It's Evidence Only If I Say So

Is "science" really synonymous for "reality?" The mindset we have been examining treats science as definitionally equivalent to truth/fact and non-science (or perhaps "non-sense") as equivalent to preference or value. This is a prevailing view in contemporary Western society, recently put on display by apologists for the current US administration. Hold onto this thought, and also to this one: "To scientific naturalists the notion that there could be a reality outside of science is literally unthinkable."

Thomas Kuhn developed a paradigm model of science, an explanation of how science progresses that reminds one of saltationism. "Normal science" prevails most of the time, but gets interrupted or reset by occasional revolutions or "paradigm shifts." A paradigm, of course, is a way of looking at reality, a worldview or perspective or interpretative lens by which one sees and interacts with the world. Scientists, being humans, operate according to a set of values or principles or "ground rules" that influence the way they perceive reality. So long as a particular paradigm holds sway it dictates the approach to doing science. It becomes a form of "groupthink" that actually enhances the ability of scientists to communicate and collaborate. But this often means that phenomena that do not fit the paradigm are not seen or ignored because they are not being looked for. One sees what one knows or recognizes. Adherents to paradigms are typically conservative (not necessarily in the political sense), unwilling to suffer challenges to the paradigm and willing to defend it even at substantial cost. Only when the "crisis"--the overwhelming accumulation of observations contrary to the prevailing paradigm--occurs can they get past their loyalty to the old paradigm. But no matter what there must be a paradigm. "To reject one paradigm without substituting another is to reject science itself." This is what puts evolutionary biologists in a quandary. To them, there is no alternative to the naturalistic explanation they have devised for the development of life on earth. According to their paradigm, it is true and cannot be seen as otherwise. The questions for all of us, scientists and others, are whether they are right and whether they properly may control the public discussion of these matters as they currently do.

An Irrepressible Conflict?

According to Judge Overton, science (evolution) and religion (creation) are not opposed. He was quite indignant that anyone would suggest that the two, properly understood, are in final conflict. He was also quite mistaken in what he thought the evolutionists believe.

George Gaylord Simpson disagreed with the judge. In his The Meaning of Evolution, he wrote: "Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic, or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity...Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." In further elaboration, he added, "There is neither need nor excuse for postulation of nonmaterial intervention in the origin of life, the rise of man, or any other part of the long history of the material cosmos. Yet the origin of that cosmos and the causal principles of its history remain unexplained and inaccessible to science. Here is hidden the First Cause sought by theology and philosophy. The First Cause is not known and I suspect it will never be known to living man. We may, if we are so inclined, to worship it in our own ways, but we certainly do not comprehend it." There is no room for God in Simpson's thinking, or if there is it is only for an eternally hidden, uninvolved god who may not be known by "his" creatures. How there is no conflict between this view and Christianity is beyond understanding.

Simpson's view is not merely a personal or a minority opinion. It may often get blurred or even covered over, but Simpson's words accurately reflect the thoughts of the scientific establishment. Naturalism--that worldview that posits the material universe is all that is, has been, or ever shall be--is the philosophical basis for Darwinism. The first two of Judge Overton's "rules" express this. "Natural law" should be understood as referring to the physical laws of nature and not the philosophical and legal idea pertaining to human rights and related concepts.

There is also a commitment to empiricism, as demonstrated in the last three of the judge's "rules." Empiricism is the philosophy that all truth is discerned by observation, that it is gleaned through the senses. It is not the same thing as naturalism and many are confused on this point. In fact, these two tenets of Darwinism are in conflict, for all the claims made by naturalism cannot be empirically verified. More to the point, empiricism itself cannot be empirically verified, making it self-referentially absurd. As it happens, the commitment to naturalism is prior to the commitment to empiricism; if it were the other way around, the theory of evolution would be confined solely to statements about microevolution, which can be observed. No one has ever witnessed macroevolution.

Judge Overton Explains It All for You

In 1981 the Arkansas state legislature passed a law that required the state public schools to teach "creation science" and "evolution science" in a balanced manner. It was immediately challenged. Poorly written, the law was dead on arrival in court. Michael Ruse, a Darwinist philosopher of science, provided key testimony that the presiding judge, William Overton, drew upon when writing his decision.

