I guess this is what retired professors are reduced to, flogging their ideas over whatever little venue will accept them for publication (I’m not retired yet, but feel free to poke fun at the irony in a few years), but you know, you’d expect a little more sophistication and logic. You ought to learn something from those years of professing, after all. But not Jerry Hopkins! He’s a retired history professor who writes these amazing little ditties for the opinion pages of the Marshall, Texas newspaper. He’s got a recognizable style as a creationist: he makes a stupid assertion, and then plows ahead repeating the assertion until, apparently, the reader is supposed to believe it.
Evolution is not an empirical science. It is a matter of absolute faith. In fact, it cannot be proven by any exercise of science. It cannot be demonstrated by observation, tested or otherwise verified. It is unproved and has no way of being proved. The transmutation of one species into another has never been observed and will not, because no man can live the millions of years necessary to verify the process. Evolution should not be classified as a theory, because by definition a theory must be testable so as to justify that designation.
All it takes is one observation or test to shoot this claim down. Fortunately for Jerry, though, he’s so ignorant of the field he’s critiquing that he isn’t aware of any counterexamples. But it’s easy to find them: I just opened the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and here’s one interesting example: “Breeding phenology drives variation in reproductive output, reproductive costs, and offspring fitness in a viviparous ectotherm”. They’re looking at the effects of climate change on all these parameters of reproduction in a lizard, Zootoca vivipara. It’s got observations, measurements, experiments, and is most definitely an empirical study of how organisms change in response to a changing environment. It takes less than a minute to look this stuff up, but apparently Jerry is extraordinarily busy in his retirement.
Oh, but there’s the problem: he thinks a researcher has to live for millions of years to directly and personally observe a phenomenon, or it didn’t happen. This is a very peculiar attitude for a professor of history to take. He must be very old to have lived through all of the history he taught in his classes.
Evolution is a speculative philosophy, a religious construct devised by man to exclude God. Evolution exists outside the realm of science and experimentation. It is not questioned or doubted in the scientific or academic worlds. Evolution reigns supreme in universities, even those who claim to be Christian and supposedly believe the Bible. It has become “a sacred cow” that no one challenges or opposes. If you question evolution, you are immediately condemned as an ignoramus, a religious fanatic and uneducated. Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics have lost their positions, tenure and respect when they have merely used the forbidden term “intelligent design.”
But Darwin, to name one prominent example, was agnostic, not at all anti-religious, and he suffered years of anguish because he feared his ideas would be used to attack the religious people he loved. There are lots of scientists who believe in God and yet also accept evolution — Jerry dodges that one by calling them those who claim to be Christian
. I guess I’ll have to break the news to Ken Miller that sorry, guy, you’re actually an atheist, according to Jerry Hopkins of Marshall, Texas. Welcome to the club!
Jerry’s argument could be stronger if he named a few of those Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics
who have been fired for using the words intelligent design
. I don’t know of any; if one of my colleagues at my university proposed it, I’d probably give them an epic eye-roll, and that’s about it. Maybe I’d challenge them to a public argument, if I thought they were doing a disservice to the students. They probably would lose my respect, but you don’t get to enforce respect.
The philosophy of evolution is not scientific. It is a religious belief. Evolution is a worldview, a belief system, built on atheistic presuppositions without proof intellectually or materially. This religious philosophy is based on religious presuppositions held to by faith. This philosophy is an assault on the biblical doctrine of creation and the reality of God as Creator. Romans 1:18-32 clearly holds that unregenerate man rejects God as Creator, defying God as sovereign, seeking to “hold down” this special revelation. Verse 25 clearly shows man substituting willfully his “new reality” in vain reasoning, accepting a God-defying worldview that worships and serves the creature and creation rather than the Creator God. This is how Paul stated it — “who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:25). The use of the prepositional phrase “more than the Creator” (πаρá τòγ κτίσαντα) uses the preposition πаρá denoting a position “alongside of” or “parallel to” or “adjacent to” as its basic sense (based on S. E. Porter’s Idioms of the Greek New Testament). Such an expression indicates that man deliberately and hostilely rejects God as Creator-Designer. Man has “exchanged” truth of God for “the lie of godlessness.”
I’m going to take a wild guess here and figure that Jerry Hopkins was a professor at a Bible college, just from that glurge of Bible vomit.
While there is a philosophy of evolution, it’s more diverse than he realized, and it’s definitely not built on atheistic presuppositions. There’s no such thing as proof in science, except in the sense of disproving claims. Nowhere in the long list of things I was expected to know to earn a degree in my field is there a statement that “there is no god”. There is a pragmatic assumption that one will provide evidence in support of a claim…and “there is a god” is one of those claims that is hard to support. Provide that evidence, and we’ll incorporate it into our theories. Them’s the rules.
