God and Science, Part 1: A Refutation of Darwinian Evolution

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Dawkins and Rand’s point, as far as it goes, is valid, but only within the realm of abstract philosophy. Even there it is only valid for the limited purpose of critiquing philosophy’s quest for epistemological certainty at the foundation of our knowledgebase. Science, on the other hand, is committed to search for a deeper explanation so long as one is available. This is because adding additional completeness to our description of our world is valuable even where certainty is not increased. Even Dawkins admits that “Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right.” He feels he has provided an explanation of the complexity of life in four different ways: cumulative selection, over-simplified information theory where trivia counts as meaning, snowflake-level fractal production, and easy-as-pie gene mutations. As we have shown above, all of these approaches to explaining the complexity of biological systems fail, and so science is left to continue the search for an alternative explanation for biological design complexity.

In the Huffington Post article Dawkins also offers a superficially intriguing “logical” argument against God, saying that, since complexity didn’t arise in our world until late in its evolution (things were simple following the Big Bang), God could not be the creator of our world. This, he says, is because complexity requires an explanation. So, if God were the beginning of things he would have to be simple because the beginning of things was simple, apparently implying that simplicity cannot lead to complexity. But this blatantly contradicts his own arguments on the origin of complexity, which assert that simple mutations accomplished according to simple rules will incrementally and inevitably produce vast and amazing complexities (the fractal/snowflake/glider gun argument), and that evolution was produced by precisely such a process. It is the intelligent design theorists who claim that the simple cannot produce the complex without aid of intelligent design.

Dawkins also reveals the hidden premise of materialism. In saying that God must be simple (for him in this context simplicity entails lack of intelligence) because the originating condition of matter and energy at the beginning of our world was simple he reveals his assumption that the physical world is the limit of all we must consider in any argument for or against God. He simply ignores what might be on the other side of the Big Bang and the fact that the Big Bang itself broke the rules of physics. If one is going to beg the question and assume materialism outright at the start of the discussion what is the point of producing an argument against God at all. The whole enterprise is completely circular: start by assuming only the physical world exists and then argue that God is not the creator of the world because the organizational simplicity of early matter and energy is too simple to be God. This type of thinking allows for the possibility only one conception of God in theory, pantheism. No more ridiculous piece of reasoning has ever been offered in the history of science and philosophy! The very brief argument is riddled through and trough with logical fallacies, although, since Dawkins is the master of political rhetoric, it is a very captivating piece of prose and will, naturally, inspire may to atheism.

Ayn Rand, of course, was neither a dummy nor a politician. The integrity she evinced in her personal quest for the truth can only be described as brutal and heroic. Rand’s point was not fallacious as are Dawkins’ frequently spurious forays into the art of “reasoning;” Rand’s objection was technically valid within the context of epistemological certainty in philosophy. No matter how far back you go, there will always be that unanswered question at the beginning. While this objection has relevance regarding the issue of certainty, it is not relevant in the context of completeness.

Certainty, while a classic concern for philosophy, is much less an issue for science, where, as Karl Popper demonstrated, certainty can never be fully or even substantially achieved. Nonetheless, a deeper explanation is always useful to science because, although it may not give us more certainty, it does give us more completeness. It gives us more information about our world than we otherwise had. In terms of completeness and explanatory value there is a huge difference between saying “We don’t know who made God” and “We don’t know where our world came from.” If we can establish that God (or another intelligent designer) made our world, we have added something enormously important to our knowledge base.

For science, and certainly for theology, it is not true that one stopping point in the search for a deeper explanation of life is necessarily as good as any other. In fact, for science and theology, the deeper explanation is always better. Typically, in fact universally to my knowledge, adding a deeper level of explanation in science is practically useful, potentially generating a myriad of valuable new applications. Adding God to our theoretical base, of course, doesn’t give us new technology. The implications are largely for sociology and political science, but it could bring us peace on Earth if we could all come to agree that God teaches tolerance and human rights (and would condemn to hell those who were unrepentant of crimes against others). It could also save us from falling into the nightmare of C. S. Lewis and Ayn Rand who revealed the horrors of an atheistic scientism that would promote horrific human experimentation, Nazi-like eugenics and genocide against those presumed to be inferior genetically, and brutal human conditioning programs.

And there is the spirit of science itself to consider, always held in the highest esteem in Western culture. The entire history of science reflects this truth that one never quits searching for a deeper explanation so long as one is available. This principle is the spirit of scientific discovery, without which there is little impetus for progress. Whenever we know that there is in fact a deeper level to go to, Ayn Rand’s objection “Who made God?” doesn’t apply in science, as I am sure she would agree, being a great champion of industry and technology, both of which have sprung from science. As long as it is possible for the explanation to go to a deeper level, science says that it should. And, really, this is largely true of philosophy as well. Philosophy is interested in discovery for its own sake even where degree of certainty on ultimate questions is not enhanced. After all, philosophy is the historical father of science.

And, believe it or not, though often characterized as a staunch atheist, Rand was not recommending that we ignore genuine evidence for God if we found it. She was only urging intellectual honesty: we should admit that assuming God’s existence does not eliminate the philosophical conundrum of explaining how it all got started. While this is true in philosophy, it is of no practical concern to science (and it is not true in theology, since theology maintains that God can impart the certainty of his existence directly to human awareness through divine grace). In any case, science’s current willingness to entertain the possibility of an infinite universe proves that the question of ultimate origins is not a showstopper to scientific inquiry. In an infinite universe, finding the ultimate beginning is impossible by definition.

True, unless one assumes an infinite universe, as some scientists now do, the quest for a deeper explanation will inevitably hit the wall somewhere. But, to avoid a prematurely truncated inquiry, we have to be sure that we are at that genuine starting point, not somewhere in the middle, before we cease investigating. Certainly there are profound differences for our understanding of ourselves between the implications derivable from stopping our inquiry at a mindless blind physical system and stopping it with an intelligent eternal and compassionate God who extends to us hope of eternal life and a glorified transformation to angelic form!

We would not think it proper to stop the quest for an explanation of the biomechanics of life at the point of describing the gross physical framework and primary organs of the body after the microscope was invented. The obligation to push the explanation even deeper again fell incumbent upon science following the invention of the electron microscope, which gave us further visibility into the cell. The advent of atomic physics and then quantum physics had the same effect of pushing the explanation deeper, describing the structure of matter at deeper and deeper levels. While pointing to invisible things, the accuracy of these deeper descriptions was confirmed by tests of predictions logically derivable from the theoretical assumptions. Thus, whenever there has been evidence of deeper underlying phenomena at work, science has always felt the obligation to acknowledge it—that is, until now, when that deeper phenomenon seems to be intelligent design, which opens the door to God, and in so doing the perennial can of worms of the intensely politicized debate between theists and atheists.

Now that modern science has revealed living systems to be machines of such complexity that their accidental construction can be mathematically ruled out, the rule of pushing scientific explanation as far as it can go has suddenly been suspended—it is politically inconvenient for materialists, who predominate in mainstream science. “Tough nougats,” is what I say to them, “let the chips fall where they may.” In the light of recent data, nature has clearly qualified as a machine-building machine; science is merely politically reticent to admit it. Political reticence notwithstanding, the spirit and integrity of science obligate us to acknowledge that something beyond accident must now be invoked to explain life. It is clear that a deeper explanation is both possible and warranted.

It is only intellectually fair to acknowledge this now that the hard data for intelligent design is in. For decades, early quantum theorists and Darwinian evolutionists shouted all over books, magazines and TV, “Look, the ultimate nature of the world is purely accidental and chaotic!” These premature inanities produced profoundly destructive impacts on society and our view of human life. Now that evidence for the opposite conclusion has been found, it should have been no less shouted from the rooftops. But, what has actually occurred? Scientists have swept the new evidence for ID under the rug, forbidden its discussion in schools by decree of the courts by falsely identifying ID with biblical creationism, and finally say that it is not important to look at such ultimate levels of nature at all. “Let’s just forget the whole thing, it’s a simple matter of self-organization. The universe is not a machine-building machine; it just looks that way—a lot. Anyway, explanation has to begin somewhere; so what’s the big deal if we prefer to stop the investigation early?”

The big deal is that science knows better; it now knows of the existence of a set of physical constraints favorable to life’s formation that are so detailed in their specificity as to make the accidental hypothesis dismissible. We now know that the creation of life by true accident would exhaust the resources of the entire history of the universe before attaining a probability within the thresholds of scientific credibility. The theory or accidental evolution has in fact been scientifically refuted by Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument (see Appendix 2).

The characteristics of nature so finely tuned for life qualify our universe as a machine-building machine. A deeper level of explanation beyond accidental evolution is now available. Even so, some neo-Darwinists still want to know why we would ever want to dig any deeper than self-organization? One wants to scream at them, “Oh, for crying out loud! Fourth grade science students know the answer to that: to find the truth.” That’s what science is about, after all, isn’t it…?

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

Let us take as our first example of innuendo, the neo-Darwinist commentaries on evolution intended for public consumption. These deceptively lump together mutations from very different causes as if they were all the same kind of thing. Yes, the core textbook discussions regarding genetic processes and biochemistry reveal the different natures of each of the various types of mutations—so there is no vast conspiracy to hide anything—but whenever the talk turns to the larger dynamic of evolution all of a sudden the work of evolution is simply done by “random mutations.”

The casual reader gets the clear impression that this nondescript aggregate group of “random mutations” has (or so it would seem from the lack of description) not the slightest hint of intelligent design or directional bias. After all they are merely “random.” But this is not so. The neo-Darwinists, and other serious students of evolution, know that the only genuinely accidental category of mutation are the point mutations, single nucleotide changes caused by injurious exposure to (typically) external sources of toxics or radiation. But toxic-induced point mutations are no longer considered to have made any significant contribution to evolution. So, at least within the context of the intelligent design/accidental worldview debate, this kind of ambiguity is potentially misleading, though perhaps not intentionally so.

The guy and gal on the street naturally derive their understanding of the nature of the evolutionary process from the popular summaries provided by neo-Darwinian experts, for their theory dominates current evolutionary science to near exclusivity. The public is prone to naively (and falsely) assume that topical summaries from anywhere in science are going to tell them all they need to know, and be politically unbiased. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Neo-Darwinian discussions of evolution fail miserably on both accounts; they are neither complete nor unbiased. Neo-Darwinian theory assumes an accidental worldview (although there is no scientific data to suggest it) and neo-Darwinian writers are as likely as anyone else to consciously or unconsciously allow their assumptions to slant their presentations.

Key elements regarding the irreducible complexity of biological machines and the astronomical improbability of an accidental process are selectively omitted from neo-Darwinian discussions, and a bias is otherwise reflected by innuendos and politically convenient ambiguities. We have already discussed complexity and improbability, so we now know what has been missing from the neo-Darwinian discussions. Let us then turn to the prime examples of innuendo and ambiguity.

The most important example of politically manipulated ambiguity and innuendo occurs around the neo-Darwinists’ deft equivocation of multiple meanings of the term “random.” To sort out the confusion let’s start at the beginning. The natural language use of the word “random” means “accidental” in most contexts. Neo-Darwinists however have coined another technical use of “random” to mean only that mutations are not tied to beneficial form change within the creature’s present environmental niche. But does the public understand this? No, typically not until several books into the subject, that is, not until they practically become an evolutionist themselves.

Many readers will only closely examine one or two books (usually the nontechnical ones with pictures), and perhaps quickly scan a few others before forming their views on evolution. They will then move down the library shelves to another topic (probably fiction). I take it as a given that most laymen still (properly) associate the word “random” with its common language sense of truly accidental. To the casual lay reader, then, (who admittedly is not properly doing his or her homework) the neo-Darwinists seem to be saying that the mutations responsible for evolution are truly accidental (to confuse matters further a few have in fact said this). This is a mistaken reading, however, for the technical use of the word “random mutations” by modern evolutionists does not require an accidental worldview at all, only the absence of naïve perfectionism and infallible micromanagement (see fallacies 23-26 above). The technical sense of “random mutation,” which is the sense that reflects the hard data of science, rules out the existence of only an all-powerful God who wants every biological form mutation that occurs in this world to benefit every individual creature no matter what environmental niche they are presently occupying, but that is all it rules out. Every other concept of God or an intelligent designer remains fully compatible with known scientific data, notably the Christian concept of God that places paradise in the next world, not in this one. Neo-Darwinists try to recreate the Christian view in terms of the 150-year-old fallacy of naïve perfectionism, but that is not the view of mainstream Christianity.

“Well,” you might think, “thanks for clearing that up. That makes it a whole lot easier to sort things out.” Yes, and no—for that’s not quite all there is to the confusion in this area.

While in the technical language of generic evolution “random” does not entail accident, when put into the larger context of neo-Darwinian theory, which does assume an accidental worldview, the mutations must be viewed as accidental if they are to carry any evidential weight for the accidental worldview tenet of the theory. Wow! What could be more confusing to the public or more pliable to linguistic manipulation? Very little in my experience.

Neo-Darwinists who wish to advance the accidental worldview and the social-political cause of materialism in the public mind can deftly manipulate this situation to convince the layman that science has proved an accidental worldview, all the while never having to defend that thesis in the academic community. They say one thing with “random mutation” and a large segment of the public hears something else. It’s a free lunch for materialist propaganda. How can they manage such a thing without being caught at it?

It’s really not that hard to arrange to say two things at the same time, as any professional diplomat can tell you. One just has to lay the proper groundwork in advance. In this case, a simple two-step process is involved. Here is how they do it. The neo-Darwinists first establish the technical use of the word “random” in the academic community as meaning merely that there is no direct relationship between what a creature needs in its present environmental niche and the mutations that actually occur. In other words creatures don’t often get what they need from a mutation. The scientific community readily affirms that this is so, and thus the truth of the principle that evolutionary mutations are “random” is irrefutably established. No problem so far.

But then comes the popular writings and presentations in which the neo-Darwinists argue not just for the generic and uncontested basic mechanic of evolution but also for their accidental worldview. To accomplish this additional step they must say that the entire event of life’s origin and evolution can be explained by truly accidental mutations assisted only by the constantly improving directional impetus of natural selection. But for this argument to have validity, the mutations must be truly accidental, not just technically “random,” as previously defined in generic evolutionary theory. The nontechnical reading public, naively giving the neo-Darwinian author credit for being able to think straight, must unconsciously substitute “accidental” for “random” to make the argument work for the neo-Darwinian author. But in most cases this substitution is not obligated by what the author has actually said. Very few neo-Darwinists will openly step up to the plate and claim mutations are truly accidental. Usually the author will only “invite” the reader to make the change. Doing it this way takes the risk out of the presentation for the neo-Darwinist. They can simultaneously convince the public of the accidental worldview while not having to defend the accidental thesis against professional academic criticism.

Why does the reader have to make such a substitution to make the neo-Darwinists’ argument work? Because “random” in the technical sense used in generic evolutionary theory is fully compatible with all except the most naïve versions of God or intelligent design. In the neo-Darwinian sense of “random” used in “random mutation,” a fully operational space shuttle could show up overnight embedded in the rump of an elephant and it would still be a “random” mutation because it doesn’t help the creature to survive in its present environment. However, if such a thing happened we would not quickly jump to the conclusion of ruling out intelligent design.

What it all boils down to is a simple equivocation between two meanings of the same word. “Random” in the sense that evolutionists use the word at the experimental or field level to describe the actual or inferred “mutations” of generic evolution means one thing (viz. not necessarily beneficial to the creature in its present niche). The use of “random” at the theoretical level for neo-Darwinian evolution means something entirely different, namely “truly accidental from all perspectives relevant to the intelligent design question.”

Until the public becomes alerted to this subtle equivocation, the neo-Darwinists remain perfectly positioned to have it both ways. They get a free political lunch. With a lay audience they can say, well everyone knows that neo-Darwinian theory requires simple and fully accidental mutations; this comes straight from Darwin. They can also say that science has no doubt that the mutations of evolution are “random.” What they don’t say is that they are talking about two different things: the “random” that science has been confirmed is not the “accidental” that their theory needs. Thus, science has not confirmed neo-Darwinian theory at all, yet this seems to be strongly implied. Science has only confirmed basic evolution, not accidental evolution. Nonetheless, it is the rare nontechnical reader who will not come away from the typical neo-Darwinist text believing that science has in fact confirmed the theory of accidental evolution and the associated worldview of materialism.

Intended or not, such ambiguity, when it consistently occurs around key highly politicized questions is hard to acquit as fully innocent. Everyone knows there is a social controversy raging around the subject of accidental evolution versus intelligent design. The public rightly assumes that it is incumbent upon scientists who write for the public as a social obligation to give a politically unbiased view of the topic. Thus, even if fully unintentional, allowing the ambiguity to persist around the concept of “random mutations” constitutes the fallacy of innuendo, for more pains should be taken to achieve clarity when so much is visibly at stake.

Since the scientific sense of “random,” means only that mutations are not linked to what is beneficial in a creature’s environment, neo-Darwinists can defend themselves as only talking techno-speak by claiming to be doing generic evolution only, not arguing neo-Darwinian theory. They are merely evolutionists in the process of doing basic evolution. The mistakes the reader makes in reading too much into the neo-Darwinian presentation in such cases are not the fault of the neo-Darwinist, even though the whole world knows that that particular author is a neo-Darwinist, whose theory, to succeed, logically requires the mutations to be truly accidental. And, invariably, their books and articles will make that clear before they are through. So, is this confusion all perfectly innocent?

Only God and the neo-Darwinists know the answer to that question. The only thing the rest of us know for certain is that the ongoing confusion about language is damned convenient for them. The ambiguities and selective omissions in neo-Darwinian discussions always point in the same direction, towards advancing the misconception in the mind of the public that science has firmly proven the materialistic accidental worldview…a worldview that just so happens to be the view of the neo-Darwinian author.

Science knows that single nucleotide point mutations caused by toxic chemicals or radiation are invariably destructive before they produce substantial biological change. Yet neo-Darwinists lump these together with the more complex kinds of internally governed genetic system-managed “mutations” that seem to be responsible for evolution. Mutations caused by reproductive mixing of genes and a variety of internally spawned genetic transpositions (both of which require the genome to already be somehow created) are, we now know, the “mutations” responsible for evolution. They are called “random mutations” only because there is no known linkage between any of these types of mutations and the creature’s needs in its current environment. While this is absolutely true given the technical meaning of the word “random” in evolutionary science, the casual reader is never reminded that all of these other types of “mutations” are closely governed by very sophisticated genetic machinery. They are not, therefore, accidental in the usual sense of the word. Readers are nowhere reminded in neo-Darwinian texts that toxic-induced point mutations, the only truly accidental ones, don’t produce evolution, and the nonaccidental mutations do produce evolution. To me this approach is too obviously trying to get a free political ride off the prior over-simplistic assumption of 1860-1960’s era science that the mutations that spawned evolution were truly accidental. The accidental theory of evolution has long been “out of gas” but the neo-Darwinists still cling to it apparently hoping to glide across the socio-political finish line anyway.

Science now knows that even replicative errors in the genome, which most people assume must obviously be mistakes, tend to occur in “hot spots.” This suggests that they are not totally random, especially when one considers that error correction systems protect some areas of the genome more than others. In theory, hot spots for replicative errors might be intentionally used in biological system design to generate variation in genetic sequences that can be substituted into the genome in closely managed ways to produce useful future variations. Thus, even these most likely candidates for genuinely accidental mutations cannot be shown beyond doubt to be truly accidental.

Any event process that is not fully accidental can, in theory, be harnessed by an intelligent designer of life and integrated into a larger highly complex scheme to construct the machines of life. Within such a scheme, seemingly negligible contributions in the direction of life accruing from a multitude of mildly nonrandom contributory processes may add up. They add up to a substantial directional constraint on the larger evolutionary process that ensures that something in the ballpark of the known tree of life is an inevitable result. In aggregate, when carefully combined, sequenced, and orchestrated, a multitude of individually very small biases can (and apparently do) give the evolutionary process a consistent direction toward a more or less definite tree of life. Yes, it may be an exorbitantly complex puzzle for us to piece together, but it is not beyond the capability of a super powerful, super intelligent being. God, for example, could easily use such a method to create life.

Science already knows that hundreds of directional filters or biases for life exist. Yet it never censures scientists who favor the materialist accidental worldview to couch their language in terms that visibly leads the public to believe otherwise. Scattered throughout the voluminous neo-Darwinian literature one finds thousands of repetitions of the insinuation that the process of evolution is accidental and meaningless. This assertion is not often argued outright. If it were a formal defense might be required under rigorous academic standards, and such a defense cannot be made. In regards to the known physical parameters that fine-tune nature in favor of life, the fallacy is more one of selective omission than innuendo.

