What would it take?

[LouisBooth]

"A system developed that worked fine without some certain parts. "

That's the point. The system will not work without those parts, the WHOLE system must devolope at the same time. I see what you are saying but realistically I can't see it working. YOu can't build the top of a house then later build the bottom and place the top on it. One doesn't survive without the other. (this is probalby a bad anaology, sorry I can't get a clearer one at this point).

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by LouisBooth

That's the point. The system will not work without those parts, the WHOLE system must devolope at the same time. I see what you are saying but realistically I can't see it working. YOu can't build the top of a house then later build the bottom and place the top on it. One doesn't survive without the other. (this is probalby a bad anaology, sorry I can't get a clearer one at this point).

You can build the top of a house then later build the bottom underneath it... you have to use scaffolding for the purpose. After you build the bottom and take the scaffolding away, the house will fall without the bottom. It isn't the worst possible analogy, but it is better discussed without analogy. "realistically I can't see it working" is not a real objection. You must demonstrate why it won't work that way before "irreducible complexity" can be considered a legitimate objection to evolution. The fact is that it can work that way, and you can see a good, documented, example of it working that way here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/icsic.html

 

[Jerry Smith]

Well, I've answered a few questions anyway. I hope that I have helped some people who were concerned over scientific perspectives on creation to see a wider perspective. I had expected (and hoped for) more people to ask questions in hopes of resolving science issues for themselves. Maybe more will. Maybe some of the others will wish to continue the discussion. I've answered questions for bogomip, LouisBooth, Tristan & Josephus, & engaged in some discussion with them. I wonder if any of them have other questions or if they will now accept the science of neo-darwinism now that their main questions have been answered.

So far, I am very impressed with the level of civility and intellectual honesty on this board. So often, you find that where the evolution/creation controversy is discussed, there is an excess of vitriol and a deficiency of substantive discussion. My compliments to (almost) everyone participating in this board for being the exception to that rule.

Jerry

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by LouisBooth
Jerry, that's all well and good, but its pure speculation. That's the problem. We are talking mega complex systems that DO NOT WORK AT ALL unless the whole system is devoloped at once. that's my point. Its not like you can make it less effient (sp). They just don't work at all unless the WHOLE system is in place, that's the problem.

How about, as a nice example, hemoglobin. For instance, there's a lot of genes involved in making hemoglobin work. If you take one of them out, you get hemophiliacs; if you take another out, you get problems with blood clots. Both should be fatal.

If you take both of them out, suddenly the blood works just fine again.

So... Suddenly, the impossibility of imagining blood without those two complicated proteins falls away; we discover that some parts *did* work without others, although there do exist some specific combinations which don't work.

I'm not sure I've yet seen a convincing example of irreducible complexity. Actually, I'm sure I haven't, although maybe there is one somewhere.

 

[Seed]

Jerry Smith Stated:

What would it take? To believe in evolution


My answer : God telling me that it was true! Because His Word say's He CREATED all things.

This is a general statement here, not aimed at any particular person.

It's all over this site! and sad to see. People saying "open your mind"- PLEASE!...We have open minds that's why we believe God and His Word and DONT believe some half cocked lies!

Sorry, but evolution is NOT proved! and is not truth only in (your) opened mind.

Sorry if this seems offensive, just answering the Question.


Jesus

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by Seed
Jerry Smith Stated:

My answer : God telling me that it was true! Because His Word say's He CREATED all things.

This is a general statement here, not aimed at any particular person.

It's all over this site! and sad to see. People saying "open your mind"- PLEASE!...We have open minds that's why we believe God and His Word and DONT believe some half cocked lies!

Unfortunately, God did not deem it necessary to include in Genesis what method he chose to use in creation. He did, however, provide his Creation for us to study, if we cared to learn how we came to be. If a direct quote from God Almighty, recorded by dictation through Bronze-Age shepherds is what it is going to take to convince you of evolution, I cannot help. If you are intersted in the scientific side, (i.e. the study of the history of Creation), then you have a chance to learn more through the science of evolution.

