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

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Evolution – Smevolution!

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Appendix 7:

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) & ID

Perhaps nothing has captured the imagination of the peoples of the world more universally than the search for extraterrestrial life. Even here in the debate between intelligent design (ID) theory and neo-Darwinian (accidental) evolution two key questions/objections have arisen that are linked to ET:

(1) Why would SETI scientists accept so little evidence for the existence of other forms of intelligent life as a single monotonous electromagnetic pulse or a green square stuck in the middle of a planet in space, when neo-Darwinian evolutionists reject the far greater indications of intelligent design in the complex logically programmed systems of human genetics and microbiology?

(2) If ET could be the designer of life, why then doesn’t intelligent design theory qualify as science as opposed to religion? ID theory does not require God, and it makes no religious claims, employing only scientific tools: biology, physics, mathematics, probability theory, and logical analysis.

In an attempt to rebut the first objection, SETI scientists and neo-Darwinian evolutionists (correctly) say that the kinds of criteria SETI and ID theory currently use are completely different; SETI uses artificiality while ID theory uses specified functional complexity. Chief SETI astronomer Seth Shostak points out that the objection as phrased by some ID proponents falsely assumes that SETI is searching for a complex signal, when it is in reality searching for an artificial signal, one supremely simple in form, a monotonous, droning pulse, in fact. By artificial, SETI scientists mean something that nature is known or believed not to do.

The ID objection in relation to SETI does not concern so much what SETI is as a matter of fact using for its search criterion at the present moment in time, but rather what it could be using in theory. For example, if SETI were to receive a complex signal from deep space, a symphony of Alf von Beethoven, for example, a complex engineering blueprint, or a simple unambiguous linguistic message, on wavelengths that nature can spontaneously produce signals in then SETI would still accept that specified functional complexity as evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (whether they had been consciously looking for it or not) regardless of whether that radio wave frequency was something nature could produce spontaneously or not. Shostak implies that there are practical reasons why SETI must look for the droning simple pulse instead of a complex signal, but Paul Horowitz, one of the now famous geniuses in the history of SETI, informs us that there are no such practical limits.

…if we had a couple of 600-foot dishes, well within our capability on Earth, and they were spaced a thousand light-years apart, could we transmit with a dollar’s worth of energy a signal that could be received above the noise at the other end?

At five letters per word, galactic telegrams cost a dollar per word. That’s an amazing fact. It’s a fact that interstellar telegrams are cheap. If you want to think of why, probably because the sky is very quiet at radio frequencies. Nature doesn’t know how to make twenty-centimeter waves very well. And therefore, with modest-sized pieces of technology we can communicate.[206]

Thus, the capability to send and receive complex signals is in fact within the range of modern Earth science and technology, and has been for many decades. Why then aren’t we listening for complex signals (we are sending them)? Obviously the reasons are political not practical.

So, how is the SETI signal criterion analogous to the intelligent design logic, and how is it different? At the foundational level, that is, in the most general sense, both enterprises are looking for signs of intelligent life, albeit in somewhat different ways. The artificiality criterion is sufficient for both, but is only (for practicality in extreme long distance searches) practically necessary for SETI because they have shifted to such long distance searches where they believe complex signals become unaffordable.

The logic of the two enterprises, ID and SETI, is analogous in that they both can, in theory, use either the criterion of artificiality or specified functional complexity. Historically, however, as Seth Shostak points out, they have gone different routes with ID theory traditionally focused on specified functional complexity and the SETI search presently focused on a very simple form of artificial signal.

But consider, even for the type of simple artificial signal SETI is looking for to have been generated, that is, a signal that nature is incapable of producing spontaneously in a given context, extreme specified functional complexity must nonetheless have existed as a prerequisite in three different forms: a) the advanced science of the extraterrestrial civilization, b) complex technology sufficient to send the signal, and c) the complexity of ET’s bodily systems (biological intelligence). Minus biological intelligence, science, and technology, an artificial signal outside the parameters of what “dumb” nature could spontaneously produce would not have been generated at all. So, despite Shostak’s objections, even the simple signal SETI is scanning for has extreme specified functional complexity as a prerequisite for its issuance.

On the abstract level SETI and ID are nearly identical in concept. SETI is looking primarily for outward behavioral manifestations of intelligent life forms, primarily intentional communications, while ID is examining both the minute internal structures of biology and the life-favoring parameters of our physical universe for indications of intelligent design. While these enterprises are quite different on the surface at the conceptual level they are similar in that both human biological system design complexity and the artificial signal sought by SETI are viewed as the work product of an intelligent designer. An acceptable SETI signal is presumed to be a behavioral work product of ET (by SETI), and a functionally complex biological design creation is presumed to be a behavioral work product of the designer of life (by ID). So, in this sense SETI and ID are not looking for two different kinds of things at all.

Why doesn’t SETI also search for a complex signal, for wouldn’t we at least want to see, at a minimum, “We come in peace” prefacing any intergalactic signal that was of clearly intelligent origin? I think we would, though there would never be any way to guarantee it wasn’t a trick. And, although SETI claims they chose their current method for reasons of intergalactic economics, I propose that national security considerations are almost certainly why SETI has moved to simplicity. How so?

The simpler signal is ambiguous and therefore plausibly deniable when it has occurred, at least for a time. This pleases the Defense Department (and I must admit the logic of it myself) because, should we receive such a signal, we would retain the option to deny its authenticity to the public precisely because it is not complex. We could (mistakenly) call it a new kind of pulsar or any number of things in order to keep the public out of the Pentagon’s hair just long enough that the military can respond to any extraterrestrial threat in real time. ET civilizations that opt for the simple signal are by definition the ones least capable of physically arriving here, those with the least resources and the greater distances to traverse. In other words, ET civilizations capable of sending us a complex signal are the ones the Defense Department worries about the most. SETI’s ignoring the whole range of complex signals allows the potentially problematic ETs to be dealt with exclusively by the Defense Department. This logic makes practical sense, and it also makes political sense for the atheists who dominate modern science. They would have happily colluded with those in the Defense Department in contriving to move complex SETI signal searches to a secret function within the Defense Department because it avoids having to admit the validity of the design inference criterion that underlies intelligent design theory. Should the simple droning artificial signal presently being monitored for by SETI occur, any number of delaying tactics can be employed by the government in public exchanges while the track is turned over to the Defense Department because, by definition, those simple droning signals would only be used by ET civilizations located at extreme distances. No hurry to set up a defensive strategy there, but the complex signals that could arrive from much closer points of origin need immediate attention due to shorter reaction time windows.

Is ET really a concern to the Defense Department? In theory, yes; it is unavoidable. By definition a visiting ET would have extremely advanced technology and therefore pose an enormous threat should their intentions be hostile. Then there is the biological contagion risk, for which there is and almost certainly never will be any quick and easy (or foolproof) solution. ET could be bringing germs (with or without their knowledge) that would wipe us out, and Earth could harbor germs (known or unknown to us) that could wipe them out. We have only inventoried and described roughly 15% of the species presumed to exist here on Earth. Even among the known species there could be those that would present a threat to the ET organism that we have no means to anticipate.

Government scientists as well as many experts in the civilian sector know this twofold ET threat is real whether they admit it to the public or not. Any intelligent civilization with advanced medical science knows that they cannot risk first contact with alien life forms on either party’s home planet or on a third planet not previously checked for infectious agents. Even when contact is made on a safe third planet the individuals participating who have exposure to the alien species cannot come home. Several meetings of this kind would have to take place and the exposed individuals monitored during the remaining years of their life to have any reasonable degree of confidence that the aliens were not a biological exposure risk to humanity and that we were not a risk to them. Our government and, if there are any intelligent ETs out there, their government would fully understand this. That means that if ET proposed meeting us here on Earth for first contact minus any years for quarantine and close study, or simply flew in unannounced as some UFO theorists have long maintained, their intentions could be presumed to be hostile.

With this arrangement of treating simple signals as deniable and ignoring complex ones completely, the Defense Department preserves the flexible response it needs to protect the Earth. It can avoid a protracted public debate prior to launching a military strike against a perceived to be hostile extraterrestrial threat no matter what the nature of the signal may be, simple or complex. This approach avoids the loss of a possibly critical time window for military response. Any intelligent ETs would fully understand this problem and make the appropriate arrangements for third planet quarantined encounters before penetrating our atmosphere (or before permitting our space vehicles to penetrate theirs).

The practical demands of real time military action preclude holding a public debate before tactical commands are implemented. That is no way to fight a war, even here in the heart of democracy; it just doesn’t work. Such delays could have catastrophic results for life on Earth. (I have no direct knowledge of this policy by the way; I am merely making an inference to its existence from the facts and the logic of the situation—it makes sense.) Given the known risk of contagion there really is no other way to do it. We should offer friendship to alien civilizations, yes, but we don’t have to be stupid or naïve about the way we do it.[207]

Thus, there would seem to be stronger political reasons for SETI using the simple artificiality signal than there are scientific reasons. While pleasing DOD, the move to an ultra-simple SETI signal criterion also solves a problem for the atheists who dominate modern science: they no longer have to face the dilemma of either admitting that the intelligent design theorists’ design inference is valid or being convicted of using a double standard. Thus, any proposed move to simplicity in the SETI signal criterion (in the public domain) stands to be a political shoe-in. All the movers and shakers in both the government scientific and the military communities get what they want out of it. The only ones left to object are the politically disenfranchised sci-fi fans. True, you don’t want the sci-fi “nerds” arrayed against you in the blogs, but their political lobby group is not substantial.

We have broadcast complex messages directly into space for the purpose of contacting ET civilizations; why aren’t we looking for them?

In 1974, scientists from Cornell University broadcast the first deliberate message to space. It contained, in a mathematical code, a crude picture of us and basic information about our chemistry…

Carl Sagan describes the message this way: “What is said fundamentally was: Here’s the Sun. The Sun has planets. This is the third planet. We come form the third planet. Who are we? Here is a stick diagram of what we look like, how tall we are, and something about what we’re made of. There’s four point something billion of us, and this message is sent to you courtesy of the Arecibo telescope, 305 meters in diameter.”[208]

Clearly, the history of SETI has in fact involved the use of complex messages on the outgoing side of things. Why wouldn’t we assume that ET would use methods similar to our own? The fact of the matter is that should a radio frequency message arrive from space carrying symphonies, language, science, math, digital renditions of art or cultural artifacts, etc., even were it to be broadcast on a frequency nature herself tends to use, we would admit it was of intelligent design. But since science is dominated by the Marxist-like philosophy of materialism, this will never be admitted until the event occurs because political yardage is gained for the materialists by denying it. It is most likely that SETI, NASA, DOD and much of the rest of the relevant segments of university science departments stand prepared to acknowledge complex signals from space if only in programs veiled in secrecy, while we, the public, are not likely to be seeing or hearing of any such signals when if and when they occur.

Why am I so sure science would (at least privately) admit that intelligent signals carried on a frequency nature uses (not an artificial frequency) were genuine indicators of ET civilization? Because science has already confessed as much by way of a seminal 1959 paper by Cocconi and Morrison: “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” This paper is seen by some as providing the first scientific foundation for the SETI endeavor. Cocconi and Morrison proposed using the hydrogen line frequency (1420.40575177 MHz) for searches for ET signals from space. The Hl frequency is a natural occurring frequency, not an artificial one. It also has certain advantages for communicating with planets with Earth-like atmospheres as it can penetrate the atmosphere with little interference.

Without imputing any such specific intentions to the authors Morrison and Cocconi, given the national security dilemma invoked by ET contact, one obvious potential use of the Hl line as a frequency for our sending messages into space would be that it would suggest to ET that we had hydrogen bomb technology, thus serving as a warning that would keep ET away from Earth. Why not just use any frequency that worked otherwise and tell them outright that we have it? That could obviously be done as a practical matter, but there are political consequences to doing it. The political consensus at various times in our nation’s history may not have favored sending such a message (more doves than hawks). By using the Hl line frequency the hawks can succeed in sending ET an implied threat during periods when the doves have political dominance over decision making. Thus, I think a case can be made that the otherwise inexplicable move by SETI to scan for simple monotonous drone-like signals on an artificial frequency instead of covering a selection of all the real possibilities for incoming signals is more of a political move than a scientific one.

Consider for a moment. What would happen if the hawks had in fact sent an Hl line frequency message into space? We would have to allow that if ET is out there he might at some point receive the message and interpret it as an implied threat of nuclear attack. We must then allow for all the possible responses that ET might send back, ranging from “FU” to “Look at all the vastly superior weapons WE have” to “WE’RE COMING NOW!” Our government would obviously not want amateurs to receive these transmissions for fear of public panic. So if such a Hl message was in fact ever sent it might explain not only SETI’s move to searching for artificial frequency signals exclusively, but also the push to involve home computer users in the project. This keeps the attention of the amateurs focused in a safe direction.

Given the history of rancid malicious racism in the United States and the fact that the “good ’ol boy” network use to have a great deal of influence in the U.S. government, it would not surprise me to learn that such an Hl message was actually sent from Earth into space (or something more openly hostile) at some point in our modern history. While admitting this is largely speculative, it would explain why SETI has suddenly become so extremely selective in its search methods. We screwed up and sent an intimidating message into space and now we can’t risk the public inadvertently receiving ET’s hostile response. My point here for the purpose of the intelligent design-accidental evolution debate is that SETI’s move to artificiality is potentially grounded more in politics than science and that science would in fact accept any message on any non-artificial frequency whose structure mathematically corresponded to extreme complex specified functionality of any kind: the blueprint for a space shuttle for example. I belief that modern science is (consciously or subconsciously) doing everything in its power to ignore, dance around, and outright deny the design inference simply from a cultural bias in favor of Marxist-like atheistic materialism. SETI could use specified functional complexity as a criterion and remain fully in bounds of scientific propriety if they wanted to do it, but the option is politically out of bounds.

Shostak fails to mention that the intelligent design argument can and at times does use artificiality as a criterion for the presence of intelligence. Artificiality is in fact detectable in the linguistic structure, syntax and semantics of DNA and in the Boolean logic of gene regulation networks.[209] The latter essentially equate to a wiring diagram of an electronic circuit board, and the former are simply a translatable system of code similar to computerized industry’s machine control code. Accidental processes do not construct coded languages with translation systems and Boolean logical networks. It just doesn’t happen. These kinds of systems are known to be artificial.

So, yes it is true as Dr. Shostak states that the prevailing school of thought in SETI today is that a monotonous drone-like pulse emanating from a context where nature could not have been the source (an artificial signal, though not a complex one) is the best bet for an ultra-long distance search. This is because it is a much more efficient means to bridge the vastness of interstellar space. Since we have already searched nearby planets without (any acknowledged) success, SETI has perhaps given up hope of catching radio waves of Mozart (or Homer Simpson) wafting by, having leaked from a neighboring solar system, or finding a reciprocal short range message of the same kind we have ourselves sent into space.

However, complex signals are not as limited to only close origins as some of the SETI folks seem to be implying. Horowitz tells us that ET could in fact afford to do complex signals if they wished for the equivalent of a few dollars per transmission. These would be practical at least up to a distance of 1,000 light years. This merely requires us to make a 600-foot dish (perfectly doable within present technology) to receive the signal. A 1,000 light year search, in intergalactic terms, is still local neighborhood, the equivalent of a stroll around the intergalactic block. This kind of search would seldom exceed the exterior boundary of our own Milky Way galaxy, estimated to be on average 1,000 light years thick, and 100,000 light years in diameter.[210]

In view of Horowitz’ point, the fact that SETI has moved to an ultra-long distance search method best used for sources outside the Milky Way tends to suggest either that we have reason to believe that there has never been intelligent life in the Milky Way, or that there is none left (we may have already destroyed ET if he came here and evoked our defensive systems), or that we know the other intelligent life in the Milky Way has no interest in talking to us (considering us barbarians, for example), for ETs in such regions could send us complex messages on the cheap.

Making the first assumption tends to belie the “easy as pie” argument of the neo-Darwinists that an accident could have simply thrown life together over a large expanse of time, for there are approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and approximately 50 billion galaxies in the universe.[211] This equates to roughly 10 trillion solar systems. From none of these have we received any intelligent signals. That’s a lot of opportunity if, as the neo-Darwinists are fond of saying, anything can happen given the large expanse of time of evolution. Making either of the latter two assumptions means we already know ET is or was out there and therefore that an argument for intelligent design does not have to invoke God as the creator. This admission by science allows ID theory to remain properly within the realm of science. In other words, there is a big difference between the way neo-Darwinists talk and the way the rest of science walks. What science is actually doing says that the origin of life is not easy as pie and that intelligent design theory can in fact be formulated in a purely scientific form that does not involve religion.

The unsurpassed functional complexity of life makes life the prime candidate for intelligent design. Therefore, due to both ultra-complexity of living mechanisms and the astronomical improbability of random generation of such intricate and interdependent living designs, the default assumption must remain that complex life is artificial until it can be shown to arise spontaneously in nature. While demonstrating the spontaneous self-organization of life would not prove that a designer had not set nature up to be self-organizing (the ID argument would still apply), our present inability to demonstrate full self-organization means that, in the face of all the design characteristics and artificiality indicators of life, life must be presumed to be artificial until proven otherwise. Intelligent design theory should therefore be our present default working hypothesis regarding the origin and/or development of life.

