tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51839293502778914882024-03-08T04:21:02.131-08:00Cretinism vs. EvilutionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-25036890301139388832012-03-21T20:01:00.000-07:002019-09-01T13:46:40.906-07:00Introduction<p><strong>Cretinism or Evilution?</strong></p>
<p>Why <em>that</em> Title?</p>
<p>Consider the combination of chance and "editorial selection" that evolved the title of this newsletter. My spell-checker lacks the word "creationism" in its dictionary, so each time that word is encountered, an alternative pops up at the bottom of my screen, "cretinism" (i.e., "a congenital deficiency resulting in idiocy"). As for the word, "evilution," such a mutation would never have survived, had it not arisen in exactly the right ecological niche, viz., the minds of a few "creation evangelists."</p>
<p>Unfortunately, only creationists with a highly evolved sense of humor are likely to read further than the title of this newsletter. (The remainder of creationists prefer reading books with far less humorous titles like, <em>The Twilight of Evolution</em>,<br /><em>The Collapse of Evolution</em>, or <em>Evolution: The Lie</em>.)</p>
<p>An added note on "Cretinism." According to my Webster's dictionary the word, "cretin," was originally a variant French pronunciation of "chretien" which meant, "Christian." Only later did "cretin" come to mean "a congenital idiot."</p>
<p>An added note on "evilution." The heliocentric theory of Copernicus was considered "evil" by the learned theologians of the Church. Less well known is that Newton's theory of gravity was also considered "evil." Some Bible believers vigorously urged that Newton's theory "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that Newton "substituted gravity for Providence." Galen's idea of the blood circulating in the body was considered "evil." Some preachers in the last century ranted against anesthetics being "evil." (Doesn't Genesis say that God deliberately "increased woman's pain in childbirth?" So who are we to seek to overthrow "God's plan" by allowing women to be anesthetized?) And let's not forget the terrible "evil" of "Playing and/or working on Sunday." For centuries Christians made laws that kept the working man's one guaranteed day off, Sunday, a dour and fun-free day. Parks, beaches, sports centers, movie theaters, bowling alleys, libraries, museums and restaurants were all closed. Attending church was the only "entertainment" available to people on Sunday. And what about some Bible believers' opposition to the "evils" of "dancing" and "masturbation?" And the list goes on...</p>
<p>Considering the benefits to humanity in the way of education, relief of pain, and the pursuit of honest pleasures, that have come from things which learned and devoted Bible believers have labeled "evil," it would appear that the term, "evilution," has a lot to commend it!</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-77529693732117708922012-03-21T19:57:00.000-07:002019-09-01T13:46:22.684-07:00Main Index<p>Written by Ed Babinski in the *mid-latter 1990s, this series provides scientific inquiry on a number of themes related to the Creation vs. Evolution debate, including Geocentrism, Heliocentrism and the Biblical Flat Earth, Human and Animal Evolution. Including some pithy and insightful criticism of Darwin's critics. <sup>*Originally for <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Talk Origins</a></sup></p>
<p>Cretinism or Evilution?<br /><br /><strong>Number 1, Winter-Spring 1995</strong></p>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Inaugural Issue: <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/introduction.html">What is Cretinism or Evilution?</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/27-best-things-ever-said-in-favor-of.html">27 Best Things</a> Ever Said in Favor of Human Evolution</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/looking-at-how-creationists-quote.html">Revised Quote Book</a>: Looking at how Creationists Quote Evolutionists</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/creationists-admit-difficulties-with.html">Creationists admit "Difficulties"</a> with their Hypothesis</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The Handy Dandy Religious Right Refuter: <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-much-better-were-things-in-good-old.html">How Much Better Were Things</a> in the "Good Ole Days"</li>
</ul>
<p>Cretinism or Evilution?<br /><br /><strong>Number 2, Summer 1995</strong></p>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/geocentrism.html">Geocentrism</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/biblical-astronomy.html">"Biblical Astronomy!"</a> The latest advance in "creation science!</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Forget about the "evils of Darwinism", some creationists say the initial blame lies with the "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/evils-of-copernicanism.html">evils of Copernicanism</a>!"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Excerpts from Frank Zindler's "Report from the <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/center-of-universe.html">center of the universe</a>" and "Turtles all the way down"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/holy-heavens.html">The Holy Heavens</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/bibles-geocentrism.html">The Bible's Geocentrism</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Henry Morris' ingenious attempts at <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/henry-morris-denies-geocentrism.html">denying the Bible's geocentrism</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Henry Morris on the existence of <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/henry-morris-on-existence-of-other.html">other planets</a> circling distant stars</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Is the Earth the "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/is-earth-center-of-gods-interest.html">Center of God's interest</a>" with the rest of the cosmos providing various essential services for the earth and its inhabitants?</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Catholic theologians disagree on <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/sinfulness-of-extraterrestrials.html">sinfulness of extraterrestrials</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/inspiration-of-bible-compared-with.html">The "inspiration" of the Bible</a> compared with discoveries of modern astronomy</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/parallels-between-creationists-and.html">Parallels</a> between creationists and geocentrists</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>From abandoning geocentrism to accepting evolution: a "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/liberal-trend-among-evangelicals.html">liberal trend</a>" among evangelical christians?</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Geocentrism, young-earth creationism and the <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/immensity-of-space-and-time.html">immensity of space</a> and time</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A critique of Bouw's book, <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/critique-of-geocentricity-review-by.html">Geocentricity</a> by Francis Graham</li>
</ul>
<p>Cretinism or Evilution?<br /><br /><strong>Number 3, Winter/Spring 1996</strong><br /><br />Creationist Tall Tales!</p>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/creationist-folk-science.html">Creationist Folk Science</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/men-over-ten-feet-tall.html">Men Over Ten Feet Tall!</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>A <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/flood-evidence-ninety-foot-tall-plum.html">Ninety-Foot Tall Plum Tree</a>! - (Bearing green leaves and fruit found frozen on an island hundreds of miles north of the arctic circle!)</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Remains of <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/remains-of-warm-weather-hippos-have.html">Warm Weather Hippos</a> Found in the Tundra's Frozen Muck!</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/looking-at-how-creationists-quote_19.html">Revised Quote Book</a>: Looking at how creationists quote evolutionists</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>A "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/devilish-quotation-darwin-and-devils.html">devilish</a>" quotation</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>An <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/out-of-context-quotation-richard.html">out of context</a> quotation</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>An <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/old-out-of-context-quotation-charles.html">old, out of context</a> quotation</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Further quotations from Darwin on the <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/darwin-on-evolution-of-complex.html">evolution of complex structures</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Further quotations from Darwin on "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/quotations-from-charles-darwin-on.html">Design</a>"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Old, out of context quotation(s) from <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/old-out-of-context-quotations-from.html">French scientists</a>, Part 1</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Old, <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/more-out-of-context-quotations-of.html">out of context</a> quotation(s) from French scientists, Part 2</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Darwinism: Reports of <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/death-of-darwinism.html">its death</a> have been greatly exaggerated</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>"Social Darwinism"</p>
<p>Also of interest is the statement in the press release for the Dictionary of Darwinism and of Evolution: "To combat the endless distortions of Darwin's ideas, an international team of 150 specialists in the biological sciences and human studies has, over a period of 10 years, achieved an historical and critical synthesis of Darwinism and evolutionary theory. At last the matter has been clarified: Darwin is not the father of modern anti-egalitarian theories; Darwin is the founder neither of negative eugenics nor of dogmas of the elimination of the weak; Darwin is not the justifier of Victorian imperialism, in short, Darwin is not responsible for Social Darwinism.'"</p>
<p>Likewise, Peter J. Bowler (of Queen's University, Belfast) in his recent book, Darwinism (Twayne, 1993), discusses the uses of the concept "Social Darwinism" and shows how such uses are often illogical extensions of the theory of evolution and natural selection. Another lesson for creationists to ponder.</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>Cretinism or Evilution?<br /><br /><strong>Number 4 and 5 <br /><br />Summer/Fall 1996, Winter/Spring 1997</strong><br /><br />Why We Believe in a Designer!</p>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>E. T. Babinski's "Cretinism or Evilution" speech at Dragon-Con in Atlanta, June 1996; or, "There is no joy in Eden, for <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/no-joy-in-eden-creationism-has-struck.html">creationism</a> has struck out"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Why we believe in a <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-we-believe-in-designer.html">designer</a>!</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/further-reading.html">Further reading</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>The most provocative things ever said about the way God "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/most-provocative-things-ever-said-about.html">designed</a>" the cosmos</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Who is "<a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/who-is-lord-of-flies-satan-or-god.html">The Lord of the Flies</a>?" Satan or God? Martin Luther's view vs. Mark Twain's</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/problem-of-pain-and-egomania-of-psalms.html">problem of pain</a> and the egomania of the Psalms</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>More of the best things ever said in favor of <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/more-of-best-things-ever-said-in-favor.html">human evolution</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/berlinski-or-babinski.html">Berlinski</a> or Babinski?</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/genesis-is-jokesis.html">Genesis</a> is a jokesis!</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>Natural selections from Uncle Ed's <a href="http://cretinism-vs-evilution.blogspot.com/2012/03/natural-selections-from-uncle-eds-holy.html">holy book</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>"A preacher thundering from his pulpit about the uniqueness of human beings with their God-given souls would not like to realize that his very gestures, the hairs that rose on his neck, the deepened tones of his outraged voice, and the perspiration that probably ran down his skin under clerical vestments are all manifestations of anger in mammals. If he was sneering at Darwin a bit (one does not need a mirror to know that one sneers), did he remember uncomfortably that a sneer is derived from an animal's lifting its lip to remind an enemy of its fangs? Even while he was denying the principle of evolution, how could a vehement man doubt such intimate evidence?"</p>
<p>SALLY CARRIGHAR, WILD HERITAGE</p>
<p>"1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of `You may believe that you're descended from monkeys, but I believe you're a creature of God.' I guess that Buchanan hadn't considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including `monkeys.' It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called `creationism' is the feeling that somehow parts of God's creation are not worthy of being our ancestors."</p>
<p>TOM SCHARLE (scharle.1@nd.edu)</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-21830960414377256692012-03-19T15:47:00.002-07:002019-09-01T13:07:49.702-07:00Natural Selections from Uncle Ed's Holy Book<p><em>Natural Selections from Uncle Ed's Holy Book</em><br /><br /></p>
<ul>
<li>With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing; the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of mortal life.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Protagoras</p>
<ul>
<li>My philosophy remains Transcendental Agnosticism. There are realities and intelligences greater than conditioned normal consciousness recognizes, but it is premature to dogmatize about them at this primitive stage of our evolution. We've hardly begun to crawl off the surface of the cradle-planet.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Robert Anton Wilson</p>
<ul>
<li>The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Eric Hoffer</p>
<ul>
<li>All great religions in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent [or American T.V. screen], who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.</li>
</ul>
<p>- H. L. Mencken</p>
<ul>
<li>We have infinite trouble in solving [natural and] man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover "the secret of God" that our difficulties disappear.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Mark Twain (at the top of his sarcastic form)</p>
<ul>
<li>Every other sect supposes itself in possession of the truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong. Like a man travelling in foggy weather they see those at a distance before them wrapped up in a fog, as well as those behind them, and also people in the fields on each side; but near them, all appears clear, though in truth they are as much in the fog as any of them...</li>
</ul>
<p>In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.</p>
<p>- Benjamin Franklin</p>
<ul>
<li>I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Wilson Mizner</p>
<ul>
<li>An evangelical Christian once told me, "Only Jesus Christ can save Man..." (What about Woman, I wondered? Oh, well, one does not expect semantic sophistication from literalist Bible believers) "... and restore him to his lost state of peace with God, himself and others." Yeah, sure, and only <em>new</em> Pepsi can make you feel really happy, and only our brand is better than the competition, and only our country is the best country. It is truly amazing to me that people can utter such arrogant nonsense with no humor, no sense of how offensive they are to others, no doubt or trepidation, and no suspicion that they sound exactly like advertisers, con-men and other swindlers. It is really hard to understand such child-like prattling. If I were especially conceited about something (a state I try to avoid, but if I fell into it...), if for instance I decided I had the best garden or the handsomest face in Ireland, I would still retain enough common sense to suspect that I would sound like a conceited fool if I went around telling everybody those opinions. I would have enough tact left, I hope, to satisfy my conceit by dreaming that other people would notice on their own that my garden and/or my face were especially lovely. People who go around innocently and blithely announcing that they belong to the Master Race or the Best Country Club or have the One True Religion seem to have never gotten beyond the kindergarten level of ego-display. Do they have no modesty, no tact, no shame, no adult common sense at all? Do they have any suspicion how silly their conceit sounds to the majority of the nonwhite nonChristian men and women of the world? To me, they seem like little children wearing daddy's clothes and going around shouting, "Look how grown-up I am! Look at me, me, me!"</li>
</ul>
<p>There are more amusing things than ego-games, conceit and one-upmanship. Really, there are. I suspect that people stay on that childish level because they have never discovered how interesting and exciting the adult world is.</p>
<p>If one must play ego-games, I still think it would be more polite, and more adult, to play them in the privacy of one's head. In fact, despite my efforts to be a kind of Buddhist, I do relapse into such ego-games on occasion; but I have enough respect for human intelligence to keep such thoughts to myself. I don't go around announcing that I have painted the greatest painting of our time; I hope that people will notice that by themselves. Why do the people whose ego-games consist of day-dreaming about being part of the Master Race or the One True Religion not keep that precious secret to themselves, also, and wait for the rest of the human race to notice their blinding superiority?</p>
<p>- Robert Anton Wilson</p>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Salman Rushdie, <em>Imaginary Homelands</em></p>
<ul>
<li>People need religion like they need a lift in their shoe. If it makes them feel a little taller and happier about themselves, fine. But if you keep that lift in your shoe all the time, as you walk, jog, play sports, etc., you can wind up sore, or maybe even crippled...And, PLEEEEASE, let's not send folks to other countries to nail lifts onto the natives' feet!</li>
</ul>
<p>- George Carlin</p>
<ul>
<li>I'm not offended by Pagan, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, or Atheist viewpoints in fiction. Or in non-fiction, for that matter. I may disagree - but I'm almost certain to disagree with any author at some point. To anyone who equates disagreement with hatred, I say, "Bosnia!"</li>
</ul>
<p>- Gene Wolfe (award winning Sci-Fi author)</p>
<ul>
<li>During my life I have made countless friends by arguing - I am a Northerner living in the South, a Jew in the most Gentile community on the continent, an integrationist among white supremacists. I have a lot to argue about. But I have made friends over discussing a difference of opinion because I make my mind up about what I believe, but I do not make my mind up about people.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Harry Golden, columnist who wrote during the 1940s to 1960s in the Southern U.S.</p>
<ul>
<li>What is the best book in the world? I'd say that even the best book remains a mere book, and not life itself. Even the best book is one that can eventually bore you, if only through repetition. Be open to the best in every person, every experience and every book, and use your better judgment, built upon a lifetime of your own experiences. Books are not life, and cannot lead your life for you. You must decide. Even Bible believers have to decide which passages in Scripture deserve greater emphasis than others. And if an action commends itself to your conscience you don't need a book to also tell you whether it is "good" or not.</li>
</ul>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Groucho Marx</p>
<ul>
<li>Do you believe that the God who "created your mind" with it's exceeding curiosity (well, maybe not <em>your</em> mind), and its ability to ask the most fascinating questions of nature, art, beauty, science, etc., would also want to absolve us of having to think by giving us a so-called "perfect book" that must never be deeply questioned?</li>
</ul>
<p>- E. T. Babinski (in an internet discussion with a Bible believer)</p>
<ul>
<li>Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book. The inspiration of the Bible depends on the credulity of him who reads.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Robert Ingersoll</p>
<ul>
<li>Ever notice the way that preachers of "ye olde tyme religion" drag out the pronunciation of the name of their favorite holy book, calling it the "Buy-Bull?" Who buys that bull? Even the Bible tells you not to!</li>
</ul>
<p>"I will accept no bull..." Psalm 50:9 (NASB)</p>
<p>"I will take no bull[ock]..." Psalm 50:9 (KJV)</p>
<p>"...the rest of the bull - he must take outside..."<br /><br />Leviticus 4:12 (NIV)</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>Read the Bible as you would any other book; think of it as you would any other, use your reasoning ability to ask questions as they naturally arise, just as you would if you were reading another book. And it will eventually dawn on you that the books of the Bible, or at least portions of them, were of strictly human and sometimes barbarian, invention.</li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, if you have gazed at the Bible for many years through "theology colored glasses" then you may not be able to detect the many shades and depths of questions visible within the text nor those within your own head and heart as they relate to the text. Because after years of church indoctrination most people don't even realize they have acquired a particular "theological" slant, or that they have been hypnotized by "orthodox" comments made by fellow church goers, and by "orthodox" commentaries on Scripture filled with pious platitudes - commentaries that pass in silence over difficulties, or else that read into the text "orthodox" meanings that are not there.</p>
<p>Not only the Bible, but the Muslim's Koran, the Mormon's Book of Mormon, and the Hindu's Bhagavad-Gita, have pious adherents and countless pious commentaries written about them. In courtrooms in India, people are even "sworn in" with their hands on the Gita, not the Bible.</p>
<p>And isn't it laughable when two "fundamentalist" commentators cannot agree on the meaning of a verse or group of verses, each commentator insisting that his interpretation is the perfectly natural one God intended? Both commentators agree that God wouldn't bother to write a book unless every chapter and verse in it was relevant to believers like themselves, believers who were being "led into all truth" by the "Holy Spirit." God wouldn't let His words and their meaning get lost in hazy translation, or misconstrued over time, especially not by true believers like themselves, would He? Of course, the history of Christian dogma tells a different story. The controversies that revolve around interpreting the books of the Bible have been around since before certain books were even picked to be <em>in</em> "the Bible." There were many competing interpretations <em>before</em> the Nicene Council in 325 A.D. (to which we owe the invention of "The Trinity"), all the way up to the multitude of different Christian denominations today, and God didn't stop plenty of blood being shed over them.</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>Try as they might to be humble, to avoid the pitfalls of intellectual pride - largely because the Bible tells them to, perhaps - fundamentalists are dogmatic and doctrinalistic because their doctrine of the text forces them to be. They are reading an "inerrant" text. What they read, and therefore by definition what <em>they</em> interpret, must be inerrant.</li>
</ul>
<p>- Kathleen C. Boone, <em>The Bible Tells Them So</em></p>
<ul>
<li>I don't claim to be inerrant, but I recently received a miraculous vision that showed me exactly how the world will end: It is the year six billion A.D. and our sun is a slowly dying star. But our technology has grown so advanced that we simply move our planet. We head for the Andromeda galaxy and meet another planet headed in the opposite direction. We...play...chicken.</li>
</ul>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-21312767192335154812012-03-19T15:41:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:07:33.705-07:00Genesis is a Jokesis!<p><em>Genesis is a Jokesis!</em></p>
<ul>
<li>Did God "gab" the world into being? Did His glossolalia fill the void? If so, in which tongue did He dictate Creation? Literalist Hebrew scholars assume that the book of Genesis contains the first recorded syllables of God's speech, "Let there be light!" (in Hebrew). Literalist Moslems insist that Arabic is the language of Allah (God), and therefore it is an insult or worse to translate their holy book, the Koran, into foreign tongues that are not the language of God. While Hindus claim that the Sanskrit syllable, "AUM," encompasses all the vibrations of Creation.</li>
</ul>
<p>Personally, I do not pretend to know what language God used to call forth Creation. It appears that only angels were listening to God's speech at the time, and I hesitate to declare if these were Hebrew, Islamic, or Hindu angels. Therefore, I find it easiest to assume that creation by the "word" of God is merely a poetic description of how God "called" the cosmos into being. But if the description of God "speaking," and the record of His alleged "words," is poetry, what does that say about how the rest of the story in Genesis should be viewed?</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>And God said, "Let there be light." And the light causeth cancer.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>God created everything out of nothing but the nothingness still shows through.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Work for a week, then 6000+ years on holiday - isn't God lazy?</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Genesis says that after God created everything He "saw that it was good...and rested." In short, God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The world is proof that God is a committee.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>If God lived on earth, people would knock out his windows. - Yiddish saying</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Maybe God is a kid playing SimEarth?</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>According to Genesis, chapter one, the "sun, moon and stars" were "made" (asah), and "set" (natan) in the heavens "to provide light, and for signs and seasons" <em>after</em> the earth was made. So, the "earth" existed <em>before</em> the "sun, moon and stars!"</li>
</ul>
<p>Did our lonely planet twiddle its continents as it <em>waited</em> for the sun to be created, which would grab our earth with its superior gravitation and girdle our planet round its fat fiery waist; <em>waited</em> for the moon to be created to fuel the earth's tidal engines; <em>waited</em> for billions and billions of gargantuan flaming balls to be created, whose light extends in all direction to the farthest reaches of the cosmos (and which do <em>not</em> merely exist to "light the earth" and "for signs and seasons" on earth)?</p>
<p>According to the same chapter of Genesis, even vegetation and "fruit trees" were created <em>before</em> the "sun, moon and stars." As if God had decided, "Fifty-billion galaxies, including the sun, planets and many moons of the solar system must remain uncreated; in fact all the empty space in the cosmos must remain unfilled, until I have fashioned some orange, banana, and coconut trees on earth." Talk about an earth-centered creation account!</p>
<p>Other "earth-centered clues" include the way that the earth and all that lives on it took "four days" to create while the rest of the cosmos, like the "sun, moon, and the stars also," only took "one day" to create. So the Creator spent "four days" on the earth and only "one day" on the rest of the universe?</p>
<p>All of this leads me to doubt that the Hebrews ever viewed the earth as one among many "planets" or viewed the stars as "distant suns, or, distant `lamps' equally as `great' as the sun." The ancients simply viewed the "earth" as the "lower half" of creation, with the "upper half" being the "heavens" in which the sun, moon and stars were "made" and "set" to light the lower half. It's a flat world after all!</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>Speaking of the creation of man, did you know that there is only a 2% difference between the overall genetic makeup of man and chimpanzee? I can see God, on the sixth day of creation. On the last minute of the sixth day of creation. He's been goofing off all day. He still hasn't created man. Then he looks at his watch. "Oh <em>Meeee</em>! Wait, I've got an idea. Where'd I put those chimpanzee genes?" (God searches His pockets.)</li>
</ul>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>On the sixth day of creation God was walking alone through the garden of Eden and thought "What this place needs is someone to cultivate and keep it (Gen.2:15)." Then God spied some chimpanzees in a tree and thought, "Hey, what if I monkeyed around with this creature's genes? If I changed just 2% of its DNA I think I might be able to come up with a passable <em>gardener</em>."</li>
</ul>
<p>(God goofed, making Adam the first "Martin <em>Gardner</em>," whose thirst for knowledge couldn't be satiated by merely thumbing through a Farmer's Almanac. He had to taste the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mr. Gardner is an ex-fundamentalist Christian, the author of <em>Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science</em>, and, <em>The Whys of A Philosophical Scrivener</em>. He was also the mathematical puzzle columnist for <em>Scientific American</em> magazine for several decades.)</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>In the Bible it says Adam named the animals. Did he go around saying, "You're `Fred,' and you're...hmmmmm...`Barney?'" Probably not.</li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, did Adam's names resemble <em>scientific nomenclature</em>? Did Adam divide every living thing into its phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Did Adam start the branch of science known as cladistics, which studies everything it can about a living thing's anatomy and genes before fitting it into it's proper category?</p>
<p>No, I don't think Adam did that either.</p>
<p>So maybe Adam gave the animals colloquial "artsy sounding" names?</p>
<p>In any case, why should I be interested? We don't use Adam's "names" anymore. Besides, if I ever run into Adam or his immediate children in the next life I don't want to waste time arguing over whether a pig ^. .^</p>
<p>should be called a "pig," or <em>must</em> be called a "dooble-hizpot," because that's what "Father Adam" named it "in the beginning."</p>
<p>Creationists think the story points to Adam having had a "super brain," able to invent names for millions of creatures in a matter of days or hours, and remember which creature each name belonged to. Yeah, but could he do it again on a TV talk show, for us all to see, like Harry Lorraine the "memory expert" did, who memorized the names of every audience member, and then recalled them all on sight a little while later?</p>
<p>Then again, what's the point of God having Adam "name" all these creatures, especially ones that Adam was not likely to see or encounter again, like creatures deep in lakes, oceans, caves and burrows in the earth, or high up on mountainsides, or in the tallest branches and leaves of tree-canopied rain forests, or for that matter, having him "name" creatures so tiny that no one would even know they existed until after the microscope had been invented "six thousand years" [sic] hence?</p>
<p>The Hebrew tale about "Adam's naming of the animals" tells us more about ancient Hebrew ignorance of the breadth and depth of the biological world (or more about their mythic thought patterns) than about "Adam's super brain."</p>
<p>And what about naming all the <em>plant</em> species? The Bible says nothing about that. I guess even Adam's "super brain" had its limitations. Yet since Adam was given "every <em>green plant</em> to eat" and couldn't eat any of the animals "in the beginning," wouldn't it have been more useful for him to start off by naming all the plants rather than all the animals? Or did Adam point out food to Eve by saying, "See that `dooble-hizpot' over there? That <em>green stuff</em> it's munching is really good, I tried some yesterday."</p>
<p>Too bad good old Adam couldn't keep focused in the forefront of his "super brain" the one thing worth remembering according to the Bible fable, which was, "Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge." But then how could a "super brain" resist the temptation to ingesting more "knowledge?" Sounds like a sting operation to me.</p>
<p>Needless to say, creationists take this stuff very seriously, as in the July 1995 "Impact" article #265, "Could Adam Really Name All Those Animals?" by William J. Spear, Jr., part of a series of "Vital Articles on Science/Creation" produced and distributed by the Institute for Creation Research, and mailed out to probably tens of thousands each month. Spear says that God used something similar to modern day VR (virtual reality) technology, i.e., when God "formed every beast of the field and fowl of the air out of the ground...and <em>brought them unto Adam to see</em> what he would name them." (Gen. 2:19-21)</p>
<p>I'm tempted to add a final word about this "vitally scientific" ICR article, but I can't. Some stuff just writes its own punch line.</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p>
<ul>
<li>Unless the Lord God was looking for a helpmeet for Adam, why did he cause the animals to pass before Adam (as it says in Genesis chapter two)? And why did he, after the menagerie had passed by, pathetically exclaim, "But for Adam there was not found a helpmeet for him"? It seems that Adam saw nothing that struck his fancy. The fairest ape, the sprightliest chimpanzee, the loveliest baboon, the most bewitching orangutan, the most fascinating gorilla failed to touch with love's sweet pain, poor Adam's lonely heart...[So God decided to make Adam a helpmeet out of Adam's own side.] Imagine a Lord God with a bone or bloody slice of flesh from Adam's side in His hand with which to start a woman, trying to make up His mind whether to make a blond or a brunette!</li>
</ul>
<p>- Robert Ingersoll</p>
<ul>
<li>When Adam was a single man<br /><br />He couldn't find a mate.<br /><br />While all the other animals<br /><br />Could riffle up a date.
<p><br />This agitated Adam,<br /><br />Handsome, tall and slim,<br /><br />Seeing two of everything<br /><br />But only one of him.</p>
<p><br />But when the Lord came by one day<br /><br />And took Adam by the hand,<br /><br />He asked him to name the animals<br /><br />In air and sea and land.</p>
<p><br />"From all the animals I made,<br /><br />I expect you to choose a mate,<br /><br />Some charming little female<br /><br />With whom you can have a date."</p>
<p><br />But when the job was finished<br /><br />Poor Adam stood alone,<br /><br />There was no mate that he could date,<br /><br />None he could call his own.</p>
<p><br />Now Adam was disconsolate,<br /><br />He began to fret and grieve.<br /><br />It was then the Lord got busy<br /><br />And made him Mother Eve.</p>
<p><br />Just think what might have happened<br /><br />To folks like me and you,<br /><br />If Adam had selected as his mate<br /><br />A female kangaroo.</p>
<p>- Sam Hill</p></li>
<li>In the garden of Eden sat Adam,<br /><br />Massaging the chest of his madame.<br /><br />He giggled with mirth,<br /><br />For he knew that on earth<br /><br />There were only two boobs,<br /><br />And he had `em!</li>
<li>Adam (right after Eve was created): "Hey God, I've got more ribs. You got more women?"<br /><br />Adam (a year later): "Hey God it's not funny anymore, I want my rib back!"<br /><br />God created man, but I could do better.</li>
<li><p>- Erma Bombeck</p></li>
<li>You think Oedipus had a problem? Adam was Eve's mother!</li>
<li>If Eve was created "from Adam's side" she must have been tiny! But he loved her. How big of Adam.</li>
<li><p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>If Eve was created from Adam's "flesh and bone" was she, in a manner of speaking, "cloned" from the <em>DNA</em> in Adam's blood and bone cells? A female clone would look almost exactly like the male original, and bear a greater resemblance than any sister does to her brother. Talk about self-love! Makes incest look tame by comparison! Clone yourself a marriage partner! Hey, it may become the wave of the future and it's Biblical! "Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone," clone of my clone.</li>
<li><p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>God said, "It is not good that man should be alone. Let us make him an help meet." Yet so far was she from helping him at all that she deceived him, and was in part the cause of his and her own fall.</li>
<li><p>- The Roman Emperor Julian in his critique of Christianity, <em>Against the Nazarenes</em> (of which all the original copies were destroyed by Christians who would not put up with criticisms of their beliefs; mere fragments of Julian's work have survived in a Christian apologist's attempted rebuttal to Julian's embarrassing insights)</p></li>
<li>If Adam and Eve were the only two people around, and God told them to multiply, then their <em>sons and daughters</em> must have had some interesting arguments before bedtime over who gets to sleep with whom. Talk about sibling rivalry! If only God had had enough foresight to create <em>another</em> pair besides Adam and Eve. Then we wouldn't all be descended from the incestuous children of that first couple. Of course, another pair would have made the snake's job harder, having to convince four people, not just two, to eat the forbidden fruit, and the story would have dragged out longer.</li>
<li><p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>God the "Father" threw his first two children out of his house (or garden) after their first indiscretion, and barred their way back with a flaming sword. I don't know a single father on earth who'd treat his children like that after only their first indiscretion. What did God expect from "newborns" (as well as "newlyweds")? Or did Adam forget to floss after "eating" the precious piece of "forbidden fruit?" My, how horrible!</li>
<li><p>Actually, Genesis, chapter one, is about how man got swindled out of eternal life. Adam and Eve are hustled from the garden by a frightened deity after they've tasted of the tree of knowledge "and become like one of us" [like "gods," or like "God," depending on your translation]. Better evict them before they take a bite out of the "tree of eternal life," and become even <em>more</em> like gods.</p>
<p>Such myths were invented to explain why man was so superior to the animals in having a "god-like mind and amazing creative abilities like speech," yet still suffered the ignominy of death along with all the other animals. Hence, myths arose about man being "cheated" out of the other god-like quality he wished he had along with his intelligence, namely eternal life.</p>
<p>Speaking of having "god-like" qualities, Genesis plainly states, as many theologians have pointed out, that man was created in God's literal physical image: "When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God...[And] Adam became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth" (Gen. 5:1,3). Ancient near eastern peoples also told tales about how the gods found human females physically "beautiful" (compare Gen. 6:2), supposedly resembling the gods' own "beautiful" faces? So, there are examples even in the Bible where "God" is depicted in an all-too-human fashion reminiscent of other ancient deities like Zeus or Apollo, to whom the ancient Greeks believed they bore a physical resemblance.</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>The story of the fall of man in Genesis seems originally to have been one of the sardonic folktales of the Near East that explain how man once had immortality nearly within his grasp, but was cheated out of it by frightened or malicious deities. We have earlier versions from Sumerian times on that are less rationalized than the one in Genesis...The Genesis account permits itself a verse (3:22) in which God seems to be telling other gods that man is "now one of us," in a position to threaten their power unless they do something about it at once, with a break in the syntax that suggests genuine terror. [So Adam and Eve are hustled out of paradise by a frightened deity before they can "eat of (the second tree) the tree of life" and "live forever" as fellow gods. - ED.]</li>
<li><p>- Northrop Frye, <em>The Great Code: The Bible and Literature</em> (Harvest, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 109</p></li>
<li>Psalm 115:16 says that God "gave the earth to the sons of men," but, "the heavens are the heavens of the Lord." They certainly are if you believe the story about how God punished mankind for trying to reach heaven by building a tower, "a tower whose top will reach into heaven" (Gen. 11:4), i.e., the infamous "tower of Babel."</li>
<li><p>"And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, `Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they propose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'" (Gen. 11:5-7)</p>
<p>This "God" sounds a bit frightened - not as much as in Genesis, chapter 3, but still frightened - in this case, that man will "reach heaven" by "building a tower."</p>
<p>What I want to know is <em>how</em> tall was the "tower of Babel?" Was it taller than a Babylonian ziggurat? Taller than the pyramid of Cheops? Taller than the Twin Towers of Manhattan? Taller than the tallest mountain on earth? Reaching higher into heaven than mankind's deepest space probe? Just where does "God" draw the line between the "earth" and things that "reach into His heavens?"</p>
<p>The "tower of Babel" must have been taller than the tallest "tall tale" ever told by Mark Twain for God to have "come down" to take a look at it, fearing it would "reach heaven," and then confuse our language.</p>
<p>Heck, we're at the point where we name our heaven-going spacecraft after <em>pagan</em> gods, like "Gemini and Apollo," and then leave our footprints on "God's" moon in "His heavens!" And God won't "come down" and raise a ruckus again? Maybe Bible lovers who are busy picketing abortion clinics should shift gears and get busy picketing NASA before something "really bad" happens.</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>I doesn't matter to me whether Adam and Eve were created with or without "bellybuttons."</li>
<li><p>I want to know, were they created with anuses? Did they use leaves to wipe themselves? Was Adam sometimes just out of reach of leaves and had to ask Eve to find him some nice soft ones?</p>
<p>What about fecal odor? Did their farts smell? Did their underarms smell from the excrement of bacteria? What about foot odor? (Did God feel the least bit obliged to give them the recipe for soap?) Did they burp?</p>
<p>In other words, wouldn't Adam and Eve have been ashamed of a number of things long before they were "ashamed" to discover they were "naked?" And what does all this imply about the "perfection" of the Biblical God's creation?</p>
<p>Even in Genesis it says that God cursed woman by "increasing or multiplying" her pain during childbirth, which implies that God had already designed pain and suffering.</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>How can God be perfect? He's not. It shows in his work. Take a look at a mountain range. Every mountain different. Different height, different shape. Leaves are all different. He can't get two fingerprints the same. He's had a billion years to work on that. Can't even give one person two thumbs the same. And everything He makes dies. So He needs a lot of help. He's only third in command. The guy that we think is "God," third in command, He's the western marketing manager. That's all. The real God is too busy, are you kidding, He's throwing gas balls around the firmament. "Don't worry about earth man," He says, flinging another huge gas ball, "What is it, a planet? Oh well," He says, tossing another, "Earth, right? Ha, ha. I'll betcha it's Sunday, that's the day, my one day off, and they all crowd into church, `Blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah,' day off my ass.</li>
<li><p>- George Carlin (from his comedy routine on "God")</p></li>
<li>Mosquitoes were designed by God to make flies seem better.</li>
<li>AIDS is a virus. Pat Robertson is the punishment from God.</li>
<li>If AIDS is a divine punishment then lesbians are God's chosen people.</li>
<li>The good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless you die of something.</li>
<li>I doubt any God who inflicts pain for his own pleasure</li>
<li><p>- McCoy (on Star Trek)</p></li>
<li>There is no devil, it's just God when he's drunk.</li>
<li>There is no God, it's just the devil when he's sober.</li>
<li>A Bible lover once accused me of "denying God's presence."</li>
<li><p>I answered, "He doesn't make it very well known to most of us, except of course to lucky old doubting Thomas. Instead, everyone on this planet is equally blessed in being able to detect the undeniable `presence' of earthquakes, tornadoes, genetic defects, diseases, hunger, boredom, ignorance, and strife, praise God!"</p>
<p>- E. T. Babinski</p></li>
<li>"Fear of God" is third to "Fear of Spiders and Snakes," and second to "Fear of Public Speaking."</li>
<li>My greatest fear is being stuck in heaven for eternity with a bunch of televangelists.</li>
<li>Wisdom begins where the fear of God ends.</li>
</ul>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-88193757862394751652012-03-19T15:36:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:07:15.818-07:00Berlinski or Babinski?<p><em>Berlinski or Babinski?</em></p>
<p>David Berlinski is the author of "The Deniable Darwin," which was featured in the June 1996 issue of <em>Commentary</em>. (He rebutted criticisms in September's issue of the same magazine.) Should we ever cross pens or tongues in public, imagine an audience's confusion in trying to keep track of "Berlinski's, or was it Babinski's(?)" remarks. I almost feel moved by the similarity of our names to submit my own article to <em>Commentary</em>, praising some of Darwin's observations and the hypotheses he offered. For instance, in Darwin's day, the notion of the "immutability [or changelessness] of species," was increasingly being challenged but apparently was not completely overthrown! For Darwin stated in the Introduction to his book, <em>The Origin of Species</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I can entertain no doubt after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that <em>the view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained - namely, that each species has been independently created - is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable</em> [emphasis added - ED.]; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged variations of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive means of modification."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So in Darwin's day a minority of scientists (and probably a large portion of the general public), continued to assert adamantly that "species were immutable" and no species had ever "descended" from another. In fact, the word "species" is a Latin term meaning "type or kind," as in the Biblical statement, "God created each creature after it's kind." The famous cataloger of animals and plants, Carolus Linnaeus, who died 81 years before Darwin's <em>Origin</em> was published, regarded each species as a "special creation" endowed by their Creator with unique and peculiar behaviors, habits, abilities, markings, anatomical designs, etc., that set them apart, even from near-identical neighboring species. There was always <em>some</em> anatomical trait or complex behavior pattern which was "puzzlingly peculiar" to <em>each</em> species, and creationists from the 1800s to the mid-1900s pointed to such irreducible differences between species as "proof" to support their idea of the "immutability of species." In similar species of, say, spiders, the "puzzling peculiarity" could be a manner of web-spinning or mating; in similar wasp species it could be the way each parasitized a specific host-species, or in similar species of insects that pollinated plants, it could be the unique (and sometimes amazingly complex) ways each interacted with a specific species of cactus or orchid, etc. And let's not get into the beetles, which probably number upwards of a million species, each with some unique structure and/or behavior that could be cited as evidence of that species' irreducible complexity.</p>
<p>It was only with reluctance that such "old time" creationists abandoned the battle over what their modern-day counterparts sneeringly call "mere <em>micro</em>evolution." Modern-day creationists instead speak adamantly in terms of "the impossibility of <em>macro</em>evolution." As if the dividing line between what they call "micro" and "macro" evolution was clear and incontestible in every case, and more than just a mere juggling of prefixes.</p>
<p>The irony of creationism's present position is that there are some creationists who advocate <em>geocentrism </em>based on a straightforward reading of Sacred Scripture (just like Luther and Calvin advocated). These modern day "Biblical astronomers" (as they call themselves) argue that Copernicus' theory of heliocentrism, and Newton's theory of gravity, ought to be abandoned in favor of a more Biblical theory wherein the whole cosmos circles the earth once a day. Furthermore, these fellows attempt to provoke doubt in "modern astronomy" by pointing out that <em>micro</em>gravity (obeyed by objects on the earth's surface), and <em>macro</em>gravity ("supposedly" obeyed by planets in orbit around the sun) are "not the same thing." (Does this point sound familiar? Ring a bell? Hey, stop the <em>sun</em>, fellahs, I want to get <em>on</em>!)</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-44908019122174831832012-03-19T15:30:00.002-07:002019-09-01T13:07:02.076-07:00More of the Best Things ever said in Favor of Human Evolution<p><em>More of the Best Things ever said in Favor of Human Evolution</em></p>
<p>"Brookfield, Ill. -- A toddler fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo Friday afternoon... A 7-year-old female gorilla with a baby gorilla on her back, picked up the child, cradled him in her arms, and placed him near a door where zoo keepers could retrieve the boy."</p>
<p>ASSOCIATED PRESS NEWS STORY, AUGUST 16, 1996</p>
<p>"I saw one female chimpanzee, newly arrived in a group, hurry up to a big male and hold her hand towards him. Almost regally he reached out, clasped her hand in his, drew it towards him, and kissed it with his lips."</p>
<p>JANE GOODALL, <em>IN THE SHADOW OF MAN</em></p>
<p>"I handed him the cigarette packet. He opened it, took out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. He then reached out his hand again and I gave him the matches; to my astonishment he took one out of the box, struck it, lit the cigarette, and threw the box down on the table."</p>
<p>GERALD DURRELL, <em>THE NEW NOAH</em>, 1972</p>
<p>"Anyone watching our Cameroons chimpanzee, Missie, sitting at table in her salon, pouring out three cups of coffee one after the other, and then smoking a cigarette, having lighted it herself, must have had an uncontrollable urge to laugh. But she also gave food for thought."</p>
