Greg Dawes: Religious Arguments Are Susceptible to Divine Mystery

Except When We Use Them

As a general rule, evolutionists never allow their own ideas to be exposed to the criteria they are using to criticize the other guy. To wit, while Greg Dawes finds there to be all kinds of problems with appeals to divine agents, including the fact that we really can’t predict what an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect agent would do, he also finds evolution to an inference to the best explanation, in spite of the fact that that inference relies on the evolutionist’s appeals to how God would create the species.

Greg Dawes Contradicts Himself

On The Same Page

It is good to see that philosophers such as Greg Dawes understand that Darwin “argued for his theory by contrasting it with the idea of special creation” which Darwin found to be “utterly puzzling.” But on the same page the University of Otago professor states that the modern sciences are naturalistic as they make no reference to non-natural agents. No reference to non-natural agents? It is yet another example of how evolutionists believe so strongly in their own religious views that they do not view them as religious.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolutionists Are Now Embracing Determinism and Denying Free Will

His Neurons Made Him Do It

Evolution is the most influential theory in the history of science, but where exactly does it lead? Well aside from eugenics, abortion, population control, euthanasia, anti realism, blackballing of opponents, false histories and atheism, evolution also can lead to determinism. Of course like so many of its metaphysical conclusions, evolution leads to determinism only because determinism first led to evolution. For determinism was one of the planks in the so-called “Enlightenment” period, a century before Darwin. So like the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace from two centuries ago, today a growing number of evolutionists hold to the anti realism belief that free will is an illusion. For Harvard’s Gabriel Kreiman, our actions are governed by our neurons, and how they fire off is like the toss of a coin:

The rules that govern our decisions are similar to the rules that govern whether a coin will land one way or the other. Ultimately there is physics; it is chaotic in both cases, but at the end of the day, nobody will argue the coin “wanted” to land heads or tails. There is no real volition to the coin.

And likewise, there is no real volition is us either. We’re like coins. After all, in experiments the neurons of human subjects showed activity before the subjects felt the urge to action. Ergo determinism. Your actions are the result of neural computations. Kreiman believes this work challenges important Western philosophical ideas about free will. Actually it reinforces important Western philosophical ideas about free will. That’s the problem.

Now Long Non-Coding RNA Makes Proteins: ENCODE 1, Dan Graur 0

It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

It has become increasingly obvious that lncRNAs are functional but now Kristian Baker’s group has implicated them in encoding proteins, just like mRNA. As one report explains:

Previously, lncRNAs were thought to lack the information and capacity to encode for proteins, distinguishing them from the messenger RNAs that are expressed from known genes and act primarily as templates for the synthesis of proteins. Yet this team demonstrated that a subset of these lncRNAs is engaged by the translation machinery and can function to produce protein products

This means that Dan Graur’s doubling down last year (either our genome is mostly junk or evolution is false) is rapidly going the way of every other evolutionary prediction (and that would be down).

It’s not nice to bet against Mother Nature.

This Book Review of Paul Johnson’s New Book is a Must Read

Another Coat of Bronze

I remember the disappointment when I sat in class one day and listened to the otherwise brilliant professor discuss the “fact” of evolution. The switch from a scientific genius explaining how nature works to metaphysical midget issuing sophomoric truth claims was strange and disheartening. And so it is with the great Paul Johnson’s new book Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, of which Terry Scambray’s review is a must read.

Mouse Retinal Assembly “Immensely Complex” and “Confounding”

Beyond Lineage-Specific Biology

The fundamental unit of life is the cell and there are many different types of cells. In humans, for example, there are skin cells, muscle cells, blood cells and so forth. In all there are hundreds of different kinds of cells that need to work together in various ways. Now a recent study has investigated the different cell types in the retina of mice. The research focused on the number of cells present in the retina. That may not sound very interesting, but the results were indeed eye-opening.

The researchers looked at 12 different types of cells in the retina, across 30 different strains of mice. Naturally they expected to find some fairly strong patterns. The population sizes for the different cell types should be similar. And if two different types of cell work together and perhaps are synaptically connected, then their cell counts should be correlated across the different strains. That is, if the count is a bit low for one of those cell types, then it should also be on the low side for the other type of cell.

But such patterns were not found. Instead the researchers were surprised to find all kinds of variability. The population sizes of the different cell types varied substantially with little correlation across the different strains.

The researchers also looked at which parts of the genome influence the population counts of the different cell types and concluded that multiple genes, acting differently in the different strains, are involved in specifying these population counts.

The study concluded that retinal assembly is far more flexible than thought. For instance, they concluded that the different retinal cells adjust their size and shape according to their local environment, including the density of the different types of cells around them.