Sorry, but evolution is NOT proved! and is not truth only in (your) opened mind.

Sorry if this seems offensive, just answering the Question.

What are your standards of proof? Do you consider quantum theory proved? Or do you think that your computer works by accident and may break down any moment? Do you think that germ theory is proved? Or do you hold to the Christian Science approach to medicine, and never take a vaccine or antibotic? Evolution is as proved as germ theory, and no more so. Evolution is as much a fact of nature as the earth revolving around the sun, and no more so.

If you are not at all interested in the science, and only find truth as revealed to the bronze-age shepherds, then w have nothing to discuss. If you think the world has a natural component, then I don't see how you can avoid talking about it in terms of nature.

 

[Seed]

Originally posted by Jerry Smith


If you are intersted in the scientific side, (i.e. the study of the history of Creation), then you have a chance to learn more through the science of evolution.


What are your standards of proof?

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning --->God created <--- the heavens and the earth.

V.3 "Then God said" -- He spoke things into existance.


V.21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."


Funny, That does NOT say "Be fruitful and evolve."

Are you a Christian Jerry?


Jesus

 

[Seed]

Some more for ya.


It’s time to FACE the fact that:



F ossil records are an embarrassment to evolutionists.

A pe-men are fiction, fraud, and fantasy.

C hance renders evolution not just improbable but also impossible.

E mpirical science supports the creation model for origins and militates against the theory of evolution.

Fossil records

With all the millions of fossils that have been found—some 60 million specimens in the British Museum of History alone—why is there not one single fossil find that indicates verifiable transition from one species to another?

Darwin’s entire theory rests on this supposed evolution of fish becoming reptiles, reptiles transitioning into birds, and apes becoming humans. And yet, 120 years after Darwin, it is common knowledge among paleontologists that transitions from one species to another do not exist.

Yet the general public blithely accepts evolution as a fact. Even our universities teach the Darwinian theory as a proven fact of science.

Ape-Men?

Evolutionary theory predicts that scientists should be finding ample fossils of links between ape-like human ancestors and modern man. But even the scant examples for such links have been shown to be fiction, fraud, and fantasy.

There was Nebraska Man found in 1922, a “find” based on the discovery of a single tooth. After much hoopla by evolutionists, the tooth turned out to be a pig’s! There was Java Man (pithecanthropus erectus), based on a 19th century smattering of bone fragments, which was later discounted as a pre-human in a 342-page investigative report by a team of evolutionists. The 1912 Piltdown Man fossils were shown to be a deliberate fraud after fooling a generation of scientists. The famed Peking Man turned out to be nothing more than a monkey. And the even more famous “Lucy” fossil is, even according to many evolutionists, merely an ape.

Chance replaces an intelligent Designer if evolution is true. But…



HOW could chance account for the obvious organization of complex living systems? Especially when things of less complex organization (statues, buildings, computers) could never happen by chance?
WHY do respected biochemists like Dr. Michael Behe of Lehigh University say that recent discoveries show living cells to be “machines” with billions of interactive parts that could never have arisen by chance or Darwinian evolution?
WHY does Dr. James Coppedge, an expert in the science of statistical probability, calculate that the chance of forming even a single protein molecule from random processes, even in hundreds of millions of years, is an impossible 1 in 10161 (10 followed 161 zeroes)?


Empirical science and reason undergird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolution model.



ISN’T evolution just another form of the scientifically discredited theory of “spontaneous generation” — which claimed that living matter springs mysteriously from non-organic matter?
DOESN’T evolution rest on the logically absurd notion that the universe created itself? That something comes from nothing? That effects have no original cause?

DOESN’T evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), which says that everything generally runs from order to disorder and from complexity to decay?
WHY do leading evolutions concede that species appear in the fossil record “suddenly, and are not led up to by gradual … transitional sequences” (George Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution)? This is exactly what creationism would predict!


