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Evolution – Smevolution!

Copyright 2005 Rick Harrison

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Appendix 1 (continued):

The Logical Shambles of Neo-Darwinian Evolution—101 Fallacies

(or The Origin of Feces)

Fallacy #31: One small step for the lab…one giant step for accidental evolution

In the previous quote, Eldredge suggests the invalid logical move from the fact that we (intelligent designers) can genetically alter creatures in the laboratory in small ways, to the conclusion that “nature,” presumed, in neo-Darwinian theory, to be an accidental process could alter them successfully in big ways. This is precisely the opposite of what one should rationally expect, for an accident is not to be expected to out-perform human scientific intelligence. There is no logical connection between the two concepts, and we have very good reasons to believe accidental processes to be incapable of producing macroevolution. Of course, if we humans were capable biological engineers, as Eldredge implies, there would be no reason to rule out ET as a possible designer of life. ET can reasonably be presumed to have more advanced capabilities than human science. But Darwinists do rule out ET when they argue that ID proponents must simply be masking an argument for God when they claim an intelligent designer is the source of life. Yet another logical contradiction within the total neo-Darwinian case against God; trying to have it both ways, double standard…you name it., they’ve done it in a desperate attempt to artificially prolong the life of a dead theory.

Fallacy #32: All or nothing

Eldredge again: “Even were the Intelligent Designer held not to be supernatural, but rather some sort of real Being exerting a real force in nature (other than natural selection), the very first line of investigation must surely be the completed demonstration of the existence of this Intelligent Designer.” (My emphasis) Eldredge appears to be saying that anything short of a complete proof is of absolutely no evidential value regarding the question of an intelligent designer. Thus, the all or nothing fallacy. This tact has never been applied anywhere else in modern science. I haven’t listed the fallacy of putting the cart before the horse, but here it is. How can the “very first line” of an investigation be the completed proof? Talk about rigging the game; this is literally asking for the impossible: prove the conclusion of the investigation before you are allowed to start the investigation.

In addition to the literal absurdity of the wording, in doing this, Eldredge is holding the intelligent design theory to a far more stringent standard than Darwinian theory has been required to meet (or any other theory of science for that matter). Certainly, the evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution itself falls far short of a complete demonstration. There has been no demonstration of macroevolution at all let alone by way of neo-Darwinian accidental “mechanics.” There is no demonstration that natural selection has in fact done what neo-Darwinian evolution claims for it, and no demonstration that an accident can produce a machine of any substantial complexity in any way.

Every time mutational studies are done, an additional case is made that accidental evolution is false. The observed capabilities of natural selection are the smallest fraction of what is claimed for it by the Darwinists, the smallest fraction of what is required to get the job done. Why are competing theories held to a more stringent standard of evidence than the standard neo-Darwinian evolution itself has been required to meet?

In addition to all or nothing and the obvious double standard, the hidden premise fallacy reappears again here in the implied assumption of materialism. By opposing "real Being" with the supernatural, Eldredge has implied that nothing supernatural is real. Materialism itself is an instance of the all or nothing fallacy, assuming that all things must be physical merely because science has had success working with the material. Rigging the game, cart before the horse, asking the impossible, all or nothing, double standard, hidden premise: six fallacies in four lines. Is this the best our “experts” can do? Once again politics are strongly suggested, either intentional or sublimated, because Eldredge, Dawkins & Co. are all supremely intelligent academic professionals. Why then do they offer such lame logical fallacies as if they were cogent arguments? You tell me.

Fallacies #33 & #34 “I Toddler!” (thinking too small) and “We Don’t Need No Stinking Discipline!”

The “I Toddler!” fallacy is the belief that everything above and below us in the order of being must conform to our own mode of thinking (no matter how immature our thinking may be). When a small child falls and sustains a cut, a painful bruise, or a broken bone for the first time they often assume the worst. They just “know” that they are injured beyond repair and rush to their parents to show them the awful irremediable catastrophe that will certainly be removing them from this life. For that one brief instant they assume that all is lost, that the awful bleeding scrape (though small) is an unfixable eternal tragedy. They have not yet experienced healing. They do not yet know that a combination of natural processes, help from their parents, and skilled work by doctors (and prayer) will almost always assist them to full recovery—and perhaps even reward them for what they have had to suffer (the lollipop).

The neo-Darwinist objection to intelligent design based upon the existence of tragedy, suffering, and evil (discussed above in fallacies #23-26) invokes this same error. Neo-Darwinists don’t give God or the designer credit for potentially having a greater power of healing than they have yet experienced in their own lives. But, in theory, God or an intelligent designer is not limited by our small human abilities, and throughout our entire intellectual history assumed not to be so limited. In Christian theology of course (and in the direct experience of many millions of people), God can take away our sin, our pain, and our suffering in full, such that it is as if the injury never happened. The previously walking wounded who have been so healed are then fully assured that the eternal happiness of Heaven is real (they are not fully assured that they will get there, however, but they do have every reason to hope they will).

In the Christian model of reality no permanent damage is done by earthly suffering. We soon transcend the smallness of physical life on Earth and attain to the divine perspective where all is again right and as it should be—“and they lived happily ever after.”

“I Toddler” is what one might call a vertical fallacy. This type of error can be committed in the opposite direction as well. When a bug kills its mate after reproduction (praying mantis and black widow spider, for example) neo-Darwinists call it a great tragedy. But the bugs apparently don’t view it that way at all, for they never alter their behavior. Here neo-Darwinists apply the vertical fallacy from the higher to the lower. What is true for humans is not necessarily true for bugs, though, arguably, sacrificing-the-mate situations at times does occur among humans. One parent may drive the other to exhaustive levels of effort for the sake of the future of their children, for example. The exhausted partner passively or even consciously consents to this grueling routine, sometimes to the extreme of incurring a heart attack or falling asleep at the wheel. In that case, we don’t just call it a tragedy but also an unselfish sacrifice (though probably an imprudent one).

One therefore should not challenge the bug-eats-bug scenario on the basis of tragedy (which a bug, presumably, doesn’t understand to begin with), but rather upon the logic of what is gained overall for that particular species of bug. It is an odd thing for a neo-Darwinian evolutionist to highlight bug-eats-bug, for absolutely all of nature eats one or more different species…and humans eat the most. Some neo-Darwinists will actually say that the entire order of nature is a tragedy for that reason, but they go around stomping roaches and swatting mosquitoes like the rest of us. For them it is a tragedy for a bug to kill its mate, but it is not a tragedy to remove, via physical reductionism, morality, religion, friendship, love, and patriotism, absolutely all the richness of human subjective experience including all the virtues, form the realm of the real and relegate them to the category of an illusion. Our tragedies are not real, but the bug’s tragedy is! Go figure.

Once again, for the neo-Darwinists’ argument from tragedy and suffering to make any sense, materialism must be assumed as a starting point. If the plants and animals are serving humanity, serving their own families or other species in their passing, if it is only a temporary “tragedy,” and, indeed, if it is not so much a tragedy as a spiritual victory, what’s the problem? Assuming the hidden premise of materialism in this way introduces circular reasoning. One has to first assume that God does not exist (assume materialism) before this argument against God has any strength.

If God divinely heals all wounds after this life, if he reinstalls us in eternal paradise, and if it is our own fault we lost the initial paradise we had, then the suffering of this world does not argue against God’s goodness as Bertrand Russell thought it did so much as for his mercy in that we have been given a second chance at all. When the hidden premise of materialism is made visible the argument takes the trivial form of “God does not exist, therefore, God does not exist.” Such circular forms of “reasoning” don’t tell us anything of use with which to judge the question of accidental evolution versus intelligent design and are therefore of no evidential value.

Discipline is another factor relevant to the “I Toddler” fallacy. Toddler’s are initially uninformed of the benefits of discipline. “I don’t need a time out,” “I don’t want to go to my room!” and so on. Over time and with maturity, however, they come to understand that reasonable discipline is necessary to learn individual self-control and to govern group behavior; discipline aids social order and promotes personal growth. The neo-Darwinists automatically rule out the possibility that some of the suffering of this world could, among other things, be useful discipline imposed upon us from a superior parental being. Perhaps there is so much of it because we have fallen a long way and have a long way to go/grow. As atheists and materialists (and proponents of moral relativism), of course, they feel man should set all the rules for himself. One can just hear them now saying, “We don’t need no stinking discipline!” “We don’t want a supernatural parent!” “I don’t have to go to my room!”

Fallacy #35: Equivocation: vacillating between several meanings for the same term

The tactic of using the same word to mean two or more different things is sometimes employed to avoid a weakness in evidence, or to gain an advantage from confusion (or because the author is simply careless with language). If the evolution discussion does not provide the perfect paradigm for equivocal use of language, then I never want to discover what does. There are two primer offenders in evolutionary discussions in regards to the fallacy of equivocation: interchanging any of hundreds of variations of the theory of ‘evolution’ without alerting the reader to the change, and vacillating between the use of ‘random’ where it impliedly means truly accidental and more technical usages where it merely implies that there is no correlation of mutations with changes benefiting a creature in its present environmental niche.

There are other offending terms as well, such as ‘probability’, which neo-Darwinists bandy about recklessly always dismissing the strict mathematical procedures that are supposed to underlie its use as of no concern whatsoever. Equivocation is not confined to mixing words that seem to mean the same thing (but don’t); it can also apply to the confusion of entire theories.

Basic evolution, for example, merely claims descent with modification from common ancestors. While basic evolution is a component of both Synthetic Theory and neo-Darwinian theory it does not embrace all that either of these larger theories assert. Basic evolution is in fact silent on the question of purpose versus accident. Thus, confusing basic evolution with accidental evolution (the neo-Darwinian form) allows the genuine evidence for basic evolution to improperly accrue to the support of accidental evolution for which there is no evidence in the affirmative.

The myth that all evolutionary theory affirms lack of purpose, materialism and an accidental process has thus erroneously become a staple in the intellectual diet of a large segment of the (non-Catholic) public. It is the correction of this mistaken view of the world, the reintroduction of the valid distinction between purposive and nonpurposive theories, and the final refutation of the ridiculous theory/myth of “accidental” evolution, that is the purpose of this book.

Mixing and matching the many different versions of evolutionary theory while applying the same name to them can give the appearance of a much stronger case for accidental materialistic evolution than would occur even if evolutionists were all agreed upon the accidental form. Why? Because, although support from a consensus among “experts” would accrue to accidental evolution in such a case, real evidence would not. However, using the single word “evolution” to refer to multiple and very different theories, as is currently being done, allows the neo-Darwinists to call “evolution” a fact when they know darned well that only basic evolution has earned that label. Yes, at times and in places they have admitted this distinction, but not in nearly as many times and places as their confused language has misled the public to confuse the two versions of evolutionary theory.

In public venues not subject to sharp professional scrutiny neo-Darwinists tend to transition in and out of the different versions of the theory of evolution at will, thereby convincing many in the lay audience, who may often think in terms of evolution as a unitary theory, that accidental evolution is a well-supported theory. The audience assumes, if only subconsciously, that the evidence for basic evolution, and the practically unanimous expert testimony for it, also accrues to the support of the atheistic/accidental version. Lay members of the audience will often make the very reasonable assumption that when neo-Darwinian speakers claim volumes of evidence for evolution they mean the version of evolutionary theory that the speaker personally holds. But the speech doesn’t always match the speaker. Wherever the speaker holds to the accidental theory he or she tends to refer to basic evolution in his or her talks because that is where the only evidence for evolution is available. Will the real Darwinian evolutionist please stand up!

Overall, neo-Darwinists gain enormous political ground among the public by vacillating in very subtle ways between these two versions of evolutionary theory. The tactic is seemingly calculated to mislead, but remains technically defensible within professional academia so long as mainstream science itself makes no effort to even acknowledge the distinction.

Discussions of “Darwinian theory” and “neo-Darwinian theory” in day-to-day use seldom define those terms with precision. Before, between, and following the two serious attempts at an evolutionary synthesis made in the twentieth century (’50s & ’80s), what general definition we have for “neo-Darwinian theory” has been permitted to simply evolve and fluctuate in a de facto manner as a horde of evolutionists went about doing the business of evolutionary science. Genuine milestones of clarity that properly distinguished variants among the morass of theory variations have been few and far between. One that is worthy of note, and one that is often obscured or ignored in modern evolutionary texts, is the event of famous modern evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson affirming undeniable purpose in the evolutionary process.

For Simpson this was not necessarily divine purpose, but an unspecified form of purpose, the origin of which Simpson considered to be beyond science’s ability to address. Simpson informs us that the first of the two primary attempts at an evolutionary synthesis spontaneously occurred over the course of a vaguely described generation (1940-1960ish) via the combined work of many scientists across a wide range of specialties. Usually Mayr, Stebbins, Dobzhansky and Simpson are thought to be the primary or defining contributors. This synthesis addressed the accidental component of evolutionary theory by way of removing the assumption of an accidental process from the new Synthetic Theory, and leaving it with the antecedent and overly simplistic neo-Darwinian Theory.[70] Neo-Darwinian Theory and Synthetic Theory remain the two primary versions of evolutionary theory affirmed by mainstream science today.

Despite such occasional attempts at clarity through formal definitions, ambiguity on the question of purpose in evolution remained. It would seem that the synthesis itself achieved clarity only within the minds of those scientists who wrote its primary defining works, and it is not clear that even they agreed with each other on all major questions. In any case, once the world of science moved on from the first synthesis, Simpson’s important distinction concerning purpose was, from all indications, immediately ignored and buried in the subsequent popular writings by neo-Darwinian evolutionists. Personally, I suspect that was not fully unintended. The precedent that subsequent neo-Darwinian authors established of ignoring Simpson’s distinction seems to have all too quickly become the norm among evolutionary writers. Philosophical and scientific commentators who wanted to fit in were then stuck with reflecting this ambiguity. Other, more astute commentators placed it before the public in a somewhat more honest form, revealing that evolutionists had not yet resolved the question of purpose in nature. For example, American philosopher Lewis White Beck, in Philosophic Inquiry wrote: “According to Darwin’s theory animals and plants vary accidentally and spontaneously, or at least in random and unforeseen ways.”[71] (My emphasis) Here you can take your choice: the truly accidental theory of evolution, or the merely technically random version of the theory.

Some readers may want to ask, “How is this ambiguous?” or even “What’s the difference?” There is an important difference relevant to the intelligent design accidental evolution debate because the term “accidental” is a common language term that means that no purpose or direction of any kind is involved. This of course rules out intelligent design. But “random” is a technical term within evolutionary science that does not entail an accidental process at all. It only means there is a lack of a direct correlation between mutations and what is beneficial in a creature’s present environmental niche. This version of evolution does not rule out intelligent design.

To confuse things further, “spontaneous” means neither. It only means that an event is the natural result of whatever a system tends to do on its own impetus minus direct external interference. Thus, “spontaneous” events can be either fully accidental (a natural product of a chaotic system) or fully purposive (a product of intelligent design or some other purposive or directed system), or anything in between, hybrids of all types. “Unforeseen” is yet another category different from the other three, indicating only an inability to predict (which can occur merely due to lack of sufficiently detailed knowledge of the subject). So there are really four substantially different variations of evolutionary theory addressed in Beck’s one line summary. And Beck is correct to do it that way because the questions of how much and in what ways these four different aspects of evolutionary theory interact; which played the larger dominant role in determining the tree of life; and just how much accident or purpose is implied or excluded has never been resolved in evolutionary science. Specific writers such as Richard Dawkins and Ernst Mayr have loudly assumed total lack of purpose based upon their personally preferred view, but evolutionary science has never demonstrated lack of purpose.

Here, Lewis White Beck, a philosopher noted for his clarity of analysis was stuck with reflecting the ambiguity that evolutionary theorists had built into the theory regarding the question of purpose/accident. Many encyclopedia articles have done something similar, or else they simply ignore the question of purpose entirely, or arbitrarily choose to highlight one view and ignore the other.

In the world today, the laity typically follows suit in endorsing this confusion, tending to speak merely of “evolution,” not “purposive evolution,” “accidental evolution,” or “noncommittal evolution.” It is a natural linguistic convenience for both the scientist and layperson to consolidate all variations of evolutionary theory under a single term. Typically, it is only philosophers and theologians that tend to see any point in tracking such “details” and “nuances.” But ignoring the distinction between accidental, purposive, and purpose-neutral versions of evolution is hardly a detail. The entire question of accident versus purpose in nature portends providing substantial input on the very question of the meaning of life itself! Unfortunately, neo-Darwinists, and occasionally other evolutionists, who know better, ignore the theoretical distinctions regarding purpose even in formal texts where those distinctions really need to be preserved.

This is perhaps not surprising from a psychological/sociological point of view, for maintaining the distinction is only important to theists who are concerned to preserve room for God in science. Materialists, who tend to dominate scientific circles, don’t want to preserve that room, because materialism typically comes in the Marxist variety with social reform uber alles. And scientists who are neutral on the issue naïvely assume that the best way for science to preserve neutrality is never to talk about purpose at all. For many scientists talk of “purpose” simply smacks too much of religion. In such an environment an intentional or subconscious equivocation is an easy trick for a politically biased neo-Darwinist to get away with. All the neo-Darwinist has to say in his or her own defense is, “I am only concerned to do science here, not philosophy.” The response that the audience should give to that is, “There is nothing that forbids clarity to science.” But alas and alack such challenges and pushes for clarity seldom occur. Having politically and psychologically cowed the rest of the academic community, materialist propaganda artists are free to pull in ambiguity whenever it suits their agenda.

So, what is the truth of the matter? Is there purpose in nature? Based upon the raw unspun, unpoliticized scientific data, close scrutiny reveals that, not only has cosmic purpose/intelligent design not been ruled out by science, science does not yet even have either a fully explanatory theory of evolution or a coherent standard by which to judge the question of whether purpose is there or not.

In addition to Henry Gee’s “Deep Time” issue (the thesis that we will probably never have sufficient information to know how it all happened), science currently has neither a biomechanic that can explain macroevolution nor an explanation for the origin of biological information. These three areas in which science is currently fully deficient are the hard parts and the central core of the data necessary for achieving an explanation of the complex designs of life.[72] In fact, the origins of none of the ultra-complex systems of life, especially the genomes, the genetic translation systems, protein folding structures, and the brain, to date have a scientific explanation outside of the intelligent design hypothesis. (Nor, for that matter, do the moderately complex systems have a satisfactory explanation.) So, the answer to the question of is there purpose in nature that is presently most scientifically supportable is clearly, yes, there does in fact seem to be purpose in nature because we can’t explain what we have found otherwise.

Over the last four decades as the public quietly slept under the neo-Darwinist spell, a veritable avalanche of evidence against an accidental evolutionary dynamic has poured out. In the face of this new data, many Darwinists have done an exquisite job of silently waltzing away from their original assumption of an accidental worldview. Why this change hasn’t received the same publicity and fanfare that the slightest hint of accident or materialism invariably received over the past 60 years I leave to the reader to judge. You know what I think.

Fallacy #36: Probability is a good argument for Darwinists (and all of the rest of science), but it is not valid when intelligent design scientists use it.

You already know what this is about. All of science rests on probabilities as opposed to absolute certainty, especially quantum physics, which ultimately gives rise to all other physical events. The small probability of design similarities occurring in creatures minus inheritance is felt to be sufficient to label the theory of a common ancestor an indisputable fact, though there are hundreds of counterexamples in convergent design achievement. The infinitesimally smaller probability of an accident’s being able to create complex biological machines, however, is dismissed out of hand as an irrelevant objection to neo-Darwinian theory although no counterexamples to the objection can be produced whatsoever. This is a contradiction and reflects an unjustifiable double standard.

Fallacies #37, 38 & 39 Can’t see the forest for the trees, hasty conclusion & “I Magician”

Consider the following quote from D. S. Peters and W. F. Gutmann, writing in Grzimek’s Encyclopedia of Evolution, vaunting the merits of neo-Darwinian evolution over purposive explanations of life.

At this point we would like to discuss some of the general cultural, spiritual, and philosophical implications of the theory of evolution. Our pre-evolutionary world view, powerfully influenced by the classical philosophers, was one that attributed the diversity of life forms and their function to the presence of a grand plan operating with a purposeful goal. Once life was examined under the neutral observation of scientists, using the methodology employed to arrive at the theory of evolution, we developed an entirely different understanding. The process of evolution is not activated by some goal-oriented plan (e.g., ever better adapted animals or more and more complex animals) but is instead the result of chaotic, purely accidental changes in the genetic complement of organisms.[73]

Peters and Gutmann, Futuyma, Dobzhansky, Stebbins, Mayr and others have apparently concluded that because they cannot see purpose in individual spontaneous adaptations in relation to what would be advantageous to a creature in its present environmental niche, there can be no purpose in the entire evolutionary system as a whole. This is a logically invalid step to take. Looking at the holes punched into an old computer programming card or a player piano tape will not reveal purpose (except to William Dembski, encryption mathematicians, and military code breakers), but there is one. Purpose is only seen when one “steps back” and takes a look at the larger system that includes the computer or the piano that reads the card.

In their search for purpose in nature or the lack of it (to the extent that they honestly performed one at all, which alleged search, quite frankly has never been described), neo-Darwinian evolutionists have focused on the minutia affecting individual creatures while failing to see the patterns that are truly present in the total physical systems of our cosmos, our Earth’s ecosystem, and the patterns of lifeform evolution development taken as a whole. In place of statistical and probabilistic studies performed on hard empiric data (that is, instead of doing science), neo-Darwinists fell back on logically fallacious philosophies such as naïve finalism. Why resort to flawed philosophical approaches instead of doing natural science? One answer, and the only available one I am aware of, is that the flawed philosophy produced the politically favored conclusion and the empiric data did not.

Restricting the thought process to only valid tools of science instead of politics yields no such hasty conclusion. Given our current knowledge of biological complexity, the historical record of rapid evolutionary progress reveals (as do known facts of the finely-tuned constants of physics) a bias for life that goes well beyond the standard probability outcome for an accidental process. We also know from the resource exhaustion calculations of William Dembski that science cannot affirm an accidental process for life’s creation because sufficient time and physical resources have not been available to make the hypothesis remotely credible.