Having made such omissions however, it is much easier for other forms of fallacious innuendo to occur, such as when neo-Darwinists imply that previous discussions of the fossil record or of biological structure and mechanics occurring in works of classic authors have already proved the evolutionary process to be accidental beyond any question. This is not so. When this tactic is used in popular books it is unfair to the lay reader who does not have benefit of a university library (or simply doesn’t have the time) to verify the overstatements by completing the cross-reference. Conscientiously tracing these kinds of “been there and done that” references inevitably leads to disappointment. The alluded to watertight case for accidental evolution simply does not exist. Ironically, in many cases the classic author will explicitly disavows that his work speaks to the accidental question at all.

Given a combination of these misleading tactics and a poor effort at doing the requisite homework, a novice reader cannot fail to draw the mistaken conclusion that science has definitely established the accidental worldview. Yet, scrutiny of the wording of eight out of ten neo-Darwinian texts reveals that the accidental claim was never fully made; it was left plausibly deniable. The few neo-Darwinian authors who honestly step up to the plate, like Richard Dawkins, and risk refutation by openly asserting an accidental worldview can be straightforwardly refuted. But much political yardage is gained by the frequent use of ambiguity by the other 95% who prefer to maintain the escape hatch of plausible deniability. This phenomenon suggests one of two things. Either an attempt to surreptitiously imprint the mind of the public with the neo-Darwinian atheistic/materialistic politic is intentionally being made by some of these authors, or the scientific culture as a whole has so forcefully imprinted the materialistic bias on the minds of our scientists that many of them unconsciously reflect that bias—or perhaps some of both.

Not convinced? Here is another example of innuendo. In this case, the philosophy of materialism is being implied as if it were already proven to be a fact of life. Niles Eldredge “sneaks” in (perhaps unknowingly) the hidden assumption of materialism in the following quote: “Even were the Intelligent Designer held not to be supernatural, but rather some sort of real Being exerting a real force in nature.…”[111] Here Eldredge has chosen to use “real” in place of the more appropriate “physical.” He directly opposes “real” with “supernatural” implying one can’t be both at the same time. This reveals his assumption that supernatural forces are not “real” and that they exert no real forces on the world. He impliedly relegates supernatural forces to the realm of the imaginary and thus implies the philosophy of materialism.

Noted evolutionary historian Peter Bowler closes his instructive book, Evolution: The History of an Idea, with the acknowledgment that it is improper to attempt to teach the personal philosophy of materialism as if it were part of evolutionary theory, yet neo-Darwinists, consciously or unconsciously, do this all the time. Eldredge retains plausible deniability for this philosophical faux pas, of course, for he need only say that he misspoke a word or two, saying “real” instead of “physical,” and so on, and intended no profound implications. Nonetheless, a percentage of readers has been convinced at least subconsciously not only that he did affirm materialism, but that science has fully proven it. This is an ingenious tactic, because no rebuttal is possible under the academic standards for a claim that can be plausibly denied. There is no enemy, no one to return fire to. Thus, such deft use of ambiguous language constitutes a free shot at the philosophical opponents of materialism—and a cheap shot. Allowing such misleading ambiguity to be employed on so massive a scale as the neo-Darwinists have used it over many decades, consciously intended or not, is contrary to the spirit and charter of science to seek and promote objective truth. It is however, perfectly characteristic of political propaganda where persuasion, not truth, is the only concern.

While I do not accuse Eldredge or any other neo-Darwinist by name of consciously intending to promote a political agenda or personal philosophy over the practice of objective science, it remains a fact that the aggregate of debates and discussion concerning the subject of evolution have visibly taken on the characteristics of a political as opposed to a scientific event. Within the historical exchanges involved in this debate materialists have gained untold free political yardage in the battle for the public mindset by use of innuendo in place of an open and honest argument. Again much of the politicization may not be consciously or maliciously intended, but rather subconsciously absorbed from the historical influence of materialism upon the culture of mainstream science. That culture has a long history of tending to deride religion and prematurely dismiss intelligent design.

For the final example of the fallacy of innuendo (also contradiction, and selectively ignoring evidence) let’s examine the abstract to one of Stuart Kauffman’s papers (Kauffman is the guru of self-organization). Kauffman’s descriptions and hypotheses of self-organization comprise one of the primary intellectual provocateurs, if you will, of William Dembski’s refutation of what he calls the “free lunch.” “Free lunch” theory is the view that the astronomically complex order in the universe, and in biology specifically, can be achieved with no investment of intelligent design information.[112]

Understanding Genetic Regulatory Networks

Abstract

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

Such networks behave in an ordered or a chaotic regime, with a phase transition, ‘the edge of chaos’ between the two regimes. Networks with continuous variables exhibit the same two regimes. Substantial evidence suggests that real cells are in the ordered regime….As we learn more about the wiring diagram and constraints on rules controlling real genes, we can build refined ensembles reflecting these properties, study the generic properties of the refined ensembles, and hope to gain insight into the dynamics of real cells.[113]

What has been going on in this kind of RBM research is that a random search is being made through all the possible patterns that such a network might form to try to hit upon a Boolean network of decision logic, a flow chart if you will, or a wiring diagram, that will be predictive of the actual behavior of genetic regulatory networks, which are as Kauffman indicates, orderly, not chaotic. So what is wrong with what Kauffman has said here?

As usual, not much as regards the literal wording—one just leaves with the mistaken impression that life can be thrown together accidentally. With the possible exception of the first sentence there seems to be nothing that is literally and explicitly wrong in what Kauffman says. But it is just too easy to get the wrong impression given so many occurrences of the word “random” used in proximity to references to gene regulatory networks. The first sentence really is an invitation to a mistaken understanding on the part of the reader: “Random Boolean networks (RBM) were introduced about 35 years ago as first crude models of genetic regulatory networks.” My understanding is that we have never had and can’t possibly have a random model that predicts gene behavior, except as a statistical bell curve, and we know genes can’t be regulated randomly because, by definition, random governance is no governance at all. No mechanism, genetic or otherwise, can be successfully maintained by a truly random regulatory network because the absence of ordered regulation is entailed by the concept of randomness.

If I read him correctly, what Kauffman is attempting to say is not that the early models of actual gene regulation networks were random in their primary regulatory processes (and that the actual gene regulation networks they modeled are therefore similarly random). Rather, he is relating the track that the process of scientific discovery historically took in this arena. The RBM researchers employed a random method of discovery to try to find from among the many possible alternative patterns of gene regulation networks a pattern that might match up to what cells are really doing when they regulate genes. What the cells actually do to regulate genes, however, is not random.

Because the number of possible alternatives for configuring a gene regulation network is so exorbitantly large, researchers opted to let computers do random searches through the nearly endless set of possible gene regulation network designs in order to speed up the process of finding models whose features were similar to what (little) was then known of real cells. Those models that had a rudimentary or partial match to real cells were then kept for further refinement. The possibilities are too numerous to evaluate by manual hypothesis, trial and error. This is a much more complex search than one might imagine, as it is theoretically possible that every operational gene has some effect on every other operational gene.

When one considers what Boolean logic means, the addition of AND, OR, and IFàTHEN operators in an unlimited string of complex combinations, to 25,000 or more genes, each having multiple ways of influencing each other, the difficulty in finding a definite flow chart match becomes apparent. In theory, different cell types can use different methods of gene regulation, and so the search is further complicated by the fact there may more than one answer. As far as researcher knew when this search began, twenty or more gene regulation network designs might be invoked to service the different cell types, and it was even possible that different regulatory network patterns and process would be used at different stages of life. The developmental stage of the embryo where HOX genes are primarily involved, for example, might employ a different method of gene regulation than the operational genome employs to govern the more routine day to day functions of adult life.

Kauffman apparently intends no deception here, but the language once again seems to be very conveniently tailored to the materialist point of view. Once can even allow that we, the nontechnical readers, are the primary problem, not the neo-Darwinists, in that we do not immerse ourselves into the subject sufficiently to get a clear understanding of the unavoidable technical use of language by evolutionary theorists—we aren’t doing our homework in other words. One could say, in that case, that we are the ones looking for a free lunch. Over the years, I for one of probably many others, have certainly been guilty of that charge. But here, I think that we can still justly claim that the first sentence especially sounds as if the early models of gene regulation networks were modeling regulatory networks that employed random routines, that the gene regulation process is little short of chaotic. This, of course, is not true and cannot be. It would defeat the very concept of regulation. In such a case living systems would not be consistently managed at all and could not survive.

I think another fallacy is passively committed here in the selective avoidance of acknowledging what seems to me to be clear evidence for intelligent design inherent in the visible artificiality of a Boolean network. Let’s face it, one doesn’t find Boolean networks in mud puddles and volcanoes. Boolean logic is only found in artificial systems designed by intelligence. Weather may be a pseudo-Boolean system, but no real pass-fail checking for the satisfaction of quantitative parameters is done at the decision steps. Weather systems derive their predictability from simple chains of physical causation. Physical causation mimics Boolean logic because it is a system with rules. There is a pattern to weather and other dumb events of physical causation, yes, but the difference is that the pattern is not being enforced onto the weather; it is not quality checked for parameter matching and then adjusted to make sure a preselected pattern is manifested. Pass-fail parameter checking and automatic correction routines are hallmark signatures of an artificial system designed by intelligence.

The dance of bees, for example, and simple communications of other creatures, seem to involve Boolean networks that are genuinely intelligent, though they are not hugely complex. A genuine Boolean system of the extreme complexity we see in genome regulation is another matter entirely, equaling or exceeding that of the most complexly programmed artifacts of human civilization, that is, the total regulation system is that complex. Therefore, there is genuine evidence of intelligent design in biology, evidence selectively ignored by neo-Darwinian evolutionists.

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

Ernst Mayr makes a one-line argument for this in his book, This is Biology. Citing Darwin’s observation of the fundamental difference between humans and animals in respect to morality Mayr says “Yet, since humans had animal ancestors this difference had to be explained in terms of evolution.” Mayr’s logic, if we expand his statement a bit so a logic becomes visible, appears to be as follows. Since our animal ancestors obviously didn’t have souls or moral consciences, and, since evolution is the only thing known to have happened between the time of our animal ancestors and the emergence of humanity, physical evolution must have provided the foundation and impetus for the emergence of morality/ethics in human behavior.

Sounds good, so it must be true, right? No; this is a non sequitur. There is an obvious alternative. Once again the alternative is the Christian thesis, or in this case the Catholic thesis. God began joining the soul to the human body at the point when in the sequence of evolutionary development apes made the transition to man. So, evolution does not have to be the explanation for morality because there is an alternative that we have not ruled out. Intuitively it is not so strange a thing for God to have done. It’s kind of like Dad or Mom saying “I will give you an allowance when you are old enough to manage your own money,” or “I will give you a bike when you are big enough to ride and balance it.” Humanity would need a real shot at physical survival before it would make sense for God to begin the divine journey of the human race, a journey intended to lead to angelic glorification, so in theory such a gift would typically wait until the external as well as the internal conditions warranted. The assumption would be that God would arrange it such that both internal and external prerequisites would be satisfied at the same time. In Christianity, the soul is the seat of the moral sense. Our Church and the Bible provide the basis for further intellectual formation of the soul and its moral sense. Thus, merely granting evolution does not oblige us to throw away God as the source of morality. Given the existence of a viable alternative, there is no logical basis for Mayr’s conclusion that physical evolution alone is the source of man’s moral faculty. His argument simply begs the question about God. And, certainly, one wonts to say that his purely physical model does a horrible job of accounting for our moral, emotional, and religious experience.

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

Evolutionists say that all of science’s explanations are purely natural. However, they omit to mention that the Big Bang, the source of everything physical, is itself acknowledged by science to be a complete singularity that science cannot explain. The Big Bang is, in fact, an unnatural event, an event that grounds all of our “natural” explanations. Go figure.

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

The first problem with using prediction as a criterion for anything is that what science can and cannot predict changes radically with each passing decade. Much of what we could not predict fifty years ago we can predict today. Recent developments in self-organization and genome research suggest that there is more direction and less randomness in the development of life than science has heretofore allowed.

The behavior of every molecule and atom, even the behavior of statistical groups of quantum “particles” is, in theory, predictable. It is simply lack of information, not true randomness in the sense of accident or chaos that generates most of the limits on science’s ability to predict the outcome of physical event processes. Although we currently cannot even model the full extent of our partial knowledge of protein interactions without exceeding computer capacity,[114] an intelligent designer not having such computational limits could predict nature’s achievement of a tree of life and an ecosystem from the known physical state of molecules, atoms, and quantum particle groups.

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

Let’s dismiss the second fallacy first, that one must completely replace a theory to critique it. This is the charge often leveled at ID theorists by neo-Darwinists, that they have no theory to replace evolution with. But ID theorists are not trying to replace the theory of evolution, they are trying to make it better.

Next, Darwinists offer the discovery of the new bacterial gene, nylonase, and other simplistic discoveries such as a protein degraded from its ancestor, or a gene that changes color or overall size as proof of evolution. But these are too small an increment of the overall problem to be instructive, and it is not clear that anything in bacteria can be taken as representative of the complex species of the tree of life. Bacteria are unique in nature in many ways including overall simplicity. As William Dembski points out in Uncommon Descent, one shouldn’t assume everything that goes on with bacteria is common to other creatures.

The discovery of bacteria’s ability to decompose nylon has been hailed by neo-Darwinists as proof of their theory because nylon is a relatively new synthetic made by man. In their view this must, therefore, be a beneficial evolutionary adaptation to the modern environment. “Walla Booby! Evolution she is proved!” But, assuming it to be a new adaptation, this only makes a case for minor microevolutionary variations, not macroevolution. These trivially easy mutations do not show us how evolution managed to get the space shuttle out of a sun dial or how a human being can be constructed by accident.

Explaining the entire tree of life involves much more difficult achievements than those neo-Darwinists can present. Complex sets of closely coordinated changes in multiple locations of the genome are required, changes that must then be integrated into astronomically complex systems where conflicts are bound to occur. In many cases, nongenetic changes must be time coordinated with the genetic changes to make everything work. Although the associated nongenetic changes ultimately derive from instructions from the genome at some prior point in time (they may come from the developmental genome, for example) this complicates things further. For this all to work out, the developmental genome must be “expecting,” as it were, the set of changes required for a new evolutionary feature to occur in the operational genome before they happen. Basic structures and body plans are coded for in one place. Basic protein sets which vary somewhat between species are coded for in another place. The microtubule structures inside cell walls that guide cell component construction and determine which species will be built have to be coded for somewhere else. All of this must be done in a way that is compatible with any new evolutionary feature that, itself, typically involves an entire set of complex alterations affecting multiple cell types, organs, systems and subsystems.

In other words, aren’t these examples of “evolution” all transparently easy things to do, while the evolutionary task is supremely more difficult? The apparent answer is yes, the nylonase gene and other examples of evolution that “neo-Darwinists” point to are all too simple, too easy, and risk-free. They are therefore not representative of the tasks evolution must actually perform.

Classic Darwinian theory, and most if not all versions of neo-Darwinian theory, say that a chain of simple changes is all that evolution needed to get the entire job done. But there are absolutely no examples of this ever happening. No definite evolutionary pathway corresponding to neo-Darwinian theory is known to science, examples of a combination of simple and easy mutations producing evolution of a radically new kind of complex creature in real evolutionary time. Science absolutely does not know that such a thing ever did or ever could happen, and everything we now know now says it could not happen.

Yes, there are a few unimpressive examples of simple spontaneous biological changes, but no examples of a chain of such changes that has produced one very different type of creature from another. Science is simply in denial that Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory has been satisfied, which required only that only one biological feature could be shown not to have originated from “numerous, successive, slight modifications.”[115] It seems to me that the combined inputs of genetic science and biochemistry now demonstrates that all of the evolutionary changes affecting interactive internal systems fail this test, while a few simple kinds of variations such as size or color (the kinds of things the Darwinists use for examples) might pass.

The final question is, “Even if the process of the ‘evolution’ of the nylonase gene from an existing gene is ‘random’ in the sense of not being directed towards the requirements of the environment, does that make it truly accidental in the sense of ruling out purpose or design? The answer to this question is no, it is not a demonstrably accidental process because the process is constrained and controlled by the structure and mechanisms of the organism. Until the initial construction of the organism, which is visibly a nonrandom system, can be shown to be the result of an accidental event process, the events that occur within the organism cannot be considered accidental. Biological safeguards are built into living systems to ensure that, under normal conditions, only certain kinds of things can happen inside an organism. Even those types of mutations that are destructive to an individual creature can eventually come to benefit the species through the additional management layer of natural selection (this is the primary claim of the theory of evolution itself). Once such closely managed living systems are in place it is incorrect to consider random changes that occur inside of them as accidental.

The intelligent design argument does not say that there might not be a handful of useful mutations sufficiently easy to produce once living systems were in place that an accident might stumble upon them over time, even many hundreds, especially for simple creatures uniquely predisposed by their design features to tolerate genetic substitutions like bacteria. Rather, ID theory says that, despite the possibility of those rare constructive (and relatively minor) accidents, an accidental evolutionary process cannot handle the core job of the creation of the organisms and their more complex features in real evolutionary time. The nylonase adaptation may very well be a rare constructive accident, though such has not been conclusively demonstrated. Such an accident, however, can in no way explain the creation and evolution of the 100,000,000 species of the tree of life.

Professor William Dembski informs us that there is something else very odd about the bacterial gene involved with nylonase. Its DNA seems to have repetitive sequences that deviate from the triplet-based standard that forms the “…dictionary universally used in nature for the translation of nucleic acid language into protein language.”[116] Thus, in addition to being overly simple, whatever is going on with the nylonase development in bacteria appears to be nonstandard enough that it cannot be properly extrapolated to other organisms.

Of course our objection to using simplistic examples as proof of complex evolutions is dwarfed entirely by Henry Gee’s objection. He says that posing any historical narrative theory of evolution, or insisting upon any single process dynamic for evolution, is entirely premature. And it may always be premature because our base of evidence is likely going to remain much too sparse and spotty to reliably portray the larger themes of evolution with reliability. All we will ever really know is what we can see directly in the fossils, the genomes, and the physical systems and structures of life. We will know the hard data, the degree of similarity. Some phylogenetic inferences to time and sequence of heredity between specific creatures will become nearly certain, but many, and perhaps, most, will only attain a certain level of probability. High reliability will not be achieved across the entire range of phylogenetic branches of the tree of life, and certainly not across the entire historical expanse of evolutionary chronology. In other words, we will probably never know the full facts of evolution in terms of the specifics of biomechanical process dynamics and a historical narrative event sequence—and we certainly don’t know them at present. Until we do we should stop the unwarranted politicized guessing and stick to the facts.

Deep time is not the only problematic issue related to prematurity in theory construction. The additional problems of deep information and deep complexity compound the prematurity problem, one is tempted to say nearly ad infinitum. As yet neither of these questions has been substantially addressed by mainstream science.

Under these circumstances it is fully improper for neo-Darwinists to demand as they do that any criticism of neo-Darwinian theory must be accompanied by a full replacement theory. This has never been the standard in science. Most criticisms in the history of science are geared toward improving, not replacing a theory. ID theorists are not wrong in holding back a complete theory, neo-Darwinists are wrong in asserting one prematurely based upon too little evidence. The evidence is not fully in, and so this criticism that neo-Darwinists level at ID reduces to their asking us to make the same error they have made: jump the gun and pretend to know more than the evidence can support. In refraining from doing this, intelligent design theorists have been acting from prudence not ignorance.

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

An interview with Biologist Michael West in Discover magazine presents an example of these three fallacies/propaganda tactics.[117] West may only be reflecting the entrenched habits of the materialist dominated scientific culture, that is, not intending to deceive, but his remarks fit the paradigm well enough to demonstrate the problem. On page 84 he says “Using human imagination, which is limitless, we could change the blueprint of human life into a new species. We could make anything.” He is not just talking about making things in our imagination, but using our imagination to change genomes into new species in reality, and not just minor differences among closely related species, but “anything,” radically new phyla, wild chimeras, etc. While in pure theory this might be done, there is no concrete evidence that science will ever be able to make radically new types of creatures. All we presently have reason to expect is the achievement of small modifications within an existing body type and family, and for many of those a nearly endless series of troubleshooting adjustments. Based upon what science actually knows, West has made a gross overstatement. He is entitled to his opinion, and he can’t be “proven” wrong, but a politically unbiased rational thinker would not derive that opinion from what science can currently demonstrate with genetic engineering.

