Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison
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Appendix 1:
The Logical Shambles of Neo-Darwinian Evolution—100 Fallacies
(or The Origin of Feces)
Whew!
Bad Logic!
Elementary logical fallacies occur in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory at an alarming rate. Here are fully 100 oft-repeated neo-Darwinian fallacies.
Fallacy #1:
Equating a part with the whole
Early neo-Darwinists concluded that since there are some apparently random components to biological systems (the mixing of genes during reproduction, lateral gene transfers, or the rare point mutation that strikes home), it is safe to conclude that the entire process of evolution is accidental. Not so. It now appears that the transpositional genome has accomplished the lion’s share of evolutionary change in cooperation with the developmental genome. The part chance has played in evolution now appears quite minimal, and no demonstration of the ability of an accident to form complex biological machines can be made. The transpositional and developmental genomic systems are not random, though they may have a subcomponent or two that is. They have accomplished the bulk and the harder parts of evolutionary advancement in very little time minus the unavoidably high rate of flawed initial design concepts that random point mutations would have produced. It is doubtful that random changes alone could have gotten so far as to produce a minimally functional system at all, even in the simplest creature. The transpositional and developmental genomes operate within the confines of a biological machine according to a still poorly understood set of rules, but according to a set of rules nonetheless.
Even the reproductive mixing of genes does not evidence a random overall process for the creation and development of life. This is because the reproductive mixing of genes can only occur after the major nonrandom task of genome construction has first been completed. Darwinian evolution has no explanation for the origin of the genomes or for the transpositional and developmental systems that closely guide their activity. The theory of Darwinian evolution starts in the middle of the explanation of life long after the hard part is done. Nothing in the mere possibility of mixing genes during reproduction even hints that the complex information in genes and biological systems could have been configured by accident. Randomly reshelving books in the library does not eliminate the requirement for authorship.
The neo-Darwinist view of life as accidental is analogous to someone secretly turning on a machine and then the neo-Darwinists walk in and say, “Look it is all accidental and spontaneous; you can see that no one is interfering with it.” But they must first ignore the fact that it is visibly a machine and that they have not accounted for that machine’s construction.
To state what is obvious to everyone except a neo-Darwinian evolutionist, the fact that a juggler rotates jeweled watches, Faberge eggs, books, or computer chips through the air does not prove those wonderfully complex creations to be accidental. Similarly, one can take out the seven or eight memory chips and the three or four circuit boards inside the computer I am using now to type this book, randomly move them around and eventually get them all back into compatible slots by accident. But that is only because the hard part of constructing the chips and circuit boards and the standard interface to the motherboard has already been done by intelligent design. One cannot produce those memory chips and circuit boards or the larger layout of the computer's motherboard into which they must fit by accident; the designs are far too complex. It would require not only vast amounts of time but a controlled physical process of a type that nature does not have in her inventory. Since our physical universe is not a fully chaotic random mixing bowl of the kind neo-Darwinists often imply, she will never stumble upon a way to build a computer by accident. Our universe is limited by its natural laws to only certain kinds of transactions and the controlled process needed to build a desktop computer from the basic physical elements is not one of the options the dumb physical elements have available to them. Only intelligent humans or other intelligent beings can do this. Even if we presume that nature does have a controlled process of the type necessary to build life in her inventory (we cannot demonstrate this because all attempts to arrange a spontaneous recreation of life in the laboratory have failed), “she” does not have sufficient time and physical resources to have built our tree of life by accident within the history of the Universe. (See Appendix 2.) While the probability of nature having achieved the tree of life by accident is not 0, it is so close to 0 as to fall well outside the probability required for scientific credibility.
Of course, there are limits regarding where and to what extent randomness can be tolerated by a particular mechanism. In many designs, however, there are places where randomness can fit without defeating the functionality of the system. Randomness may even enhance system effectiveness in some situations. Random variation in biology, for example, allows the designer of life to help his creatures survive changing environmental pressures via minor spontaneous adaptations. This frees the designer from having to actively intervene to save his creatures and their finely tuned interdependent ecosystem from the potentially destructive effects of routine environmental fluctuations.
The bottom line here is that intelligently designed machines may have random components or subsystems. Such subsystems may enhance the machine performance or merely be a tolerable defect. Either way, this possibility demonstrates that an inference from the presence of a random component in a larger system to the assumption that the entire system is an accidental creation cannot be justified.
Many accomplished professional thinkers have recently acknowledged that limited randomness is compatible with purpose and intelligent design. Three good essays that address this topic from a variety of thoughtful viewpoints can be found in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action.[1] Noted author and physicist Paul Davies; William R. Stoeger, S.J., astrophysicist at the Vatican Observatory Research Group, University of Arizona; and Sir Arthur Peacocke, all tell us that the existence of purpose is compatible with the characteristics of our world, including some randomness.
Fallacy #2:
OK for simple creatures, therefore OK for complex creatures
Bacteria are the neo-Darwinists’ celebrated examples of “evolution,” yet they possess none of the highly complex machinery of higher life forms. That is the first thing that should raise our suspicion that we are being had by a bad analogy. It has become well known that certain simple organisms can do very simple things in terms of biological change. These simple things do not constitute macroevolution of complex radically different body types. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists assert that the simple changes in bacteria are adequate evidence for accidental evolution in and of complex creatures. For example, bacteria sometimes quickly introduce a new survival-enhancing enzyme into the active genome. Therefore, Darwinists assume, complex organisms can randomly introduce new genes sufficient to generate new survival enhancing features of absolutely any kind, even the features of much greater complexity on the highest branches of the tree of life. But an enzyme is only a single protein. They extend this lame simplistic analogy to cover even mammals having complex systems embedded within systems up to ten levels deep, plus horizontal interdependency that can extend to every gene in the organism.
Sanity check: it is a simple fact that complex organisms are not seen to be doing spontaneous development of new features in the same way the ultra-simple bacteria do. This disparity suggests that complexity barriers forbid much more complex analogous achievements in complex creatures. Furthermore, with possibly the rarest exceptions, even bacteria are not producing new genes in these “mutational” events; they are only installing them. Bacteria have always had these “new genes” available as spare parts stored in the bacterial plasmid. Plasmids are a pseudo-parasitic adjunct to the normal cell structure. They contain an inventory of genetic sequences that can be routinely substituted into the active bacterial genome. Those spare DNA segments are not being generated in real time; they are already there. The substitution process that periodically injects the spare DNA segment into the active genome is part of the existing bacterial design. It is neither an accidental form-changing encounter with the environment nor an accidental internal design innovation caused by point mutations. In other words, bacterial gene substitutions are not real time evolutionary events at all; they simply rotate the preexisting cylinders of a preexistent gun. Thus, they do not evidence accidental evolution of anything, let alone major form change in more advanced creatures whose systems are radically different.
Plasmid gene substitutions function primarily as a “Russian roulette” type of immune system. Unfortunately for the bacterium involved, the “gun” (plasmid) fires backward as often as forward. As often as not plasmid “gene” substitution injures the host more than its parasitic enemy because the substitution isn’t right for the bacterium’s current environment. At other times the change does save the host from an external threat. Overall, this process helps the bacterial species to survive (though not the individual). Being advantageous to the species, the system would be preserved by natural selection, but it evinces no demonstrable capacity to produce a higher life form from a bacterium.
We now know that it takes millions of years to integrate a single new gene in a recipient host species once that gene has been laterally transferred between creatures. Thus, bacterial gene substitutions cannot be genuinely random in the same way, or they couldn’t be accomplished so fast. We must conclude either that an interface for the plasmid “spare parts bag” of “genes” in bacteria already exists, or that bacterial physiology is so uniquely simple that little interface is required (or perhaps both depending upon the specific plasmid “gene” involved). In either case, bacteria are clearly inappropriate models for truly random design innovation in the complex physiology of higher organisms. The accidental model assumed by neo-Darwinian theory requires that gene substitutions be done the hard way, that is, without a preexisting design interface. Even if bacteria rarely do produce a new plasmid “gene” through point mutations (and bacteria are simple enough that this is possible), there is insufficient time available in the history of the Earth to produce and integrate the millions of gene changes required to build the fantastically complex tree of life under the accidental model.
Fallacy #3: Construction therefore configuration
Some evolutionists have implied that because a few amino acids will spontaneously form from primordial gases when electricity is injected into a test tube, and because a few simple strings of RNA form spontaneously under very closely constrained conditions, that the accidental creation of first life is soon to be explained. The simple achievement of a few amino acids, however, does not solve the problem of configuring the billions long genomes to do the astronomically complex work they do. Nor would the achievement of all the amino acids plus a billion nucleotides properly equate to an interactive, developmental and self-transformational genome with translation system. To blur this distinction, as the Darwinists do, is like guaranteeing the spontaneous generation of Shakespeare’s plays from alphabet soup based upon nothing more than having spooned out “See Dick run!” Perhaps monkeys will try recreating Shakespeare on a typewriter (for the right price in bananas), but don’t hold your breath waiting to read the play.
In an important new book, The Organic Codes, Marcello Barbieri reminds us that the functioning organism is a three-part system. The first part, the genetic sequences or genotype provides some but not all of the information needed to build an organism. The protein-based structures and operational systems that the genome codes for and regulates provide the visible form and function that constitutes the second part (and, I personally suspect, a lot more information hidden within protein folds); this is the phenotype. These are the two components referenced in classic evolutionary explanations (though not adequately explained). However, there must also be a complex translation/transcription system to bridge the two, to translate the information of the genes into structures and functions.
This third part, the intermediate transcription system, Barbieri calls the “ribotype.” The need for a translation/transcription system is not addressed at all in the event of spontaneous formation of a small random segment of RNA or a handful of amino acids. Thus, the true complexity of living systems does correspond to the simplistic model origin of life theorists have so far suggested to the public (a few amino acids, rudimentary chemical catalysis, a primitive membrane, and perhaps a jolt of electricity to be going on with). The classic model breaks down for three reasons. It is by far too simple; it does not address biological information in a realistic way; and it ignores irreducible complexity, the requirement for several key systems to be in place simultaneously. The minimal requirements to create life are much more extensive, requiring an intricately orchestrated time dependent interaction of three separate systems, each enormously complex in its own right, that, as Professor Behe informs us, must all be in place at the same time.
Fallacy #4:
The easy parts of the evolutionary process can be explained without intelligent
design; therefore, the hard parts can be as well.
We can explain the easy part of evolution, the rare spontaneous variation of a few minor characteristics within a species as the result of reproductive combinations and random substitution of alleles (in a genome and an organism already made). Therefore, neo-Darwinists say, we shouldn’t be concerned that we are unable to explain the hard parts: the origin of complete genomic systems and macroevolution between radically different creatures. It is simply more of the same (according to them).
However, it does not logically or biologically follow that this is true, and there is now much to argue against it. We can artificially induce some simple allele mutations and we can experimentally observe the occasional spontaneous allele substitution, but we cannot artificially induce macroevolution, nor can we experimentally observe macroevolution. The mechanics of macroevolution are in fact unknown, but to the extent that they are known we are certain that they involve close coordination of the developmental genome, the transpositional genetic systems, and nongenetic physical nanostructures in the cell. Macroevolution of a new feature in the first instance would always involve both the origination of complex new biological information and close coordination of multiple changes in these various systems. Point mutations and allele substitutions are therefore simply not enough. Arguing, as neo-Darwinists do, from the easy parts to the difficult is another case of a broken analogy; it’s a bad argument.
One major problem (of many) is that nature would encounter unique thresholds of difficulty enroute to evolving complex creatures by accident. This would not occur just once or twice. Among these, the much-vaunted spontaneous creation of amino acids ala Miller-Urey lies at the exact bottom of the difficulty scale. This is true because, with amino acids, natural law has already taken care of the hard part; some amino acids will spontaneously form under certain conditions. But, further up the difficulty scale (and it’s a long scale) we find the astronomically complex genome (the genotype) with its translation system (the ribotype), and the phenotype, which is comprised of thousands of functional biological machines, all closely interdependent with each other. We also find cellular subsystems; cells; simple multi-celled creatures; full anatomical systems; organs and tissues; complex creatures that integrate these systems vertically and horizontally to many levels; the human brain; self-awareness/self-consciousness; intelligence; tool making; abstract thinking; moral and ethical systems; science; engineering; mathematics, etc. Each of these levels of increased complexity in living systems constitutes a quantum jump to a new type and degree of complexity an accidental process would need to overcome to generate those systems without aid of intelligent design. Simply pointing to a handful of point mutations, amino acids, or allele substitutions addresses none of this.
Thus, the spontaneous creation of amino acids, even all of them,[2] in the lab from conditions simulating those of the early Earth in no way constitutes an adequate explanation of the origin of human life. In short, finding some nails on the ground does not prove possible the accidental construction of a home. “So, you want to move in next week? No problem. The nails and lumber are here. Just write me a check for the down payment, today. I’ll stick around a few hours to make sure it all falls together by accident, then we’ll have the moving van bring your stuff over tomorrow. Yes, personal check is fine. Local bank, right? Bye now!”
Fallacy #5:
One therefore many
A single nucleotide or amino acid substitution can occur by accident without harming the organism—sometimes. Two random amino acid substitutions can occur without harm—rarely. Three—nearly impossible. Four—forget it. Darwinists would have us believe that many accidental changes can occur without harming the organism. Not so—as Stephen Meyer informs us. Recent peer-reviewed research indicates that multiple random amino acid substitutions are inevitably harmful.[3] Neither can multiple DNA point mutations occur in combination in a truly random fashion without, for all practical purposes, being deleterious, and for essentially the same reason. A mere triplet, three nucleotides, identifies an amino acid. Therefore, although there are a few cases where a different triplet signals the same amino acid (redundant coding), most single nucleotide changes also cause an amino acid change or they place a useless junk sequence where the code for a viable amino acid used to be.
Beneficial randomly-generated
mutations in the sense that accidental evolution needs as evidence, that
is, mutations that can be definitely shown to lead to a major evolutionary
advancement have never been demonstrated in the lab—at all. Darwinists
will counter that everyone knows the process of evolution is too big and
requires too much time for such a demonstration, but, while that may be true,
it amounts to conceding that evolution is not scientifically testable. Noted
evolutionist Henry Gee has asserted something very similar: the deep time of
evolution history is too deep to allow practical testing and we should
therefore not pretend that we know the historical narrative process of
evolution. Instead, we should focus on describing the results of what happened
and when asked about how it all came to be we should tell the truth: “We don’t
know.” Yes, there are a few simple changes that a single point mutation can
produce, color or size change, increased muscularity etc.,[4] but
not many, and they certainly don’t add up to a radically new kind of
creature.
To say that in theory some useful genetic changes could certainly be found by an endless random search routine, does not mean that all of macroevolution by accident is a defensible theory within the probability standards of science. The capacity of random mutation to produce the genetic changes required to make radically new creatures within evolutionary time comprises only a trivial fraction of what is needed. Consider also that the universe has not had endless time to search for the necessary complex configurations. The rhetorical argument for accidental evolution (it has never been scientific) has often played off of the mental error of equating a very long time with an endless time. This same mental limitation of the primitive human mind to conceive of very large numbers in the imagination is probably what led biblical writers of the first century to use “a thousand” years as meaning any large number that exceeds the limits of the conscious imagination to visualize, to include infinity. Contrary to the misleading suggestions of evolutionists, evolution has not had the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s history to work. Most of the work of constructing the structural building blocks of biological evolution was done in the 5-10 million years of the Cambrian explosion. The requisite raw genomic system information was apparently achieved (somehow, in a manner unknown to us) somewhat earlier. It appears that only reconfiguration of gene activation marker patterns was required for the burst of life form evolution that occurred in the Cambrian, for, indeed, there was little time for anything else.
Even if some useful macroevolutionary results from random changes could be demonstrated in the lab (and they haven’t been), we still have this enormous insurmountable time problem. Uncle Bob could not have taken the bus from Los Angeles and arrived in New York the next day. There are other logical errors that we must be careful to avoid that occur in and around this question of time. To say that an accident could put together a couple pieces of the border of a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle in one hour is not to show that it could assemble the entire puzzle in any other given amount of time. Any specific claim must be supported by a concrete demonstration and supporting mathematics. This has never been done for accidental evolution, and the refuting demonstration has now been given with William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument. (See Appendix 2.) Solving the entire puzzle by accident involves more than just multiplying the time required to get four or five pieces together. Standard probability demands this. Each additional step becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve by accident that the preceding ones. If one were intentionally building the puzzle, each step would be only as difficult as any other. Not so with an accidental process. The more an accident has to do, the harder it becomes. The odds of rolling three sixes in a row on the gambling table are not 1 chance in 3 X 6, or 1 chance in 18; they are 1 chance in 6 X 6 X 6, or 1 chance in 218. Rolling four sixes in sequence increases the disparity to 1 chance in 1,296. The rules of probability apply to accidental evolution because it is a random process, which is precisely the kind of process that probability theory governs. Mother nature could have gotten extremely lucky, perhaps, but we are not entitled to affirm the extremely improbable with science. Science must always affirm the more probable over the less probable. Therefore, although one cannot definitively say that accidental evolution is completely impossible, we can say that it is so far outside the threshold of probability needed for scientific credibility as to be laughable. It is not impossible, but it is not good science.
Three billion years is an awfully long time, the neo-Darwinists tell us. Therefore, according to them, anything whatsoever can happen, and by accident. In the socially naïve years of the ‘50s and ‘60s the public believed this nonsense, but it is time now to grow up. Yes, it is a long time, but it is not nearly long enough. And it turns out that the actual process of evolution only made productive use of 5-10 million years of that time. Known facts of biology, physics and mathematics now show this maxim to be false. Imagine, now, for a moment, not a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but the real puzzle of life—in three dimensions. We are dealing with rolling more than four sixes in a row here. Trillions of moving, living, parts (cells) of many different types, cells that are complex living systems themselves, each cell on average having hundreds of parts (of a total possible inventory of thousands) doing over 2 million actions per minute at any given moment in time. In many creatures over a trillion cells are all orchestrated in a precise, closely interactive, and interdependent fashion, and life itself depends upon the successful integration of all this in real time. How long until accident achieves the border on that baby, much less the entire puzzle? The math simply forbids science from affirming accident as the dynamic behind the creation of life.
William Dembski is a consummate mathematician and philosopher. He holds two PhDs and several masters degrees. Dembski informs us that the number of smallest physical particles in the entire history of the universe and the total time available do not allow the number of random attempts required to bring the probability for success of accidental evolution down into the range required by the standards of science (the same standards applied rigorously everywhere else except in evolution). In other words, even if we were to be so generous as to allow that each step in evolution by accident only required the smallest fraction of a second and employed only one subatomic particle, there would not be enough time and particles in the history of our Universe to get the job done. This is what I call the resource exhaustion argument, and it is discussed further in Appendix 2. In producing this argument, William Dembski has done nothing less than disprove the theory of accidental evolution! What has mainstream science done in response? Have they celebrated this great achievement and ballyhooed the eloquent simplicity of Dembski’s solution as they would an achievement of half the merit that supported the atheistic worldview? No. What they have done is precisely nothing. No, I withdraw that; they have done worse than nothing. They have insulted the man, labeling him a crackpot religious fanatic, when he should be on the cover of Science and Nature and holding a prestigious chair in math and philosophy of science at Princeton and Harvard by now. Dembski is the Rodney Dangerfield of evolutionary theorists. He gets no respect. Even usually careful writers such as Francisco Ayala dismissively brush over his work, calling him a “sociologist.” To correct the record, William Dembski is not a sociologist; he is a mathematician and a philosopher, and a darned good one.
Politics aside, the fact is that William Dembski has shown that accidental evolution is too improbable to be a defensible scientific theory. As Dembski explains, there are only approximately 10150 particle events available in the history of the universe. There are several ways one can approach computing the probability of accidental evolution, but the standard probability expectation for them all so far exceeds the available 10150 particle events as to make accidental evolution more of a miracle than a fact of science. The improbability of achieving the human genome alone is 1 chance in 43,000,000,000 (4 nucleotide options for each position on the DNA strand times the 3 billion positions in the human genome). But since life is a three-part system comprised of the genotype, ribotype (translation system), and phenotype (overt structure and functional systems), this number must be exponentially increased at least by the improbability of accidentally achieving the translation system in order to produce the structure and systems of the organisms from the genome. The improbability of creating life by accident is, then, on the order of 43,000,000,000 to the power of ribotype probability. The enormous complexity of both the genome and ribotype make the improbability values for the accidental evolution of the entire tree of life a staggeringly enormous figure well outside the resources our Universe has had to apply to the problem. Since the number of “rolls of the dice,” available, that is, the number of physical events available in the history of the universe, 10150, is the merest fraction of this number, the probability of achieving evolution of human life by accident cannot reach the threshold of scientific credibility.
Alternatively one can approach computing the improbability of accidental evolution by analyzing the structural complexity and physical options available at each point in the construction of the first proteins, cells, and higher organisms as I have done in rudimentary fashion in Part 1. Or, one can compute the ordered biomass produced throughout the history of the universe and compare it to the available resources in terms of overall physical mass, employing reasonable assumptions for the efficiency rate of an accidental process, as I do in Appendix 2. The result is the same in each case: not enough resources available for accident to have gotten the job done within scientific standards of probability expectations. Based upon standard probability theory the accidental evolution of life is not a reasonable expectation, and therefore not a good scientific theory.
Fallacy #6:
Unique therefore typical
If a bacterium can rapidly evolve certain antibiotic resistances, or the ability to biodegrade a new substance like nylon, then Darwinists would have us believe that any other creature can rapidly evolve absolutely anything else. Not so—bacteria are unique in this respect in all of nature. Bacteria already have spare genetic material in (at times) useable configurations in circular strings of DNA called plasmids that can be mixed into their genome to produce simple changes. This is a feature other creatures do not have, but one they should have if Darwinian evolution were true. If the same capability is biologically possible for creatures of more complex design as Darwinists suggest in using bacteria as the flagship of evolution, complex creatures should have a plasmid substitution mechanism as well, though one that would insert more complex changes. Bacterial plasmids convey such a startling fitness advantage, as evidenced by the universally acknowledged hardiness of bacterial species, that such systems, if they could be developed for more complex creatures, would always be preserved by natural selection. It would be a great advantage to any creature to evolve useable traits so quickly. This feature is, however, not found in other creatures. The apparent reason is that a complexity barrier exists in higher creatures that forbids real-time-integration of random gene substitutions. This reveals that bacteria are atypical of nature in two important ways: their extreme overall simplicity, and the plasmid DNA substitution routine. What works for bacteria simply does not work for more complex creatures.
Thus, the neo-Darwinian flagship for
evolution, bacteria, are not representative of the tree of life as Darwinists
would have us believe. Bacteria, therefore, cannot be used to demonstrate a
hypothetical ability of nature to accidentally evolve the entire tree of
complex life. If it turns out, as it may, that yet undiscovered laws of nature
act at the deeper molecular and atomic levels in such a way as to drive the
self-organization of life, this will prove that nature can evolve life,
yes; but it will not prove that accident can do it. Having a bias built
into natural law for the self-organization of complex life of such an enormous
magnitude that it could counterbalance the astronomical improbabilities
discussed in #5 above proves that natural laws having such a capacity could not
be considered random or accidental forces. Bacterial DNA will obviously turn
out to play a part in evolution, for after all, bacterial DNA appears to be all
nature initially had to work with. However, a random (in the sense of chaotic,
accidental or unguided) DNA substitution mechanism will not turn out to be the
engine of evolution because the math forbids it getting the job done in the
time available. The sensitivity of complex organisms to unguided alterations to
their systems on the scale required to meet the timeline of the Cambrian
explosion precludes their surviving such injurious accidental tinkering.
Fallacy #7:
Microevolution therefore macroevolution
The problem here is that the few apparently random evolutionary changes that have been historically cited are trivial compared to the massive overall task evolution must perform. Neo-Darwinists merely assume that many of these simple changes will add up to large highly complex developments. This cannot be demonstrated in accordance with scientific method, and it is no longer considered even remotely plausible. Computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Peter Kassan tells us that stringing together a trillion or more simple systems of, say, the complexity level of a cockroach, will not produce a human being. It will only produce a disgusting colony of cockroaches.
There simply is no demonstrated logical or biological connection between microevolution and macroevolution; they are events of wholly different kinds. Perhaps Darwin had an excuse for not perceiving this in that he did not have modern genetics or microbiology, but the genetic scientists and microbiologists of our third millennium should darn well know it. Macroevolution of a fundamentally new feature requires alterations to hundreds of genes spread across many parts of complex systems, all closely orchestrated in real time. We have no indications that the phyla barriers could be broken through accumulation of such truly accidental small changes. Statements to the effect that they could are sheer ungrounded speculation. This has not been demonstrated in the lab, and the neo-Darwinist claim that there is firm theoretical support for it is groundless because no biomechanic based on randomness can be shown that could accomplish such large leaps in the time available. In fact, we currently have no biomechanical process description for evolution at all.
There was never much to suggest the accidental thesis when it came to the big changes; it was merely a default explanation. We defaulted to accidental evolution because we could see no other explanation at the time. Now, however, there is much evidence directly against the accidental view, and intelligent design theory, properly configured to avoid positing supernatural proximate causes or the introduction of religious authorities into science, has become a valid alternative, and one visibly suggested by the evidence. In saying this, of course, I do not mean that ID rules out God. Quite the contrary, ID leaves conceptual room for God, it merely posits nothing supernatural in its explanatory framework, only an intelligence of some kind behind the design.
The appearance of intelligent
design in biology has long been corroborated by the empiric data. Even Richard
Dawkins admits the overwhelming “appearance” of design in nature. The initially
overwhelming superficial appearance of design has now been much more deeply
corroborated by modern genetic science and microbiology. The accidental default
is no longer viable; it contradicts known evidence, albeit evidence unavailable
when the accidental thesis was first proposed. When design complexity and
accidental event improbability range deep into the immense numbers, even
requiring stacked exponents, “It just happened by accident” ceases to be a
plausible explanation.
Fallacy #8:
Once therefore always
The fossil record shows some intermediate forms for a few species, therefore, classical Darwinists believed, it was safe to assume that a complete set of intermediates would be found between all species and phyla in all lines of development sufficient to show the gradual accidental change central to Darwinian theory, or at least that such intermediates once existed whether they left useable fossils or not. The hope of filling in the fossil record in a manner incontrovertibly in support of the gradualist evolutionary model, once practically unanimous in science, seems now to have dissipated, probably for all time. True, new species are still occasionally found, but the overall picture of a broken or punctuated, that is, a nongradual process seems here to stay.
The broken character of the fossil lineages is not an isolated piece of evidence for a nonaccidental process. It is corroborated by Professor Michael Behe’s observations of irreducible complexity in cells and other biological systems. The extreme complexity that has been discovered in the biochemistry of life, the intricate interrelationships of many systems and parts, strongly suggests that gradualism can’t do the job. The minimal combined genetic and epigenetic modules requisite to new viable biological form change have turned out to be too big for gradualism. They require the simultaneous achievement and closely orchestrated integration of changes to multiple operational genes, developmental genes, and microtubule nanostructures to achieve the first instance of a new major feature or capability. The appearance of a new feature “all at once’ then reflects as a visible jump in form or function on the tree of life, which is what we see in the fossil record. Not all new features appeared abruptly in this way, some did arise gradually via incremental steps, but there is more than enough abruptness to defeat the accidental model.
Fallacy #9:
Meaningless therefore meaningful
A meaningless random sequence of a few RNA nucleotides can be strung together by a primitive ribozyme. Ok, fine. But does this mean, as the neo-Darwinists assume, that whole sets of meaningful genes can be manufactured as easily. An average gene is a thousand or more nucleotides in length (an average human gene is around 5,000 nucleotides). They must interact with tens of thousands of other genes in a myriad of complex ways. Is a ribozyme going to spew out all of those genes together with closely associated genetic mechanisms for expression, repair, replication, error correction and controlled transposition that are themselves all quite complex. No—not hardly. Yet, this is what the neo-Darwinist discussions suggest. Consider this comment from Robert Hazen in Genesis.
…the enzyme that replicates the
RNA genetic information of a phage called Q$ can
string nucleotides together into short strands of RNA even in the absence of preexisting RNA. Many short
sequences of RNA are formed in this way, some of which replicate faster than
others, and replace the slower-replicating sequences: that is, they evolve
by natural selection. Moreover, different sequences, or “species,” of RNA
replicate faster in different chemical environments. Thus, evolving genes can
arise in the absence of preexisting life.[5] (My
emphasis)
Notice that I have boldfaced the words “evolve” and “gene.” That’s to emphasize that Hazen’s argument here is a non sequitur, that is, bad logic. What Q$ replicase has been demonstrated to do is not to evolve useful genes at all, but only short meaningless sequences of DNA. Demonstrating the mere survival of the fastest reproducing short meaningless DNA segment does not prove a mechanism for generating something biologically useful. It certainly does not equate to a mechanism capable of creating the entire library of masterpieces represented by the millions of large genomes of the tree of life.
It is a simple mathematical tautology that whatever reproduces fastest has a survival advantage, other things being equal. While true, this yields neither meaning nor progressive evolution, but only a lot more of whatever simple strings are replicating. Thus, the trivial and the meaningless are invalidly equated here with the truly complex and biologically meaningful. The implied inference to “Walla Booby! Evolution proved!” here is, therefore, nonsensical. I don’t blame Hazen for making it, however, as the neo-Darwinian culture is replete with such fallacies; he is simply echoing a well-established historical precedent that has become a virtual axiom, though it is an invalid and foolish one. History will undoubtedly reveal the inane logic of this pseudo-axiom as one of the greatest intellectual blunders in the history of science and philosophy. Behe, Meyer, and Dembski et al. have, to their credit, courageously raised the alarm on this kind of pseudo-science, all too typical of the neo-Darwinian argument.
More and longer strands of RNA might eventually be achieved, yes; but no mechanism is in place to arrange the nucleotides into meaningful sequences, no ribotype is present to translate them, there are no transpositional and regulatory systems to manage them, nothing to reverse transcript them to DNA, no subroutines to error check and preserve them, etc. Random strings of nucleotides therefore do not equate to meaningful genes or genomes as Hazen suggests. In theory, once life is achieved, and once the complex genomes are all operational, an accidental creation of a novel sequence of nucleotides might, rarely, have occurred from ribozyme activity, and then be productively plugged into an existing system. This would at best only explain a minor variation or two after all the hard part was done.
It is true that differences in the chemical environment may exert selective pressures on one kind of DNA strand or the other because, after all, the nucleotide sequences are chemicals. The laws of chemistry therefore apply. But consider, even if the result of raw chemical selection turns out to favor meaningfully configured genes as opposed to merely confirming the fastest replicators of junk (this has not yet been shown), it would mean that the laws of chemistry are biased towards the spontaneous formation of the meaningful genes of life. How would a dumb/accidental system acquire such a bias prior to natural selection having had the chance to act upon living creatures? The existence of such a bias for life in natural law would strongly suggest an intelligent plan to create life.