The results of this "collaboration" were a definition of science put forward by Judge Overton and a set of rules he termed the "essential characteristics" of science. Firstly, he stated that science is that which is "accepted by the scientific community." So the problems begin right at the start. Truth is to be determined by the preferences of a community. Overton elaborated with his five essentials:

1. Science is guided by natural law.

2. All phenomena are explanatory by natural law.

3. Ideas are testable against the empirical world.

4. Conclusions are held tentatively.

5. All scientific statements are falsifiable.

Other philosophers of science were not happy with the details of the decision and several of Judge Overton's "rules" are fundamentally flawed. Scientists are not in the least tentative about their basic commitments to evolution as we have seen, commitments that are themselves not subject to empirical investigation--how do you prove empirically that ideas must be testable against the empirical world? Advocates of "creation science" do make several claims about their theory that are truly falsifiable, so why should they be excluded on this criterion? How can they be declared false and yet unfalsifiable at the same time? Sad to say, though, the scientific community at large was quite delighted with the decision and it was published in toto in the journal Science, demonstrating that scientists may be expert geologists or zoologists but are often lousy philosophers.

Grasping at Straws

Yesterday we spoke of attempts to propose a naturalistic mechanism by which early proto-biochemicals might have come about. The harsh reality of the matter is that geologists now strongly doubt the early atmosphere had the composition required by the model that reigned in the 20th century. Biochemists now believe that the putative prebiotic soup would have been chemically unstable and could not have existed in the form proposed. But even if the right chemicals were at one point congregated in a concentrated environment, how do we get from that condition to life? There is simply no evidence that concentrations of amino acids and nucleic acids will spontaneously organize and interact. Astronomer Fred Hoyle once famously remarked that this was somewhat akin to a tornado running through a junkyard constructing a working jetliner.

DNA, RNA, and the myriads of necessary proteins are interdependent. No convincing explanation has ever accounted for life starting with these materials independently. Some have advocated a "naked gene" composed of RNA; others champion the proteins; others have touted an initial inorganic organization formed from clay crystals acting as a template upon which organic molecules organizes themselves and then "took over." A lot of effort has gone into creating laboratory and computer models, but so far all these offer is insight into how a designer might have worked.

Although subsequently explained away by embarrassed colleagues, the quandary of the molecular origin of life has provoked wild speculation on the part of some very famous people, to the degree that some have advocated the idea that aliens seeded the earth with life. What are we to make of a science that has come to this end? It simply refuses to admit the bankruptcy of its basic assumptions. Faced with the irreducible complexity of life and the appearance of design, its acolytes invariably look the other way. Why? That's our next topic.

Better Living Through Chemistry

The next problem to confront us is the explanation of how the present molecular complexity came to be in the first place. Although occasionally evolutionists will protest that their theory applies only to the study of changes in life once it has appeared, the exclusively materialistic nature of the theory demands a natural explanation for life's origins as well as its progress.

So what came before the cell? Charles Darwin had a thought on this question: "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could never have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." He wrote that in 1871. Little has changed in 140 years.

We are actually less close to a naturalistic answer now than we were sixty years ago. And before that, in the 1920s biologists Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane proposed a theoretical model of life that (in brief) had four postulates:

1) The atmosphere of early earth was made up of reducing gases, with little or no free oxygen.

2) Into this atmosphere entered various forms of energy, such as lightning.

3) Essential organic compounds, formed by the interaction of energy with pre-organic chemicals, accumulated in pools.

4) From this hot prebiotic soup life emerged.

A famous experiment conducted by Stanley Miller in the early 1950s seemed to corroborate this model. At least, obligatory pictures of the Miller-Urey experiment grace practically every biology textbook, so it must have been a slam-dunk proof, right?

Maybe not.

Momma's Boy

Using our favorite examples of the bat and whale, consider what happened according to the Darwinian scheme following the original split from the putative common ancestor of mammals, the reptiles. A sequence of conserved changes eventuated in the animals we know today. The experiences of the two evolutionary sequences would have become more and more disparate as the divergence progressed. Yet when the molecular evidence is consulted--the types of enzyme cytochrome c found in homologous structures, for example--changes have occurred at roughly the same rate and they are chemically equidistant from comparison molecules in any modern reptile. But if these molecular mutations have been occurring regularly without regard to environmental pressures (in contrast to the prevailing view of natural selection), what is the implication for Darwinism? This "molecular clock" concept forms the central idea in a theory known as the neutral theory of molecular evolution. The "neutral" part refers to molecular changes that have no impact upon functionality, such as the variations in cytochrome c. It is a neat way to account for the heterogeneity found in organisms, greater than would be expected by selection and it acutally improves the explanatory power of Darwinism. A specific example of how the idea of the molecular clock has been put to use is the recent theory that all humans now living are the descendants from one woman who lived in Africa less than 200 million years ago--the so-called "mitochondrial Eve," because the studies that led to this conclusion were done on mitochondrial DNA, which is conserved as it is passed through the maternal line [mitochondria are self-replicating organelles within eukaryotic cells that are present in the ovum but lacking in the head of the sperm that fertilizes--hence all the mitochondria in my body came from my mother, and all the mitochondrial DNA is passed through the generations through the maternal line]. This has caused some controversy between the molecular anthropologists and the fossil-based anthropologists, as their sequences of descent don't agree.

