Home Main Menu (frames)

Evolution – Smevolution!

Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison

---------

Appendix 1 (cont.):

The Logical Shambles of Neo-Darwinian Evolution

Fallacy #64: Non sequitur. In a non sequitur the conclusion simply is not established by the evidence or the premises. Logic needed to connect the evidence to the conclusion is missing, incomplete or invalid.

In a non sequitur the reasons given, premises or explanation, have no logical bearing on the conclusion or facts to be explained, or if somewhat related, form an incomplete case. One might call this impersonating an argument. If self-contradiction is the mother of all fallacies, non sequitur is the ugly step-mother. All of the fallacies cited here are examples of non sequiturs, where, for one reason, or another, a logical gap exists between the evidence and the conclusion drawn from it. In a non sequitur the evidence is simply insufficient to establish the conclusion. Neo-Darwinian literature is replete with non sequiturs and implied non sequiturs. An implied non sequitur is essentially an invitation to the reader to make the logical error for his or herself and thus establish the author’s political goals without the author having risked offering a bad argument.

The most notorious of the neo-Darwinists non sequiturs is the suggestion that because life has apparently originated by spontaneous natural processes it must therefore be accidental. This is bad logic. The tendency for some of the building blocks of life to self-organize spontaneously does not preclude the elements, natural laws, and initial state of the universe having been intelligently configured by God, ET, or some other powerful designer to produce precisely this result. Richard Dawkins’ argument that, because accidental mutations can produce trivial binary “information” as he defines it, they can produce the complex biological information of the tree of life within the time and physical resources of the history of the Earth is a non sequitur. The ability to produce trivia says nothing about the ability to produce meaning, and the ability to produce minimal meaning with unlimited time and unlimited resources says nothing about the scientific probability expectation of producing horrendously complex systems of meaningful information within definite limits of time and resources.

Fallacy #65: The machine-building machine fallacy

In this fallacy machine-building machines don’t count as machines; nature is just that way. Science is viewed as not having to explain the bias in nature for life because nature is considered to have merely always been that way and, well, explanation has to begin somewhere. As Ayn Rand said once in an interview, “If we are to conclude that God made the world simply because everything that exists must have an explanation, then who made God?” Her point, as far as it goes, is valid: the philosophical problem of ultimate beginnings can never be solved, and one unexplainable starting point, other things being equal, is as good as any other. Although that much is true (Ayn Rand was no dummy), it confuses the philosophical question of ultimate beginnings with the purpose of scientific explanation generally, and ignores the simple fact that machines have defining characteristics that separate them from everything else. The mission of science is to trace out explanation as far back as it actually can be traced, not to stop arbitrarily at a given point to support a personally favored theory. In other words, we have to actually be at the starting point, not somewhere in the middle, for Aquinas’ conundrum to let science off the hook. Ultimately, science itself has said that that universe or nature is not eternal, it came into being at the Big Bang. It therefore hasn’t always been that way.

There is another reason to acknowledge that the vast order producing constraints in nature qualify it as a machine-building machine. Evolutionary scientists have at times denied that there were such biases in nature, claiming it to be fully chaotic and accidental viz Peters and Gutmann, Niels Bohr etc. Therefore it is only intellectually fair to acknowledge contrary evidence once it is found. In other words a politically based double standard is seen in the tactic of early quantum theorists and evolutionists shouting all over books, magazines and TV “Look, the ultimate nature of the world is purely accidental and chaotic!” This has profound implications for our view of human life. But when the opposite evidence is found for order and a dramatic bias for life, scientists sweep it under the rug, keep it out of the news, and say that it is not important to look at such ultimate levels of nature at all; just forget the whole thing. The universe has always been that way, and explanation has to begin somewhere, so the fundamental nature of the universe has suddenly become unimportant. I was once sternly and condescendingly rebuked by a neo-Darwinist on a Web forum once with this exact comment. He said he had already glanced over the 600 pages of this book (in a days time), and dismissed it all as being religion. Walla booby! Abra cadabra! Accidental atheistic worldview proved. Case closed!

The case for purpose in evolution, of course, is not closed. It is merely the minds of the neo-Darwinists that are closed. The existence of a set of physical constraints favorable to life’s formation constitute a machine-building machine of such monumental proportions that it flatly contradicts the previous scientific claims that the universe is accidental and chaotic.

#66 Innuendo: “You cannot pin it on me! I haven’t actually said it. I did take great pains, however, to ensure that they (the unsuspecting public) heard it.”

The neo-Darwinist commentaries on evolution intended for public consumption deceptively lump together single nucleotide point mutations caused by toxic chemicals or radiation, which are invariably destructive before they produce substantial change, reproductive mixing and genetic transpositions that are closely governed by very sophisticated genetic machinery. Even replicative errors tend to occur in “hot spots” and error correction systems protect some areas more than others, making even the event of genetic “mistakes” nonrandom. They call all these events “random mutations.” Then they loudly proclaim that “random mutations” are the source of evolution. Does the guy and gal on the street perceive the true nature of events from such descriptions, or are they more likely misled into adopting the artificially contrived myth of an accidental worldview? Judging from my own use and experience, most laymen still associate the word “random” with the stronger sense of truly accidental. The more recent, more technical (and more low profile) version of “random mutation” used by modern evolutionists, however, does not require an accidental worldview at all. The new version of “random mutation” only asserts the lack of a close correlation between individual mutations and a creature’s present environmental requirements; it doesn’t rule out purpose in the larger system. Thus the neo-Darwinists commit what I call the “fallacy of innuendo.” They can’t be held professionally accountable for having presented a case for “accidental evolution” but they have nonetheless arranged for the public to hear such a case as if they had presented it.

Scattered about the voluminous neo-Darwinian literature one finds thousands of repetitions of the insinuation that the process of evolution is accidental and meaningless. However, this assertion is much less often said outright such that a defense of it might be invoked under the rules of science or philosophy. Many of these comments imply that previous discussions of the concrete facts of the fossil record or biological structure and mechanics in the evolutionary textbooks prove the evolutionary process accidental. The reader cannot fail to draw this conclusion upon a casual read, but closer scrutiny of the wording reveals that the claim was never fully made, deniability remains to the author. This phenomenon is so prevalent that it suggests one of two things. Either an attempt to imprint the mind of the public with neo-Darwinian politics is being made by the author, or the scientific culture has been so forcefully imprinted with the accidental bias that the author is unconsciously reflecting that bias.

Here is another example of innuendo. In this case the philosophy of materialism is being implied as if it were already proven to be a fact of life. Niles Eldredge sneaks in a hidden assumption of materialism in the following quote: “Even were the Intelligent Designer held not to be supernatural, but rather some sort of real Being exerting a real force in nature.…”[83] Here Eldredge has chosen to use “real” in place of the more appropriate “physical.” He directly opposes “real” with “supernatural” implying one can’t be both at the same time. This reveals his assumption that supernatural forces are not “real” and exert no real forces on the world. That relegates supernatural forces to the realm of the imaginary and fully implies the philosophy of materialism. Eldredge is welcome to his assumptions and personal philosophy, but not to surreptitiously pass them on to our students. Noted evolutionary historian Peter Bowler closes his very instructive book, Evolution: The History of an Idea, with the acknowledgment that it is improper to attempt to teach the personal philosophy of materialism as if it were part of evolutionary theory. Eldredge retains plausible deniability for this philosophical faux pas however for he need only say that he misspoke a single word and said “real” instead of “physical” in a moment of casualness assuming any intelligent reader would get his meaning from the context.

Since the claim is deniable, one would feel awkward formally rebutting it. Nonetheless, a percentage of readers has been convinced of it, at least subconsciously. This tactic, although unethical where consciously intended, is ingenious because there is no enemy, no one to return fire to. The damage to the unwary reader is simply done. Allowing such misleading ambiguity, consciously intended or not, is contrary to the spirit and charter of science to seek and promote objective truth. It is however, perfectly characteristic of politics where persuasion is the only concern.

One might call this tactic of using innuendo, the free lunch. Materialists gain free political yardage in the battle for the public mindset. Some of it, of course, may not be consciously or maliciously intended, but rather simply absorbed from the historical influence of materialism upon the culture of mainstream science. That culture has a long history of tending to deride religion, intelligent design, and the supernatural with such subtle barbs and innuendos.

Here is an example of the fallacy of innuendo (and contradiction, and selectively ignoring evidence) in the complete abstract to one of Stuart Kauffman’s papers. Kauffman, is one of the provocateurs of William Dembski’s refutation of the “free lunch” theory, that is, the theory that the order in the universe, and in biology specifically, can be achieved with no investment of intelligent design information.[84]

Understanding Genetic Regulatory Networks

Abstract

Random Boolean networks (RBM) were introduced about 35 years ago as first crude models of genetic regulatory networks. RBNs are comprised of N on–off genes, connected by a randomly assigned regulatory wiring diagram where each gene has K inputs, and each gene is controlled by a randomly assigned Boolean function. This procedure samples at random from the ensemble of all possible NK Boolean networks. The central ideas are to study the typical, or generic properties of this ensemble, and see 1) whether characteristic differences appear as K and biases in Boolean functions are introducted, and 2) whether a subclass of this ensemble has properties matching real cells.

Such networks behave in an ordered or a chaotic regime, with a phase transition, ‘the edge of chaos’ between the two regimes. Networks with continuous variables exhibit the same two regimes. Substantial evidence suggests that real cells are in the ordered regime. A key concept is that of an attractor. This is a reentrant trajectory of states of the network, called a state cycle. The central biological interpretation is that cell types are attractors. A number of properties differentiate the ordered and chaotic regimes. These include the size and number of attractors, the existence in the ordered regime of a percolating ‘sea’ of genes frozen in the on or off state, with a remainder of isolated twinkling islands of genes, a power law distribution of avalanches of gene activity changes following perturbation to a single gene in the ordered regime versus a similar power law distribution plus a spike of enormous avalanches of gene changes in the chaotic regime, and the existence of branching pathway of ‘differentiation’ between attractors induced by perturbations in the ordered regime.

Noise is serious issue, since noise disrupts attractors. But numerical evidence suggests that attractors can be made very stable to noise, and meanwhile, metaplasias may be a biological manifestation of noise. As we learn more about the wiring diagram and constraints on rules controlling real genes, we can build refined ensembles reflecting these properties, study the generic properties of the refined ensembles, and hope to gain insight into the dynamics of real cells.[85]

Notice in the first sentence that random networks are represented as having been models of genetic regulatory systems. This is a contradiction, as no random system can model gene regulation systems because they are consistent and orderly. This is acknowledged in the last sentence where we see that genetic regulatory networks are constrained wiring diagrams that follow rules. What has been going on in this kind of RBM research is that a random search is being made through all the possible patterns that such a network might form to try to hit upon a Boolean network of decision logic, a flow chart if you will, or a wiring diagram, that will be predictive of the actual behavior of genetic regulatory networks.

We have never had a random model that predicted gene behavior. Rather, we are randomly searching through the possible alternative models to find one or more nonrandom models that predicts gene regulatory network behavior. This is a more complex search than one might imagine, as it is theoretically possible that every operational gene has some effect on every other operational gene. When you consider what Boolean logic means, the addition of AND, OR, and IFàTHEN operators in an unlimited string of complex combinations, to 10,000 or more genes with multiple ways of influencing each other, the difficulty in finding a flow chart match becomes apparent.

What Kauffman’s intentions are in wording his abstract in this way, I cannot say; it may even involve a typo in the first sentence. But the reader is given the definite impression up front that random models can represent the workings of the genome. The reader should know better, but many may not. Another fallacy is passively committed here in the selective avoidance of evidence for intelligent design inherent in the artificiality of a Boolean network. One doesn’t find Boolean networks in mud puddles and volcanoes. Weather may be a pseudo-Boolean system, but no real checking for quantitative parameters is done at the decision steps; it is simple physical causation. The dance of bees and simple communications of other creatures may involve Boolean networks that are genuinely intelligent, though not hugely complex. However, a genuine Boolean system of the extreme complexity we see in gene regulation equals or exceeds that of the most complexly programmed artifacts of human civilization. Therefore, there is genuine evidence of intelligent design here but it is selectively ignored.

Fallacy #67: Ethics can only have a purely physical evolutionary explanation

Ernst Mayr makes a one line argument for this in his book, This is Biology. Citing Darwin’s observation of the fundamental difference between humans and animals in respect to morality Mayr says “Yet, since humans had animal ancestors this difference had to be explained in terms of evolution.” This is simply a non sequitur because there is an obvious counterexample to it: the primary religious thesis that God began joining the soul to the body for humans at the point when in the sequence of evolutionary events man’s animal ancestors made the transition to man. The soul is the seat of the moral sense and the teachings of the Bible and the Church provide the basis for its intellectual formation. Granting the possible fact of evolution does not oblige us to throw away God as the source of morality. There is no logical basis for that conclusion; nor does purely physical explanation satisfactorily account for our moral experience.

Fallacy #68: “All of science’s explanations are purely natural, with the exception of…well, all of them”

Evolutionists say all of science’s explanations are purely natural. However, they omit to mention that the Big Bang, the source of everything physical is itself acknowledged by science to be a complete singularity that science cannot explain. It is, in fact, an unnatural event, and officially acknowledged by science to be so.

Fallacy #69: What science cannot currently predict, an intelligent designer of the world could not predict

The first very obvious problem with this is that what science can and cannot predict changes radically with each passing decade. Much of what we could not predict fifty years ago we can predict today. Recent developments in self-organization research suggests that there is more direction and less randomness in the development of life than science has heretofore allowed.

Furthermore, the behavior of every molecule and atom, even the behavior of statistical groups of quantum “particles” is, in theory, predictable. It is simply lack of information, not randomness, that generates most of the limits on science’s ability to predict the outcome of physical event processes. To establish that the achievement of some kind of a tree of life and an ecosystem within the conceivable (and potentially flexible) design specifications of an intelligent designer could not be predicted by that designer given complete information about the physical state of each molecule, atom, and quantum particle group soon after the Big Bang would require both a physical data model and a mathematical processor chip that go well beyond the present computational capacity of man’s mind and his computers. We currently cannot even model the full extent of our partial knowledge of protein interactions without exceeding state of the art computer capacity.[86]

The job of tracking protein folding complexity is so big it parallels the search for life in outer space. The public has been recruited to sign up potentially millions of home computers to help scientists process protein folding data, much like SETI@home[87] does in using volunteers to scan data on their home computers to find potential signals from space. It is demonstrably impossible for science to establish the absence of cosmic purpose at present given the limits of both information and computational power. Ernst Mayr’s statement that science has previously and definitively ruled out cosmic purpose is therefore proven false (and premature). To temporarily fail to rule something in does not equate to ruling it out when so much relevant data has yet to come in. Proteins are ultra complex. They configure themselves in folded patterns so intricate that it takes an average computer an entire day to accomplish in simulation what the protein has done in one billionth of a second!

The chief difficulty in simulating protein folding is time, explained Vijay S. Pande of Stanford University. Proteins fold on a time scale of microseconds (millionths of a second), but it takes an average computer about a day just to simulate the folding over a single nanosecond (one billionth of a second). At that rate, it would take almost three years to simulate a microsecond of folding and perhaps a decade or two of computer time to analyze the folding of a single protein. This is hardly a practical way to resolve the problem.[88]

To say that an accident could generate living systems involving hundreds of thousands of such creations interacting in real time with a genetic code to specify them and an intermediate translation mechanism of comparable complexity is simply politicized nonsense masquerading as science. For mainstream science to maintain neo-Darwinian theory (accidental evolution) in the face of this level of design complexity is a scandal.

Fallacies #70: Scientific prematurity, arguing from an incompletely studied and described case, & #71: One cannot critique a theory without having a full replacement for it

Darwinists offer the discovery of a new bacterial gene, nylonase, as proof of evolution. But we don’t yet know all the pertinent information about the origination of this gene. Furthermore, it is not clear that anything in bacteria can be taken as representative of the tree of life for they are creatures unique in nature. As William Dembski points out in Uncommon Descent, one shouldn’t assume everything that goes on with bacteria is common to other creatures.

The discovery of bacteria’s ability to decompose nylon has been hailed by neo-Darwinists as proof of their theory because nylon is a relatively new synthetic made by man. This must, therefore, in their view be a beneficial evolutionary adaptation to the modern environment. But four questions must first be answered before we consider this evidence for neo-Darwinian theory. First, are bacterial systems, genes and proteins sufficiently comparable to those in other creatures that the results in bacteria can be fairly extrapolated across the taxonomic inventory? Second, was the nylonase gene sequence already present in the plasmid inventory and simply became active upon a spontaneous substitution event? (If we have not observed the gene’s origin, but only its substitution into the active genome, we have not observed an event of evolution.)

Third, even if the nylonase gene was not previously present in bacteria, is the jump from an existing genetic sequence to the nylonase gene difficult enough to warrant arguing accidental evolution’s capacity to achieve the complex genomes of life, which involve much more difficult achievements of entire sets of closely coordinated changes in multiple locations, which must then be integrated into astronomically more complex systems? No; conflicts are bound to occur. Is the nylonase adaptation a single gene event involving a relatively small sized gene controlling a simple enzyme formation that affects only the external environment? Is the nylonase mutation a simple change to a gene having a nucleotide sequence so constructed that many alternative mutations to its base sequences will match the decompositional requirements of some substance or another? In other words, is this a transparently easy thing to do while the larger part of the rest of the evolutionary task is supremely more difficult? The apparent answer is yes, the nylonase gene is a simple, easy, risk-free, nonrepresentative case.

The fourth and final question is, “Even if the process of the ‘evolution’ of the nylonase gene from an existing gene is ‘random’ in the sense of not being directed towards the requirements of the environment, does that make it truly accidental in the sense of ruling out purpose or design? The answer to this question is no, it is not a demonstrably accidental process because the process is constrained and controlled by the structure and mechanisms of the organism. Only certain things can happen, and they can only happen in certain ways, and some of those things are known to be of potential benefit to the organism.

The intelligent design argument does not say that there might not be a handful of such useful mutations so easy that an accident might stumble upon them in time, especially for creatures uniquely predisposed by their design features to tolerate genetic substitutions. Rather, ID theory says that, despite the possibility of a rare constructive accident, an accidental evolutionary process cannot handle the bulk of the job of the origin and evolution of hundreds of thousands of highly complex creatures within the time available. The nylonase adaptation may very well be a rare constructive accident, though such has not been conclusively demonstrated. Such an accident, however, if accident it be, can in no way explain the evolution of the 100,000,000 species of the tree of life, many of them highly complex in their own right, a mind boggling tree culminating in the ultra extreme complexity of a human being.

Professor William Dembski informs us that there is something else very odd about the bacterial gene involved with nylonase. Its DNA seems to have repetitive sequences that deviate from the triplet-based standard that forms the “…dictionary universally used in nature for the translation of nucleic acid language into protein language.”[89] Whatever is happening with the nylonase development in bacteria appears to be nonstandard enough that it cannot be properly extrapolated to other organisms.

Of course our objection that using the case of nylonase as proof of evolution is premature is dwarfed entirely by Henry Gee’s case that absolutely all of the conceptual process dynamic of neo-Darwinian theory (or any other) is unfounded in proper evidence due to the limitations of deep time making such hypotheses fully premature. The additional problems of deep information and deep complexity as yet not fully analyzed by science compound this prematurity. It is therefore improper to demand that criticism of neo-Darwinian theory must be accompanied by a full replacement for it, for it is still too early in the data acquisition and analysis phase of the scientific method to generate any definite conceptual process description of the overall evolutionary dynamic.

Fallacies #72: Overstatement, #73: Directed Ambiguity, and #74: Delayed Demonstration (drawing unevidenced conclusions while putting off demonstration of the evidence until the distant future)

An interview with Biologist Michael West in Discover magazine presents an example of these three fallacies/propaganda tactics.[90] West may only be reflecting the entrenched habits of the materialist dominated scientific culture, that is, not intending to deceive, but his remarks fit the paradigm well enough to demonstrate the problem. On page 84 he says “Using human imagination, which is limitless, we could change the blueprint of human life into a new species. We could make anything.” This is enlarged and highlighted so the reader cannot fail to get that message even if they do not read the article. This remark, taken literally, and without qualification is patently false. There is no indication that science will ever be able to make radically new types of creatures, but only small modifications within an existing body type and family.

The overstatement is obvious. The ambiguity occurs in using the term “species,” which can change with differences so slight as mere wing color variations in songbirds, creatures otherwise identical except for the inability to interbreed. The ambiguity is clearly directed towards an exaggeration of what genetic engineering can do as it does not warrant the next statement that “We could make anything.” Nor does it warrant the previous implication that genetic engineering can achieve anything the human imagination can envisage. We can imagine chimeras with lion’s heads and eagles wings, but we certainly cannot create them. There is no scientific evidence to support the belief that this limitation will ever be exceeded. Alterations of such major systems and structures would invoke a complexity barrier so high that human science may never have the capacity to competently manipulate the amount of complex interrelated data involved (even with the aid of computers), let al.one physically coordinate and control so many delicate factors at the same time while maintaining hypersensitive life sustaining systems in the test subject.

West’s exaggeration of science’s abilities in genetic engineering is not only wildly ungrounded speculation, it is flatly contradicted by what we know of the complexities of the genomes and living systems. Yet nothing is given within that issue of Discover magazine to set West’s large print, bold faced, remarks in the proper perspective (other than West’s own admission that nothing of the kind has yet been achieved and is probably a long way off). This mistakenly implies, just as Darwinists have always implied that the missing links in the fossils are there, even if we never find them, that an expert’s expectation of finding evidence in the future is sufficient epistemological grounds to accept the same conclusions we would accept if we actually had the evidence before us.

Fallacies #75: Anticipating future evidence, #76: Reading the map before spectacles (technological prematurity) & #77: No resurrection permitted (of previously “discredited” hypotheses)

Both (limited) epigenetic inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g., genetic marker alterations)[91] and materialistic determination of evolutionary processes (many and varied physicochemical deterministic factors of evolution have been discovered since Simpson) have made at least a partial comeback in recent times. However, in This View of Life, G. G. Simpson categorically rules them both out, as he rules out predominantly directed evolution, termed “orthogenesis.” At least he rules out any form of orthogenesis with a directional influence strong enough to substantially predetermine the end products of evolution.

Simpson says the process of evolution, although historically determined, is not materialistically determined. He could easily be shown to be premature in that assertion, however, as the recent sciences of proteomics and transpositional genetics threaten to link the various component processes of life’s development together in a visibly deterministic way. His categorical statement is therefore not a categorical statement of fact as he leads his readers to believe in ruling out (prematurely) directed evolution. It is, rather, the conjunction of two fallacies: technological prematurity and anticipation of future evidence.

Even orthogenesis is again alive and well in evolutionary theory. This is true at least in the sense that the recently discovered tendencies for biological self-organization, combined with Denton’s protein folding forms, and hundreds of other deterministic physical features of our world that are demonstrably fine-tuned for life threaten to link together with further research to comprise a definite directional funnel toward human life such that humanity becomes an unavoidable product of the evolutionary process.

Contrary to the perfunctorily dismissive attitude neo-Darwinists have held towards these “old” hypotheses, in light of more modern discoveries in genetics and biochemistry nearly all of the previously “discredited” hypotheses concerning evolution have been resurrected in limited though useful applications. The ultimate extent of orthogenesis has now become a fully open question again. The neo-Darwinists will not admit that, but neither will they admit any other aspect of the evidence that threatens their religion of materialistic evolution.

In any event, in authoritatively pronouncing directed evolution (orthogenesis) and other evolutionary hypotheses irrevocably dead over the course of the past five or six decades, neo-Darwinists have committed all three of these fallacies. Recent discoveries in microbiology, proteomics and genetics brings to mind the old musical adage “Everything old is new again.” The neo-Darwinists won’t admit that either. The supreme irony here is that the only evolutionary hypothesis that we can definitely rule out with finality is the primary neo-Darwinian thesis itself, the claim that evolution is accidental and without purpose.

There is a classic case of evolutionists being caught in this fallacy, which generated an intense public embarrassment for science. In the 1950s all the “experts” agreed that the achievement of life in the laboratory (abiogenesis) was imminent. Even G. G. Simpson confidently echoed this conviction in a strong reassurance to his reading public that spontaneous evolution was a fact and the achievement of simple life from chemicals a piece of cake. That demonstration of producing life from chemicals in the lab never happened! Yet the experts confidently assured the public that it would. People’s thinking was influenced toward materialism and the accidental worldview because this “glorious” pronouncement was couched within the larger context of the propaganda of materialistic scientism. Loudly anticipating evidence that won’t actually be occurring at a vulnerable point in the discovery process where suggestion is present but not proof is a “free lunch” for materialists. They gain political ground without having paid a price for it. The public was convinced of the whole materialist-accidental worldview package because of the argument from authority; the experts signed their name to it. Yet, it never happened. In the ensuing six decades the task has only been shown to be more and more difficult. Here again we see multiple fallacies used in combination to mask an obvious fiction. Many, most or perhaps even all of those scientists may have honestly believed what they claimed at the time, but it proves that Dr. Faust is correct. The quality of scientists’ reasoning skills on abstract theoretical and philosophical questions is not nearly as good as the practical rigor and discipline they use in concrete experimental investigations. The neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. Keep in mind, “comparatively recently” in the following quote from Simpson refers to the 1960s.

Until comparatively recently, many—probably most—biologists agreed with Darwin that the problem of the origin of life was not yet amenable to scientific study. Now, however, almost all biologists agree that the problem can be attacked scientifically. The consensus is that life did arise naturally from the nonliving and that even the first living things were not specially created. The conclusion has, indeed, really become inescapable, for the first steps in that process have already been repeated in several laboratories. There is concerted study from geochemical, biochemical, and microbiological approaches. At a meeting in Chicago in 1959, a highly distinguished international panel of experts was polled. All considered the experimental production of life in the laboratory imminent, and one maintained that this had already been done—his opinion was not based upon a disagreement about the facts, but depended on the definition of just where, in a continuous sequence, life can be said to begin.[92]

Here you have the fallacies, not only of anticipating the evidence, but of the argument from authority (the “experts” agree), a part equals the whole (the first steps have been done, therefore the rest will be done), redefining the question so it may be answered in the favored way (scaling down the definition of life), and begging the question (assuming without proof that the origination of life from chemicals is a continuous sequence with no radical jumps or special components steps of a unique kind). All this in a single paragraph from one of the very top evolutionists of all time. Where would the force of Simpson’s argument be minus those fallacies? This is a question we must ask ourselves every time we read or hear an evolutionary argument. Where are the logical mistakes in the thinking process? And, is there anything left to the neo-Darwinian case after these errors are removed? The point of this entire book is to argue that, in addition to revealing substantial evidence for intelligent design, there is nothing to the neo-Darwinian argument beyond the false beliefs that natural selection can do miracles and that achieving vast computer programs and correspondingly complex robotic translation mechanisms by accident is as easy as pie.

Fallacy #78: Broken Analogy

Shanks and Joplin commit this error in claiming a catalytic reaction among a few raw chemicals adequately mirrors the more complex metabolism of living creatures, or that achieving a basic chemical metabolism mirrors the overall complexity of constructing a total integrated living organism. The oversimplification is so gross as to invalidate the analogy on the surface. It may seem like a not very astute maneuver on their part, but such analogies do achieve political yardage with the public who seldom do their homework. They portray at a glance, like a politically charged sound bite on the news, that the process of evolution is simple, therefore one should not have reservations about believing that an accident could have done it.

W. Ford Doolittle’s bridge analogy similarly fails because he argues from a fair deck of cards to the situation of physics which only has one ace (a chance at assembling life by accident) per a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion…(continued to at least 40 and to potentially hundreds of repetitions) unhelpful cards of other denominations.

Fallacies #79: Casual Dismissal (without substantive rebuttal), #80: Bits & Pieces or the One Link Equals a Chain Fallacy, #81: Now there is a standard for evolutionary evidence, now there isn’t, #82: We don’t need no stinking logic!, #83: Guilt by false association.

All of these fallacies can be found in a single article, “Science and God,” by Lenn E. Goodman, who is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.[93] They are also ubiquitous across a wide spectrum of (almost universally shallow) Darwinian commentaries on intelligent design theory. While Goodman is apparently not a neo-Darwinist, and he allows for God’s existence and the compatibility of science and religion, he casually dismisses the intelligent design argument. He does this in somewhat of a cavalier fashion similar to Father Coyne, implying that it is somehow demeaning to God that we would find signs of intelligence in his creation.

I must confess to not getting his point, or Coyne’s. From my perspective to say that God’s mundane creation must reflect God only in non-mundane ways is to abolish the distinction between the sacred and the profane, making everything sacred. God himself in the Bible disparages the physical existence and warns about placing any value in the physical, while at the same time saying in the Psalms and elsewhere that God’s handiwork can be seen in what he has made. The Bible itself then argues both that the world is not sacred and yet that God’s handiwork can be discerned in it, mundane though it is. Granted there is glory bordering on the sacred in the panoramic views of nature and the cosmos, but glory is the wrong word for all of the intricate machines of biology, notwithstanding the fact that they incontrovertibly show design. “Gory” is the word. Having said that, when the design structure is abstracted from the goo and animated on a clean and dry video screen such as in Illustra Media’s DVD, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, the glory can be seen.[94]

Goodman addresses none of the substantive arguments of ID theory such as you have seen in this book with the exception of Professor Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. He counters Behe by citing research indicating speculative routes have been proposed in research that only partially complete the evolutionary steps to only two complex biological systems (the camera type eye of humans), and the electron transport chain of the ATP energy cycle (Maricopa Community Colleges Web site). Goodman dismisses (prematurely) Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis saying that the ATP energy cycle is the most complex design imaginable, implying that it is the most complex mechanism that evolution would have to produce. He is apparently forgetting the entire vertical hierarchy of the mammalian body where each of trillions of cells must accomplish this same ATP cycle but in a closely orchestrated way within design structures of organs, tissues and body parts—nine levels deep of machines within machines. All these machines depend upon the ATP cycle and closely integrate it. Most of them are more complex than the ATP mechanism.

