Evolution Is Not Science

Last week, as I'm sure you've heard by now, children's TV show host Bill Nye 'The Science Guy' released the following video, entitled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children":



The news media immediately jumped on it, and that's how I heard about it. Frankly, I was shocked at what I heard, not because I believe that God created the cosmos (although I do believe that), but that Bill Nye apparently has a few of his facts confused. He also clearly thinks that anyone who doesn't believe what he believes is an idiot.

Here are a few of the facts that Mr. Nye is getting wrong:

1. "When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really." How can he say this immediately after saying "I mean, we're the world's most advanced technological [country]... generally, the United States is where most of the innovation still happens"? Does he think that Americans never believed in creation until recently? Clearly it hasn't held us back yet. It could be argued, based on those two statements alone, that belief in evolution has held everybody else back.
   
2. "Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates." How is evolution fundamental to understanding biology? Is he saying that if someone chooses not to believe that one species can, over time, bring forth a different species, that that person is not able to become a biologist or a physician? He might want to discuss that with the excellent Christian doctor who has kept me healthy for many years now.
   
3. "Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution." What's more simple than "I think someone made these complex living things in the world around me"? I suppose "Over the course of millions or billions of years, directed by forces which we cannot observe or repeat, counter to the observable fact that organized things in our world tend to deteriorate instead of becoming more organized, simple creatures suddenly appeared out of nowhere for no reason and then slowly became more complex creatures, guided by no intelligence at all" is much simpler.
   
4. "...here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent" Bill here seems to misunderstand something about believers in creation. Not every believer in creation believes in the "young Earth" hypothesis which says that although the universe seems very old, it actually is only something like 6,000 years old (or maybe some other figure, but you get the picture.) In fact, there is no reason that someone who believes that an intelligence created everything can't also believe that that intelligence created it billions of years ago. Young Earth is not the same topic as evolution, although they may often be part of the same arguments.
   
   This is the first time in the video, by the way, that Mr. Nye implies that people who do not believe in evolution are not very bright. More on that later.
   
5. "And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems." Obviously, if you do not believe in evolution, you can not understand science, "build stuff" that requires understanding of engineering, or "solve problems." Hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, astronauts, computer programmers, and generally very intelligent people who doubt evolution would beg to disagree.
   
6. "You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it." On the contrary, in recent years the evidence against evolution has been mounting... in fact, if there is anything that lacks evidence, it is the argument that simpler creatures can and have managed to change themselves into more complicated creatures. Human beings cannot even force evolution to happen, and to our knowledge, we are the more complex and intellectual creatures on Earth. The best we can do is make creatures mutate, but we can't make a Spider Man or a Wolverine... usually the mutations we create result in the death of the mutant. Mutation does not make creatures better. It usually kills them. It certainly doesn't turn one species of animal into a different species. And if even the most complex species on the planet can't make it happen, how can a one-celled microbe make it happen?

The thing I find offensive about Bill Nye's video, though, is not his inaccuracies, but his arrogance. He leaves no room between "smart like me" and "crazy people who can't understand the world around them." He implies that science and evolution are one and the same, but that's just not the case. Evolution is not science. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the Scientific method this way: "principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses." Did you notice how the scientific method involves observation and experiment? So far there has never been a bona-fide observed case of evolution. We haven't been able to turn cats into anything but cats, cows into anything but cows, daisies into anything but daisies, humans into anything but humans. Squirrels give birth to baby squirrels. Chicken eggs hatch and chickens come out. Evolution has as much scientific validity as Mary Shelley's story of Dr. Frankenstein giving life to an assembly of body parts by shooting them with lightning. Neither experiment, Frankenstein's Monster or Darwin's Evolution, has ever been repeated. Experimental results that are not independently repeatable are scientifically suspect.

And yet Bill Nye and others like him do exactly what they accuse creationists of doing: they shove their dogma down the throats of others. They pretend that something they cannot observe or make happen is a scientifically proven fact, and they call people names if they are disagreed with. I've even heard accounts of very qualified scientists suffering bullying within their professional circles for advancing ideas that exclude evolution. Some scientists who believe in creation actually remain "in the closet" because they fear that their career will suffer if they buck the party line on evolution. By using the word "crazy" to describe the views of creationists and by implying that they live in a dream world, Mr. Nye has shown that he has no respect for those who have views counter to his own. It's shocking that someone who aligns himself with the scientific establishment would show such disdain for the views of others.

Even if I believed in evolution, that's not the kind of attitude I want to teach to my children. Hopefully, the children of tomorrow will respect others' viewpoints, even if they disagree with them. Evolution or not, intellectual arrogance is definitely not appropriate for children.

Walking Around

Isn't it cool when people walk around?