Fallacy
#10: Species level egotism
This could also be phrased as “We humans don’t see it, therefore it can’t exist.” Squirrels, rabbits, dogs and cats don’t see a lot of what the veterinarian does, and they understand less of what they do see, but the vet is real. They don’t see the pattern of science in what he/she is doing…but there is one. They have the good sense not to deny the existence of the veterinarian entirely because his ways are partially mysterious to them. Humans could be miss a pattern of higher intelligence in nature for the same reason; it is beyond them, but nonetheless real. Some people could also be intentionally or subconsciously ignoring the evidence for intelligent design that is otherwise available to them due to a bias in their thinking.
It is perhaps even possible that the designer has chosen to veil the truth to materialist “politicians” in science and to others who subscribe to their views; he has chosen to ignore them until they stop ignoring him. Neo-Darwinists may respond that human science is unavoidably stuck with human limitations, and this is true as far as it goes. But we could approach science and the teaching of it with a bit more humility, acknowledging that, exactly because we have such limitations, there is and will always be insufficient scientific evidence to rule out God or intelligent design conclusively.
Fallacy
#11: One strike and your out
Much of mainstream science today rules out intelligent design theory as being proper science because, decades ago, some devout fundamentalist minded religious people proposed the intelligent design argument in forms that referred to religious authority (as well as science), and, in some cases, that formulation of the theory provided no testable implications. God, of course, is an authority; rather, he is the authority. Nonetheless, by definition of science, that authority can’t be used as scientific evidence. So, yet the original version of intelligent design theory was closely entwined with religion.
Because of ID’s historical antecedents, which were genuinely connected with religion, neo-Darwinists today argue that no intelligent design argument can ever be formed any differently than those first failed attempts 100 years ago. According to the Darwinists, intelligent design may not be modified; it will always be referring to God’s authority, and therefore always be nonscientific. But since when have scientific hypotheses, or philosophical ones for that matter, been impossible to modify? Not only does the Darwinist position contradict the entire history and even the definition of science, it is just irrational, even childish. “We are not letting you change. You were wrong, and that’s it. Don’t bother trying to correct your error.” This is hardly in conformance with scientific method which implies the inherent right to modify a theory to improve it. Science is a learning process that permits and encourages theoretical growth. The Darwinists’ incessant retranslation of modern American intelligent design theory back into a 100-year-old European religious view that is now an anachronistic relic is in stark contravention of the facts. Modern ID theory has since removed all assertions about God—period. Modern ID theory invokes no religious concepts or authorities whatsoever, and now has many testable implications (see Appendices 3 & 5)—it merely employs the same name because the most fundamental underlying concept is precisely that, intelligent design.
ID theory is being held to an unrealistic double standard. While all other theories are permitted modification and advancement, ID theory is singled out for different treatment. ID theory is permitted no mistake corrections, no modifications at all. All the while neo-Darwinian evolution nonchalantly changes with each passing decade, throwing out refuted tenets, adding a variety of theoretical embellishments and generally upgrading and modifying itself at will. The neo-Darwinist blockade of a corresponding growth in intelligent design theory amounts to an attempt at intellectual totalitarianism.
The history of Darwinian thought is replete with failed versions of evolution freely amended. Darwin himself was wrong (at least modern science believes he was wrong) in believing that acquired characteristics could be inherited,[6] as did Lamarck. This tenet was later dropped from evolutionary theory. Though the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics was considered disproved, it is now making a limited come back. Thus, the theory of evolution is permitted to change in a variety of ways, and even change back if the evidence so requires. Naïve mutationism has been similarly dropped from the theory of evolution, punctuated equilibrium and random drift have been added, and so on. The entire history of science, in fact, is filled with the exact same option to amend one’s theory in order to progress it that neo-Darwinists (and even the federal courts) now irrationally deny to intelligent design theory. This despite the fact that the ability to admit a mistake and make the needed correction has always been taught as an axiomatic virtue of science, if not the virtue.
Richard G. Olson tells us in his recent book Science and Religion, 1450-1900: From Copernicus to Darwin, that science and religion started out fully enmeshed as a unified explanation of nature and life.[7] Much of science has since dropped God from its explanations, but science initially asserted God as an explanation for certain features of nature, especially the origin of life. Darwin, himself, did the very thing in the Origin of Species, which monumental classic stands unamended on this point to this very day. The “Creator” is cited by Darwin as the source of the origin of life. Thus, the neo-Darwinists’ own version of Darwinian theory has had to go through the exact same decoupling transition to remove the tenet of God that science now denies to intelligent design theory! This is a blatant double standard, and it goes without saying that double standards have no place in science.
Science only gradually modified its explanations to be God-free through a dynamic event process spanning practically the entire history of science up to 1900.
In England in the early 1830’s,
the official Church of England theology was predominantly rationalist, and the
outstanding scientists were also religious men, so that there had been no
serious questioning of the eighteenth-century assumption that science is the
handmaid of religion, since it leads men to appreciate “the Power, Wisdom, and
Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” And as late as 1837, when the
distinguished geologist Adam Sedgwick was Chairman of the British Association
(for the advancement of scientific research), he concluded its annual meeting
by declaring that if he found his science [to] “interfere in any of its tenets
with the representations of doctrines of Scripture, he would dash it to the
ground.”[8]
How can science fairly deny to intelligent design theory the right to make the same conceptual evolution the whole of the rest of science has undergone? Moreover, if advancing beyond the initial prejudice for God is commendable as the neo-Darwinists all say it is, why don’t they allow and even encourage intelligent design theory to do it? Science’s current prejudice against intelligent design theory, based solely upon its past association with religion, is therefore seemingly a fully irrational and fully unscientific position to take. It only inverts science’s original prejudice for God, replacing it with a prejudice against God, and against anything even remotely compatible with God. The neo-Darwinist position, while loudly extolling the virtues of separating science from religion, inappropriately joins science with politics instead, still failing in the stated quest for objectivity, and marring the reputation of science with the heavy scent of hypocrisy.
So, if the neo-Darwinists have joined politics to science, what then is their agenda? On the surface, it appears to be a strategy calculated to defend their favored personal worldview of atheism and materialism against an encroachment from the newly modified and strengthened theory of intelligent design. While not asserting God, ID theory clearly leaves room for him, and, in doing this, runs afoul of the neo-Darwinian tradition of proclaiming that science has freed man from the “primitive superstitions” of “religion.” But, contrary to materialists’ hopes, many nontechnical laypersons and accomplished scientists alike have recently acknowledged that modern ID theory has now struck a legitimate chord in favor of God’s existence. Noting this, the atheistic materialists who predominate in the neo-Darwinian camp fear losing further ground to theism in the public mindset. Thus, the intransigence of the neo-Darwinian position in denying modification to ID theory is apparently grounded in politics. What other reason would there be? It is surely not grounded in the spirit, history, method, or philosophy of science.
The necessary amendments requisite to making ID theory properly scientific have long been made. These are entered into the published record among a plethora of excellent books by the primary intelligent design authors, notably William Dembski. Yet most of mainstream science still stubbornly refuses to admit that ID theory is anything but disguised religion. One strike and you’re out. In doing this, the neo-Darwinists are getting away with the intellectual crime of blatantly redefining someone else’s theory and enforcing a standard upon their opposition that the theory of evolution itself has not satisfied: freedom from any historical connection with religion. In endorsing this intellectual travesty, current spokespersons for evolutionary science are doing a sterling job of proving the long-lived aphorism that the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. One might have borne up well enough under the neo-Darwinists’ loss of prestige, integrity and credibility in masquerading such foolish propaganda as science, but having the federal courts elect to join them in Kitzmiller in validating the use of a double standard comes as a blow. This is not only a blow to science but a blow to democracy and freedom of thought (and indirectly to freedom of religion). (See Appendix 9.)
Fallacy
#12: Christians can’t do science without contaminating it with their personal
philosophies and religion (but everyone else can).
Critiques of intelligent design
authors made by neo-Darwinist pundits on the Web and in print point out that
some of the primary intelligent design authors have openly acknowledged their
Christian faith. Therefore, the critics claim, when Christians do science it
must be religion masquerading as science. Even Niles Eldredge, the Curator of
the
Curator or not, Eldredge, and like-minded Darwinists, appear to have forgotten their history of science. Blaise Pascal, a famous French scientist, invented the first computer. He was a devout Catholic who had sewn the date of his conversion to Christ and a description of the experience into the liner of his jacket. Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, was a very devout Christian. Rene Descartes, mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, founder of the Cartesian coordinate system, as famous as anyone in science, was a Christian as well. Darwinists have not questioned the objectivity of the science of these men. Why not? Because there is no propaganda value in maligning someone the public has already accepted.
One can, and routinely does, put faith-driven or philosophical preconceptions aside to practice an objective discipline like science, law or politics (well, at least science and law). This is especially true in science, and known to be so. Science, in fact, is famous for this principle of objectivity. It is why it is called a discipline. Humans have the ability to do this; they have the ability to be objective, though they may elect not to be.
Noted science and religion writer, Larry Witham, reports that “…four in ten ranking scientists can investigate nature and believe in a personal God.”[9] A notable case in point is physicist John Polkinghorne, Fellow of the Royal Society, former Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics and President of Queens College, Cambridge. Polkinghorne is an ordained priest in the Church of England. He has written a brief but perceptive book on the subject of faith and science based upon his 1993 Gifford lectures entitled The Faith of a Physicist, which proves our point nicely (and quite a few other perceptive books on related topics).[10] A scientist can be a believer, and a believer can do unbiased science.
Scientists can, of course, bring a prejudice for their personal beliefs into their work, though the good ones will not. Polkinghorne echoes the astute English philosopher Mary Midgley, who teaches us in her critical tour de force, Evolution as a Religion, that any rational being who hopes to navigate his world must hold a metaphysic of one sort or another. Everyone has to begin the thinking process with a worldview of some kind, conscious or subconscious; it is an unavoidable requirement to rationally navigate our planet and our rich internal experience.[11] The neo-Darwinist assertion that their own worldview preferences never contaminate their science but a Christian’s faith must always contaminate theirs is plainly indefensible. Even the Senior Editor of Nature (Henry Gee) says that they have gone too far.[12]
Kenneth Richard Samples points out to us on the Reasons to Believe Website, the track record of Christians in science is not just good, they are literally the very founders of science.
The intellectual climate that gave rise to modern science
(roughly three centuries ago) was decisively shaped by Christianity. Not only
were most of the founding fathers of science themselves devout Christians
(including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
On the Exploring Christianity Website, Dick Tripp, tells us that the list of Christians who were important to science goes much further. He cites famous Christian scientists who were literally the founders of their branch of science (29 branches of science are given including calculus, chemistry, electromagnetics, anatomy, antiseptic surgery, and so on). These Christian fathers of science include Boyle, Kepler, Newton, Pasteur, Lister, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin, Pascal, Riemann, Mendel etc.[14] Tripp cites What If Jesus Had Never Been Born, by D. James Kennedy, as the source of this information. The Kennedy/Tripp list is substantially expanded on the Wikipedia Internet Encyclopedia Website.
Catholics alone comprise almost a billion believers. There must be at least as many protestants, all denominations combined. Are neo-Darwinists really proposing that we should exclude over two billion people from doing science? And, what about the Muslims, Hindis and Buddhists? How can we be sure they aren’t doing religion in place of science? Please…
The truth of the matter is that Christians are not (or at least not often) contaminating science with their religion or personal philosophy. In any case, the risk of personal bias in science is a sword that cuts both ways. What neo-Darwinists naturally fail to mention is that scientists with the materialist worldview are also at risk for exhibiting a personal bias in their science. Neo-Darwinists themselves provide the perfect example in asserting the worldview of materialism in science books. At least Christians are honest enough to admit that they have a religion. Many neo-Darwinists and other materialist thinkers in science ascribe to a personal worldview that is called scientism. This is essentially materialism dressed up in scientific clothes. The false religion of scientism underlies much of what neo-Darwinism asserts. Scientism goes so far beyond the established facts as to be a matter of personal faith and not science at all.[15] Scientism is a very dangerous social philosophy that leaves the door open to the abolishment of human rights in favor of social and behavioral conditioning, human experimentation, unbounded genetic engineering, forced labor, government directed career choices, speech and thought control, and absolutely anything else that can be given a pseudo-scientific gloss of “for the good of humanity.”
This is the reason Christians find themselves compelled to press for fair treatment of origins of life theories in the classroom. It is not because Christians are attempting to prejudice science with their religion, it is because they are trying to stop neo-Darwinists from prejudicing science with their religion, an atheistic materialism of the scientistic variety heavily influenced by Marxism. Until the full Church gets onboard with this struggle for objectivity in the classroom our students will not hear an unbiased presentation of all sides of the issues concerning evolution. Catholics have been noticeably absent from this fight. I exhort Catholics and all Christians to study the issues closely and to begin to carry their share of the burden in social activism aimed at correcting the currently one-sided teaching of atheistic evolution in our schools and colleges. Either God-neutral evolution must be taught exclusively, or, if atheism and materialism are to be allowed as philosophical adjuncts to evolutionary theory in the classroom, then theistic evolution must be permitted as well. Intelligent design theory itself is God-neutral and should be allowed in any case. It is currently being excluded based upon the materialist political lobby having succeeded in erroneously redefining it as religion and convincing the courts to do the same.
Intelligent design theory itself is pure science. However, the larger debate raging around this subject in society today is not merely a debate over intellectual abstractions that are of no practical consequence to the Church. The battle to present (either) a balanced worldview to our science students ( or none) has drastic implications for society’s continued ability to grasp the inherent value of human life, human dignity, human rights generally, and especially the right to life of unborn children.
Fallacy
#13: Now ET exists, now he doesn’t
Modern science is spending millions looking for ET in outer space,[16] but Niles Eldredge and other neo-Darwinists insist that ET can be ruled out as the intelligent designer. How is it they know this when we have only begun to look?
Since 1995, astronomers have been discovering these
extrasolar planets and now know of more than three hundred. As observational
techniques have been refined and the data continuously taken, so smaller and
smaller planets have been discovered.
Now, with CNES-ESA's COROT and NASA's Kepler missions, the prospect of discovering Earth-sized worlds in Earth-like orbits around other stars is better than ever. "We are now on the verge of finding Earth-like planets," says Grinspoon.[17]
Our leading physicists do not rule out ET. Why, the very co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, espouses the theory that life was sent here to Earth from an alien civilization. This theory is called directed panspermia. Crick’s paper on the subject, written with noted origins of life researcher Leslie Orgel, is available free online from the National Library of Medicine (PDF). Astrobiology Magazine also has an excellent online article, "Francis Crick Remembered," discussing Crick’s life and career and the directed panspermia hypothesis.[18]
While there is clearly no way to rule out the ET hypothesis on a scientific basis, in neo-Darwinist literature a real possibility for ET exists only when it serves the purpose of materialistic science. It suddenly goes away when intelligent design theorists claim there is a physical candidate for the intelligent designer (ET), thus making ID theory fall squarely into the accepted realm of science where it cannot be dismissed as disguised religion. Here the materialists reveal not only an obvious contradiction but a prejudice against intelligent design, by switching positions on ET when it serves their political purpose.
In denying the possibility of ET neo-Darwinists are apparently trying to save the argument from imperfection (see Fallacy #24 below), that is, the argument that that God would never make a world with a serious flaw in it. If neo-Darwinists admit ET as a possible designer of life they lose the argument from imperfection for the simple reason that ET need not be perfect. While wishing perfection, perhaps, ET may not be far enough advanced in science to achieve it (to neo-Darwinian standards).
We humans, of course, are intelligent designers in our own right. We are already doing rudimentary genetic engineering and biotic machine construction. We have attempted to synthesize life from chemicals (and failed). If our results are flawed, why must ET be perfect? ET could be far more advanced than humanity and still be incapable of achieving perfection in living designs. Since neo-Darwinists are forced by incontrovertible evidence to admit the appearance of design, they need the argument from imperfection to defend their position. They need to be able to say that as a matter of fact there is no designer of life despite so many visible indications that there is one. As it turns out, the argument from imperfection doesn’t work in any case, not against ET, and not against God. This is demonstrated in fallacies 23, 24 & 25 below.
Neo-Darwinists and materialist scientists dismiss the possibility of ET within the context of evolutionary discussions because allowing ET as a reasonable hypothesis for the designer of life makes intelligent design theory properly scientific (contrary to their loud claims that it isn’t). In embarrassing contrast, within the context of cosmology and anthropology the possibility of ET is readily admitted by neo-Darwinists apparently because the existence of extraterrestrials is seen by many to contradict the biblical worldview. So the neo-Darwinists gain political yardage for their materialist worldview by switching positions on the possibility of ET being the designer of Earth’s life. Those readers who have stayed with the evolution debate through the years will have observed that the neo-Darwinists have no qualms about taking their political yardage where and when they can get it, yardage for atheistic materialism. This reveals the Marxist influence on their thinking: they are willing to sacrifice intellectual integrity to influence public thinking towards their position. They apparently assume the public doesn’t have the ability to think critically, or that most won’t read widely enough to catch them contradicting themselves in different venues. They don’t mind being embarrassed in the eyes of the minority who do their homework so long as they can influence the majority towards the achievement of their social revisionist agenda. [Note: For those interested in all aspects of the ET question, Fallacy #16 below and Appendix 7 both discuss SETI and its logical affinity to the intelligent design argument.]
Fallacy
#14: Intelligent design = biblical creationism (Creation Science)
ID theorists tell us straight out that their theory is not biblical creationism. Biblical creationists agree that the two theories are not the same. Carl Weiland, speaking for the Creation Science movement at the Answers in Genesis Website, explicitly disavows that Creation Science and intelligent design theory are two names for the same theory, explaining in concrete terms why the two are absolutely distinct. See his paper “AiG’s views on the Intelligent Design Movement.”
The neo-Darwinists, however, claim to know better than the authors of either movement what those movements are about. Richard Dawkins makes this blatant confusion in his book, A Devil’s Chaplain:
…I am proposing that you might
consider uniting with me (no need to involve others) in signing a short
letter…explaining publicly why we do not debate creationists (including the
‘Intelligent Design’ euphemism for creationists) and encouraging other
evolutionary biologists to follow suit.[19]
Given 100 or more glaring logical
fallacies in the neo-Darwinist argument, it is easy to understand why Dawkins refuses
to debate anyone. The differences between intelligent design theory and the
Creation Science theory are clear, substantial, and simple. These differences
have been amply pointed out in a myriad of published works so that Dawkins has
no excuse for blurring the distinction. In the event that anyone remains
unclear about the difference between Creation Science and intelligent design
theory, I devote a short appendix to drawing the distinction at Appendix 5. But
I repeat the primary differences here in brief. First of all, Creation Science
claims a young earth, a relatively quick creation of all species in their final
form at a single point in time (6 days at the beginning), and asserts that God
is the creator. Intelligent design theory, on the other hand, allows that life
forms developed over millions of years, allows and/or generally assumes with
mainstream science that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and claims only
that an intelligent designer of some kind, maybe God, maybe ET, maybe
someone/something we have yet to discover, is the designer of life. ID theory
does not rule out God, but the assertion of God is not part of the theory. Yet
Dawkins, Niles Eldredge and Douglas Futuyma et al., even the AAAS and NAS,
stubbornly insist that the two theories are the same when they are so visibly
and radically different. This is a mistake a 4th grader could catch!
There is then no excuse for making it.
Why do distinguished scientists make such a simple error? One possibility, as Dr. Faust has proposed, is that, when it comes to higher level judgmental tasks, intricate logical evaluations, and the manipulation of complicated abstract conceptual relationships, scientists as a group simply do not perform well. Translated: when it comes to abstract logic and high level judgments scientists just don’t get it. Their heads are buried in the data; they “can’t see the forest for the trees,” as it were. One possible reason for this is the existence of an unconscious bias for the materialistic worldview, the religion of scientism, which skews the scientist’s perspective. Such a bias can affect the psyche at many levels. The bias for materialism may run so deep as to be the corollary of you or I believing that the chair will hold us when we sit go to sit down (Descartes’ dilemma). In the same way as you and I trust our chairs, the materialists confidently rule out anything that might even remotely and indirectly smack of God. Included in the targeted group of unwelcome concepts are things that have been merely historically associated with religion but do not logically entail religion, such as intelligent design theory. The materialists of mainstream science do this unconsciously prior to even examining the base propositional content of the theory they are condemning. Thus, many materialists “innocently” brush off ID theory with “Don’t bother me with frivolous ideas. My time is too valuable.” They simply assume there is no case for ID outside the supernatural. Others, of course, may not be so innocent, but, rather, are blatantly pursing a materialist (even a Marxist) political agenda under the guise of science.
For some scientists, this aversion to God-scented concepts may reach the level of a little old lady avoiding a tuberculosis ward for fear of infection, becoming a genuine phobia. The closest thing you and I can feel for such an aversion is an intuitive recognition of the dangers of introducing our children to liberal arguments for moral relativism, where anyone’s thinking preferences are affirmed as fundamentally as good as anyone else’s. To the immature mind such nonsense can have a strange attraction and be truly and perniciously contagious; thus we justifiably fear for our children’s exposure to such moral heresies. “Don’t listen to them,” we may say, “It’s all crap!” We don’t bother to engage in seminar level refutations with our children out of a concern for intellectual fairness in such cases. We think we already know the truth, our time is valuable, and we do not wish to dignify such crap with a response. And we are afraid the ideological infection will spread and harm our sons and daughters. This is the way materialist scientists feel about any concept, valid or invalid, that opens the door to God. They genuinely believe that society would be better off God-less. Thus, they are oblivious to the question of whether intelligent design theory is genuine science or not, they just don’t want it to be heard.
Should a real concrete threat of a moral relativist takeover of society arise, we would fervently rise to the occasion to do battle against relativism as something requisite to the survival of society itself. Amid our fervor we could conceivably miss the occasional point of sound logic that occurs on the other side of the debate. Some well-meaning scientists apparently hold a similar fervor for scientism/atheistic materialism. They truly believe that they, the scientists, are the saviors of society (not Christ), and materialist science is their flaming sword. Science is seen as emancipating us from the realm of superstition, within which category neo-Darwinists have unthinkingly included authentic religion. Basic human psychology is the problem here. Humans on either side of any debate concerning what is fundamentally best for society can have a blind spot for arguments that, while valid, nonetheless set off their psychological defense mechanisms.
Minus such a psychological bias, or minus the simple absence of good analytical judgment such as Dr. Faust posits, one assumes that such glaring mistakes would only be risked for an important strategic political reason. In the case of the neo-Darwinist prejudice against ID theory, the reason apparently is that if Darwinists once admit that intelligent design theory is science and not religion, then students and the public will begin to evaluate the specific evidential components of the intelligent design case. They will see how strong that case is. They will also come to realize that after decades of science ballyhooing accidental evolution as the best it has to offer we find that there is absolutely no evidence for the accidental thesis. Science (and their religion of scientism) stands to lose face for having so enthusiastically endorsed something that turned out to be totally without evidential merit. The credibility of mainstream science is on the line here. A large core of modern evolutionists have staunchly committed themselves and their reputations as experts to the claim that science argues against God and that ID theory is nothing but bogus pseudoscience. Thus the materialists in science are obliged to continue to crank out groundless propaganda to cover their previous mistakes. They are using propaganda and denial to buy time, hoping for a gradual and silent social transition away from the accidental worldview that lets them sneak away from the abject failure of this theory minus the glaring public embarrassment science would otherwise suffer from a straightforward acknowledgment of the change.
Furthermore, should science admit the intelligent design hypothesis to be scientific (which it is), the strength of the case for ID theory would leave materialist scientists in the uncomfortable situation of having to admit that science supports the case for God as far as science can legitimately take that case, that is, up to the affirmation of intelligent design generally. Atheistic/materialism would then stand to lose substantial political ground with the public. But the Marxist influence in neo-Darwinian thinking drives them to abhor losing ground in public thinking for the materialist school of thought above all else. They are willing to endure the embarrassment of glaring technical errors in thought because they are generally visible only to academic logicians. They don’t care if they lose face among a few astute scholars because they don’t view science so much as a professional academic pursuit that must maintain integrity as a sociological battlefield where the aim is to control the thinking of the masses by hook or crook. So long as they win the public debate and the rank and file member of society is further led toward the materialist system of thought, they will spew absolute nonsense all day long every day if that is what it takes to create an “enlightened” society free of religion. Yes, it is true. We have materialist philosophers masquerading as scientists. They do science, yes, but they have no respect for the charter and integrity of science. They will give it plenty lip service, and they will honor it when they can, but when scientific integrity must be sacrificed for materialist social progress they have no qualms in subjugating the integrity of their science to their political agenda. We have taken the long way home here, but it could not be helped. The mistaken confusion of intelligent design theory with biblical creationism is a fiction intentionally cultivated by materialists in mainstream science to keep the public from seeing the strength of the intelligent design case.
Again, in sum, Intelligent design theory has only one tenet:
·
Some form of intelligent
designer is necessary to explain the complex designs of life and the complex
system of physical laws, constants, and constraints that have given rise to
complex life forms. ID theory does not say who or what the intelligent designer
is, nor whether he/she/it or they are natural or supernatural, only that there
must be a designer (see the next fallacy, #15).
Biblical creationism says much more and is more specific. Although they may vary in their formulation, the main tenets of biblical creationism generally include:
·
A young Earth
·
6-day creation
·
The book of Genesis as, in
addition to a theological account, a “literal” account of the events of the
worlds creation that is translatable to and tractable by science
·
The assumption that the
correct timeline for creation and man’s early history may be computed from
purely biblical sources, that a specific master chronology of early human
history can be accurately constructed with confidence based upon genealogies of
the biblical patriarch families traceable from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob back to
Adam
·
The God of the Bible,
Yahweh, is the creator.
Fallacy
#15: Any intelligent designer must be God
Just not
true. What makes the neo-Darwinists (who are predominately materialists) so
certain there are no physical beings intermediate between ourselves and God (ET
for example), or even that there is not a physical God—are they taking
religion’s word for it? How does a group of atheistic materialists
arrive at such an opinion? Have the neo-Darwinists looked through all the
galaxies, dimensions and, potentially, other universes as some famous
physicists have postulated, and found them devoid of advance life? No, they
haven’t. They haven’t even looked through any recent books on intelligent
design since the 1960’s!
Theories
of extraterrestrial intervention are not new. For all science knows, as
they are just beginning the search for life on other planets,[20] any number of superior beings could exist (even physical
ones). Science currently makes the well-evidenced assumption that there are
thousands of habitable planets in the universe, probably millions. The more we
look into space, the more evidence for the possibility of life on other planets
we are finding. Most recently water has been found on the moon and on Mars
after decades of assuming there would be none. So we have no way to rule out
the existence of other intelligent life in the Universe at all. This poses a
problem for the neo-Darwinians because, in order to justify their, on the
surface very much mistaken, equivocation of intelligent design theory and
biblical creation science, they must maintain that there are really no other
plausible options for the intelligent designer than God. If the intelligent
designer must be God, then, they (also mistakenly) say, intelligent design
theory must be religion. None of this holds water of course, but it as close to
legitimate as the neo-Darwinian propaganda line can get because they are
promoting a lie.
Noted physicists
have recently hypothesized that Earth’s life forms, and potentially even our
entire universe, are the product of the laboratories of an advanced
civilization. Strangely, in the view of some neo-Darwinian evolutionists,
biologists are not allowed to make the same hypothesis. Why do neo-Darwinian
evolutionists feel compelled to employ such a flagrant double standard? It all
seems merely a desperate ploy by the proponents of a failed accidental
worldview. They are irrationally grappling to hold on to the
atheist/materialist politic. Retarding intellectual progress with propaganda,
intellectual foot dragging, if you will, may be a legitimate Marxist tactic to
change society, but it is not a proper method of science.
One of
the most famous men of science, Francis Crick, held the theory that life on
earth was planted here by extraterrestrial civilizations. In addition, human
science is also currently playing around with designing things made of biotic
components, making the assumption that we will some day succeed in much greater
measure. It is logically inconsistent to do this while simultaneously assuming
that ET could not have played around and made us (in addition to a really fine
movie). Therefore, God is not the only candidate for the intelligent designer
as far as science is concerned and intelligent design theory cannot be
dismissed as disguised religion.
Fallacy
#16: Scientific evidence can never point to an intelligent designer of life,
but it can (on the same logic) point to intelligent life elsewhere in the
Universe (SETI)
Science’s
current search for extraterrestrial life uses artificiality as its criterion
for validation. At times the SETI search has included the set of prime numbers
1 through 101,[21] but, as astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute
rightly points out, SETI is currently only looking for a much simpler kind of
signal. Such a monotonous drone-like signal as is currently sought by SETI only
invokes the artificiality criterion; it does not require complexity. In other
words, no matter how simple the signal, when it is an occurrence that nature is
incapable of spontaneously producing in the given context where it originates,
SETI will accept the signal as a valid indicator of extraterrestrial
intelligence. For this reason, Shostak asserts that the analogy between
intelligent design logic (which he assumes is focused exclusively upon extreme
complexity) and the SETI criterion does not hold. Shostak is wrong about this
for two reasons. First, as Appendix 7 further explains, the existence of
complexity in the form of science, technology and living biological systems on
the originating end is a prerequisite for the production of the artificial
signal SETI is looking for, no matter how simple the signal itself may be. Second,
Shostak’s argument implies both that intelligent design theory could not
properly use evidence analogous to the simple monotonous signal that SETI has
currently targeted, that is, that ID cannot use artificiality minus
super-complexity, and that SETI cannot use certain kinds of complexity. Both of
these implied assumptions are not true.
By the
logical axiom of modus ponens, if intelligence is a necessary condition
for the origination of a simple artificial signal, then the presence of that
signal is a sufficient condition for the presence of the intelligence. Thus,
intelligent design theory can in theory legitimately use artificiality as one
of its forms of evidence. ID theory may be formulated in such a manner that it
claims that nature could not have spontaneously produced complex life forms
without intelligent guidance. In other words, ID theory may be formulated to
claim that Earth’s life forms are artificial. Once that is done, the
only way to argue that SETI and ID logics are not analogous is to beg the
question of the intelligent design of life and simply assert without proof that
no life forms are artificial because nothing in nature is artificial. But our
experiments and rudimentary excursions into biotic engineering have already
proved that principle false. Not everything made of natural biotic components
is non-artificial anymore. There is therefore no reason to assume that anything
else made of biotic material is necessarily non-artificial until we can
definitively demonstrate its origin. And there is a strong straightforward case
that Earth’s life forms are artificial. The genetic code of life is visibly a code,
it qualifies as a language with syntax and semantics, i.e., rules for
meaningful expression, and the gene regulation systems, at least in animals,
operate on a system of Boolean logic. An ordered system of language or an
axiomatic system of symbolic logic just is an objective indication of
intelligent design. Artificial informational, logical, or mathematical systems
of symbols are the true hallmark of civilization.