The much greater complexity of the brain has already been discussed, and the eye is easily seen to be more complex with 3 million ganglion cells in the electronic interface, 125 million photocells, each complex in its own right,[95] copies of the entire genome are maintained and portions differently translated in each of trillions of cells of the body. Oddly, Goodman’s line argument against intelligent design, that this one component, the ATP mechanism, is as complex as any one single fundamental component part of any living system, and therefore if nature can achieve this component it can achieve any of the component parts of all organisms, is only applicable to intelligent systems! For accidental systems, this is definitely not true. Repeating the achievement of even the same identical component over again multiplies the improbability/difficulty of the first achievement by the second because a dumb accidental process “never learns;” it has to do it all the hard way by chance all over again as if nothing had every been achieved before. The subsequent achievement of absolutely every other additional component needed by evolution, including exact clones (with the one exception of reuse), multiplies the improbability and difficulty level again and again. The rules of standard probability theory require this. Obviously this microscopic chemical chain reaction is not the hardest task accidental evolution must accomplish; it must build whole creatures. The resultant improbability for the tree of life is therefore trillions upon trillions of times greater than the complexity of the ATP energy cycle alone. Goodman’s argument against intelligent design from the ATP cycle is thus refuted, and even then science has not demonstrated that an accidental process could achieve the ATP subsystem, it has only hypothesized that it could achieve it.

Goodman’s casually dismissive approach, beyond being unconvincing, inverts the logic Darwin himself gave for the refutation of his theory: (I paraphrase) “If any (one) biological structure can be found that could not have been assembled by a sequence of small gradual steps my theory would be refuted.” Here Goodman is saying that irreducible complexity is defeated because we have one partial speculative route for a single biological machine when all irreducible complexity needs to succeed is one biological machine for which it appears that no gradual route is available. In other words, Goodman has a lot more machines to look at to make his case for the dismissal of ID theory.

Goodman cites a handful of examples of simple adaptations such as single hormones thus committing the one link is a chain fallacy, simple therefore complex, easy therefore difficult, etc. He gives a wide scattering of biological descriptions of some very small pieces of a variety of different systems but nothing substantial or significant in terms of concrete explanations of the origin of the complexity in any of them or an accidental route to their achievement. Thus the Bits and Pieces fallacy. He then affirms Shanks and Joplin’s redundancy-based counterargument to irreducible complexity thus committing with those authors the fallacy of broken analogy by endorsing overly simplistic examples.

Goodman also says some things that are just plain troubling:

And in debates on evolution, there is no settled accord about the onus of proof.

Logic cannot settle every dispute.

These assertions are problematic both from the point of view of the logical consistency of neo-Darwinian theory and the logical consistency of Goodman’s own article. Neo-Darwinists and practically every other Darwinist have long insisted that the theory of evolution is an incontrovertible fact. How can this be so, if, as Goodman suggests there is no established standard for proof in this area of thought. Further, in regards to the second statement, if we are not to use logic to evaluate a question, what do we use? We are left in epistemological limbo as Goodman provides no concrete alternative, all the while arguing his own case in clearly logical form at great length for some thirteen pages!

Finally we come to the guilt by false association fallacy. Goodman pins the reductio ad ignorantiam or “God of the gaps” fallacy on intelligent design theory. For Goodman to do this is a form of the straw man fallacy, because ID theory is not based on these lines of reasoning. ID theory is not emphasizing the gaps in evolutionary research data that might reasonably be expected to be remedied with time that are merely the natural result of lack of research and discovery. ID theory is emphasizing the lack in neo-Darwinian theory of an explanation of what we do know viz complexity, improbability, sophisticated mechanisms, interdependence of design components, and accepted instances of punctuated equilibrium, the large gaps in the fossil record that appear to be a genuine leap of evolution as opposed to incomplete discovery. ID theory is not challenging evolution, of course; it is challenging the accidental thesis.

Obviously the origin and development of life happened, so the factual gaps in the description of the event sequence can in theory all be filled in. However, in light of what we already know about the design complexity and improbabilities involved, having the complete event description in front of us will not refute the ID argument unless all the known physical constants that are fine-tuned for life and all of the points of self-organization are shown to have been mistaken and replaced by random event generators of one form or another. But if that is done the probability cost for the accidental thesis goes further through the roof and the universe cannot afford accidental evolution even now with all the help the fine tuning and self-organization can give it.

In any event, ID theory does not say that we need God to explain what we don’t yet know, but that we need intelligent design to explain what we do know. ID theory therefore does not commit the God of the gaps fallacy. Rather Goodman commits the fallacy of guilt by false association in assigning the God of the gaps thinking improperly to the intelligent design camp. This is really just another example of refusing to let modern intelligent design theory progress away from its religious antecedents the way science itself had to progress; it is the one strike and your out fallacy.

Fallacy #84: Claim Jumping

Your evidence is my evidence. If you can’t beat ‘em, co-opt their evidence for your argument. Monroe Strickberger claim jumps when he re-labels the strong ability nature has to progressively achieve and lock in physical structures that are more and more conducive to the formation of complex living organisms. In effect, he says “Look, nature does all the work, so it must be accidental.” However, a process so clearly directed toward the formation of complex life, even if we cannot yet prove it to have guaranteed life, must, as G. G. Simpson admitted, be labeled purposive, not accidental.

Fallacy #85: the FM (Freaky Magic), Black Box, or Name Game Fallacy

This one goes to Richard Dawkins with a bullet, that is, he’s climbing the charts for the most frequently committed fallacy. Dawkins says genes occasionally split or duplicate, so there is your source for all the new genes necessary for radically different and much more complex types of creatures. Walla booby! Accidental evolution proved. But how are the complex configurations of the vastly different genetic sequences of the new designs achieved? “Mutation,” naturally. Merely giving something a name is not tantamount to giving it an explanation. We have seen millions of accidental mutations in the lab. They have never done such reconfigurations or even hinted at reconfigurations having functional and progressive results; they just break things. Certainly no constructive mutations on a scale vast enough to produce evolution at the rate of the Cambrian explosion is evinced in current scientific research data outside of the transpositional elements. The transpositional genomics, however, do not qualify as an accidental process. Nonetheless, Dawkins is adamant. It just happens by gene splitting. Nothing could be more obvious. FM!

Fallacy #86: Reductionism

Physical reductionism in science competes strongly with all the others for the proper title, “Mother of All Fallacies.” It involves two other primary fallacies, begging the question and hidden premise, and generally leads out into a circular form of reasoning. Reductionism in a sense is materialism. It is the school of thought that asserts that all phenomena reduce to nothing more than a set of physical correlates. God or a nonphysical designer of life are ruled out by definition in reductionism even before the evidence is considered.[96] Reductionists refuse to consider that there might be a soul that inhabits the body. In their view, the driver reduces to the car, and if a car is one type of entity, the driver must be a similar type. This all begs the question of dualism without offering any proof whatsoever. The antiquated and simplistic arguments for reductionism are all hasty conclusions drawn from bad logic. For example, consider what Robert M. Young says in his article, “Psychology in the 19^th Century Evolutionary Debate.”

Twenty five years later, when the tide had turned, and it was demonstrated by experiment that movements which had hitherto been attributed to free will could be produced by localized electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, these findings might have been taken up by the evolutionists and determinists. They might have told the general public that thought and action were entirely functions of brain centers and that free will was thereby proven to be a chimera.[97]

The bad logic here should be obvious. A factory engineer or mechanic can reach beneath the hood to short circuit the starter of a car, but that doesn’t mean that drivers who later elect to turn the ignition switch are not doing so of their own free will. Even in the experiments referenced, it was the free will decision of the scientist to apply the electrical stimulation to the cerebral cortex that produced the desired movement. The brain and the human being it is attached to is not shown to be an automaton by these demonstrations because it first requires a conscious decision to produce the movement. The human body is shown to be a machine, however. Only in sleepwalking is free will apparently removed from the process of physical movement. Somnambulism remains largely a mystery to science to this day. However, the mere fact that one can automate the movements of a car in robotic fashion to follow a preset pattern of movement does not prove that the humans who drive cars at other times when the robotic program is missing or disabled are not introducing free will into the process of directing the actions of those cars. Similarly, the mere fact that sleepwalking is sometimes possible doesn’t prove that consciously controlled walking is impossible (though pedestrian behavior downtown threatens to prove it). Thus, we see the loony logic of reductionism.

For the reductionist, love for your children reduces to a set of neurons firing in your brain. The constitutional right to life reduces to an abstraction of a set of behavioral preferences. Belief in God reduces to fear of death or fear of the dark, and so on. Beyond the fact that reductionism reduces life to a shallow and meaningless robotic existence, there is simply no reason to make these reductions. We know that a constitutional right is more than a statistical curve of behavioral preferences. Even if we could ever identify such a complex correlation, placing electrodes into the proper cross section of a glob of gooey gray matter, making it squirm on a lab table will never produce something one can point at and say “Now that’s family loyalty!” As prolific best-selling author and noted Sociologist Andrew Greeley says in closing his contribution to the symposium on Neo-Darwinism and Its Discontents, “The Return of the Village Atheists”:

Pius reductionists that they are, they may well add that by messing with my brain chemistry they can duplicate my joy at glorious beauty and resurgent love. To which I reply, doubtless you can, but if that is the best you can do, you are intellectually bankrupt.[98]

As Greeley knowledgably implies, reductionism just isn’t so. In the same symposium, Peter Augustine Lawler goes on to equate reductionism with personal, moral, and cultural nihilism; it removes everything of value from life including human dignity.[99] Love, morality, friendship, faith in God, even consciousness, self-awareness itself, absolutely all of abstract thought, the entirety of what you have been doing reading this book is invalidated by reductionism. Or rather, vice versa: reductionism is invalidated by what you have just been doing, that is, rational thought. With reductionism there is no referential relationship between concepts and the world; it is all just the world. The classic referential model of language and thought are thrown out, minus a replacement—we have no other coherent model of language and thought.

With reductionism nothing is better than anything else. Nothing is right or wrong, just right or left. Nothing is more or less logical, etc. There is nothing to ground morality or reason. Most ludicrous of all, science, the primary home of reductionist thought, itself tells us that everything initially came from nothing in an unexplainable nonphysical event at the beginning of the universe. If the origin and source of everything physical does not reduce to a set of physical correlates how can it be rational to affirm reductionism for the things that derive from that which is not reducible? When society becomes politically ready to admit it, it will be seen that Big Bang theory alone refutes reductionism and materialism as does the whole of everything else that gives life dignity, meaning and value.

Fallacy #87: Starting an explanation in the middle of the process

Darwinian evolution does not address the origin of life or the origin of the genomes. It begins its theoretical model only after the genomes are substantially complete and assumes that there are no difficulties substantial enough to require explanation involved in deriving one radically different creature from another beyond the single word “mutation.” However, neo-Darwinian evolutionists like Richard Dawkins go on to say that God is superfluous to the explanation of our existence while the sole theory they offer to explain life only begins to address the process after life has been achieved and the genomes are substantially complete. Darwinian theory has always begun its explanation in the middle of the process and skipped all of what are now known to be the hard parts.[100] It does not address the origin of life, nor does it explain the achievement of the genomes or new biological information to expand and modify he genomes nondestructively. It is a one word theory, “mutation” for an astronomically complex process. As the next fallacy explains, even the drastically incomplete model they do produce fails.

We are not even entitled to start with proteins as a given, let alone entire genomes, as if everyone knew an accident could throw them together without aid of intelligent design. Proteins are not just strings of amino acids; they are ultra-complex three dimensionally folded compositions of amino acids. Those folds bear crucial biological information. A single amino acid has roughly 43 points of biological relevance. Average proteins contain only 100 amino acid occurrences, but can go as large as 10,000. Thus, when folded in three dimensions, a single protein has potentially thousands of points of biological relevance. Neo-Darwinists dismiss all this casually as if there is simply nothing to it. “One simply shakes a few proteins in the fractal can, so, and Walla Booby, evolution she is proved!” Nonsense. One cannot start an explanation in the middle of a process and then authoritatively dismiss competing theories that honestly try to address the first half, especially if the unexplained half is where all the hard parts occur.

Fallacy #88: Private language

Monroe Strickberger calls a bowl full of viable adaptations “accidental evolution” when it reflects so much bias for life that the word “accidental” in its normal use simply does not apply. Richard Dawkins says that he (along with Charles Darwin) has discovered a process that is neither accidental nor on purpose, but normal language use allows for no such intermediate option. Dawkins calls his model of evolution based upon “cumulative selection” nonaccidental, while enthusiastically agreeing that an accidental process could not account for the evolution of life. However, as an atheist and materialist his model of the world is Godless, and absolutely all of the mutations that feed into the selection process of his model are accidental. His worldview is accidental but his view of evolution is “nonaccidental” because he believes the survival based selection process gives the process enough direction to get the job done of creating fantastically complex machines of biology, machines that accident would otherwise have no hope of assembling. It is a failed model because the small changes that are within reach of the random mutations that are the only ones Dawkins allows for cannot produce a biological change large enough for survival fitness based selection to act upon, except for the occasional injury to the organism.

Fallacies are inevitably encountered in trying to cheat complexity; it can’t be done. If the mechanism is too complex for an accident to achieve it, it won’t be achieved in an accidental world by any means unless and until intelligent guidance is added to the process. Dawkins approach also involves the fallacy of equivocation or bait and switch. This is because, although his model is nonaccidental, and his model is purportedly of the evolutionary process, because the model fails to accurately model the realities of the biological world, we are not entitled based upon that model alone to say that evolution can ever be nonaccidental in any sense in an accidental world. His model seems to offer the reader a false third alternative to normal two of an accidental worldview without God or intelligent design and a purposive world view with God or intelligent design. In other words, the huge explanatory burden of accounting for the unmistakable appearance of design in nature, according to Dawkins, can be met without including God/ID in our worldview while still not having to make the unbelievable claim that an accident could achieve such a thing. This is a trick all to convenient to his embattled theory; an attempt to avoid fatal objections without making substantive changes. The trick, however, fails along with his model. And the objection that an accidental worldview cannot account for the origin and evolution of life stands unrefuted.

Fallacies #89: Bait and switch, #90: Tagging belief onto demonstration, #91: Leaving the back door open (failure to commit, failure to risk refutation), and #92: Chaining fallacies to breach the casual reader’s span of cognition

In chapter 7 of Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Scott Camazine et al. claim that the discovery of self-organizing biological structures and systems does not minimize the role of natural selection per classic evolutionary theory. However, the objection they are arguing against is based upon self-organization at the molecular level. They, on the other hand, have switched to a defense applicable only to the whole organism level. They cite group behavior in insects, not the basic molecular constructs essential to living cells that are seen to self-organize such as the nanosystems of microtubules in cell membranes, or essential biotic structures predetermined by natural law, such as the biologically viable proteins. This is a fully broken analogy and therefore fails as a defense of natural selection being involved in the construction of self-organizational systems at the molecular level. Natural selection works to effect (some) change at the level of insect behavior, but it does nothing to aid self-construction of the critical biotic molecules of the type evincing self-organizational ability.

The back door fallacy concerns dodging accountability, that is, leaving oneself a way out. Camazine et al. can only be held accountable for asserting that natural selection will still select the fittest organism behavior, a perfectly safe claim that is true by the mere definition of words. However, they clearly suggest to the reader that they are defending neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as being extendable to the realm of self-organizing (dead) biotic structures. They don’t say this outright, they merely invite the reader to understand it, again leaving the back door open to a denial. However, in saying that natural selection has not been minimized by self-organization in biology they have to argue that natural selection constructs the self-organizational system itself over time, otherwise the essential construction of biological machines relentlessly proceeds by self-organization at the molecular level regardless of what natural selection is doing to preserve or veto a given creature or biological feature.

In addition to broken analogy, Camazine et al. commit the fallacy of tagging belief onto demonstration by saying that “natural selection is intimately linked to self-organization, since it molds the rules of interaction among the components of a living system.”[101] They suggest to the reader that the molecular self-organizational process that at least partially builds cells and the genomes has itself been constructed by natural selection. However, they have only given evidence for the molding of some aspects of insect behavior. They merely hold the belief that natural selection assists at all the other levels of biological systems construction. They give no evidence and it is in fact clear that natural selection has no opportunity to act in the spontaneous folding of proteins and the self-assembly of cellular nanostructures. The laws of physics and chemistry have assembled these systems before natural selection makes any input. Even neo-Darwinists would not be so brash as to claim that natural selection is responsible for constructing the laws of physics and chemistry!

Furthermore, if Camazine et al. wish to present their argument as a genuine defense of orthodox evolution they must defend all of it, not just the easy parts. They never mention the claim of an accidental process, but only natural selection. Nonetheless they claim to have successfully defended orthodox theory, which espouses the accidental tenet. Thus they leave the back door open to bail out if someone properly challenges orthodox Darwinism, which they say they are defending. By using such a tactic they stand to gain political ground for orthodoxy while risking no refutation of what they have actually said should orthodoxy be demonstrated to fail in regards to a given objection. What Camazine et al. are doing is defending only part of orthodox Darwinism, that is, natural selection, not the full theory, which includes the accidental thesis. Even there they are only demonstrating a partial defense in a limited context, namely insect behavior.

The Camazine argument from insect behavior speaks not at all to molecular selection and self-organization at the molecular level, which is an entirely different kind of process. It is apparently molecular self-organization that is the process responsible for constructing the cell and the basic structures of the genome (short of configuring the complex information content). There is no evidence for the claim that natural selection and accident have built the self-organizational system that operates at the molecular level. To suggest this is purely an argument from authority based upon the blind faith in materialism and the accidental worldview, and, as in the case of Strickberger and Dawkins, amounts to one big claim jump in citing a process clearly evincing design as a demonstration of what accident can do.

Here within the context of self-organization we see a little more clearly into what Monroe Strickberger and Richard Dawkins have claimed in asserting that nature increasingly achieves a system ever more and more conducive to building the machines of life. They are claiming that accident and natural selection can build over time such self-organizing systems and structures. However, when we look close at what is actually occurring in self-organization at the molecular level, for example at protein folding and cellular nanosystems, we see that these critical subcomponents of life are being self-organized by natural law.

Camazine et al. address the social organization of (already constructed) organisms and their interactions, primarily insects. This hardly explains the construction of the most elemental structures of biological machines. Natural selection makes (some) input into the organized behaviors of insect colonies and the physical artifacts they construct. But equating this to what occurs in protein folding and nanosystems architecture in the cell is a fully broken analogy. Once again, the neo-Darwinists begin the explanation of life in the middle after the hard part of biological design construction has already occurred. Fallacies strung upon fallacies!

No wonder the average reader doesn’t see through the failed neo-Darwinian argument. Most readers pick up a science book to relax, to be amazed, informed and entertained, not to have to pick through an endless maze of logical fallacies to arrive at the truth. Neo-Darwinian authors have done the reading public a great disservice in not tending to the quality of rational thought progression in their books and articles.

If it is truly natural law that lies at the origin and most basic foundation of self-organizational systems and structures of cellular architecture (as it now appears), neither accident nor natural selection are prime movers in the creation of living designs. Natural selection can only affect the tenure, that is, the preservation of species/major form variations; it does nothing of consequence to help make them. Given the recent revelations of molecular selection, self-organization at the molecular level, and predetermined biological forms specified in natural law, natural selection has in fact been minimized well beyond the role stipulated by the orthodox neo-Darwinian model. Thus that model is refuted, contrary to what Camazine et al. would have us believe.

Fallacy #93: The Shell Game Fallacy, AKA Where’s Waldo?

Ernst Mayr commits this fallacy in his argument against cosmic purpose by referring the reader for the proof to the work of G. G. Simpson, citing his definitive refutation of finalism. Thus the shell game: the proof has already been given by another authority and is readily found elsewhere, no need to replicate it here (take my word for it). However, when we get to Simpson’s discussion we find that the only thing he has refuted is, not the legitimate alternatives for cosmic purpose (see the RFP fallacy above), but a naïve anachronism asserted by fundamentalists 100 years ago. “It has already been done, no need to replicate it here.” You will see this again and again in neo-Darwinian arguments, but the genuine proofs they allude to simply do not exist.

Fallacies #94: Deep ignorance vs. It’s a fact, not a theory!

Consider the following quote from Earl D. Hansen’s book, Understanding Evolution:

The name of Darwin’s first work on evolution, The Origin of Species, might suggest that there is one path to the formation of new species. Conceptually, Darwin argued that to be true and his viewpoint is summarized in his phrase “Varieties are incipient species.” By this he meant, of course, that the appearance of variations within a species is the source of the differences that will finally generate new species. That is the concept; but he also knew that the reality was more complex since he admitted to deep ignorance regarding the source and nature of heritable variations and he knew that selective pressures can differ for different species. (My emphasis)

Where are we today in the analysis of the origins of species? Our viewpoint differs from Darwin’s of over 100 years ago in that (1) we now know a great deal about the genetics of variation; (2) we now view species as reproductively isolated communities; and (3) we have a clearer view of the action of selection and other factors that shape the adaptations of natural populations. But, as we shall see, we are still very poorly informed as to just what occurs at that critical time when a new gene pool emerges.[102]

Even now in 2009 as I sit drafting this book, science has no real idea of what happens to produce one substantially different creature from another. Given this, doesn’t it comport more with intellectual integrity to admit that evolution is a theory, not an irrefutable fact as Darwinists insist? Admittedly, based upon the sequence of the appearance of creatures in the fossil record and the great amount of genetic, functional and structural similarities among creatures something very much like evolution has occurred, or at least something suggesting evolution. But do we know for certain that it was evolution? No. We don’t know for certain because we don’t know how natural process could have spontaneously achieved any of the truly hard parts of the process: the origin of life from chemicals (abiogenesis), configuration of the genomes, achievement of a translation system for the genome, achievement of irreducible complexity in closely interactive multipart systems, achievement of immensely complex systems like the brain, achievement of nonreducible systems of abstract thought, feeling, and moral values, speciation of one radically different type of creature from another, and how any of this could have been done in the time intervals established in the historical record.

Fallacy #95: Falsely restricting the alternatives and (#60 again) God must be a materialist

This is essentially a form of the false dilemma fallacy, but at this point, who’s counting? Writing in 1964, in the first chapter of This View of Life, evolutionist G. G. Simpson artificially restricts the even nominally credible alternatives to the classic model of Darwinian evolution to only two categories: vitalism and finalism. Both of these ancient schools of thought are discredited relics fully out of step with modern theology and philosophy, in other words they are not the strongest contenders against Darwinian evolution as Simpson suggests. In their traditionally overly simplistic and naïve forms, they are easy targets, straw men. Modern intelligent design theory had not yet been originated, but the design argument of Paley was well known, and the Catholic Church was around even in 1964. After first laying out the evolutionary model in terms of spontaneous mutations quality checked by natural selection, Simpson says this.

The theory just outlined obviously does not yet answer all questions or plumb all mysteries, even when the details here omitted are taken into consideration. It cast no light on the ultimate mystery—the origin of the universe and the source of the laws or physical properties of matter, energy, space, and time. Nevertheless, once those properties are given, the theory demonstrates that the whole evolution of life could well have ensued, and probably did ensue, automatically, as a natural consequence of the immanent laws and successive configurations of the material cosmos. There is no need, at least, to postulate any non-natural or metaphysical intervention in the course of evolution.

That conclusion has been questioned or opposed not only by many philosophers and theologians but also by a comparatively small number of scientists. The alternatives occasionally supported by scientists or scientific philosophers, and therefore pertinent here, comprise many shadings and variations of opinion, but most of them can be placed in the rubrics of vitalism and finalism…

The sort of testable evidence that would suggest vitalism or finalism would be the steady progression of life, and of each of its evolving lineages, toward a final and transcendentally worthy goal. That is not, in fact, what the known record of life’s history shows. There is no clear overall progression. Organisms diversify into literally millions of species, then the vast majority of those species perish and other millions take their places for an eon until they, too, are replaced. If that is a foreordained plan, it is an oddly ineffective one…They evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.[103]

All of the arguments against a divine plan or a purposive process of evolution given by Simpson are focused on the physical aspects of life. This is not surprising for a scientist, but it does invalidate Simpson’s argument that there is no transcendental goal. Why is it reasonable to think that God’s transcendental goals would be physical goals at all. The Christian faith, which Simpson insults with all the other religions by calling it the “higher superstition,” clearly stipulates that it is not physical paradise but the purification of the souls that have rebelled in sin, and the satisfaction of temporal justice through suffering that is the goal in this, an intermediate world that precedes the perfect one to follow. (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 NAB)

The death, even extinction, of creatures does not contradict the existence of the Christian God who clearly put at least some of them here to serve as food for man, and gave man dominion over all of them. Why couldn’t survival through adaptation simply be God’s goal for his creation once he had satisfied the other requirements for an intentionally imperfect intermediate world? Simpson fully ignores the strength of the two primary opposing arguments available at the time, Paley’s design argument from the complex mechanisms of life, and the Christian/Catholic Church’s conceptual framework requiring an imperfect intermediate creation that allows for temporary suffering. Modern evolutionists, following, predominantly, Simpson, use precisely the same strength avoidance and straw man tactics because Simpson is the closest thing to a competent philosopher they have ever had.

Fallacy #96: Lack of information = random, and random = accidental

When science has insufficient information to explain the result in a physical process they call it “random” by default. This is done even when statistical probability theory has been fully blown away, as it has been regarding the origin of life and its essential components such as the genomes, proteomics, the human brain etc. The course of evolution in being so dramatically successful and non-haphazard in advancing biological form is clearly nonrandom in that the bias for life is enormous. For decades modern science has “swept under the rug” the observation that the genomes were transforming themselves in highly nonrandom ways thus allowing the misconception that evolution had been driven by accidental mutations mediated by natural selection to become entrenched in the minds of the public. Along with that misconception, the atheistic/materialist worldview has been too often entrenched as well. A temporary lack of information about the true mechanics of a natural process, in this case, evolution, is not sufficient cause to downgrade our view of creation but, rather, to take a more humble view of ourselves.

Fallacy #97: The Catholic Church embraces evolution therefore it endorses neo-Darwinian evolution (Not true!)

In the intro I remarked that it has been an exciting couple of decades in science with the emergence of a startling volume of evidence for intelligent design theory. You may be thinking, “What’s so exciting?” “I’m a Catholic; why should I care? Evolution—smevolution. It’s all the same to me.”[104] Although scientists confidently inform our school boards and federal courts that there has never been a conflict between God and “evolution,” this is not what the neo-Darwinists tell our students in college textbooks. It is not what they tell the public in popular books on evolution, and it is not what is claimed in the core writings of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, it is not the teaching of the Church, at least as pertains to the neo-Darwinian form of evolution.

Catholic/Christian teaching is, as one would expect, in direct opposition to all God-incompatible formulations of evolutionary theory. His Holiness Pope John Paul II, in his 1996 “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution,” taught us that although basic evolution does not conflict with the Bible and the faith, some forms of evolutionary theory do.

And to tell the truth, rather than speaking about the theory of evolution, it is more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution. The use of the plural is required here—in part because of the diversity of explanations regarding the mechanism of evolution, and in part because of the diversity of philosophies involved. There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories. Here the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology...

It is by virtue of his eternal soul that the whole person, including his body, possesses such great dignity. Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God ("animas enim a Deo immediate creari catholica fides non retimere iubet"). (Humani Generis)

As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. They are therefore unable to serve as the basis for the dignity of the human person.[105]

Despite Pope John Paul II’s emphasizing the importance of distinguishing the different versions of evolutionary theory, Darwinists seldom bother with such niceties. All the while they freely (and mistakenly) remind the public that the Catholic Church endorses (their form of) “evolution.” At rock bottom, of course, the Catholic position is not even an endorsement of evolution as such, but only an endorsement of science as our only means to discover the mechanics of creation, and only then when properly performed (to the extent that we are to find them out at all). None of the theological tenets of the Church require an endorsement either of evolution or of any alternative view. In other words, the Bible is not, even in part, a book of science, but purely a book of theology. It says that God made the world and its life forms; it does not say how he made them.

As Cardinal, Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn explains in his new book, Chance or Purpose, when scientists deign to step outside science’s appropriate bounds and claim that there is no God they have entered the realm of metaphysics and ideology and left their scientific credentials behind. They are then doing politics and personal philosophy, not science. The position of the Church is too easily misrepresented in such a process. To avoid serious error one must always distinguish between basic evolution, accidental/atheistic evolution (the neo-Darwinian form), and the God-compatible versions of Synthetic Theory. These are the three basic options currently in use.[106] There are many other variants of the theory of evolution, so a person of faith must inquire as to what position each variant takes on the question of God before supporting it.

Even so, if the versions of evolution opposed to the faith were obscure and infrequently held views, our concern would be slight. The Church does not wish to impede freedom of thought, but rather to preserve both genuine scientific truth and the truths of the faith, which are held never to conflict.[107] Unfortunately, the primary version of evolutionary theory that is being taught in our schools and colleges, neo-Darwinian evolution, has the very flaws that make it incompatible with the Christian faith: materialism and the denial of intelligent design/cosmic purpose!

We cannot, as the neo-Darwinists do, simply speak of evolution as if it were one single homogenous theory. We must distinguish the variants to preserve clarity and integrity regarding the relationship of God and science. Pope John Paul II’s position statement to this effect is further developed in the current Vatican document entitled “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God.” Here it is made explicit: neo-Darwinian evolution does conflict with the Christian faith.

In continuity with previous twentieth century papal teaching on evolution (especially Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis ), the Holy Father’s message acknowledges that there are “several theories of evolution” that are “materialist, reductionist and spiritualist” and thus incompatible with the Catholic faith. It follows that the message of Pope John Paul II cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.[108] (My emphasis)

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, recently affirmed the Church’s position in a courageous New York Times editorial, one that surprisingly drew “flak” even from the Vatican’s own Pontifical Academy of Science. Cardinal Schönborn has apostolic teaching authority. Therefore, when he affirmed intelligent design and labeled neo-Darwinian evolution incompatible with the Christian faith, his statement was authoritative. Here is an excerpt from his Times editorial.

Ever since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.[109]

As some who have followed this issue know, the “flak” came from Father George V. Coyne, a priest and scientist who was Director of the Vatican Observatory until August 2006. Coyne sharply criticized Cardinal Schönborn’s editorial. Father Coyne, however, was speaking as an individual scientist, not as the Pope’s spokesman. The Vatican Observatory is an advisory body to the Vatican on scientific matters; it does not hold a position of ecclesial authority in the Church. In addition, Father Coyne is an astronomer, not an evolutionist. Those who think Father Coyne’s sharp criticisms represent an admonishment of Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn by the Vatican are much mistaken. Cardinal Schönborn is as high above Father Coyne as he can be in the Church without being pope. A former student of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Schönborn, with a group of the pope’s other former students, regularly meets with the pope to confer on evolution and other issues. He has, in fact, written the foreword to the new book that chronicles their latest conference (2006) at Castel Gandolfo, entitled Creation and Evolution.[110]

Have our most astute Church leaders imagined this conflict? Not at all. Neo-Darwinian evolutionists have historically not only affirmed an accidental/purposeless worldview but integrated that assumption into their evolutionary writings as if it were fully entailed by the scientific evidence. The truths of science entail no such thing, however. The neo-Darwinists have also openly disparaged religion and affirmed that the more “enlightened” views of atheism and materialism have been established by the advance of science. All poppycock, of course. The conflict between neo-Darwinian “theory” (which is really a combination of basic evolution with the personal philosophies of atheism and materialism, not a true scientific theory at all) and Catholic/Christian faith is undeniably real.

