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Evolution – Smevolution!

Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison

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Appendix 1:

The Logical Shambles of Neo-Darwinian Evolution—101 Fallacies

(or The Origin of Feces)

Whew! Bad Logic!

Elementary logical fallacies occur in discussions supporting neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory at an alarming rate. Here are fully 101 (there are more) oft-repeated neo-Darwinian fallacies. After reviewing the atrocious quality of neo-Darwinian thinking I think you will understand why 87% of the people in the U.S. reject the neo-Darwinian BS and still believe in God. You will also come to realize that we in Western cultures have been “had;” we have been fooled by a system of political propaganda masquerading as science, the sole purpose of which is to engender and increase the Marxist-materialist worldview in Western cultures.

Fallacy #1: Equating a part with the whole

These are actually three different but closely related fallacies. A part does not equate to the whole; some limited randomness does not rule out purpose in a machine or system; and God could have used a random search process to create some of the components of life, or even all of it.

Early neo-Darwinists concluded that since there are some apparently random components to biological systems (the mixing of genes during reproduction, lateral gene transfers between species, or the rare accidental point mutation that strikes home), it is safe to conclude either that the entire process of evolution is accidental, or at least that there is no intelligent designer of life because he/she/it would never relinquish that much control over the process. Neither of these conclusions is valid.

It now appears that the transpositional genome has accomplished the lion’s share of evolutionary change in cooperation with the developmental genome. Both of these systems are highly constrained machines. The output of such systems cannot be termed “accidental.” The part chance has played in evolution now seems quite minimal, and no demonstration of the ability of a true accident to form complex biological machines can be made. In fairness, the early Darwinists didn’t know that there was a developmental or transitional genome, or a genome of any kind. They could not see inside the cell and did not have genetic science and microbiology. Somewhat later they did have the theory of Mendelian genetics, and selective breeding experiments to prove it. But although the large processes like Mendelian genetics, catastrophic events in nature, predator selection, competition for scarce food resources, and other large threads in biology and evolution do combine to suggest both some randomness and survival of the fittest as axioms that have a definite but limited effect on the content of the tree of life, neither of these axioms explains how an accident can make sophisticated machines in real time.

At the level of the very small, however, the conceptual threads do not suggest accident at all. The transpositional and developmental genomic systems are very sophisticated micro-scale machines. The neo-Darwinists cannot explain the initial creation of those genomic systems. An accident could not have constructed those systems within the time available in the life of our universe. The transpositional and developmental genomes operate within the confines of a biological machine according to a still poorly understood set of rules, but according to a set of rules nonetheless. Thus, according to the best indications currently available to science, evolution is not predominantly an accidental process.

Once the genomic systems are present, they heavily constrain further development in lifeform evolution to those options consistent with the mechanisms and biological information already present. Truly accidental mutations occasionally add a period or a comma—perhaps a letter change at most—but the complex segments of DNA, the “books” that impart the critical core elements of biological meaning, are already written.

Contrary to Darwin’s theory, the accidental accumulation of periods, commas, and single letter changes did not produce the tree of life; the transformational and developmental genomes achieved the lion share of macro- and micro-evolution by recombining whole sections and chapters. And this could only be done after the hard part of introducing biological meaning, mechanistic structure and precise function into those systems was already achieved.

While reproductive mixing of genes is apparently random, it occurs within the confines of a larger biological machine and it is constrained and governed by the rules and structural limitations of that machine. Nothing in the mere possibility of mixing genes during reproduction even hints that the larger living machine itself could have been created by accident. Randomly reshelving books in the library does not eliminate the requirement for intelligent authorship of the books or the construction of the library itself.

Likewise, to restate what is obvious to everyone except a neo-Darwinian evolutionist, the fact that a juggler rotates jeweled watches, Faberge eggs, classic books, or computer chips through the air does not prove those wonderfully complex creations to be accidental. One can take out the seven or eight memory chips and the three or four circuit boards inside the computer I am using now to type this book, randomly move them around and eventually get them all back into compatible slots by accident. That is only possible because the hard part of constructing the chips and circuit boards as well as their standard interface to the motherboard has already been done by intelligent design—and it still requires a lot of time and many broken circuit boards to get it done. With definite time and resource limits it can’t be done within the standards of probability for scientific credibility. The same is true of producing life on Earth, and we know what the available time and physical resource limits are: not the smallest fraction of the time and physical particles required to produce life by accident has been available in the history of our universe.

To produce a computer by accident would require not only vast amounts of time and physical resources, but a controlled physical process of a type that nature does not even have in her inventory. Every mechanic and engineer knows that building a complex physical structure or machine entails more than just architectural or engineering knowledge; it requires skilled workers who exert precise physical control over the construction process. No matter how good the blueprint, if the workers are sloppy and imprecise there will be a problem. What this means for the debate of accidental evolution is that, in order to gain physically precise control over all of nature such that the unimaginably complex machines of life can be properly constructed, the magnitude of specificity that must be entrenched into natural law and the original conditions of matter and energy at the Big Bang is every bit as enormous as Roger Penrose has expertly calculated that it is. An accident could not have arrived at that level of precision in a trillion trillion lives of our universe. Once the specificity in the bias for life reaches such monumental magnitudes, the origin and evolution of life cannot be deemed accidental.

Our universe is limited by its natural laws to only certain kinds of transactions. While the highly-controlled process needed to build a desktop computer from the basic physical elements is certainly not one of the options the dumb physical elements have available to them (only intelligent humans or other intelligent beings can do this), nature does have in her inventory a controlled physical manufacturing process for the astoundingly more complex machines of life. Why? Why is nature set up to build the monumentally more complex machines of life but not the simpler machines of computing, carpentry, or agriculture? If nature had the ability to build machines in general, we should have had the simpler ones first and most. This is not the case. Even the simpler forms of life are not simple machines—far from it. Nature, therefore, is not a machine- building machine in general, one created by accident that goes flip-flopping around inadvertently building this kind of contraption and then that. It is a machine-building machine built with a very specific purpose: the creation and long-term maintenance of life.

For an accident to have created life, a fully chaotic continuous random mixing bowl is required in order to ensure that the needed components and event sequences will eventually occur in the right combinations in physical proximity, to ensure that they are not locked out prematurely. However, we know nature has never been this way. Nature’s options are in fact very limited both by natural law and by the informed content of matter and energy at the Big Bang. They become more and more limited as history progresses by irreversible physical and chemical reactions—this is called the non-repeatability of physical-chemical history. Therefore, nature as currently described by science is not a continuous random mixing bowl, despite the fact that neo-Darwinists often imply that it is. We also know that at the Big Bang our universe did not begin with pure chaos, but was highly ordered. There is nothing of a constant accidental search or a random mixing bowl routine in any of this.

Another “small” problem with the mixing bowl theory is that once the mixing bowl finds the right combinations for life it then has to somehow stop being a mixing bowl in order to preserve the unique circumstances required to support life, as nature is known to have preserved them for millions of years. The mixing bowl hypothesis requires the very nature of the universe to dramatically change in midstream from a profile having no bias for life to a profile having an enormous bias to preserve the conditions for initiating and supporting life. Allowing for natural law to so radically change pulls the foundation right out from under science itself. We know from our physicists and cosmologists that the first half of this scenario never occurred; we never had a mixing bowl. And if the second half had occurred it would have represented such a startling and unexplainable rewrite of natural law towards a bias for life that only intelligent design could explain it.

Even if nature were a random mixing bowl, that bowl is far too small, having too few physical particles to get the job done—and it hasn’t been in existence anywhere near long enough to do the job. Professor William Dembski has shown this in his resource exhaustion argument. There hasn’t been sufficient time for a random search to achieve designs as complex as Earth’s living systems within any degree of probability remotely approaching the threshold for scientific credibility.

Thus, the neo-Darwinists’ random mixing bowl explanation for the origin of life by accident is refuted for three reasons: not enough time, not enough physical particles, and not enough randomness in natural processes to call it a mixing bowl. The antiquated neo-Darwinist analogy of a random mixing bowl that once seemed so powerful an argument for an accidental worldview can now be seen to fail on all points.

This does not mean that there is no randomness in nature whatsoever. But what randomness there is does not rule out purpose or design. There are limits regarding where and to what extent randomness can be tolerated by any particular mechanism, yes. In many designs, however, there are places where randomness can exist without defeating the functionality of the system. A random element may be a tolerable defect or it may enhance system effectiveness in some situations. Random variation in biology, for example, allows the designer of life to help his creatures survive changing environmental pressures via spontaneous adaptations. This frees the designer from having to actively intervene to save his creatures and their finely tuned interdependent ecosystem from the potentially destructive effects of routine environmental fluctuations. The immune system is a great example of harnessing randomness for a purpose. It uses random guesses (very rapid ones) in attempts to “break the code” of an invading germ infection. The literal code-breaking endeavors of cryptographic analysis that spies use to break into enemy communications and that computer hackers use to break into our computers also rely heavily upon randomized subsystems. Thus, the presence of some randomness at intermediate points in a system does not rule out intelligent design.

So, even if we saw a great deal more randomness in nature than we actually do see, there is nothing to prevent rationally interpreting such features as an attempt by God or an intelligent designer to “break the code of life.” In seeing scores of physical alternatives randomly played out and sorted through and then the impossibly precise formula for life incredibly hit upon so quickly, how do we know that we are not seeing the “Mind of God” manifest in nature? God could even have used a fully random search in his own mind to hit upon the designs of life, perhaps leaving some of the unused options in other universes, or, alternatively, only physically manifesting the final plan that fully matched his requirements. Our primary point in this section, that the presence of intermediate randomness in a system or machine need not preclude the achievement of that system’s overall purpose, would seem to apply even more so to an all-powerful supernatural being having no limits whatsoever.

And, back down here on Earth, many accomplished professional thinkers have acknowledged that limited randomness is compatible with purpose and intelligent design. Three good essays that address this topic from a variety of thoughtful viewpoints can be found in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action.[1] Noted author and physicist Paul Davies; William R. Stoeger, S.J., astrophysicist at the Vatican Observatory Research Group, University of Arizona; and Sir Arthur Peacocke, all tell us that the existence of purpose is compatible with the characteristics of our world, including some randomness. So, in the situation of random functions being imbedded into certain system design elements of life and nature, the part does not successfully predict the whole. A part can be random while the whole system is reliably constrained to achieve a designated purpose.

Another instance of improperly arguing from a part to the whole is seen in the ballyhoo of premature celebration that erupted immediately following the Miller-Urey experiment. The experiment showed (only) that a few amino acids could be formed by “spontaneous” natural processes, namely the mixing of elementary gases followed by exposure to heat and electrical discharge. However, after more than half a century those few amino acids are still all we have been able to produce spontaneously outside of a few types of very rudimentary substitutes for a cell membrane enclosing a primitive chemical catalysis of gases. We know that life is enormously more complicated than a bubble of flatulence loosely salted with a few heat-induced proteins, and our inability to throw life together by accident simple confirms this.

The simplistic theory of spontaneous abiogenesis that was accepted in 1953 and has been plastered all over our science books ever since was vastly premature. The assumption that it would soon be shown true was based upon the “We have a part, so we will soon have the whole,” version of the equating a part with the whole fallacy. True, we don’t know that the theory of spontaneous generation of life from chemicals is wrong, but that one simple finding in 1953 and the precious little we have been able to add to it in the following half century is far from sufficient to justify holding the theory definitely true.

Even if it is true, as Fallacy #97 below explains, “spontaneous” does not equal “accidental.” Plenty of room remains for intelligent design to have been the source of that hugely improbable “spontaneous” event, if only indirectly via a vastly complex chain of events moving from the Big Bang to the origin of life, closely assisted by natural law. Given the huge improbabilities now known to be against such a thing occurring in a fully “accidental world,” the spontaneous achievement of life is more of an argument for intelligent design than against it.

Fallacy #2: OK for simple creatures, therefore OK for complex creatures

Bacteria are the neo-Darwinists’ celebrated flagships of “evolution,” yet they possess none of the highly complex machinery of higher life forms. That is the first thing that should raise our suspicion that we are being had by a bad analogy. Yes, certain simple organisms can do very simple things in terms of biological change. But these simple things do not constitute evidence for the macroevolution of complex systems or advanced radically different body types. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists assert that the simple changes in bacteria are adequate evidence for accidental evolution of complex creatures.

It is true that bacteria sometimes quickly introduce a new survival-enhancing enzyme into the active genome. Therefore, Darwinists assume, complex organisms can randomly introduce new genes sufficient to generate new survival enhancing features of absolutely any kind, even the features of much greater complexity on the highest branches of the tree of life. But an enzyme is only a single protein, and most of the jumps evolution has made as revealed in the fossil record requires complex sets of many genes and epigenetic alterations to have been orchestrated to occur in close proximity of time.

Neo-Darwinists feel that the simple substitution of an enzyme in a bacterium (usually already coded for in the bacterium’s plasmid genetic inventory) is all the proof we need that an accident can produce all the features of intelligent mammals having complex systems embedded within systems up to ten levels deep, plus horizontal interdependency that can extend to every gene in the organism. Sanity check: it is a simple fact that complex organisms are not seen to be doing spontaneous development of new features in the same way the ultra-simple bacteria do, that is, one genetic alteration at a time.

This disparity suggests that complexity barriers come into play at some point in the development of the tree of life. These barriers forbid the achievement of substantial biological form change via simple random single-gene substitutions. Furthermore, with possibly the rarest exceptions, even bacteria are not producing new genes in these “mutational” events; they are only installing them. Bacteria have always had these “new genes” available as spare parts stored in the bacterial plasmid.

Plasmids are a pseudo-parasitic adjunct to the normal cell structure. They contain an inventory of genetic sequences that can be routinely substituted into the active bacterial genome. Those spare DNA segments are not being generated in real time; they are already there. And the substitution process that periodically injects the spare DNA segment into the active genome is part of the existing bacterial design. It is neither an accidental form-changing encounter with the environment nor an accidental internal design innovation caused by point mutations. It is not an accidental anything. It is simply the rotation the preexisting cylinders of a preexistent “gun” used for bacterial self-defense. In other words, bacterial gene substitutions are not real-time evolutionary events at all.

Plasmid gene substitutions function primarily as a “Russian roulette” type of immune system. Unfortunately for the bacterium involved the “gun” fires backward as often as forward. Plasmid “gene” substitution frequently injures the host more than its parasitic enemy because the substitution isn’t right for the bacterium’s current environment. At other times the change does save the host from an external threat, and in so doing saves the entire bacterial colony from being wiped out. Overall, this process does help the bacterial species to survive, though frequently at the expense of many individuals. Being advantageous to the species, the system would be preserved by natural selection, but it evinces no demonstrable capacity to produce novel complex life forms.

While it is possible for bacteria to occasionally produce a new plasmid “gene” through accidental point mutations, this does not solve the problem of how to generate more complex forms of life in real time. It only adds a new bullet for the bacterial game of Russian roulette.

We now know that it takes millions of years to integrate a single new gene into a recipient host of a complex species once that gene has been laterally transferred between creatures. So even if more complex creatures had “Russian roulette” gene guns to do gene substitutions randomly they would only produce large problems, or be ignored for millions of years while integration of the new gene into the rest of the system was completed.

We must conclude either that an interface for the plasmid “spare parts bag” of “genes” in bacteria already exists, or that bacterial physiology is so uniquely simple that little interface is required. Integration of plasmid gene or gene segment substitutions is not a problem for bacteria, but it is a big problem for evolution, as Professor Michael Behe has shown indirectly with his examples of irreducibly complex biological systems. The accidental model assumed by neo-Darwinian theory requires that gene substitutions be done the hard way, that is, without a preexisting design interface. Once we move beyond bacteria to complex creatures this consumes enormous amounts of time and resources well beyond what evolutionary history has to offer. The only solution is that a nonrandom process of some kind (not necessarily perfectly efficient) drove substitutions of whole sets of genes and related epigenetic alterations. For this to occur without direct intervention by an intelligent designer would seem to require that an incomprehensibly vast system of information has been imbedded throughout all of nature, even in physics down to the quantum level, information so strongly biased for life that it has driven the production of complex life forms in amazingly brief spans of time compared to the amount of time an accident would require to do the same thing.

Fallacy #3: Construction therefore configuration

Some evolutionists have implied that because a few amino acids will spontaneously form from primordial gases when electricity is injected into a test tube, and because a few simple strings of RNA form spontaneously under very closely constrained conditions, that the accidental creation of first life is soon to be explained. The simple achievement of a few amino acids, however, does not solve the problem of configuring the billions long genomes to do the astronomically complex and highly specific work they do. It does not create gene translation, regulation, reproduction, error checking, repair, and developmental systems. Even the achievement of all the amino acids plus a billion nucleotides would not properly equate to an interactive, developmental and self-transformational genome with translation system—not even close. It would equate to several truckloads of brick scattered about and a bunch of trivia scrolled across a parchment in place of a real design blueprint.

To blur this distinction, as the Darwinists do, is like guaranteeing the spontaneous generation of Shakespeare’s plays from alphabet soup based upon nothing more than having spooned out “See Dick run!” “The letters are all there; what is stopping it?” The lack of the requisite enormous spans of time for one thing. Then there is the natural degradation of the component materials. That and the fact that nature doesn’t just sit there at the bowl dedicated to the task of spooning out letters; she is occupied with a plethora of tasks going all different directions, most of which paths become quickly irreversible. Mother Nature, if her processes are indeed random as the neo-Darwinists say, must be assumed to have an attention span problem. She cannot focus and devote her limited resources to any one component step in the larger evolutionary task long enough to achieve the required advances in biological design by accident. In other words, Mother Nature seldom comes back to the same configuration she has ever once held; she loves them and leaves them, burning bridges as she goes.

Perhaps monkeys will try spooning out Shakespeare, or recreating a play accidentally on a typewriter (for the right price in bananas), but don’t hold your breath waiting to attend the play. Even there, however, you have a semi-intelligent being dedicated to a task over a long term, a being that expresses physical control constraints over the operation that are not random; they are controlling their behavior to produce keystrokes on the typewriter. If the processes of nature are accidental as the neo-Darwinists say, they will be neither dedicated over a long term nor semi-intelligently guided. In a truly accidental scenario of evolution, nature doesn’t have a typewriter, or a typist, or control of the work area to feed paper and ink, etc. A scenario constrained by so many major purposive instruments is not an accident, but an intelligently constructed and/or guided function that radically reduces the time and resource to accomplish a specified task.

In an important recent book, The Organic Codes, Marcello Barbieri reminds us that the functioning organism is a three-part system. The first part, the genetic sequences or genotype provides some but not all of the information needed to build an organism. The protein-based structures and operational systems that the genome codes for and regulates provide the visible form and function that constitutes the second part (and, I personally suspect, a lot more information hidden within protein folds); this is the phenotype. These are the two components referenced in classic evolutionary explanations (though not adequately explained). However, there must also be a complex translation/transcription system to bridge the two, to translate the information of the genes into the structures and functions of a living creature’s body.

This third part, the intermediate transcription system, Barbieri calls the “ribotype.” The need for a translation/transcription system is not addressed at all in the event of spontaneous formation of a small random segment of RNA or a handful of amino acids. In addition to the ribotype or translation system there are the gene regulation networks, the developmental and transpositional genomes, etc. The true complexity of living systems does not correspond to the simplistic model origin of life theorists have so far suggested to the public (a few amino acids, rudimentary chemical catalysis, a primitive membrane, and perhaps a jolt of electricity to be going on with). Beyond the core tripartite genomic system there are regulatory, developmental, and transpositional genomic systems, as well as cellular systems for cells of many types, tissues, organs, and body-wide systems integrating subsystems nine to ten levels deep with horizontal communication between cells of many types.

Simple construction of a billion or two disorganized letters in DNA code does not accomplish any of this. Therefore, construction does not equal configuration where the meaningful libraries of the genomes are concerned, and the genomes themselves are not the whole story at all. Even if the monkeys could eventually type out the right sequences they would have nothing to translate it to biological systems construction events, no ribotype. They would have no pipeline of materials precisely controlled to make the right proteins and other chemicals of life available to the ribotype once it was in place.

This does not mean that the monkeys merely have to type three manuscripts simultaneously instead of one. The ribotype is not an information storage medium that merely requires simple nucleotide changes; it is a system of physical components closely constrained into a very precise system to translate information into physical form change. Movement of multiple physical elements in three-dimensional space has to be at least partially controlled; spatial distances become critical and must be managed. The ribotype needs a supporting physical environment closely controlled to keep the correct materials flowing in the immediate vicinity. Otherwise, the translation mechanism will be reaching for building blocks that are not there. The genome equates to a manuscript, but the ribotype and its material supply system require, not simple chemical alterations to DNA molecules, but precise control over much more gross physical components, and quite a variety of them, components otherwise free to move in time and space beyond the parameters that allow living systems to function.

Ultimately, to achieve the end result of complex life forms, the monkeys don’t just have to type the play; they must produce a cast of thousands and provide a theatre with stage facilities to perform it. How do monkeys get that done, and how does an accidental process minus the first shred of intelligence available even to monkeys do it? They can’t, and it doesn’t. Accident can construct some DNA and a few amino acids within limits (already having much help from natural law), but it cannot configure multipart systems to such extreme degrees of complexity in real evolutionary time.

Fallacy #4: The easy parts of the evolutionary process can be explained without intelligent design; therefore, the hard parts can be as well.

We can explain the rare spontaneous variation of a few minor characteristics within a species as the result of reproductive combinations and random substitution of alleles (in a genome and an organism already made). Therefore, neo-Darwinists say, we shouldn’t be concerned that we are unable to explain the hard parts: the origin of horrendously complex genomic and other types of biological systems in their first instance and the mechanisms of macroevolution between radically different creatures. It is simply more of the same (according to them).

It does not logically or biologically follow that this is true, and there is much to argue against it. We can artificially induce some simple allele mutations and we can experimentally observe the occasional spontaneous allele substitution, but we cannot artificially induce macroevolution, nor can we experimentally observe macroevolution. The mechanics of macroevolution are in fact unknown, but to the extent that they are reliably hypothesized we are certain that they involve close coordination of the developmental genome, the transpositional genetic systems, epigenetic gene activation markers, and microtubule nanostructures in the cell. Macroevolution of a new feature in the first instance would always involve both the origination of complex new biological information and close coordination of multiple changes in these multiple primary systems of life. The basic genome itself has three major parts that must all be addressed, adding the transpositional genome, the developmental genome, gene markers, and microtubules, means that changes to seven different physical systems at a minimum must all be cross-coordinated in real time for macroevolution to occur. Point mutations and allele substitutions are therefore simply not enough. Arguing, as neo-Darwinists do, from the easy parts to the difficult is therefore invalid, yet another case of a broken analogy.

Nature would encounter many unique thresholds of difficulty at multiple points en route to evolving complex creatures by accident. Among these, the much-vaunted spontaneous creation of amino acids by Miller-Urey lies at the exact bottom of the difficulty scale. This is true because, with amino acids, natural law has already taken care of the hard part; some amino acids will spontaneously form under certain conditions. But, further up the difficulty scale (and it’s a long scale) we find the astronomically complex genome (the genotype) with its translation system (the ribotype), and the phenotype, which is comprised of thousands of functional biological machines, all closely interdependent with each other. We also find cellular subsystems; cells; simple multi-celled creatures; full anatomical subsystems of higher creatures; organs and tissues; the human brain; self-awareness/self-consciousness; intelligence; the full organismal system of complex creatures that integrates all of these systems vertically and horizontally to many levels; and so on.

Within the realm of intelligence alone there are visibly very many unique levels of complexity that must be separately achieved: tool making; abstract thinking; moral, ethical, social, religious, and cultural systems; science; engineering; mathematics, etc. Each of these primary and sub-levels of increased complexity in living systems constitutes a quantum jump to a new type and degree of complexity that an accidental process would need to somehow overcome. Does science have any idea of what the biomechanical pathway might be by which an accident could successfully generate any of these systems without aid of intelligent design, let alone all of them in a relatively short period? No they do not. Simply pointing to a handful of point mutations, amino acids, or allele substitutions addresses none of the key difficulty factors involved in any of these systems. “Just give the monkey another page;” that’s the only answer the neo-Darwinists have. Sooner or later, according to them, the monkey typists will have Shakespeare rolling off the presses and the play being masterfully performed in a superb theatre.

