Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison
Some Randomness is
Compatible with God and ID Theory: The “Big Stir”
Darwinists have historically made a big
deal out of the fact that the processes of nature appear random to (some of)
us. Charles Darwin, in particular, built his entire theory around this concept,
but this has also been the mainstay of the argument for all
Darwinists/neo-Darwinists. They have especially dwelt upon the fact that
biological form mutations are not directly related to the changes a creature
needs to best survive in its current environmental niche, and, of course, that
genes are randomly mixed during reproduction. These two observations might be
called the two pillars of the accidental component of neo-Darwinian theory.
They have also made much of the fact that during its course of development the
evolution of the biosphere seemed to wander all over the map, as it were. But
the biases in physics and cosmology that favor life are so dramatic that, in
combination with the close governance of natural law, we knew we had a
life-friendly machine on our hands
before the biosphere was even created.
The existence of some manageable random elements (or even genuine flaws) in a
computer or other machine, for example, does not prove that the machine arose
by accident. Within machines, or in other intelligently managed processes,
random aspects can be closely constrained and guided so as not to critically
inhibit the achievement of the overall purpose. Machines and goal-driven
strategies need not be perfect from all points of view, or even from any point
of view; they need merely be sufficient
for their purpose.
If the neo-Darwinists would take a
moment to step back from the trees and look at the forest, they would discover
that, in retrospect from the larger view, the purpose of that wandering course
in creating a breathable atmosphere, a life-conducive weather/water-cycle, a
rich hunter-gatherer world, a balanced ecosystem, and a magnificent collage of
beautiful flora and fauna to cultivate, harvest, and explore could well have
been to provide a world for humans to live in. As they say, “this ain’t rocket science;” it could be that simple.
True, this world is not paradise; it has
its tragedies and challenges. But even those may have a purpose. What might
that purpose be? To foster the spiritual growth requisite to
leaving our probationary exile on Earth and moving into the real paradise of
heaven, for one. Punishment and discipline for being bad children
another. From the Christian point of view, the course of nature that seems so
purposeless to Darwinists is a close match to God’s purposes as described in the
Christian faith. I am not pushing my faith on the reader here; I am saying what
is “random” from one point of view is not necessarily random from all points of
view.
In the case of neo-Darwinists
highlighting random elements in biology the problem is that they are using our
world’s imperfections as an argument against the Christian God, all the while ignoring the fact that the teachings
of the church of that God expressly say that our world was cursed with
imperfections as a punishment. It was intentionally created as a probationary
exile between worlds that are
perfect. It is the best a good God could do for us, given our own failings.
Thus, the neo-Darwinists argument that a good God would never create an
imperfect world like ours is suffering from a huge blind spot: it is ignoring
the complete content of the Christian faith it is posed to so severely
critique. One wonts to say, “How about doing your homework first.”
And, in more general philosophical
terms, it is a logical axiom that a random part does not make an accidental
whole. Merely finding some random routines in the middle of the processes of
biology does not prove the larger process of life’s creation and evolution
accidental. There are clear examples of tightly controlled random subroutines that
serve a purpose. Code breakers use random searches as part of the method of
finding the correct key to an enemy communication; computer hackers do the same
thing to get past computer systems security; and our human immune system’s
antibody production does something very similar in matching antibodies to
pathogenic invaders (antigens). The brain’s mental problem-solving dynamics
almost certainly invoke random (in addition to guided) search routines in the
search for conceptual matches of solutions to problems.
Furthermore, randomness in genetic
transpositions and reproductive gene mixing has
a purpose: it allows life to adapt to changes in the environment without the
creator having to constantly intervene to make adjustments. In combination with
natural selection, such random mixing produces individuals and groups that are
increasingly well-matched to their environment and increasingly more fit and
efficient in general. Creating artistic variety for its own sake is another
potential purpose for random subprocesses. It is even possible that the lack of
correlation between mutations and a creature’s present environmental needs
serves a purpose.
“Now you’ve missed it,” you may want to
interject with our neo-Darwinist detractors, “for, surely there can be no
purpose in withholding what a creature needs to adapt to its environment.”
First of all: don’t call me Shirley.☺ Second, there actually could be a
purpose if we stepped back again and looked at the forest instead of the
individual trees. God or the designer may have invoked two principles that
underlie much of Christian and other moral teachings in many cultures
(including the virtue of patriotism): the individual sacrifices for the good of
the larger group, and sometimes it is best to sacrifice present short-term
benefits for a better long-term future. Why wouldn’t a Christian God
incorporate his own principles in the process of creation? Specifically, the
mutations that mismatch what the individual presently needs may be a necessary
piece of the
larger genome-building process for the tree of life as a whole that needs to
enter the flow of information at that point, or it may just be a tolerable
error within a larger machine that gets the overall job done. After all, we
said this world, in the Christian view, is intentionally imperfect.
Randomness in evolution would only rule
out God or intelligent design if it could be shown to drive the foundational process of nature so
radically that no purpose, even one stated in general terms with margins of
error, could be achieved with favorable probability over exceedingly vast
periods of time. Occurring, as they do, in the middle of things, the random
elements cited by Darwinists do not conflict with the presence of intelligent
design or cosmic purpose. The problem of mutations mismatching the environment
and random mixing of genes during reproduction both occur after life has been created—and created in a manner that these
“flaws” do not threaten life’s long-term survival; natural selection sees to
that. “Imperfections” can’t be a showstopper to goal achievement if the goal
has already been achieved before they occur.
Although science has no idea what the ultimate origin of things was like, that
is, what is on the other side of the Big Bang, we do know that the
beginning state of matter and energy was not chaotic. Quite to the contrary, it
was very highly informed and precisely focused in the direction of life. We
already know from such notable thinkers as Roger Penrose and Hugh Ross that the
bias for life built into nature is enormous. The foundational processes of our
world are not at all random. If they were, life would indeed be an unthinkable
fluke, and science itself would not be
possible.
Sir Roger Penrose estimates the
specificity of the configuration of matter and energy required to produce this
universe and its life forms to be 10 raised to the power of
10123.
Here 10123
is the exponent! We are dealing with an incredibly large number here. It would
take roughly a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion books this size merely to hold all the zeroes. We know that a fully
accidental process cannot approach such magnitudes of order within real evolutionary
time, and not within the probability thresholds of scientific credibility. We
also know that within the smallest fraction of the first second of our universe
natural law began to closely govern all interactions of matter and energy.
Thus, our world began biased for
life; it did not accidentally become
biased for life as neo-Darwinists imply in discussing their theory of
“cumulative selection.”
Randomness in nature only occurs at
certain intermediate points, such as in animal reproduction where the genes of
the parents are randomly mixed. This mixing, however, is constrained within
manageable limits inside a machine. There is no risk of losing the
structural organization of the species or the integrity of its major systems
through reproductive mixing. An intelligent designer of life could easily
employ such a system without risking the achievement of his or her goals. It
would only require a little patience and some flexibility in the desired
outcomes.
True, we don’t know everything about the
processes of the genomes or the events of evolution, but mere mystery, lack of
information, or a deficit of scientific knowledge does not establish randomness
or accident as the default explanation (the atheistic materialists in modern
science too often behave as if it does); it only establishes ignorance. There
is a genuine contradiction involved in the neo-Darwinian view of randomness.
Neo-Darwinists claim that a random process can (with the help of natural
selection) build any biological machine whatsoever, even the most complex, in
real evolutionary time. They also assert that the presence of this kind of
randomness demonstrates the absence of an intelligent designer (a builder of
machines)! How can the presence of a machine-building process disprove the existence
of a machine builder? Go figure!
And neo-Darwinists are just wrong about
the capabilities of an accidental process. In the real world (that is, outside
the Darwinian imagination) accident cannot be shown to be capable of building
complex machines by any method, with or without natural selection. The most
complex nonliving self-propagating system Shanks and Joplin can offer in their
attempt to rebut Professor Michael Behe is the rough equivalent of intestinal gas. Why is the Shanks and
Joplin example of biochemical “flatulence” the best example of “accidental”
systems neo-Darwinists can discover outside of the living ecosystem? If the
entirety of complex living systems arose by accident, there would have to be an
enormous accident-based system-production activity at the foundation of nature?
Otherwise the math doesn’t work, that is, on average, nothing gets built. Yet,
it is only the rare nonliving system
that can be pointed to as the possible
product of random events. Of course there is a contradiction built into the
Darwinian view here as well (if one does the math). Without that enormous
accident-based system-production activity at the foundation of nature evolution
doesn’t happen; with it, evolution is not accidental.
Where are the rest of the nonliving
physical machines that a potent machine-producing accidental dynamic must have
produced if neo-Darwinian evolution is true? They are not out there. Why? The
answer obviously must lie at the level of the design proposal, for
natural selection will always do its part to preserve anything fit to survive
in its environment. The limiting factor in the proposal phase of
self-propagating systems design is apparently the complexity barrier, which translates to a probability barrier,
which translates to very infrequent
accidental achievement of complex system or machine construction. Accident can
only go so far up the range of complexity when proposing design modules; then
it must stop. This is a statistical truth, not a universal one. Accident might
rarely succeed, but that is not nearly sufficient to produce the creation and
evolution of life on the established historical timeline.
One can point to the cosmos itself as
one potential example of a nature-made machine. But the Cosmos can’t serve as
an example of a machine known to have been made by an accident because we don’t
know what caused the structures of the galaxies and solar systems to form. We
don’t know the Cosmos was an accident.
A further difficulty is that if we
hypothesize accident as the source of structure in the cosmos as well as the
cause of life we find ourselves in the ridiculous position of asserting that
accident only makes the extraordinarily complex designs, but never makes simple
ones. There are no simple machines out there in nature, only complex ones. Once
again this flies directly in the face of standard mathematical probability
theory and means such a proposition doesn’t pass the threshold of scientific
credibility. This anomaly suggests cosmic purpose. Why have only the highly complex
machines we have, the structured Cosmos, the biosphere, the ecosystem, and the
living creatures? Clearly the common purpose served by all of these systems is
to promote life itself. Yet, Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionist says science
can find no indications of purpose in nature whatsoever. That can only be
because they were looking exclusively at the trees, and not the forest; they
missed the larger pattern in focusing in too tightly on the smaller processes
that, from the point of view of a perfectionist micromanager, do seem to wander
from the optimal path to a living paradise. But if probation is the purpose
rather than paradise, imperfections and a wandering path are not a problem.
An intelligent designer using embedded
random components is not so ridiculous as it might
first appear. The computational capacity of the designer of life and/or the
cosmos may be presumed to afford him or her the
ability to predict the formation of the cosmos by symmetry breaking (like
cutting a diamond?) or by any other method, as well as to predict the
biomechanics of evolution, random generators included. An intelligent designer
could be so far superior to man vis-à-vis tracking and projecting the outcome
of physical process data that, for him, creating the universe and all life
forms in it, with or without random subroutines, could be a “piece of cake.” It
would be no more difficult for him or her than you or I stirring cream into our
coffee.
We understand the chemical properties
and physical behavior limits of the components involved well enough that we
don't have to micromanage the coffee-stirring task by checking the whereabouts
of each molecule of cream. We give the spoon a half dozen spins and are
confident of achieving an acceptable mix. So what’s the problem with having
some random subroutines in evolution? The designer of life simply drinks form a
bigger cup.
If by no other means, we can envision a
designer having this capability by a simple analogy to multitasking computers.
They can do more than one task at once and track an amazing amount of data. My
small home computer upon which I am writing this now has six processor chips,
and 8GB of memory in which to store and process data. How much more potent
might the mind of the designer/creator of our world be in computational speed
and ability?
To an intelligent microbe on the surface
of a globule of cream swirling in our coffee it no doubt appears that the
processes of its world are completely random. Such a microbe might wonder why
anyone would create such an apparently disorganized mess, as the situation must
appear to it from its limited perspective. Why provide a copious amount of food
only to scald the recipient to death before it could have dinner? It makes no
sense—to the microbe. But the “mess” is not so truly
disorganized as it appears; it is in fact a really decent cup of coffee. It
only appears disorganized from the point of view of the germ. Likewise,
in saying that life must be an accident because it makes no sense to them, the neo-Darwinists are thinking
too small. And they are drawing hasty conclusions before all the data is in.
Just because we cannot presently track
the causal chains of the complex events of life all directly back to their
source, doesn’t mean that He (a hypothetical
designer of life) cannot track them. After all, the designer not only
gets to choose the cup, the coffee, and the cream, but establishes the rules
for chemical mixing. He has full
visibility of his system, well beyond what we non-chemists have for mixtures of
coffee.
And even were a designer to fully rig
the game of evolution by taking all possibility for randomness out of it, such
a process might still appear random to humans. If the laws of
chemistry were such that every molecule of cream had to blend with the coffee
in precisely the same way every time, and automatic stirring machines were
employed that never deviated, would that change the microbe’s opinion of the
odd world he had the bad luck to inhabit? Hardly; it still makes no sense to him.
Similarly, we could be living in an
intelligently-designed world and have the microbe’s experience of missing the
point for at least five possible reasons: the physics and biophysics of our
world involve complexities beyond our computational ability to track; lack of
full scientific data at a given moment; the designer’s goals might be reflected
only in patterns so large that they exceed our span of physiological perception
or mental cognition; the designer’s goals might be so foreign to our interests
or way thinking that they simply do not occur to us; or, if the smallest
components of causal chains were too small to be perceived (super-duper
strings, for example) making the macroscopic events they drove seem random. The
bottom line is that the appearance of randomness, even given our best
scientific effort, does not mean that the world is not of intelligent design.
Stir on Dude!
Although individual subatomic particles seem to “behave” randomly, the overall group behavior of quantum particles does show a strong and consistent statistical pattern. This pattern is sufficient to provide a firm foundation for the constancy of natural law at the macroscopic scale. Statistical quantum particle behavior is in fact amazingly consistent and powerfully predictive of physical events.[215]
Similarly, although individual mutations in biology reveal no bias for what is best for a creature in its present environment, the overall statistical pattern for the set of biological mutations as a whole is hugely biased for biomechanical soundness. A creature may die due to mismatching its environment, but it will always be a well-constructed machine. There will be some disabled mutant individuals (manufacturing flaws), but at the level of species design the blueprint is a good one. An accidental process would not have this result. It would not make only good machines. It would make mostly very bad ones, generally horrible, and it would almost always fail at making a machine of any kind.
We have not observed this mutational bias for mechanical soundness in the laboratory because abiogenesis and macroevolutionary mutations take too long to develop, plus we don’t yet have full visibility over all of the relevant internal genetic and microbiological processes. But we can safely infer the bias is there from the historical timeline of evolution where living machines of astronomical complexity were mass-produced well beyond the capabilities of an accident. An accident would not have achieved the same ordered structures in a trillion, trillion, trillion…lifetimes of our universe. Thus, the occurrence of some randomness, real or apparent, technically defined in relation to a selected criterion, such as environmental adaptation, does not mean that the process of evolution is accidental overall; it could still be very much biased in important ways.
The high information bearing capacity of the DNA/protein team (along with the “ribotype” that translates one to the other) and the genetic transpositional element management system, are two overtly “intelligent” aspects of the evolutionary process—they are not random. The developmental genome is another “intelligent” system that has apparently guided not only embryonic development, but somehow very substantially contributed to events of macroevolution. The details of these “intelligent” systems are currently being further exposited, along with the functions of Hox genes and the larger developmental genome that appear to be the key factors responsible for generating major body form change. The entire process is exorbitantly complex, highly informed, and constrained—and therefore can legitimately be termed “intelligent.”[216]
Yes, accident can feed variation proposals into the developmental or transpositional machinery of the genome and thereby produce some evolutionary variation, but the machine has to be there first in order to get a viable result. These machines are not random, and neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain how they could be built by accident. The top neo-Darwinian explanations are “a bunch of small accidents add up,” “a hat can be pulled from the hat,” “alphabet soup can make anything,” and “shit happens.” Neo-Darwinian theory is not science, people; it is Marxist/Socialist/Atheist political philosophy pretending to be science. It is time to wake up.
Not only intelligent design advocates, but mainstream biologists aptly compare DNA to human language.[217] The linguistic structure of DNA and the logical structure of DNA regulatory networks (and probably the neural networks of the brain) literally qualify life as an artificial system. (For further discussion of artificiality see Appendix 7, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence & ID.) The line of argument for intelligent design proceeds not only from the presence of a huge directional bias in nature, but from complexity, probability, resource exhaustion, and artificiality as well. The validity of none of these argument forms is affected by nature’s having some intermediate random subroutines.
It has become clear in the past few decades that the potential for abiogenesis (origination of life from nonliving chemicals) is fully dependent upon a strong bias for life in the laws of physics and chemistry, and that evolutionary progress is fully dependent on a self-organizing, self-transformational, transpositional genome.[218] Thus, despite the presence of some randomness at points in biological processes, such as reproductive mixing of genes, the larger system of nature and the process of life’s evolution are best described, not as a fluke accident, but as an incredibly “smart” machine.
He
Who Rides the Wind Speaks with Hot Air
Am I confident that future data will continue to reveal signs of intelligent design and a bias for life? Yes. Why? A very simple truth: accidents cannot make complex machines. Let me borrow for a moment Sir Fred Hoyle’s analogy of a tornado. A tornado can move your car into your neighbors yard on a single day of bad weather, but that does not mean that, given even four billion years to try, the weather will hit upon a pattern that will consistently take you to the office and back with punctuality, stop at the corner grocery three times a week thirty years running until you retire, and then begin dropping you off at the golf course, giving you a fifty yard boost on the par 5’s. You can send your measurements in to the PGA for the green jacket, but it “ain’t gonna” happen. You are not going to move from hacker to pro by accident no matter how long you wait.
The neo-Darwinist defense of the accidental origin and development of life has reached the point of explaining the first simple event, the tornado putting your car in the neighbor’s yard. This correlates to truly accidental genetic mutations, which are almost always destructive. The neo-Darwinists then ask us with effusive confidence to accept their word as experts that a documented small disaster is sufficient evidence to extend the capability of a merely destructive process to achieve a masterpiece of organizational complexity “free gratis,” that is without documentation. Such a gratuitous extension is simply irrational.
Baking a cake may be the perfect example to show the disparity between neo-Darwinian imagination and reality. It is easy to imagine the string of events that would produce an accidental cake: a lady spills wheat flour in a puddle of water on the pavement on a scorching day near a trash dumpster where yeast mold has begun to grow. Some old beets lie fermenting amongst a pile of stale discarded sugar. (Sounds good already doesn’t it?) Next door, Mom throws out the remnants of some baking soda that was used to deodorize her refrigerator. Her ten year old happens to be teaching the seven year old neighbor to milk the goat in the exact same spot as the flour spill. While digging their grubby little fingers into a can of cocoa surreptitiously borrowed from Mom’s kitchen counter, their two younger siblings spill some into the milk, while shuffling around in the other ingredients. The sun moves in the sky and begins to shine directly through a broken 8” X 10” magnifying sight-impaired reading lens that grandma has placed on top of the overfull trash container, creating an area of intense heat around the mess of ingredients on the ground. Half an hour later, Walla Booby! Accidental evolution has been proved! The cake is “ready!” And, lo and behold, who has inadvertently misread his car’s electronic mapping system after being diverted by an accident on the way to a lecture and turned up at the very spot in the nick of time for dessert? You guessed it: Richard Dawkins. He never doubted. The poor gentleman, who was hit crossing the street, tossed his deli bagged lunch into the air due to the impact and it landed perfectly in Dawkins’ lap as he sat in the opposite lane waiting for the light to turn. Not seeing the event and having no idea where the food came from, he had no choice but to write it off to good fortune. After all, the accidental theory of evolution tells us that more has happened from less.
Yes, all this could happen, in theory. But will it? Who is going to eat the cake to prove the theory a success? And, should we find a truly flawless cake sitting in the parking lot, will this scenario qualify as our best scientific theory of how to explain the existence of that cake? Of course not. Who would believe it?
Now, suppose further that, over the course of ten years, we find 1000 presidential banquets all mysteriously lined up in the alley out back of these children’s homes. Even should the kids be found to have chocolate fingers and toes, and even should they offer a full confession when fiercely interrogated, would we then be justified in concluding that the banquets were prepared in the same inadvertent way? Of course not.
Next, suppose a group of university professors all sign affidavits saying that their expert analysis “proves” that no other explanation is required than that those children inadvertently made 1,000 banquets exclusively from the contents of the dumpster? Does a mere argument from authority alter the balance of logic, fact, and common sense already given to us in this situation? Of course not. Shouldn’t we, rather, begin to suspect that those children live opposite a professional catering service and that the expert witnesses have colluded consciously or unconsciously to misconstrue the evidence for reasons other than scientific?
An accidental evolutionary process cannot be expected to achieve the nearly flawless results we see in the history of evolution any more than the children in the cake baking fiasco can produce a string of presidential banquets. Even in the cake example, one is forced to resort to some artificial byproducts of intelligent design to make even a mostly fouled-up result plausible. By analogy, if accident were the driving force behind evolution, the fossil record should be replete with flat cakes, sour cakes, worm-ridden cakes, rock-hard unleavened cakes, etc., but the unavoidable mistakes (partially disabled mutants and hugely wasteful systems) of an accidental process are simply not present in the fossil record, not in anywhere near the proportions required by standard probability computations. Natural selection would “quickly” remove some, but not all.
The human genome is 3,000,000,000 base pairs of nucleotides, three billion characters, many of which can be read in alternative ways for additional meaningful applications. If you accept the current theory of junk DNA (which will probably be refuted by the time this book is printed), perhaps only half of our genome is meaningful (perhaps): 1,500,000,000 characters. This percentage is declining with each passing day. A substantial modern book of 400 pages typically contains less than a million characters. The human genome alone then equates to the content of 1,500 books as a very minimal estimate! Books that can be read more than one way! Estimates of the number of species in the history of life range to hundreds of millions and beyond. The genome of each is another set of books, although much is reused. Novel variations do occur in each species, and they all have to be integrated. Neo-Darwinian theory gives no explanation of the origin of these books.
Most genuinely random mutations of nucleotides are attributed to errors in the DNA replication process.[219] The other source of (presumed to be) genuinely random mutations is toxic substances in the external or internal environment. But these are few and have little impact on the production of novel form variation. Noted evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley says that environmentally triggered mutations are no longer considered important in the development of life at all,[220] that most variation is generated by rearrangement of existing genetic material. All modern evolutionary biologists affirm this.
With this affirmation, neo-Darwinists
have painted themselves into a corner regarding their assertion that the origin
of the tree of life can be accounted for by purely accidental events. This is
because the genomes are
highly constrained mechanisms. While accidents sometimes occur
within machines, their overall functions are not accidental. One must first
achieve a substantial quantity of complexly ordered DNA, a translation process,
a replication process, an error checking and correction process, a regulation
process, a basic organismal metabolism, and a structure to physically
constrain, support, organize and protect it all in order to generate a living
organism and maintain it. Additional work along the same lines is required to
generate and integrate any substantial evolutionary advance. Each substantial
jump in biological information requires another origination event.
Neo-Darwinian evolution has no explanation for an of these origination events.
Now we see why Stephen Meyer titled his
controversial paper, “The Origin of Biological Information….” As biologist Gary
Jordan revealed to me way back in 1998, the problem of how to originate new increments
of biological information substantial enough to be of use to evolution is the
key to the explanation of life, both abiogenesis and evolution.
Macroevolution requires closely managed
changes spawned by the developmental and transpositional genomes,[221] and the origin
of the vast genetic information that drives those systems has never been
explained. The classic evolutionary theory of Darwin, Mayr, Dawkins and the
other neo-Darwinists who say that God or intelligent design is not needed to
explain life can here be seen to have failed on this one key criterion: how to
explain the origin of complex and task-specific (specified) biological
information.
Let’s
All Go to the Library!
For neo-Darwinists to point to the reorganization of existing genes via biological machinery as evidence of an accidental system having no designer is not good logic. Although the mixing of the genes in reproduction may be fully random, the neo-Darwinian thesis corresponds to merely moving books around in the library and then inanely claiming there are no authors. When books are juggled randomly little risk of impairing the primary function of the library (which is to impart useful knowledge to the reader) is incurred. The general interface for the books remains in the library system. Their subject matter applications remain unaffected; it just takes longer to find them. Even if chapters or smaller sections are juggled, the meaningful units being moved around and the language itself, which is the overall interpretive system, are not shown to be an accident. The same holds true for genes and smaller DNA segments being randomly mixed or transposed within the body. The mere fact that bodily systems move meaningful units of genetic information around in what appears at a given point in time to be a largely random fashion does not demonstrate those units and the tripartite genomic systems that interpret them to be of accidental origin.
