Is Intelligent Design religion? part 1

Is Intelligent Design religion? part 1

It is difficult to have a conversation around God, religion, creation, evolution or intelligent design (whatever we mean by any of those terms) without stale clichés and slogans being deployed. The 'machine gun' tactic is often used, throwing up to 10 quick fire bold assertions and complex questions in a couple of sentences. The questions can usually be addressed, but one at a time, whereas a well designed and witty slogan can raise 3 or 4 key issues in a dozen syllables.

One of the stalest and cheapest slogans in popular use is 'Intelligent Design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo.' Another is 'Evolution is science, creationism is religion.' There are many others, including the crassly ignorant and irrelevant 'Michael Behe got his ass whipped at Dover.' Incidentally, the real truth about the Dover trial is a lot more interesting than the myth that is usually copied, including the fact that activist Judge John Jones violated the US Constitution by ruling on a matter of religion, but that's another story.

Slogans and clichés may carry some truth, (*) or they may even helpfully simplify a complicatede issue and help us understand something difficult, even if imperfectly. But they can mislead, distract, obfuscate or tramline our thinking and stall exploration. They may also be deliberately used by propagandists in order to mould the opinions and actions of others for their own purposes. Of course both sides in any disagreement can do this, and deny they have done it, even deny it to themselves. Since none of us is neutral, we may both use these tactics and be deceived by them.

Having changed political and religious allegiances more than once, I can look back on stuff I used to accept as self evident and see how I was believing half truths and untruths what 'The System' had primed me to believe, and in some cases I can see how it was done. And I wonder what I currently believe, knowingly or unknowingly, that I will discover in future isn't so-and i must think this because I am certain that I can see others who are in error but don't believe they are, so I must look to my own errors. Anyway, back to the question at the top of the page- Is Intelligent Design religion?

If we are going to address the issue as sceptical, free thinking truth seekers willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even out of our comfort zones, we must begin by assuming that we might be misled, not least by our own preference about what OUGHT to be true. Could we be wrong? Scientists are supposed to ask that all the time. The next step is to define the terms. then we can consider the case on its merits AND consider the opposite case. So before even addressing the question I believe it is fair and necessary to raise the equal and opposite question, is evolutionism religion?

Is evolutionism religion?

Well, is it? The question may at least be put, although as I said above, before we can consider the question we must define our terms or else we are just trying to use a piano to mend a puncture in a bicycle tyre, a futile exercise. Note my use of the term 'evolutionism', which I am aware causes offence to some. I use this term to denote the acceptance of molecules to man evolution over billions of years from Big-Bang derived space dust by impersonal forces, particularly natural selection acting on random mutations (I avoid the term 'belief' here to avoid distraction). I believe this is a fair definition, but when I use it, immediately the objections come flying.

'Evolution is nothing to do with how the cosmos originated or how life began!'

'Evolution is about change over time!'

'Evolution is about changes in gene frequency in a population.'

'Evolution can be clearly seen in plant breeding.'

and, above all

'You don't understand evolution.'

And these objections, all of which I hear often, are only about DEFINITIONS! We are still nowhere near analysing truth claims about any part of the thing itself. See what I mean about how difficult it can be to have a reasoned discussion? To even start one?

Anyhow, I mean to post several short discussions over the next month or so considering the linked questions-Is Intelligent Design religion/ and 'Is evolutionism religion?' 

Feel free to comment, comments here are not moderated or censored, unlike the atheist page I was deleted and blocked from recently without warning for making a critical comment.

(*) As C S Lewis wrote in 'The Last Battle' 

" The enemy made his lie stronger by mixing a good deal of truth with it."

Radiation eating monsters versus Godzilla -film review

I saw the latest remake of the Japanese classic monster movie Godzilla last week and felt like writing a few comments about evolutionistic aspects of the film. Before continuing I should say I thought it a first class monster movie, and that I understand how we willingly suspend disbelief when storytelling is going on. However, the film was presented as modern-day realistic, and people clearly get at least some of their ideas about life from art, whether novels, songs, theatre or film. I am sure most of the audience felt they were getting a good adventure thriller, and so we were, but we also got a good dose of evolutionary reinforcement as well, largely subliminal.

CAUTION: This review may contain plot spoilers and you might prefer to see the film first.

