aLmIgHty Science...?!
Actually, I was going to name this file "The EVER-EVOLVING EVOLUTION... of the Boneheaded and Brainless" and dedicate it to those serious students who want to better understand the imaginative theories of perhaps some of the most arrogant, intolerant wise-guys in the entire Solar System (occasionally referred to in our society as: Scientists... ). But instead, I offer for a second time Albert Einstein's quote... and add some excerpts from wonderful professors whose credentials, logic and wisdom confront and challenge the best of these hard-headed academia nuts.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. " - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Internationally respected professor who has taught at Washington University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and the University of California - Berkeley, Dr. Huston Smith, in his best selling work - "Why Religion Matters" (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) writes:
- Item - Secular humanism is no longer the confident battle cry that it was when, in 1933 intellectuals gathered around John Dewey to hammer out the Humanist Manifesto. That initial manifesto was solidly mainstream. Beginning with Dewey himself, its signatories included recognized names in every field of culture - Issac Asimov, John Ciardi, and B.F. Skinner among them. The second, updated manifesto (1973) already sounded more defensive than confident, and the third (1999) comes close to reading (dully) like a shutdown. Not a single recognized name appears among its signers. (Page 159)
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In Dr. Smith's chapter, "Is Light Increasing?", speaking on enlightenment in the East and salvation in the West, he comments:
...[W]e see that none of the secular jigsaw pieces the twentieth century reached for filled in the space at the center of the human heart. The two most important ones were Marxism in the East and Progress in the West. (Marxism believes in lowercase progress too, but it stresses an ideological program for achieving it. As for East and West, I use those words to refer to the ideologies that polarized the twentieth century politically.)
To begin with the West, Progrss has turned into something of a nightmare. The campaign against ignorance has expanded our knowledge of nature, but science cannot tell us what we should give our lives to. That is disappointing: it is discouraging to discover that not only are we no wiser (as distinct from being more knowledgeable) than our forebears were; we may be less wise for having neglected value questions while bringing nature to heel. That possibility is frightening, for our vastly increased power over nature calls for more wisdom in its use, not less. The Enlightenment's second hope, of eliminating poverty, must face the fact that more people are hungry today than ever before. As for the belief that the Age of Reason would make people sane, that reads today like a cruel joke. In the Nazi myth of a super-race (which produced the Holocaust) and the Marxist myth of a classless utopia (which produced the Stalinist Terror and a Mao's Cultural Revolution), the twentieth century fell for the most monstrous superstitions the human mind has ever embraced.
With this last point we have already moved to the Eastern half of the twentieth century, where Marxist hopes have not just declined but collapsed. The Soviet Union is in shambles, and while Maoism remains nominally in place in China, no one believes it anymore -- capitalism is advancing there faster than anywhere else on the planet. In its heyday, Marxism inspired commitment by claiming that its idealism was grounded in truth. This is indeed the winning formula, but the twentieth century falisfied both halves of the Marxist vision. All of Marx's major predictions truned out to be wrong: (1) the European model of production has not spread throughout the world; (2) the working class has not progressively grown more miserable and radical; (3) nationalism and religious zeal have not declined; (4) Communism does not produce goods more efficiently than free enterprise or distribute them more equitably; and (5) in Communist countries, the state shows no signs whatever of withering away.
Faced with this miserable predictive record, apologists regularly switch from truth to justice -- are we to forget the suffering masses? But the Marxist record on compassion is no better than its record on truth. In justifying Communism's (often demonic) means on grounds of the humanitarian ends they were supposed to lead to, Marx saddled his movement with a bloddy-mindedness the likes of which history has rarely seen.
Modernity's coming to see the gods it worshiped for what they were -- idols that failed -- was the most important religious event of the twentieth century. With the ground cleared of those illusions, we can now inspect the scorched earth to see if it shows signs of new life.
When considering the subject of "Cognitive Psychology", Smith finds a classic excerpt from a science fiction story written by Terry Bisson. An alien explorer, just returned from an earth visit, is reporting to his commander:
Responding to those "scientifically" superior devotees such as sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and numerous others Mutha Superiors (better: superior Mutha's) who conclude that people follow religion because it is "easier" than empiricism. Smith replied [he] shall be candid enough to report:
-When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monaster,
sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only
three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation
bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self):
- When you have attended four "rain retreats" at the Insight Buddhist Meditation
Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading,
no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife);
- When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained
enlightenment under a bo tree in India;
- When you have been crucified on Golgatha;
- When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman Coliseum;
- When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of
dignity through your faith;
- When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute
women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day);
When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism. (Page 32)
Okay... okay! Because you've been so well-mannered... I will bring you enough evidence to settle the question: Who are the Primo-genitors of all those Bone-Heads and otherwise Missing Links we are forced to professionally associate with throughout the day? Seriously, aren't you interested to learn what Scientists say about science? (They say it... they just don't want us common folk to hear it... or pass it on!)
For example: Wouldn't you like to know which world renown Senior British Museum Scientist was quoted in Nature magazine saying:
The survival of the fittest is an empty phrase; it is a play on words. For this reason, many critics feel that not only is the idea of evolution unscientific, but the idea of natural selection also... The idea of evolution by natural selection is a matter of logic, not science, and it follows that the concept of evolution by natural selection is not, strictly speaking, scientific...