All of this would seem quite impressive, and it certainly can be daunting to the inexperienced, but at basis it simply distracts attention from the fact that the molecular clock hypothesis assumes the truth of the common ancestry thesis that it is supposed to confirm. It is a technically sophisticated restatement of the argument from classification and relationships.

So we are back to our tautologies. Evolution is true by definition. But the molecular evidence to which scientists appeal has not provided the necessary transitional forms to create links to purported common ancestors and there remains no corroboration that natural selection actually has the power to conserve and aggregate the types of changes required to explain the complexity and diversity of life on earth. Indeed, the molecular evidence has only added to the burden of unexplained complexity.

Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck...

The revolution in molecular biology over the past sixty years now permits examination of the biochemical constituents of life to a high degree of detail. It has been possible for many years now to determine the precise make-up of many important proteins and nucleic acids, such that the specific types of these molecules that occur in different species may be compared and degrees of divergence quantified.

Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there appear to be several genetic pathways to the same end. For example, most species of frog look essentially the same but their molecules differ as much from one another as do the molecules of the various mammalian families. Hence the relationship between phenotype and genotype is not as straightforward as it once seemed.

Much has been made of the high degree of convergence seen in the genomes of chimpanzees and humans. By some estimates, chimps are more closely related genetically to humans than to other sub-human primates, with up to 99% genetic convergence. Yet would anyone ever mistake a chimpanzee for a human being? The information contained within the DNA sequences and subsequently expressed must differ radically in order to account for the distinct and undeniable differences in phenotype. This point seems lost on some Darwinian biologists, who claim that "where it counts" the higher primates are nearly identical. The use of that phrase "where it counts" betrays a great deal of unspoken philosophy. At best, the genetic data corroborate the system of classification of Linnaeus; they do not confirm Darwin's theory of how these organisms came to be in the first place.

Recall that the key problem with the fossil record is the near-absence of the all-important transitional forms. Cellular chemistry also lacks the kind of consistent progression the Darwinist should expect to see from his theory. Studies of cytochrome c show a divergence range of 64-66% among animals as compared to a species of bacteria. Organisms as diverse as silkworms and kangaroos and humans therefore exhibit about the same degree of divergence from bacteria with no evidence of any intermediate forms. To take another, even more fundamental example: All living organisms used to be classified as either prokaryotes (no true nucleus--the bacteria) or eukaryotes (a nucleus contained within a membrane--the plants and animals). Based on recent RNA studies, it appears there are actually two distinct forms of bacteria, now renamed eubacteria and archaebacteria, that are so radically different from each other that they can have no common origin. This leaves us with three disparate kingdoms that cannot have a common ancestor, yet the Darwinist insists that they must, otherwise did life arise spontaneously not just once but three times?

Is That on the Map, George?

A quick survey of covered ground, just to make sure we're all on the same page.

1) Biological relationships necessitate common ancestry, per Darwinism. Descent with modification. Accordingly, the theory demands continuity between species, as illustrated by our discussion of vertebrate sequences this week.

2) The problem of discontinuity. As has been pointed out repeatedly, neither the existing order of living organisms nor the fossil record corroborates the idea of descent from common ancestors with modification--the intermediary transitional forms are scanty and inconclusive, not robustly present with a clear line of descent.

3) The relationship of phenotype to genotype. Natural selection favors the organisms whose characteristics best allow them to compete and reproduce. These are physical characteristics, but ultimately it is not these specific characteristics upon which natural selection works but the genes that specify or direct these physical traits. In other words, the phenotype is produced by the genotype, with the help of the environment.

Keep that last sentence in mind as we go forward.

Lancelot Links?

Picking up where we left off...

4) Reptiles to birds. One of the most famous fossils in existence is that of so-called Archaeopteryx, a bird-like creature believed to be about 145 million years old. It has numerous skeletal features suggesting a close kinship to a certain dinosaur species. Its discovery shortly after the publication of Origin helped convince a number of former skeptics and discredit nay-sayers. Analysis of Archaeopteryx indicates that it is best considered as a possible bird ancestor, not a definite one. Nevertheless, it is one of Darwinism's strongest bits of evidence, even in isolation--but it is not very good science to base an entire theory on one data point.

