Expanding Rainbow of Evangelical Christian Options For Interpreting the Bible Makes It Increasingly Difficult to “Tell the Difference Between Liberal and Evangelical Christian Scholars”

Options For Interpreting the Bible

However, the other side of that debate would phrase the question differently. They would say, Itʼs growing more difficult to tell the difference between conservative Evangelical and mainstream biblical scholarship, adding that they think Evangelicalism needs to come to grips with the wider world of biblical scholarship and all the questions that arise necessarily from studying the text and history deeply.

Hereʼs whatʼs happening. Some evangelical scholars now argue that the Sermon on the Mount didnʼt happen literally as written. They say that people collected Jesusʼ sayings and put them together into the Sermon on the Mount. They say the geneologies of Matthew and Luke are fiction. They say the visit of the magi is fiction. They say the negative portrayal of the Pharisees in the Gospels is not accurate. But these same scholars also sign statements saying the Bible is without “error,” adding that it is without “error” based on its intended meaning, just as their more conservative brethren likewise assert. The debate involves oneʼs interpretation of a textʼs “intended” meaning, for itʼs day and age as well as for Godʼs purposes of teaching necessary truth.

The past generation of Evangelical biblical scholars, including those of the highest calibre, have been repeating that what we have in the Gospels are the surviving traces of Jesusʼ life. So we need to apply criteria to see which parts of the Gospels may have happened historically. They admit that all we have is a scale of probability on any given passage.

Robert Gundry. Says that the author of the Gospel of Matthew presents Peter as an apostate who lost his salvation. Gundryʼs lecture can be viewed here. Gundry was expelled from the Evangelical Theological Society for arguing that the author of the Gospel of Matthew used a Jewish literary genre called midrash that embroiders historical events with nonhistorical ones.

Michael Bird. Says Gundry should be reinstated to the Evangelical Theological Society. The reason is because increasing numbers of ETS members have grown more comfortable with modern biblical criticism.

Craig Blomberg. Agrees with Gundry saying we should allow that kind of interpretation. Blomberg says we shouldnʼt see the story of Jesus telling Peter to find the coin in the fishes mouth as historical. Also says we should accept Gundry back, that his method of biblical interpretation is perfectly legitimate, that his view of three Isaiahʼs is fine, and that a Pauline imitator wrote books instead of Paul.

William Lane Craig. Says he doesnʼt know what to think about the “raising of the many saints” passage in the Gospel of Matthew, but that it could be taken as apocalyptic symbolism. When asked his opinion on whether there were guards at the tomb, Lane says he canʼt think of anybody who would defend whether there were really guards at the tombs. Craig also admits he “does not know” how to interpret the Bibleʼs opening chapter: “I think that you can see from this survey of various biblical interpretations of Genesis 1 that there is quite a wide range of interpretations of Genesis 1 that have been defended by Bible believing Evangelical scholars. It is not the case that we are ‘boxed in’ to just one interpretation that is valid and sound for anyone who is a Bible believing Christian. Thereʼs quite a wide range of interpretations of Genesis 1. And you might say, well, which of these interpretations is the best? If any, which one would you endorse? And here I have to give my candid view, I donʼt know. I have been studying and reading on this subject a long time and Iʼm still uncertain as to what is the best view, so I donʼt have a sort of hard and fast opinion on this, but I think thatʼs alright. I think that the Christian can be open-minded with respect to various interpretations of biblical passages, and doesnʼt need to pigeon-hole everybody into one acceptable interpretation.” Source: William Lane Craig, Defenders podcast, series 2, “Section 9, ‘Creation and Evolution,’” Part 12

“When it says that Adam was created out of the dust of the earth, if this is a figurative narrative that could well describe human hominid forms, the material stuff out of which these are made. I donʼt think that itʼs clear, unless you take this in a very literal way, I donʼt think itʼs clear that even human evolution would be incompatible with biblical theism.” SOURCE: William Lane Craig, Defenders podcast, series 2, “Section 9, ‘Creation and Evolution,’” Part 13
Source: Creation vs. Evolution Series

For more on this topic, keep tuned to this conservative Christian website as well as looking up the works of the above mentioned scholars to understand their points of view.

The Cosmos as Mystery. Intelligent Design? What does a wider study of nature reveal? How much jury-rigging or tinkering might I.D.ists be willing to admit was part of the "design?"

Missing Link

The I.D.ist is like a Catholic theologian who starts out by agreeing with the agnostic that the cosmos is mysterious, but in the next breath tries to convince the agnostic that the cosmos revolves around the “holy mysteries” of one particular interpretation of one particular divine revelation. To the I.D.ist that revelation is “Intelligent Design” which solves all cosmic mysteries in one fell swoop.

But the cosmos remains a mystery, both chaotic and complex, as both the new science of chaos theory, and the new science of complexity theory, have demonstrated.

And we are far from having examined the cosmos beyond earth to see whether it might contain simple forms of replicating molecules perhaps at the core of comets (where water may remain liquid for long periods of time), or on moons in our solar system (those with liquid water), or outside our solar system. The cosmos is like a tremendous laboratory running an experiment involving far with more variables (and far more varying concentrations of molecules under different conditions) than can be found in a merely human laboratory, and it has run for billions of year and has enough energy to run for billions more. Perhaps the Designer is a Tinkerer? But in that case how would we be able to tell the difference between a tinkering Designer and a cosmos that “peoples?” (makes people like an ocean makes waves). Maybe we donʼt come into the cosmos at birth, but come out of it?

I.D.ists claim that the only options are “design” or “chance,” without defining either word very clearly.

