Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison
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Appendix 7:
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) & ID
Perhaps nothing has captured the imagination of the peoples of the world more universally than the search for extraterrestrial life. Even here in the debate between intelligent design (ID) theory and neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution two key questions/objections have arisen that are linked to ET:
(1) Why would SETI scientists accept so little evidence for the existence of other forms of intelligent life as a single monotonous electromagnetic pulse or a green square stuck in the middle of a planet in space, when neo-Darwinian evolutionists reject the far greater indications of intelligently designed complexities present in human genetics and microbiology?
(2) If ET could be the designer of life, why then doesn’t intelligent design theory qualify as science as opposed to religion? ID does not require God as the designer of life. It makes no religious claims whatsoever, and it employs only scientific tools: biology, physics, mathematics, probability theory, and logical analysis.
In an attempt to rebut the first telling objection, SETI scientists and neo-Darwinian evolutionists (correctly) say that the kinds of criteria SETI and ID theory currently use are completely different; the former group uses artificiality as a criterion, while the latter uses complexity. Chief SETI astronomer Seth Shostak points out that the objection as phrased by some ID proponents falsely assumes that SETI is searching for a complex signal, when it is in reality searching for an artificial signal that is supremely simple in form, a monotonous, droning pulse, in fact.[160] While what Shostak says about SETI is true, it is only true of the present, it is only true for incoming signals not outgoing ones, and it may only be true of SETI in the public domain. Shostak does not document his source within the ID community, and thus one is unable to mount a specific defense of the ID advocates involved by analyzing the larger content and context of their arguments. But, granting for the moment that Dr. Shostak has fairly represented the remarks of some proponents of ID theory, he still misses the point of the larger ID case in two very important ways.
First, the ID objection vis-à-vis SETI does not concern so much what SETI is as a matter of fact using for its search criterion at a given moment in time, but what it could be using. It concerns the fact that if SETI were to receive a complex signal from deep space, a symphony of Alf von Beethoven, for example, a complex engineering blueprint, or a simple unambiguous linguistic message, then SETI would accept that complexity as evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (whether they had been consciously looking for it or not). We have ourselves sent symphonies into space on satellites for this very purpose. Shostak implies that there are practical reasons (unenumerated) why SETI must look for the droning simple pulse instead of a complex signal, but Paul Horowitz, one of the now famous geniuses in the history of SETI, informs us that there are no such practical limits.
…if we had a couple of 600-foot
dishes, well within our capability on Earth, and they were spaced a thousand light-years
apart, could we transmit with a dollar’s worth of energy a signal that could be
received above the noise at the other end?
At five letters per word, galactic
telegrams cost a dollar per word. That’s an amazing fact. It’s a fact that
interstellar telegrams are cheap. If you want to think of why, probably
because the sky is very quiet at radio frequencies. Nature doesn’t know how to
make twenty-centimeter waves very well. And therefore, with modest-sized pieces
of technology we can communicate.[161]
Thus, the capability to send and receive complex signals is in fact within the range of modern Earth science and technology, and has been for many decades. Why then aren’t we listening for complex signals (we are sending them)? Obviously the reasons are political not practical. One can easily argue that SETI should change to search for a complex signal, for wouldn’t we at least want to see, at a minimum, “We come in peace” prefacing any intergalactic signal that was of clearly intelligent origin? I think we would. And this is almost certainly why SETI has moved to simplicity. What has obviously been done is that that atheistic dominance in science has contrived to arrange to move complex SETI signal searches to a secret function within the Defense Department, while using the droning pulse signal criterion as a dummy substitute. The simpler signal is ambiguous and therefore deniable, at least for a time. This pleases the Defense Department (and I must admit the logic of it myself) because, should we receive such a signal, we would retain the option to deny its authenticity to the public precisely because it is not complex. We could (mistakenly) call it a new kind of pulsar or any number of things in order to keep the public out of the Pentagon’s hair just long enough that the military can respond to any extraterrestrial threat in real time. With this arrangement, the Defense Department can avoid a protracted public debate prior to launching a military strike against a perceived to be hostile extraterrestrial threat. This avoids the loss of a crucial time window for military response. Holding a public debate before each tactical command implementation is no way to fight a war, even here in the heart of democracy; it just doesn’t work. Such an uncontrollable delay could be catastrophic for the citizens of Earth. (I have no direct knowledge of this policy by the way; I am merely making an inference to it from the facts and the logic of the situation.)
While pleasing DOD, the move to an ultra-simple SETI signal criterion simultaneously solves a problem for the atheists who dominate science: they no longer have to face the dilemma of either admitting that the design inference is valid in the context of the evolution debate or being convicted of using a double standard. Thus, a move to simplicity in the SETI signal criterion (in the public domain) would be a political shoe-in. All the movers and shakers in both the government scientific and the military communities get what they want out of it. The only ones left to object are the politically disenfranchised sci-fi fans. True, you don’t want the sci-fi “nerds” arrayed against you in the blogs, but their political lobby group is not substantial.
Shostak says that complexity does not warrant an inference to intelligent design. Thus, apparently he and some other SETI scientists would refuse to accept a complex signal as evidence for intelligence even if they received one. I sincerely doubt that this is true, but what they would in fact do is untestable because SETI is no longer searching for complex signals, at least in the public domain. However, in addition to begging the question of whether certain kinds of complexity are good indicators of intelligent design, Shostak’s position is belied by the history of SETI itself. We have ourselves (USA) sent a handful of satellites into deep space (the Pioneer and Voyager series) for the very purpose of announcing our existence to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. In every case, this involved the use of complex signals. These satellites all contained complex messages, and the engineered structures of the satellites themselves were a clear message of intelligent design. We have also broadcast complex messages directly into space for the same purpose:
In 1974, scientists from Cornell
University broadcast the first deliberate message to space. It contained, in a
mathematical code, a crude picture of us and basic information about our
chemistry…
Carl Sagan describes the message
this way: “What is said fundamentally was: Here’s the Sun. The Sun has planets.
This is the third planet. We come form the third planet. Who are we?
Here is a stick diagram of what we look like, how tall we are, and something
about what we’re made of. There’s four point something billion of us, and this
message is sent to you courtesy of the Arecibo telescope, 305 meters n
diameter.”[162]
Clearly, the history of SETI has in fact involved the use of complex messages on the outgoing side of things. Why wouldn’t we assume that ET would use a logic similar to our own? Clearly, we have been asking “them,” the ETs, to make the inference from complexity to intelligent design. Why aren’t we willing to make it ourselves? The whole transition to simplicity in SETI stinks heavily of politics because it is grossly inconsistent. One might object that the satellites weren’t conveying a message based upon complexity but rather one based upon artificiality. Nature doesn’t make machines and nature doesn’t use language, so the aliens could make an inference to the intelligent origin of the Pioneer and Voyager satellites and their contents based upon artificiality. But in denying the intelligent design argument from the machines that comprise our bodies and the language of DNA, atheistic neo-Darwinian evolutionists say exactly the opposite: nature does make machines, and nature does use language! Science can’t have it both ways. One can imagine space aliens debating among themselves concerning how to best broach the subject of their existence to earthlings: “Scratch the symphonies, the natural language message, the math formulas, and the astronomy diagrams. It will have to be a monotonous droning pulse signal.” “Why?” “The atheists in science there are being hypocritical about the meaning of complex signal content.”
Granted, artificiality may also be ascribed to the complex signals we have sent into space, but to say that artificiality is a necessary condition to the design inference in all cases, that complexity alone is never sufficient, is simply to beg the question of life’s intelligent creation outright. It is to assume the answer prior to evaluating the evidence.
The key to resolving this is to ask, “How complex?” The degree of complexity, in most cases, drives the probability. Science uses probability/improbability to determine its view of things (science never yields complete certainty). Questions must be resolved in SETI the same as anywhere else in science. Complex interstellar signal content having a complexity that drives an improbability of natural (accidental) generation beyond the normal threshold for scientific credibility must be deemed of intelligent origin. Here we see that wherever the question on the table is one of intelligent design the three criteria of complexity, artificiality, and probability become inextricably linked.
Thus, the second way Shostak misses the point and exaggerates the differences between ID and SETI is in overlooking the fact that the intelligent design argument also uses artificiality. His approach reflects what mainstream science is currently doing along the same lines. They deny the artificiality argument in ID while accepting it in SETI—showing a bias and a double standard. Artificiality is in fact detectable in the linguistic structure, syntax and semantics of DNA and in the Boolean logic of gene regulation networks. The latter essentially equate to a wiring diagram of an electronic circuit board, and the former are simply a translatable system of code.[163] William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument (discussed at Appendix 2) in essence gives us the world’s largest example of artificiality, the world itself, by demonstrating that the scientific probability threshold for an accidental origin of life has been violated. The resource exhaustion argument says that, without aide of intelligence, the natural world could not have spontaneously generated the physical structures and life forms our world contains within the time and physical resources available in the history of the universe.[164] In addition to the obvious fact that SETI uses artificiality as their current incoming signal standard and that ID theory uses functional complexity, they (SETI) also use complexity in their outgoing transmissions, and ID uses artificiality in Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument and in the tripartite system of organic codes built around DNA.
