[175] A series of accidental point mutations can’t hope to approach the assembly of such systems.

There will be exceptions to the irreducible complexity rule, no doubt, particularly when small modifications are made to a developing embryo and a visibly big though otherwise simple change to the adult organism is the result; but the rule will often hold. It only takes one case, one subsystem in one creature, that cannot be built by accidental mutations aided by nothing more than natural selection to refute neo-Darwinian evolution; this is Charles Darwin’s own test of his theory. Furthermore, the established connection between the genes that control development and the genes that regulate adult processes means that design proposals in higher organisms must be very complex indeed. They must manage two corresponding changes to two highly complex and sensitive functions at the same time (embryonic development and adult physiological operations), and again, for crossing certain species barriers or other major advances, three other independent systems must also be orchestrated in sync: chemical gene markers, microtubule structures, and genetic reading frames.

Thus, known to be irreducibly complex anatomical features, frequent instances of large gaps in the fossil record, and instances of inexplicably rapid bursts in evolution such as we see in the Cambrian explosion, all count as negative tests for accidental evolution. Continuing discoveries of additional genome complexity constitute a mounting mass of refuting instances for accidental evolution and corroboration for accidental evolution’s converse thesis, intelligent design theory. We can reasonably assume that several new species will be found per year on average, yes, and that will lessen the size of some of the known gaps somewhat—but not enough, and not for all. It won’t be nearly enough to complete the dense fan shape of intermediates required by the theory of accidental evolution to bring the gaps down to a level reachable by an accidental series of changes. Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, one of the primary lines of argument for ID theory, logically implies the absence of the gradualness entailed by an accidental process, and this is strongly supported by the lack of gradualness in the fossil record. Here again we see that neo-Darwinian theory is not testable because neo-Darwinists say the event of evolution was gradual although the fossil record of evolution is non-gradual. They simply insist the evidence will change over time. While, in theory, the evidence could change that much, until it does we are ignoring the evidence we have, which presently constitutes a negative test for neo-Darwinian theory. It is a strange kind of testability that says, “Just wait until the evidence changes in our favor, then we can count the fossils as a test.”

(5) Basic intelligent design theory says we should find biological machines and systems that give unequivocal indications of having been designed, that is, machines that warrant a design inference. We do find thousands of such machines in cellular systems and higher levels of biology. They bear an uncanny resemblance to our own mechanical constructions: outboard motors in bacteria, microscopic construction crews (DNA transcription),[176] transport vehicles, camera type eyes, complex linguistic codes (DNA), error checking and repair, pipeline cell assembly networks (microtubule systems in the cell lining), Boolean logical networks (gene regulatory systems), computers (the brain), etc.

(6) ID theory predicts a high rate of success in nature’s biological form change proposals, not necessarily, as the neo-Darwinists would have us believe, a perfect success rate. Nature’s historical rate of success in achieving even minimally viable biological design, let alone steady advancement to greater complexity, is far beyond what an accidental process could achieve, even with the aid of natural selection. It is a genetic/mathematical fact that such success could only be achieved by moving triplets of nucleotides and larger modular combinations of triplets as opposed to single nucleotide mutations or transposition of non-meaningful segments. This clearly indicates foreknowledge of the syntax and dictionary of the language of DNA. T. Ryan Gregory’s new and excellent book on the evolution of the genome reveals that there are a myriad of processes in the transpositional machinery of the human genome that move gene segments around systematically.[177] The track record of evolution shows that the transpositional machinery has effectively, that is, non-destructively, moved meaningful segments of the genome around in a highly organized and constrained transpositional management architecture. The majority of transpositional events within the genome are thus not the product of an accidental process. Gregory, himself, defers from making the further inference to intelligent design. However, he admits that the transpositional genome is clearly not a random system. It has rules and an architecture that constrains and limits, if it does not actually guide, genetic transpositions. The transpositional genome is driven by a dynamic that tends to produce transpositions of gene segments on a regular basis, that is, the transpositional genome encourages change as opposed to stasis.

All things considered, I contend that the further inference to intelligent design is warranted by the combination of the rate of success of evolution taken together with the known existence of the non-random transpositional genome. An accidental theory predicts much less success, and the range of success predicted by ID is compatible with what we see in the historical record. None of the alternatives to ID are scientifically (logically, mathematically, or biologically) coherent. They involve conceding the features of intelligence without admitting the presence of intelligence; this is a contradiction.

The fossil record does not reveal the many aberrant mutational guesses an accidental system would have produced, sub-optimized, inefficient, or partially disabled creatures that would have survived the short term nonetheless. The life span of the nonoptimized or partially “disabled” species (that an accidental evolutionary process would produce in enormous numbers) would be comparatively brief, but many would survive an immediate cut by natural selection due to the lack of immediate heavy competition or intensively adverse environmental pressures. The aggregate of all such “disabled” species taken together would comprise an enormous population spanning all environmental niches and body types. The community of disabled or inefficient species should therefore be an overwhelming presence in the fossil record for they would be both mathematically enormous and geologically/ecologically ubiquitous, that is, occurring in all regions and across all environmental niches. I have heard competent scientists dismiss this concern by saying that natural selection would eliminate the disabled species fast enough to hold down their statistical presence in the fossil record, but this is not so; even classic evolutionists disagree. 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."

Fossil indications of the massive numbers of such failed design attempts consequent to an accidental process are simply not there. Natural selection would eventually see to the extinction of “disabled” and nonoptimized species, yes. But natural selection does operate like snapping your fingers. It would frequently take centuries to effect the total extinction of a species, partially defective or not. The mathematics of the grossly inefficient accidental form change dynamic (see Appendix 2) of neo-Darwinian evolution would have saturated the fossil record with visibly “disabled” species. Such moderately dysfunctional or substantially inefficient designs are simply not in the fossil record.

The system that has generated the tree of life has clearly not only anticipated the meaningful syntax and dictionary of DNA but anticipated the complex sets of complimentary genes needed to produce a given functional or body form change, and anticipated a very high level of functional efficiency. The term “anticipated” is warranted because the fossil record does not record the failures an accidental process would necessarily have endured on the way to achieving success. The record of evolution on biological efficiency is in fact mathematically spectacular, while still less than absolute perfection. Thus, the seemingly impossible success rate of evolution itself constitutes a successful test of intelligent design because accident is not a reasonable hypothesis in such circumstances.

(7) The ultimate completion of the design of life forms as opposed to an endless evolutionary development is compatible with intelligent design theory, though not with neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution. Neo-Darwinian theory says that progressive evolution is an endless process of random mutations confirmed or rejected by natural selection. Therefore, while not a strict entailment of intelligent design theory, indications of design completion serves as a valid differentiating test of the two competing theories. In other words, evidence that evolution has either stopped or been radically curtailed is not compatible with the thesis of accidental evolution.

Subtle indications of design completion are seen in three different areas of research: recent genetic sequence reductions of bacterial clades, a trend towards substantial intron loss over time, and variation spawning functions being culled out of certain taxons. We see an example of the latter in transposon systems becoming nonfunctional in eukaryotic genomes.[178] Error correction and repair systems for DNA themselves rule out much of the possibility of biological change. The designer seems at this point to be merely polishing and preserving his creations, while clearing scraps of clay from the sculpting table, as it were.

A more substantial indication of design completion is seen in the fact that long established taxons, which have in Ernst Mayr’s words “a more highly integrated (congealed) genotype,” tend not to change. Mayr admits that we have not seen a single new phylum-level body form emerge since the Cambrian, more than 500 million years ago, when seventy of them had previously emerged within a 5-10 million year period. (We have approximately 35 of those 70 phyla left today.)[179]

(8) Probability, time, and physical resource-based analyses leave no doubt that chance was not the engine that drove life’s creation. This is confirmation of intelligent design. The probabilities reveal the evolutionary process to be highly biased, for a strong bias is requisite to achieving such a complex functional result in so little time. Bias is also revealed in the tendency for biological form change proposals to be both mechanically efficient and elegant. Randomness is ruled out by the periodic large rapid evolutionary jumps shown in the fossil record, and most clearly of all in the mathematical computations of the statistical probability of the complete evolutionary process. These statistical probabilities refute classic neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution. The bias for life manifested in the scientific evidence is overwhelming, and the gaps between the species in the fossil record, even allowing a 99% reduction by new discoveries, reveal a distance in complex genetic change that accident cannot bridge.

(9) A prediction of intelligent design theory is that only simple microevolutions will be achievable randomly. These might be things such as beak size variation in birds, coloring changes in moths, overall body length in a shark, etc. Such changes are easy to accomplish genetically (once the larger genome has been constructed), and they only affect the exterior of the organism or other systems where possibilities for conflicts are minimized. The areas affected by such simple alterations either don’t have to interact in complex ways with other internal systems or those interactions are substantially unaffected by the change. A change to the color of a moth need not affect its internal chemistry in significant ways at all (depending upon how the color is achieved), nor does extending or retracting the dimensions of a bird beak affect the mechanics of its internal systems other than requiring stronger facial muscles. Likewise, the risk of internal mechanical conflict is low with single protein or enzyme changes in bacterial gene substitutions where the change mainly affects the organism’s interaction with the external environment. Jonathan Wells tells us in his excellent book, Icons of Evolution, that even such classic examples of “evolution” can be called into question. But even if we grant they are true randomly generated changes, they can only happened once the complex genomes are already constructed, and they are not examples of complex evolution. Thus, they don’t really contribute to the explanation of the hard parts of the tree of life at all; they are only minor embellishments and evolutionary dead ends.

Other than these simple classic icons of evolution, the best modern science has been able to present in even the most prestigious of the professional scientific journals of observed instances of evolution are a single degenerated protein from an ancient ancestor, an alteration in crocodile hemoglobin, and changes to human color vision genes that involve only 3-5 amino acid substitutions.[180] The most convincing (most gradual and continuous) fossil lineages evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma cites as available to support evolution are likewise comparatively simple accomplishments in comparatively simple creatures: the increase in the number of ribs of trilobites, the shape and thickness of shells in protozoans, skeletal variations in the stickleback fish, size increase in protozoans, changes in “moss animals” (bryozoans).[181] None of these changes entail either complex integration into large complex systems or a cascading chain reaction of alterations. The larger systems in these cases are, themselves, relatively simple. But even if the examples showed more complex changes, they assume the existence of a mature genome before the event of the alteration ever takes place. Thus, they do not explain how life can originate by accident. I don’t mean to imply here that merely achieving abiogenesis of ultra-simple single-celled life would suffice as an explanation of accidental evolution. What must be explained is the creation of the core genomes of the most complex creatures of the tree of life.

The limitations of observed evolution to such simple changes corresponds closely with the limitations Sir Fred Hoyle has computed for an accidental mutational process, as well as with the actual experimental results in recent protein synthesis and mutagenesis studies conducted by D. D. Axe and reported by Stephen Meyer. While accident might have done these particular simple things, the absence of observations of more complex evolutions suggests, in close harmony with mathematical theory and the known sensitivity of amino acids to random alteration, that it can do non more. These kinds of simple alterations are the most that accident has contributed to the evolutionary process, the most that it can contribute, and then only if the hard parts are done first.

Other, apparently more complex evolutions, such as the classic example of the eight or more intermediates between ancient and modern horses, may or may not qualify as manageable by a string of accidents depending upon how complex the genetic sequence changes involved are ultimately shown to be, and whether internal chemistry, structures, and functions were substantially altered. If only a handful of point mutations to growth or size-determining genes were sufficient to make the change, an accident could possibly manage it. But the base genome still had to be there first. However, if the different species of horse manifest many complex internal differences, some of which require a cascade of bodily changes to be integrated with the total system, it would be beyond the reach of an accident. In this case of evolutions within the historical lineage of the horse, once again, the hard part of constructing the basic genome must already be done before the accidental hypothesis can be even remotely credible. The form-altering input of the largely guided and constrained (nonrandom) processes of the transpositional and developmental genomes is a better explanation of variations in the horse lineage than is pure accident, even accident helped along by natural selection, for after all that is what these two genomes are known to do, alter biological form.

(10) This is the big one. Intelligent design theory predicts that all attempts at producing complex life in the laboratory or by a controlled experiment in nature from genuinely random processes will fail. On the other hand, where the conditions of a test can be demonstrated to be nonrandom, ID allows that production of complex life is, in theory, possible, though not necessarily likely. In other words, should a successful test be performed that can produce complex life via any number of steps, the prevailing natural law(s), physical conditions, and physical parameters invoked by the experiment will be discovered to contain complex forms of information biased towards the evolution of functional life forms. Alternatively, ID theory implies that if and so long as the bias for life lies at a level in nature outside science’s capacity to discern, science will be unable to replicate the requisite variables for the origin and evolution of complex life because accidentally stumbling upon the right parameters is exorbitantly improbable. This is due to the immense complexity involved. This testable prediction lends genuine refutability to intelligent design theory, for, if complex life could be generated from purely random conditions in a controlled experiment, intelligent design theory would be proven wrong.

In addition to the primary authors of intelligent design theory such as Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe, the works of many other scientists and mathematicians with varying points of view such as Michael Polanyi, Hubert Yockey, Sidney Fox, Simon Conway Morris, Sir Fred Hoyle, Bernd-Olaf Küppers and Stuart Kauffman have contributed mathematical or biochemical data that combine to form a substantial demonstration that the evolutionary process is nonrandom. Each author does this in his or her own varied way, and none of these researchers to my knowledge make the further inference to intelligent design (nor do they fully agree with each other on all the aspects of the larger evolutionary explanation). Further support for the nonrandom hypothesis is available in integrated analytical studies such as Dean Overman’s book, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, which is highly recommended. This all goes to corroborate the fully testable hypothesis that complex life cannot be generated from truly random conditions.

How complex is “complex?” That is an excellent question. There are clearly significant differences in difficulty level and complexity in the design of creatures at several identifiable stops on the tree of life. Multicellularity is one such step. Consciousness is another. The internal complexity of mammalian physiology is one. Intelligence and self-consciousness are two additional unique levels of complexity in biological systems, and so on. But accident would be extremely fortunate to reach anyone of these, let alone all of them. With further research, it may ultimately turn out that it is possible to produce a simple single-celled prebacterium through random processes in the lab, but nothing more complex than that. Or, it may be possible to randomly achieve simple multicellular creatures but nothing further, and so on. The threshold that forbids accidental origination of a given life form may turn out to exist at any one of these various distinguishable levels of complexity. Success at generating life at one level via a random based laboratory experiment does not guarantee the possibility of doing the same at higher levels. Thus, ID theory predicts that attempts to randomly construct the tree of life in the lab will fail at some level of complexity, while not yet being able to specify precisely which level, beyond affirming that the construction of intelligent mammals would definitely be out of reach of an accidental process.

The current data strongly suggests that even advanced single celled life, and thus the entire tree of life, is out of reach of an accidental process, and nothing that has been produced in the lab refutes that view. Thus, this testable implication of ID theory has been largely confirmed. Neo-Darwinists object that even the conditions prerequisite to randomly generating a simple bacterium are so complex as to be forever out of reach of a controlled experiment, and this may be so. But if it is, we have to conclude that the theory of accidental evolution is not testable.

(11) Intelligent design theory predicts that we won’t find complex machines of any type (biotic or otherwise) lying around the earth having been spontaneously formed by accidental processes—and we don’t find such things. Darwinists continue to ridicule William Paley’s watchmaker argument, but no one who finds a diamond-studded Rolex watch in the middle of a coalmine will ever believe a natural process created it (or that the union steward is honest). Similarly, finding a Mercedes at the bottom of the Pacific is not going to convince anyone of accidental evolution of automobiles by thermo-chemical reaction near a thermal vent. They will rightly assume that the car was lost at sea with a sunken cargo ship or ferry. Merely contemplating such hypotheses reveals the concept of accidental machine construction to be a ludicrous travesty upon the intellect. While granting that we cannot perform a full test of the creation of complex life in real time, if accidental evolution is true we should be able to perform much smaller tests regarding the spontaneous construction of miscellaneous functional biotic components of sufficient complexity to bridge the minimum genetic distance between the functionality of any two closest relatives on the tree of life. To the extent that all of our tests and observations uphold the rule that such minimally complex functional biotic machines (living or nonliving) are never generated by random elements of nature, intelligent design is confirmed and neo-Darwinian accidental evolution is refuted. Yes, heat can spontaneously construct a handful of proteins under the right conditions, and the Miller-Urey conditions can generate a few amino acids, and simple “protocells” can form spontaneously that have no genomic activity at all but only some simple and temporary chemical exchanges bounded by a sugar-ammonia or lipid barrier. But these do not involve genome informed and directed functional system dynamics at all. They aren’t machines, though they are or they contain some of the simplest potential components of biological machines. Such spontaneous creations might be assumed into a cell once cells were created, but they don’t explain the creation of a cell or how a cell can turn into a human being.

(12) ID theory predicts from the basis of mathematics and information theory that huge information repositories must be present at fundamental levels of biology and/or the physical and chemical processes that give rise to biological organisms to ground and enable the construction of the astronomically complex machines of life. There has to be both a blueprint and a construction control system in order to get machines together properly, including living machines. Information is essential to both. Two enormous repositories of information are already known in DNA and folded proteins, which together can not only store but physically translate in consistent and controlled ways vast amounts of information pertaining to the construction of physical structures and the operation and regulation of anatomical systems. DNA is the larger part of the blueprint, and enzymes (a class of proteins that regulate biological processes) are a large part of the construction control system. Once a viable living machine is built, of course, natural selection will vote on the best ones in relation to environmental pressures. But, an accidental process void of design information cannot produce living machines for natural selection to vote on; they are too complex. The fact that science cannot generate such information repositories sufficient to produce life from random conditions constitutes another successful test of ID theory.

When we watch the genome and enzyme governed process build a young creature from an embryo or rebuild portions of an injured adult organism we see that these two elements, design information and a controlled construction process, are crucial to getting the job done. Although we can see where most of the information comes from in these cases, we have much less visibility of the historical evolutionary process that built the tree of life in the first instance. In that case, we don’t yet know where all the information repositories will turn out to be; but we do know that they must be there. Design information may well be present at much deeper levels than biologists tend to look. We know information resides in the gross components of living cells, DNA, proteins, and microtubule structures. However, more and more, research is being geared toward deeper levels, such as the electromagnetic properties of molecules. These potential sources of design information are in turn traceable to the atomic constituents of the elements that are the building blocks of molecules. We already know that electromagnetic properties are critical determinants of the properties of some molecules. What this means for our topic of the huge information repository required to enact the structures of life is that the previous superficial estimate of the soup of primeval Earth as being either “homogenous” or random may have been hasty in not distinguishing relevant differences among the electromagnetic properties of the early elements and molecules that could have comprised a strong bias for life.

(13) The existence of a reasonably fine-tuned system of embedded constraints throughout nature, constraints that favor the formation of a tree of life that is roughly proximate to the tree that we have, is a testable implication of intelligent design theory. ID theory predicts that heretofore undiscovered information that drives the development of the tree of life in a nonrandom way, accounting for the production of the critical minimum of things needed to produce early life and the large developmental jumps seen in the fossil record, will continue to be revealed by ongoing research. This makes evolution essentially a flowering of information already resident in nature, and not a random process at all.