Ambiguity occurs in West’s using the term “species.” First of all, scientists don’t presently agree on how to define a species. Species can change with differences so slight as wing color variations in songbirds; they can be defined by the inability to interbreed and nothing else; they can be defined based upon their relationships on the phylogenetic tree of life showing nearly identical common ancestral sources; degree of genetic or structural/functional similarities can be the criterion, etc. The ambiguity is clearly directed towards an exaggeration of what genetic engineering can do. In other words, to say that we could engineer a different color pattern on a songbird’s wing certainly does not warrant the statement that “We could make anything.” We can imagine chimeras with lion’s heads and eagles wings, but can we create them? No. We can try, but what we are likely to get are grossly deformed dysfunctional products of already closely related species, such as what appears to have happened in the case of the legendary “chupacabra” in Texas and Mexico.

As many readers may have heard, two “chupacabras” were recently killed or captured in Texas. They look very much like what one would imagine to result from an aborted attempt at genetic engineering. Superficially, the “chupacabras” appearance suggests a (dysfunctional) hybrid of a Mexican dog, a coyote and a hyena. It appears to have the frame of a Mexican dog, the muscular jaws of a hyena, and the longer snout and limbs of a coyote. It is possible that it has additional cross-species genetic modules that are less visible, such as something from a marsupial. Such genes would not necessarily show but could affect behavior, such as making it tend to sit up on its back legs when (unsuccessfully) trying to devour its prey.

Judging from the anecdotal reports over the years, the “chupacabra” appears to have a problem ripping, tearing, and chewing its prey due to a mismatch of genetics affecting its jaws, teeth, and chewing behavior. It seems to be a bloodsucker for that reason. The creature seems to be caught more often drinking blood than eating meat. Dysfunctional design may be largely defeating its ability to feed itself. As with most wild predators, they only range in close to man when other feeding strategies fail, so this would explain so many human sightings.

Closer inspection and genetic analysis may show something different than what I hypothesize from the “chupacabras” appearance, but I use this well-known story to illustrate the general concept that it is hard to improve upon what nature has already done, even with science. If the “chupacabra” is in fact the abortive or intentionally monstrous product of a human genetic engineering lab, it is clear that we have not created a masterpiece of engineering but only fouled up what was already there. The only thing accomplished (in addition to creating something extraordinarily ugly) is to cause the poor creature to live a tortuous life.

There is no scientific evidence to support the belief that the limitation on creating one radically different kind of creature from another will ever be exceeded; it is merely an assumption based upon the larger now proven fallacious neo-Darwinian precept that evolution is easy as pie. Doesn’t the existence of the “chupacabra” itself prove me wrong in the event that it came from a genetic engineering lab? No. Even if the “chupacabra” is a cross-species hybrid of the kind I describe, it is a hybrid of already closely related creatures of the same family. Alterations of such major systems and structures as are required to do more than that invokes an enormous complexity barrier. In other words, to accomplish human engineered “cross-breeding” among close relatives is not to accomplish the much harder task of evolving the entire tree of life. Is that barrier so high that human science may never manage to cross it? I don’t know, but there is currently no information to suggest that we will cross it.

West’s exaggeration of science’s abilities in genetic engineering is not only wildly ungrounded speculation, it is flatly contradicted by what we know of the complexities of the genomes and living systems. Yet nothing is given within that issue of Discover magazine to set West’s large print, boldfaced remarks into proper perspective (other than West’s own admission that nothing of the kind has yet been achieved and is probably a long way off). This mistakenly implies, just as Darwinists have always implied, that the missing links in the fossils are there, even if we never find them. In any case, an expert’s expectation of finding evidence in the future is insufficient epistemological grounds to accept the same conclusions we would accept if we actually had the evidence before us—a bird in the hand…. Within the context of a politically charged arena such as the subject of evolution versus intelligent design, one needs to be even more careful about taking opinions and expectations in lieu of hard evidence.

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

Epigenetic inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g., environmentally induced gene activation marker alterations)[118] and deterministic factors in evolution have been discovered since Simpson, both making at least a partial comeback in recent times. However, in This View of Life, famous evolutionist G. G. Simpson categorically rules them both out. Simpson says the process of evolution, although historically determined in the sense that prior events inevitably restrict future options, is not materialistically determined at the outset by natural law and preexistent design specifications. The new sciences of proteomics, developmental genetics, and transpositional genetics, however, already show him premature, if not incorrect, in that assertion. Linking what is presently known about protein interactions and genetic processes with natural law, recently discovered tendencies for biological self-organization, Michael Denton’s predetermined protein folding forms, and a myriad of preset fine-tuned-for-life parameters in physics sketches a still incomplete but clearly discernable outline of a funnel towards life. Evolution now seems to have proceeded in a visibly deterministic way. Theories do come back from the dead. Several decades of intensive scientific research since Simpson, orthogenesis (directed evolution) is alive and well again as an evolutionary hypothesis. As noted evolutionist Simon Conway Morris has recently speculated, it begins to look as if humanity is an inevitable product of the evolutionary process, at least when couched within the full set of physical parameters of the larger cosmos.

Thus, Simpson’s assertion is not a categorical statement of fact as he leads his readers to believe. At best it is premature, the conjunction of two fallacies, really: technological prematurity and unwarranted anticipation of future evidence. What I am calling “technological prematurity” involves drawing conclusions about areas of nature before the technology is available to thoroughly examine them. Darwin made this mistake, though one cannot blame him for it, in assuming the cell was a simple bunch of goo because he didn’t have the electron microscope to look into its minute machinery.

Contrary to the perfunctorily dismissive attitude neo-Darwinists have held towards the “old” hypotheses, in light of more modern discoveries in genetics and biochemistry nearly all of the previously “discredited” hypotheses concerning evolution have been resurrected, at least in limited applications. But does the public know this? Not hardly. The whole enterprise of reintegrating the old hypotheses into new evolutionary applications has bee accomplished as quite as a mouse, restricted to purely academic circles for the most part. Nonetheless, recent discoveries have been so revealing that they bring to mind the old musical adage “Everything old is new again.”

The supreme irony here is that the only one of the old evolutionary hypotheses that we can now definitely rule out is naïve mutationism, which is the only hypothesis that was genuinely compatible with the neo-Darwinist accidental worldview and the thesis that life is without purpose. Self-organization and “cumulative selection” both evince a strong bias for life in nature well beyond accident. Neo-Darwinists have no other dynamic than self-organization to explain the origin of life. Current neo-Darwinian explanations of biological form change start with the preexistence of life and the self-transforming genomes, explaining further evolutions as largely a product of Mendelian reproductive population dynamics. This only demonstrates (assuming it is true at all) that once a large complex machine is built small accidents can occur within the machine; it does not demonstrate that an accident can build a large complex machine. It is neo-Darwinism that is really dead, not orthogenesis, but, given the materialist penchant for misleading the public, it is a real question whether the public will ever know it. The accidental thesis itself, however, once finally put to rest, has no hope of resurrection. This is because complexity data in biology continues to mount, and we can see far enough from what we have discovered so far in known to be incomplete descriptions that this trend will proceed unabated for many decades into the future.

There is a classic case where evolutionists got publicly caught in the fallacy of prematurely anticipating future evidence, generating substantial embarrassment for science. This was apparently an innocent event, not propaganda, as scientists of the time naively believed what they were claiming. In the 1950s, all the “experts” agreed that the achievement of the spontaneous origination of life from nonliving chemicals in the laboratory (abiogenesis) was imminent. Even G. G. Simpson confidently echoed this conviction. He strongly reassured his reading public that spontaneous evolution was a fact and the achievement of simple life from chemicals a piece of cake. Despite all the hoopla, the thought to be imminent demonstration of life spontaneously arising from chemicals in the lab never happened! Yet the experts had all confidently assured the public that it would.

As a result of those expert assurances many people’s thinking was irretrievably influenced toward materialism and the accidental worldview. It has been more than 50 years; still no abiogenesis. Science has not bothered to tell the public that the expectation of spontaneous abiogenesis is substantially gone. Anything in favor of an accidental world is widely publicized, but anything arguing against accident and materialism is shoved under the rug.

Propaganda is not harmless in a scientific context; it can do great damage. A consensus of popular experts loudly anticipating evidence can bring the public to accept the occurrence of that evidence as a certainty. “They’re the experts; they should know.” The public mindset and worldview is altered, yet, 50 years down the road the anticipated events still haven’t happened and the data suggests less and less that they ever will. Propaganda artists gained enormous political ground for the socio-political philosophy of materialism in these bogus announcements of the imminent discovery of abiogenesis without having to pay an honest price in hard research data. They got a free lunch, as it were. The public “knew” abiogenesis was just around the corner. Everyone was talking about it, and in the process the public mindset was changed to reflect the error that life was simple enough that abiogenesis could happen spontaneously from a handful of common chemicals, and perhaps sea water and electricity. In the 1950s, no one questioned the authority of published science. The experts had signed their name to it; it must be true. There are probably many people out there today that think it did happen! For them references to Miller-Urey is a reference to abiogenesis.

To have science become willing handmaid to political propaganda is a scandal. There has never been any hard evidence to support the theory of accidental evolution or the materialistic worldview, and yet a large segment of the public believes that science has definitively proven both. One would have thought that we would have learned our lesson. Surprisingly, in the six decades since the faux pas concerning abiogenesis the task of cutting through materialist propaganda has only become more difficult. It is now not just a matter of refuting a single unproven idea, but of trying to cut through a maze of multiple fallacies very subtly woven together to create a bogus mask of credibility for accidental evolution.

Unfortunately, the historical record of scientists allowing politics to influence their thinking shows Dr. Faust to be correct. The quality of scientists’ abstract reasoning skills is not nearly as good as the practical rigor and discipline they apply in experimental investigations.

Until comparatively recently, many—probably most—biologists agreed with Darwin that the problem of the origin of life was not yet amenable to scientific study. Now, however, almost all biologists agree that the problem can be attacked scientifically. The consensus is that life did arise naturally from the nonliving and that even the first living things were not specially created. The conclusion has, indeed, really become inescapable, for the first steps in that process have already been repeated in several laboratories. There is concerted study from geochemical, biochemical, and microbiological approaches. At a meeting in Chicago in 1959, a highly distinguished international panel of experts was polled. All considered the experimental production of life in the laboratory imminent, and one maintained that this had already been done—his opinion was not based upon a disagreement about the facts, but depended on the definition of just where, in a continuous sequence, life can be said to begin.[119]

Here you have many fallacies, not only anticipating the evidence and prematurity. There is also the argument from authority (the “experts” agree so you don’t need evidence); a part equals the whole (the first steps have been done, therefore the rest will be done); redefining the question so it may be answered in the favored way (scaling down the definition of life); reductionism (pretending that there is no other substantial reasons to affirm the spiritual in human life); easy as pie; and begging the question (assuming without proof that the origination of life from chemicals is a continuous sequence of physically simple steps having no irreducible complexity barriers, no additions of spiritual components, or no uniquely difficult steps of any kind). All this in a single paragraph, and from one of the top evolutionists of all time. What would the force of Simpson’s argument be minus the fallacies? Not much.

The point of going to so much trouble to belabor 100 fallacies in neo-Darwinian writings (and there are many more) is to establish that there are critical questions we must ask ourselves every time we read or hear an evolutionary argument from neo-Darwinists, and really every time we read science. One cannot take even scientific statements at face value where the issue is politically charged. Materialist spin is too often found. Those questions that we must ask ourselves include…

What fallacies are involved in the author’s thinking?

What unwarranted assumptions underlie the argument?

Are the conclusions premature?

Is the author being selective in presenting evidence?

The final question is, “Is there anything of substance left to the author’s case after these errors are removed?”

The point of this entire book is to argue that, in addition to revealing substantial evidence for intelligent design, there is nothing to the neo-Darwinian argument beyond the unsupported beliefs that the team of accident and natural selection can do miracles, and that achieving a living version of the space shuttle is as easy as pie. Science now has excellent reasons to question the former and the latter is visibly nonsense.

Fallacy #78: Broken Analogy

Shanks and Joplin commit this error in claiming that a catalytic reaction among a few raw chemicals mirrors the more complex metabolism of living creatures, and in implying that achieving a basic chemical metabolism mirrors the overall complexity of constructing a total integrated living organism.[120] Since their oversimplification is so gross as to invalidate the analogy on the surface, it may seem like a not very astute maneuver on their part. But such analogies do achieve political yardage. This is because the public seldom does their homework. Those readers who will examine the issues close enough to see the complexity mismatch aren’t going to be convinced of neo-Darwinism anyway, so, politically, there is nothing to lose for neo-Darwinists to use such tactics. They convince that large chunk of readers who don’t do their homework and their favored worldview, be it Marxism, scientism, materialism or nihilism, is that much closer to ascendancy in the society they are trying to alter. Yes, science writing can be used as a powerful tool of political propaganda.

W. Ford Doolittle’s game of bridge analogy similarly fails because he argues from a fair deck of cards to the situation of an accidental production of life.[121] In a truly accidental world physics and biology would only have one ace (the chance of assembling life by accident) in a deck of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion…(continued to at least 40 repetitions of “trillion”) unhelpful cards from which to deal out life. One would think professional authors would be scandalized in offering such obviously flawed logics (since all of science is built around probability), but they apparently believe there is some logical force to what they say.

I again disclaim accusing individual authors, be it Shanks and Joplin, Dawkins, Strickberger, Doolittle or anyone else of having bad intentions; I know no such thing concerning them. What I do know is that the pattern of spinning and selectively presenting the evidence we see in neo-Darwinist presentations overall fits the model of a Marxist propaganda tactic perfectly. I cannot explain this pattern, only describe it. The whole thing could be entirely subconscious. I have read somewhere in the literature, for example, that Doolittle (like myself) is a Catholic. For crying out loud! What would a Catholic be doing spouting Marxist propaganda. Catholics famously have no love for the Marxist worldview and overly pragmatic logic of means justifying ends. I therefore assume that Doolittle has no such intentions. But why then do neo-Darwinian authors propose such lame analogies? I can only surmise along with Dr. Faust that the abstract logic circuits in many experimental and theoretical natural scientists are flawed. While genuinely gifted in the area of practical scientific investigations, many scientists nonetheless remain notoriously deficient in the inferential logic requisite to validating abstract conceptual thinking. In other words, the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher. The whole point of belaboring these fallacies individually is to suggest what the operative rule is: in the light of recent data, a well-grounded philosopher will not be a neo-Darwinist.

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

Although these fallacies are scattered throughout neo-Darwinian literature, they can all be found in a single article, “Science and God,” by Lenn E. Goodman. Goodman is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.[122] While Goodman is apparently not a neo-Darwinist as such (he allows for God’s existence and the compatibility of science and religion), he casually dismisses the intelligent design argument minus a thorough analysis. His somewhat cavalier approach is suggestive of Father Coyne, the critic of Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn’s recent editorial piece on ID in the New York Times. Coyne, himself a priest, implies that it is somehow demeaning to God that we would find signs of intelligence in his creation. Go figure.

I must confess to not getting Goodman’s point, or Coyne’s. True, God himself disparages the physical existence in the Bible, and he cursed the ground himself on account of man’s fall. But although the Bible warns about placing any value in the physical, at the same time it says in the Psalms and elsewhere that God’s handiwork can be seen in what he has made. The Bible thus argues that although the world itself is not sacred, God’s handiwork can nonetheless be discerned in it. Certainly our own experience tells us that there is at times glory bordering on the sacred in panoramic views of nature and the cosmos. “Glory” may be the wrong word for the intricate machines of biology in vivo, but “intelligence” is not, for they incontrovertibly show design. “Gory,” perhaps, is the word for the in vivo form of living machines, as most junior high school biology lab students will attest. Having said that, once the enormously complex design structure is abstracted from the goo that surrounds it and animated on a clean and dry video screen, such as in Illustra Media’s DVD, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, the glory of the internal creation can be seen no less than in the Hubble telescopes pictures of the cosmos.[123]

The fallacy of casual dismissal occurs in the event of Goodman’s dismissing ID without ever having addressed any of the substantive arguments you have seen in this book, with the single exception of Professor Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. There he does little better. He counters Behe merely by citing research indicating that speculative routes can be proposed that partially complete the evolutionary steps to only two complex biological systems: the camera type eye of humans and the electron transport chain of the ATP energy cycle (Maricopa Community Colleges Web site). Darwin’s criterion for the refutation of his theory, however, requires only that one biological component be shown to be irreducibly complex. So the logical structure of Goodman’s argument is all turned around. By showing only partial and speculative routes he demonstrates nothing, and by addressing only two systems he is not entitled to draw the conclusion that life does not involve one or more irreducibly complex systems. He invites us to confuse speculation with fact, grant a complete path from a description of a partial one, and draw conclusions about all biological systems from a speculative analysis of only two, and two that appear to be atypical in visibly offering easily imagined routes to their incremental construction by spontaneous natural events.

Goodman dismisses (prematurely) Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, saying that the ATP energy cycle is the most complex design imaginable (and we could imagine an accidental chain of chemical events throwing it together). He implies that the ATP cycle is the most complex mechanism that evolution has had to produce, and that there are no other biological systems that are genuinely irreducibly complex. From what I have seen in the microbiology and genetics journals, he is wrong on both counts. The ATP energy cycle is neither the most complex system in biology nor the best candidate for being an irreducibly complex system. Even if it were the most complex single subsystem in biology we cannot forget the entire vertical hierarchy of the mammalian body: trillions of cells, reformed into multiple cell types, tissues, systems and organs in many layered machines nine levels deep, many cooperating horizontally with other systems. All these machines within machines depend upon the ATP cycle and closely integrate it, yes, but the integrated organism itself is a single integrated interactive machine. This is the most complex task evolution must accomplish, not an automated chemical chain reaction visibly guaranteed by the laws of nature that does not even rise to the level of the simplest living entity, the cell.

Obviously this microscopic chemical chain reaction of the ATP energy cycle is not the hardest task accidental evolution must accomplish; it must build whole creatures. That includes brains and computer language based genomes, self-replication and repair systems, aural, visual, and autonomic nervous systems, all regulated as well as any human industrial manufacturing plant in history. The tripartite genome alone is far more complex than the ATP cycle. The much greater complexity of the brain has already been discussed. One can probably get away, minus a mathematical study, in calling the relative complexity of the eye and the ATP cycle something of a standoff in terms of functional complexity. Perhaps the functions of the eye are a bit more simple, but with 3 million ganglion cells involved in its electronic interface, plus 125 million photocells, each complex in its own right, the eye is no slouch on the scale of complexity.[124] We should also recall that copies of the entire genome are maintained in each cell of the body and portions of those genome copies are differently translated in different cell types. Then there is the proteomics system. Protein-protein interactions are so complex that we cannot trace their workings with our best computers in anything like real time. In aggregate the system of interactive proteins/enzymes far exceeds the complexity of the ATP energy cycle. Thus, the fallacy of selective omission of evidence occurs here in the false premise that the ATP energy cycle is the most complex component of living systems. It is a straw man fallacy as well because there is a much better candidate for an irreducibly complex system in the living cell itself, which most likely is precisely the reason spontaneous abiogenesis has not been achieved.

Ironically, the logical kernel of Goodman’s argument against intelligent design is only genuinely applicable to intelligent systems! For an accidental process, the achievement of one machine does not make the achievement of a different machine easier. Whereas an intelligent designer who has learned to create on complex biological machine might be expected to later master different machines of equal complexity, and even string them together into an integrated system, this is not true for an accident. Accidents never learn. Probability theory says that each additional sequential achievement in a random event process adds greater difficulty to the total job, just as rolling 4 sixes in a row is harder than rolling one or two. The subsequent achievement of absolutely every additional component needed by evolution exponentially multiplies the improbability and difficulty level again and again. The resultant improbability for the tree of life is therefore trillions upon trillions of times greater than the complexity of the ATP energy cycle alone. Goodman’s argument against intelligent design from the ATP cycle is thus refuted, for it has the invalid logical structure of “If accidental evolution can achieve the ATP cycle, it can do absolutely everything else needed to build the tree of life.”

Goodman’s article invokes a number of fallacies, and science has not demonstrated that an accidental process could achieve the ATP system in the first place. Goodman has only hypothesized that “nature” could achieve it, and we are not told if “nature” means accident or not. Well, of course, if nature has been designed to achieve it, it will over time spontaneously do so. Prior to defining one’s terms and worldview merely calling a process “natural” or “spontaneous” does not even imply the process is accidental let alone prove it to be accidental.

