On Solid Ground: Evolution versus Intelligent Design

Breakpoint with Charles Colson ^ | August 4, 2005 | Charles Colson

[Mr. Silverback]

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.

[Fester Chugabrew]

The forms always display convergence as you go back in the fossil record . . .

When one assumes the evolutionary viewpoint is correct it is a simple matter to fit fossils and bones into a tree. If that's "science," then so is astrology. If the evolutionary story were true, we would have documentation (i.e. a written record) or currect examples of cases where a human and ape were confused with one another. I've seen no such thing. What is the highest speech and writing capacity ever observed in an ape? Has it ever come so close to that of a human that we cannot be sure which one we are observing? Anything even close to borderline? Nope.

[VadeRetro]

When one assumes the evolutionary viewpoint is correct it is a simple matter to fit fossils and bones into a tree.

There's no way to force it if the fossils don't cooperate. No one is forcing anything. You can't have it both ways here. If science is forcing all the evidence to fit, then all the evidence should always fit.

That's not what happens. Whenever there's a hiccup, sour note, or unexpected result in the fossil record, science reports it honestly. That's what happens. Then, naysaying luddites like the Creation-Evolution Headlines website report it as the final downfall of evolution to the whoops and hollers of the yahoos. Bondserv or Heartlander then makes an FR thread about it. It happens every few weeks.

What goes unreported by the antievolution propagandists is that, even as new controversies erupt, old ones get resolved. Not only do they not report such resolutions, they often ignore them, continuing to wave quotes from old papers from dead issues around as evidence that evolutionists don't really believe in evolution. The prestigious Discovery Institute got caught big time in one of their quote salad presentations a few years ago to the Ohio BOE.

That's what happens, not what you said. Thus, the preponderance of evidence in the fossil record is exactly the problem for you that I outline in the previous post. We do see transitions. We do see convergence as we go back and divergence as we go forward. We do see a branching tree structure.

The sum total of all the hiccups, sour notes, and outstanding questions/controversies at any given time amounts to nothing compared to the preponderance of evidence for evolution, never mind that the questions, controversies, etc. do not amount to evidence for any competing theory if there were a competing theory.

And you've been on these threads long enough to know the molecular data of all types--proteins, genes, retroviral insertions, SINEs, LINEs--yield the same trees. No one is making them do that, either.

If that's "science," then so is astrology.

If making the Occam's Razor obvious conclusion from compelling evidence isn't science, then nothing is. The airy unsupported dismissals and back-again-dumb-as-a-stumpisms of the creation/ID posters on these threads, on the other hand, would be a good example of something that is unrelated to any evidence, any line of reasoning, or anything that goes by the name of "science."

[Fester Chugabrew]

There's no way to force it if the fossils don't cooperate.

That is absolutely correct. No forcing needed. The process is so easy that nothing need be forced. If it's smaller and less complex, place it toward the bottom of the tree. If it's larger or more complex, by necessity it should fit later in the evolutionists time scale. That is not science. That is having presuppostions and fitting the evidence into them.

My observation and assumption stands: If evolution were true, we'd have documented cases where the distinction between human and ape is more "borderline" than allows for easy placement into either category. We do not have documented cases of this, except perhaps with Barnum and Bailey's Circus.

[Quark2005]

You have aroused my curiosity. The evolution of the blood clotting system has been explained? In detail? A verifiable and reproducible model? Can you point me to where I can read more about this?

The mechanism responsible for blood clotting evolution has been hypothesized, and predicted the presence of certain proteins, which were subsequently discovered. A lucid explanation in laymen's terms is given in Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer - this is the best explanation of the subject I've personally seen. (Unfortunately, I don't have the book available at the moment and can't elaborate on more specific details of the theory.)

A good (relatively readable) article about many of the consequences of evolutionary developmental biology can be found (in journal Nature) here . (The blood clotting example is given a passing mention here.)

I'm not a professional biologist, so I can't say I have a compendium of resources at my fingertips. Personally, I think the book I mentioned is the most comprehensive and interesting book on the general subject I've ever read, though (at least one of my biologist friends has agreed with me on this point). Hope this helps.

[VadeRetro]

That is absolutely correct. No forcing needed. The process is so easy that nothing need be forced. If it's smaller and less complex, place it toward the bottom of the tree.

It thus becomes once again obvious that you do not accept modern geology any more than you accept modern biology. The relative dating of fossils makes it impossible to put them in any desired order as you claim. You cannot both accept the dating of fossils and make the claim that you have made. What color is the sky on your planet? How old is the Earth?

What do you not accept about the following presentation? Does it not perhaps omit to mention that all of the features described are actually the result of one big flood?

