The View From 1776

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In an earlier posting I answered point No. 5 in Adam Leigland’s critique, which can be found on his website The Hammer of Judgement.

The following are my responses to his points No. 1 and 2; I will address his other points in future postings.

MR. LEIGLAND:

1. First, you mischaracterize the nature of my disagreement. I did not, as you claim, disagree with your assertion about Newton’s fundamental postulate. I disagreed with your statement that Intelligent Design is incontrovertibly true while scientific orthodoxy “backfires.”

MY RESPONSE:

Point taken. 

In the same vein of mischaracterization, however, I did not write that “scientific orthodoxy” backfires, rather that “atheistic secularism” backfires.  The full statement was “It is easier for such “scientists” to rely on an unprovable belief in atheistic secularism, which backfires at every turn in the real world, while ignoring the incontrovertible evidence that Intelligent Design suffuses every aspect of the universe, of life, and our perception of it.”

No one looking at the historical record can, with a straight face, deny that the atheistic secularism of socialism has fared poorly, politically and economically, when compared to societies that teach their youth individual responsibility for moral conduct and couple that responsibility with individual economic freedom.  Even the badly maimed free-market economies of England and the United States have left the secular and materialistic world of socialism in the dust.

With regard to your use of the term scientific orthodoxy, there is a vast gulf between the physical sciences such as chemistry and physics, and the laws of mathematics, on one side, and on the other, the social and soft “sciences” such as evolution.  Scientific orthodoxy characterizes the former, but not the latter, if one defines scientific orthodoxy as scrupulously honest recording of data and experimental results, drawing conclusions from those data, and submitting them to other scientists for replication and verification.

In the scientific orthodoxy of physical sciences like chemistry, chemists can make pretty good guesses about the properties of untried chemical combinations.  And they have found chemical elements previously unknown, but predicted accurately from gaps in the periodic table.

Evolutionists cannot, like chemists, look at gaps in the theoretical tree of evolutionary life and predict the exact nature of “missing” evolutionary branches.  Evolutionists can’t even agree whether there are “missing” branches, or which branches connect to others, if at all.  Evolutionists fighting about the tree of life are like Little Black Sambo’s tigers chasing each other around the palm tree.

Ernst Haeckel, the inventor of the tree of life diagram, predicted simple life forms which he called monera.  These have never been discovered, but that didn’t keep evolutionists from dredging up bits of inorganic gypsum from the North Sea and declaring to the public that they were fossilized monera.  If the evolutionary data don’t exist, just make up something and declare it to be scientific truth.

No conclusions in Darwinian or other schools of evolutionary doctrine can be tested or disproved by the methods of scientific orthodoxy.  A good analogy is to imagine a jigsaw puzzle that initially had 100 million pieces, from which only 100 pieces, randomly selected, are available; then to ask scientists to guess what the full picture showed with all the pieces available.

Darwin and his 19th century colleagues, metaphorically surveying the puzzle pieces, started with an atheistic preconception that the missing pieces, if ever found, would conform to no overall design, because each of the available 100 pieces had apparently random differences from all the other pieces.  From this they concluded that there never was an original puzzle that depicted an ordered and coherent aesthetic design.  Instead, they declared, there had been only one puzzle piece initially, the other 99 pieces having evolved by chance from the original piece.  There is, of course, absolutely no way to prove that, but evolutionists are willing to believe it, because denying the existence of
God makes them feel self-important and powerful.

Believers in evolution are actually in the contradictory position of holding that there is no design to the whole of the world, but that there are design patterns, by chance, among its biological constituents.

Intelligent Design advocates look at the puzzle pieces and note that they form certain patterns, that some of them fit together perfectly, others not at all, but all are nicely covered by various colored designs.  From this they conclude that the pieces are parts of something of much larger scope that had to have been designed and made by someone or something at an earlier time.

MR. LEIGLAND:

2. You make the common mistake of lumping current theories of cosmology, biology, and anthropology into one philosophy called “Darwinism.” Darwin wrote exclusively about the evolution of life and avoided the topic of the origins of life. He definitely did not address the origins and evolution of the universe. Cosmology, biology, and anthropology all share the idea of change over time, but that is about all they share. To group them together is disingenuous or misinformed. You also assume that what Darwin wrote in 1859 represents that current state of the field. But 146 years have passed since then, with concomitant improvements in thinking.

