Richard Dawkins documentaries...?

Question

At the end of "The Root of all Evil" Dawkins narration alludes to "the next program" describing religion as a virus that attacks the minds of the young. What's the name of this program?

Answer 1

Something like "The Virus of Faith", its (or was, not sure if it still is) on google video

Answer 2

Why do they call it Awake Magazine when it should be called ZZZZZZZZ Magazine?

Answer 3

--Richard Dawkins has his own evolutionary virus that attacks the minds of all people in propagating a fraudulent science!

THE FOLLOWING is a dialogue concerning the teaching of evolution as fact in public schools:

*** g74 9/22 p. 17 Do I Have to Believe Evolution? ***

IN RECENT years some states and school boards in the United States have raised objections to evolution being taught as a fact in public schools. One of these states is California.

The California State Board of Education decides what is to be included in public school textbooks. But it receives recommendations from groups of experts in various fields. One of these groups is the State Advisory Committee of Science Education. It submitted a framework for science instruction in the state’s public schools.
The Advisory Committee recommended that the subject of evolution should be taught as a fact, not as just a theory. However, the Board of Education did not agree. It ordered that evolution be taught as a theory instead of a fact. It also directed that in textbooks creation be mentioned as another explanation of the origin of life that had some scientific backing.

The science committee reacted explosively, saying, in effect: ‘There’s no question that evolution is a fact. We see examples of it every day. No responsible person questions it. It’s as much a fact as gravity and atoms!’ A committee member even likened belief in creation to belief in superstitions such as astrology, or that the moon is made of green cheese, or that storks bring babies.

However, there are many people who do question the validity of the evolution teaching. One such individual who had never considered the “proofs” offered for evolution as final decided to interview people who believe in evolution. Following are his observations, along with actual conversations he had in a survey conducted with evolution believers.

“I believe evolution,” a distinguished gentleman told me, “because science has thoroughly investigated the subject and is unanimous in its acceptance of it as fact.”

“You place great trust in scientists,” I observed.

“Their record testifies to their reliability, don’t you think?” he replied.

His reason for believing evolution was echoed many times during my survey. I discovered that MOST BELIEVERS(my caps) of evolution are believers because they have been told that ALL INTELLIGENT PEOPLE ARE BELIEVERS.
An obviously well-educated woman in her forties challenged me with this question: “What are your qualifications to dispute the findings of professional scientists?”

“First,” I answered, “let me say that they dispute among themselves. They argue over when it happened, why it happened, how it happened, how fast it happened, and even if it happened at all!”

“Now,” I continued, “to answer your question about my qualifications. What are the qualifications of a judge who sits on a case involving medical issues in which he is untrained? If he is intelligent and objective, he listens to the arguments of experts pro and con, and then decides on the basis of their testimony. How else can a person make a decision on various fields of knowledge in this age of specialization?”

“But the subject of evolution is so technical,” she protested.

I answered: “Theodosius Dobzhansky [an evolutionary scientist] says that much of the work of scientists is beyond the comprehension of average laymen, but that evolution is not. He says it’s a matter of elementary biology. And George Gaylord Simpson [another prominent evolutionist] contents that it’s immoral to have blind faith, whether in a religious doctrine or in a scientific theory. He also says that it’s man’s responsibility to test the findings of specialists and then decide, and that a person doesn’t have to be a research biologist to evaluate the evidence on evolution.”.
...“Too many people,” I concluded, “merely accept the opinions of others and repeat their ideas like parrots rather than taking time to examine the facts.”

When she did not comment, I added: “You’d be amazed at how many people who believe evolution know practically nothing about it.”

Intimidation and “Brainwashing”

Before I conducted my house-to-house survey of people who believe in evolution, I read some twenty books written by evolutionists. Even before that, however, for many years since my university days, I had endeavored to keep abreast of scientific developments in this field. But now I specifically examined recent writings of prominent evolutionists.

In doing so I was struck by the type of “browbeating” or “brainwashing” they used. This is typified by the following brief summary from twelve books by eleven different evolutionists:

‘Evolution is universally accepted by scientists competent to judge. It is recognized by all responsible scientists. All reputable biologists agree that it is an established fact. No informed mind today denies that man descended from the fish. It is no longer a matter of doubt.

‘The evidence is overwhelming. No further proof is required by anyone who is free from old illusions and prejudices.’

That is the consensus of all these evolutionary writers. But when claims are so sweeping, so dogmatic, they become suspect. It seemed to me that evolutionists are trying to scare off opposition and inquiry by using a barrage of intimidating rhetoric.

But why should someone who questions a theory be labeled incompetent, uninformed, a ‘prisoner of old illusions and prejudices’? Would scientists who really have the facts stoop to such unscientific, unreasonable tactics?

True, this “psychological warfare,” this “brainwashing,” does make converts to the evolution belief. But nearly all those converts are usually defenseless when confronted by those who resist the arm twisting and ask for proof.