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

Goodman also says some things that are just plain troubling:

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

Logic cannot settle every dispute.[125]

These assertions are problematic both from the point of view of the logical consistency of neo-Darwinian theory and the logical consistency of Goodman’s own article, for he seems to be affirming the irrational in saying that at times the illogical should prevail over the logical! Neo-Darwinists and practically every other Darwinist have long insisted that the theory of evolution is an incontrovertible fact. How can this be so, if, as Goodman suggests there is no established standard for proof on evolutionary questions. This is a contradiction. Further, in regards to the second statement, if we are not to use logic to evaluate a question, what do we use? Goodman leaves us in epistemological limbo, as it were, without an answer. He provides no concrete alternative, all the while arguing his case in clearly logical form at great length for some thirteen pages as if logic should be used, while presenting no valid logical content! Goodman’s article merely impersonates an argument, providing the form without the content. What are we left with to answer evolutionary questions? By implication, the argument from authority, for nothing else remains once logic is unavailable.

Finally we come to the last fallacy in Goodman’s piece: guilt by false association. Goodman falsely ascribes the reductio ad ignorantiam or “God of the gaps” fallacy to modern intelligent design theory. For Goodman to do this is a form of the straw man fallacy, because modern ID theory is not based on these lines of reasoning, though some of the (much) older forms may have been. ID theory acknowledges that there will always be gaps in evolutionary research data, that we can’t reasonably expect full discovery at any given point in time. ID theory is not defaulting to God as the explanation anytime science does not presently know something on a given subject (the argument from ignorance). Rather, ID theory is emphasizing the lack in neo-Darwinian theory of an explanation of what we do know regarding complexity, improbability, sophisticated mechanisms, interdependence of design components, and the large gaps in the fossil record that appear to be a genuine leap of evolution as opposed to incomplete paleontological discovery. ID theory does not say that we need God to explain what we don’t yet know, but that we need intelligent design to explain what we do know. ID theory therefore does not commit the God of the gaps fallacy or the argument from ignorance fallacy.

Goodman’s misrepresentation of what ID theory really says is thus a straw man. In ignoring the modern form of ID theory and refusing to let modern intelligent design theory progress away from its ancient religious antecedents the way science itself has had to progress away from its religious antecedents, Goodman also commits the one strike and you’re out fallacy. In the thirteen pages of Goodman’s article we see 20 fallacies: casual dismissal, straw man, one strike and your out, false association, contradiction, impersonating an argument, affirming the irrational, oversimplification, broken analogy, one link makes a chain (incomplete case), simple therefore complex, easy therefore difficult, hasty conclusion, scientific prematurity, it sounds good so it must be true, claim jumping, argument from authority, false premise, selective omission of evidence, and non sequitur. How many readers would be convinced if these invalid argument forms were removed? Probably none, because he would have no means to transition from his data to his conclusion. Once again, very careful reading of the evolutionary texts is called for.

Fallacy #84 Claim Jumping, and #85 passing off a tautology as a profound theory of science

Your evidence is my evidence. Claim jumping involves the misapplication of evidence or logic outside its valid range of extension while distorting its natural meaning in the direction of a politically favored conclusion. Monroe Strickberger and Richard Dawkins claim jump when they re-label the strong ability nature has to progressively achieve and lock in physical structures that are more and more conducive to the formation of complex living organisms as “cumulative selection,” a process that somehow extracts enormously complex living machines from an otherwise accidental world in an increasingly efficient manner as time goes on. However, a process so clearly directed toward the formation of complex life, even if we cannot yet prove it to have guaranteed life within a given span of time, must, as G. G. Simpson admitted, be labeled “purposive,” not “accidental,” for the strong biases for life in nature do seem to make life inevitable. The improbability of an accident achieving the same thing surpasses anything science will otherwise allow as credible. Therefore, the biases for life built into nature that manifest themselves in the progressively more and more successful event process of evolution that the neo-Darwinists label “cumulative selection” more properly accrue as evidence for intelligent design than for the accidental worldview that is usually packaged along with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

You may want to ask here, “What exactly is ‘cumulative selection’ anyway?” As far as I can tell (for the neo-Darwinists say precious little about it) it is nothing much beyond an increasingly effective toolkit of biological building blocks, a toolkit that is protected by natural selection. While it is undoubtedly true that having a toolkit makes construction jobs easier, “cumulative selection” proscribes no biomechanic of how the events of creation actually occur. In other words, it doesn’t really tell us anything important. Life initially got started somehow against all odds, and with each additional step of biological construction accidentally achieved further construction became easier and easier because the modules of biological design already achieved could be recombined or mutated to generate more and more novel features and functions, and so the process of evolution went on, starting out easy as pie and getting easier as it went. The problem here is that cumulative selection working with only an accidental process as its input source cheats probability; it contradicts standard probability theory. How does an accidental process create life in the first place? We don’t know. So cumulative selection starts out begging the question that an accident can make a machine in the first place. Doesn’t each achievement of a new module of biological design by an accidental process increase the total improbability of the evolutionary process? Yes, it does, and by huge magnitudes. But proponents of cumulative selection say the opposite, the process gets easier with each step. In fact it gets much harder, just as throwing three ‘6’s in a row in a game of dice is harder than throwing only one and throwing ten in a row is nearly impossible.

Cumulative selection in effect says that if several modules of biological design can be first accidentally achieved and protected by natural selection at a cost of say 10^-77 in improbability for each module, then the cost goes down for each successive module because the new modules can be built by merely mutating the old instead of building them from scratch, which entails many fewer steps to be accidentally hit upon. So the fourth step is much easier than the first three, and the fifth easier than the fourth, and so on. While it is true that fourth module costs less in improbability than the first three, what the neo-Darwinists fail to acknowledge is that it adds to the total improbability of the first three. So, how would this computation actually go in the case of the creation of life?

It takes something like 300 genes to construct the simplest living organism as best we can currently estimate. If the first three are substantially different and reuse is minimal the improbability of accidentally creating those three genes in sequence according to standard probability theory is 10^-77 X 10^-77 X 10^-77, or 10^-231. To alter a gene at least one amino acid must be changed and potentially hundreds. A triplet of nucleotides is used to code for each amino acid. Most biological functions and structures will invoke at least ten genes, with some potentially invoking every gene in the genome. So if we generously assume that only three nucleotide changes must be made to one of the 300 existing genes to generate each of the ten modified genes requisite to the new evolutionary function, the improbability increase for the addition of the ten genes is only 4^-30, or one chance in 1,152,921,504,606,846,976. This approximately 10^-18, which must be added to the 10^-231 cost of achieving the first minimal living cell, (already trillions upon trillions of times what the resources available in the history of the universe allow to have been generated by accident under optimal assumptions). The threshold for what the universe could optimally support in terms of improbability given its known resource limitations is only 10^-150.[126] If we assume one new feature, at an improbability cost of 10^-18 is required at a minimum to generate each of 100,000,000 species, the total cost to accidental evolution becomes 10^{-1,800,000,000,231}! Yet, Monroe Strickberger assures us that cumulative selection solves the improbability problem because each step gets easier as you go! He never shows us the real numbers or what the resource limits of our universe are however. Well, now you know. Accidental evolution is a fiction of the neo-Darwinists’ imagination that could never happen within the bounds of scientific credibility.

No new process dynamic is given with “cumulative selection;” the evolutionary dynamic being proposed is still the good old “random mutations favored by natural selection.” Nonetheless, “cumulative selection” is often referred to as a new souped-up high powered version of natural selection that somehow takes the mystery out of how an accident can make a fantastically complex machine. I don’t see that the neo-Darwinists have differentiated “cumulative selection” from “natural selection” except by, once again, invoking additional logical fallacies, word games, math tricks, and selective omission of data. They must be hoping that the public will buy off on something that sounds good, though it is without substance, because it is the only alternative they can see to God and science (in their opinion) must never lower itself to admit that for crying out loud. The bottom line is that “cumulative selection” is merely a fancy label hiding a mathematical error; it is wishful thinking invoked to save a failed worldview.

This fallacy also seems to involve what one might call passing a trivial tautology off as a profound theory of science, the trivially true fallacy. A tautology is something that is circular, true merely by definition of words. Tautologies don’t really tell us anything about the world. This new concept of “cumulative selection” seems merely to be saying that once the genomes are achieved, the evolution of life becomes relatively easy. But if the genomes are the harder part of the task and self-transformational (as they now appear to be), then the statement becomes something much closer to a circular and trivial tautology: “Having an effective mechanism of evolution in the form of self-transformational genomes makes evolution a piece of cake.” While this is true, it is not telling us anything of use; it is just stating the obvious. It doesn’t solve the primary problem of how an accident can produce living creatures with self-transformational genomes in the first place. What we want science to tell us is how did nature accomplish the hard parts of evolution, not to simply remind us that it will all fall together once the hard parts are done. How did nature manage to create self-transformational genomes that would make the tree of complex life forms inevitable if the world is governed by a truly dumb and accidental event process dynamic? They don’t say, and they don’t know. They affirm an accidental process because they refuse to admit that there are any alternatives.

This is like George Foreman insisting on saying, “There is no Ali out there, so just let me have a crack at that strapping Wally Cox again.” ID authors have established intelligent design theory as a genuine scientific contender. Yet, the neo-Darwinists continue to embarrass themselves with irrational denials, resorting to logical fallacies and rhetorical debating tricks in place of objective science. They refuse to even acknowledge their real opponent in intelligent design theory. And one can see why: they are now Wally Cox in this situation; all the recent data is against them. It can do them no good to enter the ring with ID in a fair competition at this point. And so they label ID “religion” and ask the courts to exclude it from the classrooms as a matter of law (which the courts have actually done!). The empty neo-Darwinist rhetoric comprises a shameful performance unworthy of science. It overtly and covertly smacks of Marxism. In substituting propaganda for objective science, it has struck a nearly mortal blow to the integrity of modern science. Our legal system has also been compromised in this event, with the federal courts having inappropriately intervened in an academic matter, the result being an unjustifiable preclusion of the freedom of speech of intelligent design authors.

Fallacy #86: the FM (Freaky Magic), Black Box, or Name Game Fallacy

This one goes to Richard Dawkins with a bullet, that is, he’s climbing the charts for the most frequently committed fallacy. Dawkins says genes occasionally split or duplicate, so there is your source for all the new genes necessary for radically different and much more complex types of creatures. “Walla booby! Accidental evolution proved!” It’s as easy as pie. Every mutation generates new biological “information” and mutations happen all over the place all day long. But we have just seen what the probability is for an accidental dynamic getting this done sufficient to generate 100,000,000 species: 10^{-1,800,000,000,231}, and 10^-150 is the drop dead threshold. So, it is not going to be easy as pie, and an accident will never get the job done.

How are the complex configurations of the vastly different genetic sequences of the first basic design modules of life achieved to make gene splitting possible? Dawkins doesn’t say. How are the books in the library written by accident before the transpositional and developmental genomes start modifying them and rearranging them on the shelves of the living libraries? Mutation and gene splitting, naturally—don’t you read Dawkins!? Imperfect splitting, random transposition of DNA segments, errors in replication, etc. What could be more obvious? Sounds good, so it must be true, right? No. Despite the fact that it sounds good, it can’t be true because the math doesn’t work. Dawkins gives us the equivalent of finding a crumb on the floor, when our task is to feed whole armies for millennia. The universe runs out of time and physical resources before the probability for such an event can be brought within the bounds of scientific credibility.

The dynamics of gene splitting, just like the dynamics of natural selection, have never been traced through an actual event sequence to demonstrate that we could rationally expect macroevolution from a truly accidental process in the time available. Of course there is nothing truly accidental about gene splitting in the first place, for it is occurring within a living genome. Everything we know about the complexity of the genome and cell biology says macroevolution could not happen within the historical evolutionary timeframes without the process being directly or indirectly guided, at least in part. A huge bias for life must be built into nature in order to beat the odds.

The neo-Darwinist explanation of life merely assumes complex life as its starting point. This makes the neo-Darwinist explanation of life circular. It is a non-explanation. To say that genetic transpositions can sometimes produce form innovation is to prove nothing more than what we know about every other intelligently designed machine we have ever seen: the machine has certain tolerances for accidental tinkering and variation within which it can still do its job. Modifying the machine outside of those tolerances will break the machine. Modifying the machine within those tolerances can occasionally produce a functional alteration without destroying the integrity of the machine. But until we can explain the initial construction of the machine, simply noting that it has some tolerance for random variation is not to prove that an accident is the architect. It has always been a ludicrous inference to conclude that the origin and development of life in our world is accidental from the mere fact that living machines have a range of tolerance for unguided modification within which they can still work.

The real problem is that neo-Darwinists can’t explain how the machines of life got there in the first place. The neo-Darwinists have cast some light on how the genomes modify themselves and how reproductive mixing and population dynamics can generate variation from existing genomes. But ask them how we got the first living creatures and the genomes and what do you get? FM. “We don’t have to answer that question because the theory of evolution is not a theory of abiogenesis.” Of course, by giving that answer, neo-Darwinists are tacitly admitting that they have no evidence for an accidental worldview. The only accidents they can document are little ones occurring inside of living machines that produce little.

How much bonafide investigation and exposition of the core processes of the origin and development of life are neo-Darwinists really doing? They don’t encourage research into competing theories; they have no biomechanic of evolution, no biomechanical pathways between creatures that an accidental process could navigate; and they only study the part of the process that occurs after the hard parts are done. Then they do little more than throw out two magic words: “spontaneous mutations” and “natural selection.” But without a traceable event process between the creatures on the tree of life or a biomechanical pathway between them to demonstrate that accidental evolution is possible, they are just words. In the face of the impassable probability barriers we have seen to be involved, they would have to be magic words indeed.

We have seen millions of truly accidental mutations in the lab, that is, externally induced toxic injuries. These kinds of mutations have never produced biologically viable major form innovations. They just break things. A reversion or regression of a gene to a viable but less advanced form is theoretically possible from such mutations, and may rarely occur, but they only move the system backwards to a more primitive design. A few simple things might show up, like color or overall size change, but little else. Current descriptions of cellular and genetic systems indicate that multiple changes across many genes are necessary to produce viable changes to biological functions, and, in all but the simplest cases, to biological structure. This explains why no constructive mutations of a type and on a scale sufficient to produce evolution at the rate of the Cambrian explosion has been evinced in the research data for truly accidental mutations.

Here again math is the problem. If single mutations can’t produce change, the improbability cost goes up because achieving multiple complimentary mutations at the same time is much less probable. But that high cost accrues to achieve only one feature for one creature. Again, as in rolling dice at the gaming table, the chances of doing this twice in a row by accident are not just double; the cost of achieving one must be multiplied by the cost of achieving the other. Rolling two ‘6’s in a row is not one chance in 12 but one chance in 36; three ‘6’s in a row occurs only once in 216 tries, etc. Yes, the initial cost of creating an entire gene from scratch has come down due to reuse of gene content, but the cost of making multiple modifications to achieve one new feature must be multiplied by the cost of hitting upon the correct set of mutations for the next, and the next, and so on. With 100,000,000 species and genomes ranging into many thousands of genes for each species this quickly adds up to more than the universe can afford, as we have seen, even with well over 99% reuse.

Nonetheless, Dawkins is adamant. It just happens by gene splitting, and he sees nothing in such a process that contradicts his atheistic/materialistic accidental model of our world. But he can’t have it both ways at the same time. If gene splitting is to be allowed to be the cause of evolution the accidental worldview must go because gene splitting is visibly not an instance of a truly accidental process, occurring as it does inside of complex living systems. If we ignore that and merely assume it to be accidental anyway, probability theory tells us it could never happen: there is insufficient time and physical resources in the history of the universe to allow an accidental process to achieve life.

The neo-Darwinist tactic of first completely ignoring abiogenesis and then linguistically oversimplifying evolution qualifies the theory for the black box fallacy (in addition to free lunch): mutations go in one end; life comes out the other, more mutations are sprinkled in liberally, natural selection picks the best of the best, and “Don’t worry about our affirming the improbable over the probable. It’s OK ’cause we’re the experts.” “Walla Booby! Accidental evolution she is proved.” FM! There is only one problem. There is not a single fact of biology, microbiology, genetics, paleontology, physics or mathematics that argues that an accident has done this, and standard probability theory (used everywhere else in science) says the possibility of it happening is so infinitesimally small as to be scientifically dismissible.

Fallacy #87: Reductionism

In science at least, physical reductionism competes strongly with the other fallacies for the title, “Mother of All Fallacies.” It involves two other fallacies with which we are already familiar, begging the question and hidden premise, and it generally leads out into a circular form of reasoning. Reductionism is the school of thought that asserts that all phenomena reduce to nothing more than a set of physical correlates.[127] The great physicist, and as it turns out, a competent philosopher, Werner Heisenberg, explains that reductionism sprang from an over-exuberance for natural science created by its startling success in technological applications and the practical convenience of testability.

One was not so much interested in nature as it is; one rather asked what one could do with it. Therefore, natural science turned into technical science; every advancement of knowledge was connected with the question as to what practical use could be derived from it. This was true not only in physics; in chemistry and biology the attitude was essentially the same, and the success of the new methods in medicine or in agriculture contributed essentially to the propagation of the new tendencies.

In this way, finally, the nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people…. [T]his frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world…[128]

Reductionists refuse to consider that there might be a soul that inhabits the body. In their view, the driver reduces to the car, and if a car is one type of entity, the driver must be of a similar type. This all begs the question of dualism, while offering no proof whatsoever. The antiquated and simplistic arguments for reductionism are all hasty conclusions drawn from bad logic. For example, consider what Robert M. Young says in his article, “Psychology in the 19^th Century Evolutionary Debate.”

Twenty-five years later, when the tide had turned, and it was demonstrated by experiment that movements which had hitherto been attributed to free will could be produced by localized electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, these findings might have been taken up by the evolutionists and determinists. They might have told the general public that thought and action were entirely functions of brain centers and that free will was thereby proven to be a chimera.[129]

The bad logic here should be obvious. Just because a car thief, factory engineer, or mechanic can reach beneath the hood to short circuit the electrical ignition of a car doesn’t mean there is no driver, who can perform the same operation more effectively with his or her own key. Even in the referenced experiments there occurred the freely willed decision of the scientist conduct the experiment, to consider it a moral thing to do, to apply the electrical stimulation to the cerebral cortex that produced the desired movement in the experimental test subject, etc. If all our behaviors were automatically determined, science itself would lose its value as a genuine tool of discovery. Surely, if a rich relative had showed up in the laboratory in mid experiment offering millions of dollars to remove the subject from the study and replace them with another volunteer, the study manager would have spent some time freely deliberating what to do. Reductionists irrationally deny their own direct experience of life. In doing that, they are in a sense a living contradiction. It is not just theologians and philosophers who indict such foolishness, but some of our most notable scientists. Among these one will find the great physicist Werner Heisenberg, famous German psychologist Carl Jung, American philosopher Charles Peirce, and English biologist St. George Mivart, a contemporary and intellectual sparring partner of Charles Darwin.[130] Perhaps surprisingly to some, even the great evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson held this view:

Nevertheless, I take it as now self-evident, requiring no further discussion, that evolution and true religion are compatible. It is also sufficiently clear that science, alone, does not reach all truths, plumb all mysteries, or exhaust all values and that the place and need for true religion are very much with us.[131]

Only in sleepwalking, physical or chemical injuries, organic illnesses, and lab experiments that circumvent nerve signals from the brain, is free will temporarily removed from the process of causing physical movements (other than autonomic reflexes). While somnambulism can be hard to detect and remains largely a mystery to science to this day, both scientists and laymen readily see the difference between movements caused by a healthy and an injured system, and everyone except the reductionists assume that the person is in control when in the healthy state. However, the mere fact that one can automate the movements of a car in robotic fashion to follow a preset pattern of movement does not prove that the humans who drive cars at other times when the robotic program is missing or disabled are not introducing free will into the process of directing the actions of those cars. Similarly, the mere fact that sleepwalking is sometimes possible doesn’t prove that consciously controlled walking is impossible (pedestrian behavior downtown occasionally threatens to prove it, however).

For the reductionist, our love for our children reduces to a set of neurons firing in our brain. Our commitment to the constitutional right to life reduces to an abstraction of a set of behavioral patterns, which in turn reduce to a set of neurons in the brain. Belief in God reduces to fear of death or fear of the dark, and so on. Beyond the fact that reductionism reduces life to a shallow and meaningless robotic existence, there is simply no reason to make these reductions. We know that a constitutional right is more than a statistical curve of behavioral preferences. Even if we could ever identify such a complex correlation, placing electrodes into the proper cross section of a glob of gooey gray matter, making it squirm on a lab table will never produce something one can point at and say “Now that’s some real family loyalty on table #1! and “That’s a superb example of patriotism squirming around over there on #2.” Thus, we see the loony logic of reductionism.