What this all demonstrates is that there are indeed three criteria (complexity, artificiality, and probability) which science will currently accept as evidence for intelligence within SETI, but deny when employed for the same purpose within ID theory. This reveals a prejudice against intelligent design in the atheist dominated scientific culture. Shostak’s response merely shifts the focus from the real point of the ID objection (that there is a double standard in science) to a trivial question about whether or not some particular ID proponents are fully informed about what SETI is in fact currently using as their incoming signal search criterion in the public domain. The denial in mainstream evolutionary science that the ultra-complex structures in biology (the coded language of DNA, DNA translation systems, immensely complex folded protein structures, and Boolean logic of genetic regulatory networks) are at least equivalent signs of intelligence to the complex signals that SETI would accept should they occur shows a double standard in science.
So, yes it is true as Dr. Shostak states that the prevailing school of thought in SETI today is that a monotonous drone-like pulse emanating from a context where nature could not have been the source (an artificial signal, though not a complex one) is the best bet for an ultra-long distance search. This is because it is a much more efficient means to bridge the vastness of interstellar space. Since we have already searched nearby planets without success, SETI has perhaps given up hope of catching radio waves of Mozart (or Homer Simpson) wafting by, having leaked from a neighboring solar system. However, we are not as some of the SETI folks seem to be implying limited to only close in origins for complex signals. Horowitz tells us that ET could in fact afford to do complex signals if they wished for the equivalent of a few dollars per transmission, and these would be practical at least up to a distance of 1,000 light years. This merely requires us to make a 600-foot dish (perfectly doable within present technology) to receive the signal. A 1,000 light year search, in intergalactic terms, is still local neighborhood, the equivalent of a stroll around the block, for it will seldom exceed the exterior boundary of our own Milky Way galaxy, estimated to be on average 1,000 light years thick, and 100,000 light years in diameter.[165] The fact that we have moved to an ultra-long distance search method best used for sources outside the Milky Way tends to suggest that we have reason to believe that there is no intelligent life in the Milky Way, for such life could send us complex messages on the cheap ala Horowitz. This tends to belie the “easy as pie” argument of the neo-Darwinists that an accident could have simply thrown life together over a large expanse of time for there are approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and approximately 50 billion galaxies in the universe.[166] This equates to roughly 10 trillion solar systems. From none of these have we received any intelligent signals. That’s a lot of opportunity if, as the neo-Darwinists are fond of saying, anything can happen given the large expanse of time of evolution. The bottom line for our purpose here is that fluctuations in the search criteria employed by SETI over the years that spring from such practical wisdom are fully irrelevant to the ID debate. It is only the fact that a complex signal would be accepted if it were received (or should be if science is to be consistent) that is relevant.
Accidental processes do not construct coded languages with translation systems and Boolean logical networks. It just doesn’t happen. These kinds of systems are known to be artificial. The ludicrous counterexample neo-Darwinists are so proud of, fractals (random artwork), is neither a coded language or a Boolean system.[167] The fractal counterexample also fails miserably in the context of evolution because nature is not built as a random generator of the kind fractals require, that is, as if it were a kaleidoscopic shakeup can having the ability to mix all components randomly and continuously on a rapid cycle. Our universe only had a single opportunity for a total mix of ingredients at the Big Bang. The smallest fraction of a second after that (Planck time) natural law took over. This defeated the full randomness required for true fractal production in nature, and once the planetary structures were formed many of the “ingredients” in nature’s fractal can were irretrievably separated from each other and could no longer be randomly mixed to obtain the large scale statistical opportunities needed to overcome the vast improbability of accidentally constructing living systems. Thus, nature is not a fractal machine and the neo-Darwinist analogy breaks down.
Professor William Dembski, in his resource exhaustion argument has shown us that nature has not had the time and resources to accidentally produce life. This, when combined with the fact that nature is not a fractal machine, and with the overtly artificial features of the tripartite DNA coding and Boolean gene regulation systems, establishes that science’s default position should be that life is an “artificial” creation, a product of intelligence.
To see that the standards of evidence used by SETI and ID are not really so different, consider the following four closely related questions.
1. How is the SETI signal criterion analogous to the intelligent design logic, and how is it different? At the foundational level, that is, in the most general sense, both enterprises are looking for signs of intelligent life, albeit in somewhat different ways. The artificiality criterion is sufficient for both, but is only (for practicality in extreme long distance searches) necessary for SETI. ID theory can use functional design complexity alone even where artificiality has not been established. Therefore, the logic of the two enterprises, even on the surface is at least in part analogous, for they can both use the criterion of artificiality. Seth Shostak points out, however, that ID theory has traditionally focused on complexity and the SETI search is presently focused on a very simple form of artificial signal. Therefore, in terms of historical focus, the analogy doesn’t strictly hold.
But consider, even for the type of simple artificial signal SETI is looking for to have been generated, that is, a signal that nature is incapable of producing spontaneously in a given context, extreme complexity must nonetheless have existed as a prerequisite in three different forms: a) the advanced science of the extraterrestrial being, b) complex technology sufficient to send the signal, and c) the complexity of ET’s bodily systems (biological intelligence). Minus biological intelligence, science, and technology, an artificial signal outside the parameters of what “dumb” nature could spontaneously produce would not have been generated at all. So, despite Shostak’s objections, even the simple signal SETI is scanning for has extreme complexity as a prerequisite for its issuance. Thus, complexity is, in fact, a necessary condition for the SETI signal criterion to be satisfied, another point of analogy between SETI and ID.
One might, erroneously, claim that there is a second difference between the two enterprises in that SETI is looking primarily for outward behavioral manifestations of intelligent life forms, while ID is looking at the internal structures of biology, to which, (presumably) SETI has had and expects to have no access in regards to ETs. But this only appears true on the surface. Both human biological system design complexity and the artificial signal sought by SETI are viewed as the work of an intelligent designer by ID theorists and SETI scientists, respectively, for the purpose of their hypotheses. An acceptable SETI signal is presumed to be a behavioral work product of ET (by SETI), and a functionally complex biological design creation is presumed to be a behavioral work product of the designer of life (by ID). Both the ID and the SETI groups must answer a similar question: how to establish criteria that warrant a valid inference from characteristics of the work product of an intelligent being to the existence of that intelligent being. So, in this sense SETI and ID are not looking for two different kinds of things at all; they are both looking for work products of intelligence.
2. Does extreme complexity, or at least some forms of extreme functional complexity, imply intelligence? That is the primary question before us in this book, and the central question of intelligent design theory. My answer to that question is, “yes, with the proviso that trivial complexity such as fractals be excluded.” Neo-Darwinists have been using a disingenuous stonewalling tactic in denying that the design inference is valid, all the while going about making that inference a hundred times each day when they buy a car, hail a taxi, ride a bike, etc. They know intelligently designed machines when they see them just like you and I do. Humans have this ability to recognize intelligent design creations; it is an incontrovertible fact of our experience. There is nothing whatsoever in human experience that presents a counterexample to the thesis that extremely complex machines that produce an identifiable, consistent, and visibly “purposive” output, all have intelligent designers. The argument in evolution, of course, revolves around whether or not the machines of biology, when all is said and done, will turn out to be the one and only exception to the rule, a genuine counterexample. My position on that question is that they are clearly not the counterexample because living organisms are by far the most functionally complex machines known to man. The fact that nature can self-organize or otherwise manufacture such machines does not make the machines of biology accidental byproducts of chaos; it makes nature a machine-building machine. A machine-building machine does not equate to an accident; it simply poses the same question of intelligent design once removed. A machine-building machine implies intelligent design at least as much as a first order machine. A factory that produces farm tractors is as impressive a design creation as the tractor itself.
3.
Is complexity a necessary condition for intelligence?
Yes. This is true by the definition of intelligence, which is the ability to
manipulate, compute, and analyze complex data and produce meaningful results.
4. Does the intelligent design logic use artificiality as well as complexity and improbability? Yes. SETI scientists like Seth Shostak who critique the ID argument by pointing out that SETI uses artificiality, not complexity, as the criterion for evidencing an intelligent signal, in my opinion, do the public a disservice in failing to acknowledge both that artificiality in interstellar signals requires the preexistence of extreme complexity in a minimum of three manifestations (science, technology, and the complex biological structures of the ET organism), and that artificiality is also a legitimate logic of the ID argument. The whole point of ID’s complexity and improbability arguments is to say that when complexity and improbability breaches certain thresholds we may conclude artificiality. For Shostak to stand on the distinction between artificiality and complexity is then to do nothing more than beg the question, to deny the ID argument without offering any counter argument at all.
Any valid sign of intelligence
is relevant to the ID argument: consistent function, design complexity,
artificiality, extreme improbability, precise workmanship, consistently
controlled construction processes, error checking and correction, closely
matched complex interdependent parts, etc. Much of what science finds in
biology has all of these features in spades.
The fact that science cannot
reproduce life in the lab, combined with the fact that the complexities of
biological organisms cannot be seen to arise spontaneously in nature, combined
with Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, in my view, amply qualifies life
as artificial until proven otherwise. Biological complexities are “of nature,”
yes, as everything else in this physical world must be. But just as Shostak’s
SETI signal is “of nature” while still being artificial, so we must consider
the complexities of biology artificial until they can be shown to be
spontaneously (randomly) generated. Darwin’s simple, “Anything can happen over
sufficient time by a series of small gradual changes,” is hardly a substitute
for having observed the random generation of complex life forms.
Neo-Darwinists say that it is
unfair to demand an observation of the random spontaneous creation of complex
life because the development of life takes too much time to ever be observed.
