If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.

But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.

But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.

The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.

First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.

Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.

One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.

Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .

"My hypothesis is ALL gnostic systems

(1) are rebellions against the transcendent Creator God and the world of His making.

(2) are rejections of the human condition/human nature as such.

(3) in response to (2), seek the divinization of man, or (in many cases), the divinization of a man (e.g., Joachin de Fiore, Nietzsche, Hegel, Obama).

Spirited: Agreed.

According to Thomas Molnar, there was a very close relationship between neo-paganism (scientific animism, monism) and the occult that emerged out of the Renaissance.

They were united by a joint effort: a search for a different 'human' race, both super-intelligent and empowered with the powers of a new kind of magic, "scientific" or mythical:

"(the) new supermagic, despite being called scientific, is no less aimed at a fantastic reorientation of our condition, in the spirit of a Gnostic dissociation from the created world." (The Pagan Temptation, p. 146)

At the root of the rejection of the living God is the defiant narcissistic assertion that man has not been created by Him, that he is not dependent upon Him for his own life, thus he is not created in His spiritual image.

Calling themselves "liberated" spirits, free-spirits, free-thinkers, antitheists (i.e., Marx) and revolutionaries, they saw themselves as not dependent upon the living God because they were man-gods, the creators of God, the masters of time, being, and the world who through their own powers would save themselves.

Believing they were superior to Him, they said, "you are not my father:"

"I am I, I come out of myself, and in choice and action I make myself." (Daniel Bell, quoted by Herbert Schlossberg in "Idols for Destruction," p. 43)

But in rejecting the living Creator who spoke creation into existence they had to fall back upon the only option available: anti-human, anti-creation Nature---void, matter, and energy working on and through matter.

Matter is amoral, it cannot think, speak, or create life, let alone human consciousness. In the words of the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell:

"Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way." (Russell, "Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects," 1957, p. 115)

Pagan animism and its primary doctrine evolution is a magical religious worldview devoid of God:

"Evolution is a religion," declared evolutionary religionist Michael Ruse. "This was true of evolution in the beginning and it is true still today…One of the most popular books of the era was 'Religion Without Revelation,' by Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley…As always evolution was doing everything expected of religion and more." (National Post, Canadian Edition)

All worldviews begin with a religious declaration. The Biblical or Revealed Word perspective begins with, "In the beginning God…" Super-magic begins with divinized man declaring, "In the beginning void, matter, and energy."

Void, matter, and energy is all there is, and despite that none of it lives or thinks, magical matter nevertheless thinks, chooses, is miraculously self-perfecting and Divine:

"…matter itself continually attains to higher perfection under its own power, thanks to indwelling dialectic…the dialectical materialists attribution of 'dialectic' to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones." (Dialectical Materialism, Gustav A. Wetter, 1977, p. 58)

In explicitly religious language, the following neo-pagan magicians offer all praise, honor, and glory to their non-life bearing, anti-human, anti-creator:

"We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth." (Vladimir Lenin quoted in Communism versus Creation, Francis Nigel Lee, 1969, p. 28)

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever will be." (Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980, p. 4)

Evolutionary atheism (scientific super-magic) has amply demonstrated itself to be a virulently anti-human, pathologically destructive, demonically murderous worldview. In just the first eighty-seven years of the twentieth century, the project of radically transforming the world and the consciousness of mankind has led to the brutal extermination of between 100-170 million un-evolved 'subhuman' men, women, and children.

In the Soviet Union, the God-and-human hating Magus Vladimir Lenin exulted that,

"Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another (and) that they were created by God, and hence immutable." (Fatal Fruit, Tom DeRosa, p. 9)

Lenin exercised godlike power over life and death. He saw himself as, "the master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species." It was Lenin who "decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history." From the moment Lenin made the "scientific" decision that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that evolution had surpassed, "its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified." (The Black Book of Communism, p. 752)

In Nazi Germany pagan super-magic resulted in gas chambers, ovens, and the liquidation of eleven million "useless eaters" and other undesirables.

Alain Brossat draws the following conclusions about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the ties that bind them:

"The 'liquidation' of the Muscovite executioners, a close relative of the 'treatment' carried out by Nazi assassins, is a linguistic microcosm of an irreparable mental and cultural catastrophe that was in full view on the Soviet Stage. The value of human life collapsed, and thinking in categories replaced ethical thought…In the discourse and practice of the Nazi exterminators, the animalization of Other…was closely linked to the ideology of race. It was conceived in the implacably hierarchical racial terms of "subhumans" and "supermen"…but in Moscow in 1937, what mattered…was the total animalization of the Other, so that a policy under which absolutely anything was possible could come into practice." (Black Book of Communism, p. 751)

Kultursmog: Evolutionary occult neo-paganism is the most dangerous religion thus far in history. It begins with the 'animalization of Other,' in tandem with the elevation of the 'superior elite pagan class' for whom this serves as a license to make up their own rules, abuse power, and force their will onto the citizens. This is accompanied by a process that pathologizes faith in God, creation ex nihilo, immutable truth, "He made them man and woman," enduring principles, moral ethics, virtue, and social taboos while simultaneously elevating narcissism, tyranny, cruelty, nihilism, confusion, perversion, sadism, theft, and lying to positions of politically correct "new morality."

Satanically twisted "new morality" (political correctness) is then enforced through sensitivity training, speech codes, hate crime laws, and other intimidation tactics. If not stopped, as history warns us, this rapidly escalating downward process leads inevitably to enslavement, mass murder and totalitarianism:

"A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment. The individual…is henceforth to be controlled…in large part by other men." (Evolutionary Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, Understanding the Times, David Noebel, p. 232)

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