Tom Magnuson - My Worldview
vs
Scientific Materialism / Darwinism
Let's Begin at the Beginning...The great German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnez once said,
"The first question which should rightly be asked is:
Why is there something rather than nothing?"
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein exclaimed,
"How extraordinary that anything should exist!"
Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart remarked,
"That anything exists at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe." "Why does anything exist anyway?" is NOT a trivial question.
Really, there are only two possible answers. Either there is an Intelligent Designer outside our universe that caused it to exist,
OR
the universe popped into existence by some unknown, "natural" process outside of this universe.
Bertrand Russell, world renowned atheist, apparently, didn't bother himself with the question,
"The universe is just there and that's all." He claimed that, because we know this, our lives rest on...
"...a firm foundation of despair." Russell realized that, with his world view, our lives are without ultimate significance, value, or purpose, and if we believe our lives have ultimate significance, value, and purpose we are only fooling ourselves.
Twentieth century astrophysics has presented overwhelming evidence that the universe had a beginning. Therefore it either popped into existence by some unknown process outside of our universe, or an Intelligent Designer, outside our universe, brought it into being.
Some atheists speak about the "presumption of atheism", or, when the evidence for one or the other world view is equal, the presumption ought to be that there is no God. This is irrational, because if the evidence were equal, the view that should be picked is the one that give our lives ultimate significance, value, and purpose. There should be a "presumption of theism." But the evidence is NOT equal. The evidence actually is strongly in favor of an Intelligent Designer. There are two lines of thought in looking at the plausibility of an Intelligent Designer:
philosophical argument and scientific evidence.
Dr. William Lane Craig, philosopher and debater, is a master at pointing out the philosophical likelihood of a beginning of the universe and an Intelligent Designer. Dr. Craig offers tight arguments. For his thorough philosophical arguments click HERE.
I would like to concentrate on the scientific evidence, which also favors the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Let's take a look...
Once upon a time...
Every culture must have at least one religion, or creation story, to tell the people where they came from and how they relate to each other and to ultimate reality. That creation story is the foundation for
who they are and why they are here
Their view on origins shapes their understanding of ethics, law, education, and sexuality. If life is an accident of blind chance and natural selection, then there is no source of universal moral guidelines and no unique dignity for human life. The natural consequences of this world view can be summarized by those who embrace it.
Philosopher Daniel Dennet,
Director of the Center of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University describes naturalism/materialism andDarwinism as a "universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view."
In the "Descent of Man",
Charles Darwin stated,
"We civilised men...build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment...Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man."
Francis Crick,
nobel laureate in physiology and medicine stated,"For good genetic reasons...it would be an unhealthy biological situation (to have unregulated childbearing). Some group of people should decide that some people should have more children and some should have fewer...."
Dr. Peter Singer,
professor of bioethics at Princeton University and considered to be the founder of the animal rights movement says,"Once the religious mumbo jumbo surrounding the term 'human' has been stripped away...we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how limited its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may be."
Singer also commented,
"If we compare a severely defective human infant with a dog or pig...we will often find the NONHUMAN to have superior capacities...Only the fact that the defective infant is a member of the species Homo sapiens leads it to be treated differently from the dog or pig. Species membership alone, however, is not morally relevant..."
Michael Ruse
in "The Evolution of Ethics" said,"Morality...is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends...In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate."
Steven Pinker,
professor of psychology at MIT said in "Why They Kill Their Newborns," The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 1997:"For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order. But every year, hundreds of women commit neonaticide: they kill their newborns or let them die...How could they do it?...The emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with the uncertain process (of raising children), so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (some sometimes religious) young women."
The above is just a fraction of the rational fallout in a Darwinian world. Other areas, which I won't discuss here, are the modern welfare state, criminal justice, education, etc.
On the other hand, if life is the product of an Intelligent Designer who has foresight, then we were meant to be here. We have a solid, enduring basis for morality, purpose, and dignity.
Every culture has at least one priesthood, or the group of experts, that tells the creation story.
In Western culture, we have a battle between two priesthoods and their creation stories. These two world views are religions, because whatever one takes as the foundation of one's world view is, functionally speaking, one's religion.
The story that still appeals to the majority of people in the United States is that an Intelligent Designer created the universe. That Intelligent Designer has either backed away from His creation and does not participate in it (deism), or He is involved in the affairs of men and has a purpose for every human being's life (personal). The latter belief strikes a chord with nearly 50 percent of the people in the U.S.