All that is required for the library to function is that the books defining the libraries proscribed minimum content can fit on the shelf and be identified by subject, title and author. Moving things around may slow down the reader in locating a book, but it will not defeat the primary purpose. The reader is in no danger of using a psychological self-help guide to repair his or her pickup truck.
Moving “books” around in the genetic library, even if done randomly, is therefore not an example of an accidental process. It doesn’t disprove purpose or design because the larger purpose remains unthwarted, and new secondary purposes are enabled (adaptation, variation, evolution). The primary existing design processes in mutated individuals may become temporarily nonoptimized or less than fully controlled, but the species long-term survival is enhanced. The temporary and limited degradation that mutation may cause is only a problem if the “owners” prefer the genetic library not to change and insist on micromanaging change when it does occur. An intelligent designer of life need not have immediate perfection (or perfection at all), stasis, or micromanagement as goals. So the mere presence of limited random elements in life’s biology are not an argument against intelligent design as neo-Darwinists claim.
Natural selection occasionally vetoes
proposed evolutionary changes that do not work, yes. Like a literary critic, it
can give thumbs down to a “book.” But the mere fact that an unworkable proposal
can be vetoed does not explain how to generate a workable one. How to author books—not how to get rid of low
quality volumes—and how to discover flaws in the writing and improve the text
in complex ways unavailable to an accident: those are the central explanatory
requirements of evolution. When life was presumed to be very simple, accident
seemed to be a coherent answer to these questions, but it no longer is.
Natural selection says general things
like: “too weak for the predator community,” “too slow,” “too stupid,” “wrong
food preference,” “beak too small,” “insufficient insulation from the cold,”
etc. Natural selection doesn’t write books; it only critiques them, and in not
very sophisticated ways; it’s just “go” or “no go,” “pass” or “fail.” Like a
literary critic announcing that a book has not met the current interests of the
public, natural selection announces that a biological design doesn’t match the
creature’s environment. Natural selection preserves the good “books” on a
best-sellers list, but without an intelligent author and publisher there is
nothing to preserve. Neo-Darwinists have always insisted that accident was
their author and publisher, but the recently discovered complexity data proves
that an accidental process has little hope of writing a masterpiece of the
scope and size of what we now understand living biological systems to be.
Accidental processes are no better
editors than authors. Taking the kindergarten class to the nation’s rare book
museums, blindfolding them, and turning them loose with crayons will not
improve the masterpieces on the shelves. Similarly, in the highly sophisticated
and finely tuned designs of living systems, truly random, that is, accidental, genetic change can only cause cell,
organ, system and structural degradation, inefficiencies, injuries, or death,
at least in real evolutionary time and that is all our world has had to work
with. Scientists must work within the known historical limits to evaluate
theoretical alternatives. It is extremely unlikely that one advanced complexly
designed organism could evolve from another radically different one by
accident—not in the time intervals established by the fossil record. Something as simple as a bacterium? Maybe,
in the rarest circumstances. The more complex
creatures? Certainly not, not within the thresholds of
scientific credibility.
As in the case of the rare book library,
productive results from random alterations, although assumed by modern science
to be theoretically possible (over nearly infinite time), have been
demonstrated to occur so rarely in practice as to be dismissible—and we
certainly have not had nearly infinite time. As Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby
knew, children can teach us a lot. The net result of continuing unsupervised
visits by K-1 to the library would be rapid degradation of the library
irrespective of the one rare crayon that finds its mark to make the period at
Romeo’s kiss an exclamation point. Thirty years hence, half of Shakespeare’s
soliloquies, love scenes, and dramatic murders would be overwritten with X’s
and O’s, an occasional flower, happy face, or stick man. Not to worry, the
neo-Darwinists assure us, natural selection tosses those books out and nature
just keeps trying. True, but it has gotten nowhere,
and will soon run out of time—and there is no fossil evidence that the
requisite massive number of random attempts were ever made.
For the children’s visit to the library
to result in one improved masterpiece, while preserving the integrity of the
others, and indeed, for the library to survive as a library at all, the process
has to be made nonrandom. Master authors would have to accompany the
children to the library and guide their hands every step of the way. Otherwise,
the system would have to be set up to receive stick men and happy faces on
electronic media, quality check the results before going to press, preserve
backup copies and eliminate the changes that did not work and revert to backup
as needed. But, even if we allowed that an accident could stumble upon a
primitive level of quality control that could perform such prescreening edits,
stickmen and happy faces will never combine to form a Shakespearean sonnet;
they can only trivially modify one. This is what the observed and documented
evidence of presumed to be accidentally spawned gene mutations
has amounted to so far: trivia.
Despite the neo-Darwinists loudly reassuring everyone for decades that
accidental evolution is an unquestionable fact, “stickmen” and “happy faces”
are really all we have cause to attribute to it!
In biology, natural selection does help
to preserve the best libraries after they have once been achieved.
But if blindfolded children are the only authors in the entire system, how many
masterpieces will be proposed for preservation? In our modern era of genetics
and microbiology, to say that biological libraries were constructed by accident
is simply nonsense. As Appendix 1 (neo-Darwinian logical fallacies) reveals, it
is not only children who say the darnedest things, but neo-Darwinian
evolutionists! Appendix 2 proves, following Professor William Dembski’s
resource exhaustion argument, to the same scientific probability standard used
everywhere else in science, that accident could never accomplish the
evolution of the tree of life within the time and physical resources available
in the history of the universe.
Some of Darwin’s own comments suggest that he actually believed that mutations in the stronger, purely accidental, sense were responsible for evolution. However, he elsewhere commented that evolution was probably the inevitable result of some natural law. This would take away the truly accidental nature of the process. Darwin also said he thought that God, after instilling the first breath of life, had left the processes of nature pretty much to themselves and that most of the resultant events were clearly not preordained, especially the tragedies. I leave it to the reader to decide if that constitutes a contradiction in Darwin’s philosophical beliefs. He remarked that his religious views had varied over the years and so this apparent contradiction may have been the result of the progression of his thought over time.
Whatever Darwin’s considered view of things is held to be, it has long since been established that externally induced point mutations caused by toxic or radiological exposures are not constructive and make no significant input to evolutionary change. We have much to learn about the transpositional genome, but we do know it is a system, not an accident. Consider this excerpt from the abstract of an excellent recent article in the journal Genomics.
The genome in a higher organism consists
of a number of types of nucleotide sequence-specialized components, with each
having tens of thousands of members or elements. It is crucial for our
understanding of how a genome as
an entity is organized, functions, and evolves to determine how these
components are organized in the genome
and how they relate with each other; however, no such knowledge is available.
Here, we report a comprehensive analysis of the organization and interaction of
all 40 components constituting the
genome of the plant model species, Arabidopsis thaliana, at the
whole-genome and chromosome
levels. The 40 components include (i) 6
genome structural components consisting of GC%, genes, retrotransposons,
DNA transposons, simple repeats, and low complex repeats; (ii) 3 evolutionarily
critical features consisting of recombination rate, nucleotide substitutions,
and nucleotide insertions/deletions; and (iii) 31 categories of genes with
different functions and numbers of functions. We show that the distributions of
39 of the 40 components of the genome
(excepting GC%) deviate significantly from the random
distribution model and different types of the genome components are significantly correlated… The variation of genetic recombination
rate along a chromosomal arm is shaped, not only by the distribution of simple
repeats, retrotransposons, DNA transposons, and nucleotide substitutions, but
also by the functions of genes contained, especially those with multiple
functions, suggesting that variation of genetic recombination along a chromosomal
arm is the result of interactions among the components constituting local genome structure, function, and evolution.[222]
(My emphasis)
And this is only the system of a basic plant! The underlined portion reveals that the genomes are not accidental in the stronger more traditional sense of “random” used (perhaps) by Darwin and some later theorists like De Vries. Hence, the move of modern evolutionists to a weaker definition of “random,” for it is all they can now scientifically defend. The typical non-scientist reader or television viewer, however, may have no idea that the meaning of the term “random” has been changed in the evolutionary discussion from its original meaning, which supported the concept of a truly accidental world, to its current meaning. “Random” nowadays merely disavows a connection between mutations and a creature’s current environmental conditions; it doesn’t imply accidental construction.
Despite this, the propaganda campaign for atheism and materialism continues to roll along in evolutionary science long after the core data and terminology has changed. The truth is that there is nothing left of the old theory of accidental evolution but a word game. The origin of life’s genetic library has no coherent explanation to date, and even when the “books” are juggled we now can see that it is not a fully accidental process at work. Thus, intelligent design is in no way contradicted by the process of reproductive mixing of genes and transpositional genome organization—and intelligent design theory is the only coherent theory we have that offers an explanation of how we got the living genomes in the first place.
God's Wonderful Gizmos and
Gadgets
When my son, Jonathan, was eight he
(well, OK, we) played an educational computer game called "Gizmos
and Gadgets." The game starts with a picture of an engineering or
mechanical job that has to be done. Players are given a choice of tools and
equipment to use: pulleys, levers, gears, electric switches, etc. The software
was "smart" enough to know which items would work best for a given
problem because the programmers built their engineering expertise into the
program. It is important to note that no
true junk was presented for evaluation, only valid tools and mechanical
devices that would be useful in one type of situation or another. The tutorial
or demonstration module cycled randomly through the available items, bleeping
and 'X'ing out the ones that didn't work, and
visually celebrating with great pomp and circumstance the proper solution. It was
quite fun really, though my son thought it was a little childish. Gizmos and
Gadgets demonstrated the principle that randomly cycling through a
finite serious of potentially useful options can be a valid engineering
solution in itself, particularly where the designer doesn’t want to have to
monitor and directly intervene to manually adjust the system.
It is a process that evolution may well
have used. When recent discoveries of self-organizational tendencies in biology
are added to Michael Denton’s theory of predetermined forms for the biotic
proteins in natural law, we get something very similar, except that the
component devices are fragmented into two or more parts. Within certain
strongly biased-for-success probabilities the fragments self-assemble. In this
intelligently-created natural law + self-organization model of evolution we
have a partnership. Natural law provides a stable version of half (more or
less) the blueprint of life (for biotic proteins once formed, carry huge
amounts of biological information) and the genomes cycle through candidates for
the remaining portion incrementally over time in a partly random but closely
shepherded process. This model doesn’t tell us how we first got the genomes or
natural law, but it does go a long way towards explaining evolution.
In addition to producing mechanical
soundness with a relatively small margin of error, such a process is also an
apt solution to the problem of how to dynamically match a genome to a changing
environment. Simple: gizmos and gadgets. Cycle through until you find a device
that works. Such a system of exploring a multitude of machine component options
may not be fast enough to ensure the survival of an individual creature, and at
times not even a species, but it goes a long way towards ensuring the
continuance of life itself.
You might object, “But isn’t that
exactly what the neo-Darwinists say happened: nature randomly explores options
until something clicks then natural selection preserves it?” No, not exactly.
The two models are very similar on the surface, perhaps even identical, except
for one important thing. In the intelligent design version the “devices” that
constitute the most simple gizmos and gadgets of life (or their component
modules) are not simple at all; they are very complex. By contrast, in the
neo-Darwinian theory of (accidental) evolution the modules are ultra-simple,
perhaps at times being nothing more than a single nucleotide change.
Still, the basic gizmos and gadgets
model alone is not the full explanation of evolution because it doesn’t get us
past Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity objection. Multiple closely
matched parts must still show up in the same place at the same time in many
cases. This requires a lot of precise intelligent orchestration. How that
orchestration is effected remains to be shown. It could be simply a vast chain
of action-reactions that goes all the way back to the Big Bang, the result of
the informed state of matter and energy at the beginning, perhaps deftly
unlocked by another very precisely enacted event of symmetry breaking. Or it
could be more indirect, with the initially informed state doing a complex
ballet with natural law, ultimately producing significant systems of
self-organization. These systems may go directly to the construction of life,
or they may await the arrival of yet other orchestrated or largely random
events—and there could be many levels of system augmentation of this kind,
something vastly complex. When all the requisite events finally occur,
abiogenesis is the result. Similarly complex orchestrations may be required to
complete other key steps in evolution, or they may unfold more or less directly
from the information already created by prior steps.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence, then,
that DNA displays, not only all the requisite characteristics of a language
created by intelligent beings, but the characteristics of a computer language.
The workings of the genetic machinery with code transcription, error checking,
cutting and pasting, copying, transpositional algorithms etc. precisely
correspond to the basic operations of a computer, and the DNA code corresponds
to computer language. This provides exactly the kind of precision and control
required to polish the last stages of such a vast intricately orchestrated
construction project to the very fine tolerances of living systems.
Is There Really a Scientific
Argument Against Cosmic Purpose?
No. Although two prominent scientists, Ernst Mayr and Jacques Monod, have proposed such arguments, they are in truth philosophical arguments, not scientific ones. Both are invalid.
Ernst Mayr, writing in 1988, claims that science can confidently rule out cosmic purpose, saying that no evidence for cosmic purpose has ever been found in any natural law or other program of nature.[223] The tone and context implies that science has thoroughly addressed the subject, having had clear access to the depths of the physical processes and examined all relevant natural systems at the pertinent levels. He doesn’t cite any studies on the subject, however. Nor does he say who did the looking and what scientific tools and standards were used in the search. As far as I know, no formal studies of the subject were ever done, and science has never had a standard for cosmic purpose to use to answer the question.
We now know that the electromagnetic states of molecules can affect their biologically relevant properties. There is still no way to track such subtleties across the scope of real-time biological interactions. Super strings and extra dimensions are still very much an open question in physics—forget about tracking causal connections at that level. So on what basis did Mayr confidently rule out cosmic purpose when science was not yet in a position to track relevant chains of causation at all? There, in fact, remains inherent in a truly hulking mass of biological complexity data that has accumulated over the past 50 years a myriad of pathways for cosmic purpose that science not only has not previously explored, but is not even presently equipped to explore.
For example, protein folding, key to all the processes of life, involves complexity so vast that it parallels the search for life in outer space. The public has been recruited to sign up potentially millions of home computers to help scientists process protein folding data, much like SETI@home[224] does in using volunteers to scan data on their home computers to find potential signals from space. They are not doing this just for fun. They are doing it because they need the additional computing horsepower to have any hope of ultimately completing the task. It is demonstrably impossible for science to establish the absence of cosmic purpose given the present limits of both information and computational power.
Proteins are ultra-complex. They configure themselves in folded patterns so intricate that it takes an average computer an entire day to accomplish in simulation what the protein has done in one billionth of a second! We can’t predict all protein interactions, but this is only due to the absence of information, not because they are chaotic.
The chief
difficulty in simulating protein folding is time, explained Vijay S. Pande of Stanford University. Proteins fold on a time scale
of microseconds (millionths of a second), but it takes an average computer
about a day just to simulate the folding over a single nanosecond (one
billionth of a second). At that rate, it would take almost three years to
simulate a microsecond of folding and perhaps a decade or two of computer time
to analyze the folding of a single protein. This is hardly a practical way to
resolve the problem.[225]
There are plenty of potential pathways for cosmic purpose that science has left to explore, heretofore hidden from science by sheer complexity, subtlety, smallness, or technological limitations. And at such depths of complexity it is supremely hard to imagine an accident exploring the intricacies involved in protein folding one miniscule alternative variation at a time, finally precisely configuring multilevel systems made from tens of thousands of them.
Ernst Mayr’s 1980s vintage statement that science has previously and definitively ruled out cosmic purpose is therefore both false and vastly premature. To temporarily fail to rule something in does not equate to ruling it out. This is particularly true placed in the context of ever-advancing science and in cases where so much relevant data has yet to come in. However, what we can do with confidence based upon available complexity data is rule accident out.
Since Mayr wrote his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, much of relevance has occurred. Professor William Dembski has posed the probability and resource exhaustion arguments; Stuart Kauffman has revealed self-organizational aspects of the genome; and Michael Denton’s discovery of what are potentially predetermined (life-favoring) “Platonic” forms in natural law has been published. D. D. Axe’s recent work with random protein synthesis and amino acid substitutions is yet another paradigm shattering discovery. Even Roger Penrose’s oft-cited calculations for the immense specificity of our universe’s configuration in favor of life visibly, if not dramatically, opened the door to the cosmic purpose hypothesis.[226] None of this was publicly available to Mayr in 1988, though he might have acknowledged it after the fact by recanting his assertion of the lack of cosmic purpose in his many later books. To my knowledge he never recanted.
Prior to Dembski no formal and rigorous studies have ever been done regarding cosmic purpose, nor has any objective scientific standard been established by which to judge the presence or absence of cosmic purpose. The fact that no agreement has yet been reached on the subject of purpose in nature is confirmed by theoretical physicist Paul Davies in The Fifth Miracle. Professor William Dembski has only recently completed the initial forays into this area, and his early conclusions are solidly in favor of intelligent design and cosmic purpose.[227]
Thus, the Darwinists’ long-ballyhooed claims that science has been unable to find evidence of cosmic purpose in nature are not based upon observed data having failed to satisfy an empiric scientific criterion for cosmic purpose because there has never been a criterion to use.[228] Instead, the neo-Darwinists have made naïve personal philosophical judgments based upon logical fallacies (“can’t see the forest for the trees” and “a part must represent the whole,” to name only two of many). Appendix 1 gives the full extent of the logical shambles of their case.
Yes, the component processes of evolution do seem to wander around a bit, and, taken separately, they don’t reveal an unequivocal direction in the intermediate stages of life’s development. But this hardly justifies the neo-Darwinists’ hasty conclusion that the process of evolution as a whole is devoid of purpose. Not all directed processes reveal their end in the middle. Our own embryonic development doesn’t reveal the form of humanity in the early stages—you have to look much closer into the genetic and microbiological processes to see that humanity is the inevitable result.
Underlying the neo-Darwinist flawed case against purpose are four additional fallacies: the philosophical arguments of perfectionism and naïve finalism, the hidden premise of materialism, and an overly narrow humanistic view of the problem of evil and suffering. All four of these lines of reasoning are refuted definitively at Appendix 1, fallacies #23, 24, 25 & 26.
In the view of the neo-Darwinists, God would not make an imperfect world (as they define “perfect”). Nor would he, in their view, create via a less than fully efficient process, or allow any random components. In the view of Mayr and Monod et al., God-sponsored evolution must go straight to its goal, no twists, no turns or regressions, no chances taken even at intermediate points. Neither would God, for any reason conceivable to them allow suffering or evil. But consider for a moment: what is there that is scientific about any of this? These are all philosophical assumptions, not scientific evidence. These objections have not one thing to do with empiric science—and they are just terrible philosophy. Merely because evolutionary changes don’t always lead to greater complexity, aren’t always helpful to a given creature in its current environment, and don’t always proceed in a straight line without deviation, does not mean that all opportunities for cosmic purpose have been lost. This is particularly clear when taken in view of the fact that fantastically complex living machines and an intricately supportive ecosystem have been the result of the “wandering” processes of nature—not to mention so many physical parameters in our universe fine-tuned for life.
Nonetheless, Darwinists/neo-Darwinists,
who constitute the vast majority of evolutionists, have traditionally been in
nearly unanimous agreement on this question, invariably citing these same three
“flaws” in the evolutionary process as indisputable proof of the absence of
purpose or design. But the three lines of attack they use, the arguments from
perfectionism, naïve finalism, and the problem of evil are all bad arguments, non
sequiturs. Yet they comprise the sole justification for the philosophical
standards Darwinists have assumed on the question of cosmic purpose in
nature, then presented to the public as if they were established science.
A merely assumed philosophical standard, even a good one (these are not good),
does not equate to an empirically established fact of science.
Close study of the neo-Darwinists
argument against cosmic purpose reveals that it amounts to nothing more than
the claim that “God simply wouldn’t do it that way.” God would never make an
imperfect world. The Christian worldview is a clear counterexample to this
assumption. The Christian faith holds that this (“imperfect”) world is
intermediate to the perfect world that follows, and for good reasons. We are on
probation here after rebellion and should consider ourselves fortunate to have
been given a second chance in another world of any kind. After all the human race might have received the death sentence of
genuine annihilation or eternity in solitary confinement. Under equitable
circumstances in a court of law would we say that it would not be a good judge
who would do such a thing?
Thus, there are coherent scenarios where
God or an intelligent designer might indeed make an imperfect world and it
would still be an act of supreme goodness. In fact there are very many
rationally coherent alternatives to the narrow neo-Darwinist view. Any
situation where suffering, tragedy, and hardship promotes spiritual, moral or
emotional growth, and where full compensation and healing are available in a
world that follows for anyone treated unfairly, provides the conceptual
prerequisites needed to make the existence of a good god and an imperfect world
compatible.
One can say, well we can’t prove the
existence of the next world or the justice in it with science. That is true.
But we can’t prove it isn’t there with science either. Despite this, the
neo-Darwinists say science has ruled out cosmic purpose. One wants to ask, how
is it that they alone, the neo-Darwinists, typically atheist nonbelievers, have
made so close a study of God and come to an exclusive knowledge of the limits
of God’s potential goals and his ability to work through natural processes,
while billions of people who practice their faith and grow closer to God each
day, many with advanced degrees in theology, are fully off base in their
beliefs? Should we take an atheist’s word as an expert on God? Please…
All of science agrees that science can make no definitive
statements about God whatsoever. Yet, here they are, the neo-Darwinists, making
a definitive statement about what God would and would not do as their sole
basis for science having ruled out
cosmic purpose. Whence comes a scientific proof
that God would only work through perfectly efficient physical processes, never
allow extinctions, and never permit suffering or evil under any circumstances?
But of course this is not science at all, only philosophy, and poor philosophy
at that—only one of a myriad of groundless assertions, assumptions, and overt
contradictions expertly woven into high sounding dogma that all too often succeeds
in impersonating a genuine logical argument. In my personal opinion it is not
even philosophy; it is Marxist political propaganda disguised first as science,
then, if they get caught at that, philosophy.
Can
There Be a Scientific Case for or against Cosmic Purpose?
There are some, perhaps many, who would
say that science cannot, even in limited and closely proscribed ways, address
cosmic purpose at all. Pope John Paul II, for example, pointed out that some of
the foundational questions regarding the origin of life don’t lie within the
purview of science, but naturally and unavoidably fall into the realm of
philosophy and/or theology. William Dembski, Fazale Rana, Hugh Ross and others,
believe, however, that certain limited aspects of the question of cosmic
purpose may be (optionally?) treated as legitimately scientific.
I tend to agree with the latter group.
“Tend?” you may want to challenge, “why you have
presented 600 pages of the very thing in this book!” Yes, I certainly believe
that a successful argument can be made for God from science. But it remains an open question as to whether Western
cultures will want to say that that argument is science, as opposed to philosophy. When the logic and scientific
data in support of a case is as clear as I have shown it to be, I believe it is
fully optional as to whether we include such combinations of scientific data
and logical inference under the banner of science or not. But I allow that an
argument might be made that there are reasons to prefer not including it in
science.
Whatever we do on this question, we must
at least be consistent, keeping political bias out of science. For example, if
we move to allowing the untestable theory of multiverse as a fully scientific
theory, we should also allow the theory of God or an intelligent designer as
scientific as well. Both add explanatory power and both invoke objects and
entities whose existence science cannot confirm.
One can say, “Well we might do a bit
better than that, actually. From the case you have laid out here, the theory of
the existence of a physical God
should already be admissible in science.” As Bartles & Jaymes say in the
wine commercial, “Thanks for your support,” but there remains a technical
problem regarding higher dimensions. While we should probably go ahead and
admit a physical intelligent designer
of life, going further to affirm God leads us into an interdimensional
“Catch-22,” as it were. If God is the creator of everything, then one presumes
that he might very plausibly, if not necessarily, transcend by at least one
dimension that which he has created. This means that, even if God were
physical, because of his interdimensional transcendence, science would always
come up short of proving God’s existence with direct empiric data because science
is working in one or more dimensions too few; it can’t reach far enough to
fully make the case.
I don’t doubt that my argument in this
book succeeds in establishing God’s existence as the most rationally
supportable position, all things considered. However, calling the total
argument science, is, at best, a miniscule minority
view in the tradition of philosophy of science. Still, some things can be said
in support.
Consider that to say the world is finely
tuned for the existence of life and that living organisms are exquisitely
crafted machines so sophisticated that one is rationally justified in
concluding they were intelligently designed is not to make a statement about
God at all. It is to make a statement about
the world: “The living creatures of the world look so much like
intelligently designed machines that one is rationally entitled to infer that
they were intelligently designed (not necessarily by a supernatural
designer).” No metaphysical statement about God is involved in this claim. One
merely needs an empiric criterion concerning machines (and nothing concerning
God) in order to decide the question on a scientific basis. Thus, for starters,
one can, as Professor Dembski often reminds, assert cosmic purpose or the
intelligent design of life without asserting the supernatural at all. Thus, the claim for a physical designer of
life can easily be admitted into science, despite the presently heavy political
objections to doing so.
