John Farrell Versus Isaac Newton

Guess Who Wins?

The title of John Farrell’s article in Commonweal from earlier this year is a dead giveaway. When writing about the interaction between faith and science, as Farrell does in the piece, the title “The Conflict Continues” is like a flashing red light that the mythological Warfare Thesis is coming at you.

Sure enough, Farrell does not disappoint. He informs his readers that the fear that science could “make God seem unnecessary” is “widespread today among religious believers,” particularly in the US where “opposition to belief in evolution remains very high.”

Indeed, this fear has “haunted the debate over the tension between religion and science for centuries.” Farrell notes that Edward Larson and Michael Ruse point out in their new book On Faith and Science, that the “conflict model doesn’t work so well. But that seems to be a minor speed bump for Farrell. He finds that:

The idea that the world operates according to its own laws and regularities remains controversial in the evolution debate today, as Intelligent Design proponents attack the consensus of science on Darwinian evolution and insist that God’s direct intervention in the history of life can be scientifically demonstrated.

Farrell also writes that Isaac Newton, driven by concerns about secondary causes, “insisted God was still necessary to occasionally tweak the motions of the planets if any threatened to wander off course.”

Farrell’s piece is riddled with myths. Secondary causes are not nearly as controversial as he would have us believe. He utterly mischaracterizes ID, and Newton said no such thing. It is true that Newton suggested that the Creator could intervene in the cosmos (not “insisted”).

And was this the result of some radical voluntarism?

Of course not. Newton suggested God may intervene in the cosmos because the physics of the day (which by the way he invented), indicated that our solar system could occasionally have instabilities. The fact that was running along just fine, and hadn’t yet blown up, suggested that something had intervened along the way.

Newton was arguing from science, not religion. But that doesn’t fit the Epicurean mythos that religion opposes naturalism while science confirms it. The reality is, of course, the exact opposite.

New Paper Admits Failure of Evolution

Pop Quiz: Who Said It?

There are many fundamental problems with evolutionary theory. Origin of life studies have dramatically failed. Incredibly complex biological designs, both morphological and molecular, arose abruptly with far too little time to have evolved. The concept of punctuated equilibrium is descriptive, not explanatory. For example, the Cambrian Explosion is not explained by evolution and, in general, evolutionary mechanisms are inadequate to explain the emergence of new traits, body plans and new physiologies. Even a single gene is beyond the reach of evolutionary mechanisms. In fact, the complexity and sophistication of life cannot originate from non-biological matter under any scenario, over any expanse of space and time, however vast. On the other hand, the arch enemy of evolutionary theory, Lamarckian inheritance, in its variety of forms, is well established by the science.

Another Darwin’s God post?

No, these scientific observations are laid out in a new peer-reviewed, scientific paper.

Origin of Life

Regarding origin of life studies, which try to explain how living cells could somehow have arisen in an ancient, inorganic, Earth, the paper explains that this idea should have long since been rejected, but instead it has fueled “sophisticated conjectures with little or no evidential support.”

the dominant biological paradigm - abiogenesis in a primordial soup. The latter idea was developed at a time when the earliest living cells were considered to be exceedingly simple structures that could subsequently evolve in a Darwinian way. These ideas should of course have been critically examined and rejected after the discovery of the exceedingly complex molecular structures involved in proteins and in DNA. But this did not happen. Modern ideas of abiogenesis in hydrothermal vents or elsewhere on the primitive Earth have developed into sophisticated conjectures with little or no evidential support.

In fact, abiogenesis has “no empirical support.”

independent abiogenesis on the cosmologically diminutive scale of oceans, lakes or hydrothermal vents remains a hypothesis with no empirical support

One problem, of many, is that the early Earth would not have supported such monumental evolution to occur:

The conditions that would most likely to have prevailed near the impact-riddled Earth's surface 4.1–4.23 billion years ago were too hot even for simple organic molecules to survive let alone evolve into living complexity

In fact, the whole idea strains credibility “beyond the limit.”

The requirement now, on the basis of orthodox abiogenic thinking, is that an essentially instantaneous transformation of non-living organic matter to bacterial life occurs, an assumption we consider strains credibility of Earth-bound abiogenesis beyond the limit.

All laboratory experiments have ended in “dismal failure.” The information hurdle is of “superastronomical proportions” and simply could not have been overcome without a miracle.

The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions, an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle. All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure.

Diversity of Life

But the origin of life is just the beginning of evolution’s problems. For science now suggests evolution is incapable of creating the diversity of life and all of its designs:

Before the extensive sequencing of DNA became available it would have been reasonable to speculate that random copying errors in a gene sequence could, over time, lead to the emergence of new traits, body plans and new physiologies that could explain the whole of evolution. However the data we have reviewed here challenge this point of view. It suggests that the Cambrian Explosion of multicellular life that occurred 0.54 billion years ago led to a sudden emergence of essentially all the genes that subsequently came to be rearranged into an exceedingly wide range of multi-celled life forms - Tardigrades, the Squid, Octopus, fruit flies, humans – to name but a few.

