Is Evolution a science or a faith?

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The responses, which I received for my previous post “Intelligence out of nothing,” had given me an impression that most of the atheists feel humiliation if someone try to challenge Theory of Evolution. As if, undesirable comment against this theory provoke discomfort among its followers. This attitude is somewhat similar to the behaviour that many religious people exhibit at the instance when they find no counter argument to a critique against their religion.

Interestingly, majority of people do not have proper understanding about evolution, yet they have Blind Faith in it. This is a typical religious attitude and thus it had given me an idea that Theory of Evolution is perhaps transformed into some kind of RELIGION. In light of these expressions, I decided to dedicate this post to evolution to highlight couple of problems.

Let us start with the question “What is Science?”

“Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through OBSERVATION and EXPERIMENT”
Oxford Dictionary

OBSERVATION and EXPERIMENT are the mandatory requirements. If an idea lacks one or both of these aspects, this disqualify the idea for being scientific. Science distinguishes itself using empirical standards, logical arguments, and scepticism.

Scientific explanations must meet certain criteria. First and foremost, they must be consistent with EXPERIMENTAL and OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE about nature, and must make accurate predictions, when appropriate, about systems being studied.

They should also be logical, respect the rules of EVIDENCE, be open to CRITICISM, report methods and procedures, and make knowledge public.

Explanations on how the natural world changes based on myths, personal beliefs, religious values, mystical inspiration, superstition, or authority may be personally useful and socially relevant, but they are not SCIENTIFIC. Science only deals with Cause and Effect that tribute the material world.

This provides a short list of criteria of what ‘science’ involves.

Observational data
Accurate predictions
Logic
Open to criticism
Accurate information
No presuppositions

Does evolution perfectly abide by these scientific criteria?

Atheism assumes that the existence of God can be disproved by means of Evolution. They BELIEVE that Darwin showed in his work that there is no need to invoke any supernatural force to account for the development of life through time on earth. They BELIEVE evolution and natural selection are the ONGOING PROCESSES that are OBSERVABLE in today’s world.

“FAITH is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate EVIDENCE. FAITH is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of EVIDENCE.... FAITH, being belief that isn't based on EVIDENCE, is the principal vice of any religion." ( FAITH is not allowed to justify itself by argument...”
Dawkins’ speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on 15 April 1992, published in The Independent, 20 April 1992

Almost 99% of atheists think that Evolution is a FACT and not a FAITH. According to them, there is too much EVIDENCE that confirms evolution as science and this FACT cannot be ignored. They BELIEVE evolution is LOGICAL.

“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity”
Page 317, “The Blind Watchmaker,” By Richard Dawkins

The followers of Darwinism BELIEVE every living being in today’s world descended from a common ancestor. They believe Evolution and Natural Selection are responsible for whatever is living in today’s world.

“Evolution can turn dinosaurs into birds, apes into humans, and amphibious mammals into whales.”
Live science
http://www.livescience.com/474-controver...works.html

When atheists/evolutionists are exposed to a question “Is Evolution an OBSERVABLE PROCESS,” nearly 95% of responses start with history of life that stretched over billions of years. Almost everyone from professor to layperson bring FOSSIL RECORD to support evolution.

But Hay! Does fossil record provide some method that facilitate the process of OBSERVATION of an ONGOING OBSERVABLE EVIDENCE? Fossils are only record of past animals and this record is well preserved by nature. By no scientific method, this record is capable to exhibit OBSERVABLE ONGOING PROCESS of evolution that can be replicated in labs.

If some PHENOMENON is not OBSERVABLE by any scientific means, it is consequently NOT TESTABLE in the Lab environment.

“We are condemned to live only for a few decades and that is too slow, too small a time scale to see evolution GOING ON”
Richard Dawkins
http://vialogue.wordpress.com/2012/02/26...-response/


“We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages”
Page 169
Chapter 4: Natural Selection
The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text
By Charles Darwin
Edited by Morse Peckham

Evolution is not OBSERVABLE and consequently NOT TESTABLE.

