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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Why Creation?
Message-ID: <455@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 12:51:02 EST
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.455
Posted: Tue Apr  9 12:51:02 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Apr-85 05:20:42 EST
References: <14600006@hpfcrs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 176

Thanks, Lief, for your well-written article.  Please understand that my
criticisms here are of your arguments, not of you personally.  With one
exception (immediately following.)

In article <14600006@hpfcrs.UUCP> lief@hpfcrs.UUCP (lief) writes:
>      So that you can know where I'm coming from, let me state that I was born
> and raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and still am.  I attended private
> Adventist schools from the first grade until graduating from a private
> Adventist University.  However, my graduate work was done at the University
> of California at Davis.  All through school, I was taught Creation as based
> on the first 2 chapters of Genesis of the Bible.  I was also taught the theory
> of evolution in school, but not to the degree as Creation.  I would guess that
> in public school it would be the opposite -- with the main emphasis on
> Evolution, and then Creation thrown in on the side (or the front blank page
> as some wise man once said).

From this description and your following arguments, I believe you are the
victim of roughly 16 years worth of the fallacy of special pleading.
This fallacy of argument is essentially that you use a form of argument
that you wouldn't allow for someone else's contradictory claims.

Your most blatant use of this argument is in your description of why you
believe in the Bible and creation.  When you cite experiences that lead you
to believe, you are overlooking the fact that similar experiences are
claimed by adherants of every religion in the world.

>      For one who believes in an all powerful God, the abibility to create the
> world in 6 literal days in not a problem.
> But, it sounds like my theory is all based on the presupposition that
> there is an almighty God, right?  Exactly.

When you explain creation in terms of an all-powerful god, why wouldn't
you accept the creation of the universe 5 seconds ago complete with memories
etc. by the all-powerful Ubizmo?  (This particular argument has a name-- the
Omphallos [navel] argument.  Check Martin Gardiner's "Fads and Fallacies
in the Name of Science" for more details.)  Does this illustrate the
special pleading for you?  This is why I'm going to skip your argument from
Genesis: because it is unscientific.  (I have read them.)

I'm also going to skip most of your arguments for belief in God, since
they are not really relevant to net.origins.  I'll be happy to debate
them in net.religion if you like.

> EVIDENCE FOR CREATION:
> 
>      Creationists have always held that life comes only from life.  In fact,
> this is why a creation is necessary.  All evidence points to the notion that
> spontaneous generation cannot happen.  According to Webster, spontaneous 
> generation is "the generation of living from nonliving matter...(it is taken)
> from a belief, now abandoned, that organisms found in putrid organic matter
> arose spontaneously from it."  In otherwords, given the proper conditions of
> temperature, time, place, etc. decaying matter simply turns into organic life.
> This idea dominated scientific thinking until 1846 when Louis Pasteur fully
> shattered the theory by his experiments.  Under controlled laboratory
> conditions, in a vacuum, no organic life ever emerged from decaying nonliving
> matter.  Today no reputable scientist tries to defend it on a demonstratable
> basis.  That's why Webster said it was "now abandoned".  No present process is
> observed that could support the idea of spontaneous generation.

I explained this in a note I posted just yesterday.  Briefly, modern life
such as toads, flies, and bacteria does not arise spontaneously because of
their complexity.  This complexity is required to survive in a competitive
world.  The hypothetical first life forms that arose spontaneously could
be extremely simple because they could survive in an environment without
oxygen, without predation.

>      Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize Winner of Harvard University, states it as
> cryptically and honestly as an evolutionist can:  "One has only to contemplate
> the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a
> living organism is impossible.  Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of
> spontaneous generation."  This quote taken from Scientific American, Aug, 1954.

Nothing cryptic unless it is taken out of context.  Nothing dishonest either.
All it takes is thinking about what the first organisms would be like to
realize that they wouldn't resemble modern life much at all.

>      Besides demonstrating the point that spontaneous generation is impossible,
> the above quote also demonstrates something about the faith of an evolutionist.
> Creationists need faith to believe in God, and evolutionists need faith to
> believe in something they reckon is impossible.  Dr. Wald's exhaustive search
> for a scientific explanation ended in failure, as it has for all other
> evolutionary scientists, and he had the courage to admit it.  But he also
> had an incredible faith to believe in it even though it was a scientific
> impossibility.