Although the historical strategies of SETI and intelligent design scientists may not have overlapped as a matter of historical fact, across the full range of theoretical options SETI and ID may pull from the exact same pool of alternative types of evidence: artificiality or specified functional complexity. This is as it must be for SETI and ID purport to be giving evidence for precisely the same thing: intelligence as the source of a body of empiric observations.

While, in pure concept the types of evidence available to SETI and ID are largely coextensive. ID scientists, naturally, do not have to deal with the practical limitations imposed by interstellar communications. They have convenient and direct access to the complex structures of biology at their root. ID scientists have the luxury of examining organisms firsthand where the full complexity is communicated at no cost whatsoever. And let’s not forget Francis Crick, the co-discoverer (with James Watson) of the double helix molecular structure of DNA. Crick read the physical and biological data then available as evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence was the source of Earth’s life (if only in disseminating microorganisms in our direction).[212]

At the bare minimum, SETI reveals that there can be a legitimate science focused upon the detection of intelligence via indicators resident in physical phenomena. This is the scientific discipline of intelligent design theory. This alone shows the neo-Darwinists of mainstream evolutionary science, the AAAS, and the federal courts to be wrong in dismissing intelligent design theory as unscientific prior to looking at the specifics of the data, methods, and arguments, for ID is based upon precisely the same discipline as SETI.

How Do We Know that ET Won’t Call Home?

Why isn’t intelligent design theory scientific if it does not require God as the designer of life, makes no religious claims whatsoever, and uses only scientific data from biology and physics, mathematics, probability, and logical analysis to support the theory? Forgetting Guth and Crick, neo-Darwinists (and the federal court at Kitzmiller) claim that intelligent design theory is of necessity invoking God as the designer and that any hypothesis that invokes God must of necessity be religion and not science.[213] Both of these claims are transparently false. Intelligent design theory explicitly allows for options other than God as the designer (notably ET) and, in Part 2, I discuss situations where publicly observable indications might occur that would justify even a rational belief that a being qualifying under society’s current conception of God was the source of those observations. The instantaneous reordering of our planetary systems without ill effect, for example, should it occur concurrently with a sonorous voice from the sky saying “I did that!” would be accepted by most rational thinkers as a prima facie case for God (not absolute proof, but rationally corroborative evidence). The conclusion that “God did that” could at least fall under the umbrella of forensic science, if none of the other disciplines.

Although SETI astronomers, astrobiologists, and all the other branches of science, allow for the possibility of extraterrestrial life, neo-Darwinists dismiss the ET option out of hand when ID theory wants to invoke it. Why? Apparently they think ID theorists are not offering it in good faith. But the ET alternative is a simple scientific fact that has nothing to do with worldviews, personal politics, or religion. NASA is still spending substantial amounts of money on ET focused research, as is the National Science Foundation, both of which funded the recent project to expand the search catalog of habitable stellar systems for the SETI follow-on project, Project Phoenix, at the University of Arizona. See the University of Arizona document: TARGET SELECTION FOR SETI: 1. A CATALOG OF NEARBY HABITABLE STELLAR SYSTEMS, posted to NASA’s Web site.[214] Project Phoenix is not a whimsical afterthought of a harebrained idealist with no credentials. It involves the University of Arizona and University of California Berkeley. It adds 350 dishes, a hundred-fold increase in search capacity, and integrates the Arecibo observatory and the Lovell Telescope in England. Agent Mulder couldn’t ask for a better project! Even Scully would admit that SETI is a scientific endeavor, and that the ET hypothesis is science not religion.

The possibility that some extraterrestrial civilizations may be scientifically advanced far beyond our level has been admitted since the ’60s![215]Famous astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI, estimates there are 50,000 detectable intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Despite the fact that God may (or may not) disagree with him, this clearly implies that the ET-as-designer-of-life hypothesis is both rational and scientific in principle. One of our most distinguished scientists, Alan Guth, has proposed the possibility of super-advanced civilizations designing whole “baby” universes. His theory was not dismissed as nonscientific.[216] Thus, the option for an intelligent designer of human life that is not God is a scientifically valid one. This makes ID theory, generally described, a proper scientific view.

If we found a foreign satellite orbiting earth, its ownership credibly denied by all nations, we would conclude an extraterrestrial designer made it. If there were an android in it, advanced beyond our own technology, everyone would draw the same conclusion. Given the odd neo-Darwinian logic, however, why wouldn’t they conclude that it evolved by accident? You and I know the answer: because we just know that accidents cannot build such machines.

The National Academy of Science and the federal court at Kitzmiller, therefore, have been visibly wrong in dismissing all intelligent design arguments as nonscientific without first studying them for genuine scientific content and the absence of religious claims. The most recent NAS statement on intelligent design theory I have seen says that ID theory has been historically tied up with religion so inextricably that science may now and forever after simply dismiss it as religion. This is a fully ridiculous thing to say, and it poses a most dangerous threat to academic freedom. It arbitrarily forbids the very same decoupling of religious and scientific concepts from occurring within ID theory that all of the rest of science has undergone over the past two centuries. It forbids a theory to be modified, and in doing so throws away the hard won prestige of the NAS as a legitimate body of scientific leaders.

To have a federal court step in like it did in Kitzmiller and legally compel an academic theory to be read contrary to its natural language meaning and endorse the non-scientific principle that certain kinds of theories are forever forbidden to be modified is a dangerous step towards information control and totalitarianism. It puts politically biased individuals who happen to be in key positions in the government in control of freedom of expression in the universities and high schools by way of establishing a veto power in the courts over freedom of thought and expression. This sends the message to academia that if the court doesn’t like what you have written it will redefine it for you no matter how ridiculous a distortion of what you have actually said is required to serve the court’s own politically biased agenda. For that reason, Kitzmiller is unconstitutional and itself violates the prohibition against government’s endorsing any position regarding religion.

Appendix 8:

Problem/Solution: How to Fix the Laws

What’s wrong with the laws? Currently, while forbidding religious material in the science books (as it should), the law allows the teaching of materialism and atheism in the science classroom but forbids the teaching of purely scientific formulations of intelligent design theory.

The neo-Darwinists claims ID has not peer-reviewed science and is strictly religion pretending to be science is belied by that fact that William Dembski’s book, The Design Inference, was peer reviewed as science by scientists at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Molecular biologist Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, is exclusively focused on the structure of the living systems of biology, yet the courts are calling it all religion! Something is very wrong in this, and academic freedom is absolutely imperiled by the federal court’s censorship of science books.

In the introductions to evolution texts and in various commentaries, modern neo-Darwinists insist that the overall process of life’s creation is truly accidental and that God and intelligent design can be definitely ruled out by science—a blatant lie that we have just spent over 600 pages refuting. They also straightforwardly affirm the virtues of materialism and atheism. The courts are seemingly saying that because the technical part of the neo-Darwinist view does not rule out God, anything at all can be taught along with it as long as it is placed under the neo-Darwinist banner, including the philosophies of atheism and materialism. The latter additions, however, flagrantly violate the constitutional prohibition of government endorsements for or against religion. Where the courts have erred is in forgetting that the technical theory of evolution is not all there is to neo-Darwinism. There is also the social philosophy of neo-Darwinism, an ideology that many pursue with so great a zeal that one might as well call it their religion. The philosophical tenets of neo-Darwinism include atheism and materialism, and these are frequently blended into the introductory and summary sections of evolution text books.

As far as the law goes, when public schools and universities are involved, the entire textbook must be considered to represent the government’s endorsement, not just selected sections. Even where the science teacher or university professor does not lecture specifically on the commentaries lauding the “virtues” of atheism and materialism, those commentaries are still presented to the students at taxpayer expense in the public school mandated text book. In either teaching or merely presenting atheism and materialism at public expense, the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion is violated.

One of the goals of this book is to bring the Catholic Church in America on board the fight to have these atheistic texts removed from our public schools as a violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. The current state of affairs has our government implicitly endorsing the abolishment of religion by presenting the students with endorsements of atheism and materialism at taxpayer expense in the public school systems. To that end, I solicit the reader’s help in organizing a parish drive to identify and remove texts that violate the Constitution in this regard and to petition the federal courts to outlaw textbooks that contain recommendations either for or against God. Such claims are not science but propaganda. They are vehicles to advance a personal philosophy or a religion, including laying the foundation for the advancement of Marxism/Communism in the minds of our students, and as such are inappropriate in the science classroom.

The courts have so far excluded the intelligent design argument from science classrooms even though purely scientific logic and evidence is given in abundance apparently because our culture has traditionally associated that argument with religion. A bias against ID theory is implied here because nowhere else in science or the humanities have we been unable to distinguish the past from the present in this way. Modern adherents of intelligent design theory have proposed a religion-free version of the intelligent design argument that is in fact pure science. In saying that this religion-free version cannot be taught in public schools the court has overstepped its bounds in another important constitutional area, free speech, by presuming to tell science which theories it may endorse and which it cannot, minus genuine constitutional grounds for doing it. Neo-Darwinism has historically been associated with atheism and materialism, even Marxism, (and blatantly teaches it to this day) yet it is permitted in the science classroom in public schools. One might plausibly argue that this prejudice in the federal courts itself violates the Constitutional separation of church and state by favoring atheism. In other words, we have a constitutional violation not only in the schools, but in the courts as well.

What the courts have so far been unable to grasp is that the intelligent design argument is not an argument for or against God at all, but only an argument for the existence of an intelligent designer of human life. As far as science knows, that designer could turn out to be an extraterrestrial civilization. Therefore, on strictly constitutional grounds, intelligent design theory is legal as science in public schools so long as the thesis of God is kept out of its assertions.

To be consistent the courts must, in addition to precluding the endorsement of religion in public schools, also preclude the teaching of the antireligious personal philosophies of atheism and materialism. These constitute an implied government endorsement of the abolishment of religion. Many of the current textbooks do not survive the endorsement test currently in use by the federal courts, established in the recent (2005) Kitzmiller decision.[217] The current expositions of evolutionary theory in many college textbooks fails the endorsement test used by our federal courts in openly disparaging religion.

To correct his problem, textbooks must be required to remove all philosophical/religious tenets either for or against God if the text is to be used in public schools. Currently, the government, through its schools, appears to be endorsing atheism and thereby favoring the abolishment of religion. This serves as an implicit impediment to freedom of religion and is therefore unconstitutional. Evolutionary textbooks vary in regards to this problem, and each must be examined closely to see if they assert materialism or atheism or disparage religion.

There is also a problem with the manner in which the endorsement test was applied in Kitzmiller. This must be corrected if freedom of speech is not to be impeded and the autonomy of science preserved. By asserting that the scientific arguments of intelligent design theory cannot be separated from its historical antecedents in religious belief the courts are preventing the free exercise of intellectual thought, which must allow the coupling or uncoupling of ideas and their recombination in novel ways. The opportunity to do this is fundamental to creative thought and intellectual freedom. Nowhere else is this option to progress a theory beyond its historical antecedents being denied. Thus, a bias in the courts for atheism is implied in their ruling out any form of scientific theory whose history is perceived by the court as having been entwined with theology (though all of our theories in fact have such a history), while allowing any and all theories whose histories have been visibly associated with materialism and atheism (and who preach those personal “religions” in science textbooks in public schools to this day).

Evolution itself began heavily coupled with theism and has uncoupled itself only gradually from theism and a number of other tenets through the exercise of intellectual freedom now being denied proponents of intelligent design theory. “A word must be said, also, on those theories of this general class that go to the extreme of assigning a supernatural cause to evolution, not in the sense of the divine establishment of the natural laws of evolution, a belief held by many evolutionists who nevertheless seek to discover those mechanistic laws, but in the sense that the laws themselves are supernatural.”[218] (My emphasis) This form of theistic evolution is itself an instance of intelligent design theory, which merely posits the existence of design and scientifically demonstrable mechanisms of it. Therefore, the existence of religiously affiliated antecedents is not a distinguishing characteristic between the theory of evolution and intelligent design theory. It applies to both. What the court decides on that basis must be equally applied to both. ID theory has therefore been singled out for disparate and unfair treatment under the law in the Kitzmiller decision.

The law is currently being applied inconsistently in favor of atheism. The precedent set so far by the court is that a scientific theory is allowed to uncouple itself from its religious antecedents if it precludes the existence of God entirely (which is elsewhere admitted to be inappropriate for science to do at all) but not if it leaves conceptual room for God to exist. Merely leaving conceptual room for God’s existence is not an endorsement of religion, however, but merely a permission of it, which is, itself, the very constitutional standard our laws, agencies, and court decisions must reflect and enforce: freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. On the other hand, precluding the possibility of the existence of God entirely, which the current court decisions permit, and, indeed, require, is an endorsement of the abolishment of religion, which is flagrantly unconstitutional. Our recent court decisions, therefore, have it precisely “back- asswards,” as our leading philosophers tend to say here in the pubs of Southern Indiana.

In point of fact, intelligent design theory merely says that certain levels of complex design structure cannot be accomplished minus intelligence. It does not say what that intelligence must be, and therefore implies nothing whatsoever about religion. Merely because certain authors, even myself, at times extend the discussion and argument concerning ID theory further on into the question of God does not mean that intelligent design theory itself asserts God’s existence; it does not. It merely means that there are logical and natural points of tangency where the two topics adjoin.

Kitzmiller (I would say ludicrously, and, in the intellectual sense, barbarically) ruled out including a completely innocent statement in textbooks that evolution was merely a theory, not a fact. This statement acknowledged that substantial objections had been posed against the theory of evolution (scientific objections), citing a textbook where those objections could be reviewed, nothing more. There was nothing in this notice that endorsed God or religion and therefore the school and government did not fail the endorsement test by way of the statement. In point of fact it was the court itself that failed the endorsement test by forbidding science texts to even allow for the existence of God.

What Kitzmiller did was to assume that because the phrase intelligent design can, in the minds of citizens, be associated with past religious programs, to mention intelligent design is to endorse religion. But evolution itself has precisely the same antecedents. The vast majority of the early proponents of evolution combined evolution with religious assertions about God the creator; they were theistic evolutionists. This is still done by some 900 million strong Catholic Church members today. Everyone knows the Catholic Church considers evolution as a means God likely used to create life. Why isn’t the teaching of evolution barred due to its religious antecedents?

We cannot chain scientific theories to the past, in any case; they must, by definition, be modifiable. We cannot chain them to anything, least of all public perception, which has no requirement to conform to the constitution or the standards of science. A scientific theory is a precisely formed set of empirically testable assertions (except in evolution). These assertions are defined by the author of the theory, and by no one else. If the author elects to break with the past in his or her formulation of a theory, then the link with the past is broken. It is that simple.

Many prominent modern intelligent design theorists have broken with past formulations of intelligent design hypotheses in jettisoning all religious assertions. Religious assertions are no longer components of intelligent design theory for these authors for the simple reason that they have explicitly posed their theories without them. An author defines his or her theory, not the court! The court has at Kitzmiller absolutely abused its discretion and overstepped its bounds. It has interfered with intellectual freedom, freedom of speech, and scientific independence. The Kitzmiller decision must be appealed and overturned for these reasons.

Ironically, the court opinion in Kitzmiller itself fails the endorsement test by rendering a federal policy permitting atheism to be endorsed in public school science classrooms, while precluding not only theism but even theories that merely allow conceptual room for God to exist. The court can, on a technicality, claim that it has not actually allowed atheism to be taught because no one has legally challenged the current textbooks on this basis. This is true because the way our court system works is that someone must first file a complaint with the court before the court will address the question. Apparently no one has yet “counter-sued” after Kitzmiller to remove Futuyma and Strickberger’s textbooks, or textbooks that have similarly disparaging comments about religion from use in state supported universities and high schools. We, the citizens, have allowed this inconsistency to continue because the court requires a complaint to be filed before it takes action.

Nonetheless there is still a legal case waiting to be made against the government as a whole for failing the endorsement test. By precluding the practice of science that merely allows for the existence of God while the U. S. Attorney General has not objected in court to the teaching in public schools of pseudoscience that disparages religion, the Kitzmiller decision places the U. S. Government taken as a whole in contravention of the endorsement test. If we are to permit the free practice of philosophy, science and intellectual thought in this country, the citizens and the U. S. Attorney General are going to have to rigorously review evolutionary textbooks and challenge in court all which disparage religion as well as any that teach it. Costs and punitive damages must be sought for these violations of the Constitution else propaganda artists will simply reprint the same thing under additional titles.

One more thing must be understood in regard to the law. Admitting that federal and state government may fail the endorsement test in either direction is not to say that science should be hamstrung in any way as to what conclusions it may draw about God or the presence of intelligence generally strictly from the evidence. Science should be permitted by the courts to argue from the logic of the evidence to any conclusion whatsoever, including those for or against God, as long as the endorsement or disparagement of religion, any specific religion, or the abolishment of religious freedom is not included in a philosophical or religious tenet that has been tacked onto the science. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-originated the theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin, ultimately came to the conclusion that natural selection was not powerful enough to explain the facts, that a “superior intelligence” must be involved.[219] Wallace remains one of the revered names of the history of science, even in neo-Darwinian circles. He has not been branded with that terrible dismissive label, CREATIONIST, but probably only because this aspect of Wallace’s thought is so little known amongst the public that no loss of political turf to the atheists is felt to be incurred.