In restricting their search for purpose to individual mutations, neo-Darwinists visibly commit the fallacy of not being able to see the forest for the trees (and quite a few others), though under the surface it appears to be more of a fallacy of political convenience than anything else. To illustrate the former fallacy, let’s assume Arnold Palmer designs a golf course that contains a large stand of maple trees planted on a hill. Landscapers constructed the grove in such a manner that the exterior edges spell out his name. A biologist who approaches the trees from below to study their roots, bark, and limbs will find no evidential grounds from his or her study to support the presence of intelligent design in that grove of trees. However, a helicopter passing overhead will see the design “PALMER” without fail whether they have a biologist on board or not. It is more a matter of perspective, sometimes, what one perceives than technical expertise as such. It can also be a matter of having an open.

Intelligent design theorists have positioned themselves in that helicopter. The neo-Darwinists on the other hand keep their heads down grubbing for roots because it is the only way to conceal the politically inconvenient fact that the accidental theory of evolution has failed.

Jacques Monod similarly exhibits a theoretical near-sightedness in asserting that living machines show no evidence of an external force being applied to them in their manufacture. He therefore concludes that they cannot be artifacts of design, but must instead be merely natural phenomena.[74] However, we know from genetic engineering that the design impetus for biological machine construction comes almost exclusively from the inside out. So Monod, in assuming that any machine must be constructed by application of external force, was asking the wrong question, viz “Where are the external constraints on biological designs that must be present if they are the product of intelligence?” The right question is “Are there sufficient total internal and external constraints on biological design to make the origin of complex life on Earth inevitable and to reveal a strong bias in favor of life?” Furthermore, to the extent that a powerful and comprehensive dynamic for self-organization is ultimately demonstrated to be inherent in nature (and things seem to be going that way), science will have found a fully qualifying set of external constraints that drive life’s evolution (constraints presumably sufficient to satisfy Monod himself). The external constraints will then be comprised of a combination of newly discovered and existing natural laws as well as the directionally informed body of physical particles/energy that issued from the Big Bang.

Should the present trend in discovery of self-organization and natural law-driven biases for life continue to reveal more and more directional preferences for life in prebiotic chemistry, biotic molecule formation, and protein folding determinants, nature will have turned out to be a collection of parts that essentially “snap themselves together.” At least these key elements of life will be shown to have an impressive statistical tendency to snap themselves together over time. Such a large bias toward self-organization of life is not something one can reasonably postulate as being the product of an accidental world. While the laws of self-organization may only hold in terms of statistical probability, such is still a method an intelligent designer might use, especially a supernatural one who is not in a hurry and can “foresee” the future as clearly as the present.

Let’s take a simple example to better visualize self-organization as an effective means of intelligent design. Suppose we find a collection of magnets enclosed in a transparent container installed upon a mechanism that constantly spins and shakes that container in all directions. These magnets have a variety of three dimensional shapes. They will fit together in more than one way so as to potentially form, let’s say, any one of ten sets of optional small structures having different exterior conformations. Only three of these ten types of structures, however, are held together by the combined attributes of inherent physical and electromagnetic interlocking forces such that “normal” shaking will not quickly shake apart the structure into individual magnets again. Let’s assume further that these three sets of substantially stable small structures will themselves fit snuggly together into a perfect globe shape, also immune to disassembly by normal shaking. My point: this is not a fully chaotic system I am describing; it is not an accident. Rather, it is highly informed and structured. It is a system an intelligent designer might use to construct those globes.

So what if it takes a lot of time and shaking to put globes together in this way; it is inevitable that globes will eventually be constructed. Should we say that the process could not be one of intelligent design merely because the globe can be constructed by way of any one of three optional sets of subcomponents? Of course not. What if there were twenty options, or several hundred? Intelligent design would still be the most rational assumption if accident could otherwise be shown to have a probability far outside of the standard for scientific credibility.

In such a case should we say, with Monod, that no external force had been applied to craft the globes merely because optional routes or optional globe configurations were permitted by the designer? Of course not. There are external constraints within the operative laws and there are other directionally specific factors built into the process that fully determine the result. It is only a matter of time. But if the designer exists outside of time and can immediately see the result, always having the option to erase the “chalkboard” and start again if the intended result is not seen, then it is a perfectly feasible process for that kind of designer to use.

For neo-Darwinists to continue to affirm an accidental worldview in the face of inevitable self-organization they would first have to establish that the self-organizational matrix itself sprang from underlying physical chaos by purely random means. This can never be done because the history of our universe shows it has been orderly for the most part and fully under the control of natural law. In the first fraction of a second, perhaps, there was some chaos, but the subsequent highly ordered state of matter and energy that held immediately after that first fraction of a second could not have arisen from purely random conditions so quickly, not within the probability thresholds of scientific credibility. The probabilities stacked against it are fully forbidding.

Monod’s is basically guilty of thinking too small. He assumed, as apparently did Ernst Mayr and others, that the designer of life could not be so capable that he could construct the whole “forest” as a single integrated task. Once again, the view of naïve finalism, which asserts that we would necessarily be able to see any grand cosmic design moving towards its ultimate goal merely by inspecting any of the parts available to our smaller human perception. While not wishing to encourage that kind of bogus logic, given the life-favoring constants of physics and the probabilities against an accident producing the complex tree of life, we can now confidently say that at least some of the parts of nature reveal a generalized design specification, albeit a flexibly posed one. And, given the very real possibility of future discovery of new fundamental forces and particles in physics (superstrings, the Higg’s boson, dark matter and energy, etc.) it remains possible that more definite directional patterns towards the formation of complex life will be revealed in new places and at the deeper levels of physics (self-organization of quantum networks, for example).

In theory, our designer may be far more capable and far less concerned about subcomponent details than the neo-Darwinists would have us suppose. The designer’s goal may merely have been a living ecosystem with an inventory of creatures leading to humanity through any wandering course that got the job done, and nothing more. Or the goal may have been fully specific in the mind of the designer, yet invisible in the natural processes because the designer had so much supernatural vision into the process that it was immediately apparent how the tree of life was going to turn out.

For a designer existing outside of time this would be true regardless of any random elements present within natural processes. In such a concept, the requirement for cross-compatibility among ecosystem components might be achieved largely via the use of a natural selection dynamic very much what Darwinian theory itself proposes. It all has to work together, and one way to insure that is to arrange that anything that breaks the compatibility rules doesn’t survive. A supernatural designer imposing this compatibility requirement from “up there” via supernatural means could very easily generate a world where it would appear to us down here “at first glance” that natural selection was the exclusive driving force of life’s creation, but closer inspection (of the mathematics of probability and resource exhaustion and self-organizational systems, for example) would reveal that there was more hidden directional forces at work.

A supernatural designer can set a process in motion that to all physical appearances has randomness embedded at many points yet remain fully assured of the result. A supernatural designer by virtue of existing outside of time doesn’t even have to foresee anything as such. For him there is no “future;” everything is part of his immediate experience. While modern physics allows that the normal limits of time might be transcended under certain circumstances, we already know the Big Bang was a scientific anomaly where something truly strange occurred. If there was a supernatural act of creation the Big Bang is the best candidate we have for being it. Even those allowances science makes for time distortions could be only a very small part of much larger possibilities. Those allowances are made within science; they do not limit the supernatural. We have to remember that the Big Bang remains a monumental anomaly to science. It certainly involved some kinds of events that extended beyond the limits of what modern science understands, and the possibility of a supernatural designer working on a drafting board fully outside of time itself cannot be discounted. Yet, Mayr and Monod saw no possibility whatsoever for cosmic purpose in nature. Go figure.

I think the conclusions we have to draw at this point regarding the neo-Darwinists’ position are inescapable: it was naïve; it was personal philosophical preference, not science; and the actual hard data, fairly interpreted, has always argued in the other direction. The possibility of intelligent design or our world has always been there as most of us have always intuitively recognized. Mayr, Monod & Co. required God to be a micromanager and a perfectionist, to have little patience, to allow no exploratory wanderings in the creative process, to exist within time as we do, to reveal his larger purpose in every single level of the physical event structure in nature—practically required God to come to Main Street to do a book signing. “Don’t have my copy yet so I won’t admit purpose in nature. Ha! Ha! Ha!” I mean, really, is this a mature scientific or philosophical tact to take? And they required the designer of life to eliminate all pain and suffering in his creation. We covered that concern adequately in fallacies #23-26. Science requires nothing of the kind as a prerequisite to intelligent design—only a very narrow and fully outdated personal philosophy/theology requires it.

The neo-Darwinists oversimplified. They artificially narrowed the possibilities. In so doing, despite their biological expertise, they were just wrong. They were also wrong to represent a fully arbitrary personal philosophical preference to their readers as if it were either science or a defensibly objective philosophy of science.

Mayr and Monod et al. simply failed to consider all the possibilities. Science, if and when it chooses to be fully honest, can presently say that it is clear that the entire universe as a whole is a probabilistic biological machine-building factory. The design specifications of our world may allow for flexibility regarding options, but whoop de do! Compared to the enormity of the rest of the massive design specifications, allowing for these options is mathematically trivial.

Again if we choose to be honest we must admit that our entire world took on a generalized (as opposed to micromanaged and inflexible) design imprint at the Big Bang. The result of complex life is no less certain in this kind of conception than if the design specification were inflexible. We know we will get a van Gogh, a Rembrandt, or a Michelangelo; we just don’t know which. And we don’t know that future research will not continue to incrementally reveal more influences for directional design dynamics that take most if not all of the apparent flexibility out of the process.

The subtleties of the design imprint made by natural law and the initial state of matter and energy may have understandably eluded Monod in 1970 when the false assumption that quantum mechanics showed the world to be accidental was at its peak. However, we can now see, with the subsequent help of mathematicians and researchers like Dembski, Hoyle, Axe, Meyer, Fox, Behe, Denton, Bergman,[75] and Kauffman, that the very laws of chemistry and physics limit randomness to such a degree that the processes of nature can be seen to afford an intelligent designer a perfectly manageable instrument of design. Does this prove intelligent design? No, not as such, but it strongly suggests it. And it and makes intelligent design much more probable than accident.

The 200+ factors necessary to fine-tune the Milky Way galaxy to make it compatible with life reduces the improbability of life’s achievement by hundreds of orders of magnitudes from that of a totally random or unbiased process. This is before we even get to the laws of biochemistry, where we see truly amazing information-carrying capacity in proteins and DNA! Amino acids and proteins seem to be highly constrained into life-favoring conformations by natural law, and the genomes seem to mysteriously self-organize themselves. Exactly what is there in this kind of process that suggests accident? Mayr and Monod did not have this information, but why would they prematurely rule out ever getting it? Hasty conclusion, case closed.

“OK,” some readers may be thinking, “those old maxims ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ and ‘hasty conclusion’ are well known to everyone; but what in the world is ‘I magician?’ You just made that up.” Yes, I did just make it up, but it stands for a real problem. The “I magician” problem involves an intellectual slight of hand, similar to a magician distracting the audience with a dramatic gesture. He distracts with one hand while accomplishing the real work of the trick with the other.

In the case of neo-Darwinian evolution, the distraction is accomplished by redirecting our attention to the relatively uninteresting shell game of moving genes around within the complex genomic machinery after the fact of that machinery’s creation. The central task of explaining life’s creation and evolution, of course, is to explain the hard part: how to generate a living creature’s structures and system functions (with multifunctional genome and translation system) from nonliving chemicals up to the point where complex transpositional and developmental genomes have enough of a gene library and safely guarded recombination system to take the tree of life the rest of the way home.

Key questions regarding such things as how genomes and related systems with vast and specific functional complexity could be initially created by accident; how integration of complex new features can be achieved by accident in machines with closely interdependent parts; how complex design modules are assembled prior to natural selection ever “voting;” and so on, are all ignored in the over-simplified neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Instead, our focus is redirected to the unsurprising and unimportant fact that the dynamic natural world seems to tinker around a little with the complex machinery of life after the fact of its creation.

Darwinists have shown us that bacteria can substitute genes and possibly transfer genes already created. OK, fine. They have shown us that moths can consistently change color in response to the background color of their resting place, and that the beak size of birds can vary consistently with the nature of the available food supply given time for reproductive processes to generate sufficient numbers of each type. Well, whoop de do! Yes, these are interesting observations, but they are supremely simple events within which absolutely no complex novel biological machine construction occurs at all. Yet, these examples continue to be the flagships of the theory of accidental evolution. This is like a job applicant to NASA arguing that he had painted several aircraft an bolted a few pieces of metal structural beams together, so they should hire him to do the full electronic and computer systems that guide the ship. “Next!...”

Similarly, the ID argument tells us that the primary mechanic of the evolution of new species is likely something radically different than the process that produces simple modifications to systems already built—something that does not and cannot involve truly accidental dynamics at its foundation. The ultimate task neo-Darwinists face in order to support a genuinely accidental worldview is daunting: they must demonstrate, not moving books around in the library, but genuine authorship. They must demonstrate the creation of complex biological machines without aid of a preexisting genome and related genetic systems under purely accidental operating conditions. The proof conditions for “accidental” are radically more stringent than for “spontaneous,” and they in fact can never be satisfied because we know our universe has not been genuinely chaotic.

For the “I magician” fallacy, neo-Darwinists have a number of colored scarves to waive in your face as they use the other hand to coax the rabbit out of the false bottom of the hat: simple bacterial gene substitutions; small and unexciting microevolutions within species such as birds beaks and the colors of moths; moving genes around during reproduction or recombining them within existing living systems using a system with safe guards already in it. “Walla Boobie! Accidental evolution is proved!”

Oh, yes, and lest we forget, the largest and most brightly colored scarf of all, fear of religion. Anytime the legitimate weaknesses in neo-Darwinian theory are pointed out, the offending speaker or writer is immediately branded “a religious crusader,” a CREATIONIST. and an ENEMY OF SCIENCE. From that point forward, no matter how meritorious that poor author’s science content and logical argument may be, he or she is presumed a pariah to science—unworthy of being heard. It doesn’t matter what a pariah of science says because the neo-Darwinists (the experts) have already explained what they mean. This, of course, is merely another fallacy, an old debating trick called ad hominem: if your opponent’s case is too strong, attack the speaker, not the argument itself. More specifically, the neo-Darwinists simply retranslate the valid case for ID into some ludicrous straw man argument that a child could see through.

The American and world reading publics need to understand that evolutionary science (among other branches) has become politicized. This has been so for many years now. In some academic circles the political persecution of staff members not sharing the predominant materialistic worldview has real muscle in it. Material objections to neo-Darwinian theory can only be broached at the risk of being socially ostracized from the “scientific” community, an ostracism accompanied by ridicule in public forums, and potentially even resulting in loss of academic status and position.

The larger magical trick the neo-Darwinists have pulled off, then, is to have successfully displaced a genuinely scientific process in evolutionary science with a political propaganda machine, leaving the public none the wiser. “Nothing up my sleeve!...”

Fallacies #40 Undefined theory or intentional ambiguity: “I have no obligation to clearly define what I am saying,” and #41: Spin doctor: “but I most certainly have the right to redefine what you have said.”

In an indefensible act of presumption, neo-Darwinists insist on reformulating their opponents’ theories to suit their own counter arguments. They have done this even to the writings of Charles Darwin himself (see the discussion immediately following Fallacy #101). Meanwhile, on their side of the debate, neo-Darwinian evolution has lost any clarity of definition it may ever have had.

True, recent modifications in statistical modeling techniques have left neo-Darwinian theory impressively arrayed with new conceptual tools, but while the theory has become extensively enhanced—it has not been concretely defined. Neo-Darwinists roll out endless genetic sequence comparisons—and certainly living creatures do have much genetic sequencing in common—then add all the fancy bells and whistles that accompany population studies. From these they compute the hypothetical time it would take for new species to emerge from random mutations in geographic isolation (assuming they can so emerge, which has not been demonstrated). All of this, while interesting as an informed guess, is a poor substitute for an actual biomechanical sequence of events that can be shown to transition one radically different creature into another. That’s right, science still cannot do this. We do not know the biomechanical events that produce macroevolution or how any sequence of events so complex and focused could occur in real evolutionary time.

Despite all the modernization of the abstract theory discussions, macroevolution is not a known biomechanical event process; it is merely a theoretical label for a mysterious phenomenon. For such radical changes in living creatures to occur in real time seems clearly to require intelligent guidance and control, yet, the neo-Darwinists still say otherwise. They cannot show or demonstrate otherwise, however. While the new fancy math formulas guess at genetic mutation rates with such precision that one would think that science must surely have stored away somewhere some absolutely rock-solid evidence, some known and specific sequences of randomly generated events that produce viable and advantageous mutations leading to the necessary macroevolutions between branches of the tree of life—it hasn’t. Nothing of the kind is out there in science’s toolkit or knowledgebase; we are still looking at a mystery in macroevolution.

The inferred ancestral relationships (that may or may not be true) between creatures combine to produce a very impressive chart, and we can both visibly and intuitively discern real patterns there. We have to give the neo-Darwinists that much. But how these transitions could be randomly produced in real evolutionary time is simply not known. Neo-Darwinists consider these patterns proof of the accidental theory by suggesting inheritance with modification and a lot of intermediate forms, but until we know the biomechanical process how do we know those patterns count as evidence for that process being randomly produced? And such a development already seems more than unlikely. Already we can discern that the process dynamics of human developmental and transpositional genomes show far too much information and control to be truly random. The neo-Darwinian assumption, critical to the theory of accidental evolution, that key mutations are truly random is absolutely beyond demonstration. It runs counter to the systemic control processes visible in biology, and, as an overall estimate, so far exceeds scientific standards of probability as to be dismissible.

“But this is a concern about evidence, not definition,” you might want to object. That is true, but the two concerns are related. The nature of the evidence tends to define a theory by conceptual implication. Revealing the concrete and specific entailments of a theory in turn provides implications of the theory that can be tested. The problem with making the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution testable is that it risks having the theory refuted by demonstrating that the theory’s concrete implications do not hold in the real world. And, of course, they do not hold: the thesis that a true accident can build astronomically complex machines, living or otherwise, in real evolutionary time is universally admitted within scientific circles as ludicrous (much less often in public venues). It is no surprise then that the political variety of neo-Darwinist abhors and assiduously avoids detailed discussions about evidence. Evidence leads both to clarity in definition and testability. These in turn open the door to refutation.

“It’s obvious,” “There’s no longer any doubt,” “There is practically a unanimous consensus in science,” “There are volumes of evidence on file,” “It’s been proved over and over again,” and, so on. These are the fully impressive comments you will get when you ask a neo-Darwinist to see the evidence; what you don’t get is evidence. The evidence referred to is always documented somewhere else by a prior author, often vaguely defined, leaving the inquirer to review the entire literature on evolution since 1860 for themselves! Or it is merely a rehash of the well-worn discussions of basic patterns and genetic similarities, which only go to support basic evolution (switching versions) not accidental evolution.

Having done an exhaustive review of the literature, it becomes obvious that we the public have been had: the claimed incontrovertible evidence is not out there. All one finds in the other writings on the subject of accidental evolution is just more of the same: more theory and more assumption—but no evidence. There is evidence for evolution, but there is no evidence for accidental evolution.

Leaving the definition of the theory vague and general allows neo-Darwinists to temporarily redefine the theory as needed to counter a variety of different kinds of objections that occur in different venues, especially the objection against an accidental process: now it’s accidental, now it isn’t. This tactic of failing to define the theory also allows them to continuously refit the language of their theory to match new research discoveries so that it continues to sound like a great explanation. And that is precisely what we have in neo-Darwinian theory, and all that we have: wordsmithing, something that sounds good.

As the situation now stands with a vague and abstract definition supplemented by a large number of alternative versions, there are no definite testable implications that provide for a possible refutation of the entire neo-Darwinian theory. Some versions can be refuted in one or more of their tenets, but the larger concept of neo-Darwinian evolution is not defined sufficiently to allow for refutation. It is therefore not a proper scientific theory and must be dismissed from science.

Or, at least this was the situation before intelligent design theory was recently reposed in scientific terms by Dembski, Meyer, and Behe et al. Now we know that the accidental tenet of neo-Darwinian theory is testable both in terms of mathematical probability and via time and physical resource requirement computations. It fails both tests. Now the status of the theory of accidental evolution has changed from untestable to fully disproved.

The neo-Darwinist political solution to this problem is simple (there is no scientific solution): don’t admit intelligent design theory as being scientific and the failed tests go away. By maneuvering in this way, neo-Darwinists create a situation where neo-Darwinian “theory” cannot be refuted at all because the theory has never been concretely defined except for the accidental tenet. Now anyone who challenges the accidental tenet is dismissed as doing religion and not science, so the theory cannot be tested at all. Again, basic evolution can be “tested” by finding similarity in genetic information and visible patterns in anatomical structure, which argue for inheritance with modification, but all of the data relevant to accidental evolution argues against it.

An untestable theory is not a scientific theory. Such heavy politicization of science endorsed for so long at the highest levels of academia constitutes a grave scandal; it is an insult to the integrity of science.

Beyond the refusal of neo-Darwinists to permit their theory to be tested there is the shell game of shuffling versions around to account for different weaknesses that occur at different points of the neo-Darwinian explanation. Following cogent objections being raised against what is understood in a given venue as a well-defined version of neo-Darwinian theory, telling objections are met, not with an honest admission of weakness in the problematic areas, but with the substitution of a problem-solving alternative version of neo-Darwinian theory—they switch versions! They don’t admit they have a lame horse; they simply change horses, implying that switching is OK because all the horses are from the same stable. I suppose that would be OK if all the horses are hitched together into the same team, but this is not the case with evolutionary theory versions. Punctuated equilibrium and classic gradualism cannot both be true at the same time.

