Dec 31 2008
Clever Criticisms of Evolutionary Theory
While channel-flipping one evening I witnessed a preacher tell his audience, “You expect me to believe that a lizard crawled up out of the mud one day and evolved into a monkey and that monkey is my grandfather?!”
This is an example of a classic, low-brow argument. It sounds ridiculous — to me — therefore your position is false. In this case, the preacher portrayed evolutionary theory in an extra-ridiculous fashion so as to better help his congregation to come to the conclusion they had already pegged as the more desirable one. This strategy is otherwise known as the straw-man logical fallacy.
Of course, no one seriously believes that the mud spontaneously and instantaneously generated life. Nor that a monkey ever gave birth to a human being. There were likely hundreds of transitional forms.
I would not label the preacher’s argument as clever. But there are those educated individuals who do make some clever attacks on evolutionary theory specifically and the fully naturalistic worldview in general. In the coming days I will be making a series of posts addressing some of these more clever criticisms. I hope to show both how they are used and why they are flawed.
[...] [This is the second post in a series, Clever Criticisms of Evolution (specifically, and the naturalistic worldview in general). Intro post here.] [...]
[...] [This is the third post in a series, Clever Criticisms of Evolution (specifically, and the naturalistic worldview in general). Intro post here.] [...]
[...] [This is the fourth post in a series, Clever Criticisms of Evolution (specifically, and the naturalistic worldview in general). Intro post here.] [...]
[...] [This is the fifth post in a series, Clever Criticisms of Evolution (specifically, and the naturalistic worldview in general). Intro post here.] [...]
[...] [This is the sixth and final post in a series, Clever Criticisms of Evolution (specifically, and the naturalistic worldview in general). Intro post here.] [...]