What do I.D.ists mean by “design?” How much “design” was involved in a multi-billion year process that brought the first self-replicating chemicals and then cells to life? The earth held nothing but single celled organisms for a couple billion years, before the first multi-cellular organisms ever arose. And what kind of design leaves behind so much death right from the beginning, and so many extinct species, so many cousin-species on evolutionary-like bushes that kept dying off, often the whole bush died off, and long before the first upright primate species ever began to appear. Do I.D.ists believe humanity was “designed” in the sense of being “aimed at” from the beginning, and that evolution has hit its peak with humanity, and our present species has nowhere else to go from here either naturally or artificially? But what about other species? Maybe we can raise some of them to sentience, or even raise silicon-based life forms to sentience, and they may exceed our knowledge (or our compassion) some day? And we may be gone, perhaps we will be gone before we know it, and some other sentient species will arise later, maybe not as sentient as us, maybe more so but involving a different type of societal organization? The cosmos has billions of years yet to shine. Thereʼs stellar nurseries where countless stars are still forming, and new planets are forming around such new young stars.

What processes of “design” in particular have I.D.ists proposed? Is the Designer constantly tweaking DNA oh so invisibly, having a sip of tea, then tweaking it some more? Is the Designer popping whole new species into existence, head to toe, every ten thousand years, and still doing so, even after humans have invented cell phone cameras, but keeping it a secret by always doing it out of sight? Why does the Designer favor insects when it comes to designing new species? Is He trying to tell us something by the fact that different species of beetles number in the hundreds of thousands, and that mites, those tiny parasites, are the commonest known multi-cellular species of all, with perhaps a million species of mite on the earth? Does the Designer ever have to watch out for his little darlings once he has tweaked their DNA, keeping predators and natural disasters (and natural mutagenic chemicals and events in the cell, or radiation and cosmic rays from without the cell) from ruining his proposed plans of having such newly tweaked DNA passed to the next generation? If the Designer is watching out for his freshly tweaked darlings, then why mass extinction events? Is that the Designer shaking his Etch-I-Sketch?

Is the common idea of “design” for the average I.D.ist simply anything what “works?”—from the human brain to the malarial parasite to earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. One prominent Christian apologist named Dinesh, explained in Christianity Today that earthquakes were a consequence of plate tectonics and plate tectonics are necessary in order to bring important minerals to the surface for life to continue, as if he knew for certain that an infinite Designer could not have designed things differently (except for that Designerʼs promise to design a new heavens and earth, and new heavenly bodies, lacking the horrendously frightening and deadly events found here and now, so I guess Dinesh believes God CAN come up with better designs).

But not everything that “works” was built in a day, so what is “design,” really? The human species is currently the most advanced at being able to observe and replicate nature. We are like replicating mechanisms (DNA is also, so I guess “replication” is in our genes, to use a pun, and maybe it even lay in the heart of the cosmosʼ genes judging by some hypotheses regarding this mysterious cosmos). Humans spot similarities/patterns in nature and can replicate them.

Therefore, replication is something essential for life that takes place on both a molecular level and also inside the human brain-mind. But even when we replicate things in nature it takes us time and failures until we reach success. We are tinkerers. We didnʼt go from mud huts to the Empire State Building in a day. Neither did nature. Many structures the human mind tries to replicate have flaws and we suffer failures. As observant as he was, Leonardo da Vinci did not produce a human powered flying machine in his lifetime (regardless of what you see in movies or TV). The Wright brothers did not get off the ground in one go, and their successful flight only lasted seconds. Probably the same result was true the first time a feathered bipedal dinosaur glided through the air, it probably only lasted seconds, meanwhile other dinosaurs were evolving in other directions, and they became extinct. The birds survived, so they are the dinosaurʼs greatest success story, while the vast majority of dinosaur species are now dust. Neither were the earliest known birds in the fossil record well designed for flight. They still had long bony tails that create drag, solid bones rather than lighter hollow ones; and they had unfused finger bones which makes flight less manageable, not more so, especially over longer distance; and they had a triangle-shaped thick skull like those found on reptiles not the smoother skull with thinner bone found in more recent species; and they had teeth, and a small breast bone, not the body-length keel bone of modern day birds to which are attached thick arm flapping muscles, but instead a relatively smaller keel bone in the middle of their chests to which only much smaller muscles could have been attached, allowing them less powerful flight strokes. And all of the earliest known fossil birds were “designed” with similar deficiencies and all are extinct today.

So we see from the fossil record that whatever design there is in nature it works in a tinkering sort of way (even feathers were not necessarily designed for flight, but have been found on a variety of dinosaurs, and it is doubtful that all of them were the direct ancestors of birds). Some I.D.ists infer that perhaps molecular machines inside the cells arose overnight, arranged altogether in irreducible fashion, without any stages of tinkering in between, without trial and error. But looking at the macroscopic world of nature one wonders how they could believe that is so. Birds did not come about overnight in irreducible fashion. They started out on the ground and seem to be jury-rigged together.

Having looked at the idea of “design,” letʼs look at the idea of “chance.” I.D.ists often sneer at the word “chance.”

But what do scientists mean by chance? “Chance” to a scientist often means that no one has yet found a way to detect, measure or calculate all the different things that can and do happen naturally, due to their great multiplicity, unmanageable size, or speed, so in many cases we know neither all the possibilities inherent in nature, nor even the general probabilities. That doesnʼt mean such things cannot happen. No one has proven much either way about what cosmoses can or canʼt “do,” same for replicating molecules.

