Posted on 12/19/2003 7:47:15 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
G. K. Chesterton once told a story about "an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was an island in the South Seas."
The yachtsman "landed (armed to the teeth and speaking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the pavilion at Brighton." Expecting to have discovered New South Wales, he realized "that it was really old South Wales."
Chesterton was talking about the way in which we cast off the truths we learned as children, only later, if we are fortunate, to rediscover them as adults. What we dismissed as "simple" often turns out to be far more profound than we ever imagined.
According to Stephen M. Barr, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware, what's true about people is also true about science. In his new book, MODERN PHYSICS AND ANCIENT FAITH, Barr tells us that after the "twists" and "turns" that science took in the twentieth century, it, like Chesterton's yachtsman, wound up in "very familiar surroundings": a universe that "seems to have had a beginning . . . [and is] governed by laws that have a grandeur and sublimity that bespeak design."
Instead of man being merely the result of a "fortuitous concourse of atoms," we now know that the "universe and its laws seem in some respect to balance on a knife's edge" -- exactly what is needed for the possibility of life. A slight deviation here or there, and we wouldn't exist -- the anthropic principle.
These and other "recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist's expectations and confirm those of the believer in God," writes Barr.
Notice, he said "materialist's," not "scientist's." As Barr makes clear, sciences like modern physics can and must be separated from materialism. Materialism is the belief that nothing exists besides matter, and it is a philosophical opinion. It may have, as Barr puts it, "[grown] up alongside science," but it's not science. Remember that, a critical point.
The assumption that you have to take a materialist worldview in order to do science is simply wrong. There's nothing about physics, for example, that assumes, much less demands, that view of the universe. In fact, many of the greatest scientists, like Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus, were religious believers.
Despite these facts, philosophical materialism has become so identified with science that scientists, and the general public, often have trouble telling them apart, which is why the discoveries that Barr describes come as a surprise, and their implications are resisted by many within the academy.
These implications aren't inconsistent with science, but rather with their dogmatic materialist worldview. Resisting these implications has required ingenious, almost fanciful, attempts to interpret the evidence in a way consistent with the materialist worldview.
Tomorrow I'll tell you about some of these discoveries and how they have "damaged the credibility of materialism." It's an important story about how science, far from being the enemy of faith, is only at war with those who, against the evidence, insist that England is "Tahiti."
Science does hypothesize that natural laws are uniform over time. It takes no position on how natural laws originated.
Not just that. Natural science is an impossible enterprise under a materialist rubric.
(Stanley Jaki is a great writer on faith and science.)
Maybe I haven't been following as closely as I need to, but I don't see how there can't be.
ID explains irreducible complexity whereas evolutionism doesn't. The fossil record indicates morphological stasis in species, in contradiction to the theory of evolution. Evolution simply lacks explanatory power.
Tell that to Michael Behe who wrote Darwin's Black Box. Behe is a Professor at Lehigh University and very much argues from the scientific point of view for Intelligent Design.
This wasn't a problem for Frere Teilhard, Christian evolutionist. The species remain, but new species arise from them. In some cases, maybe most cases, no new species arise from existing species at all; for the one case, a whole new branch could arise and flower into even more variety than the branch it came from.
Irreducible complexity is a hollow phrase unless you can demonstrate some necessity for the irreducibility.
Thanks for providing a link referencing Michael Behe.
That's arguable. Behe's argument is that some biological structures are so complex they could not have evolved. I dispute that that's a scientific argument. Moreover, many of his examples of 'irreducible complexity' have been thoroughly debunked.
Neither darwin, nor Teilhard de Chardin, has an answer for that, based on strict evolution.
Read some of the newer writings by Behe and others.
They are far more rigorous than anything Teilhard de Chardin wrote and are a far better refutation of spontaneous life (implying a Creator).
Compared to Behe's analysis and arguments, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as applied to macroevolution, has far less substance to it.
With over 50 different protein parts, it is hard to imagine a machine with so many necessary pieces.
And yet, some of those pieces are quite functional without the whole. How is this irreducible?
Teilhard's idea of that is that there is little to be found of the first examples of a new evolutionary branch or of the beginning of it all. Life being what it is, eats everything around it. The beginnings, therefore, can never be known. We can see only what it is now, and a few remains of things that were, ever scarcer as they were closer to the beginning. It is speculation that we engage in, trying to find out how it happened when there is nothing left for scientists to work with, no samples, no facts. Life doesn't spontaneously appear to organize itself out of plain atoms now because conditions aren't right, not to say that someone might not find the right conditions in the lab one day and therefore become an IDer in his own right. Conditions were right once, that is the assumption, but it is speculation. We cannot know.
Irreducible complexity has never been demonstrated; most of Behe's examples of it have been shot out of the water. Moreover, ID does not explain, for example, the incredibly disordered nature of the living genome. Humans have 49 non-functional copies of the gene for cytochrome C. Some of them are closer to the cytochrome c gene for rat testis than they are to human cytochrome C. Why did the designer do that?
A substantial part of the genome is composed of transposons, some of which are similar in sequence to retroviruses, sometimes cause congenital deformities, and are present in humans and primates but not in other types of mammals. Why did the designer do that?
Why did the designer introduce point mutations in the proteins of mammals so that they consistently follow a single pattern of relatedness? Why are all bat proteins closer to whale proteins than they are to bird proteins? Wouldn't intelligent design of a bat use materials from a very similar small warm-booded organism, rather than a large marine organism?
So where's the explanatory power?
Probably zero. ID isn't science because it has yet to put forth any falsifiable theory.
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