While it is true that the formation of complex life may take too much time to
be practically observable, many thoughtful commentators point out (correctly)
that asserting this position makes neo-Darwinian evolution a nontestable
theory. Neo-Darwinian evolution is therefore itself technically a
nonscientific hypothesis due to being untestable.
Neo-Darwinists cannot
demonstrate that life is an accident, they simply ask us to believe it on faith
without evidence; they beg the question without providing a demonstration. ID
theorists, on the other hand, have multiple objective criteria that establish
the presence of intelligent design, and they do demonstrate that life qualifies
under those criteria. The unsurpassed functional complexity of life makes life the
prime candidate for intelligent design. Therefore, due to both ultra-complexity
of living mechanisms and the astronomical improbability of random generation of
such intricate and interdependent living designs, the default assumption must
remain that complex life is artificial until it can shown to arise
spontaneously in nature. The trivial counterexamples of accidental design
creations produced by neo-Darwinists are not life at all; they are
two-dimensional design fractals, the equivalent of a screen saver on the old
personal computers![168] What nonsense. “We can’t spontaneously produce life so how
about some nice random artwork instead?” Poppycock!
Thus, although the historical strategies of SETI and intelligent design scientists may appear at first glance not to have overlapped as a matter of historical fact, this is true only regarding the selected strategies they have, for practical reasons, chosen to emphasize and implement. In theory, SETI and ID may pull from the same pool of alternative types of evidence. This is as it must be for SETI and ID purport to be giving evidence for precisely the same thing: intelligence as the source of a body of empiric observations. Our conclusion, then, is that, contrary to SETI astronomer Seth Shostak’s objections (and the neo-Darwinists who repeat the same line), the full set of alternative evidential logics available to SETI and intelligent design theory are very much analogous at the theoretical level. Either may use artificiality or (nontrivial) complexity as an optional criterion where circumstances make it practical to do so.
The fact that SETI has historically turned to simple manifestations of artificiality is the result of the perceived practical limitations on the transmitting end, not inherent conceptual differences with ID theory. This merely suggests that we have already (in secret) exhausted most of the 1,000 light year range in a search for our potential intergalactic neighbors (where we were very likely listening for complex signals), and are now focused on much greater distances where practical concerns mean more than they did within the 1,000 light year range. In pure concept, however, the types of evidence available to SETI and ID are largely coextensive. ID scientists, naturally, do not have to deal with the practical limitations imposed by interstellar communications. They have convenient and direct access to the complex structures of biology at their root. ID scientists have the luxury of examining the organism firsthand. And lets not forget Francis Crick, the co-discoverer (with James Watson) of the double helix molecular structure of DNA. Crick read the physical and biological data then available as evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence was the source of Earth’s life (if only in disseminating it).[169]
How Do We Know that ET
Won’t Call Home?
Now, for the second objection: Why isn’t intelligent design theory scientific if it does not require God as the designer of life, makes no religious claims whatsoever, and uses only scientific data from biology and physics, mathematics, probability, and logical analysis to support the theory? Forgetting Guth and Crick, neo-Darwinists (and the federal court at Kitzmiller) claim that intelligent design theory is of necessity invoking God as the designer and that any hypothesis that invokes God must of necessity be religion and not science. Both of these claims are transparently false. Intelligent design theory explicitly allows for options other than God as the designer (notably ET) and, in Part 2, I discuss situations where publicly observable indications might occur that would justify even a rational belief that a being qualifying under society’s current conception of God was the source of those observations. The instantaneous reordering of our planetary systems without ill effect, for example, should it occur concurrently with a sonorous voice from the sky saying “I did that!” would be accepted by most rational thinkers as a prima facie case for God (not absolute proof, but rationally admissible evidence). The conclusion that “God did that” could at least fall under the umbrella of forensic science, if nothing else.
Although SETI astronomers, astrobiologists, and all
the other branches of science, allow for the possibility of extraterrestrial life,
neo-Darwinists dismiss the ET option out of hand when ID theory includes it.
Why? Apparently they think ID theorists are not offering it in good faith. But
the ET alternative is a simple scientific fact that has nothing to do with
worldviews, personal politics, or religion. NASA is still spending substantial
amounts of money on ET focused research, as is the National Science Foundation,
both of which funded the recent project to expand the search catalog of
habitable stellar systems for the SETI follow-on project, Project Phoenix, at
the
Scientific facts are not impugned in the slightest by a given theorist’s religious (or atheist) beliefs (see Fallacy #12 in Appendix 1). A theory must be evaluated solely upon the basis of its raw propositional content, upon the basis of what it says, and on the basis of the objective facts that support it. The private worldviews of those who espouse a theory are irrelevant to the evaluation of the theory. Allowing such a superstitious and totalitarian approach to science as the neo-Darwinists take (one based upon a fear of religion) obviously leads to contradictions—and it is the equivalent of scientific McCarthyism. If I am a Christian and you are an atheist, and we both assert the same version of the theory of evolution, the neo-Darwinist method of evaluation results in that same theory being both true and false at the same time. True because the base content has a lot of supporting evidence in your case, and false because someone with religious beliefs has asserted the very same thing in my case. Many Catholics believe (not as a matter of faith but as a matter of fact) that God created the tree of life via evolution over millions of years. Consistently applying the bogus neo-Darwinist logic, the theory of evolution itself should be tossed out of science as merely disguised religion because Catholics assert that it is God’s tool of creation. To do such a thing would be ludicrous, but this is precisely what neo-Darwinists do in regards to ID theory.
The possibility that some extraterrestrial civilizations may be scientifically advanced far beyond our level has been admitted since the ’60s![171] Thus, the option for an intelligent designer of human life that is not God is a scientifically valid one. This makes ID theory, generally described, a proper scientific view. ID is not necessarily asserting any religious, spiritual, or nonphysical claims. Yet, most of mainstream science still routinely refuses to consider ID theory, dismissing it prior to evaluation as religion and not science. This prejudice apparently derives from the fact that ID theory merely opens the door for science minded people to also believe in God. This despite the fact that one of our most distinguished scientists, Alan Guth, has proposed the possibility of super-advanced civilizations designing whole “baby” universes. His theory was not dismissed as nonscientific.[172]
Once again, it is the content of a theory that
must be evaluated, not the person who is making the proposal. In Guth’s case, one of the world’s
leading scientists and thinkers has proposed a scenario where human life
originates either from more advanced future earthlings or from highly advanced
ET’s. It goes far beyond the mere creation of life to the creation of entire
universes. Famous astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI, estimates there are
50,000 detectable intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
Despite the fact that God may (or may not) disagree with him, this clearly
implies that the ET designer of life hypothesis is both rational and scientific
in principle. Thus, intelligent design
theory need not assert the existence of God as the designer. Consequently, it
must be regarded as valid science if Guth’s theory is to be valid science.
If we found a foreign satellite orbiting earth, its ownership credibly denied by all nations, we would conclude an extraterrestrial designer made it. If there were an android in it, advanced beyond our own technology, we would draw the same conclusion. Given the odd neo-Darwinian logic, however, why wouldn’t we conclude that it evolved by accident? You and I know the answer: because we just know that accidents cannot build such machines, and all of our experience confirms it. Who is it then that is really pushing personal bias into science here, ID theorists or atheists in the neo-Darwinist camp? Why aren’t neo-Darwinists willing to draw the same conclusions from the astronomically more complex biological machines of Earth’s life forms that they would draw if the android driven satellite showed up in Earth orbit? The machines of life are machines that our current technology cannot duplicate.
Why do neo-Darwinists automatically rule out the possibility of an extraterrestrial designer of earth’s life forms as a proper component of ID theory, groundlessly converting anyone’s claim for an intelligent designer, very generally conceived, to a specific claim for God, when other scientists like Alan Guth may offer the same theory with impunity? You should know the answer by now: they have a prejudice against God. They are atheists who wish to limit the advance of theism in the public mindset because they believe that the abolition of religion will be the salvation of human society. Almighty God’s one true holy and apostolic Catholic Church is to many neo-Darwinists nothing more than pagan superstition that must be swept away in the progress of natural science and a Darwinian-Marxist sociology. To do this they must dismiss ID theory without proper scientific evaluation by labeling it a purely religious claim. Otherwise, it appears to the public that science leaves the door open to God’s existence and the “evangelical” atheists lose a huge mass of converts to atheism who had previously been believing the neo-Darwinists’ groundless propaganda that science had disproved God’s existence.
Contrary to neo-Darwinian propaganda, modern intelligent design theorists do not assert that God is the designer of life; they do not make nonscientific claims, or subordinate observed data to religious beliefs.[173] Yes, some religious thinkers did made this mistake in the first half of the nineteenth century when religion and science were still undergoing a conceptual decoupling (and in the Catholic Church’s censuring of Galileo’s theory of astronomy). But modern ID theorists have disavowed those past errors—and so has the Church! Modern ID scientists cannot be saddled with the mistakes of their intellectual forbearers for eternity. No other scientific theory has been unfairly shackled to the past in this way, and the simple fact of the matter is that modern ID theorists make no such religious claims as neo-Darwinian propaganda artists ascribe to them. By pompous authoritarian decree, neo-Darwinists simply forbid progress to ID theory. This is not science; it is intellectual totalitarianism.