Another creation story is dominant in the universities, government public school system, and the media (newspaper, radio and TV). Most of these people (sometimes called the "intellectual elite"), who make up a small minority of the population, hold to the scientific materialist creation story. Despite their small numbers, they have a tremendous influence on our culture because of where they are positioned: educational institutions, government, and media of all kinds.
In the beginning...
The Intelligent Design creation story, can be summed up with these words from the Christian Bible, "In the beginning was the WORD"
...the Intelligence, the Wisdom of the Intelligent Designer, the rational principle that governs all things. The intelligent design movement of today is the Logos (Word) theology of the Gospel of John restated in the idiom of DNA information theory.
The scientific materialist creation story says...NO...
that's dead wrong !!
"In the beginning were particles and energy
in mindless motion"Therefore, we are the result of impersonal, purposeless, material processes that care nothing about us and what we do, and so we can make up moral rules to suit ourselves, or legislate morality in the public square via majority rules. This is the moral relativism of our day.
Let's get real...
To the intellectually honest person, it's evident that the universe and this earth display non-living and biological systems that show
the mark of intelligent design.
In fact, the well-known modern day apologist of Darwinism,
Richard Dawkins of Oxford University,
admits in his book The Blind Watchmaker,
"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."
"Biologists have to remind themselves constantly that what they study was not designed, it evolved."
In fact, Dr. Crick later wrote, several times, that the problems with an undirected origin of life on earth are so great that we should consider the idea that space aliens sent a rocket ship to the earth to seed it with spores to begin life. This view is known as "Directed Panspermia". He goes so far as to suggest that these aliens not only seeded the earth with life, but designed life as well. But, how did the aliens spring up?
If the Darwinists didn't constantly remind themselves that the creative force of evolution "designed" all life forms, the evidence might take them to the intuitive conclusion; intelligent, purposeful design.
By their own admission, evolutionary biologists have to defend their non-theistic, scientific materialistic world view by trying to explain why the design is ONLY APPARENT.
The central flaw of Darwinian theory, from which all the others spring, is the assumption that life is just matter. As the story goes, you have the inherent physical and chemical laws (where did they come from?). Now, if
you get the right chemicals by random chance,
AND natural selection operates,
then the increase in specified complexity just happens. But, that's totally wrong. Blind chance and natural selection can only have a cumulative effect, and cannot exhibit goal-directedness.Life isn't just chemicals, as biologists have discovered very recently. Even the "most simple" form of
life, a biological cell, has a multitude of enzymes, proteins, etc. operating within it. These components are told where to go and what to do within the cell by the stored "Information" (the Word or Intelligence) that assembled the cell in the first place. It's a marvelous, intricate city, with all the components working in perfect harmony to keep the cell alive and to allow it to perform its designed function. A program, or "Information", has to exist to tell these proteins, enzymes, etc. where to go and what to do, at the precise time, within the cell. Attempting to figure out how the complex chemicals could even develop in the first place is important. But the MOST significant question is:
"Where did the marching orders come from to direct the intricate, complex flow of the complex chemicals?" The encyclopedia that "nobody" wrote...
Richard Dawkins acknowledges,
"A biological cell has more information than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together." An analogy may be helpful. When you wonder how a functioning computer came to be, you may be interested in how the plastic, metal, etc. (chemicals) were manufactured, but the most intriguing question is,
"Who developed the Operating System and loaded the software onto the hardware (Information on the DNA)?" Can you believe that, given enough time, a truly random character generator could write the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
With the recent discovers in microbiology, the main design argument of Anglican clergyman William Paley ("Natural Theology") is more compelling today than when he wrote the book in 1802. Contrary to popular belief, no one has EVER refuted his basic argument that life came about through an Intelligent Designer. No one has explained how an irreducibly complex system, such as a watch, might be produced without a designer. This universe has the
of the Intelligent Designer everywhere you look.
carved out of a sheer rock cliff and mountain, I say, "Isn't it amazing that, over the course of billions of years, rain and wind driven sand carved a hole in the side of that mountain and fashioned all those elaborate chambers, and sculpted that ornate, towering temple facade in the side of the cliff?" 
When I watch "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade", and, at the end, see that amazing temple which contained the
HOLY GRAILIf I made that claim, you'd think I was a fool, or worse.