When
properly understood, the intelligent design argument is not merely about
complexity, but also truly about artificiality in very much the same way as
Shostak describes the current SETI search stratagem. Professor Michael Behe’s
ID argument is concerned with the irreducible complexity of the cell and other
biological components. This implies artificiality because nature appears
incapable of spontaneously placing the multiple complex parts into position
simultaneously in an otherwise very closely orchestrated way. William Dembski’s
ID argument for intelligent design is an instance of artificiality as well,
albeit a very large one. Dembski’s approach is centered around the resource
exhaustion argument. The research exhaustion argument absolutely parallels the
current SETI artificiality criterion in saying that a random or accidental
natural process could not have spontaneously generated life within a certain
demonstrable context, namely within the time and physical resource limits
established by the age of our universe (see Appendix 2). Thus, although the
historical strategies of SETI and intelligent design scientists may appear at
first glance not to have overlapped as a matter of historical fact regarding
their most publicized endeavors, as a matter of optionally useable logic, ID
and SETI are perfectly co-extensive, including all of the same basic types of
evidence. This is as it must be, for they both purport to be giving evidence
for precisely the same thing: intelligence at the source of a body of empiric
observations.
If a
practical SETI search strategy could be devised with the expectation of
discovering signals of a more complex type than those currently sought by SETI,
those more complex signals would be accepted as signs of intelligence provided
only that nature was incapable of spontaneously producing them in the context
within which they were found. Shouldn’t the same things we would count as signs
of intelligence if found in outer space count when found in inner space?
In human
experience, no system created by an intelligence exceeds the intelligence of
its creator, though it may be able to do certain tasks faster of have a greater
bulk data storage capacity. No created computational device can solve problems
or perform analytical tasks qualitatively different from those its creator can
solve or perform. Any differences are purely quantitative. This rule argues
against accident as the source of life because we have never seen an accident,
a process wholly devoid of intelligence, create an intelligent system or any
other kind of highly complex design—not one. Therefore, not only does the
existence of biological intelligence point to an intelligent designer of life,
but all of our experience says that that biological intelligence must be artificial.
Supercomputers
are good workhorses. They can do routine calculations so large that we cannot
do them in our head, or quickly on paper. Supercomputers, however, cannot
manipulate abstract concepts whole as humans do; they can only compute using
the binary number system. Nor can they perform tasks of the type involved in
human emotional/spiritual experience. They cannot make moral value judgments.
It is commonly assumed that computers far exceed the complexity of natural systems,
but this is a carefully constructed lie. The complexity of our best computer
networks do not approach the complexity of the neuro-network of the human brain
and nervous system. Even the simplest component of the ‘dumb” parts of our
bodies, a single protein, contains an information bearing complexity in its
three dimensional folded structure that outdistances the computational ability
of the average computer in real time by a factor of 86,400,000,000,000 to 1![22] But even if computers could keep pace with biological
systems, it would not prove the biological systems of non-intelligent origin.
The vast superiority of information capacity in living systems over our own
best efforts with computers is another strong prima facie indicator of
artificiality in biological systems. Contrary to Seth Shostak’s assertions,
then, there is a great similarity between the arguments of SETI and ID theory.
Fallacy
#17: Scientific evidence can never point to anything nonphysical (unless God
can definitely be ruled out, then, of course, it’s OK) [23]
Wrong again; scientific evidence has already done this in the Big Bang theory. The events prior to Planck time, that is, events prior to the first fraction of the first second of our universe’s existence, are considered by science to be a singularity, an anomaly contrary to, and prior to, the laws of physics. That singularity is a nonphysical event, by definition, because natural law did not come into being until later (a split second later, but later nonetheless). One may properly term the Big Bang “aphysical” or “pre-physical,” but it is also nonphysical because it accomplished what is impossible for the physical to accomplish. Therefore, here in this most prominent of all scientific examples, the origin of the entire universe, physical evidence does point to something nonphysical.
Nothing in the original charter of science rules out the possibility that scientific evidence and rational argument can point to the existence of something nonphysical. The scope and extension of logical inference is determined in any case and in every case by the axiomatic rules of logic alone, not by someone’s personal view of the contingent charter of science. Until the nineteenth century, in fact, scientists as well as theologians accepted Paley’s design argument, validating the logic of the design inference if not the truth of the premises of the argument Paley had posed in his time. Some scientists of the Paley/Darwin era even included God as part of scientific explanation, placing him, naturally enough, at the very origin of things. Darwin himself did this in the Origin of Species, positing God as the source of the initial breath of life that started evolution along on its course. Placing God’s involvement at the very beginning of things (as Darwin did) causes no problems for scientific method whatsoever. Modern science disallows this valid scientific and philosophical move of Darwin’s, while nonetheless hailing Darwin as one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of all time, if not the greatest. This selectivity reveals mainstream science’s bias towards materialism.
Ironically, it was then not the genuine Darwinian model that then convinced scientists of the nineteenth century, whose rudimentary science had not yet revealed the extreme complexity that we now know exists in microbiology and genetics, that God or intelligent design was no longer necessary to the explanation of life, but the God-amputated model. No wonder Dr. Faust says that scientists’ cognitive skills tend to be poor in the higher areas of judgment and abstract conceptual thinking. One is wont to say here that Faust forgot to list honesty as something also too often lacking in science, but he actually did not overlook it. He cited bias as one of the main causes of the frequent failure of scientific judgment that his study revealed.
In their zeal for the practical virtues of science, its precise control of nature, and the amazing results it yields from experimental investigation, in other words, in their zeal for science’s proven competency in the realm of intermediate causation, many modern scientists have apparently felt justified in entirely forgetting the beginning (and the necessarily different situation of a First Cause). Nothing of scientific method, logic or rules of evidence justifies their doing this. Modern science has simply become so enamored of materialism that they have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Having overcome the intractable, unproductive, and once predominant explanatory model of superstition, nineteenth century thinkers felt that the physical explanation must be all there is to it—in regards to absolutely everything. All or nothing—yet one more fallacy. Having so many intermediate causation questions answered so competently by the new fledgling model of natural science (and having their own status in the public mind enhanced by such startling success), scientists fell victim to an oversimplification, assuming that what works for most explanatory contexts, works for all.
Instead of beginning to chart the legitimate limits of science after the initial flood of success as they should have done, nineteenth century thinkers then rushed to the assumption of universal materialism. This spawned the naïve assumption that there were no limits to the scope of natural science whatsoever. In other words, science becomes the measuring rod of everything including religion, morality, human emotions and virtues, the arts and humanities, and all else. Modern neo-Darwinists, who should certainly no better, have continued to endorse this fantasy view of the world.
Unavoidably, because science obviously cannot manipulate the supernatural, even the scientists who elected to keep their faith realized that where God, an angel, or a demon might legitimately be involved, scientific explanation must still of necessity fall back on physical data to chart a reliable course. Many scientists of faith then naively joined the rapidly growing materialist culture of the nineteenth century in irrationally dismissing (for fully different reasons, however) the need for an explanation of ultimate origins to be grounded in the nonphysical. The weak logic for doing this was apparently that acknowledging the nonphysical aspects of a potential First Cause added no additional predictive ability, and added no additional data to the standard reductive physical explanation. Even after the Big Bang proved a nonphysical start to our Universe this much was still true. Honestly admitting the nonphysical origin does add one thing, however: logic—logical truth, logical consistency, logical integrity, however one prefers to phrase it. Neo-Darwinists and other materialists in science apparently saw no value in such an addition, once again revealing what may have been primarily political motives for some. To close the chapter on this monumental oversight in the history of science, the scientists of faith were too easily convinced to relegate the First Cause to the realm of pure philosophy. Of course, they didn’t have Big Bang theory in those early years to remind them that it all came from nothing in a fraction of a second. We do have it, and we, therefore, do not have their excuse.
Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists of today still feel no need for an explanation of ultimate origins. So much so, in fact, that their explanation of life starts precisely in the middle of life’s development, not at the beginning! We have today a plethora of dramatically more complex structures to explain than did Darwin. Darwin nonetheless felt compelled to resort to God as the explanation of the ultimate origin of life. Darwin did not see God acting in the range of intermediate causation at all. However, he did feel that God must have created the world and “blown” the first breath of life into his creatures. In Darwin’s conception, God then pushed the natural world off on its own independent and somewhat random course. Darwin so no evidence that God had either provided intelligent direction or obligated a given course for nature. Darwin thought that natural selection combined with spontaneous random variations in living systems were sufficiently capable to slowly build the machinery of the tree of life “by accident.” Darwin, however, knew not a fraction of the complexity that has turned since turned up. He thought the cell had a bunch of goo inside of it, called protoplasm, which sort of magically did all the work. It is clear to this author at least that the irreducible complexity arguments of Professor Michael Behe, the probability and resource exhaustion arguments of Professor William Dembski, and the arguments of Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. Michael Denton, would suffice to convince Darwin that nature could not have accidentally gotten past the complexity hurdles science has recently unveiled.
With the discovery late in the twentieth century of the self-organization of biotic molecules, we now know that the accidental neo-Darwinian model of evolution has failed. Spontaneous does not equal accidental where the formation of ultra complex systems are involved. Add to this Dr. Michael Denton’s revelation early in this century of predetermined forms in protein folding and the myriad of other physical laws and constants now known to be fine-tuned for life (cf. Penrose, Hoyle, Dyson, Ross and Rana, et al.), and the formation of life is shown to be a clearly directed process. The case for returning the designer of life to the beginning of the explanatory model where Charles Darwin placed him is once again strong.
It is true, as Niles Eldredge affirms in Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, that “…science describes the material content of the universe and the interactions among its parts, while religion is occupied with matters spiritual.”[24] That does not preclude the logical import of the physical evidence pointing to both intelligent design and a heavily biased, partially directed process. We can conclude that much without crossing the threshold into religion. Where does the direction and the bias come from? It is not necessary to be able to answer this question in order to affirm that there is in fact a bias. It is also not necessary to be able to say what the nonphysical thing is that originates the Big Bang to be able to say that thing is in fact nonphysical.
Science (as science) very legitimately balks at assigning ghosts, spirits, angels, or gods as intermediate causes in a chain of physical events. This is absolutely as it should be. Science cannot proceed with confidence to describe, to predict, or to explain where an objective empiric causal chain is affected by a ghost. Everyone agrees on that much. But, when we come to the ultimate origin of things as opposed to intermediates, the situation is different, As Thomas Aquinas demonstrated, there must of necessity be a mystery of one kind or another, something eternal (and therefore not physical) at the beginning. Empiric science cannot, by definition, deal with eternal absolutes, for example in the lab. No one contests that, but a combination of empiric data and logic can point to the existence of something eternal. Specifically, it is the combination of modern Big Bang cosmological theory and Aquinas’ First Cause argument that does this. I am not alone in drawing this conclusion; Pope Pius XII concluded the same thing when Big Bang theory was first unveiled to the world. There, in that first fraction of a second, the universe undeniably did something startling that fully defied the laws of physics and started the whole of majestic creation moving forward.
In the face of something so blatantly obvious, however, neo-Darwinists today not only remain staunch materialists, as if nothing had changed in the past 100 years of science! They still publish the ridiculous and unfounded assertion that there is no case for God whatsoever in the entire history of science, and that God therefore does not exist! And they are still teaching our science students the same rubbish in officially approved textbooks!
Certainly, the near 500 pages of this book and the expert analyses of the accomplished scientists, theologians, writers and thinkers listed in the bibliography constitute a case for God in science. When you hear this neo-Darwinists make this ridiculous claim, put them on the spot; ask them precisely what would count as evidence for God in their view if it were to occur? You will get neither a direct nor a coherent answer. You will only hear an age old line of propaganda: a good God would not allow evil; if God existed everyone would simply be immediately aware of it, etc. They will cite no science at all, but instead naïve philosophical assumptions that fail the cut at 4th Grade. The “scientific” proof they would accept is the equivalent of requiring that we live forever in paradise and can catch God strolling down Main street midday wearing a nametag!
Here is another line of argument that supports our position that science can give evidence for the existence of the nonphysical. Freudian psychiatrists, who typically endorse the atheistic view, assert that observed human behavior points to the existence of the id, the ego and the superego. All three of these theoretical Freudian constructs are nonphysical, at least in their original formulation. What exactly they were was, perhaps, never fully defined, but they were not physical. Reductionist scientists have since tried to reformulate those concepts as mere physical behavior patterns, but this does not change the fact that science accepted Freud’s original formulation. Thus, logical inference from empiric scientific data to the presence of things nonphysical already has a firm precedent in the history of science.
I am not the first to make the claim that science can properly admit logical inference from physical evidence to the existence of the nonphysical or to the existence of intelligence. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross make a strong argument that in limited contexts scientific evidence can point to the supernatural. Professor Trinh Xuan Thaun has informed us in his book, Chaos and Harmony, that one can have scientific evidence for the refutation of materialism.[25] He is not alone in this position. In, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design, astrophysicist, theologian and noted author on science and religion, Rodney Holder reaches the same conclusion.
The central issue I shall examine
is whether the origin and evolution of the universe as understood by modern
cosmology, utilizing the laws of physics, are uniquely and adequately explained
in terms of scientific naturalism alone. My intention is to show that science
cannot do without metaphysical assumptions, and the assumptions it uses ought
to lead scientists logically to embrace non-naturalism. In particular, the
science of cosmology may be suggesting that science itself provides reasons for
doubting scientific naturalism. My main focus will be on the by now
well-publicized evidence for the ‘fine tuning’ of the universe.[26]
Professor William Dembski, on the last page in chapter 25 of his excellent treatment of the subject in Design Revolution, correctly explains what may seem to be a paradox: it is a question of metaphysics, not science, as to whether nonphysical entities can have effects on physical objects. All of these authors allow that empiric data might be logically traced back to the nonphysical. However, if formal science is to be used to do the tracing, as opposed to analytical philosophy, common sense, or natural theology, then science will have to first finalize its own charter to specify when such inferences are permissible, by what means, and within what parameters. Until then, commentators will be forced to either merely assume or to argue for what that charter should be at the beginning of each treatment of the subject. This aspect of the charter of science is not presently set in stone by the scientific method itself. It is rather both fuzzy and somewhat optional. Particular proposals on how science should approach this question must therefore be reargued anew by each author on the basis of benefits, detriments, or risks to context specific explanations, and on the basis of the overall benefits to science. Among the considerations that such proposals must touch upon are explanatory power, logical consistency, consistency with existing theories, and epistemological integrity. This places an unnecessary burden on science and the philosophy of science, and it detracts heavily from the confidence society is justified in holding in science by revealing that scientists have not even seen to the foundational questions of their discipline. Appendix 10 further discusses the need for science to once and for all address this and several other unresolved foundational questions of the charter of science in a new modern synthesis focused primarily but not exclusively on evolutionary theory. In making the design inference and forcefully arguing the intelligent design case, Dembski, Rana, Ross, Behe, Meyer and many other degreed and credentialed scientists have all opted to include at least the inference to intelligent design if not to the nonphysical into the charter of science. In this book, I endorse their position and recommend science follow their lead.
Fallacy
#18: Selectively emphasizing or ignoring evidence
All of the biological complexity and probability data presented here is valid scientific evidence. Yet it has been completely ignored by neo-Darwinists despite its strength and volume. The fact that an accident couldn’t put together the larger part of a 3 billion nucleotide genome with translation system in 10 million years is a religious statement to be dismissed without scientific study and evaluation! Its all easy as pie to them. Dawkins claims to have “climbed mount improbable” by merely throwing a bunch or words around in his book, but that doesn’t build a genome. Dawkins cannot build a genome, but he claims that accident can. He ignores the real source of improbability, the initial construction of the genomes and the translation system needed to build life forms. He entirely ignores, to use Dr. Stephen Meyer’s phrase, the origin of biological information. Instead, he focuses exclusively on moving genes around (moving books around in the library) after they have first been mysteriously constructed. Even then, it is only happening in theory, that is, in hypothetical or imaginary terms. This imaginary event of gene shuffling only occurs after the tree of life is well underway. Not only does Dawkins start his climb halfway up the mountain, but a merely imaginary explanation that cannot be demonstrated does not qualify as a successful climb at all.[27] In reality, Dawkins has only climbed the foothill next door to Mt. Improbable and switched the sign.
Though the omission of the origin of biological information from their theory is the most glaring instance of selectivity, there are others. For example, neo-Darwinists are equally dismissive of the massive historical validation of the Bible, implying, and sometimes outright stating, that there is not a shred of scientific evidence for it. Some have even asserted that belief in the Bible is 100% arbitrary and irrational. In his textbook on evolution, Monroe Strickberger goes so far as to affirm that psychology and sociology have demonstrated religion to be man’s artificial invention based solely on psychological need. This ignores the reliable testimony of billions of people who testify to authentic encounters with God and it ignores the fact that religious persons show no greater prevalence of neurosis than atheists.
Since this book is written from the point of view of philosophy of science, I do not present the Bible as an authority for scientific truth. I wouldn’t be doing that in any case because Catholics don’t believe the Bible’s intent is to give scientific information. Rather, I mention the Bible for the purpose of showing how the neo-Darwinists casually dismiss known evidence to suit their political agenda of materialism. The fact of the matter is that the Bible is supported by an astounding amount of objective historical evidence. This should be apparent to anyone seeking the truth, whether they personally subscribe to a religion or not. Historical evidence has gradually accumulated to the point where the biblical thesis is today a thesis of historical science on a par with evolution itself, far surpassing the credibility of accidental evolution.
Although the recent discovery of a good candidate for Noah’s Ark at roughly 13,000 feet on a mountain peak in Iran surrounded by deep-sea fossils dramatically reopens the discussion of the appraisal of the historicity of the Bible, a successful defense of the historicity of the Bible hardly requires it. (See the Base Institute Website for more information on the discovery of a plausible candidate for Noah’s Ark). There is a great amount of incorrigible evidence for the historicity of the Bible. Much of that evidence the reader can find ready to hand at the following Websites:
Great Discoveries in the Ancient World of the Bible 5 audio tapes from the California Museum of Ancient Art
http://www.sumerian.org/cmaacat.htm
Exhibition of Biblical Artifacts in the Netherlands
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3062895,00.html
http://dialogue.adventist.org/articles/09_3_gregor_e.htm
Archaeology and the Bible (ACTS
Christian Website)
http://christiananswers.net/archaeology/
Near East Archaeology Data from ABZU put the word “Bible” in the search box and you will get
over 400 resources!
Amazing Discoveries in Bible Archaeology
http://www.concentric.net/~extraord/archaeology.htm
Bible History & Archaeology (from Bible History Online)
http://sindone.torino.chiesacattolica.it/en/welcome.htm
http://www.shroud.it/index2.htm
http://www.shroud.com/booklist.htm
Image on the Back of the Shroud
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4750663/
Carbon
Dating the Shroud of Turin
http://www.shroud.it/ROGERS-3.PDF
Proof the Shroud of Turin is Genuine
First Carbon Dating of Shroud in Error,
Shroud is Much Older
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=6346
Ancient Stone Tablet Relates Christ's
Resurrection
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=128&view=item&idx=1790
The Church of the 70 Disciples Found!
http://channels.isp.netscape.com/whatsnew/recent.jsp?story=20080817-0600&floc=NI-ntk2
John the Baptist's Cave Found!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/16/world/main636394.shtml
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0911_030911_SiloamTunnel.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-09/huoj-dok090903.php
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20030908/bibletunnel.html
Royal Seal Found! Confirms Jeremiah
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=71386
Gospel Verse Found on Ancient Shrine
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3541452
W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological
Research
http://www.aiar.org/
The Christian
Information Center
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/cic/CICmenu.html
Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society
The Foundation for
Biblical Archaeology
Dr. Tabor's Site: Archaeology of the Jewish Roman World of
Jesus
http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/dss.ht
Rare Scrolls Older than Dead Sea Scrolls
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050718/bible.html
http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/lwc_cda_article/0,1643,A%253D156415%2526X%253D1%2526M%253D50088,00.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/intro.html
http://biblical-studies.ca/dss/dss_guide.html
http://www.didjesusexist.com/links.html
References to Jesus in the Old Testament
http://www.centuryone.com/archaeology.html
Books on the Archaeology of the Bible
http://www.centuryone.com/archaeology.html
Archaeology & the Bible (Century One Foundation)
http://www.centuryone.org/arch-bible.html
The Century
One Foundation, which supports the archaeological digs at
Finally, archaeology strengthens the historical
credibility of the Bible. It constrains the imaginings of those who would make
the Bible just an interesting collection of folklore. Archaeology has
contributed substantially to the historicity of the Bible overall.
Discoveries such as the water tunnel beneath
Jerusalem dug by King Hezekiah, the Well of Jacob where Jesus spoke to the
Samaritan woman, the Pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed a crippled man, the
stone in the Roman theater at Caesarea inscribed with the name of Pilate, the
tribunal at Corinth where Paul was tried, and the theater at Ephesus where the
riot of silversmiths occurred, to name a few, help to give historical
credibility to the Bible.
Archaeology, like all academic
disciplines, does not exist in a vacuum. It influences and is influenced by
other fields of study. When Biblical studies and archaeology intersect, they
are both enlightened by the combination. There is no doubt that the events of
the Bible are firmly rooted in general world history.[28]
Thus, we are entitled to assert the historical Jesus as a well-confirmed theory of historical science much as, in Science on Trial, Futuyma claims for evolution. Both are theories not subject to rigorous experimental test, but nonetheless largely corroborated by the broken series of events revealed in the historical record. Considering the vastly greater number of steps involved in the evolutionary process and the much larger amount of time involved, it is correct to say that we have historical evidence for a larger fraction of the total events pertinent to the historicity of the Bible than we have for the events pertinent to confirming the historical theory of evolution. In his much acclaimed 2003 tour de force, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, the world’s leading philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne (retired, Oxford University, 2002) uses Bayes’ theorem to calculate the probability for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. His conclusion: the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection is 97% probable.[29]
Fine, you say, finally something simple and straightforward. We have two good historical theories, Christianity and evolution, two theories not proven beyond doubt but well supported enough that, in the absence of a better evidenced alternative theory, we should adopt them as our best explanation of the facts. No, not exactly; or, perhaps, yes and no, for it is not quite that simple. This is because neither “theory” is unitary in its claims.
Christianity and neo-Darwinian evolution each make two separate claims. Christianity claims not only that there was a historical Jesus, but also that Jesus was God. The historical evidence firmly validates the first claim but is less supportive of the second, though certainly not contrary to it. In the case of neo-Darwinian evolution, the two claims are that basic evolution occurred, and that it occurred by virtue of an accidental process, a process devoid of purpose, devoid of intelligent design, and devoid of divine intervention. There is moderate to very convincing evidence for the first claim in the fossil record, genetic and comparative anatomical studies, but no support whatsoever for an accidental process. As we have seen, much of the evidence is directly contrary to the accidental thesis. I would go so far as to say it has been visibly refuted.
In contrast, the claim that Jesus was God is supported by multiple reliable witnesses who testify to his having performed many amazing miracles. This does not demonstrate that he was God, but it is suggestive of it and is corroborative evidence for the supernatural generally. As astrophysicist and theologian Rodney Holder tells us in an article for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, “Hume on Miracles,” reliable testimony has bonafide evidential value. In this article
Hume's
argument concerning miracles is interpreted by making approximations
to terms in Bayes's theorem. This formulation is then used to
analyse the impact of multiple testimony. Individual testimonies
which are ‘non-miraculous’ in Hume's sense can in principle be
accumulated to yield a high probability both for the occurrence of a
single miracle and for the occurrence of at least one of a set of
miracles. Conditions are given under which testimony for miracles
may provide support for the existence of God.[30]
Here again, on the second claim, the Christian thesis fairs at least as well as the theory of accidental evolution on the basis of the evidence, and arguably much better. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists minimize the evidence for Christianity when they don’t outright ridicule it. In fact, the fallacy of selectively ignoring evidence is so ubiquitous in neo-Darwinian arguments that it has even been applied to Darwin, himself. Darwin included God as the source of life in The Origin of Species. While The Origin of Species is cited as the consummate authority for everything the neo-Darwinists wish to assert regarding the accidental worldview, that is, accidental form variation mediated only by natural selection, they ignore it completely in regards to Darwin having affirmed God there as the source of life. Instead, they refer to Darwin’s unpublished private comments and speculations regarding the wandering course of his personal faith. Darwin’s informal comments about his personal life are then distorted to try to prove that Darwin was an atheist and a materialist as a professional evolutionist. This is absolutely not so. Darwin himself disavowed his unpublished comments as not fully matured and not sufficiently corroborated by scientific research and analysis to warrant their being represented to the public as his well-considered professional position. Darwin explicitly labeled himself an agnostic on the personal side of things, but declined to recommend any position on religion to others as a professional. What Darwin did as a professional scientist is a matter of record: He placed God at the beginning of the evolutionary process as the source of life. Darwin never revised or retracted that professional opinion. Yet the neo-Darwinists use Darwin and his theory as if they were the consummate demonstration of the proof of atheism.
Fallacy
#19: False dilemma
Opening chapter eleven of Science on Trial, Professor Futuyma provides a perfect example of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. “Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not.” Sounds good, so it must be true right? What could be simpler. But there is a logical fallacy implied here, if not stated. The fallacy is the false assumption that there are only two options: immediate fully formed creation or atheistic accidental evolution. Most fallacies sound good, but upon closer scrutiny reveal a serious error in thought under the surface. In this case, the error is in assuming that evolution excludes either creation or intelligent design, that both creation and evolution can’t be true at the same time, and that creation by God must always be instantaneous. Evolution does not exclude creation; it only excludes instantaneous or rapid creation. Intelligent design theory allows that life may have developed over time and that inherited relationships may exist between creatures. Therefore, Futuyma's dilemma is false; the two options he identifies do not exhaust the available alternatives. There is a third alternative to instantaneous creation and evolution: creation by way of evolution. It is easy to understand how Futuyma could overlook this small third option. After all, it is only held by a billion Catholics and other Christians!
Truth be told, the alternatives for explaining the origins of life are not even limited to these three; there are four primary alternatives (signified by the Arabic numeral that follows the entry) with several additional variations (signified by a small letter following the numeral):
· Fully accidental evolution (1)
· Evolution fully on purpose—that is, creation by way of an evolutionary process (2)
· Evolution on purpose with designed-in random components that come into play at various points in the development of life and within the design of living creatures (2a)
· Creation by evolution over time with both built-in random components and true accidents permitted, accidents involving significant genetic transfers or major mutations (2b)
· Fully formed “instantaneous” creation, completed in one initial uninterrupted time interval, e.g., the six-day-creation of a literal biblical interpretation of the book of Genesis (3)
· Fully formed punctuated creation, creation of fully formed creatures at intervals over time (3a)
· A process that combines both accidental evolution and purposive creation. Non-sentient simple forms may have been permitted by an intelligent designer of Earth’s life to evolve spontaneously from nonliving matter (assuming for the sake of argument that such is possible), but these simple creatures could evolve no further through accidental processes due to a complexity barrier. This alternative allows that intelligent design may have also been employed to later polish these simplest designs to match ecosystem requirements, while it was definitely required to manufacture the higher forms of life because of complexity barriers. This option allows that the higher forms of life may also have been polished somewhat further after creation by natural selection, thus preserving beneficial minor variations that occurred over time. (4)
NOTE: I omit the logical possibility of fully formed instantaneous accidental creation here because, although it is logically possible, the improbability of such an event is visibly outside scientific thresholds of credibility. This book, of course, argues that accidental evolution also falls outside that threshold, but the fact that it does will not be immediately obvious minus close scrutiny of the facts of biology and careful application of the mathematics of probability theory.
Fallacy
#20: Straw man
The “straw man” label derives from the situation where someone sets up a scarecrow in the clothes of his real opponent and then demolishes the straw man because he is too weak to obtain victory over the real opponent. The same thing often occurs in intellectual debate. By making hokey misconstruals of intelligent design arguments, neo-Darwinists and sympathetic writers commit the straw man fallacy. They construct an artificial enemy instead of honestly addressing the full strength of the intelligent design case. These fallacies are often easy to miss as neo-Darwinian rhetoric can be fast and slippery. Here is an example from Kirschner and Gerhart’s, The Plausibility of Life:
Though the advocates of
intelligent design invoke “irreducible complexity,” they never ask about the
nature of that complexity. Behe uses elaborate biochemical examples to
intimidate us into believing that the complexity of living cells is beyond
understanding. Yet today, understanding the nature of complexity is a major
pursuit in science and the focus of much of this book.[31]
First of all, if Plausibility was intended to pursue the subject of complexity, precious little of the subject occurs there. And pursuing a topic is not the same as definitively treating it, which Kirschner and Gerhart certainly do not do. Next, Kirschner and Gerhart do not back up their claim that Behe has said or implied that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding. The accusation is not documented. To that extent alone, it is unfair at least to the reading public. Professor Behe is (on film and in correspondence) visibly the nicest man one could ever meet and anyone who has heard or read him could not imagine that he would “intimidate” anyone by any means, even intellectual exaggeration. Further, to my knowledge, no claim that cell biology is beyond understanding has been asserted anywhere in the intelligent design camp, by Behe or anyone else, and I am reasonably conversant with the literature. However, after four years of intensively digging through Indiana University’s bioscience library, I am not so sure I don’t want to make that claim. But let’s be clear. Behe’s argument for an intelligent designer is not that cell biology is beyond understanding. Rather, Professor Behe is saying that science has revealed designs in biology so complex that accident could not have constructed them by any stretch of the imagination. In misrepresenting what Professor Behe has said, either knowingly or through honest misunderstanding, Kirschner and Gerhart commit the straw man fallacy: they have substituted a false argument type (one that is much easier to criticize ) for the real argument that Behe presents.
And to say that Professor Behe and the intelligent design theorists never ask about the nature of complexity is simply taking misrepresentation as a debating tactic too far. This subject is not politics, it is microbiology, genetics and mathematics; there is a definite truth here that can be established, and a visible track record of who is doing what. As a professional microbiologist, Professor Behe does nothing but ask about the complexity of the cell and encourage his students to do the same. Every claim made in this passage about the intelligent design camp is patently false. Kirschner and Gerhart construct a false target, a straw man. Ironically, the same criticism can be fairly made against the neo-Darwinists. It is they who are flagrantly ignoring complexity, as this book clearly demonstrates. The neo-Darwinist defense for having no biomechanic to show for the process of evolution has traditionally been that the process is too big and too complex. This is much closer to an assertion that the complexity of evolution exceeds human comprehension than anything Professor Behe has said. Here is yet another fallacy and age-old debating trick: projection. Accuse your opponents of your own faults to deflect attention from the flaws in your own position.
Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity objection to neo-Darwinian theory is not that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding, but that all the parts must be in place at the same time for the mechanism to work. In other words, it is not the complexity of a cell that is beyond understanding. It is the inane hypothesis that an accident could have created such a sophisticated machine that is incomprehensible.
