Category: Evolution

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series


Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?

The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648.  The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia.  The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances.  Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities.  Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17th and 18th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.”  The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.

Human reason did not prove equal to the task.  Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.

Continue reading “Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict”

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

Naturalism is the view that nature is all that exists.  That is, the matter and energy which constitute the physical world exist, but nothing else does.  The immediate corollaries of this view, of course, are that the cosmos and everything in it is a single interconnected system of physical causation, and that spirits do not exist, and that includes God.  

It may still safely be said, perhaps, that most contemporary scientists are naturalists – although that is changing, since naturalism has been under siege for decades and is showing signs of strain.  Certainly most scientists in the fields of paleontology and biology are naturalists.  This is in stark contrast to those in the fields of physics and astronomy, many of whom have exclaimed the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics.  The difference is attributable, no doubt, to the fact that astronomers and physicists are not as constrained as biologists are by the dictates of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

Here is a representative sample of the views of many astronomers and physicists:

Albert Einstein (1879–1955):

In response to the evidence for the Big Bang, he acknowledged “the necessity for a beginning”1 and “the presence of a superior reasoning power.”2.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018): 

Commenting on the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, he stated that “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”3.

Cambridge astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) (who never accepted Big Bang cosmology): 

A “superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. . . .”4.

Physicist Paul Davies (1946- ): 

He once promoted atheism5 and is still opposed to Intelligent Design theory,6 but has conceded that “the laws [of physics] . . . seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”7  He further states: “[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.”8

Design is an activity of mind.  Mind is a capacity of persons.  The Creator is a person (or rather, three persons).  Science is the study of the Creation.  All truth is God’s truth.

Clearly, then, a commitment to naturalism is unnecessary for the conduct of good science.  But we want to claim much more than that: we want to claim that naturalism actually impedes the progress of science.

Naturalism posits that human consciousness arises out of purely impersonal, mechanistic processes.  Somehow (they don’t tell us how, since they don’t know how), it is said, the motions of the atoms in my brain produce the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions which form my mental experience.  But thoughts, beliefs, and intentions are mental events, not physical events.  Mental events occur only in minds.  A mind is not a physical thing.

The naturalist will interject that mental events are embodied in neuro-physiological structures.  That may be the case; yet the properties of brain events and the properties of mental events are mutually exclusive.  The properties of brain events are physical: magnitude, valence, location, connections among neurons.  Mental events have none of those physical properties and possess one property which brain events lack, namely, “aboutness.”  Mental events – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – are always about something else.

Thus the mind and the brain, having entirely disparate sets of properties, cannot be the same thing.

A careful distinction must here be made.  Naturalism and evolution are not the same thing; yet they are almost always conflated.  The reason is readily apparent.  Consciousness is something that requires an explanation, and evolution is the only naturalistic explanation for the rise of consciousness which anyone has ever proposed.  If you are a naturalist, therefore, your choice is between evolution, as thinly supported by evidence as it is, and no explanation at all.  It is thus naturalism, not evidence, which drives naturalists into Darwin’s embrace.

We saw that theism provides an intelligible justification for our confidence in the reliability of the human cognitive capability: our having been created in the image of a rational deity.  What is naturalism’s justification?  Far from positing a rational source for the human mind, naturalism posits a cognitive faculty formed by undirected, purposeless, mechanistic, impersonal processes.  What basis is there for confidence that such processes could result in the formation of a reliable mind?

J. B. S. Haldane, a leading evolutionary theorist of the mid-twentieth century, may have been the first to notice that 

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.

And no reason to believe that my awareness evolved.  Darwin himself worried about this.

There is more.  According to naturalism, theism is false; yet belief in God is widespread.  According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of the world’s population are religiously affiliated.  But theism is false, according to neo-Darwinists.  Do false beliefs then have survival value?  If not, how can evolutionary theory account for our species’ religiosity, how can we trust our cognitive capacity, and how can we be sure that naturalism is true?  Naturalism is thus seen to be not only self-refuting, but an obstacle to the progress of science.9

NEXT WEEK: Part Four: What Happened to Theistic Science?

ENDNOTES

1A. Vibert Douglas, “Forty Minutes with Einstein,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 50 (1956), 100.

2Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), 106.

3Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1998, 1996), 129-131.

4Hoyle, “The Universe,” 16. 

5Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), viii, 3–42, 142–143.

6https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/ spaceexploration.comment.  (Page unavailable 12.2.24.)

7Paul Davies, Superforce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 243. 

8Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 203; Paul Davies, “The Anthropic Principle,” Science Digest 191, no. 10 (October 1983), 24.

9I have Kenneth Samples of Reasons to Believe to thank for this argument.

