if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Blind Salamanders
by Hal_10000
I haven’t plinked the IDers for at least a few hours, have I? Here ya go:
The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.
If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin’s natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or “intelligent design,” you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility?
The Eye Argument is one of the least convincing of the creationists. Hitch quotes Shermer’s rebuttal:
Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. “The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the ‘light-sensitive cells’ come to exist in the first place?”
The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a “pathway” that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?
Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:
Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don’t work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don’t think I have seen it written down before.
Fire away.
Comments
Why wouldn’t a created organism have the ability to lose and regain eyesight as circumstances dictate?
Um, you’ve just described evolution.
Or what mysticist adherents of scientism have decided is proof of evolution. This phenomenon in genetics can be completely divorced from evolution. The mutation was always there, hiding in the genetic code, until conditions changed and it was made active.
Um, you’ve just described evolution.
Actually, what he described was adaptation—the notion that a bacterium can adapt itself (over many generations) into an elephant is an article of faith on your part.
(Cue emotional hystrionics from the atheist glimmer twins).
Note that he referred to a “created” being as opposed to an “evolved” one. And, to minimize the possibity of irrelevant tangents, that was a stipulation, not a conclusion.
Or what mysticist adherents of scientism have decided is proof of evolution. This phenomenon in genetics can be completely divorced from evolution. The mutation was always there, hiding in the genetic code, until conditions changed and it was made active.
Except that we have genetic evidence that that isn’t the case.
Why wouldn’t a created organism have the ability to lose and regain eyesight as circumstances dictate?
Occam’s Razor.
Like I said with Iconoclast, 2+2=4 may be the same thing as 2+2+God=4. However, when trying to deduce something, you don’t need to add in unnecessary components, which in this case is God.
So, what you’re saying is, “Okay, we have an organism which gains or loses the ability as circumstances predict. But how do we know that GOD isn’t in there somewhere, making this whole thing possible?”
If you can explain something without God, then in all likelihood good is not involved.
make that ”God is not involved.”
Like I said with Iconoclast, 2+2=4 may be the same thing as 2+2+God=4.
Mathematically speaking, that can only be true if God=0, which is pretty much your whole “point”, I’m sure.
But it’s an obviously contrived analogy. Lurkers can decide for themselves whether it’s a valid one.
Mathematically speaking, that can only be true if God=0, which is pretty much your whole “point”, I’m sure.
No, it’s that God can be anything he wants. Not only can he make a rock that’s so heavy he can’t lift it, but he can also lift it as well as not being able to make the rock in the first place. God is everything, God is nothing, God is everywhere. He can be anything he chooses.
Therefore when I say 2+2+God=4 I mean it that God can be anything, he can be the most complex multiplier in the world, or he can be zero, and he can do both simultaneously. He is an omniscient, omnipresent being, who knows everything and can be everywhere at the same time.
Therefore, as an element to be quantified in terms of science, he is utterly worthless. So when you can explain something without the presence of God, then merely adding God for the sake of doing so is violating Occam’s Razor and adding unnecessary multipliers.
But it’s an obviously contrived analogy. Lurkers can decide for themselves whether it’s a valid one.
It’s not contrived.
1. Shermer: “The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light…”
Simplification: 2+2=4
2. Tenshi: “Why wouldn’t a created organism have the ability to lose and regain eyesight as circumstances dictate?”
Simplification: 2+2+God=4
If you can explain it without God, then God is a worthless component of the explanation.
What you religious types need is the following:
2+God=4, where “God” cannot conceivably be explained by any other force, where the laws of physics were suspended, where time ran backwards, or any of the other type of things that we would consider “supernatural.”
So when you can explain something without the presence of God, then merely adding God for the sake of doing so is violating Occam’s Razor and adding unnecessary multipliers.
If you can explain it without God, then God is a worthless component of the explanation.
Believe it or not, I can see where you’re coming from, but I also see a couple of unproven assumptions as well. For starters, whether a given explanation for a phenomenon is “adequate” if that explanation doesn’t include God is in the eye of the beholder. That person X considers an explanation “adequate” doesn’t mean that person Y will, or must, or should. Likewise, the assumption that one “adds God merely for the sake of doing so” is a related assumption that is unwarranted. At the risk of overly simplifying and causing you to misconstrue my intentions, the simple fact is that “God is added” precisely because the alternative explanation is not adequate. It isn’t as if God is forced into the equation on general principles, but that it makes for a better, more reasonable explanation.
The classic example is the related pair, the Big Bang and the Anthropic Principle. Now anti-theists can come up with all sorts of scenarios to explain these things, such as the Multiverse or the Oscillating Universe, but the theist sees the theistic explanation as the one that actually comports with Occam’s Razor.
The final assumption is that science is the only legitimate method for revealing truth. It has an impressive track record, yes, but it is confined to the material Universe as currently practiced. That wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, but the underlying assumption that if something cannot be directly detected by the scientific method, it cannot exist and cannot be considered at any level, is an unwarranted one that loses more than it gains, in my view.
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"Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders?”
You don’t see any flaws in this reasoning, do you? I’m asking first before I assume you agree with this ‘think until you see what you want to see but don’t think too hard’ drivel.
Why wouldn’t a created organism have the ability to lose and regain eyesight as circumstances dictate?
The only weay this criticised the concept of a creator is to stupidly assume a creator wouldn’t bestow any adaption mechanisms into their masterpieces. And that’s a pretty sad thought process because it can only be the result of blind fundamentalism.
-sigh-