The National Academy of Science and the federal court at Kitzmiller, therefore, have been visibly wrong in dismissing all intelligent design arguments as nonscientific without first studying them for genuine scientific content and the absence of religious claims. The most recent NAS statement on intelligent design theory I have seen says that ID theory has been historically tied up with religion so inextricably that science may now and forever after simply dismiss it as religion. This is a fully ridiculous thing to say, and it poses a most dangerous threat to academic freedom. It arbitrarily forbids the very same decoupling of religious and scientific concepts from occurring within ID theory that all of the rest of science has undergone over the past two centuries. It also throws away the hard won prestige of the NAS as a legitimate body of scientific leaders and reduces the reputation of that august body to a gaggle of political squabblers and atheistic propaganda artists. Of even greater concerns it the fact that to have a federal court step in like it did in Kitzmiller and legally compel an academic theory to be read contrary to its natural language meaning in order to give one side of a political debate an advantage over the other is a dangerous step towards information control and totalitarianism. It puts the government in control of the universities by way of establishing a veto power in the courts over freedom of thought and expression in the universities. It sends the message to academia that if the court doesn’t like what you have written it will redefine it for you no matter how ridiculous a distortion of what you have actually said is required to serve the court’s own agenda. For that reason, Kitzmiller is unconstitutional and itself violates the prohibition against government’s endorsing any position regarding religion.
Appendix 8:
Problem/Solution: How to Fix the Laws
What’s wrong with the laws? Currently, while forbidding religious material in the science books (as it should), the law allows the teaching of materialism and atheism in the science classroom. In the introductions to evolution texts and in various commentaries, modern neo-Darwinists insist that the overall process of life’s creation is truly accidental and that God and intelligent design can be definitely ruled out by science—a blatant lie that we have just spent over 600 pages exploring together. They also straightforwardly affirm the virtues of materialism and atheism. Federal courts have so far chosen to ignore the atheistic commentaries in the science books, implicitly endorsing this intellectual slight of hand. The court is seemingly saying that because the technical part of the neo-Darwinist view does not rule out God, anything at all can be taught as long as it is placed under the neo-Darwinist banner, including the philosophy of atheism and materialism. The latter additions, however, flagrantly violate the constitutional prohibition of government endorsements for or against religion. Where the courts have erred is in forgetting that the technical theory is not all there is to neo-Darwinism; there is also the social philosophy of neo-Darwinism, an ideology that many pursue with so great a zeal that one might as well call it their religion.
In public schools and universities, the entire textbook must be considered to represent the government’s endorsement. Even where the science teacher or university professor does not lecture specifically on the commentaries containing atheism and materialism, those commentaries are still presented to the students at taxpayer expense in the public school mandated text book. In teaching atheism at public expense, the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion (not freedom from religion) is violated. One of the goals of this book is to bring the Catholic Church in America on board the fight to have these atheistic texts removed from our public schools as a violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.
To that end, I solicit the reader’s help in organizing a parish drive to identify and remove texts that violate the Constitution in this regard and to petition the federal courts to outlaw textbooks that contain recommendations either for or against God. Such claims are not science but propaganda. They are vehicles to advance a personal philosophy or a religion, and as such are inappropriate in the science classroom.
The courts have so far excluded the intelligent design argument from science classrooms even though logic and evidence is given in abundance apparently because our culture has traditionally associated that argument with religion. A bias against ID theory is implied here because nowhere else in science or the humanities have we been unable to distinguish the past from the present in this way. Modern adherents of intelligent design theory have proposed a religion-free version of the intelligent design argument that is in fact pure science. In saying that this religion-free version cannot be taught in public schools the court has overstepped its bounds in another important constitutional area, free speech, by presuming to tell science which theories it may endorse and which it cannot, minus genuine constitutional grounds for doing it. Neo-Darwinism has historically been associated with atheism (and blatantly teaches it to this day) yet it is permitted in the science classroom in public schools. One might plausibly argue that this prejudice in the federal courts, itself violates the Constitutional separation of church and state by favoring atheism. In other words, we have a constitutional violation not only in the schools, but in the courts.
What the courts have so far been unable to grasp is that the intelligent design argument is not an argument for or against God at all, but only an argument for the existence of an intelligent designer of human life. As far as science knows, that designer could turn out to be an extraterrestrial civilization. Therefore, on strictly constitutional grounds, intelligent design theory is legal as science in public schools so long as the thesis of God is kept out of its assertions.
To be consistent the courts must, in addition to precluding the endorsement of religion in public schools, also preclude the teaching of the antireligious personal philosophies of atheism and materialism. These constitute an implied government endorsement of the abolishment of religion. Many of the current textbooks do not survive the endorsement test currently in use by the federal courts, established in the recent (2005) Kitzmiller decision.[174] The current expositions of evolutionary theory in many college textbooks fails the endorsement test used by our federal courts in openly disparaging religion.
To correct his problem, textbooks must be required to remove all philosophical/religious tenets either for or against God if the text is to be used in public schools. Currently, the government, through its schools, appears to be endorsing atheism and thereby favoring the abolishment of religion. This serves as an implicit impediment to freedom of religion and is therefore unconstitutional. Evolutionary textbooks vary in regards to this problem, and each must be examined closely to see if they assert materialism or atheism or disparage religion.
There is also a problem with the manner in which the endorsement test was applied in Kitzmiller. This must be corrected if freedom of speech is not to be impeded and the autonomy of science preserved. By asserting that the scientific arguments of intelligent design theory cannot be separated from its historical antecedents in religious belief the courts are preventing the free exercise of intellectual thought, which must allow the coupling or uncoupling of ideas and their recombination in novel ways. The opportunity to do this is fundamental to creative thought and intellectual freedom. Nowhere else is this option to progress a theory beyond its historical antecedents being denied. Thus, a bias in the courts for atheism is implied in their ruling out any form of scientific theory whose history is perceived by the court as having been entwined with theology (though all of our theories in fact have such a history), while allowing any and all theories whose histories have been visibly associated with materialism and atheism (and who preach those personal “religions” in science textbooks in public schools to this day).
Evolution itself began heavily coupled with theism and has uncoupled itself only gradually from theism and a number of other tenets through the exercise of intellectual freedom now being denied proponents of intelligent design theory. “A word must be said, also, on those theories of this general class that go to the extreme of assigning a supernatural cause to evolution, not in the sense of the divine establishment of the natural laws of evolution, a belief held by many evolutionists who nevertheless seek to discover those mechanistic laws, but in the sense that the laws themselves are supernatural.”[175] (My emphasis) This form of theistic evolution is itself an instance of intelligent design theory, which merely posits the existence of design and scientifically demonstrable mechanisms of it. Therefore, the existence of religiously affiliated antecedents is not a distinguishing characteristic between the theory of evolution and intelligent design theory. It applies to both. What the court decides on that basis must be equally applied to both. ID theory has therefore been singled out for disparate and unfair treatment under the law in the Kitzmiller decision.
The law is currently being applied inconsistently in favor of atheism. The precedent set so far by the court is that a scientific theory is allowed to uncouple itself from its religious antecedents if it precludes the existence of God entirely (which is elsewhere admitted to be inappropriate for science to do at all) but not if it leaves conceptual room for God to exist. Merely leaving conceptual room for God’s existence is not an endorsement of religion, however, but merely a permission of it, which is, itself, the very constitutional standard our laws, agencies, and court decisions must reflect and enforce: freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. On the other hand, precluding the possibility of the existence of God entirely, which the current court decisions permit, and, indeed, require, is an endorsement of the abolishment of religion, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. Our recent court decisions, therefore, have it precisely “back asswards,” as our leading philosophers tend to say here in the pubs of Southern Indiana.
In point of fact, intelligent design theory merely says that certain levels of complex design structure cannot be accomplished minus intelligence. It does not say what that intelligence must be, and therefore implies nothing whatsoever about religion. Merely because certain authors, even myself, at times extend the discussion and argument concerning ID theory further on into the question of God does not mean that intelligent design theory itself asserts God’s existence; it does not. It merely means that there are logical and natural points of tangency where the two topics adjoin.
Kitzmiller (I would say ludicrously, and, in the intellectual sense, barbarically) ruled out including a completely innocent statement in textbooks that evolution was merely a theory, not a fact. This statement acknowledged that substantial objections had been posed against the theory of evolution (scientific objections), citing a textbook where those objections could be reviewed, nothing more. There was nothing in this notice that endorsed God or religion and therefore the school and government did not fail the endorsement test by way of the statement. In point of fact it was the court itself that failed the endorsement test by forbidding science texts to even allow for the existence of God.
What Kitzmiller did was to assume that because the phrase intelligent design can, in the minds of citizens, be associated with past religious programs, to mention intelligent design is to endorse religion. But evolution itself has precisely the same antecedents. The vast majority of the early proponents of evolution combined evolution with religious assertions about God the creator. This is still done by some 900 million strong Catholic Church members today. Everyone knows the Catholic Church considers evolution as a means God likely used to create life. Why isn’t the teaching of evolution barred due to its religious antecedents?
We cannot chain scientific theories to the past, in any case; they must, by definition, be modifiable. We cannot chain them to anything, least of all public perception, which has no requirement to conform to the constitution or the standards of science. A scientific theory is a precisely formed set of empirically testable assertions (except in evolution). These assertions are defined by the author of the theory, and by no one else. If the author elects to break with the past in his or her formulation of a theory, then the link with the past is broken. It is that simple.
Many prominent modern intelligent design theorists have broken with past formulations of intelligent design hypotheses in jettisoning all religious assertions. Religious assertions are no longer components of intelligent design theory for these authors for the simple reason that they have explicitly posed their theories without them. An author defines his or her theory, not the court! The court has at Kitzmiller absolutely abused its discretion and overstepped its bounds. It has interfered with intellectual freedom, freedom of speech, and scientific independence. The Kitzmiller decision must be appealed and overturned for these reasons.