Well? Wouldn't you like to know?
And how about this perplexing question:
Why is there NO evidence of fossilization going on... anywhere on planet Earth?
By the way, you can discover the answers to these and many other questions if you read the works of Dr. Phillip E. Johnson - a graduate from Harvard and the University of Chicago. He was a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren and has taught law for over twenty years at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his numerous books, Dr. Johnson wrote: "Darwin On Trial" in which you will find many interesting, untold details of science, education, and history.
Johnson writes: At the American Museum of Natural History in 1981, Colin Patterson, a senior pleontologist at the British Natural History Museum asked his audience of experts a question which relected his own doubts about much of what has been thought to be secure knowledge about evolution:
"Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing... that is true? I tried that question on a geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said "I do know one thing -- it ought not be taught in high schools". (Page 10)
In his chapter "Mutations Great and Small", Johnson states the following problem with scientific thinking when he writes:
Many organs require an intricate combination of complex parts to perform their functions. The eye and the wing are the most common illustrations, but it would be misleading to give the impression that either is a special case; human and animal bodies are literally packed with similar marvels... as an analogy, imagine a medieval alchemist producing by chance a silicon microchip; in the absence of a supporting computer technology the prodigious invention would be useless and he would throw it away.
Stephen Jay Gould [scientist] asked himself "the excellent question, What good is 5 per cent of an eye?," and speculated that the first eye parts might have been useful for something other than sight." Richard Dawkins responded that
Dr. Johnson challenges, "The fallacy in that argument is that '5 per cent of an eye' is not the same thing as '5 per cent of normal vision'. For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction.
Darwin wrote that "if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." One particularly eminent scientist of the mid-twentieth century who concluded that it had absolutely broken down was the German-American geneticist, Professor Richard Goldschmidt of the University of California at Berkeley. Goldschimidt issued a famous challenge to the neo-Darwinists, listing a series of complex structures from mammalian hair to hemoglobin that he thought could not have been produced by the accumulation and selection of small mutations. Goldschmidt concluded that Darwinian evolution could account for no more than variations within the species boundary. He conceded that large-scale mutations would in almost all cases produce hopelessly maladapted monsters, but he thought that on rare occasions a lucky accident might produce a "hopeful monster," a member of a new species with the capacity to survive and propagate (but with what mate?). (Page 36)
In other words, where are the scientific illustrations, the pictures showing us... at least two of every kind evolving... at the same time. We are all well aware of the knuckle walkin', hunched over critters pictured in most textbooks leading us to embrace this fanciful theory. But why is there always and only one animal pictured in a continuous developmental stage. The problem remains: it still takes TWO!
And finally, comments on: The Scopes Trial
Dr. Johnson writes...The Louisiana stature and comparable laws in other states grew out of the long-standing efforts... to reassert the scientific vitality of the Biblical narrative of creation against its Darwinist rival. The great landmark in this Bible-science conflict was the famous Scopes case, the "monkey trial" of the 1920s, which most Americans know in the lengendary version portrayed in the play and the movie Inherit the Wind. The legend tells of religious fanatics who invade a school classroom to persecute an inoffensive science teacher, and of a heroic defense lawyer who symbolizes reason itself in its endless battle against superstition.
As with many legendary incidents the historical record is more complex. The Tennessee legislature had passed as symbolic measure a statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution, which the governor signed only with the explicit understanding that the ban would not be enforced. Opponents of the law (and some people who just wanted to put Dayton, Tennessee, on the map) engineered a test case. A former substitute teacher named Scopes, who wasn't sure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, volunteered to be the defendant.
The case became a media circus [so what's new!!]... as William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson, led the prosecution.... The Scopes defense team was led by the famous criminal lawyer and agnostic lecturer Clarence Darrow. Darrow maneuvered Bryan to take the stand as an expert witness on the Bible and humiliated him in a devasting cross-examination.... The trial ended in a conviction and a nominal fine of $100. On appeal, the Tennessee supreme court threw out the fine on a technicality but held the statute constitutional. From a legal standpoint the outcome was inconclusive, but as presented to the world by the sarcastic journalist H.L. Menchken, and later by Broadway and Hollywood, the "monkey trial" was a public relations triumph for Darwinism.
The scientific establishment was not exactly covering itself with glory at the time, however. Although he did not appear at the trial, the principal spokesman for evolution during the 1920s was Henry Fairfield Osborn, Director of the American Museum of Natural History. Osborn relied heavily upon the notorious Piltdown Man fossil, now known to be a fraud, and he was delighted to confirm the discovery of a supposedly pre-human fossil tooth by the paleontologist Harold Cooks in Bryan's home state of Nebraska. thereafter Osborn prominently featured "Nebraska Man" (scientific designation: Hesperopithecus haroldcookii) in his antifundamentalist newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, until the tooth was discovered to be from a peccary, a kind of pig. (Page 6-7)
...For now, nothing more need be said on the subject of almighty Science! Other than... Hey kids, don't believe everything you read in scientific textbooks and journals. You just might be reading stuff from those who prefer defending pigs at any cost.. rather than reporting and defending truth.
Have a good day!
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