The dramatically staged introduction included clips from the original Japanese black and white film ‘Gojira’ (fish lizard, nothing to do with any kind of ‘god’) and footage from the 1950s Pacific nuclear weapons tests. There was also a brief, almost subliminal, shot of the frontispiece of Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’, including the subtitle ‘..or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.’ That bit of the title usually gets left out, not least due to that other world changing book with the word ‘Struggle’ (*) in the title. Anyway, introductions matter and we were being told that he story had something to do with evolution and radiation.

Some expert geologists/palaeontologists are helicoptered to a mine in the Philippines where a huge chasm has opened up, swallowing 40 workers and much machinery. Deep inside it (‘below the Cambrian’ as we were told) a truly gigantic fossil skeleton is found. They stand inside it’s rib cage which seems to go on for several hundred feet. There is also a huge cocoon like structure. We then learn that another similar structure has been discovered from which something appears to have hatched. We then see a gigantic trail of smashed trees and a vast furrow leading from the mine to the sea.

The next thing is that a nuclear plant in Japan collapses under what appears to have been an earthquake. The whole town is evacuated and kept sealed off. 15 years later we discover through a grief-deranged scientist whose wife died in the disaster that the radioactivity has disappeared and  a secret project is going on, studying and hopefully containing a huge weird cocoon like the one we saw in the Philippines mine. It hatches, from it emerges a gigantic winged and taloned monster that causes great destruction before flying away on huge leathery wings.

The injured researcher at last gets some answers. The pre-Cambrian MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Object) has been awakened at the Philippines earthquake, hatched out, burrowed under the nuclear station to which it was attracted by radiation, and has been consuming the radiation. Yes, it ‘comes from a distant period in the earth’s past when radiation levels were much higher than today’ as the scientist played by Ken Watanabe tells us (or was it his assistant? Please excuse minor inaccuracies, I don't have a transcript). It eats radiation, that's why it was attracted to the nuclear plant. Now it has metamorphosed (we never got to see the earlier form it took, presumably sticking with this story line it was a mega caterpillar) and now having hatched into its adult form has gone looking for some more radiation to eat.

A Russian nuclear submarine goes missing, and is tracked to a remote island jungle where the MUTO is eating it, tearing off great lumps of metal and chewing and swallowing them. The overall reality of the plot and acting and the excellent special effects actually tend to make this evident impossibility reasonably credible. The grey beast has an oddly shaped flat pointy almost metallic head ( a bit like the Shadows in Babylon 5) and bizarre talons (slightly reminiscent of the mysterious monster in the rather nasty ‘monster destroys New York’ film ‘Cloverfield’).

Anyway, it turns out that there was another cocoon, which the secret researchers ‘vivisected’ and then stored in a nuclear waste facility. They go there to discover it has hatched out (what, after being 'vivisected'?), another even larger MUTO, and, horror of horrors, its a female. It has heard the other one’s call and heads to it. Lots of violence, buildings smashed, brave soldiers getting wasted trying to stop it, and airplanes falling out of the sky as MUTO emits EMP (electromagnetic pulses) which disable all electronic devices. ‘This will take us back to the stone age’ we are told by one researcher.

A plan is conceived to move a big H bomb to an offshore site, attract the monsters to it, then blow it up. Because of the EMP grounding planes and disabling electronics, a clockwork H bomb in a Minuteman missile is used. However the male MUTO grabs the bomb. The MUTOs mate (we are thankfully spared the sight) and a cluster of football sized eggs is laid around the missile, each with a vile monster embryo wriggling inside it. Certainly quite amazing to go from fertilised ovum to chicken sized hatchling in a couple of hours.

Godzilla turns up, bigger than an aircraft carrier, and fights the MUTOs, eventually killing both in dramatic fashion. He then gives a victory roar and swims off into the sunset, fulfilling scientist Watanabe’s hopes about Gojira ‘restoring the balance’. The monster is hailed as a ‘Saviour’ (and he does indeed appear to rise from the dead after sacrificing himself to save San Francisco, although not sadly its iconic bridge, destroyed in so many films of this kind.). 

Where do I start?

