Your Gramma's a Sponge!

For all their disagreements, evolutionists strongly agree that evolution is a fact, just as gravity is a fact. There is no question that evolution occurred. And since evolution is as certain as gravity, those who do not assent must not be rational, or they must have ulterior motives. If there are scientific questions about evolution (and there are), they merely relate to the question of how evolution occurred, not whether evolution occurred. Those who point out that the scientific evidence does not bode well for evolution must understand that such evidence can in no way call the fact of evolution into doubt. The scientific evidence can only bear on questions of how evolution occurred.

Now this logic might be reasonable if the scientific problems with evolution were minor compared to the supporting evidence. We certainly do not doubt the fact of gravity even though we do not understand the details of how it works. But then again, the evidence for gravity is rather strong. In the case of evolution, it is the other way around. In the case of evolution, it is the problems which are rather strong.

We don't understand how life could have first evolved, we don't understand how multicellular organisms could have evolved from unicellular organisms, we don't understand how identical unconstrained DNA sequences could be conserved in distant species, we don't understand how shocking differences could have evolved in otherwise similar species, we don't understand how consciousness could have evolved, we don't understand how adaptive mechanisms could have evolved, we don't understand how a thousand and one complex structures, superior to our best military machines, could have evolved, we don't understand how ..., well you get the idea.

In light of the scientific evidence, the fact that evolutionists shout down any dissent makes them look more like the Wizard of Oz than sober scientists. Consider, for instance, the problem of how multicellular organisms could have evolved from unicellular organisms. Bob Holmes reported on this recently in The NewScientist. One problem is that such an evolutionary move must have occurred quickly, without leaving any evidence. As one evolution admitted, "The different branches of the animal tree evolved very rapidly in a short period, a long time ago."

Another problem is that reconstructions of the evolutionary tree are not stable. Was the ancestor of multicellular organisms a choanoflagellate? Or was it a placozoan, or a ctenophore, or even a sponge larva? Different methods lead to different reconstructions. And of course the move to multicellular organisms required more complex designs. Not surprisingly, the details of early animal evolution are still hotly debated.

While evolutionists can provide plenty of guesses about how multicellular organisms could have evolved from unicellular organisms, the fact is evolutionists have no idea how they actually evolved. And if evolutionists have no idea how they evolved, can we really be sure that they did evolve? Evolutionists scoff at such skepticism. It is unwarranted, they say, because evolution is a fact. It seems that rather than the scientific evidence putting to rest problems with the fact of evolution, it is the fact of evolution that is putting to rest problems with the scientific evidence.

Evolution's Appeal

Scientific problems with evolution don't really matter. This genre of thought scratches too many itches to let science bring it down. Traditionally those itches have mainly been theological and philosophical. Now, as the evolutionary narrative subsumes human nature, new itches emerge. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, provides a peek into this latest addition to evolution's intellectual necessity. This quote appears in a fancy, inside cover advertisement run by the John Templeton Foundation, in this month's Scientific American:

In the last two decades, evolutionary psychology has cast new light on ever more facets of human nature. And contrary to popular critiques of the field, it has done so in way that are ever more intellectually thrilling, morally enlightening, spiritually satisfying, and socially progressive. What we mean by "evolution" and "human nature" continues to develop through mutual interaction, lie the passions of a whispering couple in a close-embrace tango.

What a coincidence that objective scientific research just happens to be "intellectually thrilling, morally enlightening, spiritually satisfying, and socially progressive." Any chance that is not really a coincidence? Any chance evolutionary research is not really scientific research?

During the 1990s, biologists developed a whole new toolbox of ideas about the nature of evolution, including theories based on life history, multi-level selection, strong reciprocity, good-genes sexual selection, and costly signalling. These terms may be unfamiliar to non-specialists, but they represent a revolution in Darwinian theory and have proven their value again and again in understanding aspects of human nature that defy simplistic "survival of the fittest" reasoning.