The assumption here is that the designer would not leave the development of his final designs fully to chance. He might not specify the details, allowing for substantial flexibility or even allowing for radically different alternatives, but he would only allow alternatives acceptably compliant with some general specification.

The critical point of difference between an accidental and an intelligently designed creation is that a designer (assuming he had a definite purpose in mind) would be obliged to guarantee some minimum content by building in parameters that guarantee that at least one member of the set of acceptable variations would come about. Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, or government work as the saying goes. The designers specifications for life could be much more constrained than this, of course, specifying exactly the tree of life we see, but need not be. All that is required is that a general specification of some kind be fulfilled to ensure the designer’s overall purpose was achieved.

This suggests the RFP (request for proposal) system. Governments often obtain military technology contracts in this way, by stating the performance specifications of a desired new system in general terms. An RFP does not specify the mechanical details of system construction. Under the RFP concept, the designer of Earth’s life may have simply “said” “Make me a car,” as opposed to “Make me a red Mercedes.”

Or, to take cooking as an example, at times variations may be possible without spoiling the recipe. Gourmet chefs do this. They allow the contents of their regular soups and the mix of spices for their standard entrees to vary somewhat from week to week, giving the diner some variation without changing the composition so far as to ruin the overall parameters of a balanced recipe. Critical parameters are met, yet some variation is allowed. Under the RFP concept, any alternative mechanical design that can perform to specifications is as acceptable as any other. What neo-Darwinists take as proof of an accidental system, limited randomness in a few places in the physical process of nature, may simply be a built-in allowance for design variation, but variation constrained within a larger system of predesignated tolerances.

We already know there are master control regions within the genomes. There are “trans” control functions, a meta-genome, a transpositional genome, and a developmental genome. Experts are beginning to suspect that the genome has a master operating system that goes far beyond its individual programs.[182] Added to the long understood finely tuned cosmological constants and recently revealed partially “self-organizing” properties of chemicals and amino acids, this qualifies as a system of constraints that favor, if not the immediate, the inevitable formation of life within certain predesignated design parameters.

Additional testable implications of intelligent design theory include these classic indicators that ID theorists have pointed to all along, types of sophisticated information and functional systems that accident would not reasonably be expected to achieve within the time and physical resource limits available in the history of the universe:

(14) elements of artificiality such as language and Boolean logical networks

(15) The consistent maintenance of living systems of high functional complexity over vast amounts of time. This entails the use of sophisticated quality control structures that maintain complex biological design features, error check, repair and reproduce them with great precision and success. An accidental universe, given practically infinite time, might momentarily stumble upon a complex system, but it would be a flash in the pan as it were, not consistently maintained. Neo-Darwinists, of course, will counter “Why couldn’t a machine-building machine such as you posit the universe to be come about by an accidental fluke, one that by its very nature would then maintain all living systems over time?” On the surface this is a logical response, even quite devastating to the ID thesis—except for two things. First, although the machine-building machine maintains the machines of life, there is nothing to maintain the machine-building machine in an accidental world. It is free to fluctuate having no constraints upon it whatsoever. It would immediately pass out of existence as quickly as it came in a wildly fluctuating chaotic fully accidental universe. Second, if we were to posit the existence of such an enormous improbability, even for a brief period of time, by doing so we would destroy the credibility of absolutely all the rest of science’s predictions, which are grounded in probability estimates. Results contrary to all the other standard and fully endorsed predictions of science are no more improbable than the accidental achievement of such an accidental universe spanning system that builds and consistently maintains highly complex systems of life by pure accident. In affirming this option, science would be contradicting itself, ruling out the highly or moderately improbable in its everyday predictions while allowing dramatically extreme improbability to support this accidental view of the world.

In a sense intelligent design theory is claiming to have found nothing more in the physical and biological evidence than famous evolutionist G. G. Simpson already acknowledged to be there in 1964 (that evolution is definitely not accidental), and what Simon Conway Morris currently claims, that humans are the inevitable process of the natural systems of this universe. However, intelligent design theorists go further to add to Simpson and Morris the very defensible assumption that the design inference, which as I discuss at length in Appendix 4 below, is a fully legitimate scientific step to take in expositing and analyzing the meaning of that evidence. It may be arbitrary whether one calls this additional step philosophical, scientific, or merely logical, based upon how he or she prefers the charter of science to be defined, but it is an intellectually defensible step in any case.

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Fifteen scientifically testable implications of intelligent design theory! There is therefore no question of the scientific nature of at least some formulations of intelligent design theory. It is truly baffling that the highly prestigious American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) should claim that intelligent design theory is not testable. Perhaps that is because they haven’t read any ID publications since the 1960’s!

The AAAS has not accused (super)string theory of being unscientific merely because the hypothesized strings have yet to be fully proven or cannot be directly observed. Superstrings are only inferred from related mathematical data. Theories in quantum physics and cosmology have not been condemned out of hand as unscientific because they posit infinities that cannot be directly observed, an infinite number of subatomic particles or an infinite universe. To be logically, politically, and scientifically consistent, we should be as generous with intelligent design theory as we have been with theories of physics and cosmology. The designer of life posited by ID theory is not in principle unverifiable, but only yet to be verified, the same as the superstrings of modern string theory, the same as the atoms of Epicurus. If we can posit infinities in physical terms, we can also posit an infinite physical designer of life, or one that is merely very big. Intelligent design theory does not assert the existence of a supernatural designer, it doesn’t claim to know the nature of the designer, only the nature of the design. ID allows that the designer of life could be a physical intelligence, or lacking that, that the signs of intelligence in the created world are themselves sufficient to make the theory of intelligent design tractable to science. Humans make rational inferences to the existence of general categories of beings from their signals and artifacts every day (or are prepared to), while being unable to identify the full characteristics of the source with specificity. Submarines infer the existence of other ships based upon nothing more than sound patterns graphically represented on paper, while not being able to give the full description of those ships; mine rescue teams infer the existence of trapped miners they cannot see based upon a few taps on a pipe; a blip on a radar screen is safely interpreted as an airplane based upon the signal having met a handful of technical specifications, etc.

ID’s position is that even if we can never say who the intelligent designer is, the unequivocal physical indications of design in the world justify our affirming that there is an intelligent designer. It is like being trapped in a cave on a cold mountain when hot thermal vents suddenly come wafting through. The trapped miners or explorers cannot say from their vantage point what the heat source is, specifically, but they are justified in asserting that there is such a source. More to the point, if those trapped spelunkers heard repeated tapping in Morse code that gave them coherent messages, they would be justified in believing in an intelligent source for those sounds.

OK, you may say at this point. The design inference is legitimate under certain circumstances and intelligent design theory is genuinely scientific. But what about all the loudly ballyhooed evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution? We can’t just dismiss all of that out of hand. My answer? There isn’t any evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution, none at all—not for accidental evolution. There is not one coherent argument in all of the evolutionary writings that demonstrates how an accident could generate such complex designs as we see in living systems—not one—even with the help of natural selection. All the volumes of evidence we have serve to corroborate basic evolution only, that is, very basic evolution, meaning merely inheritance with variation. The data we have leaves the role of natural selection and accidental mutations completely unevidenced, and argues strongly against an accidental dynamic being able to propose the complex increments of biological change required to give natural selection anything of substance to vote on. So the volumes of evidence often referred to by Darwinists and neo-Darwinists in fact gives not the slightest support for Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolution, but only for inheritance followed by variation, a bare bones version of evolution that leaves the evolutionary process dynamic completely undescribed. In other words, the most basic theory of evolution does not even attempt to say how evolution happened; it only says that it happened. This is what Henry Gee says we should stick with because we will never have sufficient evidence, given the deep time of evolution, to say more. We can continue filling out the tree of life and identify probable relationships based upon degrees of phylogenetic similarities to varying degrees of probability, and refine those trees further and further over time; but we will never have confident grounds for saying how it all actually came about.

Turning the Tables: Is Darwinian Theory Testable?

Darwinists confidently assert that Darwinian evolution has been tested and confirmed over and over again, yet this is not so—not in the classic sense of experimental test and direct empirical observation. The evolution of one species from another has never been observed, and we cannot create life in the lab or produce new complex sets of genes under random conditions. As we discussed earlier, the truth of the matter is that, while basic evolution may be untestable, accidental evolution has been frequently tested and has dramatically failed eleven different tests:

1. Probability (Dembski, Meyer)

2. Resource exhaustion (Dembski)

3. Physical bias beyond an accidental or random parameter (Penrose, Morris, Ross, Denton)

4. Direct observation that nature is not a random fractal producing mixing bowl (Everybody)

5. Chicken & egg problem for abiogenesis: it takes life to produce life (Everybody)

6. Thousands of mutagenesis studies have produced no support for the accidental thesis (Everybody)

7. Randomly produced biotic machines and machine components are not seen to be produced by nature en masse as required by an accidental evolutionary process (Everybody).

8. Irreducible complexity satisfies Darwin’s own criterion for the refutation of his theory (Behe, Darwin).

9. The fossil record mismatches an accidental process. (Gish, Meyer, Denton—even Mayr)

10. We are entitled to a design inference when we see computer programming-controlled systems of high complexity that are visibly machines. (Dembski)

11. Failure to explain. Neo-Darwinian theory has no real explanation for macroevolution, and many of its presumed icons have been discredited. (Wells)

In the grand rhetorical style of Marxist propaganda however, neo-Darwinists ignore all of this and simply continue to toot their own horn where they can. In Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, Niles Eldredge claims that Darwinian/neo-Darwinian evolution has been successfully tested, not by directly demonstrating its primary claims of macroevolution or accidental processes in the lab, or by direct observation, but by predicting the patterns of fossils, phylogenetic characteristics, and similar genetic sequences among different species. He identifies these patterns as consisting of a plethora of widely varying things that range from a mere progression from the simple to the complex, to “nested” sets of genetic and physiological resemblances, to hominids moving from a smaller to a larger brain. The continued confirmation of such general patterns in new fossil finds and the physiology of living creatures are what Niles Eldredge calls the “tests” that have confirmed evolution. While such phenomena do exhibit patterns, and while they undeniably give evidence of inherited similarities or homology among creatures, which does suggest (though not prove) some form of family relationship, these are not pure tests of evolution in that there seems no way for them to truly fail. A test that can only succeed is not a true test. No record of past predictions having been made before the fact of the pattern being established is being kept to validate what are later claimed to have been predictions, and a discovery that doesn’t fit one pattern is simply classified as being another, even to the point of attributing a wholly new kind of pattern. These so-called tests/predictions of patterns in biological features of the history of life are not genuine tests because they are normally not issued in advance—thus they take no risk of failure—and incompatible discoveries are simply logged in as a new pattern.

And these kinds of patterns, even when and especially when they are accurately predicted, do not speak to the accidental question in any way other than suggesting that it didn’t happen accidentally. Accident would have caused much more variation, particularly in flawed and partially failed attempts at new design, that what we see in the fossil record. If these indirect kinds of tests are to be affirmed as genuine tests of accidental evolution, then the theory of accidental evolution has simply failed the test. The mere fact that the patterns are predictable at all tells us the process is not random. This is true by definition.

The problem with using such patterns as tests is that they are so amenable to redefinition based upon new discoveries. They are already so broad in scope and so variable that it is hard to imagine a new fossil or physiological feature discovery that could not be said to fit somewhere in such a way as to confirm some kind of pattern predicted by Darwinian theory. If a radically different species is discovered, as has recently occurred, it is simply placed on a new branch of the tree by itself and a new set of hypothetical relationships devised to make it fit into the family. Under this type of procedure, what could possibly serve as a contrary indication; what would be an unsuccessful test?

And none of these patterns offer a shred of evidence for the ability of natural selection to build complex biological machines from accidental form changes. All the patterns show is that creatures have some functions, structures, and DNA in common. The patterns do not speak to how the creatures came to be assembled, only that whatever process was employed left many of them with features in common.

True scientific tests must be rigorously defined regarding what constitutes a successful test and what qualifies as an unsuccessful test, and this must be done in advance of the test. Specific, clear and concrete parameters must be set for the relevant empiric data that would be considered refuting. Unambiguous predictions have to be made prior to the discovery of the data that is claimed as a confirmation of the prediction. Exactly how have all of these conditions been satisfied by Eldredge’s allegedly conclusive tests of evolutionary pattern predictions? He doesn’t say. Nor does anyone else. Until tests for Darwinian evolution are laid out with the proper scientific rigor, they can hardly be considered conclusive. There is a real question of ad hoc “cheating” here.

The lack of an intermediate form being discovered, let’s say, from an ancient miniature hippopotamus to a whale, at any given point in time does not, according to Darwinists, mean it won’t be discovered later. And this much is certainly true. But, for neo-Darwinists, finding something with a feature that disqualifies it as that intermediate only warrants placing it elsewhere on the tree of life. This is all as it should be as far as constructing the tree of life goes, except for one thing: the so called prediction or test can only succeed over time, it can never be refuted. So, what would satisfy the condition of an unsuccessful test of such a prediction? Finding a creature with no genetic code whatsoever or a radically different kind of genetic code, or finding a creature having no visible/functional features in common with any other creature on the tree of life (as if that were possible) seems to be the only refuting instance allowed? Such a test hardly refutes intelligent design, not does it confirm that natural selection can do the amazing things claimed for it. Think this is ridiculous? Ask a neo-Darwinist to tell you what specific kinds of nested similarities would refute the theory. Nothing will. When something very odd or novel is found, a new branch on the tree of life is simply initiated to accommodate the novel organism.

The only thing Darwinists have openly admitted to be a refutation of their theory is to find hominids existing during the age of bacteria in the early Cambrian or Precambrian period. This is a critical test because it would refute the thesis that natural selection is necessary to “build” life in increments by locking in small accidental form proposals in sequences over vast amounts of time, with small changes ultimately adding up to substantial progressive form change. This much would be true; if hominids were found at the beginning of the history of life, it would disprove natural selection. But the absence of disproof is not the presence of proof. If it were, we could also conclude that God exists because his existence has not been disproved. Neo-Darwinists certainly don’t want to allow that.

The spirit of testability is what science is after, not the letter. Science was initiated to genuinely find things out, to discover things, not just to check off blocks of technical questions on a form and say that is the best we can do. The problem with Darwinian/neo-Darwinian evolution is that there is no way to demonstrate that natural selection has truly acted to build living creatures. We know the fittest survive. We know that harsh environmental conditions can cause an extinction, as can superior competition from other species. But we do not know that natural selection was Johnny-On-The-Spot each time a new biological system/structure was invented by nature to help construct that feature. Given the deep time of evolutionary history, the one demonstration that would work to prove the input of natural selection, a 4 billion year long historical map correlating each genetic and physiological step in evolutionary change with the environmental pressures of the creatures hosting the change, is simply impractical. So, the key question in evaluating the role of natural selection is “Can we ever have clear and convincing evidence that natural selection has voted on the construction of all of the selectable genetic/biochemical/structural changes necessary to build the tree of life?” Henry Gee says no we can’t; there is far too much time involved and it is out of reach of full and competent evidentiary discovery. I agree.

We have to be careful to ask the right questions. To ask “Were all the selectable new features voted on by natural selection?” is not helpful, because, by definition, selectable features will be acted upon by natural selection. The question that is crucial to evaluating the role of natural selection in light of modern genetics and biochemistry is “Did natural selection help construct those selectable features?” In other words, what we now know that Darwin did not know is that biological features are quite complex, involving many genes and several epigenetic factors. There seems to be no way for natural selection to vote until many highly improbable genetic and epigenetic alterations are already compiled. There may be a few changes that could be accomplished by single mutations, but not many.

Resolution of the classic disagreement between the Richard Dawkins and the Ernst Mayr schools of thought on what the unit of selection is, the gene or the whole creature, is key to evaluating the capability of natural selection here. I, naturally, disagree with both schools. It seems to me that the unit of selection, as a simple matter of common sense, has to be in between the gene and the organism, at the level of a functional composite change to a organism’s structures or systems. Changing a single gene can produce only a fraction of the changes evolution needs, and waiting until the whole creature is built takes natural selection out of the construction process entirely. Darwin’s theory says small changes are acted upon by natural selection, yes, but he did not have access to genetic science. Small for Darwin was not that small; it was a small functional change, not a small irrelevant change.

Thus, we have to very careful how we compose a test. Natural selection can be refuted by finding advanced creatures at the beginning of the tree of life, yes, but that is not the only test that can refute neo-Darwinian evolution, which involves a partnership between random mutation and natural selection. After doing a rough but safe estimate of all the features of the tree of life and the component steps necessary to get those features constructed to the point that they affect a functional or structural change in the organism that natural selection can vote on, we see that evolutionary history affords too little time and physical resources to allow construction of the complete inventory of selectable features by accident. Thus, neo-Darwinian evolution fails the resource availability test, but neo-Darwinists simply refuse to admit it, saying that anything can happen by accident and that probability is irrelevant.

Even the hominid test is politically suspect. When the refuting data is present in the fossil record we are not likely to find it; it is therefore a relatively safe political tactic for neo-Darwinists to use to propose this test. We have fossil records for perhaps 1-3 % of the creatures that have lived on the earth, probably much less. This scarcity of fossils means that the only test that Darwinists have proposed as a valid criterion for refuting the theory of evolution, namely finding hominids at the beginning of things, has less than 1 chance in 20 of revealing the presence of the refuting data even when the refuting events have actually occurred. One can say that this test of evolution regarding the early appearance of hominids in the fossil record is currently pending. True, it is currently pending, but this one test that might fail could conceivably take millions of years to satisfactorily conduct, to so exhaust the fossil record in paleontological digs that even a single geographically isolated occurrence of a human community in the early periods of life’s history could not be overlooked. Once again, the neo-Darwinists offer nothing by way of test that is not exorbitantly safe politically; they are not really risking refutation.

But the neo-Darwinists have made a fatal strategic error in admitting this test (though they had little choice in the matter), because the logic of the test can be generalized from hominids to an advanced genome generally, in which case the test fails. I contend that natural selection has actually been refuted by a test that is very similar to the Cambrian-hominid test. Expanding the same concept of finding a creature vastly out of place on the chronological evolutionary tree yields other tests of a similar kind, and one of these tests actually does refute natural selection. It doesn’t have to be hominids out of place, or even a creature as such, so long as a substantial portion of the genome of advanced creatures can be shown to have existed at a time so early that natural selection never had a chance to vote on the construction of that portion of the genome. If natural selection can be shown in this way to have played no substantial role in the construction of the core of the genomes, neo-Darwinian theory fails. The late Professor Susumu Ohno, a noted researcher who discovered the link between mutation and cancer, has speculated that such key partial genomes existed sufficient to entail the rapid generation of the tree of life during the Cambrian explosion. (He didn’t argue my thesis that this takes natural selection out of the lineup, but one can easily see that it does.)