The harder question is, “Might one under
any conceivable circumstances legitimately include the assertion of the
existence of a supernatural source for observed data under the umbrella
of science?” In Origins of Life, astronomer Hugh Ross and chemist Fazale
Rana say yes, that certain limited claims about the supernatural may be
properly testable and therefore scientific. This is true only when certain
conditions are met: when genuine logical inference from the observable data
suggests a supernatural origin of the phenomena; when the explanatory model
proposed can account for new discoveries and make successful predictions; and
when the model invoking the supernatural is the more eloquent and explanatory
overall among present alternatives.
I give a very general argument to the
same effect in the second section of this book, God & Science.[229] This
proposition that science might at rare times legitimately construct an
explanatory hypothesis that points to the supernatural is a difficult pill to
swallow for modern science and philosophy of science. Still, it may turn out to
be quite true. At a minimum, this position warrants further evaluation. In the
most general sense, a scientific theory is defined as inference to the best
explanation from empiric data. The empiric data part is clear enough.
Supernatural components are not admissible there; but the “best explanation”
component does not so clearly exclude the supernatural.
Ross and Rana contend that anytime the
genuinely empiric predictions of one theoretical model matches the evidence and
its only competitor does not, that model is to be held as the scientifically
confirmed model even if some of its foundational concepts invoke the
supernatural. They are not suggesting, of course, that science allows for
ghosts in the machine as proximate causative agents. Ghosts do not permit
prediction and test. They are only suggesting that science have the integrity
to admit a logical inferential model that invokes the supernatural at the
ultimate origin of things where we have no coherent physical model with
equivalent explanatory and predictive power, or at intermediate points where
something analogous occurs by way of “demonstrably supernatural” injection of
new increments of design information. Here “demonstrably supernatural” means
nothing else adequately explains the empiric data.
Certainly, at the beginning of things we
will never have a fully empiric model available. We will never be able to empirically
test the ultimate beginning. There will always be an explanatory gap at the
beginning. This is true practically by definition. So what does science really lose by admitting an inference to the
supernatural only at that point? Nothing. The
harder question is “What does it gain?” Does the
supernatural model really add anything to explanation when we can always just
replace the word “supernatural” with “interdimensional.”
I argue in Part 2 that what it adds is a coherent explanation for the religious
behavior of fully two thirds of the human population. Is that a significant
improvement? My position is that one should certainly think so.
Conversely, if we maintain science’s
present phobia of the supernatural and assume the strictest most naturalistic
view on the question of cosmic purpose, that no aspect of the question of
cosmic purpose can ever be scientific, then there would be no grounds for Mayr,
Monod and the neo-Darwinists to claim that science has ruled out cosmic purpose
and intelligent design. Their argument against cosmic purpose is purported to
be from science.
Thus, the
neo-Darwinists themselves have historically been in violation of the more strict
view of science’s charter, within which it would not be permissible to address
the question of cosmic purpose at all. Mayr and Monod would then be stepping
out of bounds in claiming science has ruled out cosmic purpose.
It is important to note here that
historically the neo-Darwinists have had no qualms in extending their argument
to be against God, not just against a physical designer. What is good for the
goose…. If science can argue against God, it can argue for
God. The neo-Darwinists, in insisting that intelligent design theory is not
scientific merely because its historical roots (not its actual content) lie in
religion are invoking a contradiction in scientific method: to allow scientific
arguments to address the topic of the supernatural when they argue the
negative, but not when the argue the positive. This shows their motivations to
be political. They are not concerned with what is best for science, for science
cannot sanction contradictory methods and remain a respectable intellectual
discipline.
Assuming, then, that the question of
cosmic purpose is properly scientific
at least to the extent that one can answer the question yes or no, as Mayr and
the Darwinists have done in the negative and Dembski has done in the positive,
means that intelligent design theory cannot be dismissed as nonscientific by
nature. Further, if we are to be consistent, since the neo-Darwinists have been
allowed to argue against God from science, intelligent design theorists should
be allowed to argue for God from science.
This is a logical checkmate for the
neo-Darwinian position. Either the question of cosmic purpose is treatable by
science or it is not. The neo-Darwinists lose either way. Answered in the
negative, Mayr’s case and the entire traditional neo-Darwinian position against
cosmic purpose in evolution must be thrown out as inappropriate to the field of
science. Answered in the affirmative, intelligent design theory must be allowed
in the classroom.
Here we have seen that the continuation
of the neo-Darwinian myth of accidental evolution rests firmly upon nothing
more than the perpetuation of yet another trick of verbal confusion: the
flip-flop. In this case flip-flopping on the question of whether the presence
or absence of cosmic purpose in evolution is a scientific question. They can
use science to argue against cosmic purpose, but no one can use science to
argue for cosmic purpose. Now the question of cosmic purpose is scientific, now
it isn’t. Now you see it, now you don’t! Walla Booby! Abra
cadabra! Presto chango!
Accidental evolution proved! Please… We have to be able to do better than this.
They can’t have it both ways.
Yes, they give the impression that they
have real arguments in support of this prejudice, but their arguments are just
a string of fallacies impersonating a valid logic. The traditional Darwinist
philosophical assumption that grounds their view of purpose irrationally
requires that any cosmic purpose or goal must
remain tied to the small component processes of evolution, it cannot be
assigned to the larger process as a whole (where common sense would typically
place it). In other words, purpose must be visible at all stages of
construction, else it doesn’t exist. This axiom is false, for the purpose of
many machines is not visible in their smaller components and subsystems at all,
yet they do have a purpose and they are intelligently designed.
The Darwinist view also requires that
small component processes visibly forecast the final result of the larger
process to human intelligence. This is an artificial and unduly
restrictive criteria to use for the presence of cosmic
purpose in evolution, or intelligent purpose anywhere else. The patterns might
be too big for our cognitive span to perceive.
The component processes of our own
inventions, automobiles and space vehicles, for example, do not fully meet this
test. One cannot always tell by looking at the automobile frame or carburetor
that the purpose is a car. Nor can one deduce a space shuttle from examining
portions of the computerized circuitry or even the wings. At times for certain
machines the components will pretty much give the purpose away, yes, like the
wheels of a car, but this is not a necessary attribute of all machines. In some
cases, all the components might need to be in place before the purpose is
revealed, and even then, beings having a smaller scope of cognition than the
designer might not be able to perceive the purpose.
ID theorists and scientists like Michael
Denton who argue a more potent form of natural law have revealed that nature
has components that pretty much give away its purpose (life) in general terms.
In many cases, even if we are not entitled to infer from partial sets of
nature’s machine components the specific purpose of the larger machine, we are
still entitled to draw the more general conclusion that we have an
intelligently designed machine of some kind or other on our hands. Still,
neo-Darwinists irrationally refuse this justifiable inference to intelligent
design. They insist on the indefensible position that partial sets of
components of a process, system, or machine, even the minutia of it, must
inerrantly permit the prediction of its detailed purpose,
else it is not an intelligently designed machine at all. This is just a
fallacy, having no intellectual merit whatsoever. It certainly doesn’t deserve
to be the default position of evolutionary science!
The goal and purpose of evolution need
not be tied to the predictability of subprocesses at all. Purpose might
be made visible only in the whole system. Specifically, the purpose of
evolution might simply be the creation of the larger tree of life and a
functional ecosystem to support it—very
much as we see it—minus any rigid specifications concerning which of many
alternative paths must be taken to achieve it. Variation might be allowed at
many, or even all non-critical
points, many thousands of them, without precluding the achievement of the final
goal of a tree of life loosely specified. Substitution of suitable alternative
components and features might be permitted, even to the species level or
higher. Even randomness could be embedded in places in the evolutionary process
so long as random subprocesses are constrained to produce acceptable
alternatives within tolerable margins of “error.” A wandering path still
arrives at its destination.
In theory, although it is hard to
imagine a good god doing it this way, since God could foresee the results, he
could have created our world by simply throwing the dice many times until he
got the result he wanted. God could have set a random foundation to the
universes he made, created large numbers of multiverses until he got the result
of a life-spawning and life-supporting world, and then either erased the
“blackboard” of all the non-producing worlds, or simply left them out there
somewhere. Here we see that unless we start by assuming there is no God, there
is no way to conclusively argue against God and cosmic purpose from science at
all—modern science already allows for the multiverse theory.
Yet the neo-Darwinists have historically
claimed that science has exhaustively considered the question and found no room
for God or cosmic purpose. Shouldn’t evolutionary science have updated their
position based upon Mayr and company since the multiverse theory has come out?
Yes, they should have. But they have not. This again reveals that the integrity
and purity of science is not their goal at all; their goal is to advance the
political philosophy of atheistic-materialistic Marxism. It may be an
unconscious subliminal goal, absorbed from decades of propagandized science
slanted toward the materialistic worldview, but that is the only goal with
which their behavior is logically consistent. Either we must consider the
neo-Darwinists competent intellectuals, who, if only subconsciously, prefer to
be political activists over being objective scientists, or we must consider
them politically honest but intellectually deficient boobs incapable of
rigorous logical thought. There are no other alternatives consistent with their
behavior.
What is wrong with a God, a genius, or an
adult electing a route to a goal that seems indirect to a human, a slow
thinker, or a child? Indirect routes still arrive at their destinations and
may, at times, even be preferable. With an indirect route the designer gets to
“stop and smell the roses, for example. An artist may linger and wander on the
canvas for her own reasons of relishing the moment for its own sake. Beyond that, indirectness, in and of itself, is no strong argument
against purpose. In board games, for example, one may traverse the perimeter
to achieve the objective of the game, or, alternatively, cut across the center.
The unpredictability of players regarding which route they will select does not
establish the absence of purpose, only the presence of valid alternatives. The
alternatives may even be randomized at certain junctures on the path. There
could be random spinners that alternatively let the players off in a variety of
directions by pure chance. Even this would not preclude the purpose of a game
strategy being accomplished. This would be true so long as the chance element
was sufficiently constrained within the larger design such that its impact did
not overwhelm and negate the other directional features.
Surprisingly enough, it is the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense that give us the conceptual framework for a genuine and final resolution to the design question in nature of how cosmic purpose is manifested in an evolutionary process where detailed prespecified biological form variations are not required, and where variations are not required to match the present environmental needs of the organism.
The much-maligned defense contracting system is structured around a performance requirement that is published in what is called an RFP (Request for Proposal). When DoD needs a new fighter jet, they do not (usually) specify to defense contracting corporations that the companies build them an F-16, per se. Rather they list a set of general performance criteria or parameters that any plane built under that contract must satisfy. Under some contracts these may be fully general parameters specifying only such things as range, maximum altitude, armaments, maximum load, takeoff and landing distances, etc. At certain times in history they might not even care if it was a bi-plane, a tri-plane, or typical single-wing plane. The machine simply has to be able to do the job. Typically the best RFPs would not tie equipment design to very narrow environmental parameters—the broader the range of operating environments the better.
If the intelligent designer of life on Earth only required a tree of life generally, one that would produce and support human beings, then the occasional extinction is not a violation of the design specifications, and it is not necessary that every mutational evolution match a creature’s present environmental needs. Darwinists used to dismiss this argument by insisting that human life was not required to be the outcome of evolution at all. That was always a simple problem for God or the designer of life to solve, however. If life doesn’t come off the roulette wheel the first round, erase the “board” and spin it again. Recently, though it begins to look like it wasn’t all that much of a gamble. Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge tells us in his recent book, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, that it looks like human life was inevitable after all. Our conclusion for this section: God needn’t be a simple-minded micromanager, and Darwin needn’t be a god. There is plenty of room for cosmic purpose in nature, strong arguments for it, in fact, and the neo-Darwinist claims to the contrary have always been without merit.
Neo-Darwinism
Ignores Nature’s Funnel Toward Life
Similarly, in the case of the evolution of life, God’s RFP, transmitted to physics via natural law and the informed initial state of matter and energy need not have set down design specifications describing this exact world in specific detail at all. Rather, a world with more or less the same general performance characteristics as this one may have been indicated, with the details permitted to vary via a partially random process. Just how narrowly the constraints embedded into astronomical, physical and biochemical constants and laws have driven the origin and development of life remains to be demonstrated. However, a general directionality towards complex life has already been substantially revealed in nature.[230]
Because of the enormous improbabilities that we now know must be overcome at each of the various steps in evolution, additional important constraints pointing the process in the direction of life are certain to be discovered. This will very likely occur in, among other places, proteomics and the sciences of the genome. Michael Denton reports in the Journal of Theoretical Biology that one enormous factor has already been found in the determinants of basic protein folds. His article is entitled “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms.”
However, in the
case of one class of very important organic forms—the basic protein
folds—advances in protein chemistry since the early 1970s have revealed that
they represent a finite set of natural forms, determined by a number of
generative constructional rules, like those which govern the formation of atoms
or crystals, in which functional adaptations are clearly secondary
modifications of primary "givens of physics…." We argue that this is
a major discovery which has many important implications regarding the origin of
proteins, the origin of life and the fundamental nature of organic form. We
speculate that it is unlikely that the folds will prove to be the only case in
nature where a set of complex organic forms is determined by natural law, and
suggest that natural law may have played a far greater role in the origin and
evolution of life than is currently assumed.[231]
The characteristics of proteins determine the larger part of what happens inside the cell. So the discovery that protein folding is largely predetermined by natural law reveals that an enormous directional influence towards complex life is built into nature. Other examples of the kinds of directional factors I am speaking of include nucleohistones, pseudogenes, and curvature-based chemical affinities in DNA strands. We have known since the 1960’s that nucleohistones influence the organization of genes into the superstructure of the chromosome. More recently, research has revealed that pseudogenes are not junk after all but influence gene expression, genetic diversity, and recombination, thus potentially guiding the next step in evolution. Even the curvature of the DNA strand affects selection factors such as the bonding of the DNA strand to inorganic macromolecules.[232]
All these things affect the course of evolution. But let’s stop for a moment and contemplate the further implications of just one of them: Denton’s protein folding predetermination thesis. Proteins are folded three- dimensional structures so complex that hundreds of thousands of computers linked together cannot keep up with their complexity. This means that proteins potentially harbor unimaginable magnitudes of information. Proteins in fact are the primary instruments of both structural formation and biochemical process regulation, the single most important ingredient to all biological systems.
Science seems to be getting on well in tracking and explaining much of the information the basic genome conveys, though new complexity is discovered practically every day even there. Proteins, however, are quite a different matter. We have barely scratched the surface on the information capacity of proteins. We know they regulate the biological processes; but we can’t say exactly how they do it in most cases. What we do know is that the information bearing capacity of proteins apparently dwarfs that of the basic DNA sequence. This means there are potentially very important new revelations about life hidden within the protein structure. It makes sense that missing information key to the explanation of life will be found there.
Many readers will feel a certain thrill in their own intuitive realization that this is true, as they should: “Aha, so that’s where the mystery of life will be resolved.” It really is a profound realization. And it is an ironic one, since the popular view of proteins started out as little more than the goo of Darwin’s protoplasm. Now they are outperforming all of our best computers linked together! Here you see just how out of date the Darwinian theory of evolution really is.
But my point is this. Step back and link up this realization with the fact that Michael Denton is saying that the source of this vast information that will probably be the key to the origin of life is actually predetermined by natural law. This suggests, if not that much of the course of life’s development had to happen that way, that at least the process was under control to the extent that the RFP for life would be filled by at least one of several acceptable alternative outcomes.
If biotic proteins are the treasure trove of biological information and they are obligatory under natural law, then there is absolutely no reason to assume an accidental worldview—and every reason to posit intelligent design. Neo-Darwinists will immediately object: “Wait just a minute. Just because natural law limits the forms proteins can take does not mean they self-organize automatically. Experimental research has not been able to generate a substantial demonstration of self-organization in proteins. Thus the formation of life cannot be shown to be locked-in and unavoidable.” While this much is true as of the moment, the neo-Darwinist own argument that life arose by accident essentially says that if you wait long enough anything can happen. So, with so much of natural law and the state of matter and energy in favor of life at the beginning, all God or an intelligent designer had to do was sit back and wait. One presumes he has the time. Finding so much predetermined form in natural law simultaneously rules out the accidental worldview while making it statistically much easier for this world to produce life over time.
The fact that science has not been able to induce self-organization of proteins in the natural environment indicates either that the factors that must be properly set for spontaneous protein formation reside below the level of basic chemical substances, perhaps in the electromagnetic properties of the atoms and molecules, where our experiments cannot go to manipulate the proper conditions; that there were unique conditions extant on the primeval Earth that no longer hold; or that there is no natural way for the complete inventory of biologically necessary proteins to form outside of a living organism at all. In the last case, one encounters the chicken and the egg problem for which there is no known resolution except miracle/intelligent design. In the first alternative, if the electromagnetic properties of atoms are the determining factors, the improbabilities for life’s accidental formation skyrocket exponentially beyond our present already forbidding estimate, which hasn’t yet taken that additional level of physical complexity into account. In the second case, where the conditions of the primeval Earth were unique, the complexity of life’s designs entails that the information content present in the initial state of matter and energy after symmetry breaking (or whatever event unlocked the homogeneity and produced variations) requisite to making new forms, was of a magnitude that it would in itself imply intelligent design (due to protein folding complexity). The problem there would, again, be the accidental thesis attaining to such astronomical improbabilities as to cross beyond the threshold of scientific credibility.
One of the testable hypotheses of intelligent design theory is that, once such form-driving factors resident in the initial state of the universe, the symmetry-unlocking event, and natural law are more fully understood and mapped out as a complete set, they will be seen to combine to give evolution a very specific direction toward complex life. The writing is already on the wall.[233] As evolutionist Conway Morris eloquently says, it turns out that human life is virtually inevitable in a lonely universe. The issue of convergence alone has forcefully raised the question of direction in evolution. The new Templeton volume edited by Morris, The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? provides a good treatment of this question.[234]
Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross reveal in Origins of Life that we already know there are plenty of constraints guiding the process long before life begins. Over 200 characteristics of our galaxy, solar system and the Earth are fine-tuned to make life possible. One of the first scientists to bring this facet of nature to our attention was famous physicist and champion of intellectual activism, Freeman Dyson, in a very enjoyable tour of mind-expanding ideas, Disturbing the Universe. Paul Davies gives a more detailed exposition of these fine-tuned aspects of physics in his 1982 vintage, The Accidental Universe.[235] More recently Davies goes further to explicitly propose the very hypothesis we are discussing, that the universe has developed in accordance with what amounts to a cosmic blueprint in The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe. Davies does not grant the further inference that a blueprint entails an architect, however, at least in the case of nature, which is where he parts company with intelligent design theory. By allowing for the existence of multiple universes, perhaps infinite in number, the solution to the puzzle of highly improbable life becomes a simple one: one of them has to get it right. Davies considers it possible that our universe just happens to be the one where things worked out. Had it not, we wouldn’t be here to consider the question.
In addition to the self-organizational tendencies of neural networks (brain cells in petri dish fly flight simulator),[236] protocells (Sidney Fox), self-organization of genomes (Stuart Kauffman), and now protein folding predetermination (revealed in Michael Denton’s new book, Nature’s Destiny),[237] there is apparently a ready and seamless interface for inorganic and living physical systems to interact. This interaction clearly seems to facilitate the directional funnel towards life. For example, some inorganic substances, such as mica, have specific affinities regarding biotic molecules like DNA. They will bond differently depending upon the coding sequence and resulting curvature profile of the DNA strand.
The
sequence-dependent curvature is generally recognized as an important and
biologically relevant property of DNA because it is involved in the formation
and stability of association complexes with proteins. When a
DNA tract, intrinsically curved for the periodical recurrence on the same
strand of A-tracts phased with the B-DNA periodicity, is deposited on a flat
surface, it exposes to that surface either a T- or an A-rich face. The
surface of a freshly cleaved mica crystal recognizes those two faces and
preferentially interacts with the former one. Statistical analysis of scanning
force microscopy (SFM) images provides evidence of this recognition between an
inorganic crystal surface and nanoscale structures of double-stranded DNA….
Currently, nanotechnology is trying to mimic biological mechanisms to assemble technological nanomachines. Much effort is nowadays paid to use DNA molecules for the building of self-assembling nanostructures….[238]
Here the authors are hinting at the potential usefulness of the self-assembling nanostructures and preferential binding characteristics of DNA molecules to the construction of biotic machines for human technological use. In other words, in this research we are already implicitly recognizing that nature contains components of a biological machine-building process of a kind that we as intelligent designers find ready made for building biotic machines in an intelligently guided way.
There are clearly directional forces and controls in nature geared toward the creation of complex life, but perhaps not so many or so rigid that we can immediately detect their activity at a glance, or such that the system is micromanaged in the classical finalistic sense. The specifications for the end result may be more generalized. An RFP creation is more like the world Darwin himself believed he had perceived with his keen scientific instincts and disciplined system of observation, a world that, in some sense, had been left to physically develop more or less on its own—though he was unable to detect any directional flowering of preexistent information due to the limitations of the science of his day. From his vantage point in history, having no idea from the rudimentary science of the 1850’s of the complex physical constants and sophisticated genomic and biochemical mechanisms involved, Darwin understandably termed evolution “accidental.”
We now know that there are many subtle and unseen constraints that guide the process and ensure the required performance specifications are met. Science has since revealed directional forces that Darwin could not see (though Ernst Meyer and company should have seen them): physical constants fine-tuned for life, protein forms dictated by natural law, self-organizational tendencies for key biological systems….
Noted paleontologist David Raup did a study that showed extinctions occur on roughly a 26 million year cycle, the most likely explanation for which is Earth’s periodic encounter with asteroids, comets, or meteors.[239] The genomes of life develop to the point that mammals appear and then not long afterward a catastrophic meteor strike comes along just in time to wipe out the dinosaurs and give mammals ascendancy, permitting their further development. A child could see the potential for an intelligent plan in all of this. But Ernst Mayr and the neo-Darwinists say that science can’t find room for cosmic purpose anywhere. This doesn’t mean that asteroid impacts or extinctions are known with certainty to be part of the matrix of conditions key to developing the tree of life; it means they might be, and many other factors might be involved as well. In other words, Mayr’s conclusion that there was no room for cosmic purpose in science was just vastly premature.
And, clearly, purpose can allow for
variation. The Air Force maintenance and supply system provides an example. It
uses a concept called “suitable substitute” in determining the acceptability of
the mechanical components of its systems and equipment. While maintaining
exacting precision where required, engineers and mechanics are not concerned
about irrelevant details of each minute part so long as the same purpose can be
achieved. Non-critical properties are permitted to vary within reasonable
tolerances so long as the function of the overall design is not adversely
affected.
In contrast, the overly simplistic neo-Darwinian
logic requires us to reject the presence of purpose in our defense department’s
requests for proposal merely because they have not specified each nut and bolt
to be used, because they permit variation, and because the final result of the
process is not predictable except in general terms. The neo-Darwinian concept
of purpose is simply naïve; it is artificially restrictive. Being more narrow than the range of genuine alternatives, the
neo-Darwinian requirement for a humanly predictable, unvarying, unidirectional
evolutionary path is inadequate as an objective scientific criterion for cosmic
purpose.
It should be clear by now why
neo-Darwinists elected to form an argument against cosmic purpose that was only
useful in arguing against God and made no serious attempt to explore genuine
alternatives for the expression of purpose and design in nature: the
Marxist-atheist agenda. Marxists and neo-Darwinists are intimately drawn
together through the shared tenet of materialism. Marxism forms a big part of
the total intellectual inheritance of neo-Darwinism as a philosophy. The
neo-Darwinist philosophy has become subtly interwoven into the conceptual
underpinnings of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and the conscious and
subconscious beliefs of those who espouse it.
God is an impediment to the progress of
socialistic materialism and so God must be discounted by all means. In Marxism
the end justifies the means. The only end established by theory for Marxists to
strive for is the conversion of society to Marxism. Thus, Marxists (conscious
or unconscious) who happen to be scientists do not feel obligated to maintain
scientific or philosophical standards of evidence or logic at all. If they can
convince the public by invalid means, they are perfectly willing to do it.
Once again, this doesn’t mean that
Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayr, or any of the other neo-Darwinian theorists are
consciously practicing Marxism. It means that Marxism was a strong influence in
the intellectual milieu of the latter half of the 19th Century and
first half of the 20th Century when neo-Darwinian theory was being
formed. It formed the culture of
neo-Darwinism and its “logic” without separating the culture from the logic as
independent entities. Neo-Darwinian theorists don’t appear to periodically
reevaluate their logic, or even the basic set of facts and theoretical axioms
they used in the early 1900s. It’s a package deal. Is this rational in the full
sense of objective analytical inquiry? No. Does it meet the standards of science?
