 Living Waters’ Origin of the Species |
As was covered in Science Etcetera, the Living Waters Ministries has started a campaign to distribute copies of Darwin’s Origin of the Species on College Campuses, to which Ray Comfort, a critic of evolutionary theory, has added a 50 page introduction attempting to refute evolution. The link to a free PDF of the introduction appears to have gone dead. Luckily, you can still read it here through the magic of Google cache. I also downloaded a copy of the intro, which I’ve uploaded so you can download it here.
I’m actually very impressed with the ministry for taking such an innovative strategy. I would never consider distributing copies of the New Testament with an introduction arguing for the validity of Natural Selection and the modern scientific understanding of our origins in the Cosmos. I think it takes a great deal of bravery to assume the costs of printing your opponent’s most influential work, even if it is for the purposes of publishing your own criticisms in the introduction. That much I applaud.1
Unfortunately, Ray Comfort’s introduction itself is a very flawed, irrational, and misinformed work. Comfort’s rebuttal of evolution includes all the classics. There’s the watchmaker argument that the more complex an entity, the more evidence that it was engineered by a creator, which makes the Creator even more complex, begging the question of what created the Creator? There’s the chicken and egg argument, that certain organs and structures require one another to exist, and therefore could not have evolved gradually, which is an argument that relies heavily on a willful ignorance of biology and how these systems work in less complex species. There’s the god of the gaps argument, that missing links disprove evolution–an argument that works well in Creationists’ favor as every time a missing link is discovered, two more are created, but has the unfortunate side effect of squeezing god into smaller and smaller spaces as our understanding of reality expands.
This last is interesting because it questions the validity of evolution based on what it hasn’t figured out yet; however, in a defense of Creationism against the existence of vestigial organs, organs that benefited our ancestors but atrophied as we evolved out of them, Comfort argues that citing these organs as proof of evolution is unfair:
Besides, it’s not even scientifically possible to prove that something has no use, because its use can always be discovered as more information becomes available.
What an interesting double-standard. Evolutionary theorists are wrong because they haven’t found all the missing links buried in 3.5 billion years of life on Earth, but it’s unfair to question god’s work simply because you haven’t figured it all out for yourself. Comfort, predictably, takes this a step further:
Isn’t it possible that the same could be true with God? Just because you’re ignorant of His presence doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” to quoth Carl Sagan. Fair enough, but Ray Comfort appears to also believe that the existence of evidence is not evidence of existence, as when he, incredibly, appears to suggest that there is no evidence for Neanderthals:
And don’t look to Neanderthal Man for any evidence of evolution. He died of exposure–his skull was exposed as being fully human, not ape. Not only was his stooped posture found to be caused by disease, but he also spoke and was artistic and religious.
Am I reading this correctly? Comfort is implying that we believe Neanderthals once roamed the Earth–from the sound of it–on the basis of a single skeleton? A skeleton, he argues, that was only different because it was diseased? What about the other 400 Neanderthal skeletons archaeologists have uncovered since the 1850s? And what does being artistic and religious have to do with anything? Evolution doesn’t preclude the idea that other branches of Homo could have had culture. In fact, today we know that even chimpanzees have culture.
So perhaps Comfort is simply ignorant of the current science. Maybe he had to do his research with journal articles from the 1850s. Who knows? He doesn’t provide any citations for the reader to follow up on his sources and check their accuracy. However, there is evidence of Comfort selectively pulling from his references, taking them out of context to support his ideas.
For instance, there are three full pages of Hitler quotes, and it would be intellectually dishonest to deny the way history’s greatest monster applied aspects of evolutionary theory to his own personal philosophy of racial purity; however, this is a rhetorical sword that cuts both ways. For every example of Hitler invoking something akin to Darwinism in his Nazi movement, there is an example of him invoking Christianity to motivate the German people to the same ends. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” It would be logically fallacious of me to present such a quote as evidence of Hitler being inspired by Christianity, because, in the larger context of everything we know about Hitler’s political philosophy, fascism is an animal completely alien to all forms of philosophical and political thought. This is why it is fair to invoke Goodwin’s Law against Ray Comfort for cherry-picking from history those passages that support his attempt to connect Darwin and Nazism, while ignoring fascism’s connections to numerous religions and political ideologies.
Comfort invokes the something from nothing argument as his strongest point against the theory of evolution, but Darwin, evolution, and natural selection have absolutely nothing to do with this question whatsoever. The origin of our Universe concerns the Big Bang theory, of which scientists are still actively trying to figure out the details. Details found in equations that require substituting infinity for many variables as you count down to the moment before the Big Bang. While “God” is supposed to be infinite, it does not effectively resolve this question because, as with the watchmaker argument, we are still left to wonder how god came from nothing.
Why we exist instead or not existing is a beautiful mystery we can all enjoy, people of faith and people of none. It is a question on which many great scientific minds have speculated. Stephen Hawking asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Carl Sagan famously said, “In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” It is science however, not religion, that shows humility before this mind-straining idea in admitting and accepting our ignorance of the answer.
1 The text is an abridged version of Origin, but I won’t fault the Ministry for that. So long as the text has not been manipulated or selectively abridged in such a way as to subvert Darwin’s hypothesis. In this post, I am giving the Ministry the benefit of the doubt.
The full text of Origin of the Species is in the public domain, and may be downloaded at Project Gutenberg.
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