Jesus

 

[Jerry Smith]

me, previously -> If you are intersted in the scientific side, (i.e. the study of the history of Creation), then you have a chance to learn more through the science of evolution.


What are your standards of proof?

seed -> Genesis 1:1 In the beginning --->God created <--- the heavens and the earth.

V.3 "Then God said" -- He spoke things into existance.


V.21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."

I wasn't asking if you were interested in a non-scientific perspective, such as Biblical exegesis. I was intereseted in whether you cared about looking at God's nature for information that wasn't provided in the Bible - a scientific perspective.

God might have been a David Copperfield style magician that "spoke" things into existence with a poof of smoke. On the other hand, He may have created nature with the poof of smoke and that nature, obeying the laws He assigned to it, may have done the rest of the work. The evidence from nature says that evolution happened. If God "poofed" that nature into existence, complete (and replete) with the evidence of evolution, then He wanted us to believe the "lie" of evolution, or He did indeed employ evolution.

Which do you believe? That God wants us to believe a lie, or that God used evolution?

For the record, I would never suggest to an open-minded person that these were the only two options, but since you can only accept a literal creation account from Genesis, and since the evidence says incontrovertibly that evolution happened, you are really only left with these two options unless you open your mind.

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by Seed
Some more for ya.

F ossil records are an embarrassment to evolutionists.

A pe-men are fiction, fraud, and fantasy.

C hance renders evolution not just improbable but also impossible.

E mpirical science supports the creation model for origins and militates against the theory of evolution.

So far, these are 100% false, and can be fairly easily *shown* to be false.

Empirical science provides absolutely *NO* support for creation - nor could it! It wouldn't make *sense* to talk about "empirical" evidence.

And, no, it would *NOT* contradict the second law of thermodynamics. That argument sounded really convincing to me in 7th grade or so, before I learned the actual 2nd law... WHICH APPLIES ONLY TO A CLOSED SYSTEM, WHICH A PLANET IS NOT.

 

[Seed]

By Jerry - For the record, I would never suggest to an open-minded person that these were the only two options, but since you can only accept a literal creation account from Genesis, and since the evidence says incontrovertibly that evolution happened, you are really only left with these two options unless you open your mind.

And I could say the same thing to you about your evolutionary beliefs.


BTW You didn't answer my Question. Are you a Christian?

Jesus

 

[Seed]

Originally posted by seebs


So far, these are 100% false, and can be fairly easily *shown* to be false.

Empirical science provides absolutely *NO* support for creation - nor could it! It wouldn't make *sense* to talk about &quot;empirical&quot; evidence.

And, no, it would *NOT* contradict the second law of thermodynamics. That argument sounded really convincing to me in 7th grade or so, before I learned the actual 2nd law... WHICH APPLIES ONLY TO A CLOSED SYSTEM, WHICH A PLANET IS NOT.

Are you saying....You want a piece of me? One at a time!


Jesus

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by Seed

Are you saying....You want a piece of me? One at a time!

I'm saying I think you're being misled by people who make a living telling people they have counterarguments for evolution.

A while back, I used to think that "creation scientists" were honest, but uninformed. Further research reveals that, with rare exceptions, they are intentionally misleading, misquoting, and misrepresenting... and that a lot of them sell books and/or do the lecture circuit.

The key to the whole game is saying that God's only really God if He does everything by waving His hands and saying "Poof" a lot. It just ain't so; God is welcome to do things indirectly.

Let me give you an analogy.

There was a kid, and when he was in grade school, he asked his dad what he did for a living. "I build houses," his dad said. As years went by, the kid grew up, and began helping with household chores. One day, he was helping with some family bookkeeping, and he noticed that his dad got a lot of money for work, and that most of it was sent to various companies that apparently did some kind of construction services. He started studying the pattern, and it appeared that, when his dad built a house, in fact, his dad simply drafted a design, and then hired people to build the house he had designed.

Do you think his dad lied to him?

I don't.

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by Seed


And I could say the same thing to you about your evolutionary beliefs.

