Casey Luskin had an excellent and very in-depth conversation with Brandon McGuire on the Daily Dose of Wisdom podcast on YouTube. Something Dr. Luskin said reminded me of what Denyse O’Leary wrote yesterday about near-death experiences, that materialists’ attempts to explain the mind as a mere material reality — nothing more than the brain and its activity — are really attempts to explain away what won’t fit into their paradigm. In a neat serendipity, Luskin has a great comment along the same lines but covering the full spectrum of evidence for intelligent design, from the origin of the universe to the origin of life to the origin of biological information across the species.
Ubiquitous in Evolution
Materialists have many ad hoc explanations, often ridiculous, for how all that got there. But they always amount to the same thing: Because we see what we see — the existence of the universe, of life, of our own or other species, you name it — and because a designing mind outside nature is by definition inadmissible as a cause, therefore there must be a material explanation and here’s a guess at what it might be. Brandon gives the example of atheist speculation that the universe could have originated from absolute nothing via a quantum fluctuation (in what?). He asks Luskin what he makes of this kind of reasoning. Of course, it’s ubiquitous in evolution. Casey’s answer (from 01:15:32 to 01:20:14) is worth reading in full:
Well, it’s kind of begging the question, right? You’re assuming the truth of the evolutionary position before you even come to the table. And evolutionists do this all the time.
Let me give you one of my favorite examples, and this is from the field of biogeography. How do we explain the distribution of organisms in space and time with common ancestry? According to the standard evolutionary model, there are Old World monkeys who live in the Old World and there are New World monkeys who live in the New World. And New World monkeys are supposed to have evolved from Old World monkeys. We’re talking basically about monkeys in South America. This is the continent in the New World that has monkeys and monkey fossils. New World monkeys show up in the fossil record, and also I think molecular clocks, indicating that according to evolutionary thinking Old World monkeys would have somehow colonized South America around 25 to 30 million years ago, maybe 35 [million], something like that but let’s call it 30 million years ago.
The problem is that 30 million years ago, South America was an isolated island continent. According to plate tectonics, 30 million years ago South America was separated from Africa where the Old World monkeys come from. It was separated from Africa by literally hundreds if not thousands of kilometers of open ocean.
So, if you’re an evolutionist, you have a serious problem. Where do South American monkeys come from? How do you explain African monkeys colonizing South America when basically it [South America] was an isolated island continent at 30 million years ago?
But you know, they’re thinking exactly the way you just described: Well, South American monkeys are there. So, it must have happened somehow, and intelligent design is off the table. They will not even consider a non-evolutionary or non-mechanistic evolutionary approach to explaining anything.
“Now That I Think About It”
Brandon interjects with an apt joke, “You know what it could have been though, now that I think about it, it could have been a quantum fluctuation.”
Luskin continues:
Well, it’s something along those lines. I think it’s the biogeographical equivalent of a quantum fluctuation. They literally claim that African monkeys rafted across the Atlantic Ocean and colonized South America. And it can’t just be one monkey. Because [if] one monkey gets there, it’s dead. It’s got to be multiple monkeys or maybe a pregnant monkey. And primates have very high metabolisms. So, you’ve got to keep these things alive for many days with both food and water.
Am I saying it’s absolutely impossible? Maybe not. But what I am saying is this. When you see evolutionary scientists resorting to these kinds of explanations, to explain away data that does not fit their theory, their model is not working very well. I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible, but … we see this with many areas, the multiverse, [for example]: [according to materialists,] there’s a vast infinite, near infinite, number of unobservable universes. That’s how [they] explain [cosmic] fine-tuning. Or punctuated equilibrium: The reason we don’t see transitional forms in the fossil record is because the evolution took place so rapidly and in such small populations that there are not any opportunities to leave these transitional forms. [Or] the origin of the universe: you get the fluctuation in the void.
We’re now taking a step back, Brandon, and we’re seeing this macro view that, over and over and over again, materialists have to resort to very speculative and I would call [them] improbable and highly unpersuasive models to be able to explain how they can retain their materialistic and/or evolutionary model without it being refuted by the data.
Whereas the design, the information, that we’re seeing in the universe, the information required at the origin of the universe, information required to explain the fine-tuning, information required to explain complex animal forms that appeared throughout the history of life, information that is all throughout biology: This is pointing to the need for an intelligent cause. Intelligent design is explaining the data whereas materialism and evolution are trying to explain away the data.
And you can see this in the outlandish explanations that [materialists] are forced to resort to over and over again. Even if those explanations are not technically impossible, or maybe there’s a little bit of evidence for them here and there, and you can give them some inkling of plausibility in some very small sense, [if] you look at the pattern, you see that where they’re forced to go is to some pretty not very good explanatory places. This happens over and over again. And [it] tells you why materialism is not correct.
Watch the whole episode here: