AiG/CMI article adds ‘insult to injury’ for creationists?

Wilbur Wright himself explained before the Society of Western Engineers, in Chicago:

The bird’s wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but it is not any extraordinary efficiency that strikes with astonishment, but rather the marvelous skill with which they are used. It is true that I have seen birds perform soaring feats of almost incredible nature in positions where it was not possible to measure the speed and trend of the wind, but whenever it was possible to determine by actual measurements the conditions under which the soaring was performed it was easy to account for it on the basis of the results obtained with artificial wings. The soaring problem is apparently not so much one of better wings as of better operators.

And when did we claim it did? And where was your complaint to many evolutionary propagandists speaking outside their own fields! For example, see More nonsense from Professor Plimer and The ‘Indoctrinator’, or all the atheistic propaganda from Richard Dawkins, an animal behavior specialist, or remember when Murray Gel-Mann pontificated on the alleged faults of creation science although his field is quarks?

We have always tried to avoid saying or implying ‘believe me because I’m a scientist trained in such and such a field’, therefore we were not guilty of this fallacy. Rather, we try to rely on the strengths of our arguments, the soundness or unsoundness of which are independent of who is making them. Our critic has not shown any errors. Hopefully, the only time we appeal to our qualifications is defensively, to refute the charge that ‘no intelligent person/no real scientist believes creation/doubts goo-to-you evolution.

And indeed I do support the scientific method. And unlike our critic, I differentiate operational science from claims about origins.

That’s a nice ipse dixit, but even in my own field of chemistry, the claims of chemical evolutionists about the origin of life do not stack up—see Origin of Life Q&A.

Perhaps you should have read them yourself before making this accusation. The original paper that started off the punctuated equilibria section is N.Eldredge, S.J.Gould, “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” in: T.Schopf (Hrsg.), Models in Paleobiology, 82-115, Freeman, Cooper and Co., San Francisco, 1972). Our emphasis.

And note also that our critic doesn’t admit that Kantor goofed by contrasting steady state (a cosmogonic theory) with punctuated equilibrium (a paleontological theory).

Eugenie Scott admitted otherwise, as we documented in the article.

More ipse dixits. I just note one point—many anti-creationists (e.g. even the National Academy of Sciences) claim that creation is both unscientific, because it is ostensibly untestable, but go on to say that it has been examined (i.e. tested!) and shown to be false. It just goes to show that many critics can’t string two logical thoughts together.

Please also heed philosopher and apologist J.P. Moreland:

The anti-Christian and indeed Communistic background to the ACLU has been well documented by Alan Sears and Craig Osten in their book The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values (Broadman & Holman, 2005). It should be obvious that banning the slightest mention of Christianity from public places is anti-Christian, including the slightest challenge to evolution, school prayer, Decalogue displays (apart from the Decalogue above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court!). There is no phrase ‘Separation of Church and State’ in the Constitution; Thomas Jefferson’s famous mention of a ‘wall of separation’ was to stop the State from encroaching on the church (as happened with other countries with a state church), not to interfere with the Church’s role in society.

Care to explain why? There is actually widespread agreement that many judges are making law and overruling the elected legislature. Recent books arguing this case are:

• Phyllis Schlafly, The Supremacists: The Tyranny Of Judges And How To Stop It, 2004.
• Mark R. Levin, Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, 2005.

Supremacist judges are also widely regarded as calling something ‘unconstitutional’ not because it disagrees with the original meaning of the Constitution but because it disagrees with what they would like it to mean. In fact there is tacit agreement from both sides of politics: conservatives want appointments to the judiciary to be from those who will adhere to the original meaning of the Constitution, while the liberals do not — and tacitly agree that they need activist judges to legislate liberal policies from the bench, e.g. gay marriage, abortion on demand.

Jefferson even presciently wrote:

The Constitution...is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a judge who opposes this nonsense, and in dissenting from the majority decision in Roper v Simmons this year, echoed Jefferson:

What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years—not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed.

These activists talk about a “living and breathing” Constitution that “evolves”—but always towards the liberal left, it seems. But if the Constitution is evolving, there may as well be no Constitution at all! For rules to mean anything, they must be fixed. In reality, instead of the rule of law, we have the rule of judges. One must also wonder how elected officials can logically swear allegiance to a Constitution if its meaning keeps changing at the whim of judges?

I would also suggest that this loss of the rule of objective written law is largely responsible for the high rate of litigation (and threats of litigation, and a chessmaster like me knows that a threat is stronger than its execution). While a defendant can read the wording of the law and even study precedents, he can’t read the minds of the judges, so can’t be sure that a case won’t go against him. So he may pay the extortion money to avoid going to court. And alas he passes on the costs to his customers, so we are all harmed by the litigious society.

Just to show how silly this ‘living document’ nonsense is, think of a game like chess. I now have a sure-fire plan to become World Champion—find an arbiter who decided that under ‘evolving standards’, he could decide that the Laws of Chess is a ‘living document’ that allowed me to play two moves in a row at a moment of my choosing.

We see the same problem with compromisers and the Bible, actually. We assert that we should read the intended meaning of the authors out of the text (exegesis), according to what the words meant in the grammatical and historical context of their time. Conversely, compromisers read their long-age compromisers into the text (eisegesis).

Why don’t you be more specific, and also read what we actually say. In fact, we have explained Ewald’s research on cholera, once more showing that it has nothing to do with goo-to-you evolution. We recognize the role of mutations and natural selection in antibiotic resistance, and show that they are not in the right direction to turn bacteria into biologists. So how can a creationist approach to the science hinder its progress?

Au contraire, science has been impeded by the frauds perpetrated in the name of ‘proving evolution’. For example, the forgeries of Piltdown Man and Archaeoraptor, Haeckel’s faked embryo diagrams and staged photographs of Peppered Moths. And how much research into the functions of useful organs, such as the appendix and short vibration-dampening horse muscle fibres, was hindered by the notion that they were useless vestiges of evolution? The same applies to so-called ‘junk DNA’:

Researchers the world over are confirming that non-coding DNA holds critical clues to a vast range of diseases; breast cancer, HIV, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, ovarian and skin cancer … the list is growing daily. A leading figure in world genetics, Prof. John Mattick, recently claimed that, “the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology.” [Genius of Junk (DNA), Catalyst, Thursday, 10 July 2003]

Leading experts on cults identify two main defining characteristics of cults, whereas CMI doesn’t fit as can be seen from our Statement of Faith:

• Extra-biblical authority (CMI proclaims the Bible as final authority)
• Denial of the Person and Work of Christ (CMI has a theologically orthodox statement of faith).

CMI also has no membership structure. Cults control their members by fear of expulsion, for example. CMI has no such control over anyone, so how can it be a cult?

Rather, you have not explained this yourself. E.g. you fail to understand the difference between operational and origins science, and have no apparent understanding of the role of paradigms in interpreting the data.

There will only be such a post if you provide criticisms of substance, and admit your errors in fact and those of Kantor.

(Dr) Jonathan Sarfati

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