As one of the authors writes, “the complexity and sophistication of life cannot originate (from non-biological) matter under any scenario, over any expanse of space and time, however vast.” As an example, consider the octopus.

Octopus

First, the octopus is an example of novel, complex features, rapidly appearing and a vast array of genes without an apparent ancestry:

Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus (e.g., Nautilus pompilius) to the common Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to Squid (Loligo vulgaris) to the common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form.

But it gets worse. As Darwin’s God has explained, The Cephalopods demonstrate a highly unique level of adenosine to inosine mRNA editing. It is yet another striking example of lineage-specific design that utterly contradicts macroevolution:

These data demonstrate extensive evolutionary conserved adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) mRNA editing sites in almost every single protein-coding gene in the behaviorally complex coleoid Cephalopods (Octopus in particular), but not in nautilus. This enormous qualitative difference in Cephalopod protein recoding A-to-I mRNA editing compared to nautilus and other invertebrate and vertebrate animals is striking. Thus in transcriptome-wide screens only 1–3% of Drosophila and human protein coding mRNAs harbour an A-to-I recoding site; and there only about 25 human mRNA messages which contain a conserved A-to-I recoding site across mammals. In Drosophila lineages there are about 65 conserved A-sites in protein coding genes and only a few identified in C. elegans which support the hypothesis that A-to-I RNA editing recoding is mostly either neutral, detrimental, or rarely adaptive. Yet in Squid and particularly Octopus it is the norm, with almost every protein coding gene having an evolutionary conserved A-to-I mRNA editing site isoform, resulting in a nonsynonymous amino acid change. This is a virtual qualitative jump in molecular genetic strategy in a supposed smooth and incremental evolutionary lineage - a type of sudden “great leap forward”. Unless all the new genes expressed in the squid/octopus lineages arose from simple mutations of existing genes in either the squid or in other organisms sharing the same habitat, there is surely no way by which this large qualitative transition in A-to-I mRNA editing can be explained by conventional neo-Darwinian processes, even if horizontal gene transfer is allowed. 

Lamarck

In the twentieth century Lamarckian Inheritance was an anathema for evolutionists. Careers were ruined and every evolutionist knew the inheritance of acquired characteristics sat right along the flat earth and geocentrism in the history of ideas. The damning of Lamarck, however, was driven by dogma rather than data, and today the evidence has finally overcome evolutionary theory.

Indeed there is much contemporary discussion, observations and critical analysis consistent with this position led by Corrado Spadafora, Yongsheng Liu, Denis Noble, John Mattick and others, that developments such as Lamarckian Inheritance processes (both direct DNA modifications and indirect, viz. epigenetic, transmissions) in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields now necessitate a complete revision of the standard neo-Darwinian theory of evolution or “New Synthesis " that emerged from the 1930s and 1940s.

Indeed, we now know of a “plethora of adaptive Lamarckian-like inheritance mechanisms.”

There is, of course, nothing new in this paper. We have discussed these, and many, many other refutations of evolutionary theory. Yet the paper is significant because it appears in a peer-reviewed journal. Science is, if anything, conservative. It doesn’t exactly “follow the data,” at least until it becomes OK to do so. There are careers and reputations at stake.

And of course, there is religion.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Metaphysics From John Ray to Nima Arkani-Hamed

An Ad Hoc, Capricious Creation

When John Ray refused to conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity—aimed mainly at the Puritans—and so was forced to leave his position at Cambridge University, he roamed Europe for three years doing what he loved: observing nature. Ray and his companions were in for a surprise: unfathomable diversity. They found thousands of different kinds of insects, animals and plants. Every place had a different flora and fauna, and with different interactions. Life did not seem to follow the kind of compact formulas Isaac Newton was discovering for the new physics. With the overthrow of Aristotelianism, physics was becoming more parsimonious in line with Occam’s Razor. But biology was headed in the opposite direction. Were all these organic life forms and their detailed life histories really necessary? Ralph Cudworth had warned that the immense details of the world, while refuting Descartes’ rejection of final causes, were surely beneath the sovereign Creator’s dignity, and Ray’s three-year tour upped the ante. The Infra Dignitatem argument for a less hands-on creation story was born. There must have been something between the majestic Creator and this ad hoc, capricious, gritty creation. Like the Gnostics, the Aristotle of England, who would also become the father of natural theology, called for a separation between the Creator and the world.

The ancient Greeks described the cosmos as a set of concentric spheres that rotated and rubbed against each other producing harmonious tones. We have always wanted a simple, beautiful world. Certainly that is what God would have wanted too. But nature has not lived up to our expectations.

