Ray Comfort recently decided to pollute the waters of intellectual integrity by printing his own edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species putting his own 50-page foreword [edit: corrected spelling throughout] at the beginning. This foreword misrepresents the theory in an attempt to discredit evolution, connect Darwin to Hitler, and generally mislead students.

Students? Yes, Ray Comfort’s Living Water Ministries is threatening to distribute these books to college students free of charge. How kind.

Who better to counter this nonsense than the Secular Student Alliance? I recently took a volunteer position with the organization as Communications Director, and earlier this week we put out a press release announcing our intention to mobilize our groups against the deliberate attempt to mislead students:

“We’re asking students to respond proactively. We believe the best way to respond to misinformation is with a positive, educational campaign,” says August Brunsman, executive director for the Secular Student Alliance.
…
Students are aware that the distributors have the first amendment right to pass out their anti-evolution literature, but are being encouraged by the Secular Student Alliance to use their own rights to respond with a friendly, science-based message.

The Secular Student Alliance at Yale University, for example, has plans to set up a table promoting “alternative theories on sexual education,” appropriately named Students for Stork Acknowledgment.

I am clearly not an unbiased observer, but I think this is the right way to counter ignorance and misinformation: with education and friendliness. To my surprise, our press release just got posted verbatim at Ray Comfort’s blog! There are 83 comments as I write this, with a surprising number of supporters commenting.

Personally, I think we would benefit from printing a copy of the Bible with a foreword at the beginning explaining how each chapter got considered canon or not, how the book is mistranslated, and what Jesus’ followers thought at the time. Essentially, I want to put my college professor Bart Ehrman’s books inside the front cover of the Bible. And then we could distribute that to Sunday school classes.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong for the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins f bananas and turnips… continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We now this because a rising flood of evidence supports it.

Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it. (p. 8-9)

I agree with Dawkins that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming for someone who looks at it with an open mind. Though I’m not sure about the “no reputable scientist disputes it” part. Perhaps that should be “no reputable biologist disputes it,” because that is their discipline — a biologist who denies evolution is like a computer scientist who denies operating systems.

I’m sure there are Christian scientists (the career, not the cult) who dispute evolution, but that doesn’t mean they are not reputable physicists or geologists. It just means they’re brainwashed into believing the Bible over reality.

Dawkins also says, “no unbiased reader will close the book doubting [evolution].” But how can a reader be unbiased? Does such a specimen even exist?

Within just a few thousand years, generations of the mice have evolved a sandy-coloured coat camouflaging themselves from predators.

Most striking is that these mice acquired the mutation for pale fur naturally, then rapidly passed it on.

That makes the fast-evolving deer mouse one of the best examples yet studied of “true” natural selection in action….

Usually the mice have a dark coat, which enables them to blend in with dark soils and avoid being seen by predators such as owls and hawks.

But at Sand Hills in Nebraska, pale-coated mice abound.

I must point out, however, that the deer mice did not evolve into crocoducks, so this probably won’t mean much to fundies…

(the other parts are on youtube)

Science has always reserved its greatest accolades for those who prove what came before to be wrong, and every scientist in the world knows the best way to become famous is to prove everyone else wrong. Nevertheless, pseudo-scientists always argue that scientists have some vested interest in preserving the current order (and thus dooming their careers into obscurity when they could have become famous Nobel prize winners).

This argument has never made any sense, but that doesn’t stop them from making it. So, one more example won’t make any difference to them — people who advocate a bad argument that runs counter to evidence are not dissuaded by more evidence.

The point is, if a scientist found evidence against evolution, he would have every incentive to publish it and argue against evolution. If they could make their case, then they would earn their place in the history books, along with Kepler, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein.

If evolution isn’t true, we don’t want to believe it. We don’t have unreasonable faith in evolution — we accept it because of the massive amounts of evidence for it, and how it allows us to predict future findings (which often come true). If new evidence comes up that shows we were wrong, then we’ll happily believe the new theory.

Even has some great guitar work.

This is a great line:

They’ll have sex and mix up sections
Of their code they’ll have mutations
The whole thing works like clockwork
Over time

I’ll just sit back in the shade
While everyone gets laid
That’s what I call Intelligent Design

If somehow the recognized [dog] breeds existed only as fossils, paleontologists would consider them not one species but many — certainly more than the thirty-six species of wild dogs that live in nature today.

I think that’s a good point, and probably true. Dog breeds would not interbreed in nature, thus making them separate species.

Mirsky highlights the differences between an English Mastiff and the Chihuahua:

Take two that Coyne highlights for their differences — the 180-pound English Mastiff and the two-pound Chihuahua. They’re both considered members of Canis lupus familiaris, and in principle artificial insemination could produce some sort of mix or possibly an exploding Chihuahua. But face it, the only shot a male Chihuahua has with a female Mastiff involves rock climbing spelunking equipment.