This explains why many academics and modern thinkers object to the use of “intelligent design” and reject any discussion of God or special creation. As I prepare this, I’m thinking of how some of you will respond because of my experiences in the past when I’ve raised this issue in classes, academic settings or in columns such as this. I anticipate that I will be charged with unscientific thinking, anti-intellectualism and foolishness. My plea is that we civilly discuss the alternatives and come to a reasonable and sensible conclusion to explain what exists and what we can observe. Consider all the marvels in our bodies — our brains, eyes, ears, hands, feet, sex organs, lungs, digestive system, nerves, cells and many other things. There is no way these marvels could have come into being by chance or thoughtless actions. The “Big Bang” could not have created anything. Evolution is not a reasonable explanation and has no scientific proof supporting it. I cannot accept it. I confess that I accept God’s creative design of all things and believe this is a more acceptable explanation than an irrational and unprovable “theory” like evolution.
No, we object to “intelligent design” because you have to provide good evidence for the existence of your hypothesized intelligence. Got any? Listing “marvels” isn’t it, because we know how hands, for instance, evolved. We’ve mapped out the genes that generate the pattern, we have extant organisms that demonstrate the range of morphological variation, we have the fossils. The evidence contradicts your claim that there is no way they could have evolved, because…yes, way.
Evolution opens the door for all kinds of irrational and illogical ideas regarding human beings and the natural realm. This is why the first eleven chapters of Genesis are so important for us to understand who we are and what really exists and how it came to be. There are critically important elements that God’s creative acts establish and confirm. In our foolish and irrational day we need to return to God’s creative order and plan or we will persist in idiocy and idolatry as described in Romans chapter 1.
Right. You believe a few short chapters in a religious text accurately and completely describe the origin of all the biological diversity on planet Earth, but we’re the irrational and illogical
ones.
Uh-oh, here it comes: Jerry Hopkins’ ultimate message is that everyone must live their lives how he tells them to, and anything else is icky.
The assault and denial of human sexuality as defined by God must be clearly understood. Homosexuality is a sin issue, not a civil rights issue. It demonstrates the insidious, immoral efforts the Devil has triggered to discredit God and His Word. A primary impetuous in this regard is the philosophy of evolution that opens the door to any emerging sexuality or perversion. Genesis 1:27-28 states simply that God created man in His own image, male and female. God blessed them and said they were to be fruitful, to multiply and replenish the earth, subduing it and having dominion over all — fish, birds and every living thing. Genesis 2:24 clearly stresses that “a person shall leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh. Homosexuality has never been and will never be something God intended for the human race. It maybe falsely advanced under evolutionary thinking, but it cannot be affirmed by God or His Word. This is merely one example of the flawed assumptions that evolutionary thinking brings people to embrace.
Jerry Hopkins just doesn’t like what other people do with their genitals, and thinks his Holy Book justifies his opinion. I don’t believe in any gods, but if they existed, I’d trust what they wrote in the big book of nature to what some blue-nosed prig claims is written in archaic language on a few pieces of paper. And Nature seems to celebrate sex in endless variety.
If the universe was intelligently designed reproduction would not be so messy and ridicilous.
The frequent cases of embryonic development leading to people being gay or having gender dysmorphia are among the least weird things. Just look at some arthropod genitalia!
Another Bible-fucking, primitive screwhead ranting about his nonexistent cosmic tyrant and denying objective reality. Great, my already high blood pressure needed a dangerous spike this morning.
Pardon me, I need to find something to beat with a blunt object before I have an aneurysm.
There. I was wondering what he had been a professor of (my only guess had been “fly tying”), and of course that spew of scholarly-shaped pinhead-angel-dancing-only-expressed-in-a-dead-language points to him having been that most useful of all creatures, a biblical apologist.
Thanks for the news, PZ! Can’t wait to tell our parish priest. ;-)
When was the last time a creationist came up with a new “argument” against evolution? I’ve only become acquainted with the wonderful world of online fundamentalism twenty years or so ago, and I think I haven’t laughed at something truly new for about the same time.
Nothing with a conscience would have created the world we live in. Many if not most living things spend their lives on the brink of starvation, are ruthlessly and brutally torn apart by predators, watch their offspring get ruthlessly and brutally torn apart by predators, suffer severe pain from medical conditions for which they have no access to medical care. And that’s even before we get to all the horrible things people do to one another.
It speaks very badly of God that this vale of tears is apparently the best he could do.
