Science and Culture Today | Page 1265 | Discovering Design in Nature

Evolutionists group species by similarities, thinking this reveals patterns of common descent. Then they find another similarity (not surprisingly with the same pattern) and they conclude it must have evolved. After all, it fits the pattern.
The logic is laughable, and here’s a funny example. Evolutionists are now concluding that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. And how do they figure this? First, they tickled 22 apes and three humans (your tax dollars at work). Then they discovered similarities. As the BBC reports:

Before you head to the beach this summer, don’t forget to grab a few good books. Over at ID the Future, I’ve attempted to aid you by interviewing a number of authors with new books out this month. You can listen to these authors discuss their books and judge for yourself what is most interesting: First, I interviewed J. Budziszewski on his latest book on natural law theory, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction. Second, see my interview with Benjamin Wiker on his new biography The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin. Third, check out this interview with John Mark Reynolds on his new introduction to classical and Christian Read More ›

Blogger David T. at Life’s Private Book has a good post on our modern priesthood. David quotes Baron d’Holbach from the18th century:

“Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; nothing has been offered to his mind, but stories of invisible powers, upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of his priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and directing his actions.”

David notes that we still have priests, but they are secular priests–Experts–and they provide us with a semblance of meaning and healing:

…the referents have changed. The “invisible powers” offered to man today are not angels and demons, but obscure material forces…

He observes that modern man, in the place of priests of old,

…[has] “experts” who dispense therapy and pills to relieve his depression, other experts who construct government education and welfare programs, without which obscure social forces will inevitably turn him into a criminal, and yet other experts who inspect his genetic code like tea leaves and tell him that he is doomed to be a loser anyway. Instead of confession, we have therapy; instead of the sacrament of baptism, we have the sacrament of abortion; instead of Calvinism, we have genetic determinism.

We need priests because the fundamental state of man is our contingency. We are in a state of ‘primitive stupidity’ in the sense that we do not intrinsically know metaphysical truth, the answers to such questions as ‘why is there anything’ and ‘why are we here’. Much of our lives are implicitly or explicitly devoted to answering these questions, and we depend, and have always depended, on priests. Our answer is to worship. We differ in the priests we consult, and by what we worship.

This is the final installment of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here, and the second post can be found here.

The Collins/Barr Approach: A God Who Misleads?

Stephen Barr identifies himself with the position of Francis Collins who argues that although evolution looks like “a random and undirected process,” it nevertheless could have been guided by God. “Evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.” [Collins, The Language of God, p. 205.]

Barr takes me to task for highlighting Collins’ use of the word “could” because I implied that “Collins is not sure whether God did in fact know beforehand. Anyone who has read Collins’s book, however, should realize that Collins absolutely and unequivocally holds the belief that God knows all events from all eternity.” Really? In the same book that Collins says that God “could” have known and specified the outcome of evolution, he also claims that much of our DNA is basically junk that certainly was not the product of God’s intentional design. In particular, Collins goes on at length about “Ancient Repetitive Elements,” which he disparages as “genetic flotsam and jetsam” that make up “roughly 45 percent of the human genome.” Collins concedes that “some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as ‘junk DNA’ just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Language of God, p. 156, emphasis added] In other words, Collins rejects as credulous the idea that such DNA were planned by God for a reason. So much for the idea that God knew and specified the outcomes of evolution from eternity.

This is the second of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here.

Mainstream Theistic Evolution: Directed or Undirected?

In the initial decades after Darwin proposed his theory, theistic evolution typically was presented as a form of guided evolution. Although Darwin himself rejected the idea that evolution was guided by God to accomplish particular ends, many of Darwin’s contemporaries (including those in the scientific community) rejected undirected natural selection as sufficient to explain all the major advances in the history of life. Instead, according to historian Peter Bowler, there was widespread acceptance of the idea “that evolution was an essentially purposeful process… The human mind and moral values were seen as the intended outcome of a process that was built into the very fabric of nature and that could thus be interpreted as the Creator’s plan.” [Bowler, Darwinism (1993), p. 6]

This view of evolution as a purposeful process began to disintegrate early in the twentieth century after Darwinian natural selection underwent a resurgence due to work in experimental genetics. Once Darwin’s theory of undirected evolution became the consensus of the scientific community, the task for mainstream theistic evolution became considerably harder: Now one had to reconcile theism not just with the idea of universal common ancestry, but with the idea that the development of life was driven by an undirected process based on random genetic mistakes. But how can God “direct” an “undirected” process? The answer of many leading theistic evolutionists is clear: God didn’t.