Dr. Sidney Fox, Director of The Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami, 1964-1989, tells us in his book The Emergence of Life, that most scientists believed the events of physics and biology to be truly accidental until about 1965. This is when substantial dissent first arose to the accidental worldview originally hypothesized by Charles Darwin and later encouraged by physicists like Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr under the auspices of indeterminacy theory in particle physics (quantum mechanics). Despite the fact that science itself is impossible in a fully accidental world,[111] as is natural law and any consistent structure in physical objects, many scientists early on fell in with the accidental school of thought, with some, like evolutionist Ernst Mayr, asserting that science can be confident in ruling out cosmic purpose in nature.

In their article, “The Meaning of the Theory of Evolution,” which constitutes chapter 2 of Grzimek’s Encyclopedia of Evolution, D. S. Peters and W. F. Gutmann lay out the conflict between neo-Darwinian evolution and intelligent design (and the Christian faith) in an unmistakable way by saying that evolutionary processes are truly accidental, denying both purpose and design. Professor Douglas Futuyma, in the 3^rd edition of his textbook, Evolutionary Biology, does much the same thing, as does Dr. Monroe Strickberger in his textbook, Evolution:

[Peters & Gutmann] 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.

[Futuyma] Second, people had long sought the causes of phenomena in purposes: the will of God, or the FINAL CAUSES (the purposes for which events occur). Newton revolutionized Western thought by providing purely MECHANISTIC explanations for physical phenomena. Thereafter, physicists would exclude from their theories any reliance on purpose (final causes), divine design, or the operation of any supernatural forces in the day-to-day workings of the physical world. Darwin’s immeasurably important contribution of science was to show how mechanistic causes could also explain all biological phenomena, despite their apparent evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. In the decades that followed, physiology, embryology, biochemistry, and finally molecular biology would complete this revolution by providing entirely mechanistic explanations, relying on chemistry and physics, for biological phenomena. But it was Darwin’s theory of evolution, followed by Marx’s materialistic (even if inadequate or wrong) theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism—in short of much of science—that has since been the stage of most Western thought.

[Strickberger] He [Darwin] thus replaced what many had seen as an understandable view of nature—that is, the creativity of a human like God—by the most heretical concepts of all, randomness and uncertainty...Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries, by a deeper understanding of the sources of human emotional needs, and by the recognition that ethics and morality can change among different societies and that acceptance of such values need not depend upon religion...The roots of religious beliefs lie in human attempts to appeal to and control the forces of nature...From these roots arose the concept of God and soul, both of which were supposed to be eternal and immaterial.[112]

No purposeful goal, no goal oriented plan, chaotic, purely accidental. The lack of purpose explicitly acknowledged in this kind of formulation of evolutionary theory straightforwardly eliminates the possibility of God or an intelligent designer of life. Strickberger relegates religion to a mere psychological manifestation having no basis in fact, which is fully incompatible with the Christian faith. The important thing to keep in mind is that absolutely none of this is scientifically defensible. These are merely assertions of personal philosophical preference.

Monroe Strickberger is one of the three primary evolution textbook authors, as is Futuyma, along with Mark Ridley. Ridley, thankfully, takes a more rational view, as do most other scientists, allowing for the compatibility of God and science. Strickberger is less direct and less explicit in denying cosmic purpose than evolutionists like Ernst Mayr, Peters, Gutmann, and Futuyma, but he asserts a watered-down version of scientific materialism, affirming the Freudian view of religion as a mere psychological/sociological phenomenon. He also affirms moral relativism, and claims that religious dogma has been undermined by naturalistic explanations of its mysteries.

Any competent priest, theologian or philosopher (and most scientists) will tell you that no such naturalistic explanation of the true mysteries of the faith has been achieved. Indeed, absolutely all of the physical universe owes its beginnings to an admittedly unnatural mystery: the Big Bang event.[113] But if all of the world owes its beginnings to an unnatural event, how can any of science’s explanations be called purely natural? How, as Strickberger claims, did Darwin make theological explanations of life superfluous when absolutely all physical processes owe their origin to an unnatural miracle-like event that remains a complete mystery to science? Another important thing to remember is that, although theological explanations are not scientific by definition, that does not make them superfluous. For nonscientific explanation to be totally superfluous science would have had to have satisfactorily explained everything, including, and especially origins, the origin of life and the origin of the universe. But these are precisely the two things science cannot explain.

Strickberger may try to fall back on a technicality of language here, claiming that he was addressing only the “life processes” (that is, traceable purpose in the biomechanics of organisms) not the origin of life. Darwin, himself, admitted that neither he nor science had an explanation as to the ultimate origins of life, and were not likely to ever discern the ultimate origin of things. But this is an unsatisfactory defense, for Strickberger said “the creativity of a human like God” had been replaced by randomness and uncertainty. Creation has to do with origins, not merely the intermediate biomechanics of life. In the realm of origins, however, theological explanation has in no way been supplanted by randomness and uncertainty. For that matter, neither has randomness and uncertainty found a secure home anywhere else in science as an explanatory principle. This is hardly surprising, for, contrary to what neo-Darwinists loudly claim, randomness cannot be demonstrated to be capable of producing any kind of a complex system whatsoever, living or otherwise.

The bald truth of the matter is that randomness or accident can never be an explanatory principle, for it has always been defined as the very antithesis of explanation itself in both science and philosophy. The word “random” is used when there is either a lack of information so that causation cannot be traced, or a known lack of causation. Common language use testifies to this same principle: “There is no explanation for that, it is just random,” and so on Science’s explanations are causal explanations. To “explain” a process by citing randomness is therefore a contradiction in science. This is the largest contradiction that underlies the neo-Darwinian fairy tale, but, as we have seen, not the only one.

Strickberger and Futuyma could have made disclaimers of their atheistic and materialistic views as being the mere personal philosophical preferences they are rather than straightforward facts of evolutionary science, but they have not clarified matters in this way. Instead, their claims read as philosophical adjuncts to the theory of evolution, conceptual tenets the authors believe to be grounded in the scientific evidence. No such grounding exists, as we shall soon see. Not even quantum physics requires such a view, as quantum particle behavior in groups, that is, their statistical behavior, always turns out orderly in precisely the same way such that natural law, scientific knowledge and prediction are made possible. There can be nothing accidental about so consistent a phenomenon, one which provides the foundation for absolutely all of the orderly natural world, and indeed of science itself.

The cited authors are not alone in the history of evolutionary thought in affirming God-incompatible formulations of evolution. It is quite common, as much the standard as not. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, co-originator of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in the introduction to Carl Zimmer's text, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, says that evolution has no direction, no purpose and no goal. Ernst Mayr totally rejects cosmic purpose as scientifically indefensible. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the very fathers of modern evolutionary biology, was at the core of the new evolutionary synthesis[114] circa 1950 that originated the two modern forms of evolutionary theory, Neo-Darwinian Theory and Synthetic Theory,[115] its God-compatible “twin.” Dobzhansky says this about the evolutionary process: “Though neither planned, guided, predestined or predetermined (except in the Laplacian sense of universal deterministic causality), the biological evolution gave rise to man.”[116]

What Dobzhansky has asserted here goes far beyond natural science into philosophy…and it is just terrible philosophy. What’s wrong with it? Deterministic causality is not only the perfect method for a designer to use, it is the only method available in a world where physical things are permitted to change over time. Without rules of causality things would fluctuate chaotically, making the world unlivable. There would be no way either to develop a design or to maintain one. The only alternative in such a case is for the designer of the universe to intervene constantly to impose his will upon creation in a continuous miracle. The designer might plausibly wish not to have his divine attention tied continuously to the maintenance of mundane physical systems and structures in this way. Lesser monarchs, that is, earthly kings would certainly balk at it. They would not enjoy being locked into the most extreme form of micromanagement. To arbitrarily say, with Dobzhansky, that we must exclude rules of causation as a means of design is simply to beg the question of God outright. There is no scientific argument in Dobzhansky’s statement, only an unevidenced philosophical assumption—and a false one.

Indirect causation is often the tool of choice for accomplishing a purpose. Therefore, its presence leading from a complete mystery suggesting the largest miracle that could ever be conceived to living systems so astronomically complex that chance would have no hope of achieving them is not to be dismissed. Billiards and pool are 100% about causation, as is hunting, cooking etc. Hitting the cue ball causes it to collide with the target ball, which causes additional collisions and, if one is fortunate, the dropping of the correct ball in the correct hole, the desired rebound, contacts, deflections and positioning. In the act of hunting one causes an arrow or bullet to fly towards a game animal under known rules of ballistics. Physical causation is everywhere used in the assembly of machines, in architecture and in engineering. Anyone who has ever tried to cook without proper instruction on the cause and effect of spices and cooking times needs no further argument about indirect design through rules of causation.

In denying causation as a potential instrument of an intelligent designer, Dobzhansky is merely expressing his preferred personal worldview, not a finding of science. By ruling out arbitrarily, that is, for no good reason, the only method of creation over time available in the physical world, and then announcing triumphantly that there is no evidence for creation at all, he is, as Froehicky so eloquently says in the X-Files, “rigging the game.” He is denying evidence of intelligent design in God's majestic creation that is nothing short of overwhelming. What he should have said was not that deterministic causation could not be a method of creation but "Man! God can really cook!"

Throughout the history of the evolutionary debate Darwinists who have argued against God and intelligent design have really only argued against this implausible alternative of constant supernatural intervention because they have been unable to trace the causal chain of events from the Big Bang to human creation. They imply something much stronger to their readers, however, viz that they have ruled out all options for God and intelligent design (not just the inane and archaic ones), to include important future discoveries in science (and there is a lot of room for them) that trace the causality more precisely from the Big Bang to human creation.

In the future, the causal chain from the Big Bang to life will be known much more completely. It will be filled in further, perhaps, by referencing even the electromagnetic properties of amino acids and other chemical compounds. Interactions and related causal chains of events will be revealed at levels currently inaccessible to routine scientific study. Dobzhansky’s position that causation is irrelevant to purpose is therefore logically and scientifically unsupportable. At the very least it was fully premature, as science has revealed so much startling new data since Dobzhansky’s time that the genetic and microbiological knowledgebase available to evolutionists of his day was the merest fraction of what we have today, though our knowledge remains far from complete. To say that God could not create by way of a complex causal chain of events is simply bad logic, for there is nothing that so constrains him.

Causation, one may call it Newtonian mechanics or statistical quantum causation as you prefer (no difference accrues at the practical level) is, in theory, scientifically traceable all the way back to the Big Bang that created the universe. This is why Dobzhansky calls causation “universal;” it is everywhere in the physical world, that is, it is universal in scope. Causation includes everything except individual quantum particle behavior, particles too small to have any effect. It does include their group behavior, which is what generates regularity in the natural world. In saying that evolution was unplanned except for the determinism of physical causation, causation that includes everything capable of producing an effect on this side of the Big Bang, Dobzhansky must either be claiming to know something important about what lies on the other side of the mystery of the Big Bang, which is held to be scientifically impossible to know (viz that no intelligent design or purpose occurred there), or be saying something completely trivial: “except for everything physical there is no plan or purpose discernable in the physical world.” The first option is impossible, the second trivial and ridiculous.

Am I sure Dobzhansky’s profundity hasn’t escaped me? He is, after all, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary biology. He is undoubtedly a great biologist, but I refer you to rule number one for our present study: the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. I’ll tell you how profound this is. It is like saying that we can differentiate no specific evidence for God or intelligent design in nature because it all looks like evidence! This is so because physical causation leads right back to a complete miracle-like mystery at the Big Bang where everything came from nothing in a fraction of a second on the one hand, and on the other, it advances forward from the Big Bang with amazing rapidity towards the astronomically complex designs of life, which it should never have achieved by accident in a trillion trillion lifetimes of our universe. Such an overabundance of evidence hardly argues against purpose in nature. Dobzhansky can be forgiven that mistake personally, as the Big Bang theory was not established until a few years after his statement was made. He might have based his position on the alternative assumption that the universe had always been exactly as it is and was itself eternal. Not so, science has since discovered.

Despite the fact that physical/cosmological processes have been much more visibly traced since Dobzhansky’s time, modern neo-Darwinists carry on the same doctrine minus Dobzhansky’s excuse. Dobzhansky could have recanted his statement, of course, when the Big Bang theory was later originated; it was well within his lifetime. Thus this objection remains a legitimate criticism to Dobzhansky’s published works taken as a whole.

In any case, neo-Darwinists present no convincing reason for us to believe that the causal chain of events that proceeds in an amazingly direct and rapid fashion from the Big Bang to human life, that is, in a much more direct and rapid manner than an accident would conceivably do, could not constitute the sequential implementation of a plan and purpose. Physical events from the atomic level through basic chemistry to planetary positioning are known to be amazingly fine-tuned in favor of life’s creation.[117] Why couldn’t these physical constants and configurations, so heavily biased for life, be the result of a plan to create life? Dobzhansky does not say. Modern neo-Darwinists simply say that, from their individual human perspectives, the process is not perfect based upon arbitrary humanist criteria, that is, it does not proceed in a straight line to its goal and it allows suffering. Therefore, they say, God could not have done it. In other words, they apparently feel that God must be a humanist.

Neo-Darwinists have claimed much in opposition to religion through the years, apparently presuming that biological expertise automatically confers philosophical competence. The historical record does not bear this out. As one famous pundit once remarked, “The neo-Darwinist is no philosopher.” Upon close examination, the structure and content of the neo-Darwinian case for lack of purpose in evolution turns out to be a complete logical shambles, lacking both scientific and philosophical merit.

Nonetheless, noted philosophers have occasionally indorsed this transparently fallacious view. Consider this quote from Bertrand Russell.

It appears that during those ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modem theologians do not tell us.[118]

Although Bertrand Russell was certainly recognized as a great philosopher, as a scientist he was a mathematician not an evolutionist. Oddly, despite Russell’s intellectual brilliance and humanitarian compassion, and the fact that he was one of the greatest logicians of all time, he simply had a blind spot in his reasoning concerning the need to sort out the evil from the good. The fact that people may choose to be evil through the exercise of the God given gift of radical free will refutes the neo-Darwinist/humanist argument that God should have made and then maintained without interruption a suffering-free paradise from the very beginning. Russell’s position implies the mistaken belief that suffering is and can only be caused by flaws in nature, not by flaws in man. The truth is much to the contrary, as the war crime tribunals and daily headlines loudly proclaim. All of this notwithstanding, Russell was no fan of the frequently unfounded logic of evolutionists.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.[119]

Nor was Bertrand Russell an atheist in the pure sense of the word as many would have us believe.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.[120]

In other words, Russell’s problem was not so much that he had an argument against the existence of God, but that there was so much evil and suffering in the world that one would be hard pressed to argue that God was good. However, because God cannot be held responsible for humanity’s freely chosen acts of evil and cruelty, the neo-Darwinists; humanistic arguments against God reduce to the assertion that if God created this world, it should be a physical paradise. In other words, at least his part of the situation should be perfect. The paradise that humanists so often criticize God for not producing in the first instance was, in the Catholic/Christian view created in the first instance (the Garden of Eden) and can now only be recreated after judgment, or at least only be maintained after judgment. The perfection of Eden could not be maintained, not because of God’s failure, but because of man’s failures. Therefore, judgment itself must await a period of opportunity for the expression of free will, the opportunity either to selfishly inflict evil or to compassionately oppose suffering. Only after this has occurred can evil be separated from the good once and for all. In effect, God has, in the creation of this imperfect world given us “enough rope to hang ourselves,” or, alternatively, to pull ourselves back into the boat.

A world such as the neo-Darwinists insist God should have made allows no suffering. It therefore permits neither real-time remedial punishment nor pure justice. Such a world provides no impetus for self-centered persons to turn to God for salvation and rebirth. A world that does not allow accidental, that is, undeserved, suffering does not allow for soul-purifying and redemptive compassion and charity in those who respond to the suffering of others. If he or she deserved it, there is no need to feel sorry for them. It thus provides no grounds to perfect and advance our souls to a state where we can be trusted with paradise once we are given it. Thus, Bertrand Russell is wrong. Theologians have given an explanation of why God didn't create paradise in a straightforward manner, minus suffering. He did that first in the Garden of Eden. But man fell through his own free choice, and, with Satan, introduced evil and suffering into the world.

As long as humans are spiritually imperfect, a contradiction will always result from seeking paradise on earth: an otherwise perfect world will never be paradise as long as there are imperfect beings in it. In the world favored by Russell and the humanists, one perfect from the outset, a view often reflected in neo-Darwinian arguments, final judgment, and thus the final resolution to the problem of evil, would be precluded because there would be no basis upon which to enact judgment. No evil could be done; no good could be added to the perfection already present. The evil ones would be forever blessed with a paradise to live in (one they did not deserve). As you can no doubt see, this is an impossible scenario. Given free will, the evil ones would quickly ruin paradise. Minus the disincentive of real-time punishment, they would have the opportunity to go on imposing evil victimization upon the innocent ad infinitum. Thus the neo-Darwinist/atheist position embodies an enormous contradiction, it doesn’t promote paradise; it precludes it.

Far from being the noble flagship of morality that the atheistic humanism of neo-Darwinists claims to be, neo-Darwinism/humanism entails a world where evil is not only permitted, but vastly rewarded. The only means to philosophically justify such a view is to remove from man the capacity for free will and diminish him to the status of a robot. One needn’t punish a robot, but merely reprogram it. While this may in fact be the view of man that many neo-Darwinists and humanists hold, it does not suffice as an argument against God. It makes God out to be stingy with his children and therefore less good or less capable than the definition of an all-powerful God requires. It replaces man's destiny of ascent to a divine realm in glorified form only a little lower than the angels with that of a robot. It deprives God of the ability to institute justice and morality on Earth. This result, being far less than optimally good, is not permitted by the very same argument the neo-Darwinists/humanists make against God: if it is not perfect, God did not do it. Thus a contradiction is invoked by the Darwinian argument that, if God would have created the world it would be physically perfect at the outset. This kind of pre-judgment world precludes spiritual growth, justice, free will, and a higher destiny for man. Contrary to the Darwinist's arrogant claims for their much publicized argument against God, the fact of the matter is that a fully good and fully powerful God could not have done it their way.

While not yet dodging this logical contradiction, neo-Darwinists and (some) humanists have at times countered by asserting that, despite logical and theological objections, we humans simply are robots. One cannot overstate the dangers of this view for human society. They are of the gravest kind. As the great theologian C. S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia) made graphically clear in That Hideous Strength, the final book of his other classic series of novels, referred to as the "Ransom Trilogy," or the "Space Trilogy," such a view pulls all moral grounding from the criminal justice system. You can’t hold a robot morally accountable for preprogrammed behavior. This view opens the door to totalitarian governments implementing behavioral conditioning programs for humans, and for the blatant disregard of all human rights. Robots have no inalienable rights.

In the neo-Darwinist/humanist view, what is good is merely what works best for society, and who is to say what ‘best’ is except those holding power at the time? And who is likely to rise to power in a system that does not suppress criminal behavior? Unscrupulous criminals, of course. C. S. Lewis’ novel, and the two that precede it in the series make this argument against the neo-Darwinian philosophy more strongly than analytical logic can ever do, as does Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged. In both of these great achievements of literature one is shown the inevitable progression of the neo-Darwinian philosophy. The reader watches it unfold step by abhorrent step into a society that never questions but simply believes what they are told by “scientific experts” until…a horror story results repugnant beyond all human conception. Both novels must be read to achieve a full appreciation of the dangers inherent in the neo-Darwinian view. This is why Christians should object to the teaching, not of basic evolution, but of neo-Darwinian evolution in our classrooms, for as Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn has pointed out, neo-Darwinian evolution is political ideology, not science at all, and as Pope John Paul II warned, such theories remove all foundation for the dignity of the human person.

Fallacy #98: The “Let’s all agree to cheat complexity” fallacy, AKA “Accidents can make complex machines.” One might also call this the GIGO fallacy, “garbage in garbage out,” or “easy as pie.”

We have never seen it happen. All of our experience says it cannot happen. The mathematics of probability theory combined with the resource limits of our universe say the universe cannot afford it (see the next appendix). Such a thing would never happen in many times the history of the universe so far (20 billion years). If it were possible in general for accidents to make machines archaeologists would have found complex machine artifacts from ancient times that had nothing to do with the human cultures of the region and era, that is, archeologists would have found many naturally occurring machines. They have not. Thus, the only possibility left is that soft gooey machines (living organisms) alone can be made by accident, while machines with hard edges and rigid structures cannot. There is no reason to believe this to be true. Fluids are the most unwieldy of materials to accidentally throw together into a machine. Randomly pushing fluids around quickly disintegrates into a situation of irreversible chaos. Thus a cell wall that is selectively permeable by the right kinds of fluids in the right amounts at the right times is the only solution.

However, if such complex molecular arrangements as are required for a selective permeability sufficient for life tend to form spontaneously from raw chemicals, the event of such formation, while spontaneous, cannot be presumed accidental; it must be demonstrated accidental. If the laws of chemistry require selectively permeable membranes to consistently occur under the same conditions every time, this tendency would be just another of the many directional factors in nature that in combination securely focus the historical path of physics and chemistry inexorably toward complex life forms. Alternatively, if natural laws do not require the consistent achievement of selective permeability in addition to the thousands of other intensely difficult steps towards living machines, assuming the achievement of those steps to be truly and fully accidental means (mathematically) that there is not enough time and material in the history of the universe for the process to have occurred. Standard probability theory condemns such a claim as nonscientific.

Richard Dawkins would say cumulative selection can achieve complex living machines via a truly accidental process by preserving the elementary modules of the larger design one step at a time until they have all snapped together into something astronomically complex. But it turns out that the minimal complexity of the typical elementary module required to compose the tree of life forbids accidental composition. There is no scientific evidence to support the belief that simpler modules can get the job done. Such magical modules exist only in Dawkins’ imagination.

There are some simple things that small genetic changes can produce, color or size change, single enzymes in bacteria, yes. But the components of structural and functional biological form change relating to the hard parts of living designs that might be selectable based upon survival and reproductive fitness and will actually move life a step up the tree in complexity are not color and size. They are complex functions that must interact internally with vastly complex interactive systems. Consequently, they involve both multiple genes and sets of epigenetically produced physical structures that must be closely orchestrated in real time for a successful evolutionary result. There is nothing either small or accidental about the real “minimal” modules of successful biological form change. Even here I have oversimplified the problem in Dawkins’ favor, for I have ignored the more difficult problem of origins. Evolution must first establish a complex tripartite genomic system, involving not only enormous libraries of meaningful books written in DNA but a translation system that can build a complexly interactive physical system from that code in real time. The steps to doing this much harder task, steps that might be achieved by accident, don’t yet exist even in someone’s imagination.

I began this discussion with the observation that we have never seen an accident build a machine of any complexity. OK, it may have “built” a “teeter-totter,” that is, a board laid across a stone for a pivot point, or perhaps a mud wheel impaled upon a stick; but that’s about it. All our experience argues against this travesty of reason. So much so in fact that scientists and philosophers like William Dembski have proposed that their must be a natural law against it. He calls this law LCI, the Law of Conservation of Information. You and I already know this law as GIGO, Garbage in, Garbage out. In other words, you can’t get more meaningful information out of a system than you put into it. I ask the reader to contemplate for a moment what the application of this law to neo-Darwinian theory, whose superficial merits depend entirely upon the undetected perpetration of 100 logical fallacies, entails: garbage in, garbage out.

Complexity cannot be cheated in the way Dawkins proposes. As Professor William Dembski has shown with his thorough analysis and cogent arguments the mathematics of specified forms of functional complexity entail that once a certain threshold of complexity is crossed, be it 10⁵⁰ or 10¹⁵⁰, accident cannot be the source in the real world. The complexity of the human system is trillions upon trillions of times the larger of these limits of the historically proposed barriers to chance. What Professor Michael Behe has shown by revealing the presence of irreducibly complex biological systems is that working backwards from a human being through the concrete aspects of biological design to the minimal module set that would be needed to compose the final system, one sees that the easy as pie minimal units Richard Dawkins has hypothesized as grounding the accidental composition of life do not exist; they are a figment of the neo-Darwinian imagination. This is a fact fully confirmed by genetics and microbiology.

Fallacy #99: Redefining the question (so that the favored answer is made possible)

This is a more specific version of the larger fallacy of rigging the game, cheating. This error is most flagrantly committed within the context of the definition of life. We don’t have any real trouble discerning what is alive and what is not; we only have trouble putting that recognition into words or objective scientifically observable criteria. This, in itself, suggests there is something ineffable about life that goes beyond its raw physical components. In other words, maybe there is no objectively observable criteria that captures the essence of life. To insist that there must be is to commit the fallacy of holding the hidden premise of materialism, which is a personal philosophical preference not a scientific fact. Given the failed attempts to achieve abiogenesis, the origination of life from nonliving chemical materials, there seems to have been a push to redefine life into something simpler that could be produced in the lab, something ridiculous like a few interacting gases enclosed in a sugar ammonia bubble. I refer to the reader to Appendix 6 of this book for a more extensive discussion of this question.

Fallacy #100: Consensus or majority opinion makes truth

Practically all one hears from neo-Darwinists in this debate is that the majority of mainstream science has come to agree that Darwinian evolution is a fact. They then slip into a discussion of how society has been transformed by the accidental worldview of evolution, when such a view is in no way entailed by basic evolution. But the evidence they give is never direct observation, scientific demonstration or logic, it is majority opinion, the argument from expert authority or consensus. Were the majority of Germans right in following Hitler? Are the majority of lemmings right in following their leaders off a cliff?

The simple meaning of the word progress entails that, at the time of any major advancement in science, most scientists will be on the incorrect side of the issue. The standard of consensus or majority opinion in science is therefore both invalid due to the documented danger of political abuse and dangerous because it tends to induce stagnation by thwarting new theory proposals. Consider that, in Darwin's time, all scientists believed that the inside of the cell was nothing but protoplasm. Not only was Darwin's theory of evolution composed under the mistaken assumption that there was nothing inside a living cell but nondescript goo, if scientists had not been willing to challenge the mistaken majority opinion about protoplasm we would never have discovered the modern sciences of genetics or microbiology that underlie the larger part of modern medicine! The need to progress theoretical explanation by throwing out the old and replacing it with a better model that integrates recent discoveries obligates science to ward off entrenchment of the current majority opinion. Objective evidence and logic are the standards of science, not opinion.

--------------

Total score for neo-Darwinian reasoning on evolution: F-.

“Oh, come now,” you may say, “F-? Isn’t that a bit harsh even for them?” No. If you doubt my grade, take a few months of careful self-study to teach yourself logical reasoning the way our best philosophy students do using the excellent textbook on logic and critical thinking by Professor Merrilee H. Salmon (University of Pittsburgh).[121] In the meantime, here is yet another demonstration of the neo-Darwinist’s fallacy ridden argument. In this case we have a fully indefensible reconstruction of the thought of Charles Darwin himself, with atheistic spin laid on thick (fallacy #42). This was written as the very afterward to a Barnes & Noble printing of the 1^st edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The author is Oliver Francis.

Though mollify his critics Darwin did, when it came to the matter of God. References to the “Creator” absent in this first edition were added to the second: a largely tactical decision to prevent accusations of blasphemy distracting attention from the scientific importance of his theories. Moreover, “Creator” gives a softer meaning than ‘God,’ arguable [sic] no more definite than “Darwin’s” “Nature” that had no more power of direct agency other than the “aggregate action and product of many natural laws.”[122]

What’s wrong with this? It sounds awfully good, so it must be true, right? First of all it is ambiguous in a manner beneficial to the atheistic case; it seems to imply that all references to the “Creator” were missing from the 1^st Edition, which is not true; there were two references both of which are cited here. Second, Darwin ascribed the origin of natural law to God. Why would a believer in God define “Creator” to be something else? Third, Darwin gave no indication that he meant anything other than God by “Creator.” In fact, nothing else could serve to mollify his critics who were concerned with blasphemy. Serving up pantheism to Christians, as Francis here suggests, could not be expected to have a mollifying affect! To suggest that Darwin tried such a bait and switch on his critics is to make one or the other out to be a complete fool.

Ascribing such a “soft” meaning of “Creator,” that is, Creator=natural laws=nature, does makes Darwin out to be a complete fool because it has him, on page 210, placing the exact same terms on both sides of an analogy. An analogy, by definition, only holds between unlike terms. Such “analogies” become a ridiculous assertion when the terms are the same. In other words, let’s compare a squirrel to a squirrel. Here is the passage, which is discussing the evolution of the complex camera type eye.

In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?[123]

If we substitute “nature” for “Creator” as Oliver Francis would have us do, the propositional content of the passage diagrams out to something like this: a living optical instrument might thus be formed (by the cited natural process) as superior to one of (man-made) glass as the works of nature are to those of man. This is trivial. It is of the logical form “An instance of the rule A is always superior to B can be compared to the rule A is always superior to B.” But this passage is in fact one of the crowning linguistic presentations of Darwin’s core logic, not trivial at all. Thus the concept of nature cannot be substituted for “Creator,” and the expressed purpose of mollifying the Christian critics requires it be given the standard meaning of “God.” Thus, I stand by my original grade of ‘F-’ The neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. As Phillip Johnson might say, I rest my case.

Darwin’s own logic was better. He was not a neo-Darwinist, but the real thing, a Darwinist. Darwin was not trying to grind an atheistic/materialistic axe; he was looking for the true explanation of variation in living natural forms. Charles Darwin never recanted his professional and scientific version of evolution, which included God as the former of natural law and as the explanation of the origin of life.

In light of so many serious flaws in neo-Darwinian reasoning, and the fact that neo-Darwinists do not want the opposing views of intelligent design theory even to be heard in the classrooms, can we trust the neo-Darwinian “authorities” to give us an unbiased presentation of the case for and against accidental evolution? Consider the following quote from Professor Douglas Futuyma.

