Faith & Science

Reuter’s Philip Pullella is reporting that Pope Benedict says “God was behind the Big Bang.” Well, what exactly would you expect the Pope to say on the subject — that God was not behind the Big Bang?
The story starts with this:

VATICAN CITY — God’s mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said Thursday.

“The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe,” Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

Gallup has just released its most recent poll (conducted annually I believe) describing Americans’ views on the origin of humanity. This year, according to Gallup, the numbers have changed slightly:

PRINCETON, NJ — Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement.

So what question did they ask to get these results? Here it is:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your of the development of human beings?
1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

Since they’ve asked the question this way for years, it makes sense, for statistical accuracy, that they stick with the original wording. But the wording is still problematic, and for an obvious reason–the three options are not jointly exhaustive. Millions of people hold views that are not captured by the three options.

Slate startled us the other day by publishing an insightful essay asking whether political and worldview presuppositions drive the debate over climate change on both sides — not only for those on the Right, but for combatants on the Left too, including scientists (who are mostly on the Left). It’s an elementary observation that should be evident to anyone who follows the evolution debate, but of course a welcome surprise coming from a venue like Slate.

Author Dr. Daniel Sarewitz worries that because the ranks of scientists are so politically skewed, that threatens the trust that scientists currently enjoy among the public:

This exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide. If that public confidence is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society.

I wonder, though, whether the loss of confidence isn’t already happening and whether that might be a healthy development.
Recently a pair of scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, considering various published news sources, tabulated the increasingly common use, by reporters and other writers, of authoritarian phrases like “science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science dictates,” and “science commands.” Typically, the phrases introduce a doctrinaire insistence that “science” demands our belief in catastrophic global warming, Darwinian evolution, assorted dietary or other health practices, and so on.

Science is seemingly so confident in itself that it now dictates belief in areas — from morality to eschatology — once deemed to be the special domain of religion. Once, it was religion that dealt in narratives of global apocalypse, life’s origins, and taboos on assorted foods and unclean practices. Now it’s science that tells us, for example, that the perception of ourselves as possessing free will is only an illusion. It’s our “selfish genes” that manipulate us through the meaty computer of our brains. Alternatively, science can tell us how to distinguish right from wrong based on considerations of human “flourishing.”

Consider this from John Lukacs At the End of An Age (2002):

In Chapter 1 of this book I suggested another fundamental limitation of Darwinism, which is the application of Evolution ever further and further backward, claiming that humans may have existed as early as one million years ago. That is a prime example of how unreason lies buried at the bottom of any and every materialist interpretation of mankind, because of its thesis of matter preceding human mind, with mind gradually appearing: when? perhaps in dribs and drabs, much later. (I happen to believe that there is no such thing as ‘pre-historic’ man, historicity being the fourth dimension of human existence from the beginning.) But perhaps the essential fault of Darwinism is its implicit denial that there is any fundamental difference, no matter how physically slight, between human beings and all other living beings. One need not be a religious believer to struggle against this notion: for if there is really no essential difference between human beings and all other living creatures, then there is no reason to have laws and institutions and mores prohibiting certain human acts and protecting human dignity, indeed, human lives. (pp. 120-121)

Lukacs, of course, is saying that Darwinists completely misconstrue humanness, both in the context of what it means to be human in time (historicity) and in the unique qualities of what humanness is (the mind). Because Darwinists are infatuated with morphological affinities, ape-like “ancestors” become “prehistoric man.” But (whatever else we may say of primordial hominid forms millions of years ago), is this “man”? Without the unique attributes of empathy, love, reasoning, a sense of the numinous, etc., can there be a “man” before there is a history of mankind? It seems doubtful. In short, is “prehistoric man” an oxymoron? Lukacs is correct in suggesting that it is. At best, the alternative is to see the grunts and groans of ape-like creatures as a largely seamless continuum to Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and onward. Darwin tried to make his case for it and it has been problematic ever since, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point:

Could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political — and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence — or causation?

In his next installment Professor Ussery complains that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough in my chapter “What Darwinism Can Do.” As an example of common descent I pointed to Baker’s yeast, for which there is good evidence that sometime in the past its genome duplicated. But I also noted that other yeasts with unduplicated genomes have done fine for themselves. The point was that gene or even whole genome duplication is not the powerful tool that Darwinists often claim. That point passed over Dave’s head. His main comment on the book’s next chapter, “What Darwinism Can’t Do” is to tell the reader to search PubMed for the words “cilium” and “evolution.” One gets lots of papers that contain both those words, he assures us. He naively assumes that means progress is being made on how the cilium could have arisen by a Darwinian mechanism. Ussery is simply wrong. Most of those papers have nothing to do with how the cilium evolved. Others contain interesting studies of which ciliary proteins are similar to which other proteins (which at best concerns only the topic of common descent) as well as vague, speculative scenarios, but none of the papers describes in testable detail how a structure like the cilium could have arisen step-by-step by a Darwinian mechanism. Dave’s argument might be dubbed “The Argument from Personal Credulity” — because he and others believe the cilium could arise by Darwinian means, it must have done so, and any paper that agrees it happened must contain strong evidence that it did happen. Credulity, however, is not ordinarily considered a scientific virtue.