Simpson marks Wallace’s resort to intelligent design down both to the philosophy of despair and faintness in the complex and difficult search for a natural explanation. However, it is possible that Wallace felt, as I do following modern ID theorists, that this category of conclusion is both legitimately available to science and warranted by the evidence. Granted, science cannot proceed in its explanations where the supernatural is postulated to be involved as a proximate cause. Therefore, a scientific theory cannot offer as genuinely informative or explanatory a supernatural process or agency acting in the middle of a natural process. However, science legitimately can, and in the case of Big Bang theory, actually does say that the aggregate of scientific evidence and knowledge of natural processes leads at a specific point to the failure of natural explanation. Big Bang theory points to the clear existence of an “extra-natural” event or phenomenon at the very beginning of things. In other words, science can point to the supernatural as an ultimate cause of design in the cosmos generally, but not to the supernatural as an immediate cause acting upon specific concrete natural processes in real time.

This is all that ID theory has done. In fact, ID has not invoked God or the supernatural at all. Positing ID therefore does nothing to interfere with science’s concrete causal explanations or its ability to explain, test, replicate and predict. ID has merely said that traditional scientific explanations have so far failed to explain the design of biological systems, that there remains an aspect of living systems that only intelligence can explain. There is, therefore, nothing of the supernatural necessarily involved in the intelligent design thesis. The ID thesis merely leaves room for God, making him one member of a class of intelligent designers who are all viable candidates for the source of design in the cosmos, it does not require or assert God’s existence or any specifically religious claim. ID does not even go so far as to say that the supernatural cannot be ruled out; it merely says that intelligent design must be ruled in.

To say that intelligence is evidenced in a natural process is not to promote religion, it is to make a factual assertion about the nature of the world. Even to argue that God does exist from a purely scientific basis is not to make a religious claim, but a factual one. Likewise, to say that God does not exist based upon scientific evidence alone is not to impinge upon one’s freedom of religion; it is merely an assertion about the world. The logic that is invoked to move from the evidence to the conclusion for or against God or intelligent design must stand or fall on its own merits. The mere addition of logic to empiric evidence does not make a conclusion of God’s existence religion, nor the opposite conclusion materialism. It may merely be a politically “innocent” logical derivation from the objective facts at hand.

As it stands now, however, evolutionists are free to say that the evidence excludes God, but not permitted to say that the evidence affirms God, regardless of the merits of the factual and logical components of their argument. In order to avoid an implied endorsement by government of either side of the debate about God, the scientific arguments for both views must be permitted in public schools (given a modicum of intellectual merit) wherever the arguments for either are permitted so long as the evidence proposed is indeed objectively verifiable and the logical steps from that evidence prima facie valid. There is, indeed, a philosophical question (an open one) as to whether, because of the variously postulated infinite and divine attributes of God, finite empirical facts can ever argue for or against his existence by any logic.

I see no hope of quickly resolving this dilemma with authoritative finality, but have proposed above a tentative solution centered around the unique aspects of God being sufficient to establish his existence without having to prove other attributes that go beyond man’s breadth of experience or comprehension. Whether any of these unique aspects of God turn out to be tractable to scientific inquiry is doubtful, but the unique aspects of intelligence must certainly be tractable to science, and therefore intelligent design theory does not have this limitation.

Philosophy and science must be free from government constraint to speak openly on any factual question, including God’s existence and the existence of intelligent design, else the government is violating the right to free speech and improperly intruding into the independence of scientific and intellectual inquiry. While granting that personal philosophy and theology has no place in the science classroom, it is still true that Kitzmiller violated the right to assert a factual claim about the world in the science classroom merely because that factual claim indirectly allowed for God’s existence. Kitzmiller is founded upon the mistaken assumption that the scientific/philosophical assertion about design in the world is necessarily an endorsement of religion. It is not; it is merely a factual claim about the world based upon evidence. No religious of philosophical belief system is asserted in intelligent design theory at all. The court may be correct that many citizens will, at least initially, misconstrue ID theory as religion, but the court cannot impinge upon freedom of speech merely because the public is too lazy to do their homework.

Two conclusions can be drawn for the Kitzmiller foul-up. First, we the citizens (and the U. S. Attorney General), in not counter-suing, have permitted science texts to disparage religion and thereby fail the endorsement test in contravention of the Constitution of the United States. Second, the Kitzmiller decision itself violates the freedom of speech of those who wish to assert the scientific version of the thesis that evidence for intelligent design exists in nature. This is a bonafide scientific claim about the method of constructing complex physical mechanisms and about the origin of complex information in physical structures, one that does not argue for or against God’s existence. Both of these claims are prima facie traceable to and logically derivable from thermodynamic law and or information theory. As such, they conceptually entail nothing about religion, though they greatly enhance the intellectual respectability of it (which is why atheists in science so staunchly oppose ID, not because of science but because of their religion: materialism, or worse).

Of course, different authors may choose to formulate the ID thesis differently. Some may opt to explicitly include God, not as a logical derivation from empiric data, but as an axiom based upon religious belief, or simply as a hidden unjustified presumption. When this occurs the thesis may be legitimately excluded from the science classroom as being a religious one. However, if science standards organizations and the federal courts are to preclude these formulations they must also preclude those versions of evolutionary theory, which assume God’s nonexistence and endorse atheism on similarly unjustified grounds, as an unevidenced philosophical axiom. The standard must be consistent. Where the assertion of God’s nonexistence is held to be supportable by scientific evidence, such as Ernst Mayr has asserted, logical and factual critique of the case of the kind I have presented in this book (minus any scriptural and theological references), must be permitted, for if the topic itself is allowed as being scientific in nature, arguments for both sides from the empiric data must be considered equally scientific. Either science may properly argue the question of God’s existence from empiric evidence and logic or it may not. It cannot be scientific only to argue against God, but not for him based upon the same empiric data. Yet this is the current situation, one that has a de facto endorsement from the U. S. government as a whole. To allow the question to be argued in only one direction is to fail the endorsement test. The Attorney General of the United States is not hamstrung, as is the court, by the requirement for a complaint to be issued before action can be taken. The Attorney General is tasked to proactively enforce the laws of the United States, including the Constitution.

The Catholic Church in the United States must get onboard this issue. We must all push for corrective action, urging the Attorney General to challenge in the courts the textbooks that endorse materialism and atheism. Once a legal precedent is set by the court forbidding the use of such texts in public schools we must continue to be vigilant, examining new textbooks and challenging those that fail the endorsement test under the precedents once set. Otherwise, should the initial precedent be inadequate, we must seek to expand and correct any partially flawed precedents until both constitutional guarantees are fully satisfied: freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

Appendix 9:

Problem/Solution: How to Fix the Textbooks

The denial of God, cosmic purpose and intelligent design is, thankfully, not universal in evolutionary writings and textbooks. Mark Ridley, in his textbook, Evolution, is a refreshing exception in that he makes a clear statement that evolution and religion are compatible. The evolutionary writings of Francisco J. Ayala take care to allow conceptual room for God and science to coexist as well. (Unfortunately Ayala unfairly classifies ID as disguised religion, forbidding ID the theological uncoupling all the rest of science has been so graciously permitted.)[220] James W. Valentine’s beautiful textbook/popular tome, On the Origin of the Phyla, is a masterpiece of clear and objective scientific exposition. As a bonus, Valentine scrupulously keeps to the realm of science and leaves politics and personal philosophy out of it. The man I consider to be the most philosophically astute of the (old) famous biologists whose writings comprise the new evolutionary synthesis, George Gaylord Simpson, explicitly stated both in This View of Life,[221] and in the Terry Lectures at Yale, that religion and evolution are fully compatible. Would that all evolutionists took so much care.

Nonetheless, the few but well-known evolutionary textbook authors I have cited here as teaching atheistic materialism improperly in the science classroom do not constitute a negligible blimp on the radar screen of evolution textbooks. Strickberger, Futuyma and Ridley are the big three of evolutionary textbook authors. Ridley is the only one of the three who has allowed for the compatibility of God and science. Strickberger and Futuyma fail the endorsement test—so critical to separation of Church and state—that was clearly established in Kitzmiller in the federal courts. Many of the popular books that could serve as curriculum material, in endorsing atheism and materialism, do not pass the endorsement test either. Many other popular books that could serve as supplementary curriculum material, in endorsing atheism and materialism within the purview of a science curriculum in a school or college supported by public funds, fail in the same manner.

To remedy this, authors of textbooks and popular books on evolution could easily include a simple statement to deny that they have tacked the philosophical adjuncts of materialism and atheism onto basic evolutionary theory. Such straightforward position statements would go a long way towards making matters clear. At least three eminent evolutionists have done this—G. G. Simpson, Francisco J. Ayala, and Mark Ridley (in addition to Waddington)—and it helps. This allows the reader to place any later vagueness in the language into the proper context. If the public is ever to understand what the objective import of the scientific evidence is, minus politics, some overt disclaimer of this kind, along with more rigorous conceptual and linguistic clarity, must be added to the currently vague and ambiguous discussions in the textbooks, which in too many cases unquestionably give an implicit if not explicit endorsement of atheism and materialism.

C. H. Waddington presents a good model of such a disclaimer (perhaps the perfect one) in his interesting book, The Evolution of an Evolutionist:

The essential feature of an evolutionary theory is the suggestion that animals and plants, as we see them exhibiting an apparently designed adaptedness at the present day, have been brought to their present condition by a process extending through time and were not designed in their modern form. This does not, as many of Darwin’s contemporaries thought it did, necessarily deny the existence of any form of intelligent designer. It means only that any designing activity there may be has operated through a process extending over long periods of time and has not brought suddenly into being each of the biological forms as we now see them. The question of theism or atheism, which played such a large part in the public discussions of Darwin’s day, is, we now recognize, not critically answered by the acceptance or rejection of an evolutionary hypothesis but must be settled—if it ever can be—in some other way. We need not, therefore, be further concerned with it in this discussion.[222]

In addition to adding Waddington’s disclaimer, textbook authors, if they are to gain peer review, should be prohibited from exaggerating the evidence or skewing its meaning for political reasons. Futuyma’s language, for example, clearly implies much more than the evidence justifies. A layman or new student might easily conclude that biochemistry and molecular biology have substantially confirmed the entire biomechanical pathways of macroevolution between radically different types of creatures and that physics can fully explain the order in life and the cosmos without encountering a complete mystery at the origin of absolutely everything. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

To represent the materialist victory as definite, complete, and final, as Futuyma does, is a flagrant overstatement of what science actually knows. This must certainly prejudice the as yet not fully formed and not fully informed views of young students. Regardless of Professor Futuyma’s good personal intentions, his formulation of his personal philosophical preferences as if they were objective scientific fact converts what should be a vehicle of pure empiric science to one that promotes the agendas of the socio-political movements of materialism and atheism (and possibly Marxism). Restricting science to the empirically confirmable as a practical working limitation is one thing. Affirming materialism as a social mindset, metaphysical belief system, and political movement, itself bordering on a religion, is something entirely different. Science is forbidden this by its own charter.

In Futuyma’s view, materialism is absolutely established by 1) an admittedly mistaken Marxist theory of history; 2) a 150-year-old Darwinian view of evolution, conceived without benefit of any of the information from modern biochemistry or genetics, a theory that held that the inside of the cell was composed of nothing but a featureless goo; and 3) a “mechanistic” view of physics that is supposed not to need God to explain life that is elsewhere denied by Darwinists to be mechanistic when it implies intelligent design.

If philosophy is going to be inserted into a biology text, one wants to say “At least make it good philosophy!” God has traditionally always been placed at the beginning of the event chain, at the very moment of the world’s creation. Darwin himself did this. How meaningful is it, then, for neo-Darwinian evolutionists to say that we don’t need God in explanation because we don’t need him until we get to the very beginning? As a good Catholic and someone sensitive to other good Christian faiths practice of avoiding vulgar expressions I have tried throughout this book to resist the temptation to use the word “bullshit,” but there is just no other word for this: it is nothing but political bullshit.

Pope Pius XII[223] thought the Big Bang looked exactly liked creation…and that it proved God’s existence. “In a famous address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951—often quoted as an example of an inclination towards some form of Concordism— Pope Pius XII alluded to the Big Bang «as a witness to that primordial Fiat lux » (cf. Discourse to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 22.11.1951, in Papal Addresses , 2003, pp. 130-142).”[224]

Popes have had considerably less to say recently on the subject of the origin of the universe than they have on the subject of human origins. In 1951, interestingly, Pius XII (who so grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of evolution) celebrated news from the world of science that the universe might have been created in a Big Bang. (The term, first employed by astronomer Fred Hoyle was meant to be derisive, but it stuck.) In a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences he offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the theory: "…it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies.”…

But, as Doug Linder tells us in The Vatican's View of Evolution: the Story of Two Popes,, "the Pope didn’t stop there. He went on to express the surprising conclusion that the Big Bang proved the existence of God:"

Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists! [225]

Appendix 10:

The Call for a New Evolutionary Synthesis

So, how do we fix the public misconception about accidental evolution? First of all, my hopes are that scientists will finally step up to their social and scientific obligation to clearly define and separate all the distinct forms of Darwinian theory so that the significant variants can be evaluated separately. Convening meetings to formulate a new evolutionary synthesis is the obvious way to do this.

In the process of differentiating the different versions of the theory of evolution, scientists should openly acknowledge all the philosophical adjuncts each version contains. The convention should also decide whether evolutionary theory or any other scientific theory should be permitted to have philosophical adjuncts at all if those adjuncts assert things that are not scientifically testable (I consider intelligent design to be testable). Science can proceed either way and still be an effective tool. It is really arbitrary as to whether such adjuncts are allowed or not. However, by setting a standard that must be adhered to, by ruling all philosophical adjuncts in or all out, the risk of political prejudice against one kind of philosophy over another slipping into scientific theory is contained.

We need to see clearly and authoritatively defined by a formal synthesis both what is being taught to our students and what one general view of the world (if any) is intended to be conveyed to the public under the authoritative umbrella of mainstream evolutionary science. The public also needs to be told straightforwardly whether neo-Darwinian theory has come to disavow the accidental process or not, and what strength the new emerging synthesis centered around the developmental and transpositional genomes has garnered in the scientific community.

A new synthesis that does all these things would give our courts the ability to preclude materialist/atheist politics from science classrooms, as it currently does only for theist politics. It would discourage materialist textbook writers, instructors and school curriculum staff from attempting to politicize science in the first place, as they would no longer be able to hide their personal prejudice against religion in the currently permitted obfuscated language that can be read one way by students and the opposite way by the federal courts.

Technical issues must be addressed in a new synthesis as well as political ones. Professor Michael Behe has demonstrated that the current theoretical framework is necessarily out of date because it was developed before the advent of modern biochemistry. A new synthesis is needed to incorporate the vastly increased knowledgebase of detailed biochemistry and genetics. The evolutionary synthesis of the ’80s did not result in a statement of the import of the microprocesses of biology for evolution, but only the import of such major factors as architectural and developmental constraints on the evolution of biological form change. What we currently have, in short, is a macro theory of evolution that completely ignores and often contradicts the micro data, and simply does not explain macroevolution. Other biologists have recently made a call for additional work on integrating the technical components of “synthetic theory,” citing the need to take into account aspects of mutation as well as developmental issues.[226]

It is also time to step back and make a total reevaluation of the contribution of mutation to the process of evolution. The mutation hypothesis has been allowed to be freely read as “random mutation” when all the new information coming out of evo-devo says that form change driving mutations are highly constrained by developmental genes; there is hardly anything random there at all. The developmental/transpositional genome is periodically “going to the bullpen” to substitute hugely complex preformed modules of the genome, that is what is producing macroevolution, not random nucleotide substitutions and population genetics aided by natural selection over millions of years.

The basic tenets of synthetic theory, primarily population dynamics and Mendelian genetics, along with a few other refinements of the "mechanical" processes of evolution (so generally described that they are meaningless or nontestable), are (usually) stated with sufficient clarity; but none of these have ever been demonstrated to actually produce macroevolution, and many case they have not even been demonstrated to occur. It is time to step back and closely reevaluate the demonstrable role each component of modern evolutionary theory can demonstrably be shown to play in light of recent research. Constantly deferring to antiquated and unsubstantiated (though otherwise venerable) theory in contravention of new hard data is not in the best interest of science.

Since we still have nothing close to a demonstrable biomechanical pathway for evolution (random or otherwise), we should stop, take a breath, let the momentum of 150 years of hasty consensus on Darwin’s theory slide past us, and ask ourselves if Henry Gee has not in fact become the true voice of reason. We don’t know what happened in evolution. We should put the quest for a narrative theory of the evolutionary process aside as beyond our present reach and content ourselves with objectively and precisely describing the data until such time as the data itself genuinely demands a narrative. Henry Gee suspects it never will demand a narrative due to the deep time of evolutionary history and the relative paucity of paleontological data. While this is true on the fossil side of the fence, something truly revealing could come out of developmental or transpositional genetics any day.

