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How Scott Walker Could Have Answered the Evolution Question

Liberals are good at gotcha questions so they can use the answers as sound bites and then build a straw man so they set him ablaze on the evening news for months and then pull out the edited and liberal interpreted sound bite to ridicule the guy.

Gov. Scott Walker was asked about evolution.

Speaking at the Chatham House foreign policy think tank London, Walker was asked: “Are you comfortable with the idea of evolution? Do you believe in it?”

“For me, I am going to punt on that one as well,” he said. “That’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another. I am going to leave that up to you. I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution.”…

He added when pressed: “I love the evolution of trade in Wisconsin.”

He could have said, first, my views on evolution won’t pick your pocket. My view on evolution won’t use the government to oppress you, tax the productivity out of you, regulate your business to hopeless levels, force you into a government-run insurance scam, run up the deficit, and use Executive Orders to bypass the Constitution and Congress.

Of course, this won’t be enough for the intrepid questioner.

I would then explain how the word evolution is misused. Everybody, anti-evolutionists included, believes that changes within species are real and observable. But this is not the heart of the creation-evolution debate.

Evolutionists must show that nothing became something. They have to throw everything they know is true about science and proclaim that at least one time in our history spontaneous generation – abiogenesis – really happened. This they cannot prove, especially since it’s one of the foundation stones of modern-day biology. Life cannot arise from non-life.

Then there is the information problem. Where did the coding come from that organizes and sustains life? DNA is more complex than any computer program ever devised, and yet no programmer would ever suggest that computer programs spontaneously come into being. The same, of course, is true of the hardware that the programs run on.

Then there is the moral problem. How does the evolutionist account for morality in a matter-only, evolved world?

I would quote something like the following from renowned atheist Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False:

Thomas Nagel ultimately offered a simple but profound objection to Darwinism: “Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.” In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?

I might then move on to quote from Richard Dawkins:

In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.1

Next gotcha question, please.

  1. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133. []
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