Yeah, but his are supported by *mountains* of evidence. (In some places, quite literally.)

BTW You didn't answer my Question. Are you a Christian?

Jesus

I dunno about Jerry, but I am. I was raised Lutheran, and I believe in God more today than I did when I was growing up. I believe in Christ, the son of God, who was incarnate in human form, and died for our sins.

I also believe that God created the universe no less than 14 billion years ago, and that, around 4-5 billion years ago, one of the areas of the universe was enough like a planet to be identifiably the same thing that we're sitting on today, and that life has existed here for probably over a billion years, although complicated life like us may not go back more than a few million years, and humans probably well under half a million.

 

[Seed]

WHAT IS DARWINISM? Why Science Clings to a Fractured Paradigm1


by Phillip E. Johnson





Summary

The debate between creationism and Darwinism is often depicted as a dispute between naive biblical literalists, who ignore the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and scientifically enlightened intellectuals. But this is a caricature that serves the purpose of helping to perpetuate a world view hostile to Christian faith: atheistic naturalism. The debate hinges on five key terms: creationism, evolution, science, religion, and truth. Instead of trying to Christianize evolution we ought instead to challenge the assumption that atheistic naturalism is true.

The popular television game show Jeopardy reverses the usual order of things. Instead of being asked a question to which they must supply the answer, contestants are given the answer and asked to provide the appropriate question. This format suggests an insight that is applicable to law, to science, and indeed to just about everything. More important than knowing all the answers is knowing what question is being asked.

That insight is the starting point for my inquiry into Darwinian evolution and its relationship to creation, because Darwinism is the answer to two very different kinds of questions. First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence. If a small population of birds happens to migrate to an isolated island, for example, a combination of inbreeding, mutation, and natural selection may cause this isolated population to develop different characteristics from those possessed by the ancestral population on the mainland. When the theory is understood in this limited sense, Darwinian evolution is uncontroversial and has no important philosophical or theological implications.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits. They aspire to answer a much broader question — how complex organisms like birds, flowers, and human beings came to exist at all. The Darwinian answer to this second question is that the creative force that produced complex plants and animals is essentially the same as the mechanism producing variations in flowers, insects, and domestic animals before our very eyes. In the words of Ernst Mayr, the dean of living Darwinists, "Transspecific evolution [i.e., macroevolution] is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species."

Neo-Darwinian evolution in this broad sense is a philosophical doctrine so lacking in empirical support that Mayr’s successor at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, in a reckless moment once pronounced it "effectively dead." Yet neo-Darwinism is far from dead. On the contrary, it is continually proclaimed in textbooks and the media as unchallengeable fact. How does it happen that so many scientists and intellectuals, who pride themselves on their empiricism and open-mindedness, continue to accept an unempirical theory as scientific fact?

 

[Seed]

DEFINING THE ISSUES

The answer to that question lies in the definition of five key terms — creationism, evolution, science, religion, and truth. Once we understand how these words are used in evolutionary discourse, the continued ascendancy of neo-Darwinism will be no mystery, and we need no longer be deceived by claims that the theory is supported by "overwhelming evidence." As we shall see, there are powerful vested interests in this area that thrive in the midst of ambiguity and confusion. Those who insist on defining terms precisely and using them consistently may find themselves regarded with suspicion and hostility, and even accused of being enemies of science.




Creationism

The first word is creationism, which means simply a belief in creation. In Darwinist usage, which dominates not only popular and professional scientific literature but also the media, a creationist is a person who takes the creation account in the Book of Genesis as true in the most literal sense. The earth was created in a single week of six 24-hour days no more that 10,000 years ago; the major features of the geological record were produced by Noah’s flood; and there have been no major innovations in the forms of life since the beginning. It is a major theme of Darwinist propaganda that the only persons who have any doubts about Darwinism are young-earth creationists of this sort, who are always portrayed as rejecting the clear and convincing evidence of science to preserve a religious prejudice. The implication is that citizens of modern society are faced with a choice that is really no choice at all. Either they reject science altogether and retreat to a premodern world view, or they believe everything the Darwinists tell them.