The spontaneous creation of amino acids, even all of them,[2] in the lab from conditions simulating those of the early Earth in no way constitutes an adequate explanation of the origin of human life. In short, finding some nails on the ground does not prove possible the accidental construction of a 5 million dollar resort area dream home. “So, you want to move in next week? No problem. You can see that the nails and lumber are all here. Just write me a check for the down payment, today. I’ll stick around a few hours to make sure it all falls together by accident, then we’ll have the moving van bring your stuff over tomorrow. Yes, personal check is fine. Local bank, right? Bye now!”

Yes, there are quite a few simple changes that a single point mutation can produce in a living creature already built, color or size change, increased muscularity, etc.[3] However, these changes constitute the smallest fraction of the overall evolutionary task, and they are simplistic features that will never add up to a radically new kind of creature.

Fallacy #5: One therefore many

Several nucleotide substitutions or a single amino acid substitution can occur by accident without harming the organism—sometimes. Two random amino acid substitutions can occur without harm—rarely; three amino acid substitutions—nearly impossible; four—forget it. Darwinists would have us believe that many accidental changes can occur without harming the organism. Not so—as Stephen Meyer and D. D. Axe have lately informed us. Recent peer-reviewed research indicates that multiple random amino acid substitutions are inevitably harmful.[4] Neither can multiple DNA point mutations occur in combination in a truly random fashion without, for all practical purposes, being deleterious, and for essentially the same reason. A mere triplet, three nucleotides, identifies an amino acid. Therefore, although there are a few cases where a different triplet signals the same amino acid (redundant coding), most single nucleotide changes will also cause an unworkable amino acid change or place a useless junk sequence where the code for a viable amino acid used to be. Thus, attempts to accidentally produce complex biological form changes only produce a debilitated organism, one whose gene line won’t be preserved by natural selection.

Beneficial randomly-generated mutations of the type that accidental evolution needs as evidence, that is, fully random mutations that can be definitely shown to lead to a major evolutionary advancement, have never been demonstrated in the lab. Darwinists will counter that everyone knows the process of evolution is too big and requires too much time for such a demonstration. While that may well be true, it amounts to conceding that evolution is not scientifically testable, and it leaves us with no real evidence for the accidental thesis, a claim fully counter-intuitive and convincingly refuted by standard probability theory.

Noted evolutionist Henry Gee has asserted a very similar limitation to evolutionary research, while drawing a very different conclusion: the deep time of evolution history is too deep to allow practical testing and we should therefore not pretend that we know the historical narrative process of evolution at all. Instead, we should focus on describing the results of what has happened, while refraining from guessing at how it happened. We should restrict ourselves to a careful study of the comparative structures of living creatures, to include their fossils. When asked about how it all came to be, we should tell the truth: “We don’t know.”

To say that in theory some useful genetic changes could certainly be found by an endless random search routine after a living creature is already built, hardly proves that accidental abiogenesis and accidental macroevolution in real evolutionary time are defensible theories within the probability standards of science. The universe has not had endless time to search for the necessary complex configurations. This rhetorical argument for accidental evolution (it has never been scientific) has often played off of the mental error of equating a very long time with an endless time. The trick lies in getting people to believe that millions of years are sufficient for absolutely anything to happen by accident. This is not true, as William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument clearly shows us. This same mental limitation of the human mind to conceive of very large numbers in the imagination is probably what led the cultures of the biblical writers of the first century to use “a thousand” years as meaning any large number that exceeds the limits of the conscious imagination to visualize.

In any case, evolution has not had the full 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s history to work. Most of evolution occurred during the 5-10 million years of the “Cambrian explosion.” But even 4.5 billion years is not nearly enough to build a human biological system with all of its applications of intelligence by accident. The resource exhaustion argument (see Appendix 2) shows that it would take trillions of times that amount of time to bring the probability of accidental evolution within the standards of scientific credibility.

The core genomic system information requisite to the jump from bacteria to complex life forms was apparently achieved (in a manner unknown to us) somewhat earlier than the Cambrian, for without it the Cambrian explosion could not have happened. It appears that only reconfiguration of gene activation marker patterns was required for the burst of lifeform evolution that occurred in the Cambrian, for, indeed, there was little time for anything else.

How could this reconfiguration have been done by accident in the time available? How could an accident have constructed the new genes for body types not yet seen in nature in advance of natural selection participating in the quality control of the construction process? No one knows. It would seem impossible that an accident could do such things—definitely improbable beyond the bounds of scientific credibility—yet that is what the neo-Darwinist theory requires. From what we now know of the complexities of the tripartite, developmental, and transpositional genomes simply saying with Susumu Ohno and James Valentine that a large part of the base genomes for the many new body types spawned during the Cambrian explosion were present prior to the Cambrian explosion is not enough.[5]

At a minimum it would seem to have required much supplementary design information to have been present in the surrounding physical environment in addition to gene sequences for the new body type specifications somehow mysteriously achieved prior to the Cambrian without the help of natural selection. Where might both parts of that combined information repository have come from and why would both halves show up at the same time and be so conveniently complimentary to the hugely complex task at hand of rapidly generating new complex life forms? We don’t know.

There simply is no explanation of how the partial master genome of the new body types for most of the phyla was constructed up through the Precambrian. And the only candidate sources for the other half of the information presently known are long-term derivatives of the initial conditions of matter and energy at the Big Bang, classic and relativistic versions of known natural laws, and perhaps yet-to-be-discovered biological forms, or if you will, biological design formats subtly resident in natural law such that they tend to spawn self-organization of life-related physical systems (such as have been posited by Dr. Michael Denton).[6]

Hypothesizing accident as having generated either half of that information partnership runs grossly afoul of standard probability theory, and is therefore not scientifically credible. Even after we assume both halves of the design information become somehow present, the successful construction of new lifeforms requires a very coincidentally supportive convergence of environmental circumstances such that all the chemical-nutritional building blocks necessary to get new biological subsystems constructed and running are present over an extended period of time.

To say that pure accident could have arranged such an event as the Cambrian explosion is dubious in the extreme. Scientific claims (especially the highly dubious ones) must normally be supported by a concrete laboratory demonstration via controlled experiment and/or rigorously structured and implemented field observations, as well as by supporting mathematics. The first two types of support have never been done for accidental evolution, which is as dubious as any claim science has ever made, and a fully refuting mathematical demonstration has now been given with William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument. (See Appendix 2.)

William Dembski is a consummate mathematician and philosopher. He holds two PhDs and several masters degrees. Dembski informs us that the number of smallest physical particles in the entire history of the universe and the total time available do not allow the number of random attempts required to bring the probability for success of accidental evolution down into the range required by the standards of science (the same standards applied rigorously everywhere else except in evolution). In other words, even if we were to be so generous as to allow that each step in evolution by accident only required the smallest fraction of a second and employed only one subatomic particle, there would not be enough time and particles in the history of our universe to get the job done.

In producing this argument, William Dembski has done nothing less than disprove the theory of accidental evolution! What has mainstream science done in response? Has it celebrated this great achievement and ballyhooed the eloquent simplicity of Dembski’s solution as it would an achievement of half the merit that supported the atheistic worldview? No. What mainstream science has done is precisely nothing. Dembski has been ignored by mainstream science.

No, I withdraw that; the “mainstream” of evolutionary science has done worse than nothing. It has insulted the man, labeling him a crackpot religious fanatic, when he should be on the cover of Science and Nature and holding a prestigious chair in math and philosophy of science at Princeton or Harvard. Dembski is the Rodney Dangerfield of evolutionary theorists: he gets no respect—all because he has had the courage to challenge the status quo in science.

Even usually careful writers such as Francisco Ayala dismissively brush over Dembski’s work, calling him a “sociologist.”[7] To correct the record, William Dembski is not a sociologist; he is a mathematician and a philosopher, and a darned good one. Politics aside, the fact is that William Dembski has shown by bonafide mathematical proof (and for a nice change, a very simple one) that accidental evolution is too improbable to be a defensible scientific theory.

As Dembski explains, there are only approximately 10¹⁵⁰ single-particle events available in the history of the universe. There are several ways one can approach computing the probability of accidental evolution, but the standard probability expectation for them all far exceeds the available 10¹⁵⁰ particle events. The improbability of achieving the human genome directly by an accidental process without any help of built-in design features is 1 chance in 4^{3,000,000,000} (4 nucleotide options for each position on the DNA strand with 3 billion positions multiplied exponentially per standard probability theory). But since life is a three-part system comprised of the genotype (DNA code), ribotype (translation system), and phenotype (bodily structure and functional systems), this number must be exponentially increased by the improbability of accidentally achieving the translation system in order to produce the structure and systems of the organisms from the genome. The improbability of creating life by accident is, then, on the order of 4^{3,000,000,000} multiplied by ribotype improbability, which is itself another immense number. The enormous complexity of both the genome and ribotype make the improbability values for the accidental evolution of the entire tree of life a staggeringly enormous figure well outside the resources our universe has had to apply to the problem. Since the number of “rolls of the dice,” available, that is, the number of physical events available in the history of the universe, again 10¹⁵⁰, is the merest fraction of the number required for accidental evolution to have any calculable probability, the probability of achieving evolution of human life by accident cannot reach the threshold of scientific credibility. It is, in fact, effectively 0.

To make the accidental achievement of an event scenario more probable than not under standard probability theory a number of random “attempts” must have been completed equal to at least half the total improbability value. In the case of our probability estimate of the human genome give in the preceding paragraph, that would require a number of accidental attempts equal to or greater than half roughly 4^{4,500,000,000}. Half of this number is still untold trillions of times greater than what the available resources could support at the known value of 10¹⁵⁰.

Alternatively one can approach computing the improbability of accidental evolution by analyzing the structural complexity and physical options available at each point in the construction of the first proteins, cells, and higher organisms as I have done in rudimentary fashion in Part 1, and summarized in Table 1. One can also compute the ordered biomass produced throughout the history of the universe and compare it to the available particle resources in terms of overall physical mass, employing reasonable assumptions for the astronomically poor efficiency rate of an accidental process, as I do in Appendix 2. The result is the same no matter how the problem is approached: there are not enough physical and time resources available for accident to have gotten the job of evolution done within scientific standards of probability.

Based upon standard probability theory the accidental evolution of life is not a reasonable expectation, and therefore not a good scientific theory. Yes, Mother Nature could have gotten extremely lucky, but we are not entitled to affirm the extremely improbable with science. Science must always affirm the more probable over the less probable. Therefore, although one cannot definitively say that accidental evolution is completely impossible, we can say that it is so far outside the threshold of probability needed for scientific credibility as to be laughable. Since accidental evolution is not good science, it should not be taught as a leading contender, a default theory, or a flagship of evolutionary science, as is currently the case in most classrooms today.

Fallacy #6: Unique therefore typical

If a bacterium can rapidly evolve certain antibiotic resistances or the ability to biodegrade a new substance, like nylon for example, then Darwinists would have us believe that any other creature can rapidly evolve absolutely anything else. Not so—bacteria are unique in this respect in all of nature, and what they do involves very simple changes. Bacteria are atypical of nature in two important ways: their extreme overall simplicity, and the plasmid DNA substitution routine. What works for bacteria simply does not work for more complex creatures.

Bacteria already have spare genetic material in (at times) useable configurations in circular strings of DNA called plasmids that can be mixed into their genome to produce simple changes. This is a feature other creatures do not have, but should have if Darwinian evolution were true. If the same capability is biologically possible for creatures of more complex design, as Darwinists suggest in using bacteria as the flagship of evolution, then complex creatures should have a plasmid substitution mechanism as well (or something like it). Bacterial plasmids convey such a startling fitness advantage, as evidenced by the universally acknowledged hardiness of bacterial species, that such gene substitution systems, if they could be developed for more complex creatures, would always be preserved by natural selection. It would be a great advantage to any creature to evolve useable traits so quickly.

This feature is, however, not found in complex creatures. The apparent reason is that in higher creatures a complexity barrier exists that forbids real-time-integration of random gene substitutions sufficient to generate a functional or structural change of any substance (other than single gene controlled traits like overall size or color). It is the irreducible complexity problem again, the difficulty in introducing single functional changes into a highly interdependent system. In complex systems, many things must be changed at the same time to avoid system failure. Thus, far from being the flagship for accidental evolution, bacteria are actually a demonstration of the theory’s failure by revealing its being limited to the extremely simple.

Bacterial DNA will obviously turn out to play a part in evolution, for after all, bacterial and viral DNA appears to be all nature initially had to work with prior to the pivotal Cambrian explosion. However, a random (in the sense of chaotic, accidental, or unguided) DNA substitution mechanism will not turn out to be the engine of evolution for the entire tree of life. This is because complex creatures cannot tolerate it. The sensitivity of complex organisms to unguided alterations to their systems on the scale required to meet the timeline of the Cambrian explosion precludes their surviving such injurious accidental tinkering.

A DNA substitution mechanism of some other kind would seem to have been required, however. Some of the key questions that remain to be answered are how the mechanism works, what other directional factors outside of biology it interacted with, is there more than one such mechanism, how do they interact, what specific roles the different components of the genome play in producing macroevolution, where genuinely random elements enter in, and to what extent the final outcome was certain or flexible. Although these questions are the obvious key to further progress in understanding evolution, a handful of intelligent design scientists are the only ones suggesting research be conducted in these areas; mainstream science is completely ignoring these areas of study, continuing to assume it is all one big accident.

Fallacy #7: Microevolution therefore macroevolution

The problem in deducing macroevolution from microevolution is that the few (apparently) random microevolutionary changes that have been historically cited are trivial compared to the massive overall task evolution must perform. Neo-Darwinists merely assume that many of these simple changes will add up to large highly complex developments. This cannot be demonstrated, and it is no longer even remotely plausible. Computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Peter Kassan tells us that stringing together a trillion or more simple systems of, say, the complexity level of a cockroach will not produce a human being. It will only produce a disgusting colony of cockroaches.

There simply is no demonstrated logical or biological connection between the examples of microevolution known to science and macroevolution. They are events of wholly different kinds. Perhaps Darwin had an excuse for not perceiving this in that he did not have modern genetics or microbiology, but the genetic scientists and microbiologists of our third millennium should darn well know it. Macroevolution, the production of a fundamentally new feature or new creature, requires alterations to as many as hundreds of genes spread across many parts of complex systems. These changes must all be closely orchestrated in real time with other nongenetic systems.

We have absolutely no indications that the phyla barriers could be broken through accumulation of such small truly accidental changes. This has not been demonstrated in the lab, and the neo-Darwinist claim that there is firm theoretical support for it is groundless. No biomechanic based on randomness can be shown to accomplish such large alterations to living system architecture in the time available. The fact is, we currently have no biomechanical process description for macroevolution at all. We know that key components of several major systems must be closely orchestrated in real time, but we don’t know how that orchestration occurs.

There was never much to suggest the accidental thesis when it came to the big changes. Accident was merely a default explanation. We defaulted to accidental evolution because we could see no other explanation for life within the bounds of science, falsely assuming all intelligent design theory must be religion. Now, however, there is much scientific evidence against the accidental view and intelligent design theory has become a valid alternative. This assumes of course that the theory is properly configured to avoid positing supernatural proximate causes or the introduction of religious authorities into science. In saying this, I do not mean that ID rules out God. Quite the contrary, ID leaves conceptual room for God; it merely posits nothing supernatural in its explanatory framework for the mechanics of life. It does posit an intelligence of some kind at the point of ultimate origins, but this does nothing to impugn a purely scientific understanding of the physical processes of life.

The appearance of intelligent design in biology has long been corroborated by the empiric data. Even Richard Dawkins admits the overwhelming “appearance” of design in nature. The initially overwhelming superficial appearance of design has now been much more deeply corroborated by modern genetic science and microbiology in conjunction with Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument from mathematics and physics. The accidental default is no longer viable. It contradicts known evidence, albeit evidence unavailable when the accidental thesis was first proposed.

When design complexity and accidental event improbability range deep into the immense numbers, even requiring stacked exponents, “It just happened by accident” ceases to be a plausible explanation. The accidental thesis was not inane when it was first proposed by Charles Darwin, but it is now. Our task now is to get the culture of science to catch up to the facts of science. Historically, this has been somewhat problematic. With materialist politics aligned heavily against the change, doing something so obvious as altering a theory to match the facts becomes not so simple a matter.

Thus, intelligent design author and noted attorney Phillip Johnson has said that the battle to move evolutionary science to intelligent design theory is not about the facts at all, which are now sufficiently known to establish ID as by far the better form of evolutionary theory. Rather, it has become a rhetorical battle, a fight to explain the meaning and significance of the facts we already know.[8] This is the primary function of the present book, in addition to revealing to the public more of the facts they may not have seen. Neo-Darwinian authors do not present many of these facts to their readers and listeners at all; they don’t lay out the details of how complex life is now known to be. Rather they tend to talk in generalities and vastly over simplify, completely ignoring the math that says an accident could not have done such a thing in trillions upon trillions of the lifetimes of our universe.

Fallacy #8: Once therefore always

Because the fossil record shows some intermediate forms that partially bridge the gap between a few species, classical Darwinists believed it was safe to assume that a complete set of intermediates would eventually be found in all lines of development between all species and all phyla. Such fan shaped bridging by many intermediates was essential to show the gradual accidental change of Darwinian theory. However, that first hope of filling in the fossil record in a manner incontrovertibly in support of the gradualist evolutionary model, once practically unanimous in science, seems now to have dissipated, probably for all time. True, new species are occasionally found, but the overall picture of a broken nongradual process seems here to stay.

The broken character of the fossil lineages is not an isolated piece of evidence against an accidental evolutionary process. It is corroborated by Professor Michael Behe’s observations of irreducible complexity in cells and other biological systems. The extreme complexity that has been discovered in the biochemistry of life, the intricate interrelationships of many systems and parts, strongly suggests that gradualism can’t do the job. This is confirmed by what we see in the fossil record, the relatively abrupt appearance of new features and functions.

Fallacy #9: Meaningless therefore meaningful

Recent research reveals that a meaningless random sequence of a few RNA nucleotides can be strung together by a primitive ribozyme. Ok, fine. That’s interesting. But does this mean, as the neo-Darwinists assume, that whole sets of meaningful genes can be manufactured just as easily? An average gene is a thousand or more nucleotides in length (an average human gene is around 5,000 nucleotides). They must interact with tens of thousands of other genes in a myriad of complex ways. Is a ribozyme going to spew out all of those genes together with closely associated genetic and nongenetic mechanisms for activation, translation, transcription, repair, regulation, replication, error correction and controlled transposition? No—not hardly. Yet, this is what the neo-Darwinist discussions suggest: creating life is as easy as pie. Consider this comment from Robert Hazen in Genesis.

…the enzyme that replicates the RNA genetic information of a phage called Q_β can string nucleotides together into short strands of RNA even in the absence of preexisting RNA. Many short sequences of RNA are formed in this way, some of which replicate faster than others, and replace the slower-replicating sequences: that is, they evolve by natural selection. Moreover, different sequences, or “species,” of RNA replicate faster in different chemical environments. Thus, evolving genes can arise in the absence of preexisting life.[9] (My emphasis)

Notice that I have boldfaced the words “evolve” and “gene.” That’s to emphasize that Hazen’s argument here is a non sequitur, that is, bad logic. What Q_β replicase has been demonstrated to do is not to evolve useful genes at all, but only short meaningless sequences of DNA. Merely demonstrating the survival of the fastest reproducing short meaningless DNA segment does not prove a mechanism for generating something biologically useful. It certainly does not equate to a mechanism capable of creating the entire library of masterpieces represented by the millions of large genomes of the tree of life in conjunction with eight other major systems required to generate life from the base genome.

It is a simple mathematical tautology that whatever reproduces fastest has a survival advantage, other things being equal. While true, this yields neither biological meaning nor progressive evolution, but only a lot more of whatever simple strings are replicating. Thus, the trivial and the meaningless are invalidly equated here with the truly complex and biologically meaningful. While Hazen’s statement that genes can arise in the absence of preexisting life is technically true, it is unhelpful. Without all the other missing pieces of biological systems orchestrated to be in place in close proximity of time, these primitive “genes” are going to do nothing whatsoever to engender and evolve life. They will just be complex chemical compounds lying around until they biodegrade.

More and longer strands of RNA might eventually be achieved, yes; but no mechanism is in place to arrange the nucleotides into meaningful sequences, no ribotype is present to translate them, there are no transpositional and regulatory systems to manage them, nothing to reverse transcript them to DNA, no subroutines to error check and preserve them, nothing to select from the nearly endless possibilities 500 complimentary genes to cover all the bases necessary for the simplest form of independent life. And nothing to physically constrain all the developing events that might in theory provide so many complex components at the same time in near physical proximity.

Yes, in theory, once life is achieved, and once the complex genomes are all operational, an accidental creation of a novel sequence of nucleotides might, rarely, have occurred from ribozyme activity. It could then be productively plugged into an existing system. This would at best only explain a minor variation or two after all the hard part was done.

It is true that differences in the chemical environment will exert differing selective pressures on one kind of DNA strand or the other because, after all, the nucleotide sequences are chemicals. The laws of chemistry therefore apply. But consider, even if the result of raw chemical selection turns out to favor meaningfully configured genes as opposed to merely confirming the fastest replicators of junk (this has not yet been shown), it would mean that the laws of chemistry are biased towards the spontaneous formation of the meaningful genes of life. The existence of such a bias for life in natural law would strongly suggest an intelligent plan to create life. So, contrary to the “accidental” spin neo-Darwinists would prefer us to put on self-organization, the stronger the tendency for life to self-organize, the more evidence we have for intelligent design in nature. The absence of a tendency to self-organize means life could not have formed spontaneously at all.

Fallacy #10: Species level egotism

Species egotism is the unwarranted assumption by members of a species that their particular species is the highest form of life in creation. We humans would not admit that dolphins or monkeys were justified in their belief that they are the highest sentient beings in creation merely because they cannot demonstrate to themselves with their rudimentary language and conceptual skills that humans are a higher life form. They can never prove man as man exists. This is because we are more complex, and because they can’t grasp the higher things we do—when they are higher. (Observing our wanton destruction of the forests and oceans they might present a tough case against us, however, if they had the cognitive tools to do it.) These lower though sentient creatures can reach to no concepts big enough to handle the job. They can encounter us, but they can never comprehend us in full.

This problem could also be phrased as “We humans don’t see it, therefore it can’t exist.” Squirrels, rabbits, birds, dogs and cats don’t see a lot of what the veterinarian sees, and they understand less of what they do see. Nonetheless, the veterinarian is real. They don’t see the pattern of science in what he or she is doing…but there is one. They have the good sense not to deny the existence of the veterinarian entirely just because the veterinarian science of healing is partially mysterious to them. Humans could be missing a pattern of higher intelligence in nature for the same reason: the pattern is beyond them, but nonetheless real.

Neo-Darwinists may respond that human science is unavoidably stuck with human limitations, and this is true as far as it goes. But we could approach science and the teaching of it with a bit more humility, acknowledging that, exactly because all species have their own unique cognitive limitations, there is and will always be insufficient evidence to rule out God or intelligent design conclusively. God’s healing arts may be even more mysterious to humans than a vet’s procedures are to squirrels. We would still be fools to prematurely rule out the possibility. It is even possible that our designer has chosen to veil the truth to certain persons for a time; he has chosen to ignore them until they stop ignoring him.

We cannot prove God’s existence as God with conceptual argument alone because, by definition, our concepts cannot reach far enough to grasp what we are trying to prove. We can, however, encounter him and, therefore, know that he exists as certainly as dolphins and monkeys know that man exists. We can know something further about God: his general superiority. I would not be surprised to learn that dolphins and monkeys have some rudimentary conception about man’s superiority to them, particularly in the circumstances where we have become their caretakers. They can sense that we are controlling the encounter in some ways, and that we offer an affectionately condescending friendship to them. God of course, provides us with very similar cues as he cares for us, if we permit ourselves to notice them.

On the other hand, dolphins may be smarter than man in at least one thing: they do not deny our total existence, and, when offered, they accept our love and care; they love us back. This is something man too often denies to God.

Fallacy #11: One strike and you’re out

Much of mainstream science today rules out intelligent design theory as not being proper science—before ever looking at the current version of the ID argument. This is because, decades ago, some devout fundamentalist-minded religious people proposed the intelligent design argument in forms that referred to religious authority. Those early formulations of ID theory were neither testable nor refutable because, in that particular fundamentalist view of religion, the Word of God spoke even to scientific questions. It could not be contradicted, no matter what the empiric data showed. The fundamentalists, of course, were wrong about this. However, they were not wrong about everything: God is an authority, the authority, in fact. But God can’t be an authority for science by definition. Science’s empiric methods rule that out. So, yes, it’s true; the original version of intelligent design theory was closely entwined with religion, and many of the specific secondary assertions the fundamentalists advanced were wrong.