Do your airy wave-aways and unsupported dismissals include astronomy? (Data from astronomy supports big-bang cosmology and an old universe.) Nuclear chemistry? (Supports radiometric dating, which supports the contention that the fossil series are really fossil series and cannot be explained by your ignorant off-the-cuff inventions.)

And, never mind the order, why do these intermediate forms exist at all? Why do the molecular and embrylogical data paint the same exact picture if the fossil interpretation is all wrong? You didn't deal with that. Why not? What's the problem? Can't read? Can't think? Don't have a story?

Where does your literal Genesis predict the intermediate forms existing at all? (We have established once and for all that you do not accept any line of evidence that would support an age for the Earth greater than about 6K years, haven't we?)

[Quark2005]

You need to read "Origin of Species" and not read back into it what has subsequently been learned. He was an excellent naturalist, but the evidence he presents does not amount to a rigorous proof of his larger thesis.

I agree with this. I would well agree that the theory Darwin proposed was on very questionable ground back in his time. Many people, though, seem to be under the impression that the science of evolution is still stuck in that era, when in reality it has advanced by leaps and bounds. Darwin, for one, had no clue about genetics, and many of his hypotheses about how traits are inherited have turned out to be incorrect, to start with.

What he does provide is an excellent theory of variation among geographically isolated creatures. Darwinism is an extrapolation of his conclusions.

I agree that "Darwinism" is an inaccurate title for the current status of evolutionary research. Evolution can only be referred to as Darwinism so far as natural selection is a driving force behind evolution; genetic drift is another factor that pushes evolution that Darwin did not detail, for example. We know much more about evolution now than we did in Darwin's time, we know much more about the planets since Galileo's time.

[Fester Chugabrew]

It thus becomes once again obvious that you do not accept modern geology any more than you accept modern biology.

Sure I do. For the most part these disciplines do not pretend to have the entire history of the world under their belts. For an evolutionist it matters little where a fossil is found. It must be interpreted in such a manner as to support the notion that life has steadily progressed over billions of years from the most primitive to the more advanced forms.

The other disciplines you mention all have their place and their limits, and each has contributed to general knowledge about the world.

You keep bringing up bones, fossils, and every kind of scientific discipline except direct observation and documentation showing any ambiguity over whether a biological entity should be classified as ape or human. For some reason the ambiguities only come about when bones and fossils are considered. Or do we need to make up "punctuated equilibrium" (another unobserved, undocumented process) to explain a lack of evidence?

You can call evolutionism whatever you wish, but it should be kept from usrping the name "science" for itself as it has done for over a century. It's time is up. A good many folks are figuring that out.

[Quark2005]

"Extinction" is another example of a "fossil and bones" record from which anyone can construct a possible history and explanation.

Are you trying to tell me that all of paleontology is a bunk science? I'd love to hear a professional in the field respond to your charge.

Neither evolutionism nor creationism deserve an exclusive voice at the table of science in the strict sense. A debate over the merits of both would prove to be fertile material for children aged 14 and up, but dogmatic evolutionists apparently think their philosophy to be above question or debate.

Having personal experience as a science teacher, I'd be glad to teach the merits of both ideas in a science classroom.

The merits of evolution:

• It is testable, unfalsified and applicable. It explains biodiversity, the fossil record and genetic similarities found between species, even those from distantly related phyla.
• It is an essential part of understanding ecological and environmental sciences and the preservation and propagation of life on earth.
• It is an increasingly important part of the medical sciences, with a wide range of applicability.
• It explains similarities and differences between organisms, fossils, biogeography, drug resistance, extreme features such as the peacock's tail, relative virulence of parasites, and much more besides.( quote )
• Natural selection and evolution are essential for understanding everything from bioinformatics, disease resistance, and livestock & wildlife management.
• Evolution is the principle that ties together phylogenic differences between all life and ties biology into other fields of science, and explains similarities and differences between life forms; teaching biology without evolution is like teaching chemistry without a periodic table.

The merits of creationism:

• Nothing. (Makes some fundamentalists unwilling to admit their narrow interpretation of Genesis is wrong a little happier.)

Their historic development is absolutely not subject to direct observation. Period. Neo-Darwinian evolution predicts the past? Get over yourself. That is not science.

Hypotheses about past evolution are testable by genome sequencing, fossil discoveries, the testing of zoological & behavioral traits, etc. All science is about discovering that which is not directly observable. Have you ever seen an atom? Have you ever been near a black hole? When several unrelated fields of inquiry (paleontology, zoology, genetics, etc.) produce results that agree, you have a scientific discovery that remains solid until it is falsified. Get over yourself. That is science. You can't just pick out the research you don't like and throw it out.