In a broader sense, however, a creationist is simply a person who believes in the existence of a creator who brought about the world and its living inhabitants for a purpose. Whether the process of creation took a single week or billions of years is relatively unimportant from a philosophical or theological standpoint. Creation by gradual processes over geological ages may create problems for biblical interpretation, but it creates none for the basic principle of theistic religion. Creation in this broad sense, according to a 1991 Gallup poll, is the creed of 87 percent of Americans. Is creation in this sense consistent with evolution?

 

[Seed]

Evolution

The answer is no, when evolution is understood in the Darwinian sense. To Darwinists evolution means naturalistic evolution, an insistence that science must assume that the cosmos is a closed system of material causes and effects, which can never be influenced by anything outside of material nature, such as God. In the beginning, an explosion of matter created the cosmos, and undirected, naturalistic evolution produced everything that followed. Thus, no intelligent purpose guided evolution. If intelligence exists today, that is only because it has itself evolved through purposeless material processes.

At bottom the theory must be based on chance, because that is what is left when we have ruled out everything involving intelligence or purpose. But theories invoking only chance are not credible. One thing everyone acknowledges is that living organisms are enormously complex — far more so than, say, a computer or an airplane. That such complex entities came into existence simply by chance is clearly less credible than that they were designed and constructed by a creator. To back up their claim that this appearance of intelligent design is an illusion, Darwinists therefore need to provide a building force that is mindless and purposeless. Natural selection is by far the most plausible candidate.

If we assume that random genetic mutations provided the new genetic information needed, say, to give a small mammal a start towards wings, and if we assume that each tiny step in the process of wing-building gave the animal an increased chance of survival, then natural selection ensured that the favored creatures would thrive and reproduce. It logically follows that wings can and will appear as if by the plan of a designer. Of course, if wings or other improvements do not appear, the theory explains their absence just as well. The needed mutations didn’t arrive, or "developmental constraints" closed off certain possibilities, or natural selection favored something else. There is no requirement that any of this speculation be confirmed by either experimental or fossil evidence. To Darwinists just being able to imagine the process is sufficient to confirm that something like that must have happened.

Biologist Richard Dawkins calls the process of creation by mutation and selection "the blind watchmaker," by which he means that a purposeless, materialistic designing force substitutes for the "watchmaker" deity of natural theology. The creative power of the blind watchmaker is supported only by very slight evidence, such as the famous example of a moth population in which the percentage of dark moths increased during a period when the birds were better able to see light moths against the smoke-darkened background trees. This may be taken to show that natural selection can change organisms, but not that it can create organisms that were not already in existence.

Even such slight evidence is more than sufficient, however, because evidence is not really necessary to prove something that is practically self-evident. The existence of a potent blind watchmaker follows deductively from the philosophical premise that nature had to do its own creating. There can be argument about the details, but if God was not in the picture something very much like Darwinism simply has to be true, regardless of the evidence.

 

[Seed]

Science

That brings me to my third term, science. We have already seen that Darwinists assume as a first principle that the history of the cosmos and its life forms is fully explicable on naturalistic principles. This reflects a philosophical doctrine called scientific naturalism, a necessary consequence of the inherent limitations of science. What scientific naturalism does, however, is transform the limitations of science into limitations on reality, in the interest of maximizing the explanatory power of science and its practitioners. It is, of course, entirely possible to study organisms scientifically on the premise that they were all created by God, just as scientists study airplanes and even works of art without denying that these objects are intelligently designed. The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important that is outside the boundaries of natural science. For scientists who want to be able to explain everything, this is an intolerable possibility.

The second feature of scientific naturalism that is important for our purpose is its set of rules governing the criticism and replacement of a paradigm. A paradigm is a general theory, like the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has achieved general acceptance in the scientific community. The paradigm unifies the various specialties that make up the research community, and guides research in all of them. Thus, zoologists, botan-ists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and paleontologists all see their research as aimed at filling out the details of the Darwinian paradigm.