5) Apes to humans. As of the late 1980s there were five putative hominid species: Australopithicus afarensis, A. africanus, Homo habilis, H. erectus, and H. sapiens. But is the fossil record really all that secure? Physical anthropology is one of the most subjective of all investigative fields. It is all too easy to read volumes into the scanty evidence. If one is looking for human ancestors, it is easy to get quite inventive about finding them. There is enormous professional pressure to establish this important concept in evolutionary biology, pressures that sometimes lead to spectacular frauds, such as Piltdown man, covered up by the British Museum for forty years. At this point, the fossil records provide at best some plausible candidates as ancestral forms of modern humans, but they are far from establishing certainty after nearly 150 years of enthusiastic investigation. In fact, the overall testimony of the fossil record is so against the prevailing Darwinian theory of evolution that Darwinists have been forced to look elsewhere for corroboration. Lately they have turned to molecular biology, to which we will turn next.

The Vertebrate Sequence: Sufficient Proof?

All of the following sequences are accepted parts of evolutionary biology. Yet, as earlier remarked, the truth of evolution is assumed or defined into truth by the terms and presuppositions utilized (apparently unthinkingly). The challenge to evolutionists is to prove the sequences are valid without first assuming the truth of what they are trying to prove.

Gareth Nelson, he of the American Museum of Natural History, observed: "'We've got to have some ancestors. We'll pick those.' Why? 'Because we know they have to be there, and these are the best candidates.' That's by and large the way it has worked. I'm not exaggerating."

1) Fish to amphibians. Supposedly a fish species developed the ability to escape the water and survive on land, along with all the other peculiar properties of amphibians (whose reproductive systems differ considerablly from known fishes). Certain ancestral fish species have been proposed as this possible amphibian predecessor. One such species, thought to have been long extinct, was discovered in the Indian Ocean several years ago. When investigated, it proved inadequate to the task of being a frog's great-nth grandfather.

2) Amphibians to reptiles. No satisfactory candidates exist as yet to corroborate this putative link. One of the problems is that the main differences between amphibians and reptiles is in their soft parts, which are destroyed during fossilization.

3) Reptiles to mammals. The existence of a mammal-like reptile is the best example available to the evolutionary biologist: the order Therapsida, of which there are many fossil examples consisting of skeletal structures that appear to be intermediary between reptiles and mammals. The problem is--as already established above--the skeletal similarities are insufficient to confirm a definite link, and so far biologists have been unable to demonstrate a firm line of descent from the therapsids to mammals. The therapsid fossil evidence may actually create more difficulties for evolutionists trying to hold onto the idea of common ancestry.

We'll look at reptiles/birds and apes/humans tomorrow.

Gould's Three "Proofs" for Evolution as Fact

1. Microevolution. A point not in dispute is that variation occurs within species: Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, moths develop color changes in adaptation to changes in their environment, all the various races of humanity are descended from the original. But this truth provides no explanation for why the various types of living things developed in the first place. Nevertheless, for some evolutionists it suffices to marry observed microevolutionn to uniformitarianism (a philosophy) and declare victory. Part of the problem is the elasticity of the word "evolution," for it seems to cover just about anything the evolutionist desires.

2. The argument from imperfection, sometimes called the "God wouldn't have done it this way" argument, which implies that the evolutionary biologist is smarter than God. They think that instead God would have designed each living thing from scratch to maximize efficiency. This gets at the concept of homologies. Why use the same patterns of structures in different types of organisms to accomplish different functions? Why does the same set of bones in the rat, bat, porpoise, and man serve different ends? An intelligent designer, they insist, would have done better. But "the task of science is not to speculate about why God might have done things this way, but to see if a material explanation can be established by empirical investigation" (P. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, page 71). Many have tried to establish a mechanism for homologies via embryology, for "if homologous structures are relics of a common ancestor, they ought to be traceable to common embryonic parts." Darwin himself relied heavily upon what was known of embryology at his time as support for his theory. Unhappily for the evolutionists, the evidence from embryology is in the opposite direction; vertebrates appear to have multiple origins, not a common origin, and their common body parts are not homologies.

3. Transformations in the vertebrate sequence. This argument refers to what is hoped are the all-important transitional forms in the fossil record. Scanty they are, but Gould appealed to the existence of "mammal-like reptiles" and the "hominid descent line" as proof of evolution. We'll take up the vertebrate sequence next time.