Creationists on the other hand abound and mount anti-intellectual campaigns that can have severe educational consequences…every person’s well-being and social contributions depend upon his or her ability to reason clearly, to evaluate opposing arguments…[124]

One’s evaluation of creationist vs. evolutionist views of the world is only one instance of the conflict between unreasoning faith and a sometimes less optimistic logic…The conflict is between belief in mechanisms as a sufficient ground for understanding the world and belief in the inscrutable actions of a creator…[125]

According to Futuyma it is the Intelligent design theorists who are unreasoning and anti-intellectual? Like most neo-Darwinists, even Simpson, he feels evolutionists are heroes holding the last line of defense of reason against superstition. Given that the neo-Darwinian argument has never been more than a string of fallacies glossed over with high sounding scientific jargon, I would call that an optimistic view.

The Catholic faith has never been considered unreasoning. The historical writings of the Church Fathers are sufficient to rebut this charge, and prove the neo-Darwinists’ charges of unreasoning superstition ridiculous. Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas alone are sufficient here. Nor do I consider even the modern scientific case for God, literal 6-day and a young earth (ably and honorably represented by Ken Hamm and the Answers in Genesis team in Florence Kentucky) as unreasoning. Different components of their scientific case may be more or less hard to defend based upon the total scientific knowledge base, but the Creation Science argument is highly rational. The only question is whether their specific arguments will bear up under rigorous scientific evaluation.

There are two very different, though equally valid and complimentary, grounds for religious faith: rational argument and private religious experience. The latter includes but is not limited to mystical experience, which is the only part of the faith that is inscrutable. Here again, Futuyma commits a fallacy, confusing a part with the whole, and he has little excuse in the historical record of Catholicism for doing it.

My considered opinion is that both the arguments of intelligent design theory (Behe, Meyer, and Dembski) and the (very different) Creation Science case (AIG) case are more closely reasoned, more logical, than the evidentially spotty and logically fallacious defense of neo-Darwinian evolution. Thus although errors of fact may occur on either side, at least the ID side demonstrates a desire to pursue truth over politics. Granted, the mainstream view of the scientific evidence goes against AIG on the young earth hypothesis and literal 6-day creation, but the AIG score on reasoning skills still far exceeds that of the neo-Darwinists. We have just seen the quality of neo-Darwinist logic. It stinks. Professor Douglas Futuyma’s claim that logic is exclusively on the side of atheistic accidental neo-Darwinian evolution in this debate is therefore visibly false. The only real reason for the continued existence of the theory of accidental evolution at all is that atheistic scientists can see no other explanation to be possible. The theory of accidental evolution has been established merely by default. This hardly constitutes a resounding comprehensive logical victory such as Futuyma claims. To paraphrase a statement by famous evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley concerning what science should propose to the public as the theory of the origin of the tree of life: “We cannot tell the public that we don’t know.” This is the only reason that we are currently stuck with the horrendous “explanation” of accidental evolution, because science has no real explanation and is unwilling to admit that it doesn’t know.

----------

Appendix 2:

The Resource Exhaustion Argument

(Crunching the Numbers)

What Can a Random Process Achieve? Limitations of an Entropic Force

Thousands of mutagenesis experiments have been performed and no viable mutations significant enough to evidence progressive macroevolution have been observed (generally no viable mutations at all). Under such prolonged heavy bombardment by mutagens, some laboratory specimens, the fruit fly, for example, which is the most common laboratory subject, should have evinced some macroevolutionary potential, yet they have not. The force of the evidence is so compelling as to suggest that some natural law or other requires this result: a law that forbids random processes from producing nontrivial ordered results (functional order of the magnitude we see in living systems). Seeing no such law established in our current theoretical base, I will now propose one. This proposal does not originate with me. Professor William Dembski has previously made a similar proposal under the moniker “Law of Conservation of Information (LCI).” I reiterate a similar argument here because mainstream science has yet to endorse LCI (as they should), and, much like Congress, if the public does not demand they do the right thing, it is possible they never will. Dembski himself credits Peter Medawar with originating the LCI concept in a somewhat weaker form.[126]

I call my version of LCI, ORLEF-B (Ordered Result Limitations of Entropic Forces (acting upon) Biological (systems)). ORLEF-B constrains the increase in order that can arise as the result of the application of an accidental, random, or disordered force to a biological system. To be clear, although I think ORLEF-B is fully implicit in the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, what I am doing here is not merely a restatement of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. The 2^nd Law says something different. It says that entropy (disorder) never decreases in a closed system and tends to increase. The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics applies only to the larger universe as a complete system and assumes our universe to be a closed system receiving no energy transactions from outside. The 2^nd Law allows for localized increases in order at points in the universe only when they are offset by decreases in order occurring elsewhere in the universe. It stipulates that no increase in the total order of the universe is possible.[127]

ORLEF-B is different than the 2^nd Law. ORLEF-B is not concerned with the overall tendency to disorder in the closed system of the universe; it is concerned with the effects that disordered event processes have upon smaller localized open systems, specifically highly ordered machines, biological or otherwise. Viewing a physical system as an ordered process of information flow, random forces, in a sense, become disinformation. Here disinformation does more than require a reduction in order equivalent to the simple quantity of disinformation inserted. Inserted into a dynamic interactive system, physical disinformation becomes more than a simple lie; it becomes a lie upon which much else depends. In a dynamic physical system, disinformation can catastrophically reduce the order of the system, damaging the flow and process of the system itself. Thus, order is increasingly reduced by physical disinformation (random processes) inserted into the system, and the system will often be destroyed by it. ORLEF-B thus constrains the increase in order arising from random forces to a definite and very minute fraction of the disordered effects that such forces will inevitably produce on any highly complex dynamically functioning system. In short, ORLEF-B says that the cost of producing order from disorder in a localized system that is already highly ordered will always be exorbitant. It says that there are strict limits upon the local increases in order that random forces can generate, and that these limits can (in theory) be computed with confidence and empirically confirmed. It will take a lot of future research to hone the ORLEF-B constant to precision (and the value of the constant will vary for different kinds of systems). Nonetheless, it is easy to demonstrate that the ORLEF-B constant must fall within a certain range. That range guarantees that the cost of generating Earth’s tree of life with a random process would be so exorbitant as to far exceed the time and physical resources available in the history of our entire universe.

ORLEF-B merely confirms what we already know intuitively: random forces do more harm than good. They especially harm the fragile complex designs of sophisticated living machines. ORLEF-B says that, when the complexity of a machine goes beyond a critical threshold (and all of life is past that threshold), random forces can never progress the non-trivial complexity of that system; they can only degrade it.[128]

ORLEF-B can be considered a specific application of Dembski’s “new” law of thermodynamics, LCI, though I think it is at least partially implicit in the definition of entropy itself. The definition of entropy entails that fully entropic (disordered) energy can produce no useful work. In LCI Dembski says something very similar: you can’t get more complex specified information (CSI) out of a physical process than goes into it at the beginning. What we call order in functioning physical systems is the result of complex specified information (that is, order well beyond the triviality of fractals). Contrary to what the neo-Darwinists must maintain to give their fractal counterexample credibility, the physical systems of the universe and the Earth are not and have never been fractal generators. A fractal generator requires all or most of the elements of a system to be randomly mixed and remixed periodically on a fairly rapid cycle in order to get the statistical probability of accidentally achieving some substantially ordered patterns by a sheer stroke of luck over time. The opportunity to randomly mix and remix the elements of our universe was precluded as of the smallest fraction of the first second by the appearance of natural law, and there were in fact no elements to mix prior to that.

What I wish to do with ORLEF-B is to add a definite value for a mathematical constant for use as a starting point to make Dembski’s LCI practically applicable to concrete questions of evolutionary science. ORLEF-B says that one can quantify the magnitude of ordered or disordered products to be expected from a system. This is done by first identifying the ratio of CSI (or specified functional order) to randomness (disorder) in that system. The more random the system, the higher the cost in disordered by products from its interactions with other systems. Different kinds of physical subsystems will require different constants to compute output values for system to system interaction. The hypothetical (and very rough) approximations I offer for the ORLEF-B constant below apply only to biological systems (-B).

ORLEF-B predicts two things and entails one other. It predicts that an encounter between a genuinely (and substantially) random force and a much more highly ordered biological system that surprisingly produces some ordered results will always produce a vastly greater magnitude of disordered results. There will be the inevitable grey areas and rare exceptions as with any other rule, for example where two substantially ordered systems interact. System ‘A’ may have a slightly higher ratio of order to disorder than ‘B’, yet when they interact it may infrequently be the case that the interaction results in a decrease in order in B and an increase in A. This does not invalidate the rule of ORLEF-B, which is only a statistical rule; it means that the details of the interaction of the two grossly described systems will have to be analyzed to obtain an explanation. In other words, the minority part of the system was the controlling part of the interaction in those cases.

ORLEF-B predicts that random mutations, that is, mutations generated by forces known to be almost purely random, will always be destructive to biological systems over time before they can be beneficial. Though results from some such encounters may initially appear to be neutral, they will always converge to be deleterious in aggregate prior to causing an additive change large enough to generate a major advancement in body form (macroevolution). In this tenet, ORLEF-B can be seen to follow from Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, though it is more fundamentally grounded in thermodynamic law (the definition of entropy). The converse implication of ORLEF-B entails that any force observed to statistically produce predominantly ordered results on biological systems, cannot be a random force. Ordered results achieved from the interactions of mixed systems should also be attributed (as a vast statistical predominance) to the ordered components of the mixed force causing the change, not to the random elements.

I have limited the scope of ORLEF-B to that of living organisms and random forces in their immediate environment, that is, limited it to biology, as a convenience to the present discussion. However, future work should be done to facilitate the development of customized parameters for different types of physical systems. The definition of entropy in thermodynamic law theoretically entails that an analogous subtheorem can be formulated for all other kinds of physical systems/subsystems without exception.

Ruling out a productive result from any genuinely random source, ORLEF-B requires random changes to be destructive based upon purely theoretical considerations. Once the theoretical entailments of ORLEF-B are experimentally confirmed beyond question, that is, once random mutations are empirically proven to be astronomically biased toward the destructive—and, again, this has largely already been done by mutagenesis studies, including research on cancer and birth defects—neo-Darwinian theory is left with a dilemma. It must either radically downgrade projections of how much viable biological form change can be expected from genuinely random mutations, thus ruling out random mutations being the source of macroevolution, or the language must change to make clear that randomness in the sense that the public understands the word is not the source of macroevolution at all. The source of the order requisite to evolution is, rather, the highly ordered initial state of the universe combined with the influence of natural law and specific biological mechanisms such as transpositional genetic machinery and the developmental genome, the origin of which still remains a mystery.

Conclusive evidence for ORLEF-B should not be long in coming. In fact, there may be no scientist who will dispute it even now, minus the further philosophical conclusions I have drawn from it. If the physical world were an example of pure mathematics, ORLEF-B could be derived directly from probability theory. What remains to be shown is actually not whether or not ORLEF-B is true, but rather, how the laws of physics and chemistry will govern the translation of ORLEF-B to physical processes. From a purely logical perspective, since ORLEF-B can be derived from probability theory for any purely mathematical world, and a fully random world would be such a world, it is only because our world is less than fully random that a physical demonstration is required at all. So, the neo-Darwinists who proclaim an accidental world are caught in a logical pin here, a two pronged dilemma from which they cannot escape. Either they must admit that the world is not accidental or they must concede the truth of ORLEF-B, which can be mathematically demonstrated to be true in a fully accidental world. If they concede that the world is not accidental then they must allow room for cosmic purpose in nature (Ernst Mayr and other prominent evolutionists have claimed that science could rule out cosmic purpose). If, alternatively, they persist in asserting an accidental world then ORLEF-B, which holds true in such a world, shows that the accidental origination of life could not have occurred within the limited history of our universe. Thus, the import of this discussion of ORLEF-B is to require at a minimum that science must always allow room for cosmic purpose in nature.

There are no tricky ways around this. The current evidence suggests that accidental mutations fail to produce viable form evolution in living creatures no matter which route they are proposed through. Incremental accumulations of single nucleotide changes initially do less harm than larger transfers,[129] however, this process alone is too slow to meet the evolutionary timetable. Basic math and common sense tell us that accumulations of point mutations in multiple individuals that are somehow combined to achieve more rapid form change in a single host do not solve the time problem, for they have the equivalent effect of a randomly placed transfer of a large segment of DNA. That means they cause a large problem. Futuyma confirms that mutations having large effects are indeed a problem: “Mutations with large effects are often deleterious, but some evolutionary biologists believe that such mutations have sometimes been important in evolution.”[130] I take him to mean that, although the entire evolutionary process could not have been substantially grounded in large mutations, on exceptional occasions a mutation with large effect occurred that fit into an evolutionary scheme and aided an advancement. Futuyma implies that the evolutionary process is otherwise predominantly grounded in smaller mutations. ORLEF-B implies that, if beneficial large mutations did occasionally occur, more complete information would reveal them not to be fully accidental. ORLEF-B codifies into natural law the age-old wisdom of common sense: “Accidents don’t make machines, they break machines.”

Consider both the enormity of the earth’s historical biomass (earth’s current total biomass = ~1,850,000,000,000 tons[131]), and its complexity (a single human body contains trillions of cells, each doing millions of things per minute). The complex designs seen in an historical aggregate of approximately 100,000,000 or more species is seen to easily refute neo-Darwinian theory via ORLEF-B. ORLEF-B requires that the aggregate of disordered results from random mutations would vastly outweigh the ordered results. The lack of mutant designs in the fossil record sufficient to establish such a disproportionately greater biomass of mutant organisms indicates that an accidental evolutionary process was not at work. Therefore, the fossil record in conjunction with ORLEF-B refutes neo-Darwinian evolution.

Unless...unless an enormous amount of mutant design proposals actually did occur but, for some reason, never made it past the abortive embryonic stage. In this case the offsetting disordered byproduct required by ORLEF-B is satisfied by nonliving/stillborn byproducts unlikely to be detected in the fossil record. Known sensitivity of developmental systems makes such a scenario fully plausible.

The astute reader, and especially neo-Darwinian advocates, are likely to say “Wait a minute; hold it right there! You have just offered a plausible scenario that explains why there are gaps in the fossil record. Walla Booby, neo-Darwinian evolution proved! Right?” No.

As the mathematical argument below reveals, the size of the mutant/abortive byproduct would have to be so large as to be forbidden by the resource limits of the universe. Another problem with the abortive design hypothesis is that, minus an explanation as to why modern biological processes are radically different from historical ones, the ones that produced our ancestors, we should also be seeing a rate of birth defects thousands of times the current rate.

For the abortant embryo phenomena to be nearly universal, as this scenario requires, there would have to be a very tight link established between new phenotypic form/function-altering DNA sequences and the developmental part of the genome. Otherwise some proposed aberrant functional changes could survive the developmental stage to present malformed species in the fossil record. Such a tight link is not impossible. Alternative splicing, that is, reading the genetic code in more than one way, has been shown to be a fact. So the same genes could be simultaneously governing operational and developmental processes, depending on how they are alternatively read. Should such a genetic link be present between developmental and mature systems, it would explain the gaps in the fossil record. However, how such a sophisticated, and one wants to say “foresighted,” link could be constructed accidentally is very hard to imagine.

In addition, if the interdependence between the developmental gene modules and the larger operational genome is that strict, the evolutionary process becomes limited by the weakest link, in this case the developmental genes. As confirmed by Wells and Pollack above, the developing organism has been shown to be so hypersensitive to accidental mutation that the results of accidental tinkering are either lethal or seriously pathological. This brings us back full circle to the affirmation of Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis.

We have good reasons to suspect that a rebuttal of ORLEF-B and subsequent defense of neo-Darwinism will never be achieved. Scientists have now explored the entire genome map of a few small creatures and looked into the minute workings of cells with the electron microscope. No obvious pathways to macroevolution have been revealed. In other instances, we have mutated entire genomes in mutagenesis saturation experiments and seen no viable evolutionary results. From whence then will come the potential to generate radically different creatures at such a phenomenal rate as the Cambrian explosion requires?

There are three good reasons to assume ORLEF-B holds true:

(1) Meyer cites peer-reviewed random protein synthesis studies to ground his estimate that random processes will produce junk (or poison) 10⁷⁷ times for every time they create a useful protein.

(2) Thousands of mutagenesis studies show that no biologically viable ordered results have come from billions of random mutations.

(3) Thermodynamic science’s definition of entropy says that truly random energy can never be reclaimed to do any useful work, in biology or anywhere else.

How many more studies must reveal exactly the same results before standard scientific (inductive) logic justifies the assumption that future accidental mutations will not be beneficial and that infrequent neutral or mildly beneficial mutations will never link to form the large and highly complex combinations of multiple gene sets, gene expression markers, and the corresponding microtubule alterations needed to cause macroevolution? Good science does not permit the maintenance of a purely theoretical assumption in the face of universally contradictory empirical data.

Whatever is a Probability Bound?

The probability bound, or boundary, is a threshold of improbability that mathematicians say rules out chance or accidental processes altogether, a boundary beyond which chance cannot go. Accidental processes cannot exceed this boundary, for to do so entails using up all the time and resources available in the history of the universe prior to getting the job done. Even famous evolutionists have admitted that pure chance processes could not have produced life without being thwarted by this boundary. George Gaylord Simpson cites Julian Huxley: "to produce such adapted types by chance recombination...would require a total assemblage of organisms that would more than fill the universe, and overrun astronomical time." Mathematicians vary in their opinion of what level of improbability should be used for this boundary. William Dembski argues that any event with a probability less than 10^-150 simply cannot occur by chance. He calls this limit the universal probability bound. Dembski goes on to say 10^-150 is the most generous limit ever proposed in the scientific literature. “The French mathematician Emile Borel proposed a more stringent 10^-50 as a universal probability bound below which chance could definitely be precluded.” Other modern scientists use 10^-94, still others 10^-120, but no professional involved in probability-based endeavors believes a probability less than 10^-150 can occur by chance.[132] Obviously, our current estimate of the improbability of Darwinian evolution goes many times beyond this threshold at less than one chance in 10⁴⁷⁴.

The probability bound for Dembski represents the total number of particles in the universe multiplied by the smallest time in which a particle event can occur (the Planck time) multiplied by the age of the universe. This is done to compute the total resources available in the history of the universe in terms of maximum particle events. The assumption being that any event requires at least one of the smallest particles for at least the smallest increment of time within which a particle can act. Theories that require more particle event resources than the universe can offer are reasonably adjudged to be false.  

Some care with language is needed in the analysis of probability bound arguments because event probabilities, which represent the total number of possible event alternatives derivable from a set of circumstances, do not translate directly to precise particle event requirements. Some kind of bridging assumption must be made. A formula of some kind is needed to translate the unlike terms. We can make one such bridge by assuming that, on average, any specific event will not occur by chance until approximately half the alternatives have been played out first. This is the standard probability assumption. Professor James W. Valentine makes such an assumption in chapter 3 of On the Origin of Phyla in saying that it would, on average, take a monkey 10¹⁸⁰ years just to type the first sentence of Darwin's Origin of Species. The bridging assumptions of standard probability theory are requisite to doing science at all, for the entirety of science is a probabilistic endeavor. Nothing in science yields complete certainty. Thus, to say with Doolittle, Dawkins, Strickberger and the neo-Darwinists that anything at all can happen even in three or four billion years simply because it is a “large” amount of time, regardless of how steep the improbabilities become, is not to do science at all but to forsake science. By definition, science must always go with the probabilities, not against them.

Once we make the bridging assumption of standard probability theory, it is then possible to compute a minimum resource requirement for the universe’s having produced half the possible alternatives before hitting upon the tree of life by accident. The possibilities involved in random chance based evolution are so large that one needn’t proceed further to see that the universe doesn’t have sufficient resources to get the job done via the neo-Darwinian process under this assumption. Half 10⁴⁷⁴ is 5 X 10⁴⁷³, trillions upon trillions of times the particle event resources available in the history of the universe, a reasonably generous estimate of which is currently 10¹⁵⁰.

Because the total event process of evolution of all life forms on earth is very large, I propose that we can make the assumption of a probability outcome near the standard, that is, that the achievement of any one sophisticated biological design will not occur by chance until, on average, approximately half the unworkable alternatives have been tried first.[133] Assuming a number of failed attempts equal to half 10⁴⁷⁴, even with only one particle event allocated per each of the failed efforts, exhausts the universe’s historical resources many times over. Obviously our universe cannot afford to deal out half the cards in the game of random chance based evolution.

If we factor ORLEF-B[134] into the computation of resource requirements, neo-Darwinian evolution has even less of a chance—zero, in fact. But what value shall we initially set for the ORLEF-B constant, the ratio of entropic unusable waste byproducts to ordered results inherent in an accidental process? I propose (somewhat arbitrarily, but I think conservatively) to use 10¹¹⁶, a composite of Meyer’s/Axe’s probability determination for randomly synthesizing a single new protein from nonliving chemicals (10^-125) and the corresponding probability value for randomly synthesizing a single new protein inside a living organism (10^-77). Both of these obstacles (and many others) have to be overcome by a random process to generate the tree of life.

Keying on the protein synthesis process is proper because all living things are composed of proteins; therefore, the degree of efficiency of the random processes involved in generating life forms, as opposed to, say, the efficiency of a random process generating much simpler inert substances like coal or water, should be similar to that for random protein synthesis. The level of complexity is similar, and certainly greater for the accidental generation of a complete living system, which may contain as many as 85,000 different kinds of proteins in trillions of instances, than for a single protein.

Let us now, while integrating ORLEF-B, generously assume that, not the standard expectation of half, but only an extremely small fraction of the deck be dealt out prior to achieving the tree of life, say only 10¹⁰⁰ failed attempts occur prior to success. This may seem like a “big deal,” but it is only one part for every 10³⁷³ of the total “deck” as established by the improbability for neo-Darwinian evolution conservatively computed above at one chance in 10⁴⁷⁴—exorbitantly generous. What would the particle event resource requirements be for neo-Darwinian evolution given this very generous assumption that accident could quickly hit upon the correct designs of life?

It will be necessary to say a tiny bit on background concepts first. This will be easy, really—trust me. If not easy, it will at least be satisfying after a couple of run-throughs to have mastered the concepts. Let’s begin. If randomly done, not every attempt at the creation of a new life form would reach finality. Resource requirements for a random attempt could vary from practically none for an attempt at the creation of a subcomponent of life that either aborts or succeeds quite early to astronomical for an attempt that goes for millenniums before succeeding or aborting.

For convenience then, and because the event process is large enough to warrant standard probability assumptions, I will assume that each attempt to generate a biological design component averages at least half the resource requirements of a completed fully successful attempt at generating that component via the most efficient route. There is no way to know precisely what would happen in any given instance if such an accidental course of events were to occur, but this is a reasonable portrayal of what would happen on average. Given this assumption, the following discussion presents a simple view of the resource requirements for an accidental construction process in biology that got very, very lucky, one that only required our new hypothesis of 10¹⁰⁰ failed attempts.

The resources consumed by the process that generates the bodily structure in the final successful evolutionary attempt, let us call it the generative resource requirement, GR for short, must be added to the resources that makeup the organism’s final bodily structure, its structural resource requirements, SR. Both of these must be combined with the resources used up in all the failed attempts that preceded the successful one in order to arrive at the total resources consumed by the accidental evolutionary process. The resource requirements for the failed attempts in the present case would be represented as ½ GR + ½ SR (this equates to one average try). Multiplying this times the total number of failed tries, in this example assumed to be 10¹⁰⁰ yields (10¹⁰⁰ (½ GR + ½ SR)). If we add in the small additional amount for the final successful try, GR + SR, the simplified resource requirement formula for an accidental process that gets astronomically lucky far beyond the standard probability assumption is then GR + SR + (10¹⁰⁰ (½ GR + ½ SR)).

But what does the formula look like when ORLEF-B is taken into consideration? With ORLEF-B the formula becomes GR + SR + (10¹⁰⁰ (½ GR + ½ SR)) + (SR X the ORLEF-B constant). The ORLEF-B constant, as proposed here, is initially estimated at 10¹¹⁶. ORLEF-B, again, represents the ratio of junk to proper design that an accidental process can be expected to produce, like cutting out very complex paper designs accidentally with your eyes closed, having no goal in mind at all. The completed particle resource estimation formula then becomes GR + SR + (10¹⁰⁰ (½ GR + ½ SR)) + 10¹¹⁶(SR).

I will re-label these factors for clarity.

GR [the resources needed to generate the design on the final successful try]

+

SR [the resources of which the final structure is composed]

+

10¹⁰⁰ [the number of failed attempts at the tree of life in this example]

X

(½ GR + ½ SR) [the resources consumed in an average failed attempt]

+

10¹¹⁶ [the ratio of foul-ups an accidental process can be expected to incur in biology] In other words there will be 10¹¹⁶ aberrantly formed non-SRs for every properly formed SR accidentally achieved, each of which consumes additional resources.

X

(SR) [the resources of which the final structure is composed]

What does this formula actually yield as a resource requirement for an accidental evolutionary process? Delving into the manual computation of resource requirements in terms of elementary particles and particle events by first inventorying the relative proportions of each type of molecule in the total biomass of living things, the number of elementary particles in each molecule of a given type, etc., is an onerous job. I don’t doubt that it can be done as far as the structures and molecular compositions of living things have been described. And it would still be only a rough estimate because only a fraction of living organisms have been identified let alone described. The reader is most welcome to try it, of course. For my part (since I am no longer a young man), I will, instead, propose a shortcut. The shortcut I propose is to plug the current total biomass of the earth into the formula as SR and continue to key the analysis on a gross estimate of mass instead of computing particle events. If the resultant mass required to generate SR taken as the current biomass of Earth exceeds the available resources of the universe through its historical existence, Dembski’s probability bound argument will be in large part validated. Again, Dembski’s argument points to a genuine mismatch between the enormous resources neo-Darwinian theory requires and the much smaller quantity of resources actually available in the history of our universe.

Using the current biomass is generous because the earth’s biomass has been regenerated substantially through the earth’s history. Using only the current biomass will yield a resource requirement significantly smaller than that required to generate the true total historical biomass, which is, of course, the real job that the evolutionary process must accomplish. The current biomass of Earth is estimated at 1,850,000,000,000 tons.[135] Arbitrarily assuming living systems are at least 90% ordered yields an well-ordered biomass of more than 1,665,000,000,000 tons, or approximately 1.6 X 10¹¹ tons. Plugging this ordered biomass estimate into our formula as the structural requirements, SR, yields GR + 1.6 X 10¹¹ + (10¹⁰⁰ (½ GR + ½ (1.6 X 10¹¹))) + 10¹¹⁶(1.6 X 10¹¹).

So, how do arrive at a safe conservative estimate of GR? Estimating the particle event resources required to generate an ordered result in an organism by a random process to be at least double the final structural requirements (that is, that it takes at least twice the Planck time, the smallest fraction of a second, to get the job done with the full compliment of structural resources available) fills in the remaining constant at a radically conservative underestimate to yield 3.2 X 10¹¹ + 1.6 X 10¹¹ + (10¹⁰⁰ (½ (3.2 X 10¹¹) + ½ (1.6 X 10¹¹))) + 10¹¹⁶(1.6 X 10¹¹). Completing the elementary operations gives us more than 1.6 X 10¹²⁸ tons. This is many trillions of times the mass of the universe! The mass of the universe is exactly ______. The blank is there to emphasize the fact that we do not know the precise mass of the universe. Nor do we know its size or density for certain. This information is a critical factor in finally evaluating the plausibility of neo-Darwinian evolution. Therefore, it is odd that neo-Darwinists can be so confident in their theory when the final data required to precisely evaluate it is not yet available. An evaluation of neo-Darwinian evolution based upon the preliminary scientific data that is available, the currently accepted figures considered the best we have and certainly much more than a guess, shows the accidental evolutionary process to be impossible.

Reasonable estimates of the mass of the universe have been made in the range of 3 X 10⁵⁵ grams on the low end to as much as 1.6 X 10⁶⁰ kilograms. A kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds. Converted, the high end estimate of the mass of the universe is somewhat less than 3.53 X 10⁶⁰ pounds. The resource requirements for neo-Darwinian evolution at the small fraction of failed attempts posited by the current example, weigh in at well over 3.2 X 10¹³¹ pounds. This is more than 70 orders of magnitude greater than the highest estimated mass of the universe!

Clearly a random source cannot produce the ordered biomass of the earth, given an assumption of even a small fraction of the standard probability distribution, for the available resources would be exhausted before the smallest portion of living things had been completed. Granting that ORLEF-B is yet to be properly evaluated, these numbers do suggest both that Dembski’s probability bound argument is in the ballpark and that the burden of proof has shifted to Darwinists to defend their stricken theory.

But “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Not so fast,” the die-hard neo-Darwinist will object. You have oversimplified the situation in not allowing for substantial recycling and reuse of the mass and energy of the wasteful byproducts. The aberrant byproducts don’t all have to be lying around unused until the end of days, that is, they aren’t necessarily in the form of pure entropy. Much of the initial byproducts can be funneled back into the process through chemical conversion and reused as time goes along, thus giving evolution a larger available total resource base to work from than the static figure represented by the current mass of the universe. And, most unfortunately, this is true, at least in part. It doesn’t change the outcome, but it means we will have to wade through yet another calculation.

But simplicity has its advantages. For one, the reader, having understood our calculations so far, may now be willing to go the further, and actually much simpler, step in considering the additional complication of recycling the universe’s resources for reuse. This additional step is far from insurmountable—only mildly irritating. Before doing the math for reuse and recycle I will simply note about this objection that, once again, the fossil record gives no indication that aberrant byproducts were ever produced as ORLEF-B requires a random process to do, at least not to the magnitudes required. So, yes, in theory mass/and energy can be converted as fast as the Planck time limitation allows, but there is no historical indication that there was ever substantial quantities of aberrant byproducts there to convert; the process evidenced by the fossil record was far too efficient to have been accidental.

Now, what about reuse and recycle? How does this change the numbers? Physicists tell us that the mass of the universe is constant, and that energy is never lost. However it can be converted, from energy to mass, back from mass to energy, and this in any of thousands of particular types of atomic/chemical conversions known to the modern sciences of physics and chemistry over and over again—in theory. This means that the total mass/energy of the universe, here maximally estimated to be 1.6 X 10⁶⁰ kg (approx. 3.53 X 10⁶⁰ pounds) is not the limit of evolution’s working resources, but rather the theoretical limit is something larger, equating to that total mass multiplied by the number of times it has been reused and recycled in various conversions through history.

If we assume maximum recycling based upon what is theoretically possible all of the mass in the universe could, theoretically, be recycled every 10^-43 fraction of a second. Had this maximum rate of recycling occurred continuously through the history of the universe, the amount of useable energy/mass available to do the work of evolution through history would be exponentially increased to 3.53 X 10¹⁰⁴ pounds (3.53 X 10⁶⁰ pounds X 10^-43). However, this is still not enough to supply the much larger requirement of 3.2 X 10¹³¹ pounds required by our previous computation for a very, very lucky accidental process requiring only 10¹⁰⁰ tries to get the job done. The evolutionary process has not had this much to work with of course. The actual rate of recycling can be demonstrated to be far less than the theoretical maximum, and the historical loss of useable energy to entropy at the maximum rate of conversion would be enormous.

Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists are undoubtedly going to want to give it one last try. Noted evolutionist W. Ford Doolittle, specifically, would likely say: “That’s not quite enough. Even if you beat the maximum recycling rate of energy/mass conversion for an admittedly very lucky evolutionary process that only needs 10¹⁰⁰ tries to get it right, you have still unjustifiably assumed that a substantial fraction of the enormous deck of the universe’s resources must be dealt out, when in fact it might get it perfectly right the first try.[136] First of all, to assume such an improbable occurrence is not good science. Yes, the improbable can occur, but it is not good science to assert that it will occur. Having said that, for the sake of argument let’s humor the neo-Darwinists and take a look to see what does happen under Doolittle’s assumption that only one hand need be dealt out?

If we change the number of tries in the formula represented by the 10¹⁰⁰ to only one, the formula becomes 3.2 X 10¹¹ + 1.6 X 10¹¹ + (1 (½ (3.2 X 10¹¹) + ½ (1.6 X 10¹¹)))) + 10¹¹⁶(1.6 X 10¹¹), and its value still resolves to approximately the same, 1.6 X 10¹²⁸ tons, or 3.2 X 10¹³¹ pounds. This is so because the number of tries has a miniscule effect on the total compared to the ORLEF-B constant. In common language this means that an accidental process is such a foul-up that, in attempting an enormous job, an enormous mess will be made no matter that you only try it once.

The problem here, of course, is going to be that Doolittle and other neo-Darwinian theorists who propound such arguments are going to want to deny ORLEF-B entirely. They will say that the formula is wrong in having its last component present at all, that 10¹¹⁶(1.6 X 10¹¹) is unjustified. However, I have offered an explicit justification of ORLEF-B by way of citing the empiric scientific tests of which D. D. Axe’s protein synthesis studies have been comprised and the thousands of mutagenesis experiments that, combined, offer solid empiric evidence via the inductive scientific method that the ORLEF-B constant is a valid addition to any resource estimate for an accidental process, at least in biology. If any further support were needed, ORLEF-B can be shown to be derivable from thermodynamic law, the definition of entropy that says that truly random energy can do no useful work, ever; it can’t even be recycled by chemical or atomic conversion processes. Thus, the only remaining question is what value to assign to the ORLEF-B constant as a working assumption pending further research.

In attempting to leave ORLEF-B out of the computations, a neo-Darwinist would be, in effect, committing the logical fallacy of self-contradiction. They would be computing the resource requirement for a process they want to call accidental in a manner that denies the inclusion of factors associated with accidental processes. The process is accidental when the atheists do their political speaking and writing to the public under the guise of science, but it is not accidental when they do the hard science and face the mathematical facts of what an accidental process entails in the way of resource cost. That, however, is cheating. You can’t have it both ways. Once one leaves the math out of it, yes, the neo-Darwinist deception can be an easy sell. But you can’t leave the math out and still call it legitimate science. One can sell anything with good verbal rhetoric if the customer has no recourse to facts to check the veracity of the sales pitch.

We can conclude that, if ORLEF-B holds, at no time could any appreciable biomass have been generated by an accidental process because the resource costs would go higher than the total of resources our universe could supply. The import of all of this is not that the universe did not get it right on the first attempt at life—it may have—but that, if it did, the process could not have been an accidental one.

For those who intuitively rebel at this entire discussion because we all know that most physical systems are far from purely random, I would say, yes, you are right. Most physical systems, including DNA repair systems, and genetic transposition events are far from purely random. For that very reason we should cease to call them “accidental” as neo-Darwinian theory has always improperly done. We should acknowledge that it is the nonrandom component of a mixed or impure process that is the part responsible for any ordered biological design improvements.

Correcting the language of evolutionary theory in this way, apart from satisfying the requirement of intellectual honesty, leaves the possibility of intelligent design open and visible to even the most casual student of science. This is as it should be. Given ORLEF-B, accidental processes can no longer be justifiably invoked to explain the origins of life, or to explain incremental jumps in biological information.

Because Dembski’s probability bound objection to accidental evolution is borne out by our argument here for ORLEF-B, intelligent design theory can no longer be classified as nonscientific. The three legs of support for ORLEF-B are all pure science, two empiric and experimental (Axe’s protein studies and genetic mutagenesis studies) and the other theoretical, grounded in the most secure of all natural laws, thermodynamics, the very definition of entropy itself.

Appendix 3:

Testability—Is It Really Science?

Is Intelligent Design Theory Testable? (And is neo-Darwinian theory?)

ID theory says there are observable signs of intelligent design in nature, specifically biology, and only because those signs are present are we justified in affirming a designer in science. We could always affirm intelligent design from a philosophical or religious perspective, but we can only do it scientifically so long as observable indications can be found.

Observable indications there are, and in spades. Here are sixteen scientifically testable implications of intelligent design theory, all substantial, empirically observable, confirmable, and refutable—and the initial results are overwhelmingly positive for all of them. One can debate the details about how to precisely weigh the value of each test, but tests they undoubtedly are. This establishes intelligent design theory as a legitimate scientific enterprise and rebuts the neo-Darwinist propaganda campaign that smears ID theory as merely a disguised religious statement.

(1) To the extent that future random mutagenesis studies in the laboratory extend through the entire genome of organisms and fail to demonstrate positive evolutionary advancements, as they have to date failed to do, both Dr. Stephen Meyer’s thesis that random mutations cannot generate the biological information required for the higher forms of life, and Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis will be confirmed in the lab on the genetic level. Neo-Darwinists will undoubtedly object that “We aren’t even looking for evolutionary advancements in mutagenesis studies!” My response to that is “Why not, if evolution is easy as pie, so easy an accident could accomplish it?”

Obviously, the reason they are not looking is that they don’t want to create failed tests for accidental evolution. But whether or not they are in fact looking for evolutionary advancements in mutagenesis studies is irrelevant to my point here. The question before us is, “Is intelligent design theory testable?” Because they could be looking for evolutionary advancements in mutagenesis studies, intelligent design theory must be considered testable. That a group of scientists with their own agenda decides not to perform a series of tests that are in fact available does not establish a theory as nontestable. In the case of mutagenesis studies, neo-Darwinists haven’t elected to test their theory in this way for two reasons. First, they are predominantly atheists and, because they don’t expect any success, they don’t want to diminish the public opinion of their point of view by failed tests. Second, so many mutations in complex combinations would be necessary to produce an evolutionary advance (if they ever could) a test would be impractical. Neo-Darwinists will say “It is much more complicated than that; life is more complex than a simple mutagenesis event could hope to achieve, or some combination of them.” And so it is. But neo-Darwinian theory says that the tree of life arose in precisely this way: by a highly improbable string of mutagenesis events. Thus, to object in this way to testing intelligent design and/or neo-Darwinian evolution by way of mutagenesis studies is to admit that neo-Darwinian theory is in fact not a testable theory at all. This shows us that neo-Darwinian theory is not a scientific theory because it is not testable.

(2) Another test for intelligent design theory will be whether or not LCI, William Dembski’s Law of Conservation of Information, will also be corroborated by continued mutagenesis studies. Science’s inability to generate complex viable genetic information via random processes in the laboratory already constitutes corroborative support for intelligent design. We are unable to randomly generate even the simplest genomes in the lab. This means an accident could not have accomplished the large jumps of punctuated equilibrium. The inability of random mutagenesis to generate progressive evolutionary advancements and science’s inability to achieve abiogenesis (life from nonliving chemicals) lends credibility to intelligent design theory and comprises a preliminary refutation of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution.

(3) Further investigation and description of specific organisms detailing their precise parts and functions, perhaps assisted by genetic knockout studies, will also confirm or refute Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. This is the thesis that multiple parts must be in place at the same time and matched to very precise tolerances in a sophisticated design apparatus for any proposed change to be advantageous. Further genetic research will also confirm or refute the related thesis that insufficient redundancy exists in biological systems to offset the critical importance of each individual part to a biological system.

(4) Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis logically implies that complex sets of complimentary features and associated genes are required to ground the large and rapid evolutionary jumps shown in the fossil record. Thus, the frequent instances of punctuated equilibrium and even more radical events of rapid speciation seen in the fossil record all count as positive test results for Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. The irreducible complexity thesis logically implies the absence of the gradualness entailed by an accidental process. As there are no other coherent scientific alternatives to accident other than intelligent design, confirmation of irreducible complexity implies intelligent design. Self-organization and other kinds of partially deterministic systems have been proposed as an alternative to accident or intelligent design. However a universe with physical processes that self-organize into the astronomically complex machines of life, as William Dembski points out in Intelligent Design, constitutes a machine-building machine, one even more complex than the machines it has built. Self-organization theory give us no explanation for the origination of that larger machine. To say, as self-organizationists/determinists must say in order to deny intelligent design as the only coherent alternative to accident, that “the universe is just that way,” that there need be no explanation of its complex machinery, is not to give a scientific explanation at all, it is to forsake the possibility of scientific explanation entirely.

ID theory predicts that many (if not all) of the major functional character sets and significant structural modifications required to construct the tree of life will be found not to be obtainable via the gradual small accidental changes neo-Darwinian theory requires because they involve, not just a single gene, but an integrated combination of several genes, perhaps one or more epigenetic factors, along with the additional use of an alternate gene translation mechanism, as well as inputs from various master and decentralized control areas in the genome (the transpositional genome) and the developmental genome. This expectation is implicit in Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, and it is precisely what modern genetic research confirms.[137]

There will be exceptions to this rule, no doubt, particularly when small modifications are made to a developing embryo and a visibly big though otherwise simple change is the result, but the rule will hold generally. Furthermore, the established connection between genes that control development and genes that regulate adult processes means that design proposals in higher organisms must be very complex indeed in order to manage a change that can precisely accomplish two highly complex and sensitive functions at the same time (embryonic development and adult physiological operations) from the same source genes.

(5) Basic intelligent design theory says we should find biological machines and systems that give unequivocal indications of having been designed, that is, machines that warrant a design inference. We do find thousands of such machines in cellular systems and higher levels of biology and they bear an uncanny resemblance to our own mechanical constructions: outboard motors in bacteria, microscopic construction crews (DNA transcription),[138] transport vehicles, camera type eyes, complex linguistic codes (DNA), error checking and repair, pipeline networks (microtubule systems in the cell lining), Boolean logical networks (gene regulatory systems), computers (the brain), etc.

(6) Then there is aberrantly high frequency of success in the track record of the evolutionary process, that is, the rate of success in achieving viable biological design at all, let alone steady advancement to greater complexity. It is a genetic/mathematical fact that such success could only be achieved by moving triplets of nucleotides and larger modular combinations of triplets as opposed to single nucleotide changes or non-meaningful segments. This clearly indicates foreknowledge of the syntax and dictionary of the language of DNA. T. Ryan Gregory’s new excellent book on the evolution of the genome reveals that there are a myriad of processes in the transpositional machinery of the human genome setup to effectively, that is, non-destructively, move meaningful segments of the genome around in a highly organized and constrained transpositional management architecture.[139] This is not an accidental process. Gregory, himself, defers from making the further inference to intelligent design, however, he admits that genetic transposition is clearly not a random system.

I contend that the further inference to intelligent design is warranted, all things considered, because none of the alternatives are scientifically coherent. Further, for a random process to have hit upon such a complex, sophisticated and wildly successful process of genetic reorganization, it would have had to have tried other less successful methods first. The fossil record does not reveal this. Though many aberrant mutational guesses would be nonsurvivable, many would be briefly survivable. The life span of “disabled” species, taken separately, would be comparatively brief, but the aggregate of all such “disabled” species taken together would comprise an enormous population spanning all environmental niches and body types. The disabled community of failed species design would be both mathematically enormous and geologically/ecologically ubiquitous. Such a population would of necessity reflect in the fossil record. Fossil indications of the massive numbers of failed design attempts consequent to an accidental process are simply not there.

The system that has generated the tree of life has not only anticipated the meaningful syntax and dictionary of DNA but anticipated the complex sets of complimentary genes needed to produce a given functional or body form change. Once again, the fossil record does not record the failures an accidental process would necessarily have endured on the way to achieving its mathematically spectacular successes. Thus the seemingly impossible success rate of evolution itself constitutes a successful test of intelligent design.

(7) The ultimate completion of the design of life forms as opposed to an endless evolutionary development is compatible with intelligent design theory, though not with neo-Darwinian evolution, which says that progressive evolution is an endless process. Therefore, while not a strict entailment of intelligent design theory, indications of design completion serves as a valid differentiating test of the two competing theories.

Subtle indications of design completion are seen in recent sequence reductions of bacterial clades, a trend towards substantial intron loss over time, and variation spawning functions being culled out of certain taxons. We see an example of the latter in transposon systems becoming nonfunctional in eukaryotic genomes.[140] Error correction and repair systems for DNA themselves rule out much of the possibility of biological change. The designer seems at this point to be merely polishing and preserving his creations, while clearing scraps of clay from the sculpting table, as it were.

A more substantial indication of design completion is seen in the fact that long established taxons which have in Ernst Mayr’s words “a more highly integrated (congealed) genotype” tend not to change. Mayr admits that we have not seen a single new phylum-level body form emerge since the Cambrian, more than 500 million years ago, when seventy of them had previously emerged within a 5-10 million year period. (We have approximately 35 of those 70 phyla left today.)[141]

(8) If the design of life forms were imposed upon the world by an intelligent designer, probability and time based analyses performed upon biological evolutionary event processes should leave no doubt that chance was not the engine that drove life’s creation. The probabilities should reveal the process to be highly biased, for a strong bias is requisite to achieving such a complex functional result in so little time. Bias is revealed in the tendency for biological form change proposals to be both mechanically efficient and elegant. Randomness is ruled out by the periodic large rapid evolutionary jumps shown in the fossil record, and most clearly of all in the mathematical computations of the statistical probability of the complete evolutionary process. The statistical probabilities refute classic neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution. The bias for life manifested in the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

(9) An additional closely related prediction of intelligent design theory is that only simple microevolutions will be achievable randomly. These might be things such as beak size variation in birds or coloring changes in moths. Such changes are easy to accomplish genetically and only affect the exterior of the organism or systems with output directed to the exterior of the organism where possibilities for conflicts are minimized. The affected area either doesn’t have to interact in complex ways with other internal systems or those interactions are substantially unaffected by the change. A change to the color of a moth need not affect its internal chemistry in significant ways at all (depending upon how the color is achieved), nor does extending or retracting the dimensions of a bird beak affect the mechanics of its internal systems other than requiring stronger facial muscles. Likewise, the risk of internal mechanical conflict is low with single protein or enzyme changes in bacterial gene substitutions where the change mainly affects the organisms interaction with the external environment.

Other than these simple classic icons of evolution, the best modern science has been able to present in even the most prestigious of the professional scientific journals of observed instances of evolution are a single degenerated protein from an ancient ancestor, an alteration in crocodile hemoglobin, and changes to human color vision genes that involve only 3-5 amino acid substitutions.[142] The most convincing (most gradual and continuous) fossil lineages evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma cites as available to support evolution are likewise comparatively simple accomplishments in comparatively simple creatures: the increase in the number of ribs of trilobites, the shape and thickness of shells in protozoans, skeletal variations in the stickleback fish, size increase in protozoans, changes in “moss animals” (bryozoans).[143] None of these changes entail either complex integration into large complex systems or a cascading chain reaction of alterations. The larger systems in these cases are, themselves, relatively simple.

The limitations of observed evolution to such simple changes corresponds closely with the limitations Sir Fred Hoyle has computed for an accidental mutational process and with the actual experimental results in recent protein synthesis and mutagenesis studies reported by Stephen Meyer. While this evidence suggests that accident might have in fact done these particular simple things, the absence of observations of more complex evolutions suggests, in close harmony with mathematical theory, that these kinds of simple alterations are the most that accident has contributed to the evolutionary process.

Other, apparently more complex evolutions, such as the classic example of the eight or more intermediates between ancient and modern horses, may or may not qualify as manageable by a string of accidents (and probably don’t) depending upon how complex the genetic sequence changes involved are ultimately shown to be and whether internal chemistry was substantially altered. If only a handful of point mutations to growth or size-determining genes were sufficient to make the change, an accident could at rare times manage it. However, if the different species of horse manifest many complex internal differences, some of which require a cascade of bodily changes to be integrated with the total system, it would be beyond an accident’s range of potency.

(10) Intelligent design theory predicts that all attempts at producing complex life in the laboratory from random processes simulating the history of earth’s environment will fail. Where the conditions being simulated can be demonstrated to be nonrandom, ID allows that such demonstrations are, in theory, possible, though not necessarily likely. In other words, should a successful test be performed, the prevailing natural law(s), physical conditions and parameters invoked by the experiment will be discovered to contain much more complex forms of information than are presently understood to be embedded in natural processes, forms that reveal a predominant bias for evolution of functional life forms. ID theory predicts that the process of life’s origin and development will be revealed to be nonrandom in any successful laboratory test of the origin or macroevolutionary advancement of life. The processes involved in such successful demonstration will be shown to be so constrained by information structures embedded into natural law and the contingently informed state of matter and energy, that they can in no way be deemed accidental.

Alternatively, ID theory implies that if the bias lies at a level outside science’s capacity to discern, science will be unable to replicate the requisite variables for the origin and evolution of life by accidentally stumbling upon the right parameters. This is because the set of needed conditions are too complex to permit achievement via an accidental search.

In addition to the primary authors of intelligent design theory such as Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe, the works of many other scientists and mathematicians with varying points of view such as Michael Polanyi, Hubert Yockey, Sidney Fox, Simon Conway Morris, Sir Fred Hoyle, Bernd-Olaf Küppers and Stuart Kauffman have contributed mathematical or experimental data that combine to form a substantial demonstration that this is so, that the evolutionary process is nonrandom. Granted each author does this in his or her own varied way, and notwithstanding the fact that many of these researchers neither make the further inference to intelligent design nor fully agree with each other on all the aspects of the larger evolutionary explanation. Additional support for the nonrandom hypothesis is available in integrated analytical studies such as Dean Overman’s book, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, which is highly recommended.

There are clearly significant differences in difficulty level and complexity in the design of creatures at several identifiable stops on the tree of life: multicellularity, simple but conscious animals, mammals, intelligent mammals, self-conscious humans etc. Although it appears from the probability estimates that achieving even two biologically viable proteins in sequence would be impossible for an accident to achieve within the resources of the universe, it may ultimately turn out that it is possible to produce a simple single-celled prebacterium, presumed to be the first living creature, through random processes in the lab but nothing greater. Or it may be possible to randomly achieve simple multicellular creatures but nothing further, and so on. The threshold that forbids accidental origination of a given life form may turn out to exist at any one of many distinguishable levels of complexity. Success at generating life at one level via a random based laboratory experiment does not guarantee the possibility of doing the same at higher levels.

(11) Intelligent design theory predicts that we won’t find complex machines of any type (biotic or otherwise) lying around the earth having been spontaneously formed by accidental processes—and we don’t find such things. Darwinists continue to ridicule William Paley’s watchmaker argument, but no one who finds a diamond-studded Rolex watch in the middle of a coalmine will ever believe a natural process created it (or that the union steward is honest). Similarly, finding a Mercedes at the bottom of the Pacific is not going to convince anyone of accidental evolution of automobiles by thermo-chemical reaction near a thermal vent. They will rightly assume that the car was lost at sea with a sunken cargo ship or ferry. Merely contemplating such hypotheses reveals the concept of accidental machine construction to be a ludicrous travesty upon the intellect. While granting that we cannot perform a full test of the creation of complex life in real time, if accidental evolution is true we should be able to perform much smaller tests regarding the spontaneous construction of miscellaneous functional biotic components? To the extent that all of our tests and observations uphold the rule that functional biotic machines (living or nonliving) are never generated by random elements of nature, intelligent design is confirmed and neo-Darwinian accidental evolution is refuted. Yes, heat can spontaneously construct a handful of proteins under the right conditions and the Miller-Urey conditions can generate a few amino acids, but these do not involve functional system dynamics of any kind. They aren’t machines, though they are potential components of machines.

(12) ID theory predicts from the basis of mathematics and information theory that huge information repositories must be present at fundamental levels of biology and/or physical and chemical processes to ground and enable the construction of the astronomically complex machines of living organisms. In a sense, there has to be both a blueprint and an implementation control system in order to get these things together properly. Two enormous repositories of information are already known in DNA and folded proteins, which together can not only store but physically translate in consistent and controlled ways vast amounts of information pertaining to the construction of physical structures and the operation and regulation of anatomical systems. DNA is a larger part of the blueprint and enzymes (a class of proteins that regulate biological processes) are a large part of the implementation control system. This constitutes another successful test of ID theory. One can say, well, it isn’t a valid test because we haven’t seen these specific mechanisms build the tree of life through evolutionary history. This is of course true as far as it goes, but it is trivial and irrelevant because we haven’t seen and can’t see the mechanisms of biological history, whatever they may have been, only those of the present.

What we have seen is that the mechanism built around DNA and proteins rebuilds the living organisms that constitute the current foliage on the tree of life on an ongoing basis before our very eyes.

Information may well be present at much deeper levels than the gross components of living cells, DNA, proteins, and microtubule structures. More and more, current research is being geared toward the electromagnetic properties of molecules, which in turn are in theory traceable to the atomic constituents of the elements that are the building blocks of those molecule. Electromagnetic properties are critical determinants of the properties of the molecule and the larger chains of them that compose the mechanisms of living biology. What this means for our topic of the huge information repository required to enact the structures of life is that the previous superficial estimate of the soup of the early days after the Big Bang as being “homogenous” may have been hasty in not distinguishing relevant differences among the electromagnetic properties of the early elements and molecules. (As if it could have; of course, this is not practically doable, but the point remains relevant in theory.) Or, alternatively, we would have to explain how such a startling bias for life emerged in terms of the electromagnetic properties of elements and molecules that drove the subsequent immensely improbable construction of life on Earth, if such a bias was not initially present.

(13) The existence of a reasonably fine-tuned (not necessarily set in stone) system of embedded constraints throughout nature that favor the formation of a tree of life proximate to the one we have is a testable implication of intelligent design theory. ID theory predicts that heretofore undiscovered information that drives the development of the tree of life in a nonrandom way, accounting for the production of the critical minimum of things needed to produce early life and the large developmental jumps seen in the fossil record, will continue to be revealed by ongoing research.

The assumption here is that the designer would not leave the development of his final designs fully to chance. He might not specify the details, allowing for some flexibility or even allowing for radically different alternatives, but he would only allow alternatives acceptably compliant with some more general specification.

The critical point of difference between an accidental and intelligently designed creation is that a designer (assuming he had a definite purpose in mind) would be obliged to guarantee some minimum content by building in parameters that guarantee that at least one of the preordained variations would come about. Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades or government work as the saying goes. It could be much more constrained than this, of course, specifying exactly the tree of life we see, but it need not be. All that is required is that a general specification of some kind be fulfilled to ensure the designer’s overall purpose was achieved.

This suggests the RFP (request for proposal) system. Governments often obtain military technology contracts in this way, by stating the performance specifications of a desired new system in general terms. An RFP does not specify the mechanical details of system construction. Under the RFP concept, the designer of Earth’s life may have simply “said” “Make me a car,” as opposed to “Make me a red Mercedes.” At times variations may be possible without spoiling the recipe. Gourmet chefs do this. They allow the contents of their regular soups and the mix of spices for their standard entrees to vary somewhat from week to week, giving the diner some variation without changing the composition so far as to ruin the overall parameters of a balanced recipe. Critical parameters are met, yet some variation is allowed. Under the RFP concept, any alternative mechanical design that can perform to specifications is as acceptable as any other. What neo-Darwinists take as proof of an accidental system, limited randomness in a few places in the physical process of nature, may simply be a built-in allowance for design variation, but variation constrained within a larger system of predesignated tolerances.

We already know there are master control regions within the genomes. There are “trans” control functions, a meta-genome, a transpositional genome, and a developmental genome. Experts are beginning to suspect that the genome has a master operating system that goes far beyond its individual programs.[144] Added to the long understood finely tuned cosmological constants and recently revealed partially “self-organizing” properties of chemicals and amino acids, this qualifies as a system of constraints that favor, if not the immediate, the inevitable formation of life within certain predesignated design parameters.

Additional testable implications of intelligent design theory include these classic indicators that ID theorists have pointed to all along, types of sophisticated information and functional systems that accident would not reasonably be expected to achieve within the time and physical resource limits available in the history of the universe:

(14) visibly designed structures within living creatures, biological machines

(15) elements of artificiality such as language and Boolean logical networks

(16) The consistent maintenance of living systems of high functional complexity over vast amounts of time. This entails the use of sophisticated quality control structures that maintain complex biological design features, error check, repair and reproduce them with great precision and success. An accidental universe, given practically infinite time, might momentarily stumble upon a complex system, but it would be a flash in the pan as it were, not consistently maintained. Neo-Darwinists, of course, will counter “Why couldn’t a machine-building machine such as you posit the universe to be come about by an accidental fluke, one that by its very nature would then maintain all living systems over time?” On the surface this is a logical response, even quite devastating to the ID thesis—except for two things. First, although the machine-building machine maintains the machines of life, there is nothing to maintain the machine-building machine in an accidental world. It is free to fluctuate having no constraints upon it whatsoever. It would immediately pass out of existence as quickly as it came in a wildly fluctuating chaotic fully accidental universe. Second, if we were to posit the existence of such an enormous improbability, even for a brief period of time, by doing so we would destroy the credibility of absolutely all the rest of science’s predictions, which are grounded in probability estimates. Results contrary to all those standard predictions of science are no more improbable than the accidental achievement of a universe spanning system that builds and consistently maintains the highly complex systems of living creatures by pure accident. Science would be contradicting itself by ruling out the highly or moderately improbable in its routine predictions at intermediate levels of the physical event structure while allowing dramatically extreme improbability at its most fundamental levels.

In a sense intelligent design theory is claiming to have found nothing more in the physical and biological evidence than famous evolutionist G. G. Simpson already acknowledged to be there in 1964, viz that evolution is definitely not accidental, and what Simon Conway Morris currently claims: that humans are the inevitable process of the natural systems of this universe. What intelligent design theorists go further to add to Simpson and Morris is the very defensible assumption that there are no scientifically coherent alternatives to the two primary ones: a universe that is fully accidental, and a universe that is intelligently designed. ID theorists make the design inference, which as I discuss at length below, is a fully legitimate scientific step to take. It may be arbitrary whether one calls this additional step philosophical, scientific or merely logical, based upon how he or she prefers the charter of science to be defined. But the simple fact of the matter is that purpose without a purposive agent is unknown in human experience, if not a self-contradiction in principle. At a minimum, the assumption of purpose without a purposer or designer is bad inductive/scientific reasoning because we have never seen one confirmable instance of it, and therefore it is not the best explanation science can achieve for life. The design inference is the best explanation science currently has for life.

----------

Sixteen scientifically testable implications of intelligent design theory! There is therefore no question of the scientific nature of at least some formulations of intelligent design theory. It is truly baffling that the highly prestigious American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) should claim that intelligent design theory is not testable. Perhaps that is because they haven’t read any ID publications since the 1960’s.

The AAAS has not accused (super)string theory of being unscientific merely because the hypothesized strings have yet to be fully proven or cannot be directly observed. Superstrings are only inferred from related mathematical data. Theories in quantum physics and cosmology have not been condemned out of hand as unscientific because they posit infinities that cannot be directly observed, an infinite number of subatomic particles or an infinite universe. To be logically, politically, and scientifically consistent, we should be as generous with intelligent design theory as we have been with extradimensional theories of physics and various theories invoking (nonobservable) infinities in quantum physics and cosmology. The designer of ID theory is not in principle unverifiable, but only yet to be verified, the same as the superstrings of modern string theory. If we can posit infinities in physical terms, we can also posit an infinite physical designer of life, or one that is merely very big. In other words, although some ID proponents may propose that the designer of life is supernatural, intelligent design theory in its most general form is not restricted to such proposals and therefore cannot be dismissed as theology instead of science.

OK, you may say at this point. Intelligent design theory is a legitimate scientific contender, but what about all the loudly ballyhooed evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution? My answer? There isn’t any evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution, none at all—not for accidental evolution. There is not one coherent argument in all of the evolutionary writings that demonstrates how an accident could generate such complex designs as we see in living systems—not one. The evidence we have is for basic evolution only.

Turning the Tables: Is Darwinian Theory Testable?

Darwinists confidently assert that Darwinian evolution has been tested and confirmed over and over again, yet this is not so—not in the classic sense of experimental test and direct empirical observation. The evolution of one species from another has never been observed and we cannot create life in the lab or produce new complex sets of genes under random conditions.

In Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, Niles Eldredge claims that Darwinian evolution has been successfully tested, not by directly demonstrating its primary claims of macroevolution or accidental processes in the lab or by direct observation, but by predicting the patterns of fossils, phylogenetic characteristics, and similar genetic sequences among different species. He identifies these patterns as a progression from the simple to the complex, a nested set of genetic and physiological resemblances, and hominids moving from a smaller to a larger brain. The continued confirmation of such general patterns in new fossil finds and the physiology of living creatures are what Niles Eldredge calls the “tests” that have confirmed evolution. But these tests, while giving evidence of homology certainly, and suggesting some form of family relationship, do not fully establish evolution. They do not speak to the accidental question in any way other than suggesting it didn’t happen accidentally. Thus, if these indirect kinds of tests are to be affirmed as genuine tests of accidental evolution, then the theory of accidental evolution has failed the test. The mere fact that the patterns are predictable at all tells us the process is not random.

The problem with using such patterns as tests is that they are so amenable to redefinition based upon new discoveries. They are already so broad in scope and so variable that it is hard to imagine a new fossil or physiological feature discovery that could not be said to fit somewhere in such a way as to confirm some kind of pattern predicted by Darwinian theory. If a radically different species is discovered, as has recently occurred, it is simply placed on a new branch of the tree by itself and a new set of hypothetical relationships devised to make it fit into the family. Under this type of procedure, what could possibly serve as a contrary indication; what would be an unsuccessful test?