In fact ever since Newton, physics has been backsliding and becoming increasingly complex. All this was well explained in a Quanta magazine article from last week about leading physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed:

in recent years one question about the universe has come to preoccupy him, along with the field as a whole. Particle physicists seek to know whether the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, “natural,” as they say, locking together into a sensible pattern, or whether the universe is extremely unnatural, a peculiar permutation among countless other, more mundane possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allow life to arise. A natural universe is, in principle, a knowable one. But if the universe is unnatural and fine-tuned for life, the lucky outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel, then it stands to reason that a vast and diverse “multiverse” of universes must exist beyond our reach — the lifeless products of less serendipitous spins. This multiverse renders our universe impossible to fully understand on its own terms. As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead.

Like Ray’s seventeenth century findings about biology, today’s physicists are finding what seems to be a capricious creation. There is no natural explanation as the world seems to consist of a long list of ad hoc, randomly selected designs. One thing they know for sure: no creator would have done this. It must have arisen by chance.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Paper: Spontaneous Creation of the Universe From Nothing

A Two Thousand Year Old Project

Two thousand years ago the Epicureans believed that the world arose spontaneously. Their idea was that randomly veering atoms attained a great variety of configurations by chance, and would eventually find themselves forming stable, functional structures. And while this may seem unlikely, the immense universe provided a great many opportunities for those configurations to come about. In Cicero’s dialog, the Epicurean explains this to his stoic opponent:

You [stoics] would surely have no need of the activity of such a figure [a skilled craftsman] if you would only observe how unlimited, unbounded tracts of space extend in all directions. When the mind strains and stretches itself to observe these distances, it journeys abroad so far that it can observe no ultimate limit at which to halt. It is in this boundless extent of breadth, length, and height, then, that innumerable atoms of infinite quantity flit around. … There is space between them, yet they latch on to each other. In gripping each other they form a chain, as a result of which are fashioned the shapes and forms of things which you Stoics believe cannot be created without bellows and anvils. So you have implanted in our heads the notion of an external lord whom we are to fear day and night; for who would not stand in awe of a god who is a prying busybody, who foresees and reflects upon and observes all things, believing that everything is his business?

Cicero’s dialog reveals how little has changed in two thousand years and just how enduring certain metaphysical themes are. The Epicurean complains to the stoic that he does not appreciate the great size of the universe, that chance events are capable of producing functional structures, and that therefore there is no need to believe a sovereign Creator or “external lord,” who we must fear, is needed.

Though the terminology has changed, the ideas have not. This dialog from Cicero could have been written today. What goes around comes around.

Like the Epicureans, evolutionists believe that the world arose spontaneously. Darwin fulfilled this mandate for the origin of species. But the origin of everything else has been described by modern day Epicureans in the centuries before and after Darwin.

Evolutionary thought is by no means restricted to the species. Consciousness, life, the planets, the galaxy, and even the universe and its natural laws all are hypothesized to have arisen spontaneously.

This is a rather heroic mandate. It seems we do not live in a universe where functioning structures just happen to assemble. Not without other very clever structures to make it happen.

Yet evolutionists do not give this a second thought. They believe all this happened, even though the science does not support them. Last year this movement continued with a new paper entitled “Spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing.” According to evolutionists, this paper provided the mathematical proof of what they already had assumed to be true.

So there you have it. Evolutionists believe not only that giraffes, sharks, violets and moles spontaneously arose; they not only believe consciousness, love and emotion spontaneously arose; they not only believe life itself spontaneously arose; they not only believe the Sun, stars and cosmos spontaneously arose; they believe the entire universe itself spontaneously arose.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

This Piece by Lawrence Krauss is a Damning Indictment

Follow the Evidence

When Eric Metaxas wrote a Christmas Day piece in the Wall Street Journal about how science is lending support to modern-day arguments for design in the universe, he drew fire from all quarters. Apparently Metaxas arguments were full of fallacies. Of particular interest was a criticism by leading physicist, Lawrence Krauss. Surely a top scientist would leave no doubt about Metaxas’ flubs.

Krauss’ first point was that Metaxas is a “religious writer with an agenda,” and so his arguments cannot be trusted. But religious people in general, and Christians in particular, are all over the map when it comes to design. Indeed, many of Metaxas’ critics are Christian theologians.

Clearly Metaxas, qua “religious writer” or Christian, is not bound to an agenda regarding design. Why then does Krauss sense an agenda at work? Perhaps because, in fact, it is Krauss who is the one with the agenda. You see Krauss is an atheist, and when it comes to design, atheists are most definitely not all over the map. If you are an atheist, then you can’t accommodate arguments that the science strongly points to a designer. In fact, elsewhere, when not claiming others have an agenda, Krauss has advocated the abolishment of religion:

Religion will go away in a generation, or at least largely go away - and that's what I think we have an obligation to do.

