June 13, 2006

Why Didn't God Explain and Other Non-arguments
Everett

Well, the creation-evolution debate has strayed from questions of science and has suffered immensely as a result.

Farlas, your "Why didn't God explain/mention x" is probably the poorest argument I've seen you put forward as an argument against evolution. After all, you can just as easily ask why God didn't mention bacteria, viruses, amoebas, mushrooms, algae, prions, protozoa, continental drift, volcanoes, meteors, comets, nebulae, the other planets of our solar system, other galaxies, atoms, molecules, quantum mechanics, or any number of objects or phenomena known to man and not mentioned in the Bible. Are all of these things merely figments of our imagination because they don't warrant mention in the first chapter of Genesis? If anything asking why things aren't mentioned in the Bible calls into question the truth of the Bible, not of the things not mentioned. Also, it is the height of presumption to say that if x is so, then God would have said/done y.

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable ar His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!
Who has know the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?" Romans 11:33-34

Perhaps even more foolishly, you assert that Moses was "no more ignorant than we are." Of what? Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, not intelligence. Moses knew things we will never know, and we know things Moses could never have known. I suppose it's possible that he could have wrapped his head around a concept as complex and mind-boggling as evolution, but there is no reason to believe that he had the necessary grounding in biology to understand the idea of cells, much less protein synthesis, genetics, heredity, phylogenetics, cladistics and the idea of universal common descent. Furthermore, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Moses had seen caterpillers turn into butterflies or tadpoles into frogs. Again, it's possible he did, but we have no way of knowing it.

Oh, and I have answered your question as to why monkeys are still around. First of all, man did not evolve from apes. Rather, man and apes share a common ancestor which is extinct. Secondly, a species will not replace its ancestral species as long as there are sufficient resources to support them both. Man and the apes occupy different niches in the global ecosystem. Thus, the existence of man in no way necessarily mandates the exticntion of apes as far as evolution is concerned.

The fact that you don't see any evidence for evolution does not mean that it isn't there. I do not accept evolution as true on faith. I accept it because that's where the facts have led me, and the evidence continues to mount. In Chad, paleontologists have discovered a 7 million year-old collection of fossils, including a very ape-like skull with one very important difference: The angle formed by the spine and the skull is such that the animal must have stood upright, making it the earliest known hominid. Also recently discovered are the fossil remains of a fish some 370 million years old with a primitive arm, forearm and wrist, an amphibian-like neck, and a flattened skull.

For a succinct summary of why your Mustang-whirlwind argument doesn't hold up, go here:

http://www.csicop.org/si/2005-03/evolution.html

Lastly, 2x+3=21-x

Add x to both sides: 3x+3=21

Subtract 3 from both sides: 3x=18

Divide both sides by 3: x=6

QED