This is like a used car salesman saying “Well, yes, all of these sedans have at least one critical system that is broke, but you have to understand, for any of the critical systems that you are especially concerned about I can find at least one car that is not broke in that area.” But which car can you actually drive off the lot to take the kids home? For the same reason, neo-Darwinian theory is a sham, a con game, a shameful embarrassment to modern science. In the search for a theory of evolution we are not interested in finding a stable or car lot full of theoretical partially functional options, but one car that actually works! One or more of them might just get you off the car lot, but you won’t arrive home safe.

Similarly, one or more different objections can be posed against all of the different versions of neo-Darwinian theory for which the neo-Darwinists have no satisfactory answer. There is no one version of neo-Darwinian evolution that handles all serious objections.

The substitution game does not fool scientists for a minute; it is only there to mislead the public into believing that because one version or another appears to answer critical objections when taken singly that we must have somewhere in the stable at least one logically consistent version of atheistic-materialistic-accidental evolutionary theory that can answer all objections at the same time. We do not have such a theory (outside of intelligent design). Scientists are not alarmed by this because they see no other options to the accidental version, having been (wrongly) persuaded that intelligent design theory is religion and not science. Presuming both that neo-Darwinian theory has not been disproved (which it has) and that there are no other options (when there are), scientists logically assume that further work will eventually find the missing pieces, smooth out all the wrinkles, and the full explanation will eventually come together as it has tended to do elsewhere in science over the decades.

The shell game raises no alarms because, in normal applications scientists have no problem accepting a “best we can do for now” set of hypotheses that are imperfect and incomplete. They assume time will bring further progress. While this is in fact generally what happens in science, it cannot happen with neo-Darwinian theory because its primary tenet, the accidental thesis, has already been proved false—we are just not allowed to see the proof. Despite this politically orchestrated obstruction, the cat will not go back into the bag. You can’t prove a lie, and so no progress can be expected from trying.

Thus, until we realize the scam that neo-Darwinists have perpetrated upon us science is perpetually stuck with a dysfunctional stable of unworkable, disproved, and incomplete versions of accidental evolution that can never reach the standard of explanatory power attained everywhere else in science—and it will continue to expend enormous amounts of funds and research hours on an absolutely futile effort (including lots of taxpayer dollars that go to universities and “scientific” research programs). These massive efforts stand to progress nothing in science at all, but only to advance the social philosophy of Marxist-materialism.

To prevent this travesty and waste from continuing indefinitely, a formal restatement of the theory of evolution, explicitly separating, naming, and individually evaluating the many variants, and honestly appraising the evidence is now sorely needed, not only to restore honesty to science, but also so that our churches, schools, and courts can know what to say regarding the philosophical assumptions and implicit worldview involved in each of the variations of evolutionary theory. (See Appendix 10, Call for a New Evolutionary Synthesis)

While neo-Darwinists have largely shirked their responsibility to give a concrete, consistent, coherent and testable definition of their theory, a simple and straightforward definition of neo-Darwinian theory boldly proclaiming the accidental tenet occasionally does appear. But this occurs only in safe literary or social-political venues where no serious scientific criticisms (only friendly ones) are expected to arise. Why risk refutation even there? Because there, in those social venues, is where the political yardage is to be gained among the public for the Marxist-like materialist worldview.

The risk of technical rebuttal in such social environs is minimal because the audience is friendly and not technically expert. In these venues the issuance of well-worn circular emotionally charged aphorisms and politicized rhetoric is sufficient to fend off criticism. But if one reads the entire professional literature where a variety of serious objections to the theory must be defended against in professional technical journals, such simple defining statements are soon swamped by a sprawl of countless variations necessary to defend against specific technical objections. Now you nearly see a concrete definition, now you have to modify that definition yet again because it has failed in a certain area. Now this is included in neo-Darwinian theory, now that, but not this, and so on. Science in fact normally progresses theories in this way, but there is no hope for the process to save neo-Darwinian theory because the accidental tenet has already been disproved. Researchers and theorists trying to save neo-Darwinian theory by applying this standard scientific method are living a fantasy; they are in denial and vast resources are being wasted because of it.

Modern society’s overall experience of neo-Darwinism is thus not as a concrete and testable scientific theory at all but as a frustrating moving target kept in motion by political operatives. This is no doubt what prompted Pope John Paul II to remark that the key to understanding any evolutionary debate is to first ask “Which theory of evolution?” The simple theory of basic evolution was never a problem in terms of ambiguity (though it never really said very much), but the neo-Darwinists were forced to embellish it with the accidental and materialist tenets because it is otherwise a poor political workhorse for Marxist materialism. What neo-Darwinists have done is added two philosophical axioms to the basic scientific theory of evolution: 1) the world is accidental and meaningless, having no designer and no God; and 2) there is no spiritual or mental realm, only the physical.

The basic theory of evolution does not say such things, it only says that the tree of life evolved from a common ancestor by means of spontaneous mutations, some of which natural selection opposed or assisted. Though Darwin himself thought that, after God set things in motion and breathed the first breath of life, the course of nature was very much undirected and accidental, neither his worldview or his theory was atheistic. Thus, the atheistic materialist worldview is not required by even Darwin’s original theory of evolution.

Basic evolution, then, does the Marxist-materialists no good. Thus, they added the accidental, atheistic, and materialistic tenets for the public’s benefit. Because science cannot properly address these questions at all except for arguing for or against accident, they will deny the fact that they had added these tenets when addressing the professional scientific community, and switch back to reaffirming them again when they speak to the public, at least by heavy innuendo. It’s all a word game.

Marxist propaganda artists have brought in high powered intellects over the years who are geniuses at doublespeak. They are professional disinformation artists, adept at creating endless imaginary scenarios and variations that no one has the time or energy to try to pin down. Through the relentless application of pure linguistic subterfuge over decades it has now become practically impossible to pin down what the neo-Darwinists are actually saying in order to refute them. By making the task of clarifying neo-Darwinian language so gargantuan as to exceed any one commentator’s available personal resources, they win the debate by default because their “theory” presently holds the leading position in evolutionary science. It can never be dethroned so long as the debate requires a greater sacrifice of personal resources, political capital, and professional and social esteem than any single commentator can muster with which to do battle.

In the context of pure science, of course, this is nothing more than one big merciless cheat. Such a consistent and long-lived travesty of intellectual honesty can only be explained by the existence of a powerful and well-organized social-political pogrom, in this case the pogrom is Marxist-materialism.

The breadth and scope of ambiguity now resident in neo-Darwinian discussions provides would-be propaganda artists of materialism a powerful version of the “shell game” (fallacy #94). In the case of the multiple version shell game, instead of chasing around after imaginary evidence and alleged prior proofs that don’t actually exist, we are left chasing through a stable of erratic tap dancing horses seeking a single coherent definition of neo-Darwinian theory.

Fuzzy definitions are only of use to those who fear an honest evaluation, or to those who assume they already know the answer. For these, no harm is done by letting scientists explore variations freely even if those optional formulations contradict each other. While exploring all options is a good approach in science, simultaneously admitting contradictory options is not, and arbitrarily excluding options is not. Intentionally designing out the ability to test the theory is not.

While aggressively exploring variations of the accidental theory science has merely assumed that the processes of nature are accidental without ever having made the slightest progress in demonstrating it, and in the face of volumes of data to the contrary. The fallacy underlying this approach occurs in assuming that spontaneous mutations arising from the transpositional and developmental genomes can safely be considered to be accidents prior to an investigation to see if they are accidents. Here is the fallacy of equating “spontaneous” with “accidental.” All the mathematical evidence flagrantly says otherwise: the biological machines that produce these mutations have nothing of chaos about them whatsoever. And the statement, “It wouldn’t happen by accident in a million years!” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the real odds against accidental evolution.

The claim of an accidental world is typically side-stepped completely when the focus of conversation turns to the mechanics and mathematics of the process of evolution. All of a sudden what used to be accidental is no longer. However, there do remain a few neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins notably among them) that still take the accidental challenge head on. In Dawkins’ view the foundations of natural processes are accidental up to the point when natural selection begins to guide the process towards survival/reproductive fitness. The evolutionary process then gets a lot of help from what Dawkins calls “cumulative selection.”

As discussed earlier, I feel “cumulative selection” is a vacuous concept with no real correlate in the physical world, basically an impressive label for magic. Accumulated individual selections affect what does or does not survive, yes, but they don’t favor building an incrementally smarter and smarter evolutionary process for future rounds as Dawkins claims; they only favor building a smarter creature this round. While I disagree with all of Richard Dawkins arguments, which I consider to fail miserably on logical grounds, at least he honestly admits what he is arguing for: an accidental world.

However, word games can occur even here. The key question to insist upon being answered by Dawkins & Co. is “What do you mean by accident?” They will concede that our universe is not chaotic and that, as Sir Roger Penrose has shown, there is an enormous specificity in favor of a life-friendly system. They concede the physical constants are very precisely fine-tuned for life. So what do they mean by “accident?” Only they know because the word game has grown to such proportions that no one has the time to sort through the maze of neo-Darwinian circumlocutions to find out. I think it is clear at this point that the tactic occurring around the fuzzing out of the term “accidental” is the old familiar Marxist-materialist one already described: dance around the subject so the public hears one thing and the scientific community gets something different that can be strictly defended. All they really mean is what the Marxists mean: there is no God and there is no spiritual realm; everything is physical and without ultimate purpose. Bu this is philosophy not science, and very political philosophy at that.

The neo-Darwinists will cry “Foul!” and deny all of this—naturally, what else can they do. But while asserting an accidental world, Dawkins will still tell you that evolution is not “accidental.” Nonaccidental evolution in an accidental world; that is what neo-Darwinian theory claims is going on. Does that make any sense? No, it’s a contradiction. But neo-Darwinists are stuck with contradictions if they want to simultaneously advance Marxist-materialism to the public and be able to defend their theory against professional academic criticism. Evolution is not accidental when speaking to or among the scientists, but the entire world is accidental when speaking in nontechnical venues to the public.

What you will find is that in the strictly academic discussions on the record in the professional venues there is nothing in the neo-Darwinian concept of “an accidental world” that makes such a world logically or scientifically incompatible with the existence of a God or intelligent designer; they just don’t personally believe there is one. It is important to understand this: when neo-Darwinists say that evolution is “not accidental” they do not mean what you and I mean when we say it. This gives them a very slick solution to the doublespeak requirement they need. The public hears the loud statement, “SCIENCE PROVES ATHEISM!!!” Scientists hear something entirely different and much quieter: “Natural selection assists the construction of the tree of life beyond what an accident could do if it were building nonliving machines of the same level of complexity.”

Has natural selection’s contribution ever been shown to be frequent or substantial enough to offset the time and probability requirements that rule out an accidental world getting the job done? No. Have the actual mutations been tracked and documented to show that the mutations were beneficial for the originating species and then formed a module for the design advancement of the next derivative species on the tree of life? No. Does valid mathematical analysis allow that there was enough time for an accidental process to have proposed enough failed solutions to have any hope of hitting upon the successful ones? No; the math forbids such a thing. Is there any hint of the massive number of failed design proposals that would have been temporarily survivable ever having been generated in the massive numbers an accidental process must have produced? No. There are not nearly enough mutant forms in the fossil record to justify an accidental process.

When pressed with the strict mathematics in this way many of the neo-Darwinists will just throw up their hands and admit, “Well, nature just got very lucky; it could happen you know.” And, of course, yes it could have happened by accident, but the question for science is “Does science have any scientifically demonstrable reasons to believe it did happen by accident?” The answer to that question is a resounding “NO!” Here, the neo-Darwinists simply pull another rhetorical trick; they substitute one question for another so that the non-discerning public will hear a positive rhetorical affirmation of the accidental worldview no matter what. The ability of neo-Darwinists to continue to successfully pull such tricks on us rests entirely upon our letting them get away with not clearly defining their theory, excluding opposing ideas from science, ignoring volumes of opposing evidence, and not doing the math.

Yes natural selection reduces the odds of an accidental construction in comparison to the same task for nonliving machines, but not nearly enough. Until modern ID theorists like Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe, no one thought to check the full mathematical formulae. No one was computing totals; they were only looking at single steps to see if an accident might produce the simplest single components of life and assuming that if it could do that it could do it all. Mathematically, this is a huge error. The probabilities for each step in any multi-step physical event process, including evolution, must be multiplied by each other. This generates unimaginably huge improbabilities against an accident getting the job done.

Historically, evolutionary commentators would simply do a few of the thousands of steps involved, coincidentally stopping before the numbers got forbiddingly large. They were not applying strict probability theory to the known complexity of genetic and other biological systems down to the smallest biomolecular details. But, all of the structural complexity data is relevant to accurate computation of the probabilities.

Why did science allow evolutionary theorists to proceed in such a foolish manner when it insists on absolute rigor everywhere else? In my heart of hearts I can’t help but believe that this glaring omission was due to the fact that we had all been convinced that the neo-Darwinists had already rigorously done this based upon their signing their names to neo-Darwinian theory as the best science had to offer, and by the overbearing confident tone of their rhetoric. We assumed the integrity of all scientists. Their language hinted that all the squares were filled, and so we naturally assumed all the required validations had been done. Not so, in this case.

Despite the fact that Dawkins and those who follow his view say that merely adding natural selection to an otherwise accidental world can accomplish the construction of absolutely everything we see in the vast complex machinery of living systems within the time constraints of the known historical record, the math of William Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, Stephen Meyer’s probability estimates for the genetic transformations required, and the biomolecular details of Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity system descriptions all say that natural selection’s contribution at best can only be the smallest fraction of what is required. The neo-Darwinists had never done the math!

And they never did the logic. They literally expected magic from natural selection. Merely helping a good design to survive does not solve the problem of constructing an enormously complex machine in the first place. Natural selection only addresses how improvements to machines can be preserved, not how the machine is built. The problem of explaining abiogenesis (life from nonlife), by definition, cannot be solved by natural selection, which only applies to the living. Some staunch defenders of neo-Darwinian theory have tried to challenge this point by saying that even nonliving chemical processes can be favored, disfavored, facilitated, or vetoed by natural environments. While this is necessarily true to some extent by the very concept of natural law itself, if there turns out to be so vast a system of such chemical, physical, electromagnetic, or even nuclear/quantum-level preferences for building the essential building blocks of life, such a self-organizational phenomena is by definition nonaccidental due to the enormous bias for life it expresses.

In the gradualist version of evolution, that of Charles Darwin for example, the defense against our criticism that natural selection doesn’t have sufficient horsepower to get the job done would be that each improvement to a prior organism that natural selection preserves just so happens to be the next step in building the next organism on the tree of evolution. This has never been shown to be true, of course; we cannot trace these kinds of corresponding steps through the tree of life whatsoever. But even if we could, it remains so extremely improbable that such an astronomical string of coincidences would occur, that, again, the word “accident” cannot apply due to the magnitude of the bias for life that is expressed.

Evolutionary theory, both the accidental and purpose-neutral versions, presumes a vastly improbable correlation between the majority of variations that arise in simple creatures that turn out to aid their own survival as a species, and the novel increments of biological machine components necessary to construct the next branch of (usually) more complex creatures on the tree of life. Why would there ever be such a correlation if an intelligent designer had not produced it?

Another shell game maneuver is the switching between the classic gradualism of Charles Darwin’s theory and the modern version of punctuated equilibrium originated by Gould and Eldredge. In addition to being an unthinkable coincidence, a problem with Charles Darwin’s classic version of evolution is that gradualism simply doesn’t match the fossil record. The fossil record shows large rapid jumps in biological change. To get past this the newer version of punctuated equilibrium (PE) was proposed. PE says that periodically groups of creatures will become physically isolated from a larger population, which, the theorists say, encourages the emergence of form variations that would otherwise have been quickly diluted and smothered due to remixing with the standard gene sets of the host population. This is thought to account for the very rapid bursts of evolutionary change shown in the fossil record that cannot be otherwise be explained by “missing links,” creatures that actually lived but for which we have no fossil record.

But acknowledging the large rapid jumps seen in the fossil record makes it much harder to claim that an accident is the source of the variation. To build a new complex functional machine component in less time drives the improbabilities of accidental construction much higher. Enter the shell game: gradualism is presented to give the tag team of natural selection and an accidental process minimal credibility in terms of probability computations (though not in terms of the fossil record). The switch is made from gradualism to punctuated equilibrium when one brings up a criticism based upon the broken nature of the fossil record, but the probabilities become more easily detected as showstoppers by the public (they were already showstoppers to the mathematicians). Maintaining both of these versions (and many others) under the banner of neo-Darwinian evolution at the same time gives the neo-Darwinists an opportunity to switch versions on the fly to meet specific objections in public discussions. The scientists of course know the theory is incomplete and inconsistent, but since ID theory has been (for political reasons) mislabeled religion and not science, they have nothing to replace it with.

Having failed to either clearly define or substantively defend their own theory, neo-Darwinists next proceeded to brashly redefine intelligent design theory, calling it an argument from religious authority, which it clearly is not. Intelligent design theory, as offered by its modern proponents, is visibly a scientific case. Why do they do this? For the same reason they engage in the shell game: they have no answer to the ID objection so they don’t want the public to hear ID theory at all. So far, neo-Darwinists have been permitted to unfairly denigrate and dishonestly redefine a valid scientific theory without incurring censure for violation of professional academic standards. It is as if they felt themselves immune to the rules of civilized academic discourse. This is a true scandal in science.

Take the case of Professor William Dembski, for example. He is a well-known advocate of intelligent design, the author of many thoughtful and illuminating books. Dembski is well versed in both philosophy and mathematics. The man has two PhD’s and four masters degrees for crying out loud!—a thinker of the first rank. Yet, Darwinists would have us believe that Professor Dembski cannot be trusted to know the difference between intelligent design theory and 6-day creation science. They accuse him of doing biblical creationism when he explicitly denies it, in writing. The biblical creationists themselves, those at Answers in Genesis (AIG) in Florence Kentucky, for example, have also affirmed, in writing, that intelligent design theory and biblical creationism are not the same thing. Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists refuse to differentiate intelligent design theory from biblical creationism (see Appendix 5). Their reason for this slight of hand is obvious. By first equating the two they can offer arguments against the latter as a definitive refutation of the former for which they have no convincing counterarguments. The shell game again, bait and switch. Whatever one chooses to call it, it isn’t honest and it isn’t science.

Dembski, for his part, asserts only the general theory of an intelligent designer of earth’s life; he claims neither 6-day creation nor young earth theory, nor even God for that matter. ID is thus a very simple theory, and a fully scientific one, divested of any religious claims or assertions about God whatsoever. Nonetheless, Darwinists inanely offer rebuttals of intelligent design by arguing only against biblical 6-day creation and a young earth, neither of which are components or entailments of ID theory. This is the most ludicrous thing to have occurred in the history of civilized academic discourse, to have mainstream science arbitrarily redefine a theory for blatantly political reasons and then reject the authentic theory prior to evaluation based upon the bogus redefinition! The situation would be funny if the trick hadn’t been so successful. By allowing and even endorsing such deceptions academia is teaching students and the science-interested public to accept politics in lieu of rational thought and objective science.

Neo-Darwinists claim that all of the biochemists, biologists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science who comprise the intelligent design team are doing religion, not science. There is no truth in this; it is only a cheap debating trick, a ploy by Marxist-influenced neo-Darwinists and materialists in the scientific community. Marxists do not seek truth; they seek only social ascendancy for their political point of view.

Sadly, government science boards as well as many universities, professional associations, and peer-reviewed academic journals have all permitted neo-Darwinists to get away with these violations of intellectual integrity and scientific standards. The objectivity of mainstream science has been (for many years now) compromised by the overwhelming dominance of the materialist “lobby” in our scientific community. By not censuring neo-Darwinists for misrepresenting their personal philosophy as science, for misrepresenting unsubstantiated arguments as creditable philosophy, for manufacturing bogus redefinitions of opposing theories, and for ethical violations (neo-Darwinists are often personally insulting to Christian authors as a group or individually), mainstream academia as a whole has impliedly endorsed the neo-Darwinist’s unprofessional behavior. As a result, we have an integrity crisis in science where politicized contentious rhetoric has replaced fair and objective scientific evaluation.

Contrary to the neo-Darwinists’ preemptory dismissals of ID theory in their popular books (which imply that they had fully analyzed the ID case and found it wanting), the neo-Darwinist so-called “case” against intelligent design theory addresses few if any of the multitudinous points of evidence and logic presented in its favor. When they do assault the theory, they rely on propagandized rhetoric and debating tricks, not science or logic. At points, neo-Darwinists have even ludicrously claimed that probability is irrelevant to the evaluation of a scientific hypothesis, and that there are no limits to what an accident can be held to be capable of doing! They speak of the “enormous amounts of time” of evolution as if these were magic words that justify the dismissal of the science of mathematics.

Neo-Darwinists invite us to think in terms of the infinite when we imagine the resources available to evolution, but the truth of the matter is far different. Most of evolution occurred during a relatively brief 5-10 million years in the Cambrian period. The only thing that is nearly infinite in evolutionary science is the gap between what the evidence supports and what the neo-Darwinists claim.

The recently discovered complexity of biological systems entails that trillions of years would not have been enough for the accidental construction of life. This “invitation to the infinite” is a psychologically deceptive form of bait and switch. By “enormous amounts of time of evolution” the neo-Darwinists want us to read “more than enough time to build the complex machines of life by accident.” But they never lay out the biomechanical complexity of life for the reader so that a fact-based estimate can be made of how much time an accidental process would really need to construct the tree of life. Instead they present a vastly oversimplified view of evolutionary change in purely abstract terms, ignoring known complexities so extreme as to make the time available in evolutionary history a joke. The amount of time available in evolutionary history is an infinitesimal fraction of what is necessary to do the job.

In contrast to the ambiguous wording and slippery tactics on the neo-Darwinian side, intelligent design theorists have gone to great lengths to make clear both what they are saying and what they are not saying: their theory is well-defined. Intelligent design theory merely claims that there must be an intelligent designer of life. That designer needn’t be God. Neither must the designer be supernatural. As Jay Richards puts it, “It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.”[76] This says nothing about God, but materialists who predominate in the neo-Darwinist camp still loathe it because it leaves the door open for God’s existence. Allowing the public to retain their belief in God obstructs their (19th century vintage) “social reformist” propaganda campaign for Marxist materialism.