And Krauss says Metaxas is the one with the agenda?

Unfortunately Krauss’ criticism goes downhill from there. Krauss explains that “The piece was rife with inappropriate scientific misrepresentations.”

Misrepresentations?

Metaxas makes two basic arguments. First, evolution’s just-add-water view of life had led astronomers to expect that the universe is teeming with life. ETs should be common and if we point our radios to the stars we should eventually pick up some interesting signals. But no such signals have been found. It is a clear example of yet another falsified evolutionary expectation. In fact Metaxas cites some astronomers who have argued the probabilities for ET life is far lower than previously expected.

Second, Metaxas points out that the universe is fine-tuned for life. And while this is a more subtle point, no one questions that this is an interesting and powerful set of evidences that must be reckoned with. That is, except Krauss.

Metaxas is pointing to fundamental findings. While there is much more to say about them, there is no misrepresentation as Krauss charges.

In fact, again, it is Krauss who is the one who is guilty of his charges. Krauss makes the common evolutionary appeal to future findings. “We currently DO NOT know,” the publicly-funded professor begins, “the factors that allow the evolution of life in the Universe.” [emphasis in original]

I’ve seen this response many times. Evolutionists argue the science proves their theory, and when they are presented with the actual evidence they then make the argument from ignorance. So what if the evidence is against them, future science might switch things around.

Absolutely. That certainly is true. Who knows what science may discover in the future.

But that is irrelevant.

No one is talking about unknown findings at some unknown time in the future made by some unknown scientist. Metaxas is talking about the here and now. He made no sweeping metaphysical claims, as evolutionists do. He was merely discussing today’s science.

It gets worse.

Krauss next resorts to a silly straw man version of Metaxas’ simple point:

The mistake made by the author is akin to saying that if one looks at all the factors in my life that led directly to my sitting at my computer to write this, one would obtain a probability so small as to conclude that it is impossible that anyone else could ever sit down to compose a letter to the WSJ.

At this point Krauss wasn’t even wrong. Did he write this while standing in line to board his next flight?

Krauss continues with more misrepresentations of both science and Metaxas’ points. It is true that science isn’t going to prove anything for Krauss and the evolutionists. One can always interpret the evidence to support the chance-creationism hypothesis. Just look at how Krauss ends his rebuttal:

The appearance of design of life on Earth is also overwhelming, but we now understand, thanks to Charles Darwin that the appearance of design is not the same as design, it is in fact a remnant of the remarkable efficiency of natural selection.

The remarkable efficiency of natural selection?

Krauss is apparently unaware of the most basic biological research in the past half century. Yes, Charles Darwin hoped for such remarkable efficiency. And yes he presented many thought experiments for why he believed it to be true. But that was nineteenth century naturalism. There was no scientific evidence for it then, and we now understand much more about the many problems with that view.

Krauss’ criticism of Metaxas reveals the pathetic state of evolutionary thinking. Religion drives science, and it matters.

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.

The Pale Blue Dot

And a Bright Evening Star

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Jim Anders snapped one of the most profound photographs in history. Anders was one of three men aboard Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon, and as they circled the Moon they suddenly noticed an incredible sight—the Earth was rising off the Moon’s horizon. The photograph became known as “Earthrise” and its incredible perspective of our beautiful planet sparked the rise of the environmental movement. It is in Life magazine’s list of “100 Photographs that Changed the World.”

Four years later the last manned mission to the Moon took another famous photograph of Earth, shortly after departing Earth orbit for the Moon. It may be the most widely distributed image in human history and is called “The Blue Marble” because from the perspective of the crew, the Earth was about the size of a marble.

In 1990 Voyager 1, a small NASA spacecraft, had finished its tour of the solar system and took a picture of Earth as it headed for interstellar space. Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and today is the farthest man-made object from Earth. For almost ten years leading up to the 1990 photograph, astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan had promoted the idea of Voyager 1 taking a picture of Earth as the spacecraft made its way out of the solar system. But concerns about instrument damage from the Sun’s glare delayed the photograph, and shrinking budgets and staff put it at risk altogether. Finally the NASA Administrator intervened to have the photograph taken. The photo is called “The Pale Blue Dot” for at a distance of almost 4 billion miles Earth appears as a tiny blue dot (see blue pixel right of center in the brown band). That name also served as the title of Sagan’s 1994 book about the future of space travel and much more. Sagan was a proponent of what historians call the Copernican Principle—the idea that Earth, and more generally the human race, are not special or privileged, but rather are merely a statistical result of chance evolutionary events—which was an important theme in Sagan’s book. Like the ancient Epicureans, Sagan used the inconceivable vastness of the universe, as implied by The Pale Blue Dot photograph, to advance the Copernican Principle theme (though its sixteenth century namesake astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, would not have agreed) and its underlying evolutionary ideas:

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
[…]

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

And if the reader did not properly infer the religious implications, Sagan made them clear:

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

Clearly photographs can convey, or be used to convey, ideas that go far beyond the photograph itself. That is why it just may be important that this week another profound photograph was taken of Earth.