That's true, there has been a revolution in Darwinian theory. And the just-so stories have become even more unbelievable. This new toolbox of ideas does explain many aspects of human nature, but so does astrology. Ever since Darwin, evolution has become increasingly complex and circuitous. Today it looks like one massive Rube Goldberg machine, ready to collapse on itself.

Beyond Lamarckism

In case you missed it, here is a repeat of the best of Katherine Pollard's piece in the May, 2009 issue of Scientific American (page 47) where she attempts to make sense of human-chimp genomic differences that don't make evolutionary sense:

The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a whole. Rather the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where those changes make an important difference in an organism’s functioning. HAR1 is certainly such a place. So, too, is the FOXP2 gene, which contains another of the fast-changing sequences I identified and is known to be involved in speech.

I wish Charles Darwin could see the new levels of banality he has given us. The "fact" of his theory now underwrites the ascribing anything and everything to evolution, no matter how ludicrous. Evolution has become a tautology. Whatever we find in biology is simply chalked up to evolution's amazing powers.

A core tenet of evolution is that the biological variation, upon which natural selection operates, is independent of need. This view has been falsified so many times that evolutionists such as Pollard no longer skip a beat when reporting on evolution's "secret" miracles. In this case, evolution's secret is to focus the mutations right where they are needed to construct jaw-dropping designs. In other words, evolution targeted a whole bunch of mutations to create the human from the human-chimp ancestor. The silliness of evolution continues to reach new heights.

Still Still Waiting

Are there no journalists who can think for themselves about evolution? Over at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker has now joined Michelle Cottle and Amy Sullivan in a Francis Collins fawning competition. According to Parker, Collins "wants to raise the level of discourse about science and faith." Apparently Parker is oblivious that Collins is propagating centuries-old theological arguments that first laid the foundation for evolution. Nor does she seem to understand that science cannot provide the metaphysical certainty the Collins and the evolutionists have. Parker shows not even a hint of curiosity at Collins' non scientific claims. She writes:

Having earned a PhD and a medical degree, Collins is nonetheless a scientist with little patience for those who insist that evolution is just a theory that one may take or leave. Most human genes, he points out, are similar to genes in other mammals, "which indicates a common ancestry."

Should we laugh or cry? Evolution gives us dogma such as this, and journalists pass them on as though they are scientific findings. This is hardly raising the level of discourse.

Scientific American and the Banality of Evil (ution)

Will the shakeup at Scientific American shift the venerable periodical back toward science and away from the dogma in which it has been mired in recent decades? Only time will tell, but Katherine Pollard's current piece, about what makes humans different from chimpanzees, takes the magazine to new levels of evolutionary nonsense for which it has become famous (or infamous). Here are a few passages of note:

Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them—less than 1 percent—have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged.

Humbling? Why is Pollard humbled? Did the brain evolve the feeling of humility to be activated upon learning of similarities with other species? If you think this is sarcasm check out what evolutionists have had to do to explain human behavior. It isn't your Daddy's evolution anymore. It seemed that evolution was as silly as could be. It was story telling on steroids. But then came the updated version of the theory, and evolutionists became their own best parody.

Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. I was determined to find them. Since then, I and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps.

Tantalizing progress? You've got to be kidding me. This "progress" is based on yet another evolutionary fumble; namely, an extreme over emphasis on DNA. In evolution-dom, DNA is king. Long ago evolutionists latched onto DNA as a Hail Mary explanation of how the information for macro evolution could be stored and passed on. Ever since then DNA has been viewed as the blueprint for biological design. Like a computer program, DNA was forced into the role of the biological "program" that determines the nature of an organism. The other parts of the organism, as with the computer, are viewed as merely mechanically performing tasks and following instructions.

Evolutionists need DNA to fulfill this role because they need unguided change to be heritable. Such change was viewed as created by DNA mutations, which could then be passed on to offspring. Scientific problems with this dogma are mounting, but evolutionists will be slow to adjust and reconcile such a fundamental failure.