No, I didn't leave anything out of the sentence. They don't have to be doing anything special to be amazing, juggling chainsaws or doing card tricks or something. Just, walking around.

I have a four-year-old daughter who loves animals. Whenever she sees a creature that she hasn't seen before and it starts to move, she giggles. She gets so excited that the puppy or the turtle or the squirrel is moving! A little while I was walking from room to room, remembered something I had forgotten, paused to decide whether to go get it, and then turned around and went back to get it. When I did that, like a four-year-old watching a kitten walk, I suddenly became conscious of the specialness of it.

Have you ever thought about how many muscles have to work in concert for you to walk across the room? Some quick Googling returns the number 200 from a couple of sources, and I don't doubt it. I think there are only about five muscles in your leg, but what about all of the muscles that are constantly adjusting your spine, toes, feet, and all of the other parts of your body to keep you balanced and moving forward? And I didn't just move forward... I moved forward, stopped, remained balanced for a moment, then turned my whole body and walked in the other direction. At every point in that operation, many muscles were involved in keeping me doing what I wanted to do. At any time, one of those muscles could have done something different, and I would have been lying on the floor (or bashing into a wall or door, or whatever) instead of walking across the room. Mundane, you say? No! It's positively amazing! (Just ask anyone who has ever tried to design a two-legged walking robot!)

Why am I mentioning all this? Because to me, even something as simple as walking points to God. There's no way a system like the human body would have occurred by chance. People who would say "isn't it amazing how Nature designed our bodies like that?" are simply refusing to use the word "God" for the creator and using the word "Nature" instead, which doesn't really make any sense unless you're talking about "Mother Nature" and then you've just tipped your hat to pantheism, not atheism. Then again, I'm the guy who doesn't believe in the existence of atheists, so maybe I'm not the guy to apply those labels. Wait, where was I going with this again?

Oh yeah: your body is amazing. And I'm not just saying that because you are so good-looking, because everybody knows that the people who read this blog are SMOKIN' good looking! But even if you weren't so incredibly attractive, your body would still be an amazing creation by an amazing God. And when you stand up and walk away from whatever you're reading this on, I hope you are reminded of that with every step.

Love Wins - can we back the truck up just a minute?

There are a number of things in the writings of C. S. Lewis that should positively baffle most Christians. Take the final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, titled The Last Battle. In chapter 13, the heroes of the story metaphorically "go to Heaven" by being forced through the door of a stable (which is obviously a reference to the stable in which Jesus was born). Some of the "villains" of the story go through the door too, a bunch of dwarves who have consciously decided to reject the Lordship of the Christ-figure of the books, Aslan. They all, heroes and dwarves alike, wind up in a beautiful place with blue sky, refreshing summer breezes, delicious fruit growing on the trees, and reunions with loved ones. The heroes of the story love it, but the dwarves hate it; they are so determined that they know the nature of the inside of the stable that they refuse to see the reality inside. They imagine a place of discomfort and punishment, when actually they are in a place comfort and plenty. The implication would seem to be that even if someone rejects Christ, he still goes to Heaven... he just doesn't know he did. A chapter or two later, a Calormene (a member of a country that is the sworn enemy of Narnia) who spent his life serving Tash (the Satan figure in The Last Battle) gets into Heaven because Aslan has accepted his service to Tash, thinking Tash was the good true God, as service to Aslan. If you told most Christians that you thought that people who had rejected their former religion would go to Heaven anyway but not know that they were in Heaven, or that a Muslim who served Allah with all of his heart would go to the Christian Heaven because Jesus would accept his heart toward Allah as a heart toward God, they would say you were nuts, but that's what Lewis is implying in the book.

In a different story C. S. Lewis wrote called "The Great Divorce," the characters, who we eventually learn are deceased, begin as residents of Hell, but they take a ride on a bus to Heaven where they are given a chance to become full-fledged citizens. Most of them decline the invitation, and go back to Hell. Hell in this story is not a traditional flames-and-pitchforks place, but a dreary, boring, rainy kind of place. What? No fire in Hell? People leaving Hell and given a chance to repent and go to Heaven after they've died? This from the author who wrote Mere Christianity, one of the clearest articulations of the Christian faith ever written? Scandalous!

I don't think, based on what I've learned over the years about the life of C. S. Lewis, that it registered to the readers of his time what he was saying in his stories. Either that, or those kinds of views were much more mainstream in Christianity then than they are now. So C. S. Lewis probably never reaped the benefits of the sensationalized marketing that seems to surround each new Rob Bell book. I wonder if all those people who wrote all those scathing debunkings of his new book, Love Wins, before it even came out realize that all they were doing was raising interest in the book? I know several people (myself included) who might never have read it except for the controversy surrounding it. I'm glad I did pick it up, though. It gave me a lot to think about.

