(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the previous post, I said that one thing that keeps creationists from ‘seeing’ the truth of evolution is that their teleological viewpoint makes them think that species in their current form are the aim of creation. If that is the case, why would god bother making anything else? Hence ancestral forms of current species that are unlike anything that currently exist simply have no place in their model.

Another mental block that prevents them from seeing transitional forms for what they are also arises due to this teleological viewpoint. Here they are misled by the very word ‘transitional’, which suggests something less that perfect and on the way to perfection.

In an online debate with Eugenie Scott, the head of the National Center for Science Education, Ray Comfort makes the following jaw-dropping statement where he illustrates this misconception by pointing to what he thinks is the weakness of the theory of evolution:

Nothing we have in creation is half evolved. The cow has a working udder to make drinkable milk. The bee has working apparatus to make edible honey. We don’t find a half-evolved cow or bee. None of the 1.4 million species on the Earth has half an eye. All have the necessary functioning equipment, from the brain, to the teeth, to the eye, to limbs, to reproductive necessities. Everything that we see in creation is in full working order—from the sun, to the mixture of the air, to the seasons, to fruit trees and vegetables, to the animal kingdom—from the tiny ant right up to the massive elephant.

But not only do we see this mature completion in creation; we see it displayed in the fossil record. It reveals that each animal was complete.
…
I went to the Smithsonian to see the fossils galore, and they were there—millions of fossils that were evidence of special creation. The Smithsonian didn’t have any transitional fossils that proved evolution (staunch believers claim that they have them, but not on display). I also visited the evolution museum in Paris (Grande Galerie de L’Evolution). I took a camera crew, and we spent an hour looking for the evolution exhibit. It didn’t have one. All it had were millions of fossils of fully formed animals that God created (my italics).

This is a perfect example of creationists not ‘seeing’ the evidence for evolution that the rest of us see. It reveals the creationist teleological belief that everything we have now is in its final form and is functioning as designed. The very use of the phrase ‘half evolved’ reveals the deep misconceptions originating from a teleological viewpoint, because that phrase is meaningless unless one sees current species as being in their final, perfectly functioning forms.

In this view, a ‘transitional’ form must be something less than perfectly functioning. What Comfort thinks evolution predicts is that transitional forms should consist of animals malformed in weird ways, like cows with udders that do not produce milk or bees that have not figured out yet how to make honey or human beings with only one leg. This displays a staggering ignorance of the most basic elements of how evolution works. But because Comfort has a teleological view that starts from the end, he cannot see that all of us, even though we are fully functioning and adapted to our present environment, are also at the same time transitional forms even though we don’t know how we will evolve in the future.

Evolution tells us what we evolved from, not what we are evolving to. Every species that lives now or has ever lived is both ‘fully evolved’ (in that it is the result of successful adaptations to its past environments) and a transitional form (in that it will evolve in the future as a result of new environmental pressures). There is no such thing as being ‘fully evolved’ in the Comfort sense of having reached unchanging perfection.

There are only three reasons I can think of for people making the kinds of extraordinary statements that Comfort makes above.

One is, of course, outright stupidity, coupled with ignorance. One should never rule that out.

Another reason is dishonesty, in that they know they are spreading falsehoods about what evolution is but think that saving souls for Jesus compensates for lying to them. One cannot rule that out either. The ranks of religious liars and charlatans are legion.

The third and most charitable explanation, which is what I am suggesting in this series of posts, is that that they simply haven’t been able to make the Gestalt-type switch from the old teleological and Platonic worldview to the modern scientific one. While scientists can look at living organisms and fossils and see them as both fully functioning and transitional, creationists can see only a ‘fully evolved’ object. This is an almost perfect example of what happens when you cannot make the Gestalt switch to see two images while viewing a single object. While scientists can look at the image below and see both a duck and a rabbit, for creationists the duck is still only a duck, and as a consequence, the two pointy-things on the left can only be its bill.

It is quite sad.

POST SCRIPT: Here’s a ‘fully evolved’ ape

From the BBC comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News.