] and toward the informed consensus of scientists.4
Dr. Ratzsch further pointed out, "Since there is no complete and stable
and independent external reality to which we have access, there is no
particular point in talking about truth in science...."

So what do modern scientists do with data? What they do is to interpret
their data in terms of the current scientific paradigm. They do not seek
to falsify any paradigm such as evolution because paradigms are not
supposed to be easily toppled. Individual falsifying facts won't cause a
paradigm to be rejected. Even a lot of contrary data will have little
effect on a paradigm. Evolution of course is the most obvious_paradigm
which is largely immune to the influence of empirical data. Cosmology is
another.

The most obvious casualties of this new definition of science are the
concepts of reality and truth. Biologists Mark Siddall and Arnold Kluge,
in 1997, for example, suggested that "'the search for truth' was a
misguided venture in science from the start and one that has no basis in
reality.5 They further opined that "Truth, though not irrelevant to
science, is nonetheless irrelevant to the choice among scientific
theories, because it is unknowable." Nevertheless these authors conclude
that the good news is that we will keep on doing science. They depict the
situation thus: "0ur assertions regarding the terminal elusiveness of this
truth may be seen by some as troubling or even nihilistic. We counter that
it is the impossibility of achieving truth that ensures the continuation
of scientific endeavor, and that guarantees our perpetual realization of
that which is more valuable than truth itself understanding."

Science has definitely come a long way. Initially in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, actual observations (empirical data) were highly
valued. In some cases they were esteemed too highly. Some people like
eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume declared that there was
no reality other than what our senses could discover. The material world
was all there was. Gradually theory came to be more important until at the
present time empirical data are often ignored. Not all scientists,
however, support the Kuhnian appeal to consensus among scientists. To -
Settle, another philosopher of science, deplored the situation. "Many
thinkers, seeing that the search for truth is an unending quest, abandon
it (in despair perhaps) and settle for agreement with their fellows. If
they are right that it is consensus rather than truth that ought to be
aimed for in science, then the picture that emerges . . . is gloomy.6 The
worst aspect of the situation is that scientists so dogmatically defend
interpretations which are based only on consensus. "But what is vacuous is
to abandon truth as regulative and then to agree to something's being so.
And it undermines science rather than affirms it, since it rules out
appeal to reality, it rules out striving to be objective."

It is evident that modern scientists do not attempt to prove paradigms
or impor ) tant theories like evolution wrong. They merely interpret their
data in terms of the paradigm. Evolution is a philosophical starting
point, not an observation. As Siddall and Kluge remark: "Biologists are no
more immune to the requirements of a sound philosophical foundation than
are these other sciences if our occupation ever is to be more than a
simple cataloguing of the experiences of our senses. Evolutionary biology,
and phylogenetics in particular, demands this even more because, like the
quantum physicist, we are not able to observe that which we seek to
explain."

Another biologist, Andrew Brower characterized "descent with
modification'' as a circular argument or a metaphysical assumption. "There
is clearly an ontological leap between tests of individual observations
and tests of 'descent with modification, if the latter is even testab]e
without tautology.7 If 'the background knowledge: of descent with
modification' underlying cladistics is not testable by independent means,
it would seem to be more a metaphysical First Principle like vitalism or
orthogenesis than a component of a Popperian hypothetico-deductive
approach." In other words, evolution is not falsifiable, but is an a
priori assumption.

Christians, on the other hand, typically take a much more traditional
or empirical approach to science. They expect that when contrary data are
pointed out, that the hearer's response will be to reject the paradigm.
All too often however, the hearer minimizes the significance of the data,
calling them merely "anomalous" or poorly understood. Most supporters of
evolution theory expect that the obvious problems will eventually be
solved and in the meantime they concentrate on less controversial aspects
of the paradigm.

For the present, consensus by scientists is indeed used as a major point
in favor of a paradigm. Individuals arguing from a minority position
already have a major strike against them. Some scientists also claim that
science is an all or nothing proposition with no room for a critical
evaluation of individual aspects of the discipline. It was Hull who
articulated the all or none principle. He was referring specifically to
evolutionary versus numerical [empirical] categorizing of organisms, and
this same argument is used today against the creation model. "Are the
inductive inferences made by evolutionists in reconstructing phylogeny
sufficiently warranted? .... Any decision ... must rest on the advances of
the various sciences using the techniques of discovery and justification
which they do use. Hence, induction is justified by an induction! The
arguments presented by the empiricists against evolutionary
reconstructions if sound would annihilate not just evolutionary taxonomy
but all empirical science.8 According to him, it is pointless to contest
scientific speculations on the basis of data, because the whole scientific
enterprise holds together. If some theorizing is acceptable, then all of
it is beyond challenge.

Since the importance of empirical data in science has long since been
down-graded to a subsidiary importance relative to theory, the PBS
statements concerning evolution and creation are all the more interesting.
The PBS memo implied that evolution could easily have been falsified by
negative empirical evidence. On the contrary, scientists have devoted
their best efforts to protecting evolution theory from negative data. In
actual fact, it is the creation model supporters today who so frequently
appeal to empirical evidence (such as the coded nature and information
content of DNA) and the evolutionists who so blissfully fail to recognize
the
significance of these very same data. Indeed, when all is said and done,
the essence of much modern science is that it is not empirical at all but
rather post-empirical or theory based. That's quite a difference. Maybe
PBS should run a new creation-based series to alert the public to the real
situation.

References

1. David Hull. 1965. The effect of essentialism on taxonomy?two thousand
years of stasis (II). British Journalfor the Philosophy of Science 16
(61):1-18.
2. David Hull. 1964. Consistency and monophyly. Systematic Zoology 13 (1):
1-11.
3. Editorial. 1981. How true is the theory of evolution? Nature 290 March
12: 75-76.4. Del Ratzsch. 2000. Science and Its Limits: The Natural
Sciences in Christian Perspective. InterVarsity Press. pp. 191.
5. Mark Siddall and Arnold Kluge. 1997. Probabilism and phylogenetic
inference. Cladistics 13: 313-336.
6. Tom Settle. 1979. Popper on "When is a Science not a Science
"Systematic Zoology" 28: 521-529.
7. Andrew Brower. 2000. Evolution is not a necessary assumption of
cladistics. Cladistics 16: 143-154.
8. David Hull. 1967. Certainty and circularity in evolutionary taxonomy.
Evolu-tion 21 (1): 174-189.

Comment:

This author has broken through the propaganda that is taught in schools
and colleges as ?fact?. To bad so any have been brainwashed and don?t
even know it. Some in these NG actually think they are evolutionary
products with no purpose and just an organism on the path to who knows
where (because direction/purpose means a Director-Almighty God to whom
they will bow and confess sooner or later).

Contrasting the above with the Christian, who knows who he is, why he is
here and where he is going presents a gulf that seems impassable between
the two.

Oh

"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good
news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has
increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all
of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of
India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause
problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and
are causing no further trouble."

"The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit
for this s**t..."