The NASA rover Curiosity has been exploring the surface of the planet Mars. It has discovered many interesting things, but in the twilight hours after sundown on January 31, the robotic explorer turned a camera upwards to the sky, and toward home. With the Martian hills on the horizon, Curiosity photographed a bright “Evening Star” in the Martian sky called Earth. What will this photograph inspire?

Problems With the Canonical Giant-Impact Model of Moon Evolution

Lunar-Origin Studies Are “In Flux”

The problem with evolutionary theories is not that they are impossible—any theory, no matter how bad it is, if held with sufficient conviction can be adorned with enough epicycles to explain the data and avoid outright impossibility. And evolutionists certainly do have the needed conviction. For evolutionists, their theory simply cannot be false. That option is not on the table and they will do whatever it takes to avoid it, including blackballing scientists, falsely claiming the theory to be a scientific fact, misrepresenting the science in courts and in textbooks, contriving false histories, and so forth. And so while evolutionary theories can never be outright falsified, they are improbable. This can be seen both (i) by comparing the theory with the evidence and (ii) by all those epicycles which evolutionists must use to patch up their theories. The many patches added to evolutionary theories result in high complexity and loss of parsimony. One example that Robin Canup recently discussed is the origin of the Earth-Moon system.

Modern evolutionary theories attempting to explain the Earth-Moon system go back to the late nineteenth century when George Darwin, son of Charles, proposed that the Moon was made of materials ejected from the Earth by tidal instabilities. This fission hypothesis was followed by capture, co-accretion and impact hypotheses as well. Various types of hypotheses have been considered because none of them work very well. For no single hypothesis has been able to account for the various evidences, such as the mass of the Moon, the angular momentum of the system, and the high similarity between the chemical compositions of Moon rocks and the Earth crust.

In recent years the giant-impact hypothesis has been able to explain the size of the Moon and the system’s angular momentum, but not the Moon rock’s composition. Of course explanatory mechanisms can always be contrived. For example, perhaps the impacter just happened to have the same chemical composition as the Earth upper layers. But that would be “extremely improbable” explains Canup, as such similarity is not typical within the solar system.

There are other possible explanatory mechanisms as well, but inevitably, as with biological evolutionary theories, they complicate the theory and rely on serendipity and coincidence. As Canup explains:

It remains troubling that all of the current impact models invoke a process after the impact to effectively erase a primary outcome of the event — either by changing the disk's composition through mixing for the canonical impact, or by changing Earth's spin rate for the high-angular-momentum narratives.

Sequences of events do occur in nature, and yet we strive to avoid such complexity in our models. We seek the simplest possible solution, as a matter of scientific aesthetics and because simple solutions are often more probable. As the number of steps increases, the likelihood of a particular sequence decreases. Current impact models are more complex and seem less probable than the original giant-impact concept.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of evolution. Initially simple theories, which far exceed the scientific knowledge of the day, are constructed from a metaphysical commitment to naturalism. These theories are more mythological than scientific and they inevitably fail badly as science progresses. The commitment to naturalism, however, trumps all else and the theory’s initial parsimony easily gives way to incredible complexities.

The failure of evolution lies not in its falsification—an impossibly high bar evolutionists routinely erect to protect their theory—but in its failed predictions, improbability and resulting complexity and loss of parsimony.

Canup’s acknowledgment of the problem is a rare exception to the rule of declaring evolution to be a scientific fact regardless of the failures.

This Just In: Universe About to Collapse

More at 11

If you thought global warming was bad consider this: evolutionists have now concluded that the risk of the universe collapsing is even greater than previously thought:

Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything -- every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy -- will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now

Oh, and “this will have disastrous consequences.”

It may sound weird but, technically, it’s actually no different than when water turns to steam:

This violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its magnetization. The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe.

In fact, not only is this total collapse more likely than evolutionists previously thought, it may have already begun:

"The phase transition will start somewhere in the universe and spread from there. Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe. Maybe a collapsed is starting right now right here.

I hate it when that happens. Plus it will be another successful prediction for evolution. And if the collapse doesn’t happen, that too will be a successful prediction because, it turns out, the collapse may not happen after all:

Although the new calculations predict that a collapse is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all. It is a prerequisite for the phase change that the universe consists of the elementary particles that we know today, including the Higgs particle. If the universe contains undiscovered particles, the whole basis for the prediction of phase change disappears. "Then the collapse will be canceled," says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.