<p>LUDWIG HECK, <em>BOBBY THE CHIMPANZEE AND OTHER FRIENDS</em>, 1931</p>
<p>"In one of the American monkey stations a completely tame and highly `civilized' chimpanzee named JoJo always switched the light off itself before settling down to sleep."</p>
<p>HERMANN DEMBECK, <em>WILLINGLY TO SCHOOL</em>, 1970</p>
<p>"Chimps (which have the same sleep stages as we do and even seem to dream in almost the same cycles), sleep about 8 hours."</p>
<p>HANSON & MORRISON, <em>OF KINKAJOUS, CAPYBARAS, HORNED BEETLES, SELADANGS...</em></p>
<p>"The chimpanzee possesses a certain sense of humor...When the animal has succeeded in overturning a pail of water and caused a great deal of this, often including the pail, to descend upon the head of some poor unfortunate human attendant, it will clap both its hands over the top of its own head and emit a succession of loud, explosive noises from its larynx."</p>
<p>R. H. SMYTH, <em>HOW ANIMALS TALK</em>, 1959</p>
<p>"Mountain gorillas become killers when their social groups come face-to-face...One gorilla group will deliberately seek out another and provoke a conflict...An enormous male left a skirmish with his flesh so badly ripped that the head of an arm bone and numerous ligaments stuck out through the broken skin. Another left the battle scene with eight massive wounds where the enemy had bitten him on the head and arms. The site where the conflict had raged was covered with blood...Fossey actually recovered gorilla skulls with canine cusps from other gorillas still embedded in the skull's crest."</p>
<p>HOWARD BLOOM, <em>THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY</em></p>
<p>"The males from the larger band of chimpanzees began to make trips south to the patch of land occupied by the splinter unit. The marauders' purpose was simple: to harass and ultimately kill the separatists. They beat their former friends mercilessly, breaking bones, opening massive wounds, and leaving the resultant cripples to die a slow and lingering death. When the raids were over, five males and one elderly female had been murdered. The separatist group had been destroyed; and its sexual active females and part of its territory had been annexed by the males of the band from the home turf."</p>
<p>HOWARD BLOOM, <em>THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY</em></p>
<p>"The happy-go-lucky chimpanzee has turned out to be the most lethal ape - an organized, cooperative warrior."</p>
<p>MICHAEL GHIGLIERI, "WAR AMONG THE CHIMPS," <em>DISCOVER</em>, NOV. 1987</p>
<p>"Darwin was wrong. Man's still an ape."</p>
<p>GENE KELLY</p>
<p>"They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States<br /><br />For teaching that man descended from the apes.<br /><br />They coulda settled that case without a fuss or a fight<br /><br />If they'd seen me chasing you, sugar,<br /><br />through the jungle last night."</p>
<p>BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (FROM HIS SONG, "PART MAN, PART MONKEY" ON <em>57 CHANNELS,</em> RECORD# 38T 38 74354)</p>
<p>"A recent film shown on the DISCOVER channel (Sept. 1996), showed bonobo chimpanzees engaged in long `tongue kissing' sessions - chimpanzees French kissing on national television! They also showed a male and female bonobo engaged in intercourse, face to face, in the `missionary position.' They are the only known species of primate besides man that performs sex in that position. All other chimp and gorilla species do it `doggie style.' It was also announced on the program, but now shown, that bonobos engage in oral sex and homosexual-like behaviors. Some scientists believe that bonobos are the species of chimpanzee most like man."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"The folks who study DNA say there's very nearly as much `chimp' in our DNA as there is `man' in the chimp's DNA! Our DNA is 98% identical. Yet chimps don't complain that they're stuck with so much `man' in them, so why should creationists complain when evolutionists remind creationists that man is still in many ways an `animal?'"</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of `You may believe that you're descended from monkeys, but I believe you're a creature of God.' I guess that Buchanan hadn't considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including `monkeys.' It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called `creationism' is the feeling that somehow parts of God's creation are not worthy of being our ancestors."</p>
<p>TOM SCHARLE (scharle.1@nd.edu)</p>
<p>"Creationists ask, `How can man and chimpanzee be related if they don't have the same <em>number</em> of chromosomes?' (23 pairs in man, 24 in great apes). The answer is found in "The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy" by Jorge J. Yunis and Om Prakash (<em>Science</em>, Vol. 215, Mar. 19, 1982, p. 1525-1530). This paper has a picture of all the chromosomes of man, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans with each pair of chromosomes lined up next to each other and showing the 1000 band stage with all the sections labeled. Just by examining the picture you can clearly see that the chromosomes are remarkably similar. The differences are equally revealing as a vast majority are simple inversions of sections of chromosomes. <a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/articles/chimp_chromosome.html">Chromosome #2 of humans</a> is shown next to two chimpanzee (and gorilla and orangutan) chromosomes since the human chromosome #2 is twice as long as the chimpanzee (and the other two as well), yet all the bands match up showing that the one less human chromosome is merely the result of two chimp chromosomes getting connected together!"</p>
<p>CLARK DORMAN (http://cns-web.bu.edu/pub/dorman/Dorman.html)</p>
<p>"Why are the <em>chromosome numbers, lengths and banding patterns</em> for humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, so similar? [See picture above.] A `Designer' who `separately created' all four species could just as easily (with the aid of His omniscience) have stored the DNA information for the production of each species in <em>very different numbers, lengths, and banding patterns of chromosomes</em>.</p>
<p>"The evolutionary explanation is that the numbers, lengths and banding patterns of the chromosomes of these species were simply inherited from common ancestors."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"Is it possible for humans and chimpanzees to inter-breed? Utilizing modern tricks of the trade geneticists in England have cross-bred a goat and a sheep. They call it a `geep.' In the case of trying to cross man with chimp some say that genetic engineering may not be necessary, normal insemination may suffice. By artificially inseminating a female chimp with human sperm (after numerous attempts), you might produce a fertilized egg (and, if it continues to develop without any major difficulties), an embryo, a fetus, or even a `chimpman,' or a `humanzee.' Geneticists point out that some species with greater genetic differences than man and chimp <em>have</em> produced hybrid offspring. Take the hybrid between a gibbon and a siamang, two species that differ more in chromosomal composition than do humans and chimps (<em>Science</em> 205:308). So it may be possible to produce a hybrid `human/chimp' even without the help of genetic engineers.</p>
<p>"Would such a creature be a `man' or an `animal' according to the strictly `either/or' definitions of `creation science?' Or, to put the matter more sharply, `If you could use genetic engineering to substitute the DNA sequences of a chimp with human DNA sequences, doing it <em>one base-pair at a time</em>, then at what base-pair substitution would the chimp cross over to <em>being</em> a `human being?'</p>
<p>"Fortunately for creationists, few of them have even thought about such questions. As for evolutionists, no scientist I know wants to risk seeing how he might be treated should he attempt such an experiment. Especially not after the `Christian Coalition,' or Muslim fundamentalists, rally their forces against him/her. Of course, once fertilization has occurred, the Christian Coalition would be faced with the dilemma of either urging that the fertilized cell be <em>aborted</em>, or letting it grow, and risk it being born. Could they allow a creature to be born which might provide living proof that man was not a `special kind' but that he could also interbreed with chimpanzees, his nearest genetic cousins? What a dilemma!"</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"I'd like to see some human females volunteer their eggs and wombs for insemination with bonobo chimpanzee sperm." - Michelle Steiner</p>
<p>"Wow! You'll do anything to get laid." - Alan "Uncle Al" Schwartz</p>
<p>"(Blush!)" - Michelle Steiner</p>
<p>DISCUSSION, OCT. 1996</p>
<p>"Hawaii consists of a string of `young' volcanic islands that are still being formed as tectonic plates pass slowly over volcanic activity on the Pacific sea floor. The volcanoes spew up new island-making material at the end of the Hawaiian island chain as the islands ride the tectonic plates and pass overhead. Thus, the string of islands known as `Hawaii' keeps growing. The first island that was formed in the chain has been measured to be about 5 million years old. The islands that form the rest of the chain are younger in a descending order from the first.</p>
<p>"Hawaii also contains over 800 species of <em>Drosophila</em>, or, "fruit flies." That's probably because when the first Hawaiian island formed, the fruit fly was one of the first flying insects to inhabit it, and the environment of the Hawaiian islands grew varied as the islands blossomed forth. On them you can find sunny beaches with strong winds, cool forest valleys, tropical rain forests, and mountainous terrain. So the flies had a wide range of niches they could inhabit with little or no competition. As new islands in the chain sprouted up, and grew distant from one another, that led to the isolation of flies on different islands where they could no longer interbreed but evolved different species in different habitats.</p>
<p>"The unusual and diverse species of fruit flies that are found only on the Hawaiian islands, obviously had to have evolved from a common stock, just as evolutionists claim that man and chimpanzee diverged from a common stock. And like the species of fruit flies that evolved in 5 million years on the Hawaiian islands, it was about 5 million years ago, according to evolutionary theory, that man and chimpanzee diverged, and <em>the genetic distance between man and chimpanzee (about 2% of their DNA being different) is about the same as the genetic distance between some species of fruit flies on the Hawaiian islands</em>. Thus, human evolution, like fruit fly evolution, is, as Pope John Paul II recently put it, `more than just a hypothesis.' And that's putting it mildly."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"We have obtained estimates of genetic differentiation between humans and the great apes no greater than, say, those observed between morphologically indistinguishable (sibling) species of <em>Drosophila</em> flies (fruit flies)."</p>
<p>ELIZABETH J. BRUCE & FRANCISCO J. AYALA (DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA), "HUMANS AND APES ARE GENETICALLY VERY SIMILAR," <em>NATURE</em>, NOV. 16, 1978, VOL. 276, P. 265.</p>
<p>"There are more than a thousand different species of cichlid (pronounced SICK-lid) fishes in the world today. Some are bigger than goats; others could fit in a thimble. Some are thick and boxy; others lean and long. They are brown or turquoise or every shade of a neon rainbow painted on a single beast [with a host of different mouth adaptations for different feeding habits. - ED.]...In Lake Victoria in East Africa three hundred species of cichlids arose from one progenitor species in less than 200,000 years, an evolutionary pace that no other animal group has rivaled...One genetic study looked at the DNA of fourteen Lake Victoria cichlid species exhibiting highly divergent feeding behaviors...Yet despite the fishes' specialized appetites, their genes differ by only two or three base pairs, or chemical subunits, out of the many thousands that constitute the genes examined. There is more genetic variation among people than there are among these fourteen fish species - and people, keep in mind, are all members of the same species."</p>
<p>NATALIE ANGIER, "PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA" IN <em>THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY</em></p>
<p>"The genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees is so small, in fact, that it corresponds to that between sibling (closely allied) species and is less than between two nonsibling species of the same genus.</p>
<p>"It is also apparent that the malarial parasites of man and those of every one of the apes evolved from a common ancestor. This is an important point, as it indicates that their hosts, man and apes, did likewise."</p>
<p>J. RICHARD GREENWELL (SECRETARY TO THE ARID LANDS NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA), "TIPTOEING BEYOND DARWIN," <em>SKEPTICAL INQUIRER</em>, SPRING 1980, PP. 42-54</p>
<p>"The same <em>retroviral</em> DNA sequences appear in the same relative places in the DNA of both human beings and primates. And there isn't the faintest probability that such sequences could have been inserted on two separate occasions by two of the same species of retroviruses and wound up in the same relative places of the DNA of both man and primates. So, the Designer is either telling us that man and primates evolved from the <em>same</em> distant DNA stock into which a retrovirus inserted its DNA long ago - a stock that split afterwards into man and apes; or, the Designer is pulling a con game not unlike the one proposed by some creationists who argued that the Designer sculpted all the fossils - which merely <em>mimicked</em> the remains of once-living animals and plants - and filled the rocks with them to purposely deceive mankind into believing that such animals and plants had existed in the past."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI [For information on retroviral sequences found in the same places in both human and primate DNA, see Bonner et al., 1982, <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> 79:4709; Mariani-Constantini et al., 1989, <em>Journal of Virology</em> 63:4982; Edward E. Max, letter published in <em>Creation/Evolution</em>, issue 27, summer 1990, pgs. 45-49]</p>
<p>"Why is it that whenever a paleontologist notes <em>similarities</em> between an australopithicine's fossil knee joint (or femur or foot) and modern man's bones, the creationists jump all over it and state with supreme conviction: `That femur or foot bone, belonged to a "fully human" being who lived right beside his so-called evilutionary ancestors!' It doesn't matter to such creationists that the pelvis, femur, and foot bones belonged to creatures that only grew to be three-and-a-half to four feet tall at maturity, or that the big toe of these ancient foot bones (as seen in ancient footprint tracks in volcanic ash dating back to the Australopithicine era), was splayed outward, and not exactly like that of `fully human' beings.</p>
<p>"Don't creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found <em>ape-like</em> skulls with the `human leg and foot bones,' rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with `ape leg and foot bones?'</p>
<p>Come on, creationists, think about it! Did God hide the human skulls, only leaving behind leg and foot bones belonging to <em>human midgets with misshapen feet</em>, and mix such bones only with the skulls of ape-like creatures with larger cranial capacities than living apes? What a "kidder" the creationist's God must be.</p>
<p>Or maybe, just maybe, ape-like creatures existed in the past that walked erect, which freed their hands to perform actions guided by their larger-than-average ape brains? Hey, that sounds like evolution. Golly gee wiz."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<p>"The most obvious specialized features of the modern apes are their long arms and the `simian shelf,' a bridge of bone joining the two sides of the lower jaw directly behind the front teeth. The simian shelf strengthens the lower jaw, a function performed in modern man by the chin. The long arms, of course, are great for swinging through trees.</p>
<p>"These specializations are not primitive features but relatively recent developments. The Miocene apes discovered by Louis Leakey had relatively short arms and still had not developed a simian shelf, indicating with respect to these features that apes have been getting progressively less manlike over millions of years."</p>
<p>FIX, <em>THE BONE HUNTERS</em> (pg. 17)</p>
<p>"Creationists claim it would be impossible for a chimpanzee to ever produce the works of Shakespeare. But something like that has <em>already happened</em> and it only took about five million years, because chimp and man share a common ancestor, one of whose descendants grew up to <em>be</em> Shakespeare."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-57488021538326514792012-03-19T15:26:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:06:46.814-07:00The Problem of Pain and the Egomania of the Psalms<p><em>The Problem of Pain and the egomania of the Psalms</em></p>
<p>Rebecca Anne Reed, whom I knew as "Becca," was a co-worker and friend with a good sense of humor. She died recently from a blood clot that moved from her lung to her heart. She was only 27 years old, engaged to be married, a lover of dogs and children, and working on writing a romance novel.</p>
<p>I attended her funeral, which was held in a Catholic church. One of the songs sung was based on Psalm 91, which declares, "Surely He will deliver you...from the deadly pestilence...You will not be afraid of...the arrow that flies by day; or of the pestilence that stalks in darkness; or of the destruction that lays waste at noon. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it will not come near you...Because you have made the Lord your refuge...no evil will befall you, nor will any plague come near your dwelling. For He will give his angels charge concerning you, to guard you in all your ways...They will bear you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You shall tread upon the lion and cobra; the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot...Because you have set your love upon Me [Yahweh], therefore I will deliver you...with long life I will satisfy you."</p>
<p>Becca was beginning to attend church after having shunned it for a while. It was then that she was struck down at <em>home</em> ["no evil will befall you, nor will any plague come near <em>your dwelling</em>"] by an <em>embolism</em> ["Surely He will deliver you...from the deadly pestilence"], and died at age <em>27</em> ["with long life I will satisfy you"]. The irony of the words of that psalm being sung at Becca's funeral was apparent to me though no one else there seemed to notice, maybe because the psalm was matched with a pretty melody. Religious services are not designed to make you think more rationally, they are designed to "move" you.</p>
<p>Upon reading Psalm 91 later, after the service, I noticed how it consists of a list of outrageous "promises" of earthly security, stringing absurdity after absurdity, until the author wound up with "angels" not allowing him to stub his toe. Trust in Yahweh and your life will be like Superman's (or like that of another "well nigh invulnerable" comic book character, The Tick!) You'll be invulnerable to "arrows" [a modern day version of this Psalm would probably add that "bullets shall not harm you, and atomic bomb radiation shall not burn you even though thousands around you melt into puddles of ooze" - which reminds me...Pat Robertson, in the late 1970s gave a rousing speech about how "machine gun bullets" wouldn't be able to hurt true believers]. So, like Superman (or The Tick), you need not worry about any disease, deadly animal, poisonous snake [even if you walk upon it], or even worry about jamming your pinky toe! That's what the psalmist promises will happen to those who "trust in Yahweh."</p>
<p>Compare Psalm 37:25, where, at the end of a long life the psalmist sings that he has "<em>never seen</em> the righteous forsaken, or his descendants begging bread." Most people do not go through life so blind to reality and accident statistics as the psalmists apparently did.</p>
<p>What's even more ironic is how other portions of the Bible deny the "inspired lessons of the psalmists." Jesus "trusted in Yahweh" but look what happened to him (Ouch)! Or look at the "mystery of the suffering of the righteous" according to the book of Job. Job (if such a person ever existed) would probably have beaten the author of Psalm 91 over the head in disgust at his naivete (as it was, some of Job's friends argued like the Psalmist that "none of this would have happened to you, Job, if you trusted in Yahweh and were righteous," and Job of course, proved such a view naive to say the least).</p>
<p>And what about folks who were never members of "God's chosen people" yet who lived long loving happy healthy creative and prosperous lives? The psalmists were blind to that reality also.</p>
<p>Besides an egomania of blessings tied to their earthly existence, the psalmists sung about cursings, or "perfect hatred," toward any non-Hebrew people whose egos dared to affront their own. About such people the psalmists' wrath knew no bounds:</p>
<p>"Let his days be few...his children fatherless...his wife be a widow...wandering about begging...seeking food far from their ruined homes...let a creditor seize all he has...strangers steal from him...none to extend a hand...nor to his orphaned children...may he be cut off from the memory of the earth...But Thou, Oh Yahweh, deal kindly with me...Do I not loath those who rise up against Thee, Yahweh? I hate them with perfect [utmost] hatred...The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance, he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked...That your foot may be dipped in the blood of your enemies and the tongue of your dogs may be dipped in their blood...Blessed [or happy] will he be who dashes your little ones against the rock." [Ps. 58:10; 68:23; 137:9; 139:21-22 & 109]</p>
<p>Any <em>ethical</em> Supreme Being must puke at the sound of such passages being <em>sung</em> to him. (Not to forget equally grotesque passages found in less "sing-able" portions of the Hebrew Bible, like Exodus 32:27-28; Deut. 5:9; 6:13,15; 7:2,4; 13:6-9; 20:16,17; 28:45,47,53; 32:42; Lev. 27:28-29; Num. 31:8-9,15-18; Joshua 7:26; 11:20; Judges 11; 1 Sam. 15:3; Jer. 19:9; 51:20,22; Hosea 13:16.)</p>
<p>When will God's worshipers grow up (instead of merely being "born again and again") and realize that they are better than some portions of their "Holy Scriptures," or, that some portions aren't that "holy?"</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-86182107602067006192012-03-19T15:22:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:06:32.002-07:00Who is the "Lord of the Flies"? Satan or God?<p><em>Who is the "Lord of the Flies"? Satan or God?</em></p>
<p><strong>Martin Luther's View</strong></p>
<p>The father of Protestant Christianity, Martin Luther, thought flies were noxious, sent by the devil to vex him when reading. He may have gotten that idea from the New Testament, where "Satan" is connected with "Beelzebub" - from the Hebrew, "baal-zevuv," meaning literally, "lord of the flies." Of course, I'm not sure if calling Satan "lord of the flies" was originally meant as more of an insult to flies or to Satan.</p>
<p>Needless to say, Luther saw "Satan" lurking everywhere. According to Luther, "Snakes and monkeys are subjected to the demon more than other animals. Satan lives in them and possesses them. He uses them to deceive men and to injure them..."</p>
<p>"Demons are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark pooly places ready to hurt and prejudice people; some are also in thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightning and thunder, and poison the air, the pastures and grounds..."</p>
<p>"In my country, upon a mountain called Polterberg, there is a pool. If one throws a stone into it, instantly a storm arises and the whole surrounding countryside is overwhelmed by it. This lake is full of demons; Satan holds them captive there..."</p>
<p>"How often have not the demons called `Nix,' drawn women and girls into the water, and there had commerce with them, With fearful consequences."</p>
<p>"I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child...which had no human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil. He was twelve years old, and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children." [Editor's note: Referring to children that were believed to have been produced as the result of "commerce" with the devil.]</p>
<p>"A large number of deaf, crippled and blind people are afflicted solely through the malice of the demon. And one must in no wise doubt that plagues, fevers and every sort of evil come from him..." [Editor's note: Boy that Satan, what a designer! He must work longer hours than God! See the section above, "Why We Believe in a Designer," for examples of what Luther might have called "Satan's handiwork."]</p>
<p>"Our bodies are always exposed to the attacks of Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but Devil's spells..."</p>
<p>"Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind for he is the prince of death..." [Editor's note: So, who needs antibiotics, or modern sanitation and health and building practices? We just need more good Christian exorcists to heal "all the maladies which afflict mankind."]</p>
<p>"As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil..."</p>
<p>[All the above are from the collection of Luther's speeches with his friends, titled, <em>Table Talk</em>, a volume in <em>The Collected Works of Martin Luther</em>]</p>
<p>"I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist..." [Luther, letter to Spalatin, Oct. 10, 1520]</p>
<p>"When I was a child there were many witches, and they bewitched both cattle and men, especially children." [Luther in his <em>Commentary on Galatians</em>]</p>
<p>"I would have no compassion on a witch; I would burn them all." [Luther, <em>Table Talk</em>, a volume in <em>The Collected Works of Martin Luther</em>]</p>
<p>"The heathen writes that the Comet may arise from natural causes; but God creates not one that does not foretoken a sure calamity."<br />[Luther, <em>Advent Sermon</em>]</p>
<p>For further quotations see Heiko Oberman's acclaimed recent biography, <em>Luther: Man Between God and the Devil</em></p>
<p><strong>Mark Twain's View</strong></p>
<p>Like Martin Luther, Mark Twain held an opinion of the "fly" that was lower than Lucifer's hooves. Unlike Luther, however, Twain did not give "Satan" the credit for wondrously designing all manner of harmful hateful creatures and natural disasters. Twain didn't think God would have allowed Satan such near-absolute creative license, allowing him to "re-create" the whole of nature. So, concerning the fly, Twain wrote:</p>
<p>"Can we imagine a man [much less a God] inventing the fly, and sending him out on his mission, furnished with these orders: `Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth, and diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting; worry and fret and madden the worn and tired mother who watches by the child, and who humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable. Settle upon the soldier's festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he also prays, and between times curses, with none to listen but you, Fly, who get all the petting and all the protection, without even praying for it. Harry and persecute the forlorn and forsaken wretch who is perishing of the plague, and in his terror and despair praying; bite, sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gum them thick with plague-germs - feet cunningly designed and perfected for this function ages ago in the beginning - carrying this freight to a hundred tables, among the just and the unjust, the high and the low, and walk over the food and gaum it with filth and death. Visit all; allow no man peace till he get it in the grave; visit and afflict the hard-worked and unoffending horse, mule, ox, ass, pester the patient cow, and all the kindly animals that labor without fair reward here and perish without hope of it hereafter; spare no creature, wild or tame; but wheresoever you find one, make his life a misery, treat him as the innocent deserve; and so please Me and increase My glory Who made the fly.'" [Twain, "Thoughts of God," early 1900s]</p>
<p>"We approve all God's works, we praise all His works, with a fervent enthusiasm - of words; and in the same moment we kill a fly, which is as much one of His works as any other, and has been included and complimented in our sweeping eulogy. We not only kill the fly, but we do it in a spirit of measureless disapproval - even a spirit of hatred, exasperation, vindictiveness; and we regard that creature with disgust and loathing - which is the essence of contempt - and yet we have just been praising it, approving it, glorifying it. We have been praising it to its Maker, and now our act insults its Maker. The praise was dishonest, the act is honest; the one was a wordy hypocrisy, the other is compact candor...</p>
<p>"We hunt the fly remorselessly; also the flea, the rat, the snake, the disease-germ and a thousand other creatures which He pronounced good, and was satisfied with, and which we loudly praise and approve - with our mouths - and then harry and chase and malignantly destroy, by wholesale." [Twain, "God," 1905]</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-87811314665470827672012-03-19T15:03:00.003-07:002019-09-01T13:05:56.907-07:00The Most Provocative Things Ever Said About The Way God "Designed" The Cosmos<p><em>The Most Provocative Things Ever Said About The Way God "Designed" The Cosmos</em></p>
<ul>
<li>"God ordained that the rattler who sleeps in the fallen pine must sink its stone fangs in the child's pale ankle, just as the boy's heart must clench at the first flush of venom - the cold climbing his shins."
<p>MARY KARR, "AGAINST NATURE," <em>PARNASSUS</em> 18:2 1993 & 19:1 1994, a one volume combined edition of that journal</p></li>
<li>"He creates a beautiful bird, then plants the instinct in the cat to tear it apart. He brings babies into the world and watches cancer devour them...He sends down no `manna' from heaven to feed the starving, not even if they are little children. [Maybe he ran out of manna, having given it all to the `stubborn hard hearted' Israelites in the desert? - ED.]."
<p>A. E. HILLERICH, LETTER PUBLISHED IN <em>FREETHOUGHT TODAY</em>, MAY 1994</p></li>
<li>"The noise of December wind banging against our insulated house is an admonition that this domestic coziness...is conditional stuff, and that the universe which surrounds it has a way of being brutal and unsparing...
<p>"Last week, on the same night our community opened an efficient and hospitable shelter, an area man froze to death...When your wife and children are nestled all snug in their beds, and you're alone with your thoughts in the kitchen and you hear that relentless wailing, you know how much of creation theology is bull...</p>
<p>"In a high tech, antiseptic, hospital...I watched in helpless anguish as well-trained doctors and nurses rushed to save the lives of my wife and prematurely born son. Had nature been allowed to take its course, the Midwestern soil would have claimed what I love for fertilizer...</p>
<p>"The earthquake in already bleeding Armenia didn't take place because of any systemic injustice. Nor did the hurricane that flattened the already hopeless villages of Nicaragua. Nor did the flood in Bangladesh.</p>
<p>[Editor's note: The poorest people of the world suffer most from nature's "designedly" brutal ways. The earthquake in Armenia (in the 1980s) was less powerful than the earthquake in San Francisco, yet only a couple hundred people died in the U.S. quake while 25,000 died in the Armenian one. The roofs of the cheaply made houses and buildings in Armenia collapsed on their occupants, killing them, while the houses and buildings in our far wealthier nation were constructed better, with finer materials, and didn't collapse as easily. Neither is it easy for poor people to obtain all the medical assistance and proper housing and appropriate information they need to deal with nature's brutal ways. There's the weather and natural disasters as well as parasites, natural poisons, bacteria and/or viruses in their food water and air. If God designed nature to "punish" mankind He certainly must have known that such a plan would punish the poor people of the world most of all.]</p>
<p>"When Mount St. Helens burst like a boil on the earth's skin, the gas suffocated a family or two. I remember a dead little boy in the back of his parents' pickup truck. The photographs of his corpse showed the eyes wide open and the mouth agape. A tiny and bewildered face stared into an empty sky...</p>
<p>"Recently, when a green hickory branch broke and fell in Illinois, shattering the skull and mind and family and friends of a four-year-old boy, the problem was not human hardness of heart. When leukemia was diagnosed in a six-year-old girl, her parents learned something no liberation theologian has yet expressed about the nature of evil. None of these things is our fault.</p>
<p>"There are those who have gazed unflinchingly at these things and said they are the will of God. Some unfathomable thing goes on, they seem to say, that makes sense out of our orphans, puts all our shattered children and demented and despairing parents into some context. It has to do with Jesus on the cross or multinational corporations or Our Lady of Fatima. Their assertions are duplicitous or insane.</p>
<p>"No, A universe in which such things can happen is simply intolerable. And we have to tolerate it. The attempt to explain away such things is contemptible...The faith makes no attempt, but does enigmatically insist that God himself has entered and overcome the horrors of this plainly blighted project...That is no exhaustive reassurance to be sure..."</p>
<p>MICHAEL O. GARVEY, "SOME OF THE MONSTERS ARE REAL: GOD ENTERED CREATION BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN GOD CLEANED UP THE MESS," IN <em>THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER</em>, FEB. 10, 1989</p></li>
<li>"Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a small child deathly sick."
<p>S. T. COLERIDGE</p></li>
<li>A CONVERSATION IN THE NOVEL, <em>THE PLAGUE</em>
<p>Scene: A small boy lay dying in agony from the plague. A priest and an atheist doctor are in attendance, both unable to help the child.</p>
<p>Father Paneloux [the priest]: "This sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand."</p>
<p>Dr. Rieux [the doctor]: "No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."</p>
<p>ALBERT CAMUS</p></li>
<li>A CONVERSATION IN THE NOVEL, <em>CATCH-22</em><br />
<p>"Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways, there's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us...How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?"</p>
<p>"Pain?" She pounced upon the word victoriously, "Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers."</p>
<p>"And who created the dangers?" he demanded. "Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He?"</p>
<p>"People would look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads."</p>
<p>"They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering."</p>
<p>JOSEPH HELLER</p></li>
<li>"It was no use feeling the pain of an inflamed appendix until modern surgical techniques were sufficiently advanced to remove it. And often the `warnings' appear ill-adjusted to the seriousness of the disease. Toothache kills few people, while sadly some forms of cancer give little pain in the early stages. So we are left with a large amount of pain that seems to serve no purpose and which is not far distant from torture."
<p>C. S. RODD "QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK: 4. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND SUFFERING" IN <em>THE EXPOSITORY TIMES</em>, VOL. 107, NO. 2, NOV. 1995</p></li>
<li>MURDER BY GOD (A 30-SECOND PLAY)<br />
<p>Act 1, Scene 1 [Setting: Young pregnant woman found dead in a parking lot, struck by lightning.]</p>
<p>Cop : Looks like lightning hit her on the head. Guess it was the will of God.</p>
<p>Detective: It's the work of God all right, and I'm gonna make sure he goes up the river for this one.</p>
<p>Detective's narration: Ever since I started this beat, God had been responsible for putting more people six feet under the ground than any other thug in the city. They had all been written off as natural causes, but I knew better. And now he was getting sloppy. The lightning was his personal trademark.</p>
<p>WES ANDERSON</p></li>
<li>"I think that I shall never see<br /><br />
A God so cruel<br /><br />
he'd make a Flea!<br /><br />
"A Flea whose hungry mouth is pressed<br /><br />
Against my dog's<br /><br />
hot itching breast.<br /><br />
"A Flea that looks for dogs all day<br /><br />
And jumps three feet<br /><br />
to land its prey.<br /><br />
"My dog (who may in summer wear<br /><br />
ten nests of Fleas<br /><br />
deep in his hairs)<br /><br />
"Upon his bosom they have lain,<br /><br />
He intimately lives<br /><br />
with pain!<br /><br />
"Brave doubts are born in fools like me:<br /><br />
There is no god<br /><br />
who'd make a Flea!"
<p>ROSEMARY E. MORGAN (1965)</p></li>
<li>"Oh Rose, thou art sick;<br /><br />
The invisible worm,<br /><br />
That flies in the night,<br /><br />
In the howling storm,<br /><br />
Hath found out thy bed<br /><br />
Of crimson joy,<br /><br />
And his dark, secret love,<br /><br />
Doth thy life destroy."<br />
<p>WILLIAM BLAKE</p></li>
<li>The poet, Robert Frost once wrote a little gem, titled, "Design," in which he described a "fat, dimpled spider" sitting on a flower, having just finished devouring a moth, "it's dead wings carried like a paper kite." Frost pointed out that this "snow-drop spider" was of the same white hue as the flower it sat upon, so it could lie in wait without being detected. The flower's sweet scent attracted moths to dine at the very place where the moths then became the dinner of the camouflaged spider. Frost asked:<br />
<p>"What brought the kindred spider to that height,<br /><br />Then steered the white moth thither in the night?<br /><br />What but design of darkness to appall?--</p>
<p>If design govern in a thing so small."</p>
<p>ROBERT FROST</p></li>
<li>"Mr. Hollister says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down their nests in the ground - alive, mama! - and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing the spider's legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise God for His infinite mercies...Dear mama, have you fainted?"
<p>MARK TWAIN, "LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE"</p></li>
<li>"I recall one day in Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago around 1968, I came upon the Great Horned Owl. He or she was in a cage with a sign saying among other things that he or she was a `desirable' bird. The desirability of the Great Horned Owl was explained by the fact that he or she eats various critters that annoy farmers. This seems to me one of the silliest things I ever read outside of a Creationist journal. My own hunch is that the Great Horned Owl would consider itself desirable no matter what humans thought about the matter; and I also suspect that the critters eaten by the Great Horned Owl do not consider it a desirable bird at all, but probably regard it as actively nefarious.
<p>"An old Sufi teaching-story is <em>apropos</em> here. Somebody asked the divine Mullah Nasrudin, `Why do crickets make that annoying noise all night?' The mullah replied, `To give philosophers something to argue about all day.' He who has ears, let them hear."</p>
<p>ROBERT ANTON WILSON</p></li>
<li>Back in the days when Christians were being fed to the lions, one Christian, who was being pursued by a lion, ran all around the arena looking for a safe place to hide but to no avail. Finally he fell to his knees and said, "Oh Lord, please hear my prayer and fill this lion with the spirit of Christianity." Looking over at the lion, he saw the lion fall to its knees, clasp its front paws together and say, "Oh Lord, I humbly thank you for the food I am about to receive."
<p>"A Mouse that prayed for Allah's aid<br /><br />
Blasphemed when no such aid befell;<br /><br />
A Cat, who feasted on the mouse,<br /><br />
Thought Allah managed vastly well."</p>
<p>SAKI, "FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR" (1915)</p></li>
<li>An aunt of mine was teaching Sunday school. She was telling the youngsters about Daniel and the Lion's Den. She had a picture of Daniel standing brave and confident with a group of lions around him. One little eight-year-old started to cry.
<p>The teacher said, "Don't cry. The lions are not going to eat Daniel."</p>
<p>The girl said, "That's not what I'm crying about. That little lion in the corner is not going to get any."</p>
<p>SAUNDERS GUERRANT (ROANOKE, VIRGINIA) AS QUOTED IN <em>THE PREACHER JOKE BOOK</em> BY LOYAL JONES</p></li>
<li>"A small girl prayed to God to heal her of an increasingly pain-filled illness, but the TB germs continued to torture her for years, ‘honoring God's purposeful design’ with every bite they took of the child's life, comfort, and sanity."
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p></li>
<li>EXCERPTS FROM "THE LOST ENCYCLICAL AGAINST PENICILLIN" (A PARODY)<br />
<p>"Beloved children, I write to you today to offer you loving guidance against the unnatural use of antibiotics...God created bacteria and viruses for the purpose of infecting organisms sometimes seriously, sometimes less seriously - and we must never presume to interfere with the right order of God's creation...Just as all forms of birth control go against the natural purpose of conjugal relations - namely, procreation - so the use of all forms of man-made antibiotics interfere with the God-given design of bacteria and viruses and how He intends them to interact with the human body...each and every bacteria-body interaction must remain open to the transmission of bacteria...It is immoral to impede development of a natural process. That is why we have so exhaustively spoken out against artificial birth control and now anti-biotics. We cannot impede a process that God has created. No impeding, no impeding! ...God created syphilis to infect sexually immoral people, and cause them suffering and eventual death. In no way should a man-made antibiotic interfere with this God-given process. Also, the fear of syphilis is a natural encouragement toward marital fidelity, which could not otherwise hold its own in a free market."</p>
<p>CHRISTOPHER DURANG IN <em>FREE INQUIRY</em>, SPRING 1996</p></li>
<li>"Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things - the struggle for existence between different forms of life. Man sees it from his own prejudiced point of view; but clams, oysters, insects, fish, flowers, tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, fruit, shrubs, trees, have their own varieties of smallpox, measles, cancer, or tuberculosis. [I guess God had to work overtime at his biological warfare lab! - ED.] Incessantly, the pitiless war goes on...a nationalism of species against species [with human beings having attained numerous honors in the `war' effort, probably having obliterated more species - including many individuals of their own kind - than any other competitor on the planet. - ED.]...
<p>"Speaking of degrees of ferocity not yet attained by man...Husband eating is an accepted custom with female spiders, and among the Scorpions, it is quite fashionable for the mother to devour the father and then, in her turn, to be eaten by her `kiddies.' When male members of the larger cat families - that is, mountain lions - waylay and eat their own children, this is not truly an evidence of ferocity. It is an indirect crime of passion; the result of an impatient tenderness for the lioness who has become too exclusively tied up with the demands of motherhood...</p>
<p>"Of course, there is probably as little conscious cruelty in the lion that devours a missionary as there is in the kind-hearted old gentleman who dines upon a chicken pie, or in the staphylococcus that is raising a boil on the old gentleman's neck. Broadly speaking, the lion is parasitic on the missionary, as the old gentleman is on the chicken pie, and the staphylococcus on the old gentleman...</p>
<p>"Nature seems to have intended that her creatures feed upon one another. At any rate, she has so designed her cycles that the only forms of life that are parasitic directly upon Mother Earth herself are a proportion of the vegetable kingdom that dig their roots into the sod for its nitrogenous juices...But these - unless too unpalatable or poisonous - are devoured by the beasts and by man; and the latter, in their turn, by other beasts and bacteria...</p>
<p>"Swords and lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have been devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier..."</p>
<p>HANS ZINSSER, <em>RATS, LICE AND HISTORY</em></p></li>
<li>"Parasitism is such an appealing way to earn a living that the majority of the earth's organisms have adopted it. A number of parasites, like ticks, are generalists, hopping readily from one warm-blooded creature to another. Many more are remarkably specific. There are mites that can survive only in the rectum of a giant tortoise, worms that fit snugly into the quills of a single species of bird, and mites that live exclusively and harmlessly at the base of human eyelashes. Most parasites are themselves burdened with parasites." [Fleas burdened with mites, which are burdened with protozoa, which are burdened by bacteria, which are burdened by viruses! - ED.]<br />
<p>NATALIE ANGIER, "PARASITES AND SEX" IN <em>THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY</em></p></li>
<li>"So, naturalists observe, a flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey. And these have smaller still to bite `em; and so proceed <em>ad infinitum</em>."
<p>JONATHAN SWIFT, "ON POETRY" (1733)</p></li>
<li>"Although most parasitic diseases are now rare among those in developed nations, the majority of the world's people are hobbled by one or more types of parasite."
<p>NATALIE ANGIER, "PARASITES AND SEX" IN <em>THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY</em></p></li>
<li>"Until the discovery in the mid-1800s that dirt, germs, and disease all helped to kill people off, washing was not a popular activity. Before that time, the Ancient Romans were just about the only people who enjoyed it. They built large public baths with steam rooms...
<p>"Also up until the 1800s parasites were an accepted part of life. Almost everyone had fleas and lice. In the 1600s it was considered bad manners to take lice, fleas or other vermin from your body and crack them between your fingernails in company...</p>
<p>"Lack of washing led to infestations of parasites such as fleas and lice, which in turn contributed to the spread of disease, particularly plagues. These were often carried by the fleas living on the rats which flourished in the garbage-filled streets."</p>
<p>TIM WOODS & IAN DICKS, <em>WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU ABOUT HISTORY: HUNDREDS OF PECULIAR AND FASCINATING FACTS</em></p></li>
<li>"We can hardly suppose [that lice, ticks, fleas, intestinal worms, and such] were living on Adam and his lady...And yet as such creatures disdained to graze the fields or lick the dust for their food, where else could they have obtained it?"
<p>A WRITER IN <em>THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE</em>, 1746</p></li>
<li>"Supposedly Noah, his wife, and their sons and daughters-in-law on the ark, would have had to bear on their skin and in their veins and guts the many parasitical species found only in and on human beings today. Otherwise such nasty parasitical species would have troubled mankind no more, having died out with their `evil' human hosts who were wiped out by the Flood.
<p>"I certainly don't envy Noah, his wife, and his three sons and daughters-in-law, having to put up with such annoying and deadly passengers on and in their own bodies, like fleas, lice, ticks, bedbugs, hookworms, tapeworms, roundworms, liver flukes, filarial worms (that cause elephantiasis), trypanosomes (that cause sleeping sickness, and, Chagas' disease), and other parasitical species peculiar to human beings (or most suited to survive on and in human beings).</p>
<p>"Not to mention that Noah would have had to have taken aboard only those pairs of animals who were infested with parasitical organisms that afflict those animals today. What a boat full of parasites illnesses and diseases!"</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p></li>
<li>"It is likely from evidence that, somewhere in the legendary past of the history of lice, an offspring of a free-living form not unlike our book louse found that life could be infinitely simplified if, instead of having to grub for food in straw, under tree barks, in moss or lichen, in decaying cereals and vegetables, it could attach itself to some food-supplying host, and sit tight. It is one of the few instances in which nature seems extremely logical in its processes. The louse sacrifices a liberty that signifies chiefly the necessity for hard work, the uncertainty of food and shelter, and exposure to dangers from birds, lizards, and frogs; loses the fun of having wings, perhaps; but achieves instead a secure and effortless existence on a living island of plenty. In a manner, therefore, by adapting itself to parasitism, the louse has attained the ideal of capitalist civilization, though its methods are more direct than those of business or banking, and its source of nourishment is not its own species.
<p>"Thus, at any rate, arose the parasitic lice, - first, perhaps, the biting ones, the Mallophaga: the chicken louse, the goose louse, the slender duck louse, the pigeon louse, the turkey louse, the biting guinea-pig louse, the horse louse, to mention only a few [species, which live on] a diet of feathers, fur, and dandruff.</p>
<p>"[Another type of parasitic louse, not content with such a dry, bare diet, arose from the first type, or evolved separately, to take up residence] on thin-skinned, warm-blooded animals. These lice discovered by an incomprehensible cleverness (or perhaps by an accidental scratch and an occurrence not unlike the discovery of roast pig by the Chinese) that under their feet ran an infinite supply of rich red food. They developed boring and sucking structures, and thus arose: the hog louse, the dog louse, the rat louse, the foot louse of the sheep, the cat louse, the short-nosed ox louse, the monkey louse, and the head, body and crab lice of man.</p>
<p>"Interestingly, the similarity between the various monkey lice and those of man is so close that they can interchangeably feed on one or the other host without harm. We have ourselves fed two hundred Arabian head lice on an East Indian monkey for weeks at a time, with relatively low mortality. Such interchange of hosts is not usually possible. A louse fed on a foreign host, in most cases, suffers a probably painful and fatal ingestion...</p>
<p>"<em>The lice that infest each species of monkey in South and Central America, so far as known, fall into distinct species according to the hosts they infest, thus indicating to a certain degree a parallel evolutionary descent for both the host and the parasites that evolved with them and upon them</em> [emphasis added - ED.]."</p>
<p>HANS ZINSSER, <em>RATS, LICE AND HISTORY</em></p></li>
<li>"The horrid truth is that each of us has about as many bacteria and yeasts on the surface of his or her skin as there are people on earth; far from being `clean' after a bath the number of organisms released from the surface actually goes up as they emerge from the nooks and skinny crannies where they multiply. It is time to take a new look at the back of our hands and to realize that our skins are a habitat which supports a whole flora and fauna of creatures that have evolved with us through millennia [including creatures larger than yeast and bacteria but smaller than can be seen with the naked eye, like the mites on all of us - ED.]. <em>However hard we may wish to retreat from our animal origins we will not be able to escape our fellow travellers</em>. [Emphasis added - ED.] The huge majority, numerically, are harmless or beneficial. But then the huge majority are also invisible and earn our indifference...There are over two million species of animals and plants. We are just one of those species, at the mercy of the smallest virus or bacterium."