Until recently the DNA dogma was even more narrow, as evolutionists viewed only the genes within the DNA as important. The remainder of the DNA (the vast majority) was often thought of as useless junk. Now that science, no thanks to evolution, is discovering that most of the "junk" is actually important, evolutionists changed their view to include more of the DNA.

Now science is taking the next step, again no thanks to evolution, in finding that the nature of an organism may be influenced by players outside the exalted DNA. One obvious suggestion for this comes from precisely the data Pollard analyzes: the human and chimp DNA which are so similar. But Pollard's story is firmly rooted in the DNA dogma. Evolutionists make the absurd claim that a handful of genes, which stand out in humans, are the source of so much of the human-chimp difference.

Because most random genetic mutations neither benefit nor harm an organism, they accumulate at a steady rate that reflects the amount of time that has passed since two living species had a common forebear (this rate of change is often spoken of as the “ticking of the molecular clock”).

Except that the "molecular clock" doesn't actually work. It is yet another false prediction that goes unmentioned.

Acceleration in that rate of change in some part of the genome, in contrast, is a hallmark of positive selection, in which mutations that help an organism survive and reproduce are more likely to be passed on to future generations. In other words, those parts of the code that have undergone the most modification since the chimp-human split are the sequences that most likely shaped humankind.

Do we really need evolution to tell us that the DNA segments with the most differences between the human and chimp are more important in understanding the sources of the human-chimp difference? Here we see the banality of evolution.

The fact that HAR1 was essentially frozen in time through hundreds of millions of years indicates that it does something very important; that it then underwent abrupt revision in humans suggests that this function was significantly modified in our lineage.

More banality. The gene is significantly different in humans as compared to a wide range of other species. So yes, this suggests its function is significantly different in humans. This conclusion is obvious and we don't need evolution to figure it out. The evolutionary wrapping is superfluous. The talk of how the gene is "frozen in time" and that it "underwent abrupt revision in humans" is gratuitous story telling. Science gives the important findings and evolution gives the meaningless extras.

In fact, what evolutionists do not mention is that HAR1 is yet another example of genome differences between species that are larger than evolution predicted. The human-chimp differences are more than an order of magnitude greater than what evolution predicts. Fortunately, this freak barrage of typos just happened to hit the mark, providing quantum leaps in design improvement leading to the human brain.

Furthermore, these typos simultaneously must have altered two other genes which overlap with HAR1. That's right, HAR1 lies in a region of overlapping genes. Imagine typing a paragraph which contains one message when read normally and a different message when read backward. Not only must evolution have created all of biology's genetic information, but it composed the information in overlapping prose. Someday evolutionists will figure out how.

It might seem surprising that no one paid attention to these amazing 118 bases of the human genome earlier. But in the absence of technology for readily comparing whole genomes, researchers had no way of knowing that HAR1 was more than just another piece of junk DNA.

It was technology, not evolution, that was needed.

The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a whole. Rather the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where those changes make an important difference in an organism’s functioning. HAR1 is certainly such a place. So, too, is the FOXP2 gene, which contains another of the fast-changing sequences I identified and is known to be involved in speech.

I wish Charles Darwin could see the new levels of banality he has given us. The "fact" of his theory now underwrites the ascribing anything and everything to evolution, no matter how ludicrous. Evolution has become a tautology. Whatever we find in biology is simply chalked up to evolution's amazing powers. A core tenet of evolution is that the biological variation, upon which natural selection operates, is independent of need. This view has been falsified so many times that evolutionists such as Pollard no longer skip a beat when reporting on evolution's "secret" miracles. In this case, evolution's secret is to focus the mutations right where they are needed to construct jaw-dropping designs.

What Journalists Need to Know About Evolution

My high school physics teacher's favorite admonishment was "if all else fails, read the directions." It is amazing what one can learn by reading rather than divining. And this holds for more than assembling science projects. If you want to understand evolution why not try, yes, reading what evolutionists write. With my high school physics teacher admonishment in mind, this is exactly what I did many years ago. And if you are too busy to spend long hours in the library, let me tell you what I found. If you will read just this one blog entry, and keep an open mind, I promise you will learn the truth about evolution.