No. Taken whole their procedure is not scientific inquiry because they are no
longer inquiring; they are merely asserting. It is, rather, the political
prosecution of a social revisionist ideology and the promotion of the
metaphysical worldview that goes with it (atheistic materialism).
No Real Evidence against
Cosmic Purpose
Despite the entire foundation of the
neo-Darwinian argument resting upon one indefensible and naïve assumption, that
the world is one big accident, their discussion proceeds as if the “accidental”
view of evolution has been fully established by previous, voluminous, and
indisputable evidence. The problem with neo-Darwinian writings is
that this evidence is always to be found elsewhere. Still, they insist it is evidence everyone
knows, evidence that can be so readily found in the commonly accessible
primary works of evolutionary science that, well, it would be an embarrassment
wouldn’t it, indeed an insult, if one were so uninformed as to ask where that
evidence might actually be. The God’s honest truth of the matter is they
have no evidence, only rhetoric. It’s a shell game. “Another author/researcher
has already proven this point beyond any question, so I don’t have to go into
it again here.” Right. When the neo-Darwinists pull
out that reference to proof being somewhere else, you know you are in trouble:
time to get the farm boots on.
Yes, mixing of genes generates some
variation, but those variations are not new in terms of genetic sequence, only
newly expressed. Ye-e-s, population dynamics and geographical isolation may at
times loosen inherent restraints and controls on the transpositional genome
allowing the production of more variation, but the genomes are themselves not
accidental; they are machines that exist within larger machines. There is
simply no evidence for accident at the foundation of things here; it is only
the fallacy of drawing a hasty conclusion about the whole from a few of the
parts.
Having begun my investigation into this
subject as gullible as the next guy or gal, I went looking for real
evidence for the accidental thesis. Yes, I believed them…silly me. Well…what I
found after four years of assiduously digging in the university bioscience
library, always assuming that the evidence for accidental evolution would be
just around the corner in the next resource, is that absolutely no such
evidence exists: none, zip, squat, nil. No evidence exists for accidental
evolution outside of the unwarranted assumption of a naïve and simplistic
philosophical concept of purpose dating back to the end of the 1800s. That’s… it.
Having arbitrarily defined purpose in so
limited a way, neo-Darwinists naturally have no difficulty pointing to
observations in natural processes that contradict their straw man version. In
doing this they have merely rigged the game, stacked the deck in their favor.
No credible scientific evidence has ever been presented that rules out the
options genuinely available to a real God or a real intelligent designer to
employ precisely the kinds of tools we (can now) see embedded in the physics,
microbiology, and genetics of nature.
What the alleged volumes of evidence for
accidental evolution amount to are examples of the unpredictability of certain
natural event processes, such as the mixing of genes during reproduction, the
apparently random affect of environmental changes on
the survivability of a given species, right or left turns in the evolutionary
process that move a branch of the tree of life away from increased complexity
back toward simplicity, etc. A little randomness here, a wandering segment of the evolutionary
path there. All this amounts to is the unsurprising claim that the
physical world is neither perfect, perfectly predictable, nor perfectly under
control. An imperfect world such as ours does not preclude design, only a
perfectionist as a designer, and “perfection” as defined by atheistic
materialists at that.
Imperfectly controlled systems do not
rule out purpose. Livestock farms, fish farms, cattle and horse ranches: none
of these are perfectly under control, but they are the creation of intelligent
design and serve their purpose nonetheless. Automakers do not have their
factories perfectly under control. The frequency of defect
recalls show the process to be less than perfect. But we all (minus the
recipients of the “lemons”) acknowledge that the auto manufacturing industry is
purposive. The other industries are no different. None of them are perfect, but
they all have purpose. Neo-Darwinists know this; they simply require absolute
perfection in nature because they feel this world, not the next, must be
perfect if God has in fact made it. As naturalistic materialists with no
conception of sin, it never occurs to them that humanity might have been in
paradise already, fallen from God’s grace and been kicked out, and are lucky to
have an imperfect world for backup to do probationary rehab in. Their position
is “If there is a God, then by gosh and by golly he must comply with our focus
on the physical aspects of this life
and nothing else! We don’t need no stinking probation.
I don’t want to go to my room!” God must be a materialist! Imagine that. This
goes beyond merely foolish, and into the fully ridiculous.
In providing no demonstrably workable biomechanical explanation for the improbable processes of accidental evolution, and by unjustifiably ruling out cosmic purpose, neo-Darwinists are, in effect, asking us to take their position on faith. This is not good science. As Mary Midgley teaches us in Evolution as a Religion, it is not science at all.[240] Eugene Goodheart echoes a similar concern in indicting neo-Darwinists for exceeding the bounds of their academic expertise in biology in attempting to debunk religion.
In
their attempt to formulate a biological theory of religion, the neo-Darwinists
(Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, among others) have moved beyond their area
of competence, revealing themselves to be inverted fundamentalists. Ignorant of
the long and rich history of religious thought, they commit an ideology, rather
than a science.[241]
Neo-Darwinists occasionally do give what, on the surface, appears to be an argument that science has ruled out cosmic purpose and intelligent design, but these are visibly flawed in ways so obvious as to be unworthy of either science or philosophy. For example, Sean B. Carroll makes the most elementary mistake in a recent book called The Making of the Fittest in confusing basic evolution with accidental evolution. Carroll surveys the historical evidence for basic evolution and lays out some clear and concrete examples of the evolution of biological systems (like the complex camera eye). However, he then steps well away from the logical import of the evidence to say that the evidence (which is for basic evolution) “eviscerates” the argument for design by an external intelligence. There are simply no logical grounds for this position, as basic evolution and intelligent design are fully compatible. Declaring victory while losing the battle; that is all the neo-Darwinists have: debating tactics and propaganda techniques.
Carroll gives no argument whatsoever that the process of evolution is accidental. He has therefore not made a proper transition from the evidence for basic evolution to the conclusion of accidental evolution. He leaves the reader to make the mistaken assumption either that the evidence he has presented for basic evolution establishes the process to be accidental or to assume that basic evolution is somehow at odds with intelligent design—which it is not.[242] This plays fully off of the longstanding and much nourished confusion as to which version of evolution mainstream science is actually propounding—another shell game.
Ernst Mayr
The following is evolutionist Ernst
Mayr’s argument that purportedly shows that science has disproved cosmic
purpose.
The proponents of teleological theories, for all their efforts, have been unable to find any mechanisms (except supernatural ones) that can account for their postulated finalism. The possibility that any such mechanism can exist has now been virtually ruled out by the findings of molecular biology. As the late Jacques Monod argued with particular force, the genetic material is constant: it can change only through mutation. Finalistic theories have also been refuted by the paleontological evidence, as George Gaylord Simpson has shown most clearly. When the evolutionary trend of any character—a trend toward larger body size or longer teeth, for example—is examined carefully, the trend is found not to be consistent but to change direction repeatedly and even to reverse itself occasionally. The frequency of extinction in every geological period is another powerful argument against any finalistic trend toward perfection.[243]
But no one in modern philosophy and
science who supports intelligent design theory argues the antiquated
fundamentalist doctrine of finalism. That went fully out of vogue as of 1970 at
the very latest, and much earlier in all but the most staunchly religious
sectors. Thus, the entire neo-Darwinist case against cosmic purpose embodies
the straw man fallacy. They have created (or in this case, recalled from the
grave, actually) an artificial opponent that is easy to refute. They do this
bait and switch because they have no answer to modern intelligent design theory.
Finalism, as interpreted by the
Darwinists, requires that the process of evolution proceed directly from
microbe to man without any twists, turns or reversals. In arguing against
finalism, and nothing else, Mayr refutes, not the real possibilities for cosmic
purpose, but only the naïve views of a certain nearly ancient school popular in
Darwin’s time through the early 1900s—100-150 years ago. We have already seen
that the RFP concept of design specification and the allowance for this being
an intentionally imperfect world allows for the achievement of purpose without
need of perfectionism, micromanagement, or rigid invariance.
Modern intelligent design theorists do
not postulate a simplistic and outdated view of the evolutionary process, such
as the one labeled by Mayr as “finalism” in his argument against cosmic
purpose. Nor do I, nor do the 900 million members of the Catholic Church, just
to name a few. Yet the neo-Darwinists can imagine no possibilities for purpose
in nature. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn in discussing a difference of opinion
with Father Coyne, a Catholic priest, comments in Chance or Purpose,
“When an astronomer, who is also a priest and theologian, even has the
presumption to say that God himself could not know for certain that man would
be the product of evolution, then nonsense has taken over completely.”[244]
But what about
extinction, specifically? Surely that’s a problem for intelligent
design. Neo-Darwinists assert that it is obvious that no designer would allow
his creatures to become extinct. One might as well ask why then don’t
scientists still use the original version of the first microscope? Why don’t
they still drive a model-T Ford? Why do the machines humans make wear out? Why
do all material substances decay over time? Why don’t we keep the intermediate
steps in construction as opposed to the final result? We know the clock on our
universe is ticking. It is winding down and losing organization and useable
energy forms to entropy, decaying, as it were. It is expected to expire in
another 20 billion years or so. Obviously, if this world was designed, neither
it nor anything in it was intended to be permanent. So why make a big deal
about the impermanence of species when it only reflects the larger impermanence
of the entirety of our world?
Clearly, if the designer creates a
living dynamic world such as ours, subject to all manner of catastrophes from
meteor impacts to continental drift/tectonic shifts, floods, droughts etc., he
would guarantee the extinction of many of his species if he did not also allow
life to evolve and adapt in some manner. Adaption itself, while saving one
species, can cause the extinction of others by producing new competition that
outperforms them in the struggle for scarce resources, interspecies combat,
etc. Therefore, assuming that the creator of life knows at least as much about
the processes of life, geophysical evolution, and cosmology as we do, we may
safely assume that he also knows that extinction is an unavoidable circumstance
of Earth’s dynamic environment. Why couldn’t this be the designer’s intention
as opposed to his failure? The neo-Darwinists have no answer, other than God is
perfect by definition therefore he will under no circumstances create anything
imperfect. (again, see Appendix 1, fallacies #23-26)
This view, of course, rules out God being fully just and humans having free
will at the same time because it precludes God issuing humans a punishment by
exiling them temporarily to less than perfect circumstances. The neo-Darwinists
are implicitly saying, “We don’t need no stinking
punishment. We don’t have to go to our room.”
The obstinate refusal of neo-Darwinists
to allow the broadening of the intelligent design case to arguments more
sophisticated than those of the original theistic critics of evolution in the
early 1900s is an attempt to revert to those glory days when Darwinian
rebuttals actually had some semblance of logical force. Darwinists were then on
the cutting edge of primitive evolutionary science. However, even the edge was
a bit blunt back then, as there was as yet no microbiology and genetic science.
Those glory days are gone. The nonsensical thesis that an accident can make a
living machine was then plausible only because living machines were held to be
relatively simple. Neo-Darwinists are now, some 100 years later, refusing to
let go of that time-delimited “success.”
While denying the natural course of
intellectual progress to intelligent design theorists, Darwinists allow
themselves to modify their own theory at will. They are permitted to solve any
problems whatsoever as they arise. Now evolution is gradual, now it is abrupt.
Now natural selection must approve most if not all changes, now natural
selection approves very little, with most changes drifting randomly into place.
Now evolution is fully chaotic and accidental, now it is highly controlled and
directed by natural law. Now life is merely an optional fluke, now it is
inevitable. Now mutations are truly accidental, now they are only technically
random in not being tied to the current environmental niche. Now the
environment can cause heritable change, now it cannot, now it can again, and so
on. The neo-Darwinists have pressed a double standard onto science. Darwinian theory cannot be held to its past mistakes, but intelligent
design theory must be held to its past mistakes. Not only has mainstream
science endorsed this politicization of science, so have the federal courts.
Given that most if not all evolutionists
no longer consider the event process of evolution truly accidental, there is no
reason to assume the designer could not successfully predict the outcome of the
evolutionary process despite what to us is a meandering course. The shell game
as employed by Mayr in referring to Simpson’s refutation of finalism is flawed
in that G. G. Simpson did not argue against cosmic purpose as a whole as does
Ernst Mayr, contrary to what may seem to be implied by Mayr’s comments lauding
Simpson’s refutation of finalism. In the Terry lectures, Simpson explicitly
said that cosmic purpose could not be ruled out, that science did not conflict
with true religion, and that science could not properly address the subject of
cosmic purpose at all. He went further to say, that we can absolutely discern
purpose in the cosmos, though, in his view, there is no scientific evidence for
a “purposer” or designer. Some may view this as a contradiction in Simpson’s
thought—and it may be. Simpson also said that evolution had no purpose (while allowing that the cosmos might have
one). Simpson himself says that the idea
that our vast and ordered cosmos might have come into being by complete
accident is an unthinkable travesty of logic.[245]One might view
this position, that the cosmos might have purpose but evolution does not, as
invoking a contradiction as well, depending on how one chose to further exposit
Simpson’s complete system of thought. As I have my hands full already here in
this book as you can see, and not being a great expert on Simpson, I leave the
reader to sort out any apparent contradictions in the great evolutionist’s
thought.
I, and likely many others, have never
found the idea of purpose without a purposer coherent. I don’t “buy” this part
of Simpson’s presentation, but at least he allowed for the compatibility of God
and science and affirmed the presence of purpose in nature. There are several
other kinds of technical forms of purpose used in biology, the physical
sciences, and the philosophy of science, but when one talks about the
astronomical odds against a highly sophisticated machine involving
computer-like codes and intricate translation schemes occurring by chance he or
she is talking about purpose purpose, real intelligence. More is
involved than merely specifying the end result of a functionally directed dumb
natural process (technically defined naturalistic purpose). Certainly the
neo-Darwinists have not offered us the last word on purpose in evolution or the
cosmos here. Mayr says the refutation of 19th Century finalism rules
out all purpose in nature, citing Simpson’s argument against finalism, but
Simpson wanted to allow for cosmic purpose. Clearly their position still has
some “rough edges.”
In sum, the naïve argument against finalism
that Mayr touts as having fully ruled out cosmic purpose fails because it does
not rule out any of the following valid options: highly complex purpose;
intentionally variable or flexible purpose; delayed achievement of purpose
(this includes the intentionally imperfect intermediate goal hypothesis
that corresponds precisely to Christian theology); indirect/circuitous routes
to the achievement of purpose; methods by the intelligent designer that reach
beyond those presently anticipated by human science; a process within which the
intermediate steps would (understandably) not forecast the final result until
the process was finished; and RFP (God just wanted a world something “along
these lines,” within a “reasonable amount of time”), thus allowing some
wandering and variation in evolution.
Jacques Monod
Monod’s argument against cosmic purpose
in evolution involves the three basic fallacies we have already briefly
discussed: naïve finalism, the problem of evil and suffering, and
perfectionism. I have refuted these at length in fallacy #23-26 of Appendix 1,
“Whew, Bad Logic!” below, as well as #39.
It is fully possible that a virtual
or even a literal meta-genome exists in combination with other physical
constraints in the laws of nature and the informed state of matter at the Big
Bang that directs and controls the process of evolution at a level of
sophistication science has yet to fully decipher. In other words, there are
already rational grounds for the suspicion that the twists and turns in evolution
will turn out to be explainable as reflecting the characteristics of a closely
guided mechanistic process. They most probably do not radically wander at all,
in the sense that they are never outside a control system that limits the final
results to falling within a set of alternatives preordained in general terms.
Monod’s argument, being so technically
embedded into the details of genetic processes is somewhat harder to address
directly. But several things can at least be said that shows Monod’s argument
from genetics to be much less than the definitive showstopper he felt it to be.
While there are some random elements within genetic processes that are perhaps
even so random that no specific result could be guaranteed to come from them,
we have to remember that life has already been created before Monod can have
the luxury to examine the genomic processes at all. The origin of life is not
explained by Monod or anyone else. It can be shown mathematically that there
were insufficient time and physical resources for an accident to have produced
life.
We also know that the genomes are
extremely more complex than the science of Monod’s time (circa 1950-1975) held
them to be. This can be deduced from the fact Monod is considered to be one of
the “fathers of microbiology.” While his contributions to microbiology were
great—Monod literally put some of the basic pieces of our understanding of
genetic processes in place—they were at the beginning, and much has occurred
since. Science is now looking at much deeper levels of influences on the
genomic processes. Ultimately those influences may be traced to the
electromagnetic properties of atoms and molecules. When all the data is in,
much of what seemed random to Monod may turn out to be largely nonrandom.
Ultimately, the most we and Monod are entitled to conclude from the random
elements of the genome is that from the limited span of human cognition and the
necessarily limited state of scientific knowledge of Monod’s day, it was a
pretty safe bet that God or an intelligent designer of life is not a
micromanager. But, here again, this kind of argument only refutes the 1900
vintage biblical view of religious fundamentalists. It does not refute the
Catholic view of God creating via evolution, or the many philosophical variants
of the same theme. Catholic doctrine has long publicly eschewed all views that
require God to be a micromanager in the creation process. As G. G. Simpson
indicated in the preface to The Meaning
of Evolution (and the Terry Lectures at Yale), evolution is compatible with
true religion.
But Didn’t Freud Disprove
Religion?
Now comes, as the materialists suppose, the coup de grace: the argument against God from the “science” of psychology/psychiatry. In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud, an atheist, claimed religion was nothing more than a collective neurosis. What was the content of his argument? Only his expert opinion as a therapist, and the most elementary of logical mistakes.
Should we trust Freud’s insight into people as an indisputable expert? Hardly. This is the same man who wrote “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.”[246] And to want or need to believe something is not to disprove it. We all want to believe that Mom will have dinner ready at 5:30 after a hard day of school. Does that mean dinner is merely an imaginary creation of our need to eat? Early Native American populations exploring New York and Canada, trudging through dense forests in mid-July to August may have become so hot, tired, and thirsty that they fervently hoped to find a large refreshing waterfall just over the next hill. The mere fact that those exhausted explorers had a need to believe does not disprove the existence of Niagara Falls.
Similarly, the human need to find refreshment in a blissful afterlife following the sufferings of this world does not prove that afterlife unreal. Freud does not suggest that the child’s need for the parent makes the parent an imaginary creation. But if religion is true, God being “Our Father,” would be needed by us no less than our earthly parents. Thus, Freud has to first assume religion is false to be able to present the “The existence of a need disproves the reality of what is needed” argument. This is the logical fallacy of begging the question or circular reasoning, and, of course, there are so many counterexamples that disprove that form of argument that we can dismiss it out of hand. What we have left is the argument from “expert” “scientific” authority, and nothing else. But
Freud, essentially, just went too far: the part
therefore the whole fallacy. It does not follow from the fact that some people
are ill, that all people are ill, or that because some who want to believe
create a fiction, all who want to believe create a fiction. It is not even true
that all who believe want to believe.
We believe in terrorism, but we don’t want to. Truths are thrust upon us every
day in our experience of life that we would rather not believe. This can be
true even in regards to religion. Religion denies us unrestricted pursuit of
the greatest physical pleasures of life and the hoarding of personal wealth,
and requires us to sacrifice for others in certain situations even to the
extent of dying. It threatens eternal damnation in hell if we do not seek God’s
forgiveness for our sins and crimes. If we were merely inventing a fiction in
religion to satisfy what we wanted to believe, why didn’t we invent a religion
that saved us the humiliation of confessing we are not perfect and allowed us
to keep unlimited wealth, enjoy unrestricted pleasures, and put ourselves first
for survival in every situation? Freud’s logic fails for lack of integrating
the known and the obvious.
Freud moved from a sweeping psychological
generalization that the psychologically ill misuse religion to the false philosophical/scientific
conclusion that religion had no reality at its foundation, that there were no
authentic encounters with God. There is nothing to support this inference at
all. Freud’s logic was flawed more than his patient’s health and testimony, for
even an ill person can encounter God. It is, in fact, the time when humans most
often instinctively reach out to God and therefore find him: when they need
help and healing. Even the most compulsively neurotic religious persons can
find the real God, just as compulsively neurotic drinkers can find a real bar.
By analogy, the existence of such a strong addiction implies there is something real there to fuel it. That
something is not always God, however. Satan makes a full-time job of trying to
discredit believers by turning their faith into a neurotic farce in order to
embarrass the Church and lead others away from God.
Science itself is not immune to neurosis. Neurotics in
the materialist culture misuse science much as Freud revealed others as having
misused religion, obsessively insisting that science must be the gauge of truth
in all aspects of life. But is physical science the last word in our religion,
morals, love and the higher emotions, family commitments, patriotism, art and
music, etc. Of course not; to believe such a thing is a neurosis. Healthy human beings intuitively know these
experiences are grounded in the realm of the heart and the spirit, not physical
science.
There is great danger in allowing such neurotic
exaggerations of the role of science to take hold in society. Since only
“technical experts” can properly resolve disputes about scientific questions,
all of the important areas of our personal lives would then have to be
subjected to validation by the scientific “experts.” And who would those
“experts” turn out to be in the long run once the power-seeking psychopaths of
our world realized the enormous influence science could wield to sculpt and
guide public thinking? The psychological “experts” would end up being political
cronies of the powerbrokers. The great
theologian C. S. Lewis depicted this very scenario in his classic science
fiction trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet,
Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. He doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
Believe it or not, people can (except in the
movies) have sex in a sane manner; they can wage just wars without going
psychotic; they can indulge in an occasional game of bingo without being
compulsive gamblers; etc. (they just all too often elect not too). There is a
valid experience of healthy eating despite the existence of psychological
eating disorders. Likewise, there is such a thing as genuine religious
experience, despite some people having turned even that aspect of their lives
into a neurosis.
If generic neuroses found in a small percentage of the population during psychotherapy sessions can be universalized to the entire population, why don’t the Moslem countries share the West’s many mass neuroses, obsessions with sex, drugs, alcohol, money, social status, and personal appearance (thanks be to God they don’t)? Ironically, the answer is that it is because of their religion that the (majority of mainstream) Moslems are not neurotic. Their faith leads them to practice self-discipline, moderation, and balance, as well as the moral virtues—and they regularly pray for God’s help to lead a good life and stay mentally and physically healthy. True religion is anathema to neurosis.
And how can religion be considered a neurosis by evolutionary science’s standards when it is a clear advantage to a species’ survival fitness? Unselfishness, dedication to the well-being of your fellowman, strong group identity, honesty, compassion, fortitude, self-discipline, loyalty, and all the other virtues: these attributes of the religious are all survival advantages to human society.
But, if God-fearing people are not neurotic, then, unless their claim for God is true, they must either all be mistaken in the exact same way or all be lying. The statistical probability for either is dismissibly small. Three to four billion liars on the same subject? Three to four billion concurrent errors on the same topic? Please….
Where else has a mass error endured in the educated
populations of a scientific culture on such a scale? Where is the precedent for
such a thing? Perhaps the closest phenomenon we have seen is the white
supremacy illusion of the Nazis, but Aryan Supremacy hasn’t endured in the masses (it still exists in a
strong and dangerous neurotic remnant, however). As an aside, the Nazis phenomena almost seems like prophecy: after Freud introduced
his famous theory, which assigned religion the status of a mass neurosis, God
afflicted Germany with the mass neurosis of the Nazis to demonstrate the
difference. It reminds me of the aphorism that is often found scribbled onto
the walls of public bathrooms:
“God is
dead.”…Nietzsche
Which is usually followed in another
hand by,
“Nietzsche is
dead.”…God
One is tempted to add,
“God is unreal.”…Freud
“Freudian theory is
unreal.” Modern psychotherapy plus 4 billion theistic laymen.
Freudian theory is no longer in vogue as the leading
school among psychotherapists. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. That two
thirds of the population would persist in the exact same error even after
postdoctoral education is simply not the most plausible hypothesis. Recent
polls have indicated as many as 87% of Americans believe in God. As Peter
Augustine Lawler says in concluding his learned article in the journal Society
for the 2008 “Neo-Darwinism and Its Discontents” symposium, a realistic
approach to popular belief is to simply consider religious behavior as pointing
to a real and personal God.[247]
The great hopes the atheists had for Freudian theory, that
it would ultimately dispel the “myth” of religion and liberate man from what
was falsely held to be mindless “superstition,” have, therefore, fizzled much
like the neo-Darwinists’ overblown expectation of creating life from random
conditions in the laboratory. Both of these ideas were in fact ridiculous from
the outset: that two thirds of the population were
crazy, and that an accident can make a fantastically complex machine.