If much of the genomic plan key to the development of the various animal phyla was present at the beginning of the Cambrian before most of those phyla ever appeared, then natural selection obviously wasn’t crucial to building life. The classic neo-Darwinian model may have still played a minor part in further completing and polishing these core genomes, but it did not construct them. Accidental mutation may have contributed simple (usually binary) mutational inputs into a developmental or transpositional genome already substantially built, but they would be too rarely successful or tolerable to advance a species through evolution. However, while the genome is partially but not completely built, and prior to the genome being embodied in a living creature, more substantial alterations accruing from an accidental dynamic can be tolerated (because there is nothing alive yet to kill, and no functioning systems to break). This is the only situation where statistical probability allows constructive input by an accidental dynamic to a genome: before system activation occurs. After that, when an irreducibly complex living system is present, the living system is so ultra-complex and interdependent that it becomes too sensitive to accidental change for the accidental dynamic to further progress evolution. Accidental changes only harm such a system; they do not progress it. Only inactive genomes can be progressed by accidental mutations.

Ohno is not the only famous evolutionary expert to affirm that such precursor genomes must have been present at the beginning of the Cambrian. Perhaps our most famous living evolutionist, Professor James W. Valentine, author of Origin of the Phyla, asserts that much of the central core the genomes must have been present before the Cambrian explosion, or it simply could not have occurred in the time that it did. This thesis, not all that different from Professor Susumu Ohno’s Pananimalia thesis in concept, is corroborated by the math of probability theory, which tells us that something very much like this must have occurred, for there is insufficient time and resources in the history of our universe to have built life accidentally one mutation at a time. Thus, the one unequivocal test the neo-Darwinists will concede as capable of refuting their theory must return a negative if evolutionists are to have a credible explanation of the explosion of life form variation in the Cambrian period.

Given what we now know of the complexity of the genomes, it is clear that the one critical test that neo-Darwinists admit, has now essentially returned a negative result in the event of the Cambrian explosion. The only plausible explanation we currently have for that period of ultra-rapid evolution is affirmed by two of the most consummate experts we have in the field of evolutionary biology: the late Professor Susumu Ohno, and Professor James W. Valentine. Both posit that the genetic information needed for the rapid development of the larger part of the tree of life in the brief 5 million year period within the Cambrian was already present at the beginning of that explosion of biological form development. This takes natural selection out of the lineup regarding the construction of the core of the animal genome. For those genes already present before the Cambrian explosion, natural selection did not play a critical role in their construction. No creature actively expressing those genes or their incremental precursors had ever competed under natural selection prior to the appearance of the inactive form of those genes in the early Cambrian. At that point, all the “mutation” required to produce an explosion of new life forms was to rearrange chemical gene activation markers; the genes themselves were already there. A single event that produced repeated or otherwise thorough chemical immersion of those precursor genomes could have rapidly produced all possible combinations of gene activation markers. This neatly explains the enormous variation in animal form that so rapidly arose in the Cambrian, and science has no other explanation. The Ohno/Valentine hypothesis makes perfect sense because the Cambrian explosion of new life forms occurs far too fast for the classic neo-Darwinian model to work.

Thus, the Cambrian explosion constitutes a failed test of the neo-Darwinian model of evolution. In addition, with the discovery of irreducible complexity and ultra-complexity in living systems, Charles Darwin’s own test for refuting his theory has been satisfied as well: the discovery of a living system or component that could not have been formed by a sequence of small accidental changes (in the available time). These are the only two tests the neo-Darwinists admit, and they have both failed. For that reason, I consider neo-Darwinian evolution to be genuinely refuted.

Why are there so few tests for neo-Darwinian theory? Because the classic theory of evolution is so general that it doesn’t really say anything. It only requires that spontaneous variations occur in creatures and that natural selection locks in those changes that promote physical survival and higher relative rates of reproduction. This level of generality makes it easy for Darwinists to “talk their way out” of almost any objection or proposed test.

For example, suppose someone objected: “Why are kidney stones so painful as to be disabling when the only thing that can be done to relieve the pain is wait (for the small ones) or surgery (for the big ones).” Is this an instance of foreknowledge of the medical arts and surgery? Otherwise, disabling a hunter-gatherer in a predator filled environment with no practical benefit to offset the disability does not seem to promote survival so much as to impede it. On the other hand, the pain signal works to obligate modern man to go to the surgeon. Modern man has no immediate predation threat and can have his or her food at the hospital. The Darwinists will simply say no, the process of evolution is not perfect and it simply hasn’t gotten around to fixing that yet.

Or, they could say that the pain signal from kidney stones has only been around since surgery was invented some 3-9000 years ago, but that would be a very rapid evolution. Consider, then, the uniquely protected status Darwinian theory has held in regards to testability. If the test is positive, in this case, had the signal of kidney stones led to intense thirst instead of pain so that the stone could be rapidly flushed, this would be a case of evolution proved, a successful test. But, should comparative genome studies show that the pain response is not newer than 9000 years, they can simply say that evolution hadn’t gotten around to fixing that flaw by the time surgery came along and selected the pain response for continuation, or that kidney stones tend to occur in older patients and prehistoric man didn’t live long enough to make it a critical concern, etc. I am not trying to make the point that kidney stones give us critical data to evaluate evolution, I am using the example to help the reader visualize the problem of testability regarding neo-Darwinian evolution. Neo-Darwinists don’t have tests that admit negative results; they only have tests that admit alternative explanations compatible with their overall theory. So, in this approach to dealing with negative data evolution can only be confirmed, it cannot be refuted. It is an odd method of science: a theory takes no real risk of being refuted in the same event outcomes that are nonetheless counted as corroborative proof of the theory. This is, in fact, not the scientific method at all. A theory must admit of refutability to be scientific.

Then along comes intelligent design theory that offers some genuinely discerning tests for evaluating evolution, the probability argument, the resource exhaustion argument, the irreducible complexity barrier, etc., and the evolutionists say the entire enterprise is not even science, but religion! They refuse to even consider these tests!

Then there is the criterion of prediction. What at first appears to be a very impressive significance of the nested similarities as a predictive device goes away when one considers that nothing specific has been predicted in advance, that is, nothing definite enough to count as a refutation if the prediction fails. For example, neo-Darwinists’ predictions are not time delimited; unlimited time is allowed to find the missing links in the fossil record. And evolutionary scientists are permitted to superimposed new patterns after the fact of new discoveries. Any and all test results regarding patterns and fossils therefore count as successful tests, or at least neutral ones. Theories must be modifiable based upon new evidence, true, but to formulate a theory in such general terms that it is always modifiable but never refutable is not scientific. This is normally called “rigging the game,” but Darwinists prefer to call it “indisputable confirmation.”

Were specific and concrete parameters for the patterns of nested similarities laid out prior to the discovery of the evidence that established the pattern? Did Darwinian scientists make clear how many gaps were acceptable to their theory, how frequent, in what positions in the fossil sequences? In other words, were our current views of the evolutionary process all fully formed in advance of the discoveries of the evidence, or were they tailored to fit the discoveries only after the evidence was revealed? None of these questions is straightforwardly addressed in the evolutionary literature, the history of successful tests are nowhere itemized for public inspection, therefore, I assume the answer is primarily negative. Otherwise, Darwinists would have created a flagship out of any bonafide successful tests and we would not have heard the end of it. It is fully proper and necessary to periodically update and modify a theory, but it is not proper to make predictions only after the test is complete. The theory of evolution may now well fit the evidence and thus be a good explanation, but it has not been testable and therefore has not qualified as scientific under the standard definition of scientific method. Darwinian predictions are unique among those of other scientific theories; they can only succeed or remain in progress awaiting further fossil discoveries, but they can never fail.

If these pattern predictions are to provide a bonafide test for Darwinian theory, they must at least be specific enough to rule out competing theories, or tell us which of the competing theories is most likely correct, otherwise what are we actually testing? Eldredge’s “tests,” by predicting only a general and imperfect progression from the simple to the complex and a set of nested similarities among creatures that are only “predicted” after they are discovered, while serving as plausible indicators of basic inheritance, fail to distinguish between the competing theories. They do serve as tests of inheritance, and allow for refutation of the thesis of inheritance, but they don’t help us differentiate the respective plausibilities of the accidental/intelligent design theses. An intelligent designer can work from the simple to the complex, as we see occurring in evolution. In fact, in a sense all human designs have done this. Science, architecture and engineering have to first design and proof the components of human society’s various mechanistic creations before those simpler components can be safely assembled into larger constructions that are more complex.

One wants to go further and ask if these tests truly confirm the neo-Darwinian form of evolutionary theory at all. Why do we assume that an accidental process predicts such a relentlessly successful design progression as is revealed in the history of evolution? The (admittedly) almost exclusively destructive nature of random mutations contrasts starkly with the amazing success rate of biological evolution. This shows that the steadily progressive pattern is more of a failed prediction for neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution, and the addition of intelligent design or purpose remedies the problem. The astoundingly efficient progressive pattern of evolution is more truly a successful test of intelligent design assisted evolution than it is of an accident. Neo-Darwinists will universally exclaim at this point “But don’t you see, natural selection guarantees the success of evolution, and success is therefore a prediction of neo-Darwinian theory.” The problem here is that natural selection itself is not a testable hypothesis. There is no way to demonstrate the limits to natural selection’s input to the process of evolution because the process is so big and requires so much time to occur. Natural selection is the only thing that can conceivably alter the pattern of evolution from that expected of a true accident (which pattern is not seen in the fossil record) and natural selection is not testable. The primary thesis of neo-Darwinian evolution, that natural selection combined with accidental form changes, is sufficient to generate the tree of life is therefore not a testable claim. This means that neo-Darwinian evolution is not testable, and therefore not a proper theory of science. It is a popular theory, yes, but it is not a proper one.

Natural selection is the biggest but not the only aspect of neo-Darwinian theory that is not testable. Darwinists have never specified the conditions for an unsuccessful test of their “predictions” of the nested similarities that are the flagship of neo-Darwinian theory’s “testability.” Thus, the neo-Darwinists have not performed any truly rigorous scientific tests in the sense of natural science at all even in regards to the largely uncontested thesis of interspecies inheritance. An experimental protocol that permits only successful tests is not science at all but politics masquerading as science. It is a con game.

If Eldredge wants to say that these generalized cases of pattern matching are bonafide tests only in the sense of an historical science, as distinct from experimental science, then he will have to further clarify (in addition to some fancy intellectual tap dancing and liberal use of smoke and mirrors). For how does merely laying out the patterns of historical evolution in terms of nested similarities satisfy our concern for the apparent impotence of accident to give natural selection the complex multi-gene increments of form change that it needs to vote on to successfully move between species on the tree of life. Further, in what way does it makes sense to say that the study of history alone affords testable predictions of the biomechanics of evolution, which must be shown to establish that accidental evolution is even possible even with the help of natural selection? How can “predictions” of nested similarities be so significant that they can be said to confirm a theory involving enormously complex biomechanical transformations at the genetic and cellular levels without ever having to show what the biomechanics of evolution actually are? A plausible biochemical pathway that is achievable in the available evolutionary time for natural selection augmented random mutation has yet to be demonstrated between any two relatives on the tree of life, let alone all of them. Another question that must be answered is why neo-Darwinists try to impose the more stringent standards of experimental testability upon intelligent design theory but claim not to have to meet the same standard themselves because evolution is a theory of “historical science.” The two theories, after all, apply to precisely the same subject matter.

True, the scientific journal literature reveals that researchers have generated detailed hypotheses concerning many small segments of the biomechanical process of evolution, but nothing substantial enough to truly show how one creature on the tree biomechanically transitioned into another. It is, admittedly, a huge job—I am not criticizing the quality of the research or the researchers, only describing its bonafide limitations. However, merely establishing the plausibility of one or more of these minute biochemical segments of the enormously much larger requisite chain of evolutionary steps cannot count as a test of evolutionary theory. A failure of any one, or even of all, of these hypotheses has no negative impact on the theory of evolution whatsoever. If the hypothesized segment fails based upon later research, Darwinists simply conclude that the biochemical process of evolution must have been different than the specific hypothesis proposed. They won’t throw out evolution based upon the failure of these proposed segments of the biochemical chain of evolutionary events. Darwinists always have assumed and apparently always will assume that an alternative biomechanical path will be available if a proposed path is disproved. Thus, a genuine risk of the refutation of neo-Darwinian theory is not present in these hypotheses. They do not then qualify as bonafide scientific tests.

The failure of a proposed biomechanical pathway for evolution poses no problem for Darwinian theory for the simple reason that Darwinian theory predicts no biomechanical process. Evolutionary theory is completely removed, completely separated from the biomechanical event processes of life. Darwinists will simply say, well evolution obviously happened, it’s an historical fact, so there must be another pathway that we simply haven’t discovered. This argument sounds very good on the street and down at the pub, and it does appear that evolution occurred, but proceeding in this way is not science; it is not scientific method. Scientific theories have to be testable in the sense of being refutable. Neo-Darwinists say that intelligent design theory is not testable, but in fact it is, as we have just seen, and it is even testable in this strong sense of being refutable. If science could generate complex life from random conditions intelligent design theory would be refuted.

In contrast, only the inheritance thesis of basic evolution is testable in the hard sense of refutable. The additional thesis of natural selection, which turns basic evolution into Darwinian evolution, is not refutable. And, the thesis that form change proposals are truly accidental (as opposed to merely spontaneous), which turns Darwinian evolution into neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution, is not refutable. Thus, only basic evolution is a properly testable scientific theory; neither of the additional theses of accidental form change or the effect of natural selection are testable.

We have to be careful to distinguish two questions “Is there a biochemical pathway of evolution?” and “Is Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolution testable?” Although there is presumably a biochemical pathway we have yet to discover that does not require miraculous intervention, the Darwinists’ unwillingness to accept science’s inability to demonstrate such a pathway that is available to truly random form change makes the neo-Darwinian theory untestable. Beyond that, science’s inability to demonstrate how an accidental event dynamic can generate the form change proposals natural selection requires to build the tree of life legitimately constitutes a failed test of neo-Darwinian theory.

This may seem like a radical claim, that the leading theory of life’s origin for 100 years is not even testable, and therefore not scientific, and that it has in fact failed, but better men and women than I have made this claim before now. Mayr attributes the following statement to Sir Karl Popper who is the very father of the philosophy of science, as respected in the philosophy of science as Mayr, Simpson, Stebbins, Dawkins or Dobzhansky is in evolution: “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.” Popper makes this claim in his essay “Darwinism as a Metaphysical Research Program,” which comprises chapter 10 of But Is It Science?[183] A great uproar arose over this statement, and Popper later offered a recantation. I suspect, however, it was offered more in a spirit of intellectual fairness and social conciliation than admission of technical philosophical error. It is interesting to note that Ernst Mayr, for many years our senior living evolutionist, had a broader, and more candid and honest, view of evolutionary science than many more recent evolutionary biologists, one that seems to come close to Popper’s point of view. Mayr, in his book One Long Argument, in 1991, says “Darwinism is not a simple theory that is either true or false but is rather a highly complex research program that is being continuously modified and improved. This was true before the synthesis and it continues to be true after the synthesis.”[184]

Whatever the cause of Popper’s retraction, I cannot be so generous here. This is because failure to differentiate the accidental, materialist, and cosmic purpose-denying versions of Darwinian theory (and the more general research program that is not specific enough to be tested) allows the evidence for basic evolution and other philosophically and theologically innocuous versions of the theory, to be mistakenly held to support the untestable versions cosmic purpose-denying versions. The untestable versions compromise the intellectual integrity of science by inserting personal philosophy and by removing testability. It is simply dishonest to move seamlessly between these radically different concepts of evolution as if they were the same thing as neo-Darwinian authors often do. [Note: This is why I will later argue, as Professor Behe has done, that a new synthesis, a scientific meeting of the minds, if you will, is needed to sort out the language, the variable scientific tenets, and the conceptual implications of each different version of evolutionary theory, and to give each distinct version of evolutionary theory a unique name. This is required so that the public will not be misled into applying the benefits of a positive test or evaluation of one version of evolutionary theory, basic evolution, for example, to the credit of a different version such as accidental evolution.]

If no conceivable fossil discovery is incompatible with Darwinian theory because Darwinists will always find a place on the tree of life for it no matter what, restructuring the tree as necessary; if no conceivable aspect of any biological feature will argue against Darwinian theory;[185] if no biomechanical process description is incompatible with Darwinian theory; and, if Darwinists can always assume an alternate viable biomechanical route is possible between any of the branches of absolutely any imaginable tree of life, it would appear that Popper, as Einstein once did, simply recanted too soon. For how is such a theory testable and refutable?

This is not to say that we should throw out basic evolution as a plausible explanation of life, but to honestly admit the limitations of each variant of the theory so that they can be properly evaluated--separately. We cannot afford to throw out the scientific method with the evolutionary bathwater! Evolution must be considered a research program and not a theory until clarification and precision is achieved concerning its testable modern variants (if there are any). As of the present, all of the historical versions of evolutionary theory specific enough to be tested have been refuted, and what remains is so general and abstract as to have no testable implications. Intelligent design theory, heretofore dismissed by mainstream science as untestable, is imminently more testable than any variant of Darwinian evolution currently posed. Ironically, the accidental version of Darwinian theory is testable in the sense that random mutations can be generated and evaluated for their evolutionary potential. But all the results of random mutagenesis to date reveal no such potential. This test has failed, and neo-Darwinian theory, the accidental form, should be considered refuted for that reason.

Basic descent with modification, which is the simplest core of evolutionary theory that is often called an established fact, only requires that there be some general similarities between some creatures to avoid refutation; the rest is explainable by variation after inheritance. Nothing is predicted beyond this, not which similarities, not which species, not how much, nothing. This much similarity, however, is required for creatures to merely live, breath, and walk on the same planet! This minimum of similarity implied by basic evolutionary theory would likely be there even in the complete absence of inheritance. It is therefore not a true and final test of evolutionary theory at all, even for the bare thesis of inheritance. The recent addition of genetic comparison adds a great deal more credibility to the theory of inheritance, in fact, making the absence of inheritance highly improbable, but probability argues against accidental evolution even more strongly, and the neo-Darwinists dismiss the probability argument there.

Perhaps contrary to popular belief, newer versions of evolutionary theory do not resolve any of these problems. Punctuated equilibrium, for example, is not explanatory; it is merely descriptive. Punctuated equilibrium affirms the fact that there are spurts of increased evolutionary pace shown in the fossil record. It would be odd indeed if what has always been the primary objection against accidental evolution would now be ballyhooed as proof of it! Nothing more ridiculous has occurred in the history of civilized thought. Punctuated equilibrium does not add credibility to accidental evolution. It takes away the only source of credibility the accidental hypothesis ever had: small gradual changes and sufficient time for natural selection to vote on each one of them.

Sir Karl Popper and Ernst Mayr, both famous intellectual giants that have earned a permanent place in the history of science, are correct: Darwinian evolution is a research program that seems to some at least to offer some benefits in providing a tentative working model, an explanatory framework to guide further research. It is not, however, a testable scientific theory. Specific variants of evolutionary theory can spawn testable implications. The problem here has been that, historically, every time a theorist formulates a version of evolution specific enough to be tested, the test fails; it is soon refuted. Soft inheritance (Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics)[186], naïve mutationism, (naïve) orthogenesis,[187] blending of genes, naïve finalism, all these have been refuted. Even Charles Darwin’s own version of evolution, classic gradualism, has now been refuted by the fossil record.