Pius reductionists that they are, they may well add that by messing with my brain chemistry they can duplicate my joy at glorious beauty and resurgent love. To which I reply, doubtless you can, but if that is the best you can do, you are intellectually bankrupt.[132]

As prolific best-selling author and noted sociologist Andrew Greeley knowledgably implies in closing his contribution to the symposium on Neo-Darwinism and Its Discontents, “The Return of the Village Atheists,” reductionism just isn’t so. With reductionism, nothing is right or wrong, only right or left. There is nothing to ground morality. Reductionism bankrupts human experience, a trick Jung, Mivart, Simpson, and Heisenberg refused to endorse, as did the great American philosopher and founder of the school of Pragmatism, Charles Peirce:

By experience must be understood the entire mental product. Some psychologists whom I hold in respect will stop me here to say that, while they admit that experience is more than mere sensation, they cannot extend it to the whole mental product, since that would include hallucinations, delusions, superstitious imaginations and fallacies of all kinds; and that they would limit experience to sense-perceptions. But I reply that my statement is the logical one. Hallucinations, delusions, superstitious imaginations, and fallacies of all kinds are experiences, but experiences misunderstood; while to say that all our knowledge relates merely to sense-perception is to say that we can know nothing—not even mistakenly—about higher matters, as honour, aspirations, and love.[133]

In the same symposium with Greeley, Peter Augustine Lawler goes on to equate reductionism with personal, moral, and cultural nihilism. And its true; reductionism removes everything of value from life including human dignity.[134] Love, morality, friendship, faith in God, self-awareness, even consciousness itself—the reality of absolutely all mental experience—all goes away. Reductionists may say, no, those realities are still there, but they emerge from the purely physical; they are not of mental or spiritual substance. What it means for something to mysteriously “emerge” in this way from something else has yet to be made clear, another black box full of FM.

What is left for humanity?…...“I robot.” As Jung, Heisenberg and Peirce taught us, a fully robotic physical reductionist concept of human life simply does not match our much more rich direct experience. We have no reason whatsoever to throw out what we know of ourselves from direct experience in favor of a Marxism-spawned neurosis masquerading as a theory of nature geared towards nothing more meaningful than optimizing physical control over nature and individual and social behavior. As the wizened Air Force general says in the classic movie War Games, the capability of human beings exceeds that of mere “silicone diodes.”

Atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg agrees with the “general.” Though he never saw the movie, his work on the atom bomb was certainly not unrelated.

Coming back now to the contributions of modern physics, one may say that the most important change brought about by its results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century…. The idea of the reality of matter had probably been the strongest part in that rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century, and this idea had at least to be modified in connection with the new experience [of quantum physics]…. But the scientific extrapolation of these concepts into the smallest parts of matter could not be done in the simple way suggested by classical physics, though it had erroneously determined the general outlook on the problem of matter.

These new results had first of all to be considered as a serious warning against the somewhat forced application of scientific concepts in domains where they did not belong…. [O]ne of the most important features of the development and the analysis of modern physics is the experience that the concepts of natural language, vaguely defined as they are, seem to be more stable in the expansion of knowledge than the precise terms of scientific language, derived as an idealization from only limited groups of phenomena. This is in fact not surprising since the concepts of natural language are formed by the immediate connection with reality.

Keeping in mind the intrinsic stability of the concepts of natural language in the process of scientific development, one sees that—after the experience of modern physics—our attitude toward concepts like mind or the human soul or life or God will be different from that of the nineteenth century, because these concepts belong to the natural language and have therefore immediate connection with reality. [T]he existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word “understanding.” We know that any understanding must be based finally upon the natural language because it is only there that we can be certain to touch reality…[135]

Here we find Heisenberg precisely in agreement with both Jung and Peirce in the affirmation that, although our experience of moral values, artistic beauty and meaning, emotional bonds and commitments, and religious experience of God are not infallible, they do represent a genuine reality to which artificially limited empiric scientific models cannot reach. Our direct experience of a larger reality shows in everyday language in our terms for God, spirit, soul, love, family, faith, loyalty, patriotism, good and evil, life and death, etc. Over the millenniums humanity has invented terms in language for the real things in our direct experience. Direct experience is legitimate and trustworthy even when laboratory science cannot prove those things exist by experimental test. Thus, reductionism is an invalid enterprise, an attempt to bankrupt humanity, to deprive us of the most meaningful things in life for the single insidious purpose of giving the leaders of society more physical control over the individual and group behavior of its citizens.

Fallacy #88: Starting an explanation in the middle of the process

As the reader is by now redundantly aware, Darwinian evolution does not address the origin of life or the origin of the genomes. It begins its theoretical model of evolutionary dynamics only after the genomes are substantially complete. Even after cheating so much as to begin the explanation of life with the genomes already in place, Darwinian evolution cannot demonstrate the mechanics of how one radically different creature actually evolved from another. Once again, they merely assume that their models of population genetics can produce macroevolution; they can’t demonstrate that they produce macroevolution.

Darwinian theory has always begun its explanation in the middle of the process and skipped all of what are now known to be the hard parts.[136] If a genuine explanation is what we are after, we are not even entitled to start with proteins as a given, let alone entire genomes. Proteins are not just strings of amino acids; they are ultra-complex three dimensionally folded compositions of from 100 to 10,000 amino acids. Those folds bear crucial biological information, and enormous quantities of it.

A single amino acid has roughly 43 points of biological relevance. When folded in three dimensions, a single protein has thousands of known points of biological relevance, and potentially trillions. The sheer theoretical information bearing capacity of proteins goes thousands of times beyond the known biological relevance. Further research could reveal much more of relevance than is presently known. Neo-Darwinists dismiss all this casually as if there is simply nothing to it. “One simply shakes a few proteins in the fractal can…so… and Walla Booby, evolution she is proved!” Nonsense. One cannot start an explanation in the middle of a process and then authoritatively dismiss competing theories that honestly try to address the first half and the more difficult parts.

Fallacy #89: Private language

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

Fallacies are inevitably encountered while trying to cheat complexity; it can’t be done. If the mechanism is too complex for an accident to achieve it, it won’t be achieved in an accidental world by any means unless and until intelligent guidance is added to the process, regardless of the input of natural selection. In an accidental world natural selection never gets a chance to vote on the machine components required to build living systems because an accident cannot build them.

Dawkins approach also involves the fallacy of equivocation or bait and switch. This is because the model fails to accurately model the realities of the biological world. His model seems to offer the reader a false third alternative to the normal two: an accidental worldview without God or intelligent design, and a purposive worldview with God or intelligent design. This is a trick all to convenient to his embattled theory; an attempt to avoid fatal objections without making substantive changes. The trick, however, fails along with his model. There is no third alternative to chance or purpose once machines cross a certain threshold of complexity. That threshold lies far below the complexity of living creatures down near the complexity level of a rope swing that the wind can blow into motion or a teeter-totter that driftwood might build on a rock in a stream.

Fallacies #90: Bait and switch, #91: Tagging belief onto demonstration, #92: Leaving the back door open (failure to commit, failure to risk refutation), and #93: Chaining fallacies to breach the casual reader’s span of cognition

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

The back door fallacy concerns dodging accountability, that is, leaving oneself a way out. Camazine et al. can only be held accountable for asserting that natural selection will still select the fittest organism behavior, a perfectly safe claim that is true by the mere definition of words. However, they clearly suggest to the reader that they are defending neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as being extendable to the realm of self-organizing (dead) biotic structures. They don’t say this outright, they merely invite the reader to understand it, again leaving the back door open to a denial via the use of innuendo. Again, I don’t accuse them of intentional deceit, but of having a poor quality argument that doesn’t take any real risk of refutation. However, in saying that natural selection has not been minimized by self-organization in biology they have to argue that natural selection constructs the self-organizational system itself over time. Otherwise the essential construction of biological machines relentlessly proceeds by self-organization at the molecular level regardless of what natural selection is doing to preserve or veto a given creature or biological feature. In other words, natural selection doesn’t really help construct the machines; it only votes for its favorite machines after they are complete. Thus, natural selection cannot really empower an accidental world and Dawkins’ “cumulative selection” is shown to be an empty concept, not a true alternative to chance or purpose.

Camazine et al. commit the fallacy of tagging belief onto demonstration (or at least innuendo) by saying that “natural selection is intimately linked to self-organization, since it molds the rules of interaction among the components of a living system.”[137] The authors seem to suggest to the reader that the molecular self-organizational process can at least partially builds cells with nothing more than the aid of natural selection (and that the genomes have been similarly constructed). No capability of this magnitude has in fact been demonstrated by science for natural selection. What these authors have done is give evidence for natural selection molding some aspects of insect behavior. They merely hold the belief that natural selection assists at other levels of biological systems, such as cell construction. Their study does not demonstrate that the larger claim for natural selection aiding biological system construction is true, and nothing else that science has done to date demonstrates it either.

If Camazine et al. wish to present their argument as a genuine defense of orthodox evolution they must defend all of it, not just the easy parts. They never mention the claim of an accidental process, but only natural selection. Nonetheless, they claim to have successfully defended orthodox neo-Darwinian theory, which espouses the accidental tenet. Thus, they leave the back door open to bail out if someone successfully challenges the accidental thesis in orthodox Darwinism, which they say they are otherwise defending. By using such a tactic, they stand to gain political ground for orthodoxy while risking no refutation of what they have actually said. In reality, what Camazine et al. are doing is defending only the basic evolution part of orthodox neo-Darwinism. Even there they are only demonstrating a partial defense in a limited context, namely insect behavior, not system construction. In propaganda value, however, they get a free ride by indirectly influencing readers to uncritically accept their conclusion that the full theory of accidental evolution which has to do with system construction is somehow supported by their rigorous peer-reviewed study on insect behavior. There is no logical connection between insect behavior and biological system construction, thus, yet another non sequitur.

The Camazine argument from insect behavior speaks not at all to molecular selection and self-organization at the molecular level, which is an entirely different kind of process. It is molecular self-organization that is the process responsible for constructing the cell and the basic structures of the genome (short of configuring the complex information content). The authors present no evidence for the claim that natural selection and accident have built the self-organizational system that operates at the molecular level. To suggest this is purely an argument from authority based upon the blind faith of materialists in an accidental worldview. As in the case of Strickberger and Dawkins, this amounts to one big claim jump in citing a process clearly evincing design as a demonstration of what accident can do. It is a scandal that peer reviewed journals allows such logical fallacies to be published without censure. Using this fallacy as a debating trick, neo-Darwinists have for the past few years been co-opting the bias for life resident in nature, which is proper evidence for intelligent design, rhetorically spinning self-organization in favor of an accidental origin of life.

Here, within the context of self-organization, we see a little more clearly into what Monroe Strickberger and Richard Dawkins have claimed in asserting that nature increasingly achieves a system ever more and more conducive to building the machines of life (cumulative selection). They are claiming that accident and natural selection can build over time such self-organizing systems and structures. However, when we look close at what is actually occurring in self-organization at the molecular level, for example at protein folding and cellular nanosystems, we see that these critical subcomponents of life are being self-organized by natural law and prebiological information hard coded into physics and chemistry, not natural selection. In other words, the bias for life is already there, resident at different points in natural law, natural process and informed physical matter. It appears that life is going to self-organize to roughly the same extent regardless of the input of natural selection. But even if further research would show natural selection is key to the self-organization of life (this has not been done to date), to have our world built in such a way as to favor the continuance of component systems essential to constructing life is just another way of demonstrating that there is a bias for life built into our world. Nothing precludes an intelligent designer from taking natural selection into account and integrating it into the creative process.

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

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

If natural selection in fact favors the self-organization of life then it is because natural laws and informed matter and energy issued by the Big Bang are so constructed to produce that bias. Given the recent revelations of molecular selection, self-organization at the molecular level, and predetermined biological forms specified in natural law, the role of natural selection seems to have been minimized well beyond the role stipulated by the orthodox neo-Darwinian model.

Fallacy #94: The Shell Game Fallacy, AKA Where’s Waldo?

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

Fallacies #95: Deep ignorance vs. It’s a fact, not a theory!

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

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

Where are we today in the analysis of the origins of species? Our viewpoint differs from Darwin’s of over 100 years ago in that (1) we now know a great deal about the genetics of variation; (2) we now view species as reproductively isolated communities; and (3) we have a clearer view of the action of selection and other factors that shape the adaptations of natural populations. But, as we shall see, we are still very poorly informed as to just what occurs at that critical time when a new gene pool emerges.[138]

Even now in 2010 as I sit drafting this book, science has no real idea of what happens to produce one substantially different creature from another. Given this, doesn’t it comport more with intellectual integrity to admit that evolution is a theory, not an irrefutable fact as Darwinists insist? Admittedly, based upon the sequence of the appearance of creatures in the fossil record and the great amount of genetic, functional and structural similarities among creatures something very much like evolution has occurred, or at least something suggesting evolution. But do we know for certain that it was evolution? No, not really, not evolution in the sense of a fully unguided and spontaneous sequence of inheritances with accidental variations. We don’t know this for certain because we don’t know how natural processes could have spontaneously achieved any of the truly hard parts: the origin of life from chemicals (abiogenesis), configuration of the genomes, achievement of a translation system for the genome, achievement of irreducible complexity in closely interactive multipart systems, achievement of immensely complex systems like the brain, achievement of nonreducible systems of abstract thought, feeling, and moral values, speciation of one radically different type of creature from another. We don’t know how any of this could have been done in the time intervals established in the historical record.

Fallacy #96: Falsely restricting the alternatives and (#60 again) God must be a materialist

Unjustifiably restricting the alternatives is essentially a variation of the false dilemma fallacy, but at this point, who’s counting? Writing in 1964, in the first chapter of This View of Life, evolutionist G. G. Simpson artificially restricts credible alternatives to the classic model of Darwinian evolution to only two categories: vitalism and finalism. Both of these ancient schools of thought are discredited relics fully out of step with modern theology and philosophy. In other words they are not the strongest contenders against Darwinian evolution at all, contrary to what Simpson suggests. What they are, are easy targets. Simplistic and naïve, they are easy to defeat straw men. After first laying out the evolutionary model in terms of spontaneous mutations quality checked by natural selection, Simpson says this.

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

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

The sort of testable evidence that would suggest vitalism or finalism would be the steady progression of life, and of each of its evolving lineages, toward a final and transcendentally worthy goal. That is not, in fact, what the known record of life’s history shows. There is no clear overall progression. Organisms diversify into literally millions of species, then the vast majority of those species perish and other millions take their places for an eon until they, too, are replaced. If that is a foreordained plan, it is an oddly ineffective one…They evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.[139] (My emphasis)

All of the arguments against a divine plan or a purposive process of evolution given by Simpson are focused on the physical aspects of life. This is not surprising for a scientist, but it does invalidate Simpson’s argument that there is no transcendental goal. Why is it reasonable to think that God’s transcendental goals would be physical goals at all, not spiritual—may we safely assume that God is a materialist? Please…. The Christian faith, which Simpson insults with all the other religions by calling it the “higher superstition,” clearly stipulates that the transcendental goal is not physical paradise on this Earth. Rather, the transcendental goal is the purification of souls that have rebelled in sin, the satisfaction of temporal justice, and the attainment of the spiritual paradise that follows life on Earth. The purpose of life on Earth is to be an intermediate facilitation of this final spiritual goal. (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 NAB) Survival through adaptation could simply be God’s goal for his intermediate creation, while the transcendental goal is something far different. Simpson fully ignores the strength of the much more robust orthodox Christian/Catholic conceptual framework, addressing only the two antiquated straw men of vitalism and finalism.

And notice that Simpson only argued against “metaphysical intervention in the course of evolution;” (my emphasis) he doesn’t argue against God as the ultimate source of the natural laws and configurations of matter that brought life about. He only claims that the natural laws and configuration of matter were sufficient to create life without subsequent intervention; he doesn’t rule out God as the source of those laws and configurations. If the natural laws and configuration of matter were responsible for the creation of life, as opposed to the purely accidental blundering about assisted only by natural selection that Dawkins and company assert, there is plenty of room for intelligent design at the source.

So, in this passage what did Simpson really achieve? He argued against two ancient and naïve hypotheses about life, while allowing that a version of modern ID theory could be true, the non-interventionist model that posits the requisite design information being supplied at the beginning through natural law and the initial configuration of matter and energy.

Modern evolutionists often refer back to Simpson as already having won their battle against ID theory; but he never argued against modern ID theory, having never seen it. What he did do was expressly affirm a scenario very much like intelligent design, with the information requisite to the origin of life supplied at the beginning via unknown sources.

Simpson saw clear purpose in nature but was unwilling to further characterize what kind of purpose it was. Having ruled out transcendental goals in nature (by committing the fallacy of perfectionism), he would seem to have felt that God must not be the source of the purpose in nature. Yet, in the Terry Lectures, Simpson argued that “true religion” and science were fully compatible. Go figure.[140]

What concept of God did Simpson have, if any? Einstein’s, where God was the universe? Darwin’s where God started things off but did not further intervene? A little of both, perhaps? I don’t know. But in referring back to Simpson as having given the last word on the subject via a consummate and irrevocable refutation of God and intelligent design as the driving force of evolution, neo-Darwinists commit the shell game fallacy. They exaggerate well beyond Simpson’s actual position. Simpson clearly achieved no such grand success for their side because his description of life originating from natural law and preconfigurations of matter precisely mirrors one method that ID could have been indirectly responsible for the creation of life.

Fallacy #97: Misidentification of Terms. “Lack of information” = “random,” and “random” = “accidental;” or “natural” = “spontaneous,” and “spontaneous” = “accidental”

None of these five terms/phrases mean the same thing, yet neo-Darwinian writing frequently invites us to confuse them in order to lead us to the accidental worldview they would prefer us to have. When science has insufficient information to explain the result in a physical process they may at times elect to call an event “random” by default, meaning they can’t show any direct correlations with other events or demonstrate any causal connections. If we, the public, get confused and take “random” to mean “accidental” so be it. This kind of misunderstanding easily occurs because the concern of mainstream science is to show the practical causes of things, not to establish or refute intelligent design. “Random” for science doesn’t mean “accidental;” it means the scientific investigator is presently unable to establish a statistical correlation between the event he or she is calling “random” and some other type of event that might be involved in a demonstrable chain of causation.

The reader may (properly) object that “Well, if a team of foreign scientists found the space shuttle lying about somewhere in a foreign country that had never heard of such things they would not consider it a “random” creation overall, even while temporarily remaining in the dark about how each of the subsystems functioned.” That is quite true. The overall system could be seen at a glance to be nonrandom. That is why this bogus “lack of information = random” inference is a fallacy in the context of the larger question of the accidental or purposive dynamic of evolutionary processes. Given our culture’s visible concern over the debate about the relationship between God and science, the decision to redefine “random” in this technical way is at best a poor choice of words.

Even in the old days when the specific workings of various mutational subprocesses within the genomes were initially unknown (they are still not fully known) we could see that we had a “space shuttle” on our hands in the complex designs of living systems. Yes, investigators had to withhold the term “nonrandom” from the specific processes of the genomes until further information was forthcoming. But it was never proper to call the overall system of the genomes, and the evolution-producing mutations they engendered, “random” in the common vernacular sense of the word, meaning accidental. Doing so simply misled the public into thinking that life was one big accident, and that is not what the evidence suggests at all.

To call a process accidental merely because it is natural or spontaneous is another logical fallacy. If we see cell phones, IPODs, Rolex watches, or digital cameras springing out of the branches of a tree we know something is fishy; it must be a publicity stunt. We know that, if that “tree” is really producing those devices spontaneously it is no accident. In some ways proteins alone are the equivalent of IPODS in complexity; their interactions cannot be tracked in real time by our fastest computers. Our brains similarly outperform computers in many ways. In the event of evolution, millions of hugely complex machines have been produced. We actually have an event analogous to the discovery of a tree full of IPODs or cell phones. Thus, the “natural” occurrence of complex biological machines on the tree of life does not prove their accidental production, notwithstanding the fact that we see a few nuts and bolts springing out of spontaneous chemical interactions from time to time. More likely, God is pulling a publicity stunt.☺ What else could the machines of life be labeled by science but “natural” or “spontaneous” when scientists immediately ignore and dismiss without study any real evidence for intelligent design or the supernatural when they find it?

Fallacy #98: The Catholic Church embraces evolution; therefore, it endorses neo-Darwinian evolution (Not true!)