MY RESPONSE:

I use the term Darwinism to encompass all of the various warring camps within the field of evolutionary biology, such as:

- The original Darwinian hypothesis (that minute variations could be amplified via successive breeding or hybridization over infinitely long time periods; Darwin’s own experience with breeding pigeons – which he glossed over in his public writings – showed, to the contrary, that the results were always reversion to the original species characteristics, because there is an inherent limit to differences effected by cross-breeding).

- The neo-Darwinian synthesis of Julian Huxley (placing its bets on random and cumulative genetic mutation).

- Punctuated equilibria advocated by Gould and Eldredge (the vast numbers of irreconcilable gaps in fossil remains, where millions of intermediate species gradations were predicted but not found, could be accounted for by sudden very great leaps in genetic mutation affecting many different species’ characteristics at one time, over vast geographic areas simultaneously.  This, of course, is barely distinguishable from Divine creation of new species.)

- The Richard Dawkins DNA / RNA school (evolution takes place at the information level, not the physical level alone; every individual’s DNA is a history of all genetic changes since the hypothetical original life form from which all plants and animals theoretically descended).

The vitriolic fights among these warring camps are well known within the biology community, but either unknown or ignored by secular media and textbook writers.  The only thing that evolutionists have “proved” is that there is no hypothesis of evolution that can conform to all the known facts.  There being no unifying hypothesis for the congeries of doctrinal dispute, evolutionists seek solace in their religion of atheism and take it on blind faith that Darwin spoke the revealed truth.  Heretics who question the great god Darwin must be excommunicated from education and public discourse.

Far from steady progress implied by your “146 years” of “concomitant improvements in thinking,” what has taken place is a series of yawning chasms opening up among evolutionary biologists, with the rapid increase in numbers of inconsistencies that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

In the antithesis of scientific, open-minded inquiry, this internal warfare is concealed from the general public, especially from young students, who are told blandly that all the world’s scientists unequivocally accept Darwin’s hypothesis of evolution via natural selection.  The guild of evolutionary theorists has worked effectively to stifle any mention of the vast numbers of discrepancies that cannot be explained by evolutions. 

This is simply a continuation of the precedent set by the under-handed deal concocted by Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Joseph Hooker, in what they called “the delicate arrangement” to introduce into the record earlier letters from Darwin that hinted at his general work, but before he had arrived at the idea of natural selection, the intent being to establish a phony record implying that Darwin had actually reached his 1859 conclusions before the submission of Alfred Wallace’s “Ternate” paper in 1855.  Lyell and Hooker arranged to publish Darwin’s hastily written “abstract” as he styled “On the Origin,” and present it to the public before the Linnean Society became aware of Alfred Wallace’s work.  Wallace had in reality both anticipated all that Darwin had to say, and done it four years before Darwin’s “On the Origin.”

I must also disagree with your statement that “Darwin wrote exclusively about the evolution of life and avoided the topic of the origins of life. He definitely did not address the origins and evolution of the universe.”

Darwin, like his father before him, was careful to conceal from the public his atheistic leanings, which were the impetus for his whole work on evolution. His friend Charles Lyell also counseled him not to attack Christianity head-on, but to undermine it indirectly, as that would facilitate a wider public acceptance of his views.

Inescapably, however, if one promotes an atheistic, secular view, he is aligning himself with the view that life originated spontaneously from random combinations of chemicals under random environmental conditions, and he is denying the existence of a Supreme Being Whose act of existing IS the universe as we perceive it.

In Chapter One of the 1st edition of “The Descent of Man,” Darwin wrote: “If I have erred in giving to natural selection great power, which I am far from admitting, or in having exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.” Believing that the laws of nature and science, as we know them, are themselves random phenomena with no assignable origin is straight-down-the-middle-of-the-pike atheism. 

As for your statement, “Cosmology, biology, and anthropology all share the idea of change over time, but that is about all they share. To group them together is disingenuous or misinformed,” do you mean that each branch of science is a watertight compartment and that scientists in one are obliged to ignore finding in the others?  That is, in fact, what evolutionists do. 

For example, the “primordial soup” hypothesis for the origin of life entirely by chance, proposed by the atheistic Soviet biochemist A. I. Oparin in 1924, requires that there be no free oxygen in the atmosphere, otherwise the postulated sequential combinations of chemicals would screech to a halt as oxygen, in effect, would “rust” the process.  Geologists, unfortunately for the evolutionists, since then have found clear evidence in ancient rocks that there were significant amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere at the postulated time of the “primordial soup.”

Needless to say, the science sections of the liberal media have not reported this and evolutionists ignore it, continuing to speak hopefully of prospects that somehow, some way they will, like Dr. Frankenstein, succeed in suffusing inorganic matter with life.

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