Ironically, the court opinion in Kitzmiller itself fails the endorsement test by rendering a federal policy permitting atheism to be endorsed in public school science classrooms, while precluding not only theism but even theories that merely allow conceptual room for God to exist. The court can, on a technicality, claim that it has not actually allowed atheism to be taught because no one has legally challenged the current textbooks on this basis. This is true because the way our court system works is that someone must first file a complaint with the court before the court will address the question. Apparently no one has yet “counter-sued” after Kitzmiller to remove Futuyma and Strickberger’s textbooks, or textbooks that have similarly disparaging comments about religion from use in state supported universities and high schools. We, the citizens, have allowed this inconsistency to continue because the court requires a complaint to be filed before it takes action.
Nonetheless there is still a legal case waiting to be made against the government as a whole for failing the endorsement test. By precluding the practice of science that merely allows for the existence of God while the U. S. Attorney General has not objected in court to the teaching in public schools of pseudoscience that disparages religion, the Kitzmiller decision places the U. S. Government taken as a whole in contravention of the endorsement test. If we are to permit the free practice of philosophy, science and intellectual thought in this country, the citizens and the U. S. Attorney General are going to have to rigorously review evolutionary textbooks and challenge in court all which disparage religion as well as any that teach it. Costs and punitive damages must be sought for these violations of the Constitution else propaganda artists will simply reprint the same thing under additional titles.
One more thing must be understood in regard to the law. Admitting that federal and state government may fail the endorsement test in either direction is not to say that science should be hamstrung in any way as to what conclusions it may draw about God or the presence of intelligence generally strictly from the evidence. Science should be permitted by the courts to argue from the logic of the evidence to any conclusion whatsoever, including those for or against God, as long as the endorsement or disparagement of religion, any specific religion, or the abolishment of religious freedom is not included in a philosophical or religious tenet that has been tacked onto the science. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-originated the theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin, ultimately came to the conclusion that natural selection was not powerful enough to explain the facts, that a “superior intelligence” must be involved.[176] Wallace remains one of the revered names of the history of science, even in neo-Darwinian circles. He has not been branded with that terrible dismissive label, CREATIONIST, but probably only because this aspect of Wallace’s thought is so little known amongst the public that no loss of political turf to the atheists is felt to be incurred.
Simpson marks Wallace’s resort to intelligent design down both to the philosophy of despair and faintness in the complex and difficult search for a natural explanation. However, it is possible that Wallace felt, as I do following modern ID theorists, that this category of conclusion is both legitimately available to science and warranted by the evidence. Granted, science cannot proceed in its explanations where the supernatural is postulated to be involved as a proximate cause. Therefore, a scientific theory cannot offer as genuinely informative or explanatory a supernatural process or agency acting in the middle of a natural process. However, science legitimately can, and in the case of Big Bang theory, actually does say that the aggregate of scientific evidence and knowledge of natural processes leads at a specific point to the failure of natural explanation. Big Bang theory points to the clear existence of an “extra-natural” event or phenomenon at the very beginning of things. In other words, science can point to the supernatural as an ultimate cause of design in the cosmos generally, but not to the supernatural as an immediate cause acting upon specific concrete natural processes in real time.
This is all that ID theory has done. In fact, ID has not invoked God or the supernatural at all. Positing ID therefore does nothing to interfere with science’s concrete causal explanations or its ability to explain, test, replicate and predict. ID has merely said that traditional scientific explanations have so far failed to explain the design of biological systems, that there remains an aspect of living systems that only intelligence can explain. There is, therefore, nothing of the supernatural necessarily involved in the intelligent design thesis. The ID thesis merely leaves room for God, making him one member of a class of intelligent designers who are all viable candidates for the source of design in the cosmos, it does not require or assert God’s existence or any specifically religious claim. ID does not even go so far as to say that the supernatural cannot be ruled out; it merely says that intelligent design must be ruled in.
To say that intelligence is evidenced in a natural process is not to promote religion, it is to make a factual assertion about the nature of the world. Even to argue that God does exist from a purely scientific basis is not to make a religious claim, but a factual one. Likewise, to say that God does not exist based upon scientific evidence alone is not to impinge upon one’s freedom of religion; it is merely an assertion about the world. The logic that is invoked to move from the evidence to the conclusion for or against God or intelligent design must stand or fall on its own merits. The mere addition of logic to empiric evidence does not make a conclusion of God’s existence religion, nor the opposite conclusion materialism. It may merely be a politically “innocent” logical derivation from the objective facts at hand.
As it stands now, however, evolutionists are free to say that the evidence excludes God, but not permitted to say that the evidence affirms God, regardless of the merits of the factual and logical components of their argument. In order to avoid an implied endorsement by government of either side of the debate about God, the scientific arguments for both views must be permitted in public schools (given a modicum of intellectual merit) wherever the arguments for either are permitted so long as the evidence proposed is indeed objectively verifiable and the logical steps from that evidence prima facie valid. There is, indeed, a philosophical question (an open one) as to whether, because of the variously postulated infinite and divine attributes of God, finite empirical facts can ever argue for or against his existence by any logic.
I see no hope of quickly resolving this dilemma with authoritative finality, but have proposed above a tentative solution centered around the unique aspects of God being sufficient to establish his existence without having to prove other attributes that go beyond man’s breadth of experience or comprehension. Whether any of these unique aspects of God turn out to be tractable to scientific inquiry is doubtful, but the unique aspects of intelligence must certainly be tractable to science, and therefore intelligent design theory does not have this limitation.
Philosophy and science must be free from government constraint to speak openly on any factual question, including God’s existence and the existence of intelligent design, else the government is violating the right to free speech and improperly intruding into the independence of scientific and intellectual inquiry. While granting that personal philosophy and theology has no place in the science classroom, it is still true that Kitzmiller violated the right to assert a factual claim about the world in the science classroom merely because that factual claim indirectly allowed for God’s existence. Kitzmiller is founded upon the mistaken assumption that the scientific/philosophical assertion about design in the world is necessarily an endorsement of religion. It is not; it is merely a factual claim about the world based upon evidence. No religious of philosophical belief system is asserted in intelligent design theory at all. The court may be correct that many citizens will, at least initially, misconstrue ID theory as religion, but the court cannot impinge upon freedom of speech merely because the public is too lazy to do their homework.
Two conclusions can be drawn for the Kitzmiller foul-up. First, we the citizens (and the U. S. Attorney General), in not counter-suing, have permitted science texts to disparage religion and thereby fail the endorsement test in contravention of the Constitution of the United States. Second, the Kitzmiller decision itself violates the freedom of speech of those who wish to assert the scientific version of the thesis that evidence for intelligent design exists in nature. This is a bonafide scientific claim about the method of constructing complex physical mechanisms and about the origin of complex information in physical structures, one that does not argue for or against God’s existence. Both of these claims are prima facie traceable to and logically derivable from thermodynamic law and or information theory. As such, they conceptually entail nothing about religion, though they greatly enhance the intellectual respectability of it (which is why atheists in science so staunchly oppose ID, not because of science but because of their religion: materialism, or worse).
Of course, different authors may choose to formulate the ID thesis differently. Some may opt to explicitly include God, not as a logical derivation from empiric data, but as an axiom based upon religious belief, or simply as a hidden unjustified presumption. When this occurs the thesis may be legitimately excluded from the science classroom as being a religious one. However, if science standards organizations and the federal courts are to preclude these formulations they must also preclude those versions of evolutionary theory, which assume God’s nonexistence and endorse atheism on similarly unjustified grounds, as an unevidenced philosophical axiom. The standard must be consistent. Where the assertion of God’s nonexistence is held to be supportable by scientific evidence, such as Ernst Mayr has asserted, logical and factual critique of the case of the kind I have presented in this book (minus any scriptural and theological references), must be permitted, for if the topic itself is allowed as being scientific in nature, arguments for both sides from the empiric data must be considered equally scientific. Either science may properly argue the question of God’s existence from empiric evidence and logic or it may not. It cannot be scientific only to argue against God, but not for him based upon the same empiric data. Yet this is the current situation, one that has a de facto endorsement from the U. S. government as a whole. To allow the question to be argued in only one direction is to fail the endorsement test. The Attorney General of the United States is not hamstrung, as is the court, by the requirement for a complaint to be issued before action can be taken. The Attorney General is tasked to proactively enforce the laws of the United States, including the Constitution.
The Catholic Church in the United States must get onboard
this issue. We must all push for corrective action, urging the Attorney General
to challenge in the courts the textbooks that endorse materialism and atheism.
Once a legal precedent is set by the court forbidding the use of such texts in
public schools we must continue to be vigilant, examining new textbooks and
challenging those that fail the endorsement test under the precedents once set.
Otherwise, should the initial precedent be inadequate, we must seek to expand
and correct any partially flawed precedents until both constitutional
guarantees are fully satisfied: freedom of religion, and separation of church
and state.
