Why even bother? The risks of vaccination are NOT zero. Low, yes. Zero, no.
But what do you “buy” with that risk? Maybe you keep your job. Maybe you stay in college. OK, I get those calculations. But they are not medical calculations!
From a straight medical perspective, I just don’t take the risk (for me). But there are several factors in play, here.
not reasonable to think that all this “just happened by accident.” I really don’t have enough faith in Darwinism to believe that.
(h/t: Instapundit)
YOU have 18 minutes to watch this, so do… I think that it is quite clear that there are often micro changes to animal structure. Every animal breeder for thousands of years has known THAT! Environment, broadly conceived, drives these micro-changes.
And an intelligent agent (the breeder) can decide what traits are most important, here. But, at heart, we are NOT talking simply about “woolier sheep.”
Yeah, and we haven’t even gotten to the “Cambrian explosion” and the Burgess shale…
The issue is that we have yet to find macro, complex, multi-step changes. Sure, I can go from wolf to pug, but they are both still dogs! Wolves are not now alligators. Where is the example of a proto-dog suddenly growing feathers and then taking flight? C’mon!
And what “survival value” would such a proto-dog with feathers have? What good would half a mammalian eye be?
Now once an eye already exists I can breed for a certain color or a certain acuity. Yeah, DUH!
But THAT is not the question. The question is how the eye got there in the first place! The issue is not the survival of the fittest. It is the arrival of the fittest!
We need to take a bit of a hard-nosed scientific stance, here. No more early 19th-century Darwinian fairy tales and catechisms!
and a bit of a theoretical statistician. So for me, I want to look at odds and probabilities. That’s why I am skeptical of completely naturalistic explanations for life. Of course there is micro evolution. Animal breeders have known THAT for thousands of years. DUH!
But where is the evidence for macro evolution? It’s one thing to produce woolier sheep or a certain color of eyes through breeding selection. It is quite another to go from sheep to birds! I mean, just where does the information for the new structures come from? And why are there no intermediary steps in the fossil record? (See: Cambrian explosion)
RANDOMNESS? That hardly seems likely! We need to look at odds and probabilities, here.
“His experiments revealed that, for every one DNA sequence that generates a short functional protein fold of just 150 amino acids in length, there are 10(77) nonfunctional combinations—combinations that will not form a stable three-dimensional protein fold capable of performing a specific biological function.
—Stephen Meyer. The Return Of The God Hypothesis
And remember, just one protein fold won’t do it. Many are needed for an even rudimentary function. And all these protein folds have happen at once–I mean, what survival value is there in 1/3 of a mammalian eye?
See, material evolution scribes tend to blithely wave off such objections with a casual, “over millions of years.” But that just won’t do. There simply is not enough time (statistical space) in the 13 billion years of the universe for that to be even remotely likely.
No, as a scientist who is a bit wedded to statistics and probability, I honestly don’t have enough faith to go down that materialist road…