This mindset has so predominated in science that, oddly, even a noted Catholic priest (a scientist) has inexplicably chimed in against intelligent design theory and in support of neo-Darwinian theory. This despite the fact that the Catholic Church clearly rejects neo-Darwinism. That priest is Father George V. Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory. He claims that intelligent design theory denigrates God by reducing him to a mere designer. But of course, ID theorists have never attempted to define the limits of God at all; the focus on the designer aspect of the creator simply because they are formulating design theory, not God theory. They don’t have to explain the larger aspects of God because they are not doing theology. If they were, Coyne and the neo-Darwinists would have criticized them for that.

In dismissing intelligent design theory as a nonscientific enterprise that merely disguises a religious pursuit, Coyne, Futuyma, and Dawkins, et al., have shamelessly constructed an unauthorized redefinition of the modern theory of intelligent design, effectively transforming it into a 150-year-old throwback. This, while themselves hailing neo-Darwinian theory, itself no more explanatory than the protoplasm theory of Darwin’s own time, circa 1860 as the flagship of 21^st century science! Futuyma says ID is merely religion, and Coyne says ID makes a statement about God that is not good enough for his religion! Go figure. In the final analysis, both are simply wrong, as modern ID theory says nothing whatsoever about God or religion.

As a Catholic who happens to be a proponent of intelligent design theory, I personally take offense at the accusation that I have in some way denigrated my God by asserting a scientific theory that merely affirms transparent truths of observable data and rational thought. These truths, of all things that a priest might complain of, point to a designer of life, thereby opening the door to God’s existence being compatible with modern science and philosophy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself affirms that rational evidence for God can be seen in the majestic patterns of the created world,[77] as does the Bible. How is this a problem for the Church? What in the world was Father Coyne thinking?

Granted, God works in mysterious ways. So does Congress, but they are (usually) presumed to be intelligent. There is nothing in the scripture to ground the view that that divine mystery extends so far as to shroud all general indications of design. It is true, as God warned Job, that we may never understand all of God’s ways, but the Psalms do tell us that “the firmament declares his handiwork.” And, in Isaiah 45:18 (RSV), the prophet says “(he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!).” Thus, the teachings of the Church allow that evidence of design can be detected in nature.

I agree with Fr. Coyne only to the extent of conceding that there is plenty of room for God’s methods to be mysterious to us. That much is demonstrable in the realm of the purely physical before the supernatural is even considered: quantum entanglement; the inability to translate quantum physics to relativity; the singularity of the Big Bang where everything we see seems to have come out of nothing; the present cosmological dilemma of having to choose between throwing out gravity or keeping dark matter and dark energy (about which we know precious little) in order to explain the increasing rate of expansion of our universe. Given the many and substantial indicators of intelligent design in physics and biology it is not necessary for all mystery to be removed from science’s understanding of the physical world for ID theory to be a credible hypothesis.

Intelligent design theory does not denigrate God as Fr. Coyne charges. It speaks not at all to whatever truly transcendent supernatural abilities God may have. It merely makes God a credible hypothesis for the source of the fine-tuning of physics for life and the ultra-complex machines of biology. Contrary to the rigid and simplistic mechanical watch model that Fr. Coyne mistakenly attributes to ID, the way that the designer interacts with the world is not specified in intelligent design theory at all. No claims are made regarding either ongoing intervention by the designer or the degree of precision with which the design has been specified. ID makes no such claims beyond the necessity for acknowledging that intelligent design is present and admitting the impossibility of accident being the source of life.

We don’t yet know how the designer did it; we only know that we can rule accident out. Much like a seven-year-old child coming into a friend’s room (after a 16-year-old neighbor has sneaked in to baffle the 1^st graders) and seeing a magnificent twenty story construction of Lego’s, an intricate sailboat in a bottle, or a giant house of cards, the friend is not rationally entitled to say, “How did that accident get there?” but only, “How’d you do that!?” The rational mind has the ability to detect intelligent design at least in the flagrantly obvious cases, and what we see in the living machines of biology by far surpasses Legos (though, in the event of self-organization may turn out very similar). Therefore, in my courtroom at least, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Professor Michael Behe, Professor William Dembski, and Dr. Stephen Meyer et al., have been fully vindicated of astronomer Fr. George V. Coyne’s accusations.

And, in another intellectual coup, Father Coyne has authoritatively pronounced “God did not design me!” I must confess to still be struggling to find a biblically compatible meaning for this statement. God refers to himself as “your Builder” in Isaiah 62:5. Father Coyne seems to believe (with Charles Darwin) that God put things in motion in a profound and mysterious way, breathed the spirit of life in the first creatures, and then set the universe completely free to go its own random way. While, in theory, it might have happened that way, this view seems hardly compatible with Christian theology as the Bible says that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without God being concerned.

The Church teaches that God answers prayer. Given that he does it seems hardly likely that he is going to set the universe so radically free that unnecessary 911 calls flood his phone system. But even had God set nature completely free as the Darwin-Coyne lobby would have us believe, God remains the architect. Existing outside of time he certainly would have (immediately) “foreseen” the results. He could have simply vetoed the process had those results been unacceptable in terms of achieving his desired design specifications. However deep the full mystery of creation may be, the Church also teaches that, through the natural gift of reason, we can at least discern the designing hand of our Creator in nature in a general way, without necessarily knowing all there is to know about every physical event process. Thus, ID theory is fully compatible with Christian theology, even strongly suggested by it.

Beyond the fact that Coyne seems completely oblivious to the atheistic/materialistic philosophical tenets that neo-Darwinists have tacked on to basic evolution, in my view, Coyne’s remarks just basically miss the point. The context of the ID debate is only concerned with whether or not intelligence is behind the structures and process of life. It is not concerned with how subtle, how profound, how magnificently complex, or how mystically vague the designer elected to be when he impressed his design requirements upon the world. ID theory is concerned with that part that we can know, not the part that we cannot know. All ID theory says is that the design structures we see in living systems could not have been achieved within the available time and physical resources without aid of intelligently imposed constraints being embedded into or onto natural processes.

Coyne seems to be assuming that God would have to had fully micromanaged the details of life’s creation, that nature’s course toward human life could not have been a winding one at all, for there to be any basis for ID theory in science. But this is just the error of naïve finalism again (see fallacies #23-26). Within a generalized request for proposal (RFP) concept (see fallacy #51), or any other generalized conception of design specification, a designer can allow for options, permit flexibility, and tolerate certain margins of error. He could even permit certain goals to be achieved through randomizing features, while still maintaining constraints on the larger machine of nature that guarantees an overall result that falls within established tolerances. An appeal to something as intellectually archaic as naïve finalism is fully incongruent with the modern intellectual milieu. Naïve finalism isn’t even a part of modern theology, let alone the scientific theory of intelligent design. Resorting to naïve finalism is an act of political desperation, not logical cogency.

In his critique of Cardinal Schönborn’s editorial, Fr. Coyne commits the additional fallacies of one strike and you’re out and double standard by refusing to let ID theory “grow up” over the past 150 years. Coyne, like the neo-Darwinists, refuses to allow ID to jettison its prior ties to religion while knowing full well this is a task science itself has had to do. He, of course, has no problem permitting endless variations and changes to Darwinian theory under the umbrella of scientific progress.

True, the watch model did originate with theologian William Paley way back in the early 1900s, but even evolution in its early days was theistic. There is nothing in the concept of a watchmaker argument that requires God to be the watchmaker. And, in pure concept, there was nothing wrong with Paley saying that a watch implies a watchmaker in the first instance; it does, of course.

In light of modern quantum physics, however, the picture of nature has become less one of the rigid parts of an interactive machine than of the statistical probabilities of interacting energy field equations. Father Coyne asks us to believe that this means that we should no longer view the world as a functional mechanism. Fuzzy energy field dynamics notwithstanding, it is an indisputable fact that when those energy fields finish interacting in their fuzzy statistical ways, the same mechanical things happen time after time, day after day, up here in the visible world of physical objects and Newtonian Mechanics just exactly as they would should the world be a classically hard mechanism at its foundational level. Our world functions as a machine despite the fact that its smallest component parts at the subatomic level, the quantum particles that makeup the “levers and pulleys,” are defined by energy equations that are somewhat fuzzy.

What’s the point of belaboring fuzziness at quantum levels if it doesn’t alter the mechanistic outcome in the final result up here where we live? We already know our theories of physics are incomplete and must be revised to permit a transition from quantum equations to relativity theory. Fuzziness at the quantum level is not sufficient cause to throw out our conviction that our world is a consistent orderly system hugely biased for life. Obviously there is a correspondence bridge of some kind from quantum theory that guarantees that the mechanistic model still holds up here on the surface of things or we wouldn’t be able to live as we do and science could not make predictions at all.

Given such strict correspondence, I don’t see quantum theory as impugning the laws of Newtonian physics so much as confirming and explaining them at a deeper level. We have “always” (that is, in my lifetime) known that there were atoms that composed the metal of the parts of our factory machines and automobiles. We knew that there was space between the orbiting electrons and the nuclei. This did not keep us from rightly constructing conceptual models of solid material with correspondingly solids-based behaviors in the macroscopic world. In this case the linguistic/conceptual model was using technically “wrong” words at the surface of things viz-a-viz the deeper reality but the world was in fact mechanistic and the materials were in fact solid. The spaces between atomic particles were too small to make any practical difference and the same holds for the fuzzy energy equations at the quantum level. What we know of quantum mechanics, especially given the incompleteness of the theory and unresolved mysteries, obligates no change to our mechanistic worldview. If the world were not mechanistic, science could not exist and intelligence would not be a survival advantage to the human species.

Father Coyne, in critiquing ID theory for being associated with what he suggest is the “archaic” and “disproved” model of Newtonian mechanics, is just wrong. Newtonian mechanics is not disproved by quantum mechanics, it is clarified and complimented.

What Did Einstein Believe?

And let’s not put quantum theory up on an unimpeachable pedestal. Quantum physics has plenty of problems of its own. It cannot be considered as having higher theoretical integrity than Newtonian mechanics. Father Coyne mistakenly suggests that quantum mechanics has replaced Newtonian mechanics as the model for our larger worldview and conceptual framework. But this can hardly be so, given the incompleteness of quantum theory, the professional disputes about what it means, the fact that it describes the same world as Newtonian physics describes, and that our living experience has not been changed in the slightest by the advent of quantum theory.

Quantum theory is so obtuse that it is doubtful if more than a handful of scientists fully grasp what it means at any given moment in time. Each theorist’s renditions of the theory tend to differ in some important respect. Noted theoretical physicist N. David Mermin (Cornell) provides a wonderful quote from Richard Feynman at the introduction of his article “Spooky Actions at a Distance: Mysteries of the Quantum Theory.”[78]

There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Einstein recognized that there is something fundamentally wrong or incomplete with current quantum mechanics. Yes, the theory is visibly incomplete in its inability to establish a concrete explanation for the random behavior in individual particles and the ordered behavior manifested in the statistical group behavior of particles. Here it is the unjustifiable inference from lack of explanation to lack of order that is the problem. Mystery does not equal chaos. Einstein rebelled at this fallacious conclusion, saying that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

If one disassembles a machine into its component parts, obviously the parts will not separately respond in an orderly fashion the same as the fully assembled machine responds. If one strikes an automobile piston laying on the shop table with a hammer the engine will obviously not spring into life allowing you to drive to the market. This analogy combined with the conceptual difficulties we have had with quantum theory suggests that at some level of the atom we must transition from what is the smallest mechanism in nature to (among those things that are smaller) what must be considered component parts incapable of independent orderly function until they are “assembled” by application of some external force constraints (what quantum theory seems so far unable to discover). Father Coyne argues that the mechanistic worldview has been refuted by quantum physics, but to conclude that the machine doesn’t exist because the parts taken separately don’t perform as a mechanism is obviously invalid. One might call this the fallacy of requiring machine components to be the machine.

There is perhaps a somewhat more cogent defense of indeterminacy, though it still does not refute the mechanistic worldview. It goes like this. The problem in quantum physics is not so much that the engine fails to spring into life when you strike a piston on the table with a hammer, but that when you strike it in precisely the same way multiple times the piston responds erratically and unpredictably, exhibiting vastly different responses in each instance. How can it be a reliable component of anything if its response is erratic? Of course, if this happened with a real piston it could only be because there were irregularities in the surface, differences in the angle of the blow, or other variations in the conditions of the event. But in quantum physics we can find no variables to explain the erratic variations in response to identical originating conditions.

This, of course, is why Einstein postulated that quantum physics is simply incomplete; we are missing something that will explain these variations in response. Very likely, the erratic behavior of quantum particles has to do with something no more mysterious than the absence of consistent cohesion, which is consistently supplied by the force field interactions generated by other particles within interaction range, dark matter, Higg’s bosons, or some other missing piece of the physics puzzle science has yet to discover. The atheists’ inference to an accidental worldview from this phenomenon, considering that quantum indeterminacy or erratic single particle behavior has no effect on the orderly behavior or particles in groups or on the macroscopic world whatsoever, is simply not justified. The only defensible conclusion to draw is the incompleteness of our physical theory, not the chaotic nature of physical systems.

The presence of consistent states of interactive cohesion is a clear enough fact within the observational data. We don’t know where the cohesion comes from, but we know it is there. To irrationally move to the concept of an accidental world contradicts the existence of physical order and natural law itself and must therefore be directly dismissed. The fact that a mechanism “wigs out” at the extreme ranges does not make it a non-mechanism. Thus, neither quantum physics nor relativity theory makes the world a non-mechanism, for we clearly had a mechanism when we started. They merely mean that the mechanism “wigs out” at the extreme ranges.

Events corresponding to Newtonian mechanics must remain a derivative range of quantum theory; else quantum theory does not predict the real world at all. When it stops doing that it is refuted. After all, that is precisely what Niels Bohr’s correspondence principle says: any theory of quantum physics that fails to correspond to the observable world of larger objects must be dismissed as in error. Quantum theory, therefore, predicts Newtonian mechanics within those ranges where Newtonian physics applies. It must so predict if it is to be a confirmed model of our physical world at all. Therefore, since Newtonian mechanics is derivable from quantum mechanics, to say that Newtonian mechanics has been refuted or replaced by quantum mechanics, as Father Coyne does, is to utter a contradiction.

Granted, our descriptions of quantum physics and Newtonian Mechanics don’t employ the same words, concepts, and ideas; but they do describe the same physical system, the same world. A similar disparity on words and concepts applies to our descriptions of the separate individual parts of an automobile and the operation of the functional whole, but we don’t throw out our language of the art of driving as invalid because it does not include nuts, bolts, and torque wrenches. The language and concepts humans use are necessarily different at different levels of every kind of system. This is both a matter of convenience to human manipulation of the data, intellectual ergonomics if you will, and the recognition that adding assembly and mobile operations to a set of raw parts naturally adds new events, patterns, and functions that must be described in new terms.

The language and concepts and uncertainty and indeterminacy do not exist in the theory of Newtonian mechanics except where genuine randomness is involved. Genuine randomness does not naturally exist in Newtonian physics, but must be introduced artificially by humans with free will. Where uncertainty and indeterminacy exist in quantum mechanics regarding individual particle behavior it is for a different reason: lack of information, not demonstrated randomness.

Thus, as Einstein believed, there is something necessarily missing in quantum theory. Why do seemingly erratic individual particles behave in an orderly fashion in aggregate? Thus, the theory is incomplete. Quantum theory simply “isn’t there yet,” that is, it is neither complete nor fully explanatory at the most fundamental level. It therefore has not replaced anything because a theory so fundamentally incomplete cannot be considered either matured or confirmed, albeit it extraordinarily precise and useful in the applications it does provide. In the meantime the mechanical universe continues to tick along in clockwork fashion as reliably as it ever did.

One further item concerning Father Coyne’s views and we’ll move to the next fallacy. I previously alluded to Father Coyne’s criticism of Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn’s affirmation of intelligent design. Let’s now take a closer look. What specifically is wrong with what Father Coyne has said about Cardinal Schönborn’s affirmation of intelligent design? Father Coyne insists that Cardinal Schönborn is wrong on at least five fundamental issues. His tone is quite authoritative in these criticisms. In defense of Cardinal Schönborn then, let’s see if Coyne’s hardline position actually stands up to closer analysis. [My comments are inserted in brown; Father Coyne’s points are paraphrased or quoted in black.]

Coyne point one: the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking [Wrong, Cardinal Schönborn’s topic is not basic evolution but neo-Darwinian evolution (which, in denying cosmic purpose, is not neutral). Father Coyne commits the fallacy of equivocation here, improperly switching between two different meanings of the same term.]

Two: “the message of John Paul II, which I have just referred to and which is dismissed by the cardinal as ‘rather vague and unimportant,’ is a fundamental church teaching which significantly advances the evolution debate.” [This misleads the reader into thinking that the John Paul II message advances a Church position in favor of neo-Darwinian evolution. It does not. By condemning materialist theories, it condemns neo-Darwinian evolution. Pope John Paul II merely said that basic evolution was “more than a theory.” Basic evolution is fully compatible with intelligent design.]

Three: neo-Darwinian evolution is not in the words of the cardinal, ‘an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection;’ [Wrong again. In fact, Father Coyne could not be more wrong here because the father of modern evolutionary thought, Theodosius Dobzhansky, affirms precisely what Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn ascribes to neo-Darwinian theory: “Though neither planned, guided, predestined or predetermined (except in the Laplacian sense of universal deterministic causality), the biological evolution gave rise to man.” What Coyne is apparently doing without cueing us in is pulling Dawkins’ rabbit of “cumulative selection” out of the hat. But, as discussed above, “cumulative selection” is a vacuous concept. It is a magical label that doesn’t add anything in the form of planning and guidance. It is incoherently defined, and cannot be pointed to as a real process in nature. What the accumulation of actual selective events add by way of directing the evolutionary process away from the fully random is the merest infinitesimal fraction of the level of guidance that is mathematically required to produce the vastly complex machines of life.][79]

Four: the apparent directionality seen by science in the evolutionary process does not require a designer; [Cardinal Schönborn did not premise his argument on oversimplified directionality, though Father Coyne’s remark here implies that he did. Intelligent design is not founded upon naïve and oversimplified concepts of directionality, for example, merely moving from the simple to the complex. (It is worth pointing out, however, that moving from the simple to the complex is the way most machines are in fact built by intelligent designers in human experience.) Rather, intelligent design theory argues from the entire gamut of complex design features seen in living things, as well as the lack of accidental biomechanical pathways between species, all of which reveal the impotence of an accidental process. The ID argument is grounded in a multiplicity of valid observations and logical inference from the data as the entirety of this book shows. Notably, the probability bound argument (Appendix 2) establishes the lack of time and resources requisite to accident achieving any significant complexity in living designs. By implying that the intelligent design case is based upon simple directionality alone, Father Coyne unfairly represents the ID case and commits the straw man fallacy.]

Five: Intelligent Design is not science despite the cardinal’s statement that ‘neo-Darwinism and the multi-verse hypothesis in cosmology [were] invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science,’ ” [We have already seen the strength of the scientific argument for intelligent design. Mathematician and philosopher of science William Dembski has given us four comprehensive books that present the mathematical and philosophical case for design. Michael Behe’s books, Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution; Jonathan Well’s book Icons of Evolution; Michael Denton’s books Evolution a Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny; and Stephen C. Meyer’s scientific journal article, “The Origins of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” and his recent book, Signature in the Cell, are all overtly and unquestionably scientific presentations. Father Coyne here blatantly ignores all this bonafide scientific work, reverting back to the naïve finalism of the early nineteenth century. One wonts to say that he should get away from his telescope more often. On the other hand, what is actually unscientific is the multiverse theory,[80] which is not testable, and the continued affirmation of neo-Darwinian evolution by mainstream science after it has been refuted by recent design complexity data and the derivable resource exhaustion equations and forbidding probabilities. Father Coyne gives both multiverse and accidental evolution a free pass from scientific method, while, similar to other neo-Darwinists, saying that evolutionary theorists can remain confident in their position against intelligent design without having read any of the modifications to their opponents’ theories for over a hundred years!

Conclusion: Father Coyne is demonstrably wrong on all five points, and Cardinal Schönborn’s position is fully vindicated.

Fallacy #42: Double standard

The double standard fallacy is woven throughout Darwinist arguments. No doubt you have a pretty good feel for it by now. But let’s take a moment to review. First, the neo-Darwinists demand that an intelligent designer be completely proved before the hypothesis is even considered scientific. This contradicts scientific method outright, and the theory of evolution has never been held to such a standard (nor any other theory of science). If Henry Gee is right, and I not only endorse his position but celebrate it, Darwinian evolution only has a fraction of the evidence required to proclaim it a fact as has been so often and so prematurely done. Evolution has become an icon of science, yes, but not a fact. And one can certainly ask whether it should have become an icon in the first instance in advance of the necessary data from genetics and microbiology.

For Darwinists, the inference to design can never be considered valid no matter what form the evidence takes or in what vast amounts it may accumulate. The at best spotty evidence for accidental evolution, on the other hand, for neo-Darwinists is not merely an appearance, but the real thing. Their inference is certain from modest data, our inference is impossible from an overwhelming case—a double standard.

Next: it is OK for Darwinists to add the philosophical adjuncts of materialism and lack of cosmic purpose to their theory of evolution based upon nothing but an embarrassing string of logical fallacies and naïve assumptions. But it is not OK for intelligent design scientists to add the logically defensible assumption that a design implies a designer.

Then there is one strike and you’re out. ID theory is not allowed to evolve from the ancient concept of naïve finalism and its other religious antecedents, while Darwinian theory is permitted to move past its religious antecedents and to reformulate itself constantly, throwing away substantial errors such as naïve mutationism, Lamarckism, and orthogenesis practically with the daily trash.

Some neo-Darwinists assert that there could be multiple universes having natural laws radically different from our own. Such theories are not testable, yet intelligent design theory is rejected prior to consideration because, neo-Darwinists mistakenly assert, it is not testable. Here they introduce a double standard yet again.

