On Solid Ground: Evolution versus Intelligent Design

President Bush sent reporters into a tizzy this week by saying that he thought schools ought to teach both evolution and intelligent design. Students ought to hear both theories, he said, so they “can understand what the debate is about.”

Well, the usual critics jumped all over the president, but he’s absolutely right. Considering all competing theories was once the very definition of academic freedom. But today, the illiberal forces of secularism want to stifle any challenges to Darwin—even though Darwin is proving to be eminently challengeable.

Take biochemist Michael Behe’s argument. He says that the cell is irreducibly complex. All the parts have to work at once, so it could not have evolved. No one has been able to successfully challenge Behe’s argument.

In fact, the scientific case for intelligent design is so strong that, as BreakPoint listeners have heard me say, even Antony Flew, once the world’s leading philosopher of atheism, has renounced his life-long beliefs and has become, as he puts it, a deist. He now believes an intelligent designer designed the universe, though he says he cannot know God yet.

I was in Oxford last week, speaking at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, and had a chance to visit with Flew. He told a crowd that, as a professional philosopher, he had used all the tools of his trade to arrive at what he believed were intellectually defensible suppositions supporting atheism. But the intelligent design movement shook those presuppositions. He said, however, on philosophical grounds that he could not prove the existence of the God of the Bible.

In the question period, I walked to the microphone and told him as nicely as I could that he had put himself in an impossible box. He could prove theism was the only philosophically sustainable position, but he could not prove who God was. I said, “If you could prove who God was, you could not love God—which is the principle object of life.”

I admitted that I had once gotten myself into the same position. I had studied biblical worldview for years and believed that I could prove beyond a doubt that the biblical worldview is the only one that is rational, the only one that conforms to the truth of the way the world is made. But that led to a spiritual crisis of sorts, when one morning in my quiet time I realized that while I could prove all of this, I could not prove who God was. I began to worry: When this life was over, would I really meet Him?

Some weeks later, as I describe in my new book The Good Life, it hit me that if I could prove God, I could not know Him. The reason is that, just as He tells us, He wants us to come like little children with faith. If you could resolve all intellectual doubts, there would be no need for faith. You would then know God the same way that you know the tree in the garden outside your home. You would look at it, know it is there, and that’s it, as Thomas Aquinas once said.

Faith is necessary because without it you cannot love God. So as I said to Dr. Flew, if you could prove God, you couldn’t love Him, which is His whole purpose in creating you. He later told me that I have raised a very provocative point that he would have to give some thought to.

So, I hope you will pray for Antony Flew—a gentle and courageous man who appears to be seeking God. And we should remember that if this brilliant man can be persuaded out of his atheism by intelligent design, anyone can see it. Those of us contending for the intelligent design point of view, which now includes among our ranks the president of the United States, I’m happy to say, are on increasingly solid ground.

Humans almost became extinct approximately 75,000 years ago. We know this because of the tiny genomic diversity of humans compared with other species.

A non-sequitur of genomic proportions. You demonstrate both a bad habit and bad science in asserting "we know" a 75,000 year history simply on the basis of genomic diversity or lack thereof. We can surmise, conjecture, and even reasonably posit such a thing. That is as far as it goes. Recorded history makes no mention of occasions where an ape was mistaken for a human or vice versa. Period.

If anything, genetic studies serve to expose the details and purposes of intelligent design. The record can be made to fit the assumptions of any observer, but it in no way substantiates the conjectural histories so often offered up by adherents to the philosophy of evolution.

One would think, if the ancestry of humans and apes was so closely related, there would be ample documentation of cases where creatures appeared that were so close in appearance to humans, yet not human, that one would be hard pressed as to classify them.

That would apparently be (for one example) skull ER 1470.

Cuozzo, Gish (1985 edition) and Mehlert say "It's an ape! Just an ape! Where are the in-between things?"

Another list of creationists including Gish (1979 edition) say of the same thing "It's a man! Just a man! Where are the in-between things?"

Source: A comparison of creationist opinions.

First of all, since modern apes and modern humans are only so much alike and no more, one might think that it would be no problem to tell one from the other. At any rate, one particular idiot (Gish) in six years switched his story from "Man! Just a man!" to "Ape! Just an ape!"

Your post appears to imply that there is a sharp dividing line between ape fossils and human fossils. Pray tell, where is it?

And, while you're at it, why can't (oxymoron alert!) creationist authorities agree on where this dividing line is?

For some reason we do not have a written record of living humans being confused for apes.

The living forms were the basis of most of our biological taxa in the first place. Thus, living forms fit said taxa well and extinct forms tend to blur or straddle the edges.

The forms always display convergence as you go back in the fossil record, divergence as you go forward. There's no problem telling any modern reptile from any modern bird, but there are fossils whose status has been argued or switched between the bird and dinosaur groups. As you go back in time, whales and sirenians get legs, as their relationship to their non-aquatic ancestor groups becomes less distant.

From Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record, we have the following.

Moving further up the taxonomic hierarchy, the condylarths and primitive carnivores (creodonts, miacids) are very similar to each other in morphology (Fig. 9, 10), and some taxa have had their assignments to these orders changed. The Miacids in turn are very similar to the earliest representatives of the Families Canidae (dogs) and Mustelidae (weasels), both of Superfamily Arctoidea, and the Family Viverridae (civets) of the Superfamily Aeluroidea. As Romer (1966) states in Vertebrate Paleontology (p. 232), "Were we living at the beginning of the Oligocene, we should probably consider all these small carnivores as members of a single family." This statement also illustrates the point that the erection of a higher taxon is done in retrospect, after sufficient divergence has occurred to give particular traits significance.

Figure 10. Comparison of skulls of the early ungulates (condylarths) and carnivores. (A) The condylarth Phenacodus possessed large canines as well as cheek teeth partially adapted for herbivory. (B) The carnivore-like condylarth Mesonyx. The early Eocene creodonts (C) Oxyaena and (D) Sinopa were primitive carnivores apparently unrelated to any modern forms. (E) The Eocene Vulpavus is a representative of the miacids which probably was ancestral to all living carnivore groups. (From Vertebrate Paleontology by Alfred Sherwood Romer published by The University of Chicago Press, copyright © 1945, 1966 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This material may be used and shared with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.)

That is, you don't expect to have any trouble telling a mammalian carnivore (dog, bear, cat, racoon, etc.) from an ungulate (horse, deer, antelope). If you didn't believe in evolution, you might not expect to see their ancestors get more and more like each other as you go back in time, either, but they do. It's a prediction of evolution. It's the expected signature of common descent--a branching tree thereof.

For any other model of the diversity of life, the evidence I've just described is a shrug and a wave-away. One must dismiss the evidence, claim that all 150 years worth is a Piltdown fraud, or just say "God could have left the fossil record looking like that. After all, He could have left it looking any way He wanted."

Everything in the present is at a branch tip on the tree of life. Some things do seem to show an intermediate character between things on other branches (those egg-laying monotreme mammals, for instance) but everything is in fact on its own branch tip and everything is the result of billions of years of evolution. That's the evolutionary model and it's the only one that makes any useful sense for understanding what we see. There's nothing else. Wave-aways and patent evasions don't cut it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.