True scientific tests must be rigorously defined regarding what constitutes a successful test and what qualifies as an unsuccessful test, and this must be done in advance of the test. Specific, clear and concrete parameters must be set for the relevant empiric data that would be considered refuting. Unambiguous predictions have to be made prior to the discovery of the data that is claimed as a confirmation of the prediction. Exactly how have all of these conditions been satisfied by Eldredge’s allegedly conclusive tests of evolutionary pattern predictions? He doesn’t say. Nor does anyone else. Until tests for Darwinian evolution are laid out with the proper scientific rigor, they can hardly be considered conclusive. There is a real question of ad hoc “cheating” here.

The lack of an intermediate being discovered, let’s say, from an ancient miniature hippopotamus to a whale, at any given point in time does not, according to Darwinists, mean it won’t be discovered later. Finding something with a feature that disqualifies it as that intermediate only warrants placing it elsewhere on the tree of life. So what would satisfy the condition of an unsuccessful test? Finding a creature with no genetic code whatsoever or no visible/functional features in common with any other creature on the tree of life seems to be the only refuting instance allowed? Finding the invisible and the miraculous; that is the test neo-Darwinists have in effect proposed as the refuting instance of their theory. Thinks this is ridiculous? Ask them to tell you what specific kinds of findings would refute the theory. Nothing will. When something very odd or novel is found, a new branch on the tree of life is simply initiated to accommodate the novel organisms.

The only thing Darwinists have openly admitted to be a refutation of their theory is to find hominids existing during the age of bacteria in the early Cambrian or Precambrian period. This is a critical test because it would refute the thesis that natural selection is necessary to “build” life in increments by locking in small accidental form proposals in sequences over vast amounts of time, with small changes ultimately adding up to substantial progressive form change. However this same concept yields other tests of similar kinds; it doesn’t have to be hominids so long as a substantial portion of the genome of advanced creatures can be shown to exist at a time so early that natural selection is taken out of the process. The hypothesized universal common ancestor has already been discussed as potentially being a group of creatures whose combined genomes comprise the original gene pool that evolved into everything else, a virtual common ancestor as it were. The members of that group, or some of them, might qualify under this example if, as Professor Ohno has speculated, their genomes, singly or in combination, were sufficient to entail the rapid generation of the tree of life. If much of the genomic plan was present at the beginning in substantially complete form, then natural selection obviously wasn’t crucial to building life. Natural selection may have still played an active part in that the mutation of gene activation markers, on or off switches if you will, is a whole lot easier than building the genome itself one nucleotide at a time via mutation. Similarly, making simple (usually binary) mutational inputs into a developmental or transpositional genome already built and looking for such inputs allows the mutation/natural selection team to guide future evolution of an intelligent system already built, but something other than mutation/natural selection had to first build the genomes to make this possible. And the math of probability theory tells us that something very much like this must have occurred, for there is insufficient time and resources in the history of our universe to have built life accidentally one mutation at a time. Thus the one test the neo-Darwinists will concede as capable of refuting their theory returns a negative result based upon William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, which can be established to be true mathematically.

This one critical test that neo-Darwinists admit, has now essentially also returned a negative result in the event of the Cambrian explosion. The only plausible explanation we currently have for that period of ultra rapid evolution is affirmed by two of the most consummate experts we have in the field, the late Professor Susumu Ohno, and Professor James Valentine, both of whom posit that the genetic information needed for the rapid development of the larger part of the tree of life in the brief 5 million year period within the Cambrian was already present at the beginning of that explosion of biological form development. This takes natural selection very substantially out of the lineup. The Cambrian explosion occurs far too fast for the classic random mutation model of neo-Darwinian theory to work. Neo-Darwinian evolution must be considered to have now failed even the one test that neo-Darwinists will themselves admit to apply to their theory. With the discovery of irreducible complexity and ultra complexity in living systems, Charles Darwin’s own test for refuting his theory has been satisfied as well: the discovery of a system that could not have been formed by a sequence of small accidental changes.

Why are there so few tests for neo-Darwinian theory? Because the classic theory of evolution is so general that it doesn’t really say anything. It only requires that spontaneous variations occur in creatures and that natural selection locks in those changes that promote physical survival and higher relative rates of reproduction. This level of generality makes it easy for Darwinists to “talk their way out” of almost any objection or proposed test.

For example, suppose someone objected: “Why are kidney stones so painful as to be disabling when the only thing that can be done to relieve the pain is wait (for the small ones) or surgery (for the big ones).” Is this an instance of foreknowledge of the medical arts and surgery? Otherwise, disabling a hunter-gatherer in a predator filled environment with no practical benefit to offset the disability does not seem to promote survival so much as to impede it. On the other hand, the pain signal works to obligate modern man to go to the surgeon. Modern man has no immediate predation threat and can have his or her food at the hospital. The Darwinists will simply say no, the process of evolution is not perfect and it simply hasn’t gotten around to fixing that yet.

Or, they could say that the pain signal from kidney stones has only been around since surgery was invented some 3-9000 years ago, but that would be a very rapid evolution. Consider, then, the uniquely protected status Darwinian theory has held in regards to testability. If the test is positive, in this case, had the signal of kidney stones led to intense thirst instead of pain so that the stone could be rapidly flushed, this would be a case of evolution proved, a successful test. But, should comparative genome studies show that the pain response is not newer than 9000 years, they can simply say that evolution hadn’t gotten around to fixing that flaw by the time surgery came along and selected the pain response for continuation, or that kidney stones tend to occur in older patients and prehistoric man didn’t live long enough to make it a critical concern, etc. So, in most kinds of event outcomes, evolution can only be confirmed, it cannot be refuted. It is an odd circumstance for science where a theory takes no real risk of being refuted in event outcomes that are nonetheless counted as corroborative proof of the theory.

Then along comes intelligent design theory that offers some genuinely discerning tests for evaluating evolution, the probability argument, the resource exhaustion argument, the irreducible complexity barrier etc., and the evolutionists say the entire enterprise is not even science, but religion! They refuse to consider these tests!

Then there is the general test or evaluative criterion of prediction. What at first appears to be a very impressive significance of the nested similarities as a predictive device goes away when one considers that nothing specific has been predicted in advance in a sense strong enough to count as a refutation if the prediction fails, or the prediction can’t fail because it is not time limited, unlimited time is allowed to find the missing link in the fossil record for example. Evolutionary scientists are permitted to superimposed new patterns after the fact of new discoveries. Any and all test results therefore count as successful. Theories must be modifiable based upon new evidence, true, but to formulate a theory in such general terms that is only and always modifiable but never refutable is not scientific. This is called “rigging the game” anywhere else, but Darwinists prefer to call it “indisputable confirmation.”

If these pattern predictions are to provide a bonafide test for Darwinian theory they must at least be specific enough to rule out competing theories. Otherwise a testable implication may be “confirmed” in the sense of adding additional corroboration, but the “confirmation” is trivial in that it does not tell us which of the competing theories is most likely correct. Eldredge’s “tests,” by predicting only a general progression from the simple to the complex and nonspecific fully flexible indications of basic inheritance fail to distinguish between the competing theories.

One wants to go further and ask if these tests truly confirm the neo-Darwinian form of evolutionary theory at all. Why do we assume that an accidental process predicts near perfect design progression? The admitted destructive nature of random mutations shows the progressive pattern to be more of a failed prediction for neo-Darwinian evolution, and the addition of intelligent design or purpose remedies the problem. The astoundingly efficient progressive pattern of evolution is more truly a successful test of intelligent design assisted evolution than an accident.

Darwinists have apparently never specified the conditions for an unsuccessful test of their theory regarding these nested similarities. If that is as it appears, they have not performed any truly rigorous scientific tests in the sense of natural science at all. An experimental protocol that permits only successful tests is not science but politics masquerading as science.

If Eldredge wants to say that these generalized cases of pattern matching are bonafide tests only in the sense of an historical science as distinct from experimental science, then he will have to clarify in what way it makes sense to say that the study of history affords testable predictions so significant that they can be said to confirm a theory involving biomechanical transformations at the genetic and cellular levels prior to showing the biochemical pathway demanded by the theory to even be possible. Another question that must be answered is why neo-Darwinists try to impose the more stringent standards of experimental testability upon intelligent design theory but claim not to have to meet the same standard when the two theories apply to precisely the same subject matter.

The scientific journal literature reveals that researchers have generated detailed hypotheses concerning segments of the biomechanical process of evolution. However, these cannot count as tests of evolutionary theory because a failure of one of these hypotheses has no negative impact on the theory of evolution. If the prediction fails, Darwinists simply conclude that the biochemical process of evolution must have been different than the specific hypothesis proposed. They always have and apparently always will assume an alternative biomechanical path will be available if a proposed path is disproved. Nothing is permitted to count against the theory.

The failure of a proposed biomechanical pathway for evolution poses no problem for Darwinian theory because Darwinian theory predicts no biomechanical process. Evolutionary theory is completely removed, completely separated from the biomechanical event processes of life. Darwinists will simply say, well evolution obviously happened, it’s an historical fact, so there must be another pathway that we simply haven’t discovered. This argument sounds very good on the street and down at the pub, and it does appear that evolution occurred, but proceeding in this way is not science.

We have to be careful to distinguish two questions “Is there a biochemical pathway of evolution?” and “Is Darwinian evolution testable?” Although there may be a biochemical pathway we have yet to discover, the Darwinists’ unwillingness to accept science’s inability to demonstrate a pathway under any conceivable circumstances makes the theory untestable.

This may seem like a radical claim, that the leading theory of life’s origin for 100 years is not even testable, and therefore not scientific, but better men and women than I have made this claim before now. Mayr attributes the following statement to Sir Karl Popper who is the very father of the philosophy of science, as noted in the philosophy of science as Darwin (or Mayr) is in evolution: “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.” Popper makes this claim in his essay “Darwinism as a Metaphysical Research Program,” which comprises chapter 10 of But Is It Science? [145] A great uproar arose over this statement and Popper later offered a recantation. I suspect, however, it was offered more in a spirit of intellectual fairness and social conciliation than admission of technical error. Perhaps Popper was simply recognizing that Ernst May, although the senior living evolutionist, has a broader, and more candid and honest, view of evolutionary science than many more recent biologists. For Mayr, in his book One Long Argument in 1991, says much the same thing: “Darwinism is not a simple theory that is either true or false but is rather a highly complex research program that is being continuously modified and improved. This was true before the synthesis and it continues to be true after the synthesis.”[146]

Popper, as a philosopher, added the word “metaphysical” perhaps in recognition that pure science had been often augmented with personal philosophies such as materialism and atheism, and, in the early years of evolution, even religious views. The tendency to add these philosophical adjuncts to evolutionary theory surfaces frequently even today. Because of the varied criticisms Popper received, it apparently became clear to him that Darwinism was not homogenous, that there was so much variety in the theory that it would be, in a sense, unfair to debunk the entire set of formulations for the fatal flaws of a single subgroup (the accidental, atheist, materialist version), and that some theorists, contrary to Ernst Mayr’s formulation, held a view of evolutionary science wherein the theories were more concrete, specific and testable.

I cannot be so generous as Popper here. This is because failure to differentiate the accidental, materialist, and cosmic purpose denying versions of Darwinian theory (and the more general research program that is not specific enough to be tested) allows the evidence for the philosophically and theologically innocuous versions of the theory of evolution (and the benefits of having a research program generally) to be mistakenly held to support the invalid versions, which both contradict the faith and compromise the intellectual integrity of science. It is simply dishonest to move seamlessly between these radically different concepts of evolution as if they were the same thing. [Note: This is why I will later argue, as Professor Behe has done, that a new synthesis, a scientific meeting of the minds, if you will, is needed to sort out the language, the variable scientific tenets, and the conceptual implications of each version, and give each distinct version of evolutionary theory a unique name so that it may be discussed, evaluated, rebutted, tested, and confirmed separately from all other versions. In this way the public will not be misled into applying the benefits of a positive test or evaluation of one version of evolutionary theory, basic evolution, for example, to the credit of a different version such as accidental evolution.]

If no conceivable fossil discovery is incompatible with Darwinian theory because Darwinists will always find a place on the tree of life for it no matter what, restructuring the tree as necessary; if no conceivable aspect of any biological feature will argue against Darwinian theory;[147] if no biomechanical process description is incompatible with Darwinian theory; and, if Darwinists can always assume an alternate viable biomechanical route is possible between any of the branches of absolutely any imaginable tree of life, it would appear that Popper, as Einstein once did, simply recanted too soon. For how is such a theory testable and refutable?

This is not to say that we should throw out evolution as a plausible explanation of life, but to honestly admit the limitations of each variant of the theory so that they can be properly evaluated. We cannot afford to throw out the scientific method, even to save evolution! Evolution must be considered a research program and not a theory until clarification and precision is achieved concerning its testable modern variants (if there are any). As of the present all of the historical versions of evolutionary theory specific enough to be tested have been refuted, and what remains is so general and abstract as to have no testable implications. Intelligent design theory, heretofore dismissed by mainstream science as untestable, is imminently more testable than Darwinian evolution as currently posed. Ironically, the accidental version of Darwinian theory is testable in the sense that random mutations can be generated and evaluated for their evolutionary potential. But all the results of random mutagenesis to date reveal no such potential. This test has failed, and neo-Darwinian theory, the accidental form, should be considered refuted for that reason.

Basic descent with modification, which is the simplest core of evolutionary theory that is often called an established fact, only requires that there be some general similarities between some creatures to avoid refutation; the rest is explainable by variation after inheritance. Nothing is predicted beyond this, not which similarities, which species, how much, nothing. This much similarity, however, is required for creatures to merely live, breath and walk on the same planet. The minimum of similarity implied by basic evolutionary theory would be there even in the absence of inheritance. It is therefore not a true test of evolutionary theory.

Punctuated equilibrium itself is not explanatory, it is merely descriptive. It describes the fact that there are large gaps in the fossil record. What has always been the primary objection against evolution is now being ballyhooed as proof of it! Nothing more ridiculous has occurred in the history of civilized thought. Punctuated equilibrium does not add explanation; it takes away the only explanatory hypothesis Darwinian evolution ever had, gradual change.

Sir Karl Popper and Ernst Mayr, both famous intellectual giants that have earned a permanent place in the history of science, are correct: Darwinian evolution is a research program that seems to some at least to offer some benefits in providing a tentative working model, an explanatory framework to guide further research. It is not, however, a testable scientific theory. Specific variants of evolutionary can spawn testable implications. The problem here has been that, historically, every time a theorist formulates a version of evolution specific enough to be tested it is soon refuted: soft inheritance (Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics)[148], naïve mutationism, (naïve) orthogenesis,[149] blending of genes, naïve finalism, all these have been refuted. Even Charles Darwin’s own version of evolution, classic gradualism, has been refuted by the fossil record, which shows punctuated equilibria.

It is not an accident that modern Darwinian discussions seem so general and abstract as to be saying nothing concrete at all, that they appear devoid of all concrete implications. They are devoid of concrete implications. Modern theorists are understandably gun-shy. This is because anything evolutionary theorists have so far proposed as the primary engine of macroevolutionary change that was concrete and specific enough to be tested has been disproved. Another reason may be that modern theorists realize that we don’t actually know what happened in evolution and that the theorizing has gotten way out ahead of the data. With the explosion of new data from biological research over the past few decades, it may seem prudent to evolutionists to hedge their bets by keeping their theorizing at a level of abstraction high enough to avoid having to tie it to any biomechanical process whatsoever. And this is unquestionably prudent. But it is not testable.

Unfortunately for neo-Darwinian theory it has not been so prudent. Neo-Darwinian theory (accidental evolution) has a testable implication: that accidental mutations can spawn viable sets of new genes required for macroevolution. The primary thesis of this book and the prior books of William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Michael Denton, Michael Behe, Dean Overman and many others is to show that the accidental hypothesis has now met the same fate as the other historical versions of evolutionary theory that were foolish enough to be concrete: it has been refuted. This refuted myth must now be jettisoned from Darwinian theory so that it does not continue to mislead the public into a false view of the world. What remains in evolutionary theory however, once the accidental thesis is jettisoned, though very prudent, cannot be tested at all.

Some modern theorists would apparently like to see this refutation of the accidental form of evolution go away quietly minus any public attention by reinterpreting what evolutionary theory really means in their own views and based upon more modern data. This cannot be permitted, however, because, a great deal of attention was previously focused on the accidental version of evolution in conjunction with and in augmentation of similar announcements to the public of an imagined accidental foundation for physics based upon naïve views of quantum mechanics. The public record must be corrected in kind by visibly admitting that the theory of accidental evolution has now been refuted.

Ernst Mayr seems to think this is all a misunderstanding, however:

…the critics continually criticize the claim that “Darwinian evolution is due to the natural selection of random mutations.” This criticism completely ignores the fact that from Darwin on to the 1980s the individual as a whole was considered the target of selection for the organismic biologists, and therefore recombination and the structure of the genotype as a whole were viewed as being far more important for evolution than mutational events at individual loci. Furthermore, the critics completely misinterpret the word “random.” The term, when applied to variation, means that it is not in a response to the needs of the organism.[150]

Other theorists want to similarly distance themselves from the accidental view by relegating it to naïve mutationism, a theory considered, once again, to be refuted. But not every theorist has taken Mayr’s view of evolution, and of those who have, the words “random” “accidental” and “chaotic” still pop up in contexts sufficient to mislead the reader to assume an accidental worldview. Mayr, himself, is the champion of the argument that cosmic purpose can be ruled out by science. If as Mayr says here, evolution derives not from random mutations but from transpositions of a highly complex and preexistent genetic machine, how is it that cosmic purpose is ruled out?

We have fossil records for perhaps 1-3 % of the creatures that have lived on the earth, probably much less. This scarcity of fossils means that the only test that Darwinists have proposed as a valid criterion for refuting the theory of evolution, namely finding hominids at the beginning of things, has less than 1 chance in 20 of revealing the presence of the refuting data even when the refuting events actually occurred. More importantly, the logic of this test does not refute the core of evolutionary theory; therefore it does not obligate science to abandon evolution even in the event the test fails. It is therefore not a valid test, but merely a personal statement by a given scientist that, yes, this would convince me as an individual that evolution was a mistaken theory. Only those individual theorists who proposed the test of finding hominids in the Cambrian would have to personally recant their specific version of the theory. Science itself would be perfectly free to modify and retain the theory of evolution, amend the historical event description, make some theoretical note about an early master genome such as Ohno has hypothesized (and which is the only plausible explanation of the Cambrian explosion anyway), and press on with the good work. I have no doubt that that is precisely what would happen.

Darwin’s original version of evolution predicted life form variations in a continuous fan shape of random development, minus any significant gaps. This is one of the very few concrete predictions the theory has ever made, and it has demonstrably failed, refuted by the fossil evidence. The fan shape of animal form variations on the tree of life was brought seriously into question even by the limited fossil evidence of Darwin’s own time and remains a problem to this day. Thus a real problem of ad hoc (after the fact) modification to the theory of evolution occurs.

Were specific and concrete parameters for the patterns laid out prior to the discovery of the evidence that established the pattern? Did Darwinian scientists make clear how many gaps were acceptable to their theory, how frequent, in what positions in the fossil sequences? In other words, were our current views of the evolutionary process all fully formed in advance of the discoveries of the evidence, or were they tailored to fit the discoveries only after the evidence was revealed? None of these questions is straightforwardly addressed in the evolutionary literature, the history of successful tests are nowhere itemized for public inspection, therefore, I assume the answer is primarily negative. Otherwise Darwinists would have created a flagship out of any bonafide successful tests and we would not have heard the end of it. It is fully proper and necessary to periodically update and modify a theory, but it is not proper to make predictions only after the test is complete. The theory of evolution may now well fit the evidence and thus be a good explanation, but it has not been testable and therefore has not qualified as scientific under the standard definition of scientific method. Darwinian predictions are unique among those of other scientific theories, they can only succeed or remain in progress awaiting further fossil discoveries; they can never fail.

The latest version of evolution, punctuated equilibrium, has less predictions than the classic model. The kind, size, location and frequency of the evolutionary jumps are not predicted, nor are the biological mechanisms by which such jumps are achieved, although the phenomenon is thought to arise mostly due to random variations being permitted to accumulate in geographically isolated populations. Anything and everything that might be discovered in the future is compatible with punctuated equilibrium as currently described. All future tests of punctuated equilibrium must therefore be wildly successful. The presence of large gaps in transitionary forms is already known and nothing can conceivably count as a refutation—except filling in all of the gaps with thousands of intermediates and thereby confirming classic Darwinian evolution. Punctuated equilibrium can only fail if classic Darwinian evolution succeeds. Here again, evolutionary theory takes no risk of being refuted.

A “test” of evolution is currently pending regarding the early appearance of hominids in the fossil record. This one test that might fail could conceivably take millions of years to satisfactorily conduct, to so exhaust the fossil record in paleontological digs that even a single geographically isolated occurrence of a human community in the early periods of life’s history could not be overlooked.

The Garden of Eden of biblical fame is said by scholars to be located in modern day Iraq. But Iraq is now so cluttered with unexploded bombs and ammunition that, even if permits were issued, it would be foolish to conduct an exhaustive dig throughout that country. One is tempted to say with Frohike of the X-Files again that “They are rigging the game.” When one adds the Darwinist position that the lack of a fossil does not prove the nonexistence of a creature because (and it is true) a fossil imprint may not have been produced, this one test of evolution that Darwinists admit would refute the theory (although it does not logically require a refutation) is seen to be forever inconclusive, and therefore not a valid test at all.

Evolutionary investigations have preceded more in the manner of an historical study than a rigorous natural science investigation involving tightly controlled test and experimentation. Evidence found does go to corroborate the theory as modified, but the procedure used does not qualify as a scientific test. Thus Niles Eldredge, Ernst Mayr and others far overstate the case when they claim evolution has been successfully tested over and over again. Apparently neo-Darwinian scientists hold that a theoretical explanation can be so satisfying, particularly if it is held a long time and ascribed to by the many and the prominent, that we are bound to reclassify it as an undisputed fact whether we have directly tested it or not. This may be an astute observation of social behavior but it is not in accordance with scientific method.

Merely predicting that complex life would appear late in the process and that some classification system of nested similarities or other could be superimposed on the tree of life after the fact of its discovery hardly makes evolutionary theory a powerhouse of explanation dwarfing all comers. It explains practically nothing because the biomechanics of the evolutionary process have not been given. Nor do the “tests” that have been done distinguish between intelligent design and neo-Darwinian evolution to any degree except to favor.

In other words, evolutionary theory is so confoundedly general as to tell us practically nothing and yet it is vaunted as being the most profound and illuminating thing science has ever done, informing practically every field of study we have in some significant way. Life began with a common ancestor and moved from the simple to the complex generally through some undefined thought to be accidental (non-purposive) biomechanical process of “random mutation” that can neither be explained or replicated. This is not profound, even in its own field, and one can hardly see how it illuminates every aspect of our culture. To the extent that evolution has had an effect it has not been necessarily good. Survival of the fittest is a Machiavellian concept. Machiavelli is acknowledged to be the most evil and power oriented philosopher in the history of human thought. This is hardly something to celebrate.

Although amateurs like Darwin, Wallace and similar theorists of his age may have demonstrated genuine genius in breaking out of the intellectual mold of their generation to conceive of such a radical alternative view of life, I fail to see the profundity for our own age. Now, 150 years later, we have advanced further beyond Darwin than Darwin had gone beyond his contemporaries. How can such a barren theoretical backbone as survival of the fittest and spontaneous change from unspecified mechanisms illuminate any field of study in the twentieth century where science can “see” down to the subatomic level of matter and map the genomes. No modern discipline is likely to be much enamored of blind accidental processes and no definite mechanics at the heart of explanation.

Intelligent design is equally supported by the same general kinds of prediction and tests claimed for Darwinian theory. ID predicts that complex designs will continue to be found in living creatures, complex beyond what mutagenesis studies and random lab experiments can reproduce. ID predicts that random tinkering with the genetics and design features of living things will always harm them prior to advancing their design. ID theory does not predict the absence of generic evolution. It is therefore compatible with generic evolution and all the evidence that supports it.

The popular books of Darwinists like Ernst Mayr, Douglas Futuyma and Niles Eldredge, however, by falsely equating intelligent design and literal 6-day creationism imply that intelligent design is incompatible with generic evolution, which it is not. This error is obvious to anyone who can read. It is a cheap shot, a propaganda ploy unworthy of our leading scientists. Once again, for those Darwinists who may have missed the first fifteen or twenty books on intelligent design, ID theory does not say evolution did not happen, it says evolution did not happen by accident.

Contrary to the authoritative and preemptory dismissals of intelligent design theory by such organizations as the AAAS and NAS as being an argument based upon untestable claims of religious authority, intelligent design theory offers only scientific arguments such as I have presented here. Although I may cite the Bible for literary purposes, I have not cited the Bible or any other nonscientific authority as a reason to adopt the ID thesis.

The NAS is just wrong about intelligent design always being offered as an argument from religious authority—in most cases it is not. When intelligent design is offered outside of Church publications that integrate the tenets of the faith with the science, it is presented as a strictly scientific case, as are many of the component arguments of Creation Science. The NAS is just wrong in tying ID theory to arguments from religious authority. Apparently they haven’t taken the trouble to research what is publicly available in bookstores, libraries and on the Internet. This is what our National Academy of Science says about intelligent design theory.

Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.[151]

But intelligent design does not claim supernatural intervention. ID is not limited to special publications of its advocates, and it does not refer to religious authority. We have already seen nineteen separate testable implications of intelligent design theory all of which are more substantial and direct (honest) than the odd pattern matching studies of Darwinian theory. Modern intelligent design theory is just a scientific theory, despite its religious antecedents, plain and simple.

Intelligent design theory is refutable, one of the requirements of a scientific theory that Darwinian evolution has failed to meet so far. The truly random achievement of an advanced life form (a mammal for example) from mere chemicals in the laboratory would refute the intelligent design hypothesis that accident cannot do such things.

The claims of the National Academy of Science concerning intelligent design are both decades out of date and simply false. There has always been a strictly scientific case embedded in both intelligent design and creation science arguments whether they were initially published in predominantly church related venues or not. Our mainstream scientific establishment has simply ignored the scientific kernel of intelligent design theory and creation science arguments for apparently political reasons. If one were to publish Einstein’s theory of relativity in American Catholic it would not mean that Einstein’s theory was religion and not science. The whole smear campaign against intelligent design theory has been a ridiculous affront to the human intellect and an embarrassment to the history and traditions of science. Most unfortunately our federal courts have bought into it claiming that it is impossible for intelligent design theory to divorce itself from its religious roots when the theory of evolution itself has had to do the very same thing as it started out predominantly as theistic evolution that included God in its explanations.[152]

Darwinists hold intelligent design theory to the higher experimental standard of testability, while apparently requiring no evidence whatsoever for the accidental tenet, and no standard testability for basic evolution. Douglas Futuyma, in Science on Trial, exemplifies this double standard by saying evolutionary science is an historical science and not to be restricted to the rigorous standards of testability employed in the experimental sciences. At the same time, he classifies intelligent design theory as nonscientific by definition because it can’t conform to the strict model of experimental natural science, can’t generate rigorous tests, or reproduce its claims in the laboratory. This is a contradiction because intelligent design theory is evolutionary science, its object is to explain the evolution of life the same as neo-Darwinian theory. The standards for competing theories of the same phenomena in the same branch of science must be the same.

Darwinian theory is not fully defined and can’t be tested until it is. Although the nested patterns of similarities are impressive in aggregate the fact remains that those particular patterns were not predicted in advance of their discovery. If they had turned out different, or if future discoveries are different it would not have refuted and will not refute the theory because the theory does not in fact entail those patterns. Darwinists have avoided pinning down the definition of neo-Darwinian theory to concrete and specific entailments. As such it cannot be refuted.

The Bottom Line

If intelligent design theory is correct, form constraining information must be somehow embedded into the combination of the classical natural laws of Newtonian physics, the initially informed state of matter and energy in the universe, the hidden principles of quantum physics, super strings or other structures yet to be found, very probably including a meta-genome. Whether this is all done at the very beginning of things at the Big Bang or incrementally over time at various points in the process remains an open question and is not essential to the ID hypothesis. This entails one very clear and perfectly testable implication: science will never be able to reproduce complex forms of life in the lab under “random” conditions. This is because the creation of life is predominantly dependant upon nonrandom factors. We might get lucky and accidentally achieve a bacterium, or we might not. Maybe we could achieve the random construction of a few simple genes, maybe not. But science will never be able to produce a complete life form of substantial complexity nor evolve one radically different creature from another in the lab under truly random conditions. The neo-Darwinian scientists know this full well, that is why they constantly propose trivia as evidence for the most profoundly complex process one can imagine—they know that is all the evidence they will ever have.

Darwinists will object that it is unfair to demand laboratory tests for macroevolution because the job would be so big that they could never arrange such a test. True, it probably is too big, but they do not permit ID scientists the same defense when they demand that the designer of life be produced for scientific confirmation. Assuming for the sake of argument the designer to be God he could not be produced in full even if he were willing because a small portion of his creation could not hold him. A partial appearance of God would not be distinguishable from something finite and therefore it would not be demonstrable to be God. A designer of the universe other than God is also likely to be so big that the scope of human cognition would not be broad enough to detect the limits or boundaries that serve to individuate him, that is, he would likely need to be at least as big as his creation. If someone/something smaller made claim to being the creator would we give his claim any credence? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the enormous size of the task qualifies as proper deferment for the standard criterion of scientific testability, it serves equally well for intelligent design theory as for Darwinian evolution.

Appendix 4:

The Design Inference:

Superstition or Scientific Tool?

Can chance or accident achieve complex design under any circumstances? Yes, and no. In trivial forms, such as a screen saver on your computer, a fractal software program, or a kaleidoscope shake-up can, yes. But then it takes and intelligently designed computer or art generation can to do it; so is this really an accident? Can accident go much further to create functional moving dynamic machines many levels of interaction deep without aid of any intelligently designed starting points? All of our life experiences say no, not without the same kind of impetus from intelligent design at the beginning. An airplane engine or even a bicycle cannot be designed and assembled by accident. We have never seen it happen. Mechanics know darn well that it won’t, and they have the bare knuckles and burned out brains to prove it. A design blueprint must be provided in advance, machine tools must be used by skilled craftsman to make the parts, and a precise set of nonrandom steps must be followed to get the darn thing together—period. Intelligent beings must conceive a plan, make the parts, and do the assembly. If this is true, certainly more sophisticated living machines cannot be initially created then disassembled, modified, and reassembled by accident while they are alive and in motion. Can they? How?

Contrary to the incessant innuendo to the contrary, Darwinian biologists have no answer to this question. They do not know! They have not shown the evolutionary processes in the laboratory. They cannot trace the step-by-step biomechanics of the evolutionary process, they cannot show how nature has moved from the physical components of one stage of life’s development to those of the next. Even if they could lay out the biomechanics (and they can’t), they cannot show how such an astronomically complex procedure could accidentally develop in real time minus the assistance of intelligent design.