In the intro I remarked that it has been an exciting couple of decades in science with the emergence of a startling volume of evidence for intelligent design theory. You may be thinking, “What’s so exciting?” “I’m a Catholic; why should I care? Evolution—smevolution; it’s all the same to me.”[141] Although scientists confidently inform our school boards and federal courts that there has never been a conflict between God and “evolution” (the Catholic position), this is not what the neo-Darwinists tell our students in college textbooks. It is not what they tell the public in popular books on evolution.

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

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

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

As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. They are therefore unable to serve as the basis for the dignity of the human person.[142]

Thus, Pope John Paul II emphasized the importance of distinguishing the different versions of evolutionary theory. Darwinists, however, seldom bother with such niceties. The confusion of different versions of evolution works to their advantage as they often (and mistakenly) remind the public that the Catholic Church endorses “evolution,” and the public can only assume they mean their own form of the theory. This is not so. At rock bottom, the Catholic position is not even an endorsement of evolution as such, but only an endorsement of science generally, science being our only means to discover the mechanics of creation, and the result is trustworthy only when science is properly performed. None of the theological tenets of the Church require an endorsement either of evolution or of any alternative view, but only the affirmation that the Bible is not a science book. In the Catholic view, the Bible says that God made the world and its life forms; it does not say how he made them.

As Cardinal, Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn explains in his new book, Chance or Purpose, when scientists deign to step outside science’s appropriate bounds and claim that there is no God they have entered the realm of metaphysics and ideology. At this point, they have left their scientific credentials behind and are doing politics and personal philosophy, not science. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theorists have historically committed this error in tagging materialism and an accidental worldview onto basic evolutionary theory. This puts them into conflict with the Church. It is fully inappropriate for any neo-Darwinist to inform the public that the Catholic Church embraces evolution, for the Church does not embrace their form of evolutionary theory.

It obviously follows from this that, to avoid serious error, one must always be careful to distinguish between basic evolution, accidental/atheistic evolution (the neo-Darwinian form), and the God-compatible versions of Synthetic Theory.[143] There are many other variants of the theory of evolution: accidental drift, punctuated equilibrium, orthogenesis (directed evolution), naïve mutationism, and so on. A person of faith must inquire as to what position each variant takes on the question of God and intelligent design before supporting it.

If the versions of evolution opposed to the faith were obscure and infrequently held views, our concern here would be slight. The Church does not wish to impede freedom of thought, but rather to preserve both genuine scientific truth and the truths of the faith, which are held never to conflict.[144] Unfortunately, the primary version of evolutionary theory that is being taught in our schools and colleges, neo-Darwinian evolution, has the very flaws that make it incompatible with the Christian faith: materialism and the denial of intelligent design/cosmic purpose! People of faith, therefore, cannot simply speak of evolution as if it were one single homogenous theory, as the neo-Darwinists often do. We must distinguish the variants to preserve clarity and integrity regarding the relationship of God and science. A current Vatican document, entitled “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God,” makes this clear, further developing the position statement made by Pope John Paul II in his 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy. Here the problem is made explicit: neo-Darwinian evolution does conflict with the Christian faith.

In continuity with previous twentieth century papal teaching on evolution (especially Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis ), the Holy Father’s message acknowledges that there are “several theories of evolution” that are “materialist, reductionist and spiritualist” and thus incompatible with the Catholic faith. It follows that the message of Pope John Paul II cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.[145] (My emphasis)

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

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

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

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.[146]

As some who have followed this issue know, the “flak” came from Father George V. Coyne, a priest and scientist who was Director of the Vatican Observatory until August 2006. Coyne sharply criticized Cardinal Schönborn’s editorial. Father Coyne, however, was speaking as an individual scientist, not as the Pope’s spokesman. The Vatican Observatory is an advisory body to the Vatican on scientific matters; it does not hold a position of ecclesial authority in the Church. In addition, Father Coyne is an astronomer, not an evolutionist. Those who think Father Coyne’s sharp criticisms represent an admonishment of Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn by the Vatican are much mistaken. Cardinal Schönborn is as high above Father Coyne as he can be in the Church without being pope. A former student of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Schönborn, with a group of the pope’s other former students, regularly meets with the pope to confer on evolution and other issues. He has, in fact, written the foreword to their new book that chronicles the latest conference (2006) at Castel Gandolfo, entitled Creation and Evolution.[147]

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

Dr. Sidney Fox, Director of The Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami, 1964-1989, tells us in his book The Emergence of Life, that most scientists believed the events of physics and biology to be truly accidental until about 1965. This is when substantial dissent first arose to the accidental worldview originally hypothesized by Charles Darwin, and later encouraged by physicists like Niels Bohr under the auspices of indeterminacy theory in particle physics (quantum mechanics). Despite the fact that science itself is impossible in a fully accidental world,[148] as is natural law and any consistent structure in physical objects, many scientists early on fell in with the accidental school of thought. Some, like famous evolutionist Ernst Mayr, asserted that science can rule out cosmic purpose in nature with full confidence.

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

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

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

[Strickberger] He [Darwin] thus replaced what many had seen as an understandable view of nature—that is, the creativity of a human like God—by the most heretical concepts of all, randomness and uncertainty...Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries, by a deeper understanding of the sources of human emotional needs, and by the recognition that ethics and morality can change among different societies and that acceptance of such values need not depend upon religion...The roots of religious beliefs lie in human attempts to appeal to and control the forces of nature...From these roots arose the concept of God and soul, both of which were supposed to be eternal and immaterial.[149]

No purposeful goal, no goal oriented plan, chaotic, purely accidental. The lack of purpose explicitly acknowledged in this kind of formulation of evolutionary theory straightforwardly eliminates the possibility of God or an intelligent designer of life. Strickberger relegates religion to a mere psychological manifestation having no basis in fact, which is fully incompatible with the Christian faith. The important thing to keep in mind is that absolutely none of this is scientifically defensible. These are merely assertions of personal philosophical preference. The comments about lack of direction or purpose only pertain to the processes of life, not the origin of life, and recent data call into question whether even that much is true.

Monroe Strickberger is a prominent evolution textbook author, as is Douglas Futuyma and Mark Ridley. Ridley, thankfully, takes a more rational view, as do many other scientists, allowing for the compatibility of God and science. Strickberger is less direct and less explicit in denying cosmic purpose than evolutionists like Ernst Mayr, Peters, Gutmann, and Futuyma. However, he asserts a watered-down version of scientific materialism, affirming the Freudian view of religion as a mere psychological or sociological phenomenon. He also appears to affirm moral relativism, and claims that religious dogma has been undermined by naturalistic explanations of its mysteries. Clearly Monroe Strickberger is disqualified by Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn’s criterion here, for in the last sentence he goes so far as to imply that science has disproved the eternal and immaterial nature of the soul. For crying out loud! (as my dear mother used to say)[150] How in the world would science ever make a case that anything imperceptible by empiric means was disproved by physical data? The existence of embedded intelligence in a specific physical system or object might be rule in or ruled out based upon criteria for organization of physical systems and arrangement of physical information. But the basic question of the plain existence of an immaterial correspondent to the body/mind of a human being (the soul), an entity that entails no different arrangement of the physical components of life whether it does or does not exist, cannot be answered by recourse to physical data. It would clearly invoke a contradiction to even try.

The eternal attribute of the soul is as much a problem for science as the immateriality, for not only is there is no means for science to determine length of duration of something physically imperceptible, but how long does it take to measure the eternal and then report back that it has been verified or refuted? For science to say that the soul is not eternal, it must first admit that there is a soul, and then establish a means to monitor its duration. Science has done neither of these things. Thus, there is no scientific case that God or the soul are not eternal and immaterial, and there can be none. This tactic by Strickberger is just another way of begging the question of dualism by secretly assuming materialism at the beginning of the discussion. Nothing in what science has done in its history argues against the soul in any way, though much of the experience of open-minded psychologists and psychiatrists argue for the reality of the soul. While the roots of religion for Cro-Magnon man may lie in attempts to appeal to and control nature, there is no psychological, sociological, or anthropological evidence that this is true for modern man, with exception of the pagan “religions” and systems such as Wicca, astrology, and alchemy. Certainly, nothing in Christianity is about controlling nature. A core teaching of Christianity is that we must detach ourselves from an unhealthy preoccupation with things physical and focus on developing spiritual virtues personal holiness.

Any competent priest, theologian or philosopher (and most scientists) will tell you that no naturalistic explanation of the true mysteries of the faith has been achieved. Indeed, absolutely all of the physical universe owes its beginnings to an admittedly unnatural mystery: the Big Bang event.[151] If all of the world owes its beginnings to an unnatural event, how can any of science’s explanations be called purely natural? How, as Strickberger claims, did Darwin make theological explanations of life superfluous when absolutely all physical processes owe their origin to an unnatural miracle-like event that remains a complete mystery to science? The answer: Darwin didn’t make theological explanations “of life” superfluous, and Strickberger doesn’t actually say that he did. Strickberger’s comments only pertain to “life processes,” in this context, meaning the specific steps of the process of evolution, not the origin of life. Science has never proved God superfluous to the larger explanation of the origin of life and our world, they have only demonstrated that God doesn’t appear to be micromanaging the process of life’s development regarding the details.

Although theological explanations are not scientific by definition, and therefore, as Futuyma suggests, they are superfluous to the mechanics of biology, that does not make them superfluous to explanation of the larger questions of origins and the richer truths of human experience. For nonscientific explanation to be totally superfluous to human concerns, science would have had to have satisfactorily explained everything, including, and especially origins, the origin of life and the origin of the universe, as well as human emotional, moral and artistic experience. But these are precisely the things science cannot explain.

As we saw in the discussion of reductionism, all of these things are arguably of greater significance to human existence than counting atoms, reconfiguring toxic chemicals, tinkering with already viable genetic systems before we fully understand them, and describing nature’s full inventory of seashells, insects, and mammals. In other words, they are more important than science. Science is good, but it is not everything. Science has its place, and an honored one it is. However, science can be abused and raised beyond its proper place of service, made into a religion instead of a practical method of discovery.

Darwin, himself, admitted that neither he nor science had an explanation as to the ultimate origins of life, and he felt it was unlikely that science would ever discern the ultimate origin of things. As far as his scientific writings went, Darwin never intended to ontologically replace God with anything; he acknowledged that God was the origin of the initial breath of life that got evolution going. True, Darwin didn’t see any indications that God was intervening to direct the individual steps of evolution after the ball had once been set in motion, but he did see God as the creator of the ball. Darwin’s “replacement” of God is therefore a limited epistemological replacement, not a full ontological one. In other words, we don’t need God to explain why a toad turned into a camel, but we do need him to explain life as a whole. Now, 150 years later, the toad-to-camel transition appears much more complex. We can see many signs of directional control in the process of genome evolution that Darwin could not see. He had to work minus the aid of the electron microscope and the modern sciences of genetics and microbiology.

I would go so far as to say that most readers would agree, having gotten this far in our analysis, that we can safely rule out randomness and uncertainty in the sense of a true accident as the origin of life. Randomness and uncertainty have not found a secure home anywhere else in science as an explanatory principle, either. We have noticed their occurrence, yes; but we have not noticed them creating complex biological machines. Everything we know says that this is fully impossible. Randomness cannot be demonstrated to be capable of producing any kind of a complex system whatsoever, living or otherwise, beyond snow flakes and “Pong” level computer games, and then only given a computer and the requisite software as a starting point.

The bald truth of the matter is that randomness or accident can never be an explanatory principle of anything. True randomness has always been defined as the very antithesis of explanation itself in both science and philosophy. The word “random” is used when there is either a lack of information so that causation cannot be traced, or where there exists a known lack of causation. Common language use testifies to this same principle: “There is no explanation for that; it is just random,” and so on. Science’s explanations are causal explanations. To “explain” a process by citing randomness is therefore a contradiction in science. This is the largest contradiction that underlies the neo-Darwinian fairy tale, but, as we have seen, it is not the only one. The Catholic Church therefore refuses to endorse neo-Darwinian evolution not only because it tacks the personal philosophies of atheism and materialism onto the raw scientific data, denying God’s place as creator, but because it is not properly performed science.

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

The cited authors are not alone in the history of evolutionary thought in affirming God-incompatible formulations of evolution. It is quite common, as much the standard as not. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, co-originator of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in the introduction to Carl Zimmer's text, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, says that evolution has no direction, no purpose and no goal. Ernst Mayr totally rejects cosmic purpose as scientifically indefensible. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the very fathers of modern evolutionary biology, was at the core of the new evolutionary synthesis[152] circa 1950 that originated the two modern forms of evolutionary theory, Neo-Darwinian Theory and Synthetic Theory,[153] its God-compatible “twin.” Dobzhansky says this about the evolutionary process: “Though neither planned, guided, predestined or predetermined (except in the Laplacian sense of universal deterministic causality), the biological evolution gave rise to man.”[154]

What Dobzhansky has asserted here goes far beyond natural science into philosophy…and it is just terrible philosophy. Certainly there is every evidence for an overall plan and substantial guidance. We can see that much clearly enough in the genomes, the origin of which science cannot explain, and the fine-tuning of the parameters of physics in life’s favor. There does seem to be room for substantial random variation in biological evolution of the genomes, but that is only after fantastically complex living machines are already constructed. As already shown, the existence of some randomness in a machine or system can serve a purpose and does not prove the architect or engineer who designed the machine does not exist.

And deterministic causality, which Dobzhansky allows for, is not only the perfect method for a designer to use, it is the only method available in a world where physical things are permitted to change over time. Without rules of causality, things would fluctuate chaotically, making the world unlivable. There would be no way either to develop a design or to maintain one. The only alternative in such a case is for the designer of the universe to intervene constantly to impose his will upon creation in a continuous miracle. The designer might plausibly wish not to have his divine attention tied continuously to the maintenance of mundane physical systems and structures in this way. Lesser monarchs, that is, earthly kings would certainly balk at it, with the exception of neurotically compulsive micromanagers. To arbitrarily say with Dobzhansky that we must exclude rules of causation as a means of intelligent design is not only to beg the question of God outright, but to affirm the ridiculous over common sense.

Causation, one may call it Newtonian mechanics or statistical quantum causation as you prefer (no difference accrues at the practical level) is, in theory, scientifically traceable all the way back to the Big Bang that created the universe. This is why Dobzhansky calls causation “universal;” it is everywhere in the physical world, universal in scope. Causation includes everything except individual quantum particle behavior, particles too small to have any effect. It does include the group behavior of quantum particles, which must be orderly to generate regularity in the natural world. In saying that evolution was unplanned except for the determinism of physical causation, causation that includes everything capable of producing an effect on this side of the Big Bang, Dobzhansky is claiming to know something important about what lies on the other side of the mystery of the Big Bang, viz., that no intelligent design or purpose occurred there. This is held to be scientifically impossible to know. The only alternative meaning of his statement is completely trivial: “except for everything physical there is no plan or purpose discernable in the physical world.” The first option is impossible, the second trivial and ridiculous. Yet the neo-Darwinists have issued these half-baked conclusions a dime a dozen for the past six decades as the last word on the nature of life. The masses of materialist and atheist lay people view these intellectual prematurities as infallible profundities that prove the meaningless of life. They are not profound, however, they are just one more good reason why scientists should not do philosophy.

Am I sure Dobzhansky’s profundity hasn’t escaped me? He is, after all, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary biology, undoubtedly a great biologist. I’ll tell you how profound this is. It is like saying that we can differentiate no specific evidence for God or intelligent design in nature because it all looks like evidence! On the one hand, physical causation leads right back to a complete miracle-like mystery at the Big Bang where everything came from nothing in a fraction of a second, and on the other, it advances forward from the Big Bang with amazing rapidity towards the astronomically complex designs of life. This would never have occurred by accident in a trillion, trillion lifetimes of our universe. Such an overabundance of evidence hardly argues against purpose in nature.

Dobzhansky can be forgiven that mistake personally, as the Big Bang theory was not established until a few years after his statement was made. He might have based his position on the alternative assumption that the universe had always been exactly as it is and was itself eternal. Despite the fact that physical/cosmological processes have been much more visibly traced since Dobzhansky’s time, modern neo-Darwinists carry on the same doctrine minus Dobzhansky’s excuse. And Dobzhansky could himself have easily recanted his statement when the Big Bang theory was later originated. This was well within his lifetime. Thus, our objection remains a legitimate criticism to Dobzhansky’s published works taken as a whole.

Indirect causation, of course, is often the tool of choice for accomplishing a purpose. Yet, Dobzhansky dismisses it out of hand. Billiards and pool are 100% about indirect causation, as is hunting, cooking etc. Hitting the cue ball causes it to collide with the target ball. This causes additional collisions, the desired rebound, specific contacts, deflections and positioning, etc. If one is fortunate, the designated ball also falls into the correct hole. In the sport of hunting, one causes an arrow or bullet to fly towards a game animal under known rules of ballistics. Indirect causation is employed in the functions of machines, in architecture, and in engineering. Anyone who has tried to cook without proper instruction on spices, cooking times, and procedures needs no further argument about indirect causation as an instrument of intelligent design. The sport of bowling is all about indirect causation (in addition to beer and chili dogs), though we typically would say that “we” knocked down the pins, not the ball. These are all events of indirect causation in the service of intelligent design.

A designer with full knowledge of the indirect routes a physical process would inevitably follow, a master bowler, as it were, could use a process that allowed some accidents within a controlled environment. He or she could roll a strike every time, albeit through a pinball like maze of twists, turns, deflections, tunnels, temporary spring-loaded captures, gates, and redirects. What is complex to us could be child’s play to Him. In pinball, although we humans cannot predict the route the ball will take in a given pass through the machine, we do know one thing: the ball will inevitably return to the bottom due to the law of gravity. If we can build machines from the pinball concept that feed the ball out into a variety of controlled applications, such as electrical switches, how much more could God or an intelligent designer do? No, we can’t say which specific path the ball might take on its way down. But we can say that launching the ball will inevitably turn on the light when the metal ball finally settles into the designated live-wired receptacles at traps, gates, tunnels, or side alley exits near the bottom.

Extending this analogy to the larger process of evolution gives us a system of thousands upon thousands of pinball machines, interconnected by the laws of nature and focused heavily toward the creation of life by the initial configurations of matter and energy at the Big Bang. The system guarantees life’s creation and evolution (and a supportive ecosystem) as a high probability outcome over millions of years, despite the fact that none of the particular machines guarantee that its product will enhance the survival of a given species in its present environmental niche. Thus, neo-Darwinists commit the fallacy of arguing from a part to the whole. They say that the entire system of nature is random just because individual mutations are random in relation to the individual creature’s survival fitness. This is a non sequitur. The larger system of nature can be biased for the construction and support of life generally, while the individual mutations are not biased for the optimization of a specific creature or species in a given environmental niche.

In denying indirect causation as a potential instrument of an intelligent designer, no matter how indirect that causal chain may be, Dobzhansky is merely expressing his preferred personal worldview, not a finding of science. Science, in fact, knows otherwise, for indirect causation is everywhere to be found. He simply invokes the cultural prejudice of his time, which was simple-mindedness and naiveté on the question of God and creation. Most people up to that time (Catholics excluded) felt that if God created man and his world he did it directly, and that species appeared immediately in their final form. Ironically, while preoccupied with presenting modern science as a rebuttal of the naïve finalism, perfectionism, and literal 6-day creationism of Christian fundamentalists, Dobzhansky and the neo-Darwinists committed similar errors of oversimplification and intellectual naiveté. Neo-Darwinism is essentially the flip side of the same coin of religious fundamentalism; it is a naïve and oversimplified fundamentalism of a different kind, scientific fundamentalism, sometimes referred to as the “religion” of scientism.

Cornelius Hunter addresses this problem in detail in his recent book, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. The neo-Darwinists make very specific (unjustifiable) assumptions about what God would or would not do, and implicitly pass those personal philosophical preferences off to the reader as if they were the considered judgment of science. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science has absolutely no business doing this kind of thing; these are metaphysical assumptions that science cannot support. We discussed this at length in fallacies 23-26 above. By ruling out arbitrarily, that is, for no good reason, the only method of creation over time available in the physical world, and then announcing triumphantly that there is no evidence for creation at all, Dobzhansky is, as Froehicky so eloquently says in the X-Files, “rigging the game.” What he should have said was, not that indirect causation could not be a method of creation, but "Man! God can really cook!"

“Stir on dude!” is what I say. Life is good, and eternal life is better!