Psychotherapy is not yet, in my own estimation, a bonafide science, but rather a healing art that employs scientific resources. Most scientists would probably prefer to say that it is a science, just a very unusual one, and one that is still in its formative years. Whatever your preference on that issue, the fact remains that there is no internal consistency among the different schools of psychiatry/psychology presently in use, and the conceptual foundations of no one of them can be empirically confirmed as directly corresponding to reality. Psychological theories are admittedly heuristic, that is, they are merely models of behavior and internal experience that have turned out to be useful guides for applying techniques of healing. Psychological theories are actually hypotheses still in the process of (indirect) confirmation. I add “indirect” because, due to the elusive and unobservable nature of mental phenomena, there is no way to confirm them directly.
Confirmation of theoretical concepts is a real dilemma in psychology. With no direct means to test the theoretical models, success in treatment becomes the major indicator of validity. The problem with using success in treatment as confirmation is that a half-dozen or more major schools of psychiatry have achieved roughly equivalent success (or the lack of it) over the years. Their underlying concepts are radically different, yet one seems to work as well as the other overall (not necessarily in the same circumstances). There is presently no way of sorting out which of the conceptual schemes underlying the various prominent schools (if any) corresponds closely to reality, and there are many other less prominent schools and approaches still in contention.
What the situation really suggests is that we need to more closely analyze where each system works best and draw an integrated conceptual framework, if possible, from that tapestry. We can, as Harvard Professor Leston Havens suggest, retain a plurality of psychological schools, and thus benefit from what each does best. Practicing physicians and counselors can use the shopping cart method to employ the best of elements of each approach where it is most successfully applied. Doing this does not preclude psychological and psychiatric theorists, philosophers, and philosophers of science from looking to see if the integrated tapestry of all the schools featuring their most successful areas would suggest a new conceptual framework, one that might better explain why we are seeing what we are seeing in the mixed results from the different schools across the variety of situational applications. In other words, even if one insists on calling all of psychology and psychiatry in its presently confused state a fully validated scientific enterprise, the fact that there are so many equally validated theories currently in flux within the larger discipline means that the theoretical components of a given school of psychology cannot be used to argue for or against the reality of anything. The ontology of psychological models (if any) merely serves the purpose of grounding a consistent approach to explaining human behavior in order to heal or promote personal growth. Much as Kurt Vonnegut said about the lack of hard and fast rules for the craft of writing: “If it works it works.”
Psychology/psychiatry at present is strictly a heuristic enterprise in the sense that, although specific practitioners (especially young ones) may be convinced that their theory corresponds to reality, they cannot demonstrate that it corresponds to reality. This may seem a bit odd, or even reckless and unscientific to some readers, but psychiatrists/psychologists are permitted to apply a theory to patients so long as no harm is done, a professional consensus exists that a given approach has merit, and there is at least some preliminary statistical indications that a method has a reasonable probability of “success” (“success” roughly defined as the alleviation of overt symptoms or as self-reported improvements in experience or behavior).
Since there is no way to confirm the ontological presuppositions of any of the psychiatric schools of thought, Freudian psychology cannot be used to argue for or against the existence of God (or an intelligent designer of life). Freud’s theoretical presuppositions are useful to vet the relative merits of alternative recommendations on how to treat a patient, but they are not designed to answer questions of physical cosmology, philosophical metaphysics, or theology. Human behavior, especially multiple consistent witness testimony can be evidence, but psychiatric theories of human behavior, at least in their present state of development and confirmation as lightly confirmed heuristic models, cannot be evidence for metaphysical views.
Readers may rebel against such a strong challenge to the epistemological and ontological usefulness of psychology because psychology and psychiatry, particularly Freudian theory, has been so strongly accepted in the popular culture. To those readers it may come as a shock to learn 1) just how little evidence there is for Freudian theory; 2) that none of the psychological and psychiatric theories have yet been fully validated; 3) that Freudian theory is not nearly so widely accepted among psychologists as the public assumes and as the neo-Darwinists imply (it has largely fallen out of vogue, in fact); and 4) there are twenty to thirty (or more) different schools, methods, or approaches of psychology/psychiatry being practiced at any given point in time, all of which disagree with the others on some important aspects of ontology and psychological dynamics.[248]
The final leg of the neo-Darwinian argument against God from Freudian psychology is removed when we come to realize that the God-hypothesis turns out to be identical in its epistemological base to that of standard psychological and psychiatric theory. To see the force of this last point, let’s start at the beginning with the basics of the philosophy of science.
Science can proceed in one of three ways, or in some combination of the three as is usually the case: (1) empirically/experimentally (for matters which can be directly tested); (2) historically (where there is observable indirect corroboration in an historical record, but where the thesis cannot be directly tested); or (3) by abstract theoretical explanation posed in terms of a hypothetical model that seems to match the evidence. Physical science is predominantly empiric, with some purely theoretical explanation needed at the fundamental levels of matter that we cannot directly get at to test. The methods of history are, of course, predominantly historical, with corroboration provided at points from physical science in the course of evaluating the characteristics of artifacts. Psychology employs a version of the purely theoretical approach, which one might call corroborative modeling, while also availing itself of all the resources of modern medicine to elucidate any organic components of the patients situation. In other words, psychiatric practitioners merely act as if the theoretical model used to “explain” patient behavior were true because it seems to work. So, what’s wrong with that?
The problem here is that there are many quite different theoretical models of psychology/psychiatry, and they all seem to be producing comparable results. They can’t all be literally true at the same time because they each ascribe different causes for the same behavior. So, we have a situation where some of the theoretical models must be false yet they have all been reported as having a reasonably good success rate in healing or improving the psychiatric patient. This means that reported success in treatment cannot guarantee that the underlying concepts of the psychological school reflect reality. Affirming otherwise leads to multiple realities operating at the same time, a physical contradiction.
And the success rate of the various schools of psychology is nothing to write home about. In a groundbreaking study of the late 1950s the recovery rate of psychiatric patients undergoing psychoanalysis was shown to be no better than the rate of spontaneous recovery with no treatment at all. After psychologists raised a furor over the conclusion of the study, a multitude of other studies were quickly issued across a broad spectrum of different psychiatric schools of thought, and low and behold they all, despite their different approaches and different theoretical assumptions, oddly showed a consistent improvement roughly 50% greater than the spontaneous recovery rate. From the vantage point of a disinterested outsider, the whole thing was hugely suspect.
Two important observations need to be made about these so-called validations of psychotherapy. However pure the motivations of the behavioral scientists involved may have been, they did not isolate the contribution of the purely theoretical factors to the healing process. They didn’t have to do this because they are only interested in healing; we are the ones interested in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the evolution-intelligent design debate. They had no obligation to serve our interests, but, the point is that their studies did not in fact resolve our question. Many different theories, techniques, and approaches to therapy were shown to all be generating roughly the same level of improvement.[249]
The situation suggest to me that, in addition to the fact that some of the conflicting theoretical models had to be false, the varied approaches to therapy had something in common that was responsible for the healing of the patient. Obviously a conceptually false theory cannot reasonably be proposed to have healed anyone strictly from its conceptual virtues. Something other than the theoretical component must have been responsible for the healing. So what was it?
Common sense would suggest that the offer of friendship and support by the therapist was a factor, as was emotional comfort; someone to listen sympathetically allowing the patient to unburden themselves of their concerns and express pain and frustration; reassurance that they were not alone in their experiences, that such problems were a common element of the human condition; practical advice useful to troubleshoot concrete problems; confidence that the problem had now been placed into professional hands; and aid in focusing on a definite plan of action. All these factors, present in all therapeutic encounters (or at least they should be), are pretty clearly the genuine causes of healing in psychological treatment where it actually occurs. So, while we have to allow that one or more of the theoretical models will likely match reality in part based upon that model excelling the others in certain niche applications, since the models are performing more or less the same overall, the contribution from the conceptual side must be considered minimal.
Until science can complete studies that successfully filter out the genuine healing factors from the Freudian, Skinnerian-Behaviorist, Jungian, Reichian, phenomenologist, humanist, Rogerian, Frommian, Jasperian, objective-descriptive, existentialist, interpersonal, transpersonal, experimentalist… theoretical constructs and show the effects of those constructs in strictly controlled applications, we cannot say that scientific theory has added one darn thing to the success of therapy beyond what basic supportive and problem solving techniques accomplish on their own. So when the neo-Darwinists pull Freud out of their hat as an argument against God, they are making one of two errors: denying that psychology is merely a heuristic procedure (and invoking a contradiction due to the many theories that can’t all be true at the same time), or assuming that Freudian theory has been fully validated as the one correct theory of psychiatry and therefore corroborated as the theory that corresponds to reality; it hasn’t.
One can also ask other questions, such as “Why hasn’t something so obvious and fundamental as a comprehensive validation of psychiatric science ever been done?” I personally don’t know, but I have a hunch, a suspicion really. My hunch is that, once again, the propaganda campaign for materialism is to blame. Suppose for a moment that such validation studies were done. The materialists would run the risk of having the atheistic Freudian model out-performed by, say, the more positive and personally supportive Carl Rogers interpersonal approach or the existentialist style. In that case the atheistic theoretical assumptions of Freud would be refuted and Freud could not then be used to argue against God and for materialism. The materialists therefore do not stand to gain from a proper and thorough validation study in psychiatry. At the time most of the neo-Darwinian arguments were formed the Freudian school was the favored theory in science and the public still holds that view. In pursuing a full validation program, neo-Darwinists can only lose ground in the mind of the public. Here again it looks like the neo-Darwinian agenda is not to advance science, but to alter society. Freudian theory is one of the biggest guns in the materialist propaganda arsenal, one they could hardly afford to lose. It appears that materialists will pursue their political agenda even at the cost of avoiding the proper validation of an entire scientific discipline.
What
about the Comparison of Heuristic Psychology to ID?
Where is the id, the ego and the superego? Ever seen one? We cannot observe these things. They are simply components of an abstract model that is felt to mirror the way people act. Many, if not all, psychologists/psychiatrists acknowledge that these Freudian constructs are not assumed to literally correspond to reality, but that (some) people (sometimes) behave as if they do (at least while they are in the doctor’s office, and certainly after they receive the bill). So, in part at least, on the heuristic model concept, Freudian theory gets some epistemological support. Not enough to be presumed literally true over and above the other theories, but some.
Does intelligent design theory have support as a heuristic model? Yes, quite a lot. Surely the four billion or so God-fearing people of the faiths of the world who go to church, read the holy books, pray assiduously, teach their children the faith, volunteer countless hours of community service, and donate their hard earned money to the poor are acting as if there were a God. The religious view is therefore as good an explanatory model of important and substantial components of human behavior as is Freudian psychology or any other school of psychology.
There is a double standard inherent in the neo-Darwinian argument. The heuristic model of Freudian psychology is considered valid evidence against religion while the God-theory model is every bit as well-substantiated by precisely the same heuristic logic. The God-theory model predicts and explains the behavior of roughly 4 billion living religious people and billions of others now deceased (especially the martyrs who were willing to die for their faith) at least as well and perhaps better than the Freudian model explains that of its patients. By neo-Darwinian logic, the heuristic God-theory religious model can be used to argue against the Freudian model (at least the part that says that religion is merely a psychological pacifier) as easily as the Freudian model can be used to argue against God.
The dramatic success of a heuristic model in explaining and predicting serves as evidence for the existence of the theoretical entities that comprise the model, in this case God (assuming no contradictory theories are having equal success). It is logically inconsistent, and therefore scientifically improper, to dismiss religion as not genuine purely on the basis of a psychological theory whose explanatory model itself corresponds less precisely to the world than the religious model it claims to refute. The religious model has a greater and more consistent correspondence ratio of observed behavior to modeled behavior, and a correspondingly greater predictive success. We can say with high probability that most religious people will pray to God tomorrow, go to Church next Sunday (or perhaps ‘X’ number of times per year), donate to charity within six months etc. Is neo-Darwinian theory that good at predicting its patient’s specific behaviors when averaged over millions of people? My understanding is that there are individuals that are highly predictable in Freudian therapy, but that the average predictability of all Freudian patients is not that good.
Neo-Darwinists might reply that Freudian psychology doesn’t prove the religious model wrong, it merely shows it unnecessary to explanation. But the Freudian model does not explain the devout behavior of two thirds of the world’s population that believe in God and don’t have adulterous affairs with their mother or hate their father. One can hypothesize that believers come to an irrational belief in God merely to ameliorate a fear of death, but are all believers to be classified as neurotic? What would the clinical definition of the religious neurosis be, considering that it is spread across 4 billion people spanning all ages, genders, life circumstances, occupations, mental states, physical and behavioral profiles? By the process of elimination the definition would reduce to you are a religious neurotic if you believe in God. But a neurosis by definition must generate some negative impact on the individual or society and include a definable set of irrational behaviors. What would those be for the person of faith? Charity? Community service? Practicing the virtues? Having a loving and forgiving disposition? Prayer and attendance at church? Remaining loyal to your wife? Please…. And which model really ameliorates a fear of death neurosis more, anticipating sleeping peacefully in the earth no matter what one does in this life or risking being forever tormented in Hell for having failed a very strict standard of morality that most humans never successfully attain to? Are neurotics likely to be the ones with the self-discipline to succeed at a strict moral code of life, or the ones more likely to fail?
One can object that, well, scientists who exclude the religious model know all these things, they are simply excluding the model because it is religion, and religion and science don’t mix. Sounds good, so it must be true, right? No. Asserting a religious model for explanatory purposes is not the same thing as practicing a religion any more than Freudian theory is a religion when it purports to explain religious behavior. The only difference is that the religious model asserts that rational psychologically healthy people practice religion due to an authentic encounter with God or because they have an honest and well-corroborated faith in the historical Christ, Muhammad, etc., while Freudian theory says they all have a need to believe for purely pathological reasons and their faith has no foundation in reality.
Politically biased Marxists (or the Marxist-influenced) in the neo-Darwinian community would have us believe that putting forward the religious model as the most explanatory of the evidence (or merely ID theory) equates to practicing religion. But, if merely describing religious behavior and proposing an hypothesis or heuristic model to account for it equates to practicing religion then Freud was practicing religion too, as were many of our other noted atheistic psychologists and sociologists. But, this is a ridiculous view of course, and the neo-Darwinian argument is refuted by reductio ad absurdum. To construct a heuristic model of religious behavior is not to practice religion any more than to construct a model of abnormal psychology is to behave abnormally (in most cases ☺).
Consider, is it more likely that a religious person not otherwise showing any signs of neurosis is deceiving themselves into giving away their time and money, and sometimes their lives (religious persecution occurs in some twenty or thirty nations around the globe even today), for their love of God, or that a disturbed patient documented to have abnormal thinking would be susceptible to the suggestion of the authoritative Freudian therapist who may be perceived as a virtual lifeline to emotional safety. The suffering patient is desperate to be healed, the Freudian therapist assures them that they can be healed, and so they are healed…by a psychological placebo effect, the power of suggestion. Some of them may even have been literally hypnotized as part of therapy, and they have all certainly received the suggestion that the therapist will heal them. Who is really at greater risk of self-deception? The Freudian patient is looking for a lifeline, the therapist throws it to them in the form of Freudian theory, and then asserts that the patient is incontrovertibly acting as if Freudian theory is true. The person outside of therapy has everything to lose in engaging in religious deception; the person in Freudian therapy (in their own mind) has everything to gain.
Yet this is how the neo-Darwinists represent the Christian faith, as a scientifically established self-imposed deception neurosis, despite the fact that Freudian therapy has not even been validated as a science, and the risks of deception are clearly posed the other way round. For the materialist we Christians, and yes I am one, are all neurotics deceiving ourselves because we don’t have the courage to face the fact that we are alone in the universe, and, they, the materialists, are the brave heroes in shining armor who charge to our rescue. But all that their latest act of heroism, neo-Darwinian evolution, has accomplished is to alleviate us of the burden to think logically or preserve the integrity of science.
They insist that science should deny the fact that clear empiric evidence points to the existence of intelligent design of the universe and its life forms. Denial of reality is a neurosis, but, for the materialist it would seem, anything is OK, just so long as it doesn’t point to God. Here again we see indications that neo-Darwinists are not scientists first, but social activists first scientists second, and that they are deceiving themselves.
Is religion merely a neurosis? The neo-Darwinists will never admit it, but a scientifically defensible heuristic model of religious behavior that validates religion can be built just as easily as a model that debunks religion—and remain truer to the facts by allowing that the some 4 billion religious believers in our world to be (largely) sane (excluding those in the current news headlines).
The religious model in psychology/sociology, that is, a model that says that most religious behavior is not neurotic but rather represents a genuine interaction between God and his people, evaluates much more favorably on behavioral correspondence and predictive ability than does the Freudian model that says two thirds of the world’s population are all crazy. Most psychological schools allow for the epistemological and ontological validity of religion, and admit that their conceptual framework is merely heuristic in nature. There are even schools, such as Jung’s, that allow that religion is valid in their heuristic model because that assumption produces a model that works. To be fair, Jung did not think that God needed to be a real personal being for the model to hold. Yet, he allowed that religious people were on average as sane as anyone else and possibly more so because they were not denying religion as an authentic part of the human psyche. [250]
Social, Political,
Psychological and Cognitive Prejudice in Science
Many modern evolutionists (not necessarily the living ones) were heavily influenced by the dialectical materialism of Marxism. Though the historical dynamic of Marxism can now be seen to have failed, many of its tenets live on in various modern schools of thought. One of these is the school of materialistic scientism, the intellectual ills of which are too often expressed by modern evolutionists. One of the core beliefs of Marxism is that the result justifies any method used to achieve it. One cannot, for this reason, trust the science of a Marxist to be objective. Where political and philosophical impact favorable to their system of thought can be achieved by distorting the truth, Marxists have no qualms in sacrificing scientific objectivity for political ideology. In other words, they will say or do anything, even under the banner of science, to move the public towards materialism.
The difference between materialistic scientism and the Marxism that heavily influenced is that the overriding importance of the survival of the state and economic justice for the poor tenets that hold center stage in (applied) Marxism is replaced by the no-matter-what survival of the species tenet. All else may be sacrificed for that, and for the material well-being of a society so long as society itself is not conflicting with the goal of long-term survival of the species. Nazis-type racial supremacists for example can form particularly heinous and dangerous schools within the larger scientific materialism point of view. Democratic principles, spiritual health and growth, moral standards, human rights, constitutional government, etc., none of these things need apply. Don’t bother a materialist with the small stuff. “Give me liberty or give me death” is thrown out in favor of “Give me anything instead of death” (and “Give anyone else death who gets in my way”). This view opens the way to unthinkably cruel forms of behavioral conditioning, permanent enslavement or genocidal extermination of whole classes of people “for the good of mankind,” atrocious medical and scientific experiments on humans without their consent (including radical genetic modification of the human race itself), chimerical hybridization of humans with animals, etc. Human rights in the traditional sense as pertaining to individuals are a joke in such a system—except for the ruling classes who take great care to preserve their wellbeing one way or the other.
The odd circumstance that has recently occurred, that our federal courts would be unable to distinguish between science and materialist philosophy/propaganda, derives primarily from the fact that the courts are getting prejudiced testimony from mainstream science.[251] Darwinian theory didn’t literally originate in Marxism, but in godless evolution Marxism found a soul mate; the concept of accidental evolution was a great boon to the logic of the materialist propaganda machine.
Oh, come now, you may say, science is objective by definition; there can be no real prejudice in science, and certainly not in the courts. Au contraire, my friend, scientists can be prejudiced—after all they are human. The courts know this to be true, and it has been shown to be true within their own ranks. Judges are routinely dismissed (without prejudice) from cases to remove even an appearance of bias. Bias is a real concern in both science and law, as is lack of good reasoning skills within the domain of abstract logic. Law typically outperforms science in this regard, but is not itself perfect, viz. Roe v. Wade.
In The Limits of Scientific Reasoning, Dr. David Faust reports that generalization of the results of cognitive studies suggest that scientists have been performing their professional judgments in surprisingly poor fashion. As one famous pundit once remarked, “The neo-Darwinist is no philosopher.” According to Faust, cognitive limitations inherent to our entire species have been a relatively minor player in this; the primary cause of poor judgment and low abstract reasoning skills among our scientists has been, you guessed it, bias. So there is some question as to whether the courts should be listening to science at all beyond retrieving the raw data upon which to form a legal opinion.
Cogent evaluation of intelligent design theory’s probability and complexity arguments requires precisely the kind of abstract logical skills that scientists all too often are seen to be lacking. Neo-Darwinists in particular seem to come up short, eschewing the (valid) subtleties of abstract logic in favor of grossly oversimplified summaries of incompletely analyzed raw empiric data, which they allow to be set only within the context of their prevailing theory. The neo-Darwinian theory is the criteria they use to judge evidence! In such an approach there can be no possibility of refutation, but only confirmation. But this more general problem of a scientist’s inability to think in the abstract creates a barrier to accurate scientific theory evaluation even before strongly entrenched social-political prejudices and a bias for the current scientific paradigm are brought to bear.
Assuming for the
moment that judgment findings pertaining to cognitive limitations do
generalize, what image (description) of the scientist might emerge? As I argued
in chapter 1, complex considerations and information are relevant to most, if
not all, scientific judgments. Across all scientific activities and so-called
levels of inference, from the “seeing” of facts to the “seeing” of theories,
from the measurement of atomistic units to the measurement of hypothetical
constructs, from the selection of laboratory equipment to the selection of
research strategy, complexity is the rule. The judgment literature suggests
that individuals are least able to perform adequately exactly these
types of decisions—those that require the cognitive management of considerable
complexity.[252]
Faust’s book reveals that, yes, the typical scientist provides great value to society in his discipline and rigor in dealing with concrete data and experimental controls. But when it comes to abstract thinking, logical reasoning, conceptual theory construction, and objective evaluation (with the exception of purely mathematical determinations), the track record of our scientists’ is not nearly so impressive. One rule that one might extract from Faust is that scientists have a real tendency to oversimplify. Given the vast complexities revealed in modern genetic science and microbiology one shouldn’t wonder at this behavior for it would be practically an unavoidable defense mechanism against the overwhelming landslide of ne data.
Here is one specific error in abstract
reasoning that neo-Darwinists make in relation to ID theory that practically no
commentator on the evolution debate has discussed except William Dembski, and I
think it is a glaring one. Nothing in intelligent design theory implies the
designer to be either immaterial or not empirically verifiable—but only yet to
be empirically verified. ID theory allows that the designer of life might in
fact be physical. Therefore, not even a
prejudice against the nonphysical in science has any real bearing on the
intelligent design issue. Yet, neo-Darwinian evolutionists have
successfully petitioned the federal courts to exclude intelligent design theory
from classrooms on the basis that it is necessarily religion, based upon
nothing more than quite old and out of
date historical roots. Since logic and fact cannot be the grounds for such
a mistake, and since many of these ID critics elsewhere affirm materialism and
ridicule biblical creation, the opposition to intelligent design theory is
apparently grounded in a prejudice against God and religion—bias just as Faust
has described.
Neo-Darwinian scientists believe they
have given a cogent logical argument
against ID in the classrooms by merely identifying it with its historical
religious antecedents, ignoring the entire conceptual and factual content of
the current version of the theory itself, which has jettisoned all assertions
about God or the nonphysical! This is not
good thinking. The error is so simple as to be fully covered in the old maxim
“She ain’t what she used to be,” but the
neo-Darwinists cannot even grasp that much. They allow the theory of evolution
to change, but for them ID theory cannot change; it must remain what it was in
early1900s. Misidentification of social history with factual and logical
content, double standard…the list of logical errors committed by neo-Darwinian
evolutionists goes on and on (see Appendix 1). Faust is right: too many modern
scientists are unable to effectively think in the abstract.
Ironically, the assumption that the
designer is nonphysical does not originate in modern ID theory; it belongs to
the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)! ID scientists have
proposed no specific concept of the designer, such as a particular version of
God. ID theorists have gone to great lengths to loudly proclaim that they make
no such assertions about God. In ID theory, the designer could be a yet to be
discovered extraterrestrial being or group of them, or a physical entity
spanning the very cosmos itself. While this does not comport with my personal
Catholic faith (it is a form of pantheism), it is a possibility fully
compatible with modern ID theory.
Unfortunately, the risk of prejudice in science is more than a hypothetical possibility inferred from the test scores of experimental subjects. Over the past five decades the academic research system has effectively disallowed competing research strategies in evolutionary science. Alternatives to neo-Darwinian theory are rarely studied or written about—or even considered in the planning of scientific research. Modern research is planned, developed and carried out making the assumption of the truth of an intelligent design-free, materialistic form of Darwinian theory without ever looking for or investing in genuine opportunities to disprove that assumption. But to presume the answer before collecting the data in such a manner is, of course, not the scientific method at all. It has, however, too often been the method of modern evolutionary science.
