Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Archive

A miracle is an event that should appear impossible to a Darwinian in view of its ultra-cosmological improbability within the framework of his own theory. Now, speaking of macromutations, let me observe that to generate a proper elephant, it will not suffice suddenly to endow it with a full-grown trunk. As the trunk is being organized, a different but complementary system—the cerebellum—must be modified in order to establish a place for the ensemble of wiring that the elephant will require in order to use the trunk. These macromutations must be coordinated by a system of genes in embryogenesis. If one considers the history of evolution, we must postulate thousands of miracles; miracles, in fact, without end. No more than the gradualists, the saltationists are unable to provide an account of those miracles. The second category of miracles are directional, offering instruction to the great evolutionary progressions and trends—the elaboration of the nervous system, of course, but the internalization of the reproductive process as well, and the appearance of bone, the emergence of ears, the enrichment of various functional relationships, and so on. Each is a series of miracles, whose accumulation has the effect of increasing the complexity and efficiency of various organisms.

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals
Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
The Miracles of Darwinism, Le Recherche :49)
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(More archiving from comments here)

It’s rather ironic for those who rely on citing their own imaginations about the past as the equivalent of empirical evidence (”facts”) verifying patterns to also set themselves up as iconoclasts who condemn all the false pattern/image recognition that is typical to mankind. After all, they are the charlatans trying to make use of that very fact!

It’s also ironic that virtually every judgment that New Atheists make is reliant on Judeo-Christian history, including much of their skepticism. It’s as if Protestantism evolved to protest itself into nothingness, yet it seems that some protest too much. For what God was it that condemned all graven images/patterns and declared that they were just wood and stone and so on?

Christian theism undermined false pattern recognition historically, yet New Atheists try to pretend that skepticism of this type is reliant on atheism. Or they pretend that iconoclastic truths which do away with false gods and ghosts can somehow be perverted to do away with belief in the God that forbid graven images:
At this point we could easily make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that getting rid of gods either necessitates or is the same as getting rid of God. Far from it. For Moses and the Prophets it was absurd to bow down to various bits of the universe such as the sun, moon and stars as gods. But they regarded it as equally absurd not to believe in and bow down to the Creator God who made both the universe and them. And here, it is to be noted, they were not introducing a radically novel idea. They did not have to have their universe de-deified as did the Greeks, for the simple reason that they had never believed in the gods in the first place. What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in One True God, Creator of heaven and earth. That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world- picture of humankind — an impression that is often gained from the fact that most books on science and philosophy start with the ancient Greeks and emphasize the importance of the de-deification of the universe, singularly failing to point out that the Hebrews had protested against idolatrous interpretations of the universe long before the time of the Greeks. This serves to obscure the fact that polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in One Creator God.6 It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering, not by jettisoning, belief in the Creator.
(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
by John Lennox :49)

Philosophy can lead to similar conclusions, as the rather theistic Xenophanes said of the superstitions of his day: “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” Yet he also concluded that there is “One God, greatest among gods and men…” because that is the conclusion that philosophy logically leads to if one seeks the truth.

As Chesterton noted, when people stop believing in God they generally do not start believing in “nothing”/oblivion like good atheists, instead they’ll believe anything. I.e. polytheism which in modern times it can take many forms, even reptilian alien “gods” capable of transfiguration that came down from their UFOs to help build the pyramids and other wonders, etc.etc. As history shows only a small minority of atheists insist that they ultimately believe in nothing/oblivion, the general population begins to believe anything as Chesterton said. For example, leading Nazis said things like:
The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populance as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations.

(The German Churches Under Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
by Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303)

Yet generally they would fall into paganism and their association with the occult is fairly well known. For them science was the equivalent of naturalism, which turned out to be a form of Nature based paganism which led them to try to kill the “biological substance” of the Jews through which a message that condemned Nature based idolatry, superstition and false images had come.
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