Throughout the history of the evolutionary debate, neo-Darwinists have argued against God and intelligent design only by arguing against either instantaneous fully formed creation of life, perfectionism, naïve finalism, or constant (or frequent) supernatural intervention in natural law.[155] These are all easy to defeat straw men. The neo-Darwinists imply that the defeat of these intellectual scarecrows rules out all options for God and intelligent design (not just the inane and archaic ones). They prematurely dismiss the possibility that future discoveries in science (and there is a lot of room for them) might trace causality much more precisely from the Big Bang to human creation. Such dismissals are arrogant and premature. Their position was formed long before the avalanche of very revealing data from modern genetics and molecular biology, showing it to be a political position, not a scientific one. It flies fully in the face of the still open question of finding a grand unification theory in physics, which might eventually lead to the revelation of a full chain of causation from the Big Bang to the creation of the tree of life.

Grand unification theory or not, in the future the causal chain from the Big Bang to life will certainly be known with much more completeness. Interactions and related causal chains of events will be revealed at levels currently inaccessible to routine scientific study, perhaps even going to the electromagnetic properties of amino acids and other chemical compounds. Dobzhansky’s position that causation is irrelevant to purpose is therefore grossly premature at best. The genetic and microbiological knowledgebase available to evolutionists of his day was the merest fraction of what we have today. Our knowledge of the total physical-chemical chain of events from the Big Bang to life remains fragmentary, but it is already very suggestive of intention, purpose, and design. In any case, to say that God could not create by way of a complex indirect causal chain of events is simply bad logic, for there is nothing in logic that so constrains him.

Neo-Darwinists present no convincing reason for us to believe that the causal chain of events that proceeds in an amazingly direct and rapid fashion from the Big Bang to human life (much more direct and rapid than an accident could achieve) could not constitute the sequential implementation of a plan and purpose. A myriad of key physical parameters from the atomic level through basic chemistry to planetary positioning are known to be amazingly fine-tuned in favor of life’s creation.[156] Why couldn’t these physical constants and configurations, so heavily biased for life, be the result of a plan to create life? Dobzhansky does not say. He and other neo-Darwinists like Ernst Mayr seem to have a sort of tunnel vision, as if (macro)biology was all there is to science.

Modern neo-Darwinists simply say that, from their individual human perspectives, the process of evolution is not perfect based upon arbitrary humanist criteria, that is, it does not proceed in a straight line to its goal, and it allows suffering. Therefore, they say, God could not have done it. In other words, they feel that God must be a humanist, and that God should reward humans with a perfect world even now given our flagrantly flawed intentions and behavior. Should we trust them to know more about God than the priests and theologians? Not hardly. Their philosophical positions are visibly flawed, very naïve in fact. These philosophical errors are subtly mingled into neo-Darwinian works of science as if they comprised the consummate scientific refutation of religion, God, and intelligent design.

Neo-Darwinists have claimed much in opposition to religion through the years, apparently presuming that biological expertise automatically confers philosophical competence. The historical record does not bear this out. Upon close examination, the structure and content of the neo-Darwinian case for lack of purpose in evolution turns out to be a complete logical shambles, lacking both scientific and philosophical merit.

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

It appears that during those ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modem theologians do not tell us.[157]

Oddly, despite Russell’s undeniable intellectual brilliance and humanitarian compassion (he was one of the greatest logicians of all time), he simply had a blind spot in his reasoning concerning the need for a morally righteous creator’s need to sort out the evil from the good. The faculty of radical free will in his creations (we humans) entails this; judgment becomes unavoidable. In addition to the maxim that “the neo-Darwinist is no philosopher,” perhaps we should add, “the Western analytical philosopher is no theologian.” The fact that people may choose to be evil through the exercise of the God given gift of radical free will refutes the neo-Darwinist/humanist argument that God should have made and then maintained without interruption a suffering-free paradise from the very beginning. We simply have not deserved such blessings, and the war crime tribunals and daily headlines prove it. Russell’s position implies the mistaken belief that suffering is and can only be caused by flaws in nature, not by flaws in man. He appears oblivious to the fact that such flaws would require corrective discipline and a period of rehabilitation in an imperfect environment. Despite this blind spot in his thinking, Russell was no fan of the frequently unfounded logic of evolutionists.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.[158]

And, perhaps surprisingly to many, Bertrand Russell was not an atheist in the pure sense of the word, as many atheists would have us believe. As an aside, this is, also surprisingly true even of Richard Dawkins, who says he is only 80-90% certain that God does not exist. Dawkins’ argument against God seems to derive more from the documented historical follies of religious fools and the fact that evolution seems to have followed a blind course than any direct philosophical logic demonstrating God’s nonexistence. The seemingly blind course of evolution was, of course, a key element of Darwin’s concept of nature, but he also postulated the existence of the Creator. There have been scientific fools as well as religious ones. The mere fact that a child or an idiot scrambles onto the seat of a flawless concert grade Grand piano does not impugn the genuine quality of the instrument. Man’s historical abuse and misunderstandings of religion fit into this category of instrument to artist mismatch. The same kinds of travesties can of course happen in regards to science, as we explored in the discussion of the fallacy of reductionism.

[Russell] As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.[159]

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

A world such as the neo-Darwinists insist God should have made allows no suffering. It therefore permits neither real-time remedial discipline nor pure justice. Such a world provides no impetus for self-centered persons to turn to God for salvation and rebirth. A world that does not allow accidental, that is, undeserved, suffering does not allow for soul-purifying and redemptive compassion and charity. If the victim deserved it, there is no need to feel sorry for them. Paradise provides no grounds to perfect and advance our souls to a state where we can in fact be trusted with paradise once we are given it. Thus, alack and alas, I must say that one of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell, is just plainly wrong. It is a non sequitur to argue that evil in this world rules out a good God, for, as the Christian counterexample shows, it is possible that we were given paradise, lost privilege to it, and are being given a second chance to reobtain it by proving our conversion to good intentions during our lives here on Earth.

As long as humans are spiritually imperfect, a contradiction will always result from demanding paradise on earth. An otherwise perfect world will never be paradise as long as there are imperfect beings in it. In the world favored by the neo-Darwinists and their conceptual allies like Russell and the humanists, final judgment, and thus the final resolution to the problem of evil, is precluded. There is basis upon which to enact it, and the evil ones are forever blessed with a paradise to live in (one they did not deserve). As you can no doubt see, this is an impossible scenario. Given free will, the evil ones would quickly ruin paradise. Minus the disincentive of real-time punishment, they would have the opportunity to go on imposing evil victimization upon the innocent ad infinitum. Thus, what the neo-Darwinists demand of a perfect God is both literally impossible, and perfectly heinous—repugnant to one’s moral sensibilities. They would have us give paradise to the evil ones, throw pearls before swine as it were. The neo-Darwinist/atheist position embodies an enormous contradiction: it doesn’t promote paradise; it precludes it. Far from being the noble flagship of social progress that the atheistic humanism of neo-Darwinists claims to be, neo-Darwinism/humanism entails a world where evil is not only permitted, but vastly rewarded.

The only means to philosophically justify such a view is to remove from man the capacity for free will and diminish him to the status of a robot. One needn’t punish a robot, but merely reprogram it. While this may in fact be the view of man that many neo-Darwinists and humanists hold, it does not suffice as an argument against God. It makes God out to be stingy with his children and therefore less good or less capable than the definition of an all-powerful God requires. It replaces man's destiny of ascent to a divine realm in glorified form only a little lower than the angels with the destiny of a robot: a mechanistic, emotionally, spiritually, and morally impoverished life ending on the scrap heap. It deprives God of the ability to institute justice and morality on Earth.

Thus, a contradiction is invoked by the Darwinian argument that, if God would have created the world it would necessarily be physically perfect at the outset. This kind of world precludes spiritual growth, justice, free will, and a higher destiny for man. The neo-Darwinian argument only applies to robots, not to humans, but why would God be morally obligated to give robots one kind of world over the other? And do the concepts of evil and suffering apply in any coherent way to robots at all? Contrary to the neo-Darwinists’ arrogant claims for their much-publicized argument against God, the fact of the matter is that a fully good and fully powerful God could not have done it their way. Given that humanity is a morally capable race with free will who has fallen, God only has one additional option to the world we see: immediate judgment and no second chances. Only the perfect would survive this early judgment, and no humans are perfect. The neo-Darwinists/atheist/humanist position therefore allows us only two options: we can be mechanistic robots without free will, or we can all be condemned in judgment.

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

In the neo-Darwinist/humanist view, what is good is merely what works best for society, and only physical criteria may be used to determine what is best. Who is to say what is ‘best’ for a society of robots, except those holding power at the time? And who is likely to rise to power in a system that does not suppress criminal behavior and has no moral foundation? Unscrupulous criminals, naturally. C. S. Lewis’ novel, and the two that precede it in the series make this argument against the neo-Darwinian philosophy more strongly than analytical logic can ever do, as does Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged. In both of these great works of literature one is shown the inevitable progression of the neo-Darwinian philosophy. The reader watches it unfold step by abhorrent step into a society that never questions but simply believes what they are told by “scientific experts.” A horror story results, repugnant beyond all civilized human conceptions. This is why Christians should object to the teaching, not of basic evolution, but of neo-Darwinian evolution in our classrooms, for as Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn has pointed out, neo-Darwinian evolution is political ideology, not science at all. As Pope John Paul II warned, such theories remove all foundation for the dignity of the human person.

Fallacy #99: The “Let’s all agree to cheat complexity” fallacy, AKA “Accidents can make complex machines.” One might also call this the GIGO fallacy, “garbage in garbage out,” (closely related to “easy as pie.”).

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

Richard Dawkins would say cumulative selection can achieve complex living machines via a truly accidental process by preserving the elementary modules of the larger design one step at a time until they have all snapped together into something astronomically complex. But it turns out that the minimal complexity of the typical elementary module required to compose the tree of life, the cell, forbids accidental composition. There is no scientific evidence to support the belief that simpler modules can get the job done. Such magical modules exist only in Dawkins’ imagination. Neo-Darwinian evolutionists have never produced a definite chain of such achievements that visibly combine to produce complex life forms.

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

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

Complexity cannot be cheated in the way Dawkins proposes. As Professor William Dembski has shown with his thorough analysis and cogent arguments, the mathematics of specified forms of functional complexity entail that once a certain threshold of probability ensuing from a given design’s complexity is crossed, be it 10⁵⁰ or 10¹⁵⁰, accident cannot be the source of that design in the real world. The complexity and resultant probability of the human system is trillions upon trillions of times larger than any of the limits historically proposed as impassible barriers to chance in our universe. What Professor Michael Behe has shown by revealing the presence of irreducibly complex biological systems is that working backwards from a human being through the concrete aspects of biological design to the sets of minimally complex modules that would be needed to compose living systems, one sees that the easy as pie minimal units Richard Dawkins et al. have hypothesized as grounding the accidental composition of life simply do not exist. They are nowhere to be found in the realm of earthbound physics and biology. They are a figment of the neo-Darwinian imagination. This is a fact now fully confirmed by genetics and microbiology.

Fallacy #100: Rigging the Game: Redefining the question (so that the favored answer is made possible)

This is a more specific version of the larger fallacy of rigging the game, cheating. This error is most flagrantly committed within the context of the definition of life. We don’t have any real trouble discerning what is alive and what is not; we only have trouble putting that recognition into words or objective scientifically observable criteria. This, in itself, suggests there is something ineffable about life that goes beyond its raw physical components.

The dilemma of defining life, and science’s unsuccessful struggle to overcome it, suggest that there may be no objective observable criteria that captures the essence of life. To insist that there must be such criteria despite our failed efforts to produce them is to commit the fallacy of hidden premise, assuming materialism before we start the inquiry. Following science’s failed attempts to achieve abiogenesis, the origination of life from nonliving chemical materials, there seems to have been a push to redefine life into something simpler that could be produced in the lab, something ridiculous like a few interacting gases enclosed in a sugar ammonia bubble. In other words, the assumption of materialism fails to lead us to the spontaneous production of life as we know it from nonliving chemicals, so let’s redefine life to be something other than what we know it to be so that it can be produced spontaneously from nonliving chemicals. That, my friends, is cheating, and we will have to watch the debate over the definition of life very closely in the future to see that the cheaters don’t prevail. I refer to the reader to Appendix 6 for a more extensive discussion of this question.

Fallacy #101: Consensus or majority opinion makes truth

Practically all one hears from neo-Darwinists in this debate is that the majority of mainstream science has come to agree that Darwinian evolution is a fact. They then slip into a discussion of how society has been transformed by the accidental worldview of evolution, when such a view is in no way entailed by basic evolution. But the evidence they give is never direct observation, scientific demonstration, or logic, it is simply majority opinion. The argument from expert authority or consensus alone, however, is a long established fallacy. Were the majority of Germans right in following Hitler? Are the majority of lemmings right in following their leaders off a cliff? Majority opinion adds credibility where fact and logic are already demonstrated, but in the absence of fact and logic majority opinion cannot stand alone. Human nature too often admits politics into the debate over important questions for reasons that have nothing to do with science.

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

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

“Oh, come now,” you may say, “ ‘F-’ ? Isn’t that a bit harsh even for them?” No, not really. Anyone who has had college courses in logical reasoning will recognize the invalid forms the neo-Darwinian argument has taken over the years. Anyone can make a mistake, yes. But after hundreds of invalid forms all pointing in the same direction, a direction that consistently favors the materialist worldview, I think the neo-Darwinists have lost entitlement to the benefit of the doubt. Their bias may not be intentional, but it is a bias. The real problem from the point of view of the honest seeker of the truth is that the neo-Darwinian rhetoric, impersonating a genuine argument as it does, wastes an exorbitant amount of a reader’s time and energy. In the final analysis, it presents no valid forms of argument whatsoever, at least none in which the premises are true. Investing in a college philosophy course in critical reasoning is always a good idea (at any age) for those with an active mind and regular reading habit.[160] In the case of the convoluted neo-Darwinian argument, it is practically a necessity.

In the meantime, here is yet another demonstration of the neo-Darwinists' fallacy-ridden argument. In this case, we have a fully indefensible reconstruction of the thought of Charles Darwin himself. This was written as the afterward to a Barnes & Noble printing of the 1^st edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The author is Oliver Francis.

Though mollify his critics Darwin did, when it came to the matter of God. References to the “Creator” absent in this first edition were added to the second: a largely tactical decision to prevent accusations of blasphemy distracting attention from the scientific importance of his theories. Moreover, “Creator” gives a softer meaning than ‘God,’ arguable [sic] no more definite than “Darwin’s” “Nature” that had no more power of direct agency other than the “aggregate action and product of many natural laws.”[161]

What’s wrong with this? It sounds awfully good, so it must be true, right? No; there is quite a lot wrong with it. First, it seems to imply that all references to the “Creator” were missing from the 1^st Edition. This is not true. There are two references to the “Creator” in the 1^st Edition, at pages 210 and 525.[162] Second, at page 525 Darwin ascribed the origin of natural law to the “Creator.” If “Creator” = “nature” as Francis would have us believe, then Darwin has, in his universally acknowledged master work, told us nothing less profound that that nature has originated natural law. This is fully circular, trivial, and uninformative, unworthy of both Darwin and his masterpiece.

Clearly, contrary to what Francis claims, this is not Darwin’s position, for at page 210 he says, “To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes….” (My emphasis) Here Darwin has used an active verb, employing the word “impressed” to convey an active formation of the laws of nature at the hand of a personal agent, the Creator. Read in the manner Francis recommends, it becomes “the laws impressed on matter by nature,” which seems a fully inappropriate use of the active verb “impressed.” This is conceptually awkward at best, if not contradictory, for what is nature but a combination of matter and natural law? Substituting this understanding of nature (the common one) we get “the laws impressed on matter by matter and natural law.” Obviously this is entirely circular and trivial, telling us nothing about the world whatsoever.

Darwin gave no indication that he meant anything other than the classic Christian God by “Creator,” for, indeed, he was himself bound for seminary in his younger days. And, what else could serve to mollify his critics who were concerned with blasphemy against the classic Christian God? Serving up pantheism to fundamentalist Christians, as Francis here suggests Darwin was doing, could not be expected to have a mollifying affect! To suggest that Darwin tried such a bait and switch on his critics is to make one or the other out to be a complete fool.

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

In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?[163]

If we substitute “nature” for “Creator” as Oliver Francis would have us do, the propositional content of the passage diagrams out to something like this: a living optical instrument might thus be formed (by the cited natural process) as superior to (a man-made) one of glass as the works of nature are to those of man. This is trivial. It is of the logical form “An instance of the rule, A is always superior to B, can be compared to the rule, A is always superior to B.” Obviously nothing so trivial and circular is going on here because this passage is, in fact, the core concept of Darwin’s theory, and one of the crowning linguistic presentations of his masterful book. There are no trivial passages in Origin, over which Charles Darwin toiled for twenty long years. Thus, the concept of nature cannot be substituted for “Creator,” here as Francis suggests. The expressed purpose of mollifying Christian critics requires it be given the standard meaning of “Christian God.” I stand by my original grade of ‘F-’ The neo-Darwinist is no philosopher.

Darwin’s own logic was much better than that of Francis and the neo-Darwinian evolutionists of our time. He was not a neo-Darwinist. Darwin was the real thing, a Darwinist. Darwin was not trying to grind an atheistic/materialistic axe. He was looking for the true explanation of variation in living natural forms, as opposed to attempting to engender a Marxist-like social revolution that would save humanity from the (falsely) perceived folly of religion. As a published evolutionary theorist, Charles Darwin never recanted the theistic worldview described in Origin of Species. This included the Christian God as the source of natural law and the first life breathed into the first creatures. He disclaimed recommending his later personal move to agnosticism to the public for lack of sufficient study and analysis. Thus, the neo-Darwinists are radically wrong even about their hero and namesake.

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

Creationists on the other hand abound and mount anti-intellectual campaigns that can have severe educational consequences…every person’s well-being and social contributions depend upon his or her ability to reason clearly, to evaluate opposing arguments…[164]

One’s evaluation of creationist vs. evolutionist views of the world is only one instance of the conflict between unreasoning faith and a sometimes less optimistic logic…The conflict is between belief in mechanisms as a sufficient ground for understanding the world and belief in the inscrutable actions of a creator…[165]

Despite our protracted proof of the ‘F-’ grade for neo-Darwinian reasoning, according to Futuyma it is the intelligent design theorists who are unreasoning and anti-intellectual. Like most neo-Darwinists, he feels evolutionists are heroes holding the last line of defense of reason against superstition. Given that the neo-Darwinian argument has never been more than a string of fallacies glossed over with high-sounding scientific jargon, I would call that an overly optimistic view.

Certainly the Catholic faith has never been unreasoning. The historical writings of the Church Fathers are sufficient to rebut this charge, and prove the neo-Darwinists’ charges of unreasoning superstition ridiculous. Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas alone are sufficient to establish the Church’s foundation in sound philosophical analysis.

Nor do I consider even literal 6-day creation and young earth theory (ably and honorably represented by Ken Hamm and the Answers in Genesis team in Florence Kentucky) as unreasoning, although I don’t agree with that view. Different components of their scientific case may be more or less hard to defend based upon the total scientific knowledge base, but the Creation Science argument is highly rational. The only question is whether their specific arguments will bear up under rigorous scientific evaluation.

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

My considered opinion is that both the arguments of intelligent design theory (Behe, Meyer, and Dembski) and the (very different) Creation Science case (AIG) case are more closely reasoned than the evidentially vacuous and logically fallacious arguments for neo-Darwinian evolution. Granted, the mainstream view of the scientific evidence goes against AIG on the young earth hypothesis and literal 6-day creation, but the AIG score on reasoning skills still far exceeds that of the neo-Darwinists. We have just seen the quality of neo-Darwinist logic. It stinks.

Professor Douglas Futuyma’s claim that logic is exclusively on the side of atheistic accidental neo-Darwinian evolution in this debate is therefore visibly false. The only real reason for the continued existence of the theory of accidental evolution at all is that atheistic scientists can see no other explanation to be possible. For neo-Darwinists, the theory of accidental evolution has been established merely by default, because, as materialists they will not allow themselves to consider other options. This hardly constitutes the resounding comprehensive logical victory Futuyma claims.

To paraphrase a statement by famous evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley concerning what science should propose to the public as the theory of the origin of the tree of life: “We cannot tell the public that we don’t know.” This is the only reason that we are currently stuck with the horrendous “explanation” of accidental evolution, because science has no real explanation, and is unwilling to admit that it doesn’t know.

As Phillip Johnson might say, I rest my case. And let me close this section with a fitting quote from mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford cited by J. Bronowski in his famous short treatise Science and Human Values:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that is should become credulous.[166]

By “credulous,” of course, Clifford means gullible. The public has been gullible regarding the impossible theory of accidental evolution long enough.