Appendix 9:
Problem/Solution: How to Fix the Textbooks
The denial of God, cosmic purpose and intelligent design is, thankfully, not universal in evolutionary writings and textbooks. Mark Ridley, in his textbook, Evolution, is a refreshing exception in that he makes a clear statement that evolution and religion are compatible. The evolutionary writings of Francisco J. Ayala take care to allow conceptual room for God and science to coexist as well. (Unfortunately Ayala unfairly classifies ID as disguised religion, forbidding ID the theological uncoupling all the rest of science has been so graciously permitted.)[177] James W. Valentine’s beautiful textbook/popular tome, On the Origin of the Phyla, is a masterpiece of clear and objective scientific exposition. As a bonus, Valentine scrupulously keeps to the realm of science and leaves politics and personal philosophy out of it. The man I consider to be the most philosophically astute of the (old) famous biologists whose writings comprise the new evolutionary synthesis, George Gaylord Simpson, explicitly stated both in This View of Life,[178] and in the Terry Lectures at Yale, that religion and evolution are fully compatible. Would that all evolutionists took so much care.
Nonetheless, the few but well-known evolutionary textbook authors I have cited here as teaching atheistic materialism improperly in the science classroom do not constitute a negligible blimp on the radar screen of evolution textbooks. Strickberger, Futuyma and Ridley are the big three of evolutionary textbook authors. Ridley is the only one of the three who has allowed for the compatibility of God and science. Strickberger and Futuyma fail the endorsement test—so critical to separation of Church and state—that was clearly established in Kitzmiller in the federal courts. Many of the popular books that could serve as curriculum material, in endorsing atheism and materialism, do not pass the endorsement test either. Many other popular books that could serve as supplementary curriculum material, in endorsing atheism and materialism within the purview of a science curriculum in a school or college supported by public funds, fail in the same manner.
To remedy this, authors of textbooks and popular books on evolution could easily include a simple statement to deny that they have tacked the philosophical adjuncts of materialism and atheism onto basic evolutionary theory. Such straightforward position statements would go a long way towards making matters clear. At least three eminent evolutionists have done this—G. G. Simpson, Francisco J. Ayala, and Mark Ridley (in addition to Waddington)—and it helps. This allows the reader to place any later vagueness in the language into the proper context. If the public is ever to understand what the objective import of the scientific evidence is, minus politics, some overt disclaimer of this kind, along with more rigorous conceptual and linguistic clarity, must be added to the currently vague and ambiguous discussions in the textbooks, which in too many cases unquestionably give an implicit if not explicit endorsement of atheism and materialism.
C. H. Waddington presents a good model of such a disclaimer (perhaps the perfect one) in his interesting book, The Evolution of an Evolutionist:
The essential feature of an
evolutionary theory is the suggestion that animals and plants, as we see them
exhibiting an apparently designed adaptedness at the present day, have been
brought to their present condition by a process extending through time and were
not designed in their modern form. This does not, as many of Darwin’s
contemporaries thought it did, necessarily deny the existence of any form of
intelligent designer. It means only that any designing activity there may be
has operated through a process extending over long periods of time and has not
brought suddenly into being each of the biological forms as we now see them.
The question of theism or atheism, which played such a large part in the public
discussions of Darwin’s day, is, we now recognize, not critically answered by
the acceptance or rejection of an evolutionary hypothesis but must be
settled—if it ever can be—in some other way. We need not, therefore, be further
concerned with it in this discussion.[179]
In addition to adding Waddington’s disclaimer, textbook authors, if they are to gain peer review, should be prohibited from exaggerating the evidence or skewing its meaning for political reasons. Futuyma’s language, for example, clearly implies much more than the evidence justifies. A layman or new student might easily conclude that biochemistry and molecular biology have substantially confirmed the entire biomechanical pathways of macroevolution between radically different types of creatures and that physics can fully explain the order in life and the cosmos without encountering a complete mystery at the origin of absolutely everything. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
To represent the materialist victory as definite, complete, and final, as Futuyma does, is a flagrant overstatement of what science actually knows. This must certainly prejudice the as yet not fully formed and not fully informed views of young students. Regardless of Professor Futuyma’s good personal intentions, his formulation of his personal philosophical preferences as if they were objective scientific fact converts what should be a vehicle of pure empiric science to one that promotes the agendas of the socio-political movements of materialism and atheism (and possibly Marxism). Restricting science to the empirically confirmable as a practical working limitation is one thing. Affirming materialism as a social mindset, metaphysical belief system, and political movement, itself bordering on a religion, is something entirely different. Science is forbidden this by its own charter.
In Futuyma’s view, materialism is absolutely established by 1) an admittedly mistaken Marxist theory of history; 2) a 150-year-old Darwinian view of evolution, conceived without benefit of any of the information from modern biochemistry or genetics, a theory that held that the inside of the cell was composed of nothing but a featureless goo; and 3) a “mechanistic” view of physics that is supposed not to need God to explain life that is elsewhere denied by Darwinists to be mechanistic when it implies intelligent design.
If philosophy is going to be inserted into a biology text, one wants to say “At least make it good philosophy!” God has traditionally always been placed at the beginning of the event chain, at the very moment of the world’s creation. Darwin himself did this. How meaningful is it, then, for neo-Darwinian evolutionists to say that we don’t need God in explanation because we don’t need him until we get to the very beginning? As a good Catholic and someone sensitive to other good Christian faiths practice of avoiding vulgar expressions I have tried throughout this book to resist the temptation to use the word “bullshit,” but there is just no other word for this: it is nothing but political bullshit.
Pope Pius XII[180]
thought the Big Bang looked exactly liked creation…and that it proved
God’s existence. “In a famous address to
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951—often quoted as an example of an
inclination towards some form of Concordism— Pope Pius XII alluded to the Big
Bang «as a witness to that primordial Fiat lux » (cf. Discourse to
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 22.11.1951, in Papal Addresses ,
2003, pp. 130-142).”[181]
Popes have
had considerably less to say recently on the subject of the origin of the universe
than they have on the subject of human origins. In 1951, interestingly,
Pius XII (who so grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of evolution)
celebrated news from the world of science that the universe might have been
created in a Big Bang. (The term, first employed by astronomer Fred Hoyle
was meant to be derisive, but it stuck.) In a speech before the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences he offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the
theory: "…it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across
the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the
primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst
forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and
churned and formed into millions of galaxies.”…
But, as
Doug Linder tells us in The Vatican's View of Evolution: the Story of Two
Popes,, "the Pope didn’t stop there. He went on to express the
surprising conclusion that the Big Bang proved the existence of God:"
Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists! [182]
Appendix 10:
The Call for a New Evolutionary Synthesis
So, how do we fix the public misconception about accidental evolution? First of all, my hopes are that scientists will finally step up to their social and scientific obligation to clearly define and separate all the distinct forms of Darwinian theory so that the significant variants can be evaluated separately. Convening meetings to formulate a new evolutionary synthesis is the obvious way to do this.
In the process of differentiating the different versions of the theory of evolution, scientists should openly acknowledge all the philosophical adjuncts each version contains. The convention should also decide whether evolutionary theory or any other scientific theory should be permitted to have philosophical adjuncts at all if those adjuncts assert things that are not scientifically testable (I consider intelligent design to be testable). Science can proceed either way and still be an effective tool. It is really arbitrary as to whether such adjuncts are allowed or not. However, by setting a standard that must be adhered to, by ruling all philosophical adjuncts in or all out, the risk of political prejudice against one kind of philosophy over another slipping into scientific theory is contained.
We need to see clearly and authoritatively defined by a formal synthesis both what is being taught to our students and what one general view of the world (if any) is intended to be conveyed to the public under the authoritative umbrella of mainstream evolutionary science. The public also needs to be told straightforwardly whether neo-Darwinian theory has come to disavow the accidental process or not.
A new synthesis that does all these things would give our courts the ability to preclude materialist/atheist politics from science classrooms, as it currently does only for theist politics. It would discourage materialist textbook writers, instructors and school curriculum staff from attempting to politicize science in the first place, as they would no longer be able to hide their personal prejudice against religion in the currently permitted obfuscated language that can be read one way by students and the opposite way by the federal courts.
Technical issues must be addressed in a new synthesis as well as political ones. Professor Michael Behe has demonstrated that the current theoretical framework is necessarily out of date because it was developed before the advent of modern biochemistry. A new synthesis is needed to incorporate the vastly increased knowledgebase of detailed biochemistry and genetics. The evolutionary synthesis of the ’80s did not result in a statement of the import of the microprocesses of biology for evolution, but only the import of such major factors as architectural and developmental constraints on the evolution of biological form change. What we currently have, in short, is a macro theory of evolution that completely ignores and often contradicts the micro data. Other biologists have recently made a call for additional work on integrating the technical components of “synthetic theory,” citing the need to take into account aspects of mutation as well as developmental issues.[183]
It is also time to step back and make a total reevaluation of the contribution of mutation to the process of evolution. The mutation hypothesis has been allowed to be freely read as “random mutation” when all the new information coming out of evo-devo says that form change driving mutations are highly constrained by developmental genes; there is hardly anything random there at all.
The basic tenets of synthetic theory, primarily population dynamics and Mendelian genetics, along with a few other refinements of the "mechanical" processes of evolution (so generally described that they are meaningless or nontestable), are (usually) stated with sufficient clarity; but none of these have ever been demonstrated to actually occur. Thus, once again, it is time to step back and closely reevaluate the demonstrable role each component of modern evolutionary theory can defensibly be shown to play in light of recent research. Since we still have nothing close to a demonstrable biomechanical pathway for evolution (random or otherwise), we should stop, take a breath, let the momentum of 150 years of hasty consensus on Darwin’s theory slide past us, and ask ourselves if Henry Gee has not in fact become the true voice of reason. Shouldn’t we put a quest for a narrative theory of the evolutionary process aside as beyond our present reach and humbly content ourselves with objectively and precisely describing the data until such time as the data itself genuinely demands a narrative? (Gee suspects it never will demand a narrative due to the deep time of evolutionary history and the relative paucity of data we will ever have to describe that history with.)