Take the famous X-ray experiments done on fruit flies in the 60s, bombarding their gonads with heroic doses of mutation-causing X-rays. That told us as much about evolution as shooting fruit flies with buckshot. The poor critters turned out monstrous. If we wanted to do an experiment illustrating evolution weʼd have to keep the mutation level nearer to normal and keep putting each new generation of fruit flies in different environments of slightly differing grades over a long period of time with lots of varieties of food to eat and choose from. Then watch to see how they evolve.

Something like that happened in Hawaiʼi, since that chain of islands began to rise from the sea about 8 million years ago, and the environments on those islands ranges from windswept beaches to green lush valleys to lofty mountainsides. About 500 species of fruit flies are found only on the Hawaiian islands (about 25% of all fruit fly species worldwide!) And concerning the evolution of new fruit fly genera, rather than simply new species…

Reading a book on Drosophilia, I discovered the answer to the question of why no new genera of fruit flies have evolved in Hawaiʼi despite the hundreds of species. It is due simply to the classification approach used by Drosophilia workers. The Hawaiʼian lineage is apparently descended from within the genus Drosophilia, as presently defined. Based on cladistic terminology, one genus should not give rise to another genus. Rather than reclassifying the 2000 or so “Drosophilia” into multiple genera, fruit fly workers use a variety of subgenera and informal terms to group them. In fact, genus names have been proposed for some of the Hawaiʼian lineages. [Dr. David Campbell, Biology Department, Saint Maryʼs College of Maryland]

And in answer to the question, “How to test that all Hawaiian fruit flies descended from one common ancestral population that began with a founder event,” the answer is to “Select many characters of Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian fruit flies, and use them to develop a phylogeny, using some related fly as an outgroup.” Such characters include the fact that Hawaiian fruit flies are larger and more brightly colored compared with the rest of the fruit flies on earth, and have even evolved a type of “song” that the mainland fruit flies never evolved, which means that some new morphologies and behaviors peculiar to certain species of fruit flies have evolved on the Hawaiʼian islands.

Ecologists believe Hawaiʼi has so many kinds of fruit flies because the islands were isolated for millions of years and when the first fruit flies arrived, they were able to evolve so many different types because there were few rival species of flies present, and there were also a wide variety of environments left open for them to occupy. When people first arrived at the Hawaiʼian islands centuries ago they also found that there were thousands of unique species of birds, plants, and other life forms on the islands. While it is the fruit flies that are the best known, other insect groups have also diversified. Hawaiʼi boasts the worldʼs only known carnivorous caterpillar (that feasts on, you guessed it, fruit flies, probably because such flies were the commonest most plentiful food flitting around the branches next to them), the happy face spider and a host of fascinating endemic arthropods, many of which are brilliantly illustrated in the book,

  • Hawaiʼian Insects and Their Kin” by Francis Howarth and William Mull.
  • Lush, and also in the book, “Remains of a Rainbow; Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaiʼi” by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton, published by National Geographic.
  • See also “Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution” by Alan Ziegler, published by University of Hawaii Press which traces the natural history of the Hawaiʼian Archipelago, as well as plant and animal evolution, flightless birds and their fossil sites.

Sadly, people have over time brought many new species with them to the islands, and the competition is driving most of the native species into extinction. Even the unique Hawaiian fruit flies are disappearing, replaced by flies from other parts of the world. The curse of what are known as invasive species is now worldwide. Surely the Designer must know what happens when species are no longer separated by long distances and they meet and compete on each otherʼs turf? It seems a waste to design so many species that get along with one another in say the Mediterranean Sea, and then some invasive species of algae from another continent on earth gets spilled into the Mediterranean, and starts to out grow all the other plant life there, endangering or even destroying whole ecosystems, loads of other species going down one after the other due to a spill of algae. I guess the Designer couldnʼt do anything about that. Or wonʼt. Not even after having spent so much time and effort carefully picking which tiny bits of each animalʼs genomes to edit for millions of years. Those species, all gone overnight, due to some other species he designed that could out compete it. I guess the Designer likes the spectator sport.

Also, the Designer may edit genes just right, but if he does, he doesnʼt clean up after himself, leaving behind loads of retroviral DNA inside the cell, thatʼs viral DNA that some virus inserted there. Thatʼs what happens when a mosquito injects a virus, or a virus is picked up by a scrape or cough or other random contact. The virus begins to inject itself into that animalʼs cells, sometimes it injects into the germ cells of that animals and the viral genes get carried along inside that animals for many generations. Not much use to the animal, though some cells have found uses for retroviral DNA, not all of it, but some uses have been noted. Fascinating how even a chance encounter with DNA from a virus can be used by the cell in some instances. That sounds suspiciously like evolution, trial and error so to speak, jury-rigged design, a Designer who tinkers round.

Speaking of a common question put forth by anti-evolutionists, one often hears it said that dogs are still dogs, we have St. Bernards, Chihuahuas, Great Danes, poodles, and hundreds of other breeds of dogs. But they are still dogs.

To which one might reply, “Then what were the ‘dog-bear’ looking fossils of the Miocene? Dogs or bears? And why canʼt creationists or I.D.ists agree on which side of the human/ape line these fossils lay on?”


How I.D. Survives, and Why the Theory of Evolution Does Too. (With Some Degree of “Natural Selection”)

Once you have a self-replicating molecule… thatʼs where the fun begins in the living world, because the cosmos keeps moving and changing, shuffling and reshuffling, living and dying. Furthermore, once you get to the point of a self-replicating molecule (even when that molecule is DNA and lay within the largest most complex of eukarotic cells) that DNA is copied Imperfectly, which helps explains why thereʼs so many different forms of living things.