It is therefore not an accident that modern Darwinian discussions seem so general and abstract as to be saying nothing concrete at all, for they have learned the hard way not to be specific. Modern theorists are understandably gun-shy. This is because anything evolutionary theorists have so far proposed as the primary engine of macroevolutionary change that was concrete and specific enough to be tested has been disproved. Another reason may be simple prudence. Modern theorists realize that we don’t actually know what happened in evolution and that the theorizing has gotten way out ahead of the data, e.g., Dr. Henry Gee. With the explosion of new data from biological research over the past few decades, it may seem prudent to evolutionists to hedge their bets by keeping their theorizing at a level of abstraction high enough to avoid having to tie it to any biomechanical process whatsoever. And this is unquestionably prudent; but it is not testable.

Unfortunately for neo-Darwinian theory, it has not historically been so prudent. Neo-Darwinian theory (accidental evolution) does have a testable implication: that accidental mutations can spawn viable sets of new genes required for macroevolution. This has not been demonstrated to be true, however, and, thousands of mutagenesis studies argue that it has been demonstrated false. The primary thesis of this book and the prior books of William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Michael Denton, Michael Behe, Dean Overman, and many others, is to show that the accidental hypothesis has now met the same fate as the other historical versions of evolutionary theory that were foolish enough to be concrete: it has been refuted. This refuted myth of accidental evolution (assisted only by natural selection) must now be jettisoned from Darwinian theory.

Don’t look for the announcement of this refutation in your local paper any time soon, however. Modern theorists would apparently prefer to see this refutation of the accidental form of evolution go away quietly minus any public attention. They seem to be trying to reinterpret what evolutionary theory really means in their own view, based upon more modern data. Ernst Mayr, for example, seems to think this controversy over accident versus intelligent design or cosmic purpose to be the result of a simple misunderstanding:

…the critics continually criticize the claim that “Darwinian evolution is due to the natural selection of random mutations.” This criticism completely ignores the fact that from Darwin on to the 1980s the individual as a whole was considered the target of selection for the organismic biologists, and therefore recombination and the structure of the genotype as a whole were viewed as being far more important for evolution than mutational events at individual loci. Furthermore, the critics completely misinterpret the word “random.” The term, when applied to variation, means that it is not in a response to the needs of the organism.[188]

But not every theorist has taken Mayr’s view of evolution, and of those who have, the words “random” “accidental” and “chaotic” still pop up in contexts sufficient to mislead the reader to assume an accidental worldview. Mayr, himself, is the champion of the argument that cosmic purpose can be ruled out by science. If as Mayr says here, evolution derives not from random mutations but from transpositions of a highly complex and preexistent genetic machine, how is it that cosmic purpose is ruled out at all? There is, then, a logical inconsistency in Mayr’s position, one that amounts to trying to have it both ways: refuting cosmic purpose to support the materialist worldview, but then denying you have done it to avoid defending against criticisms of the accidental thesis. At best this is a straightforward error that contributes to confusion of the issues, and at worst it is a deliberate tactic aimed at allowing the public to continue to believe the deception that science has disproved cosmic purpose, God, and intelligent design. I don’t impugn Mayr’s motives, but the contradiction in his position speaks for itself. Other modern theorists have similarly tried to distance themselves from the accidental view by a variety of techniques, such as relegating the accidental view to naïve mutationism, a theory long considered refuted.

But such a silent and ambivalent refutation cannot be permitted; it would be intellectually unfair to the theist side of the culture and a disservice to the truth generally. A great deal of attention was previously focused on the accidental version of evolution in conjunction with announcements to the public of an imagined accidental foundation for physics (based upon a naïve view of quantum mechanics). These two errors were deftly manipulated by propaganda artists in the materialist/atheist camp to lead the public to believe that science had proved an accidental world and the materialist worldview. The public record must now be corrected in kind by visibly admitting to the public that the theory of accidental evolution has been refuted. To be fair, this must be done with the same amount of fanfare that atheistic materialists contrived for the theories of accidental evolution and accidental physics when they were improperly asserted to have been proved.

Darwinian theory is so confoundedly general as to tell us practically nothing and yet it is vaunted as being the most profound and illuminating thing science has ever done, informing practically every field of study we have in some significant way. Life began with a common ancestor and moved from the simple to the complex generally through some undefined thought to be accidental (non-purposive) biomechanical process of “random mutation.” That’s not much beyond saying that life is a total mystery but has developed in describable patterns. And the biomechanical process of evolution can be neither explained nor replicated. This is not profound, even in its own field, and one can hardly see how it illuminates every aspect of our culture. To the extent that evolution has had an effect on modern thought it has not been necessarily good. Survival of the fittest is a Machiavellian concept. Machiavelli is acknowledged to be the most evil and power oriented philosopher in the history of human thought—hardly something to celebrate.

To conceive of such a radical alternative view of life as evolution represented to the people of their time, (accomplished) amateurs like Darwin, Wallace and similar theorists of their age demonstrated genuine genius in breaking out of the intellectual mold of prior generations. However, I fail to see the profundity of the accidental tenet of this 150 year old idea for our own age. Now, 150 years later, we have advanced further beyond Darwin than Darwin had gone beyond his own contemporaries. How can such a barren theoretical backbone as survival of the fittest and spontaneous change from unknown mechanisms illuminate any field of study in the twentieth century? Modern science can “see” the basic chemistry of any physical transaction it cares to examine, even down to the subatomic level of matter. Science can identify the sequence of the genomes and discover the function of a given gene. How then is it profound for a modern scientific discipline to endorse accidental processes and unknown mechanics as the heart of its explanations of anything? Beyond that, science can no simply no longer support the claim that there is anything truly accidental about evolution. It can only demonstrate that on the rare occasion an accidental point mutation occurs. All our laboratory tests with such mutations show them to be predominantly destructive. Those mutations that are not destructive are nearly all neutral, and those that are beneficial are beneficial in a trivial way. As even Ernst Mayr admitted, point mutations are acknowledged as being an inconsequential force in evolution.

Thus, the accidental part of evolution has been disproved and the rest is not testable at all, other than in the possibility of refuting the claim that natural selection guided a sequence of accidents sufficiently to construct the tree of life. In the Cambrian explosion of biological form development, that claim too is refuted.

The final neo-Darwinists objection concerning the issue of testability is that ID theory is simply religion and not science. Religion is obviously not testable, and if ID theory fails the scientific standard, there simply is no alternative to evolution, no matter how badly it scores otherwise. The AAAS and the NAS are just wrong about intelligent design always being offered as an argument from religious authority; in most modern forms of ID, this is not the case. When intelligent design is offered outside of those Church publications that integrate the tenets of the faith with the science, it is presented as a strictly scientific case. The NAS is just wrong in permanently tying ID theory to arguments from religious authority. Many scientific and philosophical theories have had to break with their antecedent intellectual roots in order to improve and progress. The whole of modern science itself has had to do this, as science and religion used to be linked. Apparently the neo-Darwinists who say this about ID theory haven’t taken the trouble to research what is publicly available in bookstores, libraries and on the Internet for the last 30 years. Here is what our National Academy of Science says about intelligent design theory.

Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.[189]

But intelligent design does not claim supernatural intervention. ID is not limited to special publications of its advocates, and it does not refer to religious authority. What the NAS has said here is all wrong concerning ID theory, and is hypocritical in the extreme as the standard of refutability it sets is not currently being met by neo-Darwinian evolution. This is either a well-constructed and highly endorsed lie about intelligent design theory, cultivated for political reasons, or it is simply a very dumb mistake. We have already seen fifteen separate testable implications of intelligent design theory all of which are more substantial and direct (honest) than the odd pattern matching studies of Darwinian theory. Despite its religious antecedents, modern intelligent design theory is a legitimately testable scientific theory. Intelligent design theory is also refutable: the truly random achievement of an advanced life form (a mammal for example) from mere chemicals in the laboratory under genuinely random conditions would refute the intelligent design hypothesis that an accident cannot do such things.

The claims of the National Academy of Science concerning intelligent design are decades out of date, and simply false. There has always been a strictly scientific case embedded in both intelligent design and creation science arguments whether they were initially published in predominantly church-related venues or not. Our mainstream scientific establishment has simply ignored the scientific kernel of intelligent design theory and creation science arguments for apparently political reasons. They’re so in love with materialism that they have a phobia of religion. Anything published in conjunction with any religious comments can’t be science as far as they are concerned. But if one were to publish Einstein’s theory of relativity in American Catholic, it would not mean that Einstein’s theory was religion and not science. It would still be the same theory. The whole smear campaign against intelligent design theory has been a ridiculous affront to the human intellect and an embarrassment to the history and traditions of science. ID theory no longer makes religious claims; it merely often appears in the context of religious discussions. Yes, the philosophical argument for God’s existence from design is a close intellectual relative to ID theory, but they are not the same thing. There is a difference: one asserts God, one does not. A child can get this. But, most unfortunately, our federal courts have bought into this elementary mistake, claiming that it is impossible for intelligent design theory to divorce itself from its religious roots. The unfairness of this is manifest, as the theory of evolution itself has had to do the very same thing. Evolution started out predominantly as theistic evolution and included God in its explanations.[190] Why would it be impossible to modify a theory? We have word processors now! It is a one-minute operation. What the court should, obviously, have done is to preclude the religious versions of ID theory from the science classrooms while allowing the scientific versions.

In any event, it is grossly hypocritical for Darwinian theorists to hold up the gold standard of scientific testability as their war cry, for even after 150 years Darwinian theory is neither clearly, fully, nor concretely defined. It can’t be considered properly testable until it is concretely defined. Darwinian theory implies no specific biochemical process, no specific biochemical facts whatsoever. As Sir Karl Popper said, the theory of evolution is not a theory at all, it is a research program looking for a theory; it is compatible with anything, except finding hominids or advanced genomes in the Cambrian, and this is a test it fails. Although the nested patterns of similarities evolutionists have mapped for the tree of life are impressive in aggregate, the fact remains that those particular patterns were not predicted in advance of their discovery. Evolutionary science has researched the similarities, then recorded them, then called them “predictions” afterwards! Once again, we are looking at a research program, not a theory. If those similarities had turned out different, it would not have refuted the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution because the theory does not in fact entail those patterns; thus, they are not predictions at all. Darwinists have avoided pinning down the definition of neo-Darwinian theory to any concrete and specific entailments. As such, it cannot be refuted beyond the extent that it already has been by the Cambrian explosion. In the event of the Cambrian explosion of rapid evolutionary development, neo-Darwinian theory just fails; either it fails to explain the rapid burst of biological form evolution or it fails the generalized “hominid test” by having to posit the existence of a preexistent master genome that was produced without the aid of natural selection.

The Bottom Line

If intelligent design theory is correct, form constraining information must be somehow embedded into the combination of the classical natural laws of Newtonian physics, the initially informed state of matter and energy in the universe, the hidden principles of quantum physics, super strings or other structures yet to be found, very probably including a meta-genome. Whether this is all done at the very beginning of things at the Big Bang or incrementally over time at various points in the process remains an open question and is not essential to the ID hypothesis. This entails one very clear and perfectly testable implication: science will never be able to reproduce complex forms of life in the lab under “random” conditions.

Appendix 4:

The Design Inference:

Superstition or Scientific Tool?

Can chance or accident achieve complex design under any circumstances? Yes, and no. In trivial forms, such as a screen saver on your computer, a fractal software program, or a kaleidoscope shake-up can, yes. But then it takes and intelligently designed computer or art generation can to do it; so is this really an accident? Can accident go much further to create functional moving dynamic machines many levels of interaction deep without aid of any intelligently designed starting points? All of our life experiences say no, not without the same kind of impetus from intelligent design at the beginning. An airplane engine or even a bicycle cannot be designed and assembled by accident. We have never seen it happen. Mechanics know darn well that it won’t, and they have the bare knuckles and burned out brains to prove it. A design blueprint must be provided in advance, machine tools must be used by skilled craftsman to make the parts, and a precise set of nonrandom steps must be followed to get the darn thing together—period. Intelligent beings must conceive a plan, make the parts, and do the assembly. If this is true, certainly more sophisticated living machines cannot be initially created then disassembled, modified, and reassembled by accident while they are alive and in motion. Can they? How?

Contrary to the incessant innuendo to the contrary, Darwinian biologists have no answer to this question. They do not know! They have not shown the evolutionary processes in the laboratory. They cannot trace the step-by-step biomechanics of the evolutionary process, they cannot show how nature has moved from the physical components of one stage of life’s development to those of the next. Even if they could lay out the biomechanics (and they can’t), they cannot show how such an astronomically complex procedure could accidentally develop in real time minus the assistance of intelligent design.

Scientists have made new plant species by genetic engineering (intelligent design) but they have not done this by a random process. But even if they could, there is a long way to go between accidentally throwing together a plant system and assembling a human being. Man has bred new “species” of domesticated animals on purpose, true. (Dogs have almost certainly done the same thing.) But the ability to make certain reproductive combinations is not at the heart of the debate between intelligent design and accidental evolution. Once the books (genes) and libraries (genomes) are complete, certainly it will be possible to move things around a bit. That’s the easy part. The evidential core of the debate is about achieving all the hard parts in the first instance. The fallacy lies in arguing from man’s being able to achieve only simple and very limited results by his best efforts of intelligent design to nature’s being able to do things trillions of times more complex by accident. One would think the illogic of this would be obvious.[191]

Are highly educated intelligent design scientists and billions of religious people from all walks of life simply naïve? Do they all just happen to be mistake in precisely the same way in believing an accident cannot make a sophisticated machine? Do neo-Darwinian biologists really sit around watching football and eating cheese balls on Christmas Eve while their kid’s bicycles spontaneously assemble themselves in the garage by accident? I don’t think so.

Beyond the dilemma of how accidents can make or effectively modify sophisticated machines there is another question that complicates the resolution of the intelligent design debate. Given the inevitable similarity between designs of intelligent origin and successful designs of an accidental origin how could you tell the difference between them? (To make this point I have to assume for the sake of argument that there could be any accidental designs that would actually work, though I don’t for one moment believe it.) Perhaps an example will help.

Imagine for a moment you are on a vast barren beach, stranded with an ancient mariner. You have nothing available but sand, driftwood, wind, and water. A stranded mariner makes a sundial that looks remarkably similar to an accident of nature: a pile of sand with some driftwood around it at intervals. She, the mariner, clearly hasn’t much choice in the matter of her materials. Both the limited materials and other features of the environment will constrain her greatly in the range of her work products. She will also have to build above the high tide mark or her construction will be washed away. She will have to repair and rebuild periodically to offset weather damage. Accidental “construction” by nature is similarly constrained. Nature will also have to “build” at the extreme edge of tidal reach during a storm that extends that reach temporarily and then does not recur for a while; otherwise, nature’s creation will be immediately washed away. This is precisely how life is thought to have originated, in warm tidal mud flats.

However, if the mariner decides to do a particularly good job, a closer inspection of her sundial may reveal a level of precision and uniformity in design and construction that one would not expect to have occurred by accident of wind and water, even the luckiest one. The pieces of drift wood that mark each hour of the day may be set on end and forced into the ground a few inches for stability—something wind, weather and tide are not likely to achieve with precision. Only wood fragments of identical size and shape might be used. The dial might be perfectly symmetrical, set in a perfect circle (i.e., one made with a string tied to a center pivot). An increasing number of notches may be cut on each piece of wood to designate the hours, etc. At this point in the advancement of complexity and precision, or one somewhat further on, a visitor arriving on the island would simply be compelled to conclude that someone had made a sun dial. They would run off in search of the castaway.

Why? Why would they draw the conclusion of intelligent design, and when? What justifies this design inference, and how would they explain the reasons for their conclusion to someone who had not seen the sundial? At what exact point in the progression from simple to complex, imprecise to precise, did the inference become warranted? And, since we would all agree that at some point the inference to intelligent design for a sophisticated sun dial would be warranted, why aren’t evolutionists willing to draw the same conclusion for the vastly more sophisticated machines of the human body?

An irregular lump of sand with a few sticks of just any fashion is not enough to warrant a design inference, but the most complex and precise form of a sundial definitely is: a perfect pyramid in the center, shellacked doweling rods with painted surfaces and lettered values etc. Somewhere in between lies the threshold of a justifiable inference to intelligent design. “I could just see that someone had made it,” a visitor to the island might say, given certain gradations in design complexity. Or, perhaps “It was too improbable that the ocean and wind could have done something like that?” More likely they would give the full set of specific features and justifiably expect that the listener would draw the same conclusion they drew for the same reasons. Everyone knows this is valid at an intuitive level. Yet the dilemma we have encountered in the evolutionary debate is how to explain in precise academic terms why intelligent design is a good conclusion to draw in such circumstances? No one doubts that we should draw the conclusion but what do you say when a child or a neo-Darwinist stubbornly persists in saying, “Why?” Hence, the philosophical and scientific conundrum called the design inference. Why are we justified in believing in a designer when we see complex, precise or functional designs?

Watching a minnow navigate a length of shallow stream, struggling over and under hundreds of natural rock gardens, splattering across mudslides, peaking in and out of caves, and squeezing through tunnels, finally arriving at a peaceful deep pool does not evoke a design inference regarding the features of the stream bed. This is true despite the fact that the course is very complex. Why not? One reason is that the components were not closely matched to each other, there is nothing precise about them. Another is that they are not organized to achieve a definite goal; the “constructions” got in the way of the minnow’s goal as much as they facilitated it. That’s the situation of a natural watercourse.

But what if a fancy restaurant or an amusement park wants to entertain us with carp and goldfish in an elaborate decorative watercourse? What if they build their franchise next to the stream, dredge the bottom, fill it with sparkling rocks and sand, sculpt the shoreline, add Chinese lanterns, drill under blockages, install decorative tunnels and caves? What if they engineer a precise route around hundreds of obstacles to the stream flow for twenty miles! Then, of course, the situation is different. Suppose thousands of parts for this, laid out in clearly functional ways: waterwheels, submerged colored lights, even simple “road signs” (a fish symbol with directional arrow)! Ultimately it all empties out over a waterfall into a deep peaceful pool with coral castles and mermaid fountains. An observer happening upon that stream would know the difference; it was intelligently designed. Even years later when the restaurant franchise was torn down, if the watercourse remained, observers would know that someone had designed the system to entertain observers. Any given isolated point in the sequence of steps along the way toward the complete construction will not suffice to convince different observers to the same extent, or any group of them, but somewhere between the beginning and the end of that construction sequence, albeit at different points for different people, everyone will ultimately be convinced of intelligent design.

My point of course is that the marvels and complexities of the human machine dwarf such a construction trillions upon trillions of times over. Yet we fail to grant the same inference to intelligent design in biology that we would immediately allow everywhere else! Why? It can only be because of decades of atheistic propaganda that originated in Darwin’s time when science was unable to reach to the complexities of human biology at all. All science could see then was the equivalent of a single mudslide: the cell was thought to be filled with nothing more than a sort of nondescript goo called protoplasm. We knew it was a near miracle that the body did what it did, but since the complex internal designs of the cell and the genome were invisible to us, we said the only thing we could say: “That’s what the protoplasm does.” So, you have a bunch of happy fish at the end of a mudslide, so what? We know better than that now, and we can certainly do better. The design inference is not religion; it is common sense, and good science!