No Answers

For instance, I asked an intelligent woman in an exclusive neighborhood: “Why do you believe evolution?”

“Because I see it all the time,” she said, and gestured toward her yard. But when I tried to find out some details, her face began to flush, so I tactfully withdrew.

At another door the elderly man who answered my ring said that we adapt to our surroundings, and that these adaptations accumulate over many generations and finally result in new types of living things.

“That isn’t the accepted thought today,” I said. “Your suntan is not passed on to your baby, nor are bulging biceps you’ve developed by weight lifting, nor a knowledge of electronics you’ve acquired through study and experience. Many years ago the evolutionist Lamarck thought this way. So did Darwin. But evolutionists today know that such acquired characteristics are not passed on by means of heredity.”

“Then how else could evolution happen?” he countered.

“That’s for you to say,” I replied. Time and again, I found the same thing to be true. Those who said they believed evolution were totally unable to give reasons, proofs, facts to back up their belief. The main reason for their belief was that scientists believed it and taught it.

On the campus of a large university, a student cited the “fossil record” as proof for evolution. He said that it “traces [for example] the evolution of modern horses from eohippus. Progressive fossils show how it lost toes, lengthened wrists and ankles, evolved new teeth for grazing, and increased in size.”

“You must know,” I replied, “that to give this neat picture, evolutionists have to leave out many of the fossils. They pick only the ones that support their theory, and assume that these are connected to each other.”

“They only simplify it to avoid confusion,” the student said.

I replied: “To avoid confusion they conceal the evidence, and in simplifying they oversimplify to the point of falsification.”

Indeed, that is just what Simpson says, that ‘the oversimplification of the horse fossil record amounts to falsification.’ And naturalist I. Sanderson writes:

“This pleasantly neat evolutionary picture of orderly progression in tooth structures, loss of toes, increase in size, and wrist and ankle elongation has now unfortunately come under grave suspicion.

“So many side-branches have been brought to light, so many intermediary forms are completely lacking that we can now only say that the classic description is no more than a guide to the probable steps by which the modern horse evolved.”

However, the fossil record is still evolution’s “star witness.” As Simpson tells us, “The most direct sort of evidence on the truth of evolution must, after all, be provided by the fossil record.”........TO BE CONTINUED.

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.....*** ce chap. 5 p. 54 par. 2 Letting the Fossil Record Speak ***

2 Why are fossils important to evolution? Geneticist G. L. Stebbins noted a major reason: “No biologist has actually seen the origin by evolution of a major group of organisms.”1 So, living things on earth today are not seen to be evolving into something else. Instead, they are all complete in form and distinct from other types. As geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky observed: “The living world is not a single array . . . connected by unbroken series of intergrades.”2 And Charles Darwin conceded that “the distinctness of specific [living] forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.”3....
*** ce chap. 5 p. 57 par. 10 Letting the Fossil Record Speak ***

10 The fossil record in Darwin’s day proved disappointing to him in another way. He explained: “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists . . . as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species.” He added: “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. . . . The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the [evolutionary] views here entertained.”8....

....12 Now, after well over a century of extensive digging, vast numbers of fossils have been unearthed. Is the record still so “imperfect”? The book Processes of Organic Evolution comments: “The record of past forms of life is now extensive and is constantly increasing in richness as paleontologists find, describe, and compare new fossils.”10 And Smithsonian Institution scientist Porter Kier adds: “There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world.”11 Hence, A Guide to Earth History declares: “By the aid of fossils palaeontologists can now give us an excellent picture of the life of past ages.”12

13 After all this time, and the assembling of millions of fossils, what does the record now say? Evolutionist Steven Stanley states that these fossils “reveal new and surprising things about our biological origins.”13 The book A View of Life, written by three evolutionists, adds: “The fossil record is full of trends that paleontologists have been unable to explain.”14 What is it that these evolutionary scientists have found to be so “surprising” and are “unable to explain”?

14 What has confounded such scientists is the fact that the massive fossil evidence now available reveals the very same thing that it did in Darwin’s day: Basic kinds of living things appeared suddenly and did not change appreciably for long periods of time. No transitional links between one major kind of living thing and another have ever been found. So what the fossil record says is just the opposite of what was expected.

15 Swedish botanist Heribert Nilsson described the situation this way, after 40 years of his own research: “It is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that . . . the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.”15

*** ce chap. 5 pp. 66-67 Letting the Fossil Record Speak ***

What About the Horse?

32 However, it has often been said that at least the horse is a classic example of evolution found in the fossil record. As The World Book Encyclopedia states: “Horses are among the best-documented examples of evolutionary development.”36 Illustrations of this begin with a very small animal and end with the large horse of today. But does the fossil evidence really support this?