<p>MICHAEL ANDREWS, <em>THE LIFE THAT LIVES ON MAN</em></p></li>
<li>"The need to evade parasites may have been the force driving some birds, fish, and mammals to become migratory or to spend part of every year in isolation from their potentially pest-ridden fellows...
<p>"The red spotted newt carries a parasite related to the agent of deadly African sleeping sickness in humans...However, at the time when the newt harboring a more virulent strain of the parasite might transmit it, the animals are spending months roaming alone through the woods, rather than congregating in ponds. Those newts carrying a malevolent parasite die off during their migrations, leaving only the newts with a mild strain of the parasite that return to the pond to mate...</p>
<p>"Birds that fly each year from North to South America may be avoiding more than bad weather. During the nine months down south, the animals do not breed and are not particularly close to one another, limiting the chance for [tropical] pests to feather-hop...</p>
<p>"When a female barn swallow has an adulterous encounter she invariably copulates with a male having a slightly longer and more symmetrical tail than that of her mate; the more sumptuous tail appears to be evidence that the male is resistant to parasites, a characteristic of broad appeal to the female. Not only may she help her young to gain the resistant trait, but, by avoiding infested partners, she limits her own exposure to bloodsucking parasites."</p>
<p>NATALIE ANGIER, "PARASITES AND SEX" IN <em>THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY</em></p></li>
<li>"Some religionists delight in ascribing to God the credit for having made apple trees in fields of green, under a blue sky. But where was his desire for beauty when he made tapeworms? Is there any justice in praising him for the beautiful, but keeping silent about the hideous? I think I would be embarrassed to have to admit that I believed in an `all-wise God' who had made tapeworms."
<p>FRED WOODWORTH, "THERE IS NO GOD" (PRIVATELY PRINTED TRACT)</p></li>
<li>"Cupping my hand, I shoveled a bee-laden mass of water onto my pool deck. I assumed the bee would quickly dry and get airborne...but the bee hobbled and his left side appeared crippled...About this time I noticed a small black ant approaching at great speed, but in crazy, zigzagging ant-patterns, as though dodging gunfire. The ant ran past the bee, checked both flanks, then dashed headlong at the bee, grabbed an antenna, and pulled with such might that the vastly larger creature momentarily lost his footing...The bee yanked itself from the ant's grip and the ant ran away...Then two ants appeared and one charged the bee and flipped him...The bee quickly righted itself, but then a third ant appeared...a fourth, and then...entire platoons of ants loping madly across my deck, weaving in complex attack patterns. The bee went wild, twisting, rolling, bobbing, but he was besieged by dozens of creatures. They badgered his head, tugged at his wings, rocked him from side to side...They pulled and pushed him...toward a seam in the deck...and steered his head out over what must have seemed to them like a precipice, then shoved him off...the ants then dragged the bee back up the vertical wall, got him to the top, and pushed him back off a second time. It seemed like overkill, but that's how ants are - ruthless...By now the bee's tongue looked dried up. He stopped moving. The ants began the long haul home with the carcass...
<p>"Nature rewards behaviors (genes) that impede or destroy rivals. In other words, Nature isn't nice...</p>
<p>"[On the other hand] It is not a profitable scheme to kill everything. Killers don't thrive. Adapters do."</p>
<p>JOEL ACHENBACH IN THE "INTRODUCTION" AND FIRST CHAPTER, "BUGS," OF HIS BOOK, <em>WHY THINGS ARE: ANSWERS TO EVERY ESSENTIAL QUESTION IN LIFE</em></p></li>
<li>"The evolutionary process is not at all a perfect one and many traits created by it are not even adaptive. It is precisely because of this that we suffer from such unadaptive traits as back pain, fallen arches, impacted wisdom teeth, varicose veins, appendicitis, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, Huntington's disease, schizophrenia, manic-depression, alcoholism, painful childbirth, and a host of other maladies which genetic evolution has created, but which natural selection has done nothing to eliminate.
<p>"Moreover, each evolutionary change tends to bring with it new forms of pain and suffering that had not existed before...</p>
<p>"For example, sexuality is not absolutely superior to asexuality, and the evolution of the former has brought with it many forms of conflict and suffering that do not exist in organisms that reproduce without sex...</p>
<p>"Sociality is not absolutely superior to solitary life, and its evolution has created new forms of competition and conflict that are less frequent, or even unknown among asocial animals...</p>
<p>"Bipedalism [walking on two legs] is by no means absolutely superior to quadrupedalism [walking on four], and the evolution of a two-legged gait in <em>Homo sapiens</em> has brought with it countless adverse side effects...</p>
<p>"Intelligence and behavioral flexibility are by no means absolutely superior to instinctive behavior, and their evolution had brought with it many forms of [intellectual angst and] emotional pain that are virtually unknown in the nonhuman world...</p>
<p>"No animal has undergone more major changes during the course of its evolution than <em>Homo Sapiens</em>, and no animal has inherited a greater capacity for pain and suffering. With every evolutionary change we have sustained, we have discovered new ways to protect our genes and new ways to suffer for their benefit. With every passing generation, the aggregate price paid for their preservation has become dearer and dearer. And our genes - unlike us - remain blissfully ignorant of the staggering mass of suffering that has been endured for the sake of their perpetuation."</p>
<p>TIMOTHY ANDERS IN "THE ROOTS OF EVIL," A SUB-SECTION IN <em>THE EVOLUTION OF EVIL: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ULTIMATE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SUFFERING</em></p></li>
<li>"He remembered the sense of loss and disgust and horror when he saw it: it swam upward wriggling heavily in a flail of heavy dying protest, through a thickened murk of greenish water, and he saw that to its brain was fastened some blind horror of the sea, a foul snake-like shape a foot or more in length, a headless, brainless mouth, a blind suck and sea-crawl, a mindless abomination, glued implacably, fastened in fatal suck in one small rim of bloody foam against the brain-cage of the great dying fish."
<p>THOMAS WOLFE, <em>OF TIME AND THE RIVER </em>[DESCRIBING A LAMPREY?]</p></li>
<li>"What kind of God can one infer from [the study of nature]? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote. Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever reach maturity. On current estimates, 95 percent of the DNA that an organism contains has no function.
<p>"Certain organic systems are marvels of engineering; others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo chick proceeds to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host queen.</p>
<p>"Whatever the God of natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the Book of Job. The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray."</p>
<p>DAVID L. HULL, "THE GOD OF THE GALAPAGOS," REVIEW OF PHILLIP JOHNSON'S BOOK, <em>DARWIN ON TRIAL</em> IN <em>NATURE</em>, VOL. 352, AUG.8, 1991, PP. 485-86</p></li>
<li>"The same Institute for Creation Research publishing house that brought us <em>Bomby the Bombardier Beetle</em> has served (by one account) as distributor of another tract titled `God's Plan for Insects' - and for that matter another called `Unhappy Gays' - but I strongly doubt that either of those comes to grips with the phenomenon of `homosexual rape' among bedbugs. If <em>X. maculipennis</em> is another instance of God's wisdom made manifest in the works of creation, I suspect that the sort of god manifested is not the one that creation evangelists want."
<p>DAVID QUAMMEN, "NASTY HABITS: AN AFRICAN BEDBUG BUGGERS THE PROOF-BY-DESIGN" IN <em>THE FLIGHT OF THE IGUANA</em></p></li>
<li>"I don't want to start any blasphemous rumors,<br /><br />But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor,<br /><br />And when I die I expect to find Him laughing."<br />
<p>DEPECHE MODE, THEIR SONG, "BLASPHEMOUS RUMORS"</p></li>
<li>"Rachels [in his book, <em>Created from Animals</em>] presents brief and powerful arguments against natural theodicy [`natural theodicy' being the attempt to justify the ways of a good creator God in a world containing naturally painful and hideous aspects], rather discomfiting to those of us who have published articles on this subject (see <em>Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith</em> 39:150-157)...
<p>"It was the amount, rather than the fact, of evil in the world that made Darwin reject God: `There seems to me too much misery in the world...' both human and nonhuman...(to what purpose all this suffering?)...</p>
<p>"Rachels has done the best job I have seen of drawing Darwinian evolutionary principles to their ultimate moral conclusions. The results are objectionable to the Christian, but not as horrible as we might have feared. It does not lead, as some preachers warn, to totalitarianism and a complete devaluing of human life. Rachels' excellent book gives intelligent readers a chance to sharpen their minds and examine their beliefs."</p>
<p>STANLEY RICE [A YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONIST WITH A MORE CRITICAL AND INQUISITIVE MIND THAN MANY OF HIS BRETHREN, PROVING THAT NOT ALL CREATIONISTS ARE CREATED ALIKE, SOME KEEP EVOLVING!] IN HIS REVIEW OF JAMES RACHELS' BOOK, <em>CREATED FROM ANIMALS: THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF DARWINISM</em>, PUBLISHED IN <em>PERSPECTIVES ON SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN FAITH</em>, VOL. 46, NO. 3, SEPT. 1994</p></li>
<li>"I've heard many preachers counsel their congregations not to be too concerned about the mysteries of life. They warn that the misfortune of the just (or worse, the good fortune of the unjust) should be accepted in faith, even if the purpose isn't understood. The same principle should apply to the mysteries of nature. Not understanding why God created us through evolution is no reason to sink into a morass of delusions that futilely deny modern science."
<p>GRANT SMITH, LETTER IN <em>THE MORNING ADVOCATE</em>, BATON ROUGE, LA., TUES., MARCH 25, 1986</p></li>
<li>"If evolution were divinely guided, why didn't it take a lot less time? And why all the dog-eat-dog destruction along the way, the grim contest of the survival of the fittest?<br />
<p>"Briefly, let me say that this is indeed a problem, but at least it is no <em>new</em> problem! Isn't it exactly the same challenge to faith when you look at the chaos of the world around you every day? If you say you believe God's in control, you have a lot of explaining to do! And yet we have come to feel we can live with that bafflement. The red randomness of evolution is simply more of the same. Get used to it."</p>
<p>REV. ROBERT M. PRICE IN HIS SERMON, "MAN: APEX OR EX-APE?" [DR. PRICE IS ALSO THE AUTHOR OF <em>BEYOND BORN AGAIN</em>, WHICH IS AVAILABLE ON THE SKEPTIC'S WEB]</p></li>
<li>"Many `Design theorists' believe in a Designer who separately created each `kind' of animal and plant and plopped them down at different points in geologic history. But this means that a vast multitude of animals and plants were created only to suffer pain and death over periods of millions of years and then have their species become extinct. `Designing' creatures for pain suffering and extinction, and then having to `design' some more for that same `purpose,' was repeated again and again, all before man appeared on the scene.
<p>"At least evolution `utilizes' the pain suffering and extinction of countless generations of creatures which are not `separately created,' but interrelated. So, no animal or plant is specially created <em>just for extinction</em>, but so that it may play a part in the ever branching struggle to change and occupy new niches and continue the survival of life in general.</p>
<p>"Thus, evolution exhibits more of a purpose than the world of the `Design theorists' because evolution `makes the best it can' out of seemingly purposeless pain, death, extinction and competition - even if evolution's `best' is just `jury-rigged design' in a world of survivors who temporarily beat death more frequently than some of their cousins.</p>
<p>"And I might add, isn't the purpose of religion similar to the purpose of evolution? Both propose to `make some purposeful sense' out of the seemingly purposeless pain death and competition in the world around us."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p></li>
<li>"On Thy wonderful works I will meditate...The Lord is good to all, and His mercies are over all His works...Thou dost open Thy hand, and dost satisfy the desire of every living thing." [By giving them living things to prey upon? But then how is the desire of <em>every</em> living thing satisfied? - ED.]
<p>"He will also hear their cry and will save them." [But if He "saves" them from being eaten by some creature, then He's starving that other creature. - ED.]</p>
<p>PSALM 145:5,9,16,19</p></li>
<li>"He gives to the beast its food, and to the young ravens which cry."
<p>PSALM 147:9</p></li>
<li>"If the psalmists' god is responsible for `hearing the cries of animals and satisfying their desire,' then their god isn't doing a very good job of it. I recently read in a science magazine (<em>Discover</em>? <em>Scientific American</em>? <em>Nature</em>? <em>Science News</em>? <em>Science</em>? sometime in August, 1996) that a recent study showed that nearly 50% of the dead birds they examined in one province in England had died of <em>starvation</em>! Which isn't surprising, since birds have to eat from one quarter to one half their body weight daily. (I picked up a bird in my backyard this fall that couldn't fly and was hopping about slowly, and gave it to some local Wildlife Rescue people, who informed us that the bird was `starving to death.' They held up its wings and showed us its rib cage was sticking out. The bird was already too far gone and did not survive, even after being fed and cared for by the kindly Rescue folks.)
<p>The psalmists' god certainly doesn't `hear the cries' of any of the baby birds that the baby cuckoo tosses out of their nest so that only the cuckoo chick remains in the nest and is fed by the other bird's parents. Nor does such a god `hear the cries' of the baby birds that I saw on the "Hunting and Escaping" video (in the <em>Trials of Life</em> series) which were dragged from their nests by sea birds of a rival predatory species in order to feed the <em>predator's</em> own hungry chicks. Nor does such a god `hear the cry' of baby birds tossed out of the nest by their own parents (because they aren't developing properly or swiftly enough). Or who fall out of their nest simply because the nest itself was poorly constructed. (After we'd found a small baby dove running on the ground outside our house [not the same animal as the starving adult bird, mentioned above] the Wildlife Rescue people informed me that the nests of doves are constructed more poorly than the nests of most other birds, hence, their chicks are liable to fall out of them more often.)"</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p></li>
<li>"If an animal dies because its competitors have beaten it to the food, it is just as dead as if it had died in battle; and its demise is not less definitive for having been bloodless. Animal conflict, in sum, whether subtle or overt is virtually universal...And some amount of reproductive competition [for mates and/or territory] is known to occur in all animal societies (with the possible exceptions of asexual clones and eusocial sisters)."
<p>TIMOTHY ANDERS, <em>THE EVOLUTION OF EVIL: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ULTIMATE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SUFFERING</em></p></li>
<li>"Sometimes several hundred species of cichlid (pronounced SICK-lid) fish co-exist in the same lake, and each has evolved its own hunting method...One cichlid resembles a rotting fish and spends a lot of time floating as though dead; but when another fish approaches, thinking it has happened on an easy meal, the corpse springs to life and attacks the would-be scavenger...
<p>"Another has its head bent permanently to the left (and yet another has its head bent permanently to the right), an adaptation that enables them to scrape, with their teeth, a meal of scales off the side of a passing fish's body...</p>
<p>"Another eats only the eyes of other cichlids...</p>
<p>"Another exclusively sucks baby cichlids out of the protective mouths of their parents."</p>
<p>NATALIE ANGIER, "PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA" IN <em>THE BEAUTY OF THE BEASTLY</em></p></li>
<li>"I call myself a reverent agnostic because I am overwhelmed by the beauty and the wonder and the majesty and the order and the loveliness and all the wonderful things there are in the world.
<p>"At the same time I am appalled and overwhelmed by the suffering and death that is a part of life. When I think that at this moment a million creatures are being killed, at this moment. And now that the moment has passed, another million creatures are being killed, all the way down to the tiniest ameba, all the way up to a jungle cat leaping onto a gazelle, or a slaughterhouse a mile and a half from here, where, in order to keep the city of Toronto going we kill something like fifty thousand cattle every night. Fifty thousand die every night, so that this city might live.</p>
<p>"The entire world is built on death. Nothing can live unless something dies. [Editor's note: That `something' includes either a plant being chewed up and digested, or an animal. Thus every animal except carrion eaters must kill some other living thing in order to continue it's own life. Even carrion eaters live on the remains of animals usually killed by some other animal or disease organism. And speaking of plants, some kill other plants, while a few even eat animals in order to live. Even animals that live solely on plants engage in competition for mates, food, and territory. Sometimes the competition is just an innocuous ritual. But in some species the competition is brutal and fierce, males injuring other males, and sometimes mortally wounding them. Brutal herbivores? You bet.] And most of the deaths in nature are full of pain. If you look at animals, most of them aren't dead when they're eaten. Big fish eat little fish, and on and on.</p>
<p>"And, you can not look at the tragedies caused by earthquakes in Armenia, Mexico, the Philippines, without being similarly appalled and overwhelmed. Man has nothing to do with that. Man can not control earthquakes. Man can not control typhoons that sweep across poor people's countries. Man can not control the fact of northern Africa, where the weather changes, the ground dries up and these people just all starve to death, not to speak of the malnutrition and illnesses that follow.</p>
<p>"And the horror of it all is, people say, `Why don't they go somewhere else?' They can't. They have no money, no means of transportation, and nowhere to go. They're doomed from the moment they were born by where they were born, just as people are doomed in places of the world by their color; or the fact that they were born syphilitic because their mother was sold into prostitution when she was ten years old.</p>
<p>"You cannot look at this world and then say, whoever started it, he being omniscient, and knowing the future and the past and the present as one, would know all of this anger and hatred and murder and killing and death, and beauty and majesty and wonder, all of it is going to happen - to believe that he could be described by the word, `Father,' is just impossible. I couldn't treat my children the way he's treated his."</p>
<p>CHARLES TEMPLETON (IN A PHONE CONVERSATION, SHARING SOME IDEAS HE WAS PLANNING TO INCLUDE IN A BOOK THAT I HAVE NOT YET SEEN PUBLISHED. MR TEMPLETON'S LENGTHY AND DIVERSE CAREER HAS INCLUDED BEING A WELL KNOWN NORTH AMERICAN EVANGELIST WHO PREACHED TO STADIUMS PACKED WITH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, AND HOST OF HIS OWN RELIGIOUS TELEVISION PROGRAM IN AMERICA IN THE 1950s)</p></li>
<li>"I believe in Someone Out There - call Him God, since other names, like Festus or Darrin, do not seem to fit - but I am not entirely certain He is all that mindful of what goes on down here. Example: Recently a tornado destroyed a town in Texas and dropped a church roof on a batch of worshippers. One of the few things left standing were two plaster statues, one of Jesus, the other of Joseph. The townspeople, according to the news, `Looked at the statues' survival as a sign of God's love.'
<p>"Hold the phone. This sounds like the he-beats-me-because-he-loves-me line of thought. If the Lord in his infinite wisdom drops a concrete roof on the true believers but spares two hunks of modeling compound, it is time to question the big Fella's priorities. If I have to be made of plaster to command attention in this universe, something is amiss."</p>
<p>JAMES LILEKS, <em>NOTES OF A NERVOUS MAN</em></p></li>
<li>"There was a woman whom I'll call Mrs. Howard. She was a widow whose life revolved around her thirty-year-old son, Johnny Fred, who was physically deformed, his body twisted like a gnarled tree, he was mentally retarded and his speech was garbled. Every day Mrs. Howard parched and boiled peanuts and sacked them in brown paper bags. In turn, Johnny Fred would maneuver his convoluted body up and down Beulah Avenue, selling those peanuts to passersby.
<p>"One day she asked me, `Preacher, why did God let Johnny Fred be born the way he is?'</p>
<p>"How could I say to this baffled mother, `God loves you. And this God of love has blessed you with a deformed, mentally deficient son who hobbles down Beulah Avenue selling peanuts while truck drivers frighten him by blasting their horns?'</p>
<p>"I think I would have made some sense if I'd said, `Mrs. Howard, I don't know the answer to your question. Here you are a widow with a deformed son, living in a shack behind a gas station, supporting yourself and Johnny Fred on parched peanuts. Frankly, Mrs. Howard, I think you're eating chicken s---.' ("Eating chicken s---" is a Southern expression that means a person was experiencing undeserved and irrational troubles.)...</p>
<p>"Repeatedly I met people who were hurting, experiencing a flood of irrational sorrow...As Tylertown's preacher I confronted a prevalence of pain among my people. My `coherence problem' has never gone away. I've never escaped from the shadowy side of life. I've seen children wasting away from leukemia. I've watched living bodies rot from lupus and cancer and cystic fibrosis. I've been with parents moments after a child has been killed by lightning. [Or, moments after a son or daughter has told their stunned fundamentalist Christian parents, "I'm gay!" - ED.] I've encountered people locked into deformed bodies, bodies twisted from birth - going through life in wheelchairs...And I've seen people existing into a senile and pointless old age, nature's final insult...Most of this human suffering - it seemed to me - was undeserved and served no purpose...</p>
<p>"Sooner or later every person with eyes to see and ears to hear stumbles into what theologians call `the problem of evil.' If God is a heavenly father who loves his children, why does he give some of them chicken s--- to eat, sending them leukemia and twisted bodies and broken hearts and minds? Did not Jesus teach, `What man of you, if his son asks him for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?'...</p>
<p>"In the presence of such undeserved suffering I saw the point of Robert Frost's couplet:</p>
<blockquote><p>Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,<br /><br />
And I'll forget Thy great big one on me.</p></blockquote>
<p>"Why are some people brought into this world to hobble down Beulah Avenue in grotesquely-twisted bodies and to devote their life's energy to peddling peanuts? Christian thinkers tend to avoid questions like that. They leave the sad dimension of life to the Buddhas and Schopenhauers and Clarence Darrows and Mark Twains. But the tragic dimension of life will not go away. It causes us from a human viewpoint - the only viewpoint us humans have - to question the nature of God. So I was able, at least, to understand why a Tylertown Baptist said to me, `Preacher, the greatest fear I have is when I die and pass over to the other side I'll discover God is the bastard I've sometimes feared him to be.'"</p>
<p>CLAYTON SULLIVAN, "FALLEN SPARROWS" IN <em>CALLED TO PREACH, CONDEMNED TO SURVIVE: THE EDUCATION OF CLAYTON SULLIVAN</em> (MERCER UNIV. PRESS, 1985)</p></li>
<li>"Somebody should have written a book in the Bible about boring, everyday life - the grind of routine. Like shopping, and the [cart or chariot - ED.] not working...Did [Jesus - ED.] ever have to stand in the `eight-items-or-less' line at the supermarket, watching a woman get out a check book and buy twenty-five items? [Did Jesus ever run out of toilet cloths with which to wipe his behind right after he had relieved himself? - ED.] It's the sheer trivialization of existence that drives out not merely religion, but all perception of the good and the beautiful and casts a kind of grey fog over life."
<p>A. N. WILSON AS QUOTED BY ROSEMARY HARTILL IN HER BOOK, <em>WRITER'S REVEALED: EIGHT CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS TALK ABOUT FAITH, RELIGION AND GOD</em></p></li>
<li>"Our forefathers (thanks to good King James)<br /><br />Talked funny, They had oddish names.<br /><br />They fell in love, succumbed to lust,<br /><br />And trampled strangers in the dust.<br /><br />They suffered flood and fire and drought.<br /><br />A few of them remained devout.<br /><br />
Their lives were jolly, vapid, grim,<br /><br />
According to Jehovah's whim.<br /><br />
How little things have changed since then!<br /><br />
Whose fault that is, God knows. Amen."<br />
<p>JEANNE & WILLIAM STEIG, <em>THE OLD TESTAMENT MADE EASY</em></p></li>
<li>"Let's take violence off TV, off the movie screen, and out of our schools...
<p>And leave it in nature and the Bible, where it belongs!"</p></li>
</ul>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-5312136162392826612012-03-19T14:58:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:05:37.450-07:00Further Reading<p><em>Further Reading</em></p>
<p>J. Achenbach, the "Introduction" and first chapter, "Bugs," of his book, <em>Why Things Are: Answers to Every Essential Question in Life</em></p>
<p>Tina Adler, "Tick Threats: New Diseases Brought to You by Your Neighborhood Ticks," <em>Science</em> News, Vol. 146, July 16, 1994, pg. 44-45</p>
<p>W. Agosta, <em>Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees: A Close-up Look at Chemical Warfare and Signals in Animals and Plants</em></p>
<p>T. Anders, "The Scars of Human Evolution," "Conflict in the Animal World," and, "The Roots of Evil," which are chapters, or sections of chapters, in <em>The Evolution of Evil: An Inquiry into the Ultimate Origins of Human Suffering</em></p>
<p>M. Andrews, <em>The Life That Lives On Man</em></p>
<p>Natalie Angier, her chapters, "Mating For Life?", "Female Choice: An Eve-olutionary Force," "Parasites and Sex," "Hormones and Hyenas," "Plenty of Fish in the Sea," "The Grand Strategy of Orchids" in <em>The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views On the Nature of Life</em></p>
<p>[I especially enjoyed her chapters on "Parasites and Sex," "The Grand Strategy of Orchids" (which places their adaptability in evolutionary perspective), and, "Plenty of Fish in the Sea" (on the explosive evolutionary radiation of cichlid fishes). Ms. Angier is a Pulitzer Prize winning author whose previous book was titled, <em>Natural Obsessions</em>.- ED.]</p>
<p>E. T. Babinski, "The Revised Quote Book" article published in <em>Cretinism or Evilution?</em> No.3. Winter/Spring, 1996, includes discussion of the design of the eye, and Darwin's discussion of the "design" question.</p>
<p>M. R. Berenbaum, <em>Ninety-nine Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em>, and the sequel, <em>Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em></p>
<p>Howard Bloom, "Mother Nature, The Bloody Bitch" in <em>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Exploration Into the Forces of History</em></p>
<p>Chris Colby, Loren Petrich and others, "Evidence for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature"</p>
<p><em>Dangerous Animals</em> (a book that I don't have any additional information about except its ISBN number, 0-7835-4762-5, which is handy if you wish to order it via interlibrary loan)</p>
<p><em>Dangerous Creatures </em>on CD-ROM (available in Macintosh and Windows versions by calling 1-800-426-9400, Microsoft Corporation) "If you're fascinated by teeth, fangs, stingers, and venoms, Microsoft provides a dose of each, from vampire bats to poisonous jellyfish."</p>
<p>B. Dixon, <em>Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule the World</em></p>
<p>Eric Elfman, <em>Almanac of the Gross, Disgusting & Totally Repulsive</em></p>
<p>Adrian Forsyth, <em>A Natural History of Sex</em></p>
<p>Tijs Goldschmidt, <em>Darwin's Dreampond</em> (discusses the "explosive" evolution of hundreds of new species of cichlid fishes with different body types and behaviors that evolved in just a few million years in lakes in East Africa)</p>
<p>S. J. Gould, "Organic Wisdom, or Why Should a Fly Eat Its Mother from Inside?" in <em>Ever Since Darwin</em></p>
<p>S. J. Gould, "Nonmoral Nature" in <em>Hen's Teeth and Horses' Toes</em></p>
<p>S. J. Gould, "Only His Wings Remained" in <em>The Flamingo's Smile</em></p>
<p>J. K. Hanson and D. Morrison, <em>Of Kinkajous, Capabaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs, And the Oddest and Most Wonderful Mammals, Insects, Birds, And Plants of Our World</em></p>
<p>J. K. Hanson, <em>The Beastly Book: 100 of the World's Most Dangerous Creatures</em></p>
<p>P. J. Hotez and D. I. Pritchard, "Hookworm Infection: It Retards Growth and Intellectual Development In Millions of Children Yet is Largely Ignored by Researchers. New Findings Suggest Excellent Possibilities for a Vaccine" in <em>Scientific American</em>, June 1995</p>
<p><em>The Race Against Lethal Microbes: Learning to Outwit the Shifty Bacteria, Viruses, and Parasites That Cause Infectious Diseases</em>, a report published Aug. 1996 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 4000 Jones Bridge Rd., Chevy Chase, MD 20815-6789. A project of the Institute's Office of Communications, Robert A. Potter, director (301) 215-8855</p>
<p>[Wonderfully informative report with color photos of your favorite pathogens! - ED.]</p>
<p>D. Kennedy, <em>Nature's Outcasts: A New Look At Living Things We Love to Hate</em></p>
<p>R. M. Knutson, <em>Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You</em></p>
<p>V. Koman, <em>The Jehovah Contract</em> ("sci-fi" novel dealing with the problem of pain and other problems with Christian beliefs)</p>
<p>W. M. Krogman, "The Scars of Human Evolution," article in <em>Scientific American</em>, 1951 (cited in T. Anders' <em>The Evolution of Evil</em> - but Anders neglected to mention the exact issue in which Krogman's article appeared)</p>
<p>Dietrich Mebs, "The Strategic Use of Venoms and Toxins in Animals," <em>Universitas</em>, No. 3, 1994, pg. 213-222</p>
<p>Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., <em>The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs</em> (Which contains some excellent sections on the problems of pain and evil and clumsy design in the cosmos, as well as sections dealing with the errancy of the Bible. Available for $18 from Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., The Flat Woods Free Press, Route 2, Box 49, Gordo, Alabama 35466-9516)</p>
<p>Miranda MacQuitty with Laurence Mound, "Staying Alive," "On the Attack," and, "Mating Games" in <em>Megabugs: The Natural History Museum Book of Insects</em></p>
<p>William H. McNeill, <em>Plagues and People</em> (which includes a chapter on mankind's struggle to no longer be the main course of hungry viruses and bacteria, and the effects of that struggle)</p>
<p>Elaine Morgan, "The Cost of Walking Erect," "The Cost of A Naked Skin," and other chapters in <em>The Scars of Evolution: What Our Bodies Tell Us About Human Origins</em></p>
<p>J. Morrow, <em>Bible Stories for Adults</em>, 1996 ("Sci-Fi/Fantasy" short stories, one of which retells the Biblical "Flood" account in the form of "Star Trek-like captain's log" entries, and a few other stories that deal with Biblical brutality)</p>
<p>J. Morrow, <em>Blameless in Abaddon</em>, 1996 (novel wherein a justice of the peace decides to prosecute God for crimes against humanity)</p>
<p>"Nightmares of Nature" (a television show that appeared on TBS on Sunday, Oct. 27th, 1996 at 8 P.M. as part of the series, <em>National Geographic Explorer</em>)</p>
<p>Nesse & Williams, "Legacies of Evolutionary History" (how faulty construction of our human bodies highlights our evolutionary past) in <em>Why We Get Sick</em></p>
<p>A. Nikiforuk, <em>The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famines and Other Scourges</em></p>
<p>David Quammen, "Nasty Habits: An African Bedbug Buggers the Proof-by-Design," and, "The Well-Kept Secret of Carnivorous Plants" in <em>The Flight of the Iguana</em></p>
<p><em>Trials of Life</em>, 6 tape video series, especially "Hunting and Escaping," and, "Fighting"</p>
<p>Mark Jerome Walters, "The Rise of Conflict," and, "Why Mammals are Unfaithful" in <em>Courtship in the Animal Kingdom</em> [previously published as <em>The Dance of Life</em>]</p>
<p>Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman, "Can We Win the War Against Cancer?", "What is the Most Venomous Animal?", "Viruses - The Dinner Guests That Stayed" in <em>Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light...And Other Explorations in Nature's Curiosity Shop</em></p>
<p>Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman, <em>Killer Germs: Microbes and Diseases That Threaten Humanity</em></p>
<p>Nell Zink, editor of <em>Animal Review</em> #7, Special Parasite Edition, Sept. 1994. Cost: $3.00 Address: 3941 Brandywine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.</p>
<p>H. Zinsser, <em>Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever</em></p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-17752264163765582422012-03-19T14:39:00.003-07:002019-09-01T13:05:19.608-07:00Why We Believe in a Designer!<p><em>Why We Believe in a Designer!</em></p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to make countless stars blaze away countless kilowatts of energy in every corner of this vast cosmos for no apparent purpose; and have the prize of his creation, the earth - which God worked on for "five" out of the "six days of creation" - receive only an infinitesimal portion of the energy expended by even the nearest star, the sun.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to make faint galaxies, faint stars, asteroids, meteors, etc., that produce or reflect so little light that they are undetectable by the earth's inhabitants. [Yet it says in the Bible that all the objects in the firmament were created to "light" the earth, and "for signs and seasons" on earth.]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to intentionally destroy his own cosmic designs, making stars in distant galaxies explode with such intensity that they stand out from all the rest of the hundreds of billions of stars in their immediate galaxy. The energies released by such novas also destroy any life forms (if they happen to exist) on planets circling stars within quite a few light-years of the nova. The cosmos also contains the remains of stellar explosions, like the Cygnus ring, a great expanding ring of matter. And there are whole galaxies seen in the process of colliding with one another; and weird "O-shaped" galaxies that are believed to be the remnants of one galaxy colliding and passing through another and turning it inside out.</p>
<p>The Milky Way galaxy (that we all know and love, since it is where our solar system resides) is presently "ripping apart a helpless smaller galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius and will soon swallow millions of its stars." [See "To Kill a Galaxy" in <em>Astronomy</em>, Vol. 24, no. 12, Dec. 1996]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create large asteroids (like Icarus and Hermes) whose known orbits around the sun intersect with that of our own planet's orbit around the sun, ensuring that at some time in the near or distant future our planet will most likely collide with such objects.</p>
<p>Furthermore, asteroids with "near-earth" orbits can have their orbits subtly altered by gravitational effects over time so that they intersect with earth's orbit. "433 Eros" (which is an asteroid twice the size of the one believed to have struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs) presently occupies a near-earth orbit. But recent computer simulations [discussed in the article, "Eros has Earth's Number" in <em>Astronomy</em>, Vol. 24, no. 12, Dec. 1996] have shown that the gravity from the planet Mars is very gradually moving that asteroid into an earth-<em>crossing</em> orbit. Astronomers have predicted that in less than 1.1 million years Eros could collide with the Earth.</p>
<p>To date, over 70 asteroids have been discovered that have "earth-approaching" orbits, and astronomers estimate that several thousand such objects exist out there. Asteroids are difficult to detect since they are small dark bodies of matter, and there is no well-funded program to chart them. As one astronomer stated, "The asteroid with our name on it probably won't even be seen until it is too late, since it will begin as an invisible black dot in the sky, that expands imperceptibly as the asteroid heads straight for us, i.e., rather than moving <em>across</em> the sky."</p>
<p>On Oct. 30, 1937, the earth and the asteroid Hermes missed colliding by only 500,000 miles (that's about twice the distance from the earth to the moon). On March 22, 1989, the asteroid "1989 FC" passed by even nearer, within 437,000 miles of Earth. The latter asteroid was between 650 to 1,600 feet in diameter, and if it had struck the earth it would have exploded with the force of more than a million tons of TNT, and left a crater up to 4 and 1/3 miles across. [<em>Sky & Telescope</em>, July, 1989, pg. 30]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create vacant worlds that circle the Sun along with the earth; and also create immense discs of matter, and planets, that have been detected circling other stars, i.e., countless acres of presumably uninhabited and barren territory.</p>
<p>(With the aid of the Hubble telescope, cloudy rings of matter have been detected circling about half of a hundred stars closely examined in the nearby Orion nebula. These stars are relatively young and the size of our own Sun or smaller. A number of stars near our Sun even have planets and/or discs of matter circling them. Unfortunately, our present astronomical instruments are not sensitive enough to detect earth-sized planets, just gigantic ones, and huge discs of matter, circling stars.</p>
<p>Yet, <em>such huge discs of matter resemble what our own solar system would look like from a distance</em>, since the Kuiper belt (made up of millions of asteroids and cometary bodies) has been observed lying beyond Pluto and circling our own Sun.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the nearby star, Beta Pictoris, which is only 50 light-years away, has a disc of matter surrounding it, and has given astronomers a clue that a number of planet-sized bodies could possibly be circling it. Because we can clearly see the star, Beta Pictoris, even looking right through the disc of matter (the edge of which faces our vantage point and passes right in front of the star), therefore the disc of matter must not contain much dust - which is exactly what one would expect if the material had already condensed into planets.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create dozens of moons in our solar system that can't be seen from Earth except with a telescope - Moons that provide light at night, or, "rule the nights" of uninhabited planets like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make only a portion of the earth easily habitable by man, the rest being ocean surface, deserts, barren scrub lands, nearly impenetrable rain forests, swampland, frozen tundra, steep mountain ranges and cliff sides, or places lacking fresh water, or having little fresh water to offer.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create myriads of flowers which bloom in impenetrable jungles where none may see them.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create bacteria that live on the bottom of the ocean where black clouds of super heated mineral-rich water spew from chimney-like mounds. Such "hydrothermal vents" in the ocean's floor are also surrounded by 30-inch long worms, clams the size of dinner plates, mussels, and a strange pink-skinned blue-eyed fish, that all live off the unique species of bacteria there, which breaks down the chemicals in the water into useable food. It is a world that exists without sunlight, and without relying on the ecosystems in the ocean above and the land above, neither do such creatures contribute anything vital to the world above.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create species with the ability to live in a cave that was isolated from the rest of the world and which was recently opened to reveal 33 new species of animals, all living in darkness. And, unlike all previously known cave critters, these lived without relying on organic matter flowing into the cave from plants that once grew in the sunlight above. So it had become a self-contained ecological system, only relying on some oxygen that seeped into the cave via cracks, and on fungi and bacteria that lived in the pool of water that partially fills the cave. Such an ecosystem "was sealed off more than 5.5 million years ago...and its creatures have evolved into specialized, self-sufficient forms." Among the 9 new species of carnivores found in the cave and "designed" for this unique ecosystem were two "pseudoscorpions and a worm-sucking leech." [See "Romanian Cave Contains Novel Ecosystem," <em>Science News</em>, Vol. 149, June 29, 1996]</p>
<p>(Why "design" such ecosystems at the sea bottom and in caves isolated from the rest of the world - ecosystems that contribute nothing of any substance to life on the earth above? Kind of makes you believe that such a "Designer" would also put life on other planets that contributes nothing of any substance to life on earth.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create weeds, flowers, annoying insects, fish, birds, diseases, that swarm in senseless profusion then perish.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to make man, a creature whose reproductive urges and reproductive success far outstrips his ability to learn from his mistakes, a creature whose population is predicted to increase by a billion in each of the next few decades, leading to the eradication of nearly all the rest of the creatures that had been "designed."</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to "control the wind, the rain and lightning, such that whole States dry and wither, while at the same time wasting precious rain on the sea; make hurricanes and tornadoes such that cities and people are crushed to shapelessness; and direct lightning to strike the life out of men, women, and children." [Ingersoll] (See Job, chapters 36-38)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to plant upon the earth "thousands of deadly shrubs and vines; stock the earth with ferocious beasts and poisonous reptiles; take pains to breed malaria and a host of other diseases in just the right `host' animals and environments he'd created for that purpose; arrange that the ground would occasionally open and swallow a few of his darlings; establish volcanoes that might at any moment overwhelm his children with rivers of fire; and then neglect to tell his children which of the plants and animals were deadly; failed to say anything about the earthquakes, and kept the volcano business a profound secret." [Ingersoll]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the wonderfully designed <em>Plasmodium </em>parasite that causes malaria which is spread with the aid of the wonderfully designed mosquito.</p>
<p>"About half of all the humans who have ever lived have died from malaria. The Roman Empire was undermined by malaria. The early American colony of Jamestown had to be established three times because of malaria." [Natalie Angier, "Parasites and Sex," <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>] Today, malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mainly children and pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose brains become infected with the parasite. There are four different species of Plasmodium, the deadliest of the four being <em>Plasmodium falciparum</em>, which is rapidly becoming resistant to drugs. The other three species of Plasmodium can still be treated with high doses of cholorquine.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a world teeming with venomous animals that kill over 60,000 people a year and cause pain and suffering to much more. Every large group of animals - coelenterates (including jellyfish), insects (including caterpillars, fire ants, and killer bees), spiders, fish, amphibians (including poisonous frogs and sea snakes), reptiles (including snakes), even a few mammal and bird species, have poisonous or venom-producing members.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the sea wasp, an Australian jellyfish with tentacles up to 30-feet long that have tens of thousands of stinging cells that contain a neuropoison that can cause a human being to die from asphyxiation or heart failure in less than ten minutes. It may be the most deadly creature in the ocean.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the bacteria that infect the food we eat. Microgram for microgram, the poisons produced by some bacteria in our food are more potent than all other known poisons on earth. It is estimated that one tenth of an ounce of the toxin produced by bacteria causing botulism would be more than enough to kill everyone in the city of New York; and a 12-ounce glassful would be enough to kill all 5.9 billion human beings on the face of the Earth. (The same happens to be true of the toxin that causes tetanus.) Pretty powerful stuff. (Do Design-theorists imagine the Designer working overtime in His own personal biological warfare laboratory?)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that most creatures on earth do not obtain all the vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and protein they need to grow up into the <em>best</em> possible shape, physically and mentally.</p>
<p>For instance, lack of vitamin D causes rickets, lack of vitamin C causes scurvy, lack of niacin causes pellagra, lack of vitamin A causes blindness in children, lack of vitamins C, E, B-6, B-12 and/or iron, causes anemia, lack of vitamin B-12 is linked to fibro-cystic breast condition, lack of calcium, iodine, or other minerals also cause deficiency diseases. As does the lack of necessary quantities of protein in the diet. Such deficiencies caused a lot more problems in the days when essential types of food were less abundant (especially during some seasons of the year) and when nutritional standards were unknown. And such deficiencies continue to plague people in less developed regions of the world. Moreover, such deficiencies are <em>especially hard on babies and children</em>, where a deficiency's effects are magnified and lead to lifelong physical and mental problems.</p>
<p>As many as 30% of the children in China (a country with the world's highest population) are believed to suffer stunted growth (and sexual maturation problems) due to zinc deficiency.</p>
<p>And there is a "goiter belt" along the Atlantic coast from west to central Africa, where many people lack enough iodine in their system. The worst area for this deficiency is in the Republic of Guinea where 70% of all adults have goiter. "Thyroid swelling was sometimes present at birth and affected 55% of school children...Endemic cretinism, mainly in its myxodematous form, was found in about 2% of goitrous patients...myxodematous children, especially those affected by the most severe neurological symptoms, suffer early and high mortality rates." ["Goitrous Endemic in Guinea," <em>The Lancet</em>, Dec. 17, 1994]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the sawtoothed grain beetle, angoumois grain moths, Mediterranean flour moths, scale insects, cabbage worms, corn earworms, corn rootworms, cutworms, tomato fruitworms (along with other insects) that destroy thirty percent of U.S. food crops each year by voraciously devouring leaves, fruits, grain (and also by spreading fungal and bacterial plant rots as well).</p>
<p>The proliferation of such creatures has led at one time or another to human starvation in well nigh every part of the globe.</p>
<p>(And only with the recent inventions of <em>refrigeration and canning</em> have insects been prevented from devouring a huge percentage of harvested food as they used to do.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the boll weevil. "The single most costly insect in the history of American agriculture. It closed down factories, depreciated land values, disrupted railroad business, caused bank failures, and created massive unemployment and homelessness. It has, however, kept the pesticide industry booming, because about 40% of all agricultural insecticides used in the U.S. are sprayed onto cotton primarily to control boll weevils. However, the little weevil still causes as much as $200 to $300 million annually in losses and adds an average of 3 1/2 to 4 cents to every 60 cents per pound of cotton." [May Berenbaum, <em>Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create species of fungi that "destroy billions of dollars worth of crops by causing diseases in the growing plant and by spoiling the stored food. Every year they destroy enough food to feed 300 million people." [Hanson & Morrison, <em>Of Kinkajous, Capybaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs</em>]</p>
<p>Out of the 40,000 known species of fungi one [or some?] of them caused Ireland's potato famine, forcing many Irish to leave their country. Evicted by fungi. One good thing about fungi is that there is a species that is deadly to locust species which sleep in the ground for a little over sixteen years at a time. The locust awakens to find most of its abdomen eaten by fungus, and it sheds parts of it, leaving only the locust's head and thorax which feebly fumbles about. (So, human beings aren't the only ones fungus picks on! Praise Darwin!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a fungus that parasitizes grasses by first destroying the grass's sex cells, so that the grass can only reproduce by sending out carbon-copy shoots, instead of via sexual reproduction, which would lead to different combinations of genes and a fungal-resistant species of that grass.</p>
<p>(What a "wonderful design" for a fungus that feasts on grasses by eating their sex-cells first! Not too "wonderful" for the grasses, though.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a fungus "that infects a beautiful flower related to the carnation, sterilizes the plant, then transforms the blossom into a fungal factory. In the stamen of the flowers, where the pollen of the plant normally would be found, an infected plant displays a bristle of fungal spores. Pushing perversity to the extreme, the fungus causes its floral host to grow bigger and showier flowers than those of normal plants, attracting pollinating insects and ensuring the transmission of parasitic spores [that destroy more flowers - meanwhile, I guess the bees and other insects looking for pollen just have to go hungry - ED.]" [Natalie Angier, "Parasites and Sex," <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create tsetse flies which carry sleeping sickness. The fly has rasp-like labellum to saw through the skin of vertebrate animals and create a pool of blood from which they drink. Its "tongue" has two channels, one for sucking up blood, and another for pumping saliva (containing anticoagulants) into the wound. The tsetse fly has been a major obstacle to furthering the development of Africa.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the trypanosome - a single-celled parasite that thrives inside the bloodstream and causes fatal neurological illnesses. In Africa the bite of the tsetse fly spreads trypanosomes over large areas, two species of which afflict people with sleeping sickness. It is estimated that 60,000 African are infected with the disease each year. Other species of trypanosomes in Africa afflict livestock. For generations there had been very little meat in protein-poor regions of Africa because trypanosomes spread by the bite of the tsetse fly decimated the herds.</p>