Here There Be Dragons

It is not legitimate to define "evolution" as "that which produces classification." That's just another tautology without power to explain. Too much is assumed by "relationship." But this goes unrecognized (as is usually the case with presuppositions). Accordingly, objections to Darwin's theory are often met by indifference--those may be problems for the mechanism proposed by Darwin but they do not overthrow the concept of evolution, which is accepted as fact based on biological relationships. It constitutes a just-so story.

Stephen Jay Gould once observed, "Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be identified."

Gould's reasoning is fundamentally flawed, for he attempts to make a comparison between observable phenomena (apples falling from trees) and conclusions extrapolated from a concept (no one has ever witnessed ape-like creatures evolving into men or even identified a certain common ancestor). Gould drew the line between fact and theory at the wrong place. This is why so many claim evolution is a fact and natural selection the theory--they've composed their boundaries without really examining the map.

As Plain as the Nose on Your Face

Evolution has to be true, because it explains biological relationships. Or so goes the argument. Recall the underlying belief that drives acceptance of Darwinian evolution: Descent with modification. Accordingly, biological relationship means evolutionary relationship. It's practically a matter of definition.

Essentialism is the concept that living things may be classified according to their fundamental characteristics. So while a bat may fly and a whale may swim, the bat is not classified as a bird and the whale is not classified as a fish because the more essential characteristic is that they are both mammals and so are categorized together. Essentialism comes originally from Plato. As such, it can be linked to Plato's idealism, in which there exist ideals of which earthly realities are just imperfect examples. Darwin's great strength was the application of a naturalistic mechanism that has tremendous explanatory power in linking various types of living things ultimately to common ancestors through transitional types and extinction. When combined with the theory of natural selection it can explain the difference between homologies (common features relevant to classification) and analogies (common features not relevant to classification). The former are relics of common ancestors; the latter have evolved independently to produce superficially similar body parts.

All the...difficulties in classification are explained...on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification: that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.

Darwin thought the argument from classification was so decisive that it could overcome the lack of evidence. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Can it really be that simple? Yes--if you're the one writing the dictionary.

How to Succeed in Academia without Upsetting the Applecart

Corroborating Cuvier, there is evidence of mass extinctions having taken place. Two well-known examples are the Permian extinction (dated about 250 million years ago), which exterminated about half of the marine invertebrate families and more than 90 percent of all species), and the K-T extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (65 million years ago) that wiped out the dinosaurs and a great deal else. Evolutionary biologists still have a hard time dealing with such events.

Much of the work in paleontology, like practically all other science, is done by eager young academicians enthusiastic to prove the principles on which they've based their fledgling careers. They seek after positive results; negative results, those that fail to support the theory, are disregarded as failures. The same phenomenon goes on in medicine--a positive study, one that shows improvement in treatment outcomes, is far more likely to get published in a premier journal than is a negative study. Young academicians need to succeed, but they have to do it within the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Furthermore, their mentors--and the people they need to grant them their advanced degrees--are thoroughly embedded in the Darwinian framework. It's hard to get one's doctorate by cheesing off the people who are in charge of awarding it.

But if the evidence leads strongly against the theory, why is it so hard to change the paradigm? It turns out that Darwinism is a just-so story.

The Rocks Get an "Incomplete" on Their Report Card

The logical counterpart to a theory of survival of the fittest is non-survival of the less fit, otherwise known as extinction or extermination-by-obsolescence. The transitional forms disappear because they are not biologically competitive. That's why they're not there cluttering up the jungle.

Okay, if the transitional forms are dead there should still be evidence of them in the fossils. But they're not there either. Darwin claimed incompleteness in the record--we just haven't dug up enough fossils yet. Surely they are there, for the number of transitional forms necessary to his theory is truly immense, considering that they all have to have occurred by very small accumulating mutations.

In actuality, evolution has triumphed in scientific circles not because of the fossil evidence but despite it. According to Stephen Jay Gould, an honest appraisal of the fossil record shows:

1. Stasis. Species appear and disappear from earth pretty much without change.

2. Sudden appearances. A new species appears all at once and fully formed.

Well, bother. What's a good naturalistic evolutionary biologist to do? Besides dig up more fossils, desperately hoping to find those missing links?

Houston, We Have a Problem

I have previously defined catastrophism as the idea tht change occurs through sudden violent upheaval. This concept reigned supreme until its replacement in science in general during the 19th century by the ideas of uniformitarianism and gradualism (changes in the Earth took place slowly and gradually via the same processes that can be observed today). The father of paleontology, a French scientist named Cuvier, thought that the geological record showed evidence of a pattern of catastrophic events involving mass extinctions, followed by periods in which new life appeared without evidence of evolutionary development. Needless to say, this idea was soundly rejected when Darwin's theory gained the status of scientific orthodoxy. But it was not immediately so. Even geologist George Lyell had reservations about the soundness of his ideas being applied to biology.