One thing that helps keeps the I.D. movement afloat is that we canʼt examine the earliest living organisms and see how much trial and error they went through, how many stages and diversifications, extinctions and dead ends took place over the Billions of years on earth when only single celled organisms exited, i.e., before the first multi-cellular species began to arise. But if we had access to a basic outline of the changes in “internal cellular architecture” of major groups of single-celled organisms during those billions of years, most evolutionists bet it would resemble the record we have for the bodily architecture of major groups of macroscopic animals as seen in the fossil record, i.e., with plenty of trial and error, different stages and diversification events, dead ends, etc., which led To Present Day Internal Cellular Architecture.

Evolutionists suggest that we may one day discover some simple replicating chemicals or simple cellular organisms to study in different regions of our solar system or outside it. No laboratory is larger than the cosmos when it comes to all the possible combinations that can take place with various atoms and molecules, minerals and energies mixing over billions of years in other places in the cosmos.

And if we ever develop quantum computers and place inside them the total information of genomes and cellular architecture of every known living species of microorganism on the planet, such computers might be able to reverse engineer the most likely pathways of how life evolved, and even give us a glimpse into what the most likely earliest successful replicators (the ones leading to all of our present day surviving single celled ancestors) looked like.

There are scientists who study complexity, evolutionary algorithms and such, who want to figure out how things work, which is the first step, before proceeding to discover all the analogues of each cellular process throughout cousin species in nature. The final step is to try and discover how such processes might be related over the billions of years of individual organismic death and species extinctions, dead-ends galore.

“Codes” in nature are shorthand for a feedback loop system based on survival of that particular arrangement of atoms and molecules that make more of themselves, or donʼt. If they do, you wind up with a “code,” which is the system itself that can make more of itself. Right now it looks like natural attraction of atoms for atoms and molecules for molecules is what built the most basic of self-replicating molecules. Is there evidence of a “code” in some platonic realm that externally directs such natural attractions between atoms? We have proven in endless experiments that such and such atoms or molecules mixed together will form this and that as expected. And we know of other self-replicating molecules besides RNA and DNA. In fact lone RNA strands will replicate themselves in test tubes to form more RNA strands if the basic building blocks chemicals of RNA are present along with a little of the common mineral like zinc to speed up the process. And if you add a tiny bit of arsenic, that destroys RNA, it will break down many of the strands. But if you add the Surviving Strands of RNA to another test tube and let them reproduce more RNA strands (they never reproduce exactly the same way, thereʼs always a little difference in the way they put themselves together), adding a bit more arsenic, and repeat the process of saving the surviving strands of RNA, and allow them to make new strands in a new test tube, you will wind up with RNA strands that are increasingly more resistant to being broken down by ever larger quantities of arsenic. I guess thereʼs something to natural selection after all.

Further Reading

Nietzsche the Drama Queen, and Christianity's Failure to Add Much That Was New to the World

Nietzsche

According to Nietzsche, “‘God on the cross.’ Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal boldness in reversal, something so horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.”

I disagree, and would argue instead that Nietzsche was a drama queen.

Nietzscheʼs “transvaluation of values” sounds dramatic, but Christianity did not turn values completely upside down, nor did Nietzsche right them again. There have been people who cared for their sick in other lands and cultures, just as there have been dictators in Christian lands. As a trained rhetorician and son of a minister, Nietzsche tended to speak in overblown terms.

In reality the idea of “God on the cross” changed the world very little because basic human needs, insecurities, ignorance and cruelty remained (we are after all, primates who follow alpha male leaders), including the egos of “Christians” which were now super-sized by being joined to the alpha male of alpha males (God).

History demonstrates that the Christian lambs who worshiped the Lamb of God on the cross soon became lions of Judah, killing more fellow lovers of Jesus and persecuting more different people for different reasons than the Romans ever did to the Christians. Christianity also helped fill the western world with the notions of demonic causation/demonization of enemies and thought control, i.e., Christianized Roman emperors decreed in their law books that anyone who doubted the truth of the Trinity was “insane, demented,” and were subject to the Emperorʼs wrath, including Imperial decrees that the books of skeptics like Porphyry and heretics like Arius be burnt. Henceforth anyone daring to question the new Christian status quo was persecuted. [Plenty of historical data to back that up at bottom]

Nietzscheʼs predecessor and idol, Schopenhauer, noted with less drama the truth about Christianity in this brief dialogue:

CONVERSATION, JERUSALEM, A.D. 33

A: Have you heard the latest?

B: No, whatʼs happened?

A: The world has been redeemed!

B: You donʼt say!

A: Yes, the Dear Lord took on human form and had himself executed in Jerusalem; and with that the world has been redeemed and the devil hoodwinked.

B: Gosh, thatʼs simply lovely.


Would the world be much better or worse off today had the Persians conquered the Greeks at Thermopylae, leaving the Middle East Zoroastrian? Or if the religion of the Roman Empire had become Mithraism rather than Christianity? Humanity would have eventually learned via people other than Jesus, lessons of practical moral philosophy, and the value of tolerance and love. Either way, It takes time for us primates to learn new things. Our own individual lives have extended childhoods and adolescences compared with those of our primate cousins, during which time we learn more.