Chapter 7 of Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution describes an easy to understand case of this kind of bias in an interesting historical account of the industrial melanism phenomenon in peppered moths. Such a biased process as is shown in the peppered moth study can only have one result: presenting the favored theory in greater and greater light. Modern researchers are doing a better job of considering relevant factors than was achieved in the moth studies. However, the fact remains that they are only looking at factors falling within the scope of neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory, a theory heavily influenced by the dialectical materialism of Marxism and its more recent variant (and potentially even more heinous), materialistic scientism. They do not look at scenarios offering a real chance of refuting neo-Darwinian theory.
An enormous bias exists in the research focus of contemporary evolutionary studies and in related areas because, in the materialist dominated scientific culture, the words “intelligent design” must always remain taboo. ID is anathema to the social political objectives of these people. This is not because a logical inference to intelligence from certain design features is not a proper scientific step to take; it is proper. It is because revealing such truths opens the door to the public’s belief in God as falling within the larger set of options included under the category of ID. Materialists, atheists, and Marxists cannot allow that, for it defeats their social revisionist agenda. They cannot show that science argues against God, but they need it to argue against God. So they cheat; it is that simple.
Intelligent design theory is vastly more explanatory than the current neo-Darwinian model.[253] Yet, neither ID theory nor any other competing theory with explanatory merit has been permitted to guide current research strategies. Contrary to Ernst Mayr’s assertion that science can find no purpose in nature, given the neo-Darwinian monopoly on funded research, the truth is that science hasn’t even been looking for purpose in a rigorous and professional way. The limitations that the entrenched political prejudice for neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory imposes on the practice of modern evolutionary science is confirmed by Dr. Mae-Won Ho in her book Beyond Neo-Darwinism. “The synthetic theory is based upon a definite assumption about how evolution occurs. The evolutionist is supposed to accept this as a given and simply show how the process may have operated in various different cases…”[254]
Although Dr. Ho uses the term “synthetic theory,” I take her to be following the customary practice of including neo-Darwinian theory under that umbrella as a linguistic convenience. The two theories, synthetic and neo-Darwinian, live hand in glove in the scientific community with little and infrequent care taken to distinguish them in the bulk of published research. G. G. Simpson indicates that synthetic theory basically subsumed neo-Darwinian theory and added certain embellishments, neo-Darwinian theory having itself subsumed mutationism and added natural selection.
For example, Mark Ridley says “Fisher, Haldane, and Wright demonstrated that Mendelian heredity and natural selection are compatible; the synthesis of the two ideas is called neo-Darwinian or the synthetic theory.”[255] Since both versions of the theory have this much in common, that is, Mendelian genetics and the population dynamics it spawns, as well as some form of natural selection, they are treated as functional equivalents for the purposes of many discussions. Authors sometimes deviate from this combined usage to make a specific point. Ernst Mayr uses the term “neo-Darwinian” quite differently, tying it to a specific author, and G. G. Simpson suggests the usage I have adopted here, differentiating the two theories by means of the accidental component that marks neo-Darwinian theory. Simpson also cites a purportedly more potent form of natural selection as the hallmark of synthetic theory (“cat in the hat” ☺).
In such an environment it is ridiculous to criticize ID theorists for a scarcity of experimental studies; such studies are neither approved nor funded based upon the prejudice for neo-Darwinian theory that permeates practically the entire academic and research communities. Treatment of the accidental thesis, which as I said, is the only thing that truly distinguishes synthetic theory from neo-Darwinism, has been mostly banished from experimental research to the higher realms of abstract speculative discussion where no testable implications are produced.
For researchers willing to look to
disprove neo-Darwinian theory or design a study giving serious credence to a
contrary hypothesis, and who can arrange funding, chances of being published in
a peer-reviewed professional journal are practically nil.
If published, the chances for an the standard
objective and positive exchange of views among scientific peers is similarly
small. No one wants to touch the taboo subject of ID except to ridicule it for
fear of professional ostracism and negative career impact.
When Professor William Dembski proposed
the first models to ground scientific studies of intelligent design theory did
the academic/research community encourage and assist him in polishing and
revising the models as normal scientific protocols would entail? No. Instead,
they ridiculed it, called it nonscientific by definition, and refused to admit
anything done under the banner of intelligent design as scientific, inanely
calling it disguised religion. Despite
working with one hand tied behind their back in this way, intelligent design
theorists have still managed to produce peer-reviewed scientific research. A
portion of that research is listed at the Discovery Institute website on the peer-reviewed bibliography page.[256]
And what, exactly, has six decades of research
focused exclusively on the classic neo-Darwinian paradigm produced as
explanation of the origin and development of life? Dr. Ho is in a better
position to say than I:
It is now approximately half a century since the
neo-Darwinian synthesis was formulated. A great deal of research has been
carried on within the paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are
limited to the interpretation of the minutiae of evolution, such as the
adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say
on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in
the first place.[257]
OK.
If You’re So Smart, What’s Your Version of the Origin
of Life
Come now, you may say, all of this heady social theory is fine, but there aren’t really any legitimate alternatives to neo-Darwinian evolution, are there? So the Darwinists would have us believe, who have for decades upon decades haughtily denied the existence of alternatives. But, yes, there are legitimate and explanatory alternatives. Any number of optional and plausible scenarios can be composed under the banner of intelligent design. There is also old-fashioned Darwinism, something closer to the view Darwin himself held as a published scientist. Contrary to the neo-Darwinists’ contrived reconstructions of Darwin’s private thoughts, Darwin held that God was the source of the origin of life. This controversy is discussed further on in the conclusion.
So what alternative concept of evolution do I personally favor? Everyone balks when put on the spot like that because no one really knows the process of life’s origin and development. I do have a couple of guesses, of course, everyone does; but I won’t call them anything more than that. Both my guesses fall within what I call the “IFT” framework, or Information First Theory, which is a form of intelligent design theory. They basically represent the classic ongoing dispute of RNA-first or protein-first.
Before looking more closely at these two guesses, let me first give an overview of what IFT is about in general terms. I am only fully committing to IFT, not to the two guesses. I propose them only to stimulate critical thinking and progress the issues.
As we all know by now, in the classic neo-Darwinian model of gradualism the major evolutionary advancements are constructed as time goes on by small accidental “mutations,” which are then locked in place by natural selection. We have already discussed the problem concerning how accident can generate a mutation big enough to impact the survival and reproductive fitness of irreducibly complex biological systems. The alteration must be substantial enough that natural selection can have something to vote on, and, with complex interdependent systems, single nucleotide mutations certainly are not enough, and sets of them sufficient to successfully advance living systems are beyond what an accident an achieve in real time. IFT resolves that difficulty by saying that natural selection doesn’t have to vote to complete the tree of life, at least not often. IFT does not preclude a frequent vote by natural selection, it merely says the vote is not crucial to the construction of biological designs. It will, naturally, be crucial to which designs survive after construction.
The most likely and most testable version of IFT says that most of the necessary information “modules” requisite to building the tree of life were achieved in advance of the Cambrian. This information could be present all in one place in a master genome similar to what has been posited by the late Professor Susumu Ohno in his Pananimalia thesis, or in a more subtle and complex interplay of many different aspects of nature. That dispersed information, if it is dispersed, then continued to converge upon the genomes from its residence at multiple points within natural forces at large incrementally over time.
The IFT concept of information does not confine the source of information to genetic modules, but allows that it might include information embedded in a variety of sources in nature and natural law (some perhaps unthinkably subtle), especially in folded protein structures, but also in yet to be elucidated laws of physics and chemistry, and the preformed/preinformed themes in matter and energy issuing from the Big Bang (or the symmetry breaking event that followed it that produced the huge life-favoring specificity of our world). Information relevant to the formation of biological systems might ultimately be traceable down to the electromagnetic properties of molecules or even to field equations of quantum physics.
With IFT, even undirected individual mutations are statistically constrained by (currently unrecognized) forces of nature such that they tend to promote and never impede biological construction tasks beyond predesignated thresholds critical to the successful construction of the tree of life. IFT hypothesizes that many genetic transpositions, possibly most, but not necessarily all, are constrained by natural law or other factors that focus them towards one or more of a set of alternative viable evolutionary variations in biological form. This produces a success rate for geophysical/environmental adaptation of the tree of life as a whole, though not for the adaptation of each species, well beyond what chance could achieve.
Thus, in IFT, the apparent workhorses of evolution, genetic transpositions, are considered to be, at least in part, substantially directed but only in a statistical sense, and then only towards a set of alternatives (not micromanaged in detail). This allows for the haphazard appearance the raw genetic sequences of the genomes have presented to the superficial inspection of some researchers in prior decades. The patterns that may have derived from IFT-type natural processes are not the kinds of patterns researchers are looking for. Because they embody too many options, are driven by probabilities only, and allow for all kinds of esoteric epigenetic influences, they don’t flag the attention of researchers thinking in terms of the conventional neo-Darwinian phylogenetic wisdom. However, the surprises the genome has provided over the past few decades along with the enormity of the complex tasks the genome accomplishes argue convincingly that it would be hasty indeed to draw conclusions based solely upon early impressions and conventional wisdom.
IFT leaves open the possibility that interactions of the genome with the creature’s environment occur that trigger, stimulate, guide, or constrain genetic transpositions that are otherwise to all appearance completely random. In some manner yet to be understood, this complexly orchestrated interaction of an organism with its environment further constrains the outcome of genetic transpositions (perhaps very loosely) so that the result falls within the statistical window that physically facilitates or probabilistically “encourages,” while not immediately requiring, the production of biological form alternatives acceptable to the designer (promotes the eventual fulfillment of the RFP).
Models have been proposed of such dynamic information increasing interaction with the environment such as Eugenio Andrade’s (National University of Columbia), presented at the SEED Journal Web site.[258] Andrade’s model is not an IFT or ID model as I understand it, but one that argues for greater emphasis in research on environmental influences and epigenetic factors in evolution. For decades neither of these questions has received the attention or resource allocation it merits. I mention it to corroborate the legitimacy of integrating environmental and epigenetic factors in a broader concept of an information-driven natural system that reaches well beyond the core genome itself.
IFT allows that, although inheritance is still presumed to be a major player in evolution, the presence of highly similar genetic sequences no longer obligates an inference of inheritance minus independent corroboration from the physical historical record. Still, inheritance will usually remain the most probable inference because science has yet to elucidate the alternatives. IFT does not require a fan-shaped tree of life as neo-Darwinian accidental evolution does. With IFT, the shape of the tree of life is driven by the kind of potent form-determining constraints that are actually found to be scattered across the full spectrum of natural processes.
Here, the “roots” of each phylum potentially but not necessarily had access to both a master RNA library and the master inventory of proteins, plus a dispersed set of form-determining constraints embedded into nature and natural law that tended to find similar solutions to similar biological problems. IFT explains convergence very nicely, and neo-Darwinian theory explains it not at all. Some opportunity for each phylum to “capture” portions of the early master libraries of both proteins and RNA is assumed to have occurred early on in life’s development, perhaps at several points. Having once gotten “off the ground” as it were, the evolution of the phyla was at times then constrained to move in closely convergent directions by the (yet to be elucidated) form determinants embedded in natural law and/or contingent information initially present in matter and energy at or since the Big Bang. In other words, in IFT the entire world becomes literally full of information relevant to abiogenesis and the evolution of the tree of life. That is a point in its favor because that’s how much information it takes to create machines as complex as we see in living systems.
IFT extends somewhat beyond the current evidence for an RNA world (self-replicating enzymes, ribozymes etc.), self-organization of biotic molecules, and self-organizational themes in the genome, but not so far as to be an implausible extension of those concepts. IFT integrates these concepts with the theory of Michael Denton on the apparent natural law-driven constraints on protein folding and allows that the enormous specificity of our universe towards being life-friendly implies the existence of form determining information constraints in far more locations in nature than science has yet discovered.
OK, having gotten the more general ideas of IFT under our belt, and covered myself sufficiently in case my guesses are wrong, here are two (of many) somewhat more specific hypothetical scenarios in which the origin and development of life on Earth might have occurred—again, basically RNA-first and protein-first. Both require intelligent design to embed critical information into the laws of nature and the basic physical parameters of the universe at the outset. Otherwise events could not have been expected to unfold with a reliable (albeit “imperfect”) directional impetus toward life.
(1) One possibility for a specific version of IFT (IFT is general just as neo-Darwinian theory is general, and therefore similarly safe from concrete objections ☺), the most literal one, is as follows. In this scenario, the DNA code of life was formed by “reverse engineering” information already built into proteins. Additional design info built into natural law and the basic physical parameters of our universe supplied the further informational components requisite to “self-organize” life. This scenario may have developed in the following way, or in another way that retains general conceptual similarity.
Combinations of heat, naturally occurring electricity, and the basic chemicals present in primordial Earth along the lines of Miller-Urey spontaneously form a few specific proteins. These proteins unfold in stages triggered by the presence of certain mediating chemicals. Whenever this unfolding occurs in the presence of not just a PAH backbone for nucleotides to form themselves on, but certain other mediating chemicals as well, the result is an “informed” PAH backbone.
What I am suggesting here is essentially a two-layered backbone concept (or as many layers as it takes to connect the information in proteins folds to a PAH backbone). Together, the multiple layers cooperate to order the sequence of nucleotides into meaningful biological information. Here, the first layer is comprised of unfolded proteins, with mediating chemicals. These chemicals, with or without the help of additional intermediate layers, attract an informed top layer of PAH. The structure of the informed PAH backbone then drives the creation of an informed sequence of nucleotides through preexistent chemical affinities driven by natural law. This process might also occur within a protocell, which would assist to preserve the chemical environment long enough for the informed structure to generate substantially longer strings of RNA/DNA.
When the other tough moments in the evolution of life come along and additional bursts of information are needed to make the large jumps in complexity we see in the fossil record, new increments of biological information may again be supplied by the unfolding of key proteins in the presence of a chemically mediating environment. This could occur either inside or outside of an organism. Thus, life, in this conception, arose via reverse translation of information already encoded into the folded structure of proteins. That information was then reproduced into RNA/DNA format with the aid of a multi-layered unfolded protein structure/PAH backbone.
Once the developmental and transpositional genomes were achieved, much of the biological information-building function could be taken over by the genome. At that point new biological information can be created in a sense “randomly” because the living system is smart enough to try genetic substitutions periodically within a managed process that often allows the individual host creature to survive the tinkering, and certainly allows the species to survive it due to natural selection disfavoring any foul-ups proposed in individual creatures. Evolution can, in a sense, afford to live more dangerously at this point because natural selection is there to back it up.
In this scenario the design information is first recognizably present in spontaneously formed proteins. The formation of these proteins, however, was inevitable given natural law in combination with the informed content of matter and energy at the Big Bang as modified by a symmetry-breaking or other information-unlocking event that drove the establishment of the life-favoring physical parameters of our world. In other words, the chemical environment of primeval Earth was not nearly as random as neo-Darwinists believe. Here natural law and the physical parameters and informed initial conditions of matter and energy at the Big Bang are the source of the design information needed to form life, not an accidental, chaotic, or fully random process.
(2) Laws of nature and the starting configuration of matter and energy at the Big Bang combined to self-organize some very basic cells and primitive organelles such as a ribozyme. The ribozyme, with or without the aid of protocells, quickly produced a “master” library of many RNA sequences (Ohno again). In conjunction with the laws of nature the basic cells and ribozyme-generated master library of RNA formed more and more “advanced” yet still simple creatures such as algae and bacteria. Bacteria continued some of the information producing functions of the ribozyme in transposing new genetic sequences. Nature was somehow chemically “smart” enough to know what to do with DNA sequences once they were present (another source of intelligent design information), at least in having a statistical probability of finding productive uses for biotic components once formed. It began to find ways to translate those components into the structures of life because it was designed to find them. The tripartite genetic system was eventually hit upon and then evolved in incremental modules over time, possibly assisted by many and varied influences and epigenetic processes driven at least probabilistically by design information traceable through a myriad of subtle (even sub-atomic) pathways all the way back to the Big Bang.
Options #1 and #2 are not mutually exclusive, of course; they can be combined into an integrated third view, and many variations. The creation of the ribozyme, for example, may have been largely driven by information reverse engineered from folded protein structures. There may be other sources of design information that derive from more complex combinations of multiple indirect inputs from natural law. They could be more deeply hidden and more subtle, such as in the electromagnetic properties of molecules. But proteins are the only clear and definite source of massive information bearing capacity presently known outside of living systems. Thus, a hybrid of options #1 and #2 is perhaps the more powerful hypothesis. The fact that we can’t get biotic proteins to spontaneously form in the lab under presumed to be representative conditions of the primordial Earth argues against this view, but we may simply be missing something, possibly something subtle that goes to the electromagnetics at the molecular level or even deeper. The fact that proteins carry so much information capacity and much information is needed argues for it.
Option #2 is basically what modern science is currently describing in the journal literature at the moment (minus the ID component that I have added) as RNA-first. For that reason, the following section focuses mostly on option #1, reverse engineering biological info from proteins, which as far as I know is a new idea. The reader can go to the journals for a more detailed discussion of option #2. One can mix and match, alter, and recombine elements of #1 and #2 into several alternate versions, one of those may turn out to be the most explanatory hypothesis when all is said and done.
Before offering more detail on version 1, protein-first IFT, I should make clear that this very speculative discussion is presented merely for the purpose of showing that ID theorists are not incapable of generating a comprehensive hypothesis of life’s origin and development; they are just honest enough to say they don’t know. And they have elected not to reinvent the wheel from scratch, as it were, tending to largely agree with most of standard evolutionary science minus the accidental propaganda. The primary concern of ID theorists has only been to get mainstream science to add the ID tenet to the current theoretical base, not to throw out the entirety of decades of valid research and start over.[259]
I will call this hypothesis the Proteins-First-IFT, or alternatively Pseudo-Fold Theory. In either case PFT works as an acronym. Amino acids, of course, are the components of proteins, and proteins have an enormous information bearing capacity in their three-dimensional folded structures. For this reason, amino acids and the few abiotically achievable proteins presently known to science are the starting point for the information that drove the origin of life in PFT. Amino acids have been shown to spontaneously arise under conditions approximating the primordial Earth (Miller-Urey).
Amino acids and any spontaneously (abiotically) derivable proteins that may be obtained from them are the only source of massive biological information capacity presently known to be available from spontaneous synthesis of elements in the primordial Earth. Information could have been resident elsewhere, but, for the present, until these deeper and more subtle information repositories can be further elucidated by science, the information resident in amino acids, the folded protein structures they form, and in RNA/DNA (and their translation systems) are the only concrete starting point IFT has. I consider anything in nature (natural law, physical constants etc.) that consistently causes to form compounds and systems that are essential to life to also be a prime candidate for a source of biological information (or “pre-biological” information if you prefer).
If Michael Denton’s thesis of predetermination of protein folds is correct, one or more of those predetermined alternatives in protein folds may be instrumental in reverse engineering the genome of the first living cell. My PFT hypothesis builds from this concept and assumes some method of reverse translation was available in the environs of the primordial Earth, while not knowing what it was.
Are a few amino acids or rudimentary proteins enough information-wise? In theory, yes—and potentially much more than enough. The initial task is only to construct the first self-transformational genomes, not to create all of the separate genomes of the individual species directly. The 20 biologically useful amino acids have, between them, 437 properties relevant to determining biological function. Exploring the alternative configurations of twenty amino acids in three dimensions (with the number of residues in a single protein reaching as high as 10,000) increases the number of alternative configurations exponentially. Thus, those early amino acids (in “pseudo-folds”) or abiotically synthesized proteins might indeed have been the source for the crucial modules of biological information needed to achieve the first living cell. Once having done that, the cell creates the other biotic proteins, which in turn add exponentially more useable information.
The meaning of “folded protein” as I use it here is nonstandard, in that is very general, including psuedo-folds. It includes even semi-permanent organizations of amino acids (chemically bonded to each other or not) that can induce chemical reactions similar to those that “hard-folded” proteins can induce when folded or during any phase of unfolding. In other words, a “pseudo-fold” need not be a real folded protein at all for our purposes here so long as it is sufficiently organized and chemically potent enough to act like one, and in a prebiotic environment.
Such a “pseudo-folding” of amino acids might occur, facilitated by clay substrata holding amino acids into close physical proximity, so that the physical-chemical cues of the temporary “structure” can be chemically “read” by a primitive, perhaps spatially-expanded, functional equivalent of the ribotype, acting as if there were a folded protein present. I suppose we might as well go all the way and imagine a psuedo-tripartite genome while we are at it. Something much more primitive, less permanent, perhaps even highly fragile, but nonetheless functionally analogous.
The ability for this to happen within a spatial scale requisite to integrated chemical response may depend upon the prior unfolding (or pseudo-unfolding) of one or more abiotically achieved proteins. In other words, there could have first been a genuine protein that did not encounter the proper chemical substrata for its information content to be “read” or chemically translated. After partial decomposition due to water solubility or other causes, a remnant of that same protein did encounter the proper chemical signaling mix in its environment to engender reactions analogous to living chemistry. It would then release part of its hidden information, perhaps in the confines of a newly formed protocell. In a chemical soup that happened to have the requisite amino acid-rich content and the right signaling chemicals, a myriad of such transactions could potentially occur within a short time very quickly building further and further increments of a primitive single-celled organism.
In addition, chemical cues in the environment, without the aid of decomposition, could cause the unfolding and reconfiguration of protein folds. In either case, both real and pseudo-folds might be “read” as if they were folded proteins. Depending on what specifically the information content of those false proteins was related to, a loosely constructed ribotype or translation mechanism might eventually be the result. After several or many levels of such intermediate construction, the first living cell is ultimately achieved. A continued unfolding of more and more complex biological information ensues from reverse translation of information built into proteins, some of which may have been newly constructed within primitive living cells.
From there the resulting dance of evolution transpires, perhaps a truly vast interplay of genetic transpositions, natural selection encouraged enhancements to the genome and ribotype, and the encounters between primitive living or protocell systems, and additional yet to be elucidated sources of design information in larger physical environment. Incremental advances are made possible by a complex dynamic interplay between information vested into natural law, new increments of information being sequentially revealed in folded proteins, and recent genome additions from transformations, recombinations, and lateral gene transfers.
The still primitive genome and translation system continues to develop incrementally by the addition of new increments of reverse engineered information from protein folds and pseudo-folds. This could occur by either reoccurrences of protein/PAH backbone structures or some other means to chemically reverse the ribotype translation system. Early cells or protocells could have absorbed such reverse translation systems and they might have retained their fragile non-permanent form just long enough to make an impact on the total biological information forming within the system. Early genomes may or may not have had a more solidified version of such a reverse transcription mechanism. Upon achievement of the base genomes of the tree of life to a point where the developmental and transpositional genomes could take the process to completion, the reverse transcription system may have been cut out of living systems by some preprogrammed means, by natural selection, or by genuine accident. It is easier to break something than to build it.
The information that comprises the blueprint for life is not (necessarily) all in a given set of proteins. It is not necessarily all in the genome. It is not all in natural law. Even the ribotype (the genetic translation system) is useless by itself. In IFT many sources of biological information and physical information that can impinge on living systems and make a form altering impact complement each other.
With IFT the tripartite system of biological information, translation and structural construction in a sense is present from the beginning, albeit in a latent and fragmented form. However, the fragments are retrievable under the right circumstances, though frequent failures are assumed in this process. In the PFT version of IFT, the equivalent of Ohno’s master genome is a master blueprint for life contained largely though perhaps not exclusively in information resident in three-dimensional folded structural patterns within proteins or their temporary impersonators, pseudo-folds.
The modular information-guided construction process of evolution under PFT continues beyond unicellular life with the aid of the developmental genome and the transpositional genome, and who knows what else, but it is not an accident. Information from multiple sources continues to guide evolutionary development in a clearly directional way. Rapid jumps in evolutionary advancement are explained in PFT by occasional interjections of reverse engineered information bursts from the master blueprint stored in folded protein structures either newly added to or newly extracted from genomic systems.
Scientific
Prematurity, Deep Time and the Argument from Authority
Can we trust neo-Darwinian “experts” to define the meaning of life for us when they couldn’t pass an elementary logic course if they were allowed to copy? (see Appendix 1) Is the history of science so free of political bias that we can safely assume its absence in modern scientists? No, and no.
The vast new resource of biological information science has accumulated in the past twenty years reveals that evolutionary theory construction has been (over)confidently proceeding upon what has turned out to be a fully inadequate base of information, really across the board. Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature magazine, agrees, attributing the deficit of information in paleontology primarily to the inherent limitations of “deep time.” The deficit in genetics and microbiology was based upon simply drawing hasty conclusions long before we had dug down as far as the physical systems data actually went.