But, out of concern for fairness, I ask the reader to do something the materialists in modern science refuse to do for you (for political reasons): slow down your thought process, pause just long enough from the rat race of modern life to realize that this antiquated fundamentalist version of intelligent design theory is not the one being advanced by modern ID theorists. Modern ID theory has fully decoupled itself from religion, just as science itself has had to do over the centuries. It is not against religion, but it does not integrate religion into the theory. Mainstream science, being committed to the Marxist-favored philosophy of materialism, is intentionally going to refrain from giving you, the public, quick and easy sound bites updating your understanding of modern ID theory. They know you are too busy to dig deeply into academic questions and that most people these days depend upon the science experts for quick and easy sound bites to stay current. It serves the political purposes of leading evolutionists to leave the public understanding of ID theory in the past. Any sound bites you get from neo-Darwinian evolutionists and other materialistic scientists are going to continue to (incorrectly) tie ID theory to religion. You will have to do your own homework to get the truth here, which is why I have written this book.

Science is supposed to allow modification and improvement of theories; theories and hypotheses are not to be eternally condemned to repeating their initial mistakes. Yet, because of ID’s historical antecedents, which, admittedly, were genuinely connected with religion, neo-Darwinists today argue that no intelligent design argument can ever be formed any differently than those first failed attempts 100 years ago. According to the neo-Darwinists, intelligent design theory may never be modified; it will always be referring to God’s authority (and therefore always be nonscientific). Poppycock! Since when have scientific hypotheses, or philosophical ones for that matter, been impossible to modify? That is what the words “theory” and “hypothesis” mean, after all: something less than a confirmed unchangeable fact. The spirit and method of science implies the inherent right to modify a theory to improve it. Science is a learning process that permits and encourages theoretical growth—at least it used to be.

Our conclusion: the Darwinists’ incessant retranslation of modern American intelligent design theory back into a 100-year-old European religious view that is now an anachronistic relic is in stark contravention of both the current definition of ID theory and the method of science itself. Modern ID theory has since removed all assertions about God—period. Modern ID theory invokes no religious concepts or authorities whatsoever, and now has many testable implications (see Appendices 3 & 5). ID theory continues to employ the same name because the most fundamental underlying concept of the theory is precisely that, intelligent design.

Science’s refusal to allow ID theory to amend itself is quite odd, really, when you stop and think about it. Science has never, ever, done that. All the while neo-Darwinists nonchalantly change a plethora of major and minor aspects of their own theory with each passing decade. They throw out refuted tenets; they add a variety of theoretical embellishments; and they generally upgrade, modify, and polish neo-Darwinian evolution at will (not that it has done them any good ☺).

The history of Darwinian thought is replete with failed versions of evolution freely amended. Darwin himself was wrong (at least modern science believes he was wrong) in believing that acquired characteristics could be inherited,[10] as did Lamarck. This tenet was later dropped from evolutionary theory. Interestingly, though the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics was long considered disproved, it is now making a limited come back. Naïve mutationism has been similarly dropped from the theory of evolution; punctuated equilibrium and random drift have been added, and so on. Thus, the theory of evolution is permitted to change in a variety of ways, even back and forth on the same point if the evolving data so requires.

The entire history of science, in fact, is filled with the option to amend a theory in order to progress it that neo-Darwinists (and even the federal courts) now irrationally deny to intelligent design theory. This, despite the fact that the ability to admit a mistake has always been taught as an axiomatic virtue of science, if not the virtue. Darwinists have accomplished hundreds of changes to neo-Darwinian theory over the past 150 years, yet ID theory is not permitted even one change? Clearly the neo-Darwinist position that ID theory could not be modified to remove the religious tenets is propaganda and not science, for science has had to do the exact same thing.

Richard G. Olson tells us in his recent book Science and Religion, 1450-1900: From Copernicus to Darwin, that science and religion started out fully enmeshed as a unified explanation of nature and life.[11] Science has since dropped God from its explanations, but science itself initially asserted God as an explanation for certain features of nature, especially the origin of life. Darwin did the very thing in the Origin of Species, which monumental classic stands unamended on this point to this very day. The “Creator” is cited by Darwin as the source of the origin of life and natural law.[12] Thus, the neo-Darwinists’ own version of Darwinian theory has had to go through the exact same decoupling transition to remove the tenet of God that most of mainstream science now denies to intelligent design theory! This is a blatant double standard.

Science only gradually modified its explanations to be God-free through a dynamic event process spanning practically the entire history of science up to 1900.

In England in the early 1830’s, the official Church of England theology was predominantly rationalist, and the outstanding scientists were also religious men, so that there had been no serious questioning of the eighteenth-century assumption that science is the handmaid of religion, since it leads men to appreciate “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” And as late as 1837, when the distinguished geologist Adam Sedgwick was Chairman of the British Association (for the advancement of scientific research), he concluded its annual meeting by declaring that if he found his science [to] “interfere in any of its tenets with the representations of doctrines of Scripture, he would dash it to the ground.”[13]

How can science fairly deny to intelligent design theory the right to make the same conceptual evolution the whole of the rest of science has undergone? Moreover, if advancing beyond the initial prejudice for God is commendable as the neo-Darwinists all say it is, why don’t they allow and even encourage intelligent design theory to do it? If their concern were solely the quality of science being practiced across the board, they would indorse such an improvement in ID theory. But if their concern is to advance the Marxist cause by not allowing a theory that opens the door to God’s existence on the grounds of pure science, their obstructive tactics make more sense.

Bottom line? The necessary amendments requisite to making ID theory properly scientific have long been made. These are entered into the published record via a plethora of excellent books by the primary intelligent design authors, notably William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and Phillip Johnson. Yet mainstream science stubbornly refuses to admit that ID theory is anything but disguised religion. One strike and you’re out. Douglas Axe, whose amino acid research forms the foundation for the probability argument I present here, puts it this way: “If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of science."[14] I would go further to say that we have a politically biased definition, one biased in favor of Marxist materialism.

In endorsing this intellectual travesty, current spokespersons for evolutionary science are doing a sterling job of proving the long-lived aphorism that the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. One might have borne up well enough under the neo-Darwinists’ loss of prestige, integrity and credibility in masquerading such foolish propaganda as science, but having the federal courts elect to join them in the Kitzmiller decision comes as a blow. This is not only a blow to science but a blow to democracy, freedom of religion, and freedom of thought.[15]

We in Western democracies are going to have to wake up from our initial infatuation with the (theoretical) purity of science and the dangerous naiveté that came with it. In theory, the motivations of scientists are pure by definition, yes. But once a large cross-section of humanity gets involved with something it rarely remains pure for long: politics uber alles. Marxists do not hold science in such an esteemed position. They are fully willing to subvert the purity of science to political objectives. The end justifies the means.

Marxist agents, called “agents of influence,” have long been at work manipulating the public mindset in favor of materialism, and they certainly have maintained a network of university professors and popular writers to further their goals in this area. Over the centuries Marxist agents of influence have succeeded so well that the prevailing view in modern science is strongly biased towards materialism, a philosophy/worldview very friendly to the Marxist political agenda. With Russia’s move to democracy the network of such agents has probably declined due to funding reductions, but true believers remain among Western scientists and intellectuals, and China may have picked up the task of supporting portions of the existing network. Whatever may remain of such a Marxist propaganda team within academic circles I leave to the reader to discern for his or her self. In large part the damage has been done. Mainstream science is presently very heavily biased towards materialism. The only antidote is to do your own homework.

Fallacy #12: Men and women of faith can’t do science without contaminating it with their personal philosophies and religions (but everyone else can).

Critiques of intelligent design authors made by neo-Darwinist pundits on the Web and in print point out that some of the primary intelligent design authors have openly acknowledged their Christian faith. Therefore, the critics claim, when Christians or other believers do science it must be religion masquerading as science. Even Niles Eldredge, the Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, makes this absurd, prejudiced, and insulting claim in his book Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. “In a further shameless hypocritical indulgence, creationists will tell you with a straight face that, by making the case for an Intelligent Designer, they don’t necessarily mean God. Creationist’s faith in the gullibility of their fellow citizens seems boundless.”[16]

This may come as news to Eldredge, but Christians by definition of the core beliefs of their faith do not try to deceive; it is against their religion. Furthermore, as a simple matter of the meaning of the words an intelligent designer doesn’t have to be God. I think it is Eldredge’s faith in our gullibility that is boundless, or his faith in materialism. His claim is patently absurd on the surface. The only thing shameless in the evolutionary debate is the neo-Darwinists flagrant reconstruction of what intelligent design theory actually says. Very few, if any, modern ID theorists are creationists, in the sense of being proponents of Creation Science, which reads Genesis literally and asserts that the Bible gives concrete information about the origin of the world that is relevant to science. The Catholic Church does not read the creation story of Genesis in this literal way and allows that the theory of evolution is true in general terms, though not the theory of accidental evolution.

Curator or not, Eldredge, and like-minded Darwinists, in questioning the objectivity of Christians who do science, appear to have forgotten their history of science. Blaise Pascal, a famous French scientist, invented the first computer. He was a devout Catholic who had sewn the date of his conversion to Christ and a description of the experience into the liner of his jacket. Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, was a very devout Christian. Rene Descartes, mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, founder of the Cartesian coordinate system, as famous as anyone in science, was a Christian as well. Darwinists have not questioned the objectivity of the science of these men. Why not? Because there is no propaganda value in maligning someone the public has already accepted. Here we see that the neo-Darwinists are not in the business of making consistent logical arguments; they are in the business of political propaganda.

One can, and routinely does, put faith-driven or philosophical preconceptions aside to practice an objective discipline like science, law or politics (well, at least science and law). This is especially true in science, and known to be so. Science, in fact, is famous for this principle of objectivity. It is why it is called a discipline. Humans have the ability to do this; they have the ability to be objective, though they may elect not to be.

Noted science and religion writer, Larry Witham, reports that “…four in ten ranking scientists can investigate nature and believe in a personal God.”[17] A notable case in point is physicist John Polkinghorne, Fellow of the Royal Society, former Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics and President of Queens College, Cambridge. Polkinghorne is an ordained priest in the Church of England. He has written a brief but perceptive book on the subject of faith and science based upon his 1993 Gifford lectures, entitled The Faith of a Physicist, which proves our point nicely (and quite a few other perceptive books on related topics).[18] A scientist can be a believer, and a believer can do unbiased science.

Polkinghorne echoes the astute English philosopher Mary Midgley, who teaches us in her critical tour de force, Evolution as a Religion, that any rational being who hopes to navigate his world must hold a metaphysic, a worldview, of one sort or another, conscious or subconscious. A worldview is an unavoidable requirement to rationally navigate our planet and the rich internal realm of human experience.[19] The neo-Darwinist assertion that their own worldview preferences never contaminate their science while a Christian’s faith must always contaminate theirs is plainly indefensible.

Lest we forget, the primary struggle of our modern era has been between Marxist materialism and the God-fearing religions such as Christianity and Islam. To have neo-Darwinists constantly raising alarms about prejudice creeping into science form one side of this struggle and one side only is more than a little suspect. What neo-Darwinists fail to mention is that scientists with the materialist worldview are also at risk for exhibiting a personal bias in their science. Neo-Darwinists themselves appear to be the most frequent violators in asserting the worldview of materialism in science books. At least Christians are honest enough to admit that they have a religion.

Scientists can, of course, bring a prejudice for their personal beliefs into their work from any source (including Marxism), not just religion—though the good ones will not. Kenneth Richard Samples points out to us on the Reasons to Believe Website, the track record of Christians in science is not just good; Christians are literally the very founders of science.

The intellectual climate that gave rise to modern science (roughly three centuries ago) was decisively shaped by Christianity. Not only were most of the founding fathers of science themselves devout Christians (including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and Pascal), but the Christian worldview provided a basis for modern science both to emerge and to flourish. Christian theism affirmed that an infinite, eternal, and personal God created the world ex nihilo. The creation, reflecting the rational nature of the Creator, was therefore orderly and uniform. Further, humankind was uniquely created in God's image (Gen. 1:26-7), thus capable of reasoning and of discovering the intelligibility of the created order. In effect, the Christian worldview supported the underlying principles that made scientific inquiry possible and desirable.[20]

On the Exploring Christianity Website, Dick Tripp, tells us that the list of Christians who were important to science goes much further. He cites famous Christian scientists who were literally the founders of their branch of science (29 branches of science are given including calculus, chemistry, electromagnetics, anatomy, antiseptic surgery, and so on). These Christian fathers of science include Boyle, Kepler, Newton, Pasteur, Lister, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin, Pascal, Riemann, Mendel, and others.[21] The list is further expanded on the Wikipedia Internet Encyclopedia Website.

Obviously, since there are 100 million Catholics alone in the United States, many of our current scientists are believers in God. To cite one famous example, Francis S. Collins, is one of the nation’s leading geneticists, now director of the National Institute of Health under President Obama. He was head of the Human Genome Project for fifteen years. Collins has also recently written an excellent book relevant to our concerns here in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Catholics worldwide comprise almost a billion believers. There must be at least as many Protestants, all denominations combined. Are neo-Darwinists really proposing that we should exclude over two billion people from doing science? And what about the Muslims, Hindis, and Buddhists? How can we be sure they aren’t doing religion in place of science? Please…. I have never caught a Christian doing bad science on purpose to try to influence others in the direction of their faith. No doubt such has occurred due to subconscious bias, however. But much of the inane neo-Darwinian literature can only be explained as (closet) Marxists intentionally doing bad science to steer people away from belief in God, which belief is a major stumbling block to the spread of the Marxist political system.

Many neo-Darwinists and other materialist thinkers in science ascribe to a personal worldview that is called scientism. This is essentially materialism dressed up in scientific clothes. The false religion of scientism underlies much of what neo-Darwinism asserts. Scientism goes so far beyond the established facts as to be a matter of personal faith.[22] Scientism, essentially the adopted son of Marxism, is a very dangerous social philosophy. It leaves the door wide open for the abolishment of human rights in favor of social and behavioral conditioning, human experimentation, unbounded genetic engineering, forced labor, government directed career choices, speech and thought control, and absolutely anything else that can be given a pseudo-scientific gloss of “for the good of humanity.”

This is the reason Christians currently find themselves compelled to press for fair treatment of origins of life and evolutionary theories in the classroom. It is not because Christians are attempting to prejudice science with their religion, it is because they are trying to stop neo-Darwinists from prejudicing science with their religion, an atheistic materialism of the scientistic variety heavily influenced by Marxism, and frequently still in its service. Until the full Church gets onboard with this struggle for objectivity in the classroom, our students will not hear an unbiased presentation of the issues of life’s origin and development.

To date, Catholics have been noticeably absent from this fight. I therefore exhort Catholics and all Christians to study the issues closely and to begin to carry their share of the burden of social activism on this topic. Either God-neutral evolution must be taught exclusively, or, if atheism and materialism are to be allowed as philosophical adjuncts to evolutionary theory in the classroom, then theistic evolution must be permitted as well. Intelligent design theory itself is God-neutral and should be allowed in any case. ID is currently being excluded from classrooms based upon the materialist political lobby having succeeded in erroneously redefining ID as religion. Unfortunately, our federal courts have been misled into doing the same thing. Much depends upon the outcome of this battle to present a balanced worldview to our science students. It may have surprisingly drastic implications. Society’s continued ability to foster an appreciation of the inherent value of human life, human dignity, and to preserve human rights generally (especially the right to life of unborn children) is placed in direct jeopardy by the illicit spread of materialist/scientist/Marxist philosophy through the science classroom. In prejudicing our children’s education towards atheism we run the risk of our society moving more and more towards a Marxist worldview, not to mention losing God’s blessings on our nation.

Fallacy #13: Now ET exists, now he doesn’t

Modern science is spending millions looking for ET in outer space.[23] Niles Eldredge, however, and other neo-Darwinists insist that ET can be ruled out as the intelligent designer of Earth’s life. How is it they know this when we have only begun to look?

Since 1995, astronomers have been discovering these extrasolar planets and now know of more than three hundred. As observational techniques have been refined and the data continuously taken, so smaller and smaller planets have been discovered.

Now, with CNES-ESA's COROT and NASA's Kepler missions, the prospect of discovering Earth-sized worlds in Earth-like orbits around other stars is better than ever. "We are now on the verge of finding Earth-like planets," says Grinspoon.[24]

Our leading physicists do not rule out ET. Why, the very co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, espouses the theory that life was sent here to Earth from an alien civilization. This theory is called directed panspermia. Crick’s paper on the subject, written with noted origins of life researcher Leslie Orgel, is available free online from the National Library of Medicine (PDF). Astrobiology Magazine also has an excellent online article, "Francis Crick Remembered," discussing Crick’s life and career and the directed panspermia hypothesis.[25]

While there is clearly no way to rule out the ET hypothesis on a scientific basis, in neo-Darwinist literature a real possibility for ET exists only when it serves the purpose of materialistic science. Within the context of cosmology and anthropology the possibility of ET is readily admitted by neo-Darwinists apparently because the existence of extraterrestrials is seen by many to contradict the biblical worldview. They will admit ET while casting aspersion on the literal reading of the Bible, but ET suddenly goes away when intelligent design theorists claim there is a physical candidate for the intelligent designer of life, namely ET. Allowing this would make ID theory fall squarely into the accepted realm of science where it cannot be dismissed as disguised religion. In switching positions on ET when it serves their political purpose, the materialists contradict themselves, revealing a prejudice against intelligent design theory, and revealing that they are incapable of doing objective science where their personal philosophy of materialism is concerned.

In denying the possibility of ET neo-Darwinists may also be trying to save the argument from imperfection (see Fallacy #24 below), that is, the argument that God would never make a world with a serious flaw in it. If neo-Darwinists have to admit ET as a possible designer of life, they lose the argument from imperfection for the simple reason that ET need not be perfect. While wishing perfection, perhaps, ET may not be far enough advanced in science to achieve it.

We humans, of course, are intelligent designers in our own right. We are already doing rudimentary genetic engineering and biotic machine construction. We have attempted to synthesize life from chemicals (and failed). If our results are flawed, why must ET be perfect? Since neo-Darwinists are forced by incontrovertible evidence to admit the appearance of design, they need the argument from imperfection to defend their position. They need to be able to say that as a matter of fact there is no designer of life despite so many visible indications that there is one because God is the only possible designer and his works would always be perfect. As it turns out, the argument from imperfection doesn’t work in any case, not against ET, and not against God. This is demonstrated in fallacies 23, 24 & 25 below.

What is perfect for a designer’s purpose need not be perfect from the point of view of the things created. One reason for this among many is that the creator may be punishing the thing created for past sins, holding them unworthy of a perfect creation until they have repented, done penance, and been redeemed/purified. Another is that the imperfect stage is exactly that, an intermediate point in a long-term creation process that requires the imperfect intermediate world for rehab and purification. The logical flaw in the neo-Darwinists case here is the error of judging a creation while it is still a work in progress, evaluating a work prior to its completion. Again, such an elementary mistake serves nothing in science, but only facilitates the Marxist/materialist cause by giving rhetorical ammunition for the agents of influence to use to misdirect the public away from God or intelligent design.

Those readers who have stayed with the evolution debate through the years will have observed that the neo-Darwinists have no qualms about taking their political yardage where and when they can get it, yardage for atheistic materialism. They are willing to sacrifice intellectual and scientific integrity to influence public thinking “forward” towards the Marxist/materialist worldview. They apparently assume that most people won’t read widely enough to catch them contradicting themselves in different venues. They don’t mind being embarrassed in the eyes of the minority who do their homework so long as they can influence the majority towards the achievement of the Marxist social revisionist agenda.

[Note: For those interested in all aspects of the ET question, Fallacy #16 below and Appendix 7 both discuss SETI and its logical affinity to the intelligent design argument at greater length.]

Fallacy #14: Intelligent design = biblical creationism (It doesn’t)

ID theorists tell us straight out that their theory is not biblical creationism. Biblical creationists agree: the two theories are not the same. Carl Weiland, speaking for the Creation Science movement at the Answers in Genesis Website, explicitly disavows that Creation Science and intelligent design theory are two names for the same theory, explaining in concrete terms why the two are absolutely distinct. (See his paper “Views on the Intelligent Design Movement"

The neo-Darwinists, however, claim to know better than the authors of either movement what those two movements are about. Richard Dawkins makes this blatant confusion in his book, A Devil’s Chaplain:

…I am proposing that you might consider uniting with me (no need to involve others) in signing a short letter…explaining publicly why we do not debate creationists (including the ‘Intelligent Design’ euphemism for creationists) and encouraging other evolutionary biologists to follow suit.^[26]

[Given 100 or more glaring logical fallacies in the neo-Darwinist argument, it is easy to understand why Dawkins refuses to debate anyone.]

The differences between intelligent design theory and the Creation Science theory are clear, substantial, and simple. These differences have been amply pointed out in a myriad of published works so that Dawkins has no excuse for blurring the distinction. In the event that anyone remains unclear about the difference between Creation Science and intelligent design theory, I devote a short appendix to drawing the distinction at Appendix 5. But I repeat the primary differences here in brief.

Creation Science claims a young earth, a relatively quick creation of all species in their final form at a single point in time (6 days at the beginning), and asserts that God is certainly the creator. In contrast, intelligent design theory allows that life forms developed over millions of years. ID theorists allow and/or generally assume with mainstream science that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and claims only that an intelligent designer of some kind, maybe God, maybe ET, maybe someone or something we have yet to discover, is the designer of life. ID theory does not rule out God, but the assertion of God as the certain creator of life is not part of ID theory. Yet Dawkins, Niles Eldredge and Douglas Futuyma et al., even the AAAS and NAS, stubbornly insist that the two theories are the same when they are visibly and radically different. This is a mistake a 4^th grader could catch!

Why do distinguished scientists make such a simple error? I propose that Marxist politics is the answer, but it is not the only possibility. Dr. David Faust has proposed that, when it comes to higher level judgmental tasks, intricate logical evaluations, and the manipulation of complicated abstract conceptual relationships, scientists as a group simply do not perform well.^[27] Translated: when it comes to abstract logic and high-level judgments scientists just don’t get it. Perhaps their heads are so deeply buried in the data that they “can’t see the forest for the trees,” as it were; perhaps a conscious or subconscious bias for materialism is at work; or perhaps their brains, while being extraordinarily gifted in the areas of maintaining an enormous data repository in their memory and performing the basic tasks of science, are weakly endowed in the area of abstract logical analysis.

For whatever reason, it is clear that modern science has remained largely oblivious to the larger patterns and logic for intelligent design that are undeniably present, and that it simply refuses to disconnect ID theory from its religious antecedents. For some scientists, this aversion to God-scented concepts may reach the level of a genuine phobia, like a little old lady avoiding a tuberculosis ward. The closest thing you and I can feel for such an aversion is an intuitive recognition of the dangers of introducing our children to liberal arguments for moral relativism, where anyone’s thinking preferences are affirmed as fundamentally as good as anyone else’s—by definition, as an axiom of socio-political philosophy. To the immature mind, such nonsense can have a strange attraction and be truly and perniciously contagious. Thus, we Christians justifiably fear for our children’s exposure to such moral heresies. “Don’t listen to them,” we say, out of raw fear of the infection spreading into our loved ones.

We don’t bother to engage in seminar-level refutations to convince our children of the dangers in such modes of thought. We don’t go out of our way to give the “heresies” a full hearing out of a concern for intellectual fairness to proponents of moral relativism. We think we already know the truth. It is dangerous bunk, our time is valuable, and we do not wish to dignify such crap with an academic response. We are, in fact, genuinely afraid of it, afraid the ideological infection will harm our sons and daughters. Perhaps this is the way some materialist scientists feel about any concept, valid or invalid, that opens the door to God. They genuinely believe that society would be better off God-less, better off without religion in any form whatsoever. Thus, they are oblivious to the question of whether intelligent design theory is genuine science or not; they just don’t want it to be heard.

For our part, should a concrete threat of a moral relativist takeover of society arise, we would fervently rise to the occasion and do battle against relativism as something requisite to the survival of society itself. Amid our fervor, we could conceivably miss the occasional point of sound logic that occurs on the other side of the debate. Some well-meaning scientists apparently hold a similar fervor for scientism/atheistic materialism. They truly believe that they, the scientists, are the saviors of society (not Christ), and materialist science is their flaming sword. Science is seen as emancipating humankind from the realm of superstition, within which category neo-Darwinists have unthinkingly included authentic faith in God, for which they blame many of the wars and atrocities that have occurred through history.

