Saturday, December 4, 2010

If there's anything that might make Christians understand why denying evolution is a waste of a life, it is this speech by Ken Miller.

Ken Miller proved his brilliance on 2/25/2009 with this speech for a Rhode Island radio station. He claims to be a Christian, but he speaks more eloquently about evolution than any atheist.

This speech will make a person like myself who is nuts about evolution, love evolution even more. And it just might make Christian evolution deniers wonder what they have been missing all their lives.

As far as I know, this is the only place on the internet where somebody bothered to write down the entire speech. Please feel free to copy and paste it if you want to convince a Christian to open his or her eyes to the beauty of evolutionary biology.

You can
click this to listen to it and/or you can read it here:

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I believe in evolution. In America that's a controversial statement. More than half of us reject the theory of evolution, and for some, it's not only wrong, but the source of nearly everything that's wrong with society today. But to a biologist like me evolution isn't politics or sociology. It's a scientific idea. And it might just be the best scientific idea ever.

Darwin's great insight was that the living world today holds the key to our biological past. The fact that he worked in an age before genetics, before the discovery of radioactivity, before the identification of even a single pre-human fossil, makes his work that much more remarkable. Darwin didn't know about the gene, but today we trace the ways in which genes themselves produce evolutionary change. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but today we follow the course of evolution thru our own DNA and the story is unmistakable. Like everything else on this planet, we evolved.

The objections often raised against evolution, like the age of the earth, or their so called gaps in the fossil record, are remarkably easy to answer. And I've done that many times, in books and lectures and twice, even in a federal court. But the evidence isn't what really bothers most Americans about evolution. What bugs them is that evolution says something they just don't want to hear. Namely, that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it, or more accurately, we emerged with it. To them that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, our existence is without purpose, meaning, or value. My concern for those who hold that view, isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology, it's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet, and even this beautiful little state, from the deep forests of Hope Valley to the rich aquatic life of Narragansett Bay.

Understanding that doesn't demean human life, it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.

--
Ken Miller, biology professor at Brown University

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
In a federal court Ken Miller explained one example of the countless lead-pipe evidences for evolution, Human Chromosome Two.

"So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed."

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

In this video Ken Miller explains why Human Chromosome Two is lead-pipe evidence for evolution. He said at the Dover trial, the anti-science creationists said nothing about Human Chromosome Two after Ken Miller
and another witness explained it. The science-deniers didn't want to talk about it."The intelligent design advocates had literally nothing to say (about Human Chromosome Two)"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.