Prominent Atheist Has Moment(s) of Goodness Without God

Recently I wrote of criticism directed at Atheists by journalist, Andrew Bolt, following the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. I noted that the comments made by the Atheists were not in keeping with "Being Good Without God."

I have thought a little more about it and, with particular consideration of Professor Richard Dawkins, I now declare there can be moments of goodness from Atheists. Experience now tells me this.

Since writing my blog I had occasion to read a super book "Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Human Genome" written by Dr. J. C. Sanders, Cornell University Professor for more than 25 years.

One section of the book took my thoughts immediately to an interview of Richard Dawkins in a DVD called "From a Frog to a Prince." During the interview Professor Dawkins was asked to give an established example of a mutation actually adding information to an organism. There followed an extended period of silence with the camera showing Professor Dawkins thinking hard for eleven or more seconds without providing an example. I understand the period of silence had to be edited down because it actually went much longer and this did not facilitate good production ends. His eventual answer was no answer at all.

What was Professor Dawkins to do in this situation? He did not have knowledge of a mutation which added information. He was on camera, expected to have an answer and exposed to potential embarrassment. Time was passing at an agonizing rate. To his great credit Professor Dawkins was not prepared to fudge an example. He would not lie his way out of this dilemma. Silence in this situation was commendable and all the more so because you can see from the DVD that he was really trying to think of an example.

I hope readers will agree with my view that the actions of Professor Dawkins in the situation were praiseworthy.

Returning now to the writing of Dr. Sanders I quote an excerpt which underlines the difficulty Professor Dawkins had in producing an example of a mutation adding information to an organism. On pages 26 & 27 of his book Dr. Sanders says the following:

"Bergman (2004)* reviewed the topic of beneficial mutations. Among other things, he did a simple literature search via Biological Abstracts and Medline. He found 453,732 "mutation" hits, but among these only 186 mentioned the word "beneficial" (about 4 in 10,000). When those 186 references were reviewed, the presumed beneficial mutations were only beneficial in a very narrow sense and consistently involved loss-of-function (loss of information)changes. He was unable to find a single example of a mutation which unambiguously created new information. While it is almost universally accepted that beneficial, information-creating mutations must occur, this belief seems to be based upon uncritical acceptance of the Primary Axiom [Evolution] rather than upon actual evidence. I do not doubt there are beneficial mutations, but it is clear they are exceedingly rare - much too rare for genome-building.

In conclusion, mutations appear to be overwhelmingly deleterious, and even when one may be classified as beneficial in some specific sense, it is still usually part of an over-all breakdown and erosion of information. As we will soon examine in greater detail, mutations, even when coupled with selection, cannot generally create new information. The types of variation created by mutation are more like the dings and scratches of life, and cannot be seen as life's spare parts (spare parts are designed). Mutations are the basis for the aging of individuals, and right now they are leading to our death, both yours and mine. Unless selection can somehow stop the erosion of information in the human genome, mutations will not only lead to our personal death, they will lead to the death of our species. We will soon see that natural selection must be able to simultaneously select against extremely large numbers of nearly-neutral nucleotide mutations in order to prevent genomic degeneration."

Sanders and Bergman have identified the problem facing those who promote the evolutionary paradigm. The very mechanism required by the paradigm is not observed in science. Mutations which add information are not evident. Little wonder advocates of evolution struggle when asked to give an example of a mutation adding information to the genome.

It is to be hoped that there will be an outbreak of honesty and the public informed of the genetic reality that humanity is not evolving to a higher state. Rather, it is deteriorating to extinction and, as explained by Dr. Sanders in his book, we are unable to prevent this.

Neil

(* Bergman, J. 2004. Research on the deterioration of the genome and Darwinism: why mutations result in degeneration of the genome. Intelligent design Conference, Biola University. April 22-23.)