Basic human psychology is the problem here; prejudice is not unique to materialists. People of faith do tend to have their own prejudices. Humans on either side of any debate concerning what is fundamentally best for society can have a blind spot for arguments that, while valid, nonetheless set off their psychological defense mechanisms. While most of us are not strangers to the risk of prejudice, we have been so naively in love with science that we have subconsciously assumed that science was immune from such error. It is not.

Then there is additional risk of conscious bias to consider. Minus a subconscious psychological bias, or minus the simple absence of good analytical judgment such as Dr. Faust posits, one assumes that such glaring mistakes would only be risked for an important strategic political reason. In the case of the neo-Darwinist prejudice against ID theory, the reason apparently is that if Darwinists once admit that intelligent design theory is science and not religion, then students and the public will begin to evaluate the full data and evidential components of the intelligent design case much more closely and discover its true strength. They will also come to realize that after decades of science ballyhooing accidental evolution as the best science will ever have to offer we find that there is absolutely no evidence for the accidental thesis. Science itself, in addition to the psuedo religions of scientism and Marxist political philosophy, all stand to lose a great deal of face. They too enthusiastically endorsed something that now turns out to be devoid of any substantial scientific or intellectual merit.

The credibility of mainstream science is on the line right along with the fervently held false religions of many scientists. Many modern evolutionists have staunchly committed their personal credibility to neo-Darwinian evolution, and more than a few to materialism and atheism. Their reputations are staked on the claim that science itself argues against God and that ID theory is nothing but bogus pseudoscience. In trying to postpone public acceptance of ID theory, they may be hoping to buy time for a gradual and silent social transition away from the accidental worldview if such is inevitable, one that is nonattributive, holding no one accountable for past mistakes. This avoids a straightforward admission of errors so grievous that it would affect their personal reputations as academic professionals catastrophically.

Should science admit the intelligent design hypothesis to be scientific (which it is), the strength of the case for ID theory would leave materialist scientists in the uncomfortable situation of having to admit that science supports the case for God as far as science can legitimately take that case. Atheistic/materialism would then stand to lose substantial political ground with the public. The long-fostered myth that science heavily argues for materialism and atheism is a huge cornerstone of the larger Marxist struggle for the hearts and minds of the public, and the Marxist segment of the neo-Darwinian community naturally abhors losing it.

Marxists do not view science so much as a professional academic pursuit that must maintain its objectivity at all cost as a sociological battlefield. Here the aim is to control the thinking of the masses by hook or crook. So long as they win the public debate, and the rank and file member of society is further led toward the materialist system of thought, Marxist scientists don’t care if they have to spew absolute nonsense all day long every day. If that is what it takes to create an “enlightened” society free of religion so be it; the end justifies the means.

Yes, it is true. We have materialist philosophers masquerading as scientists. To the naked eye, they are doing science, even impressively so. But they have no real respect for the charter and integrity of science; they only feign that respect to win propaganda points with the public. They will give the integrity of science plenty of lip service because that is what it takes to rise within the professional community, and, in fairness, many of them will honor science’s standards of integrity when they can. But when scientific integrity must be sacrificed for materialist social progress they have no qualms in subjugating the integrity of their science to their political agenda.

We have taken the long way home here, but it could not be helped. The mistaken confusion of intelligent design theory with biblical creationism is a fiction intentionally cultivated by materialists in mainstream science to keep the public from seeing the strength of the intelligent design case.

Again, in sum, Intelligent design theory has only one tenet:

· Some form of intelligent designer is necessary to explain the complex designs of life and the complex system of physical laws, constants, and constraints that have given rise to complex lifeforms. ID theory does not say who or what the intelligent designer is. It does not say whether he/she/it or they are natural or supernatural. It only says that there must be a designer (see the next fallacy, #15).

Biblical creationism says much more and is much more specific. Although they may vary in their formulation, the main tenets of biblical creationism generally include:

· A young Earth

· 6-day creation

· The book of Genesis as a literal account of the events of the world’s creation that is tractable to science

· The assumption that the correct timeline for creation and man’s early history may be computed from purely biblical sources, that a specific master chronology of early human history can be accurately constructed with confidence based upon genealogies of the biblical patriarch families traceable from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob back to Adam

· The God of the Bible, Yahweh, is certainly the creator of our world and the lifeforms in it.

Fallacy #15: Any intelligent designer must be God

Just not true. What makes the neo-Darwinists (who are predominately materialists) so certain there are no physical beings intermediate between ourselves and God (ET for example), or even that there is not a physical God—are they taking religion’s word for it? How would a group of atheistic materialists arrive at such an opinion in the first place except by species egotism? Perhaps it is the same egotism that drives them to say that they know exactly what God would or would not do with his world (as we see in Fallacies 23, 24, 25 & 26 below). Are atheists the world’s greatest expert on God now? And have the neo-Darwinists looked through all the galaxies, dimensions and, potentially, other universes (as some famous physicists have postulated) and found them devoid of advance life? No, they haven’t. They apparently haven’t even looked through any recent books on intelligent design since the 1960’s!

Theories of extraterrestrial intervention are not new (Francis Crick, Fred Hoyle, duh…?) For all science knows, as they are just beginning the search for life on other planets,^[28] any number of superior physical beings could exist. Science currently makes the well-evidenced assumption that there are thousands of habitable planets in the universe, probably millions. The more we look into space, the more evidence for the possibility of life on other planets we are finding. Water has been found on the moon and on Mars after decades of assuming there would probably be none. We launched a new explorer vehicle to Mars to look for microscopic life in Nov 2011. Clearly science has not ruled out the existence of other intelligent life in the Universe.

This poses a problem for the neo-Darwinists because in order to justify their mistaken equivocation of intelligent design theory and biblical creation science they must maintain that there are really no other plausible options for the intelligent designer than God. If the intelligent designer must be God, then, they (also mistakenly) say, intelligent design theory must be religion. But if the intelligent designer need not be God, their argument against ID theory falls apart.

Noted physicists have recently hypothesized that Earth’s lifeforms, and potentially even our entire universe, are the product of the laboratories of an advanced civilization. Strangely, in the view of some neo-Darwinian evolutionists, evolutionary biologists are not allowed to make the same hypothesis. Why do neo-Darwinian evolutionists feel compelled to employ such a flagrant double standard? It really does seem to be merely a desperate ploy by the politically motivated proponents of a failed accidental worldview. Marxists and their ideological sympathizers in science are desperately grappling to hold on to the atheist/materialist real politic. Intentionally retarding scientific progress with propaganda, intellectual foot dragging if you will, may be a time-honored Marxist tactic to change society, but it is not a proper method of science. Once we put the propaganda aside, we see that God is not the only candidate for the intelligent designer, and that intelligent design theory cannot be dismissed as disguised religion.

Fallacy #16: Scientific evidence can never point to an intelligent designer of life, but it can (on the same logic) point to intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe (SETI)

Science’s current search for extraterrestrial life uses artificiality as its criterion for validating a sign, signal, or artifact as being of intelligent extraterrestrial origin. At times, the SETI search has included the set of prime numbers occurring within the sequence of 1 through 101 inclusive.^[29] Astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute points out that SETI is currently only looking for a simpler kind of signal: a monotonous drone-like signal thought to be an economical way to send a signal across vast interstellar distances. All that is required for this kind of signal to be a reliable indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence is that it be an occurrence that nature is known to be incapable of spontaneously producing within the context in which the signal originates. SETI will accept the simplest signal as a valid indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence providing only that the artificiality criterion is satisfied.

For this reason, Shostak asserts that the analogy between intelligent design logic (which he assumes is focused exclusively upon extreme complexity) and the SETI criterion does not hold. Shostak is wrong about this for two reasons. First, as Appendix 7 further explains, the existence of extreme complexity in the form of science, technology and intelligent living biological systems on the originating end is a prerequisite for the production of the artificial signal SETI is looking for, no matter how simple the signal itself may be. Otherwise, the criterion wouldn’t serve its purpose of being a reliable indicator of intelligent life, which is a form of extreme complexity. Second, Shostak’s argument implies both that intelligent design theory could not properly use evidence analogous to the simple monotonous signal that SETI has currently targeted, that is, that ID cannot use artificiality, and that, conversely, SETI cannot use certain kinds of complexity. Both of these implied assumptions are false.

By logical axiom, if intelligence is a necessary condition for the origination of a simple artificial signal, then the presence of that artificial signal is a sufficient indicator of the presence of the intelligence. Thus, intelligent design theory can legitimately use artificiality as one of its forms of evidence. In addition, because we have now done rudimentary construction of simple machines using biotic components, not everything made of natural biotic components can be safely assumed to be non-artificial. This reality forces us to throw out our prior assumption that nothing in nature could be artificial, and, more specifically, the incorrect assumption that because living things are composed of biotic materials they could not be artificial.

There is a strong straightforward case that Earth’s life forms are artificial. The genetic code of life is visibly a code, it qualifies as a language with syntax and semantics, i.e., rules for meaningful expression, and the gene regulation systems, at least in animals, operate on a system of Boolean logic. An ordered system of language or an axiomatic system of symbolic logic just is an objective indication of intelligent design on both standards: artificiality and complexity. Linguistic, logical, or mathematical systems of symbols are in fact the prototypical hallmark of civilization, the classic example of artificiality.

When properly understood, the intelligent design argument is not merely about complexity, but also truly about artificiality in very much the same way as Shostak describes the current SETI search stratagem. Professor Michael Behe’s ID argument is concerned with the irreducible complexity of the cell and other biological components. Irreducible complexity entails artificiality because nature appears incapable of spontaneously placing the multiple complex parts of eukaryotic cells and other anatomical systems of life into position in such a very closely orchestrated way sufficient to get the darn things to work. Once again, the definition of artificiality is that if nature cannot be demonstrated capable of spontaneously generating the product in a given context that product may be assumed to be artificial.

William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument for intelligent design is an instance of artificiality as well, albeit a very large one. The research exhaustion argument absolutely parallels the current SETI artificiality criterion in saying that a random or accidental natural process could not have spontaneously generated life within a certain demonstrable context, namely, within the time and physical resource limits established by the age of our universe (see Appendix 2).

Thus, although the historical strategies of SETI and intelligent design scientists have not overlapped as a matter of historical fact regarding the emphasis employed in their most publicized endeavors, they do overlap as a matter of optionally useable logic. In theory the alternative logics available for use by ID and SETI are perfectly co-extensive. Criteria for either may include all of the same basic types of evidence. This is as it must be, for they both purport to be giving evidence for precisely the same thing: intelligence as the source of a body of empiric observations. Once practical issues are dispensed with, either artificiality or complexity of certain kinds may be used as a legitimate criterion for indicating both the presence of intelligent design in biology and the presence of intelligent life in space.

In human experience, no system created by an intelligence exceeds the intelligence of its creator, though it may be able to do certain tasks faster or have a greater bulk data storage capacity than its creator. No created computational device can solve problems or perform analytical tasks qualitatively different from those its creator can solve or perform. Any differences are purely quantitative. This rule argues against accident as the source of life because we have never seen an accident, a process wholly devoid of intelligence, create an intelligent system or any other kind of highly complex design—not one. Furthermore, Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument tells us an accident in our universe could not have made the complex life forms we see here because there is insufficient time and particle resources available in the history of universe to do it. Therefore, not only does the existence of biological complexity point to an intelligent designer of life, but all of our experience says that biological intelligence must be artificial.

Supercomputers are good workhorses. They can do routine calculations so large that we cannot do them in our head, or quickly on paper. Supercomputers, however, cannot manipulate abstract concepts whole as humans do; they can only compute using the binary number system. Nor can they perform tasks of the type involved in human emotional/spiritual experience. They cannot make moral value judgments. It is commonly assumed that computers far exceed the complexity of natural systems, but this is a carefully constructed lie. The complexity of our best computer networks do not approach the complexity of the neuron network of the human brain and nervous system. Sir Roger Penrose has recently proposed models of brain activity for complex noncomputational tasks that invoke networks of activity occurring at the level of quantum mechanics.

Even the simplest component of the ‘dumb” parts of our bodies, a single protein, contains an information bearing complexity in its three dimensional folded structure that outdistances the computational ability of the average computer in real time by a factor of 86,400,000,000,000 to 1!^[30] The superiority of living systems’ information management capacity over our own best efforts with computers is another strong prima facie indicator of artificiality in biological systems. Contrary to Seth Shostak’s assertions, then, there is a great similarity between the arguments of SETI and ID theory.

Fallacy #17: Scientific evidence can never point to anything nonphysical (unless God can definitely be ruled out, then, of course, it’s OK) [31]

Wrong again: scientific evidence has already done this in the Big Bang cosmological theory and in Freudian, Jungian, and other schools of psychology/psychiatry. The events prior to Planck time, that is, events prior to the first fraction of the first second of our universe’s existence, are considered by science to be a singularity, an anomaly contrary to, and prior to, the laws of physics. That singularity is a nonphysical event, by definition. Natural law did not come into being until later (a split second later, but later nonetheless). One may try to dodge the inevitable conclusion here by terming the Big Bang “aphysical” or “pre-physical,” but it is also nonphysical because it accomplished what is impossible for the physical to accomplish. Therefore, here in the most prominent of all scientific examples, the origin of the entire universe, physical evidence does point to something nonphysical.

Nothing in the original charter of science rules out the possibility that scientific evidence and rational argument can point to the existence of something nonphysical. The scope and extension of logical inference is determined in any case and in every case by the axiomatic rules of logic alone. Personally preferred metaphysics, worldviews, or, God forbid, social politics, need not apply. If the available data and sound logic lead to the existence of the nonphysical, then that is where science should go.

Until the nineteenth century, most scientists as well as theologians accepted Paley’s design argument. Some scientists of the Paley/Darwin era even included God as part of scientific explanation, placing him, naturally enough, at the very origin of things. Darwin himself did this in the Origin of Species. Darwin posited God as the source of the initial breath of life that started evolution along on its course. Placing God’s involvement at the very beginning of things in this manner caused no problems for scientific method whatsoever. Modern science, however, disallows this valid scientific and philosophical move of Darwin’s, while at the same time hailing him as one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of all time, if not the greatest. Such selectivity reveals mainstream science’s bias towards materialism. Darwin is a great man—except when he talks about God.

In their zeal for the practical virtues of science, its precise control of nature, and the amazing results it yields from experimental investigation, in other words, in their zeal for science’s proven competency in the realm of intermediate causation, modern scientists have apparently felt justified in entirely forgetting the beginning of things. First causes are necessarily different situations than intermediate ones. Nothing of scientific method, logic, or rules of evidence requires or justifies science to ignore the unique situation of first causes. Modern science has simply become so enamored of materialism that they have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. I think one could go further and agree with Jung that the modern scientific worldview is a neurosis that embodies a phobia of admitting the reality of the nonphysical.

Perhaps we can excuse such a neurosis temporarily, for having once overcome the primitive explanatory model of superstition, nineteenth and twentieth century empiricist thinkers experienced such a burst of discovery from rigorous application of scientific method that they understandably slipped into believing that the joy ride would never end. Many slipped into the assumption that materialism would end up explaining absolutely everything. All or nothing—yet one more fallacy. But it is time for society to be healed of this neurosis; the free ride for materialism is over.

Instead of beginning to chart the legitimate limits of science after the initial flood of experimental success began to ebb, as should have been done, many modern thinkers rushed to the assumption of universal materialism, wherein there are no limits to the scope of natural science whatsoever. In materialism, science becomes the measuring rod of everything, including religion, morality, human emotions and virtues, the arts and humanities, and all else. The irrational affirmation of universal or unlimited materialism, however, is merely an illness, not an irrefutable discovery—that is, when it is not an outright lie perpetrated by Marxist propaganda artists.

What, then, was really going on during the heydays of early science? It was not the discovery of the universal pathway to ultimate knowledge. Science was merely catching up to the backlog of discoveries made available to scientific method following centuries of lost time spent pursuing useless superstitious explanations. For three millennia humans had been forming many questions, while having only superstition to answer them. Once scientific method is suddenly brought to bear, having so many intermediate causation questions answered so competently and so fast by the new fledgling model of natural science (and having the status of science greatly enhanced in the public mind by so startling a success), and having long-held superstitions so thoroughly debunked en masse, scientists fell victim to a very tempting oversimplification. They assumed that what works so well for most explanatory contexts, works for all. It was a very comfortable lie to believe to scientists who had no faith to lose because their own worth in the eyes of society was suddenly expanded exponentially. They were “big shots” and they liked it.

Things are a bit different today. Having surpassed the rudimentary biological complexity described by the science of those days by many orders of magnitude, our science of the 21^st Century has grounds to know better. Today we have a plethora of dramatically more complex structures to explain than did Darwin in his day. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists today still see no need for an explanation of ultimate origins. So much so, in fact, that their explanation of life starts precisely in the middle of life’s development. How very convenient for them to only have to start the explanation after all the hard parts have been bypassed.

Darwin, however, with much less of a problem to solve, felt compelled to resort to God as the explanation of the ultimate origin of life. Darwin did not admit God or spirits into scientific explanation within the range of intermediate causation, but he did feel that God must have created the world and “blown” the first breath of life into his creatures. Obviously, this assumption did nothing to compromise the rigor of his application of scientific method, for he remains one of the leading example of it.

In Darwin’s conception, after the initial act of creation, God then pushed the natural world off on its own independent and somewhat random course. Darwin saw no evidence that God had either provided intelligent direction or obligated a given course for nature; but he did see the necessity for God to start things off. Darwin thought that natural selection combined with spontaneous random variations in living systems were sufficiently capable to slowly build the machinery of the tree of life by accident. Darwin, however, knew not a fraction of the complexity that has since turned up in biology. He thought the cell had a bunch of nondescript goo inside of it, called protoplasm, which sort of magically did all the work of life’s modifications.

It is true, as Niles Eldredge affirms in Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, that “…science describes the material content of the universe and the interactions among its parts, while religion is occupied with matters spiritual.”^[32] However, that does not preclude the logical import of the physical evidence pointing to both intelligent design and a nonphysical start to things at the Big Bang. We can conclude at least that much without crossing the threshold into religion. It is not necessary to be able to say precisely what the nonphysical thing is that originates the Big Bang to be able to say that the thing is in fact nonphysical.

Science (as science) very legitimately balks at assigning ghosts, spirits, angels, or gods as intermediate causes in a chain of physical events. This is absolutely as it should be. Science cannot proceed with confidence to describe, to predict, or to explain where an objective empiric causal chain is affected by a ghost. Everyone agrees on that much. But, when we come to the ultimate origin of things as opposed to intermediates, the situation is very different. As Thomas Aquinas demonstrated, there must of necessity be a mystery of one kind or another at the start, something eternal (and therefore not physical). While it is true that empiric science cannot, by definition, deal with eternal absolutes in the lab, a combination of empiric data and sound logic can point to the existence of something eternal as a first cause at the beginning of things. The combination of modern Big Bang cosmological theory and St. Thomas Aquinas’ First Cause argument provides does exactly that.

I am not alone in drawing this conclusion; Pope Pius XII (formerly Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli), who led the Church through WWII, concluded the same thing when Big Bang theory was first unveiled to the world. There, in that first fraction of a second, the universe undeniably did something startling…something that fully defied the laws of physics: creation ex nihilo or a transformation of substance from another world or dimension…we can’t say; but it was radically different, nonphysical by all indications. In the face of something so blatantly obvious as the Big Bang, however, neo-Darwinists today remain staunch materialists, as if nothing had changed in the past 100 years of science! They still publish the ridiculous and unfounded assertions that there is no case for God whatsoever in the entire history of science, that science has never admitted anything nonphysical, and that ID theory is nothing more than the religious fundamentalism of the 19^th Century.

Certainly, the 600 pages of this book and the expert analyses of many of the accomplished scientists, theologians, writers and thinkers listed in the bibliography constitute a plausible case for God in science. When you hear the neo-Darwinists make ridiculous claims, therefore, put them on the spot. Ask them precisely what would count as evidence for God in their view. You will get neither a direct nor a coherent answer, though almost certainly a flippant one, and probably an insult. You will hear only an age old line of propaganda: a good God would not allow evil; if God existed everyone would simply be immediately aware of it because God would walk down Main Street doing miracles, slapping backs and shaking hands. (He will do this at the end of course, but it will be a much grander Main Street than we will ever see on Earth.) Neither of these arguments are scientific; they are only philosophy and very poor quality philosophy at that. You will also hear an argument against 6-day Creation Science, but you will not be given a real defense of the accidental origin and evolution of the tree of life. Neo-Darwinists cite no science to defend accidental evolution; they only mime naïve philosophical maxims that fail the cut at 4^th Grade.

And, going the other way, the only “scientific” proof neo-Darwinists would accept for intelligent design is the equivalent of requiring that humanity has always lived in a flawless paradise where we can catch God strolling down Main Street on any day wearing his nametag! Oh, for crying out loud…!

Don’t let the neo-Darwinists fool you. They are not the staunch heroic guardians of pure scientific method they claim to be. In railing against a nonphysical source as the origin of life and order in our universe they are pursuing a Marxist-like social revisionist agenda, not science. What they want is an atheistic-materialist society, not intellectual truth. Consider how compatible their approach is with the method and spirit of pure science: the theory of basic evolution is not testable and the accidental version of evolutionary theory has been refuted for many years now and they refuse to breath a word about it to the public.

Science has long affirmed the nonphysical in Freudian and Jungian psychology. But Freudian theory is fine with the neo-Darwinists because it argues against God; that makes it OK. Jung’s heuristic theories also warrant the neo-Darwinists’ blessing because they suggest that religion, while fulfilling an important and universal need in the human psyche, emerged from the collective unconscious in a manner not requiring the existence of an objective independently existing personal God.^[33] The neo-Darwinists are all for that. Yet Jungian theory does affirm things nonphysical. Jung, himself, was not a materialist. He indicted materialism as a negative metaphysic that constituted an intellectual sin.^[34] While explicitly eschewing the assertion of any metaphysic or worldview whatsoever as a scientist, he did make clear that materialism as an explanatory model abjectly failed to account for psychological neuroses that could be cured by a simple confession or exploration of childhood experience. In other words, a purely organic injury or illness would not disappear so fast or from such simple interactions.^[35]

Freudian psychiatrists, while asserting that religion is a merely human invention, assert that observed human behavior points to the existence of the id, the ego and the superego. All three of these theoretical Freudian constructs are nonphysical, at least in their original formulation. Why would neo-Darwinists endorse Freud and Jung if they were materialists? Because both of these schools of psychology either argue for or allow for the nonexistence of a real personal God. Belief in God is the only substantial obstacle preventing Western society moving to a materialistic worldview, after which move a subsequent move to the Marxist political system would be much more likely to follow.

Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, but our main point here is that we see in traditional Freudian and Jungian theory (which science had no problem endorsing), a logical inference from empiric scientific data to the existence of something nonphysical. This creates a firm precedent in the history of science, as does Big Bang theory, that allows for such inferences within the domain of science. In fact, one of the few things that will likely survive criticism in Freudian theory in addition to the importance of childhood experience and sexuality in general is the existence of the nonphysical unconscious mind. Freud arrived at his theory of the unconscious precisely by making an inference from the physical to the nonphysical.^[36]

The neo-Darwinists of the time were quite happy with allowing this inference to the nonphysical in the abstract because the larger Freudian theory debunked religion. In Freudian theory, atheistic materialism gained more political yardage than it lost. Freudian theory purported to explain away God in human experience as merely a neurosis. “Sold! No problem with the nonphysical here, by golly. We Marxists will take the net gain in political yardage at the cost of logical consistency any day.” When one looks at the logical shambles of neo-Darwinian theory, he/she can see that the Marxists in science mean it; they have been taking net political profits for decades by dancing around logical consistency in order to convince a given audience on the terms that audience was willing to accept, leaving an embarrassing intellectual mess in their wake.

With Jung the neo-Darwinists’ push for an atheistic worldview also benefited immensely by seeding into the public’s mind the theory of emergence, that all of the seemingly higher order capacities of humans could emerge from purely physical, or if not purely physical at least purely human, foundations. With emergence, God is not needed to explain religion, morality, virtue, emotions, beauty, truth, aesthetic experience, etc. Having established God as unnecessary to explanation, the obvious next step is to argue that God should simply eliminated by Ockam’s Razor. Scientists who selectively allow contradictions in their theories in this way, “now the nonphysical is OK—now it is not,” are not seeking scientific or philosophical truth because contradiction is incompatible with truth; they are, rather, social activists trying to move the public worldview to materialism by whatever means comes to hand.