There is nothing dogmatic about evolution. It is a falsifiable theory; it has worked very well and no one has shown it to be deficient. There is no need yet to replace it with something else. (Maybe future findings will dictate a need to do so, but this hasn't happened yet.) Many findings could potentially falsify evolution. Here is a partial and far from complete list of potential findings that could cause evolution to be deemed a deficient theory.

Creationism, however, is completely dogmatic, and useless as a scientific theory. It cannot be falsified. Personally, I cannot understand why creationists are so stubborn on their insistence that the creation story in the Bible must be a literal description of events, for several reasons:

• Many parts of the Bible are written in parables, including many of Jesus' most famous preachings. The Creation story does not anywhere explicitly set itself aside as an exception to this possibility.
• The Bible's original audience had no conception of modern science, so the story was written at a level simple people in a simple time could understand.
• The meaning of the Bible is what is important, not the consistency of its historical facts. As I pointed out before, many parts of the Bible are not specifically internally consistent. Matthew, Mark and Luke give different accounts of the identity (and genders) of the 3 people to which Peter denied Christ. (You never addressed this point.) Matthew and Luke give two very different genealogies of Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus.
• Some statements in the Bible are completely absurd when taken too literally. Do you really believe that the descendants of Abraham during David's time were literally as numerous as all the grains of sand on the seashore? How many trillions of people would this be?
• Some parts of the Bible seem to even support an evolutionary origin of man:

  Ecclesiastes 3:18

  I also thought, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals."

• Many creationists take Genesis super-literally, in complete contrast to scientific knowledge, whereas the Book of Revelation, is interpreted and distorted to a great extent to fit the belief that we are now living in the end times. The meaning of "Babylon", for instance, is commonly reinterpreted to mean the United States or another powerful nation. If Revelation can be interpreted this loosely, why can't Genesis accommodate evolution?

Creationism is not only horrendous science, it is embarrassing theology. It supposes a God who created natural laws and then needed to intervene in His Creation because His natural laws were insufficient for generating the Creation He wanted.

The bottom line: until an alternative theory is found that is as useful and accurate as evolution has shown itself to be, as judged by a consensus of professional peer review, evolution is here to stay as the accepted scientific theory of origins; there is no good reason for it to go, and plenty of reasons to keep it and further research it.

[Right Wing Professor]

Most of us have pretty much given up on Fester. I occasionally post to remind him that what he's currently posting is contradicted by what he posted the previous week, but he's just a one trick pony. Nothing you reply to him will have the slightest impact. For example, a while ago he was arguing that simple scientific measurements, such as the speed of light, are inaccessible to the average person. Lots of very smart people told him how he could easily measure and check the speed of light. To no avail. Now he's arguing that relativity (whose fundamental premise is the constancy of the speed of light in all frames of reference) is on much stronger scientific ground than evolution. How does he know that, since he's previously argued that he has no way of directly measuring the fundamental property it's based on, and has to take it on faith?

[VadeRetro]

Sure I do.

You have just rejected your standing answer to my post 120 in total, not that your answer made any sense anyway or answered any point but one. So you're going to deal with how the fossils now indisputably make the same tree of life outlined by molecular data, right?

For the most part these disciplines do not pretend to have the entire history of the world under their belts.

Then again, I guess not. We have fossil dating methods from geology and nuclear chemistry. Thus, we can know that the fossil series occurred in the order presented. You are denying geological evidence even as you claim to accept it. This would be a singularly dishonest performance were it not a Fester Chugabrew specialty. Please inform us what parts of geology you do accept and perhaps I can show you how these are used correctly in dating fossils.

For an evolutionist it matters little where a fossil is found.

A strange statement. Well not in this context. Another falsehood. At any rate, it matters where fossils are found and such is always meticulously recorded. We expect the distribution of fossils to make sense according to a species's ability to propagate itself and this tends to happen. Where it doesn't, that is noted as an issue.

It must be interpreted in such a manner as to support the notion that life has steadily progressed over billions of years from the most primitive to the more advanced forms.

You know Piltdown Man was a forgery, right? How did some people know to suspect it almost immediately, before a single forensic clue to its falsity had been noted? You DO know that creationists have adopted it as a model since, they didn't catch it, right? They, like you, don't accept any fossil evidence for evolution.

Some people knew very early that something was wrong with Piltdown. It was in the wrong place.

Getting tired of your little wave-aways as I do all the work here. Give me a better answer to post 120 now. Deal with the points. Try to be honest, if you have it in you anywhere.

