How much do you want to bet that Kelly has never even read the book?
If that's the case, then it certainly would be in keeping with creationist tradition. I know that in "Scientific Creationism" Henry Morris had cited a "1976" NASA document, "Meteor Orbits and Dust (NASA SP-135, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics Vol. 2)", without ever having looked at it, because if he had then he would have immediately seen that it was a 1965 document printed in
1967 and that it was Volume
11 of that series. What Morris had actually done was to simply repeat a claim made by another creationist and then dishonestly claim that creationist's purported source as his own. For that matter, I strongly suspect that that other creationist, Harold Slusher, had similarly gotten the claim from yet another creationist and had himself dishonestly claimed that other creationist's source as his own. I would not doubt that most of the sources cited in
What is Creation Science? are similar in that he had never actually read them either but rather just repeated another creationist's claim. Creationist claims are like urban legends: they just get repeated over and over again.
But I still do not doubt that Kelly is a new-comer and not an experienced creationist. She was too navely confident in her single source to have experienced the truth about it yet; a more experienced creationist would have been more cagey. And I think that she does have a copy of the book, because I suspect that she had lifted some paragraphs from it and inserted them unattributed in some of her posts.
One of the problems with revealing the lies in this book lies in tracking down all the "quotes". For one thing, we need ready access to a sizable library, something that not all of us have. Second, we'd have to figure out what Morris is referring to: in many cases, he summarizes an author's position without even trying to quote him.
But some we can track down. On pages 86-88, Morris writes:
quote:
Regarding the origin of the eye, Darwin wrote these words:
quote:
To suppose that the eye, [with so many parts all working together] ... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
"Absurd in the highest degree." That's Darwin's own opinion of using natural selection to explain the origin of traits that depend on many parts working together.
But that's not what Darwin was saying, as we immediately see when we read the source:
quote:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
(On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life., Chapter 6 - Difficulties on Theory, Organs of extreme perfection and complication.)
IOW, our ability to envision how the eye could have evolved may fail us, but if we were to
think and
reason it out, then we find that it makes perfect sense for the eye to have evolved. And, indeed, Darwin then proceeds to give several examples of those intermediate forms of visual organs where are indeed found to exist in nature
and which are all functional.
IOW, Henry Morris lied about what Darwin was saying. And we'll find that that's not the only lie in this book.
™ Version 4.2