What is emerging is a far more sophisticated retinal assembly process than was imagined. As one report summarized the study:

The circuitry of the central nervous system is immensely complex and, as a result, sometimes confounding. When scientists conduct research to unravel the inner workings at a cellular level, they are sometimes surprised by what they find.

Needless to say, this sort of variability between highly-related strains, and this level of sophistication and complexity, are inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

About That Law Banning Creationism

Just One Problem

As regular readers of this blog know, evolutionists use the label “creationist” not just for those with a particular interpretation of Genesis. That is their term for anyone who doesn’t accept the fact of evolution. It doesn’t matter what your particular position is, you’re a creationist, period. So it was no surprise that Britain’s new ban on “creationism” is actually a ban on “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.”

This is all a bit awkward though because it means that the ideas of one Alfred Russell Wallace, the, err, co-founder of evolution—whose memory is preserved with a statue at the Natural History Museum in London—are now officially banned because Wallace was, according to the evolutionist’s own terminology, a creationist.

Still Trending: Now Big Data is an Evolutionary Mechanism

This is Becoming Ridiculuous

Don’t miss the Evolution of Innovation conference at Cambridge this week where it will be explained that the recent move in computer science to Big Data is, in fact, exemplary of evolution. This is yet another example of how evolutionists cast their theory in terms of contemporary technology. As we have discussed before, when the leading edge in biology was breeding, evolution was cast as a natural breeder. When computers became increasingly connected via networks, and artificial intelligence was thought to be on the horizon, evolution was said to use  “networks.” and “molecular intelligence.” When the state of the art was genetic engineering, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer and “Biotechnology” was claimed as an evolutionary mechanism.

So it is hardly surprising that now “Big Data” has been enlisted as yet another example of a cutting edge idea that fits right in with evolutionary theory. You see evolution is cool. It’s trendy and relevant. Whatever the latest technology is, it’s a perfect description of how evolution works.

These Darwinian anachronisms are reminiscent of the latent Aristotelianism in evolutionary thought (which you can read about here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Evolutionists consistently use teleological or design language to describe their hypothetical evolutionary process, even though their theory explicitly excludes all such notions. It’s all in the presentation.

The way that evolutionists think about, present and promote their theory is contradictory to the theory itself. This is another example of the failure of the idea.

About Those Biological “Laws” and the Size of the Universe

Size Doesn’t Matter

According to Steven Dick, our chairman of astrobiology at the Library of Congress, the universe is too big and too vast for life not to exist somewhere else. As he explained this week, “I think the underlying principle is, the laws of physics and biology are universal.” There’s only one problem: If the laws of biology are universal then size doesn’t matter. You see the only relevant “law” of biology is the Law of Biogenesis which states that all life is from life (Omne vivum ex vivo). That’s what science tells us and even evolutionists agree that laws do not apply to evolution. As Theodosius Dobzhansky explained, evolutionary events are “unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible.” Or as Ernst Mayr put it, “Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques” for explaining evolutionary events and processes.

Meanwhile in Britain: Creationism is Banned

And by Creationism, We Mean Anything That is Not Evolution

As Hegel would have put it, evolution is the antithesis of creationism. Evolution is based on the failure of creationism. Evolutionists have no idea how the world could have spontaneously arisen, but they know it must have, because for them creationism is so obviously false. Read any defense of evolution, including Darwin’s book and works before Darwin, and you will see it is all about the failure design and creation ideas. There is no positive scientific evidence that structures so complex we still cannot figure them out, let alone construct them, spontaneously arise all by themselves. Yet that is precisely what evolution insists must be true. Not because the science says so, but because the religion says so. The constant refrain from evolutionists is that creationism is false. And while the word conjures up anti intellectual fundamentalism—imagery that evolutionists have contrived and promoted with their Warfare Thesis imagery—what evolutionists actually mean is anything that is not evolution. Read any criticism of evolutionary Intelligent Design, for instance, and you will see the “C” word liberally applied. It is not ID, it is IDC. Evolutionists make their religious underwriting abundantly clear because they have to. That is their core thesis.

All of this was again made clear this week when Britain banned creationism from their schools. And if you read the fine print, what they mean by creationism is anything that is not evolution:

“Creationism,” for the purposes of clauses 2.43 and 2.44 of the funding agreement and clause 23E above, is any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution.

Of course evolution is, from a scientific perspective, not a good theory. So evolutionists need to manipulate people’s thinking. They misrepresent the science, use strawmen ideas as their foil, blackball dissenters and use government controls.

But of course none of this will ever work. They can take your money, abuse science and control the laws. But they can’t change the truth.

