Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

Natural Selection Is A Tautology ? // Happy Birthday Charles Darwin — III

“Many of the most prominent neo-Darwinists have written at one time or another that natural selection is a tautology, a way of saying the same thing twice. In this formulation the theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, and it defines the fittest organisms as the ones which produce the most offspring. It is important to document this point, because many Darwinists have convinced themselves that the tautology idea is a misunderstanding introduced into the literature by creationists and other uncomprehending faultfinders. But here are a few examples collected by Norman Macbeth:

J. B. S. Haldane (1935): ” … the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ is something of a tautology. So are the most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in saying the same truth in two different ways.

Ernst Mayr (1963): “… those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition … the fittest ones.”

George Gaylord Simpson (1964): “Natural selection favors fitness only if you define fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact geneticists do define it that way, which may be confusing to others. To a geneticists fitness has nothing to do with health, strength, good looks, or anything but effectiveness in breeding.”

The explanation by Simpson just quoted indicates why it is not easy to formulate the theory of natural selection other than as a tautology. It may seem obvious, for example, that it is advantageous for a wild stallion to be able to run faster, but in the Darwinian sense this will be true only to the extent that a faster stallion sires more offspring. If greater speed leads to more frequent falls, or if faster stallions tend to outdistance the mares and miss opportunities for reproduction, then the improvement may be disadvantageous.

Just about any characteristic can be either advantageous or disadvantageous, depending upon the surrounding environmental conditions. Does it seem that the ability to fly is obviously an advantage? Darwin hypothesized that natural selection might have caused beetles on Madeira to lose the ability to fly, because beetles capable of flight tended to be blown out to sea. The large human brain requires a skull which causes discomfort and danger to the mother in childbirth. We assume that our brain size is advantageous because civilized human dominate the planet, but it is far from obvious that the large brain was a net advantage in the circumstances in which it supposedly evolved. Among primates in general, those with the largest brains are not the ones least in danger of extinction.

In all such cases we can presume a characteristic to be advantageous because a species which has it seems to be thriving, but in most cases it is impossible to identify the advantage independently of the outcome. That is why Simpson was so insistent that ‘advantage’ has no inherent meaning others than actual success in reproduction. All we can say is that the individuals which produced the most offspring must have had the qualities required for producing the most offspring.

The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper at one time wrote that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory because natural selection is an all purpose explanation which can account for any thing, and which therefore explains nothing. Popper backed away from this position after he was besieged by indignant Darwinists protests, but he had plenty of justification for taking it. As he wrote in his own defense, ‘some of the greatest contemporary Darwinisits themselves formulated the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring,’ citing Fisher, Haldane, Simpson, ‘and others.’ One of the others was C. H. Waddington, whose attempt to make sense of the matter deserves to be preserved for posterity:

Darwin’s major contribution was, of course, the suggestion that evolution can be explained by the natural selection of random variations. Natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable but previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (defined as those which leave the most offspring) will leave the most offspring. This fact no way reduces the magnitude of Darwin’s achievement; only after it was clearly formulated, could biologists realize the enormous power of the principle as a weapon of explanation.

That was not an offhand statement, but a considered judgment published in a paper presented at the great convocation at the University of Chicago in 1959 celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Origin Of Species. Apparently, none of the distinguished authorities present told Waddington that a tautology does not explain anything. When I want to know how a fish can become a man, I am not enlightened by being told that the organisms that leave the most offspring are the ones that leave the most offspring.

It is not difficult to understand how leading Darwinists were led to formulate natural selection as a tautology. The contemporary neo-Darwinian synthesis grew out of population genetics, a field anchored in mathematics and concerned with demonstrating how rapidly very small mutational advantages could spread in a population. The advantages in question were assumptions in a theorem, not qualities observed in nature, and the mathematicians naturally tended to think of them as ‘whatever it was that caused the organism and its descendants to produce more offspring than other members of the species.’ This way of thinking spread to the zoologists and paleontologists, who found it convenient to asume that their guiding theory was simply true by definition. As long as outside critics were not paying attention, the absurdity of the tautology formulation was in no danger of exposure.

What happened to change this situation is that Popper’s comment received a great deal of publicity, and creationists and other unfriendly critics began citing it to support their contention that Darwinism is not really a scientific theory. The Darwinists themselves became aware of a dangerous situation, thereafter critics raising the tautology claim wer firmly told that they were simply demonstrating their inability to understand Darwinism….In practice natural selection continues to be employed in its tautological formulation.

… Although natural selection can be formulated as a tautology, and often has been, it can also be formulated in other ways that are not so easily dismissed.

