Why do Darwinists consider loss of information a great example of Darwinian evolution??

Yesterday, I read this article by Christopher Hitchens and just sat here shaking my head and wondering wtf?

I mean, Hitchens offers this title for the article...

Losing Sight of Progress
How blind salamanders make nonsense of creationists' claims.

Who in the heck does he think he's fooling? He must certainly know by now exactly how "creationists" are going to address this ridiculous assertion. So, why is it that Darwinists bring up *loss* of information over and over again and insist that these examples somehow "make nonsense of creationists' claims"?

Hitchens writes to his buddy Dawkins to ask if he's on to something...

I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point...

LOL...as if he's the first to point at loss of information and declare that the mysteries surrounding evolution are solved and that "creationists" are IDiots.

News flash Hitchens...Darwinists make these assertions all the time, but I'm sure you're well aware of that. As I've noted several times in the past, Sean Carroll is all over loss of information and equates it with proof of evolution. Sheesh...as if ID supporters question this aspect of evolution in the least.

Sigh...

Cue Casey...

Hitchens, Dawkins and Carroll can have all the evidence they want that the neo-Darwinian mechanism can mess things up, turn genes off, and cause "loss-of-function." No one on any side of this debate doubts that random mutations are quite good at destroying complex features. Us folks on the ID side suspect that random mutation and natural selection aren’t good at doing very much more than that. And the constant citations by Darwinists of "loss of function" examples as alleged refutations of ID only strengthens our argument.

Meanwhile, ID proponents seek to explain a far more interesting aspect of biological history: the origin of new complex biological features. Despite his quotation of Michael Shermer on the evolution of the eye, Hitchens has yet to do that.

Just sayin'...

I was reading the Christian Research Journal the other day, and they included a three page critique of Christopher Hitchen's, "god is not great".

Thought I'd share a bit...

Hitchens argues that religion "poisons everything," but a strong historical case can be made that Christianity in particular has motivated a host of beneficial movements in history.1 I will select only one to discuss. Christianity was at the start and heart of the scientific revolution in Europe, beginning around the middle of the sixteenth century. Given that Hitchens (and other new atheists) think that science has displaced God, this is an ironic truth. Non-Christian philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that modern science was born in a Christian cradle;2 more recently, respected sociologist and historian Rodney Stark has staked the same claim in more detail.3 That Christians were at the forefront of modern science cannot really be disputed. Why? The Christian worldview was the impetus for science for many reasons, but principally because, unlike other worldviews, it deemed nature as good, rational, non-divine, and worthy of investigation and development for the glory of God.4

Atheism, on the other hand, lives on borrowed (or stolen) intellectual capital. It must take the rationality and knowability of nature as a brute and inexplicable given, since nature, according to atheism, was not created or designed by a rational Mind. To atheists, mindless matter precedes the appearances of minds. Minds turn up for no reason. Our reasoning just happens to have the resources for developing sophisticated scientific theories about the universe and ingenious ways to harness nature's potential through technology. One atheist mathematician, who puzzled over the success of his discipline in a Godless cosmos, wrote an article on the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."5 Given a naturalistic/atheistic worldview, as he observed, there is no reason to believe that mathematics should correspond with the objective world so wonderfully; yet it does. The idea of a coherent and knowable universe is unreasonable for atheism, but it is perfectly reasonable for those who believe in God as Creator and Designer.

1. Rodney Start, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), and Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), chaps. 5-10.

2. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York; The MacMillan Company, 1926), chap. 1.

3. See Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformation, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 2.

4. See Kenneth Samples, Without a Doubt (Grand Rapids Zondervan, 2004), 187-94, for a powerful explanation of this.

5. Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, 1 (February 1960).