Neither am I impressed by Jesusʼ lessons alone. A lot of interpretation has gone into understanding them. See the forthcoming volume from Sheffield Phoenix Press, “The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics”

Furthermore…

Jesus is depicted in the Gospels leading the life of a first century celebrity who, like celebrities today, people either loved or hated. Jesus was either being listened to by crowds of people, invited to dinner and taken care of by his groupies, or he was being denounced and threatened. He never had to endure as most people do, a lifetime of anonymity including such everyday trials as marriage and child-rearing. Talk about a cross to bear. I would have liked to have seen how Jesus could parable-ize his way out of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, getting into a brouhaha with his wife after staying out late nights with his boys, or waiting in line at the check-out counter with a box of much needed diapers or Tampax that he had to get home quickly but the person ahead of him with 100 items in their cart didnʼt invite Jesus to go on through ahead, and then when Jesus thought that person was about to pay and finally allow him to check-out, he sees them take out their check-book to pay and the cashier doesnʼt have authority to cash checks and has to call over the manager. At which point Jesus explodes. But not at the Pharisees, just at life in general. Then he has a heart attack following decades of such day to day stressful situations and dies. No. Jesus was a celebrity and died a celebrityʼs death. So what? Now we have to build churches to honor him, carve statues in his imagined likeness, keep the dust off those statues and light candles for him all year long? As for Jesusʼ death on a cross, people were scourged and/or died on crosses for any number of reasons, justly or unjustly, and Jesus might have been crucified sooner had he been born thirty or forty years earlier or later, when friction between Israel and Rome was greater.

To quote E. M. Cioran: The ultimate cruelty was that of Jesus “leaving an inheritance of bloodstains of the cross… Had he lived to be sixty, he would have given us his memoirs instead of the cross… For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

The famous “sofa” line from Cioran makes me wonder what the apostles would have done had Jesus tripped and accidentally hit his head on a large rock while preaching, or, took a nasty tumble on his final walk toward Jerusalem, and, instead of being executed on a cross wound up having to be cared for by those same apostles for years until he slowly wasted away? Having to care for a crippled or brain damaged friend for a decade or more seems like more of a challenge, and certainly the image of modern day Christians wearing little bed pans around their necks would be different, along with the message that “Our savior slowly wasted away, required 24 hour care, and was only able to repeat certain syllables up till the end without making much sense… for your sins.” If you were to present the apostles with such a situation and even gave them the choice of one or the other, I bet they would choose to have Jesus die in a few hours on a cross instead, no matter how bloody, so they could march around triumphantly spreading their beliefs soon afterwards.

Cioran added…

“A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth… Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching, each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples—officialdom, with its rules… Everyone trying to remedy everyoneʼs life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society—an inferno of saviors!… The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. he has a voice: that is enough… all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions… if you fail to meddle in other peopleʼs business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your ‘self’ into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game.” (Eric Hoffer agreed with Cioranʼs assessment that Christianity, Islam, fascism, communism, and other ideological mass movements attract people for similar psychological reasons.)

Or as Salman Rushdie put it…

“Love can lead to devotion, but the devotion of the lover is unlike that of the True Believer in that it is not militant. I may be surprised - even shocked - to find that you do not feel as I do about a given book or work of art or even person; I may very well attempt to change your mind; but I will finally accept that your tastes, your loves, are your business and not mine. The True Believer knows no such restraints. The True Believer knows that he is simply right, and you are wrong. He will seek to convert you, even by force, and if he cannot he will, at the very least, despise you for your unbelief.”

Logan Pearsall Smith said something similar about human beings being possessed by their beliefs, but in a funnier fashion:

“How is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat peopleʼs brains—those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breath creeds and convictions on you as soon as they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them—the monthly Reviews seem to have room for little else. Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation? Can he ever be sure that he wonʼt be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?”

Returning to Cioran, he went even further, noting…

“In the fervent mind you always find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection is adequate against the claws of a prophet… Once he raises his voice, whether in the name of heaven, of the city, or some other excuse… he will not forgive your living on the wrong side of his truths and his transports; he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, he wants to impose it on you…. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasantsʼ Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy… Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe… The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth… The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity… Saint Paul—the most considerable vote-canvasser of all time—has made his tours, infesting the clarity of the ancient twilight with his epistles. An epileptic triumphs over five centuries of philosophy! Reason is confiscated by the fathers of the Church! And if I were to look for the most mortifying date for the mindʼs pride, if I were to scan the inventory of intolerances, I would find nothing comparable to the year 529, when, following Justinianʼs decree, the School of Athens was closed. The right to decadence being officially suppressed, to believe became an obligation… This is the most painful moment in the history of Doubt.”

Historical Data

Cambrian Explosion, No Help to I.D.—Agassiz trumps Darwin? (Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, Louis Agassiz, Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design)

Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian Explosion, No Help To I.D.

How different were organisms from one another in the pre-Cambrian?

Viewing the organisms of each phyla at the beginning of the Cambrian “explosion” it looks like bilaterian worms had been radiating into more complex and diverse worms (and early slug-like organisms had been radiating into more complex and diverse invertebrates), because in general the earliest Cambrian relatives of the living phyla tend to be a lot more wormlike (or sluglike in the case of invertebrate phyla) than most modern day representatives of such phyla. Even many living phyla are basically still worms (or slugs). In short, early representatives or relatives of the chordates are rather more wormlike than their better–known modern representatives.

