RE: [asa] What is the Christian reaction to Ray Comfort's use of "The Origin of Species"

"They also didn't cite that Collins disagrees with them concerning chimpanzees in the Language of God."

RE: quoting Collins as pro-ID and then implying he is anti-evolution when he is actually pro-evolution.

This sounds like a trick out of the playbook of the 'Expelled" movie For example, in "expelled" they interview McGrath (on an unrelated topic), making/promoting the assumption that McGrath is pro-ID and anti-evolution. McGrath actually wrote negative comments about ID and is pro-evolution as far as I can tell.

If this stuff isn't repudiated by the Christian community, then it will serve as a self-mockery of the Christian community in the eyes of intellectuals. Dawkins will pick up on it, and Eugenie has also been doing battles with Comfort lately, so this will be more fodder for her arsenal.

...Bernie

________________________________
From: Rich Blinne [mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2009 4:40 PM
To: Dehler, Bernie
Cc: asa; Randy Isaac
Subject: Re: [asa] What is the Christian reaction to Ray Comfort's use of "The Origin of Species"

You can see the pdf of it already:

http://assets.livingwaters.com/pdf/OriginofSpecies.pdf

Page 10 of the introduction cited Francis Collins from the following UK Times article that marked the release of The Language of God. (Randy, it might be interesting to get Dr. Collins' reaction given they also rehash the faux Nazi connection on pp. 36-9 which I believe caused a falling out between him and Coral Ridge.)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece

They quoted this as follows:

To ponder how DNA's amazing structure could have come together by sheer accident is indeed amazing, and has even led some to consider the possibility of design. Based on his study of DNA, the director of the U.S. National human Genome research Institute concluded there must be a God. Francis Collins, the scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome, believes it provides a rational basis for a Creator:

"When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can't survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can't help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God's mind."

After quoting Collins, Comfort says this:

DNA is an incredibly detailed language, revealing vast amounts of information encoded in each and every living cell- design which could not have arisen by purely naturalistic means. In every other area of our world, we recognize that information requires intelligence and design requires a designer. with our present-day knowledge of DNA, this presents a formidable challenge to Darwinian evolution.

But somehow strangely -- shall we say by chance? -- they didn't quote the following from the Times article a few paragraphs down:

"I see God's hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way," he says.

The next section goes onto the next page and attempts to explain away the similarities between the chimpanzee and human genomes using material from Answers in Genesis. They also didn't cite that Collins disagrees with them concerning chimpanzees in the Language of God.

A further example of this close relationship stems from examination of the anatomy of human and chimpanzee chromosomes. Chromosomes are the visible manifestation of the DNA genome, apparent in the light microscope at the time that a cell divides. Each chromosome contains hundreds of genes. Figure 5.3 shows a comparison of the chromosomes between a human and a chimpanzee. The human has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, but the chimpanzee has twenty-four. The difference in the chromosome number appears to be a consequence of two ancestral chromosomes having fused together to generate human chromosome 2. That the human must be a fusion is further suggested by studying the gorilla and orangutan - they each have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, looking much like the chimp.

Recently, with the determination of the complete sequence of the human genome, it has become possible to look at the precise location where this proposed chromosomal fusion must have happened. The sequence at that location - along the long arm of chromosome 2 - is truly remarkable. Without getting into the technical details, let me just say that special sequences occur at the tips of all primate chromosomes. Those sequences generally do not occur elsewhere. But they are found right where evolution would have predicted, in the middle of our fused second chromosome. The fusion that occurred as we evolved from the apes has left its DNA imprint here. It is very difficult to understand this observation without postulating a common ancestor.

Collins also showed in Figure 5.1 how similar the inferred DNA sequences of mammalian species with what Darwin had in his 1837 notebook for the tree of life. That would have been interesting in an introduction to Origin but again not there.

Ray Comfort has every right to publish an introduction to a public domain work but at least it shouldn't be YEC's "greatest hits". It ends with a Gospel presentation. I don't believe it's going to be terribly effective and it's the tarnishing of the Gospel that I have the greatest concern.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Sun Nov 15 21:20:07 2009