<p>In South America, Central America and Mexico another species of trypanosome is spread by the extremely painful bite of the "kissing bug." This species of trypanosome causes "Chagas' disease" in humans, which leads to persistent fevers, anemia, loss of nervous control, debilitating gastrointestinal illness, irregular heartbeat, congestive heart failure, and death due to inflammation of the heart. Ten to eighteen million people in Latin America are believed to be infected with Chagas' disease, though the infection may remain silent for years as the trypanosomes multiply inside cells, periodically wiggling out to invade and destroy a neighboring cell or to cruise in the bloodstream. And since there are an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people with the disease now living in the U.S., there is an increasing possibility of picking up trypanosomes via a blood transfusion. Some have already done so.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the trypanosome so that it can travel wherever it likes throughout the human bloodstream, mutating regularly to avoid being identified and destroyed by the immune system.</p>
<p>"When the going gets tough and antibodies have identified and wiped out 99 percent of the invaders, one of the few remaining trypanosomes suddenly strips off all identifying markers, sprouts a new coat, and begins reproducing madly, looking for all the world like a brand-new enemy. By the time the immune system has retooled to fight the refurbished foe and launch a second attack, one of the new generation of parasites has already switched to yet another coat and escaped again...Perhaps one in a hundred, perhaps one in a million, a trypanosome will express a protein coat that is quite antigenically different from its twin's...The pressures of pursuit encourage the growth of creatures who make such a change...Most living cells boast tens or hundreds of types of outer coat proteins, called variant surface glycoproteins...But there are as many as a thousand variant surface glycoprotein genes scattered throughout the coils of DNA in each trypanosome. Amazingly, that means that fully 5 to 10 percent of the trypanosome's genetic endowment is devoted to antigenic variation...[Trypanosomes have a] mutation generator - a mechanism by which they systematically introduce point mutations into their variant surface glycoproteins [what marvelous design!- ED]." [<em>The Race Against Lethal Microbes: Learning to Outwit the Shifty Bacteria, Viruses, and Parasites That Cause Infectious Diseases</em>, a report published Aug. 1996 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create assassin bugs with stout beaks they use to pierce insects, spiders, poultry, small rodents and human skin. The "kissing bug" is a member of the larger family of assassin bugs. It is known for flying into people's faces and biting them around the mouth and nose. <em>Its bite is probably the most painful of all insects</em>, the pain often affecting a great deal of the body, including swelling, faintness, vomiting, etc. Kissing bugs also transmit "Chagas' disease," since they defecate as they feed, and the fecal matter contains trypanosomes that get wiped into the person's eyes, nose, or mouth.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the sensation of pain not merely to "warn" us of danger (like the danger of touching a hot frying pan with your bare hands) but also created pain just for its own sake.</p>
<p>"It was no use feeling the pain of an inflamed appendix until modern surgical techniques were sufficiently advanced to remove it. And often the `warnings' appear ill-adjusted to the seriousness of the disease. Toothache kills few people, while sadly some forms of cancer give little pain in the early stages. So we are left with a large amount of pain that seems to serve no purpose and which is not far distant from torture." [C. S. Rodd "Questions People Ask: 4. The Problem of Evil and Suffering" in <em>The Expository Times</em>, Vol. 107, no. 2, Nov. 1995]</p>
<p>(Or take the land leeches of Sri Lanka that can bite a person <em>painlessly</em> and drain them of dangerous amounts of blood. If pain was the designer's "gift" to "warn" us of "life threatening dangers" then he let those damn leeches get by, didn't He?)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create <em>epidermolysis bullosa</em>, a virtually untreatable disorder characterized by widespread and constant blistering of the skin, so that there is no part of the body on which an infant can lie without pain.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create toxoplasmosis which causes numerous difficulties in human infants, including blindness and a risk of severe retardation. A common carrier of this illness is the common house cat.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make men reach their sexual peak at 19 and women reach their's at 35.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make the human male more likely than the female to desire sexual relations with a variety of partners.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create men and women so different that there exists a "battle between the sexes" borne out of the inability of one sex to effectively understand and communicate with the other.</p>
<p>The novelist, Anthony Burgess, once said something illuminating concerning this situation: "I think marriage is the fundamental, the basis of life. Within a marriage, you develop vocabulary, you develop a culture which makes sense within that very, very small closed circle. But one also accepts that it can be outrageously difficult. One of the reasons why some people have turned against Jesus Christ, why people are prepared to accept Scorsese's film <em>The Last Temptation of Christ</em>, is that Christ didn't do the most difficult thing of all - which was to live with a woman [and vice versa! - ED.]." [Anthony Burgess as quoted by Rosemary Hartill in her book, <em>Writer's Revealed: Eight Contemporary Novelists Talk About Faith, Religion And God</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the human body such that 70% of us suffer lower back pain, since our vertebrae are better designed to function as horizontal suspension bridges for our internal organs rather than as vertical supports for a bipedal mammal.</p>
<p>Other marvels of human body design include flat feet, weak ankles and knees, varicose veins, heart failure, dangerously thin portions of the skull, teeth that are impacted (or crooked and badly crowded), hernias, hemorrhoids, allergies, eye problems, appendicitis, gall bladder disease, prostate problems, "female problems," danger of choking (because our breathing passage, eating passage, and speech box are all right on top of each other), not to mention countless birth defects. (Does Jesus really "love all the little zygotes in the world?" - not enough to give them all a whole and healthy start in life).</p>
<p>Walk into any hospital, doctor's office, or <em>televangelists' healing service</em>, and see for yourself "how marvelous is your body and how nothing has been left to chance."</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that "everything that tastes good will either clog your heart or make you fat. Incredibly delicious foods do both." [Rick Reynolds, <em>Only the Truth is Funny</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to design the human body so that it often has problems regulating the histamine hormone.</p>
<p>If your body releases too much histamine in response to a minor bee sting or in response to receiving a small dose of anesthetics for a minor operation, then you can die of anaphylactic shock. In other words, the bee sting or anaesthetic won't kill you, but your body's faulty regulation of its own histamine hormones could.</p>
<p>"Septic shock," which is one of the most dreaded complications in intensive care units, is now thought to be due not merely to an infection but also due to a heavy release of histamine that leads to a life-threatening vasoconstriction.</p>
<p>The role that the misregulation of histamine plays in allergic reactions of all kinds is something for "Design" theorists to consider. Why so many problems with the regulation of histamine? Not enough "back-up systems" in our bodies to "check things out" before flooding our bodies with too much histamine?</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make "the urethra pass right through the human male's prostate gland, a gland very prone to infection and subsequent enlargement. This blocks the urethra and is a very common medical problem in males (1 in 3 men will need to have prostate surgery in their lives). Putting a collapsible tube through an organ that is very likely to expand and block the flow in this tube is not good design." [Chris Colby, "Evidence for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that the human male's testes form inside the abdomen, then have to pass through the abdominal wall and into the scrotal sac, thereby leaving two weak spots in the wall of the abdominal muscles. The intestines can poke through these weak spots, called the inguinal canals, which can result in much pain, and also cut off blood flow to the protruding and tightly squeezed intestines.</p>
<p>According to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who treated natives in Central Africa, "They suffer much oftener than Europeans from strangulated hernia, in which a portion of the intestines pokes out through the abdominal muscles and becomes blocked, so that it can no longer empty itself. It then becomes enormously inflated with gases which form, and this causes terrible pain. Then after several days of torture death takes place, unless the intestine can be got back through the rupture into the abdomen. Our ancestors were well acquainted with this terrible method of dying, but we no longer see it in Europe because every case is operated upon as soon as it is recognized...But in Africa this terrible death is quite common. There are few who have not as boys seen some man rolling in the sand of his hut and howling with agony until death came to release him." [<em>On the Edge of the Primeval Forest</em>, 1961]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create human beings as two-legged upright creatures based on the same skeletal design for <em>four</em>-legged creatures. This has led to innumerable problems for men and women. Aside from lower back pain, foot, ankle, and knee problems, "to effect upright posture based on the skeletal system of four-legged animals the human female's sacrum had to be pushed down somewhat, so that its lower end is now below both the hip socket and the upper level of the pelvic articulation...This has resulted in an encroachment on the female pelvic cavity, thereby narrowing the birth canal and rendering it too small for comfortable birthing. The result is that human childbirth is generally painful and often dangerous. The process of giving birth exposes both the mother and her infant to sizable risks of accidents and infections. For a woman with a small pelvis the rigors of childbirth can be excruciating, even fatal. No other animal has this problem." [Wilton Krogman, "The Scars of Human Evolution," <em>Scientific American</em>, 1951 - as cited in Timothy Anders' <em>The Evolution of Evil</em>]</p>
<p>Only in recent times has the mortality of women and children during childbirth been greatly reduced due to advances in obstetrical medicine. Even today, however, a woman's chances of dying from complications during childbirth remain greater than dying from complications due to having an abortion during her first trimester of pregnancy. If only the Designer had employed a uniquely improved design instead of just jury-rigging the old four-legged skeletal system to make us walk erect!</p>
<p>Speaking of another flaw (albeit a minor one compared to the above), designed into the upright skeletal system of human beings are "two major blood vessels, going to the legs, that must cross a sharp promontory bone at the junction of two lower vertebrae in the spine. The organs in the pelvis exert great pressure on those two blood vessels. During pregnancy, this pressure may build up to such an extent that the vein is nearly pressed shut, making for very poor blood drainage of the left leg. This is the so-called `milk leg' of pregnancy. Four-legged animals experience no such problem." [Wilton Krogman, "The Scars of Human Evolution," <em>Scientific American</em>, 1951 - as cited in Timothy Anders' <em>The Evolution of Evil</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that during gestation the female hyena's clitoris swells to the size of the male hyena's penis, and when her cubs are born they are so large and mature and ferocious - with teeth already erupted through their gums - that they sometimes tear their mother's clitoris on the way out.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that the baby giraffe falls several feet and lands on its head at birth.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to make it so that the male giraffe tastes the urine of the female before they copulate.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to make the giraffe's neck out of the same seven bones found in the necks of most other mammal species.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to construct the pig so that two toes on each of its feet don't touch the ground as it walks.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create many different species of wasp that stick their eggs on the outside of (or poke them inside) the bodies of caterpillars, beetles, crickets and spiders, so that the larva hatch and immediately begin eating their host alive.</p>
<p>In some cases, the wasp produces a toxin that partially paralyzes the host insect, keeping it alive but immobile. The biologist, J. H. Fabre learned to feed paralyzed cricket victims by placing a syrup of sugar and water on their mouthparts - thus showing that they remained alive and sentient while the wasp larva inside them was eating them. The larva even save the heart and brain for last which keeps the rest of their "meat" fresh! (Maybe they save those organs "for last" because the heart is moving and active and the larva perceive it as a "threat" and so only eat it last, and because the brain is usually furthest away and protected by an exoskeletal helmet.)</p>
<p>One species of parasitic wasp can detect the chemical produced by Mediterranean flour moth caterpillars with which they mark the flour pile they occupy, telling other caterpillars of their species that "this pile is occupied." The wasp only has to follow the scent to its source. "What was `designed' as a warning to other caterpillars to go elsewhere for dinner is an engraved dinner invitation for parasitic wasps (proving that there are worse things than having to share your dinner with a member of your own family)." [May Berenbaum, <em>Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em>]</p>
<p>One species of caterpillar, when attacked by their particular wasp predator, drop from their leaves and hang by a thin thread, but the wasp follows them down the thread. Some host species can encapsulate the injected wasp's egg with blood cells that aggregate and harden, thus suffocating the wasp parasite within them. So the Darwinian battle continues.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, there's a species of wasp that drills through wood with its ovipositor to place its eggs on a host beetle. Another species of wasp (lacking the ability to drill such holes), simply injects their eggs through the holes bored by the first wasp species; and when the eggs hatch, the larva of the second wasp has a larger head and mandibles, and <em>eats the larva of the first wasp</em>, and gets to devour the host beetle all by itself! (Talk about jury-rigged "design!" Or did the "Designer" love the second wasp species so much that it created the first wasp species just to bore holes for the second and give up its larva for the second species to feast on?)</p>
<p>There's one wasp that lays an egg inside an aphid then the larva hatches, eats the aphid, cuts a hole in the bottom of the aphid's exoskeletal shell, glues the skeleton to a leaf by sticky secretions from its salivary gland, and spins a cocoon to pupate within the aphid's shell. (More jury-rigged "design!" Or did the "Designer" love that particular wasp species so much that it created the aphid just to be used in such a fashion?)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create microscopic creatures related to spiders, called mites, that are found crawling on the skin of every human body. All animal species have their own peculiar species of mites. One type of human mite, the "follicle mite," was "first discovered in 1972 living in the holes at the base of our eyelashes. They spend their entire lives mating, eating, and relieving themselves among our lashes. A favorite food of the follicle mite is eye-liner. It contains nearly all the nutrients they need to survive." [Eric Elfman, <em>Almanac of the Gross, Disgusting & Totally Repulsive</em>] Some mites are found only on fleas - mite parasites sucking the blood of flea parasites that suck the blood of larger creatures!</p>
<p>Honey bee mites (<em>Varoa jacobsoni</em>) can destroy a colony by infesting all the drones, over a dozen mites per drone. This species of mite prefers drones - puncturing the bee's cuticle and sucking its body fluids. All the drones die and the next virgin queen bee that is born never gets to mate with a male drone bee, and the colony ends there.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create certain female mites that asexually lay a bunch of eggs containing only males. Within three to four days the males mature and mate with their mother, then die.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create Killer Whales that hunt in packs for seal and sea lion pups on certain beaches at certain times of the year - Killer Whales that, unlike all others of their kind, intentionally beach themselves as they chase the pups up the beach, then, know how to thrash their huge lumbering bodies back into the sea with their prey in their jaws - Killer Whales that very often drag the pups straight out to sea without immediately killing them so that they may play with their catch as if exulting in their triumph, tossing the seal or sea lion pup up in the air and swatting it with their tails for a long while before they finally decide to eat it. [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Hunting and Escaping"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a chacma baboon like the one that was seen catching a pigeon, plucking out its feathers, letting it go, recapturing it, pulling out its legs, and then decapitating it. [Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., <em>The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create chimpanzees that hunt in packs and drive small monkeys (or young baboons) toward a specific destination where they are captured. Then the monkey's (or baboon's) guts are torn open as they scream, and their organs and flesh are shared by the chimpanzee pack. [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Hunting and Escaping"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create chimpanzees such that rival packs engage in group warfare, injuring and killing each other. Even gorillas, which are strictly vegetarians, will engage in warfare with rival packs of gorillas that may result in broken bones and fatalities. And while we're speaking of large-brained mammals, dolphins have been observed engaging in "dolphin wars" where small groups fiercely battle other small groups over mates. [See "Mother Nature, The Bloody Bitch" in <em>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Exploration Into the Forces of History</em> by Howard Bloom]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create Humpback whales with the instinct to hunt schools of herring or other fish by "bubble-netting" them. The whales gather round the fish in a wide circle then blow bubbles out their blowholes, making a circular wall of bubbles, which frightens the fish and makes them congregate in the center of the "net." Then a whale swims up through the bottom of the bubble net and grabs as many fish as he can with his mouth wide open.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that the majority of humanity is hobbled by one or more types of parasite (with the exception of nations with modern medical knowledge and the resources to implement such knowledge, where parasite infestations are far fewer than would <em>naturally</em> occur).</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create flies that irritatingly land on people's skin, buzz in their ears, sting and/or bite people, even those already suffering from diseases that God has designed to torment them, and then those flies pass those diseases along to others.</p>
<p>The common housefly is known to transmit some thirty different diseases and parasites to humans, including leprosy, dysentery, diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever and many more. Some epidemiologists regard the common housefly as potentially the most dangerous insect in the world. (Others say that God created the mosquito to make flies look better.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create <em>Mydas heros</em>, the largest known fly, with a body length of about 2 1/4 inches and a wingspan of about 4 inches, which resides in South America. "It is so formidable it will attack even well-armed bees and wasps, diving on their backs and paralyzing them with a bite in the soft region of the neck." [<em>Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a large fly from South America (<em>Dermatobia hominis</em>) that overpowers smaller insects (like a mosquito or a smaller fly or anything small that is liable to land on and bite a human being) and glues an about-to-hatch egg on its underside, which that smaller insect carries with it when it lands on a human for lunch. The egg hatches almost instantly and the maggot crawls over to where the smaller insect has made a wound, and it enters the human being there, and matures inside the human.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the African tumbu fly (<em>Cordylobia anthropophaga</em>), "whose larva wriggle about in a boil-like swelling under the skin of humans." [Des Kennedy, <em>Nature's Outcasts</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Congo floor maggot (of the fly species <em>Auchmeromyia luteola</em>) that gets its food from human beings who sleep on the ground (since the maggot cannot crawl up a bedpost). "It sucks their blood as they sleep. The maggot seems to be totally dependent on human beings as a source of food." [Roger Knutson, <em>Furtive Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the screwworm fly of South America and Africa which aims straight for a wound (since it can't drill through the skin all by itself), even one as small as a tick bite, and lays five hundred to three thousand tiny eggs in it. They hatch and the maggots tear away with their sharp mouth hooks on the human [or cow] that is their host. As they feed, they produce a toxin that prevents the wound from healing, so infection quickly sets in. In a matter of a week, the maggots [each grown to about half an inch long] can enter the lungs or brain and kill the person [or cow]. Screwworms have been a major economic problem in livestock-producing areas.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the greenbottle fly that lays its eggs in the open sores of living sheep. The maggots hatch and eat the sheep.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the warble fly that lays its eggs in the nasal passages of horses and other animals, where they live and eat the cartilage and flesh of animals' noses.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the copper-colored fly (<em>Bufolucilla silvarum</em>) that deposits its eggs in the nostrils of toads and frogs, after which the larva, when they hatch, blind and devour their hosts.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create phorid flies that inject their eggs into living ants, one egg per ant. "The maggot emerges from the egg and crawls into the ant's head where it eventually seals the ant's mouth shut. After about two weeks the growing maggot devours the interior of the ant's head, while an enzyme breaks down connective tissue to the point where the head falls off. This heady incubator protects the larva for another couple of weeks as it transforms into a millimeter-long adult phorid fly." [J. Raloff, "When This Fly Arrives, Ants' Heads Roll," <em>Science News</em>, Vol. 146, Nov. 26, 1994] (Talk about jury-rigged design! Or did the Designer make the ant's head just to fit the needs of the phorid fly maggot?)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a parasite that feeds on fly larva (larval flies themselves being parasites that feed off of so many other organisms as pointed out above). I'm speaking of the fly parasite <em>Spalangia endius</em> - "Released in millions, these tiny parasites lay their eggs in fly pupae and their offspring proceed to consume the developing fly." [Des Kennedy, <em>Nature's Outcasts</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Great Horned Owl, a bird that will decapitate fifteen adult terns but eat only one. [Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., <em>The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Mink, a creature that has been known to wipe out whole families of muskrats in a senseless killing frenzy. [Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., <em>The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create lions with the adaptability to sometimes stalk human beings in ways that lions do not usually hunt, as in the case of the British attempt to build a railroad through the Tsavo area of Africa at the turn of the century, when two lions began stalking the camp of railroad laborers in ways no lion had ever been known to hunt before - they attacked in a pair instead of solo, they killed for fun, they attacked large groups in broad daylight [from the movie, <em>The Ghost and the Darkness</em>, which was based on a true story]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a world such that wherever you find animals you will find parasitic worms feeding on them.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a world such that "most human beings are host to any number of flatworms and roundworms. Different species of these worms are found in virtually every part of the body.</p>
<p>"The liver fluke, a leaf-shaped flatworm, is so highly specialized that it must spend the first stages of its life living in a snail and then a fish before it can invade a human and settle in the liver.</p>
<p>"There are hookworms that burrow through the skin of our feet when we walk barefoot and trichina worms that embed in our muscles. Long, skinny guinea worms live just under out skin and look very much like coiled varicose veins. The African eyeworm (loa worm) is a tiny roundworm that often migrates to the cornea of the eye in humans, where it can cause blindness. More than two hundred bladderworms were found in the brain of a woman who died of convulsions." [Barry & David Zimmerman, <em>Why Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light...</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create tapeworms that grow up to eighty feet long in the intestines of human beings - tapeworms with twenty to thirty hooks and a suckers on its head to prevent being swept away by the passage of food. Tapeworms are "designed" without digestive systems but with the ability to soak up the digested food of their hosts like a sponge soaks up water. And tapeworm eggs, which have to pass through the stomach, are coated with an acid-resistant protein similar to what makes up our fingernails. Furthermore, each worm has both testes and ovaries to facilitate sexual reproduction so they don't have to let their suckers loose for an instant to go search for a mate in the romantic darkness of your intestines.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create pinworms that crawl out to the rim of the anus where small children contaminate their fingers with them, then pass them along to other children with whom they hold hands, then the hand goes into the child's mouth or eye and another child is contaminated, continuing the cycle, where the pinworm passes through the digestive track and out the end again.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create ascarid worms that hatch in your small intestine, travel via the bloodstream to your lungs, develop to where they look like small earthworms, then crawl out of the lungs up your windpipe to your throat, where they are swallowed, then travel down to your stomach and to your intestines where they produce another generation of worms.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a species of roundworm found almost exclusively in human appendixes.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create flukes, tiny flat worms with "organs of attachment" that spend most of their lives feeding off the insides of human beings. They are transmitted via human excrement and urine, and can enter the skin directly if you're walking in infected water. They can cause numerous uncomfortable conditions, including dysentery and abdominal pain, or they can live and reproduce inside your body for twenty years and producing only minor symptoms. The "giant liver fluke" infects people in Southeast Asia who eat watercress grown in infected waters. The "giant intestinal fluke" infects people who shell fresh water chestnuts. But you have to shell them with your teeth to become infected. There's a fluke nicknamed the "Russian doll toy fluke" (<em>Gyrodactylus elegans</em>), which grows three sister flukes, each inside the other as it sucks on its human host - the outermost "sister" opens her mouth and drifts away, leaving a younger "sister" sister still sucking on you. She opens her mouth and drifts away, leaving yet another "sister" sucking on you.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the nematode known as the guinea worm or medina worm, which grows to be three feet long and reaches sexual maturity inside human beings. The larval form of the worm lives inside a tiny crustacean found in drinking water. A human being who has swallowed such water becomes infected by the worm which travels to the legs (or other parts of the body) where it causes painful inflammation and crippling muscle damage. When you bathe in a chilly lake or stream, the worm sticks its head out of your leg and releases thousands of eggs. "Early medicine took advantage of this feature to effect a cure as follows: You chill the leg, the worm pokes its head out, you clamp a stick on the worm and wind her up on the stick a little each day. [It must be done carefully or loss of the limb and death can result. - ED.] The ancient symbol of medicine, a stick with a snake around it, may refer to this cure..." [<em>Animal Review</em> #7, Special Parasite Edition, Sept. 1994]</p>
<p>Legs, however, are by no means the only sites of guinea worm infection. "I can show you pictures of a worm emerging from the back of a child's head. They come out of the chest and genitals. Once one came out under a man's tongue. The swelling was so painful he couldn't swallow and he starved to death." [Dr. Donald Hopkins as quoted in <em>People</em> magazine, Oct. 30, 1995.]</p>
<p>"Recently, there has been a serious and successful effort to wipe out the guinea worm through hygiene and water purification, which may involve the use of simple nylon swatch filters. A disease that a decade ago afflicted 3.5 million people now debilitates a mere 160,000. It is anticipated that by 1997 guinea worm disease will be a plague of the past [praise be to medical science! - ED]." [Barry and David Zimmerman, <em>Killer Germs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the nematode that causes trichinosis. Trichinosis nematodes are unusual in infecting only carnivores. The disease is passed from carnivore to carnivore, so seals, and pigs and bears get it. It would take something very odd to get it into a cow. The usual route of transmission to humans involves people eating pigs that ate rats that ate other rats or pigs with trichinosis. It lives in tasty muscle tissue." [<em>Animal Review</em> #7, Special Parasite Edition, Sept. 1994]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create lice which chew the skin or suck the blood of birds and mammals.</p>
<p>Chewing lice have mouthparts used for chewing through skin flakes, wolfing down dried blood, and gobbling up other skin debris. Most are associated with birds and are equipped with a <em>pair</em> of well-developed claws for holding onto feathers and skin, although a hundred species of chewing lice dine on mammalian skin tissue.</p>
<p>Sucking lice have mouthparts with which they can pierce thicker skin tissue and suck up rich fresh blood. This group feeds almost exclusively on mammals; and since mammals are apparently easier to hang onto than swift flying birds, bird feathers, and hairless skin, the legs of these sucking lice are endowed by their "Designer" with just <em>one</em> stout claw - a cliplike device - used for grasping mammalian hairs and staying in place (despite frantic efforts by irritated hosts to dislodge them). The lice that suck human blood mainly grab hold of hairs on the head and pubic region, and pierce the scalp and that other region, causing itchy scabs to form.</p>
<p>Interestingly, while some lice are capable of living a few weeks off their hosts, an elephant louse separated from an elephant cannot survive more than a few hours at most. They also tend to congregate and create itchy annoyance on the elephant's tender ears, armpits, groin area, and around the base of the tail.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create chiggers, a type of flea that lays its eggs <em>under</em> the skin of humans and animals, causing painful growths. The young have to eat their way to the surface when they hatch.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create fleas with thin bodies for moving easily through hair, and with immensely powerful legs for leaping many times their body length onto passing prey. And with the added ability to not just harry and bite, but to spread infections, including plague germs which in the 1300s killed tens of millions in Europe and Asia in a few short years.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the kea, a New Zealand parrot, that swoops down on sheep and tears open its flesh at the exact spot to get at the kidney fat, leaving the sheep to die in agony.</p>
<p>Kidney-fat-eating is a relatively new habit among these birds, acquired by most of them after hanging around slaughterhouses and studying sheep anatomy. Recent experiments have even shown that parrots can count, identify shapes and colors, even learn to <em>talk with</em> human beings! See Barber's, <em>The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery with Startling Implications</em>, for a record of experiments that demonstrate previously unimagined levels of intelligence in parrots.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Shrike, a bird of beautiful plumage, that attacks and slowly kills other birds (like Cardinals) by pecking their skulls open and eating out of it as their prey screams.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create species of ants that wage war with other species of ants, and even take slaves.</p>
<p>Worker ants are armed with stingers and venom and sharp jaws (to defend the colony and/or to attack other colonies).</p>
<p>Fire ants bite through the skin of animals and then swing their abdomen over to inject a powerful burning and blistering venom into the incision made by their jaws. Such blisters can take days to heal and often leave scars.</p>
<p>Some ant species produce a chemical that promotes dissension and civil war in other species, enabling the former to more easily capture and enslave the latter. Others release chemicals that mask the alarm and attack signals of the species of ant they are attacking, so the invaded ant colony stands idly by in confusion as its young are captured and enslaved.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the ant-guest Rove beetle, that produces tasty mind-altering substances that remove the ants' natural aggression toward other species. The beetle also produces substances that makes the ants take the beetle into their colony where it is treated like a baby ant grub. Besides being fed, groomed and protected by the ants as if it were one of their own grubs, this beetle can roam around the colony at will, consuming ant eggs and ant grubs. It even lays its eggs in the colony. However once the beetle's eggs hatch and the larva later spin a cocoon (which ants do not do), the ants dig up any beetle cocoons they find, thinking it's one of their own eggs, and carry it into a dry ant egg chamber. There, the cocoon dries out and the beetle inside dies, since it needs to remain in a moist place, unlike ant eggs. "But don't waste sympathy on the lomechusines (ant-guest Rove beetles), they've made their bed, so it's not all that surprising they have a little trouble lying in it from time to time." [May Berenbaum, <em>Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em>]</p>
<p>Insects often reside in other species' nests, using disguises and survival strategies. Some shed their wings, and some flies release a chemical that placates their termite hosts when the termites lick it. One such fly is the female scuttle fly, which is able to convince normally fierce predatory ants to feed and care for her. This fly is believed to be born <em>without wings or legs</em>, since she lacks the musculature to support either. She is just an oblong torso with a tiny head at one end, and a "wick" that probably dispenses a pheromone with an ant-like odor. So she is a quadriplegic invalid dependent on ant nurses to take her in, feed and groom her, roll her limbless torso when it needs to be moved about the colony, transfer her to a safer place if the colony is flooded or is threatened by outside invaders, etc. (What a plan! It's just plain weird what the "Designer" comes up with sometimes, ain't it, though I doubt it would have surprised Darwin very much.) [See, "Freeloading Flies Go Legless and Wingless" by T. Adler in <em>Science News</em>, Vol. 148, Nov. 11, 1995, pg. 311]</p>
<p>The teeny ant brain is easily fooled by chemical signals resembling their own, so other insects with similar chemical signals can take advantage of the colony's incessant labor and good will towards their "fellow" ants.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the ameba - a single-celled creature that sends out "flowing plasmic processes, called pseudopodia, for the capture and ingestion of its prey. In the sea there are relatives of ameba which typically secrete calcareous shells perforated with tiny holes to allow their exceedingly fine pseudopodia to extend in all directions; on account of these fine holes, they are called <em>Foraminifera</em>. They feed upon smaller organisms which they catch in a network of these branching and anastomosing protoplasmic strands; <em>they are web and spider all in one</em>, for, on capturing any prey, the meshes close about it, digest it outside the shell and the dissolved food then flows inwards to the main body within." [Sir Alister Hardy, <em>The Living Stream</em>] ("Pound for pound the ameba is the most ferocious creature on earth." - Graffiti)</p>
<p>"I have seen a big proteus-type ameba (<em>Chaos diffluens</em>) <strong>corner</strong> a ciliate infusorian (a `ciliate' is a single-celled creature that moves in water faster than an ameba by waving a lot of little `hairs' on the outside of its body, known as `cilia' - one example of such a creature would be a Paramecium) in the angle formed by two filaments of <em>Spirogyra</em> and capture the small ciliate creature in its pseudopodia." [Pierre-P. Grasse, <em>Evolution of Living Organisms</em>]</p>
<p>A species of ameba causes a type of dysentery (intestinal inflammation with diarrhea). And I've heard of cases where amebas got into places they shouldn't have, and eaten what they shouldn't, like a boy who swam in a lake in South Carolina and an ameba entered his eye, ear or nose, and chowed down on the boy's brain and central nervous system (a form of amoebic encephalitis?).</p>
<p>The tooth ameba (<em>Entameba gingivalis</em>) specializes in living inside the human mouth and eating bacteria there, which I'm sure doesn't please the bacteria very much. This ameba only multiplies too much if a person is very run down by a deficiency, illness or infection. As in the macroscopic world so also in the microscopic one, once a person gets sick, the "wolves" close in from all sides.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create all living things with the "widely prevalent tendency to save themselves the bother of building the things they require by their own efforts. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, the direction of least resistance is followed. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves, parasitizing simple mineral and chemical compounds in Mother Earth directly. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them, and bacteria (or investment bankers) eat the man. The principle is clear. Life on earth is an endless chain of parasitism." [Hans Zinsser, <em>Rats, Lice and History</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create bacteria that attack animal and plant cells.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the genes in bacteria that increase resistance to their host's immune system and/or to antibiotics, are carried on plasmids (extrachromosomal genetic elements) and most of them are part of transposons ("jumping genes") that can readily hop onto new plasmids in new host bacteria. And the bacteria don't have to be of the same species for such genetic transfers to take place, they just need to touch one another. The process is called "horizontal transfer." And it happens in hospitals all the time where people suffering from different bacterial diseases come into contact with one another. Hence the newer stronger strains of "flesh-eating" bacteria.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create bdellovibrio bacteria that grow on other bacteria, parasitizing their own kind.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create myxobacteria that are able to glide or slide along and which form "wolf packs" that corner and dismember prey. [John Tyler Bonner, <em>The Evolution of Culture in Animals</em> (Princeton U. Press, 1980, p. 98-99]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create viruses that attack bacteria (bacteriophages, literally, "bacteria eaters"). All part of the endless chain of parasitism, as mentioned above.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create <em>diseases that work together</em>, one weakening the body, the other killing it. What "purposeful design!"</p>
<p>I'm speaking not only of AIDS, but measles. In the developing world, up to two million children die each year from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea <em>after they get measles</em>. The measles virus blocks the release of an important chemical from a type of white blood cell. That chemical is critical to the activation of an important immune defense mechanism, leaving the body open to death from the next infection that comes along. ["Measles; Immunology: One Less Mystery," <em>Vaccine Weekly</em>, July 29, 1996, http://www.newsfile.com]</p>
<p>Measles by itself, without the aid of pneumonia or diarrhea, kills more than one million people every year. It is the most contagious of all human infections. And measles vaccines must be administered at just the right time when they can provide protection - when the child is no longer protected by its mother's antibodies but before it is exposed to measles, i.e., around 9 months of age. Before that time, being vaccinated will not immunize the child, and after that time it is too late.</p>
<p>Another instance of diseases that work together in a simply marvelous fashion is the cholera bacterium and the virus that transmits the gene for a deadly toxin from one cholera bacterium to the next, turning the bacterium from a benign to a virulent form. Cholera bacterium have hairlike structures that help the bacteria to stick to the inside of a mammal's small intestine. Most forms of cholera bacterium are relatively benign, but the ones that have the gene for the toxin (acquired by a <em>virus</em> that inserts that gene into cholera bacteria) are virulent and they cause uncontrollable diarrhea. Infected people can lose up to 20 liters of water a day. They die quickly of dehydration if the water is not replaced. There have been seven worldwide cholera epidemics since the 1870s. In 1991 more than 6,000 people died in Peru's epidemic and a simultaneous one that hit several African nations. The disease is most common in regions with poor sanitation of food and water. [Steve Sternberg, "Cholera Hides a Sinister Stowaway," <em>Science News</em>, June 29 1996, pg. 404; and, Nigel Williams, "Phage Transfer: A New Player Turns Up in Cholera Infection," <em>Science</em>, June 28, 1996, pg. 1869.]</p>
<p>Furthermore, it was recently discovered that the dreaded cholera bacterium hitchhikes through the sea on tiny copepods, allowing the bacteria to survive in water long enough to reach distant places on the globe. The copepods along with the cholera inside them, can drift into estuaries and drinking water, growing in numbers where there are more nutrients. There is evidence to suggest that algal blooms provide the copepods (and therefore the cholera bacteria) with a feast that triggers rapid copepod and bacterial expansion and cholera epidemics. Cholera continues to be endemic in certain costal areas and major rivers where there are algal blooms, like the Ganges river. ["Tracking a Killer: Following Cholera With Every Available Means," <em>Frontiers: Newsletter of the National Science Foundation</em>, Oct. 1996]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the tuberculosis bacterium, the world's deadliest contagion. In the last two hundred years it has killed an estimated two billion people and disfigured, crippled, and blinded billions more. During the late nineteenth century it killed more people in the United States than any other disease. It presently infects one third of all the people on earth (though most are merely latent carriers), and kills nearly three million people each year.</p>
<p>Most commonly, it eats away lung tissue, forming abscesses that discharge a cheesy foul-smelling pus. It can eat its way through the chest, forming large ulcerations on the body. The patient becomes pale, weak and emaciated, coughing up blood and unable to breathe. Or the germs that are coughed up get swallowed and infect the digestive tract, causing ulcers in the throat, making it difficult to speak or swallow. Or it infects the stomach and bowels, causing vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and acute pain. Or it infects the urinary tract, causing unbearable pain upon urination. It can also eat holes in various bones in the body, crippling limbs, or leading to a hunchback appearance. Or it hardens the face and causes it to turn red, leading to a wolflike appearance. Or it eats away the nose, ears and eyes. In <em>The Forgotten Plague</em>, Dr. Frank Ryan describes the condition of one such victim:</p>
<p>"...her face had suffered thirty years of destructive ulceration, leading to grotesque deformity. Her nose had been eaten away by degrees until there was nothing there except two gibbous caverns. Her left eye had been destroyed. Freida now looked out upon the world from a monstrously scarred mask, created with festering sores that teemed with tuberculosis germs. Even the comfort of plastic surgery had been denied her since every graft that had been attempted had itself become infected and ultimately destroyed by invading germs."</p>
<p>Famous people who died of TB include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frederic Chopin, Emily Bronte, Robert Louis Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Orwell, and Vivien Leigh.</p>
<p>But the worst news about TB may be read in headlines of the near future. Consider the following:<br /><br />1) TB is mutating and becoming more difficult to treat.<br /><br />2) A TB infection can knock out a person's ability to cope with the HIV virus making it into a full blown case of AIDS.<br /><br />3) AIDS can knock out a person's ability to cope with TB.<br /><br />4) More than 5.4 million people are presently infected with both the tuberculosis bacterium and the HIV virus.<br /><br />And,<br /><br />5) By the year 2005, deaths from AIDS are expected to rival the death toll from TB.</p>
<p>Putting it all together it means that HIV infected people will be increasingly likely to catch TB, spreading drug-resistance strains of TB to the population at large. As these two epidemics start to overlap in some areas the death tolls from both AIDS and tuberculosis will continue to mount at a swift pace.</p>
<p>"Africa is in the greatest danger of all. Presently close to 200 million people are infected with inactive tuberculosis. Twenty million are HIV-positive. The dire statistics have prompted one expert to state, with despair, `Africa is lost.'</p>
<p>"As a human race, we are about to face the greatest public health disaster the world has ever known." [Barry and David Zimmerman, <em>Killer Germs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Ebola virus, a "hot" virus, that causes severe headaches, backache, nausea, fever, vomiting, turns the eyes blood red, then causes blood clots in the liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet and head, wipes out one's personality, and finally the person vomits a bucket of blood followed by unconsciousness. "Then...[Then? Yes, there's <em>more</em>, as in the case of a Mr. Monet who died in a Nairobi hospital from Ebola]...came a sound like a bed sheet being torn in half, the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from his anus, those mixed with intestinal lining. He sloughed his gut. Having destroyed its host, the virus was now coming out of every orifice, trying to find a new host. Now I ask you, isn't it possible that the Designer could have made this guy suffer just a little bit less? Maybe just bleed out of his nose?" [Corey Washington in the Craig-Washington debate on the SKEPTIC'S WEB]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create viruses (a few short strands of DNA dressed up in a thin protein coat) which have the ability to slip into a bacterial-or-animal-or-plant cell and parasitize it - by making their host cell employ it's energies and chemical factory to produce many copies of the viral invader. Then, as the multiplied copies of the virus exit the host cell, they may burst and kill the weakened cell on their way out to invade and destroy more.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to have made it so that many if not most viruses are able to retreat during battle with the body's immune system and hide inside certain cells. For example, herpes viruses, including herpes simplex 1 & 2, Chicken pox, and Epstein-Barr, are able to hide within certain nerve cells and come out "when the coast is clear" months or even years later, and cause lesions, a painful case of shingles, chronic fatigue syndrome, or even some types of cancers.</p>
<p>And some viruses, called <em>retroviruses</em>, can hide better than all the rest, by inserting and integrating their DNA into the host cell's own DNA and chromosomes. The virus, in effect, becomes part of the cell. Such integrations can cause little or no harm, or they can adversely affect the genetic makeup of the host cell and cause it to become cancerous.</p>
<p>AIDS is a retrovirus that hides inside human immune cells - the same cells that specialize in protecting the body from foreign invaders like viruses! The debilitating presence of the AIDS virus multiplying inside the body's immune cells throws the immune system out of whack, and the person dies of some <em>other</em> illness that the body could normally have protected itself against.</p>
<p>"Some viruses can even turn the body's own immune system against itself, producing what are called autoimmune diseases. In fact, the diseases presently known to be caused by viral agents are only the tip of the iceberg. Viruses may be causative agents in diseases as diverse as severe depression, diabetes, schizophrenia, coronary heart disease, and who knows what else."</p>