Godzilla is taller than a skyscraper, big enough to cause a tsunami. How would his blood circulate that kind of distance from heart to extremities. is he air breathing (apparently), if so how does he live unseen at 10,000 feet? What would he eat? And how could something so big, or rather a breeding population of them, survive undetected from the pre-Cambrian? OK, it’s only a monster movie, we can let that kind of stuff go.

regarding the MUTOs, the assumption that a living thing of any kind, let alone a very large one, could survive in a cocoon from the pre-Cambrian is really in the ‘The cow jumped over the moon’ category of, shall we say, very highly improbable. More to the point, the idea that such a creature (**) could ‘eat radiation’ is even more bizarre. The grammar doesn’t even make sense. You could in theory eat uranium, but first you’d have to extract it from the ore in which it occurs, a long and complicated task (as we know from discussions about Iran’s centrifuges).

 

But radiation isn’t in any possible sense a foodstuff-it is destructive, just like a bullet from a gun. Whether gamma rays, ultraviolet rays, or charged particles, it is a purely destructive process. But, aha, this is where a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ comes in, for in evolutionary mythology (remember the homage to Darwin’s Origin of Species in the film’s introduction) mutations (the bad monsters are called MUTOs) are the primary, if not only, agent of change in progressive process whereby newer, fitter, more diverse organism arise. As Darwin wrote, ‘Until the favourable variations chance to arise, natural selection has nothing to work with’. And radiation certainly causes variations, although not favourable ones as many cancer sufferers know to their cost.

In evolutionary storytelling, mutations are good, therefore radiation is good. Only in real life we know that ain’t so. So who is willingly suspending disbelief, and to what end? 

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings trilogy although I am quite clear in my mind that there are no deathless elves, hairy footed hobbits or rings of power. I’m not complaining about seeing fantastic things in a fantasy film. But, although it might carry moral messages we could discuss, LOTR is clearly presented as fantasy. The 2014 remake of Godzilla is presented as somewhat realistic present day science fiction. I think it probable that people will to some extent have their ideas about the inevitability of evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations reinforced by some of the semi-subliminal messages in the film. I am not saying that the producer and director sat down and deliberately planned to make Darwinist propaganda, I’m sure they were more concerned with art, fame and money, but the message is there all the same. It is ubiquitous, and it is never questioned. The most effective propaganda is the propaganda of which you are completely unaware.

Nevertheless I thought Godzilla a pretty good state of the art sci-fi monster movie remake. I conclude by noting how many apocalyptic/end of civilisation films are being made these days. Something in the air? As Joni Mitchel sang in 'Woodstock'

 

'maybe its just the time of year, or maybe its the time of Man...'

 

 

 

(*) Mein Kampf (my struggle) by Adolf Hitler

(**) The term 'creature' means something created. Technically its incorrect for an evolutionist to use the term, or term s like 'designed', but they often do anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darwinism on Shetland, BBC propaganda on Countryfile

Most Sunday evenings I sit down in front of the TV with my companion and watch the country and wildlife magazine programme ‘Countryfile’ on BBC1. Usually it’s worth watching, and last night was no exception. The programme’s main focus is on agriculture and as well as considering national issues like animal welfare, government energy policy etc, the team visits a region of the UK as well as the Cotswold farm of the winsome and articulate Adam Henson. He has an interest in rare breeds that he got from his father.

Yesterday’s edition looked at Shetland and a number of the domestic animals that are kept there. I was struck by the frequent references to Darwinian terms such as ‘adaptation’. I have no problem with this term as long as we understand what it means. There was also a typically Darwinian misuse of language when a variety of duck (a local mostly black feathered version of the Indian Runner variety) was described as a ‘species’ which it very clearly was not. Much of Darwin’s sophistry depended on blurring the distinction between a variety and a species.

The key word about Shetland animals was ‘small.’ It is a windswept place with few trees, a long dark winter, and highly variable weather that is often extreme. The cattle, sheep and horses (the famous Shetland ponies that feature in the popular drawings by Norman Thelwell) were all somewhat smaller than mainland versions. These animals were said to have ‘adapted’ or ‘evolved’ to the Shetland island environment. The term ‘evolve’ was used at least twice, ‘adapt’ 4 or 5 times in the context of these domestic animals.

This is of interest in the discussion about Darwinianism since Darwin wrote a whole chapter in ‘Origin of Species’ about variation under domestication, and this was foundational to his argument about all life forms coming by descent with modification from a common ancestor. He wrote at length about how breeders and farmers took care to breed from their best stock, ‘best’ in this context meaning most useful for their purposes. If you want a dog that hunts rats, you breed from the pest pair of ratters you can get, then test their progeny as ratters and breed from the best of them, etc. This process can equally be applied to other characteristics of animals, for example if you live in a cold country you may want to breed dogs with thick fur, if a hot country then dogs with short hair would do better.