In the Cambrian the earliest members of the “chordate” phylum (out of which humans eventually evolved) resembled filter–feeding worms that happened to swim. They didnʼt have jaws, scales, a bony skeleton, or anything else that most readers would even associate with a “fish!” They looked like the first two pics on the right:

And the process of their development from the Cambrian onward, before they had evolved jaws, included nothing but rounded sucking mouths. See the third and fourth pics down on the right:

What about those trilobites you ask, i.e., animals with hinged exo-skeletons, the cousins to modern day crabs and insects? Didn't they burst onto the scene in the Cambrian seemingly from nowhere? Their appearance was preceded by millions to tens of millions of years of small shelly fossils (see pic down on right), which provides evidence of evolution and diversification of hinged exo-skeleton organisms prior to the Trilobite deposits in the Cambrian. The small shelly fossils in Chenjiang feature dozens and dozens of trilobite–like and arthropod–like organisms that preceded the Cambrian "explosion," but which fall cladistically outside of these respective clades—these are transitional forms! How can Meyer have ignored the plain evidence that the Cambrian “explosion” did not come out of nowhere?

Additional evidence that Meyer brushes aside supports the view that pre-Cambrian organisms developed in stages, from single–celled organisms up to the worms, slugs and little shellies that preceded the Cambrian Explosion:

The Sequence of Fossils in the Pre-Cambrian Appears Evolution-Like

  1. Before 700 million years ago, maybe well before: Single–celled eukaryotes (acritarchs), which are not to be confused with the smaller simpler prokayotes (bacteria) for which we have some very rare and early fossil evidence.

  2. Earlier Ediacaran: Multicellular animal eukaryotes, but simple, SPONGE–grade organisms (Sponges consist of communities of single–celled eukaryotes, and a sponge run through a sieve that disconnects all of its cells can re–assemble into a sponge again).

  3. Later Ediacaran: Multicellular animal eukaryotes with more complexity, i.e. cnidarian–grade organisms

  4. Very late Ediacaran: Simple SLUG–grade/WORM–grade organisms (at least their tracks and burrows) – the first ones only making surface tracks and lacking burrowing ability. Making tracks suggests that the organisms have at least a front end and a back end, a mouth, anus, and gut connecting them. These are almost certainly bilaterians.

  5. Very late Ediacaran: The very first biomineralized “skeletons”, e.g. Cloudina, basically a WORM secreting a tube, as well as the first evidence of predatory boring. Cloudina gets no mention at all in Meyerʼs book.

  6. At the beginning of the Cambrian, we start to see more complex burrowing – e.g., vertical burrowing through sediment, clearly indicating WORM–grade organization and an internal fluid skeleton, i.e. a coelom. The burrows gradually increase in complexity over 10 million years.

  7. SMALL SHELLY fauna: The shells, which started very small and very simple, gradually diversify and get more complex, radiating especially in the Tommotian. By the end of the Tommotion, some of the “small shellies” can be identified as parts of larger, “classic” Cambrian animals. The Tommotian is an utterly key period for any serious discussion of the Cambrian explosion. Unfortunately, the word “Tommotian”, or any equivalent terminology does not even appear in the book! The Small Shelly Fauna (SSF) gets just one (one!) mention in the book, buried in endnote 27 of Chapter 4.)

All of the above evolution-like stages of increasing complexity preceded the Cambrian "explosion."

from before the “Cambrian explosion”

Questions For I.D. Regarding the Known Phyla

Maybe an I.D.ist can explain why we need 33–40 phyla when merely 9 of those phyla constitute about 95% of all animal life? The remaining 26–31 phyla have fewer than about 2,000 known members—the rarest with just three members (Cycliophora: odd sacs represented by Symbion pandora), two members (Xenoturbellida: strange flatworm) or one species (Micrognathozoa: tiny jawed animal, and Placozoa, an animal that resembles a multicellular amoeba). Most are simple marine organisms, often referred to as worms or nanoplankton.

Also, how about an I.D.ist explaining why, among multi–cellular organisms, beetles and mites proliferate so much, producing hundreds of thousands of species, while other phyla produce far fewer? The number of species of mites might even reach 1 million according to some estimates, as more beetles and mites continue being discovered all the time. Wow, the Designer or Natureʼs innate design abilities really seem focused on mites.

ALSO…

13 phyla of multi–cellular animals appear during the Cambrian explosion.

BUT…

20 phyla of multi–cellular animals appear AFTER the Cambrian. Neither is the number of phyla into which all the worldʼs species can be divided agreed upon among systematicists. Under the most frequently used classification scheme there are 38 animal phyla, but some systematicists claim there are between 35 and 40 phyla. Three new phyla were discovered in the last century, the most recent in 1993.

Meyerʼs Creationist Hero, Louis Agassiz

Meyer idolizes Agassiz, a creationist who opposed even the evolutionary idea of common descent. Here is how Agassiz argued for creationism in his day [SOURCE: Agassiz, Evolution and Permanence of Type, The Atlantic Monthly, 1874, pages 92–101]:

“…the earliest known Vertebrates” [from the fossil record when Agassiz was writing] “…are Selachians (sharks and their allies) and Ganoids (garpikes and the like), the highest of all living fishes, structurally speaking.”

“It shall be answered that these belong to the Silurian and Devonian periods, and that it is believed [by evolutionists] that Vertebrates may have existed before that time. It will also be argued that Myzonts, namely Amphioxus, Myxinoids [Hagfish], and Lamper–eels [Lampreys], have no hard parts and could not have been preserved on that account. I will grant both these points, though the fact is that the Myzonts do possess solid parts, in the jaws, as capable of preservation as any bone, and that these solid parts, if ever found, even singly, would be as significant, for a zoologist, as the whole skeleton.”