Since he is so concerned with scientific-ness, why does he cite the Bible? It tells us that whales and fowl (Gen 1:20-22) appeared before land animals (Gen 1:24-25). That is known to be wrong.
His Bible also tells us that YHWH lied to Adam (Gen 2:16-17) while the serpent told the truth to Eve (Gen 3:4-5). He wants us to worship and obey a liar?
I presume he believes in the common modern concept of God held by Christians of his sort, that God is omnipotent and omniscient. If that is the case Satan is allowed to “discredit God and His Word” at God’s indulgence. Of course if you say that to him he’ll start babbling about God’s unknowable plan, free will, and so on. He might even use the term theodicy if he’s really got some book learning.
Jerry Hopkins :
.. Which is a religious belief that is based on religious presuppositions held to by faith.
So Its Okay If You Are
RepublicanChristianist basically in this guys mind? Guessing he’s actually probly a Repug too. Like them he seems to be so much prohjection and so much hypocrisy hereHeh. I bet Hopkins never had a studen like this.
*student
Soooooooooooo, Jesus and the miracles in the Bible did not happen unless he was there to witness them?
i like how he snuck in the Big Bang theory as an aside, and claims it couldn’t create anything.
well, um, the Big Bang literally created everything we observe in the universe.
Yes, he was a history professor at East Texas Baptist University there in Marshall.
The Bible doesn’t mention god’s sexuality specifically, but we do have one example from which we can deduce that god was an ephebophile. Of course, any sexual acts he performed with men would not produce offspring as evidence. I welcome ex-prof Hopkins to prove that negative.
“Genesis 1:27-28 states simply that God created man in His own image, male and female.”
So God is a hermaphrodite?
From Wikipedia: “ In 2015 the university applied for and received an exception to Title IX allowing it to discriminate against LGBT students for religious reasons.”. That tells me all I need to know.
The first sentence is a lie. I’m sure it goes downhill from there.
Evolution is very much both a historical and an empirical science. We can set up experiments and watch evolution in action and do so often.
There are huge numbers of examples of experiments in evolution. A few are listed in Wikipedia.
.2. There are always natural experiments in evolution that we can watch in real time.
Every 18 months on average a new virus emerges in the human population. The last one of note was…Covid-19 virus. It jumped from an animal species, evolved to adapt to humans, become more transmissable, and is now evolving to evade our human defenses of antiviral drugs and vaccines.
And that is why the latest vaccine is coming out in a few weeks, designed against the latest circulating variants.
Was Jerry Hopkins asleep for the last 5 years while this virus appeared from nowhere, took over the news media headlines, and killed 1.4 million American, some of them my friends.
Brony, No. 16, if you carefully read the text it’s worse than that. The text says, “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them.” So, Adam was made in God’s image but Eve was not. Which is one of several reasons for why man is to rule over women.
Never happened.
They never lost their tenure or positions.
They did however lose any respect for their intelligence and honesty. Respect isn’t a right, it is an earned privilege and they forfeited that.
There have been a lot of purges of evolutionary biologists at bible colleges though. At a lot of bible colleges, they had witch hunts and systematically hunted down evolutionary biologists and fired them.
Here is a partial list I made back in the days of the Dover trial.
I thought I’d post all the firings of professors and state officials for teaching or accepting evolution.
2 professors fired, Bitterman (SW CC Iowa) and Bolyanatz (Wheaton)
1 persecuted unmercifully Richard Colling (Olivet)
1 persecuted unmercifully for 4 years Van Till (Calvin)
1 attempted firing Murphy (Fuller Theological by Phillip Johnson IDist)
1 successful death threats, assaults harrasment Gwen Pearson (UT Permian)
1 state official fired Chris Comer (Texas)
1 assault, fired from dept. Chair Paul Mirecki (U. of Kansas)
1 killed, Rudi Boa, Biomedical Student (Scotland)
Death Threats Eric Pianka UT Austin and the Texas Academy of Science engineered by a hostile, bizarre IDist named Bill Dembski
Death Threats Michael Korn, fugitive from justice, towards the UC Boulder biology department and miscellaneous evolutionary biologists.
Death Threats Judge Jones Dover trial. He was under federal marshall protection for a while
Up to 12 with little effort. Probably there are more. I turned up a new one with a simple internet search. Haven’t even gotten to the secondary science school teachers.
@20: Alexander Winchell fired from Vanderbilt University, 1878
If you have time for a good laugh, here is Dr. David A. DeWitt at Answers in Genesis bloviating about Adam’s skin color
It takes him a long time to get to the money line about what the Bible actually says:
He must be very old to have lived through all of the history he taught in his classes.