Evolutionary Theory in Crisis

For any who are interested in evolutionary theory, I recommend you subscribe to Evolution News (it’s free), published by Discovery Institute, a leading Intelligent Design thinktank.  You will be kept abreast of such developments as described in “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive,” a peer reviewed article which concludes that macroevolutionary changes cannot be explained as simply an accumulation of microevolutionary changes.

A review of the article can be found here:

Peer-Reviewed Paper: “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive”

Of course, accumulations of microevolutionary changes has always been the presumed mechanism driving evolution.  Without a mechanism, there is no theory of evolution, because the mechanism is the theory.

Human Origins Research is in Complete Disarray

I haven’t written much about evolution in these pages.  The principle reason is that I consider the debate on that question to be a distraction from the question which really ought to concern us, namely, did biological diversity arise by accident, or was it by design?  And we already know from other lines of reasoning that it was by design. 

God could have used an evolutionary process, but whether He did or not is of very little consequence to me.  What is of tremendous consequence is that living systems unmistakably reflect the activity of a mind.  They are distinctively characterized by information, and information, wherever it is found, always reflects intention.  Intentions are mental activities.  Always.

There is another reason I do not jump into the debate with both feet, and that is that I usually find that those who subscribe to evolutionary theory are entrenched in their view and are not amenable to persuasion.  Since the question is of little consequence, I prefer to spend my time in other ways.

You may ask, however, Isn’t the veracity of Genesis also at stake?  Isn’t that a matter of some consequence?

Yes, it is a matter of great consequence, but I really don’t think that evolutionary theory places the veracity of Genesis at issue.  That depends on one’s interpretation of Genesis, which is another topic I prefer to avoid, for three reasons: One, I already know from other lines of reasoning that Genesis is true (regardless of what it means); two, Genesis is very difficult to interpret; and three, many people are again entrenched.  The things that matter to me, namely, God’s existence and our redemption through the Cross of Jesus, are not in doubt.

That is why, whenever anyone tries to pull me in to a conversation about human origins, the first thing I say is, Yeah, we can talk about that, but first we need to understand what is NOT at stake: God’s existence and His love; for our knowledge of these things is established through independent lines of reasoning.  There is no reason to resist God’s free offer of forgiveness merely because you think the church has it wrong about evolution.  The interpretation of Genesis is not essential to salvation.  There is a diversity of opinion within the church about the meaning of Genesis.

Nevertheless!  Sometimes there is a development in science that has great bearing on the human origins debate, and that I think deserves to be more widely heard.

In the May 2021 issue of Evolution News and Science Today (a publication of the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank), Gunter Bechley brings to our attention an important research article published May 7, 2021 in the journal Science, which is the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and one of the world’s top academic journals.

Bechley’s essay is titled, “Scientists Conclude: Human Origins Research is a Big Mess,” and it may be found at https://evolutionnews.org/2021/05/scientists-conclude-human-origins-research-is-a-big-mess/.

The Science article is titled, “Fossil Apes and Human Evolution,” (Science Magazine, 07 May 2021: Vol. 372, Issue 6542, eabb4363 DOI: 10.1126/science.abb4363), and may be found at (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6542/eabb4363).

Here are some choice quotes from the Science article:

After 150 years of continuous discoveries, essential information about human origins remains elusive owing to debates surrounding the interpretation of fossil apes.

. . . .

The root of the conflict is the remarkable differences in subjective definition and scoring of complex morphologies.

The decades-long feud regarding arboreality [tree-dwelling] and bipedalism in A. afarensis exemplifies the complexity of inferring function from anatomy. . . .

Humans are storytellers: Theories of human evolution often resemble “anthropogenic narratives” that borrow the structure of a hero’s journey to explain essential aspects such as the origins of erect posture, the freeing of the hands, or brain enlargement. Intriguingly, such narratives have not drastically changed since Darwin. We must be aware of confirmation biases and ad hoc interpretations by researchers aiming to confer [upon] their new fossil the starring role within a preexisting narrative. Evolutionary scenarios are appealing because they provide plausible explanations based on current knowledge, but unless grounded in testable hypotheses, they are no more than “just-so stories”

Bechley says, “The press release from the American Museum of Natural History (2021) sums up the gist of this review article:”

Most human origins stories are not compatible with known fossils. . . .  [T]he number of species in the human family tree has exploded, but so has the level of dispute concerning early human evolution. . . .  However, many of these fossils show mosaic combinations of features that do not match expectations for ancient representatives of the modern ape and human lineages. As a consequence, there is no scientific consensus on the evolutionary role played by these fossil apes. . . .  Overall, the researchers found that most stories of human origins are not compatible with the fossils that we have today.

Bechley concludes:

That is a fair assessment indeed, which admittedly does not mean that these evolutionary speculations are all wrong or futile enterprises. However, it at least shows that those bold hardcore Darwinists, who think they can dismiss and rebuke Darwin critics and ID proponents with some grandiose claims of allegedly settled science, are not just vastly overstating their case but indeed are ignorant of the current state of the scientific debate. The question of human origins is far from being resolved, and non-mainstream options should be explored based exclusively on the available evidence, rather than being rejected due to world-view bias.