The Bible is a book about God and His pursuit of man, based on His love for mankind. For that reason, some things are left very ambiguous. Take the origins of the universe and mankind, for example. The Bible, not being a science book, does not explicitly confirm or debunk the Big Bang, evolution, the age of planet Earth, or many other things that scores of extremely smart human beings have spent their lives trying to figure out. God (or Moses, who scholars believe wrote Genesis, if you want to get picky) apparently wasn't that concerned with those details; the point is that God caused the world to exist and God caused people to exist, but people tried to do things their own way and they wound up in a pickle because of it. The ultimate fate of mankind is another thing that the Bible doesn't have as much to say about as we would like. Despite what some may think, the Bible doesn't say that the human race will sit on clouds in Heaven and play harps forever.

In fact, the Bible doesn't say that human beings will live forever in Heaven at all. Check the end of the book of Revelation: the human race doesn't wind up in Heaven. The human race winds up on Earth. It indicates that there will be an end to this world, God's people will be saved from destruction personally by Jesus Himself, there will be a thousand years of peace, and then... it doesn't say much about the time after that, other than that we will be on Earth (obviously a "new" Earth, one with some qualities that set it apart from the current Earth, but Earth nonetheless) and that God will be in charge through Jesus. The idea that Christians will spend forever someplace in the sky is the kind of misconception that Rob Bell takes on in the book.

But let's back the truck up here. Let's talk about the things that people have said that Bell says in the book, but which he does not actually say.



Rob Bell does not say in this book that Hell does not exist. He pretty clearly says that Hell does exist. In fact, he extends the concept of Hell from the time after death into this lifetime. Ever hear someone call something "Hell on Earth?" Ever hear about something happening with qualities that are so horrible that it qualifies for the description "hellish?" He extends the concept of Hell to those before-death situations, but he also affirms the existence of a Hell after death, flames and all.

Bell does not say that everyone will go to Heaven. In fact, he affirms that some will go to Hell, and that it will be because of their own choices that they do.

What Bell does do is challenge the cut-and-dried concepts of Heaven as a place in the sky where people play harps forever, and Hell as a place under the ground somewhere where people burn in anguish forever. Bell seems to characterize "Hell" more as the torment that a human being feels when he has chosen to reject God than as a specific place, although he does discuss Jesus' story of "the rich man and Lazarus," which indicates that the two of them are physically in two different places, at some length. Essentially, Bell seems to indicate that the "punishment" of the flames of Hell is not there to callously torment people forever, but to "punish" them in the sense of purifying them and teaching them that there is something wrong about them that needs to be corrected. He also contends that the word "eternal" (as in "eternal punishment"), based on the meanings present in the source Greek word, most likely refers to the intensity of the experience rather than the time span in which it occurs. So when an uncomfortable experience for you seems to take "an eternity," that's the sense he postulates. So perhaps the "eternal punishment" of Hell is not burning forever with no end at all to the punishment, but an experience which, no matter how long it actually lasts, is a very intense lesson in "right" and "wrong." The fire which the Bible says in several places will try the works of believers is in mind here, the "wood hay and stubble" fire. Maybe the same fire that burns away those things and leaves the gold of works done by believers by the Spirit of God - maybe that same fire will be applied to unbelievers, and likewise purify them.

Bell doesn't even contend that people will get out of Hell immediately... actually, he doesn't say that they will definitely get out at all. He seems to be saying that the purifying process will last as long as it takes for them to let go of anything they are holding onto which is anti-God. After they have been purified, presumably they will be able to join in the afterlife God had wanted for them all along. Presumably they'll get to take C. S. Lewis' "bus ride to Heaven" at that point. Whether or not anyone will be stubborn enough to stay in the flames forever or not is a question Bell does not address.

There are a number of things Bell doesn't address directly in the book, although you can infer some of the answers. One thing he does not directly state is whether or not he thinks that everyone will eventually come to Salvation. In fact, if you notice my use of phrases like "perhaps" and "seems to" and "most likely" throughout this post, you'll realize that Bell, as often as not, leaves room for doubt about what he actually believes. Whether this is to allow the reader to reach his own conclusions, or whether it is there to provide Bell some "plausible deniability" of the "I never said everyone would go to Heaven!" type, or maybe a little of both, I guess is something only Bell himself knows. I know that the sort of "presenting a huge list of unanswered questions" format of the first chapter, which is presumably intended to be compelling, I found frustrating. I already have questions - everyone does. I didn't read the book to get more questions. After that chapter, the book is less riddled with question marks, but it is also a lot less filled with "this is how it is" kinds of direct answers than most books about religion tend to be.

