The View From 1776

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The central point of my recent posting, Teaching Evolution: The Argument Is Not About Science, was that the ACLU’s purpose in insisting that only Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis can be taught in public schools is to shield socialism from free and open inquiry. 

A related and critical point was that Darwinism can’t even get to first base unless it can prove that life could have come spontaneously into existence from inert chemicals, without Divine intervention.  Otherwise Darwinism is stillborn and unable to support its contention that all life forms, purely accidently, originated in and evolved from a primitive single-cell creature. 

Even allowing, as Darwin did, for possibly three or four original life forms means that separate species were created (not evolved) from the beginning.  If as many as four original species, why not more?

None of the readers who disagreed with my posting even addressed these points. 

Most objectors repeated the familiar so-called proofs of the evolutionary hypothesis: citations of similarities between species, which all boil down to nothing more than “might have been.” Is somebody my cousin simply because he looks a bit like me and has family members living in my home town?  Genealogy, it seems, is a more exact science than evolution.

Some readers’ “proofs” involved descriptions of controlled experiments such as the following:

Adaptation to High and Low Temperatures by E. coli.

A single clone of E. coli was cultured at 37 C (that is 37 degrees Celsius) for 2000 generations. A single clone was then extracted from this population and divided into replicates that were then cultured at either 32 C , 37 C, or 42 C for a total of another 2000 generations. Adaptation of the new lines was periodically measured by competing these selection lines against the ancestor population. By the end of the experiment, the lines cultured at 32 C were shown to be 10% fitter that the ancestor population (at 32 C), and the line cultured at 42 C was shown to be 20% more fit than the ancestor population. The replicate line that was cultured at 37 C showed little improvement over the ancestral line.
Bennett, A.F., Lenski, R.E., & Mittler, J.E. (1992). Evolutionary adaptation to temperature I. Fitness responses of Escherichia coli to changes in its thermal environment. Evolution, 46:16-30.

Such examples, however, actually support the Intelligent Design thesis, because Darwinism is supposed to be the opposite of planned and rigidly controlled laboratory experiments.

Richard Dawkins, one of the best known modern gurus of evolution, described Darwinism in “The Blind Watchmaker thus: “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.  It has no mind and no mind’s eye.  It does not plan for the future.  It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.”

In contrast, experiments of the E. Coli sort are planned beforehand by human minds, they are conducted under conditions rigidly controlled by humans, and, at each step of the experiment, humans intervene to measure and cull the desired results.

Darwinian evolution, if true, must be subject only to random, naturally occurring conditions, over thousands of years.  At the same time, Darwinians postulate that all the beneficial genetic mutations surviving randomly fluctuating natural conditions will be retained, so that evolution will be a cumulative process in which harmful genetic mutations will ultimately be outweighed by useful ones.  Evolutionists symbolize this in the tree-of-life diagrams that show primitive life branching into more complex life forms, culminating with human beings; which is to say that evolution is moving always toward higher levels of intelligence and perfection.

Yet it must be a process that “has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.”

Rigidly controlled experiments such as the E. Coli one above in no way substantiate this Darwinian hypothesis of the evolutionary process.  They demonstrate only that experiments subject to human Intelligent Design can produce interesting results.

If laboratory scientists can do such things, imagine the creative potential of an all-powerful Creator God who made the universe and all the laws of nature governing it.

Another category of disagreement was the argument from ontology, of which I wrote: “Science cannot claim to deal with ontology, the branch of philosophy that seeks to understand the nature and source of Being itself (how the phenomena and processes of nature came to exist), an inquiry that inevitably travels the path of religious explanations.”

One reader opined: “You confuse history with ontology.  Merriam Webster descibes ontology as “1 : a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.” In other words, ontology’s primary concern is what it means “to be”.  You describe ontology as “how the phenomena and processes of nature came to exist.” You will see that your definition is actually much closer to Webster’s definition of history, which states, “2 a : a chronological record of significant events (as affecting a nation or institution) often including an explanation of their causes. b : a treatise presenting systematically related natural phenomena.” (the first definition was “tale, story") Comparing these definitions, it should be quite apparent that what you believe to be the concern of ontology falls, in fact, under the rubrick of history. “

Evidently I need to make my intended meaning clearer.

First, let me point out that “to be” and “to exist” are more or less synonymous terms, at least that is the sense in which I used the latter term.  In point of fact, philosophical considerations of ontology, at least prior to the advent of socialism in the 18th century, all zeroed in on the question of what Aristotle called the Unmoved Mover. 

If, as Aristotle observed, all things we can see in the universe are in motion or respond in predictable ways to the energy of motion, the ultimate question is whence came the original motion.  That original source had to be something not already subject to existing motion or laws of motion.  It had to be something (God) outside the universe, existing prior to the universe, something from which all that we see originated.

Fast forward to today.  Darwinian apologists like Richard Dawkins repeatedly, and off-handedly, pull into their “proofs” the laws of nature, laws of chemistry, and laws of physics.  Whence came these laws?  That they exist is indisputable.  Moreover, if we are to accept the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe, we must postulate that all of these laws existed before the Big Bang or that they all came into being instantly at the first nanosecond of the Big Bang, for without them the Big Bang and the universe’s subsequent expansion and currently known configuration cannot be analyzed or described.

From chemistry, to astronomy, to sub-atomic particle physics, it is absolutely clear that the abstract principles of mathematics, quantum mechanics, and the many ratios (or constants) imbedded in natural phenomena are applicable throughout the universe.  In other words, a master set of rules that existed in the Mind of God before creation of the universe are what truly determine the conditions of nature that scientists observe.

Darwinians airily dismiss such considerations.  Professor Dawkins, for example, approvingly quotes from Oxford physical chemist Peter Atkins’s “The Creation”: “I shall take your mind on a journey.  It is a journey of comprehension taking us to the edge of space, time, and understanding.  On it I shall argue that there is nothing that cannot be understood, that there is nothing that cannot be explained, and that everything is extraordinarily simple… A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation.  Elephants for instance.  ONCE MOLECULES HAVE LEARNT TO COMPETE AND CREATE OTHER MOLECULES IN THEIR OWN IMAGE [emphasis added], elephants and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming through the countryside.”

“Once molecules have learnt to compete and create other molecules in their own image” is a gigantic leap of assumption, light years wide.  But this is typical of the convenient presumptions of initial conditions upon which Darwinians routinely rely. 

As my friend John DeMassa, the possessor of a PhD in chemistry, notes, in any other branch of science, no one will accept a simple assertion of this breathtaking dimension without demanding to see the data underlying it and the rigid methods of proof employed to derive and to interpret the data.  Other scientists must be able to replicate the data and to observe the claimed results.  Only in Darwinian evolution are people allowed to say that an hypothesis based inescapably on the presumed accidental origin of life, with no supporting data at all, is “science.”

Darwinians’ ontological assumption is that there is no God and no Intelligent Design in the creation of life and the vast number of plant and animal species inhabiting the earth.  All other phenomena in the universe came into being subject to uniform and tightly intertwined laws of nature; the only exception is the hypothesis of evolution, because The Great Oz, Charles Darwin, said so.

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