Then there is the frustrating problem of shifting terminology. (This is apparently frustrating only to non-evolutionists.) Despite a tendency by modern writers and some Darwinists to equate the two terms, “synthetic theory” and “neo-Darwinian theory,” George Gaylord Simpson, John Maynard Smith and others have at times explicitly differentiated “neo-Darwinian” theory from “synthetic theory.” Simpson said that the neo-Darwinian view had an overly simplistic conception of natural selection that could not explain how frequently progressive form change proposals were constantly being achieved by evolution against all conceivable odds to the contrary. This, of course, remains one of the primary criticisms of neo-Darwinian theory to this day, and is the heart of the objections posed by intelligent design theorists. Simpson claimed that synthetic theory had, by integrating all the resources of many related disciplines, finally exposited a more complex and potent form of natural selection that was truly non-accidental, incorporating acknowledgement of the strong bias for useful form change proposals seen in the historical record of evolution. He claimed it, as does Strickberger and Futuyma, but he did not demonstrate it.

According to Simpson, natural selection as viewed under synthetic theory is, in fact, capable of achieving consistently useful form change proposals despite forbidding improbabilities by, in essence, progressively altering the available choices over time in such a way as would constantly improve the chances of obtaining more and more useful biological mechanisms. By gradually but relentlessly eliminating more and more of the non-useable options from the gene pool, natural selection ultimately reduces the odds by achieving a state where the options are predominantly beneficial to life generally, though not necessarily to a given organism at a given time in a given environmental niche. Simpson admits that the entire system of nature is somehow set up to facilitate this, that it is not an accidental process at all, and thus he here separates himself from the accidental evolution of neo-Darwinists, although they at times speak of his work as if it were part of their own school. The logical import of what he says is that each step in evolution is preconstructed to facilitate the next step. But this is simply a linguistic subterfuge to camouflage directed evolution, for there is no way a random process could arrange this. Thus, logical consistency is a real concern in evolutionary theory and a new synthesis could add the logical rigor that has heretofore been absent. Evo-devo, the way I read it, is trying to do much the same thing, in simply creatively labeling directed evolution with a new term and arbitrarily and indefensibly denying that there is real direction involved. Intellectual dishonesty is a genuine issue here and must be rigorously assessed.

How Simpson’s more potent version of natural selection actually works remains a mystery, another undefined wildcard, a black box where the problem of accidental evolution goes in one end and a solution minus God comes out the other with absolutely nothing coherent contained on the inside. This is a disingenuous trick to rig the game against intelligent design. I see no way that the blind process of non-intelligent natural selection can discern the difference between something that merely makes the present species more survivable and something that not merely occasionally can but consistently will also facilitate the next advancement in complex design through the use of some feature that has no effect on current fitness. To assume, as classic Darwinian theory does, that it just so happens that every one of the features needed for the next step in evolutionary advance just so happens to be the feature also providing selective advantage at present in some dual use is even more improbable than if they just accidentally occurred.

Current examples of dual use features are so limited (they are not nonexistent) as not to surpass the statistical expectations for coincidence. In a process so large as the construction of the tree of life, to find a few dual use examples but no more is not statistically sufficient to evidence a general rule, but merely signifies the occasional coincidence inevitable in any set of events so enormous as that of the entire history of evolution. To make such an improbable claim, that such dual use of features is the workhorse of an accidental evolutionary process obligates the theorist to produce the evidence, to show the concrete path of countless strings of dual use features that actually comprise the chain of events that produce real organisms in the concrete steps that were actually taken. I am not saying we should be able to describe every step, but rather that we should be able to produce many lengthy component chains for the evolution of many creatures in order to demonstrate that such an implausible flight of fancy has genuine scientific credibility. Thus, the question of evidential standards must be addressed by a new synthesis. Many aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, including the apparent myth of dual use (generously termed an “hypothesis”) have flaunted the evidential standards for years in a shameless manner.

The flaunting of scientific standards of evidence has nowhere occurred more abusively than in pretending support for natural selection itself. There are only two options. Both suggest that the process of evolution involves an element of intelligent design, but Darwinists simply refuse to recognize this.

1. The proposals sent to natural selection for a decision already have the facilitation of the next evolutionary step built in. In this case, the need to discern the difference between survivable and unsurvivable to get to the next step goes away. In this case, the proposals are smart proposals beyond what an accident could achieve with or without blind natural selection.

2. Natural selection is not blind or dumb at all, it is somehow capable of sensing what is necessary for the next step in evolution. In this latter case, intelligence is dishonestly being secreted away under the function of natural selection. This is like denying the crazy aunt stashed away in the upstairs closet. “No that’s just the stairs screeching; we have no aunt.” But stairs don’t screech and in unintelligent accidental evolution natural selection cannot sense what is necessary for the next step in evolution; it can only affirm what works for the survivability of the current step.

Concreteness is another issue crying out for resolution. The synthetic theory’s claim for a form of natural selection so potent that it can actually solve the probability problem engendered by an accidental process without invoking intelligent design avoids logical inconsistency only because it is fully ineffable, that is, fully lacking a concrete statement. There is thus nothing to evaluate. In the Air Force we use to call this FM, freaky magic. The requirement of concreteness too must be reconsidered and updated in the new synthesis.

Another problem is that evolutionary theory has been flaunting the most basic standard or goal of science: the default requirement to explain how and why something occurred. More improbable events require scientific explanation more than less probable events. The most horrendously improbable event in the natural world is the origin of life. The origin of the genomes and the tripartite system required to produce life from them currently has no explanation whatsoever. Neo-Darwinists talk around the subject, but they don’t explain the origin of the genomes. All they say is that an accident could have done it; but that is not a scientific explanation. We cannot continue to accept untestable and unenlightening generalities as if they were valid scientific explanations. We should either produce something that has concrete substance and is testable or, as Henry Gee suggests, we should simply say that we don’t know.

Intelligent design authors have already shown us is that the probability argument rules out a predominantly random system. In the nonrandom process revealed in evolutionary data, there is sufficient impetus toward viable design achievement that the proposals are as often as not workable right out of the chute. This shows a clear bias for life and at least a moderately constrained directional process. That means that natural selection no longer plays a crucial role in determining which design options populate the planet. Natural selection would still often rule out the bad ones, but it appears that there were not nearly so many of bad design proposals presented for natural selection’s opinion as neo-Darwinian theory has traditionally assumed. Given recent revelations of the enormous complexities involved in viable biological change proposals, the extent to which a random process could make such proposals in real time have to be has to be considered minimal. The now largely demonstrable impotency of natural selection should be rigorously addressed in a new synthesis.

Another problem is clarifying terms and theory definitions. A new synthesis should address the lines of demarcation between "synthetic theory" and "neo-Darwinian" theory as regards materialism and lack of purpose. This question was never clear in use outside the work of G. G. Simpson. Some major theorists, such as Ernst Mayr, simply defined the terms separately (albeit clearly and concretely) for their own use. The “new” synthesis, which originally defined these variants, is now over fifty years old. Many occasions for individual writers and theorists to deviate, add, subtract and modify have since flowed under the bridge, as it were, with no substantial attempt being made to formally track, integrate or differentiate new developments in terms of being within or without one of these two variants or requiring a new (named) variant. In popular use today the original two primary versions of Darwinian theory are often mixed in the same discussion with myriad variations. Often they appear to be the same thing, and occasionally authors explicitly say that they are the same. In a de facto kind of way, this is true. They may now be considered to be the same thing based upon predominant use in public venues and for general purposes, but the precise content, the full range of that tenets and sub-theories that comprise neo-Darwinian theory as such is anything but clear. The next synthesis should therefore clarify and standardize the proper use of evolutionary terminology and introduce new terms for variants of Darwinian theory as needed.

The clarification, classification and evaluation of the many different views of evolution is urgently needed, and is the primary task of the new synthesis, in addition to technical updates. In sum, we need to know in clear and precise terms what a given version of evolutionary theory is actually saying, and what to call it. Minus these most rudimentary elements of theory classification, no evaluation of the merits of evolutionary theory can be completed because the theory is a moving target, one that is permitted to change form as needed to avoid specific objections.

The new synthesis should also and especially make a point to achieve clarity and standardization regarding use of the term 'purpose' for scientific writing, with a view to being more sensitive to the needs of the theological and philosophical communities. It should not be overly difficult to build a consistent and standardized model combining G. G. Simpson’s detailed treatment given in This View of Life, chapters 8-11, with Mayr’s distinctions of four types of purpose in essay three of Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, while firmly suggesting a standard that always requires the layman to be left with a clear yes or no in terms of Mayr’s “cosmic purpose,” or by building upon similarly straightforward distinctions already made by Francisco Ayala.

There was significant variation on the question of purpose even among the large number of scientists who were central to the new evolutionary synthesis that defined modern evolutionary theory. A given version of neo-Darwinian/synthetic theory may or may not address the question of purpose or an accidental process at all. Sir Julian Huxley, for example, seems not to have addressed the question of overall purpose. On the other hand, George Gaylord Simpson affirmed “purpose” as undeniably present in the processes that originated life, while saying science could not legitimately speculate as to the origin of that purpose. He thus ruled out science’s being able to answer the question of God or intelligent design either way. On the other hand, Ernst Mayr, in essay three of Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, was fully comfortable in ruling out cosmic purpose altogether.

Add to this the radical and profuse variations of a plethora of modern theorists and the whole situation virtually cries out for standardization, both of theoretical tenets and of terminology. Nor is it clear that individual theorists are being fully consistent across the full spectrum of their combined statements on evolution. Though some modern Darwinists would like to step away from the “purely accidental” in the sense of the chaotic physical forces ascribed to evolution by Peters and Gutmann, they cannot step fully away from lack of cosmic purpose and remain neo-Darwinian. This is so because Dobzhansky and Mayr et al. authored as official a definition of the neo-Darwinian theory as we have available. Lack of cosmic purpose is part of that definition because they made it so. Nor is that definition an archaic one that has been officially supplanted by more informed modern views. Notable neo-Darwinian theorists currently affirm the same principle. If, as Mayr implies, science has a standard available with which to judge the presence or absence of cosmic purpose in natural events, it should lay that standard out for public inspection and critique at the convening of the next evolutionary synthesis. Then the logic of such a culture-altering conclusion can be visibly and formally evaluated.

The next synthesis should also consider recommending that every text book or scientific study should either use Waddington’s disclaimer or say something like “We have denied purpose at points in the processes and biomechanics of evolution but have only meant that we could discover no scientifically demonstrable bias in a specific process for achieving a given function or specified final end result. This says nothing about the presence or absence of an overall cosmic purpose in life. It does not rule out an intelligent design purpose that might be resident at points higher in the chain of physical event processes than were examined, nor does it rule out purpose involving goals more complex or variable than have been considered here.”

A new synthesis would not serve the needs of the ID/Christian communities alone. There are plenty of scientific updates and loose ends to pull together from the past twenty-five years of research advancements. Referring to the last major scientific synthesis of ideas on evolution[227] in the middle of the twentieth century Professor Behe says:

Inevitably, evolutionary theory began to mean different things to different disciplines; a coherent view of Darwinian evolution was being lost. In the middle of the century, however, leaders of the fields organized a series of interdisciplinary meetings to combine their views into a coherent theory of evolution based on Darwinian principles. The result has been called the “evolutionary synthesis,” and the theory called neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is the basis of modern evolutionary thought.

One branch of science was not invited to the meetings, and for good reason: it did not yet exist. The beginnings of modern biochemistry came only after neo-Darwinism had been officially launched. Thus, just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry. The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life.[228]

Another important goal of the next synthesis should be to once and for all address and resolve into concrete axioms the answers to the basic questions of philosophy of science (or to explicitly reaffirm them if held to be already evident). The answers to these questions are logically prerequisite to science’s ability to consistently direct and govern its course, and yet a full consensus regarding them has never been visibly achieved. Science nonetheless proceeds as if the conceptual foundations for theory evaluation have been securely laid and unanimously assented to. They have not. To all appearances, they are, in fact, still a point of contention between different schools of thought. There are several central issues (with related secondary questions) upon which science must once and for all reach consensus if we are to bring evolutionary theory around to the same standard of concreteness and coherence employed by the rest of science, and to keep politics out of evolutionary science and other areas such as cosmology:

1. What makes a theory scientific (or not)?

2. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately point to the presence of intelligence behind natural phenomena?

3. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately point to the presence of intelligence behind natural phenomena?

4. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately point to the existence of God?

5. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately rule out the presence of intelligence behind natural phenomena?

6. Can empiric evidence and logic ever legitimately rule out the existence of God?

7. What are the concrete rules for testability and falsifiability of a theory?

7a. Are these rules the same in biology as they are in physics, history, mathematics etc.? In what ways are they legitimately different, and how must theories in the respective disciplines be differently evaluated?

7b. Can these rules properly vary within a discipline or a theoretical topic depending upon the nature of the natural phenomenon or theoretical question involved? Are their justifiable exceptions?

8. Can a different standard for what is scientific, testable, or refutable, be properly applied to two or more theories that offer competing explanations for exactly the same natural event without constituting evidence for political bias? If so, upon what grounds?

9. Has science historically applied standards for theory evaluation in a consistent way? If not, which of our current theories has been given too much or too little validation? What corrective action is required?

Ancillary questions that need to be addressed include:

Is the theory of multiverse testable?

Does the Big Bang prove the nonphysical?

Can or should science say anything about first causes in the first place?

Can an accident make a complex machine?

Where does biological information ultimately come from?

Only in this kind of visible and methodical way can the integrity of science be preserved concerning highly politicized questions. Might the present prejudice for atheism and materialism in the mainstream scientific culture simply be reflected in the conclusions of a new synthesis? Yes, it might. But, if it is, that prejudice then becomes visible to the public, and science loses deniability, and with it credibility. It loses the ability to surreptitiously act upon its prejudice with impunity as it has been doing for the last half century. Until a competent and representative body of scientists are convened for a new evolutionary (and perhaps cosmological) synthesis, we should hold that science has failed in its obligations to society.

Specific complaints should be heard by the convened synthesis participants from advocates of theories who claim the method and integrity of science has been violated in the treatment of their work. Any corrective action needed should be formally recommended by the convention.

Until these clarifications are achieved, the scientific situation in regards to evolution and the question of an accidental or purposive worldview will remain what it is, a logical shambles and an intellectual mess. A major house cleaning is called for here. The theory of neo-Darwinian evolution in current use is neither properly defined, nor even unitary and logically consistent in its assertions. Variants have not been properly differentiated, and, under cover of this confusion, materialist philosophy is being interjected into our science classrooms with no accountability whatsoever. Crucial distinctions have come to be so subtly blurred and deeply buried that even a federal judge cannot detect materialist metaphysics masquerading as science (if they ever could).

I hope the Church will be one of the loudest voices we hear calling for a new evolutionary synthesis because our students are now being deceptively indoctrinated into a Godless worldview under the auspices of mainstream science. Until the needed clarification is achieved in a new synthesis, the court discussions and school board debates will remain mostly a matter of smoke and mirrors, political jockeying and rhetorical dodge ball, with one set of references and testimonies (basic evolution and God-compatible synthetic theory) going to the courts and school boards and another (the full blown accidental materialism of neo-Darwinian theory) read by students in their textbooks.

Given the separation of distinct versions of evolutionary theory in a new synthesis, scientists who wish to assert an accidental process will then have no choice but to openly defend an accidental process under its own name minus the protection of the present verbal confusion. No more political pot shots at God followed by melting away into the safe oblivion of semantics: “No one is saying it is accidental.” Only a thorough housecleaning of the current logical shambles of evolutionary theory in a new synthesis can restore accountability and integrity to modern evolutionary science.

Appendix 11:

AI, Emergence, and Physical Reductionism

The unevidenced assumption that there can be artificial intelligence (AI) capable of doing everything a human being does is at times, at least implicitly, combined with the hypothetical concept of “emergence” and posed as an objection to ID theory. To some, the two concepts, AI and emergence, taken together seem to prove materialism and the accidental origin of life. But neither of these theses can themselves be proved true, and there are serious problems with both.

Foremost among these problems are the fact that we do not have an AI system that can in fact do what human beings do and we have no demonstration of higher faculties “emerging” from combinations of lower ones at the level of subtlety and complexity relevant to human faculties. Emergence is not a confirmed event in nature, it is only a word, an undefined word that specifies no observable (and therefore no testable) process or biomechanic at all. Emergence does not point to any mechanical process that might be seen in nature, anything that might be tested or confirmed. It is basically the equivalent of magic.

There is no concrete or theoretical reason to suspect that AI ever will fully duplicate the full range of human thought, feeling, and cognition. The human mind does enormously subtle and complex non-computational tasks for which we currently have no explanatory mathematical or biomechanical model, and for which Sir Roger Penrose argues something radically new, such as quantum level systems will be required. We cannot anticipate the results of using such models and systems in advance and there are real questions as to whether we can model aspects of human experience such as the emotional, moral, and religious at all.

