Rant Back

Sunday 1 February 2009

Evolution vs Creation: Hoax?

I forgot to discuss one of the most ridiculous things people say about Evolution in my previous post.

That it is a hoax.

How is this idea even credible? How can people be in so much denial that they fail to see how a hoax is impossible. I use the word impossible here to mean extremely, undeniably, next-to-impossible unlikely. The chance of it as a hoax must be somewhere between 0% to 0.0000000001%, surely.

Think about it for a second. Let's assume for a second that all the scientists in the world agree to everything, to every single detail. How would they even begin selling this hoax? Are they under some secret scientific umbrella corporation that is bent on misinforming the public and telling lies about one of the most important scientific theory in the history of civilisation? How would you get in into this secret society? How would you qualify? Do you just have to believe in evolution? Why has nobody ever blown the whistle? Not even rumours of a secret pact between scientists to keep evolution alive. Surely if such a society exists there would be ex-members who see it as wrong and reveal the 'evils' of such a society. Even religions have ex-members like that. But there's none whatsoever here.

There's so many ground for them to cover in terms of secrecy it's really just practically impossible. There is no secret society of Evolutionists.

Okay. Say the idea of Evolution is only an idea concocted by the elite few, and all the other scientists follow it because it is by the elite. That is not how the scientific community works at all.

Any theory has to be published in scientific journals, however elite or famous or influential you are, and these theories are scrutinised to the smallest detail by some of the most brilliant minds in the planet. If it's wrong or incredibly unlikely, then no matter how many scientific discoveries you've made or how much contribution you've made to the scientific community, it is still wrong.

If Evolution is as weak as the Creationists want us to believe, it would've never passed this rigorous process in the first place.

And what was Darwin's motive to commit this alleged 'hoax'? Such a theory in his time would alienate him in such a religious environment. He published his articles and books because he researched it thoroughly and had reasonable and sufficient evidence to claim it happens in nature. There were death threats and disbelief thrown at him from a variety of sources. That doesn't seem like the universal recognition a fraudster would want to strive for.

This is an excerpt from a website that claims evolution is a hoax:

"But how, exactly, did these changes take place? What are the mechanisms and required steps? How did the bones form? Or the muscles? Or the nerves, or the auditory and olfactory systems?"

Clearly they don't understand how evolution, be it macro or micro, works. And that's the problem. Creationists do not bother to understand how the theory works.

Here is another problem.

Scientists start from the evidence, or to be accurate, clues. From these clues, they work out the puzzle and then make a conclusion. If any evidence shows the contrary, they go back to step one, work out the puzzle with that extra piece and make another conclusion. Science gets revised. It evolves.

Creationists on the other hand begin from the conclusion, and from that they try to find evidence that supports their conclusion, therefore ignoring any evidence showing the contrary. So when they hear a theory that is completely against theirs, they dismiss it without considering its plethora of evidence, and then try to disprove it through a process of highly selective deductions.

Evolution is without evidence, you say? That is a laughable statement. It has been observed in real-time, and through fossil records. For references, see my previous post.

From what I've heard or read so far, the basic argument is this. Many of the living beings on Earth are too complex and too perfect for it to be borne out of evolution. Therefore it must be an Intelligent Designer.

Again, natural selection and Evolution explains the complexity. Through millions and millions of years of genetic mutation and adaptation. Too perfect? No, nothing is perfect. By the way, complexity is a different thing from perfection. You can be perfectly simple, or complexly flawed.

People say the eyes have to be formed perfectly from the start. What good is half an eye? Or a blurry eye? This argument is extremely flawed. Our eyes are not perfect. It gets damaged. There are people with short-sightedness or long-sightedness. It is not as light-sensitive as other animals'. Some people will develop cataracts. And there are animals with 'half-eyed' features. Some have eyes that can only tell them if it's day or night.

We humans are so prone to diseases that we cannot be said to be perfect. Our bodies are frail little things. We cannot hear far. We cannot smell far. But evolution has stopped for us at the moment because we don't need it. Technology does the evolving for us. We do not need strong, fast legs like cheetahs because we have created cars. We didn't evolve any defense mechanisms like shells because we have no more predators anymore.

This is more like a rant rather than a proper scientific article. Sorry about that.

And oh, this article made me laugh, because of its ignorance and stupidity:
If Earth is that old, history records should stretch back to millions of years (!)

Edward Current's brilliant satire on the faulty reasoning of religious apologetics (you can even replace when he says The Bible with The Quran, and it makes sense):
Occam's Razor Is Simply Wrong!
Godless Scientists Are Ignorant!
Stop Taking The Bible Out Of Context!
God Only SEEMS non-existent!
An Atheist Meets God

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