But consider: even had someone truly made the claim that biological complexity extends beyond human understanding, it would not be so easily refuted as Kirschner and Gerhart imply. In Molecular Theory of Evolution, Bernd-Olaf Küppers says this: “We shall probably never find out how much freedom a biologically active protein has for variation in its primary sequence. To do this would require in principle the testing of all the 10130 permutations—an impossible task…”[32] Küppers goes on to prove his point mathematically in the very next sentence. Michael Ruse, in his article, “Is There a Limit to Our Knowledge of Evolution?” which comprises chapter 8 of But Is It Science? informs us that “Overall, therefore, I am somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of our ever knowing fully the causes of evolutionary change. Like Kafka’s castle, it is a goal we shall never achieve.”[33] Ruse was not attacked for his comment, but then he is a defender of neo-Darwinian evolution. Here we see the fallacies of double standard, straw man, and projection.[34]
So we see that there is n fact a rational basis for seeing the full scope of molecular biology as extending into the humanly incomprehensible. Even had Professor Behe made such a claim it would not be a legitimate reason for criticism. The young science of protein fold molecular conformation prediction has encountered complexity hurdles that truly defy accurate prediction. Science of course is all about prediction, so in that sense, just this one single component of the cell, the protein, has in fact exceeded scientific “understanding.” Thus, placed into the context of the explosion of complexity in the new field of proteomics alone, the remark attributed to Professor Behe is completely understandable. Researchers in proteomics have at points been unavoidably reduced to making intelligent guesses. Their models and computer systems cannot reach the complexity inherent in the real world of biological proteins. These researchers use impressive mathematical devices and inductive inferences to reduce the chances of error, but they are still guessing, at least in part.[35] Our best computers today cannot model the complexities of even the fractional knowledge we have of protein interactions, and we are only beginning to understand them.
Recent studies related to identifying life-favoring constraints subtly embedded into chemical and biological processes suggest that at least some of the physical structures relevant to originating life and directing its course of development may be found to reside at the atomic level within the molecules that comprise living cells. It may even turn out that some biological determinants lie hidden deep in quantum physics. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could then come directly into play at either the atomic or quantum level to preclude our being able to take the accurate measurements needed to develop a full causal explanation. In that case, the explanation of life would truly lie forever beyond human understanding in a very real sense, and could be proven so.[36] Here again Behe is vindicated. What Kirschner and Gerhart would have us believe is a scientifically damning faus pax turns out to be a very profound scientific statement.
To my knowledge, no one in the intelligent design camp has ever asserted such a thing as that molecular biology was “beyond understanding” in the sense of a philosophy of despair as is implied by Kirschner and Gerhart that is, despairing of all opportunity for scientific explanation. Yet another fallacy, taking the statement out of context. The uncertainty principle of atomic physics is not the philosophy of despair, however, it does establish insurmountable limits to how far we big people can progress in trying to take small measurements of elementary particles. And to accuse ID of the philosophy of despair is ironic, because the whole point of intelligent design theory is to find a better explanation than simply marking the whole of life down to an inscrutable accident! To write everything off as one big accident is, in my view, genuinely despairing of meaningful explanation.
Let’s just stop for a moment of sanity check and consider what year it is, 2011. There are many millions of professional scientific journal articles, each of which describes the complex mechanisms of biological systems in minute detail. Yet, we cannot yet say that we have achieved full understanding of living systems. Until we do, there is no firm guarantee that we will, and at the deepest levels of physics, known barriers seem to clearly say that we won’t. It is hard to imagine even now, any one person mastering all of the necessary disciplines of chemistry, biology, paleontology, genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, proteomics, and bioinformatics that is necessary to fully integrate all that we currently know about life. In all of these ways, science admits the possibility that at least any one person will never fully understand life. In this sense, the statement attributed to Professor Behe would be fully understandable if not downright prescient. The bottom line is that there is nothing wrong with such a statement, and the real position of intelligent design on complexity is never addressed by Kirschner and Gerhart. They only attack a “straw man” who turns out to be more the self-portrait of neo-Darwinism than anything else.
Fallacy
#21: Overconfidence from insufficient data
No known biochemical pathway for evolution; large gaps in all the wrong places in the trail of fossil intermediates; no realistic assessment of the capabilities of the accidental element of the evolutionary process; no confirmed examples of macroevolution; no laboratory replication of either the origin of life or macroevolution; no explanation of how to configure the genomes by accident; no explanation of how nature could assemble irreducibly complex systems; scientific inspection of only a fraction of the biochemically relevant aspects of only 15% of the living species; only a few trivial examples of microevolutions: that’s the state of the evidence for accidental evolution.
And consider this. Henry Gee, Senior Editor for Biological Sciences of Nature magazine, argues that Darwinian theory has overstepped the evidence due to the limitations of what he calls “deep time.” If I understand Gee correctly, he is saying that there are so many millenniums between established fossils in a given hypothetically proposed evolutionary lineage (and probably always will be due to the vastness of evolutionary time) that we can never be confident that the proposed lineage was unbroken within the vast periods between the fossils we have found. In other words, we can’t be sure it actually is a lineage. According to Gee, the gap between the fossil evidence and any definite historical narrative of the course of evolution will always be so great as to make any narrative chronological scenario of evolution largely speculative and unfounded.[37]
According to Gee, evolutionists should not be attempting to say how or why the relationships we observe between creatures have come to be; they should be restricting themselves to describing what the genetic, structural, biochemical, and functional relationships between creatures are, that is, they should be restricting themselves to asserting things that are observable and testable. Once these kinds of objective descriptions of the species are complete, relative probabilities may be ascribed to a series of alternative cladistic profiles that show several options for the most likely (but still less than certain) biological relationships among creatures. Once that much additional work is done (and it’s a lot), one would be free to personally speculate that those biological relationships closely reflected evolutionary relationships, but science would still not be in a position to affirm such an historical relationship with high confidence. Due to the vast unobservable expanse of the history of the Earth, “deep time,” this is the best evolutionary science can do and remain a pure science. This from an acknowledged expert in paleontology and evolutionary biology, a scientist who is arguably as well informed and competent in the field as any evolutionary biologist living today.
To the extent that Gee’s estimate of the limitations inherent in the “deep time” of evolutionary history is correct, theories such as neo-Darwinism that purport to tell us the certain truth about what happened in evolution can only be considered imaginative forays that reach beyond the bounds of pure science into, at best, expertly informed speculation, and, at worst, pure fantasy. Because such guesswork is technically unreliable as a portrait of the evolutionary process, it becomes politically suspect.
I find Gee’s argument fully convincing.
Evolutionary science has been allowed to stray too far from the standard
scientific method. What one first imagines in the form of a hypothetical
scientific explanation has ultimately to be seen in the empiric evidence
and reproduced in the lab to be valid science. Observation,
hypothesis and test with replication: that’s the scientific method.
Accidental evolution has not been so tested; it has not been observed; and
every indication we have says that an accidental process cannot do what we see
has in fact occurred within the known evolutionary timeline. Calling accident
an indisputably good explanation amid such a dearth of confirmatory data, and
in the face of so much contradictory evidence from mutagenesis and random
synthesis studies, calling it an explanation that could never be contradicted
by the other 80-90% of the total of related biochemical information that is yet
to come in and the 90% of the fossil record we may never see, is simply not
good science. It is a blatant instance of overconfidence from insufficient
data.
Fallacy
#22: The myth that self-organization eliminates the need for a designer of life
Where highly complex functional systems are involved, self-organization does not occur unless a prior design has been implemented to facilitate it. Neither nature or science has every produced a counterexample to this rule. The only thing accident can assemble via “self-organization” is a set of components previously designed to be “plug and play,” as it were. If the components of a “self-organizational” system are not things designed to be easily “snapped” together, and things that will only go together in one or very few alternate ways, an accident will never arrange their assembly. Self-organization does not even occur in a fully accidental world. Thus, recent research on self-organization does not prove accidental neo-Darwinian evolution, but, rather, tends to refute it.[38]
The possibility for a complex machine to self-assemble spontaneously (in the natural environment or any other) implies that a kit has been designed and constructed for the purpose of permitting that self-assembly. To conclude from the ability of nature to self-organize (even to the small extent that we know that it does) that the world can still be accidental while producing machines more complex than any intelligence presently known to man can design, is simply bad logic.
Some thinkers, like Kauffman and Dawkins apparently feel there is a viable third alternative to chance or purpose. For Dawkins that alternative is “cumulative selection.” For Kauffman it is “inherent spontaneous order.” As far as I am concerned they are both dreaming. The only way either system could achieve machines as complex as the human body, the universe would have to be set up so that “cumulative selection” would be driving toward human physiology in the first place or that the “inherent spontaneous order” would feed out into human beings. Kauffman feels such order is derivable from the interaction of complex patterns existing “on the edge of chaos.” I think this “edge of chaos” stuff is, at best, merely vacuous word play, evolutionary mysticism, if you will. Otherwise, it strikes me as just a sneaky way to get around admitting that there is just enough order and direction in the universe to produce the extraordinarily complex machines of life. Dawkins believes that nature’s selections among the simplest living systems for survival just so happens to consistently facilitate thousands of future changes that are exactly what nature needs to build the tree of life. Yes, nature could be set up that way, and, in fact, apparently is, but what on earth would lead us to call such a system accidental? Ultimately, the hard math of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument (see Appendix 2) must prevail. The resource exhaustion argument shows the thesis of accidental self-organization of life to be a myth. Yes, we now know that there is a tendency for some of the key biotic components of life to self-organize; but there is no reason to call that self-organization accidental. As for the rest of life’s construction, the other 99.9999 %, we just don’t know how it happened! By saying that the order in our Universe is free, that is, that it does not require intelligence and purpose for its existence, Kauffman and Dawkins are merely dressing up in new clothes the ridiculous claim that an accident can make a complex machine. This claim can be mathematically disproved to the current standards of scientific credibility thresholds (immense improbability within the available time). To ask us to believe in a third alternative to chance or purpose in this way amounts to saying that there are dumb things in nature that can do what otherwise we know that only intelligent beings can do on purpose. This would not be such a hard pill to swallow if it could be demonstrated that nature could in fact do this. But neo-Darwinists ask us to forgive this demonstration requirement that all the rest of science must meet because the process of evolution is so big. I say “Nay!” to this request, “Let the scientific method stand.” That is the method that has brought us so far to where we are today; let’s not throw it away for materialist politics. And even if it could be demonstrated that nature was set up to self-organize the entire tree of life, should we accept that as evidence for an accidental world? Please…
Nothing on the order of complexity of the higher life forms can be shown to arise from “random” interactions, and nature has not had the kinds of random interactions required even if there were sufficient time available for them to kick out complex living systems. Our physical universe is governed closely by natural law. It is thus not a fractal machine that provides a continuous random mixing of the physical elements. Using Kauffman and/or Fox’s limited demonstration of self-organization as an argument for an accidental creation of life, in addition to ignoring the limitations of time and physical resources available in the history of the universe, commits the fallacies of claim jumping, starting the explanation in the middle after the hard parts are done, arguing from the simple to the complex, invalid modeling, equivocation (equating “spontaneous” with “random”), and begging the question (assuming without evidence that the self-organizational features of nature are not the result of intelligent design). This is not good thinking.
The proper view of self-organization is to mentally/conceptually delink spontaneity from randomness. If the self-organization produces results otherwise in line with what we know an accident can produce, fine, the event may be random, complex results exceeding what we can show an accident capable of producing should not be labeled “random” in the accidental sense of the word. Both accidental and intelligently designed systems can produce and utilize self-organizational components within the limits of complexity properly available to either. To merely show self-organization then is not to demonstrate one alternative over the other.
To get to the level of complexity of life from a random fractal interaction science has to first assume the requisite levels of complexity exist in natural law and the initial form of matter and energy at the Big Bang. The magnitude of information necessarily resident in both would be far beyond what an accident can produce within the time and resources available in the entire history of our universe. Yet, this scenario requires us to believe that it all appeared (by accident) in a fraction of a second. And let’s recall for a moment the real complexity of the systems this instantaneous accident is claimed to have produced. A single protein is so complex in the folded three-dimensional shape that our best computers cannot model protein interactions. Thus, self-organization is not a genuine third alternative to chance or purpose, nor can it be the result of accident once certain levels of complexity are exceeded.
Fallacies
#23, 24, 25 & 26: Naïve finalism, perfectionism, the problem of evil, and
the hidden premise of materialism
[NOTE: In describing what Christian's believe in the paragraphs that follow, I am not inserting into science the argument from religious authority. To the inveterately suspicious I can only say that while a healthy dose of skepticism is good, especially on this topic, I mean precisely what I say. Please pay careful attention to the presentation of the evidence and logic of the following arguments, as opposed to simply indulging any feelings (positive or negative) that my conclusions may evoke. This is admittedly a very emotionally charged subject, or at least can be for some. It is virtually certain that too much will be read into my presentation. So, please be careful. Reading in can occur in either direction depending upon the reader’s preferred point of view. An author’s building an explicit bias into his or her work is (normally) only relevant if the author is approaching the subject as a debater, as opposed to a scientist or philosopher. In that case, the weight and meaning of specific points of “evidence” are unanimously spun and slanted in the direction of the author’s side of the debate. An author doing analytical philosophy, as I am attempting to do here, however, does not (or is not suppose to) do this. I do take the debater’s style of presentation in this book, but not the biased approach to the evidence. This book will still seem one sided, I am afraid, but that is unavoidable because there is no evidence for accidental evolution, only for basic evolution. In that sense, one might think that I have an easy task before me, but it hasn’t seemed that way. The public has been absolutely misled by decades of intentional and unintentional blurring of the distinction between accidental and basic evolution, and this confusion works only to the advantage of the social agenda of the atheistic materialists who typically predominate in mainstream science. I have not found it an easy mess to sort out, and I hope the reader will make an effort to preserve what they have learned in this book so that some other unlucky writer doesn’t have to go through it all again.
And, yes, I am a Christian (and proud of it), but I am writing this book from the objective point of view of philosophy of science. And, yes, I do offer the Christian view at points in this discussion, even elaborately so, but it is not by way of taking the Christian position as an authority in science (which it is not).[39] It is, rather, to offer the Christian worldview as a logical counterexample to the neo-Darwinist claim that there is no coherent conceptual framework that would permit our world to be as it is, if God existed and if he were fully good and all-powerful. And yes there are authors out there who will impersonate an objective analysis while selectively omitting all the strong points of the other side. I am not one of those authors. While basic evolution has a great deal of excellent supporting evidence that I do not present in this book, I am not arguing against basic evolution. I am arguing against the accidental worldview that is built into neo-Darwinian evolution. I have looked but have been unable to find any real evidence for the accidental worldview, only logically vacuous wordplay, and plenty of that.]
The Christian worldview is a fully coherent (and very convincing) counterexample to the naïve neo-Darwinist assumption that, if there was an all-powerful and good God, there would be no substantial pain or suffering in the world. The neo-Darwinists also naively claim that the designs of all God’s creations would have to immediately be final, continually be perfect, and that natural dynamics must drive in a straight line to some physically perfect goal. There are coherent and plausible conceptions of God that require none of this. I choose as my flagship counterexample in this book the Christian worldview because it is the one that has been best developed and articulated in Western culture. So much attention has gone into the philosophical development of the defense of Christianity over the years that arguments are readily available to cover most of the bases need in this discussion to counter the neo-Darwinian case against God.
And, yes, as a Christian, I am glad that I can do a defense of Christianity (I such a defense explicitly in Part 2 in any case) simultaneously with the advancement of this counterexample. That doesn’t make what I am doing here religion as such; it is just a happy coincidence. What I am doing is philosophical analysis and scientific exposition. If the result of that analysis and exposition happens to result in points being scored in favor of a religious thesis, then let the chips of logical inference fall where they may. One must allow for a free range of inference in any case. The Christian counterexample goes to the point of rebutting the neo-Darwinist claim that, given the characteristics of this world, there simply could not be a God, at least not a good one. As you read through the paragraphs that follow, I think you will see why I chose the Christian worldview as the counterexample to present. It gives a plausible reason for each of the troubling characteristics or our world that the neo-Darwinists insist rule out the existence of God. It is also appropriate to show how Christianity can be defended in this context because neo-Darwinists have consistently disparaged and attacked the philosophical validity of the Christian thesis. Were I to devise an imaginary worldview as an alternative to both atheism and Christianity, to defend the possibility of a world like ours having God in it, it would end up sounding like Christianity in any case. I would then be accused of trying to sneak in Christianity under the guise of another model. The fact that any defense of God in a suffering world turns out to sound like Christianity, I think, is not a coincidence. Good explanatory models tend to converge upon the truth. If Christianity is true, its system of explanation will work flawlessly by virtue of being grounded in truth, that is, it will have full correspondence to reality. Other speculative hypotheses will then tend to move closer and closer to the flawless Christian explanatory model the more they achieve logical and factual soundness. Any hypothesis that achieves sufficient force of rational argument to present as a viable counterexample to a socially dominant claim such as neo-Darwinian evolution must then inevitably sound like Christianity because the counterexample is near the truth and Christianity is the truth. This logic of close correspondence for hypothetical explanatory models is itself a convincing argument for God, because, as you will see in the following paragraphs, no other model so far proposed can give so convincing an explanation as can the Christian model of why we have the alleged “flaws” we have in our world.
The disclaimer note is made necessary because, for decades now, many (not all) neo-Darwinists have incessantly and inanely accused anyone whose argument inadvertently opens the door to God or indirectly scores points for religion of doing religion instead of the science or philosophy they were actually doing. Such accusations have been visibly false in almost every case, with the exception of the proponents of literal biblical creation science whose point of view by definition unavoidably entwines biblical authority with scientific truth. Even in those cases the creation scientists are not trying to cheat; they simply have an honestly held opposing point of view. They believe the Bible actually reveals certain objective facts about the age of the Earth and the process by which life was created. My own view of the Bible (the Catholic view) does not require this. But the neo-Darwinists have accused us all, that is, anyone who challenges the accidental, atheistic, and materialistic worldview for any reason whatsoever, as being creation scientists who are doing religion in place of science. This reveals that the neo-Darwinists have their own “religion” of atheistic materialism (if not literally Marxism). They are willing to irrationally and vehemently defend atheistic materialism at the cost of intellectual integrity and objectivity in science and philosophy—and perhaps at any cost. These commentators are not engaged in the pursuit of science or philosophy as their highest goal at all (despite what their degrees may be in). The highest goal of the atheistic materialists who predominate among neo-Darwinian evolutionists is a social revolution in favor of materialism, and they are very willing to sacrifice the integrity of science and logical analysis to achieve social change through intellectual propaganda. It is very much like the Marxism of the classic days of Communism, and the influence of Marxism is clear in neo-Darwinian thinking.
But, to return to our subject, the case against God from an “imperfect” world, is an easy bubble to burst. Any scenario involving temporary punishment consequent to a moral failing of humanity suffices to burst that bubble. The benefit of spiritual growth facilitated by suffering freely undertaken for the benefit of others satisfactorily explains why a good God would permit suffering. The concepts of spiritual growth and maturation, alone, explain why God might want to progress his creation incrementally toward maturity before offering them paradise. This is straightforward qualification training, as it were. What could be more a matter of plain common sense? There is undoubtedly joy in skiing, but one doesn’t strap skis on an infant and send them down the Olympic slalom until they have grown and their skills have matured. Yes, a suffering-free paradise would presumably be God’s ultimate goal. But there could be good reasons why it would not be best to have that paradise available to humanity for a given period of time. To mention two that come readily to mind: paradise might be an as yet undeserved reward, and the creator might well prefer not to contaminate paradise with the ongoing sin of his yet to be perfected creations (that would be us). The Christian concept of original sin alone destroys the simplistic neo-Darwinian assumption that any world created by God must necessarily be perfect at all points in time no matter how badly God’s children behave themselves.[40]
The neo-Darwinist criticism of belief in God based upon an imperfect world is based upon two wholly unsupported assumptions, both of them really big: 1) the assumption of determinism, that is, the assumption that humans don’t have free will, so they don’t have to be tested prior to entry into paradise; and, 2) the assumption of materialism, wherein there is no need to mature spiritually through freely chosen acts of compassion because there is no spirit (in this view) to mature. Without these two arbitrary and unevidenced assumptions, which together amount to the belief that we humans are merely physical robots, the neo-Darwinist argument against God from imperfections in the world is completely groundless. To argue against God by first assuming materialism is merely circular; it assumes the answer to the question to be evaluated, viz “What is the foundation of our world, God or materialism?” in favor of materialism, then offers that assumption of the answer as evidence in favor of which answer to choose. In logical analysis, this is called the fallacy of begging the question, or circular reasoning. One may also properly call it the fallacy of hidden premise. Both of these labels are exorbitantly generous and overly kind in my opinion, considering the flagrant nature of the error and the obvious political benefits that accrue to materialists from making it.
Must the world be perfect if there is a God, as the neo-Darwinists insist? No. Or, rather, yes, but not at an arbitrarily selected point in time, such as the very beginning, rather, only when the time is right. Certainly, humanity has provided God with sufficient reason not to reward it with a perfect world (yet). In prematurely rewarding us God would be shown to be naïve and gullible. These traits are incompatible with God’s omniscient wisdom.
Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, in his new book Chance or Purpose, explains that there is a further metaphysical point to consider. There is more to the ontology of creation than the simple single instantaneous point in time event that popular religion often portrays. In contrast to this overly simplistic conception, the Catholic Church sees creation as ongoing, not as a single point in time past event.[41] Therefore, the neo-Darwinist objection that the physical world is not (yet) perfect commits the elementary fallacy of requiring a work to be perfect prior to the completion of the creative process. And that is just the physical side of creation. On the spiritual side, mankind’s bad behavior has invoked the requirement for an unavoidable rework to include rehabilitation, remediation, punishment, and purification. Yes, in the Christian view God produced the complete inventory of physical components of our universe in “six days” (interpreted nonliterally), but physical components are still in process in an evolving dynamic guided by natural law and the initial impetus at the Big Bang. The book says, “God saw that it was good,” not “God saw that is was static.”
As it turns out, suffering, so often indicted by neo-Darwinian evolutionists as proof that there is no God, serves a critically important function in the Christian faith. Sorrow, tragedy, tests, trials, tribulations and temptations serve to purify sinners spiritually, restoring lost compassion, ultimately perfecting the salvific gift of Christ that enables humans to go on to the perfect world neo-Darwinists insist God should have provided for them in the first place. “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation [Christ who was the first fruits reflecting the human journey to perfection] perfect through suffering.” (Hebrews 2:10, NAB) When the materialists and neo-Darwinists say that they can see no purpose for suffering, they are either begging the question of materialism vs. God or they are simply not trying very hard. Or perhaps they are speaking from the point of view of an immature and selfish human who wishes to endure no suffering to complete the spiritual growth process required to more closely approach the perfection God has established as the goal for his creations. Whatever the logical or psychological grounds may be for the neo-Darwinian view, they have simply failed to address all of the available conceptual options.
Ironically, the most powerful paradigm for transformation from an intermediate to a final form over time turns out to be a motif right out of evolutionary biology itself: metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly. In the human case, as viewed within the Christian worldview, the metamorphosis is not from an ugly worm to a beautiful butterfly, but from a self-centered, greedy, cold-hearted human being otherwise condemned to wallow in the base physical cruelties of Earth into a saintly compassionate being worthy of admittance to the heavenly angelic realm. It is precisely the metamorphosis of Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Story.” In the Christian conceptual framework, suffering becomes a tool of transformation. The brush and stylus God uses to paint and etch our future wings with beautiful shades of divine compassion sometimes has an unavoidably painful edge, due to the hardness of the medium. Fallen souls must first be purified through a period of suffering and penance, which is followed by the transformational gift of divine grace. Here in the paradigm of spiritual metamorphosis is a coherent alternative to the naïve “always perfect world” conception of the neo-Darwinists. Is it logical to assume a perfectly wise and just God would reward his creatures with a perfect world no matter how morally depraved they had become? No, of course not. The fact that the neo-Darwinists casually overlook this glaring flaw in their worldview reveals that morality as you and I know it is not in their worldview. Humans are simply fancy apes to them. Morality for neo-Darwinists reduces to nothing more than what is expedient for society. No matter how evil, no matter how cruel, no matter how inhumane a perceived path to the long term improvement of the average physical condition of the human race may be, it is justifiable in the neo-Darwinian view. If it advances the physical survival of the species, it is OK. Never mind that it creates slave labor of millions (as Stalin did in Russia); never mind that it exterminates millions thought to be genetically inferior (as Hitler did with the Jews in WWII); never mind brutal behavioral conditioning programs; never mind tortuous mind control experiments, human guinea pigs, social class systems with haves and have-nots locked in for generations; never mind anything at all…just see to the course that, under someone’s calculations who happens to be in power the moment, seems to increase the odds for raw physical survival of the human race. That is the neo-Darwinian view of morality. Now you see why God has yet to reward us with paradise.
Contrary to the neo-Darwinian objection, the existence of tragedy does not show a shortcoming of God (or prove his nonexistence); it shows a shortcoming in man. Given that flaw in humanity, the existence of (temporary) tragedy serves to evoke compassion in tepid souls that might not otherwise rediscover compassion at all. Tragedy evokes compassion in nearly lost souls. Sympathy for those who suffer relights a spark of faith through compassion. The Holy Spirit then carefully nurtures that spark into the full flame of compassion over time. Ironically, it is this very thing, the suffering of the masses, that has motivated many neo-Darwinists to adopt atheistic materialism (usually in the form of Marxism), and the dehumanizing social engineering techniques that go with it. They consider themselves enlightened by their beliefs, and view atheistic materialistic socialism as a very high calling indeed. While it is the suffering of the masses that has led them to what they feel is a high plateau of human development (materialism/humanism), they fail to see any possible role for suffering in opposing worldviews. And their own view of suffering is, one is wont to say, a bit of an odd bird. To minimize suffering of the masses in the long term and in the abstract through social engineering, they, are perfectly willing to allow horrendous suffering to millions of real people for centuries with no guarantees that the engineering techniques employed will actually produce the desired results. It is worthy of note that the first thing that must be done to pursue aggressive social engineering of the kind materialist have historically favored is to dispose of those troublesome little glitches in the law that the rest of us like to call human rights.
In the Christian view, the evil in this world is both temporary and serves a purpose. We fallen humans are permitted to explore our choices in an intermediate world and are held accountable for those choices. For God’s moral vetting process to work, humans need both to experience evil and to have an opportunity for real selfless heroism in the pursuit of good. Only under these conditions can humans make a fully informed choice at the depths of their souls. At the end of this world, the unavoidable testing ground, God eliminates evil and no trace of it will remain. God then divinely heals all wounds and an eternally joyous existence follows. The logic of Christianity says that, given radical free will and man’s prior fall into sin, there is just no other way to do it.
Noted philosopher and Kantian scholar Lewis White Beck, in Philosophic Inquiry, quotes F. H. Bradley: “This is the best of all possible worlds, for everything in it is a necessary evil.” In other words, it is the best of all possible worlds for us given our own past failings. Beck also cogently observes that the self-evident ability of God to divinely heal all wounds may be admitted as a sufficient resolution to the problem of evil, but only if we first establish the argument from design in order to have reasonable objective grounds for God’s existence in the first place.[42] I contend that the modern scientific argument for intelligent design has now (only recently) accomplished that much; it makes God’s existence much more plausible than his non-existence. Therefore, by combining modern science, logic, and the Christian worldview, we have a genuine conceptual resolution to the problem of evil.
Perhaps that is why the opposition against intelligent design theory has gone beyond staunch to acrimonious and even irrational. Materialists and atheists may have recognized that society has reached a turning point in the evidential battle for the hearts and minds of men on the question of God vs. atheism. Atheists will seldom even reproduce the ID case in its authentic form in order to criticize it. Instead they manufacture some ridiculously contrived parody, a straw man, that they can easily dismiss.
One of the most telling responses to the neo-Darwinian objection that God would have made a perfect world that the Christian worldview provides is that he did make such a world. The we blew it; we lost our privileges to that world through sin, and were kicked out of it. In the Christian view, a perfect world (Eden) was made initially. To argue, as Darwinists have historically done, from lack of perfection in the physical world, to, of all things, the nonexistence of the God of the Bible is therefore utter nonsense. The Bible says man was ejected from the perfect world for good cause. One cannot, therefore, use the biblical view to argue that man should still be in it.
We can see here that the Christian view serves as a satisfactory counterexample to all of the naïve objections neo-Darwinists pose concerning finalism, perfectionism and the problems of evil and suffering. There is a scenario compatible with both the existence of a perfect God and the temporary existence of an imperfect world. In this counterexample, which happens to be the Christian worldview, glorification of both man and all of creation follows the temporary intermediate creation. The creation will once again be raised to perfection in the fullness of God’s time. Then the perfection that the neo-Darwinists assert as necessary evidence of God will (for the second time) be present, restored as soon as humanity’s freely chosen bad behavior will permit. God is therefore not shown to be imperfect by the characteristics of this world, but simply more generous and more patient than the neo-Darwinist concept of God provides for.
The three fallacies of perfectionism, naïve finalism and the argument from evil and suffering, are the core of the neo-Darwinian argument against intelligent design.[43] The late great evolutionist Ernst Mayr seems to take the perfectionist error so far as to preclude any rational person from having any different view of creation/evolution than the naïve Darwinian concept. (He even seems to rule out that God himself might take a different view.) Mayr: “However, only transformational evolution—the orderly change in a lineage over time, directed toward the goal of perfect adaptation—is susceptible to this deistic interpretation.”[44] (My emphasis) Although I am a fan of Mayr’s writings in one sense, that is, of his perception, eloquence, clarity, discipline and precision, I do not agree with his view of science having ruled out the possibility of cosmic purpose. In this quote, Mayr, has crossed the proper boundaries of science by dictating to theology the limits within which it must interpret the relationship of God to the natural world. He begs the question of direction in the evolutionary process, and commits the errors of naïve finalism and perfectionism.
Ancient thinkers may have taken a similarly perfectionist view of divine providence, but for our purposes, the first commission of this fallacy of naïve finalism relevant to the modern evolutionary debate we find before us occurred in the early nineteenth century. Many of the Christians of the time considered evolution to be a theological heresy. Those Christians believed that every event in the natural world occurred strictly in accordance with God’s plan. This extreme view of divine providence allowed for no accidents whatsoever, although the Bible itself does allow for accidents (Jesus admitted the existence of true accidents in this world at Luke 13:2-5 NAB.). According to this early fundamentalist view, called finalism, not only does God have a final end in view for the physical world, but absolutely everything works toward that end.[45] Even the smallest most trivial details of the physical world are held to express part of the all encompassing and incontrovertible purpose of God. Nothing is left to chance.
Outside of the Christian faith, to say that God would be logically constrained to act in this way is a logical fallacy from the point of view of a purely philosophical analysis because it is logically possible that God might elect to constrain physical events much more loosely. God could elect to hold his designs only to more general parameters that allowed for a certain degree of variation. God might (as he apparently has) even allow random sub-routines at certain intermediate points in natural processes, while still holding the end results within designated limits. In doing things this way God’s goals are no less guaranteed; he has merely elected to specify those goals somewhat loosely. It is not logically necessary that God be a micromanager, only that he guarantee the achievement of his intentions.