In other words Agassiz was mocking evolutionists for not finding fossil evidence of the earliest jawless eel–like vertebrates in the fossil record prior to the Devonian. He was also mocking them for not finding fossil evidence of Amphioxus (or Amphioxus–like organisms) with a mere notochord and eyespot that existed prior to jawless eel–like vertebrates in the fossil record.But fossil evidence of both have since been found, and they were found in the places where the Evolutionists expected them to be found.

Agassiz also wrote loads that argued in favor of the idea that different races of humanity were each created separately and could be classified on the basis of specific climatic zones (just as he viewed the separate creations of animal and plant species), and that the different races of humanity were accordingly endowed with unequal attributes by their Creator. Nor was it unusual for Agassiz to have been a zealous defender of creationism since he came from a line of ministers, and during his natural science studies he favored Cuvier the creationist over Lamarck the transformationalist/evolutionist.

Meyer Admitted that the Lack of Abundant Fossils Prior to the Cambrian Cannot be Cited as Good Evidence in Favor of I.D.

A specialist in the Cambrian debated Meyer on a radio program and pointed out to Meyer the development of various organisms before the Cambrian explosion as seen in “little shellies” formations. After which Meyer backed away from the idea that the lack of abundant fossils prior to the Cambrian explosion provided evidence for I.D. Instead, Meyer admitted that enough pre–Cambrian fossils existed to provide evidence of changes in organisms occurring prior to the Cambrian.

Meyer should also be embarrassed concerning how closely his charts of the major phyla resemble the charts creationists used in the 1980s when they tried to argue that each phyla was created independently. He should have used more detailed charts such as these.

Meyer also needs to consider that species have to spread widely in order to increase their chances of even being fossilized. Some species are going to be far more successful at reproducing and invading new environments and they are going to spread widely and have a much greater chance of being fossilized. While branches of those species, their “cousins” so to speak, may go extinct far sooner, with little chance of the remains of such extinct cousins being fossilized at all. To suggest an analogy, the fossil record resembles a car park garage buried sometimes slowly, and sometimes by a catastrophe (thatʼs what todayʼs geologists believe about the fossil record, their view is called Actualism, which leaves room for both Uniformitarianism and local Catastrophic burying events). There are cars on each level of the parking garage, but the cars undergoing transitions are on the ramps between levels and havenʼt reached the point where their descendants cover a large part of any one level of the car park garage yet. So when the garage is buried the cars on the ramps are naturally less numerous. (And many of those side ramps simply lead off a cliff, leaving little to no remains, i.e., all those cousin species that go extinct for each species that makes it to a different level of the car park garage and expands its brood there, and increases its chances of leaving fossils behind. If you donʼt know where to look for the ramps, your odds of finding transitional fossils are minimal.

Paleontologists dig up transitional fossils by traveling to exactly those places on earth where the strata is dated to the time period where such transitions most likely existed, and finding an outcropping there that is exposed and that is also known to contain fossils. That is exactly how the discovery of the first mammal–like reptile fossil was made. Some brave paleontolgists traveled way up north to a particular outcropping that was dated to a particular time period between reptiles and mammals and known to contain fossils, and they found the first mammal–like reptile fossils (with double–jaw joints and other transitional features). Some of those intrepid paleontologists also died as a result of the harsh weather they experienced during their digs up there. A more recent case was the discovery of the amphibian–like fish, Tiktaalik. The paleontologist leader of the expedition knew the geologic record and where such transitions would had taken place and obtained funding to visit particular strata from that period that was exposed and known to be fossiliferous. In other words they trekked to the “ramp of the parking garage” and found on that ramp the remains of Tiktaalik, a fish with an amphibian–like skull, eyes on the top, a distinct neck, finger bones, and other amphibian–like characteristics, but in a fish. They also got lucky in that it was near the time when they would have had to retreat because winter was coming and the ground was beginning to refreeze and would have remained frozen most of the year too.

Does Meyer mention how important it is to look in the right places, geologically speaking, for transitional fossils? Does he mention that that is exactly how transitional species have been successfully discovered? Does he mention that the “Pre–Cambrian” is not really a geologic period at all due to the enormous upheavals that took place during that period? Itʼs simply rock that has no name for a period all its own, other than being “pre”Cambrian, like a heavily erased black board that you hope to discover some scribbles on that nature has not yet erased.

Also, paleontologists realized after more fossils of each species were discovered that if there was a “design” to the way organisms continued to change and spread out on the earth, that design was not straightforward. It began to look more like nature was trying everything, experimenting, trial and error–wise, tinkering, and failing a huge amount of the time. The discovery of an increasing number of ancient horse–like species led to them co–existing at different intervals and most dying out like leaves on a bushy tree when autumn comes, not following a straight path that might imply an intended plan of “design.” The fact that most species simply go extinct doesnʼt exactly cry out “intelligent design.” Vast numbers of cousin species simply go extinct, often leaving behind Nothing But A Wide Diversity Of Teeth (enamel is one of the hardest of natural substances). Meyer in his book mentions such things as the Permian extinction, which was the largest known mass extinction event. Was the Designer shaking his etch–i–sketch?