Before neo-Darwinists will admit intelligent design to be a justified inference, intelligent design theorists must be able to explain all of the designer’s purpose concerning every detail of nature, all that concerns the evolution of life, and produce the designer himself for an extended interview.“To provide scientific explanations, a Creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the Creation.”[81] However neo-Darwinists beg off their having to demonstrate the full process of evolution. They say the task is obviously too big to ever be accomplished, yet they demand ID theory produce the full details of design, which could conceivably turn out to be nothing less than the mind of God himself! Science has nowhere else applied a standard either so strict or so ridiculous as neo-Darwinists try to arbitrarily enforce on the intelligent design argument.

Intelligent design theory has also been treated unfairly in insisting on the reproducibility of its claims in the laboratory. Darwinists do not hold Darwinian theory to this same standard, although Darwinian evolution and ID theory are both theories of the same subject. Darwinists cannot reproduce their larger key theoretical claims in the lab: spontaneous advancements in biological form from accidental mutations locked in by natural selection. However, mainstream science permits Darwinian theory to proceed on an historical basis as opposed to the more rigorous standard of experimental science. In Science on Trial, Douglas Futuyma, exemplifies this double standard by saying evolutionary science is an historical science and not to be restricted to the rigorous demands of the experimental sciences, while classifying intelligent design theory as nonscientific by definition because it can’t conform to the strict model of experimental science. They are both theories of the same subject, yet one must be experimental while the other may be historical.

Ironically, if we could get past the politics and fairly interpret the data, we would see that to a great extent modern science has demonstrated intelligent design theory in the lab because mutations studies have not produced evidence of accidentally spawned macroevolution. Although we cannot to date generate macroevolution with human science-directed genetic engineering, we can demonstrate that intelligent design approaches a whole lot closer to explaining macroevolution than do accidental mutations. Darwinists do not want you to know: 1) that there is no known macroevolutionary dynamic in the biochemistry of life; 2) that there is no detectable pathway for accidental evolution to have moved between the phyla; 3) that gradualism is dead; and 4) that there are visibly substantial barriers to spontaneously evolving one radically different body type from another. In other words, ID has to explain everything up front, but Darwinian evolution has to explain nothing, ever! Hence a fully ludicrous instance of a double standard. Neo-Darwinian theory retains preferred status until fully disproved while being formulated such that it cannot be disproved, but ID theory won’t even be admitted as scientific until fully proved in advance of scientific consideration, which obviously cannot be done. Talk about rigging the game!

Here is yet another use of the double standard fallacy. Evolutionary science, Darwinists say, must proceed primarily on the basis of historical studies. Therefore, it is unfair to hold evolutionary science to the rigorous standard of scientific method used in the realm of experimental science. What they mean is that they don't want to have to reproduce evolution in the lab, or observe it happening in nature. They are not nearly so generous with intelligent design theory.

There are four primary tools of science: (1) experiment, that is, hypothesis and empiric test; (2) historical method; (3) logical inference and (4) theoretical modeling. As with historical method, conclusions drawn from bonafide logical inferences remain valid even in circumstances not conducive to experimental method, though conclusions drawn from any method of science must ultimately conform to the results of empiric observations and experimental tests where available. Logical inferences and theoretical modeling, when properly performed, may at times properly lead us beyond raw empiric data so long as they do not contradict that data. Conclusion: if the historical method-based inferences of Darwinian evolution can be considered valid in the absence of direct observations, so can the logical inferences of intelligent design. Yet, neo-Darwinists demand that ID theorists produce the designer to have credibility—a double standard.

Neo-Darwinists also demand that ID theorists produce an entire new full-blown theory of evolution to replace Darwinian theory before their criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory can be seriously considered. It is important to understand that ID theory does not purport to be a self-contained full-blown theory of evolution; it is a small adjunct tenet that is intended to be added to whatever basic dynamic is best established to explain the physical process dynamics of evolution. Intelligent design theory says nothing about the specific mechanics of evolution, but only that the source of life's origin and development (at least the author of the more complex forms of life) must be an intelligence. As such, it is only an adjunct to basic evolution, not a replacement of it. Thus, it is unfair to demand that ID scientists propose an entire new theory of the biological processes and historical events of evolution before their hypothesis can be considered by mainstream science. This has not been demanded of punctuated equilibrium or random drift theory. Once again, a double standard.

Nonetheless, Darwinists insist that intelligent design scientists must publish peer-reviewed scientific articles across the whole spectrum of biological research before ID can be considered credible. This is ludicrous on the surface because the ID thesis has made no claims that assert a biological process different from the one described in the existing literature other than that additional constraints will be found embedded throughout physical/biological processes that take most of the randomness out of the process. And modern ID theory is a brand new undertaking, and one facing incredible political opposition. But research is under way and a rough conceptual outline of research directions, tools, and methods has been sketched out that includes the following subtopics and disciplines:[82]

ID-theoretics

ID-detection

ID-input

ID-innovation detection

ID-informatics

ID-metrics

ID-heuristics

ID-axiomatics

ID-investigatives

ID-synergistics

ID-empirics

ID-biotics

ID-technics

ID-programmatics

ID-paradigmatics

Methods of Design Detection

Evolvability

Biological Information

Evolutionary Computation

Technological Evolution

Strong Irreducible Complexity of Molecular Machines and Metabolic Pathways

Natural and Artificial Biological Design

Design of the Environment and Ecological Fine-Tuning

Steganographic Layering of Biological Information

Astrobiology, SETI, and the Search for a General Biology

Cosmological Fine-Tuning and Anthropic Coincidences

Consciousness, Free Will, and Mind-Brain Studies

Autonomy vs. Guidance

Neo-Darwinists expect all of this to be done and the designer himself produced, no doubt to be interrogated by them, before they will even call intelligent design theory “scientific.” But if they, the neo-Darwinists/materialist, who control the larger portion of mainstream science endeavors in this topical area in modern academia, don’t acknowledge ID theory as scientific, how are the ID researchers to get the funding, staff, and facilities to do the required research? It is catch 22; damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Evolutionists disavow ever being able to compete the full gamut of research and proofs of evolution, yet they make these extraordinary demands of ID theory. Once again, the double standard.

ID theorists have to publish peer-reviewed articles in the scientific journals to prove their scientific credentials to the neo-Darwinists, but the great majority of editors, who are neo-Darwinists, who won’t accept the articles because they consider ID nonscience. Again, catch 22. Neo-Darwinists, of course, do not have to publish peer-reviewed articles to establish credibility for their add-on assumption of materialism; they just sneak it in. Of course, materialism is not a question of natural science at all, but of philosophy. Yet, it is allowed to be embedded in evolutionary discussions without censure. Articles openly treating materialism would not be accepted in a professional journal dedicated to evolutionary science. Materialism is simply an unstated working assumption of most of scientific academia, so they turn a blind eye when it is woven into the science articles, while scrupulously scouring materials to root out any reference to intelligent design.

Although it is good rule that discussions of materialism and dualism should go into a philosophy journal or a philosophy of science journal at least, instead of arenas of pure science, Professor Thaun has informed us in his book, Chaos and Harmony, that one can have scientific evidence for at least the refutation of materialism, if not the confirmation of it. In Thuan's case, however, the evidence is from physics, not philosophy. And what would a successful defense of materialism consist of? Any life form hypothesized to have a spirit or soul, notably to include humans, would have to be produced in the lab without recourse to God. Science would have to somehow enliven the nonliving physical structure. Clearly this has not been done.

Nonetheless, Darwinists such as Douglas Futuyma confidently assert the adjunct of materialism in their textbooks having given absolutely no case for it. They have not successfully produced a research paradigm that could convert the question from one of philosophy to one of science (as have ID scientists for their theory), while demanding intelligent design scientists go beyond the reasonable case already made to absolute proof. This entire flagrant double standard is nothing but a scandal.

The reason for the scarcity of intelligent design articles in peer-reviewed biology journals is clear, though multifaceted. It has no bearing on the quality of work done in the field. The ID argument is primarily logical evaluation of the import of existing biological and archaeological research: same data, different conclusions. Professional journals, however, are almost exclusively setup for only two types of articles: results of original experimental research or a review of current literature on a single topic. ID discussions tend not to fit nicely into either of these categories. At the time of this writing (October, 2010), ID has two dozen or so key peer-reviewed research studies/articles, and more in press, perhaps half as many peer-reviewed books, and the books of Dembski and Meyer come very close to a classic comprehensive review of the literature.[83]

One of the other primary foci of ID articles is the probability argument, but, once again, historical prejudice precludes the professional journal taking an interest. This may be because they believe that the merely cursory comments mainstream biologists have made dismissing probability concerns in relation to evolution are definitive and authoritative. This, notwithstanding the fact that Darwinists’ remarks on probability are some of the most ludicrous ideas ever allowed into print. Darwinists know the deck is both politically and institutionally stacked against intelligent design articles. It is therefore unfair of them to imply that the validity of the ID thesis or the quality of work by ID scientists is accurately reflected in the relatively small number of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles on intelligent design.

The bottom line is that ID theory requires very little uniquely targeted research other than what D. D. Axe has already undertaken to get the theory initially off the ground, that is, to produce a demonstration that random synthesis of the key elements of life is impossible within the available time and physical resources. In addition, the irreducible design complexity of living organisms is being fully and properly elucidated by standard investigations of the function and structure of cells and higher biological systems by mainstream science hand over foot every year, if only inadvertently. Conclusion: demanding an enormous library of specifically intelligent design research before giving the theory credibility is a double standard, particularly when no one is predisposed either to fund, host, assist or publish such research for fear of the prejudice against ID invoking an invisible academic censure against them for doing it.

Here is yet another instance of the double standard fallacy. If science chose to be consistent, they would admit the behavior patterns and subjective reports of billions of people who have religious experiences as being of legitimate evidential value, at least in aggregate, while allowing for some non-authentic reports. This may seem an odd suggestion, but science admits the subjective reports of individuals in psychotherapy investigations as indirect confirmation of theoretical assumptions of the existence of the id, ego, and superego, and other theoretical psychiatric constructs. One wonts to say that psychiatric patients on the whole are no more likely to be authentically reporting their internal experience than the public at large. Modern science acknowledges psychiatric theory construction as a valid scientific pursuit and is aware that psychiatric theorists build their models based in part on the reports from and the behaviors of their patients. Here reports of internal experience and generalizations from individual and group behavior serve as valid evidence for conclusions about the existence of nonobservable entities. Why doesn’t the same hold true for religious behavior?

Science, however, has chosen to ignore the same category of evidence, that is, reports of subjective experience, as of evidential quality when it points to God because it points to God. The quality or reliability of reports of religious experience are, on the whole, higher than for psychotherapeutic interviews because there are no documented indications of aberrancy in the cognitive, deliberative, physical, and emotional faculties of the average religious person, as there are in the typical psychiatric subject. Billions upon billions of psychologically healthy people through history have claimed genuine religious experience. Why haven’t Freud and company ever set out to systematically interview an equivalent number of these patients and meticulously construct a theoretical model that would best explain normal healthy religious behavior? This is only a rhetorical question, for the obvious historical answer is known: no one was willing to pay them to do it. But my point is, what should we rationally expect from such a study but a validation of these peoples’ religious beliefs?

I am not saying that because religious people claim God exists science should assume it is infallibly true. Rather, because they both say and act like God exists and no alternative explanation is at hand, the default scientific explanatory model should be that God exists pending the arrival of a better explanation. This avoids employing a double standard that conflicts with the standard behavior-based inference methods used in psychology and psychiatry. Freudian and other psychological theories argue that the inferred existence of invisible entities such as the id, the ego, and the superego best explain human behavior. Similarly, a theoretical model that includes God best explains the total behavior of religious people; it’s that simple.

On the level of common sense, and also taking note of the migration away from pure Freudian theory among modern psychiatrists and psychologists to alternative, hybrid, and eclectic theories, God, it seems to me, stands more solidly confirmed as a likely real entity than do the classic Freudian constructs of id, ego, and superego. Freudian theory never aspired to be anything except a very useful heuristic model, which it is, especially in hybrid and eclectic approaches. Freudian theory did not claim literal ontological existence for the id, ego, and superego as separate and distinct entities.

Some sociologists and psychologists have lamely tried to say that religion is a mass neurosis, a deep-seated psychological need with no basis in objective reality. But the hypothesis of a mass neurosis or benign self-deception that simultaneously affects fully two thirds of the world's population would need some additional corroboration to be credible. One would have to produce independently documented aberrant behavior in other areas of life for these otherwise normal-looking religious people, something beyond the psychologists merely making the question begging assumption that God does not exist.

Yet another example of the double standard can be found in the way neo-Darwinists have historically vacillated between touting and eschewing the value of majority opinion or consensus among experts. Darwinists will tell us that because most scientists agree that intelligent design theory is not scientific we must accept their opinion as true without bothering to evaluate the specifics of what intelligent design theory says. They will tell us that because most scientists agree that neo-Darwinian evolution is an indisputable fact, it must be one. Thus, they tout majority (expert) opinion as a sure guide in science. But at the time that Darwin first posed his theory of evolution, most scientists were theistic evolutionists; they believed that God was the best explanation of the natural world, at least the source of it. But here we see neo-Darwinists make a full 180-degree turn from hailing the trailblazing courage of (biological amateurs) Darwin and Wallace for bucking the overwhelming scientific majority, who then favored theistic evolution. Perhaps this is not a double standard, so much as logical inconsistency, or perhaps it is both. Certainly they have flip- flopped from honoring the courage of Darwin and Wallace in bucking the system in dismissing a similarly courageous case currently being made for intelligent design today by doctoral scientists Dembski, Behe, and Meyer et al. against the tide of majority opinion.

Considering this vacillation, Darwinists are apparently not so much interested in proposing a valid evidential standard as advancing the political agenda of atheism and materialism. The claim that expert consensus makes truth, of course, is a fallacy in and of itself, yet neo-Darwinists currently thrust it into the face of their audiences with triumph as if it should end all discussion. This is hardly the case, as progress itself entails that the majority will always be on the wrong side of the newest questions.

Fallacy #43: Science can never have implications about God.

In Part 2 I give an extended argument that this is not so. Two of the primary pillars of my argument are the psychological model arguments from the overwhelming amount of religious behavior and from the legitimate evidence for the supernatural in reports from near death experiences. God is more explanatory of these phenomena than materialism. In addition, human free-will focused behavioral exercises such as those demonstrated in recent psychological studies by Jeffrey Schwartz also evidence the distinction between the mind and brain, which tends to corroborate the reality of the nonphysical dimension(s).[84]

In denying cosmic purpose in nature, the neo-Darwinists implicitly allow that science can have implications concerning God. Giving a scientific argument for lack of cosmic purpose contradicts the intentional creation of the world by God, and thus implies that God is not the creator. Presumably, if, in theory, scientific evidence can be found to argue that God is not the creator of the world, scientific evidence can also argue that he is the creator. A scientific hypothesis must be refutable to be scientific. If the neo-Darwinist thesis that there is no cosmic purpose in nature is scientific, its converse, that there is cosmic purpose in nature, must also be within the scope of science, else the hypothesis against cosmic purpose would not admit refutation.

Peters and Gutmann: “…The process of evolution is not activated by some goal-oriented plan.” Futuyma says “Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.” Here we see that the meaning of neo-Darwinian theory goes beyond simple descent with modification, beyond generic or basic evolution to materialism and the denial of God. In point of fact, however, God has not been shown unnecessary to scientific explanation. With the advent of the Big Bang theory, we were informed that physical processes could be traced back to a single instant in time where all scientific explanation simply comes to a halt, a point where natural law no longer applies. At this point in the trail of physical causation, science has to throw up its hands and admit that the entire thing is a mystery. Science calls that mystery a singularity as if giving it a professional sounding name would change the fact that it is the best suggestion of God that science could ever hope to discover.

To say that God does not enhance explanation at this point is worse than arbitrary; it is a denial of the logical import of the data. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, both scientists and noted authors, in their recent book, Origins of Life, go to a great deal of trouble to give us a coherent, integrated and carefully reasoned case that science can at times and within limits legitimately point to the supernatural. True, science cannot work with the supernatural directly on a practical basis within the intermediate chains of physical causation. And science cannot directly observe, control, or replicate the supernatural. But the supernatural can still be coherently posited as the ultimate origin of things without placing any wrenches into the scientific machinery. Explanatory models can be constructed that allow for supernatural concepts that can nonetheless have testable predictions that, if not conclusive, are corroborative.

There is nothing truly unique in the hypothesis of God in science. Science has long since asserted the existence of many large, invisible, and subtle forces that could not be observed directly: gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, multiple universes, extra dimensions, etc. (to include the not so subtle and not fully explainable singularity of the Big Bang). Pope Pius XII told the simple truth when he claimed in celebration that the Big Bang theory had proved the moment of divine creation. That is, it proved it as far as science could demonstrate one way or the other at the time. It is still a pretty convincing proof to my mind. But my point is that all of these things were only indirectly evidenced. Multiverse cannot be tested; the Big Bang invokes a singularity that goes beyond the physical as currently defined; and extra-dimensional theories such as super-strings may reach beyond science’s practical ability to test. Until they are tested there is no guarantee that we have not simply created an ad hoc model to fit data that is actually being generated by supernatural causes. This problem remains in regards to the Big Bang itself until science can find a way to progress its investigations beyond the Big Bang.

Yet all of these nonobservable entities were readily admitted into science because they increased the explanatory power of our total theoretical base, at least in the view of some theorists. Evolution itself is such a concept in that it cannot be directly observed or tested. My point is that the untestable and unobservable has been traditionally admitted into science when doing so increased the explanatory power of our theoretical base. But now along comes ID theory, which as we have just seen explains quite a good little bit that science cannot otherwise account for, irreducible complexity, resource exhaustion, probability barriers, overtly intelligent coding systems, etc., and all of a sudden, “No can do!…Not scientific because 150 years ago some religious people proposed something similar.” Once again we see a flagrant double standard (and a lot of politicized nonsense).

Considering that the standard definition of God stipulates that he is the source of everything, the designer of everything, and the governor and judge of everything, it is an outright contradiction for science to both admit that God might exist and simultaneously claim that we could never need him in explanation. In view of his size, power, and potential interest in the outcome of events, the rational assumption should be that God might well be involved in quite a lot of things that concern our world. Thus, has the largely disproved theory of accidental evolution really made theological explanation superfluous as Professor Futuyma and the neo-Darwinists claim, at least in its traditional place at the ultimate origin of things?

Here we are staring into the face of a scientifically confirmed total mystery at the beginning of cosmological time. As Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches us, this must always be so. From this mystery came all the order vested into the initial state of matter and energy in the universe in a fraction of a second, all the natural laws which guide the subsequent transformations that created the majestic order of our natural world. Yet, Futuyma, Dawkins & Co. confidently conclude that theological explanation has been made superfluous by a protoplasm era theory constructed before the electron microscope, microbiology or genetic science. Mainstream science continues to tell us (and our young students) by way of neo-Darwinian theory that they prefer a glaringly incomplete and astronomically improbable theory (accidental evolution) to a supremely plausible and fully explanatory hypothesis (intelligent design) for the sole reason that it saves science from having to admit that the evidence favors the existence of God.

Fallacy #44: Nonrepresentative sample

Why should we be dismissive of religion, as science and left-leaning academia has been since Freud, when the healthy religious population has always been excluded from study? Science’s “conclusions” have been drawn from a near-exclusively neurotic group of subjects. The statistical sample used to ground such opinions is at least prima facie nonrepresentative of the larger group.

Even the staunch materialist philosopher David Hume acknowledged that multiple testimonies from reliable witnesses constitute bonafide evidence. Yet, science draws its conclusions about religion exclusively from observations of neurotics.

Fallacy #45: The only bias relevant to evolution is a 100% bias.

Natural law permits life, and strongly encourages it, but, so far as the present data goes, natural law cannot be demonstrated to definitely require life. Therefore, Darwinists claim, the bias for overwhelmingly biomechanically sound (and occasionally environmentally adaptive) variation proposals that is clearly present in nature should not be taken to suggest intelligent design.

Ernst Mayr explains away apparent purpose in natural processes as being the simple result of natural law, as if the term “natural law” was a kind talisman or magic word that should erase all concern of a visible bias in nature.[85] But, considering that natural law itself springs from a complete mystery (the Big Bang), one can, and should, ask why the law favors life so strongly in the first place. True, there is no discernable bias for a given species, but there does seem to be a clear bias for all of them together, at least for a living ecosystem containing some near approximation of our present tree of life.

And the case certainly is not yet closed on the question of a 100% bias for life. Life already appears as 100% certain given large amounts of time for known biases to be expressed. Not all individual mutations can be shown to favor life, even in the general sense, but noted author and evolutionist Simon Conway Morris says humans are inevitable in our universe given the precise configuration of natural law, the physical constants of nature, and the starting conditions of our universe. So, once the highly ordered state description of the universe at the Big Bang (what some scientists call the “boundary conditions”) is plugged into nature’s fine-tuned system of physical constants and natural laws it is not at all clear that the universe does not fully require life.[86]

Many decades of research remain. Not all of the nooks and crannies of the physical processes relevant to the bias for life in nature have been explored, such as the electromagnetic properties of molecules, which affect the way proteins fold into useable or nonuseable configurations. Until all the relevant data is in, it is fully premature to say that life even could be the result of an accident, let alone that it definitely is. The more modern science explores the intricacies of life the less room there seems to exist for accident to affect the process at all.