Mt. Rushmore just "happened?" The above examples, through our intuition, shout out, "DESIGNED!!"
How can you tell something is designed? Examples can be shown that spark people's intuitions. If I walked through a forest and saw the words, "John loves Mary" carved in a tree trunk, I would immediately recognize that this message is NOT the result of natural forces. Likewise, since DNA contains messages (much more complex than on the tree trunk), it is best explained as the product of an Intelligent Agent. William Paley's example of finding a watch in a meadow still rings true today. No one who is intellectually honest would conclude that the watch came to be through natural forces, but rather one rightly concludes that an intelligent, skillful watchmaker fashioned the timepiece.
On the other hand, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire there WAS a rock formation (it collapsed in early 2003) called the "Old Man of the Mountain".
If looked at from a certain angle, it appeared to be the profile of an old man. Similar rock formations are scattered throughout North America, the result of wind and water erosion. Italy sort of looks like a boot and Sicily sort of looks like a flattened ball. And what about the "Man on the Moon?"
However, when driving into the Black Hills of western South Dakota, would anyone mistake
Mt. Rushmore as the happy accident of wind and water erosion? Of course not. If a satellite were to take a photo of Italy and Sicily tomorrow, and now note that Italy had buttonholes and shoelaces and Sicily looked just like a pumped-up soccer ball with colored stripes and a logo, would anyone NOT conclude that intelligent beings had accomplished the tasks. And if the "Man on the Moon" were to suddenly sprout eyebrows, glasses, and a mustache, would you be worried that aliens were about to visit planet earth soon! Probably.
Dr. William Dembski
says that we can detect intelligent design by applying an "explanatory filter" that first rules out chance and natural law. Scientists determine if something is the product of random events by whether it is irregular, erratic, and unpredictable. If chance does not explain it, they determine if it is the result of natural laws by whether it is regular, repeatable, and predictable. If neither of these explanations work - that is if something is irregular and unpredictable, yet highly specified - then it bears the mark of design. For example,the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore are irregular and unpredictable (not something we see happening generally as the result of erosion), yet high specified (they fit a particular, pre-selected pattern; the faces of former U.S. Presidents). Applying the explanatory filter, the evidence clearly points to intelligent design by an intelligent agent.
Beyond blind chance...
A calculation was made back in the mid-1960s regarding the time frame involved in the assembling of a bacterium
by random chance and natural selection. If you took a "simple" already living bacterium, and pulled
apart the proteins, enzymes, etc., how long would it take for the bacterium to live again,
the system)
The answer is,
1 times 10*100,000,000,000 years That's 1, followed by one hundred billion zeroes (years). Recall, our universe is only about 14*10 (14 billion) years old. The probability for one of the "simpliest" life forms to spring up naturally, let alone for macro-evolution to take place, is for all practical purposes, a big zero.
Professor W. Cairns-Smith,
University of Aberdeen rightly states that:"...blind chance is very limited. (It can produce) low levels of cooperation (the equivalent of small words), but it becomes very quickly incompetent as the amount of organization increases. Very soon long waiting periods (age of our universe) and massive material resources (size of our universe) become irrelevant."
The probability of obtaining functionally sequenced biomacromolecules at random is in nobel laureate
Ilya Prigogine's words:
"...vanishingly small...even on the scale of billions of year."
Here's just one example. Consider the odds of one short protein molecule consisting of 100 amino acids in length happening by blind chance.
First, the odds of natural forces building one chain of 100 amino acids in which all linkages consist of peptide bonds is around
1 in 10*30.
Second, functioning proteins tolerate ONLY left-handed amino acids, yet the right-handed and left-handed isomers occur in nature with nearly equal frequency. The chance of attaining at random only left-handed amino acids in a peptide chain 100 amino acids long is again around
1 in 10*30.
Third, and most importantly, functioning proteins must have amino acids that link up in a specific sequential arrangement, just like the letters in a sentence. There are around 100 naturally occurring amino acids, and because there are only 20 biologically occurring amino acids, we find that the odds of achieving a specific functional sequence of amino acids at random for this one protein only 100 amino acids long is
1 in 10*65.
Combining these odds, the chance that one rather short protein consisting of 100 amino acids could arise naturally is
1 in 10*125,
or effectively zero, even given our 14 billion year old universe.
Quantitative assessments of biological complexity have simply reinforced an opinion that has prevailed since the mid-20th century within origin-of-life biology: chance cannot explain the origin of specified complexity in biology.