There is, of course, much scientific evidence for evolution. But there is also much evidence that the Earth is flat, that the planets and stars circle about the Earth, and that it rains on Tuesdays. In fact, given what we know from science, evolution is easily high on the list of worst theories ever. But don't take my word for it, read the evolution literature. It is chocked full of major problems with the evidence. If you are interested in the details, you can read about the fossils, comparative anatomy, and adaptive change. These are the major categories into which most of the evidence for evolution falls. In each case, the evidence raises more questions than it answers--and this is the evidence that is supposed to support evolution.

Beyond this lie more problems, such as the origin of structures so complex we still cannot understand them. In biology lie secrets that military designers would love to uncover and utilize. Our best submarines cannot track targets as accurately as bats can track their prey.

Given all these evidential challenges, it is not surprising that evolution is consistently upended by the data. In the past century, as science progressed, evolution's fundamental predictions turn out to be false. Evolutionists are constantly surprised by science.

Evolution is, by any measure, not a good scientific theory. So what gives evolutionists their confidence? Why do they universally claim that evolution is a fact, every bit as much as gravity is a fact. We feel gravity every waking moment, how could evolution possibly have this level of certainty? Understanding this is the key to understanding evolution. And again, one merely needs to read the literature. Evolutionists are not coy about their certainty. Nor is their certainty a result of exaggeration or fallacy. It all makes perfect sense once you read their proofs. Evolution is a fact, they say, because God would never have created what we find in biology.

A popular version of this argument today comes from pseudogenes, genes that appear to be broken. The argument cites pseudogenes that appear in multiple species, where they are broken in the same way. These shared pseudogenes, like identical typos in different manuscripts, suggest a common source (i.e., a common ancestor). But such a suggestion faces a plethora of problems. We don't even know how genes could evolve in the first place, let alone how species give rise to different species.

Furthermore, there are perfectly good non evolutionary explanations for shared pseudogenes. In fact, such explanations are used even by evolutionists in instances where necessary. Regardless of such complicating factors, however, what evolutionists are sure of is that pseudogenes, and certainly shared pseudogenes, would not be created. As leading evolutionist Ken Miller argues, evolution is the obvious explanation for pseudogenes because otherwise they reveal a designer who “made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.”

This is the latest incarnation of an argument that has been used as often as discussions of origins have occurred. It is the constant theme running through evolutionary thought. The evidences may come and go, but the underlying conviction is forever. Within evolutionary thought it traces back to Darwin who skillfully persuaded his readers with this religious argument about the creator and creation.

But this genre of thought by no means began with Darwin. His arguments can be found in Hume, Kant, Leibniz and dozens of other Enlightenment thinkers. And of course the lineage traces yet further back, to antiquity and undoubtedly beyond. What is interesting is that Darwin's sources, supporters, and audience were largely Christian. In Darwin's day, this religious argument about God was primarily supplied by the heavily christianized culture. There is much more to say about how this history arose, and how it relates to our situation today. But that is another story.

Now you know the truth of evolution. Religion has deeply penetrated into science, and it has produced Darwin's theory. The science is weak, but the metaphysics is powerful. Religion drives science, and it matters. In the past, religious authorities used manipulation and intimidation to enforce their views and control the culture. It is no different today. As before, many go along with the charade. Evolution will go down in history as a sort of Emperor's New Clothes tale, except this time it is real. You can keep this truth under wraps, or you can help reveal it. If you choose the latter, I can promise you one thing. You will be ridiculed and rejected. You will probably lose your job, or at least your next promotion. Oh, one other thing: you will be on the side of truth.

How to Protect Evolution

A student recently asked me this question:

How do you answer the accusation that those who doubt evolution are all creationists, and therefore not credible scientists?

Here is my response.

Evolutionists often try to protect their theory by appealing to the warfare thesis. The warfare thesis, which first gained popularity in the nineteenth century, states that the relationship between science and religion is primarily characterized by conflict. This model for understanding the science/religion interface has been shown to be erroneous many times over. Historians no longer take it seriously, except as part of the history of evolutionary thought. Evolutionists, however, continue to appeal to the warfare thesis as a rhetorical device.