Considering that there is little evidence of inefficient design proposals in the evolutionary record, the bias for highly functional and elegant design proposals is clear. Elegant and highly functional form variation proposals are not universal in our living experience. There are birth defect-causing point mutations that occur every day. But there is a lack of a middle ground in the efficiency of biological design proposals through the history of evolution as reflected in the fossil record, something between elegantly efficient mechanistic complexity on the one hand and injurious or catastrophic failures on the other. This (and everything else we know of biology and math) tells us that we cannot extrapolate from the accidental nature of point mutations to the nature of the larger, more sophisticated, long-term process underlying progressive evolution. If, as Darwinists claim, nature is doing the biological design proposals blindfolded, and if she doesn’t care if the things work well or not, where are all the so-so and really not very good but nonetheless temporarily survivable designs in the fossil record that an accidental process would have produced? What the record shows is that there are two entirely different kinds of things going on regarding biological mutations through the history of life. One is the simple accident of injurious mutations, which can do precious little but injure an organism, and the other is the clearly guided process of evolution that produced the amazingly complex tree of life against all odds in a surprisingly efficient manner. Evolutionists themselves have long conceded that point mutations induced by exposure to toxics and radiation contribute little or nothing to evolution.

While conceding that disabled designs would not survive the cut of natural selection in the long run, many would have lived long enough to make fossil imprints. Given the complexity of living mechanisms and the gross inefficiency of an accidental process, statistical probability says there would have been so many imperfect but temporarily survivable designs produced by an accidental construction process that the aggregate of them all would have left an enormous fossil trace despite the fact that no one of them would have lived long. The fossil record should reflect a huge statistical predominance of disabling but survivable mistakes. Appendix 2 gives a more complete presentation of the mathematical argument for this point.

Outside the mathematical proof of Appendix 2, perhaps the most important point we can make about the visible bias for high mechanical efficiency is that the bias is visible. Given an obvious bias for life, the burden of proof falls back upon the neo-Darwinists to demonstrate how an accident can achieve such a bias for mechanical soundness in form change proposals. After all the standard meaning of “accident” and “bias” exclude each other. While the changes produced by evolution don’t often match a creature’s present environment, they do produce efficient machinery at a rate that defies the accidental thesis. Why have biological machines always worked so well in terms of mechanical soundness? That’s one of the big questions the theory of accidental evolution cannot answer.

Evolutionary variations often produce the wrong machine for a particular time and place, but somehow they have uncannily almost always managed to produce highly efficient, even elegant, machines. How can an accidental process consistently produce machines instead of junk? Natural selection doesn’t help answer this question because the question here has nothing to do with surviving a creature’s environment, but only the initial production of viable machinery whether it matches the environment of not. This phenomena is occurring before natural selection gets a chance to vote.

Neo-Darwinists may respond, as some have, that there is no inherent bias for viable mechanisms in nature, rather the bias itself was accidentally produced one step at a time by a fortuitous convergence of events. In this conception, called “cumulative selection,” each step makes the bias for efficient biological machinery more and more substantial. This sounds awfully good, but it is of no help in resolving the question of accident or purpose. It only displaces the problem to an earlier point. Statistical probability theory tells us that biases do not develop for the production of hundreds of mechanically interrelated steps all of which are themselves biased towards the same result (in this case a bias for life) by accident. There must be a deeper underlying bias to produce such a result. To say that a bias is incrementally constructed by nature is not to show that the bias is not real, or that an accident could achieve construction of that bias by such a method any more than by any other method. The astronomical complexity and improbability of the resultant design and each of the intermediate steps of constructing it must be analyzed specifically to compute probabilities and the requirements for time and physical resources to get those jobs done. The inefficiency of an accidental process must be taken into account when those computations are made. Darwinists have never realistically done, but Appendix 2 does do it.

None of the steps in the development of physical matter from the Big Bang forward point substantially away from life or significantly inhibit it; they are all in favor of it, or neutral. Even the catastrophic comet strike that has been hypothesized to have killed the dinosaurs facilitated the emergence of complex mammalian life, giving small mammals a chance to rise to ascendancy over the more simple but vastly larger reptilians. The steps in genome evolution complete and compliment the bias towards complex life. As Darwinists are so fond of pointing out, the path of evolution is not a simplistic straight line to greater and greater complexity, true. But that path does consistently facilitate the achievement of the tree of life.

“OK, OK!” the neo-Darwinists may concede at this point, we shouldn’t call it fully accidental in the sense of chaotic and unguided, but the situation still does not warrant a conclusion of purpose because it could have turned out differently; it didn’t have to happen that way. There were alternatives and nothing constrained the process to the particular course that was taken. This point is actually legitimate, or rather was legitimate when it was first made some decades back. Given more careful analysis and new data, however, life now appears to be genuinely inevitable, at least given long periods of time for the bias for life to produce results. We have a choice here. We can believe the proponents of accidental evolution who cannot demonstrate that an accident can build a mouse trap, let alone a human being, or we can believe Simon Conway Morris, Michael Denton, D. D. Axe, and Roger Penrose, who lay out precisely why there is an enormous bias for life in nature—and they have left very little room to be contradicted.

By their own admission, neo-Darwinists concede that even the smallest probability, even one far less than 1%, will eventually occur in a random system. It is an odd conception of God that neo-Darwinists have, to presume that he does not know as much about mathematics as they do. Having less than a 100% bias does not really mean that things could have turned out differently; it only means that additional time is required to ensure the result. Does God have to be a simple minded perfectionist who rewards bad behavior as the neo-Darwinists insist? Of course not. As long as nature’s physical parameters permit life, so long as there is the slightest possibility for life at all (by the Darwinists own argument), life will eventually occur. But even if the bias for life were not so dramatic as it is, would God, who exists outside of time, need to be in a hurry to finish creation? One is wont to say that God would hardly concern himself with the delay. Perhaps, foreseeing the mess we humans would eventually make of things, he decided there was no rush, and that it would be best to give us less perfection and more discipline. And, ultimately, for a God that exists outside of time, the entire question is completely irrelevant. There is no difference to him whatsoever between a slow creation on Earth and a fast one. From “up there” God can point to the Vatican and New York, to the entire history of the saints and the Church, to the atomic age and computers from the point that equates to the first second of time down here even while we have nothing but amoebas or dinosaurs. For him, the creation of life truly is easy as pie! For a blind and dumb accidental physical process, however, it definitely is not.

Fallacy #46: Now the process of evolution is too big to be observed; now it isn’t

Darwinists tell us that they needn’t have to demonstrate even one case of accidental mutations producing macroevolution because the evolutionary process is too big to be observed. “Oh, that little problem?” neo-Darwinists may say, dismissively. “We don’t have a statistically valid base of observation, true; in fact, we don’t have any observations at all—but we don’t need any because we know the mechanics of beneficial form variation.” “What are those mechanics?” we ask. And once again the reply is the same old magic words: “Accidental mutations locked in, when conducive to reproductive or survival fitness, by natural selection.”

But have we observed these mechanics producing macroevolution? No, not at all; the process, once again is too big to be observed. Do we know that these are in fact the mechanics of evolution? No, we absolutely do not know the mechanics of evolution. As we have already seen there is far too much to argue against an accidental string of mutations building a complex living creature in the time and physical resources available in Earth’s history. As evolutionists will admit when pressed, the neo-Darwinists’ view of the mechanics of evolution is just a theory; whereas the “visible” phylogenetic relationships between creatures and their order of appearance is a fact. That is to say, we know for a fact that there are such relationships. On that general point we have relative certainty, but we can only say what the relationships between specific creatures are with a great deal less certainty. What that very general fact of phylogenetic inheritance reveals for the question of the biomechanical process of evolution, however, is not much. Science does not know how evolution happened; they only know that it happened. And what the mere fact of phylogenetic inheritance tells us for the question of accident vs. intelligent design is probably nothing at all, since inheritance can occur in either kind of system.

Thus, it is only this very generalized and abstract concept of evolution (minus the mechanics), defined simply as inheritance with modification, that is presumed to be a fact. Yet, neo-Darwinists are constantly writing books that ballyhoo the “fact of evolution” in the context of the intelligent design debate as if it should end all discussion. But my point in this section is that intelligent design theorists, who, after all, are offering a theory of the same event, evolution, as the neo-Darwinists, are not allowed to proceed in the same manner as other theories by posing their theory to the academic community for observation, hypothesis, test, and refinement. Oh, no ID theory must fully proved before science will even call it science—according to the neo-Darwinists. This effectively denies ID theorists the benefit of the enormous resources of the world community of academic science. And, if evolution is too big to be observed as the neo-Darwinists complain, how exactly are ID theorists supposed to prove their theory up front when the neo-Darwinists can’t even accumulate substantial evidence for accidental evolution over 15 decades while using the full resources of the worldwide academic community to do it?

After millions upon millions of research dollars invested, there is still no peer-reviewed study or empiric evidence that demonstrates that an accident can build the machinery of life. There are many hundreds of studies, however (all the mutagenesis studies that largely saturate a genome with toxic mutagens to see what changes the mutations produce), that strongly suggest that an accident cannot do the job. Yet the evidence for intelligent design must be full and unequivocal before science will even take the first look at it. So here’s the fallacy: evolution is too big for the neo-Darwinists to have to give any substantial proof of their theory, but no so big that competitors have to prove their theory fully before mainstream academia will even consider an alternative. What’s wrong with this picture? How have they managed to get away with it? Because we all have been led to believe for decades that they had proof—they don’t. It is simply a well-crafted misunderstanding produced by countless innuendos and tricks of wording.

There is not one shred of hard scientific evidence for accidental evolution, only the antiquated and naïve philosophical position that purposive evolution must go in a straight line, always match a creature to its present environment, and end in paradise. Combine this with the fact that toxics and replicative errors can cause point mutations of DNA and you have the entire case for accidental evolution. There is no hard scientific evidence in any of it. Purposive evolution doesn’t have to be flawless and produce paradise, and point mutations are known to be unable to produce the machinery of life alone. How could an accident have done it by any pathway imaginable? We just don’t know.

Fallacy #47: Lack of a bias in mutations for matching an organism’s current environmental niche rules out intelligent design

Long argued by the classic evolutionists as conclusive evidence against intelligent design, this superficially convincing logic is really just another case of naïve finalism as we saw above in the discussion of fallacies #23-26. It is merely a case of overly simplistic thinking. Life can survive and adapt well enough without such a bias, as we see in the case of our own world. Neo-Darwinists apparently feel it an a priori truth that an intelligent designer would never work by means of natural selection/survival of the fittest. But why wouldn’t he, when they say it works, guarantees a good fit of organism to environment, and is as easy as pie? There may, in fact, be points that commend this method to a designer of life. As long as the environment is permitted to fluctuate in important ways, survival of the fittest cannot be avoided minus constant real time intervention by the designer to constantly amend his creation. A designer is unavoidably forced to work around survival of the fittest, so why not work with it?

Again, overly simplistic thinking is the root of the problem. A designer need not be constrained to thinking in such narrow terms. He is presumed to be capable, by definition, of grasping the interrelationships of all the factors of the entire system he has designed, perhaps even, as in the case of God, able to foresee the results of any method, including one with elements of randomness. Therefore, he can predict survivability of a tree of life that meets his objectives minus any close linkage of mutations to an organism’s present environmental niche. Those with a new feature that mismatches the niche they inhabit can move to a new niche, or they may die leaving the previous form in place to try again. If the environmental parameters remain within known limits and biological form variation remains within known limits, the system need not be perfect in real time to be a predictable success overall. The extinctions and sufferings of creatures in this world need not be a showstopper to intelligent design if this world is only meant to be a temporary intermediate creation for valid reasons and those problems will be eternally remedied by a new creation to follow.

Fallacies #48: Because “cosmic” purpose is not evident in any single law, system, or process, it cannot be evident in all of them taken together as one larger integrated system; #49 one can find something without knowing what one is looking for; and #50 what evidential support has not been found in support of ID to date will never be found

All three of these fallacies are represented in a single statement by Ernst Mayr in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: “Neither have any natural laws been found which could effect such a teleology nor any program that would be able to do it, and for this reason cosmic teleology must be excluded from science.”[87] But one does not permanently exclude something from science just because it has yet to be found. Recent books by Simon Conway Morris and Michael Denton offer clear candidates for teleological pathways, and the earlier vintage computations of famous physicist Sir Roger Penrose showed such a dramatic specificity in the physical parameters of our world that to say that science can envisage no room for cosmic purpose whatsoever is simply to lack imagination.

The myriad of constants in physics that lie at the very heart of our universe’s physical systems favor life to an enormous specificity. In fact, the universe is routinely described as being fine-tuned for life. More than 200 factors within the physics of our universe had to be fine-tuned in favor of life for our galaxy to even be capable of hosting life at all![88] Add to this the newly discovered proclivities in natural law such as Michael Denton describes concerning protein forms; chemical biases that favor the spontaneous formation of biotic molecules; instances of molecular selection that may slant physical processes in life’s favor; protocell self-organization; self-organizational dynamics of genomes; and nonrandom, self-transformational processes in the genome; and you have sketched out the structural backbone of a perfectly plausible candidate for cosmic purpose in nature.

Regarding fallacy #47, science has never had an established standard, objective or otherwise, to determine the presence or absence of cosmic teleology prior to William Dembski’s proposals in No Free Lunch and The Design Inference.[89] The Design Inference didn’t appear until ten years after Mayr’s Philosophy of Biology, from which the quote was taken. How then could Ernst Mayr feel justified in ruling out cosmic purpose conclusively when science had yet to lay any formal foundations for a rigorous attempt to answer the question? The answer: Mayr’s position was not based upon rigorous science; it was based upon the intuition of leading evolutionists alone. But even the intuition of subject matter experts well-formed by the long practice of science is not science itself; it is still intuition. It is intuition that bubbles up from the subconscious where all sorts of other things have taken up residence: worldview preferences, personal politics, career aspirations, sensitivity to peer pressure and opinion, etc. Even the intuition of experts is not invulnerable to prejudice. This is why the argument from authority is perhaps the most notorious of all logical fallacies.

Some students of this subject who are well read in the primary authors of the “new synthesis” of the ’50s may think that Mayr could find his defense in the work of G. G. Simpson. While G. G. Simpson gave a good philosophical treatment of the different kinds of purpose in the abstract, he did not produce a measurable scientific standard with which to identify the presence or absence of cosmic purpose in physical systems. Minus a rigorous peer-reviewed study applying a bonafide measurable standard, Mayr’s claim of conclusively negative findings on cosmic purpose is scientifically vacuous. Many scientists seem to recognize, as did Simpson, that, whatever the precise standard for purpose in nature may turn out to be, the process of life’s evolution so visibly exceeds any conceivable standard that there is no point in counting. Simpson did not just conspicuously admit purpose in nature; he practically celebrated it—the Walt Whitman of evolutionists one might say. Yet, Simpson and those who follow his line on this still refrained from adding “cosmic” to the term purpose, leaving it very vaguely defined. They say a bias for life in nature that was clearly well beyond chance, but they saw it as a bias which required no further analysis by science.

Thus, Simpson’s work cannot be the foundation of Mayr’s position that science had conclusively ruled out cosmic purpose because Simpson affirmed purpose generally and dismissed the accidental thesis as a gross travesty to rational thought. His position leaves the door open to cosmic purpose in nature, though Simpson seemed to feel that science could not demonstrate that the purpose of achieving complex life so clearly evident in nature was in fact “cosmic,” originating in intelligence. However, in the Terry Lectures, Simpson expressly affirmed the compatibility of science and religion. One would think, then, that he would not endorse the position that science had conclusively ruled out cosmic purpose. On the other hand, Simpson apparently felt that science was not in a position to confirm cosmic purpose either.

However far Simpson may have left the door open to cosmic purpose, in 1988 when Mayr made his sweeping edict eternally dismissing cosmic purpose from further consideration by science the whole enterprise was grossly premature. Science was still two decades away from D. D. Axe’s pioneering work in random amino acid substitutions, which demonstrate beyond a doubt that an accident could not have achieved the tree of life in the time and physical resources available to evolution. Our understanding of the genomes was relatively rudimentary in 1988 compared to what we know today of transpositional elements, alternate reading frames, dispersed genes, HOX genes, the key role of developmental genomics in macroevolution, etc. Science has still yet to coherently explore the implications of Susumu Ohno’s thesis of a Pananimalia or metagenome that must have been present in the early Cambrian to explain the Cambrian explosion of novel biological forms, and a similar position expressed by leading evolutionist James Valentine. Wwe still don’t have an explanation of the Cambrian explosion, that 5-10 million years when most of the work of evolution was done in a hurry.

In other words, there are many points in the scientific knowledgebase suggestive of cosmic purpose, and plenty of room for further research to explore that thesis more rigorously. Currently, myriads of seemingly disparate research and analytical foci can all be seen to converge upon a demonstration that the accidental/random-based neo-Darwinian model fails. There is the research of Sidney Fox, Stuart Kauffman, and D. D. Axe; the well-documented analytical reviews of Stephen Meyer and Dean Overman; the mathematical studies of William Dembski, Michael Polanyi, Hubert Yockey, and Sir Fred Hoyle; the cogent observations from astronomy, microbiology, genetics, developmental biology, geology and paleontology presented by Michael Behe, Simon Conway Morris, Hugh Ross, Fazale Rana, Jonathan Wells, Donald Davison, Antoine Danchin, Michael Denton, Mae Won Ho, Duane Gish, Henry Gee and Henry Morris; and the pointed logical critique of noted attorney Phillip Johnson, etc. (Not all of these researchers and authors are ID proponents but their work at points logically goes toward leaving the door open to cosmic purpose in nature). Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists can see no room in the scientific data for cosmic purpose.

On a purely logical basis, it is clear that the mere absence of apparent purpose in one component of a system does not entail the absence of purpose in the larger system. Thus, Mayr’s inference from single laws of nature or subsets of them to the complete lack of cosmic purpose in nature’s integrated system taken whole is invalid, as is the incessant war cry of neo-Darwinists that individual adaptations are not all beneficial to a creature in its present environmental niche. Therefore, they prematurely and naïvely conclude that the (admittedly painful and often tragic) adaptive process across the whole spectrum of life could serve no conceivable purpose, holding it of no consequence that the fully 4 billion god-fearing people of the world staunchly hold to the contrary. And, really, how one can ever conclusively rule out complex life as the purpose of the universe when the universe has in fact produced complex life I am sure I don't know.

On a deeper philosophical level, saying that man could develop a reliable standard to rule out cosmic purpose at all (as opposed to ruling it in) commits the fallacy of species-level egotism. How do we know we would be able to see a designer's purpose and method? The patterns may be too large for us to presently discern. We presently cannot discern a bias for certain adaptive solutions in life in natural law alone, such as for the camera type eye, but the phenomenon of convergence shows that independent lines of evolutionary development tend to produce very similar results in independent evolutionary pathways nonetheless. Clearly this much convergence evidences a bias, if not a purpose, but a means to explain that bias other than by reference to purpose is not immediately evident to us. There might be another explanation, but we presently don’t have one. While convergence does not obligate the cosmic purpose explanation, it certainly leaves the door open to it.

Fallacy #51, the RFP fallacy: direction in purposive evolution (orthogenesis) must always be simple, specific and unwaivering (straight to a rigidly specified goal), never general and flexible

Nature’s having a purpose at all, (neo-Darwinists mistakenly claim) requires a very precisely designated final end or design specification for all natural entities and systems, with no room for flexibility. This, they say, in turn requires uninterrupted straight-line progress in evolution towards all branches of the tree of life. But some branches of the evolutionary tree have not progressed in straight lines, therefore (neo-Darwinists say) there cannot be purpose in the evolutionary process.

Some neo-Darwinists, such as Ernst Mayr, even claim that purpose requires unending advancement for all categories of life. Citing the lack of progress of archaebacteria and some prokaryotes for thousands of millions of years, Mayr, in One Long Argument, confidently announces the defeat of Aristotelian or theistic finalism, the doctrine that all things in the world move toward a predesignated purpose. “Progress thus is not at all a universal aspect of evolution, as it ought to be if evolution were generated by final causes.”[90] Why this is thought to be good logic I just don’t know. It is generally the biblical version of final causes that the Darwinists argue against, not Aristotle. The Bible’s version of creation has all creatures created “after their kinds” including the creeping things, all of which have their own established place and are not obliged to advance any further. God “assigned their tasks,” and “…ordered for all time what they were to do.” [Sirach 16:24-25 NAB]

There is a simple counterexample to Mayr here: the necessity of a simple-to-complex hierarchy of life to the achievement of a balanced ecosystem and a viable food chain. If all creatures advanced to maximum complexity there would be nothing to eat (except for cannibals). It is only the precise mix of simple and complex creatures that we have that keeps the ecosystem in balance, thus permitting life to thrive at all. Thus, when neo-Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould offer their profound refutations of purpose in nature by showing that not every part of nature, has been advancing toward increased complexity,[91] it is not clear who they are refuting. Who would claim that a bonafide purpose of any designer would be to remove the food chain!?

Mayr’s version of naïve finalism makes no sense in the primary context of the theistic view it is primarily posed to refute. A connection between purpose for nature as a whole and interminable progress in all lines of descent is not the axiom of philosophy, science, or religion that Mayr and Gould imply; it is merely a restatement of the neo-Darwinists’ fallacy of naïve finalism identified above at #26. No rational person would believe that nature must have as its final purpose the removal of the food chain, and no Christian would assert that nature’s goal is to contradict the book of Genesis. Where do the neo-Darwinists get this stuff?

And how much complexity does it take to be enough, anyway? Take a look at a handful of professional biochemistry journals. There are already millions of such articles, and the complexity just keeps going. If the designer of life wanted complexity, he would appear to have gotten it! Science itself confirms the value of simplicity in the long established principle of scientific theory evaluation called Ockam’s Razor: other things being equal, the most eloquently simple explanation is the best.

I leave it to the reader to apply this test properly to the question of how best to explain the astronomically complex designs of life. Either a blind accident tried roughly 5 X 10^-6,545,299 failed alternative designs for the tree of life (half our estimate for the probability of life) and finally found the one we see, mysteriously locating trillions of times the time and resources available in the history of our universe to do it (no doubt from interactions with myriads of unprovable multiverse worlds), or an intelligent designer simply made it this way. Which is the simpler and more elegant explanation?

Fallacies #52 & 53: The exceptions are the rule, and atypical examples.