Beyond selection...
Natural selection presupposes a pre-existing mechanism of self- replication. However, self-replication depends on functional proteins and nucleic acids, most much more complex than the above implausible (likely impossible) example. Natural selection can only choose what chance has first produced, and random chance in a prebiotic setting seems an implausible agent for producing the information present in even a single functioning protein or DNA molecule.
Nobel laureate in Physiology in 1974,
Christian de Duve, has correctly stated:
theories of prebiotic natural selection "need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place."
Most intellectually honest scientists now rightly dismiss appeals to prebiotic natural selection as indistinguishable from appeals to blind chance.
In addition, there is strong evidence, discovered recently, that conditions on earth were too hostile for life to spring up by purely natural causes. The atmosphere is now thought to have been chemically neutral, or probably even contained some oxygen. These discovers are devastating to evolutionists because reactions among atmospheric gases will not readily take place, and oxygen would have quenched the production of biological building blocks and cause biomolecules to degrade rapidly.
With the above in mind, an intellectually honest person will acknowledge the impossibility of the chance appearance of life on earth. Other atheistic scientists besides Dr. Crick realize this fact, and have come up with the idea that life was somehow transported to earth from outer space. But, since the cosmos is considered to be homogeneous (the same throughout), the improbability of the chance appearance of life anywhere in the universe would be the same.
The paper is not the message...
Getting back to a bacterium...what one needs to understand is that the "Information" is not solely in the chemicals, it's somehow inscribed on the chemicals that make up DNA. To this day, this fact is a great mystery. An example may help.
THIS writing was in my head, somehow stored in physical neurons which are a part of my physical brain. This same complex message was transferred, by chemical processes, allowing my hands to transfer it to a computer screen, a different physical medium. If I want this same complex message to be more safely stored, I transfer it onto a different physical medium, my computer's hard drive. If I wanted to share this complex message with you so you could help me edit it with your constructive criticism, I have options in the storing of the message:
physical hard driveIf I use the first method, neither the material that the piece of paper is made of, nor the chemical make-up of the ink, determines the complex message. My intelligence created the complex message on the medium. The physical paper and physical patterns of the ink chemicals are the vehicles on which the intelligent, complex message is carried. The message transcends the properties of the medium. The messages on DNA are from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry.
There is nothing intrinsic in the chemicals themselves that explains why a particular sequence arises or why that sequence carries a particular message. So, the chemical composition of life's building blocks no more determines the sequence of DNA than the properties of ink and paper determine the words and rhythm of Shakespeare's sonnets.Another imaginative theory of the origin of life has been offered by scientific materialists. It's claimed that the laws of nature (physics) and chemical attraction may themselves be responsible for the information inscribed on DNA, so-called "self-ordering properties." However, there are NO chemical bonds between the bases that run along the spine of a DNA helix. It is precisely along this axis of the molecule that the genetic instructions in DNA are encoded. This means that any of the four bases can attach to any site on the DNA backbone with equal ease, making all sequences equally probable. This fact gives unlimited possibilities for sequencing. Differential bonding affinities, which would limit the number of sequences, do NOT account for the sequencing of the four bases. These elementary facts of molecular biology have devastating implications for those who wish to say that the origin of life and information are explained by the "self-organizing properties" intrinsic to the materials which make up living systems. Bonding affinities (chemical attractions) cannot be used to explain the origin of information, but rather ONLY the appearance of order. Order is easily explained by the self-ordering properties of the laws of nature and chemical attraction. But, the origin of information; highly improbable, aperiodic, and highly specified sequences that make biological function possible, is unknown to scientific materialists.
If the properties of matter cannot explain the origin of information, what does?
Well, our experience with information-intensive systems (especially codes and languages, such as musical scores, computer disks, books) indicates that these systems always come from an intelligent agent, not from random chance or natural selection.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the DNA molecule is the product of an Intelligent Designer. Specified complexity and high information content constitute a distinctive signature of intelligent design.
Another major problem for those who still believe that DNA could have evolved through blind chance and natural selection is the very recent discovery that genes do NOT completely control the development of organisms. When an egg is fertilized and an organism begins to develop, each cell type uses only a part of its genetic code, with factors outside of the DNA turning on the appropriate genes. But if development requires that DNA be controlled by factors outside itself, the DNA does NOT completely control development. There is a much more complex process at work. There is now good evidence that two other factors in the egg control development: the cytoskeleton and the membrane. It now seems that a developmental program is written into the structure of the entire zygote, which includes the DNA, microtubule arrays, and membrane patterns - a "language" in which we are still largely ignorant. It seems implausible that blind chance and natural selection could have "created" such a complex system as this.