<p>"There is even a growing body of evidence that the flu virus of 1918 was the cause of a severe form of catatonia in survivors of that dread epidemic. The disease, called <em>encephalitis lethargica</em> (`sleeping sickness,' but not the same kind of sleeping sickness that is transmitted via tsetse flies), was the subject of Oliver Sach's bestselling book <em>Awakenings</em> (later made into a motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams)." [Barry and David Zimmerman, <em>Why Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the ever present rhinovirus "with the capacity to evolve into more than three hundred different known varieties, all causing the common cold." [Barry and David Zimmerman, <em>Why Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create diseases that <em>make people sneeze</em> once the disease has reached the stage when it is contagious, which helps pass the illness and suffering to more human hosts.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that "wild animals could act as reservoirs for any number of human viruses, making such diseases impossible to eradicate, even with universal vaccination. "A new flu virus appears every few years in humans after hiding in pigs or ducks and having mutated a new protein coat that the human immune system can't readily lock onto...HIV is constantly mutating; in 1986 a new strain, HIV-2, was identified. Others are sure to follow." [Barry and David Zimmerman, <em>Why Nothing Can Travel Faster Than Light</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that "Whatever mechanisms host organisms devise to combat viral infections, viruses seem to come up with ways to circumvent these defenses. So it is with certain viruses and interferon. Recent evidence indicates that both adenoviruses and Epstein-Barr virus produce small RNAs... whose role may be to reverse the effects of interferon." [<em>Molecular Biology of The Gene</em> by James Watson, et al, Fourth Edition, p. 948-949]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a world that first and foremost focuses on devouring and killing <em>children</em>.</p>
<p>For instance, two hundred years ago the French naturalist, Buffon, lamented that "half the children born never reach the age of eight." They died of diseases like smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, the flu, pneumonia, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis, chicken pox and a host of other diseases like tetanus and staph infections.</p>
<p>A high percentage of bacterially (and/or virally) related deaths occur to the young of all species of animals and plants, not just to the children of man. (My fiancee raised three baby squirrels, one of which died of a virus that attacked its central nervous system right after it had been weaned off the bottle.)</p>
<p>In terms of the theory of evolution it simply means that for aeons, the young of all species were "fast-food" for certain strains of parasitical bacteria and viruses whose ancestors were on this planet living off of the bounty of single-celled creatures for a billion years before multi-cellular forms of life even <em>began</em> to evolve. Bacteria and viruses have been co-evolving and adapting along with their hosts, and so have maintained their complex ability to pry open the lid on animal and plant cells and eat what's inside the can, even though the animals and plants have evolved complex immune system defenses that succeed in protecting them to various extents. It's an escalating battle of course, such that the MHC genes, that produce the surface proteins on all our cells which control immunological recognition - show an immense amount of allelic variation, such that are thousands upon thousands of immune types. Meanwhile, bacteria and viruses, keep evolving complex engines of mutation that keeps their own surface proteins mutating at a higher rate than our immune system can naturally respond to them. Hence, the incredible complexity of the human immune system <em>and</em> the viral and bacterial mutating engines and attack systems.</p>
<p>Whichever young animals or plants survive the initial onslaught of hungry parasitical viruses and bacteria, those animals and plants still have to run the <em>macro</em>scopic gauntlet of life's challenges that follow. But no subsequent danger is ever quite as disrespectful of "higher" life forms as the tiny microbes that hungrily seek to devour the children of all species.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create <em>Haemophilus influenzae</em>, a small bacterium (unrelated to the influenza virus) that is a prime cause of ear infections and meningitis in children.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create cancer, whereby your body starts eating itself alive; and the cancer cell's "hallmark trait" of "extreme genetic instability that snowballs into a variety of genetic alterations, so that if even one tumor cell survives therapy, there is a good chance it will now be resistant to the therapy." [Christopher Wills, <em>Exons, Introns, And Talking Genes</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create specific human oncogenes that grow cancers in specific parts of the body after being activated by radiation or a virus - and also have made spontaneous cancers more likely by "designing" a "unity" between some human oncogenes and the viral genes that cause cancer.</p>
<p>"Since <em>ras</em> genes were already known to function as oncogenes in certain acute transforming retroviruses, the stunning finding that they could also become oncogenes in spontaneous human tumors provided strong circumstantial evidence that [certain] human oncogenes had indeed played a role in the development of their respective tumors. In addition, it provided unity between viral and spontaneous carcinogenesis." [<em>Molecular Biology of The Gene</em> by James Watson, et al, Fourth Edition, p. 1065]</p>
<p>Virologists believe that viruses and the cells they invade must have coevolved since the beginning of life on this planet. They have even shown that a portion of the non-functional DNA in cells is a legacy from <em>retroviruses</em> that have been inserting their viral DNA into animal and plant cell nuclei for hundreds of millions of years. (See the example, directly below.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create the same <em>retroviral</em> DNA sequences in the same relative places in the DNA of both human beings and primates.</p>
<p>There isn't the faintest probability that such sequences could have been inserted on two separate occasions by two of the same species of retroviruses and wound up in the same relative places of the DNA of both man and primates. So, the Designer is either telling us that man and primates evolved from the <em>same</em> distant DNA stock into which a retrovirus inserted its DNA long ago - a stock that split afterwards into man and apes; or, the Designer is pulling a con game not unlike the one proposed by some creationists who argued that the Designer sculpted all the fossils - which merely <em>mimicked</em> the remains of once-living animals and plants - and filled the rocks with them to purposely deceive mankind into believing that such animals and plants had existed in the past. [For information on retroviral sequences found in the same places in both human and primate DNA, see Bonner et al., 1982, <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> 79:4709; Mariani-Constantini et al., 1989, <em>Journal of Virology</em> 63:4982; and, Edward E. Max, letter published in <em>Creation/Evolution</em>, issue 27, summer 1990, pgs. 45-49]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the gene for collagen (the main structural protein of the skin, bones, and teeth) with as many as 50 introns (or "breaks") within its genetic sequence such that there are 50 chances for error each time that gene is transcribed or copied.</p>
<p>For those unfamiliar with the term, "introns" are segments of genetic material that do not code for genes yet which are found interspersed between segments of genetic material that do code for genes, the latter being called "exons." The introns have to all be "cut out" of the sequence and the exons have to all be spliced together, end to end, in the correct order, before any gene can begin to direct the production of a protein molecule. Collagen contains 50 introns that have to all be cut out, and 51 exons that have to all be spliced together in order. So there are 50 chances for error each time the cell has to manufacture collagen. Such errors do occur, resulting in defective collagen and a type of osteogenesis imperfecta. Individuals who inherit this disease, like the painter, Toulouse-Latrec, have fragile bones and suffer from fractures and growth abnormalities.</p>
<p>There is an evolutionary upside to this awkward system of each gene being "divided or fragmented" by numerous introns. The exon portions of genes can then more easily fragment and recombine with other exon portions, leading to the formation of novel genes, some of which could prove useful. "One new deal believed to have resulted from such exon shuffling is a protein that helps dissolve blood clots (called tissue plasminogen activator, or t-PA for short) that's now being used to treat heart attacks caused by artery-clogging clots. Different exons on the t-Pa gene resemble exons from three other proteins involved in blood clotting: plasminogen, epidermal growth factor, and fibronectin." [Jerold M. Lowenstein, "Genetic Surprises: Some Seriously Weird Things Are Springing Out of the Twisted Tangle of Our DNA," <em>Discover</em>, Dec 1992, pg. 82-88]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create ticks, fleas, lice, flies, mites, bedbugs, mosquitoes, etc., that breed in incomprehensible numbers and thrive on the blood (and/or sweat and feces) of other creatures, transmitting viruses and bacteria that have caused countless deaths.</p>
<p>The mosquito alone "has probably killed more people than all the wars in history, and even today is responsible for at least 1 million human deaths every year. The diseases spread by this creature include malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, encephalitis, filariasis (which in turn, causes elephantiasis), and more. Thirty years ago, when malaria was actually less common than it is now, mosquitoes killed a person somewhere in the world every ten seconds with this disease alone." [Hanson & Morrison, <em>Of Kinkajous, Capybaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs</em>]</p>
<p>Ken Olson of the Arthropod-Borne and Infectious Diseases Laboratory at Colorado State University recently warned, "The spread of malaria and the dengue virus by mosquitoes is increasing, control of mosquito populations is very lax worldwide, and they are becoming pesticide resistant." He adds, "We're almost running out of options." So he's working on a way to vaccinate <em>mosquitoes</em> so that they can't carry the dengue virus. ["Building Better Mosquitoes" in <em>Discover</em>, Sept. 1996, p. 16]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the tick, a little blood sucker who finds it by sniffing for traces of carbon dioxide (exhaled by all warm-blooded creatures) or butyric acid (exuded from some animals' skin). If doesn't sniff either chemical it just waits, sometimes for <em>several years</em>, until it does. When it lands the right host it climbs on board and bites it, exuding an anesthetic so the host doesn't even feel the bite, and it buries its head in the host's flesh, feasting on blood and adding an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing until the tick is engorged. Just a few of the multitude of diseases spread by ticks include Lyme disease, Colorado tick fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Siberian tick typhus, Russian summer encephalitis, Nairobi sheep disease, and Japanese river fever.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the ubiquitous cockroach, several common species of which "spread salmonella food poisoning, cholera, dysentery, plague, hepatitis, and more, all via their excrement and vomit and through direct contact. According to some scientists, many food allergies are actually caused by cockroach excrement either left on the food or airborne with the household dust." [Hanson & Morrison, <em>Of Kinkajous, Capybaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create stag beetles that have mandibles so large they can't be used for feeding, just for fighting other stag beetles, flipping their male competitors over on their backs. (Or the Hercules beetle, which has two huge bony projections that it uses merely to wrestle with other Hercules beetles over territory and mates.) [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Fighting"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create male monkeys with large canines mainly for the purpose of threatening and biting other males. The females don't have such enlarged canines, nor do they engage in the aggressive bouts the males do. (Or the Bull Moose, whose large sharp horns are used in combat with other male moose, goring and hurting each other, over females.) [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Fighting"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create tiny plant-juice-sucking aphids, and design them to reproduce so fast that they are the most numerous creatures on earth that can be seen with the naked eye. And then create ladybugs, which are gram for gram among the most ferocious predators on earth. Certainly an omnipotent being could have made aphids reproduce more slowly and given ladybugs less voracious appetites, which would have made things balance out more efficiently. As it is, the aphid population can get wildly out of hand in very little time if there aren't enough ladybugs in the vicinity.</p>
<p>The best known ladybug (<em>Hippodamia convergens</em>) can eat 100 aphids a day, day after day, month after month. Ladybug larva can eat even more than adults, up to 40 aphids an hour, and, unlike the adult, will not take a break but keep scuttling about searching for more. True, ladybugs can change their diet to, say, pollen, if they have to - but then their fertility suffers. [Doug Stewart, "Luck Be A Ladybug: Backyard gardeners know why the ladybird beetle brings good fortune: It's appetite for plant pests is extraordinary," <em>National Wildlife</em>, 32:4 June-July 1994]</p>
<p>Of course, even with the help of the incredibly ferocious ladybug, those little plant-suckers (aphids) remain the most numerous creatures on earth (that can be seen with the naked eye). So I guess the Designer gave aphids a reproductive ability that far outstrips their usefulness to creation, especially since aphids help destroy so many plants useful to man. As far as giving a species too great a reproductive ability, the same goes for the many little critters that suck <em>blood</em> rather than plant juices.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the aphid lion (which is the larva of the lacewing insect) that sucks the juice out of aphids, then sticks the empty aphid corpse shells on the pointy hairs on its back, until it has enough aphid exoskeletons to completely cover its body. (Happy Halloween, Darwin!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the single-celled animal (carried by sand flies) that causes "kalaazar," an illness that slowly destroys the liver and other viscera.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create lungworms that cause death by suffocation.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create hookworms which have spread to about a fifth of all human beings (at present that's a billion), especially in the developing nations of the tropics. "By some estimates, the amount of human blood sucked by hookworms in a single day is equivalent to the total blood of about 1.5 million people." [Natalie Angier, <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>] By sucking blood so much blood from their victims, the hookworm makes millions of children grow into physically and mentally defective adults. Such worms are even "designed" so that they can bore into a person's feet, and be passed to newborns through mother's milk.</p>
<p>Hookworms remained a very serious problem in the United States until the latter half of the twentieth century. In fact, one common species is called, <em>Nectarus americanus</em>, "American killer."</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create filaria, which among other things causes elephantiasis (the name comes from the swelling of the limbs and scrotum to elephantine proportions because the parasites block the lymphatic vessels).</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create parasites which drive their host animals crazy, so that their hosts are devoured by other animals which continue to play host to the parasite.</p>
<p>For instance, there is a worm that makes its host mouse become hyperactive, dashing through fields so that it attracts the attention of a predatory bird which is the parasite's next host. Another closely-related worm causes its host mouse to become sluggish, so that it attracts the attention of carnivorous mammals on the ground who are the worm's next hosts.</p>
<p>One species of parasitic larva drives its host snail mad, making it climb to the top of a blade of grass instead of hiding beneath the foliage. Some of the parasitic larva then climb up onto the snail's antennae, turn vivid colors, and pulsate, which attracts the attention of a bird who perhaps thinks it's seeing something mobile and yummy like a caterpillar. Once inside the guts of the bird, the larval worms can mature and reproduce. [Examples are from Natalie Angier's article, "Parasites and Sex" in <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>]</p>
<p>(If you think these examples prove the existence of an "infinitely wise and compassionate Designer" see the <em>following </em>example!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the small liver fluke, aka the "brain worm" (<em>Dicrocoelium dendriticum</em>) that lives in the livers of sheep, deer, and groundhogs, and also in snails, and wood ants. Here's how the "brain worm" got it's name: The eggs of these worms pass out of the sheep's (or deer's or groundhog's) liver through a bile duct into their intestines and out their anus, and the fecal matter containing the eggs is eaten by dung-eating snails. Inside the snail the worms hatch into roundish things that drill through the snail's stomach to its digestive glands. These roundish things grow into "mother sporocytes" that keep reproducing until they've filled the digestive glands of the snail, after which they transform into cercaria, that look like sperm cells. These wriggle to the snail's respiratory chamber. The snail then coughs them up with other snail spit. The gob dries to a point where it resembles a snail egg, then a wood ant hauls it back to the ant's nest where the phoney "snail egg" is eaten. Once inside the ant the cercaria change into metacercaria that implant themselves in the ant's stomach with some of the worms "the brain worms" planting themselves in the ant's <em>brain</em>, making the ant go insane. Every day at dawn the ant climbs to the top of a blade of grass and locks it's jaw around the blade, suspending itself there, motionless, until dusk. A sheep or deer comes along and eats the blade of grass. Then the sheep or deer's pancreatic juices cause the metacercaria to hatch inside their intestines and the worms sniff out the liver and set up camp, producing eggs. And so it goes... (I just want to know what the Designer was smoking when he came up with such a "plan.")</p>
<p>One should note that the worms which drove the ant crazy by infecting its brain did <em>not</em> get to reproduce inside the animal that ate the ant. The "brain worms" sacrificed their chance to leave progeny so that some of their brethren could do so. "If there is such a thing as altruism, here's an excellent example; but from the ant's perspective at least, Mother Teresa this fluke is not." [Natalie Angier, <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>]</p>
<p>According to some descriptions I've read, the "snail and ant" part of the drama is apparently not required - the fecal matter from the deer, sheep, or groundhog can get spread on the grass and be eaten by another deer, sheep, or groundhog and infect them without the snail and ant intermediate stages. So we have a "plan" that probably grew more complex over time. More proof of evolution!</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create pine sawyer beetles and the teeny pine-tree-killing nematode worm (<em>Bursaphelenctus xylophilus</em>) that pine sawyer beetles transport from tree to tree. Pine trees vary in their susceptibility to pine wilt nematodes and most native species are relatively resistant. Among the most sensitive (which the nematode always kills) are Scots pines, widely used as windbreak, landscape, and Christmas trees. Here's how it's done. The pine sawyer beetle bites through the bark of pine trees allowing the nematode to enter, which feeds on the thin-walled cells that line the resin canals of pines. In an amazing four days, the nematodes reach their full larval size, which stops resin flow, cutting off the water transport system of the tree. The tree dies soon afterwards and the nematodes stop reproducing and go into a "dispersion" stage of development, where they can lie in wait for up to three years until a pine sawyer beetle lays its eggs in the dead tree. Then the nematodes surround the pupating beetle larva and work their way into its body through its air holes, after which the beetle larva grows up to travel to another tree, carrying the nematodes with them.</p>
<p>(Why go to so much "designed" effort just to kill Christmas trees? I guess the Designer is a Puritan, or maybe a Jehovah's Witness?)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create plants that naturally produce euphoric and hallucinogenic drugs like the poppy, the marijuana or hemp plant, "magic mushrooms," and even catnip for cats. (A cat that has rolled around in a whole field of catnip [O.D.'d on it] will stagger into the house and miss the litter box.)</p>
<p>Ideas for religious conservatives to debate: Man made beer. But <em>God</em> made marijuana. Who you gonna trust? Or, as comedian Bill Hicks said, "To make pot against the law is like saying God made a mistake. Like He looked down on the 7th day and said, `There is my creation, perfect and holy in all ways. Now I can rest...Oh Me...I left pot everywhere. Man, I should never have smoked that joint on the third day. If I leave pot everywhere it'll give people the impression they're supposed to use it. S---. Now I have to create Republicans.' So you see, it's a vicious cycle."</p>
<p>According to May R. Berenbaum (author of <em>Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers</em>): "Some insects share our weaknesses and vices - the fruit fly infests wineries because it's hopelessly hooked on alcohol, and the `confused gain beetle,' can be found happily chewing its way through bales of marijuana held in storage in police vaults (although the `confusion' in its name alludes to different circumstances)."</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create some species of plants with long dangling roots or climbing vines (like the strangler figs of the Old and New Worlds, or, like Kudzu) that slowly choke all life out of their host tree.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, hemlock, nightshade, deadly nightshade, various mushrooms and berries, and a host of other terrestrial plants that either produce allergic reactions when rubbed against the skin, or are poisonous when eaten. (Oddly enough poison ivy is a favorite browsing snack of deer.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create some species of marine algae with the ability to produce toxins that get into the food chain, causing things like "red tides" that can cause massive fish-kills and make the shellfish in the area poisonous.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create some species of blue-green algae with the ability to produce highly active toxins. These toxic algae occasionally form thick mats in ponds and lakes, causing the death of water fowl and cattle after drinking the contaminated water.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create some insects with the instinct to bite certain vessels in poisonous plants - thicker vessels at the base of the leaf that pump poison to the plant's leaves. After such bites the bulk of the poison drains out of the leaf before reaching the leave's outer edges so that they are safe to eat. (This is not necessarily "design" since the insect may have naturally sought out the thicker fluid-filled vessels at the base of the leaf, thinking it was the juiciest part, then after tasting the poison, switched to eating the more distant less-juicy part of the leaf.)</p>
<p>But if the poison was "designed" to keep bugs from eating the plant, why was a bug "designed" that could still find a way to eat the poisonous plant? Sounds like Darwinism at work again, designs to defeat designs, rather than an infinitely wise Designer.</p>
<p>And, there are many species of bugs that can simply eat poisonous plants, and absorb the poison into their system, making them unpalatable to prey. So they don't need to learn how to drain the leaf of poison before eating it. They just eat it.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the large and small milkweed bugs (<em>Oncopeltus fasciatus</em> and <em>Lygaeus kalmi</em>, respectively), which are able to ingest milkweed sap, which is poisonous to most other creatures. These bugs have few predator problems since the milkweed poison in their system makes them unpalatable. However, the small milkweed bug has been reported to kill and feed on its larger cousin, probably because its cousin contains a lot of the same poisonous chemicals that attract both bugs to the milkweed plant in the first place. So, we have a case of a strictly vegetarian insect occasionally devouring a member of its sibling species in order to obtain more of the yummy poison they both feed on.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a species of salamander with a line of poison sacs along its flanks which can only be released if the salamander sticks its ribs through its skin, tearing the sacs open. [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Hunting and Escaping"]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create putrid smelling plants, like the <em>Amorphophallus</em>, an 8-foot plant from Sumatra whose flower smells like burnt sugar combined with rotten fish, a smell that attracts certain flies, which pollinate the plant. The <em>Amorphophallus titanus</em> produces the world's largest flower, which sometimes grows up to 10-feet tall and blooms only once every five years. Part of the flower looks like a titanic phallus, hence the name. The odor this blooming plant produces is, however, incredibly foul. (So the Designer created some odors in the world's most titanic and prominent flower just to pamper fly noses and revolt human noses? Perhaps the Designer loves flies more than us?)</p>
<p>Not to forget the Brazilian and Jamaican <em>Aristolochia grandifloria</em>, a huge plant whose smell is so disgusting that wild animals stampede from the area when the plant blossoms.</p>
<p>Or the stinkhorn mushroom (of which there are about a half dozen species in North America) whose unpleasant odor resembles rotting flesh and attracts insects that are normally attracted to carrion. [There is a wonderful photo of a starfish stinkhorn mushroom filled with bluebottle flies in <em>Natural History</em>, 10/1996, p. 82-83]</p>
<p>The skunk cabbage produces a similar "carrion smelling" odor.</p>
<p>(Needless to say, if you're sending flowers to the family of someone who just died, none of these plants would be appropriate.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the <em>western false hellebore</em>, a plant found in the northern Rockies that leads to deformed heads in offspring should a mother sheep eat the plant. The lambs are born with "monkey face" disease where the nose is shortened or gone altogether and the face is caved in. In extreme cases, both eyeballs are in one eye socket in the middle of the lamb's forehead.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create Venus's fly traps, pitcher plants, bladderworts and sundews, that eat insects, small reptiles and frogs, and (in the case of a large pitcher plant) even mice.</p>
<p>(I wonder what Venus's fly traps ate "in the beginning" when every animal supposedly only ate "green plants" according to Genesis chapter 1? I guess it had to eat itself. Or, were some <em>green plants</em> allowed to eat <em>animals</em> in Eden?)</p>
<p>It's interesting from an evolutionary point of view to note that insect-eating plants are found growing in places that are inhospitable to nearly all other plants, like the floating islands of peat in the Okefenokee Swamp, or the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, or soggy meadows in Norfolk. Such soils lack nitrogen and phosphorus, but have plenty of water and sunlight. Meat-eating plants can get the nitrogen and phosphorus they need from the animals they ingest, and hence don't have to compete with the huge array of plants that exist on richer soils.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a species of deep-sea <em>sponge</em> that has filaments with tiny velcro-like hooks on them that the sponge uses to nab tiny crustaceans. The crustaceans struggle to free themselves for hours as more filaments grow or gather over them. Then the sponge digests the small crustacean it has captured. All other known sponges just filter water, hoping to nab some teeny bits of bacteria or organic matter. But food is quite scarce in the deep sea so this sponge needed something "more" to survive there. (This newly discovered species of "carnivorous deep sea sponge" belongs to a previously known genus of more passive species of sponges.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create animals that eat their own feces (coprophagy).</p>
<p>Chickens eat their own feces. Though I can't quote an authority as to <em>why</em>. (It's probably just a nervous pecking habit.)</p>
<p>Rabbits eat some of their own fecal pellets, running the same meal through their digestive system twice, to break down the food more.</p>
<p>Gorillas, which live in a nearly perpetual state of flatulence due to their leafy vegetarian diet, have been seen eating their own feces, though scientists are unsure whether gorillas obtain added nutrition from such a meal, or if the gorillas simply regard it as a "warm snack within easy reach" on a bitter cold jungle morning.</p>
<p>Of course, many animals eat the feces of other species, including beetles, and flies (whose maggots feed on dung, manure being a source of plagues of flies as in Australia). Butterflies are often attracted to dung or urine-soaked patches of ground to feed, perhaps because nectar lacks some minerals or nutrients they need. (So don't French kiss a butterfly, you don't know where its siphon-tongue has been.) Even adult grasshoppers in the tropics are known to enjoy dung.</p>
<p>(Has dung always been a taste treat for animals, even "in the beginning?" Only a creationist knows for sure. And whether or not a creationist agrees that Adam and Eve had navels, they'd probably agree they had anuses, and used leaves to wipe themselves, and had to watch where they walked. Some creationists say creation was so perfect there was "no decay." "No decay" my ass! Or should I say, "Adam's ass?")</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the Southeast Asian "vampire" moth which jabs its long hard sharp tube-like proboscis into human skin and sucks human blood for 10 to 60 minutes at a sitting. Its proboscis and metabolism are specially designed to endure the rigors of bloodsucking.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a moth in Southeast Asia that lives off the tears of deer, pigs, antelopes, horses, buffaloes, elephants, even human beings (if given a chance). It causes an irritation that stimulates tear flow. One moth sucked a human researcher's tears for 30 minutes before the researcher could no longer endure the irritation. There's no telling how irritating this moth must be to animals that are unable to swat it away from their faces.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create several species of stingless bees that are attracted to sweat and/or human hair, where large numbers can become entangled. These creatures are capable of causing endless annoyance, not to mention the fact that though they do not sting, they do bite.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the lamprey, which bores its circular rasping mouth into the sides of fish and drinks their blood.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a family of very small South American catfish (the candiru), some species of which burrow into the gills of bigger fish, where they suck the fish's blood. Some members of this family have been known to "wriggle their way up the urethra of a human being bathing in a stream, attach themselves, and suck blood. They are [carefully designed] with backward-pointing, erectile spines along their heads that act like barbs on a harpoon and make it impossible to extract the fish by pulling. They can cause agonizing pain, and the only way to get rid of them is by surgery." [Hanson & Morrison, <em>Of Kinkajous, Capybaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create cuckoos - birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other species of birds. The cuckoo's egg usually hatches first. It's first act is to kill all potential nest mates by pushing their eggs out of the nest. That way the cuckoo ensures it receives all the resources its foster parents can provide - as the cuckoo is usually larger than its foster parents' own offspring and requires more resources. (Loki, I know Thy works!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create sand sharks and mackerel sharks that produce cannibal fetuses with sharp teeth to devour younger fetuses, until there is only one left to be born. [Dr. A. J. Mattill, Jr., <em>The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs</em>]</p>
<p>Cannibalism within the mother's body is also known to occur in black alpine salamanders. [See <em>Remarkable Animals: A Unique Encyclopedia of Wildlife Wonders</em>, Guinness Books, 1987]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that as many as a quarter of all those born as single children began life as twins. What happens is that in the womb one twin is overcome, reabsorbed into the thrumming uterus, or into the body of the larger, stronger, faster growing twin. In cases where the absorption process does not take place early enough, or complete enough, some people carry the vestigial remains of their own twin in a mass of tissue inside them. Vertebrae, limbs and fingers of one twin are sometimes found inside the surviving twin. [from "Born Rivals" by Gregg Levoy, <em>Psychology Today</em>, June, 1989:67]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create hyenas, such that the placenta of a pregnant female hyena transforms the female hormone, androstenedione, into the fiery male testosterone - so the young in her womb, of both sexes, are born aggressive. Also, the gestation period for hyenas is so long that they are born with eyes open, muscles coordinated, and teeth already erupted through the gum, which is unusual for a newborn mammal. The increased testosterone in the pregnant female makes her clitoris swell to the size of the male's penis, which proves a painful handicap when she gives birth, since her cubs emerge so large and ferocious that "they sometimes tear their mother's clitoris as they descend through her unusual birthing organ...[And,] though hyenas are generally born in pairs, they don't stay that way for long. Most neonates root around for their mother's teat, but a baby hyena roots around for the back of its sibling's neck. Within hours, one hyena usually kills the other, especially if both cubs are the same sex. Such sibling murder is quite rare among other mammals." [Natalie Angier, "Hormones and Hyenas," <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the <em>Micromalthus debilis</em> beetle in which some parthenogenic females give birth to a single male offspring. This larva attaches to his mother's cuticle for a few days, then inserts its head into her genital aperture and devours her.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create cecidomyian gall midges in which some parthenogenic females develop offspring that live within the mother's tissues, eventually filling her entire body and devour her from inside. And within two days, the females from that brood have begun to develop their own children which begin to eat them up.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that when a queen bee grows too old, female bees chase her through the corridors of the hive lunging and biting at her until the old queen is dead.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that a drone honeybee's genitals explode when he mates with a queen bee after which the drone falls dead to the ground. "As soon as the queen opens her sting chamber to receive him, he explodes, his genitals bursting forth like a detonating grenade." [Adrian Forsyth, <em>A Natural History of Sex</em>]</p>
<p>By this method, the drone fills the queen bee with his sperm and sets up a "genital plug" in the female's reproductive orifice, making it difficult for another drone to inject competing genes into her. By using the word "difficult," I mean that the drone's suicidal effort is only partially successful, since the queen is usually in the midst of many drones as she mates, and more than one get to ravish her, though I suppose, lesser amounts of their sperm penetrate her orifice after each explosive entry.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the common bedbug (<em>Cimex lectularius</em>) with a long sharp penis that he uses to puncture his mate in the abdomen and ejaculate into her body cavity, after which "the sperm travels through her blood stream to special receptacles, where she can store it until her time of ovulation." [David Quammen, <em>The Flight of the Iguana</em>]</p>
<p>One species of bedbug (<em>Xylocaris maculipennis</em>) has taken this method a step further. The males of that species stab-rape other males. In fact a male of that species may be assaulted by another male while he is copulating with a female. "The sperm of the rapist enters the <em>vas deferens</em> of his male victim and is used by the victim during copulation." [Adrian Forsyth, <em>A Natural History of Sex</em>] Which is not to say that the sperm of the rapist is injected directly into the raped male's <em>vas deferens</em> with accuracy - the sperm "migrates in the recipient's blood to his testes," and hence to the <em>vas deferens </em>tubules attached to his testes, where the rapist's sperm is then pumped out of the penis of the raped male, and into the female. [MacQuitty & Mound, <em>Megabugs</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a scoop on the end of the male damselfly's penis which can be used before copulating to remove the semen of a previous mate.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create certain species of anglerfish that live in total darkness thousands of feet beneath the sea in which the female of the species is a couple of feet long but the male is only inches long and attaches to her body like a tiny flap of skin. The male finds a female, bites her, then his fangs disappear and his lips fuse to her body (fusing their bloodstreams together) after which the rest of the male's body atrophies away until he's almost nothing but gonads.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the praying mantis such that the male must approach the female with the utmost caution, playing "red light - green light," sometimes having to stand immobile for hours with one leg poised in the air, before making another move toward her. Besides approaching with caution, the male has to signal her at appropriate moments, waggling his antennae, stamping his feet or wiggling his abdomen in a figure-eight. If he reaches her unscathed and mounts her, it takes the male a half hour of rocking his abdomen up and down before sperm is transferred to the female, during which time the female can reach back and eat the male's head, which relieves the male of inhibitory centers of his brain, and his body then rocks up and down with a fervor previously impossible when his brain was still intact. Even when the female reaches out and snaps off the approaching male's head before he has mounted her, the male's hormones by this time are so hyped up that his legs will then move in a circular path until they rest against her and his body climbs on her back and copulates. (Washington Irving, author of "The Tale of the Headless Horseman," meets Charles Darwin?!)</p>
<p>Note: The female mantis does not as a rule eat the male. It only happens when she is hungry. And in a few species of mantises such behavior is rare or perhaps non-existent. However, since mantises are predators that react with swift and deadly accuracy to any sign of movement, the male approaches the female with caution.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create spider species where the females sometimes attack and kill their suitors. In some cases, prospective males must signal their peaceful intent by strumming the outer edges of the web, as if serenading the female into compliance.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a species of orb weaving spider (<em>Araneus pallidus</em>) such that the small male is unable to get his palps properly inserted into the larger female's reproductive organ unless she seizes his abdomen with her pincers. "If she doesn't, he keeps slipping off without getting the job done. Trouble is, once she's got her fangs into him, she can't control herself and sets about feeding on him." [Adrian Forsyth, <em>A Natural History of Sex</em>] (What an unlucky "design" for males of <em>that</em> species!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create Australia's redback spider (<em>Latrodectus hasselti</em>) such that the small male of the species inserts his "intromittant organ" into the female and then, holding his organ within her, he performs a somersault that places his abdomen beneath the female's jaws. She eats him about 65% of the time, while he <em>continues</em> to copulate with her. Those whom she eats copulate longer and fertilize more eggs. (Coming and going at the same time.)</p>
<p>[See, "Gruesome Diets III: Of Sex, Somersaults, and Death," <em>Discover</em>, 16:11, Nov. 1995, pg. 34; "Why Self-Sacrifice Makes Perfect Sense for Spiders," <em>Time</em>, 147:3, Jan. 15, 1996, pg. 60; and, Pat Coyne, "Why Do Some Female Spiders Eat Their Mates During Sex?" <em>New Statesman & Society</em>, 9:387, Jan. 26, 1996, pg. 31.]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create females of the desert scorpion (<em>Paruroctonus mesaensis</em>) with the desire to eat anything that's small enough to be devoured by them, including males of their own species. What a problem for him! The male must grab the female's claws in his own and drop his sperm packet on a nearby stick, then bat or sting her, let go of her, and run for his life. Most of the time the female lets him go and inserts his sperm packet inside her. But in two cases out of twenty the female is able to seize and munch on the male.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create mantispids (not praying mantises, mantispids are something different), members of whose subfamily, Mantispinae, feed only on spider eggs. Teeny mantispid larva hop onto spiders (if it's a male, they wait for him to come into close contact with a female, the closer the better - as for instance when a male is eaten during copulation, then they hop onto the female - or if it's a female, they wait for her to lay eggs). While they wait, the mantispids enter the spider's book lung (the breathing apparatus) to snack on spider blood. After the spider lays her eggs, the mantispid enters the egg sack before the spider completely seals it shut, and the mantispid feasts on spider eggs as it grows into an adult mantispid.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create the daddy-long-legs spider (<em>Pholcus phalangioides</em>), which leaves its own web to eat other species of spiders living in other webs. Their long legs give them free reign in walking amongst the webs of other spiders, since if one leg gets caught on a sticky filament, the other legs have enough strength and leverage to free it. Once on another spider's web, the daddy longlegs twitches its abdomen, bounces, shivers and contracts its legs in a manner that attracts the web-owner who thinks s/he's got a hearty meal in store for them. But the web-owner then becomes the main course.</p>
<p>Daddy-long-legs of the species <em>Leiobunum longipes</em> engage in leg pulling contests in which one male bites another's leg and tries to yank it out - either by jerking or rotating it. Breaking off a leg can take as many as 20 tries, after which the defeated spider hobbles off, and the other male gets to mate, having demonstrated his superiority.</p>
<p>Faced with a predator, daddy-long-legs secrete noxious and distasteful secretions from the base of their second pair of legs. And if grabbed, they can automatically shed any immobilized leg. (What a help such curious abilities must have been when all animals just ate "green plants" in the "beginning," according to Genesis chapter 1.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create predatory female fireflies that use their flashing lights to attract and devour males of rival species.</p>
<p>"In North America, more than five species of lightning bugs can live in the same area, all trying to mate on the same night. To avoid confusion, each species has a unique sequence of flashes, and the female must respond at the right point during the male's repertoire before he will approach her. When close by, either the pattern of bands on the female's abdomen or the scent of the female acts as the final cue for mating. Sneaky males can try to disrupt the mating display of other males by flying close and adding more flashes, so that the female fails to recognize the first male's display. The sneak then completes the full sequence and mates successfully. <em>A worse misfortune can befall the unwary suitor; some female fireflies mimic the flash patterns of rival species to attract males of that species, only to devour them when they approach her</em>." [MacQuitty and Mound, <em>Megabugs</em> - final sentence edited for clarity by E.T.B.]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create "transvestite" behavior in a species of wasp (<em>Cotesia rubecula</em>). In this species when a male is having sex with a female and <em>another</em> male shows up, the male doing the mounting lowers his antennae to mimic a "receptive female." The late-comer tries to mount the "female mimic," which makes a curious sight previously only seen in XXX-rated bisexual videos: The female in front being mounted, the "transvestite" in the middle, and the late-coming male on the end. Some males return to the mimic several times, trying to mount him, before giving up.</p>
<p>"`Sometimes the mimic maintains his posture for five minutes' - all the while subtly contriving to keep the tip of his abdomen, where a female's genital opening would be, just out of reach. Meanwhile, the true female, whose antennae have returned to the [non-receptive] upright position, wanders away, carrying inside her the sperm of the mimic." ["Animals: A Jealous Lover Will Do Anything" in the "Breakthroughs" section of <em>Discover</em> magazine, May 1994, p. 14]</p>
<p>Speaking in evolutionary terms the female mimic assures that <em>his</em> genes get passed along, including his genes for "transvestite" behavior.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make it so that "30% or more of the baby birds in any nest were sired by someone other than the resident male. Indeed, it is a great challenge to identify a bird species not prone to such evident philandering...Mammals are even worse.] The percentage of mammalian species whose members remain faithful to one mate is only about 2%...Much of the debauchery in nature is committed by females, which gives the lie to the dreary stereotype that only males are promiscuous, and that what females want above all is one good male. Instead, many animal social systems very likely developed as much to allow members to cheat selectively as they did to enable animals to divide into happy couples. Most pair bonds might thus be mere marriages of convenience, offering both partners enough stability to raise their young while leaving a bit of slack for the occasional dalliance." [Natalie Angier, "Mating for Life?" in <em>The Beauty of the Beastly</em>]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create many plant-eating insects, and a few insect-eating plants, and carnivorous insects to feed on the plant-eating insects, and carnivorous insects to feed on carnivorous insects, and parasites for everybody! (Life is just one big buffet.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to make infanticide not uncommon among many animals, including lions, gorillas, chimpanzees, and langurs, not to mention rodents, birds, fish, and numerous invertebrates. (Such infanticide is often the work of a male who murders his competitor's offspring, thereby increasing his own genetic stake.)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create "a microscopic animal that is very picky about its food - so picky that it prefers to all other things the optic nerve, and after it has succeeded in destroying that nerve and covering the eye with the mask of blindness, it has intelligence enough to bore its way through the bones of the nose in search of the other nerve." [Robert Ingersoll]</p>
<p>[The creature that Ingersoll referred to was not stated in the original quotation. It could be the African eyeworm (loa worm), a tiny roundworm that often migrates to the cornea - not the "optic nerve" - of the eye in humans, where it can cause blindness. Or it could be toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a protozoan that damages the central nervous system, eyes, and viscera of newborn babes, and which can be carried by the common house cat. Or perhaps histoplasmosis, a fungus that may be inhaled and infect the lungs, liver, spleen, or central nervous system, including the eyes. Or maybe, coccidiomycosis, another fungus, that causes respiratory difficulties, fever, and sometimes blindness. - ED.]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create leeches with "suckers on each end of their bodies and teeth shaped like circular-saw blades. Some leeches are small enough that you might accidentally drink them, then they grow up on your vocal cords and suffocate you. Watch for them at desert oases. The most dangerous are the innumerable land leeches of Sri Lanka. They drop from the trees and worm their way through the seams of your clothing. Their little circular-saw teeth cut deeply and painlessly. You can lose a lot of blood." [<em>Animal Review</em> #7, Special Parasite Edition, Sept. 1994]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to create birds like the ostrich, emu, and kiwi that have wings but cannot fly.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to design the bones of the flightless dodo, penguin and kiwi, making them hollow, as if their ancestors had been adapted for flight.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to design birds so that even modern bird species retain the genes and the ability (as demonstrated in embryology experiments) to grow reptilian teeth, and reptilian fore arm and wrist joints (rather than the normally <em>fused</em> avian joints of modern birds).</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom to design whales so that they all have a rudimentary pelvic girdle (hip bone) and femurs (thigh bones) that remain hidden within their flesh, unattached to their vertebral column. In fact, 1 in 400 Minke whales that have been examined have complete sets of hind legs, i.e., not just femurs but also <em>tibias and fibulas</em>, lying hidden within their flesh. Other species of whales have been photographed with muscular and bony protrusions that extend outside of their flesh in spots where rear legs would be in land-dwelling animals. Nice to know that the genes for such land-dwelling features as rear limbs, are still present and sometimes activated in modern day species of whales!</p>
<p>Moreover, fossilized remains of the earliest known swimming whales show they had hind legs. One species that arose a little later in geologic time had vestigial hind legs. So, whales lost their rear legs over time. While modern whales have no hind legs, except for the exceptions noted above.</p>
<p>Furthermore, embryos of whale species that grow into toothless adults still develop teeth in the womb that are reabsorbed before birth. Also present in whale and dolphin embryos are "five digits" of the hand or feet that are soon lost as the animal grows and the fin develops into its adult form.</p>
<p>The adult blind river dolphin (the susu) has scalloped tail fins, each showing the <em>five</em> digits of the foot from which it originally evolved. The river dolphin also has a distinct neck like land-lubbing vertebrates. Modern sea-going dolphins, like modern whales, do not have a distinct neck. But if you look back in the fossil record, early sea-going whales had trimmer longer bodies, and heads that were <em>more distinct</em> from their bodies than modern-day whale species. [See <em>The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals: A Visual Who's Who of Prehistoric Life</em>, Collier Books: New York, 1988, pg. 230-231]</p>