Yes, it has been demonstrated that our brains can function in a manner very much like computers in some ways, for example, in doing basic calculations. But has the similarity been demonstrated going the other direction, and with completeness? Has it been shown that computers can function like our minds, hearts, and souls, duplicating the full breadth and scope of human experience? No.[229] Does a robot coming to the edge of a cliff perceive and understand the threat to its existence, the impact its loss would have on friends and family? Does it feel fear for the loss of its personal existence? Does it experience love, friendship, loyalty, patriotism, romance, or holiness? Does it have a special protective affection for small robots? Of course not! Although it is impossible to prove those subjective experiences are not there in the robot; it is also impossible to prove that they are there. What reason would we have to believe those feelings were there when we had intentionally programmed the observed behaviors ourselves in a purely mechanical way? At a deeper intuitive level of course, we who use the full human range of spiritual, moral, and emotional capacities know that human minds, hearts and souls do things computers will never do. Love, laughter, friendship, and joy; national loyalty; moral outrage, a sense of justice and fair play—these are not physical things, and we just intuitively know it.

Speakers of Western languages at least have long agreed on the application of the word ‘subjective’ to our emotions and personal judgments, our abstract manipulation of concepts and ideas, and agreed upon the application of ‘objective’ to an entirely different range of extension that includes only things that are empirically verifiable. We agree on the application of the word ‘objective’ to the physical event of electrochemical activity in the brain, and on the application of ‘subjective’ to the thoughts or feelings associated with that electrochemical event. We have known since the inception of modern language that the two arenas are distinct and that both represent a genuine reality within human experience.

Many of the world-class thinkers of history, such as Karl Jung, Charles Peirce, William James, and Werner Heisenberg have resisted this artificial reconstruction of language. They recommend acknowledging the authentic reality of mankind’s subjective experience, the reality of the mental, moral, emotional, artistic, and religious realms. After all, it is from these realms that most if not all of the joy and meaning of life are derived.

Conversely, to accept the physical reductionist argument that underlies the exaggerated claims for AI and emergence is not to do logic or analysis but simply to agree to embark upon a dehumanizing journey that arbitrarily reduces humans to the level of the lower animals. But why should we agree? Why should we wish to diminish the quality of human experience to that of a bug, denying all the important things in life?

Should we do this in order to, perhaps, make an “unruly” society of activists and reformists more manageable? To bring all questions under the authoritative umbrella of science? Should we do it to create a police state ruled by scientists who feel the answer to inconveniently independent human behavior is psychotropic drugs, electroshock therapy, and brutal behavioral conditioning? The Nazi’s among us (and there still are some) will say yes, of course, as will those who believe in killing off millions of innocent human beings in eugenics programs to “purify” the human gene pool. But you and I need not be so shallow. We should give it a bit more thought.

As background for making such a decision one should read Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged and the last book of C. S. Lewis’ space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Here you will find two more world-class thinkers who show us that problems don’t diminish when we adopt scientific materialism; they only increase.[230] There is little hard evidence from empiric science that can speak to this issue one way or the other, but our immediate experience of life is clear, and the social consequences enormous. In the final analysis we must either honestly affirm the validity of our own hearts, souls, minds, and God, or we must deny them. Having said that, there are a few isolated points of modern scientific research that argue in favor of the reality of the subjective realm of the heart, mind, and soul.

Medical hypnosis for pain reduction is one example of where science reveals an explanatory gap in the materialistic theory. How is it that under medical hypnosis when doing dental surgery or child delivery the usual event of pain awareness doesn’t take place normally? If the physical brain is all there is to consciousness, and all the physical events are otherwise the same as when people would feel pain, why no pain, or less pain, in these hypnosis cases?[231]

And here is something the materialists would never have expected science to do. While science justifiably assumes there to be a brain state that correlates with every perception a living being has, research into near death experiences suggests that the mind can have perceptions without the brain! Experiences of perception have been reported during periods after the brain has shut down, once patients are later revived.[232]

Hypnotic anesthesia and the ability of some brain-dead patients to accurately report observations within the operating room for moments during which their brain was known not to be functioning are apparent counterexamples to the thesis that we can identify our perceptual experience very strictly and exclusively with the physical organs alone. Something else is going on that appears to be truly mental/spiritual as opposed to physical.

The truth of the matter is that science doesn’t understand a darn thing about mental awareness and emotion to begin with—not the subjective aspects of it. We can’t explain it, can’t say what it is, where it is, or how it is associated with brain cells. We have absolutely no grounds upon which to confidently assert the materialists’ physical reductionist thesis.

Physical reductionism does not therefore represent an evidence-based hypothesis so much as a neurotic impulse to gain more control over human society by arbitrarily simplifying the valid range of human experience. This is what the Marxist-materialist political lobby wants for our future. Materialists would throw Ockam’s Razor at us here, saying if you don’t need something for explanation it should not be retained in the explanatory model. But to throw out all of our human subjective experience, the most important things in our life, the things that truly make us who we are, is not to employ Ockam’s Razor, but Ockam’s Chainsaw! “We don’t have to explain love; throw that out. Human rights and morality just get in the way; throw those out. God is just a human invention that helps the weak face their fears; throw him out.” What is left for humanity under the reductionist view that gives us a reason to live? Just the pursuit of physical security and physical pleasure; that is all that is left. Is that enough?

Some neo-Darwinists actually deny that humans are “higher.” They apparently think we are just another dumb animal. Judging from the terrible fate of laboratory animals, however, they don’t really believe this, for why would one equal among dumb animals have to sacrifice for another? Why would all the others have to sacrifice for humans if we are not higher? The only answer is, to be logically consistent, we are not higher, but we are selfish. But that implies a lack of morality, which the neo-Darwinians loudly deny is built into their version of scientific materialism. They claim there are plenty of grounds for morality without hearts, minds, souls, and a real God. Where is their morality in treating their brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom so cruelly? They can say, well it is for the good of the many that they sacrifice, but the animals didn’t volunteer did they? And this is what is revealed in the C. S. Lewis and Ayn Rand novels: the materialists have no qualms about making any and all of us sacrificial guinea pigs for the benefit of their improved future prospects.

So the reductionist concept is very morally and socially-politically troubling. There is nothing in it, for example, to argue against unethical human experimentation, sacrificing the rights of present humans for the expected good to be obtained by advancing science for the welfare of future humans, or to say who chooses the persons that make the sacrifice and the persons who enjoys the benefits. How could one ever stop the worst power-mongering criminals from taking over such a system? There is no way to prevent the criminally and politically powerful from rising to the top and abusing such a system and this is precisely what Lewis and Rand show us.

The reductionist model fails on explanatory grounds, as well as social-political grounds. We cannot explain subjective mental experience, the fine arts, religion, morality, or any of the higher emotions and virtues with the physical reductionist model, therefore Ockam’s Razor does not apply. Yes, we know that destroying certain areas of the brain with drugs, surgery, electricity or traumatic injury has emotional and cognitive consequences. But to destroy something is not to explain it. Such barbaric knockout studies do not justify physical reductionism; they only reveal the primitive mindset and innate cruelty of those who favor it.

Science has rigorously studied neither awareness, consciousness, or self-consciousness. They have no idea what these things are, and that is probably because they are elemental and wholly “other,” that is other than what a physical reductionist can grasp. The fundamental error underlying physical reductionism is the same as that involved in trying to explain the faculty of sight exclusively from the faculty of hearing. It can’t be done; there is no point in trying it; and stubbornly insisting on it to the extreme point of excluding sight from human experience by social or legal mandate only has the effect of vastly diminishing the quality of human life. And, of course such an insane policy invokes a lie and reduces humanity to living a lie. That is precisely the effect of physical reductionism will have on society if we ever adopt it as a worldview. We are more than robots and we should not be led to make policy by persons who think they are robots.

To employ Ockam’s razor properly means to eliminate from scientific theory those concepts unnecessary to explain our experience of the world (and only those concepts). But the physical reductionists are trying to edit out not superfluities from our theories but core elements of our very experience of life! This is because physical reductionists being heavily influenced by Marxist-materialist social revisionist theory are more interested in control than explanation. The abuse of Ockam’s razor by physical reductionists involves a blatant confusion of explanation with prediction and control. They would have us reduce explanation to nothing more than prediction. The subjective realm of human experience cannot be empirically observed, predicted, and controlled, therefore why not just get rid of it; deny its existence entirely?

This view however has never been the view of science, and it never should be. Conceptual explanation gives us a richer understanding beyond a set of physical event predictions. The conceptual aspects of a theory interact with other theories (perhaps future ones) to synergistically generate new hypotheses, thus yielding predictions that are not derivable from a single bare bones theory reduced to nothing more than a finite set of current predictions. Beyond the benefit of facilitating unforeseen future predictions, the larger abstract conceptual framework of a theory simply enriches our understanding of the world we live in.

The subjective, emotional, moral, and religious realms of human experience are a bonafide part of our experience, however rarely they affect prediction of physical events of interest to science. We are therefore entitled to seek an explanation of these things by science (so far as can be done) as well as philosophy and theology. Science doesn’t lose any of the predictions afforded by a physical reductionist view in doing this, while getting a richer explanation. We can have the same predictions in psychology by viewing the physical reductionist psychological theory of Behaviorism as a heuristic tool rather than an all-inclusive metaphysic. The same holds true for the other social sciences that routinely or occasionally take humanity as a subject of study. Nothing is lost in explanation or prediction to any of these sciences in rejecting reductionism. The only loss is to the proponents of the social-political revisionist pogrom of Marxist-materialism. These extremists desperately need the authority of science to endorse reductionism because it would legitimize their effort to cut out of our current worldview all the things that obstruct their moving society to cruel forms of social, behavioral, and genetic engineering: human rights, morality, and religion.

The philosophy of materialism invokes the monumental error of substituting the very limited practical tools of science for a comprehensive worldview. This is wrong for science itself does not say there are no nonphysical aspects to our world; it merely specializes in investigating the physical realm because that realm permits controlled experiment and empiric observation.

Reductionists would have us discard all in life except the base and the banal, and they give us nothing back in trade. They wish to bankrupt humanity of all that is meaningful in our existence. This simultaneously lowers mankind’s view of itself while opening the door to extreme social dangers. Physical reductionism is not science at all, but social politics, and politics of the worst kind. For those of faith who are alert to discover and oppose the Antichrist, here in the godless philosophy of physical reductionism is his favorite haunt. Give him this much and he can take the rest.

Appendix 12:

Multiverse & M-Theory—Davies and Hawking Strike Back

At a Harvard symposium as recent as 2003 our leading scientists were still asking the same basic questions man has always asked, the same questions we all (rightly) asked in the 2^nd grade: “Did God make this? Is this the only world? Does the world have to be this way? How many worlds are there? Why is there something instead of nothing? Who made God?” As Art Linkletter used to say, kids say the ‘darndest’ things.

Those basic philosophical questions kids have always asked remain valid today. Even now in 2011 science and philosophy have more questions than answers. The new theory of multiverse, for example, endorsed here by noted cosmologist Paul Davies, doesn’t really close out those questions for science as some would have us believe. This is true because the “theory” of multiverse is not testable. To quote myself at Appendix 1, fallacy # 42:

Multiverse theory evinces another instance of the neo-Darwinian double standard. Some physicists assert that there could be very many multiple universes having natural laws radically different from our own (perhaps an infinite number). Neo-Darwinists seize upon this to argue that the larger creation consisting of all these multiple universes then had infinite time to play around with accidentally creating the vast number of random alternatives required to finally stumble upon a physical system that could create and evolve life. While, if true, an infinite multiverse that randomly searches through all possible combinatorial physical systems would make the accidental origin and evolution of life possible, and an eventual certainty (given the unprovable assumption that there is no spiritual life force that has to be added by God). The problem with making the multiverse theory work as support for the theory of accidental evolution is that accidental evolution would not be probable in a given world until science could show that the enormous number of failed attempts requisite to increasing the probability of a successful random creation of life to scientific standards of credibility had occurred in other universes.

The reason this can never be done is that unless these universes are very similar to our own we cannot collect more than the small amount of peripheral data that can be safely allowed to leak through to our instruments here (if leakage of data between universes turns out to even be possible and/or reasonably safe to attempt or allow). To make more serious probes into vastly dissimilar universes having different laws, or chaotic conditions with no laws, would seem to be fully impossible. Thus, science can only confirm the existence of very similar universes. Confirmation of these cannot be used to support the theory of an accidental creation of life because it doesn’t prove that the vast range of chaotic, dysfunctional, and otherwise failed and non-fine-tuned-for-life alternatives were randomly tried first before hitting upon the vastly improbable life-generating system of our world. Multiverse is nonetheless (incorrectly) deemed to be acceptable to science (even as theoretical support for accidental evolution) while being demonstrably untestable in the infinite-random-alternatives version accidental evolution requires. Yet intelligent design theory is rejected prior to consideration merely because neo-Darwinists mistakenly assert that it is not testable.

All multiverse really does is open up reams of new questions for science, some of which can never be answered:

Davies said the universe is perfect for life to flourish. Every little thing — from the chemical composition of the atmosphere to the existence of gravity — fits together….

Davies posited three hypotheses. The first was that we just got lucky, and the universe is ultimately absurd. The second view was that "God did it" — the universe was designed by an intelligent being. The third view was a many-universe theory. "The idea is that the universe is … a smaller segment of a large system called a multiverse," said Davies.

….Other universes, if they exist, could work according to different rules.[233]

I put theory in quotes above because in my opinion among others multiverse is merely a philosophical thesis, not a scientific one, due to the fact that the versions of multiverse theory with relevance to the intelligent design debate definitely cannot be tested, and it is not yet clear if any of them can be tested. The relevant versions are 1) that the number of such universes are infinite (or nearly infinite); 2) that there are dissimilar universes with different natural laws; and 3) that there are (many) universes that are similar to ours but do not interact with ours).[234] These multiverse alternatives cannot be proved by science because neither we nor our instruments can go into universes having natural laws different from our own. We cannot go into universes that are fully chaotic to explore and confirm them. And we cannot prove the infinite. By definition, we will have no proof of a world that never interacts with our own (unless we can force our way into it, which will be so exorbitantly dangerous that we will never attempt it and wouldn’t retrieve useable data if we did).

The multiverse theory is therefore more truly categorized as merely philosophical speculation, not science, except for the version that has similar universes that might interact with our own, which would allow confirmation and exploration. But we have no evidence in favor of this version because we have discovered no such universes. It is not clear that there would be a means to access such universes even if they do exist. Thus, there is no reason to adopt multiverse at present, and should we ever be able to demonstrate limited (past) interactions with a limited number of similar universes there is a mathematically dismissible probability that those interactions will have provided the missing astronomical magnitude of physical resources required to make the accidental theory of evolution scientifically credible because such massive influxes of resources would almost certainly have been discovered before now. We have no missing link of that magnitude in our current physical theory. To discover an error so large would potentially bring the entire theoretical base of physical science crumbling down. To properly rebuild it we might well have to make alterations that would reveal an even more astounding case for intelligent design than is already available to us.

I present what I consider to be the coup de grace for multiverse as a counter to the intelligent design argument in Appendix 2 in what I call the ORLEF-B hypothesis. ORLEF-B is a testable hypothesis that says the resource cost for an accidental construction process is so exorbitant that, barring an exorbitant influx of physical resources from outside our universe, an accident could not have created the life forms of Earth. With ORLEF-B it doesn’t matter if there are infinite universes or not; life could not have been accidentally created on Earth without a massive influx of resources from another world, and we have no evidence that such an event occurred.

Do I know there are no such things as multiverses? No, I don’t; nor does anyone else; nor does anyone else know the contrary. But I do know it is not a scientifically testable theory in the forms relevant to the ID question, which requires an infinite or nearly infinite number of universes confirmable by our science to make the probability numbers fall within the range of scientific credibility. Science will likely never have access to other universes let alone sufficient resources to sufficiently explore and test such a vast number of universes to be able to confirm that the extent of their resources is sufficient to offset the massive improbabilities incurred by the theory of accidental evolution of life on Earth. So the multiverse hypothesis is of little practical value to the present debate.

Davies cites three options: one is absurd and outside the probability range for scientific credibility; one is nontestable, and therefore not scientific; and the other is God, for whom 4 billion people already give credible testimony. Is explaining the anthropic phenomenon really as hard as Davies makes it out to be?

To say that a world must be compatible with life, life-friendly, as it were, for intelligent beings to exist to ask philosophical and scientific questions about the origin of their world is not to invalidate those questions. If this is so, all of our questions in science and philosophy are invalidated, as are all of the careers of all the academicians in the various disciplines pursuing those questions, including Davies’! To say that life (or any other event) can only occur under conditions conducive to its occurrence is not to prove the event in question accidental, but merely to state the obvious.

In my opinion, Davies, Hawking, and others too casually dismiss the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle says that the universe is so precisely tuned for life, so biofriendly, that it seems to have been intentionally constructed for the purpose of making life possible.[235] To refute the anthropic principle neo-Darwinists and their occasional intellectual allies from other disciplines say, much as Davies has said, that we could imagine a person waking up in an accidental universe where it must appear designed whether it is designed or not. Otherwise the person could not exist at all. We can imagine a person waking up in some hypothetical universe, but we can’t really, at least at present, imagine a person waking up in an accidental universe capable of producing people because we don’t know the physical and biomechanics of how an accident can do such a thing. Therefore we aren’t really imagining what Davies says we are imagining at all. We have every reason to believe that no complex lifeforms ever wake up in accidental universes. If they could, yes, it would look designed to them, but they can’t.