One should probably ask what he’s been teaching as “history”…
That is a easy one.
The Big Boat genocide and worldwide flood happened during the Egyptian Third Dynasty. That was when the Egyptians were building the pyramids.
After the worldwide flood, the Egyptians continued building the pyramids, not realizing that they had been underwater and were in fact, dead.
More biblical history from a reputable source. The Onion 2009
@13
Technically, in a flat universe, the big bang didn’t create anything. Because, at least on average, the universe doesn’t exist (assuming existence is an energetic state). But due to quantum randomness some places actually exist and other places negative exist, so it balances out.
So, if you believe quantum physics, god not only plays dice with the universe – he bets using the universe as collateral. Which probably means he’s a hedge fund manager. Explains a lot.
@19. awomanofnoimportance : Then there’s the mythology around Adam’s first wife Lilith..
Source : https://www.themarysue.com/the-pop-culutre-history-of-lilith/
Theree was another old article – blog post type thingy I recall reading from someone here many years ago but I can’t find it again now, sadly despite much searching. My Google-fu has failed me.
@15. ardipithecus :
OTOH, God (or, ok, in some versions an angel) “wrestled” with Jacob all night and changed his name afterwards.. Suggestive. Bisexual King David was a huge favourite of Yahweh’s and God seemed fine with his very devoted, intense love affair with King Saul’s son Jonathan.See :
https://thebrickbible.com/legacy/david_vs_saul/jonathan_and_david/1s20_17.html ( 1 Samuel 20:17)
Plus : https://thebrickbible.com/legacy/david_vs_saul/jonathan_and_david/1s20_42a.html ( 1 Samuel 20:42) Oh and of course 1 Samuel 20:41
Oh and aren’t Christians always claiming their god loves absolutely everyone making him the most pan-sexual of pan-sexuals? Lord of lord, polyiest of polyies…
@20.raven : Tahks. That’s quite a list.
He’s being a bad Christian by promoting an unbiblical ideology. The Bible in Ecclesiastes 1:9 says “there’s nothing new under the sun.” This means there’s no such thing as an “emerging sexuality or perversion” because they’ve all been around since the dawn of man.
Once upon a time “professor” meant something about your intellect and knowledge and wisdom. Not any more in America it seems. And “doctor” has also been devalued (note Hovind’s “three doctorates”).
Religion is going to be the death of America, one way and another.
Michael Behe has contributed two significant studies on what he has termed “irreducible complexity”. Oh I knew that that was going to be in there.
IX-103 @25:
I’d love to know what you think “negative existence” means.
If you want to expose creationists’ ignorance, it’s not a great idea to demonstrate your own.
@30 👍
Oh noes! Homosexuality is sin! And God hates sin and homosexuals. But then, why does God create so many homosexuals? And of course as Jerry Hopkins would agree, God is omnipotent. Then God could waggle his magic beard and change all those evil homosexuals into good heterosexuals. Why then are there homosexuals? Either God does not exist. Or does not really care. Or is not as claimed omnipotent. If God does exist, and is omnipotent as claimed, God does not care about homosexuals. So if God does not care, why should anybody else care? And why then does Jerry Hopkin’s opinion matter at all?
If homosexuality is a sin and is evil, and God exists and can eliminate homosexuality, and does not, evil exists because of God. Who then is evil and not good.
IX-103 @ 25
I assume you mean that both sides of the equation balance out, making the universe a ‘free lunch’. I forgot the name of the physicist that realised it, but according to the anecdote, he told it to Einstein during a walk. Einstein got so startled he almost walked into a busy street.
Appart from the direct message about sexuality at the end there, the words are pretty much echoed all over facebook in creationist groups.
Evolution is a religion.
There is no evidence for evolution.
Science purposely denies god.
Spin, rinse, repeat.
Here is what the Fount of Almost All Knowledge says about the Zero-energy universe.
It’s not impossible but right now the available data makes it “inconclusive” or not proven.
From the same Wikipedia article.
I can read this but not really understand it.
“…space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.[14]”
What does this mean anyway?
Is this all the gravitational potential energy in the universe? Or is it entropy?
If so, this implies that the Big Bang is going to end in a Big Crunch.
Good historical professor turned creationist dummy. How do you like that?
raven @36: Hawking is simply asserting something without evidence. And saying “It’s another law of nature” is bullshit. He always had a tendency to “simplify” to the point of incoherence.
I recommend Sean Carroll’s article; Energy is not conserved.