Whatever the materialist propaganda artists may say, we can see that we have firm, and quite notable, precedents in science admitting the nonphysical: Freud, Jung, Big Bang theory…and even Darwin! Freud and Jung inferred the existence of the unconscious mind, and Darwin assigned to the Creator the function of originating natural law and breathing the first breath of life into the first creature(s). More recently, Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross make a strong argument that in limited contexts scientific evidence can point to the supernatural. Professor Trinh Xuan Thaun has informed us in his book, Chaos and Harmony, that one can have scientific evidence for the refutation of materialism.^[37] In, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design, astrophysicist, theologian and noted author on science and religion, Rodney Holder reaches the same conclusion. (“Scientific naturalism” and “materialism” may be treated as synonyms for most purposes.)

The central issue I shall examine is whether the origin and evolution of the universe as understood by modern cosmology, utilizing the laws of physics, are uniquely and adequately explained in terms of scientific naturalism alone. My intention is to show that science cannot do without metaphysical assumptions, and the assumptions it uses ought to lead scientists logically to embrace non-naturalism. In particular, the science of cosmology may be suggesting that science itself provides reasons for doubting scientific naturalism. My main focus will be on the by now well-publicized evidence for the ‘fine tuning’ of the universe.^[38]

Microbiologist Professor Michael Behe recently joined this crowd of scientific experts who have suggested that it is not outside the charter of science to make inferences from objective data to the existence of the supernatural.

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural. But this seems to me to be both bad logic and bad science. Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted. Rather, it is an effort to make true statements about physical reality…. The conclusion of design flows naturally from the data; we should not shrink from it; we should embrace it and build on it.^[39]

Professor William Dembski, on the last page in chapter 25 of his excellent treatment of the subject in Design Revolution, correctly explains what may seem to be a paradox: it is a question of metaphysics, not science, as to whether nonphysical entities can have effects on physical objects. By that, I don’t mean that the question must be confined to metaphysics and excluded from science, but that whether or not one allows the thesis that the supernatural can affect the physical to be admitted into science depends upon the metaphysics that one assumes as a personal worldview. Science can optionally proceed either way so long as they do not contaminate scientific method with superstition in tracing a chain of intermediate causes.

When they are sufficiently justified by logical inference from the empiric data and enhance overall explanatory power, plus consistency with the rest of science’s theoretical base, the charter of science occasionally allows particular nonphysical constructs, such as Darwin’s “Creator,” Jung’s collective unconscious and Freud’s id, ego, and superego. We must be careful, however, to see that it allows them only in such selected places where scientific method will not be compromised. The introduction of the concept of an “intelligent designer” as proposed by modern intelligent design theorists, Behe, Dembski, and Meyer et al., satisfies all these conditions as well as the well-established historical theories just cited.

Appendix 10 further discusses the need for science to once and for all address this question of scientific inference to the nonphysical and several other unresolved foundational questions integral to the charter of science in a new modern synthesis. While this synthesis should be focused primarily on evolutionary theory, the rules of operation in cosmology and physics regarding inference to the nonphysical should also be considered.

In making the design inference and forcefully arguing the intelligent design case, Dembski, Rana, Ross, Behe, Meyer and many other degreed and credentialed scientists have all opted to include the inference to intelligent design and/or the nonphysical into the charter of science. I think this is a sound perspective to take because, after all, isn’t inference to the best explanation what we all thought science was supposed to be doing in the first place?

Fallacy #18: Selectively emphasizing or ignoring evidence

All of the biological complexity and probability data presented here is valid scientific evidence, yet it has been completely ignored by neo-Darwinists despite its strength and volume. The fact that an accident couldn’t put together the larger part of a complex living creature with a 3 billion nucleotide genome with transcription and translation systems in 10 million years can be properly ignored, according to neo-Darwinists, because it is a religious statement! They therefore dismiss ID theory without any scientific study and evaluation whatsoever! Please….

It’s all easy as pie to them. Dawkins claims to have “climbed mount improbable” by merely throwing a bunch or words around in his book, and drawing a bunch of snowflakes with his home computer. But words and snowflakes don’t build a tripartite living three dimensional genome with all the requisite ultra-complex supporting systems of life. Dawkins himself with the aid of his home computer or all the computers and machinery on Earth cannot build a three dimensionally translated and regulated living genome from raw chemicals; but he claims that an accident can. Dawkins sees the task of the origin of biological information as a no-brainer, a casual walk through the park, nothing to it. Instead, he focuses his evolutionary explanations exclusively on moving genes around (moving the books around in the library) after they have first been mysteriously constructed. Even then, it is only happening in theory, that is, in hypothetical or imaginary terms. This imaginary event of gene shuffling only occurs after the tree of life is well underway. Dawkins starts his climb halfway up the mountain, and a merely imaginary explanation that cannot be demonstrated does not qualify as a successful climb at all.^[40] In ignoring all the hard parts of the explanation of the origin of life, Dawkins has in reality only climbed the foothill next door to Mt. Improbable and switched the signs—another instance of the fallacy of claim jumping.

In similar fashion, David E. Comings, M.D. tells us in his new book, Did Man Create God?, that the accidental creation of the genome is as easy as pie, nothing to it whatsoever.^[41] Or, so he says. But if life were that simple we wouldn’t need MDs to begin with, would we? When one looks at Comings’ explanation she discovers that he only addresses a single step of the process, when billions of steps must be completed in sequence to get the job of evolution done. This involves both a logical and mathematical fallacy. Just because one step is doable by accident doesn’t mean achieving several hundred billion steps in sequence is doable as well. The math doesn’t work, but the neo-Darwinists never do the math—and they never look at all the steps at the same time, grossly oversimplifying.

Comings says the computer models show that a small but flawless increment of biological information could be achieved randomly in a mere 800 generations. The amount of “information” he claims to have been created in this computer simulation is far less than that required for a single gene, and he gives no explanation how we get the living genomes in the first place from which to start the experiment.

But more importantly, he fails to remind the reader that billions of such steps have to be done in sequence to create the tree of life. He conveniently does not mention that the improbability and resource requirements go up exponentially with each additional step that must be accomplished by an accident in sequence. Yes, one step of biological information might be achieved by accident. If the improbability for that step is as he depicts it in his example, 5 X 10^-20, then the improbability for achieving two such steps in sequence becomes approximately 10^-40. Three such steps in a row by accident generate an improbability of 10^-60, and so on. By the time one computes the improbability for ten such steps in a row it has become 10^-200, and the particle-event resource requirements for achieving a minimum 51% probability for completing those steps in sequence by accident have reached 5 X 10¹⁹⁹, exceeding the available particle-events in the entire history of the universe by a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, times.

What is required to accomplish accidental evolution is not one or two easy computer model-facilitated random mutations of letters on a computer screen, but every single step represented in Table 1 at a minimum, in sequence, and then quite a bit more, all done in three dimensions in real time and according to the rules of chemistry and physics. The event of a real physical mutation of part of a genome is nothing so easy as changing a letter on a computer screen by intelligently designing a software program that obligates the change on a regular basis according to the criterion provided by a programmer. And the hard parts, once again, is just given at no charge whatsoever: the computer, the program or organized system of modifications, the largely constrained environment in which these changes must occur, the initial “genomes” corresponding to living creatures, a ready supply of all the physical and chemical components necessary to construct an organism and keep it going. All of this is assumed before the models cited by Comings ever begin. Then the model only goes one or two steps down a path that actually requires billions of steps whose difficulty, improbability, and resource requirements, multiply exponentially with each step. The neo-Darwinian models are not valid science for they leave out anything inconvenient to their preferred conclusions and stop doing the math when it starts to give contrary indications.

Comings has grossly oversimplified the task of accidental evolution. After giving the estimate for only one step, and that one small and artificial, he confidently concludes that accidental mutations could achieve the entire tree of life with no trouble at all. In similar fashion, he summarily dispenses with the irreducible complexity thesis by saying that the computer model has demonstrated that two simple related components of a biological system could be simultaneously evolved by random mutation—two. Once again, an oversimplification. A living cell involves from hundreds to thousands of critical interrelated, closely matched, interacting components, many of which must all be in place at the same time for the cell to function. To show that two related components might at times co-evolve by chance does not scratch the surface of the irreducible complexity problem.

Comings and like-minded neo-Darwinists create very simple false targets (straw men) and demolish them with computer models that have nothing to do with the real complexity of living systems. They completely ignore the rules for computing probabilities for random events accomplished in sequence; they ignore standard probability theory completely. This alone invalidates their argument.

Why didn’t Comings and those who created the computer models have the computer do more complex and realistic tasks, say the equivalent of several hundred genes built randomly? They didn’t do realistic studies because life is so complex that realistic studies can’t be done in real time given the limits of our computer systems, and because if they did such studies the results would show that the time required for nature to randomly create several hundred genes within a living system exceeds the time the universe has been in existence. Don’t the neo-Darwinists know this? You would have to ask them; I can only say that they appear not to know it. They should know it however, because it is nothing more than basic math. However, if they do know it, they certainly don’t tell the reader. Thus, a seemingly clear case of selectively ignoring evidence.

In Comings case, by saying that a mere 800 generations in a single creature’s lineage is sufficient to randomly generate one useful gene segment, he seems to be implying that all we have to do is repeat that a billion or so times and the whole job of evolution is done. Aside from the fact that the model he uses assumes life already exists before it starts, he fails to remind the reader that his theory of random mutation-based evolution, if used as an argument against intelligent design (as he uses it), must be assumed to be representing an accidental process, not just one that is technically random in regards to a creature’s present environmental requirements. For accidental event sequences, standard probability theory requires the improbabilities of two or more events accomplished by accident in sequence to be multiplied by each other, not just added together.

Comings is suggesting that accidental evolution requires something on the order of only 800 billion generations of individual lineages. But this makes the mistake of adding the improbabilities for each step in an accidental process, as opposed to multiplying them, which is the correct method. It is quite a coincidence that the study Comings references only completes one step! If the reader goes on to complete the computations for the remainder of the billion or so additional steps required by evolution he or she would realize that the exponentially increasing improbability soon demands resources that surpass the time and physical resources available in the history of the universe. Appendix 2 shows that this result holds not only to attain a 51% or greater probability. The complexities and improbabilities associated with the accidental construction of life exhaust the resources of our universe long before the probability of generating life by accident even reaches a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1%.

Thus, it is true, as Dr. David Faust of Brown University has warned us, that scientists do not perform well in abstract reasoning skills. Either they are intentionally being dishonest for political reasons or they are subconsciously reflecting a bias for atheistic materialism, or they are just no good at abstract reasoning. Whatever the cause, they are certainly not doing good science and logic. Despite the fact that neo-Darwinian authors assure us that accidental evolution is as easy as pie, their argument falls far short of demonstrating that an accident could generate biological information on a scale actually necessary for the real physical tree of life under real physical conditions outside of a computer program. By only looking at the smallest part of one component, the base genome, and ignoring the physics and chemistry even there (they look only at evolving the information of the genome in the abstract, not at real events required for the physical molecular constructions of the genome) they capture only the smallest fraction of the real difficulty invoked in actually constructing the real living machines of the evolutionary tree.

The realities of living biology tell us that the odds of getting a useful random change to the genome (after the hard part of creating life is already done) is actually 10^-77 not 5 X 10^-20 as Comings tells us. What’s the difference in magnitude; is it that important? Yes, the difference is very much that important. The difference is the difference between a 10 followed by 20 zeroes and a 10 followed by 76 zeroes. The improbability of achieving a single step towards life accomplished outside of a living creature is harder still at 10^-125, a 10 followed by 124 zeroes. This is a big difference from what Comings represents, astronomical. But as big as Comings’ error is it is further magnified to an astounding degree when, for each of the billion or more steps of evolution, he simply adds 10^-20 to the total accrued improbability instead of multiplying. He begins with a gross underestimate and then uses the wrong mathematical operation to compute the resultant improbability of each further step. The difference for the whole of evolution is astounding! Using the different methods and beginning values (one for a computer game and one for real proteins) here are the results:

First Step

Comings/neo-Darwinist computer model: improbability of 5 X 10^-20, or 1 chance in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values for random biologically viable protein synthesis: 10^-77, or 1 chance in 10 followed by 76 zeroes

Three Steps

Comings/neo-Darwinist computer model (& Comings’ incorrect math): improbability of 1.5 X 10^-21, or 1 chance in 15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values and correct math: improbability of 10^-231, or one chance in 10 followed by 230 zeroes

This already shows a difference of 209 orders of magnitude just for three steps. More importantly, the total time/physical resources available in the history of our universe are bounded by the outer limit of 10^-150 particle-events. A particle-event is defined as a single (smallest known) particle taking the minimum amount of time required for any physical event to occur. Without at least one particle-event nothing can happen. Standard probability theory says that, on average, for an event that is 50% probable half the alternatives must play out before success is achieved. Obviously each alternative attempt requires at least one particle event (and obviously many more than one in a typical real-world event occurrence of any substance). The number of events required to make the accidental achievement of only three biologically viable proteins a reasonable expectation, roughly 10²³¹, exhausts the total resources of our universe a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times over. That’s how complex and sensitive to random alteration the key components of life are. The neo-Darwinists’ half-baked computer models don’t capture any of this, and are therefore not realistic.

Not only do Comings and the neo-Darwinists not have a realistic grasp of the problem of accidental construction of life; they are not even performing the basic math correctly. Obviously, the problem gets rapidly worse as one proceeds step by step through the several billion such steps that evolution requires.

Ten Steps

Comings/neo-Darwinist bogus computer model plus incorrect math: improbability of 5 X 10^-21, or 1 chance in 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values and correct math: 10^-770, or one chance in 10 followed by 769 zeroes.

100 Steps

Comings/neo-Darwinist bogus computer model plus incorrect math: improbability of 5 X 10^-22, or 1 chance in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values and correct math: 10^-7700, or one chance in 10 followed by 7,699 zeroes.

1,000 Steps

Comings/neo-Darwinist bogus computer model plus incorrect math: improbability of 5 X 10^-23, or 1 chance in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values and correct math: 10^-77,000, or one chance in 10 followed by 76,999 zeroes.

1 Billion Steps

Comings/neo-Darwinist bogus computer model plus incorrect math: improbability of 5 X 10^-29, or 1 chance in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Known values and correct math: 10^{-77,000,000,000}, or one chance in 10 followed by 76,999,999,999 zeroes.

This shows the concept of accidental evolution to be precisely the unthinkable travesty on rational thought that famous evolutionists G. G. Simpson proclaimed it to be. From my perspective, this actually proves intelligent design well beyond normal scientific standards of probability. That is because I see only three alternative explanations for life: an accidental process, intelligent design, or the world is just that way (an innate bias for life stemming from no deeper origin). I consider accidental evolution to have been refuted by the math we see here, and the “nature is just that way” option no explanation at all (also untestable and therefore not admissible into science as a theory). Intelligent design on the other hand, I consider to be testable by way of scientifically valid design inference criteria and other corroborative indications such as those listed in Appendix 3. Being properly testable and the only scientific alternative that has not been refuted, intelligent design should be considered our preferred scientific theory of life’s origin and development.

Another instance of selectively omitting or ignoring evidence occurs when neo-Darwinists dismiss the massive historical validation of the Bible as of no evidential weight. They imply, if not outright state, that there is not a shred of scientific evidence for the Bible, and thus, as the title of Comings’ book suggests, man must have invented God. In his textbook on evolution, Monroe Strickberger goes so far as to affirm that psychology and sociology have demonstrated religion to be man’s artificial invention based solely on psychological need. This ignores the reliable testimony of billions of people who testify to authentic encounters with God and it ignores the fact that religious persons show no greater prevalence of neurosis than atheists.

Since this book is written from the point of view of philosophy of science, when I review the historical evidence for the Bible below I do not mean to present the Bible as an authority for scientific truth, but, rather, to present the scientific evidence that supports the Bible. I wouldn’t be doing the former in any case, because Catholics don’t believe the Bible is intended to give scientific information. Rather, I list evidence for the historicity of the Bible for the purpose of showing how the neo-Darwinists casually dismiss known evidence to suit their political agenda (materialism). The fact of the matter is that the Bible is supported by an astounding amount of objective historical evidence. This should be apparent to anyone seeking the truth, whether he or she personally subscribes to a religion or not. Historical evidence has gradually accumulated to the point where the biblical thesis is today a thesis of historical science on a par with evolution itself, far surpassing the credibility of accidental evolution, for which there is no evidence at all.

Although the recent discovery of a good candidate for Noah’s Ark at roughly 13,000 feet on a mountain peak in Iran surrounded by deep-sea fossils dramatically reopens the discussion of the appraisal of the historicity of the Bible, a successful defense of the historicity of the Bible hardly requires it. (See the Base Institute Website for more information on the discovery of a plausible candidate for Noah’s Ark). There is a great amount of incorrigible evidence for the historicity of the Bible. Much of that evidence the reader can find ready to hand at the following Websites:

Great Discoveries in the Ancient World of the Bible 5 audio tapes from the California Museum of Ancient Art

Exhibition of Biblical Artifacts in the Netherlands

Archaeology and the Bible

Archaeology and the Bible (ACTS Christian Website)

Near East Archaeology Data from ABZU

Biblical Archaeology Review

Amazing Discoveries in Bible Archaeology

Bible History & Archaeology (from Bible History Online)

Shroud of Turin Official Site

Shroud Journal Project

Shroud of Turin Booklist

Image on the Back of the Shroud

Carbon Dating the Shroud of Turin

Proof the Shroud of Turin is Genuine

First Carbon Dating of Shroud in Error, Shroud is Much Older

Veronica's Veil

Ancient Stone Tablet Relates Christ's Resurrection

Noah's Ark Found

The Church of the 70 Disciples Found!

King Solomon's Wall Found

John the Baptist's Cave Found

Hezekiah's Tunnel Dated

Hezekiah's Tunnel Dated 2

Hezekiah's Tunnel 3

Royal Seal Found! Confirms Jeremiah

Gospel Verse Found on Ancient Shrine

W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research

The Christian Information Center

Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society

The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology

Israel Antiquities Society

Dr. Tabor's Site: Archaeology of the Jewish Roman World of Jesus

Rare Scrolls Older than Dead Sea Scrolls

Rare Scrolls 2

Dead Sea Scrolls

Guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls

Historical Evidence for Jesus

Did Jesus Exist?

References to Jesus in the Old Testament

Books on the Archaeology of the Bible

Archaeology & the Bible (Century One Foundation)

The Century One Foundation, which supports the archaeological digs at Sepphoris, Israel near Nazareth, puts it this way:

Finally, archaeology strengthens the historical credibility of the Bible. It constrains the imaginings of those who would make the Bible just an interesting collection of folklore. Archaeology has contributed substantially to the historicity of the Bible overall.

Discoveries such as the water tunnel beneath Jerusalem dug by King Hezekiah, the Well of Jacob where Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman, the Pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed a crippled man, the stone in the Roman theater at Caesarea inscribed with the name of Pilate, the tribunal at Corinth where Paul was tried, and the theater at Ephesus where the riot of silversmiths occurred, to name a few, help to give historical credibility to the Bible.

Archaeology, like all academic disciplines, does not exist in a vacuum. It influences and is influenced by other fields of study. When Biblical studies and archaeology intersect, they are both enlightened by the combination. There is no doubt that the events of the Bible are firmly rooted in general world history.^[42]

Thus, we are entitled to assert the historical Jesus as a well-confirmed theory of historical science much as, in Science on Trial, Futuyma claims for evolution. Both are theories not subject to rigorous experimental test, but nonetheless largely corroborated by the broken series of events revealed in the historical record, cross-checked and corroborated by use of multiple tools, techniques, instruments and disciplines of science. Considering the vastly greater number of steps involved in the evolutionary process and the much larger amount of time involved, it is correct to say that we have historical evidence for a larger fraction of the total events pertinent to the historicity of the Bible than we have for the events pertinent to confirming the historical theory of evolution.

In his much acclaimed 2003 tour de force, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, the world’s leading philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne, now retired from Oxford, uses Bayes’ theorem to calculate the probability for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. His conclusion: the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection is 97% probable.^[43] In contrast, noted author and scholar Henry Gee, editor of Nature magazine, assigns to the current historical narrative of evolution a probability of accuracy not much greater than nil. Gee is in the minority view, but his credentials are impeccable and his argument in Deep Time very convincingly laid out. I, and no doubt many others, have adopted his view based upon that argument.

Fine, you say, finally something simple and straightforward, no Ayer, no Aristotle, no Anselm, no nothing, just basic historical facts. We have two good historical theories, Christianity and evolution, two theories not proven beyond doubt but well supported enough that, in the absence of a better evidenced alternative theory, we should adopt them as our best explanation of the facts. Of course, it could not possibly be that simple. But it is almost that simple. The only complicating factor is that neither “theory” is unitary in its claims. Both Christianity and neo-Darwinian evolution each make two separate claims.

Christianity claims not only that there was a historical Jesus, but also that Jesus was God. This second claim, as one might imagine, is somewhat harder to evidence than a simple resurrection. The historical evidence firmly validates the first claim, but is less supportive of the second (though certainly not contrary to it). In the case of neo-Darwinian evolution, the two claims are that basic evolution (simple ancestral descent with modification) occurred, and that it occurred by virtue of an accidental process, a process devoid of purpose, devoid of intelligent design, and devoid of divine causation. Here, as before, there is moderate to very convincing evidence for the first claim in the fossil record (genetic and comparative fossil and anatomical studies, etc.) but there is no support whatsoever for an accidental process.

As we have seen, much of the evidence is directly contrary to the accidental thesis. I would go so far as to say both that the accidental thesis has been visibly refuted, and that very few evolutionists now will openly endorse it. Furthermore, the magnitude of the task of disproving divine causation is identical to that of proving it. So the historical theory of the resurrected Christ as God still scores better overall than the historical theory of accidental evolution.

What modern evolutionists do to avoid admitting this is to dance linguistic circles around the subject. Their goal is to both retain plausible deniability of having made the accidental claim in the minds of experts but at the same time have led the unsuspecting public into believing that they have proven an accidental world. In contrast to the fully unsupportable accidental thesis of neo-Darwinian evolution, multiple reliable witnesses support the claim that Jesus was God. They testify to his having performed many amazing miracles. This does not prove that he was God, but it is genuine evidence for it, and it is corroborative evidence for the supernatural generally. As astrophysicist and theologian Rodney Holder tells us in an article for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, “Hume on Miracles,” reliable testimony has bonafide evidential value. In this article

Hume's argument concerning miracles is interpreted by making approximations to terms in Bayes's theorem. This formulation is then used to analyse the impact of multiple testimony. Individual testimonies which are ‘non-miraculous’ in Hume's sense can in principle be accumulated to yield a high probability both for the occurrence of a single miracle and for the occurrence of at least one of a set of miracles. Conditions are given under which testimony for miracles may provide support for the existence of God.^[44]

Here again, on its second claim, the Christian thesis fairs arguably much better than the theory of accidental evolution. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists minimize the evidence for Christianity when they don’t outright ridicule it. In fact, the fallacy of selectively ignoring evidence is so ubiquitous in neo-Darwinian arguments that it has even been applied to Darwin, himself.

Neo-Darwinists cite The Origin of Species as the consummate authority for everything they wish to assert regarding the accidental worldview, completely ignoring the fact that in the same book Darwin posited God as the source of life. Or they try to explain those statements away by referring to Darwin’s unpublished private comments and speculations regarding the wandering course of his personal faith, distorting his informal comments to try to prove that Darwin was an atheist and a materialist. But, as a professional evolutionist, this is absolutely not so. Darwin disavowed his unpublished comments as not fully matured and not sufficiently corroborated by scientific research. He explicitly refused to represent those comments to the public as his well-considered professional position. Darwin labeled himself an agnostic on the personal side of things, but declined to recommend any position on religion as a professional. What Darwin did do as a professional scientist is a matter of record: he placed God at the beginning of the evolutionary process as the source of life. Darwin never revised or retracted that professional opinion. Despite this, neo-Darwinists, materialists, and atheists incessantly use Darwin and his theory as if they were the consummate scientific proof of atheism.

Fallacy #19: False dilemma

Opening chapter eleven of Science on Trial, Professor Futuyma provides a perfect example of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. “Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not.” Sounds good, so it must be true right? What could be simpler? But, believe it or not, there is a logical fallacy implied here, if not stated. At least Futuyma invites the reader to commit the fallacy, if he doesn’t explicitly commit it himself. The fallacy is the false assumption that there are only two options: immediate fully formed creation or atheistic accidental evolution. Most fallacies sound good, but upon scrutiny reveal a serious error in thought. In this case, the error is in assuming that evolution excludes either creation or intelligent design, that both creation and evolution can’t be true at the same time, and that creation by God must always be instantaneous. Evolution does not exclude creation; it only excludes instantaneous or rapid creation.