I read that the most complete T. Rex is only about 85%. Most evidence for T. Rex was quite fragmentary until that special fossil was finally found. The same is true of fossils of other species from horses to hominids to cetacea. Often only the teeth have survived and been discovered that bear silent witness to the existence of endless cousin species that once existed but exist no more. To quote Carl Zimmer in his book At the Waterʼs Edge, on cetacean evolution and the fossils of ancient cetaceans that we possess:

“Itʼs tempting to build this story like a totem pole, with trotting Pakicetus at the base, Ambulocetus laying its humming jaw on top of it, and Rodhocetus, the earliest whale to swim like a whale, sitting above the two. It seems like such a smooth progression toward todayʼs cetaceans that it must be right. But such a version would only be a vertical slice of the story. Life doesnʼt proceed from one point to another — it forks and radiates like the cladograms that represent it. Paleontologists have found many other whale bones in Eocene rocks of Pakistan and India. Mostly They Are Teeth — the rock surrenders A Few skulls as well — but even teeth clearly show that their owners were Not Clones of Pakicetus or the other better–known whales. Ambulocetus kept to brackish deltas and coastal water, but Thewissen has found whale teeth from about the same age in what at the time was the open ocean. Gingerich has found at least three contemporaries of Rodhocetus a few million years younger than Ambulocetus: Takracetus, with a wide, flat head; Gavinocetus, with a slender skull and loose hips; and Dalanistes, a whale with a head as long and narrows as a heronʼs set on a long neck, with hips cemented firmly enough to its spine to walk on land. If this is a confusing picture, it should be. As time passed, certain whale species emerged that were more and more adapted to life in the water, but other species simultaneously branched away in many directions. Walking and swimming whales lived side by side, or in some cases traded homes as the buckling birth of the Himalayas shuffled their habitats. Some were only a minor variation on a theme that would carry through to modern whales, but others — heron–headed Dalamistes, for example — belonged to strange branches unlike anything alive today.”

As I said concerning the parking garage analogy, tons of cousin species went extinct, and species that had not succeeded to the point of spreading far and wide have far less chance of being fossilized.

The Impatience of Intelligent Design Advocates

If I.D. is the assertion that some unknown intelligence used unknown means to instantaneously create biological structures then any discussion of I.D. will be relatively short and unsatisfying. Behe explained his view as “A puff of smoke!” A suspension of the laws of physics. Not very satisfying as a scientific answer. [Google this search string: Behe and puff of smoke] And the I.D.ist Berlinski wrote: “Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta–da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once.” Berlinski added the word “ta–da.” Of course Berlinski also seems ignorant of the “little shellies” in the pre–Cambrian, as well as the fact that early Cambrian phyla resemble variants of worms and slugs with far more “novel” species and biological structures coming into existence over geological time.

More to the point is how did “intelligence” do it? Via what stages and via what particular acts of intervention was each change in biological structures accomplished? Did the “Designer” utilize chemicals that already exist inside each cell, chemicals that naturally induce mutations, and move them telekinetically toward the right spots in the DNA chain to effect this or that point mutation? Or did the Designer effect a "whole genome duplication" event in some cases and whittle things down from there? Did God bend and focus mutation–causing cosmic rays so that they penetrated the nucleus of a particular egg or sperm or zygote, and thereby effected the right mutations? And if the Designer could make all of those miraculous changes one by one, then why not just pop whole new species into existence instead of all that wrangling with the tiny stuff over eons to make it look like species evolved? And why not keep popping new species into existence today so people can see it happening? After all, we have instruments that can detect micro–particles popping into existence today, but wouldn't it be great if more people could see a whole species pop into existence? Or even if scientists could see whole chromosomes appear instantaneously out of thin air while examining cells under microscopes?

And if the Designer accomplished his purposes via endless tiny mutation events over eons of time did the Designer also have to keep a watchful eye on DNA Heʼd just changed, to ensure no more mutation-causing chemicals or cosmic rays touched this or that part of the DNA to reverse each change, or to ensure the zygote/embryo/fetus was carried safely to term and thus ensure the passing along of each new genetic change the Designer had just instituted? Did The Designer also have to monitor each animal born with such new mutations to ensure it was not taken out of the gene pool by random contact with a deadly microorganism, or random contact with some nearby predator or natural disaster, so that the newly instituted genetic changes would survive and the organism reach the age of sexual reproduction and pass along such changes?

My point is that curious scientists continue to search for connections in nature, how things are related to one another, not how they are discontinuous from one another as I.D.ists seem to be concluding rather impatiently. Most scientists are not impatient when it comes to continuing to asking questions concerning how things in nature are connected to one another, how they all fit together. Questions like…

  1. How does something in the biological world work? How does it currently function. That's merely the beginning of examining questions pertaining to relationships in nature.

  2. What are all the known analogues in the biological world that resemble how that one thing works?

  3. What are a few hypothetical natural changes/alterations this one thing or its earliest ancestor might have undergone?

  4. Also, how many possible paths to genetic, behavioral and morphological changes are there? Only after knowing that can we begin to whittle down the most probable natural changes/alterations this one thing or its earliest ancestors might have undergone.

It takes a lot of patient effort and analysis in other words, to discover how things in nature are connected. But we have discovered plenty of connections throughout nature.

I.D.ists like Behe simply regurgitate in their books the very first question above, listing what scientists have discovered about how something in nature works (like the flagellum) and continue to harp on how it all fits together. Yes it does. But did it always fit together exactly like that over the billions of years in the past when the earth was filled with nothing but single–celled life forms? The flagellum most probably arose at a time when bacteria were exchanging DNA actively–and also absorbing any DNA they came across passively–for probably over a billion years. To trace all possible changes in the DNA of such ancient bacteria over that length of time is impossible at present. There are nearly no fossils of ancient bacteria, nothing like the fossils we possess of the bones of ancient vertebrates and how their modes of transportation changed over time, i.e., from fins to limbs among vertebrates. Nor do fossils of ancient bacteria reveal their inner cellular structure. So there's much information we are missing. And many questions remain concerning what happened during the billion years when the earth was filled with only single–celled organisms.