If molecular biologists see a pattern of apparently neutral mutations, which have no apparent effect on an organism’s fitness, they must find a way to reconcile their findings with the paradigm’s requirement that natural selection guides evolution. This they can do by postulating a sufficient quantity of invisible adaptive mutations, supposedly accumulated by natural selection. Similarly, if paleontologists see new fossil species appearing suddenly in the fossil record, and remaining basically unchanged thereafter, they must perform whatever contortions are necessary to force this recalcitrant evidence into a model of incremental change through the accumulation of micromutations.

Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly admitted, "We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing it does not."2 Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation occurred because of "the certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works." This certainty produced a degree of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the relegation of paleontologists to the "lunatic fringe" who reported that "they saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other."3 Under the circumstances, prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and just gather the facts would be to earn the demeaning label of "stamp collector" (i.e., one who does not theorize).

As many philosophers of science have observed, the research community does not abandon a paradigm in the absence of a suitable replacement. This means that negative criticism of Darwinism, however devastating it may appear to be, is essentially irrelevant to the professional researchers. A critic may point out, for example, that the evidence that natural selection has any creative power is somewhere between weak and nonexistent. That is perfectly true, but to Darwinists the more important point is this: If natural selection did not do the creating, what did? "God" is obviously unacceptable, because such a being is unknown to science. "We don’t know" is equally unacceptable, because to admit ignorance would be to leave science adrift without a guiding principle. To put the problem in the most practical terms: it is impossible to write or evaluate a grant proposal without a generally accepted theoretical framework.

The paradigm rule explains why Gould’s acknowledgment that neo-Darwinism is "effectively dead" had no significant effect on the Darwinist faithful, or even on Gould himself. Gould made that statement in a paper predicting the emergence of a new general theory of evolution, one based on the macromutational speculations of the Berkeley geneticist Richard Goldschmidt.4 When the new theory did not arrive as anticipated, the alternatives were either to stick with Ernst Mayr’s version of neo-Darwinism or to concede that biologists do not know of a naturalistic mechanism that can produce biological complexity. That was no choice at all. Gould had to beat a hasty retreat back to classical Darwinism to avoid giving aid and comfort to the enemies of scientific naturalism, including those disgusting creationists. Having to defend a dead theory tooth and nail can hardly be a satisfying activity, and it is no wonder that Gould lashes out with fury at people such as myself who call attention to his predicament.5 I do not mean to ridicule Gould, because I have a genuinely high regard for the man as one of the few Darwinists who has recognized the major problems with the theory and reported them honestly. His tragedy is that he cannot admit the clear implications of his own thought without effectively resigning from science.

The continuing survival of Darwinist orthodoxy illustrates Thomas Kuhn’s famous point that the accumulation of anomalies never in itself falsifies a paradigm, since "to reject one paradigm without substituting another is to reject science itself."6 This practice may be appropriate as a way of carrying on the professional enterprise called science, but it can be grossly misleading when it is imposed on persons who are asking questions other than the ones scientific naturalists want to ask. Suppose, for example, that I want to know whether God really had something to do with creating living organisms. A typical Darwinian response is that there is no reason to invoke supernatural action because Darwinian selection was capable of performing the job. To evaluate that response, I need to know whether natural selection really has the fantastic creative power attributed to it. It is not a sufficient answer to say that scientists have nothing better to offer. The fact that scientists don’t like to say "we don’t know" tells me nothing about what they really do know.

I am not suggesting that scientists have to change their rules about retaining and discarding paradigms. All I want them to do is to be candid about the disconfirming evidence and admit, if it is the case, that they are hanging on to Darwinism only because they prefer a shaky theory to having no theory at all. What they insist on doing, however, is to present Darwinian evolution to the public as a fact that every rational person is expected to accept. If there are reasonable grounds to doubt the theory such dogmatism is ridiculous, whether or not the doubters have a better theory to propose.

