Hi to my Forum Friends,
When I received the November 2011 issue of the Acts & Facts magazine from the Institute For Creation Research, there were several articles I wanted to share with you. But, I procrastinated. Today, the following article appeared on Facebook -- and got me off my "couch potato" butt. So, I am sharing part of the article here. To read the full article you will need to visit the URL shown below the title.
Or, you can visit http://www.icr.org/ and click on Current Issue in the left panel to read the full September issue -- or visit the Recent Articles section in the left panel to read from past issues.
But, let me point out a phrase in the excerpt below which might be confusing to some. The phrase, or title, "scientific creationist" is not referring to a Creation Scientist such as one will find working, lecturing, and writing for the Institute For Creation Research.
By "scientific creationist" the writer is referring to those Christian scientists who have chosen to compromise the teachings of God's Word by attempting to adapt it to fit secular science's wants and beliefs. Two current examples are:
Dr. Francis S. Collins, Director of NIH, founder and previous president of the BioLogos Foundation, who tells us, "Given the diverse theological backgrounds of our staff and of the BioLogos community in general, we have chosen not to adopt a specific (Christian) Statement of Faith." http://biologos.org/about
Dr. Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe ministry preaches a similar compromise. With a Ph.D in astronomy and astrophysics, he promotes progressive and day-age forms of old Earth creationism.
In other words, both, and all who will compromise the Word of God, throw out the book of Genesis and replace it with secular science, or other, teachings.
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Darwin's Sacred Imposter: Natural Selection's Idolatrous Trap
by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D.*
Acts & Facts, November 2011 Issue
http://www.icr.org/article/6416/
A major university promoted an annual Diversity Day that featured almost any organization willing to set up a booth. At one booth, a student was given a small carved statue that, he was told, had the power to select his best soul mate from all the girls he’d ever met. He asked how a statue could truly select, but was provided an unsatisfying, unquantifiable, mystical answer.
He then visited the Humanist Club exhibit, where an evolutionist from Princeton University quoted a colleague who said:
Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity. (1)
Thinking the evolutionist’s words also had a mystical flavor, the student asked what actually does the “selecting.” The evolutionist replied, “Environmental stresses.” The student pointed out that, by definition, “selecting” something implied volition and was presumptive evidence of intelligence. So how could selection by environmental stresses be any more tangible than selection by the statue in his pocket? The professor fired back that “selection” in this case was obviously just a figure of speech.
By coincidence, a "scientific creationist" speaking at the adjacent booth said, “Beneficial mutations in bacteria are more likely to have phenotypic impacts, or changes to observable characteristics, and undergo stronger positive selection.” The student asked him the same follow-up questions and was surprised to get the identical answers given by the evolutionist. After the student expressed his skepticism that no real “selection” was involved in adaptation, the creationist probed him: “So you’re saying that you don’t believe in natural selection and it isn’t even real?”
The student responded, “I’m saying that those who think they see positive selection, negative selection, or just plain natural selection, never seem to point to any tangible exogenous selector or selecting force to justify using the word ‘selection’ — and evolutionists definitely cannot appeal to it as a real force capable of explaining design.” He added further, “All that purveyors of ‘selection’ do is attribute choice-making abilities to Nature and give it credit for an organism’s endogenous capabilities to produce traits that solve environmental problems, enabling them to fit environments and fill them.”
Later, at home, the student pondered these interactions. Despite it being Diversity Day, when it came to the key issue of ascribing selective powers to inanimate objects, he did not see much diversity between the statue merchant, the evolutionist, and the creationist.
“Selective” Attributes Bestowed on Nature Ascribe Great Creative Power:
Living organisms fit into their environments extremely well because they have suitable intricately arranged parts that look as though they were chosen for specific purposes. Darwin knew people thought the cause of the obvious design in nature was God. He needed a mechanism, an inanimate substitute god with that one essential attribute — the perceived ability to “think.”
Nature did not need to really think. It only needed to seem like it could think in order to plant in people's minds the thought that nature's design only looked like it was real — though it wasn't. He (Darwin) struck on a clever solution: Take something within nature, living organisms, and when certain heritable traits appear in their offspring that solve environmental stresses (yet another part of nature), depict them as being “selected for” by those same environmental stresses — voilà, Nature selects.
Darwin’s application of mystical powers to natural selection was immediately spotted and severely criticized. (2) Darwin and his followers have all been forced to concede that selection is a false term when applied to interactions at the organism-environment interface — but they always justify metaphorical usage. Selection was resisted for decades precisely because there was no empirical evidence for a selector — evidence that still remains non-existent.
Thus, creationists have been encouraged to re-evaluate all evolutionary ideas — even those presumed to be well established like “natural selection” — to assess their biblical accuracy and scientific reality, and replace them with better explanations. Toward that end, a series of previous Acts & Facts articles (2) documented, at length, the following observations:
Bill Gray note: You will need to visit the September 2011 issue to read these previous articles: http://www.icr.org/ -- select Recent Issues.
Note: Bold, italic, underline, and parenthetical emphasis in the excerpt above are mine.
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If you find this issue of Acts & Facts useful, you might want to visit: http://www.icr.org/subscriptions -- and request to receive your own personal subscription which comes monthly via snail-mail. This is an offer you cannot refuse! The price is right: FREE!
So, what do you have to lose? And, just imagine the hours of interesting reading each month -- as you grow more knowledgeable of this amazing universe which God has created?
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) AMEN!
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
