So I've been really busy lately and have spent most of my free time doing other things than blogging. I do, however, still read my weekly Answers In Genesis emails which always prove to be interesting for all the wrong reasons. Their latest comic in the After Eden series is pretty baffling, even for them.
They are apparently insinuating that, if you believe in science, you can't have any firm grasp on reality because it is always changing its mind about the basic way the world works. By the second, apparently. Now if you go to the web page where this picture originated, there is no context, no explanation, and no author's note. It simply exists as-is, leaving the reader to infer as he or she wishes. I'm willing to bet that's because there isn't much to explain about an outright lie.
What exactly have we been taught about the origin of life? Not evolution mind you, because that deals with how life changes after it already exists. We're talking about abiogenesis (the study of how life began), and there is not one perfect scientifically accepted consensus on how everything went down. Unlike religion, science doesn't claim to know how something works until they actually do. Scientists don't claim to know for a fact how it all began and they certainly haven't been switching back and forth on this issue like the comic implies. They do have some good ideas, to be sure, but they don't have the mountains of evidence supporting their case like we have for evolution theory, atomic theory, cell theory, etc.
Believe it or not, it takes a lot of time and evidence for science to accept something as fact. This is actually one of its great strengths - it doesn't change its mind at every different idea that comes along, it waits and takes time to evaluate arguments put forth by different parties and isn't really ever happy until it has a theory that accounts for all of the data and explains why other alternative models are wrong or incomplete. We have a high degree of certainty that science can accurately discover the way the world works because of its rigor and demand for evidence - something creationism can't even attempt to offer.
I'm frankly disgusted by the ignorance put on display here. You'd have to already be some kind of indoctrinated and uneducated to think this is any sort of legitimate scientific weakness and, to top it off, in case by some slim chance I have any AiG staff readers, your comic isn't funny either. Sorry.
Sometimes I prefer unintended comedy over purposeful comedy. It's not that I don't appreciate the work that goes into a good stand-up routine or the cleverly crafted storyline and wordplay that made Arrested Development one of the best sitcoms of all time. It's just that sometimes you see and hear people make claims or do things that seem so stupid, they defy explanation. Sometimes these things are done out of stupidity or ignorance, but they're almost always done with a straight face and a serious attitude and that's what makes the downfall so funny. A great example of this is Peanut Butter, The Atheist's Nightmare, which I will embed below.
In case 2 minutes and 6 seconds is too much time out of your day, I'll quote the relevant portion here.
Life from non life, apart from God's direct intervention, is a fairy tale. ... If the theory of evolution was viable, then I should, occasionally, by subjecting this [the jar of peanut butter] to energy, end up having new life. ... On some occasion, I should find new life inside. And so, when we open the jar of peanut butter, we look in there, there's no new life. You may smile at this, but hopefully you'll never forget it. ... The entire food industry (of the world) depends on the fact that evolution does not happen.
Chuck Missler, you are correct; I will never forget this monumental failure of a rebuttal to a theory you clearly don't understand. Evolution, at its simplest, is the change in gene frequency over time. It has nothing to do with life coming from non life, and even if it did, your shoddy demonstration proved nothing but your ignorance.
Abiogenesis is the field of study that deals with life from non-life, but that isn't what you're attacking. You're attempting to disprove the entire theory of common descent with modifications and natural selection, which is completely irrelevant to the discussion of abiogenesis. Evolution deals with life when it already exists. It doesn't matter how it got here - a god created it, it spontaneously arose, chemical reactions caused it to happen - because the theory of evolution only deals with existing organisms. You are, in effect, setting up an egregious straw man when you show the ant in the peanut butter because that is apparently how you understand evolution. Completely uninformed.
I strongly suggest you do some research on the field, but the basics of abiogenesis are that you have an aqueous solution filled with certain chemicals that react according to the same physics that we have today. When subjected to energy, compounds do tend to form (a basic tenet of chemistry) and some chemicals are able to replicate. These chemicals are not, however, ants, or even cells. You couldn't really even call them life. But as they continue to duplicate and change ever so slightly, they grow in complexity until eventually, after a very long period of time, you have some very very simple organism that you can classify as life. And it's a judgment call on our part when it can be classified as "life," because after all, we define what that means.
Nonetheless, we wouldn't expect to see these kinds of chemicals necessary for life in abundance inside a packaged food product. We certainly wouldn't expect to see any kind of "new" life inside even if it had just come into being, because it would be too small. It would be on the chemical level. You wouldn't know it was there if you were staring at it.
But again, none of that matters, because it is all utterly irrelevant to the theory of evolution. The evidence for common descent (which you are really arguing against) comes by the truckloads every day and you haven't disproved a whit of it by your disappointment of not seeing an insect on your sandwich. When debating with someone, try to make sure you are using the appropriate counter-arguments to their claims, and more importantly, know first what their claims are. If I told you that Manny Ramirez broke the world record for stolen bases and your reply was, "But he had the most strikeouts of his career this year! He's a terrible player!" That would be nice I'm sure, but completely irrelevant. This kind of reasoning is, in effect, what you have displayed here.
If anyone reading this would like a concise, layman's explanation of abiogenesis with narration and pretty pictures, I recommend The Origin of Life Made Easy - a 6 minute video well worth your time.