This argument is one of many that reveal that evolution today has little going for it. In fact, one need not be a historian to see through this particular version of the warfare thesis. Anyone remotely familiar with the origins debate knows that evolution skepticism goes far outside creationist circles. Indeed, if evolutionists are genuinely interested in locating religious bias in the origins debate, they ought to look closer to home. Evolutionary thinking arose from religious claims that mandate a naturalistic origins.

Still Waiting

Over at The New Republic, Senior Editor Michelle Cottle continues where Amy Sullivan left off in misreporting on Francis Collins. As with Sullivan's piece (which Cottle heartily recommends), Cottle inverts evolution. In the hands of writers such as Sullivan and Cottle, evolution's compelling religion which drives the science becomes compelling science which helps to inform religion. The myth is that Charles Darwin just happened to discover, independent of any religious and cultural influence, that all life evolved.

The occasion for this latest round of dogma was a presentation by Collins at a conference for religion writers that Cottle attended last night. Like Judge Jones, Cottle was wowed by the parable of the pseudogene. So much for critical thinking. Evolution is parasitic upon scientific illiteracy of which there is a plenitude.

Scary Matthews Interview

This week on CNN Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Republican Congressman Mike Pence about science and evolution. The usually cogent Matthews challenged Pence with the following stream of anti-intellectualism:

There are people on your side of the argument who believe that all the prehistoric bones that have been discovered in the world, all the dinosaur bones, and all that stuff, was somehow planted there by liberal scientists to make the case against the Bible. There are people that really are against science in your party. Who really do question ... the science behind evolutionary fact that we were taught, you and I, in our biology book. They don't accept the scientific method. They believe in belief itself.

Pence retorted that he knew of no one who held such views, but Matthews would have none of it. What is scary is that this bizarre stream of inaccuracies and scientism is not coming from an Internet chatroom or the local pub. Chris Matthews is a long-time political commentator and usually quite insightful. And this same Chris Matthews, when it comes to evolution, suddenly sounds like a crackpot. This level of anti-intellectualism, coming from such an unlikely source, is scary.

Matthews' tirade may have seemed similar to a religious inquisition to some. But in fact, Matthews' tirade was a religious inquisition. Matthews attempted to intimidate and shout down Pence with a series of false allegations. On penalty of humiliation and defamation, Pence was to assent to the religious theory of evolution. Of course evolution is not a fact, and it is not the product of some magical "scientific method." The fossil data do not particularly help, and no halfway serious thinker holds to Matthews' strawman. There is no need to, but evolutionists cannot understand that.

This reminds me of a debate in which an evolutionist asked me if I believe in the fossil record. Evolutionists' belief is so strong that they profoundly misunderstand the nature of the data and how it bears on their creation story. To them, evolution is a fact and all evidence supports it unequivocally. Their zeal blinds them to their own anti-intellectualism. Matthews was demanding Pence's assent to evolution--a religious theory--and his charge was that dissenters are religiously driven. Look in the mirror Chris.

Religion in Science: A Current Case Study

A few blogs ago I pointed out a current example of how religion drives science. This is a good case study as it (1) shows how subtle and yet significant religious influence can be, (2) is a fascinating parallel of what is probably the most important example of religious influence in the history of modern science, and finally (3) is an excellent example of how methodological naturalism can fail.

To appreciate this current example, one needs a bit of background. For thousands of years thinkers have tried to figure out why and how objects move. For instance, in the sky objects tend to move sideways whereas down here on Earth objects tend to move vertically (flames move upward and apples drop down to the ground). Aristotle made the reasonable inference that the laws of motion were different up in the sky than they were down here on the ground. In other words, the laws of motion were location dependent.