The phantom programmer...
Going back to just DNA:
Darwinism supplies two elements to attempt to explain the increase in specified complexity of living systems over time:
From the above discussion, one can easily see that random chance and natural selection can NEVER write a meaningful, complex text. If you were to randomly jumble letters together, the result could NEVER result in the Encyclopedia Britannica, let alone a single coherent compound sentence; even given a few million years. I say a few million years because the geological evidence shows that the first life forms "sprung up" on planet earth very early in its history; maybe close to "instantaneously".
What is critical to point out again is that chemical and physical laws
(wherever they came from) can ONLY produce simple repetitive ORDER.A 500 page book can be written with the sentence "I love you." printed over and over and over again. This book would be analogous to natural crystals generated by law directed processes. It would be a very boring book, containing little information. You would quickly tire of reading this book.
This is the best that natural laws can come up with
ORDER snowflake
but NOT...
specified COMPLEXITY 
An example of a specifically complex book would be one worth reading, like Shakespeare's "Hamlet".
There's an improbable chasm between order and
specified complexity.The above paragraphs are a lot to swallow in one gulp! If I haven't convinced you in my own words, I would invite you to go to some links where some real intellectual heavyweights explain order vs specified complexity, and how something of specified complexity absolutely cannot occur through random chance and natural selection. Here are just three links:
Charle's idea
comes up short...If you took some time to read the three articles above, it's clear to see the implausibility that random chance and natural selection, the only processes offered by Darwinian evolution, can, even in principle, produce what is observed in nature.
Darwinistic thinking is a shopworn 19th century relic, not managing to keep up with the explosion of data uncovered in the latter half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. Darwinism is an outdated theory which finds it's justification in a dogmatic philosophy, not evidence. Biologists have authority to tell us the facts which they observe in natural systems, but have NO authority to tell us what metaphysical assumptions we must adopt.
The Darwinists currently hold the dominant position in culture, meaning, for the most part, ONLY their position (worldview, religion) is taught in public education or promoted in the national media. The National Academy of Sciences guidebook for
"Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science"
urges public school teachers to "teach evolution". But, this does NOT mean that teachers should inform students about why the subject is so controversial. This does NOT mean that teachers should make students aware of the dissenting arguments. Teachers are told that "there is no debate within the scientific community over whether (Darwinian) evolution has occurred." Darwinists educators are determined to persuade rather than to educate, so their textbooks have to bluff. Pick up any biochemistry textbook, and you will likely find ONLY two or three references to evolution. A common reference would be "evolution selects the fittest molecules for their biological function." No explanation...just presumption.The scientific community constantly portrays dissenters of Darnwinism as backward thinking rubes or misguided scientists who want to inject religion into the science classroom. But, what I have already noted is that religion is already in the classroom (scientific materialism is a philosophical world view, which is a religion). Darwinism bootlegs a philosophy of scientific materialism, which is opposed to any form of theism. A popular high school science textbook published by Prentice-Hall describes evolution as
"random and undirected" working
"without either plan or purpose".A textbook by Addision-Wesley says,
"Darwin gave biology a sound scientific basis by attributing the diversity of life to natural causes rather than supernatural creation." And I thought public schools were supposed to be neutral with regard to religion?! These statements are clearly antagonistic to ALL theistic religions.
In our culture, there are two distinct models of science.
1) materiallist model - nature is all there is.
If you were to postulate that an unevolved intelligence caused anything, you would depart from science and enter the territory of religion - you would depart from objective reality to subjective belief. What I call Intelligent Design is antithetical to science, so their CANNOT possibly be evidence for it.
If you follow the materialist model, a naturalistic evolutionary process follows as a matter of deductive logic, regardless of the evidence. The mechanism of origin of life and evolution must involve blind chance and natural selection, because nothing else is available. The Intelligent Designer has been summarily dismissed from consideration because of the biased naturalistic world view. This deductive reasoning is so overpowering to materialists that they sometimes say that their theory is as self-evidently true as the basic principles of math or the law of gravity. Here is Darwinian logic offered by
Professor Paul Ewald of Amherst University
in "The Atlantic":"Darwin only had a couple of basic tenets...you have heritable variation, and you've got differences in survival and reproduction among the variants. That's the beauty of it. It HAS to be true - it's like arithmetic."