Through the 1970s at a minimum we had not yet collected anything near representative evidence of the real complexities of life. Yet the prevailing theory of evolution, which modern theorists refuse to update, is vintage 1859 as updated in 1955! Compared to the much deeper data of evolutionary time and microbiological complexity, we were confidently proceeding to draw conclusions from (unavoidably) too limited fossil data, inadequate samples of ancient DNA, and incompletely described cellular and genetic systems. Yet neo-Darwinists proceeded with much pomp and bluster to announce that there could be no alternative to their own expert deductions about what had driven the origin and development of life over the vast historical epochs of life’s history, epochs from which we had fully inadequate data sampling.
For this reason, Henry Gee goes so far as to say that any and all historical narrative explanations that purport to give a “known to be true” narrative of evolution (and a single definite tree of life) are indefensible. The only basis for such specificity, according to Dr. Gee, is the “expert” opinion of a particular scientist or group of scientists. However, since the nature of the objective evidence for evolution is insufficient to demand the same opinion from all informed interpreters, expert opinion does not guarantee truth, nor does it satisfy the rigor of scientific method. Gee, as everyone should, derides the argument from authority.[260] The entire history of science, philosophy, and civilization joins him in condemning as unreliable, politically suspect, and fully contrary to scientific method arguments based upon authority alone (even technically expert authority).
I agree with Gee completely. The whole enterprise of Darwinian evolutionary theory has been vastly premature. While it was scientifically premature for Darwin to hypothesize accidental evolution in the absolute sense that he was missing masses of critical data, it was not conceptually premature or disingenuous. Darwin could honestly propose his theory because, although he might rationally allow that he was missing a lot of data, he could not know he was missing masses of critical data that would run so dramatically contrary to his theory. What I argue in this book is that now we do know it, or we should, and therefore don’t have Darwin’s excuse.
My own view goes a bit further than Gee’s Deep Time. I propose that we are now experiencing additional limits similar to the limitations incurred from “deep time,” namely “deep information,” and “deep complexity.” One might even say, in regards to the neo-Darwinian penchant for propaganda stretching well over half a century that science must now also wrestle with deep BS. We now have to filter real data points out of a purely linguistic haystack.
While we are doing this filtering and updating the volumes of new complexity data, we should put the default presumption of neo-Darwinian theory on hold and allow for all competing strategies and theories in scientific research. Gee chides us, reminding that prior to theory construction we must first objectively chart the phylogenetic data and achieve a quality controlled data synthesis capability equal to the task. We are presently a very long way from achieving even this, let alone fairly evaluating the thesis of intelligent design.
Given that Darwinists were missing so much data, it is no surprise that neo-Darwinian theory has it all wrong. As of the “new” evolutionary synthesis circa 1950 science had yet to illuminate the intricate processes of the developmental and transpositional genomes, and really, in those days we were still missing a great deal of the understanding of even the basic operational genome that we have today. Compared to what we know today, even the update to evolutionary theory achieved in the 1980s is merely knee-deep in microbiological and genetic complexity data, whereas today we are up to our necks in it.
And yet it remains entirely possible that even now we have not crossed the threshold of data acquisition essential to reveal the true character of the biomechanics of evolution. Additional biological form-determining factors almost certainly reside at deeper levels than we have yet mapped: electromagnetic properties, self-organizing nanostructures, etc. We cannot yet even fully synthesize or analyze the massive data we already have available from proteins, genomes, and neural networks. In theory we can catch up on the biomechanical descriptions over time if the data doesn’t turn out to exceed the abilities of our best computers acting in aggregate to analyze (that’s a big “if” at this point), but much of the fossil data needed to reconstruct evolutionary history will probably remain forever lost to us.
Asserting a definite theory of the evolutionary process, the how’s, the why’s, and the when’s along with a definite ancestral tree of life, therefore must wait. It has all been vastly premature. In the absence of sufficient and mature data all that remains to support definite theories of evolution is the highly suspect and too frequently politicized argument from authority. The proper method of science is to, first, gather the facts, and then compose the theory.
What Henry Gee is telling us is that, to preserve the purity of scientific method, we must realize the vastness of the evolutionary question, the “deep time” involved. What Meyer, Dembski, and Behe et al. are telling us is that we have made a similar mistake concerning the biomechanical data: our theorizing got well ahead of the data.
The loud demands of neo-Darwinists that ID theorists must present a complete detailed model of evolutionary dynamics to replace the (imaginary) neo-Darwinian model before criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory can be taken seriously are here shown to be worse than bogus. They amount to an insistence that everyone else violate the scientific method as they have done, to theorize in advance of the data. It is a funny kind of criticism to make for committed scientists, though not for social-political ideologues.
The prematurity of neo-Darwinian presumption can be seen in other facets of their thinking. The neo-Darwinian “authorities” have told us for decades that the historically “failed” theories of evolution, inheritance of acquired characteristics, orthogenesis (directed evolution), etc. could be fully dismissed as naïve and fatally flawed—never to rise again. But rise they have, albeit in updated forms. Many of the old theories of evolution that “authority” had previously condemned now appear to have at least a valid secondary role to play in evolution after all.
That certain acquired characteristics can be inherited through a process of preserved transfer of chemical gene activation markers has now been established. Thus, a new form of “Lamarckian” inheritance is still alive and well in evolution, as is a limited but steadily growing argument for orthogenesis (direction) in the intelligent design data. The phenomena of convergence, molecular selection, and self-organization revealed by researchers like Simon Conway Morris, Sidney Fox, and Stuart Kauffman clearly reveal room for directional influences in evolution (orthogenesis). The overall specificity or fine-tuning of the physical parameters of nature in favor of life, identified by scientists like Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Hugh Ross, Fazale Rana, and others, has always naggingly suggested that directional influences might eventually show up across the entire spectrum of nature.
Although, we do not yet know the full dynamics of evolution, there is clearly direction to the process, revealed, if nowhere else, in the dramatic probability figures. The mapping of additional directional constraints will probably continue for many centuries. Given the “deepness” of the time and information involved, the process of discovery may simply go on indefinitely, but the trend indicators are already clear; the complexity and probability data cannot be reverse—new discoveries cannot erase complexity and replace it with simplicity again.
Once a truly accidental origin of life is ruled out, as has now essentially been done, there are only two other possible explanations for life. Either nature is a purposely controlled and directed process focused on the creation of life by intelligent design, or nature is a purposely controlled and directed process focused on the creation of life for no reason at all: “It is just that way.” Although to say “It is just that way” is a description, it is not an explanation, and therefore not a theory, and therefore not a scientific theory. What this means is that we don’t currently have a theory of life’s origin and evolution outside of intelligent design theory; we only have a nonexplanatory political dogma masquerading as a theory.
While I respect and agree with Henry Gee, from the debating perspective, it is very fortuitous timing for the neo-Darwinists that Henry Gee has entered the discussion when he has. Gee says we don’t need a theory of evolution, only a description. Prior to the force of intelligent design theory being presented to the public by modern intelligent design authors Behe, Dembski, Meyer, and Denton et al., everyone agreed that we did need a theory of evolution. Now that intelligent design theory can be seen to offer a better theory than the non-explanation of a materialistic accident (neo-Darwinian theory) all of a sudden we don’t need no stinking theory at all, just description. If they weren’t largely atheists, one would have thought they all had got together and prayed for this, and Gee was God’s answer. ☺
I don’t impugn Gee’s motives—he is right after all—but one must admit that this is a very convenient development for the neo-Darwinists. In the current predicament of their accidental theory being disproved by Behe and Dembski et al., it would be pleasant for them indeed if science would simply drop the requirement for a historical narrative theory of evolution entirely before publicly issuing an outright and definitive refutation of neo-Darwinian theory, as now appears inevitable. Evolutionary science has invested so much of its reputation in the theory of accidental evolution that is will be a huge embarrassment to science as a whole when it falls.
I think many neo-Darwinists have long seen this coming: the need to employ delaying and obfuscating tactics while they retreat in the face of irrevocable refuting data. The astute observer can occasionally catch them experimenting with a variety of intellectual “dance steps” that would allow them to silently waltz away from the accidental thesis without having to tell the public that the accidental worldview has been officially pronounced to have failed, both in physics and evolutionary theory. Albeit unintentional, with Deep Time, Henry Gee provides them with an excellent pirouette routine. They can now regain the spotlight with the intellectual equivalent of Dancing with the Stars and spin right off the floor to resounding applause—if they hurry. In the military we do something similar. In lieu of the unpleasant word “retreat,” we simply make a “strategic advance to the rear.” You will have to look closely to see it, but that is what neo-Darwinian theory has been very subtly doing for years.
Why is Gee’s appearance so suspiciously convenient? Because the problem of deep evolutionary time that Gee very rightly points out has been with us all along. Nothing has changed to force that realization upon neo-Darwinists now, except political expediency. Some credit for causing that light to come on must go to Gee’s personal courage in presenting such a stark challenge to orthodox thought; but the neo-Darwinists have ignored powerful criticisms from acknowledged thinkers before now, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell notably among them, effectively sweeping them under the rug with untold volumes of vitriolic rhetoric.[261] Yet one can hardly detect a single pass of the rhetorical broom aimed in Gee’s direction. Of course, Gee is nearly an untouchable icon of scientific politics, being the evolution editor at Nature magazine, one of the big two along with Science.
Do we need a further explanation at this point? It is a valid philosophical question. After all, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher and theologian, taught us that explanation has to stop somewhere. I think we have to say yes we do, because it is more consistent with the established tradition and spirit of science to always seek a deeper explanation where one is available. In this case, it would also seem to comport more with intuition and common sense.
Let’ do a sanity check on the neo-Darwinist answer: “Its just that way. Nature just so happens to prefer 3 billion-long DNA code blueprints with translation systems, complex Boolean logic gene regulation networks, 10 billion-brain cell intelligent neural networks involving 60 trillion synaptic connections, and folded proteins more complex than our best computers, over simple rope swings and bicycles.” Is this intuitive? No. Does it comport with common sense? No. Does it seem to be cheating at a critical point where the tide of debate has become unfavorable? Yes. Is a deeper explanation available? Yes, ID theory.
And why all of a sudden do we not need a theory to explain this gigantic bias for life when science has always fallen all over itself rushing to explain the little biases found in the biomechanical components of living systems that explain how cells, organs, and systems can do what they do with consistency?
Gee’s point, of course, is not that we shouldn’t have a theory when a proper evidential base is available to construct one, but that the deep time of evolution presently prohibits the acquisition of sufficiently reliable data to ground a narrative history of evolution—and, again, he is right. ID does not conflict with Gee’s point about methodological limitations in our ability to procure historical evidence because it is not an historical theory; it is a biomechanical-mathematical theory grounded in microbiology and genetics where our limitations for data acquisition are not precluded by forever lost historical data. Thus, we need not consider ID theory obviated by Gee’s point about deep time even if we decide to throw out all the narrative theories of evolutionary history and never address the subject again. This is true because historical limitations do not apply to genetics and microbiology as such, though they will restrict our gaining visibility over ancient genetics and microbiology, which now seem largely limited to viable samples no more than 100,000 years old. However, the data from current genetics and microbiology, as I have argued throughout this book, is more than adequate to refute the accidental thesis of the origin and evolution of life.
Despite this, the neo-Darwinists, documentably lacking any rhetorical conscience whatsoever, will be all too happy to employ Gee wherever they can to cover their strategic advance to the rear under the relentless wilting fire of new complexity data. So long as their theory prevails, as unshakably loyal political ideologues, the neo-Darwinists will tell us that we obviously need evolutionary theory. But as a real refutation of their theory begins to loom on the intellectual horizon, they are likely to suddenly discover the wisdom of Henry Gee (which, of course, has been available to them as the self-pronounced omniscient subject matter experts all along) and attempt to misapply Gee’s historical logic to refute the non-historical thesis of ID theory. This is an invalid tactic, but they will try it if you, the reader, will fall for it. I advise the reader, therefore, to stay alert for this maneuver in the future. Future evidence is only going to go in one direction, in favor of intelligent design, and sooner or later the neo-Darwinists are going to feel the pinch.
Consensus
Among Scientists in Different Fields
Neo-Darwinists try to forestall this inevitable paradigm shift away from both the accidental worldview and the classic narrative historical theory of evolution by citing, not data and logic, but consensus. The problem, evident throughout history, with citing mere consensus is that consensus does not guarantee truth. There was consensus for Hitler and Stalin, consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth, consensus for protoplasm as the essence of a cell, etc. More to the point, every paradigm shift in science that preceded significant progress has been accompanied by precisely the problem we see in biology today: a politically prejudiced consensus on the wrong side of the issue.
Progress, almost by definition, and certainly by historical precedent, implies that the majority will initially be on the wrong side. G. G. Simpson’s confident proclamation that there was an overwhelming consensus among scientists (circa 1960) that the demonstration of the origin of life from chemicals in the laboratory (abiogenesis) was imminent was not subsequently borne out. Over a half-century later no such demonstration has been achieved and the consensus that it is imminent no longer exists. The current consensus is not that the demonstration of abiogenesis is imminent, but, merely that it may yet be possible. Based upon ten years of research for this book, I get the sense that even that slim hope is fading.
As of
In 1871 St. George Mivart, a contemporary of Darwin’s and one of the most renowned biologists of his age, gave the following description of the workings of the cell in his book, Elements of Science. [Note: St. George was not canonized as a saint; “St. George” is simply his given name.]
…But
if the body of any living organism be divided, it will, at the very least, be
seen to consist of a variety of minute distinct particles, called “granules,”
variously distributed throughout its interior.
All
organisms consist either (as do the simplest, mostly microscopic, plants and
animals) of a single minute mass of protoplasm, or of a few, or of many, or of
an enormous aggregation of such before-mentioned particles, each of which is
one of those bodies named a “cell” (Fig. 28, p. 195). Cells may, or may not, be
enclosed in an investing coat or “cell-wall.” Each cell generally contains
within it a denser, normally spheroidal, body known as the nucleus.
Now
protoplasm is a very unstable substance (as we have seen many substances are
whereof nitrogen is a component part), and it possesses active properties which
are not present in the non-living, or inorganic world…
Protoplasm
has also the wonderful power of transforming certain adjacent substances into
material like itself—into its own substance—and so, in a sense, creating a new
material…
The
small particles of protoplasm which constitute “cells” are far indeed from
being structureless. Besides the nucleus already mentioned there is a delicate
network of threads of a substance called chromatin within it, and
another network permeating the fluid of the cell substance which invests the
nucleus, often with further complications…
But
every living creature consists at first entirely of a particle of protoplasm.
Therefore every other kind of substance which may be found in every kind of
plant or animal, must have been formed through it, and
be, in fact, a secretion from protoplasm…
Lastly,
protoplasm has a power of motion when appropriately acted on. It will then
contract or expand its shape by alternate protrusions and retractions of parts
of its substance…
Such
is the ultimate structure, and such are the fundamental activities (or
functions) of living organisms (so far as they can here be described), from the
lowest animalcule and unicellular plant, up to the most complex organisms and
the body of man himself. [262]
It is not that Mivart is wrong in his description, but that the implied “and that’s all there is to it” is wrong: “ultimate structure” was clearly a premature overstatement. While this amount of knowledge was a stupendous achievement for the science of Darwin’s time, it does not even “scratch the surface” of what we know today. His theory was a protoplasm era explanation, not bad for its time, but wholly inadequate today.
Given that the requisite defense of accidental processes now appears impossible, neo-Darwinian evolution must be considered not only hugely out of date but straightforwardly refuted. I therefore (do not) regret to announce that classic neo-Darwinian theory is logically and evidentially dead. This includes the unsuccessfully patched up versions offered by G. G. Simpson, Richard Dawkins, and Monroe Strickberger, et al. who feel that the “cat in the hat” version of natural selection is sufficient to take “accident” out of an accidental world.
These versions are not, however, politically dead; they are only scientifically dead. The battle has then become, as Phillip Johnson very perceptively observed at the very start of this debate over intelligent design, a rhetorical one. It is now a struggle to bring the true import of the existing scientific facts to public awareness. This would appear a simple enough task, but linguistic obfuscation knows no bounds where entrenched politics are concerned. The evidence is clear; the language is not.
Modern neo-Darwinists are dragging their heels to avoid announcing to the public that the original form of neo-Darwinian theory is effectively refuted. To avoid this confession, they have redefined the theory without renaming it, and further differentiated twenty or thirty different variants between which they can switch to defend the most pressing objection of the moment. There is no one single version of neo-Darwinian evolution, however, that can answer all critical objections and remain a theory of an accidental dynamic.
Could mainstream science be so unethical, so inured to the strict code of ethics that science has always maintained (or at least always taught our students), so inured to science’s requirement for objectivity and honesty? Could they really have done this: misled us all for decades about the true import of the evidence? Yes, they could. And yes, they have.
In the early decades of evolutionary theory, many intellectuals, especially in Britain, began leaning way to the left of the political spectrum, even to Marxism. They saw liberal social theories as the salvation of mankind, and were, in truth, fervent believers. They had good intentions, but Marxism is a very restless bedfellow for science because it says the end justifies the means. Many neo-Darwinists are still enamored of this view today. They are trying to change society by moving the public towards materialism and a Marxist social philosophy. Their primary loyalty is not to science at all, but to the revolutionary cause. It is not immoral in the view of a Marxist to use a scientific lie (accidental evolution) to lead people to the (supposed) higher priority social truth of materialism. Thus, mere consensus among scientists cannot be trusted in such a politicized environment: one must review the evidence and the logic for oneself, not merely take an “expert” opinion. Proponents of Marxism have been highly organized for many decades, actively cultivating their own and clandestinely trying to shoe-spoon them into positions of social influence. Expert opinion isn’t necessarily wrong, even in this kind of environment, but it is not enough. The citizen must do their own homework.
To minimize the risk of falling prey to this kind of intricate verbal deception, follow Pope John Paul II’s advice: ask the right questions. Which version of evolution? What are the limits of an accidental process for achieving complex systems in real time? How does “cumulative selection” alter those limits? There clearly is no consensus on accidental processes being capable of originating life; there is a consensus against it. Most, if not all, of the modern theorists have denied that they are claiming an accidental process at all. No coherent explanation for “cumulative selection” has ever been given that is consistent with an accidental dynamic. The only real consensus is that the atheistic, materialistic scientific community members should all drag their heals stubbornly in the ground to delay and confuse by all means the public’s growing awareness that modern science has moved fully away from an accidental worldview.
Summary
& Conclusion
The Case of Uncle Bob on
the Bus—A Question of Time
As Sherlock Holmes might upbraid Watson
for holding simplistic theories, one wants to say, “Yes! Uncle Bob is
the same guy we saw in
“Look,” they tell us, “there is a bus
stop in Boise, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Cleveland…its
all laid out. What could be more clear? The bus route
is an historical fact!” The intermediate milestones of biological form
variation that must be met if the proposed path from microbe to man is to be
traversed are clear, yes. But milestones are not the only question relevant to
assessing the viability of accidental evolution. One of the other key questions
is, “Do known physical restrictions preclude the proposed route having been
traveled by an accidental vehicle in the available time?” The answer to that
question is a resounding “Yes. A trip across country in a single day is
impossible for an accidental bus.”
Further, because the real biomechanical
pathways of evolution have yet to be demonstrated, neo-Darwinists are in the
situation of asking us to decide the issue before we even know the road
conditions and the mechanical features of the “bus.” Neither a luxury sedan nor
an economy model can go where a four-wheel drive jeep or an all-terrain SUV can
go. Not only is the basic evolutionary bus fully undescribed in the
biomechanical sense, but the accidental evolution-version of that bus
can already be certified as nonoperational.
The ascribed power plant, accidental variation, doesn’t have the horsepower; it
is known to be incapable of moving the machine between known points on the
phylogenetic tree in real evolutionary time. Futuyma says it is an
uncontestable historical fact that we had bacteria, then salamanders, then
monkeys, then man. The proper response for ID proponents is “Whoop de do! We
knew that didn’t we? But how did we get first life and
then move between creatures by accident in the time available?”
Darwinists have always assumed that the
biomechanics of accidental biological form change will simply be worked out
over time. They assumed that the results of future research would fall
comfortably within their theory. Over the past several decades, however, it has
not so fallen. The known biomechanics of life are now fully incompatible with
the accidental thesis, even with natural selection added. And the more we
look the more difficult the process is seen to be. The neo-Darwinists
presumption of a free ride to eventual confirmation no longer holds water.
For evolution to have achieved so much
so fast with so little error the necessary biological information for the
larger part of the tree of life would, as Susumu Ohno has speculated, have to
have been present in the early stages of life’s development (no later than the
Cambrian). The role of natural selection is substantially reduced in such an
event, and in no way can the variations spawned by a predesignated blueprint be
termed accidental.
Neo-Darwinists are in denial of what we
already know. We now have a firm grasp of the basic underlying structures of
biological machines. We know enough about DNA and protein to know that such
complex changes to them as would be necessary to move from dust to amoeba to
man won’t happen by accident in any conceivable amount of real time—just as we
know a junky old bus doesn’t travel 400 miles an hour in a straight line over
all types of terrain. Of this much we can be certain without knowing every
detail of the bus design and construction—buses can’t do that.
For decades now, neo-Darwinian theorists
have selectively ignored evidence that argues against their theory,
acknowledging only that which supports it. Despite thousands of truly
impressive-sounding studies that
hybridize fact and imagination, we have established no biochemical
pathways between any two creatures with different body types that would be
achievable by accident in real evolutionary time.
At some point or another in the
development of the tree of life I believe we may ultimately find a case, or a
few cases, where (preexistent) Hox genes combined with highly complex
(preexistent) combinations of microtubule structures, and other important and
substantial epigenetic factors (preexistent gene marker patterns), and a
set of complex maneuvers performed by a (you guessed it) preexistent transpositional genome, will be shown to produce one
creature from another. We will then have observed “macroevolution.”
It is almost inevitable, as we know life
developed and differentiated somehow, and we can see the basic types of
mechanistic steps it must have involved. However, even having shown instances
of highly complex preconfigurations that lead with mechanical surety and
statistical consistency to predictable instances of macroevolution we will not
thereby have shown an accidental process until we can demonstrate an
accidental achievement of all of the preexisting components and living systems
needed to form the prerequisite context of the event.
Why restate the obvious yet again? Because the neo-Darwinists will simply change tactics when you are
not looking. In this case, the fallacy they will employ when the first
observed macroevolution is demonstrated will be to declare victory while losing
the battle, bait and switch, changing the subject, equivocation…on and on;
whatever, they know all the tricks girlfriends. They will throw a grand and
very loud celebration saying “See, we were right all along: Here is evolution proved!” But
there will be nothing demonstrating accident at all in the event they are
heralding.
To demonstrate accidental evolution we must do more than merely demonstrate the last step where one creature appears from another (and how, precisely, that could ever happen remains a biological as well as a conceptual conundrum). We must also show how true randomness can get us every step of the way to the point where our demonstration begins as well as from there forward, including all the hard parts that neo-Darwinian theory simply skips. In light of what we already know (the irreducible complexity of cellular systems and complex organs, the probability argument, and the resource exhaustion argument), such a demonstration is far beyond the expectations of good science; it is only just short of a manifest impossibility.
The available evidence already says no
to the viability of accidental evolution in very convincing fashion. Each time
we delve further into a biological process or system the more complex it is
seen to be. New research can only move biological complexity and the
corresponding improbability numbers in one direction, further beyond the
boundary that rules out chance altogether. One needs only scan the bioscience publications to see how true this is. The
known complexity of biological systems has grown exponentially over the past
five decades and continues to advance at an astounding rate. Some of the
reasons for this are discussed briefly but cogently in the introduction to
Karen de Bruin’s thesis, “Construction of cDNA Libraries,”
submitted to the University of the Free State, Bloemfountein, South Africa, June, 2004.
I Say Again: Humility in
Science
Dr. Stephen Meyer’s emphasis on the
difficulty of finding a useful gene sequence by accident, bears repeating here.
How hard is it to accidentally find a sequence of DNA 5,000 nucleotides
long that can do from 500 to 3,000 different useful things for the human body
in hugely complex ways, including using alternate splicing and reading frame
mechanisms? This is still an awful lot of data critical to this debate about
intelligent design that we don’t know. What we do know is that the data
is pouring in like an avalanche in the Swiss Alps and it all favors
exponentially increasing complexity.
Oddly, as we discussed in the
introduction, it is an awareness of our relative ignorance, not our
grounds for confidence that has been increasing steadily with additional
research. This maxim is not merely an abstract philosophical nicety that goes
well with a nice coffee and Danish in a comfy, cozy armchair (though I find
that it certainly does). This principle has now become the hard physical
reality of genetics, microbiology, physics and cosmology. The increase in
complexity we have seen with each additional decade of research has so far
outpaced a ballooning analogy as to be more properly described as an explosion.
