Sent
to The Star, Johannesburg Wed
23/11/2011 10:28. Published in part (less parts in blue)
as “Who would create a body like this one?”
in The Star, November 29, 2011
Siegfried
Berger ("Science also expects us to blindly follow" in Star Letters,
November 22) in reply to my viciously-trimmed
letter published on 17 November, tells us that
science is also a dogma. Not true:
Science works on the evidence. The
evidence shows that there is no comforting, "intellectual guiding
hand" steering evolution.
Would
an intelligent creator have designed the human body like this? Humans suffer from back problems:
Understandable when you consider that we are using, vertically, a spine that
developed horizontally. The discs suffer because they are not "made"
to carry compressive loads.
Or, looking at the body from a town-planning point of view, what
intelligent planner would put the fun-fair next to the sewage farm?
There
are many other examples: Our difficulty in giving birth, the appendix, nerves
that follow strange paths.
Evolution
indeed proceeds without an end product in mind, but the results are not
"accidental". Mutations arise
occasionally by chance. Survival of the fittest then ruthlessly eliminates
changes that are not advantageous. Some have likened it to a Lotto where you can
keep your correct numbers for the next round. After a few rounds you would have all winning
numbers! Thus evolution builds
continually on the useful characteristics, constantly improving all the
fiercely competing species.
However, many mutations that an intelligent designer would want, haven't
happened or did not survive at the time. So we have short lives, poor eyesight, only
two hands, no wings, thin skins, can't digest cellulose, to name a few.
The irrepressible Bob Holcombe weighs in in the same edition, with
"Many researchers believe that science need not exclude a creator".
He says that evolution can not be proved because we can not run it as an
experiment. Poor reasoning. Science works on evidence and logic too. The results of evolution are there to study,
and we have a record in fossils and matching geological strata, along with
several dating methods that agree.
Mr Holcombe defends the biblical story of creation as symbolic, with the
days representing ages. What then does
the bible mean with the oft-repeated "and it was evening, and it was
morning"? The bible means literal
days. It just happens to be wrong.
Mr Holcombe's "loving god" is obviously not the jealous god of
the bible, who delights in genocide and misogyny, approves of slavery and human
sacrifice, imposes "original sin", and murders people for collecting
firewood on a Saturday.
Finally, Mr Holcombe says that societies that deny god are declining
rapidly. In fact, objective measures of
human well-being –longevity, mental health, lower crime, reduced HIV
transmission, etc.– are highest in secular societies (western and northern
Europe), and lower in those with a strong religious component such as the US
and Muslim countries.