The reader may wonder why I chose to use a watercourse as an example of intelligent design when so many more obvious machines are available in our experience. I did this for a reason. As explained in fallacy #64, non sequitur, in the first appendix, neo-Darwinists frequently imply that, because something occurs in nature it must be spontaneous, and next that anything spontaneous must be an accident. This argument is a non sequitur twice over; both steps are invalid. It merely begs the question of the origin of designs in nature without giving any proof. Science assumes that everything above quantum level has a cause, and thus is not truly “spontaneous” at all. And at the quantum level what do we have? Spontaneous particle events that just so happen to accidentally uphold natural law in their statistical predominance very precisely year after year after year. Obviously there is nothing accidental about that form of spontaneity either, else we would see a vastly greater degree of variation. In using the fish run example I am trying to get the reader in the habit of shrugging off this kind of neo-Darwinian propaganda and thinking for themselves. Could there really be intelligently designed creations in nature, and how do we know them when we see them? The answers to these questions that I propose for the reader’s discerned contemplation are “yes” and “the same way we know them anywhere else.”

Outside of nature the design inference becomes so much easier, and it is not just because of decades of propaganda. There is a genuine intuitive difference between manmade machines and biological ones, though one finds oneself at somewhat of a loss to explain it. Seeing even a horse wagon having perhaps hundreds less parts than the artificially modified stream, we have no doubt at all that it is intelligently designed, even though it is now known not to be the optimal way to achieve its goal. Trucks or cars are more optimally designed for transporting objects or people than horse wagons, that is, until global warming destroys the ecosystem. Nonetheless, we still know that wagon was intelligently designed. Two of the features of the wagon that promote the design inference, in addition to moderate complexity, are the closely matched, precisely fashioned parts, and the fact that the overall result is to enhance the transport of objects more than to impede it. Its purpose is “visible” and it successfully achieves that purpose better than accidents can—it is a success as a tool. It works! And it works better than anything we have directly observed nature to be capable of making by accident.

Borderline cases may not warrant a design inference of course: tin cans with string, a few boards in a tree, a plank over a rock or a stream that works as a bridge or a “teeter-totter,” etc. Maybe they were put there for a purpose, maybe not. But cases much farther out on the complexity scale are intuitively quite clear to us: they were intelligently designed. Yet mainstream science persists in denying the most intensively complex example of mechanistic complexity known to man: man himself! This can only be for political reasons.

The important point here is not that there are gray areas around the threshold of the design inference of which we cannot be certain. Gray fringes around the thresholds of decision making occur everywhere in life and science. Having gray areas is not generally a problem for either scientific or common sense decisions. It is too cold to walk the five miles to town, the water is too shallow to dive into, etc. People will vary somewhat in their opinions about where the decision threshold lies for such things. The important point is that, outside the grey areas, we are not merely coincidentally correct in drawing our conclusions of intelligent design or for these other matters; we are rationally justified in having drawn them! We have made a valid inference using a reliable mental process involving logic and evidence. This remains true despite the fact that the mental evaluation process used may have occurred fully in the unconscious mind, or may have been one for which science or society has yet to lay down a set in stone threshold criterion.

No one disputes that we know intelligent design when we see it; it is a quick and often unconscious conclusion, practically a reflex. Everyone makes design inferences all day long every day without questioning them: cars, tools, electronics, etc.

We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box. A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.[192]

Knowing at a glance that a precise and sophisticated machine is the product of intelligence is easy. However, it turns out to be supremely difficult to explain in clear precise terms why we should trust our intuitive recognition of design. Why are the reflexive judgments we have made about intelligent design proper or improper in a given case? While intelligent observers disagree on a good many of the cases that hover around the intelligent design threshold, they agree on most or all of the cases falling far short of the threshold or far exceeding it.

The mental process involved in the design inference need be neither unanimously agreed to nor infallible, but merely reliable, to be valid. Neo-Darwinists make this unreasonable demand of ID theory, that it must be both unanimous and infallible, though such unrealistic standards are used nowhere else in life of science for any of the other kinds of inferences and decisions we make. We often approximate, disagree about, and make mistakes concerning weight or, distance, for example. “That is too far for a human to jump.” “It would take six locomotives to pull that load.” “We don’t have time to get there before dark,” etc. Generally, such judgments are correct, though not always. This remains true despite the fact that people disagree at times on what the correct judgment is in a given circumstance. Judgments regarding weight and distance are neither fully precise, unanimously agreed to, nor infallible, but they are reliable and rationally justified. The same is true of drawing the conclusion of intelligent design. Just as with weight and distance we know that the basic mental process we use is valid. Clearly, we are doing something reliable and consistent when we conclude that something has been intelligently made, for we are almost never wrong.

Typically, we don’t feel obligated to attempt scientific precision in resolving everyday applications of weight and distance. Science can answer these questions rigorously if called upon to do so, but there is seldom a practical necessity for it. The same is true of the design inference. Perhaps the reason we typically just conclude at a glance or intuit that something is the product of intelligence when we could do a formal computation in questions of intelligent design is the same reason we don’t call in a surveyor to jump a mud puddle: demanding scientific rigor would be overkill in these cases. For reasons of intellectual efficiency and conservation of mental energy, the method we use to make an inference to intelligent design is generally causally and imprecise, even subliminal. This is not because intelligent design is a rationally indefensible conclusion to draw, but for the opposite reason: because it is one of the easiest conclusions to rationally draw. Of the dozen or so indicators of an intelligently designed machine, only the presence of a few of them in the same artifact is sufficient to prove intelligent design. We breeze through a subliminal mental checklist probably in less than a second in most cases: precise work, complexity, interactive parts, visible purpose…somebody made this. In the case of unitary objects such as an arrowhead, we would want to examine the item more closely for design features such as precision workmanship, whether the aerodynamic balance and sharpness of the edge is evidence of the items purpose, etc. The margin of error is higher with arrowheads, but the decision making criteria are valid. We are simply unable to apply those criteria in a given case with perfection.

In the case of the design inference, we can call upon science to formalize a rigorous model that validates and exposits the mental logic that underlies our everyday decisions, just as we can call a surveyor in to measure a mud puddle. Nothing in principle forbids this being done. In fact, the modern evolutionary debate has produced the first real requirement to do this, and, in The Design Inference, mathematician and philosopher Professor William Dembski has proposed just such a rigorous computational model of the design inference.

But isn’t the question of life’s design an exception to the design inference for the very reason that it is biology we are talking about, not physics? No. In the arena most relevant to the evolutionary discussion, biological design, we have recently gained some experience in trying to design and construct simple biotic machines. In doing this we have discovered that the components of living creatures are machines no less than those we make of metal and wood. The fact that living organisms are made of soft biotic materials does not disqualify them from being intelligently designed machines. Scientists have done some preliminary research into machines made from biotic materials, computers for example.[193] It is only reasonable to assume that a more advanced intelligence could do more than we have managed so far. In genetic engineering, we have also gained substantial experience in trying to modify living biological machines that already exist. In both of these endeavors we are rapidly discovering that making biotic machines, especially living ones, is not so easy. We still cannot make anything truly alive from nonliving chemicals. We cannot, not even with conscious intention, and with all our intelligence, and all the resources of science and technology combined, generate one radically different kind of creature from another.

Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists say that the dumb process of nature has somehow succeeded where we intelligent humans have failed. This, despite the fact that what we have encountered in the immense functional complexity in human biology is precisely the situation that Charles Darwin said would disprove his theory of evolution by accidental mutation directed by natural selection: an example of a living system that could not be constructed by a series of small accidental modifications. Nature has had longer to work, of course, but as we have seen, not nearly long enough. Until the advent of modern intelligent design theory no one in science bothered to sit down and do the math: “Oh, four billion years is plenty of time for absolutely anything at all to happen.” Poppycock! Time is a poor substitute for intelligence in our experience with the assembly of highly complex machines. Could an imbecile put the space shuttle together properly in three or four billion years? (No, I couldn't!) He would only get so far before the design was broken and progress was reversed? Would you be able to build the space shuttle without a design blueprint in four billion years? Now that the electron microscope has revealed the cell’s complex machinery, the intricate language of DNA, gene regulation networks, transpositional and developmental genomes, and proteins so complex that our computers can only model a fraction of their complexity, we have discovered that the human body is at least the equivalent of the space shuttle in complexity.

Some have said, well, perhaps nature is just that way; a tendency toward life is simply built into natural processes, though not by intelligent design. In theory, that could be true, after all, life did occur, and the mysteries and secrets of the Big Bang are still just that: mysteries and secrets. But to say “It just is that way” is not the most justifiable scientific view to take, and it does nothing whatsoever to advance scientific explanation. This view forsakes explanation. The probabilities overwhelmingly support the conclusion of intelligent design of nature because the universe becomes a machine-building machine in this view, whether we prefer to admit it or not. A robotized factory is itself an order of magnitude of complexity greater than the most complex machine that it builds. To select a theory so adverse to the probabilities is not the scientific method. It is not science.

The Darwinist deferral to natural law as the element that takes the accident out of life’s origin does not constitute a valid rebuttal of intelligent design theory because the problem of explanation is simply transferred one step further back to the machine-building machine. Bias and accident are mutually exclusive by definition. Therefore, if we grant that nature is indeed strongly biased towards the construction of complex life we are already admitting that the process of life's origin was no accident.

The complexity of biological machines places them far beyond the vague area around the intelligent design threshold. They so far exceed that threshold that there is no greater question of their intelligent origin than for a radio or a TV—except to the neo-Darwinists who, like, Chekov in Star Trek V, claim that they can’t see a thing. The probability values derived from the complexity of biological machines representing the overall complexity of the human organism as one integrated machine, as shown in Table 1 of Part 1, places human life further beyond that threshold than anything we know, including the most complex machines we make for ourselves.

Many of us without a political axe to grind for materialism have no trouble going even further to say, “To heck with the space shuttle, you could have stopped with the tin cans and a string! Even there it is clear that one has a rudimentary phone or intercom. It couldn’t happen by chance.[194] How could the string be poked through such a small hole and tied securely on the ends by accident?” And you are right; even something so absurdly simple as a couple of tin cans connected by an old piece of string is practically impossible to assemble by chance.

A single human body has been estimated to contain 10,000,000,000,000 cells. Each cell has hundreds of components interacting with each other in precise ways to accomplish over 2,000,000 actions per minute. Many of these components are quite complex in their own right. Thousands of proteins may be alternatively brought into play in a single cell at different times. Cellular components are formed into higher and higher level systems: cellular subsystems, then cells, then organs, tissues, body parts and finally an integrated life form. If a tin can phone will never fall together properly, how, then do you make a complete living system by chance! Obviously someone is pulling a verbal trick of some kind. And, that’s basically what the theory of neo-Darwinian evolution is, a verbal trick. And most of us have fallen for it at some time or another. When pressed neo-Darwinists (most of them) reveal that what they mean is not accident in the pure sense of the word, but “spontaneous,” that is, nature just seems to be able to do this. They are fully content to let the public retain the confusion about terminology and the mistaken belief that the world implies no intelligent design, while it is demonstrably a machine-building machine of monumental proportions.

In challenging the design inference outright, neo-Darwinists have accomplished a masterstroke of debating strategy: they have asked ID theorists to prove the obvious. Proving the obvious, however, is the most supremely difficult thing to do. How does one prove that 2 plus 2 equals 4? It is true. We know it is true. But how to you prove it to someone that is so obstinate as to deny that it is true? In the case of concluding intelligent design, is it complexity of design, difficulty level of the physical construction process, a purpose being discernable in the functionality of the thing, high improbability in the vast reduction of all the astronomical chance alternatives to one exquisitely precise result minus any other explanation of causality, duplication of the same form with uniform consistency in multiple objects beyond the natural variance of an accidental process, precision of apparent workmanship, perfection in form, that is, manifesting near purity of an idea in a physical object? In a sense, all of these factors are importantly involved in establishing intelligent design, generally. And, generally, no one has any real difficulty in acknowledging the proper signs of intelligent design in the abstract.

But what about specifically, and in the concrete? A problem occurs when one tries to get specific and talk about individual objects because there is so much variation among designed things that the mix of the separate ingredients of the intelligent design “recipe” is never quite the same for any two types of design products. Take a hair comb and a desktop computer for example. Here complexity is clearly a key indication for the computer but not for the comb. Perceivable function significantly varies in some circumstances, for example between a shovel and the Mona Lisa. Uniformity, precision and perfect realization of concept can likewise vary. In such simple designs as arrowheads the question is further complicated by the fact that nature can at times (though rarely and not consistently) generate a more perfect realization of concept by accident than early societies have at times done on purpose, perhaps being rushed into haphazard production of arrows to support a desperate battle.

The simplest designs, of course, give us the most trouble in analysis. In the case of a tin can phone it is clearly not the complexity level that makes us suspect design? No, the design is quite simple. How about specific function? No, although it has a possible function, lying where it is first found in the city dump it is not seen to be performing a specific function out of the several that might be imagined. However, when a sterile version of the same tin can system is found connecting the two rooms of the children’s tree house in the backyard, in their hands, and them speaking into one end and listening at the other, the function becomes more clear. So the contextual implication of utility must be added as another element of the design inference as well as the difficulty level for accidental manufacture.

Context is a big help, for it reveals a purpose, but in this case another primary cause of our suspicion of intelligent design is the closely matched parts. The design also implies a physical difficulty level of construction that accident cannot easily achieve. On the other hand, seeing the children pretending to have star trek communicators that are actually small green tomatoes tells us that context alone is not enough (and to stand back out of range if they are in a playful mood). In some cases, though, closely matched parts may be enough, even if the thing hardly works. Precision of workmanship, difficulty level of accidental construction and close matching of parts can be enough to establish intelligent design even minus contextual clues revealing a purpose or use.

Believe it or not, the tin can phone is a good example to teach us that we must pay attention to the mechanical details of the process of evolution. In this case the process is much more difficult than it looks because failed attempts to push the string through the hole in the can fray the end of the string and it becomes harder and harder to get the string to go through the hole with each attempt. Pretty sophisticated science, huh? No, it is not sophisticated, but the situation does symbolize a real scientific principle: the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics.

The 2^nd Law says that entropy tends to increase with all natural processes, entropy, again, being a state of matter/energy so disorganized that it will never assume an organized form. What this means for evolution is that there is a cost to be paid for each failed attempt at forming and advancing life, that there are less and less resources available each time, and that the process will tend to become increasingly difficult. An implication of ORLEF-B is that all random processes will, to some extent, be progressively self-defeating in this way, driving up the resource cost. The event can be achieved, in theory, but in practice the cost will be high.

Seeing a machine or even a two or three dimensional design with very closely matched components suggests a designer to us because we see nature’s accidental works each day and have come to associate accidental constructions with very rough brush strokes, inconsistencies of pattern, loose ends, and, as often as not, horrendous messes. When everything matches up to imperceptible tolerances we know nature’s rough hand was not the artist because we have seen her work all our lives, and quite frankly, in our direct experience she is not that good. Art critics can tell you that such inferences are valid; you can come to know an artist’s work well enough to recognize it.

As critics of intelligent design have forever pointed out, the presence of increasing order in a subsystem of the universe does not contradict the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, and it is true. The problem with applying that argument to the origin and development of life on Earth is that millions of distinctly different subsystems are involved in the biochemical and physical processes involved, not just one. To have millions of subsystems all successfully bucking the 2^nd Law at the same time in a manner that points towards the one same result, the achievement of the complex designs of life, consistently over millions of years is simply too improbable to believe. In theory it could happen, but not in practice in any conceivable time span.

According to neo-Darwinian theory, nature spontaneously builds the most complex and difficult machines not only by accident, but also in a hurry. So why don’t we ever catch her producing these machines, at least the simple ones? Lightening may split a few boards now and then, and a few rounded rocks might be found to serve as rudimentary wheels, but where are the wagons assembled by Mother Nature? The best we can point to is that Mother Nature can in fact knock out a few decent arrow heads and balls, but with less than sufficient panache to warrant putting her on the payroll at General Motors or Toyota.

On a common sense basis it is clear that the human organism and many others far exceed the intelligent design threshold. Nonetheless, as a technical matter, the puzzling questions remain: “Exactly where does the intelligent design threshold lie? Why does it lie there? And “How do we objectively describe that threshold such that science can apply it to new situations?” William Dembski has devoted three good long books to these questions: The Design Inference, The Design Revolution, and No Free Lunch. According to Dembski, the threshold for the design inference is essentially a matter of the level of complexity and the high specificity of function, although he adds several other criteria as well in a well-developed analysis. These works won’t be the last word on the subject but they have more than validated the concept of a scientifically tractable criterion for intelligent design.

In addition to irreducible complexity, Michael Behe has emphasized and further explained another important criterion for the ID inference: closely matched parts. Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity, the requirement for all of the parts to be present for proper design function, is not a required or necessary condition for the design inference; however, it is probably a sufficient condition. Closely matched parts strongly corroborate the design inference, though are probably neither necessary nor sufficient for it. Highly redundant sophisticated systems may also warrant the design inference even when not irreducibly complex because there is insufficient time for natural selection to both gradually build and then pronounce its opinion of multiple layered redundancy or ultra-complex systems. Natural selection would probably never build the intermediate steps required to construct second and third layer redundancy because many of those steps would add nothing to survivability or reproductive success. Nonetheless, irreducible complexity, even alone, remains a sufficient condition for the inference of intelligent design because it rules out an accidental construction process having achieved the design.

Given all of this, and the fact that known biological systems qualify on all counts par excellence, I contend that the intelligent design concept is as fully validated as gravity, the nuclear or electromagnetic forces, or even space itself. We don’t throw out valid measurements of these forces or spatial distance because there remain some instances too small for our current instruments to measure. We don’t stop using math because we can’t further explain why 2 plus 2 equals 4. The concepts are known to be valid generally and the measurements we can make remain legitimate. In the same way it is clear that, although we cannot say exactly where the intelligent design threshold is in terms of functional complexity and precisely fashioned parts, that is, we can’t say where the smallest value of intelligent design resides, we can confidently say where some of the larger values are. This is no more mysterious or improper than admitting that we can’t say what the smallest quantity of space is, that last minute increment before we reach the purity of a true mathematical point. Before quantum physics we had no idea of what the smallest measurable unit of energy was, but scientists maintained full confidence in their measurements of kilowatts, joules, calories, and megatons nonetheless.

Science has been very comfortable elsewhere with admitting theoretical limitations while still heralding the practical value of those things it could reach with its instruments. It is no different with intelligent design. In the case of intelligent design, the human mind and the five senses are the instruments, and, as the instrument varies somewhat with each person, each person will have different limitations of what they can perceive and understand regarding the factors involved in the design inference. The scientific definition and standard for the color red or green is an objective constant, but yet there are unavoidable limits and variations on how individuals can implement that standard in their personal experience. And, of course, some are absolutely color blind or have the implementation of the standard inverted in their perceptual machinery: red is green and green is red to them. This could conceivably occur in other areas, including the perception of design. Charles Darwin, himself, could arguably be said to be a victim of such a malady, as he could see no purpose in the processes of nature whatsoever. Modern day neo-Darwinists have so much more evidence of design available to them than did Darwin, in biochemistry and genetics, yet they steadfastly maintain with Sgt. Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes “I see nothing!”

