Re: Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

Terry,

I'm puzzled by my inability to follow your reasoning--and by why you don't accept mine. : ) If all you have is data from contemporary organisms as cited in your Dawkins quote, you are missing two kinds of information that I think constitute the sine qua non of evolution, information from fossils and from ages, both of which are extracted from rocks. The fossils tell us that organisms in one period were generally not the same as organisms in another period. The ages tell us how long, and how long ago, those periods were, and that some of those periods occurred very long ago. Close examination of large quantities of fossils in context of their ages strongly suggests that later organisms descended from earlier ones. Hence from the rocks alone we can make a good case for the fact of evolution. Possible mechanisms might not suggest themselves from such study; so, as you say, the theory would probably be wanting.

Darwin leaned heavily on observations of living organisms in arriving at his theory, but if he had not known the fossil evidence, would he have had his key insight? Perhaps he would have--because anyone can speculate; but would he have been persuasive?

Being persuasive is the key, especially where science confronts and seems to contest beliefs based on scriptures. Without evidences for long periods of time and for actual past organisms that were significantly different from modern ones, I fail to see how one could be persuasive. To be persuasive to creationists using data exclusively from contemporary organisms, you'd have to present compelling arguments as to why God would not have created those organisms as we find them. That seems like a battle lost before the opening shot.

On the other hand, with data from fossils and their ages it should be straightforward to convince open-minded people of the changes in organisms that occurred down through the hundreds of millions of years of Earth history. If these people happened to be open-minded YECs, you wouldn't have to present compelling arguments as to why God did not create organisms all at one time a few thousand years ago. You'd just present the data; and your YECs, being open-minded, would deal with it. They could not merely dismiss it as they could the evolutionary implications of data from contemporary organisms. Conclusion: Data from fossils is, in principle, much more likely to influence and possibly persuade creationists than data from contemporary organisms.

The big problem, I think, would be in getting them to listen. Many aren't interested, and the relevant info is involved and unfamiliar.

Is "open-minded YEC" an oxymoron? In many cases, yes; but in other cases the people just have never really been exposed to more than a superficial sketch of the truth.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Terry M. Gray<mailto:grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
  To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 10:04 AM
  Subject: Re: Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

  Don,

  You have it just backwards. Dawkins, Eldredge, and I don't find these
  evidences convincing because we already believe in evolution--what on
  earth does that mean anyway from a scientific perspective? These are
  the very evidences that convince us that evolution is the best
  explanation of the currently known data (that it is "true"; what
  Gould and others have called the "fact" of evolution). Were it not
  for these evidences there would be no evolutionary theory. And, yes,
  special creation was the leading "theory" before these evidences came
  to the fore. These are the very things together with the fossil
  record and the antiquity of the earth that "forced"
  scientifically-minded people, like Darwin, to come up with something
  other than special creationism.

  TG
Received on Wed Jan 5 05:10:56 2005