Then there is the frustrating problem of shifting terminology. (This is apparently frustrating only to non-evolutionists.) Despite a tendency by modern writers and some Darwinists to equate the two terms, “synthetic theory” and “neo-Darwinian theory,” George Gaylord Simpson, John Maynard Smith and others have at times explicitly differentiated “neo-Darwinian” theory from “synthetic theory.” Simpson said that the neo-Darwinian view had an overly simplistic conception of natural selection that could not explain how frequently progressive form change proposals were constantly being achieved by evolution against all conceivable odds to the contrary. This, of course, remains one of the primary criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory to this day, and is the heart of the objections posed by intelligent design theorists. Simpson claimed that synthetic theory had, by integrating all the resources of many related disciplines, finally exposited a more complex and potent form of natural selection that was truly non-accidental, incorporating acknowledgement of the strong bias for useful form change proposals seen in the historical record of evolution. He claimed it, as does Strickberger and Futuyma, but he did not demonstrate it.
According to Simpson, natural selection as viewed under synthetic theory is, in fact, capable of achieving consistently useful form change proposals despite forbidding improbabilities by, in essence, progressively altering the available choices over time in such a way as would constantly improve the chances of obtaining more and more useful biological mechanisms. By gradually but relentlessly eliminating more and more of the non-useable options from the gene pool, natural selection ultimately reduces the odds by achieving a state where the options are predominantly beneficial to life generally, though not necessarily to a given organism at a given time in a given environmental niche. Simpson admits that the entire system of nature is somehow set up to facilitate this, that it is not an accidental process at all, and thus he here separates himself from the accidental evolution of neo-Darwinists, although they at times speak of his work as if it were part of their own school. The logical import of what he says is that each step in evolution is preconstructed to facilitate the next step. But this is simply a linguistic subterfuge to camouflage directed evolution, for there is no way a random process could arrange this. Thus, logical consistency is a real concern in evolutionary theory and a new synthesis could add the logical rigor that has heretofore been absent. Evo-devo, the way I read it, is trying to do much the same thing, in simply creatively labeling directed evolution with a new term and arbitrarily and indefensibly denying that there is real direction involved. Intellectual dishonesty is a genuine issue here and must be rigorously assessed.
How Simpson’s more potent version of natural selection actually works remains a mystery, another undefined wildcard, a black box where the problem of accidental evolution goes in one end and a solution minus God comes out the other with absolutely nothing coherent contained on the inside. This is a disingenuous trick to rig the game against intelligent design. I see no way that the blind process of non-intelligent natural selection can discern the difference between something that merely makes the present species more survivable and something that not merely occasionally can but consistently will also facilitate the next advancement in complex design through the use of some feature that has no effect on current fitness. To assume, as classic Darwinian theory does, that it just so happens that every one of the features needed for the next step in evolutionary advance just so happens to be the feature also providing selective advantage at present in some dual use is even more improbable than if they just accidentally occurred.
Current examples of dual use features are so limited (they are not nonexistent) as not to surpass the statistical expectations for coincidence. In a process so large as the construction of the tree of life, to find a few dual use examples but no more is not statistically sufficient to evidence a general rule, but merely signifies the occasional coincidence inevitable in any set of events so enormous as that of the entire history of evolution. To make such an improbable claim, that such dual use of features is the workhorse of an accidental evolutionary process obligates the theorist to produce the evidence, to show the concrete path of countless strings of dual use features that actually comprise the chain of events that produce real organisms in the concrete steps that were actually taken. I am not saying we should be able to describe every step, but rather that we should be able to produce many lengthy component chains for the evolution of many creatures in order to demonstrate that such an implausible flight of fancy has genuine scientific credibility. Thus, the question of evidential standards must be addressed by a new synthesis. Many aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, including the apparent myth of dual use (generously termed an “hypothesis”) have flaunted the evidential standards for years in a shameless manner.
The flaunting of scientific standards of evidence has nowhere occurred more abusively than in pretending support for natural selection itself. There are only two options. Both suggest that the process of evolution involves an element of intelligent design, but Darwinists simply refuse to recognize this.
1. The proposals sent to natural selection for a decision already have the facilitation of the next evolutionary step built in. In this case, the need to discern the difference between survivable and nonsurvivable to get to the next step goes away. In this case, the proposals are smart proposals beyond what an accident could achieve with or without blind natural selection.
2. Natural selection is not blind or dumb at all, it is somehow capable of sensing what is necessary for the next step in evolution. In this latter case, intelligence is dishonestly being secreted away under the function of natural selection. This is like denying the crazy aunt stashed away in the upstairs closet. “No that’s just the stairs screeching; we have no aunt.” But stairs don’t screech and in unintelligent accidental evolution natural selection cannot sense what is necessary for the next step in evolution; it can only affirm what works for the survivability of the current step.
Concreteness is another issue crying out for resolution. The synthetic theory’s claim for a form of natural selection so potent that it can actually solve the probability problem engendered by an accidental process without invoking intelligent design avoids logical inconsistency only because it is fully ineffable, that is, fully lacking a concrete statement. There is thus nothing to evaluate. In the Air Force we use to call this FM, freaky magic. The requirement of concreteness too must be reconsidered and updated in the new synthesis.
Another problem is that evolutionary theory has been flaunting the most basic standard or goal of science: the default requirement to explain how and why something occurred. More improbable events require scientific explanation more than less probable events. The most horrendously improbable event in the natural world is the origin of life. The origin of the genomes and the tripartite system required to produce life from them currently has no explanation whatsoever. Neo-Darwinists talk around the subject, but they don’t explain the origin of the genomes. All they say is that an accident could have done it; but that is not a scientific explanation. We cannot continue to accept untestable and unenlightening generalities as if they were valid scientific explanations. We should either produce something that has concrete substance and is testable or, as Henry Gee suggests, we should simply say that we don’t know.
Intelligent design authors have already shown us is that the probability argument rules out a predominantly random system. In the nonrandom process revealed in evolutionary data, there is sufficient impetus toward viable design achievement that the proposals are as often as not workable right out of the chute. This shows a clear bias for life and at least a moderately constrained directional process. That means that natural selection no longer plays a crucial role in determining which design options populate the planet. Natural selection would still often rule out the bad ones, but it appears that there were not nearly so many of bad design proposals presented for natural selection’s opinion as neo-Darwinian theory has traditionally assumed. Given recent revelations of the enormous complexities involved in viable biological change proposals, the extent to which a random process could make such proposals in real time have to be has to be considered minimal. The now largely demonstrable impotency of natural selection should be rigorously addressed in a new synthesis.
Another problem is clarifying terms and theory definitions. A new synthesis should address the lines of demarcation between "synthetic theory" and "neo-Darwinian" theory as regards materialism and lack of purpose. This question was never clear in use outside the work of G. G. Simpson. Some major theorists, such as Ernst Mayr, simply defined the terms separately (albeit clearly and concretely) for their own use. The “new” synthesis, which originally defined these variants, is now over fifty years old. Many occasions for individual writers and theorists to deviate, add, subtract and modify have since flowed under the bridge, as it were, with no substantial attempt being made to formally track, integrate or differentiate new developments in terms of being within or without one of these two variants or requiring a new (named) variant. In popular use today the original two primary versions of Darwinian theory are often mixed in the same discussion with myriad variations. Often they appear to be the same thing, and occasionally authors explicitly say that they are the same. In a de facto kind of way, this is true. They may now be considered to be the same thing based upon predominant use in public venues and for general purposes, but the precise content, the full range of that tenets and sub-theories that comprise neo-Darwinian theory as such is anything but clear. The next synthesis should therefore clarify and standardize the proper use of evolutionary terminology and introduce new terms for variants of Darwinian theory as needed.
The clarification, classification and evaluation of the many different views of evolution is urgently needed, and is the primary task of the new synthesis, in addition to technical updates. In sum, we need to know in clear and precise terms what a given version of evolutionary theory is actually saying, and what to call it. Minus these most rudimentary elements of theory classification, no evaluation of the merits of evolutionary theory can be completed because the theory is a moving target, one that is permitted to change form as needed to avoid specific objections.
The new synthesis should also and especially make a point to achieve clarity and standardization regarding use of the term 'purpose' for scientific writing, with a view to being more sensitive to the needs of the theological and philosophical communities. It should not be overly difficult to build a consistent and standardized model combining G. G. Simpson’s detailed treatment given in This View of Life, chapters 8-11, with Mayr’s distinctions of four types of purpose in essay three of Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, while firmly suggesting a standard that always requires the layman to be left with a clear yes or no in terms of Mayr’s “cosmic purpose,” or by building upon similarly straightforward distinctions already made by Francisco Ayala.
There was significant variation on the question of purpose even among the large number of scientists who were central to the new evolutionary synthesis that defined modern evolutionary theory. A given version of neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory may or may not address the question of purpose or an accidental process at all. Sir Julian Huxley, for example, seems not to have addressed the question of overall purpose. On the other hand, George Gaylord Simpson affirmed “purpose” as undeniably present in the processes that originated life, while saying science could not legitimately speculate as to the origin of that purpose. He thus ruled out science’s being able to answer the question of God or intelligent design either way. On the other hand, Ernst Mayr, in essay three of Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, was fully comfortable in ruling out cosmic purpose altogether.
