Monday, March 28, 2005

Verdict that Demands Evidence

a good post I read today, on CT's blog.

Christianity Today, April 2005
Verdict that Demands Evidence

It is Darwinists, not Christians, who are stonewalling the facts.
Charles Colson with Anne Morse posted 03/28/2005 10:00 a.m.

It was one of the first—and angriest—post-election hissy fits: In The New York Times, Garry Wills credited White House political adviser Karl Rove for getting millions of religious conservatives (whom he compared to Muslim jihadists) to the polls and sneered, "Can a nation which believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"

It's an interesting question, considering the iron grip evolutionists have had over our educational institutions for a century. And at first glance, it seems odd that Americans—among the best-educated, most technologically advanced people in the world—would choose miraculous stories over scientific ones.

But is there really so little evidence for biblical miracles, and so much for naturalistic evolution?
As historian Paul Johnson notes, Christianity is a historical religion that deals in facts and events. Among those facts is that Jesus, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, in a specific time and place. Johnson cites the mounting archaeological discoveries that have almost universally supported the biblical accounts. And the life of Jesus, he notes, is better authenticated than most other figures of antiquity, like Aristotle and Julius Caesar. As Johnson puts it, "It is not now the men of faith; it is the skeptics who have reason to fear the course of discovery."

All well and good, but Darwinism, at least, has been empirically proven, right?

Wrong. Sure, there's evidence that evolution takes place within a species—but the fossil record has not yielded evidence of one species becoming another, as Darwin confidently predicted. This lack of evidence has not gone unnoticed by sociologist Rodney Stark. Stark calls himself neither an evolutionist nor an advocate of Intelligent Design; instead, he says, he is merely a scholar pursuing the evidence where it leads. In For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press, 2003), Stark offers startling evidence that Darwinists have covered up mounting flaws in their theory. He concludes that the battle over evolution is hardly a case of "heroic" scientists fighting off the persecution of religious fanatics. Instead, from the start, evolution "has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator—an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work."

Committed Darwinists continue this strategy today. For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article—and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that he was wrong—but declined to make a public retraction.

So who's really rolling back the Enlightenment? Those who invite us to follow the evidence wherever it leads—or those demanding that we ignore it? The folks who want both evolution and Intelligent Design taught in school, with all their strengths and weaknesses—or those who attempt to silence any opposition?

The evidence for Intelligent Design has become so persuasive that the 81-year old British philosopher Anthony Flew, a lifelong atheist who once debated C. S. Lewis over the existence of God, recently admitted that a creator-God must exist.

In the final analysis, any objective observer must conclude that belief in either the biblical or the naturalistic worldview demands faith. The issue is not science versus faith, but science (evolution) versus science (Intelligent Design), and of faith versus faith regarding how the universe and life came to be.

So to return to Garry Wills's question—are we so unenlightened to reject Darwin in favor of Christian doctrine?

I practiced law for many years, dreaming every lawyer's dream to take a great case into the Supreme Court. This is the case I'd most like to argue: pitting the common consensus against the Darwinist establishment.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

A rainy rainy day

Friday was supposed to be the big event, the thing that Alysa has been the most excited about - going to see the manatees. In a town 75 miles north of where we were, there is a rescue/rehabilitating place for manatees, as well as other animals native to Florida. They have an underwater observatory for the fish and manatees. So.....we set off for Homosassa Springs. We should have left a little earlier than we did, but I don't think it would have made much of a difference.

It took us 3 hours to get there. It took an hour and a half to go about 20 miles. The lights along the state highway were not timed at all, and we stopped at almost every single stoplight. You would think that they would give the 7 lane highway priority over the side streets, but apparantly not. It was awful. Another unnecessary traffic problem.

We finally get up there, and the nice sunshiney weather has turned a bit dark and dreary. It was sprinkling a bit. But it was warm out, and we've driven all this way, that we decide to buy tickets and go thru the outdoor park even tho it's sprinkling. In the couple minutes it took to buy our tickets, it had begun pouring. The ticket lady was nice enough to not charge us for Alysa since we were still going to go thru it.

It starts thundering and lightning, so we decide to sit in the car for a bit to see if the rain tapers off. But it doesn't. After a half hour, we decide to go for it anyway. I was a bit worried that the kids would cry about getting so wet. We get out, and start crossing the parking lot, and it is flooded. Brennen says 'this is nuts, the trail is going to be all muddy and flooded - we can't even cross the parking lot' and we decide to not go thru the park. It was just blowing sheets of rain. At least it was warm out. But it was crazy to go thru an outdoor walk in the middle of a thunderstorm. So we get in the car and start leaving, and Alysa is heartbroken and disappointed. She starts sobbing - those quiet, heartwrenching sobs. She is so upset about not seeing the manatees. So I tell Brennen to stop the car, and I look at a map of the walking tour. The manatees are at the very beginning of the trail. So we decide to go back and just go thru the manatee exhibit, and then leave.

When we start walking the trail, we are pleasantly surprised to see that it isn't a dirt path, but a nice, wide, paved path. And the rain had died down a little and the trees overhead were blocking some more of it. So the walk to the manatee exhibit wasn't that bad. The manatees were really cool - a lot bigger and wider than we had thought they were. After we saw them, we decided to go ahead and walk the rest of the mile trail. So we got to see a crocodile, alligators, flamingos....we saw them fight LOL. Alysa loved it. She didn't even stay under the umbrella with me....she was running and jumping in the puddles. And while we were out there, the rain picked up again. of course. LOL. It turns out it had been storming that hard up there all week, so we would have had to go thru that anyway. But we would have dressed more appropriately had we known. Oh well. It's things like that that make family vacations, family vacations LOL. I'm just bummed that it was raining too hard for me to take my camera with. So no pictures to show for that day.


Aiden and Alysa.....as they got braver, they let the waves start hitting them, but they didn't like the saltiness in their faces!!


tons of shells - there were so many, you had no choice but to walk on them, crushing them.


Hurricane damage on Sanibel Island

They searched for seashells by the seashore at Sanibel

Day 4, Thursday.......we drove down to Sanibel Island. It should have been about a 3 hour drive. And it was, to the island. But then they had these traffic guards, causing traffic jams. Instead of just letting the 4-way stop work the way it's supposed to, letting traffic flow........they had to get in the middle and mix it all up. It took an hour to go about 3 miles on the island. And an hour to do the same route back. You could also still see the hurricane damage on the island. Wow. We had been wanting to drive up to Captiva Island, but b/c of the traffic, we didn't.

But, they don't say that Sanibel Island is the best place to go shelling in the US for nothing. Wow. It was amazing. We were at the beach for 3 hours. We found tons of shells, and the kids had so much fun. The beach we went to, Bowman's Beach, was one of the ones mentioned in all the tourist guides as the beach to go to - but it wasn't even that crowded, which was wonderful. The waves were great too, so Brennen and I took turns playing in the waves and looking for shells on the sand under the water, and watching the kids. And I got sunburned, kind of bad. I decided I'd rather come home with a little color instead of white LOL.

After the beach, we went to a nature preservation, which was supposed to be really cool........we drove the 5 mile route, saw some birds and that was it. Turns out to see the gators and such, you have to do the walking trail. But we were too tired to do that after being at the beach for so long. So, it was pretty but a little disappointing for as big as they talked the refuge up.

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