It's my war too, dear Heartlander. And it's NOT "against" science. Science itself, as well as Christians, is being corrupted by the insane insistence at the heart of atheistic methodological naturalism; to wit, the only valid explanations for natural phenomena MUST BE natural (i.e., material) causes.
But this view is not exclusive to atheists. There are theists who purport to believe this, too. In professional circles today, Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy is more or less enforced against all dissenters. Whether it be a theoretical or a working scientist, it is prudent to keep one's mouth shut or risk damage to one's career. To me this evidences a profound dishonesty and corruption within science itself.
Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at NYU and a self-professed atheist, found this out back in 2007, when he had the temerity to name Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell as a top-book-of-the-year of the Times Literary Supplement. Meyer's work deals with design theory. An amazing "food fight" with the practitioners of Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy ensued, littered with ad hominum attacks against Meyer and even Nagel. (See the link below for the gory details).
In the course of which, Stephen Meyer critiques his critics:
The central argument of my book is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question.Now I'm no expert; but I do believe I have common sense enough to realize that Sutherland meticulously designed an experiment that could not fail to produce the outcome he wanted to reach.
Nowhere in his review does [Darrel] Falk [professor of biology, Point Loma Nazarene University] refute this claim or provide another explanation for the origin of biological information. In order to do so, Falk would need to show that some undirected material cause has demonstrated the power to produce functional biological information apart from the guidance or activity of a designing mind. Neither Falk, nor anyone working in origin-of-life biology, has succeeded in doing this. ...[Yet] Falk [insists] that it is “premature” to draw any negative conclusions about the adequacy of undirected chemical processes.
To support his claim that I rushed to judgment, Falk first cites a scientific study published last spring after my book was in press. The paper, authored by University of Manchester chemist John Sutherland and two colleagues, does partially address one of the many outstanding difficulties associated with the RNA world, the most popular current theory about the origin of the first life.
Starting with a 3-carbon sugar (D-gylceraldehyde), and another molecule called 2-aminooxazole, Sutherland successfully synthesized a 5-carbon sugar in association with a base and a phosphate group. In other words, he produced a ribonucleotide. The scientific press justifiably heralded this as a breakthrough in pre-biotic chemistry because previously chemists had thought ... that the conditions under which ribose and bases could be synthesized were starkly incompatible with each other.
Nevertheless, Sutherland’s work does not refute the central argument of my book, nor does it support the claim that it is premature to conclude that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the power to produce functionally specified information. If anything, it illustrates the reverse.
In Chapter 14 of my book I describe and critique the RNA world scenario. There I describe five major problems associated with the theory. Sutherland’s work only partially addresses the first and least severe of these difficulties: the problem of generating the constituent building blocks or monomers in plausible pre-biotic conditions. It does not address the more severe problem of explaining how the bases in nucleic acids (either DNA or RNA) acquired their specific information-rich arrangements. In other words, Sutherland’s experiment helps explain the origin of the “letters” in the genetic text, but not their specific arrangement into functional “words” or “sentences.”
Even so, Sutherland’s work lacks pre-biotic plausibility and does so in three ways that actually underscore my argument.
First, Sutherland chose to begin his reaction with only the right-handed isomer of the 3-carbon sugars he needed to initiate his reaction sequence. Why? Because he knew that otherwise the likely result would have had little biological significance. Had Sutherland chosen to use a far more plausible racemic mixture of both right- and left-handed sugar isomers, his reaction would have generated undesirable mixtures of stereoisomers—mixtures that would seriously complicate any subsequent biologically relevant polymerization. Thus, he himself solved the so-called chirality problem in origin-of-life chemistry by intelligently selecting a single enantiomer, i.e., only the right-handed sugars that life itself requires. Yet there is no demonstrated source for such non-racemic mixture of sugars in any plausible pre-biotic environment.
Second, the reaction that Sutherland used to produce ribonucleotides involved numerous separate chemical steps. At each intermediate stage in his multi-step reaction sequence, Sutherland himself intervened to purify the chemical by-products of the previous step by removing undesirable side products. In so doing, he prevented—by his own will, intellect and experimental technique—the occurrence of interfering cross-reactions, the scourge of the pre-biotic chemist.
Third, in order to produce the desired chemical product—ribonucleotides—Sutherland followed a very precise “recipe” or procedure in which he carefully selected the reagents and choreographed the order in which they were introduced into the reaction series, just as he also selected which side products to be removed and when. Such recipes, and the actions of chemists who follow them, represent what the late Hungarian physical chemist Michael Polanyi called “profoundly informative intervention[s].” Information is being added to the chemical system as the result of the deliberative actions— the intelligent design—of the chemist himself.
In sum, not only did Sutherland’s experiment not address the more fundamental problem of getting the nucleotide bases to arrange themselves into functionally specified sequences; the extent to which it did succeed in producing more life-friendly chemical constituents actually illustrates the indispensable role of intelligence in generating such chemistry. — Stephen Meyer, in "Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell", David Klinghoffer, ed. [emphasis added]
Is this even science??? Or is this abuse of science?
I have always thought that science is about discovering the laws of nature. What Sutherland seems to have done is to try to "force nature" to give up only the "answers" he wants to hear. In short, the content of his designing mind trumps the natural world outside of his head.
JMHO FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for writing, Heartlander!