Well, with defenders such as these…who needs offenders?
I posted a link to Jerry Bergman and George Howe’s book Vestigial Organs Are Fully Functional: A History and Evaluation of the Vestigial Organ Origins Concept on TFT’s Facebook page along with a little statement about how to Atheist evolutionists vestigial organs appears to mean something to the likes of “What does that organ do? I dunno! Well then, it must be useless, evidence of evolution and hey, we can just cut those organs right out of people!”
Well, in reply, an Atheist provided a link to Claim CB360 which reads, “Practically all ‘vestigial’ organs in man have been shown to have definite uses and not to be vestigial at all.”
In other words, that is the claim, for which they cite Henry M. Morris’ 1974 AD book, Scientific Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 75-76) to which they will reply via the worldview philosophy of Darwinian evolution.
They reply runs thusly:
1. “Vestigial” does not mean an organ is useless. A vestige is a “trace or visible sign left by something lost or vanished” (G. & C. Merriam 1974, 769). Examples from biology include leg bones in snakes, eye remnants in blind cave fish (Yamamoto and Jeffery 2000), extra toe bones in horses, wing stubs on flightless birds and insects, and molars in vampire bats. Whether these organs have functions is irrelevant. They obviously do not have the function that we expect from such parts in other animals, for which creationists say the parts are “designed.”
Vestigial organs are evidence for evolution because we expect evolutionary changes to be imperfect as creatures evolve to adopt new niches. Creationism cannot explain vestigial organs. They are evidence against creationism if the creator follows a basic design principle that form follows function, as H. M. Morris himself expects (1974, 70). They are compatible with creation only if anything and everything is compatible with creation, making creationism useless and unscientific.
2. Some vestigial organs can be determined to be useless if experiments show that organisms with them survive no better than organisms without them.
To my Atheist friend, I wrote:
That is a most excellent resource and proves that which I have often noted. There many sorts of definitions for example, grammatical definition, etymological definitions, philosophic definitions, theological definitions, medical definitions, etc., etc., etc.
They quote Morris making a scientific point thus, employing a scientific definition of something actually claimed by many Atheist evolutionists and they reply with a dictionary, therefore grammatical, definition.
Thus, they are bating and switching and you took the bait.
Moreover, hilariously, they claim “‘Vestigial’ does not mean an organ is useless” but that “A vestige is a [dictionary/grammatical definition] ‘trace or visible sign left by something lost or vanished.’”
So, it is not useless, noooooooooooooooooo, only lost or vanished. I am unsure that we can use something that has been lost or have vanished but I am sure that Atheists evolutionists, being the story tellers that they are, will invent a quaint Victorian Era tall tale about how something lost and vanished is actually useful.
Not to mention, that the organ is not lost of vanished but still there and that the point is that they were once thought to be useless but then found to be useful.
Well, the Atheist wrote back:
The organ’s *discernible function* is lost or vanished, and incredibly, in some cases has taken on a new purpose, such as a largely passive repository for certain strains of gut bacteria (e.g. the appendix) but this isn’t to guarantee that has been it’s purpose all along.
A very twitty-witty observation from TFT but he fails to provide any direct quote examples to support what he’s trying to say, and resorts to the usual empty, snide rhetoric about “atheist evolutionists hilariously..blah-blah-ing their quaint victorian etc etc.”
It is very odd indeed that he claimed that I failed “to provide any direct quote examples to support what he’s trying to say” considering that this all began by my providing him an entire book as a reference.
In any regard, I replied thusly:
Most excellent, you just keep proving my point about Atheist evolutionists weaving quaint Victorian Era tall tales; “this isn’t to guarantee that has been it’s [sic] purpose all along” because the tall tale tells you otherwise.
Darwinian evolution is a branch of cryptozoology which seeks mythological chimeras which are half one species (whatever that is) and half another (or any combination of more than two).
In this case, they were so desperate to prove evolution that, based on partial information, they literally cut functioning organs out of the bodies of humans in whom they were designed to serve a purpose.