They say more research is needed.

Enter Two More Ideas For Earth-Moon Evolution

Evolutionary thought holds that the universe, the quasars, the galaxies, the solar systems, the planets and moons (oh and all of biology too) arose spontaneously by chance events and natural law. How that occurred is uncertain and under scientific investigation. That it occurred is not uncertain, it is a fact. These two different departments of evolutionary thought are disjoint. The fact of evolution does not derive from the particular theories of how it could have happened. It must be that way because there is substantial uncertainty of how it could have happened. Theories of the Solar system evolution, for instance, fall into two broad categories. In the monistic theories, the planets and Sun arise from the same process, such as in Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis. In dualistic theories, the planets and Sun arise from different processes, such as in Buffon's comet theory. These two rival classes of explanation have competed for centuries and as historian Stephen Brush has observed, the time scale for reversing between these two types of explanation has grown shorter and shorter as we approach the present. Hence the origin of the solar system, says Brush, is an unsolved problem. [1]

This week’s Science magazine provides yet another example of this phenomenon of a multiplicity of explanations in another one of professor Brush’s areas of interest: the evolution of the Earth-Moon system. It is another example of a problem that has required ever increasing complexity of explanation to account for the evidence. Science has two papers on the evolution of the Earth-Moon system, one calling for a larger impactor than usual and a subsequent resonance with the Sun, and the other calling for a faster spinning proto Earth and subsequent resonance between the Sun and Moon. As the perspective explains, the two papers “offer differing solutions to the problem.” Fortunately the fact of evolution does not depend of the science of evolution.


1. Stephen G. Brush, Nebulous Earth: The Origin of the Solar System and the Core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 4.

Is the Current Solar System Evolution Theory Nearing the Next Flip?

The epistemological foundation of evolution is interesting. Evolutionists know that evolution is a fact, but they do not know how evolution happened. In fact there is tremendous uncertainty about how the world could have spontaneously originated all by itself. This extreme epistemological difference between the fact and theory of evolution may seem contradictory but it isn’t. The fact of evolution is not contingent on how it happened. It merely is contingent on the end product. It is, as mathematicians say, path independent. The end product makes evolution a fact because the end product obviously would not have been intended by any intelligent agency otherwise capable of designing and creating the world. So Aristotle had it right with his disinterested and oblivious Prime Mover. Nature must have created itself. This makes for a striking dichotomy between evolutionary apologetics and evolutionary research. The former has no doubt evolution is a fact while the latter is full of doubt about how evolution occurred. In fact, evolutionary theories display an often humorous level of flexibility of explanation. Evolutionary explanation must be strictly natural, but beyond that anything goes, no matter how heroic, unlikely and cartoonish. And when the unlikeliness becomes too extreme even for the evolutionist, he simply calls upon the multiverse to improve the odds. If there is a near-infinity of universes, then anything can happen. An early example of this flexibility of explanation was in the theories of how the solar system evolved which to this day have continued to amass just-so stories. Now it appears the current theory of solar system evolution may be approaching another flip.

A century before Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace were imagining how biological evolution could have occurred, Bernoulli, Kant, Buffon and Laplace were imagining how the solar system could have evolved. In both cases the naturalists were certain evolution had occurred, though they had nothing but unfounded speculation about how it occurred. Bernoulli, Kant and Laplace had proven the solar system evolved with the usual silly evolutionary proofs.

A false dichotomy

Bernoulli’s explanation, that the sun’s atmosphere caused the planetary motions and alignments, was reminiscent of Descartes’ whirlpools. And while Bernoulli’s explanation was later discarded (as most evolutionary explanations eventually are), he introduced a powerful argument that became crucial in evolutionary thought and remains pervasive today.

Bernoulli argued that there are two possibilities: random design or a single mechanistic cause. Like ripples in the sand, patterns that we observe in nature are, according to evolutionists, necessarily a consequence of mechanism. It is yet another evolutionary argument that is difficult to explain because it is so silly. But that is the argument. In this false dichotomy, random design is evolution’s null hypothesis.

It was well known that the planetary orbits were aligned so as to form a striking pattern. Surely this could not have arisen by chance, argued the great mathematician. Bernoulli argued that either the planets fell into their orbits by chance or some mechanism caused their alignment. Bernoulli used a calculation to show the long odds of random design, thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a mechanical cause did the job. He who would deny this, Bernoulli fallaciously concluded, “must reject all the truths, which we know by induction.”

Twenty years later Immanuel Kant elaborated Bernoulli’s argument. Why do planets revolve about the sun in the same direction? “It is clear,” explained the great philosopher, “that there is no reason why the celestial bodies must organize their orbits in one single direction.” If God had directly arranged their orbits then we would expect them to reveal deviations and differences:

Thus, God’s choice, not having the slightest motive for tying them to one single arrangement, would reveal itself with a greater freedom in all sorts of deviations and differences.