[VadeRetro]

You DO know that creationists have adopted it as a model since, they didn't catch it, right?

You DO know that although creationists have adopted it as a model since, they didn't catch it, right?

(Editor needed. Must work for peanuts.)

[Quark2005]

Nothing you reply to him will have the slightest impact.

I got that sense a long time ago; I still enjoy the challenge of coming up with counter-arguments (good fun - keeps the adrenaline going even if it is futile).

Funny to note the orignal intent of the article posted as been lost among the arguments here. I've scrutinized the quote made by Bush; it doesn't really seem he gave much of an endorsement to anything; he seems to have been caught off-guard on a subject that he doesn't often focus on and attempted to manufacture a typical politician's answer, only he slipped (as he is commonly known to do - let's face it, love him or not, Bush's public speaking isn't always that great when he's talking off-the-cuff).

This is especially curious, as Bush's own science advisor, John Marburger, has previously criticized intelligent design as pseudoscience and defended the teaching of evolution in public schools.

[VadeRetro]

Most of us have pretty much given up on Fester.

Unfortunately, you have to give him enough rope to hang himself on each new thread. For the newbies, you know.

He's certainly done it on this one.

[VadeRetro]

For some reason the ambiguities only come about when bones and fossils are considered.

Simple, bland restatement. Do you have any tricks except coming back again dumb as a stump?

Again, it is evolution and nothing else that actively predicts the fossil forms will show more relationship to each other than the diverged present forms. Darwin drew a tree of branching evolution in the first edition of Origin, 1859. Give the man credit for a successful prediction here instead of pretending it's a problem.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Are you trying to tell me that all of paleontology is a bunk science?

No. Paleontology is limited to classifying and documenting what is found, and from there surmising how the record was laid down in history. It is a useful discipline, to be sure. But it cannot, with much certitude, make statements about world history beyond what has been documented in writing by eyewitnesses. Beyond that it is not science, but historical archaeology. There is nothing testable about the past, no matter how much you wish otherwise. Predictions about what will be found in the static record can be fulfilled both by those who adhere to an evolutionary point of view and those who hold to a creationist point of view. Whoopee.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Creationism, however, is completely dogmatic, and useless as a scientific theory.

You'd be hard pressed to find me arguing for creationism as part of a science cirriculum. While it may be a handy straw man to bring up "creationism" as if it were inserting itself into science, the fact is evolutionism is no more scientific because it has adopted a methodology that merely interprets history. It is certainly no boon to scientific advancement. There is nothing an evolutionist posits that any ding-dong couldn't interpret the same way, or differently, and still sound reasonable.

[Fester Chugabrew]

For example, a while ago he was arguing that simple scientific measurements, such as the speed of light, are inaccessible to the average person.

From the standoint of direct observation they still are. Direct observation is the primary source of knowledge for most people. The average person relies upon the testimony of others in understanding the speed of light. Sorry you choke on such a minor bone, but that's just how it is.

[Fester Chugabrew]

You have just rejected your standing answer to my post 120 in total . . .

No. I accept parts of modern geology and modern biology, but not all of it. I'm neither as gullible as you nor as emotially attached that I would reject all science just because certain pretenders use science to advance a philosophy.

[Junior_G]

Actually, skull 'G' is a vampire.

[Quark2005]

Paleontology is limited to classifying and documenting what is found, and from there surmising how the record was laid down in history. It is a useful discipline, to be sure. But it cannot, with much certitude, make statements about world history beyond what has been documented in writing by eyewitnesses.

It most certainly can. Radiometric dating (along with other dating methods) of surrounding rocks places the time of fossils. From there scientists gradually sequence what life form lived when. Valid science, with plenty of checks and balances.

There is nothing testable about the past, no matter how much you wish otherwise.

Baloney. I've just given list after list of examples of testable consequences of the past. I'm not going to respond to any more answers that equate to you just holding your ears shut to them (come to think of it, you haven't answered several very simply put questions of my own, you just keep parroting the same rant about how we can't test the past).

By your reasoning, recorded history isn't any more valid that natural history. Prove to me that you weren't created five minutes ago, along with the entire universe and all your intact memories with the appearance of having been here. You can't. This "theory" explains the presence of everything perfectly well, but it isn't falsifiable, and not science.

Creationism fails on scientific grounds for the exact same reason.

Evolution succeeds because it is testable, and remains the only solid scientific theory describing the history of life on earth. The past is testable; at least its implications for discovery are.

Saying the past "isn't testable" is a useless distraction that has no real meaning in a scientific sense.

I note that you haven't contested the point that evolution is practically useful and creationism is practically useless. This fact alone warrants the teaching of one above the other.