The evidence, as it existed in Darwin's day, pointed toward discontinuity amongst the basic biological divisions with very few intermediary forms. These intermediary forms were nowhere to be found. It is not as though the jungles are teeming with organisms on the way to becoming other things. T. H. Huxley himself cautioned Darwin against rejecting the possibility of large jumps (saltations). So how to account for the absence of transitional forms--besides the obvious conclusion that they don't exist because they never existed?

Adapt and Overcome

I wrote yesterday about the bomb tossed by mathematicians into the evolutionary biologists' playground. Clearly the theory needed reworking but there was no question of it being abandoned. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University proposed a mechanism whereby a series of discontinuous transitions occurred in the genes regulating embryonic development. This would lead to the development of profound differences in adult forms. The difficulty is that Gould's theory is speculative and lacks corroborative evidence; it also represents a form of saltationism that is anathema to hard-line Darwinists.

The reality is that there is an a priori assumption of the factuality of naturalistic evolution. It constitutes the foundational working premise of modern biology. It is axiomatic and therefore unquestioned because it is beyond (or beneath, since it is foundational) question. If evolution requires macromutations they must be possible even if we haven't yet figured out a mechanism for them. On the other hand, if macromutations are impossible, then evolution doesn't require them because it obviously happened without them.

Indeed, who needs evidence when the theory flexes so accommodatingly?

The Micromutation Lottery

How can complex, intricate biological systems derive from a process of "infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being?" Everything has to change in tandem, because systems are interdependent and integrated. It's not like swapping out a faster microprocessor while retaining the old hard drive. Furthermore, these changes have to afford a selection advantage--they have to allow the new organism to be a superior breeder.

The mathematical probability of evolution is influenced directly by the following variables:

1. The necessary quantity of favorable micromutations.

2. The frequency of occurrence of such micromutations when and where required.

3. The efficacy of natural selection to preserve and accumulate mutations consistently.

4. The time allowed by the fossil record.

A group of mathematicians actually worked this out in the 1960s. When they reported their conclusions at a scientific meeting there was an immediate uproar from the evolutionary biologists, for the mathematicians had demonstrated that Darwinism was practically impossible.

So, what do you do when the entire basis for your professional life has been called into question?

The Faith of Charles Darwin

Saltations are sudden jumps in the development of organisms, resulting in the appearance of a new type in a generation. Another term for this is "systemic macromutation," meaning a large set of mutations occurring simultaneously to produce a significant variation, such as the gain of an organ or faculty. The concept is hard to accept in the naturalistic scheme given the great complexity of living things, for how do all the necessary parts change in unison?

Remember that Darwin had taken a copy of the first volume of George Lyell's work on geology with him on his voyage on HMS Beagle. Darwin was committed to applying Lyell's joint theories of uniformitarianism and gradualism to biology. Hence, Darwin eschewed saltationism--it was the equivalent of a miracle and that could not be allowed. Macromutations were out of order. Darwin could accept only tiny variations that accumulate slowly over time. His theory required the existence of a very large number of transitional forms, a sequence of successive generations of organisms showing only small variations, but over time the accumulation of these variations would lead to the formation and appearance of new species.

The problem for Darwin is that evidence or corroboration for his theory was lacking in the fossil record. The known fossils during his lifetime did not demonstrate the gradual intermediary transitional forms. At the time, he got around this by supposing that the fossil record was incomplete. Scientists simply hadn't unearthed sufficient fossils to prove him correct.

"Faith is the assurance of things hooped for, the conviction of things not seen," right? I apologize for taking Hebrews 11:1 out of context, but Darwin's position here certainly sounds some people's ideas of faith. In actuality, Darwin indulged in something more akin to wishful thinking.

Darwin's Three Principles Reviewed

1. Species are not immutable. Recall that the idea that species are fixed was prevalent prior to Darwin's writing.

2. "Descent with modification" can account for life's diversity. All living things have descended from a very small number of common ancestors.

3. Natural selection/"survival of the fittest." The concept of natural selection is comprised of several components. The production of variation in living things "without direction or purpose." The action by environmental factors to "favor" some variations and "discourage" others and the accumulation of favorable mutations over time, giving rise to new species. Recall that a species is a reproductively distinct population. The organism that is most successful at reproducing itself is naturally selected. Random mutations in the genetic information of an organism are supposed to provide the mechanism for the production of variation.