Citing one intermediate fossil species between a primitive land mammal and the whale, neo-Darwinists ask us to believe that they have established their case. Might inheritance have occurred and the hundreds of other intermediates be out there undiscovered in the fossil evidence, or perhaps not having made fossil imprints for some reason? Yes, they might be, but working from the exception doesn’t establish the rule. As Sir Fred Hoyle concluded in The Mathematics of Evolution, Darwinists have only succeeded in making a case for the small applications of evolution, not the large ones. The many intermediates within the horse family are a convincing case for inheritance with modification, but the more vast and largely unfilled distances between the radically different creatures of the separate phyla still allow for alternative hypotheses such as independent origins of the phyla. I am not saying here that I personally think the independent origins of the phyla hypothesis is a stronger contender than the hypothesis of a common origin of all the phyla; I am saying the neo-Darwinists have gotten way too comfortable asking the public to accept faulty logic in support of their position.

For example, Shanks and Joplin give very few (and not very apt) examples of redundant systems as evidence that random tinkering need not destroy irreducibly complex organisms because we can see that there is some redundancy in some places in nature. They do not make any effort to justify extending these exceptional examples (some are nonliving systems) to the typical living system in biology. The mere fact that Shanks and Joplin had to stretch credibility so far as to use nonliving chemical reactions as an example of a redundant biological system shows that redundant living systems are very hard to find. But Charles Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory stipulates that only one irreducibly complex organ, feature, or system be found that could not have been formed by a series of small accidental mutations. Thus, the task Shanks and Joplin really have to perform to counter the irreducible complexity argument is to demonstrate across-the-board redundancy in all natural systems, not just a handful of nonliving systems.

One can say, well we can imagine that nature found a way to use the second strand in the double helix of DNA as functioning as a universal source of redundancy. In theory, this might be possible, but within the real systems of biology the actual historical use of a strand of the DNA double helix to function as chalkboard space for accidental evolution has not been demonstrated. If it had been, Shanks and Joplin would not have had to reach so far for examples of redundancy as to delve into the realm of the nonliving to find them. What has been demonstrated is that the complex interactive designs of many of the components of living systems cannot be constructed or altered one small piece at a time. All the primary parts must be in place at the same time or the system fails. In the case of a living cell this means that the cell dies and the evolutionary experiment ends there.

Fallacy #54: Self-contradiction

Self-contradiction is the mother of all fallacies (just ahead of “I Toddler!”). Avoidance of contradiction is the foundation of rational thought itself. Nonetheless, the neo-Darwinists have become strangely comfortable with it.

1. Neo-Darwinists as a group simultaneously maintain that the cosmic purpose/intelligent design/God hypotheses have been disproved by science, and that all claims about God/cosmic purpose are not scientific hypotheses at all (thus, have never been seriously looked at by science), and (Simpson and the NAS) that science and religion are fully compatible. One cannot assert the first claim and either of the other two at the same time and avoid contradiction. Darwinists allow that the question of cosmic purpose/intelligent design is scientifically treatable when Ernst Mayr says science has ruled out cosmic purpose—within their ranks he has only been applauded and never condemned for this argument. However, the same question is said to be nonscientific by nature when intelligent design theorists propose a strong case for an affirmative answer to it. Any statement or hypothesis must be refutable to be scientific. Thus, if Mayr’s thesis that there is no cosmic purpose in nature is scientific, its converse, that there is cosmic purpose in nature, must also be within the scope of science since it is the necessary entailment of any refutation of Mayr’s claim.

2. Some neo-Darwinists (Dawkins) say the evolutionary process is accidental during the biological form change proposal phase prior to natural selection. Elsewhere they say (Futuyma) that mutations are not accidental, only technically random in the sense of being unbiased for adaptive advantage in the environmental niche of the mutating creature. The first entails a genuinely accidental world and the second allows that the world may not be genuinely accidental.

3. Neo-Darwinists say that evolution has been an indisputable fact for decades. They also admit that science hadn’t been able to construct a theory of the generation of novel biological form variation until the end of the twentieth century that was even coherent, let alone demonstrable in the evidence. This is when we first obtained a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics of the genomes. Nor can we yet demonstrate the biomechanics of macroevolution. We can only produce coherent but unevidenced hypotheses. The way the genomes evolve radically different body types and complex new systems is still largely mysterious to us. Isn’t the complete lack of a biomechanic itself sufficient grounds for rational dispute? Combined with the unexplained gaps in the fossil record the lack of a biomechanic of the macroevolutionary process has always left more than sufficient room for dispute.

In “Evolution: A Paleobiological View,” Professor David Woodruff reveals the little known fact that science still does not know what causes the evolution of one related species from another, let alone vastly disparate creatures with radically different body plans![92] I think this revelation would startle most baby boomers who, like me, have felt that science had been confidently representing itself to the public as having had a good grasp of the biomechanics of the process of both speciation and major body type evolution for at least the past four or five decades. Not so, however: they have neither grasp nor biomechanic.

We do know (or have good grounds to suspect) that novel body type evolution must of necessity be heavily centered on the early stages of embryonic development, and therefore, that developmental genes are key to the process. Nonetheless, we cannot fully describe or experimentally demonstrate that process. While having good grounds for believing that the developmental genome is a key component of macroevolution, we cannot show that spontaneous variations within it are sufficient to produce macroevolution.

4. Some neo-Darwinists say that evolution is a perfectly understandable method for God to use in creation, and some say that a good God would never create parasites, and some say that viruses and bacteria, which are parasites (and generally transferred among creatures by other parasites), are prime candidates for the source of the genetic transfers that evolution needs to complete its work. God could use evolution to create; evolution requires parasites; but God would never create parasites. Go figure….

5. Neo-Darwinists say that science is unable to find any conceivable process through which a designer could interject cosmic purpose into the processes of nature. They also affirm, along with modern physicists, that quantum particles are completely indeterminate, inexplicable and random while yet always turning out the same reliable effects in their group behavior that provide the foundation to all of the consistency in physical reality that science itself depends upon. Could one imagine a better candidate for a visible mechanic for the input of the designer than in asserting an invisible conforming influence on the most basic individual particles of matter? And what of the natural laws themselves and the over 200 physical constants fine-tuned for life? Doesn’t fine-tuning the world for life constitute a visible mechanic for cosmic purpose?

If that weren’t enough, a mystery similar to what we find in quantum mechanics at the foundation of matter recurs writ very large indeed at the foundation of time. When we trace things back in time we encounter another inexplicable mystery: the Big Bang. Could one ever conceive of a more flagrant candidate for divine intervention and the manifestation of cosmic purpose? From the 1960s through the late 1980s science did not even seriously consider alternatives to the Big Bang. Even today it is not clear that they have any real alternatives, for multiverse is not a testable theory. So, the neo-Darwinists admit that everything comes from nothing in a fraction of a second, matter behaves inexplicably at its foundation, and all is amazingly ordered and fine tuned for life, while simultaneously insisting that science can find no room anywhere for cosmic purpose.

Here we see Dr. David Faust’s thesis in cleartext: scientists tend not to be gifted in the area of abstract reasoning.[93] This is an easily forgivable sin after all that science has given us, but the problem is that some scientists don’t know their own limitations in this area. Those who have not taken care to restrict themselves to science instead of political, metaphysical, social, and analytical philosophy are issuing logical fallacies by the bushel as if they were the most authoritative pronouncements of human thought.

6. Neo-Darwinists say that, although uncertainty in quantum mechanics make it technically possible, the conditions permitting young earth 6-day creation to be true are so astronomically improbable as to be scientifically dismissible. They deny, however, the exact same evidential standard when astronomical improbability rules out accidental evolution.

Neo-Darwinists have said that, due to the (presumed) indeterminacy of individual quantum particles, the laws of nature in our own world could radically change at any time in any way, though such would be highly unlikely. Allowing that natural law could change suits their purpose in opposing religion because it argues strongly against a lawgiver, God. But, they also imply by ridiculing creationism to scorn that natural law could never be changed in such a way as to make the claims of young earth 6-day creationists possible. This fallacy, as all fallacies do, invokes a contradiction: laws could change in any way—but not that way.

In defense of accidental evolution, evolutionist W. Ford Doolittle says that even the smallest possibility can occur when defending accidental evolution. Yet the neo-Darwinists laugh and sneer when the remote possibility of a young Earth is suggested. High improbabilities can happened to allow accidents to create life, but not to allow the Bible to be true. Thus, the neo-Darwinists issue a contradiction and prove themselves wrong in the one single inference they have thought to be forever secure from rebuttal, that a literal reading of Genesis can be definitely ruled out by science.

To be logically consistent, one must admit that the evidence can never fully rule out a young Earth any more than it can rule out accidental evolution. I don’t argue here that the Earth is young, but that the neo-Darwinists contradict themselves to push a rationally indefensible theory. Appendix 5 describes specific scenarios involving fluctuations in natural law over time and implications of the multiverse theory (that neo-Darwinists assert solves the improbability problems of accidental evolution) that would allow a literal 6-day creation (believe it or not) even given the hard scientific data we now have to the contrary. Again, I do not argue for 6-day creation; I am pointing out that neo-Darwinists contradict themselves in ruling it out while affirming accidental evolution, which is just as implausible.

7. Back to quantum physics. Here the neo-Darwinists say the world is not a machine that must be explained by an intelligent designer because quantum physics involves uncertainty, which refutes the mechanistic model of Newtonian physics. They also say, as all of physics does, that quantum physics allows enormously successful prediction of physical events. But a process cannot be uncertain or indeterminate in its essence and still yield successful prediction. And science does not agree that the Newtonian model of physics is contradicted by quantum mechanics; they say it is complimented by it. In fact the correspondence principle of Niels Bohr requires that any theory of quantum physics be compatible with Newtonian mechanics, else it must be rejected. Quantum physics underlies, underwrites and consistently makes possible the Newtonian model (as modified at the extreme ranges by Einstein). If one system is mechanistic, so must be the other.

8. Neo-Darwinists claim that a random process can (with the help of natural selection) build any biological machine whatsoever, even the most complex, in real evolutionary time. They also assert that the presence of this kind of randomness also proves the absence of an intelligent designer (a builder of machines)! How can the presence of a machine building process disprove the existence of a machine builder?

The tolerance of contradiction between speakers and writers representing neo-Darwinian theory in different places and times allows neo-Darwinian theory to reap substantial benefits of political profit (while making them look foolish to a close student of the subject). Such vacillation enables neo-Darwinists to assert disparate claims that impress different groups of (gullible) readers who are susceptible to separate lines of thought that, if offered together, would constitute an overt contradiction. Dr. Mae-Won Ho, author of Beyond Neo-Darwinism, echoes the same concern.

Much of the problem is that neo-Darwinism appears completely invincible to falsification by observations or by experiments, so much so that many doubt if it is a scientific theory at all. Partly, the stochastic nature of evolutionary changes must demand that there should be an unique explanation for each event, so that any difficulty raised by observations could be explained or explained away with ease, and partly, the practitioners of neo-Darwinism exhibit a great power of assimilation, incorporating any opposing viewpoint as yet another “mechanism” in the grand “synthesis”. But a real synthesis should begin by identifying conflicting elements in the theory, rather than in accommodating contradictions as quickly as they arise.[94]

Fallacy #55: Attack the speaker, not the evidence (character assassination and personal insult based upon prejudice against religion)

Darwinists personally insult intelligent design scientists, Creation Science scientists, and the Christian community as a group. They claim none of them (that is, none of us), including scientists like Jonathan Wells who holds two PhDs from Berkeley, and William Dembski who holds five or six graduate degrees, can even make the elementary distinction between science and religion, while they fail to distinguish between their personal philosophies of atheism/materialism and science. This grand tradition of science ridiculing religion goes back to Isaac Asimov who claimed that the intellectual capacity of those who believe in God was kindergarten level. This reveals a prejudice in science against an entire group of people billions strong based solely upon their religion. When Darwinists do such things they are not doing science, they are waging a political campaign for their favored personal philosophy, atheistic materialism. While being careful to say "he or she," they forget that legal protection against discrimination has also been extended to religion.

Here are only a few examples. G. G. Simpson calls religion the “higher superstition,” thus implying that Christians are all deluding themselves and that there is no factual basis for their beliefs. We see this insult and prejudice again in the fallacy about Christians being the only people who can’t do science properly. Niles Eldredge, the Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, makes this claim: “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.”

Richard Dawkins says that theorizing about intelligent design/God, as the source of biological information, is “addle-brained.”[95] In a recent book, Into the Cool, Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan relay and apparently endorse a quote from T. Edis saying that the literalism of Creationists is lunatic.[96] See Appendix 5 for a demonstration that, although Creation Science may be wrong, it is not lunatic. The thesis of 6-day creation is a rationally argued thesis that remains remotely possible under radically new cosmological theories such as multiverse and views of quantum physics that allow for abrupt changes in natural law. Creation Science is not likely to be true, but it is not lunatic. On the other hand, to say the equivalent of an accident can make the space shuttle, as the neo-Darwinists do, is to my mind at least, a lot closer to lunatic than saying that God may have found a way to conceal from science the true age of the Earth for a few centuries. In the following quote, Isaac Asimov goes so far as to assert that Creationists are simply incapable of rational thought!

However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at their “scientific” and “philosophical” points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand of the actual arguments for—or even against—evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of reason.

--Isaac Asimov, 1981[97]

Here insult, accusation, and ridicule replace evidence and logic. These are debating tactics, not science, and the lowest form of those. Nor are they logical analysis or anything else meriting the reader’s time and attention.

Fallacy #56: Begging the question: merely assuming without proof the answer to the core question at issue (a form of circular reasoning)

The typical evidence given in evolutionary biology texts can only legitimately be considered to be evidence for generic evolution, not accident. Although a few rhetorical arguments, very abstract examples, and oversimplified, unrealistic computer models have been offered as purported justification of the capability of accidents to make biological machines, these are transparently invalid and fully abstracted from any concrete physical or biological process. They are not tied to the facts of biology at all, and, coincidentally, stop precisely at the point where probability theory says an accident can go no further: two or three steps into the creation of life.

No proper defense of the tenet of accidental processes has ever been given, and quite clearly cannot be given. Darwinists are merely asking us to take their word for it without proof. In their view accident is first presumed to be capable of anything given several billion years to work. This begs the question of accidental evolution before an objective analysis can even begin, and flies directly in the face of the facts of biology and honest mathematics, which say otherwise.

Fallacy #57: It sounds good, so it must be true

This is what we used to say in the Air Force, tongue in cheek, when first given an explanation of a new official policy. Closer inspection at times revealed that, as with all things human, the quality of the underlying logic was somewhat variable. The same holds true of the fully abstract, grandiose explanation of neo-Darwinian evolution. Granted, natural selection of the fittest accidental form variations (assuming there could be any) leading to a large hypothetical family tree of life gives a clear picture of what might have happened in the most general of terms. As Dr. Mae-Won Ho tell us in chapter 7 of Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, at the time Darwin wrote The Origin of Species this concept struck people as very intuitive. It seemed to be hugely explanatory because Darwin’s readers were themselves deeply immersed in the struggle to survive.[98] Because it made sense to them on an intuitive level, they simply believed it. However, absolutely no biomechanics of the evolutionary process was known, and no experiment and test could be offered to confirm the theory. They believed it anyway.

Offering an intuitive and graphically clear explanation, even an elegant one, such as Darwin’s, is not quite enough: we also want that explanation to be true, and we want it to be demonstrable according to the rules of science. It has to fit the facts, and be shown to fit the facts. However, for these conditions to be fulfilled we have to first know the facts. This luxury was not available to Darwin in the years prior to the electron microscope, modern microbiology and genetics. The theory of accidental evolution survived so long precisely because we could not rapidly obtain the pertinent facts. With the advent of genetic science and microbiology however that situation is now changed.

If generic evolution of some kind did occur, the family tree might indeed turn out to be close to what has been proposed by evolutionary science, but all the evidence we now have says it could not have happened by accident. Generic evolution does not claim to know how life arose and does not assert an accidental process. Generic or basic evolution only says that species are related to each other through inheritance and that variation somehow occurs over time: descent with modification. That’s it. Generic evolution has good explanatory power. Neo-Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, which claims that it all happened by accident, has no explanatory power whatsoever. It stands in contradiction to an enormous body of evidence.

A lot of small gradual changes happening by accident; improvements accidentally hit upon locked in by the rule of survival of the fittest, natural selection; a family tree descended from one common ancestor through inheritance. This explanation sounds very good, and it became wildly popular soon after Darwin originated it for that reason. It sounds good only because we can visualize it happening. It is intuitive, simple, and clear in concept. However, after having gone to look for it with scientific tools, we do not see it happening, and we see that it is far too simple. We do not see evolution of this kind occurring, that is, accidental generation of form variation. What we see are big jumps in the fossil record, and a genomic self-transformation process producing evolution within a closely governed machine process, not evolution from accidental toxic exposure-induced mutations.

The rapidly increasing pace of scientific research has created a situation where the size of the scientific knowledge base in biology is now increasing exponentially every few decades. This is especially true in certain high focus areas, such as genomics and proteomics. Here a huge increase in data may only take a few years. The theory of accidental neo-Darwinian evolution is 150 years old. It was conceived at a time when we did not have this data, when we could not see inside cells at all. In Darwin’s day, when scientists thought cells contained only a nondescript goo called protoplasm, as opposed to the thousands of complex mechanisms accomplishing over two million actions per minute that science has since revealed, accidental evolution sounded good, and there was nothing to contradict it. Nowadays it doesn’t sound nearly so good and nearly everything contradicts it. Neo-Darwinian evolution has become an impossible anachronism, but atheistic materialism is so entrenched in our scientific culture that modern science refuses to permit the theory a dignified passing.

In the grand tradition of the Air Force, we must now admit that our original plan has been overcome by events. The theory must be changed to accommodate the facts. Accidental evolution is outmoded by new information, to include the demonstration of self-organizing processes at key points in the biotic and prebiotic steps of the origin and evolution of life, fully forbidding improbability, lack of sufficient time and physical resources for an accidental process to stumble on complex designs, and the 200+ known parameters of physics that are fine-tuned to permit life. Accidental evolution sounded good in Darwin’s time, but we now know that it can’t be true.

Fallacies #58: Bugs Really Shouldn’t Do It that Way!, #59: God Must Be a Materialist, & #60: Knowingly looking in the wrong direction

Philip Kitcher commits both of these fallacies in his attack on Creation Science, Abusing Science. First, sparing us no pathos whatsoever, Kitcher bemoans at some length the enduring tragedy of a praying mantis biting the head off its mate, or a black widow spider consuming her husband.[99] But this is obviously not a tragedy for the bug, whom, even an evolutionist must admit, views things quite differently than a human. If it is not a tragedy for those who suffer it, how is it a tragedy at all?

Moreover, how can the death of a bug be a tragedy for anyone, let alone neo-Darwinists, who both assert moral relativism and elsewhere assert that this same phenomenon in more generalized form, one individual sacrificing itself for the increased survivability of the family, hive, colony, herd, tribe etc., is the heritable origin, the sole evolutionary basis for the highest moral thing we humans do: self-sacrifice. While bemoaning an insect sacrificing itself for its family, the neo-Darwinists go busily about torturing a plethora of much more advanced creatures such as mice and monkeys for science, even recommending killing unborn human fetuses to extract their stem cells for research.

In the grand tradition of neo-Darwinian logic we may assume that some biochemical benefit is incurred by this process of insects devouring their mate or it would not have been preserved by evolution in lieu of its otherwise direct elimination of not only individual members of the group but a critical half of a mating pair. At the very least, it must be the vestige of an earlier process that did convey a benefit. Under the logic of their own theory, if it wasn’t best for the species, why would natural selection approve it? If it is best, why is it a tragedy or a repugnance?

If the natural death of a bug is so repulsive and tragic, how is it that neo-Darwinists permit themselves to eat higher, more lovable, and more sentient creatures such as lambs, ducks, cows, geese, and rabbits in their daily menu? Much as Eldredge has the courage to accuse Christians of disingenuously offering the intelligent design logic, one feels compelled to say here that neo-Darwinists don’t really mean what they say about the tragic nature of animal death. Sort of a do as I say, but not as I eat fallacy. According to neo-Darwinists, killing and butchering of higher creatures en masse is OK for our survival, but a bug can’t sacrifice its own life for its own family without running afoul of the corny and artificial materialist manifesto of psuedo-morality. Certainly, the argument from aesthetics does not support the neo-Darwinists here, for those who have ever visited a butcher shop or meat packing house well know that what we humans do to feed ourselves is frequently more repugnant than the death of an insect!

The neo-Darwinists may respond, “Well, we don’t have to watch the butchering, we just eat the steak after the grilling, once the garlic butter is added. And our need to kill other creatures to feed ourselves merely strengthens our argument. Why does this cruel world require us to do such things to other creatures in order to survive? A good God would never allow this.” My response is that the world does not require this at all (my brother has been a vegetarian for decades); we choose it, and so does every neo-Darwinist that eats meat! A pound of vegetable nutrition incurs only one quarter the cost in water, labor and material investment as a pound of beef. One may easily opt to be a vegetarian and let the lovable animals live. Every large town has organic and vegetarian entries to offer in the stores. If the neo-Darwinist argument from bug-tragedy is an honest heartfelt objection, why aren’t all the neo-Darwinists vegetarians? Granted, neo-Darwinists can turn their heads from the butchering, but they can’t turn their heads from the flesh of a sentient or near-sentient creature that rests upon their plate, albeit smothered in garlic butter, barbecue, or teriyaki sauce.

Let’s face it. Yes, the creatures are lovable and cute, and they are God’s gift to us, and in that sense our friends—but they are also delicious; they taste great! And, to employ another Air Force aphorism, let’s look at the big picture. Both we and they are mortal in any case; we are going to die of something, so why not give a gift to others in passing? If the animals serve a higher species in offering themselves as a gift before they experience the inevitable passing, is this a tragedy or an opportunity to accomplish something good? I love the animals as much as anyone (probably more than most), but there is nothing repugnant about one creature eating another within the natural order of things. To say the contrary is mere foolishness.

The perfectionist argument we saw in fallacy #25 reveals the assumption of materialism that underlies nearly every argument the neo-Darwinists make. In Christianity, for example, God is a spiritual being and goes to great lengths to express his disdain for everything material as far as man’s placing any value in it whatsoever. In the Christian conception, God’s goals are spiritual, not material. The eternal world he is in the process of creating is a spiritual one, not a physical one. Therefore, Ernst Mayr’s whole enterprise of asserting that science can be justified in ruling out cosmic purpose after doing nothing more than scanning natural process for signs of perfectionism and physical micromanagement is both a case of thinking too small and knowingly looking in the wrong direction. God’s ultimate goal, at least as defined in the Christian faith, is paradise, yes, but not here on Earth where Mayr, Futuyma and Co. are looking for it.

To argue from the imperfection of the physical world to the nonexistence of God is thus transparently invalid. It only reveals where the materialists have chosen to place their values, not where God places his. God need not be a materialist.

Consider this analogy. A young boy, Steven, grows up in a small town. He and his father are the best of friends. Now of college age, he remembers his childhood days with great fondness. Sadly, this very summer he has unexpectedly lost his father to an undetected and fast growing cancer. Remaining at his father’s side until the end, Steven has nearly missed the deadline to reappear on campus 200 miles away for a prestigious scholarship competition. Murphy’s law is invoked: his car is stolen from the hospital parking garage the very day of his father’s death. Steve appears at his uncle’s car dealership across town with only minutes to spare to try to arrange for a temporary vehicle. His father’s brother manages a lot of 500 fabulous new cars and thirty or forty old “junkers” acquired as used trade-ins. Steve’s uncle tells the salesman to take Steve out and let him have any car he likes the best—it’s a gift! No argument, no nothing.

The salesman, a materialist, wishing to impress his boss, tries to push the bright red Jaguar—“at least take the Porsche, or the Cadillac!” No, the son will not hear of it. He has chosen, instead, the rusting 1958 Buick. That is the car his dad used to take him on drives in the country in when he was a kid. The salesman is nonplused, but, seeing his choice, uncle Bill instantly understands what he has done. He does not criticize it. He simply runs out with a smile and a wave, then pats the salesman’s back. “Job well done!” The materialist salesman doesn’t get it. He thinks they are both nuts. But here the spiritual value was properly deemed so overridingly important that material imperfections were considered irrelevant. How much more irrelevant would the crass details of this intentionally imperfect world be to a God who, with perfect goodness and infinite compassion, places his primary values in the affairs of the heart? God does not have to be a materialist.

Fallacy #61: If God existed he would simply show up on Main Street and do a bunch of miracles; no one would doubt it

Believe it or not some defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution have actually said this. This objection may appear somewhat inane to professional philosophers, but it holds a certain intuitiveness for many people. Children, especially, may have asked themselves the question, as have I: “Why doesn’t God just show up and do some miracles and put an end to all the doubters?” The first thing to say about this is that both the Bible and the historical records of the Church say that God has already done this. Unfortunately, most people did not acknowledge his divinity even as they observed him doing great miracles.

Granted, God could choose to show up in radiant form and do a succession of miracles until fully everyone had been convinced. However, the Bible again reveals that it is at least possible that God would have a valid reason for not doing that. I am not asserting (nor denying) the authority of scripture here, I am merely saying we can find a conceptual alternative in the Gospels that makes sense. That alternative serves as a counterexample to the naïve argument that God would necessarily make a dramatic appearance on Main Street if he existed.

In the Gospels, Christ reveals to his disciples that he has spoken in parables for the specific purpose of veiling his truth from those who have already rejected him in their heart. There are, at a minimum, two possible reasons God would choose not to show up on Main Street and do undeniable miracles: 1) they would result in indiscriminate conversions of good and evil alike, and this gift is being withheld from the evil ones; and 2) some of the good have not met God’s preconditions for such a blessing—they have not purified themselves by repentance and have not sought friendship with God in their hearts with humility.

Fallacy #62: The Psychological Need Fallacy (AKA The Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud Show)

According to the neo-Darwinian atheistic materialists (not all neo-Darwinists are such but the theory seems to entail a materialist worldview), people have created God in their own minds. Following Freud, they assume humans have a fear of death and that they want and need hope and peace of mind during times of suffering. The neo-Darwinist argument here seems to take the form of, 1) belief can have an alternative source; therefore, 2) it does not evidence God; therefore, 3) God does not exist.[100] Restated, this is the claim that God does not exist because those who believe in him would exhibit the same belief whether he existed or not. But just as paranoid people can have real enemies, hopeful people can have real gods. We have a psychological need for the fire department when our house is burning, but that does not mean they won’t be there to answer our call. A small child has a need for friendship, but that does not impeach his/her claim to have found a friend around the corner. That question must be decided on independent grounds. Many people have even a neurotic desire to win the lottery, and although it is unlikely, it has yet become a confoundedly joyous reality for some. Therefore the neo-Darwinist argument from Freud fails. Just because there may be false grounds for belief does not prove that there are no true grounds for belief.

In the fallacious view of those who cite Freud and Marx as evidence against God, we are always justified in defaulting to the negative. This, principle is not a genuine instance of Ockam’s razor, however; it is only the most radical form of pessimism. The bad logic in such claims should be obvious. Merely having a psychological need or desire might partially impeach the testimony of some religious witnesses, but it does not disprove God’s existence.

Even on a purely psychological basis this is terrible thinking. If one is going to invent a fantasy to appease one’s anxieties about hardships in this world and the threat of death, why invent a religion that requires the postulant to imitate a man who gave all he had to others, lived in dire poverty, was hated by the world, persecuted and obstructed at every turn, and then tortured to death? Is this an anxiety reduction method? Please…. The Christian faith is not an ala carte shopping system where one can take the joy and leave the suffering. Christians are obligated to imitate Christ. This includes carrying their own cross unto death in a world that will hate them for being good and will persecute them harshly.

Still, the neo-Darwinists will persist: believers, while not reducing present anxiety, are at least imagining a means to get paid for it later. In other words, the Freudian and materialist criticism is that people who happen to be poor and/or happen to be oppressed or persecuted can fantasize a future reward for present suffering in the eternal spiritual paradise to come. I acknowledge the possibility of this motivation here, for all Christians have it. However, merely demonstrating a possible motivation doesn’t prove that people have elected to deceive themselves.

And the neo-Darwinist objection does not explain rich Christians who are not suffering and others not under oppression at the time of their conversion. The comfortable safe and wealthy convert (who has been instructed about the faith) knowingly gives up the things the Freudians say he or she has invented the religious fantasy to later achieve: comfort and safety. For such people their religious conversion does not resolve the threat of suffering; it creates that threat.

Still, the die hard critics of religion will say, well those people are so obsessed with the fear of death that they will give up all they own and even suffer in this life to appease that fear. But is this scientific? Have rich converts been psychoanalyzed en masse in a large representative modern study and professionally diagnosed as obsessed with the fear of death? No. No such studies have been done. Can this many people really be so neurotic? Only proper scientific studies can offset the default assumption of healthy until observed to be otherwise. The Christian faith continues to grow century by century among the rich as well as the poor. The Catholic Church alone is practically a billion strong and doing great things in charities, hospitals and universities around the world. Is this what neurotic people do, focus on the well being of others, or do they normally stay intensively centered upon themselves?

And the theory of evolution (the basic one) itself has something to say here. There is no known innate fear of death in the animal kingdom, and humans are members of that kingdom. Animals have defense mechanisms, but no demonstrated fear of death as such. Some animals (apes, as I recall) have a death ritual where they go off alone to die (one presumes for dignity’s sake). If they are in fear and dread of the experience, wouldn’t they not rather seek the comfort and reassurance of the community? One presumes natural selection has approved this ritual because it takes the risk of infection and attraction of predators away from the community. Animals do not fear death, they merely avoid predators as an effective defense mechanism. When a creature is mortally wounded they do not panic or have the equivalent of a human “nervous breakdown” because of an inordinate fear of death; they simply go somewhere apart (if they can), lie down and die in peace and dignity.

As the evolutionary progeny of such animals we humans should have no more fear of death than they have, which is effectively nil. Why would natural selection approve the invention, preservation, and hugely successful propagation of a neurotic fear of death that would impede an individual creature’s ability to fight for his community? The neo-Darwinists, who inevitably have some kind of answer for everything, will probably say that the need for acceptance within the community overrides the fear of death and drives an acceptable level of defense of the community; thus it is a tolerable defect. This answer succeeds to a point, but certainly a community member who defends his community only when there are witnesses is less of a boon to long term survival of the group than one whose commitment does not have such glaring exceptions.

Yes, humans need God, but one wonts to say that this would be no less the case if he is real than if he is not. The existence of such a universal need, to my mind, should suggest to psychologists, and especially to evolutionists, that there could well be a reality correspondent to that need. Why would natural selection maintain so prevalent and powerful a need for something that is nonexistent, something unreal that could never be obtained? The behavioral response to seek such a thing should be extinguished according to Skinner, and it is not an inefficient use of scarce biological resources to pursue something nonexistent. The billions spent on the Church and related pursuits are so staggering in aggregate, even after physical relief charities are subtracted, the purely worship-oriented expenses. Why would natural selection preserve such wasteful behaviors? The neo-Darwinists in their ingenuity will say, well, the religious element in human behavior comes as a package and he worship reinforces the charity, which aids survival of the species. While this is true, the raw physical survival benefit could be doubled or trebled if the worship element were removed from the faith by natural selection, but this has not occurred.

How can belief in religion offer any survival or reproductive fitness advantage in the early phase of its simplest conceptualization? I will grant that a well developed institutionalized religion like Catholicism conveys a reproductive advantage in encouraging large families, and a survival advantage by having a huge globe-spanning support network—but this was not true at the beginning. And there is Skinner again: why do people who believe in a nonexistent God continue to waste their time, energy, and monetary donations praying for solutions that never come? Skinnerian psychology argues that the behavior of prayer should be extinguished by lack of reinforcement via reward. Either some prayers are being answered, or the petitioner is being blessed in the act of prayer, or both, else the behavior of prayer should go away. Thus, belief in a non-existent God is not justifiable on the basis of either evolutionary theory or the science of psychology.

Karl Marx and many neo-Darwinists, of course, would still disagree, saying religion serves a purpose as an opiate on a more abstract and general level; it is simply a pain killer for the fear of death. But even on that more general level of argument we must record an objection. Society has alcohol, drugs, exercise, laughter, family love, friendships and recreational diversions; all of which can serve as powerful distractions, or even literal opiates. And what about the availability of more direct psychological mechanisms such as denial and repression. If we are going to turn to a neurosis to ameliorate our fear of death, why not just use these direct methods to stoutly shove it under the rug of conscious awareness and save a massive fortune in food money otherwise spent on worship? One would think these alternative palliatives are far more concrete in their effects on the organism than a fictitious metaphysical theory.

Psychology itself tells us that it is the rare and dysfunctional person who has a real neurotic fear of death. We all know we are mortal, so why are we not all in a panic right now if the fear of death is so widespread as to engender religion in two thirds of the population? We would have had to suppress that fear. But if we have suppressed it, why do we need to invent religion? The empiric data indicates that the average human doesn’t fear death in concept at the level of a neurosis. Rather we experience fear in the face of a direct threat to our existence, that is, a gun in our face. Old people become more and more aware of the terminal diagnosis shared by all of mortal humanity, but they don’t react with panic. Lying there in bed they don’t show the mortal fear that people display in the face of a direct physical assault. Humans display a practically useful defense mechanism against lethal threats, but this is not the same thing as a neurotic phobia of death.

In evolutionary theory it is assumed that biological systems have (presumably) developed interactively with their environment through history such that psychological needs and behaviors survive only because they serve a purpose. The evolutionary argument thus supports the reality of God more strongly than it supports the thesis that religion is a fictional neurosis. If something real was present to produce a substantial concrete advantageous effect on the organism consequent to religious behavior, such as a powerful being who answers requests for aid and comfort through both emotional reassurance and genuine intervention that resolves threats in the environment, this would satisfy the evolutionary dynamic of concrete enhancement to survival fitness more directly than our inventing a neurotic fantasy of a God who does not actually exist. A real God functions to aid survival directly in the same way that an infantry platoon calling on a field phone for artillery support in battle functions to aid survival. Having no one on the other end of the call, or a nonexistent God, visibly does nothing substantial for survival. It only wastes resources and distracts one from performing other critical tasks.

Neo-Darwinists have dismissively rejected this argument by reformulating it in an overly simplistic form. They say there is no evidence that God has answered the prayers of people in life and death emergencies. But a God who helps the faithful problem solve practical dilemmas on a daily basis through the years is a boon to survival even if he doesn’t yank our bacon out of the fire in every emergency. Have the neo-Darwinists surveyed the faithful to establish the reality of this kind of support? Of course, not. They know, or should know by the profuse public testimony of the faithful, that the answer to that inquiry will be “Yes, God supports us on a daily basis.” As a practicing Christian who has interacted with many people of faith over the years I can tell you that in my experience this kind of support has been definitely extended to believers, at least in my lifetime, and the recorded history of the Church confirms that this has been the norm through history. Plus, the biographies of the saints and martyrs indicate that there have been quite a few instances of miracles and intervention where God not only yanked individual people’s bacon out of the fire in an emergency, but saved entire nations from plagues or barbarian invasions as well.[101]

The clincher against the Freudian concept of religion as merely a neurotic invention is that fear of death is not a plausible reason for concocting a false religion of the type man has actually devised. Why pose such a high moral code as a prerequisite to avoiding eternal torture in hell that few would wishful think themselves into such a predicament. If you are merely fantasizing your way to a more contented frame of mind, why deprive yourself of all the “good stuff” while you are doing it? If the goal is merely selfish psychology, while we are trying appease our anxieties, why not invent a God who lets us off the hook completely and allows us to satisfy our physical appetites as well? Eat as much as you want, have as many wives or husbands as you want, keep all your earnings for yourself without having to donate to Church and charity—isn’t that a more likely fantasy for us to invent if we were merely trying to appease our psychological anxiety? “God wants you to be as happy as you can be, and if the other kind falls short he deserved it. or I, God, will make it up to him later.” Why isn’t that concept of religion more likely to have been invented than the ones we see, which consistently teach self-discipline and self-denial?

Many of humanity’s religions, at least Christianity, with its inherent high possibility of negative judgment and eternal damnation, do not, when rightly understood, serve to relieve anxiety. They introduce a reason to fear not only physical death but eternal punishment, for anyone who cannot achieve a strict self-discipline. Is this a basis for reduced anxiety? Is it likely to appeal to an escapist minded neurotic? Hardly. The religion humanity have actually invented therefore, do not, as Marx and Freud, believed, serve as a psychological palliative at all. They introduce new and greater threats that subhuman creatures and nonbelievers do not even have in their world. Religion is in fact the first known factor in human culture to introduce a genuine reason to fear death: eternal damnation.

The mere fact that these two famous men of a much simpler and far less informed time in man’s intellectual history, Marx and Freud, happened to agree with each other about man’s psychological need for God does not disprove God’s existence. One can need something that is real, and it would generally be the case that what one needs is real, else why would it be necessary? The worldviews of these two intellectual giants were arguably biased by their own obsessive psychological concerns: one with the legitimate social struggle of the lower classes for justice, and the other with the somewhat less legitimate struggles of the sexually deprived. The fact that their theories were vastly influential in the history of human thought neither disproves God’s existence nor automatically establishes that the approximately 3-4 billion people currently living who believe in God are all neurotic. Marxism has since visibly failed, and the theory of accidental evolution is, at present, rapidly heading the same direction.

Fallacy #63: Political bias fallacy: anything is intellectually defensible if it gains political yardage for a favored view

This, of course, is a moral fallacy, not a logical one, but it induces a plethora of logical fallacies including double standard, and poses such a threat to the integrity of science that it must be addressed. This fallacy involves politically expedient blind spots, reversals of position, and making unjustifiable exceptions to universal scientific rules for one’s favored theory.

As we saw in the discussion of the fallacy of contradiction above, and is further discussed in Appendix 5, for neo-Darwinists all things are possible in an accidental world where natural law can fluctuate due to the instability of quantum particles and where multiverse allows every conceivable possibility to be realized in one world or another—except the configurations that match the literal truth of the Bible. For neo-Darwinists, the probability argument is valid everywhere in science except when used as evidence for cosmic purpose, for God, or for intelligent design. Clearly a political criterion is being used to drive the neo-Darwinist position on these issues, not a logical criterion, because the neo-Darwinist position flip-flops all over the map. However, it always lands on a position consistent with the social-political-metaphysical philosophy of atheistic materialism.

For example, first the neo-Darwinists tell us that quantum mechanics prove that natural law is not constant, thus we cannot justify the existence of a lawgiver, such as god. Next, neo-Darwinists would have us believe that the constancy of natural law, while not inviolate, is yet inviolate enough to rule out a single large-scale fluctuational period that could save the scientific coherence of young earth/6-day creation. Finally, they assure us, going the other way again, that natural law could absolutely be violated hundreds of times in very specified and focused ways so as to give a non-supernatural account for the well-documented miracles that just so happen to occur around devout and saintly individuals. Materialistic politics is the only theme that adds consistency to this behavior.

ID scientists, who argue that the complexities of life present strong evidence for an intelligent designer, rightly point out that the modern definition of science embodies a political prejudice by not allowing for the possibility of a creator of human life, even in theory. Mainstream science has ruled out a designer of life prior to gathering and evaluating the evidence.

Modern scientists admit we can see intelligent design in other things like satellites or robots, but for some odd reason they refuse to admit that we can see it in living systems (which represent the most sophisticated design functionality of anything we know). To say in advance of knowing that an entire category of machines (in this case biological ones) for which we do not actually know the origin could not possibly have been designed by an intelligent being prior to making an honest effort to collect and evaluate the evidence contradicts the spirit and tradition of science. It is especially suspect in view of the fact that scientists are themselves presently busy researching how to make biological machines, inducing genetic modifications to living genomes, and looking for indications of intelligent life in space (SETI).[102]

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[70] G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), 202-212.

[71] This ambiguity was present as early as the 1950s, practically from the outset of the new synthesis. See Beck, Philosophic Inquiry, 284: “According to Darwin’s theory animals and plants vary accidentally and spontaneously, or at least in random and unforeseen ways.”

[72] Biologist Gary Jordan first brought to my attention the inability of Darwinian theory to explain the origin of new biological information in 1998. Gary is a professional biologist with many years of service to state and federal government environmental agencies.

[73] Peters, D. S. and W. F. Gutmann, “The Meaning of the Theory of Evolution,” In Grzimek’s Encyclopedia of Evolution, edited by Bernhard Grzimek (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976), 37-38.

[74] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 3-12.

[75] Jerry Bergman, “Darwinism and the Deterioration of the Genome,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 (2005), http://www.trueorigin.org/mutations01.asp.

[76] Jay Richards, “What is Intelligent Design?” posted to the Intelligent Design the Future Web site at http://www.idthefuture.com/2005/05/what_is_intelligent_design.html.

[77] Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph numbers 31, 35, 37, 39, and 286.

[78] N. David Mermin, “Spooky Actions at a Distance: Mysteries of the Quantum Theory,” in The Great Ideas Today, Britannica Great Books, 1988, edited by Mortimer J. Adler, (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1988), 3. Mermin cites famous physicist and noted intellectual Richard P. Feynman’s, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), p. 129.

[79] Theodosius Dobzhansky, “On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology,” in Theodosius Dobzhansky, Max K. Hecht, and William C. Steere, eds., Evolutionary Biology, vol. 2, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1968), 32.

[80] See Appendix 12 for a detailed discussion of why multiverse theory is not testable.

[81] Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982), 138.

[82] These research areas and subdisciplines were extracted from William A. Dembski, “Intelligent Design and Peer Review: A Response to Eugenie Scott and the NCSE,” Discovery Institute, November 1, 2003 posted at http://www.discovery.org/a/1621, accessed 29 Oct 2010; and Joseph C. Compana, “A Synthetic Overview of Intelligent Design and Proposals for Procedural Scientific Heuristics,” published to the ResearchID Website in PDF at http://www.researchintelligentdesign.org/w/images/archive/7/70/20060719015451!The_ID_Paradigmatic_and_Heuristics.pdf accessed 29 October 2010.

[83] See “Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design,” Discovery Institute, August 26, 2010, posted to the Web at http://www.discovery.org/a/2640 accessed 29 October 2010.

[84] Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D, and Sharon Begley. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

[85] Mayr, Argument, Essay 3.

[86] Commentators traditionally refer to nature’s being so specifically arranged to facilitate life as the “anthropic principle,” e.g., Rodney D. Holder, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 30, although physicists initially coined the term for a technical use that means something different.

[87] Mayr, Philosophy of Biology, 58.

[88] Rana, Origins, 222; also see Witham, By Design, ch.3.

[89] William Dembski, No Free Lunch (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litllefield Publishers, Inc., 2001); William Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[90] Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 65.

[91] Stephen Jay Gould, “The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail Can’t Wag the Dog,” in The Richness of Life, edited by Stephen Rose (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 278-285.

[92] David S. Woodruff, "Evolution: A Paleobiological View," Science, vol. 208, no. 4445 (1980): 716-717.

[93] Faust, David. The Limitations of Scientific Reasoning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

[94] Mae-Won Ho, “Beyond neo- Darwinism - An Epigenetic Approach to Evolution,”  Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 78, no. 4 (1979): 574.

[95] Dawkins, “Challenge,” 629.

[96] Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 315.

[97] Futuyma, Trial, 166.

[98] Mae-Won Ho and Sidney W. Fox, eds., “Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors” (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1988), 118-120.

[99] Kitcher, Abusing Science, 137-139

[100] Hoimar V. Ditfurth, The Origins of Life: Evolution as Creation (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 186. Ditfurth attributes the definitive demonstration of this fallacy to Hans Küng.

[101] Michael Walsh, ed., Butler's Lives of the Saints (San Francisco, Ca: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).

[102] See Appendix 7 for further discussion of SETI.