In a supreme irony (which I admit to finding enjoyable), in rebutting the naïve finalism of early fundamentalist Christians, neo-Darwinists have, it seems to me, committed the same fallacy themselves. Whereas the fundamentalist Christians asserted that “As a matter of fact, based upon religious authority, God is known to be a micromanager,” the neo-Darwinists go an additional step to commit a stronger, purely logical fallacy, viz “If there were a God or intelligent designer, he would of necessity be a perfectionist and a micromanager.” They feel this is established by the meaning of the word God alone. But this is not logically required by the definition of God; it is merely their own preferential view. And it is not a view supported by the Bible.
To dismiss fully possible
alternative views of God out of hand with no more substantial argument than the
classic one liner we all here in Introduction to Philosophy 101: “How can evil
exist in the world if God is both all good and all powerful?” strikes one as
hasty at best. Apparently neo-Darwinists haven’t studied the Christian theology
they so loudly and pompously dismiss for Christianity has long since shown a
coherent solution to the problem of evil. What’s the solution? Once again: its our
fault, not His. The simplistic objection from Philosophy 101 is weakened
from another perspective. A "perfect" world, in the sense of a
painless, flawless, effortless physical paradise might well not be the
aim of a designer at all, and for good reasons—unless his creatures are already
perfect.
Why does God tolerate evil? Why doesn’t he destroy fallen men along with the fallen angels the instant of the first transgression? Compassion—God is good. Compassion and clemency are virtues. God has elected to give mankind another chance in permitting us to be here in this intermediate world for our rehabilitation. After humanity’s commission of mortal sin, God, from the sole perspective of pure justice, needn’t have allowed our continued existence in any world whatsoever. Within the Christian conceptual framework, the problem of evil is not an indictment of God, it is an indictment of men and (fallen) angels, and a showcase of God’s enduring kindness and divine mercy.
On the more technical side of the discussion, neo-Darwinists cite the extinction of species, death and suffering of the lower animals, imperfections in biological design, and less than 100% success in adaptive form variations in the history of evolution as definitive proof that there is no God (or any other substantially potent and predominantly good, that is, not cruel, intelligent designer). In other words, imperfections in biology rule out an all-powerful all-good God as the creator of life. It is, however, both hasty and presumptuous (not to mention dangerous) to indict God for a temporarily imperfect world when his only real alternative was to destroy us, his human critics, in order to cleanse it and restore paradise for the few already worthy of it. As the home folks say here in Indiana, “Thank God for small favors.” I, at least, prefer God’s approach to that of the neo-Darwinist. ☺
Is it God who is the cause of the bulk of the world’s tragedy, or is it man? It is clearly man who is waging war upon man, man who is failing to provide food for the poor, and man who is failing to ensure justice to the oppressed, not God. Given man’s moral failings, even the most likely presumed to be unnecessary evils, such as the existence of parasites and bacteria, could have valid reasons for being. They could be punishments per the biblical precedent of afflicting evildoers with illnesses and pestilence. These kinds of elements in nature give God a moveable thermostat as it were, a means to raise or lower the threshold of punishment and suffering based upon the changing requirements of human personal and social dynamics. If one looks at the terrible acts of human cruelty culminating even in genocide, atrocities occurring to this very day (2010), it would seem to me that humanity has gotten off lightly on punishment, parasites notwithstanding. The rational question to ask is not why has God afflicted us with parasites, but why does God tolerate humanity at all?
Nonetheless, neo-Darwinian authors cite the existence of human parasites and pathogens (lice and germs) as the coup de grace in their argument against the existence of God. Why would a good God create such things that only cause misery and suffering? This argument only shows a lack of imagination and an unfamiliarity with the teachings of the Christian religion they deign to authoritative denounce and criticize. It also shows a gigantic blind spot to mankind’s own moral culpability.
“OK,” you may object, “parasites may serve as punishment or be tools to teach us physical and spiritual cleanliness and self-discipline. But what about the big stuff, why the fatal tragedies?” The Christian answer to that is that you are forgetting that life is eternal. In the Christian view, the vastly larger part of life doesn’t take place in this world at all. Suffering ends with this life, thus comprising hardly a dot in the joyous never-ending story, and God divinely heals all wounds incurred here. In other words, the suffering we experience here is not as big a deal as we make it out to be, once the larger scheme of eternity is considered.
Let’s just stop and think for a minute. If the world were the paradise the neo-Darwinists claim God should always maintain, how much compassion would we see among the immature humans that currently reside here? Would we ever stop to think of anyone but ourselves at all? In many cases, unfortunately, probably not. It would be a world populated by physically content but very much self-centered couch potatoes. Granted, there would be plenty of parties, but how much genuine compassion would there be? And would we even be psychologically content in such a world, or just grow fatter and more restless? Once again the hidden premise of materialism is evident in the Darwinian assumption that it is only physical safety and comfort, not compassion and spiritual virtue, that defines paradise. The neo-Darwinists “need to get out more,” as we say here in Indiana, read a broader range of literature, make some friends…. Their objections simply lack imagination. They show a complete ignorance of the Christian faith, the faith that they so glibly criticize. And they reveal that the neo-Darwinists are largely oblivious to the entire spiritual and emotional dimensions of life. Yes, this tragic world is not paradise, but Christian theologians cogently point out that we must first learn compassion before there can ever be a paradise with humans in it.
But what about extinctions? Isn’t it just dumb to make a creature only to have it disappear again? Explain that if you can.” Extinctions are perhaps the quintessential blemishes in creation that neo-Darwinists hold to be absolutely incompatible with a good creator. Why would an omniscient all-powerful God design a creature that didn’t work out, only to have to turn around and erase it from the chalkboard of life? I can’t speak for God, but one possible answer is that extinctions do not necessarily represent mistakes at all. They might be intended as intermediates. Or they might be intentionally temporary. Why must God prefer a static creation to a changing one? And, if as neo-Darwinists claim, this world is cruel to living creatures and terribly flawed, why would a good God insist that a species endure it forever? Perhaps the creatures are here only to bless us fallen humans; they serve their time, gain release, and wait in peace for the next eternal world where they can live again in endless joy. Is that so terrible? Why would neo-Darwinists blanche at making animals subservient to humans when they are themselves willing to cause unthinkable human suffering in the grand cause of a Marxist-like reengineering of society?
From the humanist point of view one might argue that it is a tragedy to lose a species, because, in the humanist philosophy, there will be no eternal world to follow this one. But, if, as the Christian view asserts, there is an eternal world after this one, there is no evil in giving mankind an opportunity to express compassion by watching over the lovable lower creatures and the beautiful living garden, heroically trying to save them from extinction where possible. That struggle stimulates virtue and compassion. The Christian view also allows that even the lower creatures and the plant kingdom may have a spirit that is eternal. Therefore, extinction may not represent loss of life at all, but merely release from suffering pending a metamorphosis into a joyously different existence to follow.
There are also purely logical reasons not to consider the loss of a species a tragedy. From the point of view of suffering, a taxonomic category, as such, is not a tragedy to lose; only the loss of individual living creatures is a tragedy. Suffering and death occur with or without extinctions. The Darwinist argument, if it is to make any sense at all, must be viewed as tantamount to saying that death itself rules out God, since death of the individual is where the only real tragedy lies. Once again in deducing tragedy from physical death, the neo-Darwinists reveal their hidden premise of a personal belief in materialism. An otherwise unavoidable tour on this imperfect Earth followed by promotion to Heaven is not a tragedy; it is the best possible outcome given mankind’s freely chosen fall into sin. Only the hidden premise of materialism makes death seem an evil thing, and only the denial of sin makes it seem an avoidable thing.
St. Paul said that where there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual one, seemingly allowing that even the death of an animal could be a promotion into the eternal world, albeit delayed pending judgment. Whether or not one’s own view of Christianity conforms to this assumption, it remains an unevidenced philosophical assumption for science to assume that animal and plant species do not go on from life on earth to life in the spiritual dimension. Thus, the logical inference from extinction of species to the nonexistence of a good and all-powerful God is invalidated by the existence of this possibility.
Essentially, the problem of evil is completely obviated by viewing life on Earth as an intermediate existence generously offered to humanity through divine grace and mercy as a chance to rehabilitate ourselves. Why can’t neo-Darwinists conceive of even the logical possibility that this world is an intermediate one, not a final end in itself, when the Bible and the Church have said for centuries that it is intermediate? There are only three possibilities:
1. Neo-Darwinists can’t do logic and analytical philosophy any better than a kindergartner. This may seem unfair and personally insulting, but I present the analogy in this way because it is exactly the insult/criticism neo-Darwinists (quoting Isaac Asimov) have long leveled at Christians who offered objections to accidental evolution.[46] The neo-Darwinist mistake in denying as logically impossible precisely what the Bible affirms is one a 1st grader could catch—at least a first grader who had been to Sunday School.
2. Neo-Darwinists are intentionally “pulling our leg” in order to do political profit taking. They offer arguments known to be invalid because those arguments will nonetheless convince a percentage of casual readers who won’t delve into the subject deeply enough to catch the error. They lose technical points to academic purity, but gain converts to the social movement of materialism.
3. Neo-Darwinists are so immersed in their personal philosophy of materialism, or are so affected by the heavy bias in scientific culture for materialism, that they have developed mental blind spots to related thinking errors. In addition to Dr. Faust, noted origin of life researcher Sidney Fox holds this out as a real possibility. Fox, having lived through much of the modern development of evolutionary theory in the biochemistry community, witnessed firsthand the phenomenon of an unconscious cultural bias for an accidental worldview. He notes influences from the work of famous quantum physicists Bohr and Heisenberg, but also allows for the possibility of an intentional bias.[47] Dr. Mae-Won Ho, with whom Fox has written at times, echoes this concern in her very cogent treatment of the state of evolutionary research, Beyond Neo-Darwinism.
None of these three alternatives are compatible with good science. They most certainly do not represent our best science.
To evaluate the design of a tool properly one has to know its true purpose. A child doesn’t need a bicycle that goes 100 miles per hour, and is made of solid gold, for example. It may be fun to dream of one, and, in our imagination, solid gold bikes are theoretically "better," but there is no practical value in having one. In the same way, physical events and objects need not be perfect so long as they do not impede the overall objective of the spiritual growth of humanity. A novice bicyclist does not need solid gold and a morally flawed humanity does not yet need paradise. We do not put on a tuxedo to pull a pig out of the mud, and we certainly don’t make the pigs wear them. So why do neo-Darwinists think God or any other superior intelligent designer would insist on the equivalent for fallen humanity? Why surround us with paradise when we are simply not ready for it?
John Haught tells us, in Darwin’s Gift to Theology, that we have to consider closely who God is to see if evolution contradicts God’s existence or not.[48] Since Christ, God’s essence has become more and more manifest as a form of self-giving, a non-domineering paternal affection that does not micromanage the physical earth but nonetheless accomplishes his goal of the spiritual growth of mankind. Darwinists have therefore invented an imaginary or “false” God for the purpose of their naïve finalism argument (another example of the straw man fallacy). The extent to which Christ had to suffer to get our attention is the case in point about the requirement for suffering: the stylus had to be that hard to make an impression on our calloused hearts. We see the truth of this everyday. We coexist with the suffering poor in our own neighborhood, frequently never giving them a second thought until tragedy strikes so dramatically as to make headlines. We are not entitled to conclude that God prefers suffering, but only that he is forced to use it to evoke compassion in us, who seem not to prefer compassion. Certainly if God’s own son can endure torture and death for the purpose of furthering our spiritual growth and eternal future, the loss of a portion of the lower animals to extinction will not be too high a price to pay. Thus, it does not contradict all possible concepts of a good God to have death, suffering, and extinction in nature.
Ultimately, the problem of evil and suffering, as with most fallacies is resolved in the simplest of ways once we see the truth. In this case, the truth is that we are thinking too small. As a child thinks there is no remedy for its first fall and scrape, but soon finds out that Dad or Mom, or at least the doctor can fix it (plus there is a treat involved), so we, when we enter Heaven will learn the same lesson, but writ very large indeed. With His divine power and perfect goodness God can and will heal all wounds as if they had never been. These wounds will not be merely forgotten, but divinely washed away, healed for eternity. The souls of the afflicted will have grown from their sufferings (a divine mystery, but nonetheless true), and will be rewarded for having endured them. God’s justice, after all, is perfect. Then…then, only joy will remain for eternity. Where will the neo-Darwinist complaint be then? This is the eternal hope of Christians, the promise of salvation for which they patiently wait through all trial and tribulation. In this counterexample to the neo-Darwinists view, neo-Darwinists are selectively omitting the more important side of the event of human life: eternity. When one arbitrarily excludes over 99.9999…% of the relevant material, it is not surprising that the result of one’s calculations is untrue. St. Paul suggests the enormity of this ratio at Romans 8:18, NAB: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.”
In, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, our late and much beloved Pope John Paul II similarly places the relative weight of emphasis on salvation, not on suffering, though the burden and reality of suffering is not denied. In the Christian view, this is where the emphasis belongs. His Holiness also introduces the obvious consideration of radical freedom in God’s created beings: humanity and the devil have both been free to introduce evil and suffering into what was initially God’s paradise. Tragically, they abused their freedom. In the Christian worldview, moral accountability for evil properly lies with us, and with Satan, not with God.[49]
As if the neo-Darwinian errors of naïve finalism, perfectionism, and the problem of evil weren’t enough logical flaws for one argument, there is an even bigger fallacy ever looming in the background of the neo-Darwinian case: hidden premise. In this case, the hidden premise is the assumption of materialism. Without it the argument for physical perfection makes no sense whatsoever, and with it the argument simply goes in a circle. Once the possibility of a spiritual domain is admitted the possibility arises that God’s purpose and his concern is not strongly focused on the physical aspects of paradise at all, as the neo-Darwinian concept entails, but is almost entirely concerned with the spiritual. In that case, much of the physical “detail” could be (and probably is) fully irrelevant to God’s purpose.
The same hidden premise of materialism is used to ignore the authentic religious testimony of billions of reliable witnesses and dismiss out of hand the very convincing arguments from direct religious experience and the arguments from the rich internal life of humanity (our moral conscience, love of family, patriotic fervor, experience of the fine arts etc.). To materialists, since these things are not empirically observable, they are not real. To me it is the supreme irony that, while irrationally denying the reality of the richest elements of their own human experience, the materialists who predominate in the neo-Darwinian camp accuse fully two thirds of the entire world population of being neurotic for honestly affirming their own human experience.
While I grant that the evidence for humanity’s subjective experience is not strictly scientific in the rigorous sense of experimental natural science; it is strictly evidence. Arguments from the richness of subjective human experience are sufficiently valid to have been included in the classic philosophical arguments against materialism. And the argument from the richer elements of subjective human experience is scientific in another legitimate sense. Arguments for the authenticity of subjective reality qualify as valid scientific evidence by the same standard used in psychology and psychiatry. Many aspects of evidence used in the sciences of psychology and psychiatry are no less subjective than the argument from religious experience. Thus, to give no weight to so much reliable testimony is once again simply to assume materialism at the outset, not to argue for it (the fallacy of begging the question), and to employ a double standard, counting subjective testimony when it suits one’s politics and rejecting it otherwise.
Fallacies
#27: Oversimplification, #28 Misrepresenting the Strength of the Evidence, #29
Invalid Modeling, and #30 Declaring Victory While Losing the Battle
Niles Eldredge makes the following statement: “Complexity is the outcome of a genetic program that can be altered. Evolution is simply the claim that, over billions of years of time, the genetic programs of organisms come to be altered through natural processes. We have observed these processes and now have the means to alter this information, and hence developmental pathways, ourselves.”[50] The first thing we should ask ourselves here is “Does the statement ‘The Space Shuttle is the outcome of a mechanical and electronic program that can be altered’ explain the creation of the Space Shuttle without intelligent design?” No, of course not. The next thing to note is that Eldredge is very careful with his words here. Has he said anything wrong? No. Has he said anything helpful to the debate over accidental evolution vs. intelligent design? No.
Most of the problems involved in this passage result from the what I call the fallacy of innuendo. Eldredge hasn’t actually said anything wrong, but whether his phraseology is intentionally misleading or not, it is so exquisitely ambiguous as to leave the door wide open to many important errors in the reader’s interpretation. Eldredge says, “We have observed these processes” immediately following a statement about the alteration of genetic processes over billions of years. Those particular historical processes, or a genuine modern corollary to them, have not been observed. Only very short term mutational processes have been observed, almost all of them destructive, and the rest trivially small compared to the overall task evolution must accomplish. Eldredge seems to imply that at least we have observed natural processes that have successfully altered genetic programs in a way to produce the evolution of one type of creature from another. No such thing has ever been observed. He seems to imply that we can now alter developmental pathways (as intelligent designers) in a way that can produce one type of creature from another. We cannot. He may not have intended these stronger implications, but, if he hasn’t, what has he actually said that is important for our understanding of evolution?
Most probably his point was, “What’s all the hubbub about in the modern criticisms of evolutionary theory? All the theory of evolution says is that modifications to the genome of creatures occur (by some yet to be demonstrated method) and we know that changing the genome produces biological form changes because we can induce some genome changes ourselves. Why would anyone want to challenge something so obvious?” The problem here is that, if this is all Eldredge is saying, he has stepped away from the claim that the process is accidental and moved closer to Henry Gee’s position that science constrain itself to simply describing the tree of life without hypothesizing how or why it happened. While this is a good position to take, to offer it as a rationale to minimize the import of intelligent design criticisms of evolutionary theory is to blur the distinction between Gee’s (quite new) purely descriptive approach to evolution and the classic neo-Darwinian theory, which posits an accidental process, which is the tenet of neo-Darwinian theory at which most recent criticisms have been aimed.
Eldredge also seems to imply that the achievement of meaningful complexity from accidental mutation is as easy as the achievement of trivial or junk complexity. We don’t know that it is even possible to achieve meaningful complexity of biological information from accidental mutation at all (and have great reasons to believe otherwise). As D. D. Axe has shown the difference in difficulty level between trivial mutation and the simplest increment of biological meaning (a single protein) amounts to some 77-125 orders of magnitude. The achievement of meaningful biological information by accidental mutation has only one chance in between 1077 and 10125 attempts to succeed. And that is only for a single instance of the simplest element (though proteins are far from simple). Stringing hundreds of thousands of genes and proteins and other biotic components together in just the right way to form the tree of life is obviously much harder yet. In other words, even if we grant Eldredge a clean slate regarding his intentions being honorable in this passage, his comments remain a gross oversimplification of what is actually involved.
Peter Schuster provides another example of oversimplification, equating what I would call junk, trivial, or playground level complexity with the vastly greater complexity of biological systems. He cites a randomizing program, John Horton Conway’s “Game of Life” program, which generates relatively simple random two-dimensional patterns that can “simulate purposeful behavior.” The “Game of Life” can be run on any standard PC (but not in nature by accident). However, as we saw in our discussion of the complexity of proteins, even the most powerful mainframe computers cannot model protein to protein interactions without simplifying assumptions. Proteins are not all there is to life, which has nine or more levels of three dimensional living and moving machines, organs, and systems embedded into each other, all governed by the central nervous system, itself a form of intelligence. Our computers cannot successfully model either protein interactions or the complex functions of the brain. In any case, purposeful behavior for a living being involves first constructing all of these fantastically complex biological machines, then getting them up and running, and then orchestrating all their actions in the same direction to achieve a purpose. Compare this to Schuster/Conway’s “purposeful behavior” and see if you think it is an accurate model:
An argument that had often been
used, that complexity cannot arise from simple elements, has been refuted by
simple mathematical structures called cellular automatons, which are
reminiscent of board games. Cellular automatons generate patterns that are made
up of occupied and unoccupied fields. The essential part of a cellular
automaton is made up of the rules that allow one to calculate the configuration
in the next time interval from the present configuration. Beginning with a
starting configuration dynamic structures are produced that can simulate
purposeful behavior among other things. An impressive example illustrating this
is John Horton Conway’s “Game of Life”, which is played on an extended
chessboard pattern. Since there are two independent directions along which the
automaton can develop, it is classified as two-dimensional. Among the various
simple dynamic patterns, the development of the “Gosper Glider Gun” is
particularly impressive. From a starting configuration, a dynamic pattern
develops in about seventy time intervals that discharges small moving elements
that occupy five squares, so called “Gliders”, in a precisely determined
direction…Wolfram identified, however, yet another, fourth class of
one-dimensional cellular automatons, which after a starting phase appear
neither ordered nor simply periodic nor chaotic. Indeed, they form complex
patterns and have been viewed as an analogy to the complexity of living
systems, which is expressed in the phrase, “Life at the edge of chaos”.[51]
Here Schuster has prematurely declared victory over intelligent design theory’s complexity argument, all the while visibly losing to it in his having presented a glaring oversimplification of the processes of life and a flagrant mismatch between the model and the system it is purported to represent. Schuster claims that “complex behavior” can arise by repeated application of simple rules to simple elements. But he commits the fallacy of equivocation by redefining “complex” from its proper meaning within the evolution debate, which is the astronomically greater level of complexity seen in biology, to something as trivial as a child’s game. He has failed to demonstrate that his type of “complexity” can explain the origin and development of living systems. But this was the purpose of the discussion as advertised in the topic of his article: “Evolution and Design.” What he has actually shown is the minor capabilities and the major limits of these kinds of computer programs. He has demonstrated nothing of what a fully random process. These programs are themselves intelligently designed, and they require a computer to run for crying out loud! Such programs involve only an infinitesimal fraction of the complexity of living systems.
To “simulate” purposeful behavior at an immensely reduced scale is not to achieve it. To play checkers is not to play chess, and to play chess is not to play tennis. To play tennis is certainly not to explain how to construct the tennis player. Schuster’s systems are only playing checkers, while the goal of evolutionary explanation is to explain how to build a tennis player. The astronomical difference in difficulty level between a glider gun and the human body is very deceptively camouflaged by abstracting the concept of complexity in this way. There is a conceptual slight of hand involved in moving from concrete applications at the easy end of the scale, then abstracting to the general idea and imposing no specified limits on it whatsoever, then concluding from the abstract that we may legitimately bring the demonstration back down to earth at the complex end. Schuster is asking us to accept an analogy between living beings and something more primitive than a child’s computer game. The “Glider Gun” is sub-Pac Man for crying out loud, practically “Pong”! The analogy simply does not hold. Richard Dawkins makes the same broken analogy in comparing the two dimensional design output of his computer program, which generates the equivalent of a variety of snowflakes, to the real complexity of animated, self-correcting, learning capable, intelligent, and moral three dimensional living systems whose total complexity we couldn’t match if we simultaneously employed every computer on the planet!
Living systems don’t just modify a few two-dimensional squares in a temporarily recurring pattern. They are three dimensional machines in intelligently guided internal and external motion, interacting in consistent, quality controlled ways. They are scrupulously and actively (one even wants to say “purposefully”) maintained over time. Error detection and repair. Full system self-replication. Trillions of cells in each creature, thousands of parts in each cell, a single cell doing millions of tasks per minute, nine levels of systems vertically embedded in each other cooperating with as many systems laterally.… Would linking thousands of “Glider Guns” together make the human body? No, it would make nothing, and attempting to link many of them into a more complex system would probably hasten the loss of even the temporary simple patterns that the single unit programs produce (not to mention losing our interest in watching it). Schuster represents the “Glider Gun” as a valid hint of much greater things accident can supposedly achieve, but it is no such thing. In reality the “Glider Gun” dramatically demonstrates the upper limits of spontaneous randomly generated complexity. This is the precise opposite of what Schuster implies. Even such supremely simple random generators and module compilers as the “Glider Gun” or the “Game of Life” can only be achieved in the real world if we first intelligent design a computer and a software program to make it possible! Such systems require intelligent design yet Schuster is offering them as an argument to show that intelligent design is not necessary to achieve complex systems. Remember computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Peter Kassan. He reminded us that combining even 3,000,000 cockroach genes does not equate to the functionality of a human, it is merely the functionality of a colony of cockroaches. And here in the “Glider Gun” the complexity doesn’t approach a bacterium let alone an insect.
To make the enormous leap to the characteristics of living systems, either the compositional elements or the rules that govern their interaction (or both) must be made orders of magnitudes more complex than the trivial systems Schuster describes. Neither the physical elements of our universe nor the presently known laws of nature are that complex. Thus we are still left with lack of explanation of the magnitude of complexity we see in living systems. Only the vast information content of the matter and energy present at the Big Bang and perhaps the discovery of much greater complexity in natural law, at, say, the level of electromagnetic properties of amino acids and/or deeper levels of quantum physics, will remedy this lack of explanation. Whatever the source turns out to be, it is clear that neither the elements nor the rules are so simple as Schuster suggests. If fractal programs and computer games adequately modeled the complexity of life we would have achieved exact replicas of human biology on from these programs. Instead, what have we got? Glider guns and snowflakes![52]
And, here they go again:
This is a gross overstatement of the facts, for we do not have a mechanistic explanation for all biological phenomena. We can not mechanistically explain the origin of any living creature. We can only explain much of how they work; we cannot explain how they came to be. In this quote, Douglas Futuyma implies that the biomechanical processes, the mechanisms, of evolution are known, that they have been revealed and charted. They have not been charted. We have not demonstrated even one small fraction of a complete biomechanical pathway between any two significantly divergent species. The theory of evolution is entirely abstract and general. No mechanisms are given for macroevolution, and thus the mechanistic explanations Futuyma implies simply do not exist. His quote was taken from the introduction to a text book on evolution, after all. Here is the fallacy of innuendo again. His language is technically correct when applied to descriptions of extant biological systems as far as explaining how they work. It is not correct when applied to explaining how they came to be constructed. Yet it is clearly offered in the context of evolution, not physiology. Darwinian theory merely says that creatures are related to each other by inheritance, that they descended from a common ancestor, that the fittest creatures will survive, and that spontaneous adaptations in biological form somehow occur. There is not one shred of mechanistic explanation in this. After a large part of the tree of life has been achieved, Darwinian theory gets closer to mechanistic explanation by describing complex population studies where reproductive mixing of genes occurs, but we only know for sure that this can produce minor changes within the same species. The population dynamics neo-Darwinian theory describes have never been shown to produce one new kind of creature from another. It is merely hypothetical.
True, biological researchers by the thousands are revealing more of the biological mechanisms of life every day; but they are not revealing evolutionary mechanisms. They are only revealing the mechanisms that maintain the life of current organisms. We have no demonstrable mechanistic explanations for evolution, nor are we close to having them. Merely saying that genes are moved around in reproduction is not to give a mechanistic explanation of macroevolution. Breaking the barrier between different body types requires close coordination of intricate changes in the nongenetic nanostructures of the cell membranes, changes in the operational genome, and changes in the developmental genome. Almost certainly additional changes are required. Chemically determined gene activation markers must be modified and a myriad of other changes that comprise the evolutionary distance between the substantially different source and destination creatures in any hypothesized evolutionary chain of progression must be accomplished as well. To my knowledge, not one hypothesis has even been offered to speculate how synchronization of those three primary systems and a multitude of secondary systems can be arranged in so close a manner by an accidental process.
Futuyma has not literally said that we know the biomechanisms of evolution. But he has certainly invited the reader to make the mistaken assumption that he has said it. This is the oft-used neo-Darwinian fallacy of innuendo. (They didn’t invent the fallacy, but you would never know it.) What he actually said was more limited, that Darwin’s theory “explained” evolution without reference to God or the spirit, and that the biomechanisms of life not of evolution, were later explained by science. What the neo-Darwinists consider to be the “mechanisms” of evolution are accidental mutation and natural selection, followed by geographic isolation based Mendelian population dynamics. (These hypothetical process have never been shown to produce macroevolution; they are simply used as the default explanation of the development of the tree of life because we don’t have an explanation.) But it is the rare reader who will not take him to have implied that the biomechanisms of the origin of life and evolution are known to science as well. In point of fact, they are not.
How philosophically meaningful is it to inform one’s readers that life can be explained without reference to God when we as yet have no explanation for the origin of life and the initial achievement of the genomes. God’s traditional place in the explanation of life has always been at the beginning, and this is precisely where the mystery remains. Nothing has changed in this regard over the centuries, yet Futuyma suggests the opposite. The hypothesized transformational dynamics of Darwinian theory only begin long after life has been originated and genomes have been achieved. Not only does Futuyma vastly overstate the case, but he says that Darwin made theological explanations of life superfluous, when Darwin, in The Origin of Species, asserted God as the source of the breath of life that started the whole thing going. Once again we find that “The Darwinist is no philosopher.”
Granted, Charles Darwin allowed that we would never discover the explanation for the origin of life, but aren’t we now close to achieving the origin of life in the lab and explaining the biomechanics of macroevolution? No—not even close. Consider the words of Sir Karl Popper, revered by many as the father of modern philosophy of science, and arguably as great a philosopher as we have had. Popper absolutely agrees with Charles Darwin’s assessment that we will most likely never have an explanation of life’s origin.
I do not think that Darwinism can
explain the origin of life. I think it quite possible that life is so extremely
improbable that nothing can “explain” why it originated; for statistical explanation
must operate, in the last instance, with very high probabilities. But if
our high probabilities are merely low probabilities which have become high
because of the immensity of the available time (as in Boltzmann’s
“explanation”), then we must not forget that in this way it is possible to
“explain” almost everything. Even so, we have little enough reason to
conjecture that any explanation of this sort is applicable to the origin of
life.[54]
Fallacy #31: One small step for the lab…one giant step for accidental evolution
In the previous quote, Eldredge suggests the invalid logical move from the fact that we (intelligent designers) can genetically alter creatures in the laboratory in small ways, to the conclusion that an accidental process could alter them successfully in big ways. This is precisely the opposite of what one should rationally expect, for an accident is not to be expected to out-perform intelligence. There is no logical connection between the two and we have very good reasons to believe accidental processes to be incapable of producing viable macroevolution. Of course, if we were as capable biological engineers as Eldredge implies, there would be no reason to rule out ET as a possible designer of life, as Darwinists do when they argue that ID proponents are simply masking an argument for God. ET can reasonably be presumed to have more advanced capabilities than human science.
Fallacy #32: All or nothing
Eldredge again: “Even were the Intelligent Designer held not to be supernatural, but rather some sort of real Being exerting a real force in nature (other than natural selection), the very first line of investigation must surely be the completed demonstration of the existence of this Intelligent Designer.” (My emphasis) Eldredge appears to be saying that anything short of a complete proof is of absolutely no evidential value regarding the question of an intelligent designer. Thus, the all or nothing fallacy. In doing this, Eldredge is here holding the intelligent design theory to a far more stringent standard than the Darwinian theory of evolution has ever been required to meet, or any other theory of science for that matter. The evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution falls far short of a complete demonstration; in fact there has been no demonstration of even the smallest step in evolution. The observed capabilities of natural selection are the smallest fraction of what is claimed for it by Darwinists. Why are competing theories to neo-Darwinian evolution held to a different standard of evidence? This is not good science.
The hidden premise fallacy reappears again here in the implied assumption of materialism. By opposing "real Being" with the supernatural, Eldredge has implied that nothing supernatural is real, that science knows this and that the reader knows it too. It is also the fallacy of innuendo, asking the reader to believe something that hasn’t even been said let alone proved. If we grant (as we most definitely should not) that Eldredge's hidden assumption of materialism is true, God is obviously ruled out, but not by evidence, by personal preference alone. Hiding this premise of materialism is a logical fallacy because we are asked to accept the truth of it without benefit of a supporting argument.