Your faith argument thus falls apart, once the full rationale is explained.
I won't bother picking apart your abusrd characterizations such as
"exhaustive search, "failure", and "scientific imposibility".

If this is the way you were taught about evolution in your Adventist schools,
I'd recommend doubting more of what they taught you.

>      Surely, using rational and objective thinking, one would conclude that if
> it takes a high order of intelligence just to understand *life*, then it must
> take a far greater intelligence to design it.  Thus, the fact that there
> exists zero evidence that spontaneous generation is possible leads me to
> believe that life was designed by some form of intelligence.

Here we have the classic watchmaker argument.  Which has classic rebuttals:
either the watchmaker must have a creator-watchmaker (ad infinitem) or
if the causal chain can stop somewhere, why not with our universe and no
watchmaker-god.

>      Let's look at another evidence of creation.  Obviously, if all life was
> created on earth simultaneously, then one would expect to find such evidence
> in the fossils.  Descending into the Grand Canyon for example, one moves
> downward past the Mississippian, Devonian, Cambrian, etc. geological stratas
> as they have been tagged.  The Cambrian layer is the lowest or last stratum
> of the decending levels that has any fossils in it (although every now and
> then someone will find a random fossil in Pre-Cambrian strata).  Interestingly
> enough, all lower strata below the Cambrian have no record of life.  And yet
> the Cambrian layer is full of all the major kinds of animals and plants found
> today.  The life forms in the Cambrian layer compare with the complexity of
> current life forms.

If all life was created on earth simultaneously, we would expect to find
representatives of all types in all the layers.  Why don't we find whale and
other extant species bones in Cambrian layers?

Note also, that if you suggest hydraulic sorting, that the above argument
no longer supports simultaneous creation.

>      This evidence is a puzzle to evolutionists.  Darwin, in his Origin of
> the Species, states, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous
> deposits belonging to these assumed earliest period prior to the Cambrian
> system I can give no satisfactory answer."  Drs. Marshall Kay and Edwin
> Colbert of Columbia University also agree with this evidence when they state
> "Why should such complex organic forms be in rocks about 600 million years
> old and be absent or unrecognized in the records of the preceding two billion
> years?...If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite
> fossils in the rocks older than Cambrian is puzzling."  This quote taken from
> Stratigrapy and Life History, Page 102.

It's plain to see that your education on this subject is not up to date.
Extensive precambrian faunas have been discovered, as well as extensive
evidence of algae and bacteria as much as 2 billion years ago.

In any event, it is to be expected that it would be more difficult to find
fossils of early life than of more modern life.  Early life would be
smaller and simpler.  It might not have easily fossilizable skeletons.
For example, if we wanted to find fossils of the earliest bacteria, we
would expect them to look like fossils of recent bacteria.  It's hard to
find bacteria fossils.  Are you surprised by that?

I'm also not responding to a long and fuzzy argument about kinds, groups,
species, etc. where you claim for one section of the argument that these
groups are all made up and not real, and in another section you recognize
these groups to claim evolution has not occurred.  If you really insist,
I'll address this section in another note (this one is soooo long.)

> CONCLUSION:
> 
>      While brief (although it doesn't seem brief while I'm typing), I hope
> this answers some of your questions -- and I'm sure it creates some.  The
> proof for the truth of the creation story in Genesis is not demonstrable.
> The proof for the thruth of the theory of evolution also is not demonstrable.
> In other words, neither evolution nor special creation can be demonstrated in
> the laboratory.  Thus it becomes correct to speak of the doctrine of evolution
> or the doctrine of special creation, because one or the other is accepted in
> the same way that one decides which religious group he will join.

We see clearly in your reasoning that you have two standards of proof: one
that you apply solely to creationism (special pleading) and bad science
which you apply to discredit evolution and support creationism.  It is the
special pleading that makes creationism a religious doctrine.  Scientific
doctrines such as evolution are based on more reliable criteria.

>      As it now stands evolutionism and creationism are beliefs to which
> adherents are won by persuasion and not by laboratory proof.

It is undeniable that adherants to evolution can be won by persuasion rather
than scientific evidence.  In-depth study leads the vast majority of
scientists to reject creationism and accept evolution.
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh