God of the Gaps?
Posted: October 17, 2013 in Atheism, Darwinism/Intelligent Design, Evolution, Existence of God, Logic, Philosophy, Reason, ScienceTags: argument from ignorance, darwinism, evolution of the gaps, god of the gaps
Will this kind of thing ever end? Not until atheists finally admit that their position -its not merely a “lack” as they foolishly pretend to themselves- is void of intelligence and in fact annihilates intelligence itself since atheism cannot have true rationality.
In atheism all rationality is the end product of completely non rational processes and of course is an “accident”. Under atheist stupidity, rationality is just electrochemical movement in meat. As Francis Crick himself said,
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.” -(p. 3) -Francis Crick (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribner’s SonsAtheism says that your so-called rationality, your logic, your reasoning faculties; all together is “nothing but a pack of neurons. Well, Sir Crick has passed on to the other realm that is much more solid than this one and has been obliged to answer for his crimes against the Deity, so we can’t ask him the obvious question, “Why should we listen to what a pack of neurons is saying?”, or “How can a pack of neurons be true or false?”.
Other interesting questions like this could and should be posed to atheists as often as it takes to get the message, the logical conclusions and implications of their inane position, into their incredibly stubborn heads.
In any case, we must take a quick and dirty look at one Darwinism’s chief complaints against both creationism and Intelligent Design (these are not the same).
Often when theists or even deists point out to Darwinists that their theory cannot account for the intricacies and functional complexities found in every living thing, they will tell you that you’re committing a logical fallacy. Specifically they claim this type of statement is a “God of the gaps argument”. This simply means that, because you can’t explain how something occurred, you simply invoke God as the answer. God fills in the gap where knowledge of how is.
God is used to explain what evolutionism can’t explain. This is of course a form of “argument from ignorance”. And believe me, Darwinians everywhere are quick to parrot their fave priests that have told them this, over and over and over. Here I would love to start a nice discussion of how virtually every amateur and professional Darwinist in the world is little more than a parrot. They are always parroting what they were told in school, in their temples (universities), on their fave web sites, in books etc etc.
They do not tend to think well at all for themselves, so, having been forced into the standard Darwinian mantra, they simply parrot what they were told by their priests and pastors. This is because they either cannot or will not think such things through for themselves. So, they need indoctrination and counselling from their priests to know what to believe.
Well, I would love to really get into that little delicacy, just for fun, but I don’t feel like it.
So, on to the infamous parroted “God if the gaps” accusations.
First of all, arguments of the pattern:
“Evolution cannot explain this therefore God did it” arguments, are almost never used by any informed theist and never by any of the major Intelligent Design or creationist debaters, scientists etc on this.
People like Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Douglas Marks, Jay Richards etc, do not use “gap” arguments at all. What they really do is argue from a simplified form of “statistical mechanics” (for lack of a better term). This means that when an IDist says anything like, “no evolutionary evidence exist for this, no known evolutionary pathway exists to explain this, no known mechanism exists that can accomplish this”, They are not saying “you can’t explain it, therefore God must have done it”.
That is simply and categorically false.
They are saying that 1) there is no evidence at all that evolution did this, but 2) there is enormous evidence that Darwinian evolution cannot do this, and there is enormous evidence that only intelligent agents can produce algorithmic, prescriptive information that is found everywhere in biological systems. Therefore, the best explanation is not evoltuon but intelligent origin.
Very, very few creationists or IDists will simply say, “God did it and that’s it that’s all, no need for further research”. In recent years, I’ve never heard any of them say anything even remotely like that! So, when highly misinformed and disingenuous Darwinian fanatics claim that this is what they’re saying, they are lying, incapable of thinking straight, seriously not listening or all of the above.
In my personal experience it is ALWAYS the last 2 options. and sometimes the first as well.
Again, what are IDists saying? Based on the principles of statistical mechanics, they’re saying that we already know that such mechanical sophistication and algorithmic information cannot arise by chance no matter how much time is allotted. The probability of such machinery and circuitry being constructed, with the plans for making the parts and the assembly instructions for putting them together with all this being algorithmically encoded in DNA, is so astronomically small that it may as well be considered impossible. It is in fact, statistically impossible by ANY known random or stochastic process including mutations plus selection.
So, this has nothing at all to do with “gap” arguments but is merely stating the obvious based on the laws of probability! Something Darwinian biologists tend to be uniquely inapt at using or even understanding.
Designists are not saying, “we can’t see how this happened therefore God id it” at all; on the contrary! They are saying, “the laws of probability”, thermodynamics and physics do not allow any purposeless, unguided process to create this kind of integrated functionality.
That is a very different thing from a mere gap argument. So in fact, they are not arguing from ignorance but from well documented knowledge! Knowledge of proven mathematics applied to the mechanics of biological machinery.
See?
That is NOT a gap or ignorance based argument at all. It is a solid scientific empirical method being used to calculate whether nature can even do such things. When facing the odds of events that have estimated with between 1 in 10^20 to 1 in 10^130 to even worse odds, the obvious answer is that blind evolution could not have done it, no matter how much time you allot!
Secondly, there is a humongous hypocrisy at work among the Darwinists when they foolishly choose to use this rebuttal.
Notice that Darwinists have NEVER, not even once, provided a viable mutation/selection pathway for the existence of even the smallest living things. This means that the ONLY way they can claim that any living thing evolved is through speculation and conjecture -most of the time just wishful thinking and vivid imaginations are all they have.
For example, how does Darwinism explain the incredible integrated circuitry of vision, the eye?
They invent, yes invent, out of thin air, a story!
If you’ve seen the perfectly naive, childishly simplistic explanations given by Darwinists for the origins of sight and eyes you know what I’m talking about it. Even the scenarios given by so-called professional scientists. There simply are no viable, serious Darwinian pathways for vision and eyes. None. Not even remotely close.
Their explanation is always the same – an imaginary pathway -less than 100 steps (rotflmao)- that they think may have, could have, must have etc., been the real evolutionary one. So how about evidence for such naive suppositions -they’re ALWAYS ridiculously naive- on how something may have happened by evolution? Nope. Don’t need any real empirical evidence.
Really? Why not?
Because they simply invoke evolution of the gaps! They do this everywhere, “evolution did it”. Oh, sorry, they use slightly different terms but the answer is always the same – evolution did it!
In other words, Darwinists are the WORST offenders of “gap”, ignorance-based arguments! They never have any viable mutational-selection pathways to explain anything but the very very trivial! So, without a grain of empirical evidence that really does explain how vision systems developed without a “seeing” intelligence, they simply claim -loudly and with much bombast and pompous fury against any other theory, “evolution did it!”
“Proof?”
“We don’t need proof!! We KNOW evolution did it!”
“How do you know this, without proof?”
“Because no God exists! “
Oops. There you have it. The cat is out of the bag. The whole system is 99% religion based. Metaphysical Naturalism. In other words. The religion of atheism.
Don’t believe this? Well then you’re being incredibly naive and demonstrating a very profound ignorance.
Just to help you out:
Wow, if that isn’t clear enough, nothing is. So, Darwinists are in fact religious adepts of Naturalism (materialism), a very very old heathen religion.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.” – Richard Lewontin, 1997. Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997 (review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).- Dr. Richard Lewontin, Geneticist, Harvard U.
Therefore it must be illegal, in the USA, to teach Darwinism is public schools. So why isn’t it?