The interesting thing about this statement is that it does NOT follow that heritable variation and differential survival have any creative power to cause major innovations in life forms. It's a leap of faith to assume the creative power of blind chance and natural selection.
This materialistic model is employed by American public educators. It shuts out ANY consideration of Intelligent Design, and if Intelligent Design is even brought up in public education, they immediately cry "foul" and call on the "separation of church and state" to quash any debate.
This is curious because evidence of Intelligent Design is permitted in other areas of the materialistic model. In fact, it is common scientific practice to infer the existence of something that is not observable. The connection is made between information and intelligence, and inferences are made. Archaeologists assume a mind produced the inscriptions on the
Rosetta Stone.
Radio telescopes search the sky for evidence of information-bearing radio signals from aliens. If they were to receive a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers,
as shown in the movie "Contact", they would conclude that it came from intelligent beings - without the need for independent evidence of the existence and nature of the aliens. No such message has arrived. Evidence of intelligent design is permitted in such cases because it does not conflict with materialism, because the ancient peoples or aliens are presumed to have evolved by blind chance and natural selection.However, molecular biologists have ACTUALLY discovered high information content and irreducible complexity in the biological cell. DNA justifies making the design inference. Now, the rules change. The proposition that the biological cell is the work of an Intelligent Designer is out of the question, because now we have overstepped the bounds of science, and are now talking religion. How intellectually dishonest!
2) empirical model - nature is made up of matter, and nothing else. There are accepted procedures for testing hypotheses. Whatever is testable by scientific methods is eligible for consideration. In this model, a person CAN present evidence that unintelligent natural causes are not adequate to do the work of the creation of the universe or life.
Let's briefly look at what random chance and natural selection have done that we have ACTUALLY MEASURED?
On an island in the Galapagos chain is a population of finches with rather small beaks. The average size of the beaks of these finches is a little different from year to year, and we can sometimes correlate this with climatic change. In a very dry year when the seeds become dry and harder, the birds with smaller beaks may starve. The finches that remain have beak sizes 3 to 5 percent larger than before the dry year. So, probably, the larger beaked finches were able to open the tough, hard seeds, and were able to survive. When the rain came again, the average beak size of the population became smaller. The previous discussion is written up in the junior high, high school, and university textbooks as a most impressive example of what random chance and natural selection have been SCIENTIFICALLY OBSERVED to do. It's interesting that the National Academy of Sciences guidebook to public school teachers does NOT quote the title of a 1987 paper by the Grant's in "Nature": "Oscillating Selection in Darwin's Finches."
Another "impressive" example of random chance and natural selection at work is the peppered moth.
Peppered moths in England have two basic varieties, dark-colored and light-colored. In England in the first part of the 20th century, air pollution was a problem. Among other things, trees trunks were darkened. The darker-colored peppered moths came to predominate the population. The reason given was that hungry birds had a harder time seeing them on the darker tree trunks. When air pollution laws kicked in around 1950, the tree trunks lightened up, and light-colored peppered moths made a comeback. This was heralded as proof of Darwinian evolution. But, this fluctuation in moth populations, like the finch beaks, involved NO major innovation or directional change. Decades later, it was uncovered, by laymen, that these moths rarely light on tree trunks!! The photos we see in textbooks are peppered moths glued or pinned onto the tree trunks. Here is an article from the ARN web site on this deceptive and flawed peppered moth story short version and long version.
It is well known that the ONLY DNA mutations that are known to be beneficial are those that affect interactions between a mutant protein and other chemicals. For instance, a member of an existing mosquito population may experience a DNA mutation. It could be more resistant to a chemical, say an insecticide, than other mosquitos. This mosquito survives, reproduces, and over a period of time, an entire mosquito population becomes very resistant to the insecticide. But, they're still mosquitoes. They haven't become something different.
They're fooling themselves...and maybe you...
Now, what we observe in the examples above is micro-variation, and micro-oscillation (a back and forth process within a species). One makes a giant "leap of faith" to say that these cases show how moths, birds, and human observers came into being, in the first place, from a common ancestor. Reason being, these micro-processes do NOT result in an increase in specified complexity or increase in "information" inscribed on the DNA. To dogmatically state that these micro-variations, with no increase in "information", prove that Darwinian macro-evolution is true (with its explicit claim that tremendous amounts of innovation, specified complexity and information are being generated by purely natural, mindless, processes) is being intellectually dishonest.