Such practical limits and individual variations in applying the process do not invalidate the design inference any more than a student using the smallest gradients of the millimeter scale of a ruler would invalidate the student next to him being relegated to using only whole inches from the opposite side of the ruler because of poor eyesight. Similarly, a scientist’s using a micrometer to make extremely small measurements does not invalidate the mariner’s using a plumb line to make large ones.

Inferences to clear instances of intelligent design are not invalidated by the inability to fix the smallest possible objectively agreed upon specified complexity value that is necessary of sufficient to prove design. Nor are they invalidated by the fact that different people have adopted personally customized standards for intelligent design inferences. Just as for color perception, so long as they remain visibly within the safe to assume range and away from the grey areas close to the unknown threshold, intelligent design inferences need not be questioned in practice.

It is undoubtedly the great variety of situations to which the design inference might apply that cause us to doubt that there could be a single process or criterion involved. How could the same identifiable criterion be manifested in all these different things from bacteria to wagons to power drills to the genetic code to the space shuttle to novels to the Mona Lisa? Though the point is well taken, as often occurs in scientific and especially evolutionary investigations, our failure to understand may derive more from the fact that we are asking the wrong questions than that there is no satisfactory answers. In other words, there may be no single criterion for intelligent design. That does not mean we are left without proper means to make the inference. There is no one single way to conclude a surface is hard. We can poke it, press it, kick it, shoot it, stab it, even sleep on it. Any of these methods are satisfactory to reveal the hardness of a surface.

The legitimacy of using multi-faceted criteria whose thresholds cannot (yet) be precisely laid out in quantitative terms is confirmed every day in criminal court. People’s lives are taken, their children are taken from them, they are assigned to life in prison or long-term psychiatric care, based upon a reasonably exact procedure that, nonetheless, no two jurors would explain to you precisely the same way. Motive, intent, opportunity, witness testimony, character evaluation, personal history, psychoanalysis reports, DNA samples, physical descriptions, vehicle identification, associations with known criminals, etc. All these factors and more are weighed, combined and cross-referenced before a decision is rendered, including factors unique to each individual case. Jurors may be first timers and have no experience in such a complex procedure at all, but yet we are still confidant in the reliability of the outcome of this informal, not fully extrapolated, and inconsistently applied juror adjudication process that we are willing to stake human lives on it. This, while knowing the process is not infallible.

In intelligent design inferences we don’t even have to go so far as to say “who done it,” we only have to say that an intelligent being was involved generally. That would seem a much easier task than identifying a murderer by name. Furthermore, design inferences are explicitly used at the beginning of all legal inquiries where a death is involved, the coroners inquest, to determine if the death was accidental or on purpose (murder or suicide). This is precisely a design inference question: did an intelligent purposeful agent cause the event or did it result from an accident? If we can take lives based upon rudimentary design inference criteria, why can’t we make a scientific judgment of the same type when nothing near he gravity of life and death hangs in the balance and we have, in Dembski’s resource exhaustion argument, a literal mathematical proof that accident can be ruled out?

It is ironic to note that a pattern of evidence so simple as a few rough holes occurring in certain locations in a victim’s body can absolutely convince an experienced criminal investigator that an intelligent being was the cause. On the other hand, observations of thousands upon thousands of finely tuned working components stacked nine levels deep within a biological machine (human being) are insufficient to convince even more highly trained evolutionary scientists that an intelligent being was the cause. I submit to you that if the design inference is valid where less evidence is involved, it is valid where more evidence is involved.

The design inference is therefore a valid conclusion to draw in most of the cases where it has been made, including the astronomical complexities of living machines. Describing in detail exactly how we justify the inference in each case is possible, though cumbersome, and science should be undertaking more studies of how to objectively quantify the decision logic used in such inferences. William Dembski has made an extraordinarily good start.

All of the factors mentioned above, except beauty and elegance, are clearly describable in either empirical or mathematical terms, and it is not clear that math, at least as it relates to geometrical form and optimization of the ratio of simplicity to efficiency, may not be substantially involved even there. The atheistic physical reductionists (most neo-Darwinists are such) are stuck with admitting that even subjective qualities such as beauty and elegance can be reduced to a set of physical parameters. There will remain borderline cases regarding intelligent design just as there remain borderline cases in criminal investigations, but the most complex machine we have ever encountered, the human body, will always be acknowledged as falling within the legitimate and unquestioned domain of a valid design inference. Life is unquestionably a product of intelligence.

Appendix 5:

A Word on Creation Science Versus Intelligent Design Theory

Mainstream science is presently basing their defense of accidental evolution against intelligent design theory upon a lie: the lie that intelligent design theory is the same thing as Creation Science (6-day biblical creation theory and young Earth theory). One of the many books that repeat this error of equating modern intelligent design theory with biblical creationism is Michael Specter’s Denialism.[195] He dismisses both views out of hand as obviously contrary to science and as if they were both precisely the same theory. This, without venturing to address any of the evidence and logic presented here or the many features that blatantly differentiate one theory from the other. Nearly all neo-Darwinists repeat the same error, including, notably, Richard Dawkins and Douglas Futuyma. Futuyma addresses biblical creationism exclusively in the appendix to Science on Trial as if it were the only objection neo-Darwinian theory need address, and Dawkins repeats the false identification of the two views in his book, A Devil’s Chaplain:

…I am proposing that you might consider uniting with me (no need to involve others) in signing a short letter…explaining publicly why we do not debate creationists (including the ‘Intelligent Design’ euphemism for creationists) and encouraging other evolutionary biologists to follow suit.^{^[196]}

Even Dorian Sagan, writing with Eric D. Schneider in their recent offering Into the Cool, makes the same mistaken equivocation of the two quite different theories.[197] Perhaps the most flagrant instance of this occurs in astrophysicist John Gribbin’s new book, In Search of the Multiverse, at page 195, where, in contravention of decades of explicit definitions to the contrary by modern ID authors, he explicitly redefines “intelligent design” as being 6-day creation theory. Gribbin simply proceeds as if modern intelligent design theory had never occurred![198]

Once again, we see Dr. Faust’s observation that scientists can be weak on abstract logical skills. One would think that scientists of all people would at least do their homework. This is as flagrant an example of the fallacy of “straw man” as one could ever hope to find. Since 6-day creation is a much easier theory to rebut than modern intelligent design theory, the tactic of redefining ID to make it an easier opponent is very much suspect. It smacks a bit too much of a Marxist propaganda technique. Though I stop short of accusing any specific author of intentionally contaminating his or her science with political philosophy, overall that contamination is clearly occurring at least as a subconscious bias.

Whatever the intentions of the specific authors may be, in truth, the two theories, Creation Science (CS) and Intelligent Design (ID) Theory, are vastly different. There is no excuse for those informed on the subject of evolution to confuse these two theories. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinists incessantly represent them to the public as being the same thing.

Let’s be clear. ID has only one tenet: that life could only have arisen with the aid of intelligent design. That’s it. ID, like gravity, is a supremely simple theory. Things fall down, not up; ultra-complex machines require intelligent design. ID says nothing about God or the Bible. ID says nothing about a young Earth. ID says or implies nothing outside of science. The source of the intelligence in ID theory does not have to be God or anything supernatural. Thus, ID theory does not imply, contain, or assume religion at all.

Who or what the intelligent designer is left to be determined by future research, just like the underlying source of gravity, which we were still trying to clarify long after the theory was accepted, was left to further research. Neo-Darwinists insist that ID theory must produce the designer first in order to be credible, but science has never demanded such a thing, and neo-Darwinists do not hold themselves to the same standard. They cannot produce a definite event sequence for the imagined macroevolutionary changes between creatures on the tree of life; they cannot show the missing intermediate fossils, prove how a more abrupt change could occurred, or lay out the biomechanics of the steps involved in transitioning from one creature to the next. Yet they insist that we can infer that the macroevolutionary events must exist in evolutionary history. But just as it may be practically impossible to demonstrate a complete macroevolutionary biomechanical event sequence, it may also be practically impossible to identify the intelligent designer. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Neo-Darwinists feel their inference to macroevolution is valid although such events cannot be seen or even demonstrated possible. ID theorists feel their inference to an intelligence behind the designs of life is valid although they cannot identify the designer. Similar to what gravity theorists of old claimed, and similar to what the neo-Darwinists of today claim, ID merely says that we can make a legitimate inference to something we can not yet directly observe.

ID, gravity, string theory, braneworld theory, neo-Darwinian evolution, even nuclear physics and particle physics share this feature, that they were justified in asserting the existence of some of the primary constructs of the theory prior to being able to produce the theoretical entities for direct observation. Certainly it should not be surprising that intelligent design and neo-Darwinian theory share this limitation. They purport to be explaining precisely the same thing, the tree of life. But I digress, for my point here is just that ID is a simple theory. ID merely posits an intelligence behind the designs of life. It says nothing more (though individual theorists may say more, e.g., William Dembski proposes the Law of Conservation of Information).

The theory of Creation Science is quite different, and claims a great deal more. CS begins with the authority of the Bible. It then goes on to claim that God is the designer of life, that the Earth is much younger than mainstream science believes it to be, and that living things were created directly in their final forms (the 6-day creation of Genesis). CS denies that the tree of life was created through millions of years of evolution.

In contrast, ID does not deny evolution (nor does it affirm evolution); it is open to either possibility depending upon where the evidence leads. Such openness is possible because ID does not aspire to be a complete theory of life’s origin and development at all; it is merely a proposal to add the ID tenet to whatever more or less complete best theory we may happen to have at a given moment in time. Intelligent design theory is intended to serve as an hypothesis that can guide future research that might ultimately lead to the discovery of a complete theory of life’s origin and development, but ID itself is not that theory.

Personally, I do not believe that Creation Science is the correct view. There is certainly a great deal in science to argue against it. However, I should make clear that it is not my intent to insult young earth Creation Science theorists merely by strongly couching my book in the Catholic perspective. I respect the theory of CS; I just don’t happen to believe that it’s true. I allow that future developments could prove me wrong, however. The theory is coherent and consistent, and it has accumulated a body of scientific data and logic for support. It has been too much the norm for critics of Creation Science to insult the theory as if it were patently nonsense, with nothing of science about it at all. Even the Vatican has (I feel unfortunately) at times labeled CS as ridiculous. While I hold with the Catholic Church that the CS view of the book of Genesis is incorrect, I do not think Creation Science is nonsense either as science or as theology. It is importantly wrong as theology, yes, but that does not make it nonsense in the intellectual sense. It goes against much of mainstream science as well, but that does not make it nonsense in the realm of science either, as we will soon see.

The Vatican, of course, criticizes the CS approach for using the Bible as if it were a science book. This is a valid theological criticism, but even there, I think ridicule is going too far. At least in the United States, the literal reading of the Bible has always been an enormous force in popular theology. The tradition of the Catholic Church is not to insult popular theology but to properly inform and guide it. True, it is incorrect to view the Bible as literal in all passages, and the creation story in Genesis is not one of the literal sections. Nonetheless, I believe the language the Vatican has used about CS is too strong. It is at least too strong for the rest of us to mimic.

Catholics should not get me wrong here. I affirm that the pope and the bishops, as the successors of the apostles of Christ, absolutely have the authority to issue such admonishments. Certainly we have a great pope, and there is no question that he would wish that I hadn’t done more things than I wish he hadn’t done. And, it is true, that the errors of CS can do much damage to the credibility of the faith in the eyes of unbelievers who are staunch advocates of science. The bishops (the pope is the Bishop of Rome) are empowered by Christ to authoritatively guide us in how to read the scripture. They can, therefore, legitimately ridicule a given theological approach if they feel the error is sufficiently great to merit such strong measures. The rest of us, however, the laity who do not have such authority, should not ridicule our fellow devout Christians who affirm CS for having made what is, on the personal level, merely an honest mistake. In the modern world, many of us will struggle to perfect our faith until very late in life, and will make a plethora of errors along the way. We should not ridicule each other on that journey of the faith, but rather encourage, gently correct, guide and support.

Even though the Vatican has the absolute right to ridicule erroneous interpretations of the Bible, I still wish they had not done so in this case. The animosity such insults generate in response will tend to further divide the larger family of Christian and God-fearing faiths. Those faiths should, in this late hour, be in the process of unification. Ironically, I have no doubt that the pope, in issuing a scathing critique of CS, intended to do the right thing, that is, to facilitate unification. His strategy, to facilitate unification by briskly laying out the single truth around which we should unify (there is only one truth after all), albeit a somewhat painful method, may turn out to be the only method that works. I leave the theological questions lie here, for my concern in this book is with the science.

On the intellectual and scientific playing fields, however, the Vatican is merely equal to the rest of us. It has to justify its positions with sound arguments and scientific data, as do we. My point here is that, as the reader will see below, CS cannot be said to be ridiculous on the basis of science alone. One can make an argument that CS is almost certainly false on the basis of science alone, but not that it is ridiculous. And CS cannot be definitively proved false. It can only be shown to be implausible based upon current scientific data and integrated theory. There is a difference.

There is more. Theology excepted, the science-based component arguments of CS have not yet had a full and fair hearing within the mainstream of science. To see this we have to first separate in our minds the theology of CS from its scientific arguments, especially the objections to neo-Darwinian evolution. True, until the theology part is separated out, the total integrated thesis of CS cannot be considered science. This is because CS does not make provision for refutation of its most general claims, which are grounded in theology. Because CS is grounded in the authority of the Bible, it does not and cannot allow for refutation. But, as we all know, a theory that is not refutable is not scientific. CS, however, does allow for refutation of the individual scientific arguments it uses against neo-Darwinian evolution, and CS proponents do genuinely affirm the value of science as a means to the truth. They are simply saying that mainstream science is in error regarding neo-Darwinian evolution. So, on a stand alone basis, once the theology is removed, the individual modules of scientific argument CS employs are genuinely scientific and deserve close evaluation by mainstream science. Of particular merit is the CS objection that neo-Darwinian evolution has no explanation for the creation of the genomes, for the creation of biological information generally, and no demonstration or explanation of abiogenesis (the initial creation of life from nonliving elements and chemical compounds). These are absolutely valid objections, obviously core to the explanation of life, which, taken together, thoroughly decimate the plausibility of the theory of accidental evolution. None of the hard parts of the origination and evolution of the tree of life are accounted for in neo-Darwinian evolution!

The discerning reader will likely want to ask at this point, “Can you be more specific concerning the meritorious claims of CS?” Yes, I can. Creation scientists present a volume of scientific data and argument; and it is all readily accessible to the public—much of it free, and the rest available through nominal or standard subscriptions. There are over 75 articles available free at Creation Research Society Quarterly. See AIG Research Journal and Creationwiki’s Creation Collaborative Encyclopedia (Wiki) as well as AIG Questions & Answers, AIG Articles Archive, AIG In-depth Answers, and AIG Online Resources for additional materials. In reviewing this literature, the reader will have to remember to mentally separate any theological assertions that may arise in the commentary sections of the introductions and conclusions of a given article from the hard science sections that present the main body of scientific data and analysis. In these discussions we see that the arguments proposed to support the theses that the Earth is young and that life first appeared in its present form (although the theses are almost certainly incorrect in my own view) are clearly scientific arguments and hypotheses despite neo-Darwinists’ loud assertions to the contrary.

From the scientific and philosophical point of view, the scientific modules of CS, once separated from its theological assertions, comprise a very rigorously laid out, internally consistent, and cogent system of thought that employ genuinely scientific arguments. Once a full and impartial peer-review by mainstream science is carried out (this has not been done) the claims of CS may or may not turn out to be true. But, to that extent, and with the claim of biblical authority and the non-refutability excerpted, the individual scientific arguments of CS qualify as science and merit respect and close evaluation.

With a very few exceptions, a full and objective peer-review has been denied such science-based component arguments of CS because mainstream science has a phobia of touching anything that has ever been issued in support of a religious view. In other words, the neo-Darwinists are quite happy to take a quick look at the transparently wrong arguments of CS in order to ballyhoo the presumed genius of their vacuous theory of accidental evolution, while completely ignoring the potentially meritorious objections. One can easily see the political logic involved in doing it this way. Scientists in the mainstream are unwilling to touch the component arguments if a CS theorist proposes them, and they are unwilling to sponsor the meritorious aspects of those arguments themselves for fear of being identified with CS and politically drummed out of their career ladder. Neo-Darwinists have been shameless in unfairly tagging any research that deigns to contradict the accidental thesis as CS. It is not an unreasonable fear. It is, in fact, reminiscent of the anticommunist overreaction spawned by the McCarthy hearings in Congress back when Richard Nixon was a young congressman. If you say anything that disagrees with the mainstream view, you are automatically a communist. In the neo-Darwinists version of McCarthyism, if you question accidental evolution you are automatically a Bible thumper who doesn’t know the first thing about science.

Had we the intellectual maturity to put these irrational prejudices aside, we would see that mainstream science can learn something of value from the genuinely scientific criticisms of CS. Instead, what has happened is that the entire effort of CS theorists has simply been dismissed as ridiculous, swept under the rug, insulted, and ignored as if it were a single statement of religion. In dismissing the scientific components of CS without a proper hearing, the materialists who dominate mainstream science have given their social agenda of promoting materialism precedence over the quest for scientific truth. Mainstream science, at least in the field of evolution, has been flagrantly biased by materialist/atheist politics for many decades.

True, the young earth theory of CS does appear much less likely than the current mainstream scientific estimate of roughly 4.5 billion years. So, to encourage further evaluation of the component arguments of CS in the face of the implausibility of its primary thesis may seem to be almost purely a point on scientific method. But it is that method that ensures us truth in the final result. And consider: to say the 6-day creation thesis of CS is false is not in the least to say that neo-Darwinian evolution is true. Creation Science is not the converse of neo-Darwinian evolution, though the two are incompatible. What argues against one does not necessarily corroborate the other. In contrast, intelligent design theory and accidental evolution are true converses of each other, and what argues against one corroborates the other and vice versa. Nonetheless, the component arguments of CS have much to say about enormous flaws in evolutionary theory, especially the accidental version. These criticisms are of much use to science. Until we let the scientific community perform proper peer-review of the CS scientific articles and studies we won’t have the benefit of that additional scrutiny to generate the confidence level we usually enjoy in and demand of our other scientific models, theories, and beliefs.

To date, the scientific modules of CS, separated from its theology, have not had a legitimate peer review in mainstream science; they have only been offered propagandized ridicule. Despite this unfair reception, CS theorists have done science and society a valuable service in very ably highlighting the weaknesses in the neo-Darwinian case. This may go far to explain why mainstream science doesn’t want Creation Science to get a fair hearing.

I suspect many readers will want to take a step back at this point, perhaps objecting: “But what is this you say about not being able to absolutely disprove CS? I thought science had already done that!” A given scientist’s estimate of the overall weight of the evidence (including perhaps some of our own popes) will tend to assign CS claims for a young Earth and 6-day creation a probability that is vanishingly small. But, given the theoretical fluctuations in natural law permitted by quantum theory, the new multiverse theory in physics, extradimensional braneworld theory, and other recent hypotheses in physics that posit physical dynamics that, if they don’t actually alter the flow of time, can alter our current estimates of it, the claims of Creation Science cannot be definitively ruled out. They have been disproved to the satisfaction of much of mainstream science, yes; but they have not been disproved. Consensus does not make truth. The multiverse theory alone, which is loudly proclaimed by neo-Darwinists to have obviated the probability argument for ID (since multiverse is untestable, this is not true), opens up an entirely new field of possibilities in cosmological theory. Under multiverse, 6-day creation and evolution could conceivably both be true at the same time!