<p>Reminiscent of the <em>river</em>-swimming susu's anatomical ties to land creatures, it should be noted that the earliest whale fossil remains are found in ancient <em>river</em>bed deposits, as if whales evolved from river-swimming carnivores that gradually moved from the river to the place where all rivers run, the sea, where both whales and dolphins continued to evolve into sea-going creatures less like their land-lubbing ancestors.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite foresight and compassion to make the genes for "the crop and tail-feathers of pigeons vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds; and make the genes for the dog vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport." [Charles Darwin in <em>Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, II</em> (D. Appleton and Company, 1875, p. 415)] (What divine providence!)</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create a multitude of means for hindering some of his creatures from being eaten by others: There are high speed sprints, jinking runs, distraction displays, spines, quills, armor, poisonous secretions, foul smelling and/or burning sprays, near perfect camouflage, even disguises that make a herbivore look as though it were a hunter (as in "eye-spots" on the wings of moths that the moths can flash to frighten birds away).</p>
<p>And only a Designer could have made other animals to pursue and prey upon creatures he'd designed not to be eaten (as in the case of the Great Horned Owl which preys upon the Canadian porcupine). All in all, this doesn't look like "design," it looks like "The Designer" is really "a committee" with different members designing different ways to foil the other's designs. Or maybe the Designer is into "spectator sports" of a gross nature on a grand scale.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to arrange it so that some insects attracted by a flower's sweet innocent fragrance and hungering for some nectar or pollen, don't have a prayer's chance in hell...</p>
<p>There's a species of praying mantis that looks like a petal of the orchid it perches upon. It is the same bright white color as the orchid and even has a little green ring around its neck resembling the tiny green parts of each orchid petal. Hungry insects that are attracted by the orchid's sweet innocent scent, don't have a chance once the camouflaged mantis reaches out and makes a meal out of them. [<em>Trials of Life</em> video, "Hunting and Escaping"]</p>
<p>Robert Frost, the poet, mentioned a similar example involving a white spider that laid in wait on a white flower, and asked, "What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?--If design govern in a thing so small."</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have had the infinite wisdom and compassion to create some plant species with the ability to give out "signals" to other members of their species when under attack. And then create the insects to attack them. [<em>The Way Nature Works</em>, Macmillan, 1992]</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have made it sooooo easy to find the "one true faith" that even your parents could pick it out for you, and in most places on earth, they do. It's even easier to find a "true" Christian as opposed to a false one, or a "true" Moslem as opposed to a false one. The "believer in the true way" (of a religion or denomination or interpretation) is always the one with whom you are speaking at the moment.</p>
<p>Only a Designer would have made it so that "The type of person who devotes himself to the pursuit of wisdom is most unlucky in everything, but above all in begetting children - as if Nature had taken pains, I suspect, to keep the disease of wisdom from spreading too widely among mortals." [Erasmus, <em>In Praise of Folly</em>]</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
<p>After reading the above, it should come as no surprise that many who reject a "blind watchmaker" explanation for the cosmos <em>still have trouble</em> accepting that a "Watchmaker of infinite wisdom and compassion" explains the cosmos. This "trouble" is not new. Long before Darwin's theory, there were philosophers who suspected that something <em>less</em> than an "omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator God" seemed to be sufficient to account for the cosmos. Thus, even today, a lot of people don't fully "buy" either atheism or the "Design" hypothesis. Nor do they feel "compelled" to do so.</p>
<p>As for those who say we "must" choose either "God" or "atheism," I ask, "Whose God?" The God of Christian theology (and of which denomination or heretical sect? - today there are over 20,000 Christian denominations and missionary organizations), Jewish theology, Islamic theology, Hindu theology? And, "Whose atheism?" There are different atheist organizations, and different types of atheism, and different folks who endorse each group and/or type, with different approaches and personalities.</p>
<p>Personally I think that a person's attitude, their friendliness and love of others, is more important than particular "beliefs" concerning "big heavy theoretical" questions. So, I always remain open to befriending any of my "enemies" who have an inquiring mind and a sense of humor. There are better things to do than hate one's enemies. Most followers of Jesus' teachings would agree. Voltaire's prayer is also to my liking, "In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-64610295175080326872012-03-19T14:28:00.003-07:002019-09-01T13:28:14.206-07:00No Joy in Eden: Creationism has struck out
<p><em>No Joy in Eden: Creationism has struck out</em></p>
<p>Hi! I'm E. T. Babinski. Welcome to CRETINISM OR EVILUTION. I'd like to begin with a warning. The following presentation will cover mature subject matter, like God's invention of the penis. The name of "Darwin" will be spoken aloud, and it will be assumed that the books of the Bible were written by a pre-scientific people who believed their god reeeeeeeally loved to sniff burnt goat flesh [Gen. 8:20 "and the Lord smelled the soothing aroma;" see also, Num. 15:24 & 29:28], a common divine addiction back then.</p>
<p>First, a little about myself. During high school and college and a few years afterwards I was a Bible banging, born again, Baptized as a believer, dyed-in-the-bloody-wool-of-the-Lamb Christian. I was elected president of the most evangelical group on my campus. And I lectured my fellow biology students and professors on the errors of EVILution.</p>
<p>After college I engaged in a mental tug-of-war with several former believers, trying to win them back to the fold. But instead of winning them back, the struggle made me think about what <em>I</em> believed and why, and I grew to question those beliefs and their basis in the Bible. As I took my first steps toward leaving the fold the transition period was unsettling but afterwards I felt alive and full of curiosity - just as I was before I entered the fold. It was like being born again, again.</p>
<p>I figured that people needed to hear the stories of those who had left Protestant Christian fundamentalism and why. So I edited over three dozen personal recollections and put them in a book, <em>Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists</em> (Prometheus Books, 1995). Billy Graham's best friend is in there. There's even a few quotations from science fiction writers, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Heinlein, Philip Jose Farmer, and Orson Scott Card.</p>
<p>I also produced three newsletters. The most recent one is <em>Cretinism or Evilution?</em> I didn't come up with the word<br />"Cretinism," my spell checker did. It lacks the word "creationism," so each time it encountered it, my computer asked if I was trying to spell "cretinism," which my Webster's dictionary told me referred to "a congenital deficiency resulting in idiocy."</p>
<p>My Webster's also said that the word, "cretin," originated as a variant pronunciation of a French word meaning "Christian." So, the meaning of "cretin" changed over time from "Christian" to "congenital idiot."</p>
<p>I'm only guessing, but such a radical alteration in meaning might have occurred during the days when the French heretic Voltaire took to flinging his wit at Christian heretic-hunters, telling them, "In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."</p>
<p>As for the word, "EVILution," Bible believers have dubbed many theories "evil" over the centuries. The theory of Copernicus, that the earth moved round the sun, was dubbed "evil," because the Buy-Bull says that God "hangs the earth" solidly, but "moves, guides, and leads" the sun, armies of stars, and constellations across the sky. Some creationists still argue that the Copernican theory is the root of all modern evil, and they'd like to see teachers spend "equal time" teaching about an earth-centered cosmos, along with Copernicus' "rival" theory. I produced a whole issue on such folks, some of whom have Ph.D.s, but who believe the Bible's literal words speak clearer than modern astronomy.</p>
<p>Newton's theory of gravity was considered "evil" because it "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture - like `hanging' the earth and `guiding' the sun, moon, and stars - and exchanged the truth of God's direct action on His works for the lie of mere material mechanism." They said that Newton "substituted gravity for God."</p>
<p>Creationists employ a version of that argument against evolution, saying the theory of evolution is "a substitute for God's direct action of creation which is constantly ascribed to him in Scripture." (Of course, they should tell that to the Pope or to C.S. Lewis who both left room for the theory of evolution in their Christian theologies.)</p>
<p>Relieving pain through anesthetics was also dubbed "evil." God must be allowed to "punish" whom He will with whatever pain they "deserve." That's why God created pain and the many diseases that generate it. Genesis even says that God deliberately cursed woman by "increasing her pain in childbirth." So who are we to seek to overthrow "God's plan" by allowing humanity to feel less pain?</p>
<p>Even Ben Franklin's marvelous invention, the lightning rod, was condemned as an insult to Almighty God, or at least, to his aim. For the Bible says <em>God</em> "sends forth lightnings...<em>He covers His hands with the lightning</em>. And commands it to strike the mark. Its noise declares His presence...Under the whole heaven He lets it loose, And His lightning to the ends of the earth...Whether for correction, or for His world, Or for lovingkindness, He causes it to happen." [Job 36:27-33 & 37:1-13 & 38:35] Ben's little invention drained a lot of the ancient fear out of lightning bolts flung from "God's hand." It diminished "God's power," and the "direct action of punishment which is constantly ascribed to God in Scripture."</p>
<p>And let's not forget the terrible "evil" of "working or playing on Sunday." For centuries Christians passed laws that made the working man's one day off a day when he or his family could not visit grocery stores, restaurants, parks, lakes, beaches, libraries, museums, nor play sports with his own children, nor go boating (and if someone was caught out at sea in a storm on Sunday no one was allowed to go out and try to save them), nor fix the house, nor sew clothes, nor even buy some medicine.</p>
<p>And what about Bible believers' opposition to the evils of "card playing," "dancing," "masturbation?" The list goes on...</p>
<p>Considering the benefits to humanity in the way of education, relief of suffering, and pursuit of honest pleasures, that have come from things that learned Bible believers have labeled "evil," it would appear that the term, "EVILution," has a lot to <em>commend</em> it. Therefore, if someone asks you whether or not you're an evolutionist, you ought to reply, "Evolutionist? Heck no, I'm an EVILutionist and damn proud of it!"</p>
<p>As for <em>equal</em> time for creationism in school, I'm all for it. But since creation only took six days, and evolution took billions of years, the <em>equivalent</em> time spent teaching creationism should only be one pico-second for every four years spent teaching evolutionary science. (A "pico-second" is approximately the time it takes a beam of light to travel the width of a human hair.)</p>
<p>But all kidding aside, let's get to the big questions. The biggest one is, "Are there intelligent beings elsewhere in the cosmos?" The cosmos as it is presently known, contains over 50 billion galaxies, each galaxy containing between 100 to 200 billion stars. Recent advances in telescopic magnification have allowed astronomers to detect rings of matter and <em>planets</em> that circle stars other than our own. It is conceivable that intelligent beings exist, or have existed in the distant past, or will exist in the future, on planets other than the earth. Are we the only intelligent beings who have evolved in the cosmos' vast dimensions of space and time?</p>
<p>Even a "Biblical creationist" might find himself unable to believe that we are the only intelligent beings "God created" in a cosmos of countless blazing stars and (who knows how many) planetary bodies? So much cosmic "real estate" going to waste. Doesn't sound very "purposeful" does it?</p>
<p>Yet, if intelligent beings exist on other planets, how are <em>they</em> going to react to the "Biblical creation account?" Are they going to believe that the cosmos was created in "six days" as measured from <em>one</em> planet's perspective, the earth's? Such beings might well wonder why the cosmos wasn't created based on the length of a "day" on their own planet, rather than ours.</p>
<p>Neither are they going to believe that five out of the "six" days of creation, or, five sixths of the "creation period" was focused solely on the earth, during which its seas, dry land and sky, and the plants and animals on it, were created. The "rest" of the cosmos with it's 50 billion galaxies, and it's unknown multitude of planets, including the one these other beings live on, took only "one day" out of "six" to create? They'd be on the floor laughing at such <em>earth-centered</em> viewpoints in the very first chapter of the Bible. Only one planet, the earth, took <em>five sixths</em> of God's creation time to complete? No intelligent being inhabiting <em>another</em> planet is going to believe that!</p>
<p>Or, how about <em>this</em> for a "worst case" scenario after meeting a technologically advanced being from another planet: (Being from another planet speaking with Billy Graham's son) "So, you say, <em>five sixths</em> of God's `creation time' was spent on your pitiful little planet full of natural disasters and turmoil and idiocy, and God only spent <em>one sixth</em> of that time creating the rest of the cosmos, including what was to become our vast pan-galactic civilization whose history stretches back before the first pitiful little Biblical book was scrawled on goat skin parchments?"</p>
<p>Hence my next big question, ARE THERE CREATIONISTS ON OTHER PLANETS? Do they quote from a book somewhat like our earth-centered book of Genesis? And, supposing that the name of their planet is "Zontar," does their book read something like this...</p>
<p>In the beginning God created the heavens and ZONTAR, and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters OF ZONTAR and God said let there be light, and there was the first evening and morning. And God separated the waters and caused dry land to appear ON ZONTAR, and there was a second evening and morning. And God made the land bring forth green plants and fruit trees ON ZONTAR, and there was a third evening and morning. And God made TWO GREAT LIGHTS, one to rule the day ON ZONTAR, and one to rule the night ON ZONTAR, and he made the stars also, and set them in the sky to light ZONTAR and for signs and seasons, and there was a fourth evening and morning. And God made animals ON ZONTAR, and there was a fifth evening and morning. And God made beings IN HIS OWN IMAGE, and he visited them in the garden where He and they left slimy trials as they moved and talked to each other via their antennae, and there was a sixth evening and morning. And on the seventh day God "rested" from creating the heavens and ZONTAR.</p>
<p>Of course, we earthlings, being raised on the Bible, would know that God needed to "rest" after creating ZONTAR, so He could regain enough energy to trek to another part of the cosmos (near one of those stars he'd created "to light ZONTAR") and create a place called "earth." Once there, He had to "separate light and darkness again," "separate the waters," make dry land appear, create plants and fruit trees, make two more "great lights" to "rule the day and night" on that planet, create animals, and create beings in his own image, this time more ape-like than the intelligent snail-like beings of ZONTAR.</p>
<p>Then, after creating the heavens and the EARTH, God "rested" a second time. (The first time God "rested" was after he'd created ZONTAR, remember?)</p>
<p>Returning to the strictly Biblical picture, it says in Exodus 31:17, "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he <em>rested, and was refreshed</em>." According to learned editors of a Bible published in 1774, the true meaning of the Hebrew is, "on the seventh day He <em>rested, and fetched breath</em>."</p>
<p>Which reminds me, what does God do when He "rests and gets refreshed?" What does He do in His spare time? Isn't it an insult to depict an <em>infinite</em> Being getting so worn out from six day's work that He needs to "rest and be refreshed?"</p>
<p>(But then, it's also silly for the author of the Biblical book of Job to depict God "handling" lightning bolts like the Greek god Zeus used to be depicted. Needless to say, there were lots of similarities between the ways men depicted the gods back then, like the way everyone assumed the aroma of burnt animal flesh was a feast for the gods after which they'd either calm down or grant man some special request.)</p>
<p>Returning to Genesis, check out 1:16 where it says the sun and moon are "two great lights" ("great <em>lamps</em>" in the original Hebrew) created to "light" the earth, "for signs and seasons" on earth, to "rule the day and night" on earth. But Mars has <em>two</em> moons (raising her total of "great lamps" to "three," obviously God felt that Mars needed lamps to brighten its nights too). Neptune has four moons, Uranus has eleven, Jupiter has sixteen, and Saturn has at least eighteen moons (or, in Bible-speak, "nineteen great lamps!") The earth gets only <em>one</em> great night-lamp? And even that "rules the night" so badly (during part of its lunar cycle) that for 3 nights out of every 28 it abdicates its "rule," and doesn't "light" the earth at all, and we bump into folks in the dark...like creationists.</p>
<p>In Galileo's day there was also some debate over the nature of bright "wandering stars" which did not move across the night sky in unison with all the other stars. With the aid of his telescope it was finally concluded that these "wanderers" were not stars at all, but solid objects like the earth, which merely <em>reflected</em> light from the Sun.</p>
<p>This scientific recognition introduced another disturbing notion. As one theologian put it, "If the earth is a planet, and only one of several planets, it can not be that any great things have been done specifically for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited. [The idea of so much planetary real estate specially created just to go to waste was an appalling alternative, suggesting a lack of purposefulness that theologians had a difficult time reconciling with the strictly purposeful actions of the Creator in the Genesis account. - ED.]; but if these other planets are inhabited, how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? [Adam and Eve were the first and only couple God says he created when he "made the heavens and the earth." Furthermore, Eve is called the `mother of all living.' - ED.] How can they trace their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Savior?"</p>
<p>Good questions! Of course, to "Biblical astronomers" it was Galileo's claims that were absurd, never the Bible's. They poked fun at Galileo since his name sounded similar to the ancient province of "Galilee": "Oh, men of <em>Galilee, why do you stare up at the heavens</em>?" [from the book of Acts, where Jesus has just ascended "into the clouds"]. Such was the refusal of some to peek through "the devil's instrument" and see the many "lamps" specially created for uninhabited worlds.</p>
<p>Other questions for creationists relate to smaller, more intimate aspects of creation.</p>
<p>Like when God created Adam's naughty bits. Might not God have said to Gabriel, "Hey Gabe, could you toss me fifty of those extra-sensitive nerve endings?" Gabe answered, "Fifty extra-sensitive nerve endings for that little flap of skin? You only put five nerve endings in each buttock!" And God said, "But I've got to ensure that Adam fills the earth with his kids. On second thought let's add another fifty, I want them calling out my name while they're doin' it."</p>
<p>Which makes me wonder what Adam said right after he'd bitten the forbidden fruit and noticed Eve was "naked." I bet he said: "Stand back, Eve! I don't know how big this thing gets!"</p>
<p>Speaking of which, a drone honeybee's genitals explode as soon as the queen bee opens her sting chamber to receive him. The drone dies soon afterwards. I wonder if Adam knew that and feared for the safety of his life when Eve first crooked her finger in his direction?</p>
<p>Which raises another question, "Is there an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life?"</p>
<p>And what about the sex lives of insects? Insects are just supposed to be God's little soulless machines. So it's not a matter of them having the "free will" to come up with stuff God never intended, especially ugly or dirty habits that mock his brilliance or the perfect sexual codes that supposedly keep the Creator most happy.</p>
<p>But then, why is the common male bedbug (<em>Cimex lectularius</em>) armed with a long sharp penis that he uses to stab-rape female bedbugs in their abdomen and then ejaculate into their body cavity (ignoring the usual genital opening in the female)? "The sperm travels through her blood stream to special receptacles, where she can store it until her time of ovulation." [David Quammen, <em>The Flight of the Iguana</em>]</p>
<p>This slice of sadomasochism in the insect world is apparently a method of getting around the "mating plug" which glues the female's genital tract shut after she has been inseminated by one male. Thereafter, competing males can't inject their sperm into her. By stabbing the female in the abdomen, and then having her store the injected sperm inside her "special receptacles" more than one male gets a chance to inseminate a female bedbug. (Exactly how "special" the "receptacles" are that the sperm collects in, is another matter. Could they be normal parts of the female bedbug's anatomy that eventually got used in a novel fashion to store sperm?)</p>
<p>Was the abdominal-stabbing technique of insemination "created?" The "Grand Designer" must be quite a tinkerer and fixer-upper! A little duct tape <em>here</em>, some abdominal-stabbing <em>there</em>, just because "He" didn't want to pull out the "mating plug" he'd "created" earlier?</p>
<p>One species of bedbug (<em>Xylocaris maculipennis</em>) has taken this method a step further. The males of that species stab-rape other males. In fact a male of that species may be assaulted by another male while he is copulating with a female. "The sperm of the rapist enters the <em>vas deferens</em> of his male victim and is used by the victim during copulation." [Adrian Forsyth, <em>A Natural History of Sex</em>] Which is not to say that the sperm of the rapist is injected directly into the raped male's <em>vas deferens</em> with accuracy - the sperm simply "migrates in the recipient's blood to his testes," and hence to the <em>vas deferens </em>tubules attached to his testes, where the rapist's sperm is then pumped out of the penis of the raped male, and into the female. [MacQuitty & Mound, <em>Megabugs</em>]</p>
<p>Creationists may conclude this is "God's design," but I doubt that any creationist wants to believe in the kind of God who "specially created" the behavior of <em>Xylocaris maculipennis</em> with the express intention that males stab females in the abdomen to insert their sperm (or males stab other males in the abdomen, and then their sperm shoots out the raped male's penis into a female being stabbed in the abdomen).</p>
<p>Evolutionists view such behavior as another example of the intensity of nature's competition to pass along one's genes rather than those of a rival. Male bedbugs jumped at their evolutionary opportunity. They seized the day, even if it meant stabbing females in the abdomen because the female's genital opening could be sealed by a "mating plug;" and even if it meant seizing another male and becoming a pain in his arse (as the British say).</p>
<p>Having studied nature with nearly as much single-minded ferocity as a male <em>Xylocaris maculipennis</em> studies a rival male's backside, I've grown convinced that nature's God must be a libertarian. There are hermit species and social species, herbivores and carnivores, animals that mate for life and some that live to mate...and some that <em>eat</em> their mates.</p>
<p>In nature there's also mothers who eat their sons and daughters; fathers who kill other father's children; daughters who eat their mothers, sons that mate with their mothers, and brothers and sisters who kill and/or devour each other in the womb! [For examples see the following article, "Why We Believe in a Designer!"]</p>
<p>But let's get back to the "Good Book." According to the Bible:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The young lions roar after their prey,<br /><br />and seek their meat from God..."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sounds noble, but what if that "meat" is a Christian in a Roman arena? Furthermore, a male lion will kill other male lions, and/or eat the offspring of another male after he gains control of a pride. And the female will eat her own runts or deformed cubs (most mammals do). But, to continue with the Psalm...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"O Lord, how manifold are thy works!<br /><br />in wisdom hast thou made them all...<br /><br />both small and great beasts...<br /><br />These all wait upon thee;<br /><br />that thou may give them their meat in due season."</p>
<p>[Psalm 104, KJV]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How blind the psalmist was to nature's ways! He left out that "the Lord" either gives lions "their meat in due season;"</p>
<p>Or has them be eaten by their own mother;</p>
<p>Or has them be eaten by a rival male who has taken control of the pride;</p>
<p>Or has them be killed by a rival female with a parenting disorder usually caused by inbreeding;</p>
<p>Or has them starve because their parents fail to bring enough food home, or die trying, or are taken by hunters;</p>
<p>Or makes young lions the "meat" of some other predatory species that catches them off guard;</p>
<p>Or (if they are male) has them grow up and be killed in combat by another male seeking territory or mates;</p>
<p>Or makes them the "meat" for a parasite and/or disease organism.</p>
<p>It's all the same to "the Lord."</p>
<p>In 1994 one thousand lions, one-third of the population of East Africa's Serengeti park, died from painful convulsions by a virus that attacked their blood cells, lungs and brain, i.e., the Canine Distemper Virus. The lions probably picked up the virus from hyenas who picked it up from domesticated dogs that lived just outside the park. (Also in 1994, a tenth of the 500,000 western gray kangaroos in South Australia and the 2.8 million gray kangaroos in neighboring New South Wales, went blind due to a mystery virus.)</p>
<p>And consider all the parasitical worms, leeches, flukes, mosquitoes, lice, fleas, crabs, ticks, mites, cancer cells, bacteria and viruses that "wait upon God" to "feed them" the quivering "meat" of human flesh. The leech grabbing on beneath the water to suck your leg. The mosquito piercing your arm for a taste of the alluring fluid. The worm coiled inside your colon eating your unconsumed food. The flea that jumps 130 times it's own body length, repeatedly, just to press its hungry mouth against your hot itching skin. These are some of the many species that live the "easy life" by literally sucking the life out of other species.</p>
<p>There's a creation-science textbook that says, "How marvelous is your body. Nothing about its working has been left to chance. Everything works just as planned by God. Only He had the wisdom to design the blood-clotting mechanism." [<em>Investigating God's World</em> by DeWitt Steele; part 2 by Herman and Nina Schneider; Beka Book Publications, a division of Pensacola Christian College, Florida; 1977, page 144].</p>
<p>This is the kind of textbook creationists want "equal time" for. It's authors are careful not to mention some of God's other marvels, like "the polio virus - perfectly designed to attack healthy children and kill them or leave them crippled for life. Again, everything works just as planned by God. Only He had the wisdom to design the polio virus." [Orson Scott Card]</p>
<p>Speaking of the human body, 70% of us suffer lower back pain, since our vertebrae are better designed to function as horizontal suspension bridges for our internal organs rather than as vertical supports for a bipedal mammal.</p>
<p>Other marvels of human body design include flat feet, weak ankles and knees, varicose veins, heart failure, dangerously thin portions of the skull, teeth that are impacted (or crooked and badly crowded), hernias, hemorrhoids, allergic reactions, eye problems, appendicitis, gall bladder disease, prostate problems, "female problems," danger of choking (because our breathing passage, eating passage, and speech box are all right on top of each other), not to mention countless birth defects. (Does Jesus really "love all the little zygotes in the world?" - not enough to give them all a whole and healthy start in life).</p>
<p>Walk into any hospital, doctor's office, or <em>televangelists' healing service</em>, and see for yourself "how marvelous is your body and how nothing has been left to chance."</p>
<p>And what about cancer, where your body starts eating itself alive? Cancer cells whose extreme genetic instability snowballs into such a variety of genetic alterations that even if one tumor cell survives therapy, there is a good chance it will now be resistant to the therapy. What a "wonder of design" is a cancerous tumor.</p>
<p>Throughout the length and breadth of nature we see "designs" that defeat other "designs," exactly as Darwinism predicts. Animals and plants dine on their fellow creatures or slowly suck the life out of them. "Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator sport?" [Richard Dawkins, video lecture, "River Out of Eden."]</p>
<p>Immunologists say our bodies are involved in an internal "arms race" just like the one in the world of prey and predators at large. Bacteria and viruses are constantly mutating, trying to out-maneuver and overtake our body's immune system. They say the immune system works on the basis of, guess what, random mutations and natural selection. There's "Darwinism in your blood," without which you would die of the common cold in a few hours. As soon as an invading microorganism is detected, your body starts producing antibodies with random key codes, and only a small percentage of those keys fit the invader's lock. At first it's a "loose fit" but it's good enough to be able to lock onto a few invaders. Then only those key-codes that had some partial success are used to make the next generation of antibodies and some additional random features are added to those. And only those sets of random codes that fit best are reproduced again, in greater numbers, with a few more random changes, until an exact key is finally produced that fits the lock of the invaders.</p>
<p>That's what's happening in our bodies all the time as they struggle to fight off an invading cold or virus. They are using random mutations coupled with natural selection of whatever "works," to discover just the right <em>complex key</em> to fit the exact lock and thwart the invaders. Meanwhile bacteria and viruses are mutating to avoid having their locks picked!</p>
<p>Of course, every once in a while some voracious and quickly reproducing microorganisms mutate a new lock that's <em>very</em> hard to pick, and millions of people die, as in the plague that killed about half the population of Europe before it subsided in 594 A.D.</p>
<p>That was followed about 700 years later by the bubonic plague that killed about 30 million people in Europe in just <em>three</em> years (1347 A.D. to 1351 A.D.). Estimates vary as to whether a quarter or a third of Europe was killed by the plague, but it was quite brutal and led to a lot of witch burnings in retaliation. (For instance, in Calvin's city of Geneva the plague is estimated to have killed 9 out of every 10 people who contracted it, and one year the rulers burned twenty people for being witches and afflicting the city with plague. Calvin, being a Buy-Bull believer, believed in witches and was involved in their prosecution).</p>
<p>Prior to plaguing Europe, this deadly bacterium had killed about 45 million people in Asia. The disease was carried by fleas that lived on rats. It wasn't until 1893 that the first effective vaccine was developed against bubonic plaque. Still, the disease continued to claim lives. The United States had a bout with bubonic plague around 1900. And in 1910 in Siberia about 60,000 people died from it. Even as late as the 1960s-70s about 10,000 people died from it in Vietnam. A bacterium called <em>Yersinia pestis</em> was the source of bubonic plague. (And Yersinia bacteria - along with many other kinds that hunted human beings more successfully in the past - continue to grow immune to modern antibiotics.)</p>
<p>It was diseases like smallpox, measles, mumps, influenza, cholera, malaria, typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, introduced for the first time into the New World by European settlers, that killed most of the Indians in North and South America. (Though some Europeans nudged the process along by giving Indians "gift" blankets that had been wrapped around disease victims.) So, diseases, not guns, killed most of the Indians.</p>
<p>The world's worst known case of the "flu" - an influenza epidemic - struck between 1918 and 1920, making half the world's population sick and killing from between 20 to 40 million people. Five hundred thousand people died in the U.S. New York city was quarantined, nobody allowed in or out. And in San Francisco it became illegal to exit your home without wearing a surgical mask. That same epidemic also killed more soldiers in World War One than the war did.</p>
<p>It's also nice of the Designer to make it so that when some diseases reach the stage where they are contagious, <em>they make us sneeze</em>, which helps pass the illness and suffering along to more human hosts.</p>
<p>Diseases also work together, one weakening the body, the other killing it. What "purposeful design!" I'm not speaking only of AIDS, but measles. In the developing world, up to two million children die each year from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea <em>after they get measles</em>. The measles virus blocks the release of an important chemical from a type of white blood cell. That chemical is critical to the activation of an important immune defense mechanism, leaving the body open to death from the next infection that comes along. ["Measles; Immunology: One Less Mystery," <em>Vaccine Weekly</em>, July 29, 1996, http://www.newsfile.com] Cholera is another disease "specially designed" for destruction, the cholera bacterium working hand in hand with a virus that transmits the gene for a deadly toxin to other cholera bacterium, making them lethal.</p>
<p>An estimated one-third of the world's population is infected with latent tuberculosis bacterium. Each year 8 million people develop active cases; nearly 3 million of them die.</p>
<p>The Ebola virus, a "hot" virus, that was in the news after it had killed a number of people in Africa, is a pretty creation. It causes severe headaches, backache, nausea, fever, vomiting, turns the eyes blood red, then causes blood clots in the liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and/or head, wipes out one's personality, and then the person vomits a bucketful of blood followed by unconsciousness. "Then...[Then? Yes, there's <em>more</em>, as in the case of a Mr. Monet who died in a Nairobi hospital from Ebola]...came a sound like a bed sheet being torn in half, the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from his anus, those mixed with intestinal lining. He sloughed his gut. Having destroyed its host, the virus was now coming out of every orifice, trying to find a new host. Now I ask you, isn't it possible that the Designer could have made this guy suffer just a little bit less? Maybe just bleed out of his nose?" [Corey Washington in the Craig-Washington debate, published on the SKEPTIC'S WEB]</p>
<p>Creationists should study the wide variety of "nature's ways," including all the "designs" that exist simply to defeat other "designs." Maybe they could use the time they spend praising God for the "beauty and wonder" of "His designs" to study some of the less praiseworthy aspects of "God's creation?" They certainly appear to be ignorant of "the rest of the story."</p>
<p>Did God design the bacteria that infect the food we eat? Even prayed over leftovers from Thanksgiving Day? Microgram for microgram, the poisons produced by some bacteria in our food are more potent than all other known poisons on earth. It is estimated that one tenth of an ounce of the toxin produced by bacteria causing botulism would be more than enough to kill everyone in the city of New York; and a 12-ounce glassful would be enough to kill all 5.9 billion human beings on the face of the Earth. (The same goes for the toxin that causes tetanus.) Pretty powerful stuff. Is that God's handiwork? Creationists - if they thought about it - must imagine God working overtime in His own personal biological warfare laboratory.</p>
<p>Did God design the sawtoothed grain beetle, angoumois grain moths, Mediterranean flour moths, scale insects, cabbage worms, corn earworms, corn rootworms, cutworms, tomato fruitworms, etc., that destroy 30% of U.S. food crops by voraciously devouring leaves, fruits, grain, and also by spreading fungal and bacterial plant rots as well? Are we supposed to praise the Lord for designing such insects whose proliferation leads to human starvation?</p>
<p>Which reminds me of a joke about a preacher who was visiting a farm and said to the farmer, "God's been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer." "Yes," the Farmer replied, "But you should have seen how He treated them when I wasn't around."</p>
<p>Should we also praise God for designing a species of roundworm that is found almost exclusively in human appendixes? And for designing three species of tapeworms found only in man, one of which can grow up to sixty-feet long. Worms designed with hooks and suckers to anchor them in our intestines, and designed with the ability to absorb food directly through their skin? And should we thank God for giving us a species of flea and three species of lice, that are designed to live only on man? Humans even have their own species of mites that are found on everyones' bodies. Or thank God for mosquitoes - a popular host to killer diseases, efficiently spreading them around with its "neatly-designed" wings and biting mouthparts, thus leading to the deaths of more people than have died in all the wars that have ever been waged by man? Or for the many species of flies that freeload off sweat, garbage, corpses, and fecal matter? The common housefly moves from garbage and excrement to our kitchen tables and faces, where they spit up material from their last meal, spreading harmful germs. Flies buzz, sting and bite people, even those already suffering from diseases that God has designed to torment them, and then those flies pass those diseases along to others.</p>
<p>The screwworm fly of South America and Africa aims straight for a wound (since it can't drill through the skin all by itself), even one as small as a tick bite, and lays five hundred to three thousand tiny eggs in it. They hatch and the maggots tear away with their sharp mouth hooks on the human [or cow] that is their host. As they feed, they produce a toxin that prevents the wound from healing, so infection quickly sets in. In a matter of a week, the maggots [each grown to about half an inch long] can enter the lungs or brain and kill the person [or cow]. Screwworms have been a major economic problem in livestock-producing areas. Glory be to God?</p>
<p>Mankind hunts many noxious and overabundant species of fly and kills them without hesitation; also the flea, the spider, the rat, the snake, the disease-germ and a thousand other creatures that "God designed." Heaven forbid that such creatures be found crawling about in a <em>church</em>, even one that preaches creationism! Such "miracles of God's design that demonstrate He is the Creator" are killed without hesitation by the janitors or church ladies who dust, sweep and disinfect "God's sanctuary."</p>
<p>As a fundamentalist "I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the <em>fly</em> was honest." [Mark Twain]</p>
<p>In 1999 the two small stocks of smallpox virus left on earth (stored under heavy guard in laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia and Novosibirsk, Russia) will be put into an autoclave and heated until they are "dead." Let's all shout hallelujah that one of "the Designer's" most deadly and damaging creatures will soon be eradicated.</p>
<p>Since 1967 the World Health Organization has been immunizing people to smallpox in even the remotest regions of the globe. The last person who died of smallpox was a medical photographer working in a lab who was infected by accident in 1978. But smallpox killed more than 60 million people in Europe between 1650 and 1750. And during the 1950s eight-million people a year continued to die of smallpox. Millions more were blinded or permanently disfigured by it, even though Dr. Edward Jenner had developed a method of immunizing people to the disease as early as 1796. Researchers are hanging on to millions of doses of smallpox <em>vaccine</em>, just in case someone has hidden away some smallpox virus in a secret freezer and threatens to use it in biological warfare. Researchers are also hanging on to a few segments of smallpox DNA that cannot cause infections, but might contain valuable information about how viruses function.</p>
<p>The next target for eradication is polio, another virus whose only reservoir is humans. In 1985, the Pan American Health Organization started a drive to eliminate polio from the Western Hemisphere. By 1994, after a vigorous immunization campaign, the Americas were declared free of polio for the first time. But the virus persists in Africa and Asia.</p>
<p>- <em>The Race Against Lethal Microbes: Learning to Outwit the Shifty Bacteria, Viruses, and Parasites That Cause Infectious Diseases</em>, a report published Aug. 1996 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute</p>
<p>Speaking of such horrible illnesses (more of which can be found in the section, "Why We Believe in a Designer!"), shouldn't the churches be given over, every now and then, to justifiable indignation meetings? If God will listen to a prayer request, won't He also listen to a complaint? It might please Him to find man growing more self-reliant and eager to question things, using the brains God gave him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And what in the end,<br /><br />caused Jehovah's plagues<br /><br />and pestilences<br /><br />to dwindle,<br /><br />was it theology<br /><br />or medical science?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>[Two hundred years ago the French naturalist, Buffon, noted that "half the children born never reach the age of eight" - because doctors back then didn't know how to deal with smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, the flu, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis, chicken pox and a host of other deadly infections like tetanus and staph. Why is nature "designed" to kill such a huge proportion of infants and young children? - ED.]</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Bible doesn't teach<br /><br />irrigation, medication,<br /><br />vaccination.<br /><br />As a means of education,<br /><br />Scripture is a loss.<br /><br />The substance of its<br /><br />"revelation"<br /><br />is just that God's the boss.</p>
<p>[Barbara Smoker, <em>Good God</em>]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Darwin looked at nature and noticed things like the way a sunfish sometimes lays <em>three hundred million</em> eggs. And Darwin wondered as we all do, "What the hell is that creature trying to prove?" A single bacterial cell that divides every twenty minutes, will multiply to a mass four thousand times greater than the earth's in just two days. That doesn't happen, because of the inconceivably huge <em>death rate</em> of bacteria. If all the eggs from one mother housefly lived, she would produce more than five trillion offspring in just one season.<br /><br />A single oyster, left to its own devices, produces more than one-hundred-twenty-five million eggs in a season. That's more than enough oysters, if none died in eight years, [10 to the 89th power number of oysters] to crowd the water out of the oceans and make it cover the earth.</p>
<p>A female sea turtle lays a hundred or more eggs, but after they hatch in a nest buried beneath the sand on the beach, only a handful of baby sea turtles make it to the safety of the ocean.</p>
<p>About one hundred million sperm cells are found in each cubic centimeter of human ejaculate. Yet only one sperm lives to fertilize the female's egg. The rest die. And many fertilized eggs never reach maturity.</p>
<p>There are equally bountiful numbers from the world of seed-bearing plants. Why such an over abundance of seeds and sperm and fertilized zygotes, born only to die?</p>
<p>Some Creationists say that death is a result of "the Fall of Adam." But if everything is only supposed to be "dying, decaying, and diminishing" that hardly explains enormous increases in local plant and animal populations, and the sometimes explosive evolution of new species from the same early stock to occupy very different environmental niches.</p>
<p>Or see the new book, <em>Darwin's Dreampond</em> by Tijs Goldschmidt, that discusses the "explosive" evolution of hundreds of new species of cichlid fishes with different body types and behaviors that evolved in just a few million years in lakes in East Africa.</p>
<p>Or, study the incredible variety among the more than 800 species of fruit-flies that evolved on the Hawaiian islands (and nowhere else on earth) in just five million years. Moreover, the percentage of genetic similarity (and differences) between some of those species of fruit flies is about equal to the percentage of genetic similarity (and differences) between man and chimpanzee.</p>
<p>So, <strong>strike one for creationism</strong>, and its "dying, decaying, and diminishing" explanation.</p>
<p>Other creationists say the over abundance is there to "preserve" each "kind" of creature. But that doesn't explain why many "kinds" that have lived on this planet are now extinct. If God "designed" the overabundance to simply ensure the "preservation" of all the "kinds" He'd created, then He's failed miserably. The fossil record boldly attests to such a failure.</p>
<p><strong>Strike two for creationism</strong>, and its "preservation" explanation.</p>
<p>What explanation is left? It seemed to Darwin that nature's riotous plentitude of life and death, especially when spread out over hundreds of millions of years, would make large scale evolution of highly divergent species <em>inevitable</em>. Species diverge, populations eventually losing the ability to interbreed with one another, and the divergences often continue, making species grow further away, not nearer, to the original genetic stock. Death is simply the price paid for evolutionary change throughout time.</p>
<p>Or, as the songwriter, Jackson Browne put it,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With its beauty and its cruelty<br /><br />With its heartbreak and its joy<br /><br />With its constantly giving birth to life<br /><br />And to forces that destroy,<br /><br />And the infinite power of change<br /><br />Alive in the world.</p>
<p>["Alive in the World" on his <em>Looking East</em> cd]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to evolution it took billions of years for an amoeba to become a man. This seems laughably implausible to creationists who cannot believe that God would design a system of evolution whereby an amoeba becomes a man in any length of time. But a single cell becomes a human baby in nine months and they call it "God's miracle." If only they would consider evolution in a similar light.</p>
<p>Furthermore, cells from a woman named "Helen" - who died a couple of decades ago from cancer - continue to thrive in laboratory petri dishes all over the world exactly as if such cells were single-celled organisms. They even "out-compete" some other single-celled organisms when placed in the same petri dish. So, single human cells retain some of the characteristics and abilities of our single-celled ancestors!</p>
<p>Lastly, creationists ignore the many clumsy, as well as hideous,</p>
<p>adaptations for survival, poetically alluded to in the following song:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All things dull and ugly,<br /><br />All creatures short and squat,<br /><br />All things rude and nasty,<br /><br />The Lord God made the lot.</p>
<p>Each little snake that poisons,<br /><br />Each little wasp that stings,<br /><br />He made their brutish venom,<br /><br />He made their horrid wings.</p>
<p>All things sick and cancerous,<br /><br />All evil great and small,<br /><br />All things foul and dangerous,<br /><br />The Lord God made them all.</p>
<p>Each nasty little hornet,<br /><br />Each beastly little squid,<br /><br />Who made the spiky urchin?<br /><br />Who made the sharks? He did.</p>
<p>All things scabbed and ulcerous,<br /><br />All pox great and small,<br /><br />Putrid, fouled and gangrenous,<br /><br />The Lord God made them all.</p>
<p>["All Things Dull and Ugly," from the Monty Python movie,<br /><em>The Meaning of Life</em>]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pigs have two toes on each foot that don't touch the ground when they walk. Male primates have functionless nipples. The new born giraffe falls a couple of feet and lands on its head at birth. There have always been plenty of reasons to doubt the "design explanation." (See, "Why We Believe in a Designer!")</p>
<p><strong>Strike three for creationism</strong>.</p>
<p>Which reminds me of a joke. A man was having a pair of pants made by a Jewish tailor. But the man grew impatient over how long it was taking the tailor to finish them. The man complained, "It only took God six days to make the world, but it's taken you over a month to make the pair of pants I ordered." The tailor held out the man's pair of pants with pride and said: "Dat may be so, but take a look at the world...den take a look at dees pants!"</p>
<p>Let me end with two ways to reconcile the "God of the Bible" with the theory of evolution:</p>
<p>According to evolution, everything evolved "in the beginning" out of the simplest atomic elements, like hydrogen and helium. Isn't it amazing then, that in the Bible, God is designated over and over again by a big letter "H" followed by a little letter "e," (<em>He</em>) which is the <em>symbol</em> for "helium!" [from the video, <em>Galaxies in Collision</em>]</p>
<p>It also says in the Bible that a thousand years to man is but a day in God's eyes. That idea has me worried. What if things in the cosmos are happening too fast for God to see? What if six billion years passes every time God blinks? "Strange," God muses to Himself, "Whenever I drop a single-celled organism onto a pretty blue planet, the planet explodes into thermonuclear dust."</p>
<p>E. T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-53939980984553020822012-03-19T14:08:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:04:47.179-07:00The "Death of Darwinism"<p><em>The "Death of Darwinism": Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated</em></p>
<p>The "death of Darwinism" has been predicted by at least one scientist or popular journalist every decade since Darwin first proposed his theory. (For that matter, there are still a few college trained individuals today who continue to argue in favor of geocentrism! They are emphatic Bible believers of course. See Cretinism or Evilution?, No. 2)</p>