Can these mutations bear the load Darwinism places upon them?

Sand and Stone

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell--and great was its fall.

This is the conclusion to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (found in Matthew 7:24-27). The "words of mine" to which he refers were the entire sermon. The immediate context is his warning that not everyone who calls him Lord will enter the kingdom. It does not suffice merely to hear the words of Jesus or even to acknowledge that what he says is true. One must act upon what he has said. He assures us that the man who hears and acts has built his life upon a solid foundation, a rock that will provide insurmountable support against the assaults that inevitably come. Note that Scripture repeatedly instructs us that the fear (respect, obedience, harkening, heeding) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Such a wise man builds on the words of Christ.

In contrast, the foolish man (and in Scripture foolishness has a moral dimension) may hear the words of Christ but ignores them. He may acknowledge their wisdom but he does nothing with them. He builds his life on another foundation, one that proves incapable of withstanding life's assaults. And everything he has done comes to nothing but ruin.

Why do I insert this commentary here? We have just finished discussing several ways of handling the confrontation between biblical Christianity and the philosophical materialistic naturalism that underpins Darwinism. A man must consider carefully the foundation upon which he builds his life. Not all foundations are structurally sound. Not every form of knowledge is wisdom.

The Way Forward

In his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Phillip Johnson described three ways he has seen people who have professed Christian beliefs handle the dispute between Darwinism and Christianity. One could simply apostasize and embrace full-throated naturalism by deciding that naturalism provides the best description of reality, overthrowing any pretense to maintaining Christian conviction. One could also try to reshape Christianity according to naturalism, accommodating Christianity by jettisoning the miraculous and other supernatural aspects of biblical Christianity. This is theological liberalism. Or one could become a fideist, the epistemological equivalent of holding one's hands over one's ears and shouting down opposing ideas--believe despite everything. This may seem attractive at first but is intellectual suicide and actually disobedience to God, who has commanded us to "take every thought captive" (2 Corinthians 10:5).

And that is the key to the real way forward. We do what Paul says and take on the philosophies of the age, expose them, and defeat them. We do not simply roll over and accept the soothing public pronouncements of the science educators. We ask the hard questions, both of them and of their facilitators in the media.

It might seem a daunting, impossible task. Yet the three "titans" of modernism were Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Two have already fallen. If the evidence continues to mount up as it has against Darwinism, how long can it stand?

A City upon a Hill, or Vanity Fair?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that a city set upon a hill is not easily hidden. It attracts attention, exposed as it is. Just so, the deeds of the righteous are on public display. It is not desirable that the light instilled in a man by the Spirit of God should be hidden. The idea of a godly community brought before the attention of men as an example has deep roots in American political ideas, going all the way back to John Winthrop's famous address on board the Arabela, "A Model of Christian Charity." Toward the end of this sermon, he observed,

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken... we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.

Winthrop warned that being the focus of attention has significant drawbacks if the community loses faith with God.

Vanity Fair, other than being the title of a book by Thackery, is a community described by John Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress, as a place that will not abide righteousness and does its level best to kill those who try to live for God. Although it purports to be at peace with its godless ways, it shows through its persecutions of the godly that it cannot abide being reminded of its depravity.

The difference illustrated by these two communities is that between a society founded upon a desire to honor and obey God and one that will not have God in its thinking but is devoted entirely to the satisfaction of human desire. Furthermore, Vanity Fair is a society that will actively persecute those who try to live and think biblically.

Is the America of the 21st century Winthrop's city on a hill or Vanity Fair?

But what is the correct, Christian way forward? What has the American church gained in the past thirty years by becoming more active in politics, especially as it has become increasingly identified with the Republican party? Some would say the results of the recent national election shows a repudiation of both the party and the church.

What is more effective--change at the ballot box or change in the human heart?

A New Religion Established

Although not often considered in these terms, a religion may be the same as a worldview--the way in which one thinks about life as a whole and answers the "big questions" about reality. They are the governing principles by which one lives or how a society is shaped. In this manner, everyone has a religion, even those who deny they have a religion.

Phillip Johnson has identified three signal events as critical to understanding the Western worldview as it now exists:

1. The triumph of scientism. Johnson cites as an illustration the Darwin Centennial of 1959 [which makes for very interesting consideration in 2009, both the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Origin]. The 1959 event was held at the University of Chicago, also the site of the first self-sustaining atomic chain reaction and the Miller experiment that purported to show how life could have originated from inorganic substances and energy. At the time of the centennial celebration the scientific community could look back on breathtaking achievements that had elevated the prestige of science to stratospheric heights. The virtual establishment of materialistic naturalism as the most successful philosophy led Sir Julian Huxley to wax eloquent in explaining his hopes that science was destined to become mankind's new religion.

