Happy New Year

 
This is a year to celebrate Charles Darwin and evolution. In order to start off on the right foot here are some simple¹ thoughts from our Intelligent Design Creationist friends over at Uncommon Descent [TEN THOUGHTS DARWINISTS NEED TO PONDER BEFORE BREAKFAST].

As we head into the new year and the impending Darwin bi-centennial on February 12th, we’re sure to be regaled with story after story of the wondrous things that Darwinian evolution hath wrought. A friend e-mailed the following to me, and with his permission, I reproduce it here below the fold. Perhaps pondering some of these questions might bring some balance to what is otherwise sure to be a lopsided Darwin love-fest for the next couple of months. The original of this can be found at the University of California Santa Barbara Veritas Forum website.

1. Evolution by natural selection is more plausible in a theistic world than an atheistic world.
2. Darwin never accounted for the arrival of the fittest. Naturalism’s god-of-chance is always called upon to do the job.
3. Science rules out the possibility that natural processes might prevent major evolutionary change simply by definition because biological stability and conservation would imply that creation events had taken place since the creation of the universe.
4. Creation preceded Evolution anyway.
5. Edward Blyth described the process of natural selection well before Darwin and Wallace. He concluded that it acted as a force of conservation eliminating deterimental variations from populations.
6. Darwin admitted that based upon the data published in his Origin of Species, one could come to “directly opposite” conclusions. For example, natural selection can prevent major evolutionary change from occurring on a gradual step-by-step basis by eliminating useless transitional stages thus explaining the lack of transitional sequences leading to all of the major body plans (phyla) in the fossil record.
7. Natural selection better describes biology’s “ordinary rules of stability” than major evolutionary change.
8. Darwinian theory predicts a pervasive pattern of natural history that is upside-down from the pattern found in the fossil record.
9. Natural history is more compatible with progressive creation than Darwinian evolution.
10. The ultimate origin of Nature itself cannot be natural. Either Nature or a Natural Law Giver has always existed. Nature has not always existed. What do you conclude?

All these questions, and more, will be answered at the Darwin 2009 Festival in Cambridge, July 5-10, 2009. Speakers include Sir David Attenborough, Dr. Matt Ridley, Lord John Krebs, Professor Steve Jones, Dame Gillian Beer, Lord Robert May, Richard Dawkins, Professor Dan Dennett, Ian McEwan and AS Byatt.

Is anyone from North America interested in going?

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1. I use the term very literally.