Nathan Lents in USA Today: Evolution is Certain

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

In a recent USA Today opinion piece evolutionist Nathan Lents states that the human race has “evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.” And if there was any doubt, Lents later clarifies that it is “the undeniable scientific truth that the human population evolved from ancestor ape species and shares common descent with all living things.” Simply put, Lents is stating that evolution is an undeniable scientific truth.

This claim of high certainty is nothing new. From the Epicureans in antiquity, to their modern descendants, mandates of a strictly naturalistic origins have consistently been foisted with no less confidence. Lents’ certainty is the rule, not only for today’s evolutionists, but in the long history of Epicurean thought.

One immediate sign of trouble is that such claims of certainty are inevitably in conflict. For example, proponents of monergistic and synergistic theories of the origin of the Solar System (where the Sun and planets formed simultaneously or in sequence, respectively), were both certain their theories were correct. But they cannot both be right. As Dire Straits put it, “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.”

Lack of detail is another sign of trouble. How can we be certain of theories which gloss over a host of details, and really are little more than just-so stories?

But it gets worse. For inevitably, such claims of certainty are made about theories that make little scientific sense. Daniel Bernoulli was certain the solar system resulted from the solar atmosphere forcing the planets into the ecliptic. Bernoulli was a brilliant scientist, but in this case, not so much. The irony is that he chose to express absolute confidence in what was undoubtedly the biggest blunder of his career.

It is no different with evolutionists today. They are absolutely certain, but their certainty is exceeded only by their inability to defend their theory. Evolution has left a trail of failed predictions. And with each failure the theory becomes more contorted, complex, and mysterious. There is no explanation, beyond mere hand-waving, of how the entire biological world is supposed to have arisen by itself—spontaneously. The idea is a scientific failure.

All of this leads to the inevitable question of why. Why do Lents and the epicureans make such claims? Surely they must know better.

Indeed they do know better, or at least should know better. There simply is no question that Lents and his fellow evolutionists are aware of the science. In a very real sense they are without excuse. They massively misrepresent the science, and it is tempting to brand them as liars and be done with it. And indeed, in a sense they are liars—they make ridiculously false claims and they know it. Given their training and experience, there simply is no way they could be innocently naïve of the basic scientific facts they so consistently contradict with complete assurance.

But to stop there would superficial. Anyone who knows evolutionists knows they do not easily fit into the liar category. To begin with, evolutionists really do believe what they say. A liar makes statements he knows are false.

So how can evolutionists understand the science and yet believe evolution is true? The answer is a long story but, suffice it to say, it is a story about religion. What we are dealing with here is much more complicated than a simple lie. And much more dangerous.

Religion drives science, and it matters.