As of the year 2000 we were just gearing
up to apply nuclear transfer technology to the cloning of laboratory mammals
(rats) in an attempt to enhance our ability to trace out some of the
connections between genes and phenotypic processes. It is a horrendously
complex job, considering the entire taxonomic inventory, with major hurdles and
critical unanswered questions.[263] Only in the
past few years have we discovered that this task will be much more difficult
than anticipated, as the content of a single gene turns out to be scattered all
over the chromosome. The simple straightforward information of DNA, which we
were confident represented the secret of life in a simple and direct reading
frame, has given way to six different interacting genome-related systems: the
basic genome (DNA/RNA and genes), the gene regulatory system, the genomic
translation system, proteomics (and associated systems of the phenotype), the
developmental genome, and the transformational genome, as well as alternate
reading frames. Compare this to what Darwin based his theory upon: some gooey
protoplasm, a nucleus, some chromatin and very little else. And that’s just the
information revolution in biology. Physics is very likely sitting on the verge
of a new data explosion as well. The eventual import of the discovery of dark
matter in physics combined with LHC results and continued work on string theory
can only be imagined.
Whence then comes
the confidence of the neo-Darwinists that they have all the answers, that life
can all be attributed to one big happy accident? Amidst the deluge of new
biological data, the most basic mysteries of biology have endured. In a brief
page and a quarter length science news summary (to all appearances politically
neutral to our question of accidental evolution), Elizabeth Pennisi has quietly
delivered what I view as a serious blow to the neo-Darwinian propaganda
campaign. The simplified view of the genome that has underpinned the false
hopes of accidental evolution for decades is finally and irrevocably burst with
her article in the premier journal, Science, 15 June 2007.[264] It’s just not
that easy to accidentally stumble upon a living genome. This is not her point,
but mine; however it is an inescapable inference from the increased complexity
of the genome that her article reveals.
Michael Behe’s new book, Edge of
Evolution, confirms the same principle, that the complexity threshold
attainable by an accidental process has now been indisputably breached. This
has been shown not only in genetics, but in several other areas of biological
structure and function. The same trend is evident in the other primary branches
of science. Contrary to neo-Darwinists’ effusive
overconfidence that the new data fits perfectly into their theory, the only
clear trends in the new data are that the physical processes of the natural
world are monumentally biased towards life. They are in fact so
horrendously complex that “accidental universe” becomes an indefensible misnomer, and “accidental life” an oxymoron.
What both Behe’s book and Pennisi’s
article show us is that to date we have not even accurately understood the
basic concept and construction of a gene, let alone the other five primary
systems needed to turn genes into life.[265] All the while
of course, over the past six decades or so, the neo-Darwinists, have been
confidently proclaiming that genetics and microbiology had things so well in
hand as to unquestionably confirm their view of an accidental process of
evolution. Please…we have to be able to do better than this.
So, Just How Complex Has
All of This Become, Really?
For a nice look at how modern
evolutionary science proceeds and also a merely surface-scratching hint at how
fantastically complex the life sciences have become see the Evolution of CAKs[266] chapter of the
online book Cell Cycle at the Eurekah Bioscience Collection, which is only a small part of
the National Library of Medicine's Online NCBI
Bookshelf collection. Also see the recent Eugene V. Koonin et al.. article on evolutionary
classification of proteins published online at Genome Biology.[267] Both of these
works are very well done, and it was good of their authors and Web publishers
to make them available on line.
A somewhat more complex discussion may
be found in a PhD thesis published on the Web by the University of Nottingham, UK submitted by Richard Grayson Bradley,
August 2006 on immune targeted tumor therapy research for cancer tumors. If
your appetite for science has been whetted, then, just for fun, look at the
article by S. Gerlo et al. in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences or the classic
evolutionary study of Hiroki Oota et al., also available online: “Genetic
Study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Southeast Asians.”[268]
Next read a smattering of the articles
on biochemistry, genetics, protein research, etc. at BioMedCentral,
Cornell University’s Arxiv project,
and the following journals:
American Journal of Cell Physiology—Cell Physiology
http://ajpcell.physiology.org/
The American Journal of Human Genetics
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/203/
Bioinformatics
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/
Brain, Behavior and Evolution
Briefings in Functional Genomics
http://bfg.oxfordjournals.org/
Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences
http://www.springerlink.com/content/78360w1370245214/?p=d25a50eba868491ca8e23b77a7359f38&pi=9
DNA Research
http://dnaresearch.oxfordjournals.org/
Genome Biology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/7/
Genome Biology and Evolution
http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/
NCBI: Homology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/homology/
Human Molecular Genetics
http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/
Integrative & Comparative Biology
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/
The Journal of Biochemistry
Journal of Heredity
http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/
Journal of Molecular Cell Biology
http://jmcb.oxfordjournals.org/
Journal of Theoretical Biology
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00225193
Molecular Biology and Evolution
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/
Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10557903
Mutagenesis
http://mutage.oxfordjournals.org/
Nucleic Acids Research
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/
Systematic Biology
http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/
NCBI: Taxonomy
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/taxonomy/
Theory in Biosciences
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01695347
Next stop? Any university bioscience library. Flip through some of the
other technical journals at random to get a closer look at how astronomically
complex life science has become. Alternatively, if you don’t want to work that
hard, just go to Science magazine’s beautiful Web site, but even they won’t
have it all. It doesn’t matter so much where
you look, so much as that you just keep looking. The trail of complexity is
virtually endless in relation to the time available in a single human lifespan.
The complexity of biological systems is off the charts! There is no substitute
for glancing at the professional biology, chemistry, and genetics journals
(even if you can’t understand them), because only there will you see the true
complexity of life. Everywhere else you will encounter politically orchestrated
oversimplifications.
The knowledgebase for biological systems
includes millions of highly detailed component descriptions and is rapidly
growing. Topics now range down to atomic and subatomic structures and
nanosystems. An accidental process clearly has no chance to create living designs
of this magnitude of sophistication.
Even given all of this, modern science
has discovered only a fraction of the life science knowledgebase that will
ultimately be revealed. What fraction? There is no way to know, but I think we
can safely say less than half. The clear trend is that there are precise
natural laws at the atomic and nanosystems level that are geared towards the
production of the essential forms of biological life.[269] Could an
accident manage such a creation? No way.
A Beautifully Simple Conception
If the case for the accidental version
of neo-Darwinian evolution is so weak as I have described it here, why do we
cast aside the obvious design inference and defer to
Within the socio-historical context of
the mid-nineteenth century,
The seven questions science still cannot
answer are the biggest and most crucial questions of all relevant to this
debate: 1) Where did all the matter and energy come
from at the Big Bang? 2) Why did the Big Bang occur that made our universe? 3)
Why were things so incredibly informed at the beginning as opposed to chaotic
if the process is accidental? 4) Why do quantum particles obey the laws of
nature in groups when their individual behavior is erratic, that is, why do we
have consistent natural laws? 5) Why did the ordered structures of the galaxies
form when the laws of nature as presently described don’t require it? 6) How do
we explain the origin and development of life when accident clearly cannot do
the job? and 7) What is the nature of mind, the
mental, emotional and spiritual experience of humanity?
These seven points of profound mystery
occur at precisely the points in the formation and function of our world where
one would rationally expect the creative influence of God or an intelligent
designer to be manifest: the beginning of things, the physical foundations, and
the point where humanity is distinguished from the lower animals. These
mysteries suggest many things, but all incompatible with a big accident:
miraculous creation; divine purpose; a blueprint for God’s plan (information);
controls for pattern development (quality control on implementation of the
blueprint); hidden directional constraints that guided the structural design
for the cosmos; bringing forth living creatures “after their kinds,” as stated
in the Bible; and a spiritual-physical faculty that facilitates the self-aware
soul’s interaction with the body. Yet Ernst Mayr and the neo-Darwinists insist that
science can find no trace of cosmic purpose! Poppycock! Nothing could be more
obvious. It is a classic case of what Dr. Faust describes: poor judgment by
scientists due to bias and the incapacity for or lack of interest in the
rigorous manipulation of abstract logic.
In all fairness to Darwin, he presented a darn good case within
the capacity of the science of the time. There was nothing wrong
with Darwin’s judgment. He evinced no
blind spots for the evidence because most of the evidence now available was not
known to science at the time. Darwin’s problem was that he was simply missing
key information, information that has since become available. Darwin didn’t
have Big Bang theory, genetics, or microbiology. There was a goo inside the cell that was imminently pliable and
variable. The parts are small, the changes tiny, and the time to work enormous.
So, one day all the necessary miniscule modifications just accidentally fall
into place. What could be simpler or more explanatory? Walla Booby! Accidental evolution
proved! There was nothing to contradict this hypothesis at the time and no
better explanation available. Matters are far different today.
Darwin had a
persuasive, a truly logical style of writing (many of his successors have met
with less good fortune), and a natural charm derived partly from being in love
with his subject. What he did not have was knowledge of modern genetic science
and electron microscope empowered biochemistry. As Professor Michael Behe has
written, cells were simply black boxes to
Now, in the twenty-first century, one
wants to say that that is all a bit fast. One wonts to say, “Hold on a minute
Charley! What about all of this new data from genetics and microbiology?” No
one questions that
What are the detailed mechanics of the
billions of critical steps at the biochemical level at which they must occur to
achieve transition from amoeba to man? How can random changes add up to
something significantly beneficial without first getting in the way in a
harmful manner?
Here’s another troubling question. If
the design inference is so obvious to us, how did Darwin get past it? First, in
an odd indirect sense, he didn’t. Darwin didn’t deny the possibility of making
a design inference; he actually made one, but in the negative. He personally
did not perceive design in nature, but not because he denied the faculty of
perceiving design to humans. Darwin basically said “I am able to perceive
purpose or design in nature and I have looked as closely as anyone and as close
as humans can, and it’s just not there.”
But of course he was unable to reach
deep enough to see where the intricate machinery was operating at the cellular
and genetic level. When Darwin looked at nature at the gross superficial level
he perceived accidental processes—or thought that he did. He saw no overriding
plan or sense to the natural course of events that was then available to
inspection. Darwin saw no divine purpose revealed in the macroscopic
day-to-day operations of nature. If a man was struck by lightening
standing under a tree, Darwin saw no divine providence in it. Neither do I…usually. It is
interesting to note that Christ himself saw no divine providence in it; he
acknowledged that there are true accidents in the world, yet he certainly did
not deny the world’s creator. Neither did Darwin in his published work.
Darwin offered his theory of evolution
as a theistic evolutionist, as if God had first made the world and then
left it more or less on an unguided course. The only obvious intellectual error
that I can see that is fairly attributable to Darwin is what one might call the
“Bowling Fallacy.” When a master bowler
releases a ball down the alley, many fans already discern that it is going to
be a strike. In some types of events an initial impetus of guidance is enough;
one doesn’t have to babysit the ball as it goes down the lane. “Bowl on dude!”
Darwin’s intellectual independence from
modern neo-Darwinists is in clear evidence here. He was not a card-carrying
member of the materialist church of a meaningless and accidental world. He may
be the only thinker on record in the history of the evolutionary discussion who
saw not even the appearance of purpose in natural processes and at the same
time affirmed the Creator as the source of life.[271] It is the
perfect situation to suggest the bowling metaphor, yet Darwin seems to have
missed it. Dr. Faust again? As an aside, it is ironic
to me that Darwin was a theistic evolutionist in his published writings, and
yet, modern atheistic materialists who dismiss God out of hand revere Darwin
practically as he were a god himself. Marxist logic, the end justifies the
means, for it is the misunderstanding of Darwin that has done more for atheism
than any single other event in history.
The problem boils down to the lack of an
electron microscope.
Although
Kind of like a lava lamp, all types of
beautiful variations are likely to spring out of random protoplasmic gyrations
without causing any damage to the existing biological functions at all—a very
change-tolerant system. (By invoking the lava lamp I am not
intimating that Darwin used Cannabis
here, although it was legal in
England until 1928, and he is known to have spent an awful lot of time near his
desk lamp). As long as one end of a blob maintains a connection with
another, as long as protoplasm is talking to protoplasm, hey, it will all work
out. A new blob can be pinched off the end of another, change color, move to a
new location, make a new connection, have a different and presumably quite dull
“conversation” and ultimately do wonderful new things for the organism. That’s
just the way it is; protoplasm is the vital component of life; there has to be
one, so what’s the need to look further? It is as far as we can see, so case
closed.
It was a beautifully simple conception,
except for one thing: it was wrong. It provided a completely stress-free
environment for evolutionary theorists, however. “Oh, don’t worry about it; it
could happen by accumulated small changes. The protoplasm does all the work,
you know.” As Michael Behe has been kind enough to teach us,
All these years since (approximately 150)
Darwinian theorists have not offered an explanation of the biomechanics of how
complex biological machines could arise in the first instance, or of how one
type of organism can evolve into another (major body form innovation). They
only purport to tell us that highly configured DNA sequences, genes, and gene
sets, once originated, could be shuffled and realigned in accordance
with primarily structured and orderly processes within the body in a relatively
simple fashion to generate minor changes within a species (reproductive based
variations from Mendelian genetics). For Darwinists the big changes somehow
just happen through an unknown sequence of events involving many of these
small changes, and often in a hurry. This explanation is hardly more advanced
than the goo hypothesis. They don’t know what the events are; they don’t know what the sequence is; but
they do know it involved only the
simplest of steps and that accident had plenty of time to throw it all
together. Please….Science has to be able to do better than this.
Science has now advanced to the point
that, if we were honest enough to cast aside political intransigence, we would
see that Darwinian theory has lost both of its primary functional components:
random variation and natural selection. Random mutations have been shown to be
destructive and natural selection is now held to infrequently offer an opinion
to be of use in the construction phase of life. It is unable to work with the
simple mutations that an accident can propose. Without those two elements there
is no neo-Darwinian theory. At some
point we are simply going to have to make the psychological adjustment and
admit it:
No matter how big a fan one may be of
natural selection, in and of itself natural
selection does not distinguish between intelligent design and Darwinian theory (or any other theory). Competition, environmental
parameters, demanding or catastrophic events, and other significant pressures
of the natural environment will unavoidably cull and tailor a designer’s
creations no less than those of random origin. Natural selection will always be
there to offer an opinion on major functional differences. The fittest
will always survive no matter how they came to be, accidentally or on purpose.
Natural selection is the one thing all
scientists agree upon, though they differ as to the extent to which it is
involved, the exact parameters within which it operates, and its ultimate value
to the evolutionary process. Intelligent design scientists do not deny that
natural selection works at times to preserve functional form variation. They
only deny that an accidental process can propose modules of biological change
of sufficient complexity and numbers in real evolutionary time for natural
selection alone to construct an amoeba from chemicals and a human being from an
amoeba.
Similarly, the fossil record and the
genotypic/phenotypic similarities of organisms do not serve to evidence
accidental Darwinian evolution over intelligent design. Darwinists will loudly
object that those scientists closest to the data can absolutely see that at many critical points in the
development of life the process was left to a random outcome (within certain
tolerances of preexistent physical and historical parameters). That may well be
so. But it is precisely the last proviso, “within
certain parameters” that permits the compatibility of the historical record
with an RFP concept of intelligent design in evolution. A designer could
have done it in accordance with the historical record, though one may tend to
look at him somewhat askance given the limited imagination of our small human
perspective for having a sloppy method. The showstopper, however, remains:
while what is visible of the evolutionary method may seem sloppy to us for an
intelligent craftsman, an accident could not have built the tree of life in
accordance with the historical timeline and known biochemical complexity data at all. “When the impossible has been
eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how implausible, must be the truth.” [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character, Sherlock Holmes.]
What Decides the Issue?
Only four things have been shown capable
of distinguishing between intelligently designed and accidentally constructed
life forms: (1) the creations of an intelligent designer might exceed
demonstrable time constraints; that is, the designer might act faster than an
accident of nature could act through known biochemical processes; (2) the
design features in organisms might be so complex, so narrowly specified, and so
closely matched as to require a straightforward design inference (that is, one
could tell they were intelligently made just by looking at them); (3) the
origin of sophisticated biological information at levels of what might be
termed hyper-complexity (the genome and its translation system, the
brain/nervous system etc.) cannot be explained by an accidental process; and
(4) the magnitude of improbability for an accidental construction process in
total could be so great as to forbid reasonable belief, so great, in fact, as
to require an assumption of time and physical resources in excess of those
available. All four of these criteria are seen to converge toward the
inescapable conclusion of intelligent design when one closely investigates the
question of life’s origin and evolution.
It is critical to understand the
distinction between historical science and experimental empiric science.
Darwinian theorists eschew the requirement to give experimental or laboratory
proof of evolution because they say their discipline is historical not
experimental in nature. This is true for basic evolution, perhaps, but not for
the accidental tenet. The claim of
accident is not a historical claim as is the claim of the basic event
sequence of evolution as reflected in the fossil record because the claim of an
accidental form variation process is not a claim about what happened at
the macro scale of historical events, but about how it happened. Saying
how evolution happened unavoidably
entails assertions about the biomechanical process. The facts of
biochemistry and microbiology must support this claim for it to hold true. As
such, the tenet of accidental evolution must be tested and demonstrated under
the protocols of experimental science, not just historical analysis. It has
failed all such experimental forays to date, meaning mutational studies, and
the known mathematics simply forbids it.
This philosophical adjunct to the basic
theory of evolution, the accidental process tenet, has always been the crazy
uncle that evolutionists have consistently kept in the closet when authentic
experimental research is being done. Claims for this tenet only come out in the
rhetorical phase of Darwinian discussions, not in the laboratory science.
One can only surmise that this is why
neo-Darwinists so loudly proclaim that evolution is an historical
science, to redirect attention from the biomechanics, which are all against
them. As with synthetic theory, neo-Darwinian evolution’s nonaccidental twin,
the research and exposition of neo-Darwinian theory has historically been
focused on the macroscopic, the big phylogenetic changes visible in the fossil
record, augmented by populations studies and comparative genomics.[272] All well and
good as far as it goes, but neo-Darwinists have strongly directed our focus to
these areas to the full exclusion of the relevant data from biochemistry and
microbiology, apparently hoping/expecting that the highly nonrandom trends in
recent research would reverse over time. There is little hope of that reversal
now. Complexity cannot be put back in the box once it is documented.
In addition to failing at the
biomechanical level, the Darwinian approach leaves us with the mystery of the
origin of the genomes, the origin of natural law, and the origin of the initial
order of matter and energy in our universe. It only has the historical patterns
in the fossil record, and those do not argue against intelligent design, only
against 6-day instant biblical fundamentalist creationism (naïve finalism).
Thus, you find them constantly switching questions on you. You ask about their
case against intelligent design; they give you a case against naïve biblical
finalism instead—bait and switch, equivocation, whatever you prefer to call it,
it is a trick.
Another trick to watch out for is the
natural=spontaneous and spontaneous=random and random=accidental verbal sleight
of hand. Let’s grant for a moment that natural law can “spontaneously” generate
living systems given nothing more than the informed state of matter and energy
following the Big Bang, in other words, no further divine intervention
necessary. To say that in nature we have such a system-building system, a
machine-building machine, if you will, is not to say that the intelligent
design requirement is lessened, but that is increased. An enormous system that
builds subsidiary systems is more complex than its subsidiaries. Therefore the
Darwinist tactic of falling back upon natural law as the explanation of the
origin of life as if it ruled out the need for intelligent design in
explanation fails because it both adds to the complexity of the designs that
must be explained and because it proposes as the explanation only a complete
mystery that does precisely the same things an intelligently designed machine
does. As currently described, the Big Bang is as perfect a physical corollary to
the miraculous creation story of Genesis as we could ever hope to find. One
regrets that when God said “Let there be light!” in his mercy he did not add
“Let there be common sense too!”
What Did
To be fair to Charles Darwin, he was
always a theist in his professional published scientific work. He was also a
theist for most of his personal life. He certainly was not what we now call a
neo-Darwinist, who have added atheism and materialism
to the theory of evolution. Darwin’s overall score on logic was excellent while
the logic of the neo-Darwinists stinks.
It is true that Darwin privately came to
believe so strongly in the influence of natural selection that he felt the
force of the design argument had been negated as pertains to evolution of gross
biological structures. But Darwin did not have the benefit of the evidence of
modern biochemistry and genetics in order to see the full strength of the
argument for design. One can only surmise that the level of complexity modern
biochemistry reveals would qualify under Darwin’s own view of his stated
criterion for the refutation of his theory.
Although Charles Darwin’s personal
religious views transitioned at times from believer to agnostic, he was a theist when he wrote The
Origin of Species, holding that the Creator formed
natural law and imbued the essence of life into matter at life’s inception.[273] This is
remarkably consonant with the account given by Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna
Christoph Schönborn in his recent book, Chance or Purpose, at least so
far as the inception of life goes. Darwin understandably did not perceive God’s
guiding hand on the course of natural history as does Cardinal Schönborn. At
the time of his writing,
To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.[274]
Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind to some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker.[275]
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the correct description of my state of mind.[276]
Note that Darwin here proposed an
interesting argument for God/intelligent design: the existence of intelligent
thought cannot be accounted for except by positing that an intelligent source
somehow engendered it. We have no genuine alternatives to his conclusion to
this day. Finally, consider Darwin’s secretary’s remarks upon persistent
inquiries from the public.
Mr. Darwin begs me to say that he receives so many letters, that he cannot answer them all…He considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God…[277]
Consider these additional informal
comments of the great evolutionist.
I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.[278]
Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.[279]
Claims have been made that
Darwin’s published views clearly did
incorporate the Creator as the source of life and natural law. In other words,
Darwin saw no other explanation for these, and we have no other explanation to
this day. True, the development of life took what appeared to
Darwin to be an accidental course, but he did not feel the origin of
life was accidental. Some of his later speculations posited that natural law
would be found to account for life, but he also attributed natural law itself
to the work of the Creator.[281] Darwin’s
position is fully consonant with the general RFP form of information-first
theory that I have proposed (and with the sport of bowling).
The appearance of randomness in nature’s
course, correctly noted by Darwin, has since been overwritten by overwhelming
evidence of design beneath the surface of that course in the physics,
chemistry, and biomechanics, discovered only with the advent of the electron
microscope and genetic sequencing tools. These tools were unavailable to
Darwin. Nevertheless, it is a testament to his genius that his postulations of
a process guided by natural law, a process requiring a Creator at its
inception, can now stand without need of amendment in the face of modern
research while the work of his less professionally astute and less rigorously
disciplined neo-Darwinian successors has been fully refuted.
The neo-Darwinian explanation has fully failed in light of current data. It is a dead theory. This is true in terms of logic and scientific viability, though politically, neo-Darwinian may pass away from the social venues in a very slow and agonizing fashion. The whole thing is unseemly, really—to maintain an enormous lie at the very foundations of science for purely political purposes. It really is a scandal. The continued affirmation of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary model rests upon nothing more than the presumed authority of the noted scientists who refuse to give it up. As Philip Johnson has so cogently observed, society merely awaits the official rhetoric to catch up to the facts.
No one knows what the full
explanation of life’s origin and development will turn out to be. There may be
some major surprises. For example, it may turn out that it is possible to accidentally create very simple life forms but not
possible to accidentally evolve them further. The
Church would probably argue against the creation of any level of life by
accident, but science is not permitted to assume anything in advance of a
demonstration. The full and proper test of the accidental worldview component
of neo-Darwinian theory is not only to demonstrate how to originate the first
simple living cell from nonliving chemicals, but how to accomplish each
major jump up the evolutionary ladder. Impassable thresholds may be present
at many points in evolutionary progress that would preclude an accidental process from going any
further. The math of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument tells us
those thresholds must be there, as do the irreducible complexity studies of
Professor Michael Behe. Therefore our default theory of evolution should not be
accidental evolution, but intelligent design.
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[215] Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1.
[216] W. E. Lonnig and H. Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, vol. 36 (2002): 389-410. Scott F. Gilbert, John M. Opitz, and Rudolf A. Raff, “Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,” Developmental Biology, vol. 173, no. 2 (1996): 357-372. Gilbert et al. say that the emerging synthesis in evolutionary biology is that the classic Darwinian model for macroevolution that says population dynamics can explain macroevolutionary events has failed, and that a new dynamic is being invoked by a more robust model that posits special segments of the developmental genome, called “morphogenetic fields,” as the primary source of macroevolution.
[217] Valentine, Phyla, 77-79.
[218] Robert Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt, “Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 6 (2003): 823; T. Ryan Gregory, ed., The Evolution of the Genome (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005); Eugenio Andrade, “The Interrelations between Genotype / Phenotype / Environment: A Semiotic Contribution to the Evo:Devo Debate,” SEED Journal, vol. 5, no. 2 (2005): 27-65.
[219] Davison, “Instant Evolution” published to the Internet at http://www.iscid.org/papers/Davison_InstantEvolution_050204.pdf.