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?