2. Art imitates life. Recall our exploration of the phenomenon of Inherit the Wind. This was the Hollywood version of the Darwin Centennial. Remember how the film concludes--Spencer Tracy picks up a Bible in one hand, a copy of Origin in the other, hefts them in his hands as if weighing them, shrugs his shoulders, and puts both in his briefcase. The implication is that reasonable people will find accommodation for both perspectives. This is a more effective cultural anesthetic than the abrasive comments made by people like Richard Dawkins or either of the Huxleys.

3. God expelled: The U.S. Supreme Court's decision on school prayer. The importance of the decision does not lie so much in the actual disallowance of prayer in the public schools but in its symbolism--God has been made irrelevant to a "good" education, for if he were important he would be discussed there. But now God is rarely to be found in the public classroom. And any attempt to re-introduce him is met with a loud and vigorous negative response.

The Dangers of Accommodation

I remind the reader of the definition of Darwinism given in the 1995 statement by the National Association of Biology Teachers: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments." Recall also the words of evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson: "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." Furthermore, recall how science has come to be associated in the contemporary mind with not just materialism--philosophical as well as methodological--but with reason and rationality.

In what way, then, can biblical Christianity and Darwinism (materialistic naturalism applied to biology) coexist? The philosophical underpinnings of naturalism insist that only science may speak about objective reality and that faith is commensurate with irrationality or at best personal subjective opinion or preference. In this culture, peace is afforded only on the materialist's terms--we can paper over the differences so long as theists agree with the superficial reassurances of the science educators: "All the scientists are saying is that all living things are related and that a certain amount of natural variation occurs in nature." But that is not "all" the scientists are saying and it is dishonest to perpetuate this superficiality.

If theists don't confront and expose the truth about Darwinism and warn one another about the quicksand of naturalism at its core we will succumb to the cultural naturalism that surrounds us and threatens to engulf our children. If they are unprepared to deal with this mindset they may abandon the biblical faith, relegating God to the periphery or the private sphere of life if they retain him at all.

Naturalism is widespread throughout the various categories of human thought. It applies equally well to the humanities and to the social sciences especially. It is rampant in popular culture and entertainment, the sphere from which so many people take their ideas today. The idea of objective truth does not survive the "death" of God, hence the widespread acceptance of relativism, multiculturalism, and many other features of postmodern thought. Because we do not live in isolation from the world we cannnot retreat behind walls or moats.

A Hitch in Our Intellectual Giddy-Up

"A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised."

Paul speaks of the "natural man," meaning the spiritually unregenerate man, the man dead in sin and trespassess. This is the state in which we are all born. It takes a gracious act of the Spirit of God by which he breathes new life into a spiritual corpse to bring a man into life and renewed understanding. But until that happens, such a man rejects what he does not understand--he thinks it is foolishness, stupidity, irrationality, "anti-science." But he does so lacking understanding. It is as if an ant rejected the reality of the Empire State Building because she couldn't grasp the concept.

We Think We're So Smart

God's wisdom does not come by the application of man's wisdom--far from it. In fact, God states explicitly that he will destroy the wisdom of the "wise" (those men who esteem themselves wise according to the wisdom of this world or are so esteemed by others) and the cleverness of the "clever." And we are a clever people, aren't we? We just love the well-turned phrase, the snappy retort, the elegent insight. We feast on irony.

But what does our cleverness profit us? What becomes of the man wise according to this age? What of the intellectual [and here I have to insert a recommendation that anyone who has not already read Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals needs to run right out and acquire a copy; it frightens me that people are crowing about the "return" of intellectualism to this nation's seats of power when the track record of intellectuals in power is truly scary] and the academic elite? What of the clever debater? God has bypassed them all. He does not communicate his message through those who have figured it all out for themselves and condescend to explain it to the rest of us. Instead, God spoke through a rag-tag group of common fishermen and social marginals. And when he did include an intellectual he first literally knocked said intellectual off his high horse and then schooled him for fourteen years before setting him loose on the world.

"God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that he may nullify the things that are.." It's an upside-down, inside-out, backwards way of doing things. Precisely not the way of this world.

Why? "So that no man may boast before God."

"Hey, God, I'm pretty hot stuff. Me, I've got it all figured out. I know the score. Lucky for you I'm around, right?"

Wrong.