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Last Updated December 6, 2003
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Shattering Delusions: Winkey Pratney
Part 2: The Historical Record
by Winkie Pratney
The idea that "creation halts human inquiry," and that a picture of reality starting with God "finishes off any ideas of research," is a modern fiction. Once again, many life-sciences have many Christian researchers like those in the past, such as Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and his predecessor John Ray (whose book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation blocked evolutionary thought in science for 200 years). History is filled with the genius of men like Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, the brilliant Isaac Newton, Pascal, and Leibnitz, who (despite the strange silence on this aspect of their lives from the secular researcher) all outspokenly loved God and studied His world with joy. Darwin's time was no exception (R.E.D. Clark; Creator God or Cosmic Magician? Symposium on Creation, vol. IV, pp. 117-118; Peter Master; Men of Purpose, pp. 9-20, 93-101, 114-121).
This is utterly superfluous. Evolutionists can play this game, too, only much more effectively. Stephen Hawking believes in Evolution (you know, the world's most famous living physicist?). Virtually the entire scientific community believes in Evolution (you know, all those people with "Dr." before their names?). If we're going to go with majority opinion, here, Evolution is the clear winner. Even so, the "Appeal to Authority" game is fruitless. It proves nothing that Hawking agrees with me, and it proves nothing that Newton agrees with Pratney. What does prove things? Logic, a concept of which he is entirely devoid.
I couldn't care less about Newton's opinions on Creationism, and nor should you. They are in contradiction with observed phenomena, and are, therefore, not valid. Newton was a physicist; his opinions on biological matters do not outweigh the opinions of current biologists. In fact, none of these men were biologists, and none of them exist today, in an age where the evidence for Evolutionary Theory is so overwhelming that no self-respecting scientist could deny the theory's validity. If Newton were confronted with all the current evidence for Evolutionary Theory, he would accept it because he is a scientist.
FARADAY'S ELECTRICITY
In 1831, when Darwin was a backslidden, 22-year-old ministerial student starting out his five-year voyage on the "Beagle", Michael Faraday, then 40, began a series of experiments that demonstrated the principle of electromagnetic induction. "Very few men," said Sir William Bragg, "have changed the face of the world as Faraday has done. He was one of the greatest experimental philosophers that ever appeared in this country or indeed in all the world. The whole world of electricity started with a simple experiment carried out in the Royal Institute by one of the greatest scientists of all time."
Born the year John Wesley died (1791), at 44 recognized as the leading man of science and honored with a doctorate by Oxford University, he became an elder at 50 in the Chapel Meeting House in Pauls Alley, London, preaching there every Sunday, often to fellow scientists. Near his death in 1867, and holding no less than 97 unsought distinctions from international academies of science, he said, "My worldly faculties are slipping away day by day. Happy it is for all of us that the true good does not lie in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little children trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting his unspeakable gift. I bow before Him who is Lord of all." Significantly, the principal men to follow him in constructing the electrical age all owned the same Christ as their Lord-Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), James Clerk Maxwell, and Sir John Ambrose Fleming.
He's still ranting about all the dead people that agree with him. Meanwhile, the Evolutionists have the virtually the entire scientific community (which consists entirely of living people), today, as well as empirical evidence.
LORD KELVIN'S SECOND LAW
The Absolute Temperature Scale still bears Lord Kelvin's name, but other exploits in his day, like the submarine cable, revolutionary ship's compass and 69 other patented brainwaves, made him a household word. He died in 1907 with over 600 published scientific papers to his credit, 70 patented inventions and 21 honorary degrees. Elected unanimously at 22 as Glasgow University's youngest professor ever, he opened every lecture with prayer. "A firm believer in creation for his entire life, he often insisted that the power to analyze, to look for causes, was itself a creation of God. He never ceased to look for causes, causes of causes, and for causes of these in return. Seeking a cause for the escape of heat from the Earth, he became in the end a founder of geophysics and the joint discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics." He was 35 in 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of the Species."
Stephen Hawking agrees with me. He's looked at all the current evidence for Evolutionary Theory. Lord Kelvin is dead and, thus, cannot look at all the current evidence for Evolutionary Theory, which was not uncovered in his time (i.e.: the Fossil Record). More appeals to authority that are utterly irrelevant. He can't come up with a solid argument against Evolution, so he's resorting to the uninformed, and generally wrong, opinions of dead scientists.
