Fire and Knowledge

In 1938, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 165.

Just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. And if those mechanisms turn out to be natural forces, then no supernatural force is necessary, and they can simply change their name to evolutionary scientists and get to work.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 80.

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.

—Herbert Spencer (1891) in Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 45.

Most humans have twelve sets of ribs, but 8 percent of us have a thirteen set, just like chimpanzees and gorillas. This is a remnant of our primate ancestry: We share common ancestors with chimps and gorillas, and the thirteen set of ribs has been retained from when our lineage branched off six million years ago.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 18.

A quick and simple way to debunk the theory of evolution would be to find a fossil horse in the same geological stratum as a trilobite. According to evolutionary theory, trilobites and mammals are separated by hundreds of millions of years. If such a fossil juxtaposition occurred, and it was not the product of some geological anomaly (such as uplifted, broken, bent, or even flipped strata—all of which occur but are traceable), it would mean there was something seriously wrong with the theory of evolution.

–Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 16.

Today is evolution weekend, when Christian churches are encouraged to create an “opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science.” Sounds like a good idea to me, since from my own experience many Christians are ignorant of the basic premises and evidences of evolution. I know I was for a long time, since I only read creationist literature. Polls also attest to this.

Here is an excerpt from the clergy letter:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

(via Mere Comments)

No one seems to think that a religious person engaged in the study of history must find a way that God rigged human events in order to cause the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, or the Holocaust. Yet curiously, that is exactly what many expect of a religious person engaged in the study of natural history—they want to know how God could have ensured the success of mammals, the rise of flowering plants, and most especially, the ascent of man.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 237-8

We say, then, that it pleased the designer to design only microorganisms for nearly 2 billion years of earth’s history. He then began to tinker with multicellular organisms, producing a bewildering variety of organisms that survived only briefly. In the Cambrian era, roughly 530 million years ago, the designer produced an extraordinary variety of microorganisms, many of which were the first representatives of what we now regard as the animal phyla, the major groups into which animals are classified. Even in the Cambrian, he was not yet interested in designing a vertebrate, an animal that, like us, is built around the backbone. That came later.

Then, as we have seen, the designer produced one organism after another in places and in sequences that would later be misinterpreted as evolution by one of his creatures. And just to compound that misunderstanding, he would ensure that the very first limbs he designed looked just like modified fins, and that the first jaws he designed looked like modified gill arches. He would further ensure that the first tetrapods had tail fins, like fish, and that the first birds had teeth, like reptiles. So thoughtful was this designer that after having designed mammals to live exclusively on the land, he would redesign a few, like whales and dolphins, to live in water—but not before he designed creatures that were literally halfway between land and swimming mammals. In working his magic, this designer chose to create forms truly intermediate between walking and swimming mammals….

Is the designer being deceptive? Is there a reason he can’t get it right the first time? Is the designer, despite all his powers, a slow learner? He must be clever enough to design an African elephant, but apparently not so clever that he can do it the first time. Therefore we find fossils of a couple dozen extinct almost-elephants over the last few million years. What are these failed experiments, and why does this master designer need to drive so many of his masterpieces to extinction?

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 127