Today in America, most "intellectual elites"espouse the belief that the micro-variation, which produces that finch beak variation, or peppered moth variation, or mosquito variation, or bacteria or virus variation is
all you need, over long periods of time through a line of descent by impersonal random chance and uncaring natural selection, to turn a bacterium into algae, and ferns, and trees, and ants, and mice, and cats, and elephants and university biology professors.
Understand this...
The claim is that complex software programs are being written by random chance mutation and natural selection. About one out of 10,000 mutations may be somewhat "helpful" to a living organism. The reason a mutation may be helpful is that it alters a short segment of DNA code.
For instance, a bacterium may experience a mutation that makes it unable to digest a toxic substance that it once could digest. This would be a benefit to the organism, but not because of a complex, innovative change. A long series of random chance mutations and natural selections cannot develop irreducibly complex systems within an organism, such as, circulatory systems, kidneys, livers, hearts, sight organs (eyes), or brains. This has been expertly demonstrated by
molecular biologist Dr. Michael Behe
in his landmark work, "Darwin's Black Box".
What does the existence of irreducibly complex systems mean, and how does their existence impact neo-Darwinian theory?:
'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.'
"A system which meets Darwin's criterion is one which exhibits irreducible complexity. By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."
Michael J. Behe
"Molecular Machines: Experimental
Support for the Design Inference"Click HERE for the ARN web site and some examples of irreducible complexity investigated by Dr. Behe.
There are three basic modern day arguments against intelligent design. Let me discuss each of them:
ITHINKITEVOLVED
The probability that ITHINKITEVOLVED would appear after all the disks are spun is 1/26*15, a very small number indeed. Now, imagine that a disk is frozen if it happens to put a letter in the viewing window that matches the one in the target message ITHINKITEVOLVED. The remaining disks that do not match the target message are randomly spun, and the process is repeated. The target message can be expected to appear in a surprisingly small number of generations of the above process. Variation is generated at random, but selection among variants is non-random.
The above analogy is supposed to show how complex biological systems might have arisen through random chance and natural selection gradually. What is wrong with the analogy.
EVERYTHING!Suppose ITHINKITEVOLVED are the letters to a combination lock. Suppose after spinning disks for a while we have:
IQHMNOIREBODVWD (every other letter is correct)
The analogy says that this is somehow an improvement, and would somehow help us open the lock. If your life depended on the opening of the lock, you would be dead. If your reproductive system depended on opening the lock, you would leave no offspring.
Ironically, the lock combination analogy is a highly specified, irreducibly complex system that wonderfully illustrates why a functioning, irreducibly complex system cannot be approached through random chance and natural selection gradually.
We are told by Darwinists that evolution occurs by random chance and natural selection. It is NOT goal directed. Yet in the analogy, by world famous Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, an intelligent "decider" is freezing the appropriate letters in the correct positions to reach "his" goal of ITHINKITEVOLVED. This analogy is actually closer to being an example of an Intelligent Designer constructing an irreducibly complex system.
The fatal problems with this analogy are simple to see. The fact that distinguished thinkers overlook simple logical problems is quite amazing, and likely shows their bias against Intelligent Design.
The basic problem is that the argument demands perfection at all. Clearly, designers who are able to make better designs than they have, do not necessarily do so. The argument from imperfection overlooks the possibility that the designer might have more than one motive for designing something the way he did. Engineering excellence might be relegated to a secondary role.
The argument from imperfection critically depends on a psychoanalysis of the yet unidentified designer. The design used could be for some yet undetected practical purpose. The point of scientific interest is NOT the mental state of the designer, but whether one can detect design. Atheists like Freeman Dyson, Leslie Orgel, and Francis Crick have rightly concluded that design could be detected in complete absence of information about the designer's motives.
Here's the syllogism that some scientists use to argue that a designer would not have made things "imperfect", so evolution must be true:
1. A designer would have made the vertebrate eye without a blind spot. (says who?)
2. The vertebrate eye has a blind spot.
3. Therefore Darwinian evolution produced the vertebrate eye.Can you say, "non sequitur?" The conclusion does NOT follow from the premises!