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Appendix 2:

The Resource Exhaustion Argument

(Crunching the Numbers)

Whatever is a Probability Bound?

The probability bound, or boundary, is a threshold of improbability that mathematicians say rules out chance or accidental processes altogether, a boundary beyond which chance cannot go. Mathematicians vary in their opinion of what level of improbability should be used for this boundary. Professor William Dembski tells us that proponents of this concept through history, such as the famous mathematician Emile Borel, or the secret code breakers of the National Security Agency, have suggested different magnitudes for this limit based upon their own perspective and purposes. However, acknowledgement that such a boundary exists seems to be implicit even in the work of famous evolutionists, who admit that chance processes could not have produced life. George Gaylord Simpson cites Julian Huxley: "to produce such adapted types by chance recombination...would require a total assemblage of organisms that would more than fill the universe, and overrun astronomical time." One might call this the “resource exhaustion argument,” and modern mathematician William Dembski has his own version that combines standard probability theory with the known physical and time limits of our universe.

William Dembski argues that any event with a probability less than 10^-150 cannot rationally be expected to be the result of chance. He calls this limit the “universal probability bound.” Dembski goes on to say that 10^-150is the most generous limit ever proposed in the scientific literature. The French mathematician Emile Borel proposed 10^-50as a universal probability bound below which chance could definitely be precluded; some scientists use 10^-94, still others 10^-120, but no professional involved in probability-based endeavors believes a probability less than 10^-150 can occur by chance.[167] Obviously, our current estimate of the improbability of neo-Darwinian evolution goes many times beyond this threshold at less than 1 chance in 10^-6,545,300. An event that exceeds the probability bound is not necessarily physically impossible, but it should not be expected to be the result of chance and cannot be affirmed as a credible scientific hypothesis minus an explanation that identifies a nonrandom cause.[168]

Dembski’s argument keys on the maximum number of physical events available in the history of the known universe. To determine what that number is, he multiplies the estimated number of physical particles in our universe, 10⁸⁰, times the number of actions a single particle can perform per second, 10⁴⁵, times an estimate of the number of seconds available in the history of the universe, 10²⁵. Even if all the particles stay constantly “busy,” there is a maximum of roughly 10¹⁵⁰ particle events available since the Big Bang with which to accomplish the work of evolution (and absolutely everything else). In other words, use the smallest and shortest event type available in the physical world, there are at most, 10¹⁵⁰ separate events possible in the history of the universe to date.

I leave it to Dembski to convince you of the viability of using this particular limit to rule out chance. I have no doubt that it does, but I am not a mathematician. Rather than confuse you (and myself) trying, I am going to move on to propose my own common sense application of the resource exhaustion-probability limit concept that, if not directly derivable from Dembski, is certainly a close conceptual offspring.

First of all, some care with language is needed in the analysis of probability bound arguments. This is because event probabilities, which represent the total number of possible event alternatives inherent in a set of circumstances, do not translate directly to precise particle event requirements. Only one of the alternatives will occur and each alternative has a different requirement for time and physical particle resources. Some kind of bridging assumption must be made to translate the unlike terms of “possible alternatives” to “definite resource (particle event) requirements.” Where accidental or fully random processes are involved, we can make such a bridge by assuming that, on average, any specific event will not occur by chance until approximately half the alternatives have been played out first. If there is one ace in a set of 30 cards, on average 15 cards will need to be dealt before the ace appears. This is the standard probability assumption. Professor James W. Valentine makes such an assumption in chapter 3 of On the Origin of Phyla in saying that it would, on average, take a monkey 10¹⁸⁰ years just to accidentally type the first sentence of Darwin's Origin of Species.

This bridging assumption is in fact the standard assumption of probability theory. Probability theory is not something esoteric that I pulled in from left field here to make my case; it is a foundational tool of science, very much requisite to doing science at all. The entirety of science is a probabilistic endeavor. Thus, to say with Doolittle, Dawkins, Strickberger and the neo-Darwinists that anything at all can happen in three or four billion years simply because it is a “large” amount of time, regardless of how steep the improbabilities become, is not to do science at all but to forsake science for “professional” intuition, or perhaps something worse, such as politics. By definition, science must always go with the probabilities, not against them.

The larger the sampling base the more nearly results tend to match the predictions of probability theory. Therefore, because the total event process of evolution of all life forms on earth is very large, I propose that we can safely make the assumption of a probability outcome near the standard. The achievement of any sophisticated biological design should not then occur by chance until, on average, approximately half the unworkable alternatives have been tried first.[169] Once we make the bridging assumption of standard probability theory, it is then possible to compute a minimum resource requirement for the universe’s having produced half the possible alternatives before hitting upon the tree of life by accident. The number of alternatives involved in random chance based evolution are so large that one needn’t proceed further to see that the universe doesn’t have sufficient resources to get the job done via the neo-Darwinian process under this assumption. Half 10^-6,545,300 is 5 X 10^-6,545,299, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of times the particle event resources available in the history of the universe (currently estimated at 10¹⁵⁰). Obviously, our universe cannot afford to deal out half the cards in the game of random chance based evolution. It can’t even get close. Therefore, science is not entitled to affirm accidental evolution because its probability is only a small fraction of naturally directed or intelligent guided evolution.

One Big Mess—the Cost of Doing Business with an Accident

Thousands of mutagenesis experiments have been performed and no viable mutations significant enough to evidence progressive macroevolution have been observed (generally no viable mutations at all). Under such prolonged heavy bombardment by mutagens, some laboratory specimens, the fruit fly, for example (which is the most common laboratory subject) should have evinced some macroevolutionary potential. The force of the evidence is so compelling as to suggest that some natural law or other requires this result: a law that forbids random processes from producing nontrivial ordered results (functional order of the magnitude we see in living systems). Seeing no such law established in our current theoretical base (other than the definition of entropy in thermodynamic law), I will now propose one. This proposal does not originate with me. Professor William Dembski has previously made a similar proposal under the moniker “Law of Conservation of Information (LCI).” I reiterate a similar argument here because mainstream science has yet to endorse LCI (as they should), and, much like Congress, where politics are involved, if the public does not demand they do the right thing, it is possible they never will. Dembski credits Peter Medawar with originating the LCI concept in a somewhat weaker form.[170]

I call my version of LCI, ORLEF-B (Ordered Result Limitations for Entropic Forces—Biology). ORLEF-B constrains the increase in order that can arise as the result of the application of an accidental, random, or disordered force to a biological system. To be clear, what I am doing here is not merely a restatement of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. The 2^nd Law says something different. It says that entropy (disorder) never decreases in a closed system and tends to increase. The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics applies only to the larger universe as a complete system and assumes our universe to be a closed system that receives no energy transactions from outside. The 2^nd Law does allow for local increases in order but only when they are offset by decreases in order occurring elsewhere in the universe. The 2^nd Law stipulates that no increase in the total order of the universe is possible (so long as it remains a closed system, which science traditionally has assumed that it is).

ORLEF-B is different. ORLEF-B is not concerned with the overall tendency to disorder in the closed system of the universe. It is concerned with the effects that disordered event processes have on highly ordered machines, biological or otherwise.

Viewing a physical system as an ordered process of information flow, random forces, in a sense, can be considered disinformation. Here disinformation does more than require a reduction in order equivalent to the simple quantity of disinformation inserted. Disinformation inserted into a dynamic interactive system at a key location becomes more than a simple lie; it becomes a lie upon which much else depends. In a dynamic physical system, disinformation can catastrophically reduce the order of the system, damaging the flow and process of the system itself. The system will often be destroyed by it.

Acknowledging this tendency, ORLEF-B constrains the increase in order arising from random forces to a definite and very minute fraction of the much larger disordered effects that such forces will inevitably produce on biological machines. In short, ORLEF-B says that the cost of producing order from disorder in a localized system that is already highly ordered will always be exorbitant, so exorbitant in fact that nothing of substance can be constructed by means of random forces.

The limits upon local increases in order that random forces can generate, and the exorbitant cost incurred in increased disorder elsewhere in the system, can (in theory) be computed with confidence and empirically confirmed. It will take a lot of future research to hone the ORLEF-B constant to precision (and the value of the constant will vary for different kinds of systems). Nonetheless, it is easy to demonstrate that the ORLEF-B constant must fall within a certain range. That range guarantees that the cost of generating Earth’s tree of life with a random process would be so exorbitant as to far exceed the time and physical resources available in the history of our entire universe.

ORLEF-B merely confirms what we already know intuitively: random forces do more harm than good. They especially harm the fragile complex designs of sophisticated living machines. ORLEF-B says that, when the complexity of a machine goes beyond a critical threshold (and all of life is past that threshold), random forces will on average not progress the system, but rather degrade it.

ORLEF-B can be considered a specific application of Dembski’s “new” law of thermodynamics, LCI, though I think it is also at least partially implicit in the definition of entropy itself. The definition of entropy entails that fully entropic (disordered) energy can produce no useful work. In LCI Dembski says something very similar: you can’t get more complex specified information (CSI) out of a physical process than goes into it.

What I wish to do with this ORLEF-B argument is to add to evolutionary discussions a mathematical constant having a definite value that can be used as a starting point in answering concrete questions of evolutionary science concerning the question of accident versus intelligent design. ORLEF-B is an attempt to make Dembski’s LCI practically computable for purposes of testability. From the point of view of logical argument, ORLEF-B is the final counter to the multiverse theory, which itself is the neo-Darwinists logical counter to the resource exhaustion and probability argument. In other words, the neo-Darwinists say, if there are infinite universes out there, one of them would have realized the remote possibility of an accidental creation of life. So they say. But this can only be true in worlds where existing natural laws allow accidental trial and error at little cost in resources, or in worlds where astronomical amounts of resources are available (much greater amounts of resources than have been available in our universe). ORLEF-B tells us that our world is not one of those worlds. The cost of accidental exploration of physical system creation is high in our world, and the amount of resources available are known, and known to fall far short of what is needed to make the accidental creation of life fall within the range of the scientifically credible.

The kicker here is that ORLEF-B is testable, while multiverse is not. Once we can inductively and empirically confirm ORLEF-B we know that our universe could not have produced life with the resources available to it minus a huge influx of resources from outside our universe. Barring science being able to demonstrate that such an influx of external resources in fact occurred, we an conclude that life did not occur by accident in our world regardless of whether other universes exist or not.

Although without extensive additional research to refine it, ORLEF-B unavoidably remains a gross estimate. Nonetheless, I argue that it is a reliable starting point from which to develop more accurate estimates. It is also of present use in that it can ground derivable underestimates that are visibly certain. Thus, ORLEF-B won’t answer all quantifiable questions about biological effects of random forces with certainty, but it will already answer the question “Can an accidental process produce the tree of life within the time and physical resources of our universe?” with certainty. This answer comes from computing a derivable underestimate that is so visibly certain as to leave no doubt in the matter whatsoever.

ORLEF-B says that one can quantify the ratio of ordered to disordered byproducts of a random force acting on a highly ordered biological system. Different kinds of physical subsystems will require different constants to compute output values for system to system interaction. The hypothetical (and very rough) approximations I offer for the ORLEF-B constant below apply only to biological systems (-B). The amount of order in the targeted biological system alters the value of the ORLEF-B constant, and so does the amount of disorder in the random system that is affecting it. So, the value of the ORLEF-B constant will vary somewhat for each different type of ordered system-random force interaction, depending upon the amount of order present in each system and specific constraints of natural law that apply to the kinds of processes involved.

ORLEF-B predicts two things and entails one other. It predicts that an encounter between a substantially random force and a much more highly ordered biological system that surprisingly produces some ordered results will always produce a vastly greater magnitude of disordered results.[171]

Thus, ORLEF-B predicts that random genetic mutations, that is, mutations generated by forces known to be almost purely random, will always be destructive to biological systems over time before they can be beneficial. Though results from some such encounters may initially appear to be neutral, they will always converge to be deleterious in aggregate prior to causing an additive change large enough to generate a major advancement in body form (macroevolution). ORLEF-B can be seen to follow from Professor Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, though it is more fundamentally grounded in thermodynamic law (the definition of entropy).

Given ORLEF-B, any ordered results produced by the interactions of mixed systems should be attributed (as a vast statistical predominance) to the effects of the ordered components of the mixed force causing the change, not to the random elements. In other words, I have gone to all of this trouble to develop a new theory of physical system interactions for the sole purpose of changing our evolutionary discussions by only one word: to take the word “accidental” out of all statements regarding the cause of progressive biological form and function development.

Ruling out a productive result from any genuinely random source, ORLEF-B requires random changes to be destructive based upon purely theoretical considerations. Once the theoretical entailments of ORLEF-B are experimentally confirmed beyond question, that is, once random mutations are empirically proven to be astronomically biased toward the destructive—and, again, this has largely already been done by mutagenesis studies, including research on cancer and birth defects—neo-Darwinian theory is left with a dilemma. It must either radically downgrade projections of how much viable biological form change can be expected from genuinely random mutations, thus ruling out random mutations being the source of macroevolution, or the language must change to make clear that randomness, in the sense that the public understands the word as meaning “accidental,” is not the source of macroevolution at all.

The assumption underlying ORLEF-B is that the source of the order requisite to evolution is, rather than random chance, the highly ordered initial state of the universe that engendered self-organizational and directional vectors in physical systems highly favorable to life. These embedded directional vectors or constraints, when combined with the influence of natural law, produced as a high probability outcome the specific biological mechanisms key to evolution, such as transpositional genetic machinery and the developmental genome.

The precise origin of all these remains a mystery, and creation of life by means of such instruments is fully compatible with intelligent design (and God). Thus, the import of this discussion of ORLEF-B is to require at a minimum that science must always allow room for cosmic purpose in nature, if not outright affirm ID theory as a favored theory of science.

Conclusive evidence for ORLEF-B should not be long in coming. In fact, there may be no scientist who will dispute it even now, minus the further philosophical conclusions I have drawn from it. The current evidence suggests that accidental mutations fail to produce viable form evolution in living creatures no matter which route they are proposed through. Incremental accumulations of single nucleotide changes initially do less harm than larger transfers,[172] however, this process alone is too slow to meet the evolutionary timetable. Basic math and common sense tell us that accumulations of point mutations in multiple individuals that are somehow combined to achieve more rapid form change in a single host do not solve the time problem, for they have the equivalent effect of a randomly placed transfer of a large segment of DNA. That means they will also tend to cause large problems. Noted evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma confirms that mutations having large effects are indeed a problem: “Mutations with large effects are often deleterious, but some evolutionary biologists believe that such mutations have sometimes been important in evolution.”[173]

I take him to mean that, although the entire evolutionary process could not have been substantially grounded in large mutations, on exceptional occasions a mutation with large effect occurred that fit into an evolutionary scheme and aided an advancement. Futuyma implies that the evolutionary process is otherwise predominantly grounded in smaller mutations. ORLEF-B implies that, if beneficial large mutations did occasionally occur, more complete information would reveal them not to be fully accidental. ORLEF-B codifies into natural law the age-old wisdom of common sense: “Accidents don’t make machines, they break machines.”

Let’s now move from abstract theory to the concrete and consider both the enormity of the earth’s historical biomass (earth’s current total biomass = ~1,850,000,000,000 tons[174]), and its complexity (a single human body contains trillions of cells, each doing millions of things per minute). The complex designs seen in an historical aggregate of approximately 100,000,000 or more species is seen to easily refute neo-Darwinian theory via ORLEF-B. ORLEF-B requires that the aggregate of disordered results from random mutations would vastly outweigh the ordered results. Therefore, the lack of an enormous mass of mutant designs in the fossil record sufficient to establish such a disproportionately greater biomass of mutant organisms indicates that an accidental evolutionary process was not at work.

Unless...unless an enormous amount of mutant design proposals actually did occur but, for some reason, never made it past the abortive embryonic stage or made no fossil imprints for other reasons. In this case, the offsetting disordered byproduct required by ORLEF-B are satisfied, but undetectable. The known sensitivity of developmental systems makes such a scenario fully plausible. The astute reader, and especially neo-Darwinian advocates, are likely to say “Wait a minute; hold it right there! You have just offered a plausible scenario that explains why there are gaps in the fossil record. Walla Booby, neo-Darwinian evolution proved! Right?” No.

As the mathematical argument below reveals, the size of the mutant/abortive byproduct would have to be so large as to be forbidden by the resource limits of the universe. Impossible trumps nondetectable in this case, and the sensitivity of the developmental genome acts as a design constraint, making the process nonrandom. Another problem with the abortive design hypothesis is that, minus an explanation as to why modern biological processes are radically different from historical ones, the ones that produced our ancestors, we should also be seeing a rate of birth defects thousands of times the current rate. So, this hypothesis is also empirically refuted.

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

In addition, if the interdependence between the developmental gene modules and the larger operational genome is that strict, the evolutionary process becomes limited by the weakest link, in this case the developmental genes. As confirmed by Wells and Pollack above, the developing organism has been shown to be so hypersensitive to accidental mutation that the results of accidental tinkering with the developmental genome are either lethal or seriously pathological. This brings us back full circle to the affirmation of Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis. Not only is the machine design irreducibly complex, but that part of the design that is used to reproduce the machine is even more sensitive to accidental change than the machine itself.

We have good reasons to suspect that a rebuttal of ORLEF-B and a subsequent defense of neo-Darwinism will never be achieved—thus the materialists in science will almost certainly opt not to look at it at all J. Scientists have now explored the entire genome map of a few small creatures and looked into the minute workings of cells with the electron microscope. No obvious pathways to random mutation-induced macroevolution have been revealed. In other instances, we have mutated entire genomes in mutagenesis saturation experiments and seen no viable evolutionary results. From whence then will come the potential to accidentally generate radically different creatures at such a phenomenal rate as the Cambrian explosion requires?

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

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

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

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

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

But what value shall we initially set for the ORLEF-B constant? What is the ratio of the entropic unusable waste byproducts to the ordered results that an accidental process typically produces? I propose (somewhat arbitrarily, but I think conservatively) to use 10¹¹⁶, a composite of Meyer’s/Axe’s probability determination for randomly synthesizing a single new protein from nonliving chemicals (10^-125) and the corresponding probability value for randomly synthesizing a single new protein inside a living organism (10^-77). Both of these obstacles (and many others) have to be overcome by a random process to generate the tree of life.

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

The current biomass of Earth is estimated at 1,850,000,000,000 tons.[175] Arbitrarily assuming living systems are at least 90% ordered yields a well-ordered biomass of more than 1,665,000,000,000 tons, or approximately 1.6 X 10¹² tons. At 2,000 pounds per ton that is 3.2 X 10¹⁵ pounds of well-ordered biomass. Using 10¹¹⁶ as the value for the ORLEF-B constant, producing the well-ordered biomass of 3.2 X 10¹⁵ pounds requires a large mess of disordered byproducts equal to 3.2 X 10¹³¹ pounds. This exceeds the total mass of the universe by trillions and trillions of times. Reasonable estimates of the mass of the universe have been made in the range of 3 X 10⁵⁵grams on the low end to as much as 1.6 X 10⁶⁰ kilograms. A kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds. Converted, the high end estimate of the mass of the universe is somewhat less than 3.53 X 10⁶⁰pounds.

Further research in physics may show that ORLEF-B (if it turns out to be true) is simply the application of standard probability theory applied to elementary particle behavior (if particle behavior were assumed to be random). In this case ORLEF-B would still be a law, but it would be a mathematically derivative law obtained by applying probability theory to known features of elementary particles. If the value of the ORLEF-B constant is at or near what I have proposed for it, then, if ORLEF-B can be established derivatively in this way or by other combinations of theoretical models and empiric evidence, then it will refute the theory of accidental evolution directly.

This discussion of ORLEF-B is completely hypothetical, but the existence of such a law is suggested by D. D. Axe’s findings regarding the high improbability of creating functional proteins by accident and the predominantly injurious results of inducing random mutations in laboratory creatures. The significance such a law as ORLEF-B will have for the evolutionary debate rests entirely upon what the precise magnitude of the ORLEF-B constant turns out to be. Some ranges will refute accidental evolution, some will give it a few tries, and some will allow many tries.

In the meantime, D. D. Axe’s findings regarding the difficulty of randomly generating biologically useful proteins are sufficient to refute the accidental theory of evolution. The hypothesis of ORLEF-B goes more to telling us that we probably should never have fallen for the accidental worldview in the first place because it never made any logical or natural sense. Our personal experience of nature gives us the intuition that ORLEF-B is correct for we have never seen an accident make a machine and we never expect to see it.