Could he have dreamed then that the Law he helped co-discover would today be one of the biggest headaches to Darwin's theory? "The sheer venturesomeness of Kelvin's speculations were possible only because of his underlying certainty that behind everything lay the power of the Creator God. Science, in his view, could never lead a man to disbelieve in God." Kelvin wouldn't buy today's notion that creation is somehow "unscientific." When his sister in later years read to him Darwin's early statement of "disbelief in Divine revelation and evidence of creative design in the Universe," Kelvin "unhesitatingly denounced it as utterly unscientific."
Darwin apparently published his theory with much apprehension, fearing the scorn of fellow scientists; in the first edition of his "Origin," he prepared a line retreat along Lamark's ideas in case his theory of natural selection was found indefensible (Life & Letters of Charles Darwin-Ed. Francis Darwin, D. Appleton & Company, 1888, vol. 2, pp. 12-15). Professor C.D. Darlington was of the opinion that Darwinism began "as a theory that could be explained by natural selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be explained just as you would like it to be explained" (Darlington: "The Origin of Darwinism," Scientific American, 200, 5:60; May 1959, pp. 60-61).
Again, why does it matter what scientists back then thought of Darwin's theory? He's referring to a time when the majority of the scientific community consisted of European men with a devout Christian upbringing. Of course they'd be reluctant to question the Bible! Today, things are different. The current scientific community recognizes the fact that science and physical observations are not subordinate to religious doctrine.
JOHN FLEMING'S "VALVE"
John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the vacuum tube) was 11 when Darwin published "The Origin." Charles Williams' YMCA and William Booth of the soon-to-be-founded Salvation Army, had both been ministering in England for 15 years; John's father was a pastor. A great spiritual awakening took place that year with many people in his father's church becoming Christians. Although his early life was financially difficult, John grew up to contribute some of the greatest discoveries of his day in physics and electrical engineering. "Busy though he was at scientific affairs, he had another loyalty to the Friend he had found as a young man. He began to be less quiet as a Christian believer and to use his remarkable powers as a lecturer in speaking about the Bible. He loved the Bible and studied it as the Word of God. 'It contains,' he said, 'the record of events quite out of line with normal human experience and predictions-some of which have already been remarkably fulfilled it is, and always has been, revered as the communication to us from the Creator of the Universe, the Supreme and Everlasting God.'"
Again, Fleming was a Christian, and a very devout one. It's no surprise that he wants every word in the Bible to be true. The current scientific community, which consists of scientists of many faiths (or non-faiths, for the atheists and agnostics, such as Stephen Hawking), seems to disagree with him.
Few other men could equal his skill in completely enthralling an audience. He was a brilliant speaker, getting popular scientific lectures across to nonscientific audiences; copies of his published works kept in University College fill five volumes. He was an outspoken opponent of Evolution theory, and could not bear to look on quietly while an "unproven and unscientific theory was blatantly taught as fact to the ordinary public." From 1904, under the title Evidence of thing Not Seen, he lectured on the unadorned facts about Evolution.
When J.W. Swan of Newcastle made a carbon-filament lamp, it was further improved by Edison, who appointed Fleming to be his chief electrician. Fleming was later also called in by Marconi to help get his wireless telegraph to work; progress was held up without an essential technology that Fleming finally designed in 1904-the "valve" as he called it, or the vacuum tube.
Bla bla bla, a Christian invented the vacuum tube, Christian scientists 150 years ago said Evolution was wrong. Would someone wake me up when he's gotten around to an actual argument?
SON OF DARWIN MEETS MULTIPROCESSOR
(A Science-Fact Horror Movie For An Old Theory)
Darwin had been dead 33 years. He had no idea that his theories could ever be practically tested. Charles Babbage's "analytical engine" had failed to get off the ground 70 years before, awaiting the very technology that Fleming launched. It was left to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert in 1946 to build the first nail for the coffin of Darwin's time-protected theory in ENIAC, a clanking, hard-wired monstrosity weighing 30 tons that used 19,000 of these vacuum-tubes, prototypes of the modern microchip.