Phillip Johnson
Darwin On Trial — pp. 20-23

Conference Call With Michigan US Congressman Mark Schauer

I just hung up from a conference call with US Congressman Mark Schauer. I don’t know how it is I was phoned. The whole process was set up by his office. Apparently, people throughout Michigan were randomly called and were allowed to listen in on the conversation. There appeared to be a mechanism where one could ask the Congressman questions and in answering the question you were allowed to hear the Congressman’s response to political questions. We were periodically told that if we wanted to ask a question we should push #3. I pushed #3 but never got a chance to ask a question. I wanted to ask the Congressman where in the US Constitution he and the government found the authority to spend 800 billion dollars. I also wanted to ask what a provision to create health care bureaucracy was doing in this legislation.

Anyway, having said all that, allow me to tell you that if the microcosm of the Michigan citizens I heard tonight is representative of the American public at large, we are so toast as a nation. The Michigan citizens who asked questions (assuming it wasn’t rigged) were all statist. They all asked in one form or another what the stimulus package was going to do for their special interest. An auto worker from Eaton Rapids phoned in and wanted money for the auto industry. A senior citizen from Grand Ledge phoned in wanting to know what money was in the legislation for senior citizens. (She also was offended that people wanted to criticize the President, who was, after all, only trying to do what the great Franklin Roosevelt did.) A guy from Washtenaw called in complaining that Wall Street shouldn’t have got bailed out but rather guys like him should have got bailed out. A guy from Charlotte called in who has been trying to sell a house for over a year and he wanted to know what the government was going to do to help houses sell more briskly. Are we beginning to see a theme here?

As long as Americans believe it is the job of the state to provide nourishment and it is their job to suck at the teat of government we will continue to spiral into tyranny and oppression. I fear that the one two punch of government schools and mass media over the course of several generations have effectively rendered the citizenry (at least the sampling from Michigan I listened to tonight) brain dead. There is no desire for freedom, but instead a long plaintive cry to be fed, taken care of, and to have their diapers changed. People really have come to believe that in the state we love and move and have our being. People really have come to the point where they are looking to the state for salvation. This mindset which I repeat endlessly as being part of the American psyche, was born out in spades in this telephone conference this evening. It was most discouraging.

Congressman Schauer was unfailingly courteous, but then nobody he spoke to was disagreeing with the BS he was shoveling. Congressman Schauer made it clear that there is going to be a huge push for alternative energy. Carbon fuel is out and bio-fuel, wind energy, and other forms are in. According to Congressman Schauer this bill provides money to invest in “green cars.” Congressman Schauer noted that it was his hope that some of those cars would be built in Michigan. Interestingly enough there was a great deal of talk about ending free trade in favor of fair trade. Congressman Schauer said a great many things that were untrue. I don’t think Congressman Schauer purposely is a liar but rather it is my opinion that his false worldview causes him to speak lies that he genuinely believes are true. Most of his lies had to do with how this spending is going to help the economy and how this is all the previous administrations fault and how doing something is better than doing nothing and how every $1.00 spent by the government will result in a $1.50 return in the economy. This is Keynesianism that has long since been proven as completely false. Congressman Schauer also faulted people who just wanted to continue to pursue the failed ‘tax cuts for the rich’ policy pursued by the Bush administration. The obvious answer to this is that tax cuts without spending cuts was irresponsible — indeed almost as irresponsible as pursuing a policy to go deeper in debt through irresponsible spending legislation in order to solve being in debt.

What is sad about all of this is that these people have so few that can challenge them from rank and file America. What is sad is that Americans are largely drones that have been reared and trained to keep the machinery of our fascist culture running and consequently have not be reared and trained to ask questions about the nature of the machine. People need to quit warning about coming fascism or socialism. We already are far into Huxley’s Brave New World.

Rice Christians … Rice Americans

Historically, in the history of Christian Missions, any individual or people groups of an indigenous culture that the Missionaries were serving in that converted to Christian just for the advantages that Christianity brought were often referred to as a “Rice Christians.” Often times these conversions were in name only as attachments to the previous religion that they were thought to have left was retained in subtle ways and so the label “Rice Christians” became a pejorative. Basically the reality of “Rice Christians” was that their loyalty to Christ was purchased at the price of social or material advantage. Once that social or material advantage went into eclipse so did their loyalty to Christ.

Today in our current climate I am convinced that something like this is happening in America in reference to the religion of statism. Legion are the name of those whose loyalty belongs to the state so long as the state can provide them with material or social advance. But what is to happen when the state runs out of provision for these Rice Americans? What will it mean for our nation when people lose their loyalty to the state because the state can no longer provide — especially when there is no religion for them to go back to with which they are already familiar? I am fairly certain that families who have been Rice Americans for several generations are not going to deal peacefully if their god and their religion can no longer provide for them.

But I suppose this scenario could never play out since the states supply for Rice Americans is doubtless inexhaustible.

CRC Banner & Speaking Of Evolution — Happy Birthday Darwin II

Recently, Christian Reformed Church flagship magazine, “The Banner” ran a three-page article on evolution arguing that theistic evolution (now called Evolutionary Creationists) is a viable alternative for Christians to embrace. The article was written by a couple who teaches at Calvin College and who work in the Physics and Astronomy departments. The article was excruciatingly basic and it was plugging a recent book that the Professor have recently written. I want to take a few minutes to examine some of the quotes in the article.

http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=1935

“For example, modern species of dogs and wolves and coyotes descended from some ancestral wolf-like species that no longer exists. Similarly, all dogs, cats, and other mammals descended from a common ancestor even longer ago.

