Luc De Vos, who must be somewhere in his early 40s, is the singer of a Flemish rock band Gorki (or Gorky) since 15 years or so, and since a few years, he regularly writes a column in a free local magazine, Zone 09 (after the telephone zone number). His take on Creationism is quite refreshing, in my opinion, and as I don't think you'll ever find any other copy of what he wrote anywhere on internet, I've chosen to translate an excerpt of last week's column into English myself, and post it here.
He tends to write in a personal language that doesn't translate too well, but I've tried my best to keep the atmosphere of how he writes, intact.
He writes:
The theories of Darwin are based on the principle of trial and error. For example, on the North Pole, there are only white rabbits. Somebody must have tried out brown rabbits there once, but they were too obvious in plain view, more than healthy, from a wolf's perspective. Therefore they had made an attempt (trial), which turned out to be a mistake (error). I'm posing it a bit simply here, but I'm merely reproducing what school and the media have tricked me into believing.
According to the creationists, people who believe in creation by a god, that principle of Darwin is just too simple to be true. They claim that for example an eye, to take an apparent organ, couldn't have come into existence by trial and error. The eye is put together so brilliantly, that it must have been developed somewhere in the lab of a brilliant thinker, a divine architect, a space being, a cosmic technical engineer.
My take on this is that these creationists with this position do degrade our dear friend God, because let's call him God now, for keeping things simple, down to the level of some kind of mad professor that, somewhere in a lab with all sorts of tubes and Bunsen burners and magic potions in bubbling little pots, somewhere in the corner of the universe, is doing some scientific experiments and, just for fun, casually invented the universe and the earth, created people too who now, with all of their misery, roam on the face of the earth. This is the God they worship, because he's so clever, and on top of that, he has unlimited powers.
These creationists really must have a low opinion of God. In my view, they see him as some kind of Merlyn the Wizard who plays puppet theatre with us, a magician really, who charms white rabbits out of his hat and not brown ones, because those are not so cute, perhaps?
Perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with Flemish, but is this argument basically "Creationism is a weak belief because it either has to deny natural selection or accept it and thus assume that a creator makes imperfect creations?"
If so, that's a weak argument itself for failing to address (or even evidently realize the existence of) millennia of debate over the nature of free agency. Even Spinoza and the Deists addressed that idea centuries before Darwin's birth!
(If that's not the argument, I really didn't follow it and would appreciate elaboration!)
Re:I Don't Follow the Argument
pudge on 2006-09-20T02:54:05
I don't see anything in that translation that implies the dichotomy you see. And I don't think "Creationism," properly defined by the people who self-identify as Creationists, accepts natural selection anyway (not for humans, at the least).
And frankly, though, I somewhat agree with this, and I believe recently some Catholic bishops or somesuch came out and said much the same thing: if God is omnipotent, who's to say he didn't work through natural selection? Maybe he set up a great big complex domino set, knowing how the dominos would fall. He placed the matter just right so that when the Big Bang happened, it was inevitable that the Earth would form as it did, that life would come to exist on it, and through "natural selection," that man would come to exist.
I don't know one way or another, but nothing I've read about God tells me that's implausible (although, many of my conservative Christian friends would argue that this simply doesn't jive with the Genesis account, a point on which I am unsure).
Re:I Don't Follow the Argument
Aristotle on 2006-09-20T08:59:41
The strongest argument I have heard about why the believing in the bible must necessarily preclude acceptance of natural selection is that if you do not believe that Adam and Eve literally existed as per biblical account, then you have to dilute the story of the first sin, and thus all the tenets that follow from, such as the necessity for a saviour.
But neither that nor anything else in Genesis seems to preclude natural selection as the vehicle for the creation of all else.
Of course, a conscientous skeptic will wonder why His personal intervention would be necessary for the creation of man, when natural selection was perfectly sufficient for all else.
Few topics are so incredibly resistant against all attempts to reconcile the positions.
Re:I Don't Follow the Argument
pudge on 2006-09-20T15:49:02
The strongest argument I have heard about why the believing in the bible must necessarily preclude acceptance of natural selection is that if you do not believe that Adam and Eve literally existed as per biblical account, then you have to dilute the story of the first sin, and thus all the tenets that follow from, such as the necessity for a saviour.
But that's a fallacy, because you can believe Adam and Eve literally existed, but that they account of how they were created glossed over the details.
But neither that nor anything else in Genesis seems to preclude natural selection as the vehicle for the creation of all else.
Correct, IMO; some people believe natural selection may well be how all but man came into being.
Of course, a conscientous skeptic will wonder why His personal intervention would be necessary for the creation of man, when natural selection was perfectly sufficient for all else.
No one is saying it was necessary, though, just that it's how God chose to do it.