Theistic evolutionist Stephen Barr is a serious and thoughtful man, and on the First Things blog, he has raised some serious and thoughtful objections to an essay I wrote for The Washington Post as well as to reflections on that essay by Joe Carter (also at the First Things blog). Unfortunately, I think Barr’s criticisms confuse matters more than they clarify them. Nevertheless, I’m grateful that he has aired his objections, because some of his misunderstandings are shared by other conservative intellectuals, and they deserve a response. This is the first of three posts responding to Barr.

False Dilemma or Wishful Thinking: Is Darwinian Evolution Undirected or Not?

Barr first claims that Joe Carter and I “are trapped in a false dilemma” because we wrongly think that random processes cannot be directed by God. Barr points out that even random events, properly defined, are part of God’s sovereign plan. Just because something is random from our point of view, doesn’t mean that it is outside of God’s providence. Barr may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. Indeed, most, if not all, of the scholars who believe that nature provides evidence of intelligent design would agree with him. The problem with Barr’s argument is not with his understanding of the proper meaning of random, but with his seeming blindness to the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists do not share his view. Barr’s ultimate disagreement here is not with me or Joe Carter, but with the discipline of evolutionary biology itself.

Once upon a time scientists were supposed to be skeptical. Scientific theories, we were taught, were to be questioned. Yes scientists were to formulate theories, but they were also to search for evidence against theories, even their own. And while such a noble action as searching for problems with one’s own theory might be too much to ask, certainly scientists were never to protect a theory against contradictory evidence or mislead the public. That would be the ultimate scientific sell out. Scientists were to be objective, and to follow the evidence where ever it may lead.
Those days are gone — long gone. Misleading the public, covering up evidence, protecting theories — that is all standard fare today. We have now arrived at the sad state where evidence that is contrary to evolution — any contrary evidence — is not allowed. Consider this recent exchange between Yudhijit Bhattacharjee of Science magazine and evolution crusader Eugenie Scott:

Today’s New York Times features an article by science writer Nicholas Wade highlighting what Wade calls “surprising advances [that] have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.” Yet the scientists quoted in the article fail to address the fundamental issue that has generated the longstanding impasse in the field: the problem of the origin of biological information. Wade describes the various developments in pre-biotic chemistry that are making some scientists more optimistic about solving the problem of the origin of life. Yet, the central problem facing them is not the synthesis of pre-biotic building blocks or even discovering an environment in which life might have plausibly arisen–difficult as these problems have proven to be. Instead, Read More ›

Yesterday, ENV interviewed molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter on his new web-book Darwin’s Predictions. Our conversation continued:

ENV: A typical instance of a failed prediction would be that Darwin himself expected the geology and paleontology would confirm that the earth is at least 400 million years old, because that’s how long he thought it must need to evolve its repertoire of species. We now know that while the earth and life are much older than that, the time frame for the development of most animal body plans or phyla in the Cambrian explosion occurred in a geological flash of probably of less than 10 million years. What do you think is the most devastating failed prediction you discuss? How would you crystallize it simply, perhaps as cocktail-party ammunition?

CH: That’s a difficult question, there are so many. Of course today DNA is a popular topic, so the finding of long stretches of identical DNA in distant species is a good one. Evolutionists have worked hard to figure out how this could be, but have not even come up with a good epicycle yet.

Then there is the evolution of contradictory behavior patterns, such as altruism. Evolution has undergone a big makeover in the past fifty years in trying to explain such behaviors. The evolution narrative has become incredibly creative in explaining every behavior imaginable. Loyalty, sacrifice, honor, suspicion, obligation, shame, remorse, moral indignation — the list goes on and on of the incredible powers of evolution.

But I think my favorite is that the minor, adaptive, changes that we do observe in populations is now known to be responsive to environmental pressures. Organisms have complex cellular mechanisms that intelligently and rapidly respond to environmental changes. Again, it is fundamental to the theory of evolution that biological variation be blind, not responsive, to environmental pressures. The only epicycle available to evolutionists is that evolution created phenomenally complex mechanisms so that evolution could occur.

ENV: I can imagine a Darwinist objecting that these predictions are outdated. Theories naturally develop, and as they do they, scientists throw off new predictions — predictions that in Darwinism’s case, the theory can in fact pass. Your response?