Intelligent design theory allows that life may have developed over time and that inherited relationships may exist between creatures. Therefore, Futuyma's dilemma is false; the two options he identifies do not exhaust the available alternatives. There is a third alternative to instantaneous creation and evolution: creation by way of evolution. It is easy to understand how Futuyma could overlook this small third option. After all, it is only held by 900 million Catholics and at least an equal number of members of other God-fearing religions!

Whatever Futuyma’s logical error quotient may actually be in regards to this statement, I leave to the reader to decide within the context of his larger book, Science on Trial. What is certain, however, is that the alternatives for explaining the origins of life are not so limited as accidental evolution or immediate fully formed creation. There at least eleven alternative methods by which life might in theory have been originated (six primary options with variations).

· Accidental evolution (1)

· Fully formed accidental “creation,” either an immediately complete inventory of fully formed life forms appear in a single event, or fully formed creatures are added in increments (2a & 2b). This option is traditionally ruled out as so obviously improbable as to be “impossible,” but with a multiverse having infinite universes that all changes.

· Evolution fully on purpose—that is, creation by way of an intelligently informed evolutionary process so completely guided and constrained that there are no random components to the process (3)

· Evolution on purpose with some designed-in random components that come into play at various points in the development of life and within the design of living creatures without ever thwarting the overall purpose (3a)

· Evolution on purpose with both built-in random components that facilitate the purpose overall (though perhaps imperfectly) and true accidents permitted, accidents that may at times substantially thwart the overall purpose, though not fatally (3b)

· Fully formed “instantaneous” creation on purpose, completed in one initial uninterrupted time interval, e.g., the six-day-creation of a literal biblical interpretation of the book of Genesis (4)

· Punctuated or incremental creation on purpose, creation of fully formed creatures at intervals (4a)

· Punctuated or incremental creation on purpose of, not fully formed creatures, but elements of physical/biological design information that taken together ensure the eventual origin and evolution of the tree of life. (5)

· Punctuated or incremental creation on purpose by use of miraculous supernatural intervention at points in the history of Earth’s life, intervention that alters the course of things in a manner invisible to science. This would have the same effect as physical design information being added to nature at increments, but without producing any empirically discernable evidence other than indications that miracles had occurred at points in natural processes through history. (5a)

· A process that combines both accidental evolution and purposive creation (in any of the above forms). As an example of this concept, non-sentient simple forms may have been permitted by an intelligent designer of Earth’s life to evolve spontaneously from nonliving matter (assuming for the sake of argument that such is possible), but these simple creatures could evolve no further through accidental processes due to a complexity barrier. This alternative allows that intelligent design may have also been employed to later polish even these simplest designs somewhat further to match ecosystem requirements, while it was definitely required to manufacture the higher forms of life because of complexity barriers. This option allows that the higher forms of life may also have been polished somewhat further after creation by natural selection, thus preserving beneficial minor variations that occurred over time. (6)

Fallacy #20: Straw man

The “straw man” label derives from the situation where someone sets up a scarecrow in the clothes of his real opponent and then demolishes the straw man because he is too weak to obtain victory over the real opponent. The same thing often occurs in intellectual debate. By making hokey misconstruals of intelligent design arguments, neo-Darwinists and sympathetic writers commit the straw man fallacy. This provides them the luxury of addressing an artificial enemy while avoiding the full strength of the intelligent design case. These fallacies are often easy to miss, for neo-Darwinian rhetoric can be fast and slippery. Here is an example from Kirschner and Gerhart’s, The Plausibility of Life:

Though the advocates of intelligent design invoke “irreducible complexity,” they never ask about the nature of that complexity. Behe uses elaborate biochemical examples to intimidate us into believing that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding. Yet today, understanding the nature of complexity is a major pursuit in science and the focus of much of this book.^[45]

In the course of such a brief excerpt five major misrepresentations occur, that is, they are misrepresentations when legitimately placed into the context of the intelligent design debate, which after all is the intended context here.

1. ID authors never ask about the nature of complexity—NOT TRUE, a precise examination of complexity is central to their argument.

2. Professor Behe intimidates his readers—NOT TRUE, after the pope he is the nicest man alive.

3. Professor Behe says that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding—NOT TRUE, he makes a living understanding them.

4. Understanding the nature of (biological) complexity is a major pursuit in science—NOT YET TRUE, only ID scientists and very few others have presented focused on the conceptual entailments of complexity. Many scientists describe complex features of living systems, but they don’t analyze the implications of that complexity for evolutionary theory.

5. Understanding the nature of (biological) complexity is the focus of much of Kirschner and Gerhart’s book, The Plausibility of Life—NOT TRUE. They present no significant fraction of the total complexity of life, and then do the math completely wrong when summarizing it.

Let’s take the last one first. If Kirschner and Gerhart’s book Plausibility was intended to pursue the subject of biological complexity, it abjectly fails, for precious little technical data on the subject occurs there. Plausibility is a perfect proof that pursuing a topic is not the same thing as catching it. The subject of biological complexity visibly gets away Scott-free from Kirschner and Gerhart.

Next, Kirschner and Gerhart do not back up their claim that Behe has said or implied that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding. This accusation is nowhere documented in their book. To that extent alone, it is unfair at least to the reading public, but Behe in fact says no such thing. As far as being intimidating goes, Professor Behe is (on film and in correspondence) visibly the nicest man one could ever meet. Anyone who has heard or read him could not imagine that he would “intimidate” anyone by any means, even intellectual exaggeration. Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, is a very friendly read. Further, to my knowledge, no claim that cell biology is beyond understanding has been asserted anywhere in the intelligent design camp.

After six years of intensively digging through a large university bioscience library, however, I am not so sure I don’t want to make that claim! But let’s be clear. Behe’s argument for an intelligent designer is not that cell biology is beyond understanding. Rather, Professor Behe is saying that science has revealed designs in biology so complex that accident could not have constructed them by any stretch of the imagination. The accidental origin of life is the thing that is incomprehensible to Behe, not cell biology (which he teaches). Kirschner and Gerhart commit the straw man fallacy in abundance here (one might also label these mistakes as equivocation, bait & switch, and false attribution). They substitute at will false argument types for the real logic that Behe presents.

To say that Professor Behe and the intelligent design theorists never ask about the nature of complexity is simply taking misrepresentation as a debating tactic too far. Even I am exhausted by Dembski’s treatment of the subject, and Behe’s primary, and now famous, argument against accidental evolution is named “Irreducible Complexity,” for crying out loud. As a professional microbiologist, Professor Behe does nothing but ask about the complexity of the cell, and he encourages his students to do the same.

Every claim made in this passage about the intelligent design camp is patently false to anyone familiar with the ID debate. Kirschner and Gerhart construct a false target, a straw man, and take very little pains to hide the fact. Ironically, the same criticisms they unfairly direct at Behe can be fairly made against neo-Darwinists. In casually dismissing Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, and Meyer’s probability arguments, Kirschner and Gerhart and fellow neo-Darwinists are flagrantly ignoring complexity, not vigorously pursuing it as this passage would have us believe.

Ironically, the neo-Darwinist defense for having no biomechanic for the process of evolution has traditionally been that the process is too big and too complex. Go figure. This is much closer to an assertion that the complexity of evolution exceeds human comprehension than anything Professor Behe has ever said. Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity objection to neo-Darwinian theory is not that the complexity of living cells is beyond understanding, but the simple and visibly supportable assertion that all the parts must be in place at the same time for the mechanism to work. Behe’s thesis is merely one of common sense and the visible facts of biology.

But consider for a moment: even had someone truly made the claim that biological complexity extends beyond human understanding, would it be so easily refuted as Kirschner and Gerhart imply? Not hardly. In Molecular Theory of Evolution, Bernd-Olaf Küppers says this: “We shall probably never find out how much freedom a biologically active protein has for variation in its primary sequence. To do this would require in principle the testing of all the 10¹³⁰ permutations—an impossible task….”^[46] This, about a single protein! Küppers goes on to prove his point mathematically in the very next sentence.

Michael Ruse, a staunch defender of neo-Darwinian evolution, in his article, “Is There a Limit to Our Knowledge of Evolution?” which comprises chapter 8 of But Is It Science? informs us that, “Overall, therefore, I am somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of our ever knowing fully the causes of evolutionary change. Like Kafka’s castle, it is a goal we shall never achieve.”^[47] Ruse was not attacked by Kirschner and Gerhart for his comment, but then he is on their side. Instead they elect to attack Michael Behe for a comment he did not make.

Having defended Professor Behe from this false accusation, let us now revisit a prior citation to shed greater light on the claim that the raw facts of biological and physical complexity might exceed human comprehension after all.

The configurational complexity of biomolecules means the entropic contribution to the free energy is a significant factor in their behaviour, requiring detailed dynamical calculations to fully evaluate. Computer simulations capable of taking all interatomic interactions into account are therefore vital. However, even with the best current supercomputing facilities, we are unable to capture enough of the most interesting aspects of their behaviour to properly understand how they work.^[48]

The author of this comment is Sarah A. Harris, an Oxford trained physicist, and the authors of the other references cited in the accompanying footnote are similarly well qualified. None of these authors despair of ultimately grasping the nature of these processes at the deepest level, but science cannot presently demonstrate that we will come to so grasp them, given the complexities involved. Thus, the hypothesis that the full scope of molecular biology will at some point be seen to extend into the humanly incomprehensible is not a scientifically incredible one, but rather a genuinely open question. Therefore, even had Professor Behe made such a claim it would not be legitimate grounds for criticism.

Certainly, a substantial number of enduring mysteries remain in our quest to understand our world. One mystery lies in how a dynamically changing system so complex and intricate that it could providentially see to the needs of so many living creatures at the same time could stay in balance over vast amounts of time, permitting a broad tree of life to exist at all. As Roger Penrose has computed, the specificity of our world is roughly 10 to the power of 10¹²³. This is a super immense number, a 10 followed by trillions upon trillions of zeros.

Still, one might think the human brain was up to the task of analyzing this mystery, computing all the alternative possibilities for the design of our universe: 100 billion neurons, each with thousands of connecting fibers. Not so, however. This is only the smallest fraction of the computational power that would be needed to analyze all the optional paths our universe might have taken. There are estimated to be roughly 10⁸⁰ elementary particles in the universe. They can potentially be reconfigured every 10⁴³ times per second! So, go ahead and run through the possibilities for the first 20 billion years in your head. Each person to scribble them all down on a slip of paper and send them in to me wins a major award. Allow 20 billion years for delivery, however—I have to check your work.J

More concretely, the young science of protein fold molecular conformation prediction has encountered complexity hurdles that truly defy accurate predictions. The complexity extends beyond what our conscious minds can handle even when assisted by our most powerful computers. Science of course is all about prediction, so in that sense, just this one single component of the cell, the protein, has in fact exceeded scientific “understanding.” Placed into the context of the explosion of complexity in the new field of proteomics alone, if Professor Behe had remarked on the incompressibility of living systems there are plenty of grounds in science for holding such an opinion.

Overwhelmed by the complexity of protein folding and protein interactions, researchers in proteomics have at points been unavoidably reduced to making intelligent guesses because their models and computer systems cannot reach to the complexity involved. These researchers use impressive mathematical devices and inductive inferences to reduce the chances of error, but they are still guessing, at least in part.^[49] Our best computers cannot model the complexities of even the fractional knowledge we have of protein interactions, and we are only beginning to describe them.

Recent studies related to identifying the life-favoring constraints subtly embedded into chemical and biological processes suggest that at least some of the physical structures relevant to originating life and directing its course of development may reside at the atomic level deep within the molecules that comprise living cells. It may even turn out that some biological form determinants lie hidden deeper, in quantum physics. If quantum networks can drive complex brain activity, as Roger Penrose has recently suggested, perhaps they can drive self-organization of genomes as well. If so, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could then come directly into play, precluding our being able to take the accurate measurements needed to develop a full causal explanation of the details of life’s origin and evolution. In that case, the explanation of life would truly lie forever beyond human understanding in a very real sense.^[50]

Let’s just stop for a moment and do a sanity check on this complexity thing. Consider the year: 2011. There are millions of professional scientific journal articles, each of which adds something different to the complex descriptions of the mechanisms of biological systems. A given biological system subcomponent description could and often does involve subtle interactions of many components, sometimes hundreds. Still, we cannot say that we have achieved full understanding of living systems. Until we do, there is no firm guarantee that we will. At the deepest levels of physics known barriers to measurement seem to clearly say that some important data will always remain outside our reach.

Before we ever address the inherent limits of investigating the contribution quantum physics makes to biological systems, it is hard to imagine any one person mastering all of the necessary disciplines of chemistry, biology, paleontology, genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, proteomics, and bioinformatics that is necessary to fully integrate all we currently know about life. In all of these ways, science admits the possibility that no one person will ever fully understand life. Here then is another sense in which the statement attributed to Professor Behe would be fully understandable (if not downright prescient).

Fallacy #21: Overconfidence from insufficient data, or theorizing in advance of the facts

No known biochemical pathway for evolution...large gaps in all the wrong places in the trail of fossil intermediates…no realistic assessment of the capabilities of the accidental element of the evolutionary process...no confirmed examples of macroevolution...no laboratory replication of either the origin of life or macroevolution...no explanation of how to establish a functioning tripartite genomic system by accident…no explanation of how nature could assemble irreducibly complex cells and anatomical systems…scientific inspection of only a fraction of the biochemically relevant aspects of some 15% of the living species, and a corresponding dearth of description for the much greater fossil component of the presumed to have existed total tree of life…only a few trivial examples of microevolutions from random conditions…an inability to track the full complexity of protein-protein interactions using our best computers…functional mapping of the genomes of very few species…precious little understanding of the transpositional and developmental genomes that seem to be the only plausible source of the complex alterations requisite to the large scale biological form change that macroevolution requires, experts in evolution despair of every knowing how it happened (Gee and Ruse): that’s the state of the evidence for accidental evolution. All the data we have is against accidental evolution, yet nearly all our evolutionary theorists are for it. Something is clearly amiss, and to my nose at least, the scent leads to Marxist-materialist politics.

As mentioned earlier, Henry Gee, Senior Editor for Biological Sciences at Nature magazine, argues that Darwinian theorizing (and all other theories asserting a specific process for lifeform evolution) has overstepped the evidence due to the limitations of what he calls “deep time.” If I understand Gee correctly, he is saying that there are typically many millenniums between established fossils in a given hypothetically proposed evolutionary lineage (and probably always will be due to the vastness of evolutionary time). Thus we can never be confident that a proposed lineage is the true one, or even that the majority of what our phylogenetic trees sketch out actually are lineages. According to Gee, this forbids our having confidence in any definite historical narrative of the course of evolution.^[51] We can be confident that science is making good guesses based upon the data available, but the data available is insufficient to guarantee the results.

Given such limitations,, evolutionists should not be attempting to say how or why the relationships we observe between creatures have come to be; they should be restricting themselves to describing the “what,” the observable and the testable genetic, structural, biochemical, and functional characteristics of creatures. Only once the descriptions of past and present species are complete (still a long way off), may we ascribe relative probabilities to a series of alternative cladistic profiles that show options for the most likely (but still less than certain) biological relationships among creatures. But even then science would rarely be in a position to affirm narrative historical relationships with full confidence.

Due to the vast unobservable expanse of the history of the Earth, “deep time,” as Gee calls it, this is the best that evolutionary science can do and remain a pure science. For Gee, it is more important to protect the integrity of evolutionary science than to invent psychologically (or politically) satisfying narrative histories. This, from an acknowledged expert in paleontology and evolutionary biology, a scientist who is arguably as well informed and competent in the field as any evolutionary biologist living today.

To the extent that Gee’s estimate of the limitations inherent in the “deep time” of evolutionary history is correct, theories such as neo-Darwinian evolution that purport to tell us certain truth about what happened in the historical event of evolution can only be considered imaginative forays that reach beyond the bounds of pure science. Yet, neo-Darwinists would have us classify their theory as for all intents and purposes an established and immutable fact of science that could never be contradicted by new data.

I find Gee’s argument convincing. Compared to the scientific rigor in Gee’s approach the neo-Darwinist position seems little more than an exaggerated exercise in prematurity and politically inspired overconfidence.[52]

Neo-Darwinist experts call the accidental form variation-natural selection explanation and the traditional historical narrative of neo-Darwinian evolution a redundantly confirmed explanation that could never be contradicted while admitting that another 80-95% of the total related data from paleontology, genetic science, biochemistry, and even quantum physics is yet to come in. This is literally a mathematical contradiction; a larger portion of evidential data can always contradict a smaller portion.

The 90-97% of the fossil record we haven’t seen, the biomechanic we don’t have, the quantum mechanics we don’t yet know, the proteomics we can’t keep pace with, and the full range of self-organization we have yet to discover.... Why couldn’t all of this add up to a better explanation that would in fact contradict the neo-Darwinian assumption that it all came from nothing more than accidental form change assisted by natural selection? Why would science continue to endorse such a blatant instance of overconfidence and prematurity now that we know we are missing so many pieces of the puzzle? I don’t know.[53]

What I do know is that there is nothing to be gained for science in risking such a monumental embarrassment. In the realm of politics it is a different matter. Marxist-materialists, seeing that the scientific data is likely to go against them in the future, will be strongly motivated to take the political yardage gains now, while they can. Thus, neo-Darwinists can frequently be caught arguing fully against the clear import of the raw data, dwelling in the past as it were, because the scientific past is the only part of science that supports their political goals for the future. Thus, you will frequently find neo-Darwinists sketching an oversimplified view of evolution, and omitting to bring their readers and listeners up to date on recent data on the complexity of living biological systems. As long as the neo-Darwinists dominate mainstream evolutionary science we are going to have to do our own homework, for it runs against their political goals to fully inform us.

Fallacy #22: The myth that self-organization eliminates the need for a designer of life

Some thinkers, like Stuart Kauffman, Richard Dawkins, and Monroe Strickberger, feel that, when it comes to the foundational underpinnings of nature as whole, there is a legitimate third alternative to chance or purpose. For Dawkins and Strickberger that alternative is “cumulative selection.” For Kauffman it is “inherent spontaneous order,” or “self-organization.” As far as I am concerned, they are all dreaming—looking for a free lunch.

The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics allows order to accidentally increase in a local subsystem of the universe, passing any cost in increased disorganization to points outside that local system. While this is true, it does not absolve us from the necessity of doing the math on the time and resource costs for accidentally producing highly complex ordered systems. In each case we must look to see if the universe can afford the cost in terms of overall time and physical resources. The hypothesized event must be otherwise possible within the constraints of known information, and once shown to be possible, relatively probable in comparison to the other available alternative event scenarios.

Just because it is theoretically possible for accidental increases in order to occur doesn’t mean that when increases in order do occur they are necessarily accidental. And it is not true that in all times and under all circumstances local increases in order of any type or any magnitude can occur at all. The 2^nd Law is not a blank check, a free lunch or a free ride; we still have to do the math and look at other factors present in the physical environment at the time to determine what is possible given the full context. We have to compute the probability to see if an accidental process could have achieved such systems within the time and physical resources available during the known timeline of the event. When the probability turns out dismissibly small, the accidental thesis must be ruled out as scientifically untenable for that event. This is what mathematician William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument does. It shows that the probability that the tree of life could have been achieved by accident within the time and physical resources available falls far outside the range of scientific credibility.

Modern science writers have coined a term, “edge of chaos,” that seems to suggest that there is something magical about the physical event of breaking the original symmetry of the elemental configurations in the early days of our universe such that standard mathematical probability theory and physical resource computations need no longer be a concern. This is not true. Science makes no exceptions to the requirement to compute probabilities and resource limits. If the extraordinary specificity of our world’s physical life-favoring parameters was produced by merely randomly breaking symmetry of the original homogenous soup of matter and energy following the Big Bang then it was one big happy accident indeed, an accident so improbable that science simply cannot affirm that it happened! Again, science must always affirm the probable over the improbable.

Self-organization “from the edge of chaos” may be a poetic inspiration, but it is not a mathematical truth. Either self-organization of life equates to the unpacking of preexistent design information or the real time creation of intelligent design information, or it does not conform to the probability standards of science by virtue of claiming an accident so improbable that science must dismiss the hypothesis.

According to the neo-Darwinists, there is this enormous bias in nature that invokes astronomical magnitudes of improbability, and yet it is free…a free lunch. We don’t have to compute probabilities and resource requirements because nature is just that way. As materialists they can’t explain the origin and evolution of life any other way, so, why look a free lunch in the mouth, as we say here in Indiana. No charge, problem solved…next question.

Neo-Darwinists celebrate this gross travesty of logic, math, and the entire spirit and history of science as if it were one of science’s most elegant and brilliant discoveries! While it is brilliant propaganda, it is not brilliant science. In a sense, of course, it is elegant, or rather, it was elegant in 1859 when Charles Darwin proposed it, and it was brilliant back then. Back then we could not see inside the cell and had not discovered the genomes. But this is a very subtle misdirection because the question before us is not was it elegant and brilliant, but is it elegant and brilliant in light of current data. It is no longer brilliant, because it ignores most of the data now available and runs directly contrary to science’s own probability thresholds for credibility. It is not elegant for the same reason: it has no means to assimilate much of the new data.

Ultimately, the hard math of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument (see Appendix 2) prevails over all forms of accidental world theory, be they self-organization based or invoking Dawkins’ cumulative selection concept. There can be no free lunch. Order is both a scarce and a numerically accountable resource. Accidental evolution puts nature way into the red. Yes, there can be self-organization of life, and, yes, there can be a natural process that gets increasingly efficient at building the tree of life, but we cannot call these processes accidental without invoking improbabilities beyond the scientific threshold of credibility.

We now know that there is a tendency for some of the key biotic components of life to self-organize; but there is no scientific reason to call that self-organization “accidental.” As for the rest of life’s construction, the other 99.9999 %: we just don’t know how it happened! By saying that the order in our universe is free, that it does not require intelligence and purpose for its existence, Kauffman and Dawkins are merely dressing up in new clothes the ridiculous claim that an accident can make a complex machine—Darwin’s new clothes, if you will. This claim can be mathematically disproved to the current standards of science (immense improbability and resource exhaustion). The same refutation did not apply to Darwin because it is based in modern data on protein and genome complexity, specifically the sensitivity of proteins and more complex living systems to random changes.

Many informed readers will object that I minimize Kauffman, Strickberger, Futuyma, Doolittle and Dawkins et al. too casually here, for, not only are they noted scholars, but other accomplished thinkers have indicated that they accept self-organization as a suitable stopping point in a causal chain of scientific explanation. Physicist Paul Davies, for example, says this in his (1992) book, The Mind of God.^[54] There are two major problems in stopping the scientific investigation into the origin of life before we have to—three if we leave self-organization in the context of neo-Darwinian theory.

First, because life is so astronomically complex self-organization of life implies a bias for life built into nature so enormous as to constitute a plausible case for an intelligent designer. Therefore if we place the concept of self-organization within the context of accidental neo-Darwinian evolution we generate a contradiction by in effect saying “This self-organization of life (which the math says probably originates in intelligent design) is the way accidental evolution (which does not originate in intelligent design) occurred. Second, the tact of stopping the chain of explanation early violates the entire spirit and tradition of scientific enquiry. Nowhere in the grand history and tradition of science have we ever arbitrarily stopped our quest for explanation when there was clear evidence of a deeper underlying phenomenon at work. There is a very practical reason for the spirit of science being that way, which is the third reason not to stop our inquiry prematurely at the point of self-organization: we just might be missing something. The spirit and tradition of science says that you have to know you are scratching bottom before you stop digging. Stopping our inquiry into the origin and evolution of life at self-organization does not give us the certainty that there is nothing more to be learned.

Taking the position that scientific explanation may be allowed to stop at the first hue and cry of “self-organization” is politically very suspect because it implies that science need have no interest in attempting to answer the question of intelligent design at all. The Marxists love this of course, for they assume there is no God and would rather spend the money genetically engineering us all into efficient workers, but stopping the inquiry at self-organization without going further to see if intelligent design is involved it is inconsistent not only with the historical tradition and spirit of science but with what science has actually been doing recently in SETI and biotic machine engineering. Both of these enterprises tell us that there can be valid signals of underlying intelligence in physical data and that biotic machines can in fact be the product of intelligence.