Biologists clearly continue to include the two types of dogs within the same species out of modesty. But with creationists fighting evolution education throughout the country, the time calls for bold action. Let’s reassign the trembling, bug-eyed Chihuahua to its own species.

It makes sense to me, but it won’t make a difference to creationists. If anything, they will see it as a sign of desperation: “See, they don’t have any evidence for evolution, so now they’re creating new species out of thin air!” (I guarantee you Ray Comfort will say almost those exact words.)

If it is done, it should be because it’s the best thing to do, not to try and convince creationists.

Mirsky ends with a great one-liner:

Calling a Chihuahua a wolf is like calling someone at the Discovery Institute a scientist.

Indeed.

So what do you think — should some dog breeds be separate species?

It’s a truism that history is done to serve the interests of the present, so it’s not surprising that we look back on Charles Darwin as the major player in the faith vs. reason debate. However, in doing so we ignore the arguments that concerned Darwin himself most of all. In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond & James Moore reconstruct the debates over race and slavery which preoccupied Victorian England, and show how Darwin’s science was influenced by his abolitionist beliefs.

Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

Pullquote: Go proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!
Erasmus Darwin Zoonomia

Darwin was born two years after the slave trade was abolished in England, thanks in some part to his famous grandfathers, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin. Darwin was raised in a fiercely abolitionist family, cutting his teeth on abolitionist tracts and his grandfather Darwin’s excessive poetry. His grandfather Wedgwood bankrolled some of the abolitionist efforts and provided the famous family seal: Am I not a man and a brother? From birth, Darwin was surrounded by a cast of assertive sisters and female cousins who would descend upon him were he to set a foot off the abolitionist course.

But the world that Darwin was entering was changing. Britain was developing a race consciousness, as shown by Sir Walter Scott’s romantic epics of Anglo-Saxon history. What we now call “scientific racism” was developing alongside the subversive sciences of phrenology and crainiology. Samuel Morton was measuring brain size in his skull-strewn lab — called the “American Golgotha” by both friends and enemies — in order to rank the various races by brain power. Any question who ended up on top?

But the central argument which vexed Darwin was advanced by the British slave-holding planter class; that African slaves actually belonged to a difference species than their owners. As this argument developed it took hold amongst naturalists like Morton, Josiah Nott and Darwin’s famous opponent Louis Agassiz. This group eventually took the name “polygenists,” since they believed that mankind began as a number of different species. To the question on the Darwin family seal, the polygenists answered flatly, “No.”

The Mutability of Species

Pullquote: “… plurality of species in the human race does no more violence to the bible, than do the admitted facts of Astronomy and Geology.”
Josiah Nott

Desmond & Moore do an excellent job of showing the complexity of the argument. Christians war with Christians over interpretations of Genesis: does it support the plurality of human species? Competing naturalists study dogs and farm animals to discover just how mutable the species could be, all attempting to show how Africans could — or could not — be related to Anglo-Saxons. The potential fertility of hybrids and crossbreeds was hotly debated.

Darwin’s entry into this debate was on the issue of the mutability of the species. Some naturalists maintained that a species could only shift a certain amount. A few went so far as to suggest that all breeds of dog were descent from different species of canine (wolf, dingo, coyote, etc.). So Darwin hoped to show that natural selection, and particularly sexual selection, could account for the extreme divergence of species. Thus he could show how hominids of such apparent differences could come from the same stock.

This is Desmond & Moore’s thesis, and it’s a rough case to make at times. Darwin’s timidity is legendary, and he was not constitutionally suited for the life of a crusading abolitionist or scientist. Instead, we find Darwin’s passion showing through at odd moments. One of the most telling is his reaction to his mentor Charles Lyell, who soft pedaled the reality of American slavery in his Travels in North America. Darwin is coldly polite in his correspondence, but draws Lyell’s attention to his own, yet to be completed, Journal of Researches. There, five hundred pages in, Lyell would discover an account of Darwin’s experiences with slavery on his Beagle voyage, including the following:

“Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth!” (p. 499-500)

Years later, the fire-breathing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrsion would hear Darwin’s full broadside, read to him by his son. The fact that we find a late life correspondence between these two men tells us much about Darwin.

Breadth and Depth

Since Darwin was reluctant to wear his heart on his sleeve, Desmond & Moore dig deep into the archives. The work heavily with Darwin’s correspondence, both personal and professional. They pay close attention to aspects of his life that are usually glossed over, like his year studying in Edinburgh for his aborted career as a doctor. Desmond and Moore show the intellectual currents that swirled around him, yet still find time to consider his relationship with the African man who taught the young Darwin the art of taxidermy.

This is history the way I like it: rich in detail yet sweeping in scope. You explore Darwin’s personal convictions, and on the way you seem to meet everyone of interest in the early Victorian period. Darwin emerges as neither a scientific saint nor a amoral anti-christ, but a man finding a unique way to fight his family’s war: the fight for universal brotherhood.