Then there was the problem of simply describing motion, especially for objects up in the sky. Did the planets circle the Earth, or did they circle the Sun? In either case, their motion was apparently very complicated. Astronomers had to use epicycles to describe celestial motions. But did celestial objects really fly along such circuitous tracks, turning this way and that as they made their way around the Earth or Sun? It was about four hundred years ago when Johannes Kepler finally found that the simple ellipse nicely describes the motion of Mars about the Sun.

As profound as Kepler's discovery was, it nonetheless did not explain why a planet would trace out an elliptical orbit. Furthermore, the ellipses did not much help to reconcile the motion of objects in the sky and motion down here on the ground. Enter Isaac Newton. A bit more than three hundred years ago, Newton proposed his universal law of gravity and laws of motion. These profoundly simple laws simultaneously explained why objects move, why they move the way they do (such as planets tracing out ellipses), and Newton's laws reconciled celestial and terrestrial motion.

Newton's laws were a tremendous scientific breakthrough. They showed how apparently complex observations could result from simple laws. Appeals to unknown or mysterious causes could now be replaced with elegant mathematical formulas. Could not all of nature could be so described? Newton's findings fueled theological ideas mandating the removal of miracles. After Newton, a variety of traditions became increasingly influential which argued god works exclusively according to natural laws. The religious influence on science was not going away, as the history books tell us.

One powerful, and unappreciated, religious influence emerged from an intriguing problem in astronomy. Newton's laws explained how the planets move, but not how their motion was initiated. In particular, the planets all circled the sun in the same direction, and roughly in the same plane. In the century following Newton, scientists and philosophers developed a powerful argument for why the planets must have arisen as a result of natural laws.

The argument compared ordered motion with random motion. Simply put, the argument stated that since a creator is sovereign, it would be capricious for him to design his creations using a particular pattern. Instead, such creations (such as the planets) would exhibit random motion. And since the planets do not trace random orbits, but rather move in a pattern, they must have arisen naturalistically. The test for design became randomness and any observable order was taken as evidence for a naturalistic origin. Scientists set about devising explanations for how the planets could have evolved. The explanations grew increasingly complex and unstable as a variety of mechanisms were considered to explain the origin of the planets. The religion in science did not lead to simple, elegant explanations. Likewise, Darwin and evolutionists since Darwin used this argument as proof for biological evolution, and that too has grown increasingly complex.

This religious driver in science is very much active today, and a few weeks ago another example was reported. Physicists have been studying the small dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way galaxy. There are several dozen such dwarf galaxies, and the researchers discovered that the eleven brightest of them orbit the Milky Way in the same direction, and in roughly the same plane. Sound familiar? This is the same pattern for the planets orbiting the Sun. Of course, the researchers assumed that the pattern must have arisen naturalistically:

Professor Kroupa and the other physicists believe that this can only be explained if today’s satellite galaxies were created by ancient collisions between young galaxies. [emphasis added]

But now they are in a bind. If the dwarf galaxies were created by such collisions, then their spin rates would not make sense. The only way to explain their fast rotational rates would be to modify Newton's law of gravity. As one researcher put it:

The only solution is to reject Newton’s theory.

So in addition to forcing science toward increasingly complex explanations, in this case methodological naturalism also forces the reevaluation of Newton's law of gravity. This example shows how methodological naturalism can go beyond simply enforcing certain types of explanations--it can send feedback into science's fundamental laws in ways that are not obviously healthy.

Why is Evolution a Fact?

Evolutionists say evolution is a fact, every bit as much as gravity is a fact. That is remarkable. We see and even feel gravity everyday. Evolution, on the other hand, entails rather dramatic, one-time, events that were supposed to have occurred long ago, when no one was around to witness them. How could we be sure of such a theory? There must be some extremely powerful and compelling scientific evidence for evolution to make it a fact as gravity is a fact. That is what one would think. But, surprisingly, there is no such evidence. When evolutionists try to explain why evolution is a fact, it is a tremendous anticlimax. Consider this example from evolutionist Massimo Pigliucci:

Consider the following: if there is any obvious evidence of the fact that evolution has occurred, it ought to be the impressive and worldwide consistent fossil record. Moreover, using the geological column as a way to date events during the history of the earth predates Darwin (i.e., it was invented by creationists), and we keep discovering new intermediate fossils further documenting evolution every year.