I find it somewhat suspect that many of the same authors who, in the face of a strong case for ID, now suggest we stop the explanation of life’s origin and evolution at self-organization previously attempted to answer the question of intelligent design themselves. That is, they attempted to answer the ID question so long as the inquiry seemed to be favoring an accidental world. They apparently didn’t mind answering the question of ID in the negative, but they now prefer to avoid answering it in the positive. This reveals a political bias that is incompatible with objective science.

Fallacies #23, 24, 25 & 26: Naïve finalism, perfectionism, the problem of evil, and the hidden premise of materialism

NOTE: Please understand that, in describing in detail what Christian's believe in the paragraphs that follow, I am neither inserting into science the argument from religious authority, nor trying to press my own personal faith onto the reader, though I may get a bit carried away with an inspiration at times. My purpose is, rather, to offer the Christian worldview as a logical counterexample to the neo-Darwinist claim that there is no coherent conceptual framework that would permit our world to be as it is, if God existed and if he were fully good and all-powerful.

In addition to the ever-present hidden premise of materialism, the three fallacies we will discuss here, the argument for perfectionism, naïve finalism, and the argument from evil and suffering are the core of the neo-Darwinian argument against intelligent design.^[55] It bears pointing out that none of these arguments have a single thing to do with science; they are purely philosophical or even theological arguments. That doesn’t mean they carry no intellectual or rhetorical force, however.

The problems of evil and imperfection are, in fact, two of the oldest and most formidable stumbling blocks to faith in God, although there is a perfectly reasonable resolution to both, as we will discover in the paragraphs that follow. Finalism only became an issue after the advent of the theory of evolution because until then there was no reason to challenge it. There are two distinct religiously spawned concepts of finalism: 1) instantaneous creation of life in its final form, and 2) all things work to a predesignated final end or purpose (no accidents, no mistakes, and everything serving a divinely ordained purpose). Biblical Creationists (intelligent design theorists are not Biblical Creationists) are the ones that most often assert finalism in sense #1. To make their case against intelligent design easier, neo-Darwinists will occasionally pretend that finalism in this sense of instant creation is the only view that theists have available to them, ignoring of all things their very own theory of evolution as a tool that God might use to create.

Neo-Darwinian evolutionists also insist that if there is a God, finalism in sense #2 must be true as well. Finalism in either sense is a very antiquated view even in theology. The neo-Darwinists cling to it because it makes it easier to construct a bogus “refutations” of theistic debating opponents. A straw man with plenty of predetermined weak spots is an easier opponent to beat than a real one who doesn’t have those weaknesses.

The hidden premise of materialism is a very simple fallacy: the neo-Darwinists assume the material world is all that exists. This assumption underlies all of their arguments and discussions but is very seldom revealed to their readers or listeners, who must pay very close attention to see that the neo-Darwinian arguments fail minus granting the hidden assumption of materialism.

“The Problem of Evil”

Let’s begin our discussion of these four core objections to God and intelligent design with the problem of evil, and then move on to look at perfectionism and the two forms of finalism. Examples of the hidden premise of materialism will pop up along the way.

Epicurus, one of the famous Greek philosophers, is one of the earliest and best known thinkers to have formally posed the philosophical problem of evil as an argument against God. Here is his famous riddle.

Why Call Him God? (Epicurus)^[56]

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

Some people have claimed that Epicurus’ riddle is more than an astute linguistic conundrum, that it is visible and straightforward proof that God does not exist. I disagree. Most of us get past such over-simplified and naïve conceptions in fourth grade, once having heard the explanation of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden (original sin) in church. Here is a riddle in the opposite direction that does not leave out anything important, such as free will, sin, love, fatherly patience, personal growth, and a generously offered second chance.

Why Call Him Wise? (Harrison)

Is God unselfish, even divinely so?

Then why not share life, create legions of other beings and love them?

Is God generous?

Then why not allow those beings radical free will so that they can grow to moral maturity (if they choose to) and share the higher realms of paradise with Him in an angelic form instead of being merely robots or dumb animals?

Is God just and merciful?

Is God fully good?

Does God love his creations?

Then why not be patient with them, tolerate their mistakes for a time so they don’t have to be prematurely destroyed? If they demonstrate an intent to do evil, why not exile them from the paradise of which they are no longer worthy to preserve its purity, but don’t completely destroy them prior to availing them a chance at redemption?

Do weak-willed humans tend to lose compassion for others and think solely of their own physical safety and comfort, thus risking readmission to paradise?

Then why not temporarily allow tragedy and suffering in the intermediate world that will facilitate their spiritual growth and restore human hearts to compassion?

Does justice require that humans not be punished prematurely for evil deeds they have not yet done?

Then why not give them an intermediate imperfect world in which they can fully express their good or evil choices (without ruining paradise), offer them a chance to redeem themselves from any evil they do, and then, only after exhaustive opportunities for redemption and rebirth, when the fruit of the tree is fully clear, only then eternally separate the evil from the good and restore the good back to paradise?

Was Epicurus unable to understand these things?

Then why call him wise?

What we see in the response to Epicurus is that the Christian worldview is a fully coherent counterexample to the naïve neo-Darwinist assumption that, if there were an all-powerful and good God, then there would be no substantial pain or suffering in the world. The only way to avoid the explanatory power of the Christian model is either to reduce humanity to robots without free will, or to assume them to have perfectly good intentions. We know from our own direct experience that we are not robots, and we also know from the headlines that our human hearts are not yet perfect.

Here we see what the neo-Darwinists, being good politicians in the Marxist tradition, are hiding from us. They believe human beings are robots, that we don’t really have free will, and that we don’t have the divine dignity of an immortal soul given by God. For them, a temporary testing ground in not necessary, for we can’t help what we do, and indeed, for them there is no God to do the testing. In a superb essay, “Darwin and Fundamentalism,” appearing in Richard Appignanesi’s recently edited collection of fine essays on science, Postmodernism and Big Science, anthropologist Merryl Wyn Davies cites Richard Dawkins:

Dawkins is explicit: we are lumbering robots built body and mind by genes: “DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to the music.”[57]

The neo-Darwinists are entitled to their view as a personal philosophical preference, but when they employ the problem of evil as a formal argument against the existence of a good God, it becomes more than a matter of personal preference; it becomes a matter of the technical evaluation of the logic of their argument. Technically the problem of evil used as an argument against a good God fails because of the Christian counterexample, and any other similar scenario. These counterexamples show that it is possible to have a good all-powerful God and still have the evil and suffering humans experience here on Earth.

On the surface the neo-Darwinian argument against God from the problem of evil seems to be grounded in a complete failure to understand the logical implications of free will. What is actually going on is something different, though closely related. It is not that they don’t understand free will, but rather that they deny we have it based upon the hidden premise of materialism. Thus, their argument against God is circular reasoning; one has to assume materialism and God’s nonexistence first in order to deny free will. This is the logical fallacy of begging the question, and it proves their argument against God to be invalid.

As Davies cogently observes in the same essay, this extreme approach to materialism and a robotic view of human nature reveals that, no less than religion, neo-Darwinism has its own fundamentalists who start their treatment of any topic from an assumed inviolate creed. They refuse to deviate from this creed no matter what the objective scientific data and valid logical analyses seem to show.

There is in fact no scientific case for the robotic view of humanity as the ability of our genes to determine our real time thought progressions and behaviors cannot be demonstrated. As far as Dawkins’ selfish gene theory goes there are many instances of human behaviors clearly working against the survival of the human species: genocide, suicide, homosexuality, xenophobia, etc. None of these behaviors are conducive to the survival of the human genome, and if the species genome goes, so do all the specific genes and subsets of genes within the species. Thus, just as with the theory of accidental evolution itself, Dawkins’ selfish gene theory[58] that we are driven by our genes’ quest for their own survival and absolutely nothing else has no visible biomechanic. Without a biomechanic the theory cannot be shown to be true; there is nothing substantial in the way of direct data or logic to support it, and very much that argues against it.

Given free will, however, it makes perfect sense that God, who does not tolerate evil, would, from a sense of justice refrain from punishing a crime before it is committed. Providing an option for repentance and conversion is also something we would expect a good God to do, that is, to show mercy where possible and still preserve justice. It makes perfect sense then that prior to condemning his children for eternity God would want to be thorough in identifying who was incorrigibly evil and who was merely experiencing a temporary moral failing from which they could be healed—or who was amoral as some materialist may be, in a sense spiritually neutral, needing time to spiritually awaken. So the qualities of goodness, mercy, and justice all demand a scenario where evil is allowed to be played out temporarily. Evil cannot be allowed in paradise by definition, which means that all candidates for paradise must be tested and purified. For this testing and purification to occur (in addition to rehab, temporary punishment, and spiritual growth) there must be an intermediate temporary and imperfect world.

The neo-Darwinist concept of a good God as presented in their argument from the problem of evil is logically flawed in another way. One might call this selectively omitting relevant information. It ascribes to a good God only one redeeming quality, intolerance for evil. It arbitrarily ignores the other qualities inherent in goodness: justice, mercy, compassion, and the ability to forgive. Properly understood, the problem of evil is not an indictment of God, but an indictment of humanity. Given the evil we have done, God is doing all he can to mitigate the damage and redeem us.

That leaves us to deal with the objection that so many people die early without having an opportunity to do any rehab here at all. To this objection, which is sound enough on the surface, there are several possible replies. Purgatory is the most concrete solution, and the Catholic one. The spiritual growth that is not accomplished here can be done there. It may seem unjust on the surface but that is only because we are imagining it being done in an unjust way. God is fully just and Purgatory is a place of the spirit fully under his control; there are no accidents there. Souls who left early in tragedy will be credited with the suffering they have already endured and will receive the benefit of additional prayers from the members of the Church, which speed their progress toward Heaven. In theory, while their experience is not identical to those who spend more time on Earth, it is morally and spiritually equitable, which works because God’s goals for humanity are spiritual not physical progress.

The reader might object that, while that explains the human-created evils, it does not explain the natural evils: hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. The Christian explanation of natural evils is somewhat different but still a closely related concept. Within the Christian conceptual framework God has set a higher goal for humanity than just mere physical existence. He wants to raise us up to the divine in a glorified angelic, spiritual form. Achieving that requires moral, emotional, and spiritual purity. This is a goal we have to work towards over time, and love and compassion are fully essential to success. Given humanity's track record of selfishness, without tragedy to reawaken compassion we might never take our focus off of ourselves and the pursuit of our own material comforts sufficient to stimulate spiritual growth. We might too often be content to just tool along “fat, dumb, and happy,” as the saying goes, grabbing more for ourselves and forgetting God and our fellowman entirely.

In the Christian view God wants us to strive for greater things, to focus on the next, higher, heavenly world. Living with the continual possibility of a natural disaster unexpectedly taking our lives at a moment's notice forces us to keep the next world in mind, to set our focus on the higher spiritual realm. We might otherwise be prone to forget it so long as things are going well down here, all comfy and cozy, peachy and rosy.

Natural disasters (theoretically, as we don’t fully know the mind of God) can serve several valid purposes, including stimulating virtue: compassion for others, charity, self-discipline, personal strength, faith in God, self-control, and self-sacrifice, etc. God can use disaster to punish specific nations or to punish the human family as a single family and single team for our collective sins. Then there is the point that for us to be a sure bet never to return to evil once readmitted to eternal paradise we would have to have known evil for what it is in its fullest extension, seen it up close and personal, as it were, and rejected it at the deepest depths of our souls. For imperfect and immature souls, a paradise of the kind the neo-Darwinians claim God should have given us does not offer the heat and hammer of the blacksmith’s forges to temper and purify our souls by testing them in the presence of genuine evil and intense trials and temptations. But, for neo-Darwinists who think we are merely physical robots, none of this is necessary. We too often forget to ask them, however, “Why do robots need paradise in the first place?” This point is checkmate for the neo-Darwinist argument from the problem of evil, for a good God need not take cognizance of a mere robot’s environment at all. Robots don’t suffer for they have no soul with which to experience it. God has no moral obligation to pamper robots with full and eternal paradise. He isn’t even obligated to give his robots a six month tune-up and oil change. They will still be there when he gets around to it.

In the Christian view the tragic natural disasters are not fully inordinate evils as they are limited and temporary. This is especially true when placed into the context of the divine healing and eternal happiness that follows life in this world for all of us assuming we don’t reject the forgiveness of our God. We all die from something. Ultimately, natural disasters serve the purpose of stimulating necessary spiritual growth in a human race that is otherwise reluctant to pursue that growth. Once again, we are the problem. So much for the problem evil.

A close relative of the argument from the problem of evil is the argument from imperfection. The neo-Darwinists naively claim that the designs of all God’s creations would have to immediately be final, continually be perfect, and that every process dynamic in nature must drive in a straight line to some physically perfect goal. One might call this the “Paradise now!” objection: God must make an instant paradise, spend no time at all doing it, be fully efficient in the process. God (who literally has all the time in the world) must “waste” no time by allowing physical processes to wander; he must allow no physical imperfections in any system or object he/she creates. Neo-Darwinists claim that all of this is directly deducible from the concept of a good all-powerful God. The refutation of this argument is one simple word: “Why?” Why must God do it this way when there are coherent and plausible conceptions of God that require none of this?

Before we get into the more subtle arguments, we should note that Christianity provides a very straightforward and telling response to the neo-Darwinian objection that God would have made a perfect world: he did. Unfortunately, we were kicked out of it! To argue, as Darwinists have historically done, from lack of perfection in the physical world, to, of all things, the nonexistence of the God of the Bible is therefore utter nonsense. The Bible says man was ejected from the perfect world for good cause.

One does not have to be a Christian fundamentalist to find a case for God in science, despite the physical imperfections of our world. The case against God from an “imperfect” world is an easy bubble to burst because even the non-fundamentalist Christian conceptual framework not only allows but requires this world to be imperfect: we rebelled and our world was cursed as a punishment. God, who is good, generously allows us to be exiled here in a necessarily imperfect world, placing us on probation for crimes meriting a death sentence as a compassionate act of clemency. Clemency cannot serve as an argument against a good God.

Any scenario involving mankind receiving a justifiable temporary punishment consequent to our own moral failings suffices to burst the bubble of the shockingly naïve perfectionist argument against God. Would it be more appropriate for a good and compassionate God to simply flunk us all out and send us to Hell for eternity, or to give us another chance in an imperfect world? We can’t do rehab in paradise in our present state because we would contaminate it with our sins. One doesn’t dress farm lot swine in tuxedos, although the cute little household pet piggy can have one.

Preparation, formation, purification, requalification, maturation, growth, punitive rehabilitation…these are very familiar concepts to all of us, but apparently completely foreign to neo-Darwinian evolutionists. They all take time to bear fruit and they must all allow for mistakes. There are some experiences you have to be ready for prior to indulging in fully. There is an undeniable joy in skiing, but one doesn’t strap skis on an infant and send them down the Olympic slalom, not until they have grown and their skills matured. The spiritual and moral growth processes can be at least as time and effort intensive as learning to ski, especially for slow learners, and we have plenty of those.

Yes, a suffering-free paradise would presumably be God’s ultimate goal, but there could be good reasons why it would be best to not have paradise available to humanity prior to a retraining period. Our moral and spiritual failings are those reasons. In other words, regarding the imperfections and sufferings of this world, God has not done this to us; he has done this for us. The alternative is eternal damnation, solitary confinement in Hell. Thus, the neo-Darwinist objection seems very odd to Christians to whom it seems ungrateful to criticize God for giving us a second chance. In the Christian view, we are the only reason the world is not perfect.

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, in his new book Chance or Purpose, explains that there is a further metaphysical point to consider. There is more to the ontology of creation than a single instantaneous point in time event. In contrast to the neo-Darwinists’ overly simplistic conception that any creation by a God would have to be instantaneous, the Catholic Church sees creation as ongoing, especially mankind’s creation.^[59] Given that paradise was in fact created at the beginning and we lost it through our own moral/spiritual fall, the creation process that the Church affirms is presently ongoing is actually a re-creation. We had paradise, lost it due to our own fault, and God is presently working to heal and re-create the world along with our souls so we can have it back at the earliest time compatible with our own spiritual and moral condition.[60]

Thus, the neo-Darwinist objection that the physical world is not (yet) perfect commits the elementary fallacy of requiring a work to be perfect prior to its completion. It demands that children still into finger paints and toilet training be dressed in tuxes and taken to the opera before they have matured to the natural point where it makes sense for them to do those things, and for the theatre director to leave a standing invitation for the entire farm lot to attend “come as you are.” Well, you may say, things simply aren’t done that way at the theatre. And if things are not done that way in our theatres why would neo-Darwinists expect less stringent rules for God’s paradise. In the Christian view, humanity demonstrated that it was not ready for paradise, and that is precisely why we don’t have paradise here on Earth today.

The Catholic Church envisions humanity on a journey of faith that incrementally purifies the spirit and helps it grow in compassion and reverence for God. Our souls are still in the process of a (re)creation—the re-creation of fallen man in the image of Christ. In the Christian model, mankind’s bad behavior has invoked the requirement for an unavoidable rework: rehab, remediation, punishment, and purification, yes, but more importantly a divinely engendered rebirth of the soul. Obviously, if humanity is a rework in process, it is inappropriate to demand perfection while the work is still ongoing.

Manufacturing souls is an odd process compared to say making a bookcase or kitchen table. In the spiritual realm the imperfections in our world can themselves be tools: producing the struggles, trials, and hardships that serve as chisel and stylist with which God sculpts our hearts into less selfish and more compassionate forms. It is a painful process, but necessary.^[61]

Another reason for good God to create an “imperfect” world is the fact that paradise would constitute an as yet undeserved reward for humanity. So, given the Christian conceptual framework there are actually many good reasons why our world remains imperfect: it is a work in progress because we are a work in progress; we don’t yet deserve paradise; we have incurred legitimate punishment; and the concept of paradise unavoidably entails purity control (hogs who insist on wallowing in the mud are not allowed into the wedding reception, but the little pet piggy who doesn’t mind his bubble baths can come in).

An imperfect world actually facilitates the growth of human souls towards spiritual perfection. Suffering is then not an indication of the nonexistence of a good all-powerful God; it is evidence for a good, all-powerful, patient, and forgiving God.

The neo-Darwinist criticism of belief in God based upon an imperfect world is based upon two really big assumptions, both of them wholly unsupported: 1) the assumption of determinism, that is, the assumption that humans don’t have free will, so they don’t have to be tested, reformed, purified, or held accountable; and, 2) the assumption of materialism, wherein there is no need to mature spiritually through freely chosen acts of compassion because there is no spirit to mature. These two arbitrary and unevidenced assumptions (which, by the way, contradict everything we know intuitively form our authentic experience of life) together amount to the belief that we humans are merely physical robots. Without this completely demeaning reduction of our own race, the neo-Darwinist, atheist, and Marxist arguments against God from the presence of evils and imperfections in the world are completely groundless.

To argue against God in this way by first assuming materialism is obviously circular. It assumes the answer to the question before the investigation starts. In logical analysis, this is called the fallacy of begging the question. One may also call it the fallacy of hidden premise because the assumption of materialism is not openly admitted within the structure of the argument.

Whatever the logical or psychological grounds may be for the neo-Darwinian view, in hastily ruling out God based upon the presence of evil and suffering in our world, they have simply failed to address all of the available conceptual options. The Christian counterexample proves there could be a good all-powerful God even given the sometimes tragic conditions that hold in this world.

And lets’ face it; the conceptual paradigm they have chosen to endorse as man’s most profound philosophical effort is—there is no other word for it—childish. It is immature. They think the human race should be entitled to paradise prior to growing up, prior to paying our just debts for previous sins, prior to learning self-discipline and virtue. They think that we should have all good things now at no cost whatsoever—if God is to be considered good. They think all creative processes should be instantaneous—instant gratification. Perhaps an otherwise good God would do things this way, but not a good parent—certainly not a smart parent.☺ Is this in fact the approach neo-Darwinists take in rearing their own children? I would venture to say, no, it isn’t. They are talking the talk but not walking the walk.

Ironically, the most powerful paradigm for transformation from an intermediate to a final form over time turns out to be a motif right out of evolutionary biology itself: metamorphosis. The lowly caterpillar changes into a beautiful free-flying butterfly. The human situation, as viewed within the Christian worldview, is analogous except that the change is even more startling. Here the change is from a self-centered, greedy, cold-hearted human being, otherwise condemned to first wallow in the base profanities of a merely physical and selfish subhuman existence closely followed by an eternity of solitary confinement in Hell to a saintly compassionate being worthy of admittance to the heavenly angelic realm. It is nothing other than the metamorphosis of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ aptly named masterpiece, “A Christmas Story.” The brush and stylus God uses to paint and etch our future wings with beautiful shades of divine compassion sometimes has an unavoidably painful edge, but this is due to the hardness of the medium (our fallen hearts and souls), not the intent of God to be cruel to his children.

Contrary to the neo-Darwinian objection, the existence of tragedy in this world does not show a shortcoming of God (or prove his nonexistence); it shows a shortcoming in man. Given that flaw in humanity, the existence of (temporary) tragedy serves to evoke compassion in tepid souls that might not otherwise rediscover compassion at all. Tragedy, and perhaps tragedy alone, can evoke compassion in nearly lost souls. Sympathy for those who suffer relights a spark of faith through compassion. In the Christian metaphysic, the Holy Spirit then carefully nurtures that spark until it can be fanned into the full flame of divine compassion over time, triggering a magnificent and eternal spiritual metamorphosis. “EB…I…NEE…ZER SCROOOOOOOGE!”

To dismiss fully possible alternative views of God out of hand with no more substantial argument than the classic one liner we all here in Introduction to Philosophy 101: “How can evil exist in the world if God is both all good and all powerful?” strikes one as hasty at best. Apparently neo-Darwinists have never studied the Christian theology they so loudly and pompously dismiss. Christianity has long since shown a coherent solution to the problem of evil: it’s our fault, not His.

A "perfect" world, in the sense of a painless, flawless, effortless physical paradise might well not be the aim of a designer at all, and for good reasons. Such a world won’t be best for free-willed moral beings unless and until they are already perfect. It is the simple maxim not to spoil the child while he is still in formation. A physical paradise is a discipline-free world. Discipline is needed for growth, as is suffering. Punishment is required for justice. Individuals with free will tooling along effortlessly in paradise will have nothing to correct selfish or evil tendencies, nothing to build moral character. The neo-Darwinian view is a hugely naïve concept. It looks at perfection of the external physical aspects of life alone, ignoring the moral, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life. The neo-Darwinist concept of God is not the only one available (certainly not the best) and so their argument against God’s existence fails. It is, however, a concept coincidentally quite convenient to the nature of the Marxist-materialist social revisionist’s agenda.

Why does God tolerate evil? Why doesn’t he destroy fallen men along with the fallen angels the instant of the first transgression? Compassion—God is good. Compassion and clemency are virtues. God has elected to give mankind another chance. It’s that simple.

Ironically, it is the very thing that lies at the heart of Christianity, suffering, that has motivated many neo-Darwinists to adopt atheistic materialism. They already consider themselves enlightened by their materialistic beliefs. They view atheistic materialistic socialism as a very “high” calling indeed. They don’t need no stinking suffering! They don’t need no stinking discipline! By virtue of their fervor for materialistic social reform they are already “perfect;” for them that is as high as man goes. But why, I ask you, would robots develop revolutionary fervor for any cause?

Well, you might respond, isn’t it obvious? They are trying to reduce human suffering over the long term through social engineering. Yes, that is what they say, but, the proof is in the pudding. What they have actually done through history is something quite different. They have been willing to condemn, enslave, torture, experiment upon, genetically modify, and exterminate by planned genocide and population reduction techniques any number of millions of people in order to eliminate suffering! They indict religion for producing terrible wars in the name of what is good, and what are they willing to do in the name of social material progress? Anything whatsoever!

Never mind that the neo-Darwinian Marxist-materialist concept opens the door to creating slave labor of millions (as Stalin did in Russia). Never mind that it condones the extermination of millions thought to be genetically inferior (as Hitler did with the Jews in WWII). Never mind brutal behavioral conditioning programs. Never mind tortuous mind control experiments, human genetic and biowarfare guinea pigs. Never mind social class systems with haves and have-nots locked in for generations untold. If a concept is felt to increase the long term prospects for the physical advance of human society, any cost in human suffering is acceptable—and the concept doesn’t even have to work; it only has to be believed by those who happen to be in power (no matter how irrational or insane those persons may be).