Vorjack is a librarian/archivist and a public historian, living with his wife in history-soaked Albany, New York.

“Without God, how can you have objective moral values?”

Many atheists roll their eyes at this. Of course moral values can exist without God. We don’t need God to tell us that rape and murder are wrong.

But when atheists are pressed to explain precisely how objective moral values exist, they have a hard time with it.

False Grounds of Morality

Pullquote: Appealing to an invisible moral sense instead of evolution is like appealing to Zeus to explain lightning.

Of course, Christian morality is doomed because it grounds morality in something that doesn’t exist: the commands of God.

But atheistic morality does little better. Let me explain.

Some atheists say that morality is about maximizing well-being or complexity or happiness because these things have intrinsic value. But what is intrinsic value? How do you detect it? If we could freeze an act of kindness in time and crack it open, would we find a glowing orb inside called “intrinsic value”? Intrinsic value, it seems, is mysterious and undetectable, and it’s odd to see so many atheists embrace it after having just rejected God for being mysterious and undetectable.

Others think morality is about a hypothetical social contract, perhaps one we would agree to behind a “veil of ignorance” about what lot in life we will be given. But a hypothetical contract is no more real than a hypothetical God, and cannot serve as the ground of morality.

Still others say morality is about the fulfillment of certain rights or duties, such as the right to life or the duty not to harm. But where do these rights and duties come from? How do we know which rights and duties there are? They seem to be invisible, and as atheists like to point out, “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”

Some atheists think we can know what is right and wrong because we can sense them with the “conscience” – a mysterious sixth sense that can directly detect moral values. But no such cognitive faculty has ever been found, and we don’t even know what, exactly, it’s supposed to be detecting.

In fact, our moral beliefs are quite easily explained by biological and cultural evolution. Appealing to an invisible moral sense instead of evolution to explain our moral beliefs is like appealing to Zeus to explain lightning after we already know how electric charge works.

So what does this mean? Is morality just a trick played on us by our genes?

I think not.

Reasons for Action

Pullquote: God may be dead, but morality need not die with him. Morality existed long before man invented God, and morality will continue without him.

Morality is about reasons for action. Reasons for action to feed the poor. Reasons for action to not torture children.

The problem with most moral theories is that they refer to reasons for action that do not exist: God’s commands, intrinsic values, hypothetical contracts, invisible rights and duties, etc.

But reasons for action do exist. Put your hand on a hot stove and try to tell me there is no reason for action to move your hand.

But which reasons for action do exist?

Desires exist. They are brain states. Soon, neuroscientists will be able to map and measure them directly in the brain. Desires are the reasons for action that exist.

Some things tend to fulfill desires. Other things tend to thwart desires. This is where good and bad come from. They come from the only reasons for action that exist: desires. It is an objective fact about the world that desires exist, and that certain things tend to fulfill desires while other things tend to thwart them.

Desire-based theories of morality are all the rage in moral philosophy today. I think one of them in particular is more plausible than the others. It is called desire utilitarianism. You can read about it here.

God may be dead, but morality need not die with him. Morality existed long before man invented God, and morality will continue without him.

Lukeprog is an IT consultant from Los Angeles, California. He writes about philosophy of religion and meta-ethics at Common Sense Atheism.

I almost threw my laptop it made me soooooooooo mad! Made me wonder what the logo would look like after we’re taken outta here!

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I’m not surprised Google has put the missing link logo on there, one of their founders is a Russian and we know atheism is strong in Russia. Not surprising at all.

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“Scientist unveil fossil of Darwinian masillae’…I mean..I am really tired of this stupid AC world… MY FATHER IS YHWH…MY GOD AND MY SAVIOUR YESHUA and THE KADOSH RUACH….they worship satan…. Sick stuff…

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I find myself mad and in disbelief that googel would celebrate such an out right falsehood.

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THAT is why I use BLINGO instead of Google.

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This is just disgusting. Disgusting.

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Gee Whiz, if Google is trying to stay in touch with what is going on in the world today, they should change their logo to have burning red flames of fire around it…… GOOHELL

I don’t want to believe people like this actually exist, but alas, there is too much evidence…

Update 11pm: They are very excited about all the “proclaimed non-believers” showing up at their site today:

HALLELUJAH!! PRAISE GOD!

This thread caused a huge stir on another site, proclaimed non-believers. That in turn created curiosity. Which in turn brought a bunch of them here to see what was the big deal.

They then went back to their forum and laughed at us and made fun of us.

But I betcha it also got some of them to thinking and their visitation to our site may very well have brought someone to the Lord. If out of all those, just one was saved, it was well worth the traffic issues it caused on this site.

I hate to break it to them, but I highly doubt anyone was “saved” today by their overreaction to a Google logo.