<p>In Darwin's own day, creationists were predicting that his book would be forgotten "in ten years." Darwin replied, "That may be so, but I don't think the subject [of evolution] will be [forgotten]." (See Cretinism or Evilution No. 1 for the quotation.)</p>
<p>Darwin's theory continues to be supported by recent evidence and by the vast majority of biologists. Take the recent book that details the decades-long study of Darwinian evolution of finches on the Galapagos Islands, The Beak of the Finch: The Story of Evolution in Our Times by Weiner. Or see the recent study of the Darwinian evolution of bacteria and viruses, titled, Why We Get Sick by Nesse and Williams. Or see George C. Williams' Adaptation and Natural Selection. "A beautifully written and excellently reasoned essay in defense of Darwinian selection" -- R. C. Lewontin in a book review in Science magazine.</p>
<p>Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution by Gary Cziko (MTT Press, 1995) is another "strictly Darwinian presentation that balances the current attack on evolution."</p>
<p>Some other recent works dealing with Darwinism include:</p>
<p>Evolution and Its Influence: The Herbert Spencer Lectures, 1986, edited by Alan Grafen, "reviews the impact of Darwinism on art, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and other fields."</p>
<p>Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism by James Rachels, "shows how the theory of evolution influenced Darwin's own moral and religious views - especially his concern for the welfare of animals - and describes the controversies that followed in Darwin's wake."</p>
<p>In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought by Carl N. Degler, "offers a history of the impact of Darwinism (and biological research) on our understanding of human nature, providing a fascinating overview of the social sciences in the last one hundred years."</p>
<p>A final word on the French. Modern day French scientists appear to be giving Darwin his due. Presses Universitaires de France has recently published (as of March 1996) a three volume Dictionary of Darwinism and of Evolution, edited by Patrick Tort. A work of 4912 pages, it was composed by an international team of specialists in the biological and human sciences. It will contain "The history of transformism ['transformism' being the French term for 'evolution']; the history of the Darwinian theory of natural selection in particular, as well as of adverse theories; the history of theories developed with reference to Darwinism in the various sectors of biology and the human and social sciences; the history of the influence of these theories on society [on a country by country basis]."</p>
<p>Creationists take note, the French are coming! And the next time you hear a creationist tell you that some French scientist called evolution a "fairy tale for adults," tell him that the University of France Press has just published the Dictionary of Darwinism and of Evolution. Evolution is not a "fairy tale" to French scientists.</p>
<p>Besides which, Jean Rostand, the fellow who said, "Transformism [evolution] is a fairy tale for adults," also wrote that "Transformism may be considered as accepted, and no scientist, no philosopher, no longer discusses [questions - ED.] the fact of evolution." (L'Evolution des Especes [i.e., The Evolution of the Species], Hachette, p. 190). Jean Rostand was also an atheist who would have viewed the Biblical account of creation as a "fairy tale for adults."</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-79806554107530273682012-03-19T14:03:00.002-07:002019-09-01T13:29:13.394-07:00Old, Out of Context Quotations from French Scientists<p><em>Old, Out of Context Quotations from French Scientists</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."</p>
<p>- <strong>Prof. Louis Bounoure</strong> (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17. (P. 5 of The Revised Quote Book)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So far as the research below demonstrates, this quotation appears to be a mistakenly jumbled combination of statements made by two different people at least 36 years ago! - Neither did the editors of The Revised Quote Book find enough room or honesty in their publication to discuss the social/historical context out of which the quotation(s) arose. The famous French scientist, Lamarck, was the first major scientific figure in Europe to seriously and strenuously propose "the theory of transformism" [today known as "the theory of evolution"]. So naturally, when the British "amateur scientist," Darwin, usurped Lamarck's throne to become known as the "father of transformism/evolution" the French were miffed. To them, Lamarck was the "father" of that theory. This basic disagreement must be taken into consideration whenever quotations from French scientists regarding "transformism" or "evolution" are cited, especially since those very words soon became identified with Darwin's (rather than Lamarck's) theory of "how" it occurred. This helps explain some quotations from French scientists wherein they showed disdain for "transformism/evolution." (However, note the very end of this article for the latest word on what French scientists think of evolution and even Darwin's theory!)</p>
<p><strong>Grasse and the "Myth of Evolution"</strong></p>
<p>Even until the 1970s there was at least one famous French scientist of the "old school," Pierre P. Grasse, who continued to voice strong reservations concerning Darwin's particular explanation (and the Neo-Darwinian explanation) of "how" evolution occurred. Not surprisingly, Grasse is quoted FIVE TIMES in The Revised Quote Book, because he wrote of the "myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon."</p>
<p>However, the editors of The Revised Quote Book neglect to tell their readers that in the same book by Grasse from which they have quoted, Grasse also stated in the most unequivocal terms: "Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontology, i.e., the history of the living world ... [Also,] Embryogenesis provides valuable data [concerning evolutionary relationships] ... Chemistry, through its analytical data, directs biologists and provides guidance in their search for affinities between groups of animals or plants, and ... plays an important part in the approach to genuine evolution."<br /><br />(Pierre P. Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, New York, 1977, pp. 3,4,5,7)</p>
<p>Of course, Grasse also tipped his hat to the French "father of evolution," Lamarck, stating: "Lamarckism, which is no less logical than Darwinism ... is a tempting theory ... and we would not be surprised to learn from molecular biology that some of its [Lamarckism's] intuitions are partly true...it should be considered today a way of thinking, of understanding nature, rather than a strict doctrine entirely oriented toward the explaining of evolution."<br /><br />(Pierre P. Grasse, p. 8)</p>
<p>The authors of The Revised Quote Book lifted Grasse's phrase, "the myth of evolution," out of context, trying to deceive others into believing that Grasse was doubtful of evolution even though he stated he "agreed" with the "nearly unanimous" scientific consensus that "evolution" was an historical scientific "fact." Grasse simply disagreed with explanations of exactly "how" evolution occurred. He felt the "how" part was not a "simple, understood, and explained phenomenon."</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-34179471080371702922012-03-19T13:57:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:04:15.385-07:00More Out of Context Quotations of French Scientists<p>Concerning the quotation with which this section began, let's repeat it here:</p>
<blockquote><p>"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."</p>
<p>- <strong>Prof. Louis Bounoure</strong> (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17. (p. 5 of The Revised Quote Book)</p></blockquote>
<p>Since the Revised Quote Book stated that "Prof. Bounoure" had served as the "Director of Research" at the "French National Centre of Scientific Research" I wrote the Center [The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique = The National Center for Scientific Research]. I asked them about the exact origin of the quotation and received the following reply, dated March 3, 1995 (translated by professional French translator, Jacques Benbassat, with some minor editing and paragraphs re-arranged in an easier to follow order):</p>
<blockquote><p>Dear Mr. Babinski,</p>
<p>The new director general of the CNRS [i.e., the National Center for Scientific Research in France], Mr. Guy Aubert, has given me your letter of December 6, 1994, in which you requested several points of information concerning the quotations by French scientists, concerning the theory of evolution.</p>
<p>Here is the information I was able to gather:</p>
<p>The beginning of the quotation, "Evolution is a fairy tale for adults" is not from Bounoure but from Jean Rostand, a much more famous French biologist (he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Academy). The precise quotation is as follows: "Transformism is a fairy tale for adults." (Age Nouveau, [a French periodical] February 1959, p. 12). But Rostand has also written that "Transformism may be considered as accepted, and no scientist, no philosopher, no longer discusses [questions - ED.] the fact of evolution." (L'Evolution des Especes [i.e., The Evolution of the Species], Hachette, p. 190). Jean Rostand was ... an atheist.</p>
<p>The [end] of the quotation of Professor Bounoure to which you allude is taken from his book, Determinism and Finality, edited by Flammarion, 1957, p. 79. The precise quotation is the following: "That, by this, evolutionism would appear as a theory without value, is confirmed also pragmatically. A theory must not be required to be true, said Mr. H. Poincare, more or less, it must be required to be useable. Indeed, none of the progress made in biology depends even slightly on a theory, the principles of which [i.e., of how evolution occurs -- ED.] are nevertheless filling every year volumes of books, periodicals, and congresses with their discussions and their disagreements."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>[Obviously, Bounoure was expressing his distaste at those in his day who argued over the "principles" of evolution, "how" it took place, whether via Lamarckian or Darwinian "evolutionism." Bounoure probably thought that such "principles" were not worth all the "discussions and disagreements" since they were not well understood, were yet to be discovered, and perhaps might not be discovered, i.e., if supernatural intervention into the evolutionary process was accepted. Bounoure was a theist. He also probably thought that more practical scientific investigations needed to be pursued and less "discussions and disagreements." - ED.]</p>
<blockquote><p>As far as we know, Louis Bounoure never served as ["Director" nor was even] a member of the CNRS. He was a professor of biology at the University of Strasbourg. Bounoure was a Christian but did not affirm that Genesis was to be taken to the letter. He expressed his ideas in his work. He is clearly "finalist" and against all contingent visions of evolution. ["Finalism" is a philosophical term related to a belief in ultimate purpose or design behind everything, including, in this case, the evolution of the cosmos and of life. - ED.] He bases his views, among other things, on the existence of elements that are pre-adapted for their future<br />functions.</p></blockquote>
<p>[In my letter to the CNRS I also asked whether the quotation might not have originated with another French scientist, "Paul Lemoine," to whom the televangelist James D. Kennedy has incorrectly attributed the quotation. And here was the answer they gave to that question. -- ED.]</p>
<blockquote><p>As far as Paul Lemoine is concerned, he is indeed a "famous French scientist" since he was the director of the National Museum of Natural History. In the Encyclopedie Francaise [French Encyclopedia, circa 1950s], volume 5, he wrote the following: "It results from this explanation that the theory of evolution is not exact ... Evolution is a kind of dogma which its own priests no longer believe, but which they uphold for the people. It is necessary to have the courage to state this if only so that men of a future generation may orient their research into a different direction." And this quotation often circulates among anti-evolutionist groups.</p>
<p>Paul Lemoine was an atheist, and he was against the theory of evolution because he felt it was not a good explanation of the origin of living beings and by showing its limits risked to discredit materialism. Although this point was not very clear we believe that when he spoke of "the theory of evolution" he was actually addressing the explanation of specifically [how] evolution [occurred] and not the [more general idea] of evolution itself.</p>
<p>The problem [of the origin of the quotation] apparently stems from the confusion in the discourse of these three scientists between the fact of evolution and the explanation of this fact. None were creationists but they all felt that the explanations given for the understanding of evolution were insufficient, even totally inexact.</p>
<p>This is the information that I am able to give you. if you would like to have more details, you could write to Jean Staune, Institut de Paleontologie Humaine, 1 rue Rene Panhard - 75013 Paris. This institute is associated with our own: The National Center of Scientific Research.</p>
<p>Very truly yours,<br /><br />Marie-Antoinette de Lumley</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Since writing this section on quotations from French scientists, I have browsed the Internet and seen a creationist incorrectly attribute the quotation, "Evolution is a fairy-tale for adults," to "Pierre P. Grasse," the French biologist whom I mentioned earlier and who wrote that evolution was a "fact!"</p>
<p>Some of the responses to a French scientist stating "Evolution is a fairy-tale..." included Jeff Shallit's: "The French have had a bug up their a-- about Darwin since the Origin of Species was published. I think it's a case of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. I know at least two college educated French people who could not even recognize Darwin's name. Perhaps even today Darwin continues to get short shrift in France. Anyway, the claim that 'evolution is a fairy-tale' is nice, but where's the evidence for a competing theory? We have been waiting years for that evidence."</p>
<p>Speaking of science education in European countries, Omni (Sept. 1987) published a letter by a Mr. Fabio Femino of Messina, Italy, who said that "The doctrine of creation has been taught in Italy's public schools -- by law -- since 1929, displacing the theory of evolution." [Note: Italy remains one third Catholic, one third communist, and one third apathetic toward Catholicism and communism. -- ED.] Mr. Femino continued, "There are no Italian popular science books in bookshops. Popular science magazines are almost unknown. Astrology and witchcraft, however, are spreading fast." [So, teaching creationism to the youth is no cure for either communism or the occult! -- ED.]</p>
<p>And, as apartheid South Africa has taught us, teaching creationism in public schools and churches for a hundred years can also go hand in hand with racism. In fact, some of Carl Sagan's episodes of his popular science program, COSMOS, were banned from being shown on public television in South Africa strictly because they dealt with evolution.</p>
<p>Another correspondent Alan Filipski, added, "The validity of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection does not depend on a quote by anyone, Nobel prize winner or Pope. There are a number of scientists (e.g. Fred Hoyle) who have done great work and also hold eccentric opinions on certain scientific matters. So what? Quotations are not facts about the natural world. Science progresses despite (and sometimes because of) eccentric individuals, but no individual's opinions are revered as facts. The process [of scientific investigation] retains the true and discards the false."</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-51461213256698984272012-03-19T13:42:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:03:57.047-07:00Quotations from Charles Darwin on "Design"<p><em>Further Quotations from Darwin on "Design"</em></p>
<p>The subject of the evolution of complex structures also deserves a little aside on Darwin's opinion of the "design" argument in general. The quotations below are from The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin:</p>
<ul>
<li>"With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all [original italics] satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws. A child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by the action of even more complex laws, and I can see no reason why a man, or other animals, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I probably have shown by this letter. Most deeply do I feel your generous kindness and interest. Yours sincerely and cordially, Charles Darwin"<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray, [a minister] May 22, 1860)</li>
<li>"One word more on 'designed laws' and 'undesigned results.' I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can't and don't. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed."<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray July 1860)</li>
<li>"Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing."<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray, Sept. 17 [1861?])</li>
<li>Did God ordain, Darwin asked, "that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did he cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with faws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport?" Surely no one could admit divine providence in these matters! Darwin concluded, then, by parity of reasoning, that "no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided."<br /><br />(Darwin in Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, II [D. Appleton and Company, 1875], P.415, as cited by Ric Machuga in his article, "Clockwork Origins?" in Books & Culture: A Christian Review, Jan./Feb. 1996, P. 19.)</li>
<li>"...With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot. I like to try and ask you a puzzling question, but when you return the compliment I have great doubts whether it is a fair way of arguing. If anything is designed, certainly man must be: one's 'inner consciousness' (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man's rudimentary mammae [nipples]... were designed. If I was to say I believed this, I should believe it in the same incredible manner as the orthodox believe the Trinity in Unity. You say that you are in a haze; I am in thick mud; the orthodox [creationist Christian] would say in fetid, abominable mud; yet I cannot keep out of the question. My dear Gray, I have written a deal of nonsense. Yours most cordially, C. Darwin"<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray Dec. 11, 1861)</li>
</ul>
<p>Creationists should get to know the real Darwin, not some caricature of the man and his ideas based on a few quotations lifted out of context. I do hope that any creationists reading the above two paragraphs from Darwin's letters will not cite merely the final sentences, namely, "...this is childish writing," and, "I have written a deal of nonsense." Of course, if such quotations were lifted out of context and began appearing in creationist magazines, they would fit nicely with others we have examined in issues of this newsletter!</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
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<p>Speaking of the evolution of complex structures, here are some additional quotations from Darwin found in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volumes I & II, edited by his son, Francis Darwin:</p>
<ul>
<li>"I cannot too strongly express my conviction of the general truth of my doctrines, and God knows I have never shirked a difficulty."<br /><br />(Darwin to Charles Lyell Sept. 20, 1859)</li>
<li>"About the weak points I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder."<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray [a Christian minister] Feb. ?, 1860)</li>
<li>"Henslow [says he]... will go a very little way with us [in accepting the Darwinian theory of evolution], but brings up no real argument against going further. He also shudders at the eye! It is really curious (and perhaps is an argument in our favour) how differently different opposers view the subject... Baden Powell says he never read anything so conclusive as my statement about the eye!"<br /><br />(Darwin to Charles Lyell Feb. 15, 1860)</li>
<li>"To recur to the eye. I really think it would have been dishonest, not to have faced the difficulty; and worse... it would have been impolitic I think, for it would have been thrown in my teeth, as H. Holland threw the bones of the ear, till Huxley shut him up by showing what a fine gradation occurred amongst living creatures."<br /><br />(Darwin to Charles Lyell Feb. 23, 1860)</li>
<li>"...I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often make me feel uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"<br /><br />(Darwin to Asa Gray Apr. 3, 1860)<br />[Fifteen years later, Darwin wrote of the "black-shouldered peacock, the so-called Pavo nigripennis given in my 'Var. under Domest.;'...the variety is in many respects intermediate between the two known species." (Darwin to August Weismann Dec. 6, 1875) So, Darwin did not doubt that peacocks and their complex feathers had evolved. - ED.]</li>
<li>"For the life of me I cannot see any difficulty in natural selection producing the most exquisite structure, if such structure can be arrived at by gradation, and I know from experience how hard it is to name any structure towards which at least some gradations are not known."<br /><br />(Darwin to Charles Lyell Apr. 1860)</li>
</ul>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
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<blockquote><p>"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."</p>
<p>- <strong>Charles Darwin</strong> in The Origin of Species, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1971, p. 167. (p. 18 of The Revised Quote Book)</p></blockquote>
<p>Darwin is not a "modern source." Furthermore, this quotation has been lifted out of context. According to the edition of The Origin of Species published by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952 (in the Great Books series), here is the entire quotation in context:</p>
<blockquote><p>"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."</p></blockquote>
<p>Darwin then went on to describe how some simple animals have only "aggregates of pigment-cells...without any nerves ... [which] serve only to distinguish light from darkness." Then, in animals a bit more complex, like "star-fish," there exist "small depressions in the layer of [light-sensitive cells] -- depressions which are "filled ... with transparent gelatinous matter and have a clear outer covering, "like the cornea in the higher animals." These eyes lack a lens, but the fact that the light sensitive pigment lies in a "depression" in the skin makes it possible for the animal to tell more precisely from what direction the light is coming. And the more cup-shaped the depression, the better it helps "focus" the image like a simple "box-camera" may do, even without a lens. Likewise in the human embryo, the eye is formed from a "sack-like fold in the skin."</p>
<p>George Gaylord Simpson in The Meaning of Evolution, points out that the different species of modern snail have every intermediate form of eye from a light-sensitive spot to a full lens-and-retina eye.</p>
<p>Neither would all the modifications necessary to improve clarity of vision need to be accomplished by a single method of change, nor by changes occurring simultaneously in the eye as a whole. For instance, Darwin continued: "If a lens has too short or too long a focus, it may be amended either by an alteration of curvature, or an alteration of density; if the curvature be irregular, and the rays do not converge to a point, then any increased regularity of curvature will be an improvement. So [also] the contraction of the iris and the muscular movements of the eye are neither of them essential to vision, but only improvements which might have been added and perfected at any stage of the construction of the instrument. Within the highest division of the animal kingdom, namely the Vertebrata [animals with backbones], we can start from an eye so simple, that it consists, as in the lancelet [small sea animals which evolutionists think resemble the earliest ancestors of fish], of a little sack of transparent skin, furnished with a nerve and lined with pigment, but destitute of any other apparatus. In fishes and reptiles ... the range of gradations of dioptric [optical] structures is very great ... In living bodies, variations will cause the slight modifications, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"</p>
<p>That is what Darwin wrote in context. Obviously, he was not admitting that the origin of the eye was an insuperable difficulty, as the editors of The Revised Quote Book wish to deceive their readers into thinking.</p>
<p>Coincidentally, the same week that I checked on the above quotation, the evolutionist, Stephen J. Gould, wrote an article on it! ("Common Pathways of Illumination," Natural History 12/94, p. 10) According to Gould, "Anti-evolutionists continually cite this passage as supposed evidence that Darwin himself threw in the towel when faced with truly difficult and inherently implausible cases. But if they would only read the very next sentence[s], they would grasp Darwin's real reason for speaking of absurdity 'in the highest possible degree.' (Either they have read these following lines and have consciously suppressed them, an indictment of dishonesty; or they have never read them and have merely copied the half quotation from another source, a proof of inexcusable sloppiness. Darwin set up the overt 'absurdity' to display the power of natural selection in resolving even the most difficult cases -- the ones that initially strike us as intractable in principle. The very next liner, give three reasons all supported by copious evidence for resolving the absurdity and accepting evolutionary development as the cause of optimally complex structures."</p>
<p>Besides Gould's article there have appeared several others on the topic of the evolution of the eye, demonstrating that such an evolution is far from "absurd," but rather is entirely plausible.</p>
<p>See professor Kenneth R. Miller's excellent article on eye evolution, "Life's Grand Design" (Technology Review, v. 97, no. 2, Feb./Mar. 1994, pp. 24-32).</p>
<p>See also D. E. Nilsson and S. Pelger's article, "A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve" (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 1994, v.. 256, pp. 53-58).</p>
<p>In his recent book, River Out of Eden (Basic Books, 1995), Richard Dawkins points out how Nilsson and Pelger set up a computer model of evolving eyes to determine if a smooth gradient of change exists from a pigmented eye spot to the camera eye with a lens and cornea, and how long it would take such a transformation to occur. They employed pessimistic figures for the amounts of change possible per generation -- giving their model only 50% "heritability" (many human traits are over 50% inheritable), and chose pessimistic values for the coefficient of variation (how much variation there typically is in a population). And they determined that Darwinian evolution could produce a good camera eye in less than a half a million years! That's a mere "blink of the eye" in geologic time!</p>
<p>Since an eye's efficiency can be easily measured using elementary optics, their computer simulation had more validity than, say, trying to measure how subtle anatomical changes increased the efficiency of a cheetah's speed and agility.</p>
<p>"Nilsson and Pelger began with a flat retina atop a flat pigment layer and surmounted by a flat, protective transparent layer. The transparent layer was allowed to undergo localized random mutations of its refractive index. They then let the model deform itself at random, constrained only by the requirement that any change must be small and must be an improvement on what went before. The results were swift and decisive ... leading unhesitatingly from the flat beginning through a shallow indentation to a steadily deepening cup. The transparent layer thickened to fill the cup and smoothly bulged its outer surface in a curve [the cornea]. And then, almost like a conjuring trick, a portion of this transparent filling condensed into a local, spherical subregion of higher refractive index [a lens]." -- Dawkins, pp. 80-81</p>
<p>And the lens that formed was not of a uniform refractive index, but was "graded," just like real eyes, with the highest refractive index near the center of the lens! And it was graded according to the optimum ratio for vision, known as "Mattiessen's ratio."</p>
<p>I should add that Nilsson and Pelger's computer simulation never produced an eye that combined the focus of two lenses -- one placed directly behind the other -- lenses that could slide toward and away from each other to produce added magnification and "close-ups" of small objects and far away objects, as in a "zoom camera." Instead, the best "zoom" available to us humans is to bring the newsprint closer to our eyes! I guess the "Biblical Creator" in his infinite wisdom could not design eyes any better than natural selection could. However, robots of the future will undoubtedly have such "extra" design features added by their human creators.</p>
<p>Other recent articles, like Gould's, mentioned above, have pointed out how a common genetic key triggers the development of eyes of vastly different construction in animals as varied as flies and mice (in vertebrates and invertebrates). So, all eyes may originate from a common ancestor that evolved this genetic trigger. See for instance, Peter Monagham's article, "Revelations from Fruit Flies" (Chronicle of Higher Education A8-A9, May 26, 1995). And also see Carol Yaesuk Yoon's article, "The Wizard of Eyes: Evolution Creates Novelties by Varying the Same Old Tricks" (New York Times, Nov- 1, pp. C1, C11).</p>
<p>Also see the articles on eye evolution in Science, v. 265, no. 5173, Aug. 5, 1994, pp. 742 & 785; and in Nature, v. 368, Apr. 21, 1994, p. 690.</p>
<p>As an aside, I must mention a recent article in Discover magazine (Jan. 1996), titled, "From Fin to Hand," that discussed how merely extending the length of time a particular gene remained activated during embryological development, had a lot to do with turning a fin into a hand! So, minor mutations of embryologic growth patterns might produce larger effects than expected, even perhaps in the story of eye evolution from an eyespot to a skin dimple to an eye cup, etc.</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
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<blockquote><p>"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer."</p>
<p>- <strong>Dr. Richard Dawkins</strong> (Department of Zoology, Oxford University, UK), 'The necessity of Darwinism'. New Scientist, vol. 94, 15 April 1982, P. 130. (The Revised Quote Book, P. 6)</p></blockquote>
<p>By lifting this brief sentence out of its original context the editors of The Revised Quote Book make it sound like Dawkins is in favor of teaching the instantaneous creation of animals and plants as part of a "two model" approach to "origins." However, any reader paying attention to Dawkins' use of the word, "Superficially," and to the title of Dawkins' article, "The Necessity of Darwinism," must realize that the editors have ignored the context of the quotation. In context, Dawkins wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>"The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.</p>
<p>"Darwin's theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist...</p></blockquote>
<p>(For further information on what Dr. Dawkins has to say about Darwin's theory, I recommend his two books, The Blind Watchmaker, and, River of Life.)</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-2289514681765684982012-03-19T10:55:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:02:56.369-07:00A "Devilish" Quotation: Darwin and The Devil's Gospel<p><em>A "Devilish" Quotation: Darwin and The Devil's Gospel</em></p>
<p>Before discussing some of the quotations in The Revised Quote Book, I'd like to alert readers to a "devilish" statement in one of Darwin's letters that creationists are milking for all its "unholy" worth. The quotation has appeared in a number of creationist magazines and at least one book (Robert T. Clark and James D. Bales' creationist book, Why Scientists Accept Evolution, Baker Book Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966, p. 64). The version that I recently ran across, appears below:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On August 8, 1860 ... in a letter to T. H. Huxley, who was one of Darwin's two outspoken champions in England, Darwin referred to Huxley as: 'My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel, i.e., the devil's gospel.' No doubt Darwin meant to be humorous with this analogy, but nevertheless, it bespoke his having an evangelistic, cosmic view toward his own work. (Lester J. McCann, "Darwin's Impact," Watchmaker, v. 2, no. 6, June 1995, p. 27)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tom Scharle mentioned another version in an [unnamed] creationist periodical:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Charles Darwin in the closing words of a letter to Thomas Huxley, the ferocious "bulldog" for evolution, said this, "To my good and kind agent for the propagation of the gospel, i.e., the devil's gospel." Darwin and many evolutionists seem to have a better grasp on the importance and implications of origins than many in the church. Unfortunately they do not believe the truth of God's word.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This "devilish" quotation from one of Darwin's letters appears below in its original context:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...Have you seen Agassiz's weak metaphysical and theological attack on the 'Origin' in the last 'Silliman'? [The 'American Journal of Science and Arts' was commonly called 'Silliman's Journal.'] I would send it you, but apprehend it would be less trouble for you to look at it in London than return it to me. R. Wagner has sent me a German pamphlet, giving an abstract of Agassiz's 'Essay on Classification,' 'mit Rucksicht auf Darwins Ansichten,' &c. &c. He won't go very 'dangerous lengths,' but thinks the truth lies half-way between Agassiz and the 'Origin.' As he goes thus far he will, nolens volens [=willing or not willing], have to go further. He says he is going to review me in [his] yearly Report. My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel -i.e., the devil's gospel. Ever Yours, Charles Darwin. (Darwin to T. H. Huxley Aug. 8, 1860 [in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by his son Francis Darwin, Vol. 11, pp. 123-4, 1959])</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Note that according to the letter, Darwin may just as well have been speaking of "Mr. R. Wagner," rather than "Huxley," as "My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel - i.e., the devil's gospel." Wagner was the one who sent Darwin a German pamphlet, and Wagner said he was going to publish a review of the 'Origin' thus "propagating the Gospel" (in Germany?! which at that time rejected the theory of evolution). Wagner also expressed fears that Darwin's theory went to very "dangerous lengths," very "dangerous" being practically synonymous with "devilish." Thus Darwin could just as well have been referring to the "propagation of the devil's Gospel" that Wagner was accomplishing.</p>
<p>Tom Scharle wrote: "It is Wagner who is said to be 'propagating the devil's gospel,' not Huxley. Darwin is crowing how the weaknesses of his opponents' arguments (particularly Agassiz's) is winning people like Wagner over to Darwin's side. I think it is a legitimate figure of speech to say that someone is 'propagating the devil's gospel' if he is propagating something which he (in this case Wagner) doesn't intend to propagate ('nolens volens' = 'willing or not willing'). Is this a common expression?"</p>
<p>After searching through several authoritative dictionaries of common expressions and phrases, found that "propagating the devil's gospel" was not mentioned in any of them.</p>
<p>However, in Darwin's youth, when he was attending university, there was a freethinking Anglican minister who attracted a lot of attention and who was severely censured. This minister, the Rev. Robert Taylor (author of Diegesis, a biting attack on Christianity bared on comparative mythology, which he wrote while serving time in prison for blasphemy), was dubbed "The Devil's Chaplain" for his heterodox opinions.</p>
<p>This phrase was recalled much later by Darwin for he used it in a letter he wrote to J. Hooker (July 13, 1856): "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature." It is therefore hardly surprising that Darwin might employ a similar phrase four years later in a letter to another close friend, Thomas Huxley.</p>
<p>Also, in Darwin's day at least some irate reviewers of the Origin, of which Darwin had many, must have compared his work to the "devil's."</p>
<p>Darwin typically let such criticisms slide off his back. In his letter to Huxley he is obviously making a joke about such "devilish" comments that others had made about his work.</p>
<p>So, even if the phrase did refer to Huxley (who is mentioned after it) or to R. Wagner (who is mentioned before it), it is such a trifling phrase that it can hardly "prove" anything to anyone, except to creationists, who would like to see nothing but the "devil" in "Darwinism." Of course, Darwin's use of the phrase, "propagating the devil's gospel" is no more incriminating than if he had mentioned "playing the devil's advocate," or if he had mentioned enjoying "Devil's food cake."</p>
<p>Another expression that Darwin used in a letter to Huxley written about three months later can be seen below:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you have any important suggestions or criticisms to make on any part of the 'Origin,' I should, of course, be very grateful for [them]. For I mean to correct as far as I can, but not enlarge. How you must be wearied with and hate the subject [since Darwin kept bringing it up in the numerous letters he wrote Huxley. - ED.], and it is God's blessing if you do not get to hate me. (Darwin to T. H. Huxley Nov. 22, 1860)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Obviously, since Darwin employed the expression, "God's blessing," it "proves" that Darwin was really working for "God" and not the "devil." Of course such reasoning proves nothing at all, except perhaps that creationists are the ones exhibiting "devilish" behavior by their undue emphasis on a casual phrase spoken in jest, and by their questionable assumption that the phrase must have referred to "Huxley" rather than Wagner.</p>
<p>As I said, phrases employing the word "devil" were used to denounce people like Rev. Taylor years before Darwin. Similar phrases ran also probably be traced to a few of Darwin's irate creationist reviewers. Darwin slightly modified their phrases and sentiments to joke about how "devilish" his scientific theory was.</p>
<p>There's an early Christian version of a similar kind of jest made at the expense of one's self that might help Christians put Darwin's jest in perspective. The story dates back to 300 A.D., and involves a Christian exorcist and a possessed man. The demon in the man told the exorcist that he wouldn't "leave" until the exorcist answered one question, "According to the Gospel parable, who are the 'sheep' that shall enter eternal bliss, and who are the 'goats' who are worthy of eternal perdition?" The Christian replied, "The goats? That's me! The sheep? God alone knows who they are." At which point the demon replied, "Because of your humility, I will come out."</p>
<p>Darwin was such a genuinely humble and gentle person. For instance, he delayed publishing his theory for quite a few years because he knew his creationist wife would take offense. After his theory was published he replied even to his most vociferous critics with remarkable calmness. He was against slavery (though his close minister friend was in favor of it), and he was against "vivisection" (i.e., cutting up live cats and dogs for scientific experimentation). He wrote compassionately about the pain of animals. And he repudiated the "Social Darwinistic" interpretations of his views when they first arose. -For other aspects of Darwin's humble and gentle nature (very UNdevilish), see Issue No. 1 of Cretinism or Evilution?</p>
<p>Now, back to analyzing some quotations in The Revised Quote Book!</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-55228840370759783362012-03-19T10:48:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:02:40.330-07:00Looking At How Creationists Quote Evolutionists: The Revised Quote Book<p> About ten years ago the Creation Science Foundation of Brisbane, Australia, produced The Quote Book, which contained quotations from some mainstream evolutionists, some anti-Darwinists, and a few non-Biblical (“New Age”) creationists, that appeared to raise grave questions regarding the validity of the theory of evolution. Soon afterwards, it was pointed out to the editors of <em>The Quote Book</em> that some of the quotations were “somewhat different from the originals.” The Creation Science Foundation then produced The Revised Quote Book (copyright 1990). And the editors claim they have “Painstakingly checked each reference ... New and better quotations have been added ...</p>
<p> Efforts have been made to replace quotes from older publications with near-identical ones from modern sources ... [and]</p>
<p> Great care has been taken to avoid charges of quoting out of context.</p>
<p>“Great care?” We shall see. In each issue of <em>Cretinism or Evilution?</em> we will examine one or more quotations that appear in <em>The Revised Quote Book,</em> not merely for accuracy of reproduction, but in order to determine their scientific significance and context to see if what each quotation says is what creationists think it says.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-51857265349688581262012-03-19T10:32:00.003-07:002019-09-01T13:36:54.842-07:00Flood Evidence: Ninety Foot Tall Plum Tree Frozen in Siberia?<p><em>Ninety Foot Tall Plum Tree with Ripe Fruit and Green Leaves Found North of the Arctic Circle?</em></p>
<p>Some young-earth creationists have hypothesized that "before the Flood" the earth was a "tropical" or "sub-tropical" paradise from pole to pole, but with the coming of the Flood, the world's climate was quickly and drastically altered. One piece of evidence that some creationists have offered in support of this hypothesis are "frozen trees bearing ripe fruit and green leaves found above the arctic circle." Another piece of evidence offered in support are "remains of warm weather hippos found in the tundra's frozen muck." We shall discuss both of these unusual claims in the pieces that follow.</p>
<p>For starters, just try to imagine a plum tree that was 90 feet tall! That's over 70 feet taller than the height given in World Book Encyc. ("plum trees grow from 7 to 18 feet").</p>
<table style="background-color:#fff;color:#000;float:right">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/plumtree.gif" alt="Plum Tree" width="368" height="362" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<blockquote><p>Dr. Kent Hovind (a creation evangelist who addresses hundreds of audiences each year, speaks on radio, and is also known for offering $10,000 for "evidence for evolution") has claimed that a 90-foot tall plum tree with green leaves and ripe fruit was found frozen on New Siberian Island over six hundred miles north of the Arctic circle by the Russian arctic explorer, Baron von Toll. Dr. Hovind has repeatedly cited this piece of evidence in his live presentations, radio programs, and in his Creation Seminarvideotapes.</p>
<p>Ralph Epperson (a creationist lecturer from Tucson, Arizona, also known as a conspiracy theorist and author of The Unseen Hand: An introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History), has claimed that there are 50-foot tall pear trees with fruit still frozen on their branches at the north pole.</p>
<p>I have been unable to track down the source of Epperson's claim that a multitude of such frozen fruit trees exist at the north pole. However, Dr. Hovind's claim of a single fruit tree sounded relatively more convincing and he was able to tell me that he had read it in Bible-Science News, "about ten years ago." After a diligent search I pinpointed the article, "The Mystery of the Frozen Giants" by Lee Grady [cover story, Bible-Science News, v.23, no.4, April 1985]. On page 2, Mr. Grady stated:</p>
<blockquote>Baron Toll, an Arctic explorer, found the remains of a saber-toothed tiger and a 90-foot plum tree with ripe fruit and green leaves -- over 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the New Siberian Islands.</blockquote>
<p>As to the source of this information Mr. Grady cited The Waters Above (Chicago: Moody Press, 1981, p. 316) by the young-earth creationist, Joseph Dillow. I obtained a copy of Mr. Dillow's book and found that Dillow had stated:</p>
<blockquote>Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a saber-toothed tiger and a 90-foot plum tree with green leaves and ripe fruit on its branches over 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the New Siberian Islands.</blockquote>
<p>Mr. Dillow cited two sources for this information:</p>
<p>1) The first was, The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North-East Siberia by Bassett Digby, F.R.G.S (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1926). Here is what Digby stated (p. 150-51):</p>
<blockquote>Bolshoi Lyakhov is the most southerly of the group [of New Siberian Islands]... It was along the south coast [of that island] that Toll found his extraordinary layers of what he called "fossil ice." They were as much as 70 ft. thick. On the top of them lay the post-Tertiary deposits in which were remains of wooly rhinoceros and mammoth, American stag, reindeer, a horse (apparently the Mongolian wild horse, which still exists), saiga, antelope, ovibos, and sabre-toothed tiger. There was lying among them, too, a 90 ft. alder-tree (Alnus fructicosa), with even its roots and seeds preserved.</blockquote>
<p>Note that the tree spoken of by Digby was not a "plum" tree (Prunus is the name for "plum tree"), but an alder-tree (Alnus is the name for "alder") which is related to the birch family.</p>
<p>2) Mr. Dillow's second source of information was the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia For Promoting Useful Knowledge, New Series, Volume XXII, Part 1, "The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia," by I.P. Tolmachoff (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1929). Tolmachoff agreed with Digby (above) that the tree which Baron von Toll discovered was not a "plum" tree (Prunus) but an alder (Alnus):</p>
<blockquote><p>Toll...had opportunities of collecting, within the tundra ground, leaves, roots and fine branches of plants like Alnus fruticosa .. which are not to be found there now, but grow in more southern latitudes (p.47)</p>
<p>When Alnus fruticosa was growing on the New Siberian Islands they were connected with the continent which at that time thus had protruded about four degrees farther north as compared with the recent shore line of the mainland. The retreat of the forests might have been caused by the separation of the New Siberian Islands, although the climate, generally speaking can have suffered very little change, if any. (p. 48)</p>
<p>... Alnus fruticosa which in the New Siberian Islands had been discovered first by Toll in the ground of the upper recent tundra, where the latter located, of course, the mammoth-horizon. (p. 54)</p></blockquote>
<p>Attentive readers may have noticed that Digby stated the name of the tree was Alnus fructicosa, and "fructicosa" is indeed used to describe "fruit-bearing" species. However the use of "fructicosa" is simply an error (or perhaps a misspelling made by the typesetter of Digby's manuscript). Because any check of the list of botanical species shows there is no such species as Alnus "fructicosa." Of course Tolmachoff employed the correct spelling, "fruticosa" (without the "c"), which refers to a "bushy tree" which does not grow to be extremely tall. Baron von Toll in the original report (cited below) also stated that the tree was an Alnus fruticosa, not "fructicosa." So we know for certain that the original description was of a bushy species of alder, and not a fruit-bearing "plum" tree.</p>
<p>Now we come to what Baron von Toll stated in his original report, published in the Memoires de L'Academie imperials des Sciences de St. Petersbouro, VII Serie, Tome XLII, No. 13., Wissenschaftliche Resultate der Von der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften sur Erforschung des Janalandes und der Neusibirischen Inseln in den Jahren 1885 und 1886 Ausgesandten expedition. ["Scientific Results of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of the Investigation of Janaland and the New Siberian Islands from the Expeditions Launched in 1885 and 1886" -- ed.] Abtheilung III: Die fossilen Eislager und ihre Beziehungen su den Mammuthleichen, by Baron Eduard v. Toll (St. Peterabourg: Commissionnaires de I'Academie Imperiale des sciences, 1895). A translation of the relevant passages from Toll's report are printed below:</p>
<blockquote><p>And the layers from top to bottom as follows:</p>
<p>1. a peat covering composed of water mosses among other things.</p>
<p>2. a frozen, sandy clay layer with Alnus fruticosa, Salix sp., a scapula of Lepus sp. [i.e., a shoulder bone of a saber-toothed tiger -- ed.]</p>
<p>3. similar layers with Pisidium sp. and Valvata sp. The reclining nature of this layer is covered here. In figure 1 these same layers 1 and 2 form the upper horizon, only the deposit of the sea basin with Pisidium and Alvata is missing there.</p>
<p>The surprising thing in this instance is the discovery of Alnus fruticosa which is so wonderfully preserved that the leaves hold fast on the twigs of the boughs -- indeed even whole clusters of blossom casings are preserved. The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table. With a magnifying glass, one can even recognize in figure 2 the blossom casings of the Alnus fructicosa. These findings provide evidence that a vegetation which today reaches its northern limit 4 degrees to the south on the mainland was predominant at that time on the Great Ljachow Island below 74 degrees and that these remnants could not have floated here from afar but grew here at this site. (p. 60 -- translation by Prof. Jerry Cox, Furman University, May 1994)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Notice that the color of the leaves is not referred to in Toll's paper. They were probably brownish, desiccated and shriveled, with at most, traces of greenish color here and there. The original sources are simply silent as to this matter.</p>
<p>A photograph of the alder that Toll discovered is reproduced below (= "figure 2" from Baron v. Toll's original monograph):</p></blockquote>
<table style="background-color:#fff;color:#000;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img style="border-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/alder.gif" alt="Alder" width="493" height="306" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Having compared statements in Joseph Dillow's book, The Waters Above (cited in Bible-Science News) with the original sources, we arrive at these conclusions:</p>
<p>1) Contrary to statements made in the two creationist publications (cited above), Baron von Toll did not discover a frozen "plum" tree. He found the remnants of an alder. And speaking of the particular species of alder that Toll discovered, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had this to say, "Alnus fruticosa .. is found in the <em>North</em>east European USSR, in the Urals [an <em>alpine mountain</em> range], in <em>northern</em> regions of Western Siberia, and in Eastern Siberia." [emphasis added -- ed.] [from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, trans. of the 3rd ed., Moscow, 1977 (New York: MacMillan, 1981), v. 18, P. 6] Furthermore, the black alder (Alnus glutinosa) grows where glaciers are currently retreating in Alaska. So, finding remains of an alder does not constitute evidence of a "tropical" or even a "sub-tropical" climate.</p>
<p>2) Contrary to statements made in the creationist publications, there was no "ripe fruit" on the tree's branches. The only "fruit" of an alder is a single-seeded, winged nutlet, which resembles a tiny cone much like the larger ones found on pine trees. This nutlet also remains on the branches long after the seed has dropped from it.</p>