“This time you’ve gone too far,” I can hear the reader saying. “That is fully impossible!” But, no, no it isn’t; not in multiverse, and not in braneworld theory. Some of these claims are not testable, because multiverse itself is not testable, but they are not impossible, and some braneworld hypotheses appear to be testable. Given the new radical possibilities in modern cosmology and physics, it is possible, just for one example, that our world was in fact created in another universe first, a universe having a few different laws than our universe (no entropy, no aging, and no decay, for example), but otherwise identical to our universe. In that universe mankind and all the rest of what we call “creation” could have been created in six days followed by a day of inactivity of the creator.

Let’s posit further, just for the sake of the example, that that world was Eden, the initial paradise described in the Bible’s book of Genesis. Then, let’s further assume, occurs the fall of man in rebellion against God. Next, man is punished by exile to another, less perfect, world. Let’s assume this is our present universe. To accomplish this exile in terms of physics, a portion of the design blueprint of Eden is spewed into our universe through the singularity we call the Big Bang, where it is mixed with less perfect design specifications, watered down as it were. Rephrased in terms of braneworld theory, the “collision” of the brane that largely defines our 4-dimensional physical world with the universe of Eden, degraded paradise into the world we live in, interjected entropy and aging, etc. The express purpose of this degradation of paradise is to punish man for his sin. In such a multi-universe/multi-brane world, the Bible’s statement that “the world” was created in six days could then turn out to be literally true. I am not saying I believe this is what actually happened (or that it is compatible with Catholic dogma); I am saying that, once we admit multiverse and braneworld theory, we cannot demonstrate that it did not happen.

Thus, although the magnitude of probability as currently estimated for a young Earth or 6-day creation (in our universe exclusive of multiverse) may be vanishingly small given our current state of knowledge, the theory of Creation Science as such is not ridiculous. Although the theory of multiverse is not testable, it will probably hang around because it explains certain important anomalies in physics, and again, some forms of braneworld theory are apparently testable and could produce much the same result.

The fact that multiverse is not testable does not mean we could never find “Eden” as such. While a theory of an infinite series of universes is not testable, it is not clear that we might not advance to the point of discovering a single sister universe, or even achieving a means of transit to that universe. In theory, then, if the natural laws were similar enough across the two universes, humans might be changed in the process of transiting into that other universe (the degradation reversed, as it were), changed to a state of eternal youth where we would experience no aging or decay. We would have found Eden! The Bible teaches, however, that angels guard the entrances to Eden; so, from a theological point of view we cannot anticipate a successful passage. On the basis of theology, God would have to conduct us there after judgment, but strictly on the basis of science, the existence of such a sister universe and two-universe creation scenario is possible.

One of the points I have tried to emphasize throughout this book is humility. We don’t know everything yet. Science has discovered some astounding and quite fundamental things only in the past couple of decades, the most notable example, perhaps, being dark matter. Dark matter was previously unknown throughout the entire confident, if not pompous, history of science, and yet it constitutes from 70% to 95% of everything in the universe! Success at string theory or other hypotheses for grand unification could shake up the accepted paradigms a good little bit further. New discoveries at this level can potentially be the harbinger of paradigm-shattering revelations. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that today’s truth is tomorrow’s fiction and vice versa.

Justifying a literal reading of Genesis outside of multiverse is much more difficult, however. Radiometric dating techniques have largely supplanted carbon dating and provide the foundation for modern science’s view that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. For Young Earth Theory to be a substantial contender again, serious doubt (at a level mainstream science would acknowledge) would have to be introduced into our understanding of atomic decay, which underlies the radiometric/carbon dating methods of age determination. Something similarly radical would have to be introduced into our understanding of age determinations of the universe by “red shift” light spectrum analysis. Corresponding adjustments to the way science has traditionally viewed the formation of the geological strata of the surface of the Earth would have to occur. There is currently very substantial cross-corroboration between observations in these three different fields that give science firm confidence in its current estimate of the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth. The overturning of all three of these seemingly well-confirmed and cross-corroborative methods of time measurement is, admittedly, highly unlikely; but it is not scientifically impossible. Accidental evolution is no less unlikely. Thus, neo-Darwinist ridicule of CS on this basis of extreme improbability equates to self-ridicule, and is hypocritical in the extreme.

The red-shift theory for aging the universe only holds water if we assume that the universe is expanding. Astronomers and cosmologists haven’t fully brought the assumption of an expanding universe into question—it remains a near certainty, but there are certain recent observations the theory doesn’t explain and there are optional theoretical models employing the new concepts of branes that can explain our physical observations of our universe without assuming expansion. For example, at a recent (Mar 20210) Dutch Theoretical Cosmology meeting noted Theoretical Physicist Professor Misao Sasaki (Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University) presented the following paper:

Speaker: Misao Sasaki (Yukawa Institute, Kyoto)

Title: Observational equivalence of conformally related frames

Abstract: I argue that spacetimes which are conformally related are actually observationally indistinguishable. When applied to cosmology, this allows an extremely unconventional, apparently controversial picture that our universe may not be expanding at all. I show how such a picture of the universe can be observationally consistent.[199]

This constitutes perhaps only the smallest crack in the door, but it does afford the theoretical possibility that at some future time the Universe will be demonstrated not to be expanding. If that happens, the red-shift data currently used to age the Universe will be invalidated for that purpose. If the Universe turns out to be young in whatever new cosmological model ultimately prevails, then, of course, the Earth cannot be old. So it would really only take a turnover in this one area to put us back to the drawing board; we would have to take a closer look at radiometric dating/carbon dating based upon its incompatible results with new astronomical observations or newly established theories of theoretical physics and the altered cosmological models they drive.

Consider, many of our best theoretical/mathematical physicists now argue for the possibility of such things as multiverses (multiple universes) in addition to extra dimensions and quantum indeterminacy. In these other worlds different natural laws hold. Quantum indeterminacy, in theory, allows for rare fluctuations in natural law in our world (highly improbable but possible). Some physicists (and other scientists including Kauffman) are now arguing that the natural laws in our world could change…period, that is, long-term and stable changes in natural law are possible. Other possibilities arise with the new physics and cosmology such as anomalous fluctuations in the flow of time, cross universe transfer of matter and energy through black holes, etc.[200] These possibilities are often posed by neo-Darwinists as arguments against entrenching ourselves in the traditional view of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, the view that looks as much like divine creation as one might ever expect to find. They wish to open up these other radical possibilities to weaken our confidence in divine creation. However, in doing this, they have ironically reopened the door to a literal 7-day creation and a young Earth (not as theology, but as science). This is true because, if the natural laws can change, then science will never be entitled to make historical deductions about our world. We will never have grounds for full confidence in our aging techniques.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that, minus the assumption that God intentionally created the physical world in a manner that it would be comprehensible to the human mind, there is no reason for us to have confidence in our grasp of the nature our universe whatsoever. Consider the amount of understanding a ladybug or firefly has of the nature of the universe. One can say with the good ol’ boys here in Indiana that “Well, it knows enough not to worry about it.” And, while that is sound wisdom, and serves as proper admonishment to those of us who go in circles writing books trying to figure all of this out, it does raise an interesting point. If the neo-Darwinists believe with the materialists and atheists that humans are only advanced apes descended from germs and bugs or at least from a common ancestor of germs and bugs, why do they assume our understanding of our world is any closer to the truth than that of the lower creatures? Why would anyone working from that conception ever deign to presume to rule out God or the truth of the Bible or any other worldview? (Unless politics had biased their thinking.)

In theory (radical experimental speculative theory, as it may be), some combination of an anomaly in the flow of time, interaction between multiple universes or multidimensional branes, and/or a rare fluctuation in the natural laws of our universe could generate a situation where our world would consistently look to radiometric dating, geophysical strata and light spectrum analysis much older than it actually is. Our current state of science would be unable to prove a young Earth, but it would be true nonetheless.

Ironically, once we allow that time might be radically altered (mainstream science does not currently provide for radical time alterations but the future might prove it wrong, and some modern physicists are currently speculating in that direction), a concept right out of the Bible might explain the discrepancy between our current science and the Creation Science view of our universe. In Isaiah 38, King Hezekiah was granted an additional fifteen years to live and the Sun, apparently miraculously, turned back the equivalent of ten marks on the sundial. Joshua was, again apparently miraculously, given an extension of daylight to prosecute battle. If God has elected to do miraculous interventions over the centuries in response to prayer that affect time and alter the physical world in some corresponding way, the physical world might not be showing its true age. Although positive responses to prayer would, one would think, tend to go towards making the Earth seem younger, the positive is not the only thing God has to deal with in human relations. Punishments issued as miraculous alterations, specifically, loosing Satan into the world, and allowing him to routinely do miraculous evil could increase the aging of the world significantly from the supernatural malice that has afflicted it. Thus, the Bible could be true and science’s readings accurate at the same time although they do not agree. A miracle, dark or light, has intervened to alter the physical world in a manner that cannot be detected. This particular scenario, involving the miraculous as it does, does not help CS establish its position with science because it is not testable, but the scenario cannot be disproved either.

Granted, direct evidence from archaeology and anthropology of too many generations of humans would seem to rule out most of this kind of intervention, proving the age of the Earth, at least since the advent of humans, to be greater than the CS estimates, but radiometric dating, light spectrum analysis, and geological strata data alone would be insufficient to rule out such a scenario. It is not clear that we presently have that many generations of humans documented exclusive of inferences made from radiometric dating of artifacts. I am not arguing for a young Earth here, and I don’t believe the theory currently has substantial scientific plausibility, but, given the odd possibilities modern science wants to affirm for its own purposes elsewhere, and given the possibility of supernatural tomfoolery, it cannot be absolutely ruled out.

Once again, to be clear for the ever-present critics out there, I am not arguing that such views should be adopted as the currently favored (most probable) scientific view. What I am arguing is that the neo-Darwinist/materialist/atheist camp are here caught in check. They can’t argue against the Big Bang theory, which looks so much like divine creation, and they can’t argue against intelligent design theory’s devastating probability argument without affirming the radical new speculative theories of science, such as multiverse and braneworld theory. But when they do, those theories then open up the door to 6-day creation as at least being scientifically coherent and, if only very remotely, scientifically possible. If the radically experimental, speculative, views of the origin of the universe are plausible, the list of all the radical options they engender must be conceded possible as well, not just the ones the neo-Darwinists find politically palatable. I find it as startling as you, but the truth is that one of those options is 6-day creation! As a consequence, the 6-day creation hypothesis of Creation Science cannot be dismissed as having been definitively disproved by modern science; and it cannot be dismissed as nonsense.

It is perhaps more difficult to imagine the possibility of Young Earth theory being true than 6-day creation, even with the radical new theories of science. However, it only takes the smallest adjustment to save the literal reading of Genesis at this point: allow that the genealogies in the Bible are true but not meant to be exhaustive of all the generations of mankind, but rather to show the highlights. Another simple solution is to add a little supernatural tomfoolery. Outside an authoritative teaching of the Church saying otherwise, anyone who allows that God is real, must then allow that science cannot be the final judge of the issue on Young Earth theory because miraculous intervention having skewed the physical data must always remain a consideration. I am not advocating abandoning the conclusions of science here; I am just arguing for a little more humility from those who say science has fully disproved 6-day creation and or even the existence of God (of all things). The one thing we can definitely conclude from the new physics is that the universe is potentially more awe-inspiring than even Creationists have heretofore ever held it to be! In any case, the possibility for a literal reading of Genesis to be true can easily be preserved by making one of these two adjustments. Catholics still say God didn’t intend Genesis to be read literally, but even they (we) have to allow that it might, as a pure coincidence, turn out that science will ultimately affirm a process of our universe’s origin that could vindicate the 6-day creation hypothesis.

Whatever new concepts may lurk in future discoveries that might explain black holes or the singularity at the Big Bang, if such concepts there be, they would, by definition, entail a startling rework of science’s conceptual foundations. One may rebel against admitting such radical changes, but the history of science argues for just such radical humility, for being prepared to cast aside the old and bring in the new. The present state of science has radical humility written all over it. Our present scientific paradigm has it that it all came from a complete mystery at the Big Bang, and science still does not know how to bridge the apparently random behavior of individual quantum subatomic particles to make it compatible with the known truths of a fully orderly physical world at the visible level of Newtonian mechanics (normal physics). Thus, there is plenty of room for humility and future surprises in science.

If the long sought grand unification theory in physics, string theory or something akin to it, is finally confirmed and elucidated, who knows what the implications for intelligent design will be? We could end up with the multiverse from Hell, as it were, where universes have seamlessly overlaid each other, and we have only had the illusion of living in a single independent world. In such a mess, each person’s path could wander undetectably through a tapestry of segments of intermingled worlds that is unique to themselves, and the objectivity that science requires for accuracy is a well-crafted illusion. I believe in a single objective world, but the new theories of physics offer radically new possibilities for such a world.

Consider the following brief excerpts from Wikipedia, the Free Dictionary, and Cornell University’s arXiv.org concerning some new developments in modern theoretical physics.

(From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braneworld, accessed 26 April 2010)

Brane cosmology refers to several theories in particle physics and cosmology motivated by, but not exclusively derived from, superstring theory and M-theory.

Brane and bulk

The central idea is that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk". The additional dimensions are compact, in which case the observed universe contains the extra dimensions, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate in this context. In the bulk model, other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models.

The ekpyrotic universe, or ekpyrotic scenario, is a cosmological model about the origin and shape of the universe. The name comes from a Stoic term for "out of fire". The ekpyrotic model of the universe is an alternative to the standard cosmic inflation paradigm, both of which accept that the standard big bang Lambda-CDM model of our universe is an appropriate description up to very early times. The ekpyrotic model is a precursor to, and part of the cyclic model.

The ekpyrotic model came out of work by Neil Turok and Paul Steinhardt and maintains that the universe did not start in a singularity, but came about from the collision of two branes. This collision released a large amount of energy which would appear very similar to the classic big bang, but avoids the singularity. The universe then expands until it appears almost featureless and flat, and this allows another cycle to take place with the universe being mostly removed of all debris. The ekpyrotic model received recent attention from cosmologists, and has been discussed in a number of articles that suggest it as an alternative to the Big Bang theory after it was published in Physical Review.

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(From the Free Dictionary by Farlex, Inc. at http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Braneworld, accessed 26 April 2010)

brane cosmology

Any of various theories that describe the universe in terms of multidimensional objects called branes. A brane can have any number of spatial dimensions. A 0-brane is a zero-dimensional object, and can represent a point-like particle. A 1-brane is a one-dimensional or string-like object; in string theory vibrational states of 1-branes represent elementary particles. A 2-brane is a two-dimensional object, or membrane (from which the word brane is derived).

The familiar world of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension can be described as a 4-brane (three space dimensions and one time dimension) moving in a higher-dimensional universe called the bulk. In some brane cosmology theories, there are many other universes (branes), moving through the bulk, which sometimes interact with each other. According to ekpyrotic theory, before the Big Bang our universe was a contracting brane that collided with another brane. This triggered the Big Bang and the creation of matter and radiation. Other brane cosmologies describe the whole universe as a 10- or 11-dimensional brane in which most of the dimensions are invisible to us – perhaps because they have been ‘rolled up’ so that they are extremely small. However, it is also possible in some models for large or even infinite dimensions to exist, yet be concealed from us.

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(From Cornell University’s arXiv.org at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0301/0301126v1.pdf, accessed 26 April 2010)

Born-Again Braneworld

Sugumi Kanno,1 Misao Sasaki,2 and Jiro Soda3

1Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan

2Department of Earth and Space Science, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University,

Toyonaka 560-0043, Japan

3Department of Fundamental Sciences, FIHS, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan

Talk presented at The 12th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, Tokyo, Japan, November, 2002

Abstract

We propose a cosmological braneworld scenario in which two branes collide and emerge as reborn branes with signs of tensions opposite to the original tensions of respective branes. In this scenario, the branes are assumed to be inflating. However, the whole dynamics is different from the usual inflation due to the non-trivial dynamics of the radion field. Transforming the conformal frame to the Einstein frame, this born-again scenario resembles the pre-big-bang scenario. Thus our scenario has features of both inflation and pre-big-bang scenarios. In particular, the gravitational waves produced from vacuum fluctuations will have a very blue spectrum, while the inflation field will give rise to a standard scale-invariant spectrum.

Conclusion

In this paper, we proposed a scenario in which two branes collide and are reborn as new branes, called the born-again braneworld scenario. Our model has the features of both inflationary and pre-big-bang scenarios….as the collision of branes mimics the pre-big-bang scenario, the primordial background gravitational waves with a very blue spectrum may be produced. This brings up the possibility that we may be able to see the collision epoch by a future gravitational wave detector such as LISA.

[Also see a similar article published in the peer-reviewed science journal, Progress of Theoretical Physics:

“Born-Again Braneworld”

Authors: Sugumi Kanno, Misao Sasaki, Jiro Soda

Journal-ref: Prog.Theor.Phys.109:357-369,2003]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0210/0210250v2.pdf

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Until we have a grand unification theory that is definite and certain, such scenarios as are resident in the ekpyrotic theory of our world’s origin (which is, again, a cosmological theory legitimately derived from multidimensional string theory and particle physics) remain fully possible. The ekpyrotic (out of fire) theory shows the scientific realism of a cosmological scenario that reflects in general ways the Creation Science view of cosmology. It has turned out that string theory offers more than one consistent model for explaining our world. As a result, many different speculative theories of cosmology remain explanatory contenders that science cannot now (and perhaps ever) refute. Some of these more or less equally acceptable theoretical models offer very different interpretations of the red shift phenomena that science presently uses to date the age of our universe. Note physicist and author Brian Greene suggests that ‘M’-Theory has unified the primary contenders of string theory into a single theory by showing that a single mathematical generates them all.[201] I can’t dispute this at the level of the mathematics (since I am not a mathematician) but, as a philosopher, I can say that it takes more than the commonality of a foundational mathematical formula and comparable predictions to prove multiple theories identical to each other. What happens in between counts too. What are the ontologies of the various theories? Do they posit the existence of the same mass-energy constructs (objects), entities that can be individuated to have a coherent existence over time? What are the process dynamics of the interaction of these “objects”? Are they the same for each theory? It is not clear that ‘M’-Theory has satisfactorily answered these kinds of questions, and it is not even clear if braneworld theory to date passes coherence, consistency and completeness (ontology and event process description) tests all at the same time. If there is no ontology associated with these different theoretical models, they are not really describing our world at all. A merely mathematical model can be altered in a practically infinite number of ways and still make precisely the same predictions. We can choose the simplest model by invoking Ockam’s Razor, but while giving us elegance, it does not guarantee truth, and thus does not rule out a model compatible with 6-day creation and a young Earth.