Add to this the radical and profuse variations of a plethora of modern theorists and the whole situation virtually cries out for standardization, both of theoretical tenets and of terminology. Nor is it clear that individual theorists are being fully consistent across the full spectrum of their combined statements on evolution. Though some modern Darwinists would like to step away from the “purely accidental” in the sense of the chaotic physical forces ascribed to evolution by Peters and Gutmann, they cannot step fully away from lack of cosmic purpose and remain neo-Darwinian. This is so because Dobzhansky and Mayr et al. authored as official a definition of the neo-Darwinian theory as we have available. Lack of cosmic purpose is part of that definition because they made it so. Nor is that definition an archaic one that has been officially supplanted by more informed modern views. Notable neo-Darwinian theorists currently affirm the same principle. If, as Mayr implies, science has a standard available with which to judge the presence or absence of cosmic purpose in natural events, it should lay that standard out for public inspection and critique at the convening of the next evolutionary synthesis. Then the logic of such a culture-altering conclusion can be visibly and formally evaluated.
The next synthesis should also consider recommending that every text book or scientific study should either use Waddington’s disclaimer or say something like “We have denied purpose at points in the processes and biomechanics of evolution but have only meant that we could discover no scientifically demonstrable bias in a specific process for achieving a given function or specified final end result. This says nothing about the presence or absence of an overall cosmic purpose in life. It does not rule out an intelligent design purpose that might be resident at points higher in the chain of physical event processes than were examined, nor does it rule out purpose involving goals more complex or variable than have been considered here.”
A new synthesis would not serve the needs of the ID/Christian communities alone. There are plenty of scientific updates and loose ends to pull together from the past twenty-five years of research advancements. Referring to the last major scientific synthesis of ideas on evolution[184] in the middle of the twentieth century Professor Behe says:
Inevitably, evolutionary theory
began to mean different things to different disciplines; a coherent view of
Darwinian evolution was being lost. In the middle of the century, however,
leaders of the fields organized a series of interdisciplinary meetings to
combine their views into a coherent theory of evolution based on Darwinian
principles. The result has been called the “evolutionary synthesis,” and the
theory called neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is the basis of modern evolutionary
thought.
One branch of science was not invited to the meetings, and for good reason: it did not yet exist. The beginnings of modern biochemistry came only after neo-Darwinism had been officially launched. Thus, just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry. The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life.[185]
Another important goal of the next synthesis should be to once and for all address and resolve into concrete axioms the answers to the basic questions of philosophy of science (or to explicitly reaffirm them if held to be already evident). The answers to these questions are logically prerequisite to science’s ability to consistently direct and govern its course, and yet a full consensus regarding them has never been visibly achieved. Science nonetheless proceeds as if the conceptual foundations for theory evaluation have been securely laid and unanimously assented to. They have not. To all appearances, they are, in fact, still a point of contention between different schools of thought. There are at least six central issues (with related secondary questions) upon which science must once and for all reach consensus if we are to bring evolutionary theory around to the same standard of concreteness and coherence employed by the rest of science:
1. What makes a theory scientific (or not)?
2. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately point to the presence of intelligence behind natural phenomena?
3. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately point to the existence of God?
4. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately rule out the presence of intelligence behind natural phenomena?
5. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately rule out the existence of God?
6. What are the concrete rules for testability and falsifiability of a theory?
7. Are these rules the same in biology as they are in physics, history, mathematics etc.? In what ways are they legitimately different, and how must theories in the respective disciplines be differently evaluated?
8. Can these rules properly vary within a discipline or a theoretical topic depending upon the nature of the natural phenomenon or theoretical question involved? Are their justifiable exceptions?
9. Can a different standard for what is scientific, testable, or refutable, be properly applied to two or more theories that offer competing explanations for exactly the same natural event without constituting evidence for political bias? If so, upon what grounds?
10. Has science historically applied standards for theory evaluation in a consistent way? If not, which of our current theories has been given too much or too little validation? What corrective action is required?
Only in this kind of visible and methodical way can the integrity of science be preserved concerning highly politicized questions. Might the present prejudice for atheism and materialism in the mainstream scientific culture simply be reflected in the conclusions of a new synthesis? Yes, it might. But, if it is, that prejudice then becomes visible to the public, and science loses deniability. It loses the ability to surreptitiously act upon its prejudice with impunity as it has been doing for the last half century. Until a competent and representative body of scientists are convened for a new evolutionary synthesis we should hold that science has failed in its obligations to society.
Specific complaints should be heard by the convened synthesis participants from advocates of theories who claim the method and integrity of science has been violated in the treatment of their work. Any corrective action needed should be formally recommended by the convention.
Until these clarifications are achieved, the scientific situation in regards to evolution and the question of an accidental or purposive worldview will remain what it is, a logical shambles and an intellectual mess. A major house cleaning is called for here. The theory of neo-Darwinian evolution in current use is neither properly defined, nor even unitary and logically consistent in its assertions. Variants have not been properly differentiated, and, under cover of this confusion, materialist philosophy is being interjected into our science classrooms with no accountability whatsoever. Crucial distinctions have come to be so subtly blurred and deeply buried that even a federal judge cannot detect materialist metaphysics masquerading as science (if they ever could).
I hope the Church will be one of the loudest voices we hear calling for a new evolutionary synthesis because our students are now being deceptively indoctrinated into a Godless worldview under the auspices of mainstream science. Until the needed clarification is achieved in a new synthesis, the court discussions and school board debates will remain mostly a matter of smoke and mirrors, political jockeying and rhetorical dodge ball, with one set of references and testimonies (basic evolution and God-compatible synthetic theory) going to the courts and school boards and another (the full blown accidental materialism of neo-Darwinian theory) read by students in their textbooks.
Given the separation of distinct versions of evolutionary theory in a new synthesis, scientists who wish to assert an accidental process will then have no choice but to openly defend an accidental process under its own name minus the protection of the present verbal confusion. No more political pot shots at God followed by melting away into the safe oblivion of semantics: “No one is saying it is accidental.” Only a thorough housecleaning of the current logical shambles of evolutionary theory in a new synthesis can restore accountability and integrity to modern evolutionary science.
[160] Seth Shostak, “SETI and Intelligent Design,” 1 December 2005, published on the Space.com Website at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html, accessed 9 December 2001.
[161] Thomas R. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Listening for Life in the Cosmos, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1987), 168.
[162] Ibid, 122.
[163] Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 282-285; Marcello Barbieri, The Organic Codes: An Introduction to Semantic Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[164] William A. Dembski, The
Design Inference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William
A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology
(Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999); William A. Dembski, No Free
Lunch (Lanham,
[165] NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Web site, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980317b.html, accessed 21 December 2009.
[166] See the NOVA online Web site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/tour_ggs.html, accessed 21 December 2009.
[167] See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987) for many examples of fractals.
[168] Ibid.
[169] Francis Crick and Leslie E. Orgel, “Directed Panspermia,” Icarus. Vol. 19 (1973): 341-346.
[170] Margaret C. Turnbull and Jill C. Tarter, “Target Selection for SETI: A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems,” University of Arizona, Steward Observatory, published to NASA’s NStars Database Web site at, http://nstars.arc.nasa.gov/index.cfm, specifically http://nstars.arc.nasa.gov/TurnbullTarter.pdf.
[171] Edward Ashpole, The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (London: Blandford Press, 1989); Michael D. Lemonick, Other Worlds (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Robert Jastrow, “Cosmic Evolution,” Natural History, vol. 77, no. 1, 37-38.
[172]Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), chap. 16; Amir D. Aczel, God’s Equation (New York: Dell Publishing, 1999), 176.
[173] Neither do most forms of the creation science case, which can easily be reconfigured to be offered as science exclusive of any references to religion. They may not always be so configured because they may at times be offered primarily within a religious community. The mere fact that Creationists have the integrity not to deny their faith does not make the scientific component of their argument nonscientific.
[174] See the U.S. District Court decision, TAMMY KITZMILLER, et al. v. DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al., Case No. 04cv2688, U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA, December 20, 2005, published to the Internet in PDF format at the Web site for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania at http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf.
[175] Simpson, View, 199.
[176] Simpson, View, 200.
[177] Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), 138.
[178] Simpson, View, 197.
[179] C. H. Waddington, The Evolution of an Evolutionist (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), 38.
[180] As an aside, the biography of Pope Pius XII, Keeper of the Keys, by Thomas McDermott, is a great read, a fascinating look inside the conclave of cardinals that select the Pope. It reveals the unique trials of the war years. Keeper of the Keys appears to be out of print, but is available at used booksellers on the Internet and at various public, parish, monastery and university libraries.
[181]
Mario Gargantini “Magisterium of
the Catholic Church” in the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and
Science, published to the Internet at http://www.disf.org/en/Voci/78.asp. The reference to Papal Addresses is
more fully cited as Benedetto XV -
Giovanni Paolo II, Papal Addresses to the
[182]
Doug Linder “The Vatican’s View of Evolution: The Story of Two Popes,”
published to the Internet at Professor Linder’s
[183] Arlin Stoltzfus. “Mutationism and the Dual Causation of Evolutionary Change.” Evolution & Development. Vol. 8, no. 3 (2006): 304-317.
[184] See the article “Evolution,” in Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia, 9th ed., vol. 1, 1339.
[185] Behe, Black Box, 24-25.