You're given a flyer about a talk, "Information: The Key to Understand (
sic) Nature and Science". The fellow making the presentation, "some head of Information Technology" from "some university". It's an event organized by the engineering department of the university in collaboration with the foreign students department.
Now, thinking that it must be interesting, you turn up for the talk. Much to your surprise, you discover that, heck, the talk has nothing to do with "Information Technology". The fellow turns out to be some proponent of creationism, who has the nerves to refute Darwin's theory of evolution when he appears to be ignorant of the subject.
Unfortunately, I was one of the unaware idiots who attended the talk. My only consolation is, there's a bigger idiot who draws ridiculous conclusions based on flawed assumptions. A friend suggested that I should file a formal complaint to the university but considering that I was quite amused by his so-called "theorems" (so the session wasn't a total waste of time), I decided not to. Nevertheless, I strongly think that it was irresponsible of the organizers in coming up with such a misleading title for the talk.
That night, I Googled for the professor's name. My search returns an entry of that fellow's page on Wikipedia. (You've gotta love Wiki!)
Werner Gitt, as I found out, is a famous proponent of creationism from Germany, whose theories, however, are rejected in the scientific community as pseudoscience. (It didn't come as any surprise, though.)
The pdf version of his book, "
In the Beginning was Information" is available online. So, I'm not going to elaborate too much on his flawed theories. Simply speaking, he dimissed evolutionism, claiming that macro-evolution (a fish turning into a frog, for instance) is impossible.
Why?
Because a creature who has the DNA of a fish cannot possibly turn into a frog. The DNA is designed to do only what it is supposed to do. Darwin knew nothing about DNA and therefore drew wrong conclusions. Oh yeah, neither do you, Professor Gitt. Go read up on natural selection. For goodness sake, don't make assumptions when you have no understanding at all about the subject.
Besides, the complexity of the DNA proves that it must have come from an designer. And this is whom we call, the creator.Oh wait, Professor Gitt, that sounds familiar. Ah, the
watchmaker analogy! But isn't that obviously self-contradicting? It means, to be able to design such a complex thing as the DNA, the creator must be complex enough, and therefore has to be designed by something
even more complex.
Aha! That is why the creator is omnipotent!Erm, is that even a valid argument?
And, considering that the DNA contains an astronomical amount of information, we can also conclude that the sender (as in the "sender" of the "information") is omniscient.Uh, sigh...
Unfortunately, not much time was allocated for discussion so there wasn't any chance to point out his flawed views and see what he had to say.
Professor Gitt brought along enough copies of the translated version of his book to give away for free. (Again,) when I Googled for the publisher
いのちのことば社, it turned out that the company publishes books for churches.
Ah, now that explains everything! I wonder when are they going to stop misleading innocent minds.
Atheist Resources:
Free InquiryReligion is BullshitRichard Dawkins.net
ID number: 5181977899455588562
Permalink: http://escapist5.blogspot.com/2008/06/je-viens-crire-en-franais.html
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