While based upon the undeniable truth that a world has to be life-friendly to have life, such seemingly profound observations are actually trivial. They entail no facts whatsoever. Davies’ objection is merely a question-begging and circular hypothetical: “If a universe compossible with life could come about by accident, then the mere existence of intelligent beings would be insufficient to establish that the universe was designed by an intelligence for the purpose of supporting life.” This hypothetical proposition is useless to the ID debate because it fails to answer the core question: “Given the astronomical complexities of life and the precise fine tuning of physical parameters necessary to support it, could a universe compossible with life be achieved by accident in the first place?” The answer to that question is “No, not to scientific standards of probability.”

The IF, THEN form of argument that is implicit in the story of someone waking up in an accidental world that appeared designed is merely a sneaky way to beg the question. We first have to assume that it is possible to accidentally make such a world including the life forms it contains or we can’t proceed with the story—it’s a loaded counterexample, and invalid for that reason.

Thus the various aspects of the anthropic principle do not reveal any fatal flaws in the intelligent design argument. And even if we grant for the sake of argument the most materialistic renderings of quantum physics and multiverse theory such as Stephen Hawking’s version of M-theory, the door is still wide open for God, for these theories start with multiple universes being created out of nothing.[236] Hawking says M-theory does not require God because those universes arise from natural law and are a “prediction of science.” But M-theory leaves the entire creation unexplained. Once you have the mass and energy of the multiverse in a given and very much preinformed state, natural law can take it the rest of the way, but there is no explanation of the origin of the physical mass and energy; there is no explanation of the preinformed state of that mass and energy in its initial appearance; and there is no explanation for the origin of natural law itself. Just as author and philosopher Ayn Rand reminded us that we can always ask “Who made God?” we can also ask “Who created the mass, energy, preexistent embedded physical information, and natural laws of a multiverse?”

What multiverse theory does do in regards to the ID debate, or, rather, what it would do if it were a properly testable scientific theory that was at some point actually confirmed, is weaken the resource exhaustion and probability arguments of intelligent design theory. If it could be proved that the universes within multiverse were randomly constructed and unimaginably vast in number, then and only then, would the additional universes add time and resources that an accidental dynamic could apply to the monumental problem of creating a life-friendly universe and astronomically complex lifeform by trial and error. However, the prospects for our being able to confirm, enter, explore and describe so many universes sufficient to determine that they were random creations is effectively nil. Universes not randomly created don’t help the accidental theory of evolution or the accidental worldview at all because they don’t count as one of the vast numbers of random attempts necessary to make a successful result probable within the scientific threshold of credibility.

Thus, for purposes of the ID debate if for no other reason, the multiverse theory is not feasibly testable, and it certainly has not been tested. It therefore cannot be posed as a defense of the accidental theory of evolution or an accidental worldview of physics and cosmology. So, when you here neo-Darwinists allude to multiverse theory as a rebuttal of the probability and resource exhaustion arguments of ID theory, you will know that they are engaged in yet another attempt to get a free lunch. They would like to count the multiverse chicken now before it hatches because it is not likely that that hatch will ever occur.

At best/worst with multiverse and M-theory we still have an arbitrary philosophical choice of whether we wish to view the universe as accidental or designed. As Hawking says, God is not required, but at the same time we are not obligated to dismiss the possibility of God either. To be more precise, within the context of multiverse or M-theory, how we answer these questions about accident and intelligent design depends on how many and what kinds of other universes science can actually prove to exist. If all possibilities are realized, as Hawking claims, in an infinite series of member universes, then God could actually create a highly complex design structure by way of a fully accidental process—and in a single instant. In this situation we would encounter the irony of being able to say both that God made the universe and that it occurred by accident! Or we could at the point of having actually proved a multiverse with sufficient resources to generate life by accident (if we wanted to ignore all the independent evidence we have for God) say the universe is just that way, one big accident.

Stephen Hawking’s version of M-theory is both unique and extraordinary in that it has all possibilities for our world being realized at the same time, including the astronomically improbable ones such as an accidental creation of the complex functional designs of life. It is not clear how he is going to provide the physical resources for all this to be happening simultaneously, however, or even how it could be physically possible. If all the possibilities inherent in our three-dimensional world exist simultaneously in reality, as Hawking believes, where do they exist? They must be three-dimensional after all (plus time), or they are not the possibilities of our world. There is no direct evidence for the existence of such enormous adjuncts to the physical reality we can otherwise demonstrate that we live in, so, obviously either extra dimensions are being invoked or Hawking is claiming a matrix of something like “parallel” universes somehow inextricably joined to our own as integral components of a larger multiverse. But here again the issue is proving that such additional universes exist. No free lunch.

So how does one confirm a multiverse? Supposing for the sake of argument we could discover a method that offered a plausible chance to do this, how could we be certain (without ever having been there) which type of world/universe/dimension we had discovered or the extent of its resources without “breaking into it” with a probe? The only kinds of worlds that it would be safe for us to interact with would be those with natural laws and physical constants very much like our own. But if all possibilities are realized how do we know we are not breaking into a world constructed in such a way as to rush destructive energy across the bridge or portal when our probe enters it—an enormous unstable land mine of physics, as it were? Even if physicists can cleverly devise some thought-to-be-safe preliminary probes or computations to give us a reliable hint of what kind of world we will be forcing a bridge into, how do we know it is not the kind of world that is built such that it looks “normal” to our probes and computations, but bursts out across any inter-world bridge with unstable destructive forces nonetheless. Remember, all possibilities are realized in M-theory. Such deceptive configurations would be one possibility.

Our very delicately balanced and fine-tuned for life universe rests, in a sense, precariously upon the consistent group behavior of quantum particles. That group behavior remains consistent enough to serve as the foundation for the orderly events required to support life in our world. However, the interactive quantum force field dynamics that all of the order and structure of our world (and thus life itself) depends upon could be thrown catastrophically out of balance by an uncontrolled/unpredictable influx of (by definition) unknown energies from another world. Such an exchange could, in theory (since science still does not know why individual quantum particles behave the way they do in the absence of controlling forces from other particle/wave fields) reconstruct the nature of the particles themselves or throw the field equations of fundamental particles out of balance long enough that the disruptions would effectively end life on Earth or throw the entire universe into a destructive chain reaction from which it would never recover.

Our society could never prudently take the risk of forcing contact with other worlds in this way at all. With so much potential energy on the other side of the transaction we couldn’t risk a possible catastrophic exchange with a chameleon/counterfeit unstable world. Consequently, it is hard to see how a multiverse can be proved and charted sufficiently to demonstrate the existence of sufficient resources or alternative trial and error universe products to make the accidental theory of evolution scientifically tenable in terms of probability. Given the risk factor, it is most likely that M-theory will in fact never be tested beyond the construction of purely theoretical mathematical equations.

Even minus the risk, assuming massive amounts of energy would be required to break through to another world, or at least massive expenditures of time and money in research, we probably will never be able to afford a full test of M-theory or other multiverse theories.

M-theory is, in fact, not even a single theory, but a collection or partial theories that are used to separately address different segments or ranges of physical phenomena. How any of those component theories, or all of them taken together, could entail that all the unrealized possibilities of our world are being separately realized elsewhere, is unclear. Suffice it to say that it makes all the difference what kind and how many universes turn out to be members of the multiverse.

As far as basic multiverse theory goes, if there are a finite number of other universes, then there might or might not be enough time and physical particle resources for the accidental thesis to fall at least slightly into the standard range of probability requisite to being scientifically credible. We would have to do the math, and before we could we would have to confirm the existence of each of many universes, and this is neither safe nor practical to do. We would also have to verify that the universes were randomly created, that is, that they reflect a wide range of configurations thus indicating a random spread of outcomes. A problem here is that some of those configurations, perhaps most of them, would make attempts at interaction from our universe exorbitantly dangerous. This problem would very likely preclude science ever being able to verify the random spread of configurations in the massive numbers needed to support the accidental theory of evolution.

With infinite universes, of course, the probability for accidental life becomes 100%, as does the probability for purposive life, and the probability of absolutely everything else. But there is no way to prove the infinite, and to say that an intelligent designer definitely exists somewhere in multiverse as does an accidental world with life, does not answer the question of which of the two categories our world falls under.

The bottom line for our purposes is that until we can show that there exists either an enormous number of other randomly created universes or at least one other enormously large and enormously old random mixing bowl type universe with trillions upon trillions upon trillions…the time and resource of our own world that has dumped some of its output into our world, the resource exhaustion and probability arguments against accidental evolution remain fatal objections.

For intelligent design theory to be defeated by M-theory or multiverse theory we have to have actually demonstrated that this hypothetical enormous new resource base truly exists. We have not done this, and it would seem unlikely that we would ever have sufficient resources to do it, or that we would have sufficient desperation to take the world-ending risks of doing it. By constructing bridges into other worlds we could actually invoke the melting of the elements described in the Bible as ushering in the end of the world as we know it. (2 Peter 3:10-12 RSV) Curiosity killed the cat!

But let’s say for the sake of argument that we do prove multiverse at some point in the far distant future, though I am personally certain it will never happen. Accidental evolution of life on Earth then becomes mathematically possible within science’s threshold for credibility. However, the key word here is “possible.” Just because something could happen by accident in one of a nearly infinite number of universes doesn’t mean that it did happen by accident here in ours, particularly considering that two thirds of the Earth’s massive population are currently pursuing personal relationships with God in their religious faiths. Because it is so exorbitantly difficult for an accident to throw together and maintain a highly complex machine, even in a world with sufficient time and resources for an accident to build such machines by trial and error, it is still much more probable to encounter such machines made on purpose by intelligent design than the same machines made by accident.

Multiverse makes all possibilities highly probable to be found at least in one instance somewhere in an infinite or nearly infinite creation, but it doesn’t alter the standard frequency of expectation of how often we will find one kind of event compared to the frequency of occurrence of another kind of event. There would be many more worlds where life was created by intelligent design in an infinite or nearly infinite multiverse than worlds where life was created by accident because it is so exorbitantly hard for an accident to do such a thing. For every world where life had begun by accident there would be many trillions where it had been created on purpose. This is borne out both by standard probability calculations from the complexity of life and by direct empiric observations of our world. These inductively show that the probability of finding complex machines made by accident is very near 0.

Thus, science must always affirm intelligent design theory as more credible than an accidental worldview in any given world that contains astronomically complex systems, and especially irreducibly complex ones, particularly where independent evidence exists for an intelligent designer being involved. With a proven multiverse we can say that it is scientifically credible that life would arise accidentally somewhere within the multiverse, but not that it is scientifically credible that it would arise on a given planet.

Statements about the probability implications about infinite universes can be very misleading in the context of the intelligent design/accidental world debate. Multiverse makes accidental life possible, true, and not merely possible but highly probable. Nonetheless, life created on purpose by intelligent design remains much more probable even in multiverse. Thus even multiverse doesn’t make the thesis of accidental life on Earth fall within the range of probability requisite to being scientifically credible.

Appendix 13:

Chaos, Chaos Theory, Quantum Mechanics & ID

Getting Smart about Chaos

There is an elementary logical and mathematical problem involved in assuming chance processes as the sufficient cause of complex organized life forms because they cannot provide the requisite organized source materials. This limitation, a preclusion factor really, is conceptually codified in the definition of entropy integral to thermodynamic law. As regards natural processes, entropy, disorder, randomness, disorganization, accident, and chance essentially all mean the same thing. Entropy is a chaotic randomness of physical energy that has reached a state of disorder so extreme that it can neither be recaptured to do any additional work nor be reclaimed into ordered systems—ever. Entropy is completely and permanently useless random heat energy.

By our current well-grounded scientific assumptions codified in thermodynamic law, therefore, to the extent that a system or force is random or entropic it cannot produce complex ordered results at all in the aforementioned sense of providing the ordered source materials requisite to forming any kind or ordered system. The definition of entropy core to thermodynamic science stipulates this as an axiom or axiomatic derivative. What entropic forces can (theoretically) do towards contributing to the rise of new forms of ordered systems is to stimulate recombination of existing ordered structures into more complex ones by breaking symmetry (in a sense destructively), loosening the chemical, electromagnetic, or nuclear force bonds that rigidly hold a structure into a static form, allowing the elements to reform in new ways. But as far as bringing order out of chaos, entropic or fully random forces cannot do that alone. They can only break the bonds on another highly ordered system allowing mutations, if you will, to occur, and even there only at a typically high cost in physical refuse (entropic byproduct) produced by breaking the system.

Thus, it has always been a contradiction to say that fully accidental processes or forces could alone give rise to complex life forms or even any stable from of simple ordered structure whatsoever. Order cannot come from pure chaos; chaos can only assist order in changing its form.

So, when the process or forces said to be producing life or other complexly ordered systems are only partially accidental/entropic (and by implication the other part substantially informed and directed), it is incorrect to say that the accidental or entropic portion is a sufficient or even a primary cause. In such cases it is the ordered input and only the ordered input that can be the source material for the ordered results of the magnitude we see in living systems. It is a partnership between the ordered precursor system (the clay or marble of a sculpture, if you will) and the entropic or random forces that comprise the “chisel.” However, when the chisel is wielded randomly/chaotically, the chisel is by far the junior partner in the creation of any ordered design structure that may arise.

Typically all the disordered component of an energy exchange does is get in the way of progress and heavily add to the cost in terms of energy lost to disorganized byproducts. In fact, what we can see in such an analysis is that there must be a third and not very junior partner present. Otherwise new more complex forms of ordered systems cannot arise at all. That third partner is the self-organizational tendencies inherent in matter, energy, and natural law, built-in properties that allow the freed elements of a broken system to interact and recombine in novel ways producing more and complex forms of order than those present in the precursor system prior to the “breakage.” But again, any progress in generating new complex designs occurs at a high cost in garbage production, waste products that with each transaction become more and more entropic until they become pure entropy—completely worthless physical “trash.”

Due to the disorganized byproducts of physical transactions the net order in the universe as an entire and closed system tends to be decreased substantially in these events and at a minimum stays the same; it never increases. This is essentially a statement of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics: entropy never decreases in a closed system, and tends to increase with each physical energy transaction that occurs.[237] The increased order in complex ordered system products that we see from such symmetry breaking or other spontaneous recombination events is a localized increase in a small sector of the universe, say our Earth for example, which is offset by a lot of disorganized garbage spewed out elsewhere as the “operating cost” for the “spontaneous” “manufacturing event,” as it were.

With this definition of entropy and the 2^nd Law under our belts we can see that neo-Darwinian theory as popularly understood by the public as being fully accidental evolution has always been in conflict with the definition of entropy in thermodynamic law. To be clear, it is not the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics that conflicts with neo-Darwinian evolution, as has been previously debated ad nauseam, it is the definition of entropy that causes the conflict.

Increased order can arise in a local subsystem spontaneously without conflicting with the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics so long as entropy does not decrease in the larger closed system of the universe (assuming as science traditionally has that our universe is a closed system). There is no problem in asserting that from the point of view of ID theory, none at all. The problem arises when the assertion is modified to explicitly identify the material input source of the increase in order as being the disordered or entropic elements on the input side of the event process. In other words the problem is in asserting that purely random, chaotic, or accidental forces in and of themselves can be the sufficient cause of new complexly ordered systems. Entropy or disorganization as such cannot be the material source or sufficient cause for increased order anywhere under any conditions by definition. The definition of entropy in thermodynamic law forbids this; it forbids order coming out of pure chaos.

Contrary to all this, neo-Darwinian theory has it that the junior partner acts alone and the two senior partners are unnecessary. ID theory says no, preexistent order and self-organizational laws are required as well as any entropic energy force encounter that may at times be necessary to unlock the inherent self-transformational forces. ID theory says that we cannot explain the existence of the two senior partners or the strong life-favoring bias resident within them without God or some other kind of intelligent designer.

As an aside, it is has not been fully demonstrated that the junior partner of entropic force is truly necessary to the event of the creation of the ordered structures of our world, including life. This is only a hypothesis. Science has not mapped either the physical event dynamics that created the ordered structures of the cosmos or the event dynamics of the origin and evolution of life. We don’t yet know what those event dynamics were, and therefore we don’t know of entropic force-caused symmetry breaking was an essential element or if the events were driven by other yet to be discovered self-organizational forces in nature, perhaps occurring at scales so very small (superstring or quantum particle networks or entangled systems) and/or so very large (constraints imposed by universal background radiation from dark matter and energy, for example) that they have yet to be identified by science, leaving entropic force symmetry breaking fully superfluous to the creation of the complexly ordered systems of our world.

The theory of accidental evolution essentially says that order can come from chaos, and that the world is a truly random mixing bowl. Both of these principles are wrong. Thermodynamic law via the definition of entropy says that order cannot come from chaos alone, and physics and cosmology tell us that our world has never been a truly random mixing bowl.

The language that has been in vogue for some years now concerning order arising from “the edge of chaos” is very misleading because the chaotic elements are never the material source of new ordered systems. They are only the event key, and potentially a very destructive key, that unlocks the possibility for development of new highly ordered systems by breaking the very rigid symmetry of a larger precursor system. Even this is still hypothetical as it is not clear that in fact any such symmetry breaking event actually occurred around an encounter with entropic energies. But, working under the assumption that such symmetry breaking can occur, the breakage loosens electro-chemical (or even atomic) cohesion factors, allowing parts of the ordered precursor structure to break free and recombine into new forms (other parts being dissipated as entropic waste).