If Evolution lacks Observational data then no evolutionist can make accurate predictions on the foundation of Logic. This the stage where presumptions start polluting the mainstream ideas. This is precisely what supporters of evolution are doing. They are developing theory after theory and model after model on the ground of mere assumptions by misinterpreting Observable scientific data so their hypothesis standout. In order to prevail supremacy in a social structure and avoid conflicting situations such predictions are not available to open criticism in academic arena because they lack accurate information.

Such models and theories might not effect a scientist, but they truly influence people who have no or least scientific knowhow. Such pseudoscientific models easily convey some ideology to the general people who are credulous to everything that comes from the authority they trust. This is how public bring fossil record to defend theory of evolution, which is bewildering as most of these people are very unaware that fossil record is only revealing a flaw to the Theory of Evolution.

Geological studies revealed that about sixteen different strata encompass most of the fossils. The oldest is the Precambrian, which is the lowest fossil bearing stratum. It has no fossils, other than occasional algae, bacteria, fungi on its surface.

Right above Precambrian is the Cambrian stratum. Unlike Precambrian, Cambrian rocks contain literally billions of the little trilobites, sponges, corals, jellyfish, molluscs, crustaceans and, in fact, every one of the major invertebrate forms of life plus many, many other complex species. Multicellular animals appear suddenly and in rich profusion in the Cambrian but none had ever been found beneath it in the Precambrian.

Life appeared abruptly from nowhere almost spontaneously in the Cambrian Stratum and there is no EVIDENCE that these creatures evolved from any simpler creatures. Palaeontologists call this immense problem “the Cambrian Explosion.” This fact totally devastates the basis of evolutionary theory, which explains that life evolved through cumulative changes through many slight successive steps.

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of the Species, 6th ed., London:
John Murray, p. 154.

Another trouble that Cambrian fossil record exhibits is the absence of transitional (intermediate) fossils between Cambrian animals and simpler Precambrian forms. If creatures evolved through cumulative changes through many successive steps then there should be innumerable transitional species from simpler to more complex. The fossil EVIDENCE indicating no transitional forms, but only gaps between species as there ought to be if evolution was true. This problem is not limited to the Cambrian stratum but extend to all other fossil bearing strata, namely:

Precambrian---------- (algae, bacteria, fungi)
Cambrian-------------- (sponges, snails, jellyfish)
Ordovician------------ (clams, starfish, worms)
Silurian---------------- (scorpions, corals)
Devonian------------- (sharks, lungfish)
Carboniferous------- (ferns, cockroaches)
Permian-------------- (beetles, dragonflies)
Triassic--------------- (pines, palms)
Jurassic--------------- (crocodiles, turtles)
Cretaceous---------- (ducks, pelicans)
Palaeocene--------- (rats, hedgehogs)
Eocene-------------- (lemurs, rhinoceroses)
Oligocene---------- (beavers, squirrels, ants)
Miocene----------- (camels, birds)
Pliocene----------- (horses, elephants)
Pleistocene------- (man)


“Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. [of evolution].”
p. 292, the Origin of Species

“The reason for abrupt appearances and gaps can no longer be attributed to the imperfection of the fossil record as it was by Darwin when palaeontology was a young science. With over 200,000,000 catalogued specimens of about 250,000 fossil species, many evolutionary palaeontologists such as Stanley argue that the fossil record is sufficient.”
W.R. Bird, the Origin of Species Revisited p. 48.

“It is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleo biological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled.”
N. Heribert-Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung
(The Synthetic Origin of Species), p. 1212.

Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History was asked why he did not include a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book, “Evolution.” In reply, Dr. Patterson said this:

“I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise [portray] such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it.

[Steven] Gould [of Harvard] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least ‘show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.’ I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.”
Dr. Colin Patterson, letter dated April 10, 1979 to Luther Sunderland, quoted in L.D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma, p. 89.

Finding that so-called “natural selection” accomplished no evolutionary changes, modern evolutionists moved away from Darwinism into Neo-Darwinism. This is the revised teaching that it is mutations plus natural selection (not natural selection alone) which have produced all life forms on Planet Earth.