Some of us forget how long ago Darwin lived. Born the same year as Abe Lincoln (1809), nine years after Volta re-invented the electric battery, it would have really blown his circuits to see a home micro-computer, let alone to run a CRAY-1 or a S1 Mark IIA Multiprocessor with the capacity of eight BILLION operations a second. In Darwin's day, the great salvation of his theory was that no one could live long enough to disprove it. For over a century the standard argument ran like this: "Just because you can't see it working doesn't mean it didn't; you haven't looked long enough, so there! Given enough time and chance, anything can happen-and probably did."
Enter digital logic, integrated circuitry, the programmable computer: and with it a whole new ball game. You see it is now possible to duplicate million of years and billions of random variations, simulate original conditions, accelerate and possible spontaneous process-to practically shrink awesome numbers into months, weeks, sometimes days or hours. Darwin's theory can be tested, today, NOW.
And it has been. With embarrassing results. Put simply, it doesn't work. Put bluntly, nothing else outside of INTELLIGENT DIRECTED CONTROL does anything more than jam test programs into chaos. This has led to interesting shouting matches between the cyberneticists (those who ran the tests on the computers) and the neo-Darwinists, and some mad scrambles for some exotic new catalyst or concept to account for the disappointing facts. Leave a system to itself and all you have at the end of a long time is a bigger mess than you started with. And new discoveries on the complexity of molecules and the conditions necessary to create them only seem to make the problem worse (Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution-Ed. Moorhead & Kaplan, Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 1967; Murray Eden: Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory, p. 11; M.P. Shutzenberger, pp. 73-75; A.E. Wilder Smith: The Creation of Life-A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution, baker; James F. Coppedge: Evolution-Possible or Impossible? Zondervan, 1973).
This is all superfluous. Evolution in organisms has been observed in nature. Species of cockroaches have become more resistant to certain pesticides, members of certain desert tribes in Australia have adapted their bodies to become more efficient in the way they store and use water. Virii mutate and form new versions of themselves, resistant to antibodies. These are very small examples of Evolution in nature. Are we going to trust what a computer program tells us about the real world over what observing the real world tells us about the real world?
THE MASTER-LAW OF NATURE-ENTROPY
Remember Lord Kelvin and his co-discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The Second Law defines that all things run down, not up. Complex things break down; life becomes more disorganized (look at your desk or bed). Time and Chance make things WORSE, not better. A field, a room, a person left alone and unattended, fall apart. "Entropy" (the tendency of an energy system to run down-Webster's New World Dictionary), says Jeremy Rifkin, in applying the law in his radical book to both economics and politics, "is the universal master-law, and unbroken reality written all around you."
For reference, here's the scientific definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
"If a process occurs in a closed system, the entropy of the system increases for irreversible processes and remains constant for reversible processes. It never decreases."
Source: Fundamentals of Physics, Fifth Edition, Halliday, Resnick and Walker, pg. 514.
Notice the term "closed system." This refers to a system whose energy, mass, charge, et cetera are all constant. Does your body's mass stay the same? Do you always have the same amount of energy? No, you decrease mass when you go to the bathroom, increase mass when you eat, and burn energy when you walk up a flight of stairs. The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply to your body or any other organism (such as the first ones on Earth millions of years ago).
When you think about it, there are only two basic ways to get order out of disorder:
(1) Chance and Time. These two factors form one alternative. Say we start with these, nothing and no one else. Does it help? Not a lot. Time passing makes things fall apart, not fall together. Both only tend to make things worse, so that really seems to rule them both out.
Completely incorrect. As time goes on, anything in a closed system will move toward a lower energy state. This is not a "way out of disorder," it is the way into disorder. Of course, this only applies to closed systems. An open system's entropy can increase or decrease.
(2) An Agent and a degradable Energy supply. That is to say: Someone deliberately acting on the disorder with the power to use in fixing it up. Of course, the Agent must pre-exist the system, and must be at least as complex as the order you want in the system.
Putting all this more simply, if you want to dig ditches, you have to BE THERE first-with the energy and the tools to do it. You also have to be smarter than the ditch!
Again, totally wrong. In a closed system, disorder will increase regardless of interference from an outside source. Here he goes again claiming that the Laws of Physics shut off when "intelligence" intervenes. The Laws of Physics are universal.
Refrigerators make water (less complex) into ice (more complex) because an AGENT of GREATER WISDOM than the ice blocks (Frigidaire design team?) put together a MACHINE (on special at Sears) that uses DEGRADABLE ENERGY (your astonishing power bill!). The "randomness" was transferred out of the water into heating air behind your fridge, and finally you got something to put into your lemonade-paying only for a fridge, electricity, sales tax and commission, and your service contract when the whole thing succumbs to the Second Law again on Tuesday and breaks down.