Evolutionary Creationists combat evolutionism by attacking the first premise. They argue that God could work through biological evolution to create the species, just as God works through natural processes like evaporation and condensation to govern rainfall.”

From a Christian perspective of anthropology the statements of the Haarsma’s is fraught with grave danger. Indeed, the danger is so grave in these statements that the whole Christian faith could conceivably be overturned.

The Haarsma’s are telling us that it is acceptable to believe that all mammals (and keep in mind that man is a mammal) descended from (and so necessarily evolved from) a common ancestor. If this is true then the act of God in creating man as the piece de resistance of His creation is overturned. Likewise, any idea of man as uniquely bearing the image of God seems likewise overturned. The Haarsma’s are required to answer, if their supposition as evolutionary creationists is true that man has descended and evolved from a common ancestor, where in the evolutionary process man was stamped with the Imago Dei. When and where did God, in the evolutionary creationist myth, breathe into man the breath of life?

Also the Haarsma’s must answer in their evolutionary creationist paradigm when, where and how sin entered into the world.

Another problem in the Haarsma’s evolutionary creationism worldview is the presumption that all is evolutionary process. This presumption requires the belief that nature is going from something inferior to something superior (hence the term “evolution”). The problem though is that in Scripture the assumption is just the reverse. The assumption in scripture is not that everything is going from inferior to superior but rather that in creation we had the superior (the creation that was declared “good” and “very good”) which gave way to an inferior state (we might should call it devolution) called “The Fall.” The Christian story is Creation, Fall, Redemption, Glorification. For the Haarsma’s the Christian story seems to be Creation, evolution, Glorification.

Another problem in the Haarsma’s article is that in the Scriptures we clearly see man being distinct from the animals. Man is charged to name the animals thus showing his un-relatedness to the animals. And yet the Haarsma’s would have us believe that Man, having a common descendant with all animals has a basic relatedness to the animals.

Now, I’ve raised some questions here and to be fair to the Haarsma’s they did say in the article that there book attempts to answer questions that the article did not have space to address. But I will go out on a limb here and say, without reading their book, that evolutionary creationism can’t be harmonized with Scripture without doing serious damage to scripture.

The primary message to the ancient Hebrews was about the who and why of creation—that Israel’s God is the sovereign creator of all and humans are God’s image bearers—not the when and how of creation.

This is a HUGE assumption. Where in and from Scripture does Scripture teach that Scripture isn’t concerned with the when and how of creation? One just can’t assume these things without proving them so.

One could appeal to Jesus words in Matthew 19:4-5 that Jesus Himself believed that the when and how of the immediate and direct (hence non-evolutionary) creation of Adam and Eve was important. (We might also want to ask here if Jesus’ human nature was descended and evolved from a common ancestor.)

“If God’s purposes in Genesis 1 did not include teaching scientific information to the Israelites, then we should not look there for scientific information about the age of the earth or the formation of species. Instead, we can look at what God has revealed in nature itself to understand the when and how.”

The problem here is the assumption that general revelation can’t be read and interpreted properly apart from presupposing special revelation. It is true that God has given us two books wherein we can read His revelation but it is not true that we can read the book of nature correctly if we presuppose a theology other than Christianity.

Apart from presupposing what is taught in Scripture — that the Universe has order because of God’s providence — there is no consistent reason for the Scientist to believe that the Sun will rise regularly. The irrationality for believing that the sun will rise regularly is something David Hume pointed out. A science that begins without special revelation is a science that is autonomous and so can come up with everything from punctuated equilibrium to man being descended from animals.

It should be emphasized that evolution is only a theory. Embracing evolution is a blind leap of faith. There is no science that does or can prove it. Any evidence that is brought forth to support it is evidence that only proves evolution because it presupposes the truth of evolution. That is hardly a scientific approach. Therefore to appeal to nature as interpreted by science, as the way to determine the formation of species is a thin reed on which to rely.

The most significant problem I see with the Haarsma’s article is that it doesn’t take into account how theology informs science. Those who start with the theology of Hinduism, or Islam, or Communism (let us never forget Lysenkoism) or Humanism, or Christianity are going to develop significantly different sciences. Because that is so science can not be used to prove or disprove any metaphysical or theological construct since science depends upon those constructs for its existence.

Another significant problem I see with the Haarsma’s position is its implied Deism. It seems that for evolutionary creationists God starts the evolutionary / creation process and then kind of fades away to let the evolutionary process roll on.

I will continue to be mystified by those who desire to take a paradigm that was created and defended as a means of explaining this world without taking into consideration the God of the Bible and try to combine it with the God of the Bible.

The Haarsma’s article is fraught with severe difficulties. I trust people will not take their word on the issue.