Evolutionists promote Neo-Darwinism to prove, for instance, cats and dogs were ONCE linked and united by a common carnivorous ancestor. Quite often, to demonstrate Evolution in action in the OBSERVABLE WORLD, they propose examples like:

The Peppered Moth
Live Birth in Three-toed Skinks
Italian Wall Lizards
Cane Toads
Darwin’s Finches
Butterflies and Parasites
Nylon eating flavobacteria
Fruit flies
Stickleback fish
Etc.

All these life forms might be good examples of ADAPTATION and VARIATIONS IN SIMILAR SPECIES but by no scientific means are they the examples of CHANGE IN KINDS like APES INTO HUMANS. No matter, through what mutational process they had gone by but they still be bacteria, fish, fly, moth, lizards etc. just as each fossil was a complete distinct creature that had no transitional properties in it.

On the other side in laboratory, Mutation only revealed injurious results. After tedious efforts and thousands of experiments over fruit flies, scientists critically failed to obtain even one beneficial trait. Mutation does not add beneficial information to the genome.

If the mutations themselves were truly random—that is, if they were neither directed by an intelligence nor influenced by the functional needs of the organism (as Neo-Darwinism stipulates) then the probability of the mutation and selection mechanism ever producing a new gene or protein could well be vanishingly small. Why? The mutations would have to generate, or “search” by trial and error, an enormous number of possibilities—far more than were realistic in the time available to the evolutionary process.

Even assuming that all mutations were beneficial—in order for evolution to begin to occur in even a small way, it would be necessary to have, not just one, but a SERIES of closely related and interlocking mutations—all occurring at the same time in the same organism!

The odds of getting two mutations that are in some slight manner related to one another is the product of two separate mutations: ten million times ten million, or a hundred trillion. That is a 1 followed by 14 zeros. What can two mutations accomplish? Perhaps a honeybee with a wavy edge on a bent wing. But he is still a honeybee; he has not changed from one species to another. More related mutations would be needed. Three mutations in a sequence would be a billion trillion (1 with 21 zeros). But that would not begin to do what would be needed. Four mutations, that were simultaneous or sequentially related, would be 1 with 28 zeros after it. But all the earth could not hold enough organisms to make that possibility come true. And four mutations together does not even begin to produce real evolution. Millions upon millions of harmonious, beneficial characteristics would be needed to transform one species into another.

But all those simultaneous mutations would have to be beneficial; whereas, in real life, mutations very rarely occur and they are almost always harmful.

(By the way, you would need to produce all those multi-mutations in a mated pair, so they could properly produce young. Otherwise, it would be like mating a donkey and a horse—and getting a sterile offspring.)

Another important factor not to be overruled is the process of cell division. The human body has about 100 trillion cells. In the nucleus of each cell are 46 chromosomes. In the chromosomes of each cell are about 10 billion DNA helix. Cell division can occur at the amazing rate of 1000 base pairs per second! If DNA did not divide this quickly, it could take 10,000 years for a human to grow from that first cell to a new-born infant.

If evolution does not serve any scientific assistance then what is its purpose? Is evolution merely a system that pushes people away from the concept of God? If so then who is winning by having individuals who detest God and defy moral principles?

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We do not have to directly observe Evolution to establish it as a viable theory, although if we use species with a short life span such as bacteria or fruit flies we can observe evolution in action in these species. We use this data to create theories about dinosaurs or early hominids and we compare.

The other problem in your post is you seem to have reduced the Theory of Evolution down to a few concepts that you think by 'disproving' you destroy the whole theory, well that's just not so. The theory of evolution is the convergence of many different theories that supports a bigger overall picture. This is a very common mistake made by religious debaters, by seemingly challenging one aspect of evolution you destroy the entire theory, well you don't. Science challenges itself everyday, how else would we improve.

Every scientific theory is a 'work in progress' and the sooner religious people grasp that concept and stop trying to disprove them on a whim - plus half an hour with Wiki - the better we will all be.

Oh, and as a footnote, the Oxford English dictionary is for finding explanation of words, it's not a definition of scientific theory or scientific method. Here's a much better use for your Oxford English Dictionary, look up 'banausic prolixity'.

MM