More Fossil-Molecule Contradictions: Now Even the Errors Have Errors

Evolution as Contra Indicator

The problem with evolution is that, because it is always wrong, being wrong doesn’t count against it. In fact, evolution is so wrong that even its errors have errors. And whereas a normal theory with so many flubs would have long since been discarded, since evolution is true from the start it can’t be discarded. So instead evolutionists spend their time trying to determine just how wrong they are. One of evolution’s many problem areas is with the so-called evolutionary tree. Evolutionists compare the species to figure out which branch and twig they go on, but it never works out very well. One of the problems is that the fossil comparisons are inconsistent with the molecular comparisons. This has been a problem for more than half of a century—ever since we had molecular data—and it is just getting worse. Now a new massive study shows that not only is the problem worse than previously thought, but the errors increase with those species that are supposed to have evolved more recently. This means that the standard strategy of blaming it on the fossil data won’t work very well this time:

Our results suggest that, for Aves, discord between molecular divergence estimates and the fossil record is pervasive across clades and of consistently higher magnitude for younger clades. […] Unexpectedly, relative disparity is substantially higher for crown than for stem divergences. This observation is difficult to attribute to fossil preservation biases. The quality of the fossil record is expected to improve from the past towards the present, because more fossil bearing rocks are preserved from younger deposits. If disparity were primarily driven by gaps in the fossil record, one would expect the gap between the divergence of a lineage and its oldest known fossil to be smaller on average for the basal crown divergence in each clade, which by definition occurred more recently than the stem divergence. […] In sum, biases in the fossil record predict larger gaps between genetic divergences and fossil occurrences for stem divergences than for crown divergences, yet the opposite pattern is observed. […] Though often mischaracterized as scrappy, the fossil record of modern birds is now sampled from hundreds of thousands of specimens from throughout the Cenozoic. As increasing efforts have yielded vast numbers of new specimens but failed to reconcile the gap between molecular and fossil evidence, it becomes less plausible to attribute disparity solely to gaps in the fossil record.

In other words, the data make no sense on the theory of evolution. These are not minor errors that could plausibly be characterized as evolutionary “noise.” These are fundamental problems that have consistently contradicted the theory for decades.

Fortunately evolutionists know that their theory is true. Everything spontaneously arose, even though evolutionists have no idea how this could possibly have happened. That’s just the stuff of good solid scientific research.

The Divine Action Project is Another Example of Evolutionary Belief in Action

A Centuries-Old Quandary

Twenty five years ago the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley jointly sponsored a long-running series of conferences and publications on theology and science. Theologian Wesley Wildman calls it the Divine Action Project as so much of the work relates to the question of how God interacts with the world. And while the various participants hold to different nuanced views of divine action, they all generally agree that special divine action—the idea of God acting in miraculous or non law-like ways—is a problem. As Wildman explains:

There was wide agreement among DAP participants that any postulate of SDA [special divine action] exacerbates the theodicy problem, so a lot of energy was expended in trying to deal with this.

In other words, divine action that is intentional and particular exacerbates the thorny problem of evil. If God is all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing, then there would be no evil in the world. Since there is evil, then God must not be all-good, or all-powerful or all-knowing.

Better to restrict the divine action to law-like, uniform actions so our good God is not responsible for this bad world.

This idea that God would not have intended for this world goes back to antiquity and forms the basis of the powerful metaphysics that underwrites evolution. As the Epicureans explained, the world must have arisen on its own. It must have evolved.

This idea is so intuitive and so compelling that evolutionists do not even think of it as metaphysical or religious. It drives them to the conclusion that the world must have arisen spontaneously but the absurdity is lost on them, so powerful is the religion.

And while the DAP participants were all theists, this powerful metaphysic is by no means limited to them. Atheists believe just as ardently as any theist that no creator would ever have designed or created such a world. As PZ Myers wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does.

In other words, special divine action is a problem. This time, however, this truth comes from an atheist, illustrating once again that the key distinction is not between theist versus atheist or between religion versus science. This is the myth of the Warfare Thesis.

But the key distinction is at a deeper level of raw religious beliefs and the Divine Action Project is yet another example of this.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Here’s That Algae Study That Decouples Phylogeny and Competition

“We Were Completely Baffled”

In Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution the engine of progress is death. Nature is one big Malthusian battlefield as natural selection kills off the less-fit designs. As David Hume had put it a century before, “A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” and nature is so arranged so as “to embitter the life of every living being.” In Darwin’s day Alfred, Lord Tennyson found that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and Herbert Spencer summarized Darwin’s new theory as the “Survival of the Fittest.” Or as Nietzsche lamented, it is the weak “who most undermine life.” But there’s only one problem: this is all the result of junk science. For every Serengeti Plain there are untold stories of mutualism and cooperation between species which contradict one of evolution’s most fundamental predictions. All of this came to light once again in a massive evolutionary study of algae.

