Capital Punishment: Does it do what it is intended to?

I have been researching capital punishment this week.  I did not post on Wednesday; this is because I have found that this topic is more difficult to research than I thought that it would be.  I am still researching the Biblical aspect of the topic, but I have come to several reasons not regarding the Bible that have influenced how I have thought about capital punishment.

There are many reasons that people are for capital punishment.  Several of these reasons are cost, deterrence, special deterrence, and respect for human life. 

The cost argument for the death penalty is that it costs more to keep someone in prison than it does to execute them.  In all actuality, capital cases can be quiet expensive.  In 1982 in a report by the New York State Defenders (as quoted by Nathanson, 2001, p. 37), it was estimated that it would cost more than $1.4 million dollars to conduct all the legal process surrounding an execution for a single person.  Imagine how high these prices would be today. 

Another common argument for the death penalty is that it deters other people from committing murder because they know that they might be executed.  The problem with such a claim is a lack of true evidence, because the topic is so difficult to study scientifically.  In “The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence”, Donohue and Wolfers state that there is no current evidence (as of 2006 when the article was written) that the death penalty actually deters crime.  It states the flaws that are in past studies.  Flaws of past studies are also outlined by Nathanson (2001) in “An Eye for an Eye”.  Upon comparing murder rates in death penalty states and murder rates in non-death penalty states (according to these statistics), the rate seems to actually be lower in states without the death penalty (see picture below from website with the statistics).  Whether this is due to the death penalty being in place or whether it is due to other reasons needs further studies.

Special deterrence is another argument for the death penalty that states that if you execute a murderer it prevents that person from committing future murders.  Does it prevent offenders from offending again more than a lifetime sentence and is there an actual problem?  As long as the murder does not escape, I believe that a life sentence would serve just as well.  Also, I do not believe that there is a real problem with reoffenders.  Hugo Bedau compiled a study in which he examined 2,646 people convicted of murder who were released between 1900 and 1976 (Nathanson, 2001, p. 30).  He found that only 16 were convicted of another homicide.

Overall, I do not believe that the death penalty actually accomplishes any of the benefits that advocates of capital punishment raise and this is one of the main reasons that I believe that the death penalty should not be in place in current times.

References:

Nathanson, S. (2001). An eye for an eye, the immorality of punishing by death. (2 ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc.

Donohue, J. & Wolfers, J. (2006, April). Donohue, j., & wolfers, j. (2006, april). the death penalty: No evidence for deterrence. retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/donohuedeter.pdf.Economist, Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/DonohueDeter.pdf

Comparison of Evolution and Creationism

There are many topics that I want to talk about today.  First, I will discuss how evolution contradicts the basic laws of science.  Secondly, I will show that there are some things that evolutionary scientists cannot account for that creation scientists can account for.  Then, I will discuss natural selection and mutations.  Finally, I will have a synopsis of all the ideas that I have talked about at present. 

Cause and Effect and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Although cause and effect is a fundamental idea in science, evolution contradicts the idea of cause and effect.  In creation, the cause is that the universe was created by God, but in the evolution, the universe created itself.  According to Morris (1974), “the universe cannot be its own cause” (p. 25).

The second law of thermodynamics is also fundamental to science.  It states that if every system is left to its own devices then it will go from order to disorder (Morris, 1974, p. 25). Evolution seems to contradict this as it states that everything in our universe goes from disorder to order, from less complex, to more complex (Morris, p. 25). 

DNA and the Simplest Organism.