[Editor’s Note: This is the final post in a six-part a series from microbiologist Donald L. Ewert, where he argues that the processes used by our immune system to generate antibodies are anything but “random,” and do not serve as an example of Darwinian evolution. Other posts in this rebuttal can be found at: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four, and Part Five. In the first five posts, Dr. Ewert responded to Kathryn Applegate of the BioLogos Foundation. In this sixth post, he responds to similar arguments from Edward Max at TalkOrgins that antibody generation is “evolution in miniature.”]

One of the goals of Edwards Max’s post at TalkOrigins is to refute a narrow claim of “creationists” that “random mutations are detrimental.” But he goes further and, like Applegate, asserts that “clearly what we observe in the antibody response is evolution in miniature.” Max believes that because affinity maturation of antibodies is an established biological process, it therefore carries more weight than the computerized model of evolution used by Richard Dawkins to demonstrate that “without the intervention of any intelligent designer…successive rounds of mutation and selection could be unambiguously shown to lead to increased fitness within living organisms.” Like Applegate, Max draws inspiration from a naíve reductionist view of affinity maturation to give false comfort for his philosophical perspective.

This just in from Tom Woodward: A special edition of the weekly “Darwin or Design” program, featuring Trinity College Research Professor Tom Woodward’s interview with Discovery Senior Fellow John West, is airing tonight, Thursday, November 18th. The hour-long program begins at 7 pm Eastern (6 pm Central, 4 pm Pacific) on the Salem Network station in Tampa, WTBN, at AM 570. The discussion centers on the scientific and philosophical issues in the origins contoversy among naturalistic Darwinists, theistic evolutionists, and design theorists. Those outside Central Florida can listen live via the internet by clicking here.. The topic is the new book, God and Evolution, edited by Discovery Fellow Jay Richards. Dr. West contributed the opening chapters of the book, and Read More ›

The first part of Professor Ussery’s review of The Edge of Evolution on the website BioLogos is mainly an exercise in throat clearing, where he describes his “philosophical and personal perspective,” notes that he and I agree on common descent, and correctly points out that my book concerns the mechanism of evolution. In the second installment Dave begins to show that he somehow just doesn’t get the big points of the book. In writing of the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations which degrade the genome, I had said that they were “hurtful.” He misunderstands this, writing, “the example [Behe] gives us is not a ‘good mutation.'” But the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations most certainly are “good” mutations in a Darwinian sense because they are adaptive — they help the organism survive. Think of it — it was already known that most mutations that have an observable effect are deleterious. But now we know that even “good,” adaptive mutations frequently damage or break genes. That is a fact that seems to be off most Darwinists’ radar screens, although it is a profound challenge to their theory.

Dave then first employs what turns out to be a frequent tool of his: citations of papers in the literature (implying they support his position) without even an attempt to explain how they pertain to the mechanism of evolution or the edge to Darwinian evolution that I argue for in my book. He cites one paper, “Origins, evolution, and phenotypic impact of new genes,” without saying how it is known the genes arose by Darwinian processes or citing where it was that I said gene duplication and diversification couldn’t produce new genes. (I said no such thing — the book concerns the limits to Darwinian evolution; it does not say Darwinian processes can’t do anything, and I discuss the likely Darwinian origins of genes for antifreeze proteins in the chapter “What Darwinism can do.”) He cites another paper “about recent evolution of beneficial mutations in humans” without saying what those mutations are, whether they are simple or complex, or whether they are constructive or (like antimalarial mutations) degradative. A reader of Dave’s post would be quite surprised to discover that one of the last subsections of the article is called “Is Darwinian evolution enough?” where the author gingerly writes that non-Darwinian mechanisms (although — God help us — not intelligent design) “should not be categorically dismissed.” Someone just might suspect that Dave is being misleading here, but I think it much more likely that he is so enchanted by Darwinian theory that he sees overwhelming evidence for it in any paper that contains the word “evolution.”

I normally do not respond to criticisms and reviews of my work that are simply posted on the internet. Rather, I engage reviews, comments, and articles that appear in journals or prominent newspapers and magazines. The reason is that those printed venues usually ask noted scientists or philosophers to review books, so that they are very likely to contain the most pertinent and insightful comments. After all, if a book challenging Darwinian evolution is reviewed separately by the likes of Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Michael Ruse, and Richard Dawkins, then the odds are good that they would have discovered any major errors, if such there be. However, if upon considering their criticisms, we see huffing and puffing instead of reasoned argument, or an attack on straw men instead of the actual arguments the author made, then we can conclude that the best minds in the field don’t have answers to the arguments the book presents. And if the best minds don’t have answers, it is quite likely that no one else has answers either.

That’s what happened when The Edge of Evolution was published in 2005. It received uniformly hostile reviews by prominent Darwinists. However, in my author’s blog on Amazon.com, at the time I engaged their criticisms and showed that virtually all of the reviews consisted of various degrees of bluster, question-begging, or attacks on straw men. What valid points remained I showed were minor and did not affect the main argument of the book: that while Darwinism can explain minor changes in life, there are strong reasons to think it does not explain much of the phenomenal complexity of the cell. Anyone who wishes to read those responses can do so at my blog and make their own judgments.