To believers in creation, Darwinists seem thoroughly intolerant and dogmatic when they insist that their own philosophy must have a monopoly in the schools and the media. Darwinists do not see themselves that way, of course. On the contrary, they often feel aggrieved when creationists (in either the broad or narrow sense) ask to have their own arguments heard and considered. To insist that schoolchildren be taught that Darwinian evolution is a fact is in their minds merely to protect the integrity of science education; to present the other side of the case would be to allow fanatics to force their opinions on others. Even college professors have been forbidden to express their doubts about Darwinian evolution in the classroom, and it seems widely believed that the Constitution not only permits but actually requires such restrictions on academic freedom.7

 

[Seed]

Religion

To explain this bizarre situation, we must define our fourth term: religion. Suppose that a skeptic argues that evidence for biological creation by natural selection is obviously lacking, and that in the circumstances we ought to give serious consideration to the possibility that the development of life required some input from a preexisting, purposeful creator. To scientific naturalists this suggestion is "creationist" and therefore unacceptable in principle, because it invokes an entity unknown to science. What is worse, it suggests the possibility that this creator may have communicated in some way with humans, perhaps with real prophets — persons with a genuine knowledge of God. Such persons could be dangerous rivals for the scientists as cultural authorities.

Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Thus, students in the public schools must be taught at an early age that "evolution is a fact," and as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism.

The proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, since naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of scientific knowledge and what contradicts knowledge is implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have said everything that can be said about God. In naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.




Truth

Our fifth term is truth. Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy. The reason for this is that "truth" suggests an unchanging absolute, whereas scientific knowledge is a dynamic concept. Like life, knowledge evolves and grows into superior forms. What was knowledge in the past is not knowledge today, and the knowledge of the future will surely be far superior to what we have now. Only naturalism itself, and the unique validity of science as the path to knowledge, are absolutes. There can be no criterion for truth outside of scientific knowledge, no mind of God to which we have access.

This way of understanding things persists even when scientific naturalists employ religious-sounding language. For example, the physicist Stephen Hawking ended his famous book A Brief History of Time with the prediction that humanity might one day "know the mind of God." This phrasing gives some friends of mine the mistaken impression that he has some attraction to theism. In context, Hawking was not referring to a supernatural eternal agent, but to the possibility that scientific knowledge will eventually become complete and all-encompassing because it will have explained the movements of material particles in all circumstances.

The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether Darwinism is true. They will gladly concede that the theory is incomplete and that further research is needed. At any given point in time, however, the reigning theory of naturalistic evolution represents the state of scientific knowledge about how we came into existence. Scientific knowledge is by naturalistic definition the closest approximation of absolute truth available to us. To ask whether this knowledge is true is to miss the point, and to betray a misunderstanding of "how science works."




CHRISTIANS AND DARWINISM

So far I have described the metaphysical categories by which scientific naturalists have excluded the topic of God from rational discussion, and thus ensured that Darwinism’s fully naturalistic creation story is effectively true by definition. There is no need to explain why atheists find this system of thought control congenial. What is more difficult to understand — at least at first — is the strong support Darwinism continues to receive in the Christian academic world. Attempts to investigate the credibility of Darwinist evolution are regarded with little enthusiasm by many leading Christian professors of science and philosophy, even at institutions that are generally regarded as theologically conservative. Given that Darwinism is inherently naturalistic and therefore antagonistic to the idea that God had anything to do with the history of life, and that it plays the central role in ensuring agnostic domination of the intellectual culture, one might have supposed that Christian intellectuals (along with religious Jews) would be eager to find its weak spots.

