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The alchemists, of course, were looking in the wrong place, expecting to find their secret in physical mixtures or chemical reactions, when transmutation of the elements had to wait for radically new discoveries in nuclear physics. Darwinists are also looking in the wrong place, expecting to explain large-scale evolution by DNA mutations and natural selection, when abundant evidence already indicates that those processes cannot do the job. When biologists eventually unravel the true organizing principles of life, they will quickly put Darwinism behind them.
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Darwinists, like Marxists, tend to be blind to their own commitment to materialistic philosophy. In this regard, Darwinists are more like Marxists than alchemists. So instead of becoming, like alchemy, just a dim recollection (“someone whose name began with D”), Darwinism might, like Marxism, persist for a while (after passing into oblivion everywhere else in the world) – on American college campuses.

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From Wiki on Wells
"Father's [Sun Myung Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
--Jonathan Wells, Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.

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I recently found myself in a conversation with two college undergraduates, both of them seniors in the natural sciences (physics and biochemistry, respectively). At one point we were discussing alchemy, which they knew as a pre-modern attempt to transmute lead into gold. I asked them whether they could name any famous alchemists. They could not, though one of them dimly recalled hearing of “someone whose name began with A.”

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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf

Oh I believe this is how gunpowder was found as well, but they also killed the Emperor in the process of making him immortal, via mercury ingestion.

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

Could you please link to the Hovind version of that professors-on-a-plane tale, Fil? I'm not familiar with the reference, and would appreciate being able to see how these guys plagiarize one another.


Panel from "The Rat's Generation"
On a tangent, Chinese alchemy was largely related to Taoism, and involved in the pursuit of immortality elixirs. One of their discoveries was the distillation of human hormones from urine. They would collect urine from urinals used exclusively by women, and from those used by men, and would distill sex hormones from it. And they'd use the refined hormones to treat disorders. Amazing stuff, done many hundreds of years ago.

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Mr Hovind and the Professor

The anecdote of Hovind's meeting with an unnamed Professor is told as part of the "Lies in Our Textbooks" sermon. The original source was Hovind's own transcript (www.drdino.com). Hovind's words are in bold.

What you are about to read begins as a nice folksy anecdote but upon closer inspection begins to have the appearance of a work of fiction. This story is then used to spring board into a total misrepresentation of the Big Bang model. I should emphasize the current scientific opinion of the age of the universe is 14 billion years rather than the 20 buhillion years which Hovind repeats ad nauseam.

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

Thanks, Fil. Yup, same general pattern, quoting unnamed individuals who just happen to be exceedingly handy straw men.

Why, just the other day, I was on a TWA flight to Ft. Worth, and was sitting next to a research professor in mathematics, who was returning to a Bible school in Texas (the land of queers and steers). He showed me some work he'd done, a formula which he told me proved that life could not have begun by natural chemical means. I took a brief look at the formula, borrowed his pen, and circled three errors: two sign errors, and a decimal point misplaced. The prof gasped, and said, "Oh, crap! Corrected like that, this proves that abiogenesis would happen in almost any reasonable environment." He then had a heart attack and died. But I got his movie headphones and his wallet.

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Originally posted by HalfMooner
Why, just the other day, I was on a TWA flight to Ft. Worth, and was sitting next to a research professor in mathematics, who was returning to a Bible school in Texas (the land of queers and steers). He showed me some work he'd done, a formula which he told me proved that life could not have begun by natural chemical means. I took a brief look at the formula, borrowed his pen, and circled three errors: two sign errors, and a decimal point misplaced. The prof gasped, and said, "Oh, crap! Corrected like that, this proves that abiogenesis would happen in almost any reasonable environment." He then had a heart attack and died. But I got his movie headphones and his wallet.

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