Theology was not discarded in the Enlightenment, as is often said, it was internalized. Laplace followed with his version of Bernoulli’s random design null hypothesis calculation, and cosmic evolution increasingly became accepted. The details were yet to be worked out, but it was fast becoming a fact.

Thus Laplace could on the one hand assure Napoleon of his evolutionary theory while, on the other hand, fail to explain new observations such as the anomalous orbits of Uranus’ moons, discovered by William Herschel. Here is how historian Stephen Brush describes it:

Laplace was familiar with Newton’s opinion that the regular motions of the planets proved their divine design. We know he was acquainted with Daniel Bernoulli’s prize essay of 1734 on the subject, since in an earlier paper he had cited Bernoulli’s method for calculating the probability that n bodies all move in the same one of two possible directions if their motions are selected by chance: 2^(–n+1). In that paper Laplace had applied the method to six planets and ten satellites, finding the probabilities to be 2^–15 = 1/32768. By 1796 he had made the coincidence even more unlikely by including the seventh planet, Uranus (discovered by William Herschel in 1781), as well as four more satellites, Saturn’s rings, and the rotations of five planets, the Sun, the Moon, and one of Saturn’s satellites (Iapetus). Thus of the 30 known motions in the Solar System, all are in the same direction. If these motions had been determined by chance, the probability that at least one of them would be different from the rest is extremely high (1–2^–29). [Nebulous Earth, Cambridge, 1996, p. 21]

It is astonishing that thinkers such as Bernoulli and Laplace promoted such metaphysical madness. Brush continues:

Laplace was aware when he first published his theory that Herschel had found the two satellites of Uranus to have orbits in a plane nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. In 1798 Herschel announced that the satellites of Uranus have retrograde motion. While this amounted to only a slight revision of his earlier result—the orbit plane is still nearly perpendicular but is tilted in the other direction—it was still [Herschel explained] “a remarkable instance of the great variety that takes place among the movements of the heavenly bodies” since previously all known motions took place in the same direction.

A remarkable instance of the great variety? Even the evolutionary false dichotomy was breaking down. But no matter, the narrative had become too compelling. Laplace simply ignored the anomalies (as evolutionists routinely do today), while including four other satellites announced by Herschel which were never confirmed:

In later editions of the Exposition, Laplace simply ignored the fact that at least two of the Uranian satellites have retrograde orbital motion, even though he added to his total the four spurious ones announced in the same paper by Herschel. Perhaps he considered that an orbit that is nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic should not be counted as retrograde; but I agree with Jaki that his treatment of this case is peculiar. Laplace did express doubt about the existence of the four satellites reported in 1798, and unless they are counted as retrograde (which Herschel did not claim) their inclusion scarcely affects the statistical argument.

In fact Laplace’s treatment of this case is not at all peculiar. Confirmation bias is standard practice in evolutionary apologetics. And that’s after the false dichotomy.

Laplace referred to his theory as the “true system of the world.” Sound familiar? Laplace could assure Napoleon that the God Hypothesis was superfluous not because Laplace had solid scientific details backing up his case—he didn’t—but by virtue of this ridiculous, fallacious line of argument.

Flexibility of explanation

Herschel’s anomalous satellites, with orbits almost perpendicular to expectations, would by no means be the only problem for Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis. Problems mounted and, as usual, the theory became more complicated.

In Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis, planet formation is a natural consequence of star formation. In Buffon’s earlier comet theory, planet formation is a separate event and not a consequence of star formation. This fundamental difference defines two categories of theories for the origin of the solar system—the monistic and dualistic categories, respectively. Monistic theories hold that all the major components of the solar system formed together. Dualistic theories hold that stars form by one process and planets form by a different process.

Since Laplace the mounting problems with the Nebular Hypothesis caused a reevaluation and search for alternate explanations. A major problem was that the sun rotates too slowly. The vast majority of the angular momentum in the solar system resides in the planets, a fact that was difficult to reconcile with the Nebular Hypothesis.

And so the twentieth century witnessed a series of monistic and dualistic theories competing to explain the solar system’s origin. There was the dualistic theory of a close encounter with a nearby star proposed by Chamberlin and Moulton and later by Jeans and Jeffreys. But such a close encounter could not reproduce the high angular momentum we observe in the planetary orbits. Also, material ripped from the sun by the encounter would be too hot to condense and form planets.

Russell proposed a new monistic theory calling for a rise in density of the collapsing solar nebula. Also, the idea of magnetic braking was considered as a mechanism for depleting the sun’s angular momentum. This was followed by the dualistic theory of Alfvén and Schmidt, and then the monistic theory of Kuiper and Urey. Schmidt’s dualistic theory was later refined in the Safronov–Wetherill model and after this Cameron promoted the “supernova trigger” hypothesis.