DNA holds information needed to make proteins that are essential for the cells (and organisms) survival and it also contains the information for its own replication (Morris, 1974, p. 47).  The interesting thing is that proteins assist in the reproduction of DNA and the synthesis of proteins (Morris, 1974, p. 47).  Where then did the original proteins come from?  The model of creationism has a simple answer to this question:  God made the original organisms with the proteins needed to replicate DNA and to make proteins.  The model of evolution does not have a simple answer for this.  As discussed before, evolutionary scientists have been trying to discover for years whether DNA, RNA, or PNA was the first nucleic acid (Scott, 2009, p.27).  Scientists have been able to create amino acids from simple compounds, but they have not yet been able to show how these amino acids could have formed together to make the very complex proteins that are found in organisms today (Meyer, 2009).  They have also, to my knowledge, not been able to figure out where DNA came from without using a DNA template (Morris, 1974, p. 50).  Even in a laboratory, DNA has to be replicated using preexisting DNA as a template; therefore, why is it so easy to believe that DNA could have come together by chance at a previous time (Teerikorpi, 2009., p. 415)?  In Genetics and the Logic of Evolution, the author proposes that DNA came from a world made of RNA. Where did the RNA come from? 

How much genetic information is needed in order for an organism to survive?  In the 1990’s scientist were seeking to answer this question (Meyer, 2009).  In “minimal complexity” experiments, scientists were seeking to find out what the minimal requirements for cellular function were (Meyer, 2009).  They found out that the simplest cell, Mysoplasma genitalium, requires 484 proteins and 562,000 bases of DNA in order to survive and perform its daily tasks (Meyer, 2009).  According to Meyer (2009), some scientists speculate that 250-400 genes are needed for minimal functionality.  Along with genes and proteins though, a membrane, phosphates, lipids, sugars, vitamins, metals, sugars, and countless other molecules would need to come together in order to form the simplest cell (Meyer, 2009).  Morris (1974) predicts the chance of all the molecules that a cell needs coming together randomly would be 1 in 10⁵³(p. 61).  Furthermore, scientists, with all of these molecules, cannot make life.  They must first start out with life, with a cell, in order to synthesize life in a lab; therefore, how could this have happened by chance in some time in the past.   J. P. Danielli reported to have synthesized life in 1970, but he did so by first starting with a living cell (Morris, 1974, p. 50).

Natural Selection and Mutation

Natural selection does exist.  This can be shown by the peppered moth of England (Morris, 1974, p. 51).  From an evolutionary scientist point of view, variation and natural selection bring rise to new species, but from a creationist’s point of view, this is not true.  Creationists believe that God had a purpose and that organisms have the ability to change to better suit their environment in order to allow the organism to survive in nature (Morris, 1974, p. 52).  Natural selection does not make anything new, as evolutionists suggest, but rather natural selection sieves through organisms that do not have the qualities that suit the environment that they are currently in (Morris, 1974, p. 52).  Genetic mutations, according to neo-Darwinism, are one of the sources that bring about new species of higher order (Morris, 1974, pg. 54).  Yet, beneficial mutations are very rare and the overall effects of all mutations are negative, suggesting a decrease in order, not an increase in order (Morris, 1974, pg. 55).

Synopsis

Although most people do not consider creation science as a science, I argue that it as much of a science as evolution is a science.  Evolution is taught in schools today as truth, but there is little evidence that evolution actually occurred in the past or that it is still occurring today.There is no evidence to where the essential molecule of life, protein, came from or where the template for making proteins, RNA, originated.  Although there is evidence that a possible scenario for the environment in the past (although now an outdated scenario) could have caused amino acids to form, how these amino acids come together to form proteins is still unknown.  One of the most important parts of the cell is the cell membrane and the origin of this is still unknown (Teerikorpi, 2009, p. 422).  Both of these are models of what could have happened, and as a model, creationism seems to be the more reasonable explanation for how the universe and life as we know it came to exist.

References:

Meyer, S. (2009). The Evolution of a Mystery and Why It Matters. Signature in the cell [Kindle version]. HarperCollins Publishers.

Morris, H. M. (1974). Scientific creationism. Master Books.

Weiss, K. M., & Buchanan, A. V. (2004). Genetics and the logic of evolution. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Teerikorpi, P., Valtonen, M., Lehto, K., Byrd, G., & Chernin, A. (2009). The evolving universe and the origin of life. New York, New York: Springer Science Business Media.

Scott, E. C. (2009). Evolution vs. creationism, an introduction. (2nd ed.). Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Pub Group.