In the algae study the researchers competed various pairs of freshwater green algae species against each other. Those species that are thought to be more closely related in the evolutionary tree should have competed against each other more intensely. On the other hand, species that are farther apart in the evolutionary tree should exhibit less competition.

But none of this was found in the experimental results. No such trends were found and once again the theory of evolution produced a false prediction and did not help to explain the scientific evidence. The team spent months trying to resolve the problem, but to no avail. As one of the researchers explained:

It was completely unexpected. When we saw the results, we said ‘this can’t be.’ We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin’s hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right? … When we started coming up with numbers that showed he [Darwin] wasn’t right, we were completely baffled. … We should be able to look at the Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can’t be predicted from the Tree of Life.

Of course none of this has anyone doubting the truth of evolution. It just must be more complicated than was previously thought. Perhaps algae are “plastic” and diverging in ways unrelated to competition. Or perhaps nature’s species cooperate at greater levels than was thought. Perhaps there is more co-evolution between species, resulting in more cooperation.

You see there are always more epicycles for evolution. With each new absurdity another new complicated just-so story is woven into evolutionary theory. As Lakatos explained, some theories simply are not falsifiable. But as a result they sacrifice realism and parsimony.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

A Clever Spliceosome Mechanism Was Just Reported

And a Massive Violation of Occam’s Razor

In the seventeenth century clocks were a favorite comparison with the complex workings of nature. In the eighteenth century the analogy switched to watches. Now, with the latest crystal structure mapping of the incredible spliceosome machine, which edits newly transcribed gene transcripts, we’re back to clocks. But this time the complexity services evolution rather than design. First for an explanation of the results:

A grandfather clock is, on its surface, a simple yet elegant machine. Tall and stately, its job is to steadily tick away the time. But a look inside reveals a much more intricate dance of parts, from precisely-fitted gears to cable-embraced pulleys and bobbing levers.

Like exploring the inner workings of a clock, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers is digging into the inner workings of the tiny cellular machines called spliceosomes, which help make all of the proteins our bodies need to function.

The spliceosome is truly an amazing molecular machine. In fact one of the new findings was a clever, unique interlocking mechanism between a protein and RNA in the spliceosome. And what does such complexity suggest to evolutionists?

Could this be a challenge for the theory that cannot even explain how a single protein could have evolved, let alone a massive molecular machine such as the spliceosome?

By no means. In fact, the evolutionists simply concluded that evolution must be even smarter than we thought it was. For such a clever mechanism must mean that protein and RNA have (somehow) evolved together in a much more coordinated fashion than was previously thought:

What's so cool is the degree of co-evolution of RNA and protein. It's obvious RNA and protein had to be pretty close friends already to evolve like this.

Funny how a contradiction is cool. In fact what is cool is the mechanism itself that was discovered. Its hypothetical evolution is what philosophers call a multiplied entity. Evolutionists are constantly adding their unnecessary explanatory mechanisms which add nothing to the science except an unlikely origins narrative.

Mechanisms such as these remind us that biology, like clocks, is full of parts that fit together. That means that both parts are required for the mechanism to work.

That easily contradicts evolution’s blind action, which can’t even reroute a nerve. How could it luckily evolve two parts together? What is needed is a gradual pathway of functional intermediates. Needless to say evolutionists know of no such pathway. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but it does raise the question of how evolutionists can be so certain that it exists. Particularly when evolution cannot even explain how a single protein could have evolved.

Religion drives science, and it matter.

Your Genetic Controls Take Form Even Before Conception

The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Who would have thought that the tiny West Africa nation of The Gambia, where British slave trade thrived centuries ago, would someday provide a devastating blow to Darwin’s theory on “the Preservation of Favoured Races.” But The Gambia’s consistent climate of rainy and dry seasons made for the perfect experimental conditions to test what is already known to be true in animals; namely, that not only does the food that you eat carry with it instructions for your body, and not only does the food that your mother eats while pregnant with you also influence your body, but the feed that she eats before conception also influences your body.

Rural diet in The Gambia is predictable across the seasons, as the rainy and dry seasons come and go. So people born in The Gambia are walking biology experiments in that their birth date is a reliable predictor of their mother’s diet before and after conception.

And sure enough a new study reveals that small molecular markers, such as the methyl group, which are attached to our DNA and influence which genes are expressed, vary depending on when they were born. The differences are statistically significant and are consistent with what has already been found from various studies, preconception diet alters the epigenetic control of the genome.

With evolution we would have to believe that random mutations somehow created an astonishingly complex adaptation machine for no reason, and it just happened to persist in the population, and just happened to come in handy eons later, and so be preserved by that all-powerful creator known as natural selection. The sheer intricacies and interdependencies of epigenetics, and the lack of an evolutionary fitness pathway, are inconsistent with an evolutionary origin.

Nothing in biology makes any sense in the light of evolution.