Review: Ben Stein documentary, “Expelled”

[The following essay was written in fulfillment of an assignment for a class I took at Reasons Institute in the spring of 2020.]

Critics of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution are systematically denied a fair opportunity to present their views in and through established science organizations.  That is the major premise of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a 2008 Ben Stein documentary.

Through a series of interviews with scientists on both sides of the creation-evolution divide, Stein establishes that Intelligent Design theory (ID) is suppressed in the science establishment.  The scientists whom Stein interviews are well-credentialed and articulate, but they are almost to a person taken from one or the other of two classes, namely, Discovery Institute fellows, or the victims of anti-ID persecution.

Stein’s authorities claim that in private, leading scientists will sometimes acknowledge concerns about the truth of neo-Darwinism.  There are numerous published writings which show that such admissions do not occur in private only, and it would have advanced Stein’s argument considerably had he mentioned them – or better yet, interviewed their authors.

It also would have been useful had Stein spent more time explaining ID and demonstrating its religious neutrality.  This is especially the case in view of the justification which evolutionists typically offer for suppressing ID, namely, that it is just religion in disguise.

Perhaps the most serious weakness of the film, however, is the extravagantly bad light in which mainstream science is presented.  It is true that ID advocates are censored and persecuted by the science establishment, and the western public needs to be aware of it.  It is also true that Darwinism was a significant contributor to Nazism abroad and euthanasia in this country, and that it helps to sustain the right-to-die and abortion movements.  These are all important circumstances.  They are even marginally relevant, but Stein makes far too much of them.

The premise that evolution is necessarily progressive and that it is driven forward by a process whereby only the fittest organisms survive to propagate – the “survival of the fittest” – has indeed led to a phenomenon known as “social Darwinism,” according to which the extermination of certain classes of humans by other classes of humans is regarded as a good thing.  But Stein does not here so much critique social Darwinism as use it to damn his opponents by association, which is a type of ad hominem fallacy.  Darwinism isn’t false merely because it has effects which most people deplore.  It is possible, moreover, to believe in Darwinism while energetically opposing the death cult in all its forms, and some leading scientists do exactly that.

What is probably worst of all is that almost all of this propaganda is not conveyed in the script, but as part of the visual accompaniment of the relatively innocuous verbal material.  Such a device reaches the audience at an emotional, not a rational level. 

Stein is justifiably upset about the establishment’s refusal to permit ID theory a fair hearing; but I think he has missed an opportunity to make a more winsome, and perhaps a more effective appeal.  Darwinists viewing this film are likely to see Stein’s choice of means of persuasion as outrageous and, as always, to dismiss his arguments summarily – if they finish watching at all.  So much for winning over one’s opponents!

I doubt that I would recommend this film to anyone.  It contains a lot of important information about discrimination against perfectly competent scientists who happen to recognize the scientific status of ID, and I would like to see that information disseminated as widely as possible.  But I am afraid that the less an individual knows about that already, the more likely he or she is to be influenced by the propagandistic features of the film, and to become incensed at mainstream scientists.  And that can only make the work of the more circumspect more difficult.

Fuzale Rana of Reasons to Believe offers A Response to the Most Compelling Evidence for Biological Evolution

 

Fuzale Rana is a biochemist with Reasons to Believe.  This video is an excellent example of the outstanding work which this organization has been doing for over 30 years now.

Dr. Rana opens by describing the recent discovery that the duckbill platypus may hold the key to the treatment of type-2 diabetes in humans.  The male platypus has a venom in its hind feet which contains a hormone that causes its attackers’ blood sugar to crash, causing the attacker to become lethargic.  The hormone is similar to one in humans which also regulates blood sugar, but which is not as long-lasting.  By studying the hormone, scientists may be able to devise a treatment for type-2 diabetes, which is characterized by dangerously high levels of blood sugar.

Evolutionists insist that similar structures in various species must be interpreted within an evolutionary framework as evidence of common ancestry.  Indeed, they cite such similarities (which they call “homologies”) as the most compelling evidence for evolution.  Rana explains how such similarities make more sense within a design framework.

Why would a creator employ common designs?

Homologies make the biological realm intelligible.  If the body structure of every species were fundamentally different, studying one species would offer us no insight as to the functioning of any other species.  Biology as a discipline would be nearly impossible.  The similarity of life-forms enables us to comprehend life generally.  This, in turn, enables us not only to devise treatments for human illness by studying other species, but also to fulfill the divine command to be stewards and caretakers of the planet.

There is more!  Budget 40 minutes for Dr. Rana’s remarks, but don’t miss the Q and A.  Enjoy!