<p>3) Contrary to statements made in the creationist publications, neither Baron von Toll, nor Digby, nor Tolmachoff, ever stated that the leaves on the tree were "green."</p>
<p>4) Contrary to statements made in the creationist publications (and in Digby's book), there is no mention of the tree being "90 ft." In the original report Baron von Toll stated that "The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table." The sentence is a little difficult to interpret, but Toll seems to be stating that the tree's length, including stems and roots, was "15-20 ft." and that some of the stems and roots were "jutting" out of the ice layer, or, "profile" that they were laying in. This would agree with the fact that the "bushy" species of alder, Alnus fruticosa, is known to grow to be about 19 and a half ft. tall [see the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, under "Alnus (alder)"], not "90 ft." (This leaves open the question where Digby may have obtained the "90 ft." figure. One guess is that he may have added the "70 ft." maximum thickness of all the "fossil ice" layers with the "15-20 ft." figure for the tree that Toll gave. 70 and 20 makes 90! However, in that case, Digby misunderstood what Toll was originally talking about. For instance, Toll did not say that the tree extended through all the "fossil ice" layers, nor did he say that it was standing "upright." Toll says it was found in a "frozen sandy clay layer," i.e., not extending through all the fossil ice layers. So, it was lying horizontally in one specific layer. The photograph further demonstrates that it was lying horizontally since the hand-sized pick axe seen in the upper middle of figure 2 is lying on flat ground next to a horizontally spread out tree. Either way, the fact remains that Toll's original report does not mention "90 ft." in reference to this discovery.)</p>
<p>5) That the alder had roots, twigs, stems, leaves and blossom casings demonstrates that it was not transported in a cataclysmic Flood to the island, but it probably grew there, at a time when the New Siberian Islands were connected to the mainland, which would have extended the forest limit further north [Tolmachoff, p. 47-48].</p>
<p>Alders are most often found beside rivers and springs, either in alpine regions or in northern latitudes. It is possible that the tree originally grew on the edge of a river which increased in flow during a seasonal thaw that loosened the tree's soil and roots. It fell, and was quickly covered with mud, which later froze. For instance, the tree was found in a "frozen, sandy, clay layer." That Toll found only a single tree instead of a forest-full of such specimens, proves that the tree's preservation was a rare and lucky circumstance.</p>
<p>6) What about the bone of the saber-toothed tiger that was found in the same "frozen sandy clay" as the alder? Unfortunately, one bone can tell us little about the climate. As Tolmachoff stated in his paper (P. 71), "[Baron von] Toll ... did not distinguish between primary and secondary localities of fossil mammals in the New Siberian Islands. Our knowledge of different fossil mammals there is very unequal. We have, for example, little doubt that the musk ox was an Arctic animal, like its recent representatives, and that it used to live and die out along with the mammoth and rhinoceros. But we know, for example, very little about the tiger the remnants of which were found in the New Siberian Islands. Was it also an animal well adapted to Arctic conditions, or did it lack such an adaptation, making the change of climate [which Tolmachoff believes took place over a very long period of time - ed.] fatal for it? Did it formerly live in the New Siberian Islands, or were the few bones found brought over there by rivers [i.e., at a time when the island was connected to the mainland -- ED.]?"</p>
<p>In other words, did saber-toothed tigers adapt to a cold climate, developing thicker skin and fur, and follow and feast on migrating herds of other cold-adapted mammals? That's not an unrealistic possibility. The island on which the few saber-toothed tiger bones were found is the southernmost of the New Siberian Islands and geologists contend that it was once part of the mainland. And the climate may at that time have been less severe. Even today that particular island is inhabited by Arctic foxes (which are hunted there), and by northern deer and lemming. And, during the two months of summer that the island enjoys, it is filled with muddy swamps and abundant bird life. [See the Encyclopedia Americana, Encyclopedia Britannica and The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, under "New Siberian Islands," "Liakhov Islands," and, "Bolshoi Lyakhov Island."] And speaking of other large mammalian carnivores adapted to a cold climate, there's the snow leopard, a large whitish cat with dark blotches and long thick fur that inhabits the mountains of Central Asia; and, of course, the polar bear.</p>
<p>In summation, the story that Baron von Toll found a "plum tree with ripe fruit and green leaves," growing six hundred miles north of the arctic circle does not agree with Toll's original statements. The Waters Above, a book by young-earth creationist writer, Joseph Dillow, inaccurately represented data contained in the works of Digby and Tolmachoff. Neither Digby nor Tolmachoff wrote that the tree which Toll found was a "plum tree," bearing "ripe fruit," and having "green leaves." Neither did Dillow check the original source, Baron von Toll's paper. It is hoped that this creationist fable will no longer be repeated by young-earth creationists. Kent Hovind has already admitted to dropping this tale from his repertoire.</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<h3>Additional Reading</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mammothtales.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ninety-foot-plum-tree-filling-some.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Ninety-Foot Plum Tree, Filling Some Gaps</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-59599909781995869192012-03-19T10:26:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:02:11.881-07:00Remains of Warm Weather Hippos Have Been Found in the Tundra's Frozen Muck?<p><em>Remains of Warm Weather Hippos Have Been Found in the Tundra's Frozen Muck?</em></p>
<p>While researching the "frozen fruit trees" question, I ran across a second case where statements made in The Waters Above did not accurately reflect original data (and that's putting it mildly):</p>
<blockquote>Along with the fruit tree, the remains of a woolly rhinoceros, a mammoth, and a horse were found by Toll. The warm-weather hippopotamus has also been found in the tundra's frozen muck. (Dillow, The Waters Above, P. 346)</blockquote>
<p>The "tundra," as defined by the Webster's New World Dictionary (2nd College Edition), is "any of the vast, nearly level, treeless plains of the arctic regions." So, naturally, the passage about the "hippopotamus also" being found "in the tundra's frozen muck," seemed intriguing, so I checked the reference that Mr. Dillow gave, which was Karl W. Butzer, Environment and Archeology (Chicago: Aldine, 1964), p. 325. And here is what Mr. Butzer actually wrote:</p>
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<p>One of the few animals of possible interest [in ascertaining just how warm certain Interglacial periods may have been] is the hippopotamus, a warm to warm-temperate species requiring perennial waters, and unlikely to be found in seasonally frozen rivers. Interglacial hippos have been recorded from southern Europe, France, England, Germany, and Hungary. Lack of evidence from Scandinavia or eastern Europe may indicate that no radical weather changes in winter temperatures need be assumed. The extinct water buffalo (Buffelus murrensis) found in Germany and the monkey Macaca sylvana ssp. found in different parts of temperate Europe during the Holstein [Interglacial period] may however be more suggestive of warmer conditions.</p>
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<p>Mr. Butzer was merely explaining that hippopotamus bones had been found as far north as England (but not as far north as Scandinavia), and that, between times when the glaciers descended, [i.e., "Interglacial periods"], the earth may have been warmer than it is now, but not "tropical or sub-tropical" from pole to pole. Obviously, there is nothing in this passage about hippopotamus bones being found "in the tundra's frozen muck." The Waters Above by Joseph Dillow inaccurately represented what Mr. Butzer originally wrote.</p>
<p>Perhaps (and this is just a guess) Dillow's myth about the hippo was based on an extremely superficial and ignorant reading of the text. For instance, he may have thought that "interglacial" meant that the hippo bones were found "inside a glacier." After having seen the way he misread Digby and Tollmachoff's passages to arrive at a "frozen plum tree, with ripe fruit and green leaves," lying "above the Arctic Circle," one can only wonder at how Dillow's mind works.</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-60807460204020091862012-03-19T09:43:00.009-07:002019-09-01T13:01:58.088-07:00Men Over Ten Feet Tall?<p>I mention all of the above because I wish to discuss some of Carl Baugh's "tall tales" which are being spread by "creation evangelists" like Kent Hovind, and others. Below is a picture of some sort, perhaps an artist's creation (Baugh calls it a "Photograph") as shown in Baugh's book, Dinosaur (Promise Publishing, 1987).</p>
<p>Both Baugh and Hovind proudly display a slide reproduction of this picture in their "creation science" presentations. Unfortunately, Baugh, in his book, does not say where the picture came from, or give any further details concerning it, except for the caption which appears beneath it in his book: "A miner fell through a hole in a mine in Italy and found this 11' 6" skeleton." Kent Hovind, during his presentations, even adds a date ("1856," if I recall correctly) for this "discovery," though there is no mention of a specific date in Baugh's book.</p>
<p>Naturally, the thoughts that ran through my mind when I first saw this "photo" were...</p>
<img style="border-width: 0px; float: right;" src="https://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/bigskel.gif" alt="Big Skeleton" width="316" height="178" />
<blockquote><p>1) If this is a "Photo" of a genuine discovery, then the skeleton in that photo is of the tallest man on record! According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's tallest known human being was Robert Wadlow, the 'Alton giant," who was only 8' 11" tall, and who died of a septic buster caused by the way his ankle brace rubbed against his right ankle. Wadlow was so tall, he had to wear ankle braces to support himself! Baugh's "photo" is of a human being over two and a half feet taller than the tallest man on record! Why hasn't anyone else, like the folks who publish the record books, heard about this remarkable discovery?</p>
<p>2) Where did this "photo" originate? In what book, journal, or newspaper did it first appear? Which mine was that skeleton found in? Near what town in Italy, and in what year? And by whom? (None of these questions were ever answered by Baugh, not in his book, nor in two later telephone conversations I had with him.)</p></blockquote>
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<p style="text-align: left;">In response to the photograph above, I recently received the following letter, which I thought the readers might find interesting:</p>
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<p>Mr. Babinski:</p>
<p>Although I am a creationist, I loathe the unsubstantiated claims many so called creation scientists make, without bothering to check all available evidence. I would like to add another piece of evidence which shows that the "photograph" is a fake. The man kneeling over the skeleton is lit up on the right side of his face (his perspective) and shadowed on his left. The man second from the left on the picture is lit up just the opposite of the kneeling man. Obviously a artists mistake.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>Gene Rhea Tucker</p>
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<p>3) How can anyone be sure this is a photograph" and not an artist's print or creation, perhaps created for some fictional novel or short story written by one of Jules Verne's early imitators, or based, perhaps on tall tales of "Atlantis" or other tales that may have been popular back then? It is known that during the 1800s, giant fossilized creatures, like dinosaurs, held the public eye, since they were being dug up for the first time and pictures of these were presented to the public in newspapers all over Europe, and people must have speculated whether human beings may not have been larger in the past. So this may be an artist's print or creation, inspired by nothing more than the imaginative speculation of people in the 1800s concerning giant animal species.</p>
<p>This idea that the picture was the creation of "Imaginative speculation" drawn for a newspaper or a novel or short story of that day, is an interpretation that Baugh must face up to, especially since he has nothing to corroborate his story but a picture whose origin is just as indistinct as the picture itself, and hence, which is dubious to cite as a "Photograph" of a genuine discovery at all.</p>
<p>Other questions also leap to mind:</p>
<p>4) Who determined that the skeleton was exactly 11' 6"? From the picture alone, you can't tell the exact size of the skeleton, certainly not to the "inch." 5) Where did the story about the miner "falling down a hole" come from? 6) What is the nature of the rectangular "sign" with the indistinct "letters" beside the skeleton? 7) Obviously if it was a "photo" it could not have been taken deep in a mine, because even with a dozen eighteenth-century miner's lamps, there would not have been much light, and it is unlikely that anyone would start a campfire deep down in a mine to take such a photo there, as there probably would not be enough air to support a campfire down in a mine for very long. If it was a "photo" taken inside a mine it shows remarkably all the bones of the skeleton from head to toe fully exhumed, cleaned white, fully connected to one another, and well lit, along with large portions of the foreground and background appearing bright. Nor does it seem probable that men would have descended into a mine dressed in full evening jackets with white pants and large top hats. 8) But if this war., say, a "Photo" taken above ground and outdoors, why not wait for fulfill daylight and get a good shot with fine line clarity instead of this indistinct shot? Even the earliest photographs on record displayed more clarity and were more distinct than this alleged "photo." I include some examples in a separate section below. 9) If such a skeleton had indeed been found in the rock then after the bones )were excavated they would have become disconnected and taken on the form of a random heap of bones, unlike the picture, which shows even the fingers, toes and jawbone connected together. And if the excavators boxed the bones up and dragged them up out of the mine, cleaned them thoroughly to make them appear as bright and clear as they do in the 'Photo, " and then put them together with wire and glue to look like the perfectly placed bones of a human skeleton, then why go through all that trouble, and not take a better "photo?" or at least, if you're going to go through all that trouble, leave more evidence of such an extraordinary discovery than one indistinct photo? 10) And what must the odds be of finding a whole skeleton like that, even with finger and toe bones, every rib, even the jaw, altogether in the same deposit? The chances of finding such a perfectly complete skeleton are slim, unless it was a later intrusive burial of a whole individual by his friends. Ah, but then this skeleton wasn't "buried by the Flood!"</p>
<p>Having struck my curiosity with his indistinct "photo" (originally published in God-knows-what newspaper or book), I phoned Carl Baugh, the author of the book in which the picture appeared. He said that he obtained the picture from another creationist, Clifford Burdick. Baugh was visiting Burdick's home one day and Burdick told Baugh, "You want this?" (meaning, the picture in question) and added the little story that it was of a skeleton found in a mine in Italy in the "19th century," i.e., in the 1800s. No more verification was apparently asked for or added by Burdick, who died soon after turning over the picture to Baugh. So, the story begins and ends with Burdick and with what Baugh says Burdick said, which is precious little in the way of corroboration.</p>
<p>Clifford Burdick, of course, once argued for "The Discovery of Human Skeletons in Cretaceous Formation" (Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 10, Sept. 1973) or, as the skeletons were nicknamed, "Moab Man." Human skeletons found in rock from the Cretaceous era? According to the geologic time scale, not even humanity's earliest human-like ancestors appeared until well after the Cretaceous. However, this case turned into yet another instance in which creationists had to recant due to the evidence pointed out by mainstream scientists. For instance, a professor of anthropology examined the "Moab Man" skeletons as soon as they were first uncovered (when some ground was being bulldozed). The professor agreed that these were indeed human skeletons, but that they were just Indian skeletons that had been buried in a rock crevice, the surrounding rocks dating back to the Cretaceous, but not the buried skeletons, which were merely slid in between the rocks, and which were later covered by sand, etc.</p>
<p>In two letters that I possess, dated, Nov. 13, 1973, and, June 1976, John P. Marwitt (the anthropologist on the scene when the skeletons were originally uncovered by bulldozing), wrote: "I took some pains to point out to all concerned, including the 'Creation Research Society,' that in no sense could the human remains be seen as contemporary with the [Cretaceous] sandstone deposits [surrounding them]. There was consolidated [Cretaceous] sandstone in the area of the burials, at the same elevation. But the buried [human skeletons] were surrounded and covered with loose blowsand and rotted sandstone spalls, not consolidated or semiconsolidated [Cretaceous] rock. I explained to everyone present that the burials had apparently been placed in a crack/crevice in the rock and were covered by blowsand and spalling of the sandstone caused by weathering. Placement of burials in crevices and niches was frequently practiced in the Southwest, both prehistorically and historically. [In short,] the [human skeletons] were not a part of or included in the [Cretaceous] sandstone formation, they were not found in a rock matrix as implied by Burdick. The bones themselves were not fossilized and there had been no replacement of bone calcium by mineralization. They were soft, friable and partly decayed -- in short, of rather recent vintage, probably historic Paiute or Ute, or possibly of Euro-American origin, since no associated artifacts were found." Later, a femur from one of the skeletons was carbon dated to around 210 years ago +/- 70 years. A few other such skeletons have also been found -- the same story applies, as outlined above.</p>
<p>So Burdick, being wrong about "Moab Man" as a "disproof of modern geology," isn't exactly a fountain of truth. Still, after my phone call with Baugh, I checked every article Clifford Burdick had published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, trying to dig up some precise information on the origin of the picture of the 11' 6" human skeleton "found in the mine in Italy." And I found nothing. Not a peep from Clifford Burdick concerning this record breaking giant human skeleton!</p>
<p>Suffice it to say that although Clifford Burdick was noted for publicizing phony claims of "fossil men that contradicted evolutionary theory," I could not find any mention of the record breaking 11' 6" skeleton in any of Burdick's books that I consulted at Bob Jones, nor in any of Burdick's articles in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, all of which I checked scrupulously, issue by issue. So, Burdick himself did not think highly enough of the picture of this record breaking skeleton to publicize it in the least (perhaps it was just sent to Burdick in the mail by another creationist who photographed the original print or artist's creation, thinking it odd, but without really noticing Its source, or what it represented). So, even Burdick felt it was not worth publicizing such an indistinct picture of unknown origin. Burdick handed it to Baugh as a trifle, saying, "You want this?" But Baugh and Hovind have declared this picture to represent a true and scientifically verified discovery! They tote out this picture in their debates with mainstream scientists, and say, "Explain that!" But Baugh and Hovind have to explain it first! Doesn't it seem strange to either Baugh or Hovind that they are both acting more rashly than Burdick, who didn't even discuss the picture (below) in his creationist publications?</p>
<p>I hasten to add that the arms on the man shown pointing at the skeleton (in Baugh's alleged "photograph") seem abnormally long.</p>
<p>Compare the photos below, taken in Italy during the same period. Note the fine line clarity of such photos in the mid-1800s even when photographing objects in shadowy light! Surely anyone who took the time and effort to excavate, clean, have the bones reattached (and have gentlemen dressed in fine clothes pose beside) such a gargantuan discovery - would have taken more care in having a decent "photograph" taken of it, seeing how clear and distinct photos were, even at that time period. Even the "earliest known photo" that I found published in a book of early photos, preserved more fine line details than Baugh's alleged 'photo!"</p>
<p>Photos from 1846</p>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/photo5.gif" alt="19th Century Photographs" width="175" height="136" /></td>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/photo2.gif" alt="19th Century Photographs" width="175" height="233" /></td>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/photo4.gif" alt="19th Century Photographs" width="175" height="121" /></td>
<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/photo6.gif" alt="19th Century Photographs" width="175" height="132" /></td>
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<p>The "photograph" of the giant human skeleton thus raises more questions than it answers. But this "tall tale" doesn't end here! Compare the tale behind the "Freiberg skull," the "human skull" of coal, the coal dating back to the Carboniferous Age, long before human beings ever appeared on earth. This find was touted by Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood as tolling the death knell for modern (old-earth) geology. The "Freiberg Skull" was discovered around the SAME time as Baugh's "giant human skeleton" was supposedly "photographed," but this "skull" was later shown to be a fabrication molded out of bits of soft brown coal to superficially resemble a human skull with no true skeletal features, the hoax being carried out to promote belief in the Biblical Flood. Young-earth creationists eventually gave up the ghost of arguing for the authenticity of the "Freiberg skull." Two articles in the Creation Research Society Quarterly admitted the truth of the original reports, namely, that the skull was nothing but a fake (see, Dr. Wayne Frair, "The Human Skull Composed of Coal," CRSQ, v. 5, March 1969; and, Dr. Wayne Frair, 'Additional Information on the Freiberg Human Skull Composed of Coal," CRSQ, v. 20, June 1993). Yet Baugh clings to his indistinct picture he calls a "photo," a photo that dates back to the same time period as the "Freiberg skull" hoax!</p>
<p>But back to Baugh's picture of the giant human skeleton. The story gets curiouser and curiouser. Not content with Baugh's ignorance concerning the origin of the picture, I set about to search for its origin myself, something that Baugh apparently doesn't have the genuinely scientific inclination to do. I wrote four of the largest museums of natural history in Italy and received a reply from one of the largest, a copy of which appears below:</p>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/anna.gif" alt="Giant" width="600" height="347" /></td>
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<p>My search for the truth did not end there. I wrote a researcher who owns hundreds of books by creationists, books that were published both in this century and the previous one, and I asked him if this "discovery" was mentioned in any of them. The closest thing he could come up with was a book written in 1926, The Biblical Story of Creation by Giorgio Bartolli, a famous Italian creationist. Bartolli mentioned a number of "fossils of giant creatures," but no giant men, nor any mention of the picture of the record breaking giant human skeleton found in Baugh's book. This Italian creationist was also a professor of geology and a former director of a mine in Sardinia, Italy. So, again, I drew a blank. A copy of this researcher's letter appears below:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear Ed:</p>
<p>I didn't find anything about the 11-foot human skeleton. Giorgio Bartoli is the Italian mine director (a Sardinian mine); his 1926 book doesn't mention it. This makes me suspect no evidence exists outside the picture Baugh has in his book (I have Baugh's book too).</p>
<p>Best Wishes,<br /><br />Tom McIver</p>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/cardiff.gif" alt="Cardiff Giant" width="351" height="439" /></td>
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<p>So I contacted William Corliss, the fellow who specializes in cataloging scientific anomalies, including keeping track of accounts of human "giants." And Corliss told me he had never heard of any evidence of a human being as tall as 11' 6", and added that there were "a lot of hoaxes" in that field, like the Cardiff Giant (a 10' 4.5" tall statue of a human being carved out of gypsum, and displayed as if it were a fossilized giant human being, all done to make money!). A copy of Corliss' reply appears below, along with pictures of the Cardiff giant:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear Ed:</p>
<p>I just returned from a short vacation and found your letter waiting.</p>
<p>Although I have collected a number of reports of large skeletons, none of them even approaches the 11'6" skeleton you mention. You should ask for some sort of reference from the scientific literature. Lots of hoaxes in this field.</p>
<p>Sincerely,<br /><br />William R. Corliss</p>
<p>P.S. As for my compilation UNKNOWN EARTH, I can't see how it supports creationism. Anyway, it is simply a collection of reports from the literature--primarily the scientific literature. Some of these reports may question dating methods and/or the claimed ages of certain formations.</p>
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<td style="width: 423px;"><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/cardiff2.gif" alt="Cardiff Giant" width="331" height="397" />
<p>The Cardiff Giant on display at the Farmer's Museum, Cooperstown, New York</p>
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<blockquote><p>I phoned Carl Baugh a second time, but he could tell me nothing more about the picture of the 11' 6" skeleton. Then he added that the picture was "beside the point, since some fellow" had told Baugh "about a front page full color story in the Denver Post around 1991, that told of a 10' tall woman in Mozambique who just showed up one day at the local village since that village was giving out free vaccinations." Baugh added that this ten foot tall woman was not suffering from a pituitary deficiency (which causes gigantism along with weakness and lack of coordination) because she could bench press 300 pounds!</p>
<p>Wow! What a lead! A recent front page news story! And such detail! Maybe there is evidence of human beings ten foot tall or taller! I told Baugh "Thank you very much," and I set about trying to track down this new evidence. I phoned the Denver Post and spoke to the lady in charge of the front page for the past five or ten years. And she didn't recall any such story. Indeed, wouldn't Guinness have picked up on such a report if it had been front page news in a major American newspaper? I checked the 1995 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, and found that Robert Wadlow, the "Alton giant" (8' 11" tall) was still listed as the world's tallest human being on record. The lady at the Denver Post then gave me the number of a company that specializes in subject-title-word searches in major American newspapers (not including the tabloids which mix fact and totally fabricated articles together). But after an exhausting computerized search, using all the key words at our disposal, like Africa, Mozambique, giant, large, tall, woman, lady, immunization, vaccination, etc., we came up a complete blank!</p>
<p>I also phoned Colorado State Univ., which had the Denver Post Index, and checked key words, and again drew a blank. And I conducted a search via the Furman University Library's computerized magazine and newspaper search facilities. All to no avail. The closest I came was an article about an African nation in The Economist (v.328, no.7825, Aug. 21, 1993, p.Nl(2)), titled, 'Anybody Seen a Giant?' I read that article. It did not mention "giant , human beings." It dealt solely with economic growth. The lady at the Denver Post with whom I had spoken earlier, told me that the "giant woman" story sounded more like something published in a supermarket tabloid than in a newspaper. By this time I had to agree with her.</p></blockquote>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/cardiff3.gif" alt="Giant Fraud" width="323" height="266" />
<p style="text-align: center;">GIANT FRAUD being laid to rest at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York in 1948. Thousands had paid to see the fake "petrified man" that had supposedly been plowed up on a Cardiff farm.</p>
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<blockquote><p>Baugh had wished me well in my search for this info, and said he wanted to hear what I'd found, but he didn't express any interest in researching things himself. Apparently he already knew that humans over ten feet tall were a fact. I suppose he bases this "fact" on the carved "footprints" in his possession. After my exhaustive search I let Baugh know how fruitless it had been. I await the day when less astute creationists like Baugh begin doing their own research of each specific "tall tale" before piling gossip upon gossip and calling it all "scientific evidence." These people spread the most gullible "tall tales" and display the most spurious "evidence" to hundreds of church audiences each year, and they always claim they are "more right" than the evolutionists they misquote and misinterpret!</p>
<p>To recap my conclusion: During the 1800s, giant fossilized creatures, like dinosaurs, held the public eye, since they were being dug up for the first time and pictures of these creatures flooded newspapers all over Europe. People must have speculated whether human beings may not have been larger in the past. So Baugh's "photo" is most likely an artist's print or creation, inspired by nothing more than the imaginative speculation of people in the 1800s concerning giant animal species.</p>
<p>That the picture was originally created to accompany a fictitious newspaper article, or for a novel or short story of that day, is an interpretation that Baugh must face up to. It's up to Baugh or other creationists to tell us exactly where this "discovery" was first publicized, and show that the picture he's displaying is indeed a "photograph." An indistinct picture Of unknown origin with no other records to back it up, coming from that time period, proves nothing.</p>
<p>Baugh's enthusiasm for spreading creationist tall tales has made him a sort of creationist folk hero, as he goes about prying up limestone slabs in Texas, leaving large numbers of scientifically significant dinosaur tracks to decay away uncataloged as he chips his way through them, vainly searching for any markings even vaguely human, around which he can then build another tall tale interpretation.</p>
<p>Baugh's tall tale reminds me of Kent Hovind's, that I heard Kent repeat at one of his lectures: "Someone in the audience at one of my creation seminars came up to me and told how they (or someone they knew) was working in a mine (in West Virginia or Kentucky) and they found a 'giant human skeleton' in the mine, but no one was interested enough to excavate the bones or investigate further, and the whole area was then covered beneath water because they built a damn in that region." If Kent believes that story to be true then why don't some "creation scientists" take the names of the people telling the tale, and try to trace this news back to its source(s)? Why not visit that town or surrounding area and interview lots of people till you find the ones with matching stories, or put an ad in the local paper or on the local radio, asking about the story? If that checks out, get a map of the mine, and, if it's not too filled with silt, dredge an opening to the shaft, and send down one of those swimming robots with a light and a camera on one end and with mechanical claws to bring something back, just a piece of bone to check out the story. Why? Because this could provide the first, corroborated evidence of giant human beings "buried by the Flood." If such a story were true, "creation scientists" would have hard skeletal evidence. Instead, creationists like Baugh and Hovind do not adequately pursue the origins of the "tallest tales" they hear, even when they supposedly have "dates, places, and human contactees" to begin their search. They merely take delight in spreading such tales ... in the name of the "Lord of Truth."</p>
<p>Kent Hovind's gossip about the discovery of "giant human skeletons" in a mine in West Virginia reminds me of a similar claim that was made by a creationist over a hundred years ago, namely, that they had found a fossilized human skull and part of the backbone of someone who had drowned in the Biblical Flood and in whose eyeless sockets could still be seen the terror of that all-destructive Deluge. The creationist who found the fossil named it, Homo diluvii testis ['Homo" means "man," and "diluvii" means "Deluge."] Cuvier, the French scientist, took a closer look at the Homo diluvii testis fossil, cleaned the excess rock and dirt off the fossil, and lo and behold, it turned out not to be human at all, but was the skull and part of the backbone of a large salamander from an Oligocene lake bed. (See picture below.)</p></blockquote>
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<td><img style="border-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/diluvii.gif" alt="Homo diluvii testis" width="190" height="216" />
<p><em>Homo diluvii testis</em>.<br /> Skull and part of the backbone of a large salamander from the Oligocene lake beds at Oeningen, Switzerland, mistaken by Scheuchzer for the remains of a human drowned during the Biblical Flood.</p>
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<blockquote><p>Speaking of the way that a misidentified fossil can generate a "tall tale," some historians have suggested that the tale of the one-eyed giant, the "Cyclops" of ancient Greek storytellers, may have originated from someone who ran across the skull of an extinct mammoth. The large hole in the middle of the "forehead" of the gigantic mammoth skull would have seemed like an "eyesocket of a one-eyed human of gigantic proportions" (especially since mammoths became extinct thousands of years, prior to the rise of Greek civilization). But in reality the hole was where the trunk was attached, i.e., the mammoth's nasal passageway.</p>
<p>I'd be remiss if I did not mention some other "tall tales" spread by Carl Baugh. For instance, when the skeleton of a buried Indian was uncovered near Glen Rose, Texas, Baugh said that this skeleton was "gigantic." It turns out that ft was not. Baugh also claimed to have discovered an incredibly enormous footprint, which he called "Max." What Baugh actually had found was merely * some vague marking in unconsolidated earth (i.e., in 'marl," a mixture of sand, clay and limestone fragments) that he kept carving picking and poking at, until he'd "unearthed" a grotesquely large "footprint" formed more by his own hand and imagination than anything else. The limestone layer that preserves genuine dinosaur tracks lay beneath the loose marl in which Baugh had carved the "Max footprint." So, Baugh hadn't even reached the track layer of the limestone rock! He was just carving and playing in the marl above the limestone layer. See my hand drawn pen sketch of what Baugh "found" (my . sketch is based on a color slide of the "Max print" that I have in my personal collection -- the slide says it all, far better than my hand drawn pen sketch):</p>
<p>Baugh's most prized possession, apparently, is a metal hammer with a wooden handle, the head of which is partially "encased in stone", Baugh purchased the "hammer in stone" from someone who found it lying near the top of the ground in a little crevice. All indications have led experts to conclude that it is merely a nineteenth-century miner's hammer with a bit of stone concretion that consolidated around the hammer's head as it lay in a crevice in the earth (a phenomenon that can happen in a short period of time). It was also found near some old mine! So far as I know, Baugh has not yet had the hammer" wooden handle (which was not fossilized) carbon-dated, though a lab has offered to do so for free.</p></blockquote>
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<p>GIANT FRAUD being laid to rest at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York in 1948. Thousands had paid to see the fake "petrified man" that had supposedly been plowed up on a Cardiff farm.</p></td>
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<p>Exactly what the hammer was doing so near the surface of the earth is anyone's guess. Heavy and sleek objects, like an iron-headed slender-handled hammer, would descend faster than most other objects in water. So if this hammer was "buried during Noah's Flood" it should have sunk quicker than a stone to the bottom-most sediments, hundreds to thousands of feet bellow the level at which it was found (unless it was first-cousin to that miraculous "floating iron axe-head" mentioned in the Bible in 2 Kings 6:5-6)! What's really interesting about this is that the hammer is not made for the hand of a "giant," but fits nicely in the hand of an ordinary-sized human being. Perhaps Baugh misses the irony of that fact.</p>
<p>If I recall correctly, Baugh's "fossilized human tooth" (the fish tooth, mentioned above), also does not appear to have belonged to a "giant" creature.</p>
<p>Even more ironic is the fact of all the jokes about "things being bigger in Texas." The American Journalism Review (15:4, May 1993, p. 11(l)) published, "A Long, Tall Texas Tale," that told about the hoax published in the Laredo Morning Times about a giant earthworm! No wonder Baugh is able to raise support for his museum which attempts to demonstrate the existence of "giant human beings" that once lived in Texas! Things are always "bigger" in Texas!</p>
<p>Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on Baugh's search for "human giants" in Glen Rose, Texas. He's merely picked up where earlier, less astute, creationists left off. It was those earlier creationists in Texas who imagined that some of the dinosaur trails were made by giant human beings. According to Cecil Dougherty, author of Valley of the Giants (Valley of the Giants Publishers, first edition, 1971), Adam (the first man) was 16 feet tall! King Og (whose bed according to the Bible was 14 ft. by 6 ft.) was 14 feet tall! Noah was 12 feet tall, Goliath was over 9 feet tall, and modern man is 6 feet tall.</p>
<p>Please note that the mere mention in the Bible that "King Og's bed" was "14 ft. long and 6 feet wide," even if the story is true, is not the same as saying that King Og was exactly that tall and that wide! It only says that his bed was. (Maybe he had a lot of wives, like Solomon!?)</p>
<p>As for Noah's height of "12 ft. tall, and Adam's height of "16 ft. tall," I know of no references to either Noah's or Adam's "height" in the Bible.</p>
<p>Perhaps Dougherty, like many Bible believing creationists before him, obtained the idea of "giants in those days" from Genesis 6:4, which reads: "The Nephilim (which many Bibles translate as 'giants' or cite in a footnote at the bottom of the page as 'giants') were on the earth in those days ...</p>
<p>The trouble is that the Bible does not depict Adam as one of the "Nephilim" (or giants). It just depicts Adam as an average-sized human for his day and age. So if Adam and his descendants were "on average" "16 foot tall" as Dougherty believes, then how tall was a "Nephilim/giant" back then? Whew! "Giant " must have been unbelievably tall if the first average-sized human was created 16 feet tall!</p>
<p>Of course, the 'Book of Enoch, verses, 7:1-4 (in a section of the Book of Enoch dated to about 250 B.C.B.) explains that the "giants" mentioned in Genesis 6:4 were 300 cubits (or about 450 feet) tall! So I guess the ancient authors of the Book of Enoch answered my question regarding how tall a giant" must have been back then!</p>
<p>Of course, Bible believers have believed in the existence of "giants" for a long time, since the Bible tells them so.</p>
<p>In 1663 a French Academy paper by, a noted scholar of the Ancient Near East argued that Adam was 140 feet tall, Noah was 50 feet tall, Abraham was 40 feet tall, and Moses was 25 feet tall! (from The Best Worst & Most Unusual by Felton & Fowler, Gallahad Books, 1994)</p>
<p>And, Cotton Mather (1663-1728), an early American clergyman and writer, seems to have been enamoured of the idea. See the article, "Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather's Letters to the Royal Society" by David Levin (William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 45, Oct. 1988, p. 751-770).</p>
<p>I end with a "tall tale" by a master of the genre, Mark Twain. In his book, The Innocents Abroad, Twain tells the true story of his trip to Europe and the Holy Land, a trip he took with a group of pious Christian sightseers. Together, they visited numerous holy sites in the Near East, including, "an Arab village ... where Noah's tomb lies under lock and key." As Dave Barry says, "I'm not making this up." According to Twain's description, "Noah's tomb is built of stone and is covered with a long stone building. The building had to be long because the grave of the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long! It is only about four feet high, though. He must have cast a shadow like a lightning rod. The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The evidence is pretty straight. Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these introduced themselves to us today. It was pleasant to make the acquaintance of members of so respectable a family. It was a thing to be proud of. It was the next best thing to being acquainted with Noah himself."</p>
<p>E.T. BABINSKI</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-19.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5183929350277891488.post-66337386517476541522012-03-18T22:07:00.001-07:002019-09-01T13:01:25.983-07:00Creationist Folk Science<p><em>Creationist Folk Science</em></p>
<p>The Evangelical Christian professors at Calvin college who wrote Portraits of Creation (Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1990) argued in that book that young-earth "creation science" was "folk science." I'd like to add that the "creation evangelists" with the most attention-grabbing presentations specialize in repeating "tall tales" -- tales that their more astute creationist brethren abhor, because, after all, not even all creationists are created alike, some keep evolving. With every retraction of an outrageous claim, they dig up a new one equally as outrageous as the first, and this new one is asserted with the same absolute assurance as the prior claim, and with just as little evidence to back it up.</p>
<p>Evolutionists have made assertions based on insufficient evidence and made claims which have been proven false, like the "Piltdown man" skull (which turned out to be a hoax), and the postulated existence of "Nebraska man" based on the evidence of a single tooth that turned out to belong to an extinct species of pig (though many scientists questioned the "human" identification right from the start, and it was a British newspaper artist, not a scientist, who made the drawing of "Nebraska man with his family" to sell papers). And there's Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley's claim that some curious looking mud from the sea bottom might represent the "first life" on earth, and hence they named the mud Bathybius Haeckelii, but the mud was in reality, lifeless, and failed to grow. (However, bacteria have recently been found growing near the ocean floor near some steaming hot sea water vents, and some evolutionists have postulated - with better reason than before - that perhaps the first living organisms arose "on the ocean's floor," rather than near the earth's surface.)</p>
<p>The difference between overly zealous evolutionists and the less astute creationists in this area, however, pertains to who disproved the original flimsy assertions and how. In the case of claims made by evolutionists, it was fellow pr-o-evolution scientists, not "creation scientists," who dug deeper and conducted the disproofs via critical scientific investigation of the original assertions. Even today, evolutionists are so candid in revealing the nature of their finds and also admitting difficulties when it comes to fitting some evidence squarely in place, that creationists comb scientific literature just to pick out such difficulties. There is no "conspiracy" among evolutionary scientists who speak and write as candidly as they do. - But among the less astute creation scientists there is a vain repetition of outmoded claims that goes on and on, hence the term "folk science" when applied to creationism.</p>
<p>Furthermore, concerning "creation science" assertions, it's the mainstream scientists, again, who point out the flaws in the creationist claims, since the majority of creationists (and their supporters) are so reluctant and/or inexperienced in digging up further relevant information regarding the claims they assert. Often one need only check the original records of mainstream scientists to see where the creationists misread the original findings! Which just goes to show that creationist claims are often totally vacuous, either hearsay, or a misquoted or misunderstood passage from a mainstream science journal. I've mentioned several such cases in the Fall insert alluded to above ("The Earth is Old! According to evangelical Christians!"), and I have more such retractions on file. But, to repeat a few: Creationist and engineer, Walter Brown, had to be instructed by some biology professors as to what "adding a leap second" on the atomic clock really referred to. (It did not mean that the earth's speed of rotation was "slowing down a second per year.") Or take Henry Morris' claim in The Genesis Flood, regarding perhaps the world's largest case of "out of sequence" geological layers, the older layers lying atop the younger ones, and how he emphasized that this disproved modern geology, when in fact, it proved that even immense overthrust faulting (in this case, the Lewis Overthrust) could occur, and that modern geology is correct in its determination of the relative order of geologic strata and geologic ages. Even the geologist (Steve Austin) and paleontologist (Kurt Wise) both affiliated with Morris' Institute for Creation Research, have admitted that in this famous case an overthrust was indicated by the geologic evidence, and in effect, Morris was misinterpreting the original data at his disposal! Morris has also backed down concerning his claim that "human footprints" had been found along with dinosaur footprints in Texas. Most astute young-earth creationists have likewise backed down from their previous assertions concerning these "human footprints." These depressions and markings only superficially resemble human footprints, and the original creationists who asserted that these footprints were "human," simply blinded themselves to evidence of the dinosaurian side toes, evidence which can be seen even on the earliest film, "Footprints in Stone." The other evidence of "man prints" in Texas consisted of obvious carvings of human footprints, carvings which even some young-earth creationists (like those at Loma Linda) rejected right from the start. Again, in this case, the less astute creationists were eventually shown the errors of their superficial "researches" by mainstream scientific researchers who made detailed maps of the so-called "footprints" and 'human trails" (far more detailed than the "creation scientists" had made, and took photos over a period of years, and compared dino tracks elsewhere, which clearly demonstrated the dinosaurian nature of such trails, and how the prints were formed). There are too many cases of creationists "backing-down-once-cornered-by-mainstream-scientists" for me to even mention them all in one brief article. And that's because there have been far too many wild assertions made by creationists over the years.</p>
<p>Of course the less astute creationists are loathe to admit that even one of the "classic" creationist "tall tales" can ever be "disproven." Creationists like Carl Baugh, who wants to build a museum shaped like Noah's Ark near the site of the Texas "mantracks," seems to have never admitted making a single erroneous assertion or interpretation, though he's changed his tune a couple times, like when he admitted that the "giant mantrack trails" pointed out by earlier creationists were indeed only dino-prints. But then he proceeded to convince himself and some others that, although the prints in the trail were made by dinosaurs, he could make out smaller "human prints" "inside" each dino-print!</p>
<p>Whereas before, he could make out "human toe depressions" along the outer edges of the dino-prints' now he could - make out "human toe depressions" inside the same dino--prints, the human having 'walked inside" each dino-print the animal left as it passed.</p>
<p>Or take the case of Baugh's discovery of a "fossil human tooth," which he eventually allowed some scientific experts to examine under an electron microscope, and which was found to be merely a fossil fish tooth. Baugh conceded it was a fish tooth, but later retracted his concession. Baugh also found some rounded inorganic rock concretions and claimed they were the "fossilized skulls" of modern mammal species found among dinosaur remains!</p>
<p>Baugh is one of those fellows who is able to see and find exactly what he wants to see and find. He never lets evidence, especially contrary evidence, get in the way of his theories. Baugh's ability to find what he wants to find is only exceeded by Ron Wyatt's, another creationist, who has asserted that he has found: 1) the remains of Noah's ark, 2) the Ark of the covenant (I thought only Indiana Jones ever found that!), 3) The true site of the Israelite's Red Sea crossing, 4) Chariot wheels from Pharaoh's drowned army, 5) The actual rock Moses struck to release water for the Israelites in the desert, 6) The true site of the crucifixion, 7) Noah's grave, 8) Noah's house, and, 9) Mrs. Noah's grave.</p>
<p>Folks like Baugh and Wyatt lie at the least astute and most gullible end of the spectrum of "creation folk science," much like "Saint" Helena (the mother of the first Roman Christian Emperor -- Constantine) did. Helena lived about four hundred years after Jesus' day. "Way back then, Helena traveled all over Palestine and was always fortunate. Whenever [she] found a thing mentioned in her Bible, Old or New Testament, she would go and search for that thing and never stop until she found it. If it was Adam, she would find Adam's grave; if it was the Ark of Noah, she would find the Ark; if it was Goliath or Joshua, she would find their graves." [Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad] "Saint" Helena found the copper plate that Pilate had nailed to the top of her Savior's cross, and upon which Pilate had written, "This is the King of the Jews." She also found the three crosses upon which Christ and the two thieves were crucified, and the exact spot of the crucifixion, and the very spot where the soldiers divided the rainment of the Saviour, not to mention the tomb of Melchizadek (a very obscure Old Testament prophet), and the rift in the rock made by the earthquake (mentioned only in Matthew) at the time of Jesus' Crucifixion. Helena was as fortunate as a Ron Wyatt and a Carl Baugh rolled into one! But it's easy to "find" everything you're looking for if you just use "eyes of faith.." For faith is a wondrous thing. It can move mountains and also convince you that a herring is a race horse.</p>
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