33 The Encyclopædia Britannica comments: “The evolution of the horse was never in a straight line.”37 In other words, nowhere does the fossil evidence show a gradual development from the small animal to the large horse. Evolutionist Hitching says of this foremost evolutionary model: “Once portrayed as simple and direct, it is now so complicated that accepting one version rather than another is more a matter of faith than rational choice. Eohippus, supposedly the earliest horse, and said by experts to be long extinct and known to us only through fossils, may in fact be alive and well and not a horse at all—a shy, fox-sized animal called a daman that darts about in the African bush.”38

34 Placing little Eohippus as the ancestor of the horse strains the imagination, especially in view of what The New Evolutionary Timetable says: “It was widely assumed that [Eohippus] had slowly but persistently turned into a more fully equine animal.” But do the facts support this assumption? “The fossil species of [Eohippus] show little evidence of evolutionary modification,” answers the book. It thus concedes, regarding the fossil record: “It fails to document the full history of the horse family.”39...............“The concept of evolution cannot be considered a strong scientific explanation for the presence of the diverse forms of life,” concludes evolutionist Edmund Samuel in his book Order: In Life. Why not? He adds: “No fine analysis of biogeographic distribution or of the fossil record can directly support evolution.”40.......

...Astronomer,--- Carl Sagan candidly acknowledged in his book Cosmos: “The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer.”42

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.....CONTINUED*** g74 9/22 pp. 25-26 Do I Have to Believe Evolution? ***

NOT TRUE SCIENCE , BUT SCIENCE FICTION

His words reminded me of the admission by Dunn and Dobzhansky in Heredity, Race and Society: “Scientists, like all other men, often succumb to the temptation to prove some particular view or to reinforce some preconceived ideas.”

Sullivan, in The Limitations of Science, said that scientists do not “invariably tell the truth, or try to, even about their science. They have been known to lie, but they did not lie in order to serve science but, usually, [their own] religious or antireligious prejudices.”

Evolutionists also have the knack of quickly dismissing crucial problems with their airy speculations. Without proof, amazing transformations of one complex form of life into another are referred to as fact, in the style of the writer of fairy tales.

With the wave of a wand, the evolutionist makes a scale become a feather, or a hair. A fin becomes a leg, which somehow vanishes in a snake, but then turns into a wing on a bird, a hoof on a horse, a claw on a cat, a hand on a man. Such “explanations” are science fiction at its fictionest.

Nitrogenous wastes, once eliminated as ammonia by fish, are eliminated as urea in amphibians, but then changed to uric acid in reptiles, then back to urea in mammals. Mammals supposedly modified their sweat glands into becoming breasts that produced milk, and bore live young that by another chance coincidence developed, at the very same time, the instinctive wisdom to suck at the breasts!

At times, I felt that such explanations were not given in all seriousness. They must be joking, I thought. But they are serious! They are not joking! They accept science fiction as true science.

It is little wonder that their books are filled with ‘could-have-beens,’ ‘might-have-beens,’ ‘may-have-beens,’ which, after a while and after much repetition, become ‘must-have-beens.’ Possibilities become probabilities, which then become certainties. Assumptions evolve into dogmas. Speculations become conclusions. High-sounding language evolves into “evidence.”

All of this is traitorous to the true scientific method. But by means of this brainwashing, blind faith in evolution evolves. With it evolves the arrogant authoritarianism required to sustain what they cannot prove. Sweeping proclamations are used as a club against unbelievers, perhaps even reassuring the evolution priesthood, those who are its promoters.

But such science fiction is not at all reassuring to many parents with children in school. At home these parents may teach their children creation, while at school the teachers teach evolution. One thing is certain: Someone is lying!

If in school evolution were taught as a theory only, and creation acknowledged as an alternate that has scientific backing, then the contradiction in the child’s mind might be eased. But evolutionists fight tooth and nail the introduction of any idea but their own. Supposedly enlightened scientists and educators, evolutionists, try to crush thoughts that do not support their preconceived ideas. Where once they insisted on the right to teach the theory of evolution, they now try to deny anything else being taught.

Evolutionists also refuse to face up to their dilemma, which is a serious one: the fossil record shows evolution to be an inadequate explanation for the sudden appearance of complex life forms. But special creation fits the record precisely, yet is unacceptable to evolutionists emotionally. They simply cannot stomach the thought that they could be wrong, that there could be a Creator, a Power higher than their own brains, One who brought forth living things in His own way.

So, instead of being fair-minded, evolutionists generally try to impeach the fossil record. They resort to name-calling and insults against those who cannot swallow their tales. And they liken belief in creation to storks bringing babies. Like a religious hierarchy in the “Dark Ages,” they declare ex cathedra (with authority) that evolution is a fact, and excommunicate into the outer darkness of ignorance any who will not embrace their faith.

Evolution is to its promoters a sacred cow. But sacred cows have a way of being brought low by the advance of truth. Like a hammer, truth eventually smashes the altars on which false ideas have been enshrined.—Contributed. ..