Also, this argument is unconvincing because even if structures have no apparent function, evolution can "explain" nothing about how the structure arose. Even a so called vestigial organ in a body needs an explanation for how it arose, and evolutionary theory comes up empty.
In closing, the result of scientific investigations in the field of microbiology, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, is that life was designed. The result is unambiguous and significant, ranking it as one of the greatest achievements of science. But, in most of the scientific community, no high-fives have been exchanged and no corks have been popped to celebrate. An embarassing silence surrounds the amazing complexity of the cell and all other aspects of life and the universe. When the subject comes up publicly, Darwinists stare at the ground and shake their heads. Feet shuffle and sighs are heard.
So why is evolutionary thinking so pervasive in our culture, and why do atheistic scientists cling to it?
Dr. Phillip Johnson can give some insight.
To go to the ARN web site, Click HERE
Darwinism has hung on for so long because it's the only theory of origins that many influential university professors and theorists have to support their atheistic world view.
Why do many scientists find it difficult to accept the Intelligent Design theory?
"...some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder."
To a scientist, a conclusion of intelligent design can be very unsatisfying, because the thought that knowledge of mechanisms that produced life might be unattainable is terribly frustrating.
So, those who do NOT want to believe in Intelligent Design (for whatever reason), scientific materialists, have a vested interest in Darwinism. It is the ONLY theory they have to cling to in support their materialistic world view. Richard Dawkins, renown atheist, said it this way,
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Professor of biology at Harvard, Richard Lewontin, is surprisingly honesty when he says:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises...because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Theodosuis Dobzhansky,
Russian-American geneticist, once said,"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
By "evolution" he meant neo-Darwinism. However, since he penned those words in the early 1970s, the evidence for evolution has become even more flimsy, exposing his statement as a philosophical credo, not a scientific inference. Dobzhansky was wrong. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of EVIDENCE - EVEN if the evidence points to Intelligent Design.
In evolutionist's minds, EVERYTHING they hold dear (belief in no personal Intelligent Designer) is staked to evolutionary theory. It seems they will not let go, even if the evidence leads the other way.
As new evidence against Darwinism is uncovered every month, scientific materialists must defend a theory which is crumbling.
They claim that belief in an Intelligent Designer is a vestige of 18th and 19th century thinking. They might say that in the enlightened 20th and 21st centuries we know better. They will say that science has taught us that we are the product of mindless motion and uncaring physical processes performed over time. They will be less likely to trumpet, in public, that the conclusion to draw from Darwinism is that life is ultimately insignificant and meaningless. But, they are really the ones thinking 19th century thoughts. The evidence for Intelligent Design has become so compelling that Darwinism will likely fall in the first part of the 21st century. It's demise will be interesting to watch.
We believe the Intelligent Design movement will replace neo-Darwinism for three reasons.
1) The majority of people do NOT believe in Darwinism, and so, there is a growing demand for help in answering the claims of the pervasive and intellectually imperialistic Darwinism.
2) Intelligent Design is a full-fledged scientific research program, NOT a narrowly conceived ideological position. It is an open-minded philosophy that is not afraid to see the work of an intelligent agent in the natural world.
3) Intelligent Design actually makes sense to people. It appeals to their intuitions.
For some excellent papers showing the plausibility of Intelligent Design CLICK HERE
One more compelling evidence for Intelligent Design is the fine-tunedness of the universe.
Few laypeople realize the incredible balance that had to be built into the initial conditions of the Creation Event (Big Bang, if you will). Every once in a while, evidence of this manages to leak out into the mainstream media. One example was by
political commentator George F. Will.
His commentary in Newsweek just scratched the surface of the fine-tunedness of the universe. But, it was brilliant. Click HERE to view.Another fine article on this subject by Dr. Walter L. Bradley can be viewed by clicking HERE.
However, the most indepth treatment of the fine-tunedness subject of the universe and planet earth can be found at
Dr. Hugh Ross' web site, Reasons to Believe.
The astrophysicist's brief article will get you started. Click HEREI would invite you to look through many, or all, of my "Intelligent Design" favorite links.
On the entire subject of Intelligent Design vs Scientific Materialism / Darwinism, you might be asking,
"What's the big deal?" People have their opinions and should be allowed to live their lives as they please. Well, if there is a personal Intelligent Designer, which the finely tuned universe and life reveals, the previous thought goes out the window, because that personal Intelligent Designer is interested in us. We now need to investigate more specifically
Click HERE to discover the plausible identity of the Designer.