Instead, the prevailing view among Christian professors has been that Darwinism — or "evolution," as they tend to call it — is unbeatable, and that it can be interpreted to be consistent with Christian belief. In fact Darwinism is unbeatable as long as one accepts the thought categories of scientific naturalism that I have been describing. The problem is that those same thought categories make Christian theism, or any other theism, absolutely untenable. If science has exclusive authority to tell us how life was created, and if science is committed to naturalism, and if science never discards a paradigm until it is presented with an acceptable naturalistic alternative, then Darwinism’s position is impregnable within science. Yet the same reasoning that makes Darwinism inevitable also bans God from taking any action within the history of the Cosmos, which makes theism illusory. Theistic naturalism is self-contradictory.

Some hope to avoid the contradiction by asserting that naturalism rules only within the realm of science, and that there is a separate realm called "religion" in which theism can flourish. The problem with this, as we have already seen, is that in a naturalistic culture scientific conclusions are considered to be knowledge, or even fact. What is outside of fact is fantasy, or at best subjective belief. Theists who accommodate scientific naturalism therefore may never affirm that their God is real in the same sense that evolution is real. This rule is essential to the entire naturalistic mindset that produced Darwinism in the first place.

If God exists He could certainly work through scientifically explainable processes if that is what He wanted to do, but He could also create by some means totally outside the ken of our science. Once we put Him into the picture, there is no good reason to attribute the creation of biological complexity to random mutation and natural selection. Direct evidence that these mechanisms have substantial creative power is not to be found in nature, the laboratory, or the fossil record. An essential step in the reasoning that establishes that Darwinian selection created the wonders of biology, therefore, is that nothing else was available. Theism says that something else was available.

Perhaps the contradiction is hard to see when it is stated at an abstract level, so I will give a more concrete example. Persons who advocate the compromise position called "theistic evolution" are in my experience always vague about what they mean by "evolution." They have good reason to be vague. As we have seen, Darwinian evolution is by definition unguided and purposeless, and such evolution cannot in any meaningful sense be theistic. For evolution to be genuinely theistic it must be guided by God, whether this means God programmed the process in advance or stepped in from time to time to push it in the right direction. To Darwinists evolution guided by God is a soft form of creationism — that is to say, it is not evolution at all. To repeat, this understanding goes to the very heart of Darwinist thinking. Allow a preexisting supernatural intelligence to guide evolution, and this omnipotent being can do a whole lot more than that.

Of course, theists can think of evolution as God-guided whether naturalistic Darwinists like it or not. One problem with having a private definition for theists, however, is that the scientific naturalists have the power to decide what the term "evolution" means in public discourse, including the science classes in the public schools. If theistic evolutionists broadcast the message that evolution as they understand it is harmless to theistic religion, they are misleading their constituents unless they add a clear warning that the version of evolution advocated by the entire body of mainstream science is something else altogether. That warning is never clearly delivered, because the main point of theistic evolution is to preserve peace with the mainstream scientific community. Theistic evolutionists therefore unwittingly serve the purposes of the scientific naturalists by helping persuade the religious community to lower its guard against the incursion of naturalism.

We are now in a position to answer the question, What is Darwinism? Darwinism is a theory of empirical science only at the level of microevolution, where it provides a framework for explaining phenomena such as the diversity that arises when small populations become reproductively isolated from the main body of the species. As a general theory of biological creation Darwinism is not empirical at all. Rather, it is a necessary implication of a philosophical doctrine called scientific naturalism, which is based on the nonscintific assumption that God was always absent from the realm of nature. Evolution in the Darwinian sense is inherently antithetical to theism, although evolution in some entirely different and nonnaturalistic sense could conceivably (if not demonstrably) have been God’s chosen method of creation.

To return to the game of Jeopardy with which we started, let us say that Darwinism is the answer. What, then, is the question? The question is: "How must creation have occurred if we assume that God had nothing to do with it?" Theistic evolutionists err in trying to Christianize the answer to a question that comes straight out of the agenda of scientific naturalism. What we need to do instead is challenge the assumption that the only questions worth asking are the ones that assume that naturalism is true.


Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law at the University of California. He is the author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance, and also the forthcoming Defeating Darwinism — By Opening Minds (InterVarsity Press).

 

[Seed]

That will take you awhile to examine. Get back to me