The fossil record, of course, is not "obvious evidence" of the fact of evolution. If we want to speak of facts, the fossil record provides a wide spectrum of data which do not prove evolution. Indeed, the fossil record falsified several fundamental predictions of evolution. That is a fact. Another fact is that evolutionists make startling truth claims and then back them up with weak or even contradictory evidences. This raises the question of how evolutionists could have such certainty in light of such skimpy evidence? More on this later, but to forestall the obvious, their certainty is not from science.

This is Only a Test

Think you understand how religion drives science? Here is a good example to test your skills. If you can explain the invisible hand of religion in this case, then you have a fairly good grasp of how religion drives science. If not, then check back in a bit for my explanation of Darwin's god at work.

Atheists Strategize on Minnesota Radio

Over in the atheist wing of the evolution camp, Eugenie Scott strategized and commiserated with, and sometimes chided, her fellow secular humanists this past weekend on a Minnesota radio program called Atheists Talk. Scott is Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, and a fine person. Atheists are sometimes hostile when faced with evolution criticism, but not Scott. I have opposed her occasionally in debates and discussions and she is always professional and respectful.

Scott's strong diplomacy skills are needed not only in defending evolution (not an easy task). She also needs those skills in dealing with her fellow evolutionists who sometimes want to make war with those of us who don't worship Darwin's god. Scott knows something of the strong theological basis for evolution (I once heard her use the god-of-the-gaps argument as deftly as any theist), and she seeks to use it to evangelize us heretics. If 10,000 clergy can, in short order, be summoned to sign a pro evolution letter, then can't this religious sentiment be harnessed to persuade those who reject evolution?

The NCSE's strategy, therefore, is to remove religious obstacles to evolution. The evolution camp is chocked full of theists, many of whom are more than happy to spread the good word of why theology, properly understood, mandates evolution and not divine creation or intelligent design. And the NCSE understands that religion is too big a force to oppose. So why oppose a giant that can instead be your ally? There are, however, three problems with the NCSE's strategy.

First, the NCSE underestimates religious differences. They are correct that religion is a powerful force, but it is also split into myriad factions whose differences are not easily overcome. In our secular society religious belief is sometimes viewed as more or less unified, but this is far from true. The theological basis for evolution is simply far too alien for many folks. Indeed, it is remarkable how evolutionists confidently make their theological and metaphysical proclamations, without justification, as though they are obviously and undeniably true.

Second, the NCSE underestimates the scientific obstacles to evolution. Those who worship Darwin's god don't mind, but others do. The NCSE is asking folks to consider an alien theology that mandates a theory that fails scientifically. That strategy will not go far.

Finally, the NCSE underestimates the transparency of its motives. Evolutionists are driven by their theology and metaphysics to claim that we must accept a silly theory as fact. And all of this is obvious. Evolutionists aren't fooling anyone. Take the atheist wing as an example. The atheist's motives are painfully obvious for all to see. When they ignore fundamental scientific problems and declare evolution to be a fact, it is not because they know something we don't. It is because they have no choice. Atheism is compatible with evolution, period. Evolution made atheism respectable, and atheists cannot let it go.

When atheists strategize about evolution it is yet another example of how religion drives science.

Getting Close (I Hope)

We're still waiting. Opinion makers from left, right and center continue to misunderstand evolution, despite the fact that evolutionists continue to flash their signs for all to see. The latest missed opportunity comes from Amy Sullivan's piece in Time Magazine about the work of evolutionist Francis Collins. As Sullivan reports, Collins derides alternatives to evolution as not scientific and not good theology either. This of course is nothing new. Evolutionists and their forerunners have been saying this for more than three centuries. Sullivan is ever so close to "getting it." Of course evolution is a fact. Of course scientific problems don't matter. Evolution must be true, for our religion demands it. But yet again this flashing red sign goes unnoticed as Sullivan manages to look the other way. We're still waiting.