Darwin’s observations about intelligent selective human breeding (or ‘variation under domestication’ as he called it) were hardly original, but were thoroughly decent science as far as they went. Variation under domestication is exactly what we can see in terms of the process that led the domesticated farm animals of Shetland to exist in their present form. No problems so far.

The Shetlanders, being intelligent and resourceful people who wanted to survive as well as they could in a tough climate, selected the animals that suited them best and bred them over several centuries with a goal of achieving suitable characteristics. That they were able to succeed, within limits imposed by the various animals’ genomes, is interesting but unremarkable. And importantly, it tells us NOTHING about how any of these animals arose. Sheep remain sheep, cattle remain cattle, ducks remain ducks.

Adam Henson compared a sample of wool from his Cotswold sheep with a local farmer’s Shetland sheep wool. The Shetland wool was much finer. Both Cotswold and Shetland sheep produced quality wool, but with slightly different characteristics, and this was the result of breeding. Call it adaptation if you will (I prefer to call it selective breeding) but if we are going to call it evolution then to avoid confusion we need a completely different term to describe the never observed process by which men supposedly evolved from hydrogen gas that came from the big bang, via dirty water and sparks, pond slime, jellyfish, frogs, mice, lemurs, apes etc. However, sometimes confusion may be just what you want if you are trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes.

Darwin’s biggest offence against science was to describe the above sort of ‘adaptation’ and then boldly assume that nature would do ‘immeasurably more’ when in the real world we observe nature doing measurably less. Intelligent men and women with a goal can ‘adapt’ a bred quite a lot in a relatively few generations, no argument. But what happens if Adam Henson’s Cotswold sheep and the Shetland breeds are left to their own devices, as would happen in nature with the human breeder’s mind and hand removed? Yes, they will interbreed and soon lose any distinctive features they have. Intelligent, purpose driven human breeding is seen to produce more varieties, while nature left to herself tends to revert to the mean as natural selection only selects for survival, whereas men can select for colour, temperament, quality of plumage or wool, meat, sense of smell etc.

Yes, some degree of species splitting into varieties, arguably even new sub-species or even perhaps species, can happen in isolated populations. You could most likely take a range of domestic sheep and leave them to roam and mate freely on an isolated island like Shetland and probably get a tougher variety within relatively few generations as natural selection eliminated the less fit. You see this with feral goats in Somerset. But you won’t get a new kind of animal, at least nobody ever has during recorded history. The idea that all mammals have a common ancestor remains sheer speculation.

Natural selection does less, not more, than selective human breeding. How do I know? Because I can see it. Animal species like sheep, horse, dog, cat or poultry under human domestication tends to produce more varieties than in the wild, but will revert back quickly if the breeder’s directing hand is removed. Darwin knew this, as he wrote about the need for plant breeders to ‘rogue’ their nursery stock (i.e. remove plants with undesired characteristics) and the need for animal breeders not to breed from ‘their worst stock’. The latter idea as applied to humans was enthused about by Darwinians like Galton and put into practice by a failed Austrian watercolour painter who became chancellor of Germany in the 1930s.

So, even watching a family friendly country programme on a Sunday evening, one cannot avoid the steady, slow drip of evolutionary propaganda. The BBC has never, ever, once given even half an hour to a fair examination of the arguments against Darwinism, even though it often gives a voice to unpopular, divisive and outlying points of view from various other areas of life. But there seems to be a strong BBC policy to insert Darwinian references into every kind of programme, from University Challenge to dramas like Lark Rise to Candleford, the News, and now Countryfile.

This might seem trivial, but it’s not. Life is made up of small things, information-true or false- comes in small packages, education and indeed indoctrination depends on frequent repetition. When the young person invited to question Darwin retorts ‘Its proved by mountains of overwhelming evidence’ stuff like the unexamined assumptions about farm animals ‘becoming adapted’ or ‘evolving’ to life on Shetland is an example of the kind of background mood music that is steadily dropped into their brains from when they first begin to understand language.

John’s Gospel chapter 1 verse 3 says ‘Through him (Christ) all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made.’ Evolutionism is not science, at heart it is and always was intended as anti Christian propaganda. It was designed and spread by the enemies of the Gospel-revolutionaries, liberals and secularists- to emasculate the church and dechristianise society.

It's working as intended.