Scientists have made new plant species by genetic engineering (intelligent design) but they have not done this by a random process. But even if they could, there is a long way to go between accidentally throwing together a plant system and assembling a human being. Man has bred new “species” of domesticated animals on purpose, true. (Dogs have almost certainly done the same thing.) But the ability to make certain reproductive combinations is not at the heart of the debate between intelligent design and accidental evolution. Once the books (genes) and libraries (genomes) are complete, certainly it will be possible to move things around a bit. That’s the easy part. The evidential core of the debate is about achieving all the hard parts in the first instance. The fallacy lies in arguing from man’s being able to achieve only simple and very limited results by his best efforts of intelligent design to nature’s being able to do things trillions of times more complex by accident. One would think the illogic of this would be obvious.[153]

Are highly educated intelligent design scientists and billions of religious people from all walks of life simply naïve? Do they all just happen to be mistake in precisely the same way in believing an accident cannot make a sophisticated machine? Do neo-Darwinian biologists really sit around watching football and eating cheese balls on Christmas Eve while their kid’s bicycles spontaneously assemble themselves in the garage by accident? I don’t think so.

Beyond the dilemma of how accidents can make or effectively modify sophisticated machines there is another question that complicates the resolution of the intelligent design debate. Given the inevitable similarity between designs of intelligent origin and successful designs of an accidental origin how could you tell the difference between them? (To make this point I have to assume for the sake of argument that there could be any accidental designs that would actually work, though I don’t for one moment believe it.) Perhaps an example will help.

Imagine for a moment you are on a vast barren beach, stranded with an ancient mariner. You have nothing available but sand, driftwood, wind, and water. A stranded mariner makes a sundial that looks remarkably similar to an accident of nature: a pile of sand with some driftwood around it at intervals. She, the mariner, clearly hasn’t much choice in the matter of her materials. Both the limited materials and other features of the environment will constrain her greatly in the range of her work products. She will also have to build above the high tide mark or her construction will be washed away. She will have to repair and rebuild periodically to offset weather damage. Accidental “construction” by nature is similarly constrained. Nature will also have to “build” at the extreme edge of tidal reach during a storm that extends that reach temporarily and then does not recur for a while; otherwise, nature’s creation will be immediately washed away. This is precisely how life is thought to have originated, in warm tidal mud flats.

However, if the mariner decides to do a particularly good job, a closer inspection of her sundial may reveal a level of precision and uniformity in design and construction that one would not expect to have occurred by accident of wind and water, even the luckiest one. The pieces of drift wood that mark each hour of the day may be set on end and forced into the ground a few inches for stability—something wind, weather and tide are not likely to achieve with precision. Only wood fragments of identical size and shape might be used. The dial might be perfectly symmetrical, set in a perfect circle (i.e., one made with a string tied to a center pivot). An increasing number of notches may be cut on each piece of wood to designate the hours, etc. At this point in the advancement of complexity and precision, or one somewhat further on, a visitor arriving on the island would simply be compelled to conclude that someone had made a sun dial. They would run off in search of the castaway.

Why? Why would they draw the conclusion of intelligent design, and when? What justifies this design inference, and how would they explain the reasons for their conclusion to someone who had not seen the sundial? At what exact point in the progression from simple to complex, imprecise to precise, did the inference become warranted? And, since we would all agree that at some point the inference to intelligent design for a sophisticated sun dial would be warranted, why aren’t evolutionists willing to draw the same conclusion for the vastly more sophisticated machines of the human body?

An irregular lump of sand with a few sticks of just any fashion is not enough to warrant a design inference, but the most complex and precise form of a sundial definitely is: a perfect pyramid in the center, shellacked doweling rods with painted surfaces and lettered values etc. Somewhere in between lies the threshold of a justifiable inference to intelligent design. “I could just see that someone had made it,” a visitor to the island might say, given certain gradations in design complexity. Or, perhaps “It was too improbable that the ocean and wind could have done something like that?” More likely they would give the full set of specific features and justifiably expect that the listener would draw the same conclusion they drew for the same reasons. Everyone knows this is valid at an intuitive level. Yet the dilemma we have encountered in the evolutionary debate is how to explain in precise academic terms why intelligent design is a good conclusion to draw in such circumstances? No one doubts that we should draw the conclusion but what do you say when a child or a neo-Darwinist stubbornly persists in saying, “Why?” Hence, the philosophical and scientific conundrum called the design inference. Why are we justified in believing in a designer when we see complex, precise or functional designs?

Watching a minnow navigate a length of shallow stream, struggling over and under hundreds of natural rock gardens, splattering across mudslides, peaking in and out of caves, and squeezing through tunnels, finally arriving at a peaceful deep pool does not evoke a design inference regarding the features of the stream bed. This is true despite the fact that the course is very complex. Why not? One reason is that the components were not closely matched to each other, there is nothing precise about them. Another is that they are not organized to achieve a definite goal; the “constructions” got in the way of the minnow’s goal as much as they facilitated it. That’s the situation of a natural watercourse.

But what if a fancy restaurant or an amusement park wants to entertain us with carp and goldfish in an elaborate decorative watercourse? What if they build their franchise next to the stream, dredge the bottom, fill it with sparkling rocks and sand, sculpt the shoreline, add Chinese lanterns, drill under blockages, install decorative tunnels and caves? What if they engineer a precise route around hundreds of obstacles to the stream flow for twenty miles! Then, of course, the situation is different. Suppose thousands of parts for this, laid out in clearly functional ways: waterwheels, submerged colored lights, even simple “road signs” (a fish symbol with directional arrow)! Ultimately it all empties out over a waterfall into a deep peaceful pool with coral castles and mermaid fountains. An observer happening upon that stream would know the difference; it was intelligently designed. Even years later when the restaurant franchise was torn down, if the watercourse remained, observers would know that someone had designed the system to entertain observers. Any given isolated point in the sequence of steps along the way toward the complete construction will not suffice to convince different observers to the same extent, or any group of them, but somewhere between the beginning and the end of that construction sequence, albeit at different points for different people, everyone will ultimately be convinced of intelligent design.

My point of course is that the marvels and complexities of the human machine dwarf such a construction trillions upon trillions of times over. Yet we fail to grant the same inference to intelligent design in biology that we would immediately allow everywhere else! Why? It can only be because of decades of atheistic propaganda that originated in Darwin’s time when science was unable to reach to the complexities of human biology at all. All science could see then was the equivalent of a single mudslide: the cell was thought to be filled with nothing more than a sort of nondescript goo called protoplasm. We knew it was a near miracle that the body did what it did, but since the complex internal designs of the cell and the genome were invisible to us, we said the only thing we could say: “That’s what the protoplasm does.” So, you have a bunch of happy fish at the end of a mudslide, so what? We know better than that now, and we can certainly do better. The design inference is not religion; it is common sense, and good science!

The reader may wonder why I chose to use a watercourse as an example of intelligent design when so many more obvious machines are available in our experience. I did this for a reason. As explained in fallacy #64, non sequitur, in the first appendix, neo-Darwinists frequently imply that, because something occurs in nature it must be spontaneous, and next that anything spontaneous must be an accident. This argument is a non sequitur twice over; both steps are invalid. It merely begs the question of the origin of designs in nature without giving any proof. Science assumes that everything above quantum level has a cause, and thus is not truly “spontaneous” at all. And at the quantum level what do we have? Spontaneous particle events that just so happen to accidentally uphold natural law in their statistical predominance very precisely year after year after year. Obviously there is nothing accidental about that form of spontaneity either, else we would see a vastly greater degree of variation. In using the fish run example I am trying to get the reader in the habit of shrugging off this kind of neo-Darwinian propaganda and thinking for themselves. Could there really be intelligently designed creations in nature, and how do we know them when we see them? The answers to these questions that I propose for the reader’s discerned contemplation are “yes” and “the same way we know them anywhere else.”

Outside of nature the design inference becomes so much easier, and it is not just because of decades of propaganda. There is a genuine intuitive difference between manmade machines and biological ones, though one finds oneself at somewhat of a loss to explain it. Seeing even a horse wagon having perhaps hundreds less parts than the artificially modified stream, we have no doubt at all that it is intelligently designed, even though it is now known not to be the optimal way to achieve its goal. Trucks or cars are more optimally designed for transporting objects or people than horse wagons, that is, until global warming destroys the ecosystem. Nonetheless, we still know that wagon was intelligently designed. Two of the features of the wagon that promote the design inference, in addition to moderate complexity, are the closely matched, precisely fashioned parts, and the fact that the overall result is to enhance the transport of objects more than to impede it. Its purpose is “visible” and it successfully achieves that purpose better than accidents can—it is a success as a tool. It works! And it works better than anything we have directly observed nature to be capable of making by accident.

Borderline cases may not warrant a design inference of course: tin cans with string, a few boards in a tree, a plank over a rock or a stream that works as a bridge or a “teeter-totter,” etc. Maybe they were put there for a purpose, maybe not. But cases much farther out on the complexity scale are intuitively quite clear to us: they were intelligently designed. Yet mainstream science persists in denying the most intensively complex example of mechanistic complexity known to man: man himself! This can only be for political reasons.

The important point here is not that there are gray areas around the threshold of the design inference of which we cannot be certain. Gray fringes around the thresholds of decision making occur everywhere in life and science. Having gray areas is not generally a problem for either scientific or common sense decisions. It is too cold to walk the five miles to town, the water is too shallow to dive into, etc. People will vary somewhat in their opinions about where the decision threshold lies for such things. The important point is that, outside the grey areas, we are not merely coincidentally correct in drawing our conclusions of intelligent design or for these other matters; we are rationally justified in having drawn them! We have made a valid inference using a reliable mental process involving logic and evidence. This remains true despite the fact that the mental evaluation process used may have occurred fully in the unconscious mind, or may have been one for which science or society has yet to lay down a set in stone threshold criterion.

No one disputes that we know intelligent design when we see it; it is a quick and often unconscious conclusion, practically a reflex. Everyone makes design inferences all day long every day without questioning them: cars, tools, electronics, etc. Knowing at a glance that a precise and sophisticated machine is the product of intelligence is easy, but it turns out to be supremely difficult to explain in clear precise terms why the reflexive judgments we have made are proper or improper in a given case. While intelligent observers disagree on a good many of the cases that hover around the intelligent design threshold, they agree on most or all of the cases falling far short of the threshold or far exceeding it.

The mental process involved in the design inference need be neither unanimously agreed to nor infallible, but merely reliable, to be valid. Neo-Darwinists make this unreasonable demand of ID theory, that it must be both unanimous and infallible, though such unrealistic standards are used nowhere else in life of science for any of the other kinds of inferences and decisions we make. We often approximate, disagree about, and make mistakes concerning weight or, distance, for example. “That is too far for a human to jump.” “It would take six locomotives to pull that load.” “We don’t have time to get there before dark,” etc. Generally, such judgments are correct, though not always. This remains true despite the fact that people disagree at times on what the correct judgment is in a given circumstance. Judgments regarding weight and distance are neither fully precise, unanimously agreed to, nor infallible, but they are reliable and rationally justified. The same is true of drawing the conclusion of intelligent design. Just as with weight and distance we know that the basic mental process we use is valid. Clearly, we are doing something reliable and consistent when we conclude that something has been intelligently made, for we are almost never wrong.

Typically, we don’t feel obligated to attempt scientific precision in resolving everyday applications of weight and distance. Science can answer these questions rigorously if called upon to do so, but there is seldom a practical necessity for it. The same is true of the design inference. Perhaps the reason we typically just conclude at a glance or intuit that something is the product of intelligence when we could do a formal computation in questions of intelligent design is the same reason we don’t call in a surveyor to jump a mud puddle: demanding scientific rigor would be overkill in these cases. For reasons of intellectual efficiency and conservation of mental energy, the method we use to make an inference to intelligent design is generally causally and imprecise, even subliminal. This is not because intelligent design is a rationally indefensible conclusion to draw, but for the opposite reason: because it is one of the easiest conclusions to rationally draw. Of the dozen or so indicators of an intelligently designed machine, only the presence of a few of them in the same artifact is sufficient to prove intelligent design. We breeze through a subliminal mental checklist probably in less than a second in most cases: precise work, complexity, interactive parts, visible purpose…somebody made this. In the case of unitary objects such as an arrowhead, we would want to examine the item more closely for design features such as precision workmanship, whether the aerodynamic balance and sharpness of the edge is evidence of the items purpose, etc. The margin of error is higher with arrowheads, but the decision making criteria are valid. We are simply unable to apply those criteria in a given case with perfection.

In the case of the design inference, we can call upon science to formalize a rigorous model that validates and exposits the mental logic that underlies our everyday decisions, just as we can call a surveyor in to measure a mud puddle. Nothing in principle forbids this being done. In fact, the modern evolutionary debate has produced the first real requirement to do this, and, in The Design Inference, mathematician and philosopher Professor William Dembski has proposed just such a rigorous computational model of the design inference.

But isn’t the question of life’s design an exception to the design inference for the very reason that it is biology we are talking about, not physics? No. In the arena most relevant to the evolutionary discussion, biological design, we have recently gained some experience in trying to design and construct simple biotic machines. In doing this we have discovered that the components of living creatures are machines no less than those we make of metal and wood. The fact that living organisms are made of soft biotic materials does not disqualify them from being intelligently designed machines. Scientists have done some preliminary research into machines made from biotic materials, computers for example.[154] It is only reasonable to assume that a more advanced intelligence could do more than we have managed so far. In genetic engineering, we have also gained substantial experience in trying to modify living biological machines that already exist. In both of these endeavors we are rapidly discovering that making biotic machines, especially living ones, is not so easy. We still cannot make anything truly alive from nonliving chemicals. We cannot, not even with conscious intention, and with all our intelligence, and all the resources of science and technology combined, generate one radically different kind of creature from another.

Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists say that the dumb process of nature has somehow succeeded where we intelligent humans have failed. This, despite the fact that what we have encountered in the immense functional complexity in human biology is precisely the situation that Charles Darwin said would disprove his theory of evolution by accidental mutation directed by natural selection: an example of a living system that could not be constructed by a series of small accidental modifications. Nature has had longer to work, of course, but as we have seen, not nearly long enough. Until the advent of modern intelligent design theory no one in science bothered to sit down and do the math: “Oh, four billion years is plenty of time for absolutely anything at all to happen.” Poppycock! Time is a poor substitute for intelligence in our experience with the assembly of highly complex machines. Could an imbecile put the space shuttle together properly in three or four billion years? (No, I couldn't!) He would only get so far before the design was broken and progress was reversed? Would you be able to build the space shuttle without a design blueprint in four billion years? Now that the electron microscope has revealed the cell’s complex machinery, the intricate language of DNA, gene regulation networks, transpositional and developmental genomes, and proteins so complex that our computers can only model a fraction of their complexity, we have discovered that the human body is at least the equivalent of the space shuttle in complexity.

Some have said, well, perhaps nature is just that way; a tendency toward life is simply built into natural processes, though not by intelligent design. In theory, that could be true, after all, life did occur, and the mysteries and secrets of the Big Bang are still just that: mysteries and secrets. But to say “It just is that way” is not the most justifiable scientific view to take, and it does nothing whatsoever to advance scientific explanation. This view forsakes explanation. The probabilities overwhelmingly support the conclusion of intelligent design of nature because the universe becomes a machine-building machine in this view, whether we prefer to admit it or not. A robotized factory is itself an order of magnitude of complexity greater than the most complex machine that it builds. To select a theory so adverse to the probabilities is not the scientific method. It is not science.

The Darwinist deferral to natural law as the element that takes the accident out of life’s origin does not constitute a valid rebuttal of intelligent design theory because the problem of explanation is simply transferred one step further back to the machine-building machine. Bias and accident are mutually exclusive by definition. Therefore, if we grant that nature is indeed strongly biased towards the construction of complex life we are already admitting that the process of life's origin was no accident.

The complexity of biological machines places them far beyond the vague area around the intelligent design threshold. They so far exceed that threshold that there is no greater question of their intelligent origin than for a radio or a TV—except to the neo-Darwinists who, like, Chekov in Star Trek V, claim that they can’t see a thing. The probability values derived from the complexity of biological machines representing the overall complexity of the human organism as one integrated machine, as shown in Table 1 of Part 1, places human life further beyond that threshold than anything we know, including the most complex machines we make for ourselves.

Many of us without a political axe to grind for materialism have no trouble going even further to say, “To heck with the space shuttle, you could have stopped with the tin cans and a string! Even there it is clear that one has a rudimentary phone or intercom. It couldn’t happen by chance.[155] How could the string be poked through such a small hole and tied securely on the ends by accident?” And you are right; even something so absurdly simple as a couple of tin cans connected by an old piece of string is practically impossible to assemble by chance.

A single human body has been estimated to contain 10,000,000,000,000 cells. Each cell has hundreds of components interacting with each other in precise ways to accomplish over 2,000,000 actions per minute. Many of these components are quite complex in their own right. Thousands of proteins may be alternatively brought into play in a single cell at different times. Cellular components are formed into higher and higher level systems: cellular subsystems, then cells, then organs, tissues, body parts and finally an integrated life form. If a tin can phone will never fall together properly, how, then do you make a complete living system by chance! Obviously someone is pulling a verbal trick of some kind. And, that’s basically what the theory of neo-Darwinian evolution is, a verbal trick. And most of us have fallen for it at some time or another. When pressed neo-Darwinists (most of them) reveal that what they mean is not accident in the pure sense of the word, but “spontaneous,” that is, nature just seems to be able to do this. They are fully content to let the public retain the confusion about terminology and the mistaken belief that the world implies no intelligent design, while it is demonstrably a machine-building machine of monumental proportions.

In challenging the design inference outright, neo-Darwinists have accomplished a masterstroke of debating strategy: they have asked ID theorists to prove the obvious. Proving the obvious, however, is the most supremely difficult thing to do. How does one prove that 2 plus 2 equals 4? It is true. We know it is true. But how to you prove it to someone that is so obstinate as to deny that it is true? In the case of concluding intelligent design, is it complexity of design, difficulty level of the physical construction process, a purpose being discernable in the functionality of the thing, high improbability in the vast reduction of all the astronomical chance alternatives to one exquisitely precise result minus any other explanation of causality, duplication of the same form with uniform consistency in multiple objects beyond the natural variance of an accidental process, precision of apparent workmanship, perfection in form, that is, manifesting near purity of an idea in a physical object? In a sense, all of these factors are importantly involved in establishing intelligent design, generally. And, generally, no one has any real difficulty in acknowledging the proper signs of intelligent design in the abstract.

But what about specifically, and in the concrete? A problem occurs when one tries to get specific and talk about individual objects because there is so much variation among designed things that the mix of the separate ingredients of the intelligent design “recipe” is never quite the same for any two types of design products. Take a hair comb and a desktop computer for example. Here complexity is clearly a key indication for the computer but not for the comb. Perceivable function significantly varies in some circumstances, for example between a shovel and the Mona Lisa. Uniformity, precision and perfect realization of concept can likewise vary. In such simple designs as arrowheads the question is further complicated by the fact that nature can at times (though rarely and not consistently) generate a more perfect realization of concept by accident than early societies have at times done on purpose, perhaps being rushed into haphazard production of arrows to support a desperate battle.

The simplest designs, of course, give us the most trouble in analysis. In the case of a tin can phone it is clearly not the complexity level that makes us suspect design? No, the design is quite simple. How about specific function? No, although it has a possible function, lying where it is first found in the city dump it is not seen to be performing a specific function out of the several that might be imagined. However, when a sterile version of the same tin can system is found connecting the two rooms of the children’s tree house in the backyard, in their hands, and them speaking into one end and listening at the other, the function becomes more clear. So the contextual implication of utility must be added as another element of the design inference as well as the difficulty level for accidental manufacture.

Context is a big help, for it reveals a purpose, but in this case another primary cause of our suspicion of intelligent design is the closely matched parts. The design also implies a physical difficulty level of construction that accident cannot easily achieve. On the other hand, seeing the children pretending to have star trek communicators that are actually small green tomatoes tells us that context alone is not enough (and to stand back out of range if they are in a playful mood). In some cases, though, closely matched parts may be enough, even if the thing hardly works. Precision of workmanship, difficulty level of accidental construction and close matching of parts can be enough to establish intelligent design even minus contextual clues revealing a purpose or use.

Believe it or not, the tin can phone is a good example to teach us that we must pay attention to the mechanical details of the process of evolution ala Grigg. In this case the process is much more difficult than it looks because failed attempts to push the string through the hole in the can fray the end of the string and it becomes harder and harder to get the string to go through the hole with each attempt. Pretty sophisticated science, huh? No, it is not sophisticated, but the situation does symbolize a real scientific principle: the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics.

The 2^nd Law says that entropy tends to increase with all natural processes, entropy, again, being a state of matter/energy so disorganized that it will never assume an organized form. What this means for evolution is that there is a cost to be paid for each failed attempt at forming and advancing life, that there are less and less resources available each time, and that the process will tend to become increasingly difficult. An implication of ORLEF-B is that all random processes will, to some extent, be progressively self-defeating in this way, driving up the resource cost. The event can be achieved, in theory, but in practice the cost will be high.

Seeing a machine or even a two or three dimensional design with very closely matched components suggests a designer to us because we see nature’s accidental works each day and have come to associate accidental constructions with very rough brush strokes, inconsistencies of pattern, loose ends, and, as often as not, horrendous messes. When everything matches up to imperceptible tolerances we know nature’s rough hand was not the artist because we have seen her work all our lives, and quite frankly, in our direct experience she is not that good. Art critics can tell you that such inferences are valid; you can come to know an artist’s work well enough to recognize it.

As critics of intelligent design have forever pointed out, the presence of increasing order in a subsystem of the universe does not contradict the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, and it is true. The problem with applying that argument to the origin and development of life on Earth is that millions of distinctly different subsystems are involved in the biochemical and physical processes involved, not just one. To have millions of subsystems all successfully bucking the 2^nd Law at the same time in a manner that points towards the one same result, the achievement of the complex designs of life, consistently over millions of years is simply too improbable to believe. In theory it could happen, but not in practice in any conceivable time span.

According to neo-Darwinian theory, nature spontaneously builds the most complex and difficult machines not only by accident, but also in a hurry. So why don’t we ever catch her producing these machines, at least the simple ones? Lightening may split a few boards now and then, and a few rounded rocks might be found to serve as rudimentary wheels, but where are the wagons assembled by Mother Nature? The best we can point to is that Mother Nature can in fact knock out a few decent arrow heads and balls, but with less than sufficient panache to warrant putting her on the payroll at General Motors or Toyota.

On a common sense basis it is clear that the human organism and many others far exceed the intelligent design threshold. Nonetheless, as a technical matter, the puzzling questions remain: “Exactly where does the intelligent design threshold lie? Why does it lie there? And “How do we objectively describe that threshold such that science can apply it to new situations?” William Dembski has devoted three good long books to these questions: The Design Inference, The Design Revolution, and No Free Lunch. According to Dembski, the threshold for the design inference is essentially a matter of the level of complexity and the high specificity of function, although he adds several other criteria as well in a well-developed analysis. These works won’t be the last word on the subject but they have more than validated the concept of a scientifically tractable criterion for intelligent design.

In addition to irreducible complexity, Michael Behe has emphasized and further explained another important criterion for the ID inference: closely matched parts. Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity, the requirement for all of the parts to be present for proper design function, is not a required or necessary condition for the design inference; however, it is probably a sufficient condition. Closely matched parts strongly corroborate the design inference, though are probably neither necessary nor sufficient for it. Highly redundant sophisticated systems may also warrant the design inference even when not irreducibly complex because there is insufficient time for natural selection to both gradually build and then pronounce its opinion of multiple layered redundancy or ultra-complex systems. Natural selection would probably never build the intermediate steps required to construct second and third layer redundancy because many of those steps would add nothing to survivability or reproductive success. Nonetheless, irreducible complexity, even alone, remains a sufficient condition for the inference of intelligent design because it rules out an accidental construction process having achieved the design.

Given all of this, and the fact that known biological systems qualify on all counts par excellence, I contend that the intelligent design concept is as fully validated as gravity, the nuclear or electromagnetic forces, or even space itself. We don’t throw out valid measurements of these forces or spatial distance because there remain some instances too small for our current instruments to measure. We don’t stop using math because we can’t further explain why 2 plus 2 equals 4. The concepts are known to be valid generally and the measurements we can make remain legitimate. In the same way it is clear that, although we cannot say exactly where the intelligent design threshold is in terms of functional complexity and precisely fashioned parts, that is, we can’t say where the smallest value of intelligent design resides, we can confidently say where some of the larger values are. This is no more mysterious or improper than admitting that we can’t say what the smallest quantity of space is, that last minute increment before we reach the purity of a true mathematical point. Before quantum physics we had no idea of what the smallest measurable unit of energy was, but scientists maintained full confidence in their measurements of kilowatts, joules, calories, and megatons nonetheless.

Science has been very comfortable elsewhere with admitting theoretical limitations while still heralding the practical value of those things it could reach with its instruments. It is no different with intelligent design. In the case of intelligent design, the human mind and the five senses are the instruments, and, as the instrument varies somewhat with each person, each person will have different limitations of what they can perceive and understand regarding the factors involved in the design inference. The scientific definition and standard for the color red or green is an objective constant, but yet there are unavoidable limits and variations on how individuals can implement that standard in their personal experience. And, of course, some are absolutely color blind or have the implementation of the standard inverted in their perceptual machinery: red is green, and green is red to them. This could conceivably occur in other areas, including the perception of design. Charles Darwin, himself, could arguably be said to be a victim of such a malady, as he could see no purpose in the processes of nature whatsoever. Modern day neo-Darwinists have so much more evidence of design available to them than did Darwin, in biochemistry and genetics, yet they steadfastly maintain with Sgt. Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes “I see nothing!”

Such practical limits and individual variations in applying the process do not invalidate the design inference any more than a student using the smallest gradients of the millimeter scale of a ruler would invalidate the student next to him being relegated to using only whole inches from the opposite side of the ruler because of poor eyesight. Similarly, a scientist’s using a micrometer to make extremely small measurements does not invalidate the mariner’s using a plumb line to make large ones.

Inferences to clear instances of intelligent design are not invalidated by the inability to fix the smallest possible objectively agreed upon specified complexity value that is necessary of sufficient to prove design. Nor are they invalidated by the fact that different people have adopted personally customized standards for intelligent design inferences. Just as for color perception, so long as they remain visibly within the safe to assume range and away from the grey areas close to the unknown threshold, intelligent design inferences need not be questioned in practice.

It is undoubtedly the great variety of situations to which the design inference might apply that cause us to doubt that there could be a single process or criterion involved. How could the same identifiable criterion be manifested in all these different things from bacteria to wagons to power drills to the genetic code to the space shuttle to novels to the Mona Lisa? Though the point is well taken, as often occurs in scientific and especially evolutionary investigations, our failure to understand may derive more from the fact that we are asking the wrong questions than that there is no satisfactory answers. In other words, there may be no single criterion for intelligent design. That does not mean we are left without proper means to make the inference. There is no one single way to conclude a surface is hard. We can poke it, press it, kick it, shoot it, stab it, even sleep on it. Any of these methods are satisfactory to reveal the hardness of a surface.

The legitimacy of using multi-faceted criteria whose thresholds cannot (yet) be precisely laid out in quantitative terms is confirmed every day in criminal court. People’s lives are taken, their children are taken from them, they are assigned to life in prison or long-term psychiatric care, based upon a reasonably exact procedure that, nonetheless, no two jurors would explain to you precisely the same way. Motive, intent, opportunity, witness testimony, character evaluation, personal history, psychoanalysis reports, DNA samples, physical descriptions, vehicle identification, associations with known criminals, etc. All these factors and more are weighed, combined and cross-referenced before a decision is rendered, including factors unique to each individual case. Jurors may be first timers and have no experience in such a complex procedure at all, but yet we are still confidant in the reliability of the outcome of this informal, not fully extrapolated, and inconsistently applied juror adjudication process that we are willing to stake human lives on it. This, while knowing the process is not infallible.

In intelligent design inferences we don’t even have to go so far as to say “who done it,” we only have to say that an intelligent being was involved generally. That would seem a much easier task than identifying a murderer by name. Furthermore, design inferences are explicitly used at the beginning of all legal inquiries where a death is involved, the coroners inquest, to determine if the death was accidental or on purpose (murder or suicide). This is precisely a design inference question: did an intelligent purposeful agent cause the event or did it result from an accident? If we can take lives based upon rudimentary design inference criteria, why can’t we make a scientific judgment of the same type when nothing near he gravity of life and death hangs in the balance and we have, in Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, a literal mathematical proof that accident can be ruled out?

It is ironic to note that a pattern of evidence so simple as a few rough holes occurring in certain locations in a victim’s body can absolutely convince an experienced criminal investigator that an intelligent being was the cause. On the other hand, observations of thousands upon thousands of finely tuned working components stacked nine levels deep within a biological machine (human being) are insufficient to convince even more highly trained evolutionary scientists that an intelligent being was the cause. I submit to you that if the design inference is valid where less evidence is involved, it is valid where more evidence is involved.

The design inference is therefore a valid conclusion to draw in most of the cases where it has been made, including the astronomical complexities of living machines. Describing in detail exactly how we justify the inference in each case is possible, though cumbersome, and science should be undertaking more studies of how to objectively quantify the decision logic used in such inferences. William Dembski has made an extraordinarily good start.

All of the factors mentioned above, except beauty and elegance, are clearly describable in either empirical or mathematical terms, and it is not clear that math, at least as it relates to geometrical form and optimization of the ratio of simplicity to efficiency, may not be substantially involved even there. The atheistic physical reductionists (most neo-Darwinists are such) are stuck with admitting that even subjective qualities such as beauty and elegance can be reduced to a set of physical parameters. There will remain borderline cases regarding intelligent design just as there remain borderline cases in criminal investigations, but the most complex machine we have ever encountered, the human body, will always be acknowledged as falling within the legitimate and unquestioned domain of a valid design inference. Life is unquestionably a product of intelligence.

Appendix 5:

A Word on Creation Science Versus Intelligent Design Theory

The two theories, Creation Science (CS) and Intelligent Design Theory (ID), although not opposed to each other on the general tenet of the intelligent design of life, are otherwise very different. ID has only one tenet: that life could only have arisen with the aid of intelligent design. Creation Science goes further to claim that God is the designer of life, that the Earth is much younger than mainstream science has established, and that living things were created directly in their final forms as opposed to being created through millions of years of evolution (the 6-day creation of Genesis).