The point I wish to belabor a bit here intermixed with an introduction to basic thermodynamic law is that the (hypothetical) rise of highly complex organized systems from these otherwise destructive events should not be understood as indicating that entropic energies can themselves alone give rise to new forms of increased order, but that the highly ordered precursor system that was disrupted by these entropic energies (in combination with natural law and the chemical- electromagnetic- or atomic-level self-organizational properties of atoms, elements, and molecules) was the repository of the order requisite to producing the new forms of more complexly ordered systems. Again, order cannot come from chaos as such.

The definition of entropy in thermodynamic law thus conflicts with the foundational premise of accidental evolutionary theory, which says that purely random processes could have generated the immensely complex ordered systems of life. Thermodynamic law is not likely to be thrown out, however, as it is the most basic of all natural laws. Einstein said the laws of thermodynamics (of which the definition of entropy is an essential and primary foundational component) are the only laws he believed would never be refuted.[238] Therefore, as a result of this conflict with thermodynamic law the theory of a truly accidental origin and evolution of the tree of life has to go.

What Did Einstein Believe?

Why were the assumptions of chaos and accident made by neo-Darwinists in the 1970’s when the very father of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was willing to admit the determinism of natural law as early as the 1950’s? Natural processes can’t be fully accidental and deterministic at the same time. Perhaps neo-Darwinists merely reinvented the word “chaos” using it in some innocent technical sense, as many scientists do for specific technical applications? For some theorists this may be true. Evolutionists now admit that, in referring to “random” mutations, they were referencing only the lack of a direct correlation between mutagenic events and any beneficial form change that would assist the affected creature to survive in its present environmental niche—they were not implying chaos throughout the whole of physics and biophysics.

But if there is not chaos throughout physics and biophysics how does Ernst Mayr reach the conclusion that science can find no pathway for intelligent design or cosmic purpose in nature? What we are dealing with here once again is deft use of ambiguous language, bait and switch tactics, equivocation, and so on—a system of propaganda designed to lead the public to an accidental atheistic worldview while insulating professional scientific authors from having to defend such an outrageous claim in professional circles. There can be no truly accidental origin and evolution of life; nearly all professional theorists understand this and when pressed in an accountable forum they will admit it. But the language of many of those who do know it can still easily mislead the public to believe otherwise.

In order to rule out cosmic purpose and intelligent design, which neo-Darwinists have clearly affirmed to have been done for decades, a genuinely chaotic or fully accidental process is actually necessary. After all, any non-chaotic physical mechanism, including all of the laws of physics and chemistry, so long as it contains a bias for life of any magnitude at all, could be the chosen instrument that God or an intelligent designer uses to accomplish his or her purpose. Creation need not be instantaneous, only inevitable.

To me at least, there is a contradiction inherent in one neo-Darwinist, Douglas Futuyma, for example, denying that neo-Darwinism claims an accidental evolutionary process, only “random” mutations in the technical sense just discussed, and (the late) Ernst Mayr saying that science has exhaustively ruled out any pathway for cosmic purpose in nature. One says that evolutionary science claims practically nothing on the subject of intelligent design in either direction, while the other claims that science has ruled out ID altogether. Precisely how science had ruled out cosmic purpose, of course, Mayr never bothered to explain.

Perhaps Peters and Gutmann and other evolutionists who freely bandied about the words “accidental” and “chaotic” only intended that the events of toxics or injury induced genetic mutations were “chaotic” but that the fundamental laws and event processes of physics and biophysics generally were not. Nevertheless, in going further (along with Mayr and company) to deny purpose in nature (which they did), they clearly threw the authoritative weight of science behind a worldview of atheism, materialism, and meaningless accident. How they proposed to justify that worldview if not by the assertion of accident at the foundation of both physics and evolution I don’t know.

Perhaps the evolutionary scientists of the ‘70’s merely fell victim to the same misconception that befell the public during the heyday of particle physics. From the ’50s on through the ’70s at times it seemed that new subatomic particles were being discovered every month (hundreds are now known).[239] In those days, there was a lot of talk about “indeterminacy,” “probabilistic behavior” and “uncertainty” and even “chaos” in the realm of elementary particles. Many of us in the public mistakenly came to believe that these terms implied real chaos, truly random motion at the most fundamental levels of matter, when most physicists only meant that indeterminacy ruled at the fully insignificant level of a single minute subatomic particle. Particles as a group have always been orderly, generating no surprises of any consequence, and allowing full predictability of the macroscopic events of the universe. Only half a century later does the public finds this out, however, long after the damage to our previously God-centered society and worldview has been done.

Once again, confused language, not scientific fact, has been at the heart of the materialist campaign against society’s belief in God, generally pursued through the vehicle of a verbally obfuscated presentation of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and, in this case, via the theory of quantum mechanics in physics.

So, what do modern quantum physicists mean exactly when they say that elementary particles are ‘chaotic’? The answer: not much and quite a bit. Not all physicists mean the same thing. There is presently no firm agreement or consensus within the field. There are two primary schools of thought, one that follows Albert Einstein, and the other that follows Niels Bohr. Bohr’s camp is saying that the individual quantum particle is unpredictable and visibly erratic, its behavior truly chaotic. As far as this goes it is not a practical problem that individual particles are in fact unpredictable and erratic from the point of view of science’s ability to anticipate what they will do individually, because as a group they always fall into orderly patterns that allow science to predict macroscopic events. The problem is one of explanation: we don’t know why the particles do this as a group if they are erratic as individuals. It is still a complete mystery as to how and why our world takes on the same orderly form day after day, and Ernst Mayr can find no room for cosmic purpose in nature!J

Einstein, of course, was not impressed with Bohr's view of uncertainty and indeterminacy in quantum physics. His most famous comment, that God does not play dice with the universe, was issued as a rebuttal of Bohr's uncertainty principle (see the NOVA video, Einstein Revealed). Einstein was concerned to correct the public misconception that Bohr's uncertainty principle justified a belief in true chaos at the foundations of matter. Einstein, who gave us our most fundamentally important equations about matter, was convinced that order, not chaos, was at the heart of the universe. He felt that science would ultimately discover further unifying principles that would explain quantum behavior. As David Lindley relates in his excellent new book Uncertainty, our theory of quantum physics, in Einstein’s view, and that of several other noted physicists, must be considered incomplete, missing a key part of the total physical description of our world.

That, ultimately, is what so distressed Einstein—the idea that physical outcomes are truly unpredictable. Physicists today who share that distress cannot shake the feeling that something must be missing, that quantum mechanics must be, as Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen said, incomplete. [240]

There is a great deal of logic supporting Einstein. The elementary particles are clearly behaving in consistent orderly ways as a group because all of physics and observed natural processes reflect that order and consistency. Obviously, then, some constraint has been place upon quantum particles that can enable the generation of the consistent group behavior—we just haven’t found it yet. This constraint holds quantum particles into group behavioral parameters so precise as to foster the continuation of the finely tuned processes of the natural world without known exception for roughly 15 billion years!

There are only two reasonable hypotheses to explain this, only two that are logically possible, in fact. Either, as Einstein predicted, a physical constraint will be discovered that explains why the inexplicable behavior of individual quantum particles consistently translates to the ordered laws of nature, or there is a nonphysical constraint that does the same job. So, either Einstein was correct and there is no chaos at the heart of physical processes at all, or materialism is refuted. Either way God-theory and intelligent design come out ahead. One might call this “Bohr's Dilemma:” further research can only confirm Einstein or refute materialism. The only alternative is to throw up our hands and forsake the search for explanation entirely, which is to forsake science itself.

Professor Trinh Xuan Thuan holds that “Bohr's Dilemma” (he doesn’t call it that) can be presently resolved in favor of the refutation of materialism, apparently because quantum behavior has been studied thoroughly and no physical constraints upon quantum particles are in evidence, yet constraints there must be. Bravo Professor Thuan for maintaining integrity in science! (It is possible I am misinterpreting Thaun’s argument here, which, in a brief and fast-moving narrative is not made fully explicit.)[241]

While applauding Thaun for permitting his scientific conclusions to go where the evidence leads regardless of the prejudice in favor of materialism in modern science, I believe, with Einstein that the dilemma of how to resolve quantum chaos into order and harmony will be resolved another way. (I could be wrong, however.) I believe that science will discover a more fundamental unifying force. This force will explain the orderly group behavior of quantum particles, showing them to be no more chaotic than the stray water droplets coming out of a hose show the overall directed flow of water to be chaotic. Calling such processes “chaotic” is really stretching the concept out of its natural meaning for all that is entailed is a lack of perfection, not a lack of order. The process is not accidental or random for the flow of water is constrained in a consistent direction such that work can be accomplished in an orderly manner. So to the objection that the underlying processes of nature are not perfect therefore there cannot be a God we simply respond “Whoop-dee-do! All this proves is that God is not a micromanager; he prefers to work with a spray gun or a garden hose.” And, if you stop and think for a moment, where do we use such tools? For big jobs.

In the meantime, pending the discovery some grand unifying force for quantum particles, we can still confidently say, contrary to the materialists’ claims, that an objective analysis of the behavior of quantum particles yields a stronger argument against chaos than for it. If quantum particles were truly to vary randomly between the available states across the entire range of their wave and particle behavior all of our physical and chemical laws would fail, atomic structure would break down due to fluctuations in orbiting electrons, and the world as we know it would cease to exist.

In Bohr’s view, it remains theoretically possible, though unlikely, that the random or otherwise indeterminate behavior of individual quantum particles could at times diverge from their observed typical patterns and one or more of the laws of nature would, in these rare exceptional instances, momentarily fail. What the Bohrists do not tell us is that there would be nothing to justify our confidence that such bifurcations would be rare if the most fundamental level of matter were truly chaotic.

Thus the argument for atheism from quantum physics breaks down. What is so disturbing about the fact that God uses a garden hose, permitting a few stray drops of water here and there, as opposed to a microscopic eyedropper with nary a miss? It’s a big job after all and perhaps God had better things to do with his time, or perhaps, as I argue in Fallacies 23-26 in Appendix #1, we don’t yet deserve paradise so he did not feel obliged to give it to us. Our conclusion: "Inch by inch, row by row, God made this garden grow...with a garden hose!" A proper understanding of science and logic reveals that God needn’t be a micromanager, and that we needn’t be an atheist.

Some writers seem to weave in and out between Einstein’s view and Bohr’s view when using the term “chaos.” Perhaps this is because science has yet to decide between them. ‘Chaos’ is also applied to wholly different kinds of systems outside quantum mechanics and means something different there. The behavior of planetary systems and weather phenomena are typically given as examples of chaotic systems.

So is there any substantial element of true chaos in nature? Not in my opinion. If I read him right, Thaun believes weather to be a truly chaotic system, imperfectly predictable in theory. However, I disagree. I think the only problem with predicting weather is lack of complete information, which makes weather unpredictable in practice, though not in theory.

In a superb article that appears in Paul Davies’ (editor) book The New Physics, Joseph Ford does a masterful job of sorting through all of the confusion about chaotic systems in “What is chaos, that we should be mindful of it?” But to demonstrate how hopelessly mired the subject of quantum physics has become in linguistic obfuscations, even Ford’s considerable victory of linguistic legerdemain is not achieved before first writing several pages that read in spots like an outright contradiction. He acknowledges this himself:

In the foregoing, we have asserted first that ours is a strictly deterministic world and second that ours is mostly a chaotic world, an interesting but perhaps confusing juxtaposition of assertions. Upon reflection, a reader pondering whether determinism and chaos are contradictory terms will surely welcome a definition of chaos more precise than that conveyed by the vague words ‘erratic’, ‘irregular’, ‘disordered’, or ‘seemingly unpredictable’, so commonly used in the current literature.[242]

He finally resolves the definition of chaos into a matter of high complexity, with the lack of full information about that complexity leading to unpredictability. Thus chaos as Ford views it is not true randomness but only unpredictability from the perspective of a would-be manager of the system.

Ford also notes that systems can be so complex that they are humanly indistinguishable from truly random systems, meaning that although they are governed by natural law, and therefore orderly, we don’t have the slightest hope of ever sorting them out into manageable predictions. In this context, it is not lack of order in the physical systems underlying weather phenomena that makes weather "chaotic." Rather it is the fact that we have insufficient information about the impossibly numerous and minute variables involved to fully predict them. The unique circumstance in the case of quantum/particle physics is that some of the needed information is not merely yet to be discovered, but theoretically defined as being forever inaccessible to science (indeterminacy).

That’s easy enough, you say, but this kind of common sense modern resolution of the nature of “chaos” at the heart of quantum physics is neither universally held among modern physicists nor the clear historical precedent. While such a common sense path to resolving the question of order and chaos in quantum physics may be overwhelmingly endorsed by today’s lay readers, it has not always been so amongst the experts through the history of modern science.

In the interesting 1991 video Mind and Matter about the search by Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung for a link between mind and matter, the statement is made that quantum physics is a “radical departure from causality itself.”[243] If that isn’t an invitation to confusion, I haven’t seen one. Bohrist physicists may believe it to be true, but the real question is what does it mean? And, of course, just because a cause has yet to be found does not mean there is none. The grand tradition of science is to always assume the opposite. To confuse things even more, the correspondence principle of Niels Bohr says that quantum events do translate effectively to the visible events of our world known to be closely governed by Newtonian mechanics.[244] But how do they translate and how can they if causation is not involved at the foundational level of quantum physics?

Therefore, the physical reality of quantum mechanics can hardly be said to be a radical departure from causality as a whole. It might be a departure from a knowledge of causality due to the complexity or inaccessibility involved, or due merely to temporary ignorance of the processes involved, but not from causality itself. The only departure of concern perhaps is the departure of some physicists’ language from the normal clarity of empiric scientific discourse. Even if we assume with Bohr et al. that we will never find any causes for the individual particle behavior, that quantum particles are just that way, intrinsically indeterminate, we still have to explain the force dynamic that underlies the correspondence principle. Something harnesses those particles such that their group behavior is orderly enough to produce consistent compliance with the laws of nature for the macroscopic events the particles comprise as constituent elements.

So what do they mean by “radical departure from causality itself?” Perhaps the remark in the Pauli film about departure from causality was alluding to the spooky observations of early quantum physicists who found that the thoughts of the experimenter were at times seen to affect the result of the experiment. The first thing one wants to say is that more work in verification and replication needs to be done in those areas. But, even if we take those results absolutely at face value there is no departure from causation implied. Physical reductionists will see this immediately because they assert that mind is matter (and nothing else). Even dualists who believe in the nonphysical will have no concern about the continuity of causal laws in such events because for them the mind and brain are so intimately conjoined that it is no departure from physical causality that the energy fields of the brain could have effects on such miniscule levels as quantum force fields.

One of the concerns I have about the public’s perception of what is going on in quantum physics is that through intentional or inadvertent misconstruals of the work of Bohr et al. (as with Darwin) the public has been misled toward atheism and materialism. There is no firm factual foundation for such views in the field of quantum physics, which is still in process of resolving a consensus among its own members. The predominant view at present seems to be that science will discover a grand unification theory that will explain quantum particle behavior in a more or less traditional way by subsuming them under a more basic underlying event process that is itself orderly and consistent, also allowing the current mathematical models of quantum physics to feed smoothly into the classic models of physics at the macroscopic level and the extreme range events governed by relativity theory.

However, there are those who persist in describing quantum behavior as truly chaotic, or seem to so describe it. In Mind and Matter Pauli’s last assistant, Professor Charles Enz, compares the behavior of individual subatomic particles to the situation of a roulette wheel without further explanation. Technically, he is correct, but the further implication of an accidental and meaningless world that the roulette wheel symbolizes for many is not supported. When people hear “roulette wheel” in the film some will assume the elementary phenomena underlying the physical world are truly chaotic because roulette to them is a game of “chance.” For those viewers, science has just disproved God and intelligent design.

In fact, however, contrary to the traditional use of the symbol, the results of a spin of the roulette wheel can in theory be fully predicted by physical science—if enough detailed information about the state of the wheel, the spin, and the drop of the ball can be obtained. Thus, the analogy to roulette would seem only to be accurate and helpful if we apply Ford’s definition of chaos as merely a lack of sufficient information to yield prediction. Otherwise use of this symbolism is not helpful, fully mysterious in fact, and potentially very misleading to the lay public.

As I take pains to show through this book, especially in Appendix 1, the misleading remarks, and the well over 100 fallacies that occur throughout neo-Darwinist presentations (and their materialist first cousins’ presentations in quantum physics as well), all point in the same direction: atheism, materialism, chaos, accident, yet none of them are scientifically defensible in such a reading. These are outright mistakes or linguistic ambiguities, by now, many thousands of them, and they all point in the same direction: an accidental, meaningless, godless, worldview.

If these oversights, omissions, ambiguities, misrepresentations, and logical mistakes were all innocent of political bias, statistically a fair portion of them would point away from materialism—one would think more or less as often as towards it. This is not the case, however. The statistical bias in the political-philosophical orientation of these voluminous “mistakes” in science presentations about evolution and quantum physics is glaring. The mistakes could be unconscious and unintended, and in many cases undoubtedly are, but there is a clear bias in the pattern. This bias for materialism has strongly pervaded mainstream scientific culture more or less from the time of the advent of Marxist philosophy on the world stage, and the correspondence may be more than coincidence.