All completely wrong, A refrigerator works the way it does because it is an open system, not because the "intelligent designers" designed it to violate a physical law. Physical laws can't be violated, except in the most extreme conditions (like a black hole). There's no need to design a refrigerator to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because the law of entropy doesn't apply to open systems, which a refrigerator is.
That is why some have made an open challenge for anyone to prove that MACRO-evolution is scientifically possible. Like R.G. Elmendorf, who offers a $5,000 cash reward for anyone who can find a natural process in which available energy, structure, and information INCREASE with time-WITHOUT requiring PRIOR and HIGHER energy, structure, and information:
The reason that none of these challenges have been met is because there is no "proving" in science. There is observation and theorizing. A scientist sees something and he makes a theory to describe its workings, then tests that theory to see if it holds true all the time. Scientists never look for "proof" of their theories, but are constantly looking for disproofs. Also, he mistakenly differentiates micro and macro-evolution. The two are driven by the same mechanism, as previously discussed.
"Evolution is here defined as a real, natural, self-caused, continuing, uphill process-involving energy, structure, and information-which goes from disorganized to organized, from random to ordered, from lower to higher, from simple to complex, from atom to amoeba, from molecules to man. All uphill processes (photosynthesis, growth, etc.) are local and temporary, and all require a creative trio of prerequisites in order to operate:
Again, he's completely wrong. The more complex something is, the more disorder is has. This should be obvious. Are we to argue that the sun is the simplest of creations because is has creates massive amounts of entropy via nuclear fusion? Are we to assume the same of any nuclear reactors on the planet? Wouldn't you think that the more disorder something has, the more complex it is, and the more organized it is, the simpler it is? Doesn't that make sense? Well, let's make sure and see what the Chaos Theory says about complexity: "Complexity may then be characterized by a lack of symmetry..." (Source) A simple logical train of thought would state: Symmetry implies organization, or order. Lack of symmetry implies a lack or order, or an abundance of disorder. Complexity is defined as a lack of symmetry. Complexity is, also, therefore, a lack of order. If molecular disorder increases continually, then so does complexity.
Even if the human body were a closed system, the Law of Entropy would still not contradict Evolution. It would, in fact, support Evolution.
(1) ENERGY-an appropriate outside source of energy.
If he's searching for violations of the Law of Entropy, he won't find them in a system which can receive energy input from an external source, and why is that? Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies only to
(2) ENERGY CONVERSION MACHINE-a fit structure or mechanism to use and transform the above energy.
Amazing, this is actually
(3) INTELLIGENCE-an intelligent information and control system to direct the machine (found only in life) (R.G. Elmendorf-"$5,000 Reward," September 1, 1976; Bible-Science Association Western Penn., Bairdford, PA 15006).
Completely incorrect, again. Evolution does not require intelligent intervention. The Laws of Physics always apply, intelligence or no intelligence.
Just for laughs, I decided to check his bibliography, which is very well-organized in terms of what data came from where. Here is the entry under the "Thermodynamics" heading:
Scientific Case for Creation, Henry M. Morris, Creation Life Publishers, Box 1606, El Cajon, CA 92022
How cute. He got his information on thermodynamics from, not a physics text, like me, but from a Creationist text. Does anyone else find this funny?
ARE YOU "BREAKING DOWN"?
Do not put off getting right with God. Do not say to yourself, "Give me time and I'll be okay." Entropy contradicts you. Time will never make you better; time only INCREASES disorder. Are you going to take the awful chance that you are right and the Word of God is wrong? Some things are not a gamble-they are suicide. The testimony of the Universe is against you. Chance offers no safety. Her deck is stacked in favor of the house. All that can bring order out of disorder is greater Power and higher Intelligence. Such is the Second Law-in physics or in life.
Gee, thanks for the kind words of advice, Winkie, but I think I'll pass. It's too bad for him that 4/5 of the world's population isn't Christian. If God is really as all-powerful and all-knowing as the Christians say he is, I'm sure he'll understand why I chose to forgo Genesis in favor of real life.
In his second installment, Winkie has only succeeded in appealing to irrelevant authorities and butchering a physical law. What more could he possibly do in his third and final installment? Turn the page and see.