Fallacies
#33 & #34 “I Toddler!” and “We Don’t Need No Stinking Discipline!”
The “I Toddler!” fallacy might be termed the vertical fallacy: the belief that everything above and below us in order of being must conform to our own mode of thinking and conceptual assumptions. When a small child falls and sustains a cut, a large bruise or broken bone for the first time they sometimes assume the worst, that they are injured beyond repair, that all is lost, and that a small scrape is an irremediable eternal tragedy. This is because they have not yet experienced healing. They do not know that natural processes, their parents, and their doctors can assist them to full recovery—and perhaps even reward them for what they have had to suffer.
The neo-Darwinist objection to intelligent design based upon the existence of tragedy, suffering and evil in the world represents a similar error: they are thinking too small. They don’t give God or the designer credit for a greater power of healing than they have yet experienced. This is a fallacy because God or an intelligent designer is not necessarily limited by our small abilities. In theory, God can take away our sin, pain, and suffering in full such that it is as if it never happened. We can then go on to eternal happiness without giving it another thought, realizing just how small a consideration the “tragedy” was. We may also learn a greater love for our creator through the experience of healing and rescue just as the child comes to more deeply love and admire his parents and the doctor who have healed him from a threat to life thought to be beyond mitigation. We learn, as we must, the inevitable lessons of compassion for our fellow man and love of God, but no permanent damage is done even if we are slow learners.
The vertical fallacy can be committed in the opposite direction as well. When a bug kills its mate after reproduction (praying mantis and black widow spider) neo-Darwinists call it a great tragedy, but the bugs apparently don’t view it that way at all, for they do not alter their behavior. This is the vertical fallacy argued from the higher to the lower. What is true for us is not necessarily true for them. Arguably situations have occurred with humans. One parent may drive the other to exhaustive levels of effort for the sake of the future well-being of their children, and the exhausted partner passively or consciously consents. In that case we don’t call it a tragedy but an unselfish sacrifice. One therefore should not challenge the bug eats bug scenario on the basis of tragedy but rather logic: what is to be gained for the species? This of course does not pose a challenge to existence of God but to the Darwinian evolutionary logic itself.
Similar to their being unaware of the availability of efficacious healing, toddler’s are initially uninformed of the benefits of discipline. “I don’t want to go to my room!” and so on. Over time and with maturity, however, they come to understand that reasonable discipline is necessary to govern group behavior and to learn self-control, and that it aids personal growth. The neo-Darwinists automatically rule out the possibility that some of the suffering of this world could, among other things, serve a disciplinary purpose, that is, discipline imposed upon us from a superior parental being. As atheists and materialists and proponents of moral relativism they feel man should set all the rules for himself. One can just hear them saying “We don’t need no stinking discipline!” “We don’t want a supernatural parent!,” “I don’t’ have to go to my room!” etc. A child’s rebellion is insufficient logical grounds to establish the invalidity of the punishment or the nonexistence of the parent. No matter how loudly the neo-Darwinists protest, the logical possibility remains that suffering serves a valid purpose.
Fallacy #35: Equivocation: vacillating between several meanings for the same term (e.g., Which theory of ‘evolution’? Does ‘random’ mean truly accidental or merely unbiased in a limited context? etc.)
The tactic of using the same word to mean two or more different things is sometimes employed to avoid a weakness of evidence, or to gain other advantage from confusion (or because the author is simply careless with language). Ironically, mixing and matching many different versions of evolutionary theory while applying the same name to them can give the appearance of a much stronger case for accidental materialistic evolution than would occur if evolutionists were all agreed upon the accidental form. This allows them to call “evolution” a fact without having to defend the stronger thesis of accident and materialism against the devastating technical and logical criticism that may be posed against it. In public venues not subject to sharp professional scrutiny they can transition in and out of these versions at will, thereby convincing many in the audience who are thinking in terms of evolution as a unitary theory. The audience assumes, if only subconsciously, that the evidence for basic evolution, and the practically unanimous expert testimony for it, also accrues to the support of their atheistic/accidental version. This is not so. Will the real Darwinian evolutionist please stand up!
Discussions of “Darwinian theory” and “neo-Darwinian theory” in day to day use do not define the terms with precision. Before, between, and following the two attempts at an evolutionary synthesis made in the twentieth century, what general definition we have for neo-Darwinian theory has been permitted to simply evolve and fluctuate in a de facto manner as a horde of evolutionists went about doing the business of evolutionary science. There is one important milestone to aid navigation in our inquiry concerning accidental versus purposive evolution—just one—and it is often obscured or ignored in modern evolutionary texts. That is the event of famous modern evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson affirming undeniable purpose in the evolutionary process. For Simpson this was not necessarily divine purpose, but an unspecified form of purpose, the origin of which Simpson considered to be beyond science’s ability to address.
Simpson informs us that the first of the two primary attempts at an evolutionary synthesis spontaneously occurred over the course of a vaguely described generation (1940-1960ish) via the combined work of many scientists across a wide range of specialties. This synthesis addressed the accidental component of evolutionary theory by way of removing the assumption of an accidental process from the new Synthetic Theory, leaving it with the antecedent and overly simplistic Neo-Darwinian Theory.[55] Neo-Darwinian Theory and Synthetic Theory remain the two primary versions of evolutionary theory affirmed by mainstream science today. I am ignoring for the moment recent major subtheories such as punctuated equilibrium and random drift in addition to the incessant ambiguities in the formulation of practically all modern presentations of evolutionary thought regarding the question of accident/purpose.[56]
Simpson’s important distinction concerning purpose was, of course, immediately ignored. It was then buried in subsequent writings by neo-Darwinian evolutionists. The precedent they established of ignoring Simpson’s distinction seems to have then become the norm among evolutionary writers in general. In the world today, the laity typically follows suit in endorsing this confusion, tending to speak merely of “evolution,” not “purposive evolution,” “accidental evolution,” or “noncommittal evolution” This is a natural linguistic convenience to simply consolidate all the variations under a single term, but it does breed confusion. Unfortunately, neo-Darwinists, and occasionally other evolutionists, who know better, ignore the distinction even in formal texts where it really needs to be clarified.
Another confusion occurs when basic evolution, which is merely descent with modification from common ancestors, is confused with accidental evolution. Although basic evolution is a component of both Synthetic Theory and neo-Darwinian theory it does not embrace all that either of these larger theories assert, being in fact silent on the question of purpose versus accident. Confusing basic evolution with accidental evolution (the neo-Darwinian form). once again, allows the genuine evidence for basic evolution to improperly accrue to the support of accidental evolution for which there is no evidence in the affirmative. The myth that all evolutionary theory affirms lack of purpose, materialism and an accidental process has thus erroneously become a staple in the intellectual diet of a large segment of the (non-Catholic) public. It is the correction of this mistaken view of the world, the reintroduction of the valid distinction between purposive and nonpurposive theories, and the final refutation of the ridiculous theory/myth of “accidental” evolution that is the purpose of this book.
Close scrutiny of the scientific data reveals that, not only has cosmic purpose/intelligent design not been ruled out by science, but that science does not yet even have a fully defensible theory of evolution. In addition to Gee’s deep time issue, another reason for this is because none of the versions of evolutionary theory so far proposed have a coherent explanation of the origin of biological information—and this is the hard part of the explanation of the complex designs of life.[57] No satisfactory explanation can be given of the origin of the astronomically complex information-intensive systems in and around the genomes that drive the design, construction and regulation of living things. In fact, the origins of none of the ultra-complex systems of life, especially the genomes, the genetic translation systems, protein folding structures, and the brain, to date have a scientific explanation outside of the intelligent design hypothesis. (Nor, for that matter, do the moderately complex systems have a satisfactory explanation.)
As the public quietly slept, a veritable avalanche of evidence against an accidental first phase of the biological form variation process has poured out over the last four decades. (By first phase I mean the phase prior to natural selection/cumulative selection when a new feature is constructed and integrated, or, if you will, when form change is “proposed.”) In the face of this new data, many Darwinists have done an exquisite job of silently waltzing away from their original assumption of an accidental worldview. Now mutations are no longer accidental, they are merely ‘random’ in the sense of unbiased for survival fitness in a given environmental niche. Why this change hasn’t received the same publicity and fanfare that the slightest hint of accident or materialism invariably receives I leave to the reader to judge.
The import of switching the label for mutations from “accidental” to “random” is that the neo-Darwinists are not often challenged to defend the accidental worldview during the presentation of theory regarding the mutational phase. What potential critics may miss in this procedure is that neo-Darwinian theory still affirms that the world itself is accidental and devoid of purpose. According to the neo-Darwinists, and Richard Dawkins is notable in having made this point clear, it is only natural selection that takes the initially accidental character of the process of evolution out and gives evolution direction. The biological form variation phase, being prior to natural selection, then, in pure neo-Darwinian theory, resides within the still accidental phase of events.
To call mutations, as Douglas Futuyma and many modern evolutionists do, not accidental, but merely random in the technical sense of not having a bias for adaptation within the current environmental niche, is to contradict the precepts of neo-Darwinian theory as historically and currently defined. It is therefore a contradiction for evolutionists like Futuyma to affirm the technically random view of mutations and simultaneously claim that they are affirming neo-Darwinian theory and its materialist/accidental worldview. Now neo-Darwinian theory invokes an accidental worldview, now it doesn’t. Vacillating between these incompatible definitions of neo-Darwinian theory allows the evolutionist, intentionally or otherwise, to entirely avoid a defense of the theory’s accidental worldview. But this is the only component of evolutionary theory, and in itself a nonscientific tenet, that argues against religion, which the neo-Darwinists vociferously contend has been supplanted by the advance of evolutionary science. What they claim to have been absolutely established has in fact never been defended! It is all a verbal trick. This is a scandal! It is an enormous embarrassment to the history of disciplined intellectual thought.
Fallacy
#36: Probability is a good argument for Darwinists (and all of the rest of
science), but it is not valid when intelligent design scientists use it.
You already know what this is about. All of science rests on probabilities as opposed to absolute certainty, especially quantum physics, which ultimately gives rise to all other physical events. The small probability of design similarities occurring in creatures minus inheritance is felt to be sufficient to label the theory of a common ancestor an indisputable fact, though there are hundreds of counterexamples in convergent design achievement. The infinitesimally smaller probability of an accident’s being able to create complex biological machines, however, is dismissed out of hand as an irrelevant objection to neo-Darwinian theory although no counterexamples to the objection can be produced whatsoever. This is a contradiction and reflects an unjustifiable double standard.
Fallacies #37, 38 & 39 Can’t see the forest for the trees, hasty conclusion & “I Magician”
In the opening we read the following quote from Peters and Gutmann vaunting the merits of neo-Darwinian evolution over purposive explanations of life.
At this point we would like to discuss some of the general cultural, spiritual, and philosophical implications of the theory of evolution. Our pre-evolutionary world view, powerfully influenced by the classical philosophers, was one that attributed the diversity of life forms and their function to the presence of a grand plan operating with a purposeful goal. Once life was examined under the neutral observation of scientists, using the methodology employed to arrive at the theory of evolution, we developed an entirely different understanding. The process of evolution is not activated by some goal-oriented plan (e.g., ever better adapted animals or more and more complex animals) but is instead the result of chaotic, purely accidental changes in the genetic complement of organisms.[58]
Peters and Gutmann, Futuyma, Dobzhansky, Stebbins, Mayr and others have apparently concluded that because they cannot see purpose in individual spontaneous adaptations in relation to what would be advantageous to a specific creature in its present environmental niche, there can be no purpose present in the entire evolutionary system taken as a whole. This is a logically invalid step to take. Looking at the holes punched into an old computer programming card or a player piano tape will not reveal the purpose (except to William Dembski, encryption mathematicians and military code breakers) that is actually there. Purpose is only seen when one “steps back” and takes a look at the larger system that includes the computer or the piano that reads the card.
Neo-Darwinian evolutionists have focused in too closely on the minutia of the system while failing to see the larger patterns that are truly present. By integrating logical fallacies such as naïve finalism into their evaluative logic as if these fallacious reasoning devices were tools of science, they have unavoidably been led to premature and erroneous conclusions regarding the extent to which purpose is manifest in biological systems, or more precisely, in nature’s larger system of biological systems.
If Arnold Palmer designs a golf course with a large stand of maple trees planted on a hill in such a manner that the exterior edges spell out his name, a biologist who approaches the trees from below to study their roots will have no grounds for confidence in a claim that there is no intelligent design in any forest of stand of trees. A helicopter passing overhead will see the design without fail, however. A panoramic view of the history of evolution shows that life has advanced so straightforwardly toward effective designs, even achieving complex component machines like the human eye over and over again independently, that it is more correct to say that there is no evidence for accident than that there is no evidence of design.
Jacques Monod similarly exhibits a theoretical near-sightedness in asserting that living machines show no evidence of an external force being applied to them in their manufacture. He therefore concludes that they cannot be artifacts of design, but must be mere natural phenomena.[59] Until the actual biomechanics of evolution can be demonstrated, this conclusion is entirely premature because we don’t yet know how life was manufactured. Should the present trend in discovery of self-organization and natural law driven biases for life continue to reveal more and more directional preferences for life in prebiotic chemistry, biotic molecule formation, and protein folding determinants, as I suspect it will, nature will turn out to be a collection of parts that snap together spontaneously (in terms of statistical probability) and inevitably construct the biological machines of life. This is not to say that at any given point in time some mystery and ignorance will not remain in the biology of life, but that sufficient bias for the self-organization of the mechanisms of life will be demonstrated to justify rejection of Monod. In other words, if we find a collection of magnets enclosed in a transparent container that will only fit together one way or, when continually shaken, will strongly prefer and inevitably and irreversibly find either one or a few specifiable configurations that have visible design elements, we would be entitled to say that external force had been applied to craft those magnets such that the resultant designs would be achieved.
The designs of life are the most complex and the most functionally sophisticated known to man. Minus a demonstration to the contrary, such as showing that an accident can do such things (which hasn’t and can’t be done), we have a clear candidate for design on our hands. If we don’t know the mechanics of the manufacturing process how are we qualified to say that there is no sign whatsoever of external forces being involved. As we are learning more and more startling things about the key elements of life each year that dramatically alter our understanding of the genomes and protein structures, there was never grounds for such categorical overconfidence shown by scientists such as Monod and Mayr who over thirty years ruled out intelligent design and cosmic purpose as if it were an absolute scientific certainty. Their entire atheistic ideological pogrom was entirely unfounded (I do not impute bad intentions, just bad reasoning). They were, as neo-Darwinists have aggressively continued to do since, systematically liquidating all bonafide contenders to the atheistic/materialistic worldview fully in advance of the data collection phase being complete. This is entirely contrary to the scientific method. It may not be a knowing violation, but it is a violation. It is at a minimum quite naïve for accomplished thinkers like Mayr and Monod to forget that science is a continual advance involving the periodic discarding and replacement of old theories with new. The evolutionists of Darwin’s day did not know there were genes and machines inside the cell; they thought is was just goo. They felt the data collection phase was complete as well, but they were absolutely wrong in that assumption.
Monod fails to consider the possibility that the entire universe as a whole was made as a machine building factory, that our entire world took the design imprint of external force in total in a single moment at the Big Bang. Both natural law and the initial state of matter are potential sources of enormous constraints that direct the process of life’s origin and evolution, generate self-organization etc. Recent research has revealed many of life-favoring constraints to the point where most scientists have today simply made the shift from an accidental view of evolution to some form or another of at least a partially directed non-accidental process. The staunchest most die-hard atheistic neo-Darwinists are really the only ones dragging their feet. Granted, they are making enough noise for everyone else, shooting into the air, as it were, in an attempt to convince the public that the inane scientific stampede to an accidental worldview is still underway. Nothing could be further from the truth. Neo-Darwinists are simply in denial. An explanatory paradigm shift away from the accidental worldview has been solidly in progress for decades.
The subtleties of the design imprint made by natural law and the initial state of matter and energy may have understandably eluded Monod in 1970 when the false assumption that quantum mechanics showed the world to be accidental was at its peak. However, we can now see, with the subsequent help of mathematicians and researchers like Dembski, Hoyle, Axe, Meyer, Fox, Behe, Denton, and Kauffman, that the very laws of chemistry reduce randomness from the process of the formation of life’s requisite biotic molecules by thousands of orders of magnitude from that of the truly chaotic. The immense order impressed upon matter and energy at the first moment of the universe (the initial state description) that ultimately converged with natural law to produce the 200+ factors necessary to fine-tune the galaxy to make it compatible with life reduces the improbability of life’s achievement by additional hundreds of orders of magnitudes from that of a totally random or unbiased process before we even get to the laws of biochemistry where we see the truly amazing information capacity of proteins and DNA! Proteins seem to be highly constrained into life favoring conformations by natural law, and the genomes seem to mysteriously self-organize themselves. There is nothing of an accidental worldview in this.
As we saw from the discussion of protein synthesis in Step 2 above, the single step of moving protein synthesis from outside to inside the cell alone reduces the improbability of generating a biologically viable protein by 48 orders of magnitude for the creation of a single protein. The total improbability savings accrued in the achievement of the entire inventory of proteins of life from this step alone equates to millions of orders of magnitude. To obtain the 85,000 different proteins of the human body by an external process of nonliving chemicals requires that the 10-125 improbability for achieving one viable protein outside a living organism be multiplied by itself 85,000 times, as opposed to the same multiplication of 10-77, which applies to the manufacture of a viable protein inside a living organism. This is because, just as in rolling two or more dice in succession, the improbability of achieving two or more steps in a process is computed by multiplying the probabilities of each step (not adding them). Rolling two 6s in succession is not improbable to the extent of one chance in 6 plus 6 but rather one chance in 6 times 6, or one chance in 36. The process of life’s development forward from the first microorganisms can in no way be considered random due to this astronomical reduction in the odds of viable protein construction. We have yet to fully fathom the enormous information carrying capacity of proteins, but we know they are key to every act of construction and systems regulation that takes place in living creatures.
A single order of magnitude reduction equates to a reduction of the total improbability to only 10% of the original value, that is, a reduction of 90% just for one step! This continues for each subsequent order of magnitude reduction. The orders of magnitude of improbability saved by moving protein production from outside the cell to inside it are roughly 4,080,000! Thus the structural aspects of our physical world that each reduce the probability for biological design construction by hundreds to thousands to millions of orders of magnitude from that of a fully unbiased process are the functional equivalent of an enormous built-in design constraint.
The two primary and initial forces affecting nature’s physical design structure and process dynamic, natural law and the initial state description of the universe, comprise immense design engendering constraints. The totality of these constraints are only now beginning to be revealed in a multiplicity of ways in the various branches of science. The resultant order in planetary, physical and biological systems that ensued dwarfs that found in any artifact known to man, as does the magnitude of the force that must have been applied. Thus, the universe itself may be one large artifact created by application of external constraints, an artifact that happens to be a biological machine-building machine. Therefore, in addition to this fallacy of not being able to see the forest for the trees, Monod commits another fallacy: hasty conclusion. He has decided the issue before all the relevant information could be assembled and evaluated.
OK, that’s “can’t see the forest for the trees” and “hasty conclusion.” Those old maxims are know to everyone; but what in the world is “I magician?” The “I magician” problem involves an intellectual slight of hand, similar to a magician distracting the audience with a dramatic gesture with one hand while he accomplishes the real work of the trick with the other. In the case of neo-Darwinian evolution the distraction is accomplished by taking our focus off the central task of evolution, the hard part, which is how to generate an entire creature’s structural and functional design, with a complete genome, and refocus it onto moving genes around within complex genomic machinery after the fact of that machinery’s creation. Key questions regarding such things as how the genome could be created by accident, its complexity, integration of complex new features, assembly of complex design modules prior to natural selection “voting,” avoiding the inevitable conflicts, and so on, are all ignored. Instead, our focus is redirected exclusively to the unsurprising and potentially fully unimportant fact that the dynamic natural world seems to tinker around a little with the complex machinery of life after the fact of its creation.
Darwinists have never addressed the hard parts of the initial achievement of the bulk of the genetic machinery or the structural and functional components of life. The have only shown us that bacteria can substitute and possibly pass among themselves genes that are already created, that moths can consistently change color in response to the background color of their resting place, and that the beak size of birds can vary consistently with the nature of the available food supply given time for reproductive processes to generate sufficient numbers of each type. Those birds who can eat, live, and those whose beaks mismatch the type of food available, die. These are supremely simple events. They does not explain the ultra complex developments requisite to the development of the tree of life from dust. All of the events Darwinists cite as examples of the capability of random evolution require the preexistence of genes and genetic machinery, not to mention 99.999% of the entire rest of the organism, including all the complex parts.
The ID argument tells us that the primary mechanic of the evolution of new species is likely something different, something that does not involve truly accidental real time generation of new viable genes and other complex biological design information because accident simply cannot handle that job. The ultimate task neo-Darwinists face is daunting: they must demonstrate the creation of complex biological machines without aid of a preexisting genome and preexisting genetic machinery under purely accidental operating conditions. The proof conditions for “accidental” are more stringent that for “spontaneous.” A process seen to be spontaneous in nature does not rule out intelligent design being vested at some earlier point in the process in such a way as to guide and direct the consistent occurrence of the “spontaneous” event.
Moreover, because it may turn out to be possible to accidentally create very simple life forms but not possible to accidentally evolve them further into very complex ones, the full and proper test of the accidental worldview component of neo-Darwinian theory (remember they say the process of evolution is accidental up to the point that natural selection starts to guide it) is not only to demonstrate how to originate the first simple living cell from nonliving chemicals, but how to accomplish each major jump up the evolutionary ladder. Impassable thresholds may be present at each of these points that would preclude an accidental process going further. Clearly, from the perspective of what is possible for accident to achieve, there is a difference in kind between a single enzyme biodegradation function in a bacterium and the entire human immune system, which can defend against 12,000,000,000 different threats. There is a significant difference between the human brain and a handful of rudimentary censors in a bacterium.
Thus, for the “I magician” fallacy, neo-Darwinists have three basic colored scarves to waive in your face as they coax the rabbit into the hat with the other hand: simple bacterial gene substitutions, small microevolutions within a species such as birds beaks and the colors of moths, and moving genes around in reproduction to produce variations from the existing genome. Oh, yes, lest we forget, the largest and most brightly colored scarf of all, fear of religion. Anytime the legitimate weaknesses in neo-Darwinian theory are pointed out by a thinker with an open mind, that thinker is immediately branded a religious crusader, a CREATIONIST. No matter the content of their argument; they don’t bother to look at it. The material content of objections to neo-Darwinian theory can only be broached at the great risk of social ostracism from the “scientific” community, an ostracism accompanied by the harshest ridicule in public forums, and potentially resulting in loss of academic status and even position.
Fallacies
#40 Intentional ambiguity: “I have no obligation to clearly define what I am
saying,” and #41: Spin doctor: “but I most certainly have the right to redefine
what you have said.”
In an indefensible act of presumption, neo-Darwinists insist on reformulating their opponents’ theories to suit their own counter arguments. They have even done this to the writings of Charles Darwin himself (see the discussion immediately following Fallacy #100). Meanwhile, on their own side of the debate, neo-Darwinian evolution has lost any clarity of definition it may have initially had. Over the course of the past half-century modifications induced by a cascade of advancements in research and theoretical modeling techniques have left neo-Darwinian theory impressively arrayed with the newest conceptual tools. So, yes, the theory has become extensively enhanced. It now has all sorts of fancy bells and whistles: population studies, genetic comparisons, fancy math formulas that guess at genetic mutations rates with such precision that one would think we had absolutely rock solid evidence that such mutations actually occur (we don’t)—but neo-Darwinian theory remains nonetheless horridly defined. A simple and straightforward definition of neo-Darwinian theory occasionally appears in the literature (where no criticisms are addressed). But if one reads the entire literature where a variety of objections to the theory must be defended, such simple statements are soon swamped again by the sprawl of countless new themes and variations necessary to defend against specific objections. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now this is included in neo-Darwinian theory, now that, but not this, and so on. The frustrating moving target of evolutionary theory is no doubt what prompted Pope John Paul II to remark that the key to understanding the evolutionary debate is to first ask “Which theory of evolution?” The sprawling hide and seek approach to defining modern neo-Darwinian theory has grown until the whole enterprise has become a travesty upon disciplined intellectual thought.
The problem here is that the breadth and scope of ambiguity now resident in neo-Darwinian discussions provides the would-be propaganda artists of materialism yet another version of the “shell game” (fallacy #93) with which to befuddle the naïve and unsuspecting public. In this case, instead of chasing around after imaginary evidence and alleged prior proofs that don’t actually exist, we are left chasing after a coherent definition of the theory itself. Many of the versions of neo-Darwinian theory contradict each other. Some say the process is “accidental” some say it is not. Some ascribe the bulk of the work to natural selection, some to accidental drift. Some affirm a gradual process, some the rapid periodic jumps of punctuated equilibrium, and so on. They cannot all be true at the same time. By weaving in and out between versions, evolutionists may be innocently saying that “Look there is a version of evolution that answers your specific objection.” But answering single objections is not what scientific theory validation is truly about; we want the theory to be defensible overall. It is a mistake to believe that because one version or another appears to answer critical objections when taken singly that we have at least one logically consistent version of evolutionary theory that can answer all objections at the same time. We do not have such a theory.
It does no good to merely to answer single objections with an array of different theories, none of which can survive the full scope of criticisms, and all of which cannot be true at the same time. A formal restatement of the theory of evolution, explicitly separating and individually evaluating its many variants, is now needed, not only to permit honest scientific evaluation, but also so that our churches, schools and courts can know what to say regarding its philosophical assumptions and implicit worldview. (See Appendix 10, Call for a New Evolutionary Synthesis) Fuzzy definitions are only of use to those who fear an honest evaluation and/or who have assumed that they already know the answer, and that there can be no other answer. For these, no harm is done by letting scientists explore variations freely even if those optional formulations contradict each other. This is precisely what science has in effect done for the past 50 years. They have proceeded on the assumption that neo-Darwinian theory is true and restricted the focus of their inquiry and analysis to the nuts and bolts of how an evolutionary process might have generated the tree of life (accidentally). While proceeding in this manner, however, they have merely assumed that the processes of nature are accidental without ever having made the slightest progress in demonstrating it. More seriously, they have ignored blatant opportunities to test and disprove the accidental tenet that have always been available. Their only defense has been the “large amounts of time” involved in evolution, but William Dembski, in his resource exhaustion argument (see Appendix 2), has now shown that the time available is not nearly sufficient for accident to have constructed the complex machinery of life now known to us. Dembski’s case is visibly sound, yet mainstream science is simply ignoring it. What the neo-Darwinists are trying to do is silently waltz away from the accidental language so that the materialists don’t have to admit defeat, and then fend off Dembski by saying “Who are you arguing against? Our theory does not say the process is accidental.”
Because accidental evolution is no longer defensible, most modern evolutionists tend to avoid the accidental question entirely (except when doing politicized philosophy); but they offer no help whatsoever in correcting the historical record on the accidental question, leaving the presumed validity of the accidental version in tact in the mind of the public. The claim of an accidental world is then simply side-stepped when the focus of conversation turns to the mechanical process of evolution. This is a wise move for the neo-Darwinists because accident can’t be defended there, in and around the mechanics of things. However, for some neo-Darwinists, Richard Dawkins notably among them, the foundations of natural processes are openly asserted to be accidental up to the point when natural selection begins to guide the process towards survival/reproductive fitness. While I disagree with all of Richard Dawkins arguments, which I feel fail miserably on logical grounds, at least he honestly admits what he is arguing for: an accidental world.
It is important to understand that when Richard Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists say that the world is not accidental they do not mean what you and I mean when we say it. Dawkins and those who follow his view say that merely adding natural selection to an otherwise accidental world can accomplish the construction of absolutely everything we see in the vast complex machinery of living systems, and within the time constraints of the historical record. With the lone exception of natural selection, the entirety of all the rest of biology and the physical world is accidental in their view. They feel this alteration is sufficient to fend off criticisms that they are saying that an accident can build machines. They feel natural selection is that powerful. However, this kind of defense fails because it ignores the problem of constructing the machines in the first place. Natural selection only addresses how improvements to machines can be preserved, not how the machine is built.
In the gradualist version of evolution, that of Charles Darwin for example, the defense against our criticism would be that each improvement to a prior organism that natural selection preserves would just so happen to be the next step in building the next organism on the tree of evolution. This was never shown to be true; we cannot trace these kind of corresponding steps through the tree of life whatsoever; and it is improbable in the extreme. But at least with this version there was an imaginary, if highly improbable, route that one could conceive in general terms. The problem is that gradualism doesn’t match the fossil record. The fossil record shows large rapid jumps in biological change. To get past the criticisms against gradualism, the newer version of punctuated equilibrium was invented. But acknowledging the large rapid jumps seen in the record makes it much harder to claim either that an accident is the source of the variation or that each improvement to the prior organism could plausibly turn out to be a viable next step to building the next creature on the tree. Too radical a divergence occurs in many of the punctuated leaps to make it plausible that the larger module would both be an improvement for the prior organism and a useable step in creating the next creature, and larger machine modules are much more improbable and time consuming to achieve by accident. Might it conceivably have happened that way, yes. Is the hypothesis probable enough to be scientifically credible, no—not without the assumption of some intelligence built into the system to guide the outcome.
Here again we see the shell game. Gradualism is presented to give natural selection and an accidental process dynamic minimal credibility, but the switch is made to punctuated equilibrium when one brings up a criticism based upon the broken nature of the fossil record. Maintaining both of these versions (and many others) under the banner of neo-Darwinian evolution at the same time gives the neo-Darwinists an unfair opportunity to misrepresent a batch of individually failed versions of evolutionary theory as if they constituted one coherent, consistent, and successful single theory, which they do not.
In addition to allowing contradictory versions within the same theory, neo-Darwinian evolution is glaringly incomplete: no specific biomechanical chain of events is identified by which the astronomically complex biological machines of life have been built (or group of mechanisms). It is therefore like magic, a black box, if you will. An accidental process feeds into one end of the box and the magnificent machinery of life comes out the other. What happens in between? Who knows? Mutations—that’s all the process description we have for the biomechanics of the creation of the tree of life: one word. One word isn’t enough to explain the majestic creations of life. It certainly does not constitute a defense of an accidental process. This one word explanation is not even an advance over protoplasm; it is merely a label that hides the fact that the biomechanics of evolution are unknown to science. It is the equivalent of saying “It just happens,” which is no scientific explanation at all. “Mutation” in Darwinian theory means any significant increment of biological change. Therefore, the form of the neo-Darwinian explanation is completely circular and therefore meaningless: “the biological change of evolution happens by way of biological change.” True, the very recently discovered influence of the transpositional and developmental genomes adds a great deal more substance to the prior one word magical mantra of “mutation,” but both of these are closely controlled mechanistic systems; they suggest anything but an accident. Once again the value of a shell game option becomes obvious: when you need a concrete mechanistic explanation to fend off critics you use nonaccidental developmental and transpositional genomic systems; when you want to do materialist politics, you use accidental mutations.