Certainly, I don’t accuse any specific author (including Enz, Dawkins, or anyone else) of being a card-carrying Marxist. Nor would I wish to deny anyone free choice in personal politics or personal expression in the event that they were Marxist; that is their express right in a free society (to the extent that they obey the law). My concern is solely with the integrity of science as such.

As an example of such a suspect expression, in this case ambiguity assisted by innuendo delivered by tone of voice, someone, possibly the narrator, in the Mind and Matter film claims that atomic particles do not follow inviolable laws. This could be a very narrow and precise technical statement that hasn’t been fully clarified, and thus fully defensible and relatively trivial, but it is delivered in the context of mysterious background music as in essence a spooky bombshell of a revelation worthy of the X-Files. Spun in such a way the total media presentation will suggest to many casual listeners that subatomic particles are not governed by natural law at all, in group or individual behavior. To some laypersons this, again, might imply true chaos at the foundations of our world. And why make a very technical statement on an obtuse subject in a film designed for the general public and withhold the clarification? And why couch it in the total media presentation as if it were a worldview-shaking bombshell, unless the intent is to imply that it is one? Obviously to entertain and sell copies of the film is one answer, but that doesn’t solve the problem of the tendency for scientists and commentators to consistently spin the data from quantum physics in favor of an accidental worldview.

If there was any doubt about the embedded suggestion of atheistic materialism, the coup de grace of conceptual confusion comes when Enz says that the revolution sparked by quantum mechanics has caused the final separation of science and religion and made God superfluous. Perhaps he merely means “superfluous to science,” but many listeners may make much larger inferences to man’s total existence and worldview. Why emphasize the separation of science and religion in this context? That separation had long been underway, and for legitimate reasons, long before the advent of quantum physics circa 1930. Quantum physics would have no effect at all on the separation of science and religion unless one interprets quantum physics as describing a truly accidental foundation for our world.

But, again, we know the foundation is not accidental if from nothing else Bohr’s own correspondence principle that says quantum behavior must conform to the macroscopic world of which it is a constituent, a world that fully conforms to natural law. The mere fact that God elects to use a stencil and paint gun instead of a micro-fine brush does not prove there is no artist or craftsman at work. We don't deny intelligent design and order in the plumbing of our home simply because the individual water molecules are randomly straining in all directions to get out of the pipes. Certainly the majesty of the “stencils” imposed by the “painter” of our natural world far exceeds household plumbing. The fact that such “stencils” constrain quantum particles to highly ordered results shows Einstein to have been correct in his dispute with Bohr. Bohr wittily responded that who was Einstein to tell God what to do. But, of course, that response was unfair because Einstein was merely saying that we can observe what God has already done. We are not telling him; he is showing us.

Although, with Einstein, we can confidently say that many stencils are in place sufficient to constructively harness any otherwise chaotic elements that may be present at the quantum level, we cannot yet fully explain what put those stencils there. There remains much we do not know about the origin of the order of our world, yet we don’t deny that there is order. NASA scientists acknowledge that we cannot fully explain the origin of ordered cosmological structures. Dr. Stephen Meyer echoes this limitation in his refutation of structuralism in saying that the information form and content of known natural laws has in no way been shown to be sufficient to entail the majestic designs of biology. We don’t know where God has hidden all of his stencils for life, but, with Einstein, I think we are rationally entitled on the basis of both the probability and resource exhaustion arguments to say they must be there.

Similarly, I suspect we will find natural explanations for the order in biology resident in natural law somewhere at a deeper level, in the electromagnetic properties of atoms for example, properties that generate the self-organization of life, perhaps in combination with quantum-level interactive networks and structures yet to be described.

Aquinas first cause argument, of course, tells us that explanation has to stop somewhere. On the other hand, science and philosophy tell us that throwing up your hands prematurely and saying we just don’t know when further explanation is in fact possible is not the best we can do. In Chaos and Harmony, Professor Thaun says that the inability of science to explain by reference to purely physical constructs the eloquent and beautiful way nature has harmonized the chaotic elements reveals that materialism has failed as a system of scientific explanation. Thaun seems to be saying we are already there with quantum physics, already at the most fundamental level of physical description, and there is no physical explanation for the “stencils” that order quantum particle group behavior resident in the observations and data of quantum research—it just isn’t there. This leaves only a nonphysical source for the “stencils” (my term, not his).

It is possible that Thaun is right and that our physical regress investigations have already hit the wall. However, until we have or are certain that we can’t find a grand unification theory in physics, it is premature to say that, as Einstein suspected, we will not find God’s spray-painting stencils in future physical data. The other fascinating question that comes out of all of this is at what point if any will we in fact hit the wall, and will we at that point have found genuine evidence of the supernatural?

Aquinas tells us that, inevitably, we will find evidence of the supernatural in either of the only two possibilities that exist here. That is because, even if we find the stencils hidden in deeper levels of natural law than science has yet to discover, we still have a causal regress to the Big Bang—and when we get there explanation stops.

So we reach an impasse. Classical physics cannot say why the universe happened, because nothing can happen except that prior events caused it to happen. Quantum physics cannot say why the universe happened, except to say that it just did, spontaneously, as a matter of probability rather than certainty.[245]

Although some scientists will try to weaken our argument here by glibly tossing out alternatives or supplements to the Big Bang such as multiverse theory (which is not testable and therefore not scientific) or an eternal nonexpanding universe, the current scientific consensus does not support them. Dr. Hugh Ross tells us in the 15^th chapter of Mere Creation, a collection of scientific writings edited by Professor William Dembski, that the Big Bang theory has been tried by fire in the crucible of scientific criticism and is in no danger of being replaced.[246]

In acknowledging that a scientific case can, even in principle, be made against materialism, Thaun and Ross (and his co-author Fazale Rana) are well ahead of their time. Other first rate thinkers have been breaking the same ground. Noted philosophers of religion William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, for example, make a cogent case against naturalism in their 2000 vintage offering, Naturalism: A Critical Analysis.[247]

Despite such (nearly heroic) attempts at clarity and understanding, over dramatized claims about the failure of causality and prediction at the most fundamental levels of matter have long been made and continue to be made in the media, sometimes from authoritative scientific sources. The wording in these discussions is often technically correct, but couched in a way almost certain to mislead the nonscientist, seeming to say that chaos lies at the foundations of our world. First time exposures of this kind to quantum physics for laymen and others who are only casual students of the subject will likely result in their coming away with the mistaken conclusion that the world is accidental or truly chaotic. There is little room for God or intelligent design in such a view.

Am I being too hard on materialistic scientists by indicting them for carelessly (or intentionally) misleading the public, perhaps in the more extreme cases even secretly pursing a Marxist political agenda within science? Maybe. But let me ask you a question Is it possible that we, the public, all got it wrong when the revelations of quantum mechanics and particle physics first came to light decades ago if no one intended to mislead us? Is it possible that we all came out of middle school and junior high school biology class with the same understanding that Darwinian evolution implied an accidental foundation to our world unless someone within the chain of instruction in academia from scientist to textbook author to teacher intended us to get that impression?

It is possible—and pigs might fly! Of course, with the exaggerated spin modern science is placing on the promise of genetic engineering, perhaps they will. This might actually be possible because bats are rodents, but you get the point. With all the politicized crap you find in neo-Darwinian texts, you would think they were flying.

But even if the misunderstanding is purely our fault (the naïve theists who simply failed to do our homework and put the neo-Darwinists’ ambiguous remarks in the full context of all the other technical and popular writings issued on evolution over the past sixty years), we shouldn’t feel too badly. A recent discussion in Physics Today reveals that the physicists are themselves still debating the correct understanding of quantum theory, and I have not read any two evolutionists who hold precisely the same view of how it all works.

In the early days of quantum theory from say 1930-1950 there were undeniably some in the scientific community who truly felt quantum events had no ties to causality or natural law in any significant sense (some apparently still do). But such a position is indefensible. It denies the correspondence principle, destroying the bridge between the observable events of Newtonian mechanics, the extreme events of relativity and the underlying foundation of quantum/particle physics, a bridge that must be there if the world we see every day is real and these theories we hold are true. Without that bridge we encounter a situation where order comes from disorder in a completely inexplicable mystery before our very eyes each day. To my mind, that scenario rather more suggests the need for God in explanation than makes him superfluous. If the stencil isn’t physical….

True Chaos

Joseph Ford explains that, beyond mere unpredictability due to insufficient data, one can formulate a strict definition of a truly chaotic system that allows no predictability even in theory. The system description for a truly chaotic phenomena includes no constituent or component patterns whatsoever. There is only one pattern in a truly chaotic system, the total system description itself. It is safe to conclude that there is no order within such a system, and the system can generate no ordered result. If quantum events were strictly chaotic in this sense, the bridge from elementary particles to the observable events of classical physics (the correspondence principle of Niels Bohr) would fail. We would, in fact, have never had a reason to hypothesize such a principle. Life would not be here to ponder the issue if pure chaos prevailed. My point here is that it is the most flagrant and easily avoidable error to confuse a fully chaotic system with a highly ordered one. Pure chaos has no repeating patterns at all, let alone the self-organizing and self-maintaining ultra-complex three dimensional moving living systems of life!

Since no one is prepared to throw out classical physics and most of our useful science along with it, it is safe to say that modern physics has not adopted a view of the underlying processes of quantum physics as being chaotic in this strict sense. Enough order is assumed present in quantum events such that when passed across the correspondence principle bridge to the observable events of everyday life via probabilistic laws, the visible world we encounter will be coherent and orderly enough to permit science to publish its laws and make consistently successful predictions. Enough said: our world is not based in chaos.

Another definition of chaos that is commonly understood, or misunderstood if you prefer, by many is to have the word mean purely random. A purely random system is the opposite extreme of a truly chaotic system in terms of pattern representation, for a fully random system cycles through all possible patterns and holds to none. A chaotic quantum particle system in this sense could not support the observed consistency in our macroscopic world for the obvious reason that if the quantum patterns were changing randomly our visible world would have to change randomly along with them, assuming natural law stayed constant. To give consistency to our visible world under such a scenario the natural laws that translate quantum events to visible phenomena would have to constantly change in perfect synchronization with the random fluctuations in quantum states. This would imply intelligent design much more strongly than even the convincing data we already have to see such an extraordinary effort expended to guarantee a life-friendly world “up here” no matter what kind of constantly changing mess was occurring “down there.”

But I Thought Chaos Theory Proved the World was Accidental

This may be a common assumption, and possibly another confusion cultivated on purpose by them, but chaos theory does not prove the world to be accidental. Although Chaos Theory remains a branch of modern physics, it does not have to do with ascribing chaos as the foundation of the universe, but with how patterns of form can mathematically be derived from partially ordered and partially chaotic systems in predictable ways.

Outside of chaos theory proper, the term “chaos” is employed elsewhere in various scientific disciplines in a technical way to identify systems that behave erratically in the sense of being hypersensitive to minute changes,[248] as well as unpredictable in the aforementioned sense of insufficient information being available to describe their originating states or predict their output.

It is surprising just how much shear language issues can be critical to objectively informing the public’s worldview. Everyone hears the misleading press releases, misleading news bites. They see misleading public documentaries. In all these they hear the word “chaos” bandied about in all kinds of different contexts and frequently with heavy materialistic spin and innuendo added. Ultimately in the majority of cases, “chaos” will mean to a layperson whatever sense they have had of it in the popular usage of their native language, and very little else. Almost always this sense will suggest an accidental world because in natural language sense of “chaos” there is no order, meaning in the application to physics, no natural law. Suffice it to say that when the term “chaos” comes out, one must either ask for a definition of terms for the presentation, or take the entire thing with a grain of salt as being too ambiguous to evaluate.

Scientists today, in intensively investigating both the theory of superstrings as a more fundamental level of matter beyond quantum particles, as well as other avenues related to grand unification theory (GUT), reaffirm their belief in real physical forces at the foundation of causation. If science had adopted materialist philosopher David Hume’s view of statistical conjunction as the only basis for natural law, we need look no further for deeper underlying entities. Anything can cause anything in such a world and the only explanation one can achieve is “It’s just that way.” GUT, however, like all our other theories and laws, claims the existence of a more fundamental real force that ties together the forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. GUT could reasonably be expected to have explanatory implications for quantum particle behavior as well.

To see how far quantum ‘chaos’ physicists are willing to stretch science, logic and common language use to obtain the privilege of applying the word “chaos” in any sense to the fundamental processes of nature in support of the materialist political agenda, consider the following ball field analogy. A college baseball coach has been assigned 100 visiting students from an indigenous people who are residents of a remote Alaskan village for a 6-hour cultural exchange event at a university in Arizona. They do not know about baseball.

The coach splits them up into three groups. She tells the first group to spend two hours doing anything they want as long as you remain on Field 1. The second group is told to take any defined team position you want on the baseball field until all the positions are filled, and then play the game by the rules provided. The extras are to cheer and substitute in for players on the half hour. Otherwise, the extras can do anything non-obstructive that they want as long as they stay within visual range of the field, Field 2. The students assigned to Field 3 are given a team roster and told to follow the roster exactly regarding position assignments, and then play by the rules of the game.

The political trickery in quantum physics comes into play in the use the already understood popular language term ‘chaos’ as a technical term of art in physics to refer to the situation on Field 2 instead of Field 1, as it would normally be applied in natural language. On field 2 of course all the required positions are always filled, it just doesn’t matter who fills the position. There may appear to be a momentary disorderly scramble as the team initially takes the field but they always sort themselves out quickly into the exact same configuration: all positions filled; play ball!

Since science is heavily concerned with prediction of physical processes, it is not surprising or incongruous that quantum physicists would want to coin a term to distinguish the unpredictable assignment of field positions for individuals on Field 2 (quantum particles) from situations with predictable field assignments as in Field 3. But, in choosing a term, why pick the one word that is already in use in the common language to describe the far different situation in Field 1? This just increases confusion, and promotes misunderstanding in the direction of the accidental world view.

And the analogy here raises an interesting question for the intelligent design debate. If the individual quantum particles don’t have any position assignments on the “field,” that is, they don’t individually tend of their own nature to go to a position on the useable “ball field” at all, what is it that has ensured a particle always showed up where and when needed to keep the orderly world we see intact if not the “coach.” Here again is Thaun’s argument for a refutation of materialism.

Why use ‘chaos’ to describe a situation where a predominance of the “players” always choose an orderly game of baseball and the others always choose not to significantly obstruct it? Considering that the “game” that quantum particles play serves to hold up the very fabric of the visible universe, operations, which, taken in total, are thousands of times more complex than a game of baseball, the term ‘chaos’ hardly applies. In fact, both assumptions that quantum chaos physicists make, that there is no reason or cause for the orderly group behavior of quantum particles, and that the situation can be honestly described as chaotic, seem both to be fully unjustified.

Why would materialist scientists want to misrepresent the situation at the foundation of physics to the public as chaotic when it is in fact quite orderly? One would have to ask them to be sure, but I surmise it is because they have already lost so much ground in cosmology to the Big Bang theory. Big Bang proved the universe was not eternal, but created. We have to remember that Marxism used to be a hugely popular political philosophy among intellectuals. There remain substantial, though largely hidden, pockets of Marxist academics even today, and even more scientists who have fallen under the influence of the related materialist ideology. In other words, many scientists still have a social agenda (if only an unconscious one) and tend to slant data, language, and research itineraries to influence public thinking in the preferred direction.

As note physicist Abraham Pais puts it, “Einstein had started his solitary search for a theory of principle that would maintain classical causality in an orderly way and from which quantum mechanics should be derivable as a constructive theory.” He reports Einstein as saying in 1929 that “I admire to the highest degree the achievements of the younger generation of physicists which goes by the name quantum mechanics and believe in the deep level of truth of that theory; but I believe that the restriction to statistical laws will be a passing one.”[249]

Here Einstein is saying that, when a more fundamental level of explanation underlying quantum mechanics is later achieved, the laws then seen to apply will not be merely statistical but derived from real physical force dynamics. If Einstein is correct, we will know it when we hit true bottom in the vertical structure of matter because everything will be explained and there will be no loose ends. Of course, if our world turns out to be vertically infinite there will be no true bottom.

There is more to ground Einstein’s position than just the intuition of history’s greatest physicist, though that would be a compelling argument in itself. The only three available alternatives are anathema to modern science: 1) invoke a nonphysical cause of the statistical order in quantum particle behavior; 2) assert that order can come from disorder, that is, that there need be no cause for the statistically ordered behavior of quantum particles—but this would violate two axioms of science, the definition of entropy and the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics that entropy can never decrease; or 3) violate the optimistic spirit of the entire history of science to date, throw up our hands and admit that there are loose ends in quantum physics that we will never be able to explain.

In closing there is one last interesting possibility to consider, especially amusing perhaps for persons of faith. It might be called “the Tower of Babel Barrier.” To keep man’s pride from getting the better of him any more than it has, God could continuously create deeper and deeper layers of our world in real time for the express purpose of staying ahead of us and teaching us humility. “Separating the languages didn’t do it; let’s see…how about trying some new physics! Boy! They’ll be chasing their tails forever on this one. Perhaps they’ll discover the created word while they’re looking.”

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