And in a sense, that's a good thing. Sometimes people have to be forced to think for themselves, to examine their own beliefs about things, and to reach conclusions based on their own perspective of the facts. Love Wins presents itself as this kind of book, but because it doesn't truly present every side of the story, in the end you wind up supporting Bell's apparent views without him ever saying that his views are correct. So you are convinced of something that the book never came out and said, this is what the Bible says. It's clever writing, but I'm not sure it's 100% honest about its intentions.

For many years I've said that I truly believe that we will be surprised at the people we run into in Heaven. In the end Bell brings this to an extreme: we may be surprised to find that anyone might be there one day, even people who consciously rejected God in this life. Even people who consciously reject God for a while in that life. I don't want you to get me wrong; I enjoyed this book very much. I like Bell's writing style, and his ideas gave me a perspective that will be with me for a long time as I go through the Scriptures. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the afterlife. His ideas are different from what most Christians believe, but not in the way the pre-publication critics thought. Bell agrees that Heaven and Hell exist. He just thinks they exist in a different way than we always thought. Give the book a chance. Find out what it says. Then take it or leave it, but you owe it to yourself to at least know what it is that you're taking or leaving.

I don't believe in atheists II

Several years ago, I blogged that I don't believe in the existence of atheists. I still hold to my theory, partly because of the reasons I mentioned in that blog post, but since then I've obtained evidence to back me up from the Bible. Observe:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
(Romans 1:18-23 ESV)

Did you catch that? The Bible says that everybody knows there is a God. It's obvious, based on the evidence of God's creation - the creation points to a creator. But did you notice the sinister plot that's mentioned? It says that the unrighteous know the truth, but try to suppress it (which is a fool's errand, since according to this Scripture, deep down everybody knows the truth anyway). Don't try to pull this Scripture on one of them, of course, because their folly runs so deep that they certainly won't listen to the clear truth of God's Word, but I have a little bit of logic you could try.

Let's think about science for a moment. Science tells us that everything has a start and a finish. I, for example, was born one day (this occurred nine to ten months after I was conceived), and one day, if the pattern of all of recorded history holds, I can expect to die. Animals are born and die. Science even tells us that planets and stars have a beginning and an ending. Science is all about trying to find a cause and effect for things, because science tells us that everything has a beginning, and everything has a cause.

Now, let's rewind backwards. Let's rewind WAY backwards. I don't care how far you go... go back to the very beginning. Let's say the "Big Bang" theory is correct and the entire cosmos started from a catastrophic explosion. Science tells us that the explosion has a cause. What was the cause? Tell you what, I won't go the obvious route... let's go with space aliens. Let's say they used technology to seed the cosmos, which didn't exist before.

What caused the space aliens?

You can see that this logic is going to go on and on forever, and become more and more outrageous and convoluted, until eventually you give up and come to a brick wall. Everything has a cause, but one thing is the cause of everything. Something started it all in the first place, and that thing did not have a cause. It existed outside of the rules of cause and effect. In fact, it created cause and effect. That thing, whatever form it takes, is the definition of "god."

This argument does not prove the identity of the God of the Bible by any means, but I think the rules of logic point, as clearly as the laws of nature mentioned in the Scripture from Romans, at the existence of God. If someone calls himself or herself an atheist, I would like to submit that either he has not thought his beliefs through to their logical conclusion, or that he is deliberately concealing what he already knows, deep down, to be true.

There IS a God. It's only logical.

Eternal

The new Ben Stein movie Expelled is about how "intelligent design," belief in which is similar to but not the same as belief in Biblical creation (creationism actually falls under the category of intelligent design theories), has been marginalized by the atheistic intellectual elite. Christians believe in intelligent design by a creator we call God. Other religions believe similar things about similar deities. Some people believe that life was placed on Earth by an alien intelligence (I'm serious, and so are they).

The alternative to ID is of course evolution, which says that the things that exist are not the product of a designer but of chance over time. Given enough time, the theory basically goes, the right conditions will eventually occur and life will begin to exist. There may be fits and starts, but we are theorizing that we have plenty and PLENTY of time, here.

Have you noticed that all of those theories have something in common? The common factor is something eternal. For the person of faith, that thing that is eternal is a deity. For the alien theorist, presumably the aliens either have been around forever, or something created them and something created that. For the evolutionist, maybe the universe has been around forever... although sciency types will generally tell you that the Universe started with a Big Bang, but before that bang there was something that went bang. So that something is, for all intents and purposes, eternal. Or maybe they'd say that time is eternal, or the laws of chance are eternal. But something goes on forever.

Now, if you notice, the longer you think about things like this and the further back you go, the more like the Judeo-Christian God it all starts to look. God is eternal and He is the creator of everything. Now, in some aspects things are different... God is not from another planet (He made them all) and He is not mindless and random. But the more closely you examine just about anything, the more God you will see in it.

I wonder who the aliens think created them?