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.