“Eliminate suffering”…go figure. It is worthy of note that the first thing that must be done to pursue aggressive social engineering of the kind materialists have historically favored is to dispose of those troublesome little glitches in the law that the rest of us like to call “human rights.” There are no checks and balances to prevent atrocity in the name of progress in the neo-Darwinian concept. Only inviolate individual human rights provide the checks and balances needed. In the neo-Darwinian concept those inviolate individual human rights don’t exist because the welfare of the individual must be always subverted to the perceived welfare of the species.

Marxist materialists are naïve. They believe suffering can be fully eliminated in an imperfect world with an imperfect human race. In hopeless gambles to do the impossible, that is to eliminate suffering completely, they are willing to perpetrate unthinkable atrocities on present humanity in the name of the future, all the while going about vigorously removing the only thing that can in fact keep the evil ones in our fallen race in check: individual human rights.

Christians are also called by the Church to reduce suffering, but in Christianity the suffering that can’t be avoided has a valid role. For God’s moral vetting process to work humans need to experience evil, have an opportunity to endorse or reject it, and have an opportunity for real selfless heroism in the pursuit of good. Only under these conditions can humans make the fully informed choice at the depths of their souls that triggers the spiritual metamorphosis requisite to reentry to paradise.

Still, in the Christian concept this problem of suffering is not permanent. There is a solution. When the good have grown through suffering in a good cause and the evil ones have made their choice against God, then at the end of this world God will eliminate evil once and for all and no trace of it will remain except in the purifying fires of hell. God divinely heals all wounds and an eternally joyous existence follows. The logic of Christianity says that, given radical free will and man’s prior fall into sin, there is just no other way to do it.

Readers who are not Christian may feel I have been talking past you in delivering what appears to be a sermon, but I am not. Christians already know this. I am not talking to them; I am talking to you. And what I am saying is that the argument from the problem of evil fails to prove the nonexistence of a good God because the Christian conceptual framework shows that a good God could have valid reasons for making the world “imperfect” in physical terms. I am also saying that one needs to be very careful in evaluating the neo-Darwinist rhetoric for among the neo-Darwinists, in addition to those who honestly believe what they are saying, are politically motivated individuals who have an agenda to move the world towards the Marxist-materialist social model. To do this they first have to convince the public that there is no God, and they will say or do anything that seems to work, including subverting the integrity of science, logic, philosophy, and common sense to accomplish their goals. The end justifies the means.

Noted philosopher and Kantian scholar Lewis White Beck, in Philosophic Inquiry, quotes a real gem from F. H. Bradley that sums up the Christian position on evil very concisely in a single, and singularly profound phrase dripping with poetic irony: “This is the best of all possible worlds, for everything in it is a necessary evil.”^[62] In other words, an imperfect world can be the best of all possible worlds for us given our own past failings.

Here we see that proper understanding requires us to examine even the word “perfect” a bit closer. Perfect for what purpose? The Christian concept of original sin easily destroys the simplistic neo-Darwinian assumption that any world created by God must necessarily be perfect at all points in time no matter how badly God’s children behave themselves.^[63] Given that the sins of humanity warranted eternal destruction in terms of a pure concept of justice, should we be complaining that a good God also tempers pure justice with mercy and allows us a reprieve by way of rehab here on Earth? You may form your own opinion, but as for me, I am grateful for rehab!

Beck also cogently observes that the self-evident ability of God to divinely heal all wounds may be admitted as a sufficient resolution to the problem of evil, but only if we first establish the argument from design in order to have reasonable objective grounds for God’s existence in the first place. I contend that the modern scientific argument for intelligent design has now (only recently) accomplished that much; it makes God’s existence much more plausible than his non-existence. Therefore, by combining modern science, logic, and the Christian worldview, we have a genuine resolution to the problem of evil.

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“Imperfect Evolution”

So much for the abstract arguments against God’s existence from the problem of evil, suffering, and imperfection. Philosophically, they don’t hold water. Let’s move on to look at the argument from imperfection in the more specific and concrete context of evolution. The late great evolutionist Ernst Mayr seems to take the perfectionist error so far as to preclude any rational person from having any different view of creation/evolution than the naïve neo-Darwinian concept. He even seems to rule out that God himself might take a different view. Mayr: “However, only transformational evolution—the orderly change in a lineage over time, directed toward the goal of perfect adaptation—is susceptible to this deistic interpretation.”^[64] (My emphasis)

I am a fan of Ernst Mayr’s writings in terms of his literary acumen and intellectual eruditeness, but I am not a fan of his logic. Mayr speaks with authority and is extremely confident in his position. For this reason he tends to convince his readers of his own views while giving the (false) impression that he has achieved a very thorough treatment of the subject. While his treatment is thorough enough when he talks population dynamics and other of the technical aspects of evolution, when moving to the philosophical domain and drawing sweeping inferences asserting the lack of purpose in nature he does precious little homage to completeness, selectively omitting volumes of evidence for purpose and intelligent design in nature.

In the quote given, Mayr crosses the proper boundaries of science by dictating to theology the limits within which theology must interpret the relationship of God to the natural world. He also begs a very important philosophical/theological question entirely without justification in assuming that this physical world would have to be God’s first creation and ultimate goal, as opposed to being intermediate. Mayr fails to consider the possibility that even if this world were God’s ultimate goal he might elect to specify his objectives loosely allowing margins of error and occasional wanderings in the physical event processes. God needn’t be obsessed with the details so long as he can ensure the larger elements of his plan are achieved.

Mayr is not the first person to claim that God must be a perfectionist regarding the physical world, a perfectionist in human terms. There are undoubtedly more ancient thinkers that have taken a similarly perfectionist view of divine providence, but for our purposes, the first commission of this fallacy relevant to the modern evolution debate occurred in the form of the naïve finalism of Christian fundamentalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the Christians of the time considered evolution to be a theological heresy. Those Christians believed that every event in the natural world, no matter how small, occurred strictly in accordance with God’s plan. This extreme view of divine providence allowed for no accidents whatsoever. (Note: the Bible itself does allow for accidents. Jesus admitted the existence of true accidents in this world at Luke 13:2-5 NAB.). According to this early fundamentalist view, called finalism, not only does God have a final end in view for the physical world, but absolutely everything works toward that end.^[65] Nothing is left to chance.

Outside of a fundamentalist Christian faith, to say that God would be logically constrained to act in this way is a logical fallacy because it is logically possible that God might elect to constrain physical events much more loosely, allowing for a certain degree of variation, indirect pathways, margins of error, etc. God might (as he apparently has) even allow random sub-routines at certain intermediate points in natural processes, and allow for true accidents as well, while still holding the end results within designated limits. In doing things this way, God’s goals are no less guaranteed.

It is not logically necessary that God be a micromanager, only that he guarantees the achievement of his larger intentions. Ironically, Mayr’s position is not the position of an open-minded secular philosopher and scientist at all. It reflects the same extremely narrow view that the religious fundamentalists hold, the same view he is criticizing. Mayr disallows any broader conceptions of theology as if the fundamentalist view of religion were the only one rationally available. In restricting their rebuttal to the naïve finalism of early fundamentalist Christians, neo-Darwinists have, it seems to me, committed the same fallacy themselves. Whereas the fundamentalist Christians asserted that “As a matter of fact, based upon religious authority, God is known to be a micromanager,” the neo-Darwinists go an additional step to commit a stronger, purely logical fallacy, viz., “If there were a God or intelligent designer, he would of necessity be a perfectionist and a micromanager.” They feel this is established by the meaning of the word ‘God’ alone. But this is not logically required by the definition of God, and it is not a view supported by the Bible; it is only a precept of Christian fundamentalists.

Of course fundamentalist religion is a much easier opponent for the neo-Darwinists, a straw man, compared to the full range of theological views. It is much easier to argue against 6-day creation than against intelligent design theory generally. Thus, the neo-Darwinists’ tactic of restricting their response to the easy target of fundamentalism is more than a bit suspect.

Neo-Darwinists cite the extinction of species, death and suffering of the lower animals, imperfections in biological design, and less than 100% success in adaptive form variations in the history of evolution as definitive proof that there is no God (or any other substantially potent and predominantly good, that is, not cruel, intelligent designer). In other words, imperfections in biology rule out an all-powerful all-good God as the creator of life. It is, however, both hasty and presumptuous (not to mention dangerous) to indict God for a temporarily imperfect world when his only real alternative was to destroy most of us, his human critics, in order to cleanse this world and restore paradise for the very few already worthy of it (if any). I, for one, prefer God’s approach to that of the neo-Darwinist (as do most other Hoosiers and Americans). ☺ If God had stuck with the paradise-only concept, there would have been a paradise, but we wouldn’t be in it! As the home folks say here in Indiana, “Thank God for small favors.”

Is it God who is the cause of the bulk of the world’s tragedy, or is it man? Clearly it is man who is waging war upon man, man who is failing to provide food for the poor, and man who is failing to ensure justice to the oppressed, not God. Given man’s moral failings and consequent invocation of just punishments, even the existence of parasites and bacteria, could have valid reasons for being. They could be punishments. Note the biblical precedent of afflicting evildoers with illnesses and pestilence: the 10 plagues in Exodus, Antiochus’ terrible illness, etc. Having these kinds of elements in nature gives God a flexible means to raise or lower the threshold of punishment based upon the constantly changing requirements of human personal and social immorality. When one looks at the terrible acts of human cruelty culminating even in genocide it would seem that humanity has gotten off lightly, parasites notwithstanding. The rational question to ask is not why has God afflicted us with parasites, but why does God tolerate humanity at all?

Nonetheless, neo-Darwinian authors cite the existence of human parasites and pathogens (lice and germs) as the coup de grace in their argument against the existence of a good God. Why would a good God create such horrible repugnant things that only cause misery and suffering? This argument only shows a lack of imagination, plus a stark unfamiliarity with the teachings of the Christian religion, the same religion that neo-Darwinists daily deign to authoritatively denounce and criticize. It also shows a gigantic blind spot to mankind’s own moral culpability. Why are there pathogens and parasites? “We deserve it” is the obvious answer.

“OK,” you may object, “parasites may serve as punishment or be tools to teach us physical and spiritual cleanliness and self-discipline, which are virtues. But what about the big stuff, why the fatal tragedies?” The Christian answer to that is that you are forgetting that life is eternal. There are no fatalities where life is eternal. Unfortunately our language doesn’t always capture the enormity of the gift of eternal life that Christ has restored to us. In using the words “death” and “fatal” we incorrectly imply that the tragedy is permanent and can’t be cured. In the Christian view, however, they can and will be cured.

For Christians, the vastly larger part of life doesn’t take place in this world at all, and suffering serves as the primary tool that allows us to re-qualify for the good stuff in the next world. Suffering, tragedy, and death all end with this life (if we include any necessary time in Purgatory)—and that we all agree is good. The roughly 70-80 years of earthly life comprises hardly a dot in the joyous never-ending story of eternity in the perfect world the neo-Darwinists say God should have created in the first instance. But of course, in the Christian view God did create it; we fouled it up, and he is recreating it and us even now so we can be restored to paradise as quickly as possible after the requisite purification. Add to that promise of restoration to paradise the fact that God divinely heals all wounds incurred here on Earth, and the tragedies experienced here, while still real, are neither as monumental nor as permanent as those outside the Christian or Muslim faiths might otherwise presume.

Some might still object, “Why have death though; couldn’t we be purified without dying?” The Christian answer, again, is that it is not death; it is transition, transition from rehab to paradise. “Death” is not the greatest evil in the Christian world; it is the final escape from it. Death ends suffering for Christians, again allowing for any additional time to purify ourselves in Purgatory.

And let’s just stop and think for a moment. If the world were the physical paradise the neo-Darwinists claim God should always maintain, how much compassion would we really see? Would we selfish humans ever stop to think of anyone but ourselves at all? We wouldn’t have to—so, would we? Unfortunately, in many cases, probably not. The most likely outcome is that we would have a world populated by physically content (though not physically fit) and very much self-centered couch potatoes. Yes, there would be plenty of parties, but how much genuine compassion would there be? And for how long would we remain psychologically content in such a world? We would grow fatter and fatter and…what then…more restless? We would begin to search for something else, knowing we were missing something, but what…a challenge? meaning? a moral commitment? Self-discipline from the practice of virtue? a heroic cause? a crusade? a God?

The neo-Darwinist may likely respond, “Well, why didn’t God just make us all unselfish in the first place? Then we wouldn’t have all these problems.” Once again the hidden premise of materialism is evident as a Darwinian assumption. If we are only robots, this objection makes sense; if we have free will it doesn’t. But what does God want with a bunch of robots? It seems to me that the neo-Darwinists “need to get out more,” as we say here in Indiana, read a broader range of literature….meet some real people….Get a better sense of reality. For them the standard reply is the same as their reply to all the hundreds of other cogent objections to their accidental worldview: “Why not?” They don’t get it. There is more to human life that a repetitious circle of automated physical routines.

To me, the neo-Darwinist objection simply lacks imagination. It shows a complete ignorance of the Christian faith, the same faith that they so glibly criticize as if they were great experts on it. And it reveals that the neo-Darwinists are largely oblivious to the entire spiritual and emotional dimensions of life. Should we trust the wisdom and judgment of such “experts?” Are they the ones we should consult about what a good God might or might not do? Hardly.

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Why Extinctions?

But, “Wait just a minute,” you might say. “What about extinctions? Isn’t it just dumb to make a creature only to have it disappear again? Explain that if you can.”

Extinctions are perhaps the quintessential blemish in creation for neo-Darwinian biologists. They hold extinction to be absolutely incompatible with a good creator. Why would an omniscient all-powerful God design a creature that not only suffers but ultimately doesn’t work out? Why create something only to have to turn around and erase it from the chalkboard of life? And if life is not just a set of robots, why show so little compassion for your own creations?

One answer is that extinctions do not necessarily represent either mistakes or terminations, and again, death is a release from suffering. Using the lower creatures for the temporary purpose of creating humanity via evolution does not in and of itself constitute a mistake. If the creatures were intended to be either intermediate or temporary or fully under the stewardship of humanity, then their loss to extinction is not a mistake or an unwanted termination. We humans use temporary creations for all kinds of purposes, and typically in the process of creating: stencils for painting, cutouts for cookies, sections of house frame that are then snapped into the larger creation just as evolution apparently did with segments of the genomes, etc. Using temporary biological forms, design segments, and molds similar to what evolution has itself done in delivering portions of the eventual human genome via temporary species is then not contrary to the creative process of intelligent design at all, but actually typical of it.

And if “the Creator” has the capacity to divinely erase all pain and heal all injuries in an eternal world to come, are the imperfections of earthly life really too high a price to pay for our own rehab and eternal redemption? From my position in the gallery, the “Nays!” have it—but maybe that’s just me. If the natural processes of evolution and extinction and the sufferings that go along with it are necessary for God to recreate humanity in purified spiritual form in order to restore us to paradise I am all for it.

Does suffering in fact facilitate spiritual growth? Yes, we see the truth of this every day. We coexist with the suffering poor in our own neighborhood, frequently never giving them a second thought until tragedy strikes so dramatically as to make headlines. Then we are falling all over ourselves asking what we can do to help, but it is often too late. You may object, “So, what’s so good about that?” and the answer is, from the point of view of the victims of the tragedy, nothing. But it is not God who forces us to ignore our neighbors’ troubles until they reach a catastrophic level; that is our choice. But if we move our focus in these tragedies from the victims to the members of their community we see that compassion has in fact been engendered in many sleeping hearts, albeit too late to save those currently afflicted. And those sleeping hearts may be there earlier to help in future situations because of their new-found compassion.

From all of this we are not entitled to conclude that God prefers suffering, but only that he is forced to use it to evoke compassion in us, who seem to prefer self-enhancement. Certainly if God’s own son can endure torture and death for the purpose of furthering our spiritual growth and eternal future, the loss of a portion of the lower animals to extinction will not be too high a price to pay. Thus, it does not contradict all possible concepts of a good God to have death, suffering, and extinction in nature.

And there are even practical arguments for extinctions. Once we grant the Christian thesis of man’s ejection from paradise for his own rebellion against God, and grant the further requirement for an imperfect world to conduct rehab in, extinction can be seen to serve a valid practical function within the mechanics of nature. Noted evolutionist David Raup tells us that without extinction speciation might soon stop.

Evolution without extinction suggests several problems. Most important biodiversity would increase exponentially. The more species lineages that came into being, the more lineages there would be to produce more species. Rather soon, the system would saturate: speciation would have to stop because there would be no room for new species.^[66]

From the point of view of humanity, such a premature end to speciation might be catastrophic. Evolution might end before we were created! So, outside of the arbitrary theological assumption that we don’t deserve to be kicked out or paradise, or that, for whatever reason, God simply would never do things this way, there is no cogent argument against God or intelligent design from the fact of extinctions.

Neo-Darwinists will object to that, of course, because even in this view of creation via evolution extinctions could be terminated once humanity was achieved. But why blame God for these later extinctions when he has placed humans here as his stewards, as the guardians of his creation. Is God responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of species each year due primarily to deforestation of the rain forests, or are we responsible for it?

We don’t know the future fate of the extinct species, that is, whether God has eternal life in store for them as well. Whether or not one’s own view of Christianity conforms to this idea, it is a fact that St. Paul’s said that where there is a physical body there is also a spiritual one and that the entire creation is awaiting renewal.^[67] It therefore remains an unevidenced philosophical or theological assumption for materialist scientists to assume that animal and plant species do not go on from life on earth to life in the spiritual dimension. The neo-Darwinists’ “logical” inference from the extinction of species to the nonexistence of a good and all-powerful God is therefore invalidated by the existence of the possibility of eternal life for plants and animals.

If God’s creatures leave this world full of death, suffering, and extinctions “early” for a spiritual paradise is that a tragedy? True, lower creatures may not have a continued personal identity in the next life, but if their spirit “merely” returns to God in a non-individuated form is that worse? One of the Christian concepts of Heaven has it that there are different levels of Heaven corresponding to the varying degrees of spiritual rewards that God’s creatures may merit, the higher levels being closer to God. If the lower creatures do not continue their personal identities in the next life but rather return in the spirit to be in full union with God, can this be deemed anything less than an indescribably joyous gift, and a monumental improvement over the too often tragic earthly struggle they left behind?

If as neo-Darwinists claim, this world is exorbitantly cruel to living creatures, so terribly, terribly flawed, isn’t it better that a species just serve its temporary creative purpose in this world and then get the heck out of here at the earliest opportunity? And what about experimenting on animals? Science is very much in favor of that, but it is precisely the same concept: sacrificing the animal for service to humanity. The neo-Darwinists are contradicting themselves in favoring animal experiments but disallowing the propriety of extinctions in the service of God’s higher plan for creation. For modern science the concept is just throw the animal away once its job is done. At least with God’s plan the possibility remains that the animals will also inherit an eternal reward.

From the materialist/humanist point of view one might argue that it is a tragedy to lose a species, because, in the humanist philosophy, there will be no eternal world to follow this one. But, if, as the Christian view asserts, there is an eternal world after this one, there is no evil in giving mankind an opportunity to express compassion by watching over the lovable lower creatures and the beautiful living garden. There is no eternal tragedy in allowing fallen man a chance to engage in a heroic struggle to try to save species from extinction where possible. That struggle stimulates virtue and compassion the same as the struggle to save our fellow man from a plethora of human tragedies.

There are also purely logical reasons not to consider the loss of a species a tragedy. Species do not feel pain or endure the concrete trauma of death; species do not suffer—only individual creatures suffer. From the point of view of suffering, a taxonomic category, as such, is not a tragedy to lose; only the loss of individual creatures is a tragedy. Genuine suffering and real personal death of individual creatures, of course, occur en masse in this world with or without extinctions.

Natural Disasters

“OK,” you may concede, “that makes a certain amount of sense. Extinctions have a role in creation by evolution and species as such do not suffer. But what about accidents? Why does God allow accidents in the first place? Why do bad things happen to good people? Natural disaster wouldn’t be so bad if only God controlled what happens so that those who suffer actually deserve it?” Obviously that would be more in tune with perfect justice, but only in the short run, as God can satisfy pure justice in the eternal world that follows. Only atheistic materialists require pure justice in this world, and they will inevitably miss some of the best offsetting gifts God bestows on those who suffer here because those gifts are gifts of the Spirit. A lot of the justice in this world simply goes unnoticed by materialists because they are blind to gifts of the Spirit.

In the Christian worldview, the existence of true accidents can serve a spiritually therapeutic purpose. What does it take to spiritually heal a selfish human being? It depends upon how selfish a person is. But consider, if only those who deserved tragedy ever experienced it, although it would be just, would anybody care? “They got what they deserved. Whoop de do! Next question.” If people only get what they deserve, what grounds is there to stimulate compassion for the victims? Yes, it would make this imperfect world more just in the short term, but humanity would never get out of this world and move on to paradise. We would be stuck here waiting for the tough-skinned among us to be saved by a stronger jolt to reawaken their compassion.

Considering that we humans are such slow students, stiff-necked people who require strong stimuli, using the occasional accident in place of universal suffering actually turns out to be an efficient method. Accidents only need strike a few in a randomized way visible to everyone to get the point across to the entire human race. God can stimulate compassion in 100% of the population for only 2% of the cost. True accidents also serve to remind everyone to prepare to leave this world for a better one, to take our focus off of this life and place it on higher things. Considering that many of us refuse to respond to anything less than a tragedy, God is doing everything possible to minimize tragedy; we are the ones insisting on it.

God’s use of accidental tragedy and natural disasters serves the purpose of defeating our human tendency to procrastinate. Humans tend to put off thinking about and preparing for the next world until they are under real threat of death. In the Christian worldview the purpose of this world is to prepare for re-entry into paradise. Thus, God can remain good while allowing accidents because in so doing he is giving us exactly what we require to stop procrastinating. Spiritual growth is necessary to receive the paradise that neo-Darwinists say God should have given us in the first place. A simple logical axiom is involved. If there can be no paradise without compassion, and if there can be no compassion without tragedy, then tragedy there must be.

The Golden Bicycle

To evaluate the design of a tool one has to know its true purpose. A child doesn’t need a solid gold bicycle that goes 100 miles per hour. It may be fun to dream of one (not that I personally ever did), and, in our imagination, solid gold bikes are theoretically "better," but there is no practical value in having one. In the same way, physical events and objects need not be perfect here on Earth so long as they do not impede the overall objective of the spiritual growth of humanity. A novice bicyclist does not need solid gold, and a morally flawed humanity as a whole does not yet need paradise, some are ready but many are not. We do not put on a tuxedo to pull a pig out of the mud, and we certainly don’t make the pigs wear them. So why do neo-Darwinists think God or any other superior intelligent designer would insist on paradise for humanity in its present imperfect, often immoral, and sometimes downright evil condition? It is the hidden premise of materialism again. They view humans and their world as merely physical. Perfection and growth for neo-Darwinists only apply to physical things and thus they make no allowance for a requirement for spiritual growth at all.

The hidden premise of materialism is the answer to the $64-dollar question: “Why can’t neo-Darwinists conceive of even the logical possibility that this world is an intermediate one, not a final end in itself?” “Duh, well, I never thought of that,” doesn’t work considering that a massive worldwide Church has said for centuries that our world is intermediate, while giving very plausible arguments supporting the necessity for our spiritual rehab and recreation here? One may think I am once again being unduly hard on the neo-Darwinists, but there are only three possibilities; the fallacy of hidden premise is the least culpable option, corresponding to #3 below:

1. Neo-Darwinists can’t do logic and analytical philosophy any better than a kindergartner. This may seem unfair and personally insulting, but I present the analogy in this way because it is exactly the insult/criticism that neo-Darwinists (quoting Isaac Asimov) have long leveled at Christians who offered objections to accidental evolution—tit for tat.^[68]

2. Neo-Darwinists are intentionally “pulling our leg” in order to do political profit taking. As agents of influence for Marxism (disinformation agents some would prefer), they offer arguments that they know darn well are invalid because those arguments will convince a percentage of casual readers who won’t delve into the subject deeply enough to catch the error. So they lose technical points to academic purity, so what; they gain converts to the social political movement of Marxist materialism, which is their primary goal.

3. Neo-Darwinists unintentionally pulling our leg. They are so immersed in their personal philosophy of materialism, or are so affected by the heavy bias in scientific culture for materialism, that they have developed mental blind spots to related thinking errors. In addition to Dr. Faust, noted origin of life researcher Sidney Fox holds this out as a real possibility. Fox, having lived through much of the modern development of evolutionary theory in the biochemistry community, witnessed firsthand the phenomenon of an unconscious cultural bias for an accidental worldview. He notes influences from the work of famous quantum physicists Bohr and Heisenberg, but also allows for the possibility of an intentional bias.