I should make clear that it is not my intent to imply an insult to young earth Creation Science theorists merely by strongly couching my book in the Catholic perspective. It has been too much the norm for critics of Creation Science to insult the theory as if it were patently nonsense. Even the Vatican has (I feel unfortunately) at times labeled CS as ridiculous. While the CS view of the book of Genesis is incorrect, I do not think Creation Science is nonsense as science, or even as theology. It is importantly wrong as theology, yes, but that does not make it nonsense. The Vatican, of course, was criticizing the CS approach for using the Bible as if it were a science book. This is a theological criticism, but even there, I think ridicule is going too far because, at least in the United States, the literal reading of the Bible has always been an enormous force in popular theology. The tradition of the Catholic Church is not to insult popular theology but to properly inform and guide it. Yes, it is incorrect to view the Bible as literal in all passages, and the creation story in Genesis is not one of the literal ones. The Pope and the bishops have the authority to issue such admonishments, for such errors can do much damage to the credibility of the faith in the eyes of unbelievers. The rest of us, however, should not ridicule our fellow devout Christians for having made what is on the personal level merely an honest mistake in the formulation of their view of the faith. In the modern world, many of us will struggle to perfect our faith until very late in life.

From the scientific and philosophical point of view, however, CS is a very rigorously laid out, internally consistent, and cogent system of thought that uses genuinely scientific arguments for its defense. To that extent CS qualifies as science. It appears to be wrong, yes, but that does not make it nonscientific. Being incorrect is a condition Creation Science theory shares with almost all of the rest of science’s theories and hypotheses, which were ultimately shown to be incorrect in regards to one tenet or another by the advancement of science.

A young earth theory does appear much less likely than the current mainstream scientific estimate of roughly 4.5 billion years. Having said that, precisely because mainstream scientists have refused to examine the scientific arguments of Creation Science, the scientific jury must nonetheless be considered to still be out on the subject of a young earth. This is precisely because Creation Scientists have not yet had a full hearing of their case within the scientific community. The Creation Science case is not non-scientific by nature, as neo-Darwinists would have us believe; it is merely the currently less plausible scientific theory. Certainly, CS theorists have done science and society a valuable service in very ably highlighted the weaknesses in the neo-Darwinian case. This may go far to explain why neo-Darwinists don’t want Creation Scientists to get a fair hearing.

The simple fact of the matter is that Creation scientists present a volume of scientific data and argument, which may in the final analysis be wrong, but is nonetheless clearly science. To date their case has been fully ignored by mainstream science. See the Creation Research Society Quarterly journal, AIG Research Journal, and Creationwiki’s Creation Collaborative Encyclopedia (Wiki) as well as he informal but scientific resources at AIG Questions & Answers, AIG Articles Archive, AIG In-depth Answers, and AIG Online Resources. The theses that the Earth is young and that life first appeared in its present form (although probably incorrect in my own view) are clearly scientific ones despite neo-Darwinists’ loud assertions to the contrary. Although a given scientist’s estimate of the overall weight of the evidence (including perhaps some of our own Popes) may assign such claims a probability that is vanishingly small, given the theoretical fluctuations in natural law permitted by quantum theory, the claims of CS cannot be definitively ruled out. Thus, although the magnitude of probability as currently estimated may be ridiculously small, the theory as such is not ridiculous. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that today’s truth is tomorrow’s fiction.

It is always possible that future discoveries will show us to have been theorizing in advance of the facts. Science has discovered some astounding and quite fundamental things only in the past couple of decades, viz dark matter, previously unknown, that constitutes up to 95% of everything in the universe. Some recent measurements in astronomy indicate that the universe may not be expanding after all. New discoveries at this level can potentially be the harbinger of paradigm shattering revelations. Though our current paradigms may survive these two particular revelations, success at string theory or other hypotheses for grand unification could shake up the accepted paradigms a good little bit. Whatever new concepts may lurk in future discoveries that might explain black holes or the singularity at the Big Bang, if such concepts there be, would by definition entail a startling rework of science’s conceptual foundations.

Our present scientific paradigm has it that it all came from a complete mystery at the Big Bang, and science still does not know how to bridge the behavior of quantum subatomic particles to make it compatible with the known truths of Newtonian mechanics (normal physics). Thus, there is plenty of room for surprises, particularly if the long sought grand unification theory in physics, string theory or something akin to it, is finally confirmed and elucidated.

Radiometric dating techniques (“carbon dating”) provide the foundation for modern science’s view that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. For Young Earth Theory to be a substantial contender again, serious doubt (at a level mainstream science would acknowledge) would have to be introduced into our understanding of atomic decay, which underlies the carbon dating method of age determination. Something similarly radical would have to be introduced into our understanding of age determinations of the universe by light spectrum analysis. Corresponding adjustments to the way we view the formation of the geological strata of the surface of the Earth would have to occur. There is currently very substantial cross-corroboration between observations in these three different fields that give science firm confidence in its current estimate of the age of the Earth. The overturning of all three of these seemingly well-confirmed and cross-corroborative methods of time measurement is, admittedly, highly unlikely; but it is not scientifically impossible. Some quantum fluctuations affecting natural law at a fundamental level, perhaps arising from the dynamics of string theory that have yet to be elucidated, could have caused a physical anomaly or anomalies that would simultaneously give us consistently false readings in these three dating methods of carbon dating, light spectrum analysis, and geological strata. The possibility that such a thing could occur seems vanishingly small. But, because the possibility of such fluctuations remains inherent in the indeterminacy of quantum physics and the remaining unknowns of extra-dimensional physics, it is not scientific nonsense to pose such a hypothesis, but merely a case of the hypothesis being currently bereft of evidence.

Consider, many of our best theoretical/mathematical physicists now argue for the possibility of such things as multiverses (multiple universes) in addition to extra dimensions and quantum indeterminacy. In these other worlds different natural laws hold. Quantum indeterminacy allows fluctuations in natural law in our world (highly improbable but possible). Other possibilities arise with the new physics and cosmology such as anomalous fluctuations in the flow of time, cross universe transfer of matter and energy through black holes, etc.[156] These possibilities are often posed by neo-Darwinists as arguments against entrenching ourselves in the traditional view of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, the view that looks as much like divine creation as one might ever expect to find. They wish to open up these other radical possibilities to weaken our confidence in divine creation. However, in doing this, they have ironically reopened the door to a literal 7-day creation and a young Earth (not as theology, but as science).

Given the new radical possibilities in modern cosmology and physics, it is possible, just for one example, that our world was in fact created in another universe first, a universe having different laws than our universe, a universe in which time had slowed to the extent that it would be true to say that six “days” of formation occurred followed by a day of inactivity. The result was then spewed into our universe through the singularity we call the Big Bang, which could turn out to be, among other things, the output side of a black hole in a massive parent universe or another trans-universe portal of some kind. In theory (radical experimental speculative theory, as it may be) some combination of an anomaly in the flow of time, interaction between multiple universes, and a rare fluctuation in the natural laws of our universe could generate a situation where our world would consistently look to carbon dating, geophysical strata and light spectrum analysis much older than it actually is.

I am not arguing that such view should be adopted as the currently favored most probable scientific view. What I am arguing is that the neo-Darwinist/materialist/atheist camp are here caught in check. They can’t argue against the Big Bang theory, which looks so much like divine creation, without affirming the radical new speculative theories that open up the door to 7-day creation and young Earth theory as at least being scientifically coherent. If the radically experimental, speculative, views of the origin of the universe are plausible, the list of radical options they engender are plausible. One of those options is 7-day creation/young Earth. In this radical new physics/cosmology it is held either that we cannot ever know the nature of the other universes or what occurred before the Big Bang, or that we don’t currently know and won’t until we achieve a grand unification theory in physics (and perhaps not even then due to practical limits on experiment). As a consequence, 7-day creation and young Earth theory of Creation Science cannot be dismissed as having been definitively disproved by modern science. All we can conclude from the new physics is that the universe is potentially infinitely more awe inspiring than even Creationists have heretofore ever held it to be. Wow!

Thus, Creation Science cannot be dismissed as merely religion; it is coherent science, but not as well supported by the current evidence as the mainstream view. It is not required that a theory be the prevailing one to qualify as science, but merely that it employ scientific method and data. Thus, Creation Science can qualify as science once the purely theological claims are separated out.

Now, back to the distinction between the two views. It is important to be clear that modern intelligent design theory makes no religious claims at all; it is all science. The work of Creation Science theorists, on the other hand, taken as a whole, is somewhat different. While they do have an impressive arsenal of truly scientific arguments, they, nonetheless, are visibly making two distinct kinds of arguments. One of those arguments is from religious authority. They do not, however, as neo-Darwinists unfairly insist, pretend that the one is the other, that theology is science. Creation Scientists simply have the integrity to acknowledge the reality of their God and refuse to deny the fact that God truly has authority. I make the same personal affirmation myself. I don’t represent that affirmation as science, but I have even more confidence in it than I do in the scientific truths. As mentioned in the introduction, in the view of the Catholic Church, the genuine truths of both theology and science will never conflict, though at times they may appear to pending a more thorough analysis.

While it is fully right and proper for Creation Scientists to assert their theology on its own turf, it is not right to represent the theological components as science, and I’m not sure that CS theorists have actually made this error. They simply have a habit of presenting their integrated system of though in wholeness. In their view theology and science are two sides of the same coin that represents the wholeness of truth. While one barrel of the CS rhetorical weaponry is undeniably theology, the other barrel is loaded with a surprisingly potent scientific case. These two types of Creation Science arguments, the theological and the scientific, need not be entangled together by critics, even though CS theorists tend to pose them together. The core scientific arguments, modules, or distinct lines of reasoning if you will, of CS can be separated from the larger religious thesis and scientifically evaluated separately. Who would not give Albert Einstein the courtesy of separating his theory of relativity from a larger religious article had it been originally published in American Catholic as “Our Father’s Plan.” There would have been no question about doing it. Einstein in fact affirmed God in his own way and no one said we should throw out his scientific work because of that affirmation. The reason is that Einstein’s view of God has been, properly or improperly, described as a pantheistic view similar to Spinoza’s where God=the world itself. This allows materialists, humanists, and physical reductionists to rule and traditional theists to drool; that is why no one criticized Einstein. One can spout any kind of intellectual nonsense whatsoever and never be criticized by mainstream science so long as the Christian God is denied and materialism is affirmed.

Neo-Darwinists tend to pursue this prejudice further in taking a single scientific point of contention from the Creation Science case, distorting it into a foolish inaccurate parody that only a simpleton would propose, and then urge readers to dismiss the entirety of a very substantial and empirically well-grounded Creation Science case without giving it further study and evaluation. Such distortions are hardly good science, and, to be frank, are not intellectually honest.

Does mainstream science in fact have all the critical component data it needs to dismiss out of hand all Creation Science claims as they have heretofore done? No. Are mainstream scientists receptive to authentic evidence and logic that might argue against neo-Darwinism or for a young earth? No. The neo-Darwinian writings are available in the public record, and the prejudice is plain for all to see. I leave the reader to judge. It is safe to say that mainstream science has not always been as receptive as the standards of objective science require. Certainly, mainstream science is clearly not spending any time or money in research areas that might argue against the currently favored theory of accidental evolution.

Again, for those new to the subject, contrary to neo-Darwinist claims, intelligent design theory and young earth Creation Science are two absolutely different theories. Intelligent design theorists are not “neo-creationists” as many Darwinists assert. Intelligent design theorists assert a creator only in the sense of an intelligent designer of life as a scientific hypothesis. ID theory does not assert who that designer is. They allow that it might or might not be God. ID is therefore not biblical creationism, and it is not tied to the young earth view of biblical Creation Science. It is important to keep this distinction in mind because Darwinists will try to dismiss intelligent design theory by offering a rebuttal of selected biblical Creation Science claims while ignoring the entirely distinct set of arguments of intelligent design theory. (They also ignore the remaining Creation Science arguments for which they have no rebuttal). They then claim a resounding victory over both, while having addressed the truly cogent portion of neither.

Intelligent design theory is not biblical, neither is it anti-biblical. Nor should the reader assume from my comments that I hold that any or all biblical Creation Science arguments have been fully and properly rebutted by the neo-Darwinists. I do not so hold. The neo-Darwinian argument concerning the age of the Earth is convincing but it hinges upon the reliability of carbon dating and other dating techniques the reliability of which Creation Scientists have called into question on the basis of genuinely scientific concerns. Recent advancements in the argument, however, do seem to favor the validity of carbon dating in most applications, and it would appear to be sufficient to corroborate the belief in an older Earth.

Creation Scientists make a variety of separate scientific objections to neo-Darwinian evolution. Each of these must stand or fall on its own individual merits and the success or failure of one implies nothing whatsoever about the merits of the others. It only takes one successful line of objection to refute a theory. Therefore, when posed as a single integrated theory of the origin of life, Creation Science may itself stand refuted by a refutation of only one of its own tenets. The same should hold true of any integrated theory, including neo-Darwinian evolution—it must be refutable to be scientific. Yet neo-Darwinists have added, modified, and removed various tenets of their theory through history quite freely, revealing that there is no unchangeable core of scientific content in neo-Darwinian theory at all.

When neo-Darwinists attempt to refute the modern scientific assertions of Creation Science by arguing only against the ancient naïve finalism espoused by some Christian fundamentalists a century ago they are not doing science but political propaganda. By definition scientific theories must be amenable to modification based upon new data. On the same logic the neo-Darwinists use to reject Creation Science, that is, eternally tying a theory to a past error, you and I could reject all of modern evolution for having once believed in protoplasm and God! Darwin himself held those beliefs. Neo-Darwinists reserve the option to modify to themselves alone however, denying it to those who oppose them. Nothing could be more transparently ridiculous or unscientific! This is the quality of the argument posed by neo-Darwinists against Creation Science. Mainstream science and its prestigious organizations have scandalously endorsed this fallacy, and now even the federal courts! Having abandoned all pretense of objectivity, those endorsing this prejudice have taken the additional step of erroneously identifying intelligent design theory and Creation Science as the same theory. This is done so that ID can be tossed out prior to evaluation as being religion and not science.

Creation Science arguments include all the main points I make in this book about complexity, improbability, the questions of how an accident can make complex machines or configure complex new genetic information, the impotence of natural selection to solve these problems, etc. Therefore, the Creation Science case is as scientifically and intellectually potent taken as a refutation of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution as the book you are now reading. Therefore, the Creationist case is hardly lunatic as the neo-Darwinists have insultingly labeled it. Insult is not a tool of science, but of politics and propaganda. Where a valid case can be made, insulting your opponent is not necessary. In addition to using insult, which is not a tool of science, consider how evasive the neo-Darwinist approach to the evolution-ID debate has been. First, they ignore the scientific arguments of Creation Science and focus exclusively on their religious claims. Then, when they come to debate ID, which has no religious claims to use as decoys, falsely identify it with Creation Science. They then dismiss ID as religion without a hearing.

[Note: To complicate the terminology after having just clarified it, in at least one book of collected writings, the term “intelligent design creationism” has been applied to intelligent design theory, apparently with the permission of ID theorists. I assume that this is understood by all parties to preserve the distinction between biblical 6-day/young Earth creationism and intelligent design theory because the ID writings in that collection are from authors who do not include biblical creationism as a component of their version of intelligent design theory. I assume that in this use, ID is deemed a form of “creationism” simply because it affirms in general terms a creator, a designer of life, though not necessarily the biblical one. Although, in this general sense, ID may be legitimately referred to as a form of “creationism,” in a strictly linguistic, conceptual or philosophical sense, it is not biblical creationism. ID, therefore, cannot be rejected as nonscientific by virtue of having invoked religious authority in lieu of empiric evidence. Once again, ID theorists neither affirm nor deny the God of the Bible. Their theory is strictly one of the import of the scientific evidence, which they assert entitles us to deduce a “generic” designer of life without being able to go further and specifically identify who or what that designer is.]

Appendix 6:

The Definition of Life:

A Word on RNA First/Metabolism First

A debate is currently in progress, and has been for some time now, regarding, not only how life began, but how to define life itself. There is currently no agreed upon definition of life.[157] One of the main questions in this discussion is which came first, RNA or basic chemical metabolism? What science can currently demonstrate or hypothesize with confidence regarding the origin of life “ain’t” much:

(1) Self-organization of protocells is possible from thermally generated proteins immersed in water. Protocells are misnamed, for they are essentially just the shell without the contents, a primitive membrane.

(2) A primitive organelle called a ribozyme can replicate small strands of RNA outside of a living cell.

(3) Strands of RNA can be composed upon a PAH hydrocarbon backbone structure that functions to hold nucleotides in place long enough for them to be bonded together in a string that, with further chemical transitions, can then became the double helix of DNA.

This is a long way from creating life, however. Marcello Barbieri has shown us in The Organic Codes that a translation mechanism for the DNA is needed. Extrapolating from Michael Behe’s work, we know that a whole lot of structural, informational, and metabolic components must somehow be put into place at the same time to achieve the minimal mechanical requirements for life (leaving the question of the spirit aside). So the “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” approach of the RNA first/metabolism first debate itself embodies a gross oversimplification of the problem of life’s origin. The case for the metabolism first side is weak in that protocells do not have a genome, and in not giving the specifics of the internal chemistry of these “metabolizing bubbles.” Without the specifics we don’t know that RNA formation inside the bubble will be enhanced more than impeded. Ultimately, until the exact chemical components of a given hypothesized version of a protocell have been identified, it is pointless to debate their capabilities at all.

The other thing that needs to be said is that calling such a thing as a raw chemical catalytic process enclosed in a semi-permanent membrane bubble alive is an intellectual and moral travesty. Such things are not alive. Though they may have be a chronological precursor of life, so is everything else life is made of a chronological precursor of life. The physical constitution of the very first and most primitive of these protocells could apparently be the chemical equivalent of something no more complex than a fart in the bathtub![158] This is not life. There is a difference. Although protocells in Sydney Fox’s discussions are described as more complex than this, they are otherwise significantly more primitive in the key processes of life than bacteria.[159]

To dumb down the definition of life so far as to call protocells alive implies physical reductionism, grossly oversimplifies what we actually know, and commits the fallacy of arguing from the easy to the hard. To conclude from such simple achievements as protocells, and a few strands of RNA that the jump to life can be accidentally achieved is simply premature. It is the error of “deducing” that the house will assemble itself from the presence of a pile of boards and nails. It ain’t gonna happen.

Physical reductionism is itself a blatantly unjustified assumption, noting more than an assertion of the personal philosophy of materialism. It is an unwarranted denial of the spirit and the dignity of living things.[160] Furthermore, the original intellectual question man posed to himself through history of how to define life was not a question of how to identify the most primitive chemical precursors of life but rather to extrapolate from the organisms that we were already certain were alive the essential qualities they possess that differentiates them from the nonliving. In my view, Shapiro, Fox and others who advance a reductionist definition of life have confused the question of what are the essential elements of life with what were life’s chemical precursors.

Already, well before the question of how to define life was recently reposed in modern times in the evolutionary context, science had long since established what life was. We were simply having trouble polishing the language used to describe life’s essential attributes, and this more in philosophical applications than scientific ones. In science, we already knew that the cell, not a protocell, was the smallest of living things; we knew that DNA was an essential part of life; and we knew that there was a clear demarcation point between biology and chemistry at the cell. In proposing a new definition of life that has absolutely no use for anyone in or out of science except a chemist, what reductionists are actually doing is regressing both science and culture! They propose to take science back from a point of progression regarding the definition of life that it had already visibly achieved. Science has always acknowledged that the distinctions between sentient life, self-conscious life, and human life were all meaningful for the experimental sciences as well as for anthropology, sociology, psychology, ethics and religion. Taking away these distinctions and reducing life to a mess of chemicals leaves no rational foundation for the humane treatment of humans, let alone animals as laboratory subjects. It removes the grounds for outlawing human experimentation without the informed consent of the subject. In short, it is the first step in laying a scientific justification for the removal of human rights.

There are clearly unique attributes relevant to the definition of life at several stages of development that are worthy of note, even biochemically. We should be asking not only what is the definition of life, but what are the essential defining attributes of human life, of mammalian life, of bird, reptilian or amphibian life, bacterial life, sentient life etc. There are important distinctions at each of the divisions of life that require preservation and maintenance for proper understanding. I think it goes without saying that in seeking the definition of life the intent of the multi-disciplinary communities of philosophy, theology and science, the arts, sciences, and humanities, was never to define the essential characteristics of a fart in the bathtub!

The question of life’s origin and definition legitimately originated in a multi-disciplinary context (not just chemistry): chemistry, biology, cosmology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, and genetics. The bulk of all past work on this question will simply be negated by making such a radical move as reductionists now propose. If reductionists can succeed in this degradation of the term “living,” the new definition will ultimately be integrated into the other disciplines and into the culture at large. It will be the equivalent of a Nazi book burning, the destruction of the enlightened human culture of life. All but gross, one almost wants to say “pagan,” materialism will be thrown out. We will begin to view all living things and ourselves as no different than a collection of complex chemical bubbles! If you think there is no respect for life in our current culture as revealed in abortion and senseless violence (50,000,000 unborn children killed since 1973), wait until the generation that is taught the reductionist worldview grows up: genocide, eugenics, racial and ethnic cleansing, human experimentation, forced behavioral conditioning, information control…It will be Stalin on his worst day. Human rights will be totally sacrificed for the benefit of whatever makes the integrated chemical bubble of society pass gas in a more efficient manner.

But even the moral argument is superfluous here; the reductionists are just wrong from all points of view. Self-propagating chemical systems aren’t necessarily alive. An oil well fire is a self-propagating chemical system. They don’t grow in the same way organisms grow by complex integrative methods; they merely expand. They don’t struggle for survival; they merely survive when conditions are right and perish when they are not. Oil well fires don’t sense threats and employ defensive systems; they don’t have organismal behavior in the usually understood sense of goal-oriented mobility.

There is a clear difference in kind between chemical bubbles (protocells), and what we normally call alive. After awareness, the most important difference between protocells and living things, and it may perhaps be related to awareness, is active or proactive adaptation. Protocells cannot proactively adapt to a changing environment. Chemical bubbles don’t act at all, they only react. An essential characteristic of a living thing is the ability to be proactive as well as reactive.

Granted, bacteria don’t exhibit the hallmark characteristics of life in the same manner or degree as higher life forms do, but this only reveals that one definition of life may not be sufficient to capture all that is important for proper understanding. The attempt to redefine life in this ridiculous way, by reducing it to the simplest maintainable chemical system, is like saying any child who can pick up a piece from the board is a chess player. Yes, one can choose to use the word that way because of personal preference, but one has then both arbitrarily changed the language and lost the meaningful distinctions captured in the prior uses of the term “life.” Even if such a change were to be made, the fullness of the experience of both chess and life will remain in the world; reductionists would only be fooling themselves. The rest of us would simply invent new words to refer to the fullness of these experiences. Reductionism accomplishes nothing but the introduction of confusion and the loss of prior work in many disciplines. The most efficient way to approach protocells is simply to call them possible chemical precursors of life and leave it at that.

So, which came first the RNA or the metabolic protocell? It is probably an unimportant question, perhaps even a trivial one. We know that so much more has to be in place to achieve a living cell than just these two components. For the question to be significant to the explanation of life, one has to hold that the RNA directs or otherwise aids in the construction of the protocell, or the protocell is critically important to the successful assembly of the RNA. However, without a translation system and associated organelles such as a ribosome, simple RNA doesn’t build anything, and a PAH backbone is all that is apparently required to string together some spontaneously organized RNA molecules. Thus, my view is that RNA and protocells probably originated independently and then encountered each other. This is a defensible view on the grounds that both are relatively easy to achieve, which is evidence precisely by the fact that they are what we can demonstrate to be the first and most likely occurrences in the chain of components of life. Bubble “eats” RNA and the various other chemical components of life and then the built-in chemical affinities of the components self-construct a more and more complex cell over time. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to where the exact demarcation point for life would occur in this process, because as far as we know all the components of a cell must be there at the same time, and those requirements vary from cell type to cell type. What we do know is that the complex mechanisms of a living cell would never self-construct in an accidental world. For such an astronomically improbable thing to occur there would have to be an enormous bias for life built into the laws of nature and the initial configuration of matter and energy at the Big Bang.

----------------

Neo-Darwinian Evolution: It Ain’t Natural

What’s that did Richard Dawkins say!

Not chance…not purpose…some other way?

My thoughts?

My dear I cannot say, not ‘till the children nod away.

As science cannot hide design,

They simply up and changed their mind.

“We need no God behind life’s dance.”

And yet they dare not call it “chance.”

An argument they can’t defend.

Will the bloody nonsense never end?

Could a neo-Darwinist make something grow?

Oh, yes! But only words, you know.

Toss them glibly to and fro, pile them high, out they blow.

And that scent? It sure ain’t Miracle Grow!

Home Main Menu (frames)

---

[83] Eldredge, Tree of Life.

[84] Dembski, No Free Lunch.

[85] Stuart Kauffman, The Santa Fe Institute, Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, University of New Mexico Medical School, “Understanding Genetic Regulatory Networks,” International Journal of Astrobiology, vol. 2, no. 2 (2003):131-139, Cambridge University Press.

[86] Gabriel Waksman, ed., Proteomics and Protein-Protein Interactions: Biology, Chemistry, Bioinformatics, and Drug Design, Protein Reviews, vol. 3 (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, Inc., 2005), vi; Also see Joseph D. Puglisi, ed., Structure and Biophysics – New Technologies for Current Challenges in Biology and Beyond (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005) for a good indication of the astronomical complexity of protein shape prediction and related research.

[87] See the SETI@home Website at U. C. Berkeley, http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/, accessed 10 Dec 2008; and the article discussing folding@home at the Planetary Society Website at

[88] Amir Alexander and Charlene Anderson, “Searching for ET and the Cure for Cancer: The Planetary Society Helps Trigger a Computing Revolution,” published to the Planetary Society Website at http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/setiathome/setiathome_20070706.html, accessed 10 Dec 2008.

[89] Christian de Duve, Singularities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92.

[90] See Discover magazine’s special issue, Discover Presents: The Body, Summer 2008, 84.

[91] Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

[92] Simpson, View, 11.

[93] Lenn E. Goodman, “Science and God,” Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (2008): 130-142.

[94] Unlocking the Mystery of Life, DVD, Illustra Media (http://www.illustramedia.com).

[95] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watch Maker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 25-27.

[96] Leading evolutionists E. O Wilson proposes such a reductionist view in his recent book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. See Todorov’s critical review, which exposes the flaws in this philosophy. Tvetan Todorov, “The Surrender to Nature,” a review of E.O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, The New Republic, 27 April 1998, 29-33.

[97] Robert M. Young, “Psychology in the 19^th Century Evolutionary Debate,” in Historical Conceptions of Psychology, edited by Mary Henle, Julian Jaynes, and John J. Sullivan (New York: Springer Publishing Company, Inc., 1973), 180-204.

[98] Andrew Greeley, “The Return of the Village Atheists,” Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (2008): 162-163.

[99] Peter Augustine Lawler, “Manliness, Religion, and Our Manly Scientists,” Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (2008): 155-158.

[100] Beck, Philosophic Inquiry, 284.

[101] Scott Camazine, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Nigel R. Franks, James Sneyd, Guy Theraula, and Eric Bonabeau, Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 89.

[102] Earl D. Hansen, Understanding Evolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981), 203.

[103] Simpson, View, 21-23.

[104] William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, ed., Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2001). Signs of Intelligence is a good introduction to the subject.

[105] Pope John Paul II “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution,” delivered to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 22 October 1996, in Robert John Russel, William R. Stoeger, S.J., and Francisco Ayala, eds Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1998), 3-8.

[106] As a historical/theoretical point of information, Synthetic Theory includes beefed-up claims about the capabilities of natural selection and several important embellishments of the mechanics of evolution centered mostly around population studies. Despite the fact that many authors seem to use the terms interchangeably for their purposes, the two versions of evolutionary theory are not identical twins, but only historically and conceptually close relations.

[107] Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Chance or Purpose? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 24.

[108] Very Rev. J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., et al.., “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God,” approved by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then President of the International Theological Commission, and currently published to the Vatican Web sit at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html. Also see the Catholics United for the Faith discussion at http://www.cuf.org/Faithfacts/details_view.asp?ffID=60.

[109] Christoph Schönborn, “Finding Design in Nature,” New York Times, July 7, 2005.

[110] Pope Benedict XVI, Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo, Compiled by Stephan Otto Horn, S.D.S. and Siegfried Wiedenhofer, translated by Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).

[111] Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 4-5.

[112] Sidney Fox, The Emergence of Life (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1988), chap. 8; D. S. Peters and W. F. Gutmann, “The Meaning of the Theory of Evolution,” in Bernhard Grzimek, ed., Grzimek’s Encyclopedia of Evolution (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976), 37-38; Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 3^rd Ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc., 1998); Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution, 3^rd Edition (Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2000), 59-67.

[113] For a good step by step walk through of the events of the Big Bang see John M. Charap, Explaining the Universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 11.

[114] V. B. Smocovitis, “G. Ledyard Stebbins and the Evolutionary Synthesis,” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 35 (2001): 801-14. The “new synthesis” of the 1950s integrated Mendelian genetics, population studies, and various other findings of the separate branches of science into evolutionary theory.

[115] Following this initial use, I am going to diverge only for a time from the standard practice of not capitalizing “synthetic theory” because I wish to make clear to new students of the subject that synthetic theory is in fact a separate and distinct version of evolutionary theory, distinguishable from neo-Darwinian evolution by the absence of the accidental tenet, that is, the assumption that the process of evolution has no purpose. Different authors use the terms differently, such as Ernst Mayr, but, for clarity’s sake I will stick with this usage following the distinctions made between synthetic theory and neo-Darwinian theory by G. G. Simpson in chapters 4 and 10 of This View of Life.

[116] Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), part one, essay three; Theodosius Dobzhansky, “On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology” in Theodosius Dobzhansky, Max K. Hecht, and William C. Steere, eds, Evolutionary Biology, vol. 2, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1968), 32; Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xii.

[117] Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 2007), chap. 10. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross. Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004); Schroeder, Science of God, 5, 27.

[118] From the Bertrand Russell section of Stephen Jones’ Web page on evolution quotes at http://bevets.com/equotesr.htm. Jones’s main quotes page is at http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cequotes.html.

[119] From Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy, quoted in the interesting Wikipedia Web site entry for Russell at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell - Am_I_An_Atheist_Or_An_Agnostic.3F_.28194.

[120] From Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?, published to the Positive Atheism Web site at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm.

[121] Merrilee H. Salmon, Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, 3^rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995).