In any event, it is still possible, though highly unlikely, that science will ultimately choose an extradimensional theoretical model of physics that will compute the age of our universe differently. Granted, it would seem to require some radical concept, such as the “born old” idea, where the collision of two or more branes generated an informed state of matter and energy at the Big Bang (assuming in this context that there was one) that both produced the planetary systems and life on Earth quickly while also instilling signs of a much greater age (signs as incorrectly read by our currently insufficiently advanced scientific methods) than the Earth actually possessed. Having discovered deeper laws of string theory, or some other new theoretical model of physics, we may at some point in the future rectify this error and reinterpret the signs of the age of our Universe correctly and see that the Earth is in fact much younger. What are the odds of this happening? There is no way to say at present. We know our theoretical model of physics is presently incomplete but we can’t say precisely which way it will most probably go in advance of having gone there and verified it. I would not object to assigning a probability not much greater than nil, but that is the same probability that accrues to the theory of accidental evolution. Thus, when neo-Darwinists insult and ridicule Creation Science it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The implications of braneworld theory are much more directly supportive of intelligent design theory in the sense that they give us a perfectly elegant answer to the question, “Where did the design information come from, and how did it enter our system?” One simply ascribes the information as having been engendered by the encounter of two or more branes at the Big Bang or other seminal event. The result was a combination of natural law and the informed state of matter and energy that set the bowling ball of creation rolling irrevocably toward the strike zone: life became inevitable given the rules of the game and the point and manner in which the “ball” (mass and energy) was released. Wobbles and deviations are permitted so long as the built-in information, the natural laws, and the precise physical posture assumed by matter and energy at the beginning of the formation of our world make the result of biological life inevitable within the expected life of our universe. If we posit a cyclical pattern to cosmology, even that much is not required. All that is required for the intelligent design to come to fruition is that life be hit upon within one of the available cycles.

I would like to close this section by getting back to the distinction between the two views: Creation Science and intelligent design theory. It is important to be clear that modern intelligent design theory makes no religious claims at all; it is all science. The work of Creation Science theorists, on the other hand, taken as a whole, is somewhat different. While they do have an impressive arsenal of truly scientific arguments, they, nonetheless, are visibly making two distinct kinds of arguments. One of those arguments is from religious authority. They do not, however, as neo-Darwinists unfairly insist, pretend that the one is the other, that theology is science. Creation Scientists simply have the integrity to acknowledge the reality of their God and refuse to deny the fact that God truly has authority. I make the same personal affirmation myself. I don’t represent that affirmation as science, but I have even more confidence in it than I do in the scientific truths. As mentioned in the introduction, in the view of the Catholic Church, the genuine truths of both theology and science will never conflict, though at times they may appear to pending a more thorough analysis.

While it is fully right and proper for Creation Scientists to assert their theology on its own turf, it is not right to represent the theological components as science. I am not sure that CS theorists have actually made this error. They simply have a habit of presenting their integrated system of thought in wholeness. In their view theology and science are two sides of the same coin that represents the wholeness of truth. While one barrel of the CS rhetorical weaponry is undeniably theology, the other barrel is loaded with a surprisingly potent scientific case. These two types of Creation Science arguments, the theological and the scientific, need not be entangled together by critics, even though CS theorists tend to pose them together. The core scientific arguments, modules, or distinct lines of reasoning if you will, of CS can be separated from the larger religious thesis and scientifically evaluated separately.

Who would not give Albert Einstein the courtesy of separating his theory of relativity from a larger religious article had it been originally published in American Catholic as “Our Father’s Plan.” There would have been no question about doing it. Einstein in fact affirmed God in his own way and no one said we should throw out his scientific work because of that affirmation. The reason is that Einstein’s view of God has been, properly or improperly, described as a pantheistic view similar to Spinoza’s where God=the world itself. This allows materialists, humanists, and physical reductionists to rule and traditional theists to drool; that is why no one criticized Einstein. One can spout any kind of intellectual nonsense whatsoever and never be criticized by mainstream science so long as the Christian God is denied and materialism is affirmed.

Neo-Darwinists tend to pursue this prejudice further in taking a single scientific point of contention from the Creation Science case, distorting it into a foolish inaccurate parody that only a simpleton would propose, and then urge readers to dismiss the entirety of a very substantial and empirically well-grounded Creation Science case without giving it further study and evaluation. Such distortions are hardly good science, and, to be frank, are not intellectually honest.

Does mainstream science in fact have all the critical component data it needs to dismiss out of hand all Creation Science claims as they have heretofore done? No. Are mainstream scientists receptive to authentic evidence and logic that might argue against neo-Darwinism or for a young earth? No. The neo-Darwinian writings are available in the public record, and the prejudice is plain for all to see. I leave the reader to judge. It is safe to say that mainstream science has not always been as receptive as the standards of objective science require. Certainly, mainstream science is clearly not spending any time or money in research areas that might argue against the currently favored theory of accidental evolution.

Again, for those new to the subject, contrary to neo-Darwinist claims, intelligent design theory and young earth Creation Science are two absolutely different theories. Intelligent design theorists are not “neo-creationists” as many Darwinists assert. Intelligent design theorists assert a creator only in the sense of an intelligent designer of life as a scientific hypothesis. ID theory does not assert who that designer is. They allow that it might or might not be God. ID is therefore not biblical creationism, and it is not tied to the young earth view of biblical Creation Science. It is important to keep this distinction in mind because Darwinists will try to dismiss intelligent design theory by offering a rebuttal of selected biblical Creation Science claims while ignoring the entirely distinct set of arguments of intelligent design theory. (They also ignore the remaining Creation Science arguments for which they have no rebuttal). They then claim a resounding victory over both, while having addressed the truly cogent portion of neither.

Intelligent design theory is not biblical, neither is it anti-biblical. Nor should the reader assume from my comments that I hold that any or all biblical Creation Science arguments have been fully and properly rebutted by the neo-Darwinists. I do not so hold. Nor do I hold that any or all of them prevail; I only assert that much of the content of Creation Science arguments, once divested from the theology of the presenter, is genuine science. Mainstream science’s current estimate of the age of the Earth is convincing, but it hinges upon the reliability of carbon dating/radiometric dating or other dating techniques the reliability of which Creation Scientists have called into question on the basis of genuinely scientific concerns. Recent advancements in the argument, however, do seem to favor the validity of carbon dating/radiometric dating in most applications, and it would appear to be sufficient to corroborate the belief in an older Earth.

Intelligent design theory is not biblical, neither is it anti-biblical. Nor should the reader assume from my comments that I hold that any or all biblical Creation Science arguments have been fully and properly rebutted by the neo-Darwinists. I do not so hold. The neo-Darwinian argument concerning the age of the Earth is convincing but it hinges upon the reliability of carbon dating and other dating techniques the reliability of which Creation Scientists have called into question on the basis of genuinely scientific concerns. Recent advancements in the argument, however, do seem to favor the validity of carbon dating in most applications, and it would appear to be sufficient to corroborate the belief in an older Earth.

Creation Scientists make a variety of separate scientific objections to neo-Darwinian evolution. Each of these must stand or fall on its own individual merits and the success or failure of one implies nothing whatsoever about the merits of the others. It only takes one successful line of objection to refute a theory. Therefore, when posed as a single integrated theory of the origin of life, Creation Science may itself stand refuted by a refutation of only one of its own tenets. The same should hold true of any integrated theory, including neo-Darwinian evolution—it must be refutable to be scientific. Yet neo-Darwinists have added, modified, and removed various tenets of their theory through history quite freely, revealing that there is no unchangeable core of scientific content in neo-Darwinian theory at all.

When neo-Darwinists attempt to refute the modern scientific assertions of Creation Science by arguing only against the ancient naïve finalism espoused by some Christian fundamentalists a century ago they are not doing science but political propaganda. By definition scientific theories must be amenable to modification based upon new data. On the same logic the neo-Darwinists use to reject Creation Science, that is, eternally tying a theory to a past error, you and I could reject all of modern evolution for having once believed in protoplasm and God! Darwin himself held those beliefs. Neo-Darwinists reserve the option to modify to themselves alone however, denying it to those who oppose them. Nothing could be more transparently ridiculous or unscientific! This is the quality of the argument posed by neo-Darwinists against Creation Science. Mainstream science and its prestigious organizations have scandalously endorsed this fallacy, and now even the federal courts! Having abandoned all pretense of objectivity, those endorsing this prejudice have taken the additional step of erroneously identifying intelligent design theory and Creation Science as the same theory. This is done so that ID can be tossed out prior to evaluation as being religion and not science.

Creation Science arguments include all the main points I make in this book about complexity, improbability, the questions of how an accident can make complex machines or configure complex new genetic information, the impotence of natural selection to solve these problems, etc. Therefore, the Creation Science case is as scientifically and intellectually potent taken as a refutation of neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution as the book you are now reading. Therefore, the Creationist case is hardly lunatic as the neo-Darwinists have insultingly labeled it. Insult is not a tool of science, but of politics and propaganda. Where a valid case can be made, insulting your opponent is not necessary. In addition to using insult, which is not a tool of science, consider how evasive the neo-Darwinist approach to the evolution-ID debate has been. First, they ignore the scientific arguments of Creation Science and focus exclusively on their religious claims. Then, when they come to debate ID, which has no religious claims to use as decoys, falsely identify it with Creation Science. They then dismiss ID as religion without a hearing.

[Note: To complicate the terminology after having just clarified it, in at least one book of collected writings, the term “intelligent design creationism” has been applied to intelligent design theory, apparently with the permission of ID theorists. I assume that this is understood by all parties to preserve the distinction between biblical 6-day/young Earth creationism and intelligent design theory because the ID writings in that collection are from authors who do not include biblical creationism as a component of their version of intelligent design theory. I assume that in this use, ID is deemed a form of “creationism” simply because it affirms in general terms a creator, a designer of life, though not necessarily the biblical one. Although, in this general sense, ID may be legitimately referred to as a form of “creationism,” in a strictly linguistic, conceptual or philosophical sense, it is not biblical creationism. ID, therefore, cannot be rejected as nonscientific by virtue of having invoked religious authority in lieu of empiric evidence. Once again, ID theorists neither affirm nor deny the God of the Bible. Their theory is strictly one of the import of the scientific evidence, which they assert entitles us to deduce a “generic” designer of life without being able to go further and specifically identify who or what that designer is.]

Appendix 6:

The Definition of Life:

A Word on RNA First/Metabolism First

A debate is currently in progress, and has been for some time now, regarding, not only how life began, but how to define life itself. There is currently no agreed upon definition of life.[202] One of the main questions in this discussion is which came first, RNA or basic chemical metabolism? What science can currently demonstrate or hypothesize with confidence regarding the origin of life “ain’t” much:

(1) Self-organization of protocells is possible from thermally generated proteins immersed in water. Protocells are misnamed, for they are essentially just the shell without the contents, a primitive membrane.

(2) A primitive organelle called a ribozyme can replicate small strands of RNA outside of a living cell.

(3) Strands of RNA can be composed upon a PAH hydrocarbon backbone structure that functions to hold nucleotides in place long enough for them to be bonded together in a string that, with further chemical transitions, can then became the double helix of DNA.

This is a long way from creating life, however. Marcello Barbieri has shown us in The Organic Codes that a translation mechanism for the DNA is needed. Extrapolating from Michael Behe’s work, we know that a whole lot of structural, informational, and metabolic components must somehow be put into place at the same time to achieve the minimal mechanical requirements for life (leaving the question of the spirit aside). So the “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” approach of the RNA first/metabolism first debate itself embodies a gross oversimplification of the problem of life’s origin. The case for the metabolism first side is weak in that protocells do not have a genome, and in not giving the specifics of the internal chemistry of these “metabolizing bubbles.” Without the specifics we don’t know that RNA formation inside the bubble will be enhanced more than impeded. Ultimately, until the exact chemical components of a given hypothesized version of a protocell have been identified, it is pointless to debate their capabilities at all.

The other thing that needs to be said is that calling such a thing as a raw chemical catalytic process enclosed in a semi-permanent membrane bubble alive is an intellectual and moral travesty. Such things are not alive. Though they may have be a chronological precursor of life, so is everything else life is made of a chronological precursor of life. The physical constitution of the very first and most primitive of these protocells could apparently be the chemical equivalent of something no more complex than a fart in the bathtub![203] This is not life. There is a difference. Although protocells in Sydney Fox’s discussions are described as more complex than this, they are otherwise significantly more primitive in the key processes of life than bacteria.[204]

To dumb down the definition of life so far as to call protocells alive implies physical reductionism, grossly oversimplifies what we actually know, and commits the fallacy of arguing from the easy to the hard. To conclude from such simple achievements as protocells, and a few strands of RNA that the jump to life can be accidentally achieved is simply premature. It is the error of “deducing” that the house will assemble itself from the presence of a pile of boards and nails. It “ain’t gonna” happen.

Physical reductionism is itself a blatantly unjustified assumption, noting more than an assertion of the personal philosophy of materialism. It is an unwarranted denial of the spirit and the dignity of living things.[205] Furthermore, the original intellectual question man posed to himself through history of how to define life was not a question of how to identify the most primitive chemical precursors of life but rather to extrapolate from the organisms that we were already certain were alive the essential qualities they possess that differentiates them from the nonliving. In my view, Shapiro, Fox and others who advance a reductionist definition of life have confused the question of what are the essential elements of life with what were life’s chemical precursors.

Already, well before the question of how to define life was recently reposed in modern times in the evolutionary context, science had long since established what life was. We were simply having trouble polishing the language used to describe life’s essential attributes, and this more in philosophical applications than scientific ones. In science, we already knew that the cell, not a protocell, was the smallest of living things; we knew that DNA was an essential part of life; and we knew that there was a clear demarcation point between biology and chemistry at the cell. In proposing a new definition of life that has absolutely no use for anyone in or out of science except a chemist, what reductionists are actually doing is regressing both science and culture! They propose to take science back from a point of progression regarding the definition of life that it had already visibly achieved. Science has always acknowledged that the distinctions between sentient life, self-conscious life, and human life were all meaningful for the experimental sciences as well as for anthropology, sociology, psychology, ethics and religion. Taking away these distinctions and reducing life to a mess of chemicals leaves no rational foundation for the humane treatment of humans, let alone animals as laboratory subjects. It removes the grounds for outlawing human experimentation without the informed consent of the subject. In short, it is the first step in laying a scientific justification for the removal of human rights.

There are clearly unique attributes relevant to the definition of life at several stages of development that are worthy of note, even biochemically. We should be asking not only what is the definition of life, but what are the essential defining attributes of human life, of mammalian life, of bird, reptilian or amphibian life, bacterial life, sentient life etc. There are important distinctions at each of the divisions of life that require preservation and maintenance for proper understanding. I think it goes without saying that in seeking the definition of life the intent of the multi-disciplinary communities of philosophy, theology and science, the arts, sciences, and humanities, was never to define the essential characteristics of a fart in the bathtub!

The question of life’s origin and definition legitimately originated in a multi-disciplinary context (not just chemistry): chemistry, biology, cosmology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, and genetics. The bulk of all past work on this question will simply be negated by making such a radical move as reductionists now propose. If reductionists can succeed in this degradation of the term “living,” the new definition will ultimately be integrated into the other disciplines and into the culture at large. It will be the equivalent of a Nazi book burning, the destruction of the enlightened human culture of life. All but gross, one almost wants to say “pagan,” materialism will be thrown out. We will begin to view all living things and ourselves as no different than a collection of complex chemical bubbles! If you think there is no respect for life in our current culture as revealed in abortion and senseless violence (50,000,000 unborn children killed since 1973), wait until the generation that is taught the reductionist worldview grows up: genocide, eugenics, racial and ethnic cleansing, human experimentation, forced behavioral conditioning, information control…It will be Stalin on his worst day. Human rights will be totally sacrificed for the benefit of whatever makes the integrated chemical bubble of society pass gas in a more efficient manner.

But even the moral argument is superfluous here; the reductionists are just wrong from all points of view. Self-propagating chemical systems aren’t necessarily alive. An oil well fire is a self-propagating chemical system. They don’t grow in the same way organisms grow by complex integrative methods; they merely expand. They don’t struggle for survival; they merely survive when conditions are right and perish when they are not. Oil well fires don’t sense threats and employ defensive systems; they don’t have organismal behavior in the usually understood sense of goal-oriented mobility.

There is a clear difference in kind between chemical bubbles (protocells), and what we normally call alive. After awareness, the most important difference between protocells and living things, and it may perhaps be related to awareness, is active or proactive adaptation. Protocells cannot proactively adapt to a changing environment. Chemical bubbles don’t act at all, they only react. An essential characteristic of a living thing is the ability to be proactive as well as reactive.

Granted, bacteria don’t exhibit the hallmark characteristics of life in the same manner or degree as higher life forms do, but this only reveals that one definition of life may not be sufficient to capture all that is important for proper understanding. The attempt to redefine life in this ridiculous way, by reducing it to the simplest maintainable chemical system, is like saying any child who can pick up a piece from the board is a chess player. Yes, one can choose to use the word that way because of personal preference, but one has then both arbitrarily changed the language and lost the meaningful distinctions captured in the prior uses of the term “life.” Even if such a change were to be made, the fullness of the experience of both chess and life will remain in the world; reductionists would only be fooling themselves. The rest of us would simply invent new words to refer to the fullness of these experiences. Reductionism accomplishes nothing but the introduction of confusion and the loss of prior work in many disciplines. The most efficient way to approach protocells is simply to call them possible chemical precursors of life and leave it at that.

So, which came first the RNA or the metabolic protocell? It is probably an unimportant question, perhaps even a trivial one. We know that so much more has to be in place to achieve a living cell than just these two components. For the question to be significant to the explanation of life, one has to hold that the RNA directs or otherwise aids in the construction of the protocell, or the protocell is critically important to the successful assembly of the RNA. However, without a translation system and associated organelles such as a ribosome, simple RNA doesn’t build anything, and a PAH backbone is all that is apparently required to string together some spontaneously organized RNA molecules. Thus, my view is that RNA and protocells probably originated independently and then encountered each other. This is a defensible view on the grounds that both are relatively easy to achieve, which is evidence precisely by the fact that they are what we can demonstrate to be the first and most likely occurrences in the chain of components of life. Bubble “eats” RNA and the various other chemical components of life and then the built-in chemical affinities of the components self-construct a more and more complex cell over time. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to where the exact demarcation point for life would occur in this process, because as far as we know all the components of a cell must be there at the same time, and those requirements vary from cell type to cell type. What we do know is that the complex mechanisms of a living cell would never self-construct in an accidental world. For such an astronomically improbable thing to occur there would have to be an enormous bias for life built into the laws of nature and the initial configuration of matter and energy at the Big Bang.

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Neo-Darwinian Evolution: It Ain’t Natural

What’s that did Richard Dawkins say!

Not chance…not purpose…some other way?

My thoughts?

My dear I cannot say, not ’till the children nod away.

As science cannot hide design,

They simply up and changed their mind.

“We need no God behind life’s dance.”

And yet they dare not call it “chance.”

An argument they can’t defend.

Will the bloody nonsense never end?

Could a neo-Darwinist make something grow?

Oh, yes! But only words, you know.

Toss them glibly to and fro, pile them high, out they blow.

And that scent? It sure ain’t Miracle Grow!

Main Menu

Main Menu

Evolution – Smevolution!

Is Intelligent Design Theory Testable? (And is neo-Darwinian theory?)

Brane and bulk

brane cosmology

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Born-Again Braneworld

Abstract

Conclusion

Neo-Darwinian Evolution: It Ain’t Natural