Having thus failed to either clearly define or substantively defend their own theory, neo-Darwinists next proceeded to brashly redefine intelligent design theory, calling it an argument from religious authority, which it is not. Intelligent design theory, as offered by its modern proponents, is visibly an exclusively scientific case. Neo-Darwinists have been permitted to unfairly denigrate and dishonestly redefine a valid theory without incurring censure for violation of professional academic standards. It is as if they felt themselves immune to the rules of civilized academic discourse. This is a true scandal in science, but so far, they have gotten away with it.
Take the case of Professor William Dembski, for example. He is a well-known advocate of intelligent design, the author of many thoughtful and illuminating books. Dembski is well versed in both philosophy and mathematics. He gives every indication of being a thinker of the first rank. (The man has two PhD’s and four masters degrees for crying out loud!) Yet, Darwinists would have us believe that Professor Dembski cannot be trusted to know the difference between intelligent design theory and 6-day creation science. They accuse him of doing biblical creationism when he explicitly denies it, in writing. The biblical creationists, those at Answers in Genesis (AIG) in Florence Kentucky for example, have also affirmed, in writing, that intelligent design theory and biblical creationism are not the same thing. Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists refuse to differentiate intelligent design theory from biblical creationism. Their reason for this slight of hand is obvious. They can offer arguments against the latter as a definitive refutation of the former for which they have no convincing counterarguments. The shell game again, bait and switch. Whatever one chooses to call it, it isn’t honest and it isn’t science. The political element here is so blatant that one can imagine Froehicky of the X-Files showing up in frustration on Professor Michael Behe’s doorstep at Lehigh University with an empty bottle of scotch: “They’re rigging the game!” Behe, of course, already knows this.
Dembski, for his part, asserts only the general theory of an intelligent designer of earth’s life; he claims neither 6-day creation nor young earth theory. ID is thus a very simple theory, and a scientific one, fully divested of any religious claims or assertions about God whatsoever. Nonetheless, Darwinists inanely offer rebuttals of intelligent design by arguing only against biblical 6-day creation and a young earth neither of which has the slightest relevance to ID theory. They then claim victory over intelligent design theory. This is the most ludicrous thing to have occurred in the history of civilized academic discourse! It would actually be funny if it weren’t teaching our students and science interested public to accept politics in lieu of rational thought and objective science.
Neo-Darwinists claim that the biochemists, biologists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science who comprise the intelligent design team are doing religion, not science. They discuss the exact same topics we have discussed here in Part 1 of this book. Granted, Part 2 touches at points on religion, but even there I am not doing religion, merely leaving the logical and factual door open to it. Why would neo-Darwinists accuse ID theorists of doing religion when they are merely practicing science? I can see no legitimate reason for doing this. ID scientists are apparently being harassed because they don’t deny their religious faith (that doesn’t mean they bring it into science). This amounts to a demand that scientists deny God in their personal life before their work will even be considered scientific. This is apparently a ploy by Marxist-influenced neo-Darwinists and materialists in the scientific community whose ethics are far different than our own. They are not concerned so much with the visible logic of their case as with dissuading those with differing views from gaining an established position in academia and in the public mind. This is obviously and blatantly contrary to both the charter of science and the Constitution of the United States. It amounts to a de facto social requirement that scientists cannot have a religion. Insisting on such a denial of God before being accepted as a scientist in the government section of the scientific culture would also fail the endorsement test affirmed in the federal court decision in Kitzmiller (although the decision was otherwise wrong in saying that ID theory is religion).
Sadly, government science boards as well as many universities, professional associations and peer-reviewed academic journals have all permitted neo-Darwinists to get away with these violations of intellectual integrity and scientific standards as they go about freely promoting a blatant bias for materialism. By not censuring neo-Darwinists for misrepresenting personal philosophy as science, for misrepresenting unsubstantiated arguments as creditable philosophy, and for manufacturing bogus redefinitions of opposing theories, and for ethical violations (neo-Darwinists are often personally insulting to Christian authors as a group or individually), mainstream academia as a whole has impliedly endorsed neo-Darwinist unprofessional behavior. We therefore have an integrity crisis in science. The objectivity of mainstream science has been (for many years now) compromised by the overwhelming dominance of the materialist “lobby” in our scientific community.
Contrary to the neo-Darwinists’ preemptory dismissals of ID theory in their popular books as if they had fully analyzed the ID case and found it wanting, the neo-Darwinist so-called “case” against intelligent design theory addresses few if any of the points of evidence and logic presented in this book. And in the rare event when they do, they rely on propagandized rhetoric and debating tricks alone. At points, neo-Darwinists have even ludicrously claim that probability is irrelevant to the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis, and that there are no limits to what an accident can be held to be capable of manufacturing! They speak of the “enormous amounts of time” of evolution as if the capacity for biological change resident in that amount of time were the mathematical equivalent of the infinite. They invite us to think in terms of the infinite when we imagine the resources available to evolution, but the truth of the matter is far different. Most of evolution occurred during a relatively brief 5-10 million years in the Cambrian period, and the recently discovered complexity of biological systems entails that trillions of years would not have been enough for the accidental construction of life. Here the deceptive tactic being used is basically bait and switch, or the logical fallacy of equivocation, using the same word, phrase or concept to mean two or more things that may be alternated at will. By “enormous amounts of time of evolution” the neo-Darwinists want us to read “enough time to build the complex machines of life by accident.” As Appendix 2 makes clear, the amount of time actually available in evolutionary history is the smallest fraction of what is necessary to do this.
In contrast to the ambiguous wording and slippery tactics on the neo-Darwinian side, intelligent design theorists have gone to great lengths to make clear both what they are saying and what they are not saying: their theory is well defined. Intelligent design theory merely claims that there must be an intelligent designer of life. It needn’t be God. Neither must the designer be supernatural. As Jay Richards puts it “It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.”[60] This says nothing about God, but materialists who predominate in the neo-Darwinist camp loathe it because it leaves the door open for God’s existence. This obstructs their (19th century vintage) “social reformist” propaganda campaign for materialism, what has been discerningly called the religion of “scientism,” and has been heavily influenced by Marxist philosophy.
The unmistakable warning flags of political propaganda are there in the neo-Darwinian writings for those who care to look. These are the same warning signs visible throughout the history of thought, the signs that portend the encroachment of politics into science, philosophy, and literature: intellectually indefensible statements, self-contradiction, personal insults, redefining the opponents position so it can be easily attacked. All these academically invalid tactics occur copiously in neo-Darwinian rhetoric. Noted evolutionist Douglas Futuyma claims that intelligent design theory is nothing different than literal 6-day creationism. Many neo-Darwinian books do the same thing while mixing anti-religion/pro-materialist propaganda seamlessly in with real science.[61]
There is even a noted Catholic priest (a scientist) who has inexplicably chimed in for neo-Darwinian propaganda despite the fact that the Catholic Church clearly rejects neo-Darwinism. Father George V. Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory, claims intelligent design theory denigrates God by reducing him to a mere designer (the mere designer of absolutely everything that exists!) Both of these claims are untrue, unfair, and, in my view, irrational. Coyne, Futuyma, and Dawkins, et al., have shamelessly constructed an unauthorized redefinition of the modern theory of intelligent design, effectively transforming it into a 150-year-old throwback. This, while themselves hailing neo-Darwinian evolution as the epitome of progress, with neo-Darwinian theory itself being no more explanatory that the protoplasm theory of Darwin’s own time, circa 1860! Futuyma says ID is merely religion, and Coyne says ID makes a statement about God that is not good enough for his religion! Go figure. Both are simply wrong. ID theory says nothing whatsoever about God or religion.
As a Catholic who happens to be a proponent of intelligent design theory I personally take offense at the accusation that I have in some way denigrated my God by a scientific theory that merely affirms transparent truths of observable data and rational thought, truths that, of all things, point to a designer of life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself affirms that rational evidence for God can be seen in the majestic patterns of the created world, as does the Bible. What in the world was Father Coyne thinking? Granted, God works in mysterious ways. But there is nothing in the scripture to ground the view that that divine mystery extends so far as to shroud the general indication of design so clearly evident in the physical structures and functions of physics and biology. As God warned Job, we may never find understand all of God’s ways, but the Psalms do tell us that “the firmament declares his handiwork.”
One enduring mystery lies in how God could make a dynamically changing system so complex and intricate that it could providentially see to the needs of so many living creatures while staying in balance over vast amounts of time such that life could exist at all. As Roger Penrose has computed, the specificity of our world is roughly 10 to the power of 10123. This is a super immense number. One might think the human brain was up to the task of analyzing the alternative possibilities for the design of our universe: 100 billion neurons each with thousands of connecting fibers. Not so. This is only the smallest fraction of the computational power that would be needed. There are 1080 elementary particles in the universe (give or take a half dozen). They can potentially be reconfigured every 1043 times per second! So, go ahead and run through the possibilities for the first 20 billion years in your head. Each person to scribble them all down on a slip of paper and send them in to me wins a major award. Allow 20 billion years for delivery, however. I have to check your work.
So, I agree with Fr. Coyne to the extent of conceding that there is plenty of room for God’s methods to be mysterious to us. That much is mathematically demonstrable in the realm of the purely physical before the supernatural is even considered. However, it is precisely because such closely specified order has been achieved out of a monumental sea of nonfunctional possibilities that our rational minds are able to infer intelligent design through science because the alternative is dismissibly improbable. Intelligent design theory does not denigrate God as Fr. Coyne charges. It speaks not at all to whatever truly transcendent supernatural abilities God may have. It merely makes God a credible hypothesis for the source of our world as one of several members of the set of all the possible candidates for the intelligent designer. ID theory makes no literal claims about God at all. It therefore cannot be denigrating him. ID theory does not even affirm God’s existence; it only speaks of a designer of life or a designer of the cosmos in general terms. Therefore, in my courtroom at least, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Professor Michael Behe, Professor William Dembski, and Dr. Stephen Meyer et al., have been fully vindicated of astronomer Fr. George V. Coyne’s accusations. (Cardinal Schönborn’s article is discussed below.)
In another intellectual coup, Father Coyne has authoritatively pronounced “God did not design me!” I confess to still be struggling to find a biblically compatible meaning for this statement. God refers to himself as “your Builder” in Isaiah 62:5. Father Coyne seems to believe that God put things in motion in a profound and mysterious way and let the universe basically express its gifts in ways so subtle and mysterious that we cannot fathom them. But the Church teaches that, through the natural gift of reason, we can at least discern design in nature in a general way, without necessarily knowing all there is to know.
But Coyne’s remarks are basically just missing the point. The context of the ID debate is only concerned with whether or not intelligence is behind the structures and process of life or not. It is not concerned with how subtle, profound, magnificently complex, or mystically vague the designer elected to be when he impressed his design requirements upon physical matter. All ID theory says is that the design structures we see in living systems could not have been achieved within the available time and physical resources without aid of intelligently imposed constraints on the process.
In yet another error, Coyne, Futuyma and others try to pin on ID theory the antiquated views of naïve finalism and perfectionism, where God was seen as the consummate micromanager. These anachronisms are simply not part of the modern theory of intelligent design. They are over a hundred years old, have never been affirmed by current ID theorists, and there is simply no intellectual justification for leveling such criticisms at the current proponents of ID theory. Within the RFP concept (see fallacy #51), or any other generalized conception of design specification, a designer can allow for options, and even permit their achievement through randomizing features, while still maintaining a machine specification that guarantees the intended output within established tolerances. Naïve finalism isn’t even a part of modern theology, let alone the scientific theory of intelligent design.
In another naive and simplistic throwback, neo-Darwinists object to intelligent agency because the effects of creation have been visibly delayed beyond the literal 6-day biblical creationist model. First of all, the fact that our experience of this world and its history is unavoidably placed in the context of time does not rule out the possibility that God acted outside of time to directly specify, set, and implement the design structure of his creations. And the fact that a large span of time elapsed since God first set the universe in motion in a manner that must irrevocably produce his chosen design specifications (be they specific and invariable, or general and variable) does not mean he was not the primary actor or the designer in any more meaningful sense than a man releasing a bowling ball can be said to not be the actor responsible for scoring a strike. Time elapses from the moment the bowler releases the ball, but that does not mean he is not the agent responsible for the collision of the ball with the pins. One wouldn’t want the neo-Darwinists to arrange the festivities at the conclusion of the next Pro-Bowlers Tour. When the huge checks and fancy jackets are being passed out to the winners the announcement would not be “Congratulations Mr. Weber” but “… and now this years champion, a 16 lb blue marbled ball from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.”
There are further errors in the bogus neo-Darwinian definition of intelligent design theory. Contrary to the rigid and simplistic mechanical watch model that Fr. Coyne mistakenly attributes to ID, the way that the designer interacts with the world is not specified in intelligent design theory at all. No claims are made regarding either ongoing intervention by the designer or the degree of precision with which the design has been specified. ID makes no such claims beyond the necessity for acknowledging that intelligent design is present and admitting the impossibility of accident being the source of life. We don’t yet know how the designer did it, but we can see that he did implement a design. Much like a child coming into a friend’s room and seeing a magnificent construction of Lego’s, an intricate sailboat in a bottle, or a giant house of cards, we are not rationally entitled to say, “How did that accident get there?” but rather, “How’d you do that!?” The rational mind has the ability to detect intelligent design. If psychology’s attribution of human behavior to, among other things, the dark passions of the id, as well as the ego and superego is valid science, we have as much reason to scientifically affirm the mind’s ability to recognize design when it sees it.
In attempting to lock ID theory into an antiquated exclusively Newtonian mechanistic model, Father Coyne commits the straw man fallacy, once again redefining modern intelligent design theory to make claims it does not make for itself. He then criticizes the false version, making ID theory appear refuted. Neo-Darwinists are guilty of the same fallacy in calling ID theory “Creation Science” and then only deigning to critique an over simplified version of Creation Science. They have been so successful promoting these errors however that much of the public, and apparently even some of the Catholic clergy, doesn’t even know that ID theory is not Creation Science!
In his critique of Cardinal Schönborn’s editorial, Coyne commits the additional fallacies of one strike and you’re out and double standard by refusing to let ID theory grow up over the past 150 years as science itself has had to do. He, of course, has no problem permitting endless variations and changes to Darwinian theory under the umbrella of scientific progress. True, the watch model did originate with William Paley way back in the early 1900s, but Darwin’s theory is older yet. However, there was nothing wrong with Paley saying that a watch implies a watchmaker in the first instance, for of course it does. In light of modern quantum physics, however, the picture of nature has become less one of the rigid parts of an interactive machine than of the statistical probabilities of interacting energy field equations. Father Coyne asks us to believe that this means that we should no longer view the world as a functional mechanism. Fuzzy energy field dynamics notwithstanding, it is an indisputable fact that when those energy fields finish interacting in their fuzzy statistical ways, the same mechanical things happen time after time day after day up here in the visible world of physical objects, otherwise known as classical Newtonian physics. Our world is in fact mechanistic even if the fuzzy little one below us is not.
What’s the point of belaboring fuzziness at quantum levels if it doesn’t alter the mechanistic outcome in the final result? Obviously there is a correspondence bridge of some kind that guarantees that the mechanistic model still holds up here on the surface of things. Given such strict correspondence, I don’t see quantum theory as impugning the classic model of Newtonian physics so much as confirming and explaining it. We have “always” (that is, in my lifetime) known that there were atoms that composed the metal of the parts of our factory machines and automobiles. We knew that there was space between the orbiting electrons and the nuclei. This did not keep us from rightly constructing conceptual models of solid material with correspondingly “solid” behaviors in the macroscopic world. In the same way, as long as strict correspondence between the quantum level and the observable levels of physics holds there is no reason to say that the classic Newtonian model has failed, for we see it operate flawlessly every day. The only modifications to Newtonian physics that have been necessary are those that Einstein proposed in the theory of relativity. They only pertain to a few situations at the extreme ranges of speed and distance and affect nothing in our living experience.
One can say, well, an energy field is a fundamentally different kind of object than a particle, and, because it must be predicted with statistical probability rather than unexcepted certainty, we really have two different systems. In that sense the one system is not merely short hand for the other. That is probably the most popular view in modern physics, but I have to disagree. It strays too far from common sense, and it contradicts the fact that physical phenomena are known to require different laws and models at each hierarchical level of matter and physical event structure. We have traditionally always considered the lower levels compositional constituencies of the higher levels, not contradictions to them. So long as the strict correspondence of the quantum system output reliably produces the observable system of Newtonian mechanics, that is, the mechanistic visible world we live in, even though we have yet to confirm and fully exposit the bridge between the two levels of physics, we must still view the former as the cause of the latter. In concept, this is no different than atoms being the cause of solid objects although in one sense the two are wholly different kinds of ideas. Father Coyne, in critiquing ID theory for being associated with what he suggest is the “archaic” and “disproved” model of Newtonian mechanics, is just wrong. Newtonian mechanics is not disproved by quantum mechanics, it is clarified. In any case, ID theory is not dependent upon the Newtonian model so long as intelligent design can be generally discerned in nature.
What Did Einstein Believe?
And let’s not put quantum theory up on an unimpeachable pedestal. Quantum physics has plenty of problems of its own. It cannot be considered as having higher theoretical integrity than Newtonian mechanics, which Father Coyne mistakenly suggests it has replaced in our larger worldview and conceptual framework. It is also so obtuse that it is doubtful if more than a handful of scientists fully grasp what it means at any given moment in time. This condition alone precludes the normal scientific validation protocol of peer review and worldwide experiment and test under consistent frameworks. Noted theoretical physicist N. David Mermin (Cornell) provides a wonderful quote from Richard Feynman at the introduction of his article “Spooky Actions at a Distance: Mysteries of the Quantum Theory.”[62]
There was a time when the
newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do
not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only
one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his
paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of
relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Should we stop thinking in terms of solid objects and gravity and switch to computing energy field equations as we work through our daily routines? Not me, not in Bloomington. I certainly don’t walk around thinking in terms of energy field equations. I wouldn’t survive a week crossing the streets in a big college town.
As Einstein recognized there is something fundamentally wrong or incomplete with current quantum mechanics. Though the theory is visibly incomplete in its inability to establish a concrete explanation for the “correspondence bridge” between random behavior in individual particles and ordered behavior in the statistical group behavior of particles, I would go further to say that quantum theory, at least in the way that it has been represented by many commentators is genuinely self-contradictory. It is the unjustifiable inference to an accidental world that is the problem again. Einstein rebelled at this as well in saying that God does not play dice with the Universe. Much as we saw the neo-Darwinists improperly do in fallacy #1, equating a part with the whole, some physicists have concluded that since the individual particles behave randomly the world itself is accidental. This confusion about quantum mechanics can be very easily resolved with the simplest conceptual adjustment (Right! J).
If one disassembles a machine into its component parts obviously the parts will not separately respond in an orderly fashion as does the assembled machine. If one strikes an automobile piston laying on the shop table with a hammer the engine will obviously not spring into life allowing you to drive to the market. This suggests that the atom or its basic components, the proton, electron and neutron are the smallest mechanisms in nature and anything smaller must be considered a component part incapable of independent function. Father Coyne argues that the mechanistic worldview has been refuted by quantum physics, but to conclude that the machine doesn’t exist because the parts taken separately don’t perform its functions is invalid.
There is perhaps a somewhat more cogent defense of indeterminacy that might be imposed onto our analogy, though it still does not refute the mechanistic worldview. It goes like this. The problem in quantum physics is not so much that the engine fails to spring into life when you strike a piston on the table with a hammer, but that when you strike it in precisely the same way multiple times the piston responds erratically and unpredictably, exhibiting vastly different responses in each instance. If this happened with a real piston it could only be because there were irregularities in the surface, differences in the angle of the blow or other variations in the conditions of the event, but in quantum physics we can find no variables to explain the erratic variations in response to identical originating conditions.
This, of course, is why Einstein postulated that quantum physics is simply incomplete; we are missing something that will explain the variations in response. I suggest that the something we are missing will turn out to be related to the mechanistic worldview, and in fact will confirm it. Obviously the erratic behavior of quantum particles has to do with the absence of consistent cohesion. At the quantum level we are dealing with forces so close to the pure state of energy that the cohesive factors that bond energy packets into consistently behaving larger entities that constitute matter are minimized. Perhaps they are simply minimized to the extent that the slightest variation, one occurring at a level not perceivable to present science (superstring level, in another of the hypothesized physical dimensions, etc) destroys cohesion, like a living microbe whose structure is maintained by a cell wall so thin that the slightest chemical alteration in its environment breaches the membrane and cause erratic unpredictable injuries or death to the organism. The atheists’ inference to an accidental worldview from this phenomenon, considering it has no effect on the orderly behavior or particles in groups or on the macroscopic world whatsoever, is not justified. It contradicts the existence of physical order and natural law itself. Einstein’s inference that quantum theory must be incomplete is here seen to be justified.
Many readers will immediately balk at the suggestion of self-contradiction, even if it only resides in the commentaries. Surely you are not claiming that quantum mechanics is self-contradictory, for there is a robust consensus for it throughout mainstream science. Yes, I’m afraid that I am. Grounding truth on mere consensus is a fallacy in itself, as we discuss below in fallacy #100. No matter how “robust” the theory, or the consensus for it, it can still be wrong and proven so in the light of new discoveries. Theories, even well-established ones, can even be shown to be self-contradictory in the light of careful logical analysis, particularly where obtuse technical terms and concepts have never been fully and properly expounded. Let’s face it; people make mistakes.
In the case of arguing from quantum physics to an accidental worldview, however, the mistake is so glaring that a child could catch it. If the behavior of individual quantum particles is truly accidental, having no bias or pattern, the aggregate behavior of those particles in statistical groups cannot express a consistent bias or pattern either. This can be mathematically proven. Yet the behavior of quantum particles in statistical aggregate does express a bias. It is perfectly consistent, so consistent in fact as to underlie absolutely all of the patterns of our natural laws. Thus, the myth that quantum physics justifies an accidental worldview is shown to be grounded in yet another logical fallacy: equivocation. The public has been duped yet again into missing a bait and switch tactic between two radically and importantly different meanings of the same word. The word in this case is “random.” “Random” may be used to mean truly accidental, or it may be used to mean merely that we do not have sufficient information to say what the causes are for the behavior of the natural events in question. The only justifiable application of “random” to quantum physics has been the latter, lack of sufficient information to reveal the causes of the consistent pattern and undeniable bias statistically present in quantum phenomena. We absolutely do know, however, that the bias and the patterns are there.
To suggest, as materialist scientists often do, that an accidental worldview can be deduced from quantum physics therefore raises questions of both competency of professional judgment and professional ethics. Father Coyne of course does not suggest that the world is accidental at its foundation in the sense of devoid of a maker, but rather that it is either so divinely mysterious that it might appear random despite our best scientific efforts to ferret out its ultimate nature, or, perhaps, even that it might be genuinely accidental and still capable of expressing God’s immutable will and purpose nonetheless. Christ himself acknowledged that there are some true accidents in the world. I don’t know which of these alternative views best mirrors Father Coyne’s position, but I cannot agree that the latter view, a fully accidental world, is compatible with a biblical concept of God who set things in their place and established their tasks for all time. The biblical concept is not the concept of genuine accident at the foundation of things.
Science, of course, is good in its place, as is mystical theology; but one can get too much of a good thing or extend otherwise good things beyond their proper range of application. This is the mistake that materialists make in extending the proper limitations of scientific method, which justifiably limits science to the examination of purely physical phenomena as a means of guaranteeing reliable investigation, and justifiably limits the scientific ascription of intermediate causes to purely physical events in order to avoid permitting unpredictable “ghosts in the machine.” Extending what is merely a practical rule of operation to a universal fact of metaphysics (that nothing nonphysical exists), however, is going too far. Just because science cannot effectively work with the nonphysical does not mean that it does not exist.
Father Coyne makes another mistake in implying that quantum physics is in such an unassailable state of epistemological exultation that it can impugn or replace the mechanistic worldview derived from Newtonian physics. The things that quantum theory cannot explain, such as how and why quantum events consistently produce the world of observable events while individual quantum particles are held to be indeterminate, unpredictable, and unyielding of certainty in measurement, are of orders of magnitude greater scope and significance (even foundational in nature, and, as was shown, self-contradictory) than anything one might fault Newtonian physics for. Relativity theory has already made the necessary patches. There is nothing to my knowledge that is wrong with Newtonian physics as augmented by relativity theory.
Relativity theory does not make the world a non-mechanism, it means the mechanism wigs out at the extreme ranges just as many machines do. Granted, you can’t conveniently use quantum theory to explain the behavior of things larger than atoms any more than you can conveniently use cellular subsystems to explain human social behavior. But why should you expect to? Every step up the hierarchical scale of nature’s embedded physical systems produces interactions of larger and larger entities that must necessarily be explained by their own behavioral models referencing new systems predicate upon larger “objects.” Not all of the difficulties reduce to mere convenience of language, however. Larger and smaller systems may simply act differently and invoke unique laws of interaction that do not reduce to mere shorthand of an aggregate of explanations based upon the concepts of systems at different levels. Obviously the laws of planetary movement shouldn’t be expected to coincide at all points with electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Yet we do not say that atomic physics refutes astronomy. Father Coyne, however, asks us to believe that quantum physics refutes Newtonian mechanics, or more precisely, that a worldview he falsely presumes is legitimately derivable from quantum physics refutes a mechanistic worldview that is legitimately derivable from Newtonian mechanics.
In one sense, events corresponding to Newtonian mechanics must remain a part of, or a range of, quantum theory, else quantum theory does not predict the real world. Quantum theory therefore predicts Newtonian mechanics within those ranges where Newtonian physics applies. It must predict it if it is to be a confirmed model of our physical world at all. However, a model, ‘A’, that consistently entails another model, ‘B’, while simultaneously scoring less on scientific theory evaluation criteria than ‘B’ overall, cannot be said to have disproved ‘B’. The fallacy of Father Coyne’s position can also be more strictly demonstrated by the logical axiom of modus tollens. If A entails B, and B is disproved, so is A disproved. Since Newtonian mechanics is derivable from quantum mechanics, to say that Newtonian mechanics has been refuted is to logically entail the refutation of quantum physics as well. Thus Father Coyne’s position is the equivalent of saying that Newtonian mechanics is refuted by the refuted theory of quantum physics. A refuted theory or proposition, having a truth value of “false,” cannot serve to refute the truth of any other theory or proposition. Coyne can defend by saying that he was not claiming the refutation of Newtonian physics but only the mechanistic worldview the public has constructed from it. However, this defense fails because a mechanistic physics does in fact entail a mechanistic worldview. This is merely modus tollens again. Refutation of the mechanistic worldview requires refutation of the mechanistic theory of Newtonian physics, which then requires refutation of the deeper theory of quantum mechanics that predicts the theory of Newtonian mechanics.
One can object that the quantum model doesn’t really entail the Newtonian model, they just so happen to overlap in explanation for a range of events, that they in truth invoke radically different conceptual assumptions about the nature of reality. To me this is merely ontological hair splitting. Our original and primary concern in constructing a worldview or conceptual framework is not with technical models and abstract concepts, but with reality. In reality, the quantum level of physics, that is, the real events there, not the technical model, do in fact physically generate the visible world that behaves according to Newtonian mechanics. This is not conceptual entailment, but it is contiguous/continuous physical causation. Events that are physically contiguous/continuous cannot be based in contradictory realities. Therefore, in the sense of physical causation, the quantum level of the world does in fact entail the Newtonian level of the world. To deny that is to deny that the quantum level is the literal underlying layer of the atomic and gross physical layers of the world. Such a denial reduces quantum theory to an abstract specialized conceptual model devoid of any literal correspondence to reality.
To avoid this problem, Coyne must be asking us, or rather, telling us, for he assumes when he speaks an almost ferocious authority for empiric science, to abandon our mechanistic view of the world based upon the well-established theory of Newtonian physics, and assume a quantum view of the world. But what is that view? And why is it better. Is it the purely accidental view of individual quantum particles which cannot be tied to natural law and therefore scientific prediction at all that Coyne is recommending, or the fully orderly view of the aggregate statistical behavior of quantum particles, which differs not one whit form Newtonian mechanics because it theoretically predicts and physically causes Newtonian mechanics?
Coyne’s view can only appear to be coherent if we allow ourselves to jump back and forth between these two different views of the quantum world as we walk our way through his argument. We must first assume the fully accidental view to establish that there is any difference in the degree to which nature is shown to be mechanistic by quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics in the first place; there is not. This is required to create the appearance of a conflict. We must then jump to the non-accidental view of quantum physics in order to make quantum physics a theory that is tractable to scientific method, explanation, and prediction at all. This is the same trick that neo-Darwinian evolution (accidental evolution) relies upon, an equivocation between two versions of the same thing: now it is accidental, now it is not. In this case it is Father Coyne who is trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat: Walla Booby! Abra cadabra! Presto chango! The mechanistic worldview is disproved! Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Quantum theory has not disproved anything, except perhaps its own current formulation, which is self-contradictory. In saying this I am not claiming that quantum physics as a discipline should be thrown out, but that it should be retained and made consistent.
Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not exist in Newtonian mechanics. They do exist in quantum mechanics, though only regarding individual particles. The statistical behavior of quantum particles en masse is so consistently uniform as to be as certain as any law of physics that applies at the Newtonian level. Thus, as Einstein believed, there is something necessarily missing in quantum theory; the theory is incomplete. We cannot explain either why the group behavior of quantum particles is not erratic as is the behavior of individual particles or what constitutes the bridge between the quantum and Newtonian levels of physics.
An incomplete and mysterious theory that cannot find its way past indeterminacy and uncertainty in measurement at its core neither merits the epistemological weight sufficient to refute the mechanistic worldview Father Coyne would have us throw out, nor is capable of predicting Newtonian physics at all. This reveals that the “indeterminacy” of individual particles is not the core of quantum theory at all, but their reliably consistent statistical group behavior. It has always been misleading to say that the science of quantum physics either entails an accidental worldview or that the behavior of individual quantum particles is at the core and essence of that science, for the individual particle behavior produces nothing of use to science whatsoever, except a mystery.
The accidental view of evolution and the indeterminate view of quantum mechanics thus share the common element of politically tainted science. The risks of allowing the intrusion of politics into science range far beyond basic scientific theory, however, into the full spectrum of society. Other known consequences of politics intruding into science include withholding viable treatment for Gulf War Illness after it was confirmed to be available in order to maintain the illusion of a perfect victory in the Gulf War,[63] and pressing risky designs at NASA because they impress the world and the public, and potential military adversaries.