Both monistic and dualistic theories have been repeatedly proposed throughout the twentieth century. In fact, as Brush observes, the time scale for reversing the answer has grown shorter and shorter as we approach the present. Hence the origin of the solar system, says Brush, is an unsolved problem.

Today’s hypothesis

Today’s accepted theory for the origin of the solar system is a complex, cosmic choreography based on the Nebular Hypothesis. It goes something like this (as you read this keep in mind it is a fact because, as Bernoulli and Laplace argued, there obviously is only a single cause):

A large cloud of material, including dust, hydrogen and helium, collapses to form the sun and a surrounding disk. The rotational rate increases as the cloud collapses. It also heats up, especially in the inner region, say within the orbit of Jupiter. In this inner region, only rocky materials can withstand the high temperatures and they collect to form the inner planets, initially as molten blobs. Later they are coated with particles that collect on their surface. These become the crusts of the inner planets.

Between Mars and Jupiter there is no planet but instead we find the asteroid belt. This is because Jupiter perturbed the nascent planets that formed in that region, causing them to collide rather than coalesce. The result is a ring of asteroids, rather than a planet, circling the sun.

In the outer regions of the solar system, where the temperature is lower, icy dust collects to form small planetesimals that later attract the hydrogen and helium gases. Left over planetesimals may be captured as moons or are ejected to the outer reaches of the solar system to become comets. Hence the composition of comets and meteorites should represent the early solar nebula.

Later, the sun’s radiation and solar wind drive any remaining gas out of the solar system, and the sun’s rotation is dramatically slowed by magnetic braking. This is the rendition of Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis from recent years, but there remain several anomalies to explain. For instance, Venus and Uranus have anomalous spin characteristics. Also, about a third of the more than one hundred moons in the solar system have irregular orbits, revolving about their host planet in the wrong direction for example. And some revolve faster than their host planet spins. This would not occur if they were formed by a condensing cloud. Also, Pluto’s orbit is more elliptical than the other planets, and significantly inclined from the ecliptic.

There is no general explanation for these many anomalies. It could be that huge impacts reversed the spin of Venus and tipped Uranus on its side. Perhaps moons that revolve too fast have dropped from a higher orbit, and thus increased their rate of rotation. Or they may have been captured by rather than formed with the planet.

As for Pluto, one idea is that a large planetesimal passed near Neptune, lost some energy and fell down near Jupiter which ejected it to beyond Pluto. In the process the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are all perturbed and Neptune, in turn, perturbs Pluto into its highly eccentric and inclined orbit we observe today.

Another difficulty with today’s theory of the solar system origin is the great size of the outer gaseous planets. In order to accumulate so much light gas they must have formed very quickly because early on the sun’s solar wind would have blown the gas out of the solar system altogether.

One explanation for this is that these planets formed via a faster acting mechanism known as disk instability. But if this works for Jupiter and Saturn, it leaves open the question of why Uranus and Neptune are not so large. If the disk instability mechanism gave Jupiter and Saturn their thick atmospheres, why didn’t it give thick atmospheres to Uranus and Neptune?

One answer is that our solar system formed in a cluster of stars. Perhaps the neighboring stars were so close that radiation heated the gases in the outer reaches of our solar system, making them more difficult for Uranus and Neptune to capture

A new flip?

In recent years the Nebular Hypothesis has met with even more failures. For instance, discoveries of distant planets have revealed star systems that make no sense on the Nebular Hypothesis. As one researcher commented, “These discoveries are making it very difficult to stick to the party line endorsing the so-called standard model.”

And now, new analysis of NASA’s Genesis mission reveals contradictory variations in nitrogen and oxygen isotopes. As one researcher explained:

These findings show that all solar system objects including the terrestrial planets, meteorites and comets are anomalous compared to the initial composition of the nebula from which the solar system formed.

And as another researcher concluded, that raises questions about the Nebular Hypothesis:

The implication is that we did not form out of the same solar nebula materials that created the sun—just how and why remains to be discovered.

Discovered? This has very little to do with scientific discovery. The researcher is confusing metaphysics with science. The reasons for the isotope variations will be explained, not discovered. New epicycles will be applied where needed, and perhaps there will be a flip to a new dualistic theory.

Of course there is nothing wrong with hypotheses about how the world arose. Even circuitous, heroic and unlikely theories are at least worth consideration. There should be no constraint or limit on our imagination. Theories can be posited, tested, evaluated and rejected, as appropriate. But of course evolutionary thinking isn’t about any of this. If it was then the true status of the theories would be admitted.

Evolutionary thinking is about injecting a religious agenda into science that evolutionists insist must be true. Religion drives science, and it matters.