Hopkin’s previous employer, East Texas Bible University, is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas (part of the Southern Baptists). Only one course in the current biology course listing mentions “evolution” in the short description: “BIOL 4306 Population Ecology (3)This course focuses on microevolutionary and macroevolutionary processes that occur within populations that lead to genotypic and phenotypic changes. Topics include natural selection, effects of selection on a variable characteristics, processes that lead to speciation, and the history of life on Earth”. At least one of the bio professors touts intelligent design.
Current history & political science department has 3 faculty (2 of whom are probably married to each other given a common family name and that they both got their PhDs from Texas Tech within a year of each other). Hopkins’ Ph.D.: University of Kentucky – ’86. Thesis title: Billy Graham and the Race Problem, 1949-1969. The abstract ends “The primary conclusion of this study is that Billy Graham ultimately could not dissociate himself from the racial status quo. He was unable to realize the plight of blacks and criticized them for challenging the inequities in American society. His opposition to the civil rights protest movement marked his failure as a social reformer. “
Ah, now we get to the quux of the matter. This guy’s emotional trigger is anything that threatens human supremacy and nature-apartheid, challenging his status as a “temporarily embarrassed angel” rather than “just” a thing of meat and bone … as if that’s so terrible a thing to be.
Bingo!
Also, that guy appears to be a raging homophobe. Not sure why he thinks evolutionary science promotes homosexuality though …
Bekenstein Bound, go more meta.
“Homosexuality has never been and will never be something God intended for the human race. It maybe falsely advanced under evolutionary thinking, but it cannot be affirmed by God or His Word.”
Evilutionists: it’s natural.
Goddists: it’s sinful.
‘If you’re not against it, you’re for it’ type of thinking, much as being pro-choice becomes being pro-abortion in their minds.
(I’m familiar with that sort of cognitive error)
I’ve newer seen impetuous used as a noun before.
Oh well.
@ 38
This opinion brought to you by Rob Grigjanis; a physicist who published a handful of unremarkable papers 30 years ago and never accomplished anything of note. In reference to a man described thus:
Form your own opinions of who is “incoherent” is all I’m sayin’.
@ 41 John Morales
Did you have any sort of opinion you wanted to express? Because your comment consists of 5 paragraphs:
One: an instruction
Two: a quote
Three: a supposed paraphrase
Four: an assertion
Five: a parenthetical assertion of alleged personal experience
… none of which takes any particular stance.
Did you have any type of argument or other worthwhile contribution you forgot to share or is that all you’ve got?
Silentbob, still at it?
—
I am responding to an implicit question; that you think there’s no opinion there is informative.
“Not sure why he thinks evolutionary science promotes homosexuality though …” was the prompt.
#41 directly and explicitly addresses that.
I can elaborate, even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_are_either_with_us,_or_against_us
—
I responded to an implicit question.
(You think I’m wrong?)
Rob, I respect.
He knows his stuff.
You know that. He and I know you know that, and Mano knows that, in that blog.
Anyway. Pretty obvious what you are attempting.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
—
He’s too mature (by certain standards), but I’m certainly not.
“I’d love to know what you think “negative existence” means.”
is what Rob wrote, in regards to the claim he explicitly quoted:
“at least on average, the universe doesn’t exist (assuming existence is an energetic state). But due to quantum randomness some places actually exist and other places negative exist, so it balances out.”
The responses were, well, hardly relevant, and rather missed the point.
(I noticed how the actual person to whom Rob responded did not attempt dispute that)
I’m not nearly enough of a physicist to judge Hawking’s statements about space itself being a store of “negative energy;” but I can’t help thinking phrases like “negative energy” and “negative existence” are, to put it charitably, unconstitutionally vague; as is this idea of “zero” that everything supposedly adds up to.
Raging Bee @48: There’s no problem with negative energy, just depends where you define the zero energy.
For example, for a two-body system with gravity, the zero of energy is usually defined as that of a configuration in which the two bodies have zero initial relative velocity, and are an infinite distance apart (or far enough for gravity to be negligible). Now consider a configuration in which the initial relative velocity is again zero, but the bodies are a distance R apart.
Because gravity is attractive, it would take energy to pull the bodies apart to a distance at which gravity is negligible. That means the energy of the system is negative. In fact, it is −GmM/R, where m and M are the masses of the two bodies. That also applies to any gravitationally bound system (circular or elliptic orbit). All down to gravity being always attractive.
“That also applies to any gravitationally bound system (circular or elliptic orbit)”. What I meant was that bound systems have negative energy, not that the energy is always −GmM/R. For circular orbits, it’s −GmM/2R, where R is the radius; for elliptical orbits, it’s −GmM/2a, where a is the semi-major axis.