I do not indict NASA for pursuing the space shuttle in lieu of a safer capsule concept, but merely point out that political factors were likely weighed against others including maximizing safety, when approving the shuttle concept. The shuttle was not an indefensible idea, but rather a trade-off of risks and benefits.[64] It was a genuine exploration of the capabilities of the machine, a legitimate experiment. I do, however, fully indict the Department of Defense and the VA for an indefensible cover-up of bonafide Gulf War Illness treatment options. This was pure politics; humanitarian concerns were counted as nothing. The question of criminal negligence or other criminal culpability remains in this area until the full truth of why we for fifteen years denied treatment for established biological infections to our veterans is made public. As the curtain of denial begins to loosen up on Gulf War Illness after nearly twenty years of unnecessary suffering for the approximately half of the some 150,000 GWI patients who suffer from the biological infection type of GWI, it begins to look like the Tuskegee human experimentation study all over again.[65] The ill veterans appear to have been made into guinea pigs and intentionally denied treatment. This is illegal to do without their consent, thus the specter of criminal culpability of our government remains in this area. The point of the moralistic aside is to demonstrate that, yes, politics can indeed interfere with science, and the refusal to admit it is simply naiveté.
In any case, quantum theory simply “isn’t there yet,” that is, it is neither complete nor fully explanatory at the most fundamental level. It has therefore not replaced anything in a definitive fashion and the mechanical universe continues to tick along in clockwork fashion as reliably as it ever did.
One further item concerning Father Coyne’s views and we’ll move to the next fallacy. In the introduction, we discussed Father Coyne’s criticism of Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn’s affirmation of intelligent design. Let’s now take a closer look at what specifically is wrong with what Father Coyne has said about Cardinal Schönborn’s affirmation of intelligent design? Father Coyne insists that Cardinal Schönborn is wrong on at least five fundamental issues. His tone is quite authoritative in these criticisms. Let’s see if his position stands up to analysis. [My comments are inserted in brown; Father Coyne’s words are in black.]
One,
the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely
neutral with respect to religious thinking [Wrong, this equates
Cardinal Schönborn’s topic of neo-Darwinian evolution, which, in denying cosmic
purpose, is not neutral, with basic evolution, which is. Father Coyne commits
the fallacy of equivocation, improperly switching between two different
meanings of the same term.] two, the message of
John Paul II, which I have just referred to and which is dismissed by the
cardinal as ‘rather vague and unimportant,’ is a fundamental church teaching
which significantly advances the evolution debate; [This
misleads the reader into thinking that the John Paul II message advances the
debate in the direction of neo-Darwinian evolution. It does not.
By condemning materialist theories it condemns neo-Darwinian evolution. Pope
John Paul II merely said that basic evolution was “more than a theory.”
Basic evolution is fully compatible with intelligent design, and intelligent
design is fully entailed by the Christian faith.] three,
neo-Darwinian evolution is not in the words of the cardinal, ‘an unguided,
unplanned process of random variation and natural selection;’ [Wrong
again. In fact, Father Coyne could not be more wrong here because the father of
modern evolutionary thought, Theodosius Dobzhansky, says precisely what
Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn ascribes to neo-Darwinian theory: “Though neither planned, guided,
predestined or predetermined (except in the Laplacian sense of universal
deterministic causality), the biological evolution gave rise to man.”[66] Richard Dawkins, one of the best known spokesmen for
neo-Darwinian theory defines it as precisely what Father Coyne says it is not,
random variation guided by cumulative natural selection.]
four, the apparent directionality seen by science in the evolutionary process
does not require a designer; [This is the straw man fallacy again,
setting up a fictitiously weak opponent so the strong opponent doesn’t have to
be addressed. Intelligent design is not founded upon directionality as such,
that is, merely moving from the simple to the complex, although moving from the
simple to the complex is the way most machines are built. Cardinal Schönborn
did not premise his argument on oversimplified directionality, though Father
Coyne’s remark here implies that he did. Rather, intelligent design theory
argues from the entire gamut of complex design features seen in living things,
as well as the lack of accidental biomechanical pathway between species, all of
which reveal the impotence of an accidental process. The ID argument is
grounded in a multiplicity of valid observations as the entirety of this book
shows. Notably, the probability bound argument (Appendix 2) establishes the
lack of time and resources requisite to accident achieving any significant
complexity in living designs. By implying that the intelligent design case is based upon simple directionality
alone, Father Coyne unfairly represents the ID case and commits the straw man
fallacy yet again.] five, Intelligent Design is not science
despite the cardinal’s statement that ‘neo-Darwinism and the multi-verse
hypothesis in cosmology [were] invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for
purpose and design found in modern science,’” [We have
already seen the strength of the scientific argument for intelligent design in
summary form here. Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, Jonathan
Well’s book Icons of Evolution, Michael Denton’s book Evolution a
Theory in Crisis, and Stephen C. Meyer’s scientific journal article “The
Origins of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” are all
overtly and unquestionably scientific presentations. Father Coyne here simply
labels intelligent design theory unscientific but gives no support for his
position; he therefore begs the question, another logical fallacy, and asks us
to accept his word as an authority, an additional fallacy. What is
unscientific is the multiverse theory (because it is not testable), but Father
Coyne gives it a free pass. Father Coyne is demonstrably wrong on all five
points, and Cardinal Schönborn’s position is fully vindicated.[67]
Why is the multiverse theory unscientific? Let’s use a simple Socratic form of argument, the exclusive either/or. Either the other universes of a multiverse interact with our universe or they do not; that much is obvious, for there are no other alternatives. If they do not interact with our universe we cannot have evidence of their existence; thus the theory is not testable—by definition. In other words, if we grant that there are no interactions between the universes then even anomalous data that an interaction with a different universe might explain must be explained some other way, for we have stipulated that there are no interactions. The other alternative, that the different universes of a multiverse do interact causes us to throw out our laws of thermodynamics, which underlie practically all of science, because those laws are founded upon the assumption that our universe is a closed system. Ironically, if we were to allow that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics holds in open systems such as an interactive multiverse, then intelligent design is immediately proven. This is because the 2nd Law says that order never increases by natural spontaneous processes in systems to which it applies. If our universe turns out to be an open system, as an interactive multiverse requires, we must either throw away the 2nd Law or apply it to open systems. One such open system is the Earth’s planetary system. Applying the 2nd Law to Earth in that way precludes any spontaneous increase in order by natural processes. Thus, the natural spontaneous creation of life is ruled out, and intelligent design is established.
Nor does the multiverse theory defeat the probability argument as the neo-Darwinists and sympathetic cosmologists would have us believe. Even if there are as many universes as there are alternative event sequence possibilities entailed by the random construction of something so complex as human life, the improbability that our world would be the one where life was made by accident remains incomprehensibly high. It is exactly the same as the probability life was created by accident in a single closed universe: well beyond the threshold of scientific credibility. Just because something could happen by accident doesn’t mean that the most reasonable position to take is that it did happen by accident.
Science will not be willing to throw away thermodynamic law for the interactive form of multiverse. In its non-interactive form multiverse is not testable. In its interactive form it is not compatible with our current theoretical base of natural laws. Multiverse, then, has no possibility of being confirmed. There are only two things that can be done: it can be considered untestable and therefore nonscientific because it can’t possibly be confirmed, or it can be considered false, indirectly refuted by superior performance of its theoretical competition and incompatibility with known foundational laws of nature.
Fallacy
#42: Double standard
The double standard fallacy can be seen in many places, woven throughout Darwinist arguments. I suspect you already have a pretty good feel for it by now. First, the neo-Darwinists demand that an intelligent designer be completely proven before the hypothesis is even considered scientific, even though only a substantial fraction of the potentially relevant data has been collected. All the while, they present very little evidence for accidental evolution. If Henry Gee is right, and I for one not only endorse his position but celebrate it, Darwinian evolution only has a fraction of the evidence required to proclaim it a fact as has been so often and so prematurely done. Evolution has become an icon of science, yes, but not a fact, and one can certainly ask whether it should have become an icon in the first instance, or whether it should have remained one in the light of modern data.
For Darwinists the inference to design can never be considered valid no matter what form the evidence takes and despite all the evidence you have just seen in this book. The spotty evidence for evolution, on the other hand, for neo-Darwinists is not merely an appearance, but the real thing.
Next double standard: it is OK for Darwinists to add the philosophical adjuncts of materialism and lack of cosmic purpose to their theory of evolution, based upon nothing but an embarrassing string of logical fallacies and naive assumptions, but it is not OK for intelligent design scientists to add the logically defensible assumption that a design implies a designer.
Then there is one strike and you’re out. ID theorists are forever stuck with ancient concept of naïve finalism that was at times asserted by early fundamentalist Christians, although modern intelligent design theorists assert no such thing. ID theory and argument is not allowed to evolve, progress, and refine itself as theories naturally must do over time, while neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is permitted to reformulate itself constantly, throwing away substantial errors (such as naïve mutationism) practically with the daily trash.
Intelligent design theorists must be able to explain all of the designer’s purpose for every detail of nature, all of the evolution of life, before neo-Darwinists will admit intelligent design to be a justified inference.[68] However neo-Darwinists beg off their having to do the exact same task, that is, to demonstrate the full process of evolution, on the grounds that it is obviously too big to ever be accomplished. In the meantime they assert evolution to be a fully established incontrovertible fact, while validation of intelligent design theory must await a complete demonstration spanning the entire scope of evolutionary history. Science has nowhere else applied a standard so strict as neo-Darwinists arbitrarily try to enforce on the intelligent design argument.
Intelligent design theory has also been treated unfairly in insisting on the reproducibility of its claims in the laboratory. Darwinists do not hold Darwinian theory to this same standard, although they are both theories of the same subject. This is not surprising, as Darwinists cannot reproduce their claims in the lab. However, mainstream science permits Darwinian theory to proceed on an historical basis as opposed to the more rigorous standard of experimental science. In Science on Trial, Douglas Futuyma, exemplifies this double standard by saying evolutionary science is an historical science and not to be restricted to the rigorous demands of the experimental sciences, while classifying intelligent design theory as nonscientific by definition because it can’t conform to the strict model of experimental science. Ironically, to a great extent the modern science has demonstrated ID theory in the lab because mutations studies have not produced evidence of accidentally spawned macroevolution. Although we cannot generate macroevolution with our own genetic engineering either, we can demonstrate that intelligent design can approach a whole lot closer to macroevolution than can accidental mutations.
Two things must be understood to sort out the historical science/experimental science question. First, contrary to what Futuyma implies, evolutionary science is not exclusively an historical enterprise. The dating and collation of fossils, description of geological changes over time, and all the tasks that go into reconstructing a sequential picture of the nature of the earth and the life forms that have lived on it through history are almost exclusively historical in nature. The object of historical method is essentially to observe and describe what has happened based upon relatively rough-hewn visible evidence. This historical procedure directly evidences the order of appearance of various life forms, but unless and until we actually observe one type of creature giving birth to another, or see a fossilized instance of it, the historical process alone cannot demonstrate macroevolution. History merely shows different types of creatures emerging at given points in time; it does not show them emerging from each other. Darwinists ridicule the demand for this kind of chimerical birthing event, and it might not have happened, of course, for there is no evidence for it, but the point is, short of such a demonstration of chimerical births, thousands upon thousands upon thousands more intermediate forms are needed to make the change from, say, a donkey to a whale, in such a gradual manner as to make the transition fully invisible to the fossil record.
The process of macroevolution is presumed (by Darwinists) to take too long to ever be observed. But this assumption must also assume extreme gradualism. Otherwise when an event process generating a more radical (nongradual) biological form change reaches its end point, the birth process would reveal one type of creature spawning another, or at least the spawning of a radically new feature not possessed by the parent. In such a case, evolution could be observed, and eventually should be.
Gradualism, however, is rebutted by everything science has learned in the past fifty years: the sensitivity to random mutation of the cell and the developmental genome, gaps in the fossil record, the requirement for sets of complimentary genes to construct and integrate a radically new feature. The interaction of genes with each other is so complex that Richard Dawkins says that it may even be true that every operational gene to some extent affects the expression and regulation of every other operational gene. Thus successful integration of a novel feature becomes quite involved. Even some of the top neo-Darwinists are backing away from gradualism. “Thus, more often than not, the gradual origins (if indeed there were gradual origins) of species and higher taxa have not been documented.”[69] We now know that complex closely coordinated changes to whole sets of operational genes are needed to produce the advantageous biological features necessary to move from one body type to another, and they must be closely orchestrated with corresponding changes to the developmental genome and nongenetic microtubule nanostructures in the cell walls. Since the historical evidence gives no instances of observed macroevolution, and it is now known to be so horridly complex, a valid question remains as to whether macroevolution occurred at all or is even biochemically possible. Yet intelligent design theory which would make this remote possibility of macroevolution coherent in the light of recent data must be fully proven before it can become an hypothesis, while accidental evolution, which now appears to have been proven impossible, can remain more than an hypothesis, more than a theory, a veritable icon of science. This is fully inconsistent.
Therefore, there is a glaring need for the experimental sciences of genetics and biochemistry to show that there is both a possible and an actual macroevolutionary dynamic, a potential biochemical pathway between the different creatures and features of the phyla. Neo-Darwinists must also demonstrate that the dynamic is accidental, at least regarding phase one of the form proposal process prior to natural selection, if neo-Darwinian theory is to have sufficient corroboration to hold up against the mass of evidence already posed against it.
Contrary to popular belief, natural selection has not been established by evidence; it was introduced as merely a default explanation. Early evolutionists “deduced” that natural selection could do this because the only other logically possible mechanic the early theorists could conceive of was an intelligently directed process, which they immediately and arbitrarily ruled out because the only form that hypothesis had historically been posed in had been religious. They held religion to be incompatible with science so they, you guessed it…threw out the baby with the bathwater. Intelligent design must be religion; that was the mistake that led to put all our chips on natural selection without any direct evidence for it whatsoever.
William Dembski cites a great quote from Sir Julian Huxley in his classic work, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, where Huxley admits that natural selection is merely a default, but that the only alternative is to “…confess total ignorance and abandon for the time any attempts at explanation.”[70] But this is precisely the kind of prematurity that Henry Gee warns us against. Don’t theorize in advance of the data. The cladistic approach Gee recommends has no “explanation” attached to it in advance. This is the proper approach because we have not gathered even the comparative paleontological data in fullness, let alone the biochemical and genetic data. In other words, at this point in the natural progression of scientific method for evolution we are not supposed to have an explanation, we are supposed to be seeking one by way of gathering data with an open mind without skewing our read of it by trying to make it fit a preformed opinion.
That is exactly how profound neo-Darwinian theory is. Even basic Darwinian theory, considered to be both a scientific icon and an established fact, depends upon nothing more than this hasty and fallacious move to establish natural selection as true by default. This is an enormous scandal that such a profound and far reaching error has not only been permitted to survive but universally glorified as the equivalent of gravity and relativity theory! Please…
Evolution is an historical science, yes, but not entirely. Evolutionary science is properly viewed as also being partially an experimental science. the biochemical pathways for evolution have to be demonstrated to be possible. Darwinists do not want you to know this because all the preliminary evidence from genetics and biochemistry says that there is no such macroevolutionary dynamic in the biochemistry of life, no pathway between the phyla (at least for a random process), that gradualism is dead, and that there are visibly substantial barriers to spontaneously evolving one radically different body type from another. Science could already easily defend the thesis that there simply are no demonstrated real (evolutionary) time traversable biochemical pathways between the phyla manageable by an accidental process. Why haven’t they done this: political reasons, a double standard.
Here is yet another use of the double standard fallacy. Evolutionary science, Darwinists say, must proceed primarily on the basis of historical studies. Therefore, it is unfair to hold evolutionary science to the rigorous standard of scientific method used in the realm of experimental science. What they mean is that they don't want to have to reproduce evolution in the lab, or observe it happening in nature. They are not nearly so generous with intelligent design theory, however, which must proceed of necessity almost exclusively by the equally valid instrument of logical inference (also a primary tool of science) as opposed to experiment and test.
There are four primary tools of science: (1) experimental, that is, hypothesis and empiric test; (2) historical method; (3) logical inference and (4) theoretical modeling. As with historical method, conclusions drawn from bonafide logical inferences remain valid even in circumstances not conducive to experimental method, though conclusions drawn from any method of science must ultimately conform to the results of empiric observations and experimental tests where available. Logical inferences and theoretical modeling, when properly performed, may at times properly lead us beyond raw empiric data so long as they do not contradict that data. Conclusion: if the historical method based inferences of Darwinian evolution can be considered valid in the absence of direct observations, so can the logical inference of intelligent design. Therefore, intelligent design theory cannot be dismissed as nonscientific by nature simply because we cannot produce the designer, prove it in full, or because it has a history of being associated with religious programs. Evolution itself started out as a theistic theory, was closely associated with religion in the early days, and cannot be directly demonstrated or fully proven.
It is also important to understand that ID theory does not purport to be a self-contained full-blown theory of evolution; it is an adjunct tenet that is intended to be added to whatever basic dynamic is best established as that responsible for the origin and/or development of life, exclusive of accident with which it is incompatible. Intelligent design theory says nothing about the specific mechanics of evolution, but only that the source of life's origin and development (at least the author of the more complex forms of life) must be an intelligence. As such, it is only an adjunct to basic evolution, not a replacement of it. Thus, it is unfair to demand that ID scientists propose an entire new theory of the biological processes and historical events of evolution before their hypothesis can be considered by mainstream science. This has not been demanded of punctuated equilibrium or random drift theory. Once again, a double standard.
Nonetheless, intelligent design scientists must, Darwinists insist, publish peer-reviewed scientific articles across the whole spectrum of biological research before ID can be considered credible. This is ludicrous on the surface because the ID thesis has made no claims that assert a biological process different from the one described in the existing literature other than that additional constraints will be found embedded throughout physical/biological processes that take most of the randomness out of the process. Other than that very narrow claim about a step by step narrowing of the focus and direction of the evolutionary process, intelligent design theorists have been working fully from the existing evidence. The ID claim is merely that the existing evidence warrants a logical inference of intelligent design, not that the biological mechanisms are totally different from those mainstream science describes. Even the ID claim about the step by step narrowing of the focus and direction towards complex life forms is not so different from the process described by Darwinian evolutionists such as G. G. Simpson and Monroe Strickberger for the mysterious ability of evolution to defeat standard probability theory with a series of increasingly adaptive pool of form change combination options. Such an increasingly adaptive pool of options might come about through natural selection but it does nothing to defeat standard probability. Thus, the only difference in the way the two theories accomplish the narrowing of the focus towards complex life is that ID theory does it with a coherent explanation as opposed to a combination of verbal magic and invalid math.
Neo-Darwinists do not have to publish peer-reviewed articles to establish credibility for their add-on assumption of materialism. There is a good reason for this. Materialism is not a question of natural science, but of philosophy. Articles treating materialism would therefore not be accepted in a professional journal dedicated to natural science. Rather, they would go into a philosophy journal or a philosophy of science journal. This is almost universally a good rule, although Professor Thaun has informed us in his book Chaos and Harmony, that one can have scientific evidence for at least the refutation of materialism, if not the confirmation of it. In Thuan's case, however, the evidence is from physics, not biology.
And what would a successful defense of materialism consist of? Any life form hypothesized to have a spirit or soul, notably to include humans, would have to be produced in the lab without recourse to God to enliven the physical apparatus with a nonphysical spirit of life. Clearly this has not been done. Nonetheless, Darwinists such as Douglas Futuyma confidently assert the adjunct of materialism in their textbooks having given absolutely no case for it, while demanding intelligent design scientists go beyond the reasonable case already made to absolute proof by producing the designer himself for public inspection! The whole thing is an embarrassment to the tradition of civilized intellectual discourse, scientific and philosophical inquiry. It is a scandal.
The reason for the scarcity of intelligent design articles in peer-reviewed biology journals is clear, and has no bearing on the quality of work done in the field. The ID argument is primarily logical evaluation of the import of existing biological and archaeological research. Professional journals, however, are almost exclusively setup for only two types of articles: results of original experimental research or a review of current literature on a single topic. ID discussions tend not to fit nicely into either of these categories. There are only a handful of journals predisposed to accept new theory proposals and the same theory would normally only be proposed once, and critiqued and amended afterwards. If all the options here had been fully used the number of articles possible would not have changed the criticism that no substantial research had been undertaken. In addition, there has been an undeniable historical misconception that ID theory is Creation Science, and that Creation Science is merely theology. Even in the new theory proposal venues a prejudice against ID is likely to surface and impede objective peer review and publication.
The other primary focus of ID articles is the probability argument, but, once again, historical prejudice precludes the professional journal taking an interest. This may be because they believe that the merely cursory comments mainstream biologists have made dismissing probability concerns in relation to evolution are definitive and authoritative. This, notwithstanding the fact that Darwinists’ remarks on probability are some of the most ludicrous ideas ever allowed into print. Darwinists know the deck is both politically and institutionally stacked against intelligent design articles. It is therefore unfair of them to imply that the validity of the ID thesis or the quality of work by ID scientists is the reason there are few peer-reviewed scientific journal articles on intelligent design.
The bottom line is that ID theory requires very little uniquely targeted research other than what D. D. Axe has undertaken, that is, random synthesis of the key elements of life. The irreducible design complexity of living organisms is being fully and properly elucidated by standard investigations of the function and structure of cells and higher biological systems. Conclusion: demanding an enormous library of specifically intelligent design research before giving the theory credibility is a double standard, particularly when no one is predisposed either to fund, host, assist or publish such research for fear of the prejudice against ID invoking an invisible academic censure against them for doing it.
Here is yet another instance of the double standard fallacy. If science chose to be consistent, they would admit the behavior patterns and subjective reports of billions of people who have religious experiences as being of legitimate evidential value, at least in aggregate allowing for some non-authentic reports. This may seem an odd suggestion, but science admits the subjective reports of individuals in psychotherapy investigations as confirming theoretical assumptions of the existence of the id, ego, and superego, and psychotherapy patients on the whole are no more likely to be authentically reporting than the public at large. Modern science acknowledges psychiatric theory construction as a valid scientific pursuit. Here reports of internal experience and generalizations from individual and group behavior serve as valid evidence for conclusions about the existence of nonobservable entities.
Science, however, has chosen to ignore the same category of evidence, that is, reports of subjective experience, as of evidential quality when it points to God. The quality or reliability of reports of religious experience are, on the whole, higher than for psychotherapeutic interviews because there are no documented indications of aberrancy in the cognitive, deliberative and emotional faculties of the average religious person, as there are in the typical psychotherapeutic subject. There are billions upon billions of people that through history have claimed genuine religious experience. Has Freud et al.. interviewed an equivalent number of patients?
I am not saying that because religious people claim God exists science should assume it is true, but because they act like he exists. A theoretical model that includes God best explains the total behavior of religious people. Theoretical modeling of religious behavior should count as evidence for God in the same way that psychologists believe Freudian or other psychological theories best explain human behavior by reference to the existence of invisible entities such as the id, the ego, and the superego.
Some sociologists have lamely tried to say that religion is a mass neurosis, but the hypothesis of a mass neurosis that affects fully two thirds of the world's population would need some additional corroboration to be credible, such as independently documented aberrant behavior in other areas of life, something beyond the psychologists merely making the question begging assumption that God does not exist.
Here is another example of the double standard: majority opinion or consensus. Darwinists will tell us that because most scientists agree that intelligent design theory is not scientific we must accept their opinion as true without bothering to evaluate the specifics of what intelligent design theory says. They will tell us that because most scientists agree that Darwinian evolution is an indisputable fact, it must be one. Thus they employ the standard of majority opinion in science. But at the time Darwin first posed his theory of evolution, most scientists were theistic evolutionists; they believed that God was the best explanation of the natural world. Darwinists hail the trailblazing courage of (biological amateurs) Darwin and Wallace for bucking the overwhelming scientific majority then favoring theistic evolution. However, they dismiss a similarly courageous case being made for intelligent design today by doctoral scientists Dembski, Behe, and Meyer et al.. because most scientists believe otherwise. Once again, a double standard. Here the true agenda of the materialist atheistic element in the Darwinian camp is revealed: they hail majority scientific opinion when it argues against God, but rebut the same standard when it argues for God. Obviously these Darwinists are not interested in proposing a valid evidential standard at all; they are only interested in advancing the political agenda of atheism and materialism. The claim that consensus makes truth is a fallacy in and of itself, yet they employ it freely as if it should end all discussion.
The claim that evolution is an indisputable scientific fact reveals a double standard yet again. Scientific facts come in two varieties: directly observed or confirmed theoretical. Gravity qualifies as both as we can see objects falling down on Earth but not in space. It is also theoretically confirmed. With evolution however, it is only microevolutions that have been observed, small changes within a species. Macroevolution is not, an observed fact. The chronologically sequenced appearance of species in the fossil record is an observed fact; the fact that those species evolved from each other is not an observed fact.
Many scientists have claimed for decades that evolution is a theoretically confirmed fact, that the many correspondences of form, feature, and genetics theoretically confirms the theory because there can be no other explanation. However noted evolutionist/paleontologist Henry Gee tells us the evidence from the fossils is too weak to justify the conclusion of the Darwinian process of evolution (or any other process). In other words, even if there were no other explanation, there is still a minimum scientific standard for the strength of connection between the evidence and the theory it is purported to prove. According to Gee evolution so far has failed that standard. He should know, he is the senior editor at Nature.
And, remember, Darwinian evolution doesn’t just claim inheritance, it also claims that the form variation process is accidental until natural selection begins to guide it. There are therefore alternative explanations. Accident in no way adequately explains the nonrandom character of the biological form generation process. As we saw in the quote from Huxley above orthogenesis (directed evolution) was initially ruled out for political reasons, not scientific ones, simply due to the early evolutionists’ inability to logically or factually perceive that all forms of orthogenesis need not be either extreme or tied to religion. If we did an honest reevaluation of evolution today, from scratch as it were, we would have to withhold the paleontological support ala Henry Gee as being premature, inadequately tied to the theory, and we would have to add a limited theory of orthogenesis to account for the visibly nonrandom character of the early stages of new biological form generation. Thus, we see that, when properly done, theoretical support is not in favor of Darwinian theory. Darwinian evolution therefore cannot be considered a scientific fact in the theoretical sense either. Therefore it is not a scientific fact at all, but only a popular “fact” based upon the presumed authority of the popular Darwinian writers. It is certainly not indisputable. As Gee reminds us, the argument from authority is not a legitimate part of scientific method. Exercising that argument for evolution therefore does not make it a scientific fact. In all of this a double standard is evident in the neo-Darwinists ignoring the evidence for nonrandom form generation and exaggerating the evidence from paleontology. If the evidence has the slightest hint of Darwinian theory it is a shoe-in, but if it argues strongly against Darwinian theory it is ignored.
Fallacy
#43: Science can never have implications about God.
Obviously, as a simple matter of fact, this is false because scientists sometimes go beyond the pure charter of science in what they say to tack on a personal philosophy. Personal philosophies can and often do have implications concerning God. The philosophy of materialism and lack of purpose in life’s development are two perfect examples. Affirming that there is no spiritual realm or dimension rules out the existence of all spiritual beings, which is an assertion that goes beyond the legitimate bounds of science. Denying purpose in life’s creation contradicts the intentional creation of man and the world by God, and minus a coherent case based in real scientific evidence, is a statement of personal belief or preference, not science. Neo-Darwinists have done both of these things.
Peters and Gutmann: “…The process
of evolution is not activated by some goal-oriented plan.” Futuyma says “
Scientists are not magically immune to the incursion of politics into what should be purely scientific activity. The statements of scientists "go where they go," as it were, if they foul up, they foul up, just like the rest of us, regardless of any restrictions the charter of science would otherwise oblige them to honor. Scientists don't have to follow the rules. If all theories were properly formulated to stay strictly within the bounds of science, and if all scientists refrained from tacking their personal philosophies onto the theories of science, Father Coyne would be correct is his belief that the faithful have nothing to fear from "science". Unfortunately scientists have not all so restrained themselves and it has become necessary for the faithful to rebut neo-Darwinian theory in its implied or stated assertions that science rules out God, argues strongly against God, or makes God completely unnecessary to explanations of the origin of life and the ordered design of the cosmos.
In point of fact, God has not been shown unnecessary to scientific explanation. With the advent of the Big Bang theory we were informed that physical processes could be traced back to a single instant in time where all scientific explanation simply comes to a halt, a point where natural law no longer applies, and a point where we have to throw up our scientific hands and admit that the entire thing is a mystery beyond that point. Science calls that mystery a singularity as if giving it a professional sounding name would change the fact that is the best suggestion of God science could ever hope to discover. We could just as easily call it God and explain a lot more in the process including the legitimate behavior and belief systems of billions upon billions of reliable people of faith.
To say that God does not enhance explanation at this point is worse than arbitrary, it is a denial of the logical import of the data. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, both scientists and noted authors, in their recent book, Origins of Life, go to a great deal of trouble to give us a coherent, integrated and carefully reasoned case that science can at times and within limits legitimately point to the supernatural. Science cannot work with the supernatural directly on a practical basis; science cannot directly observe the supernatural; science cannot via controlled experiments replicate the supernatural. However, explanatory models can be constructed that allow for supernatural concepts that can nonetheless have testable predictions. I construct my own case for that in Part 2 of this book, God & Science. There is nothing inherently more unscientific about the existence of a large being than a small one, and science has long since asserted the existence of many large and important things that could not be observed directly, gravity, multiple universes, extra dimensions etc. These things were only indirectly evidenced, yet they increased the explanatory power of science and, so, were included in scientific theory. Evolution itself is such a concept that cannot be observed directly but is included in science because it is held to be explanatory.
Pope Pius XII told the simple truth when he claimed in celebration that the Big Bang theory has proved the moment of divine creation! Considering the standard definition of God as the source of everything and the designer of everything and the governor and judge of everything it is an outright contradiction for science to admit that God might exist and simultaneously claim that we could never need him in explanation. While staring into the face of a scientifically confirmed total mystery at the beginning of cosmological time, a mystery from which came all the order vested into the initial state of matter and energy in the universe in a fraction of a second of time, and all the natural laws which guided the subsequent transformations that created all the majestic order of the natural world, science is telling us (and our young students) that they prefer a catastrophically incomplete explanation to having to admit that the scientific evidence favors the existence of God.
Fallacy
#44: Survival or reproductive success cannot be a purpose
Noted evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has rightly asserted that the evolutionary process has evidenced a purpose of achieving DNA sequences that “…improve the reproductive fitness of a population in the environments where it lives.” But Ernst Mayr says this is “quite inadmissible” to designate something so general as survival as a purpose.[71] You and I of course have established our personal survival as a purpose within limits, we establish the same for our children even our pets and livestock. Indeed, the purpose of survival has been assumed to underlie much of what humanity has done collectively and as individuals through history. Survival, far from being inadmissible, is the prototypical purpose, the mother of all purposes.
In the context of the evolution and intelligent design debate, the primary context from which concerns about purpose have arisen, a designer can rationally have no other purpose at all for his creatures but survival, at least temporarily until some other purpose is achieved. Existence over time requires survival by definition. If the designer is to admit a changeable environment, adaptation for survival is the only method by which an intelligent designer can ensure his creatures survive environmental change short of active and constant intervention. Therefore survival by adaptation or any other means is not only a legitimate purpose, it is an unavoidable prerequisite to achieving any purpose where life is concerned.
Fallacy #45: The only bias relevant to evolution is a 100% bias. Natural law permits life but does not require it; therefore (Darwinists claim) there is no bias for adaptive variation proposals in nature that might suggest intelligent design.
Ernst Mayr