Verdict that Demands Evidence: Darwinists, not Christians, are stonewalling the facts

It was one of the first—and angriest—post-election hissy fits: In The New York Times, Garry Wills credited White House political adviser Karl Rove for getting millions of religious conservatives (whom he compared to Muslim jihadists) to the polls and sneered, "Can a nation which believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"

Committed Darwinists continue this strategy today. For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article—and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that he was wrong—but declined to make a public retraction.

So who's really rolling back the Enlightenment? Those who invite us to follow the evidence wherever it leads—or those demanding that we ignore it? The folks who want both evolution and Intelligent Design taught in school, with all their strengths and weaknesses—or those who attempt to silence any opposition?

The evidence for Intelligent Design has become so persuasive that the 81-year old British philosopher Anthony Flew, a lifelong atheist who once debated C. S. Lewis over the existence of God, recently admitted that a creator-God must exist.

In the final analysis, any objective observer must conclude that belief in either the biblical or the naturalistic worldview demands faith.

I think the ox of evolution is dead :-)

Could be, Trib. It all seems to hang on the problem of whether people are willing to concede that evolution seems to be something that happens within species; and that grander claims -- to the effect that macroevolution actually occurs -- may not be as well founded as the general public imagines today.

That is, the doctrine that holds the production of a novel species from an already existent other in response to changing physical environmental conditions/constraints, while generally held to be true "among us advanced, enlightened moderns" -- seems to have been found somewhat lacking in explanatory power in more recent times.

I don't think the ox of evolution is dead; he just needs to be placed into the proper overall perspective, which at the end of the day may be the one that abandons the idea of macroevolution altogether.

For certainly we must say that macroevolution depends for its truth on a congeries of developments that have never been directly observed acting together by a single human being, dead or alive.

And so the entire theory of macroevolution seems to rest on observations which are -- rather paradoxically -- "unobservable" in principle.

But I guess we'll have to wait on further research in order to further qualify these issues....

Stay tuned! Thank you so very much for writing!

"A better question would be how does intelligent design explain molars and appendixes, though they are probably explainable in terms of natural selection: "

Appendixes are now know to have an important function. They provide fluid into the colon which reduced the chances of getting colon cancer.

By molars, I assume you mean wisdom teeth. Wisdom teeth are most likely due to microevolution with the human species. Our jaw has gotten smaller over time, causing the medical problem known as wisdom teeth. However, I see no way that this can be presented as a positive evolution. Smaller jaws and wisdom teeth do not contribute to survival. It's a degradation, consistent with devolution, and a cursed earth, with a perfectly designed human body slowly being degradated over time.

There are now over 600 inherited human genetic diseases. Where are the positive mutations promised by evolution?

Thank you so much for your excellent post!

IMHO, the continual review of any theory is good for everyone. The advances made since Darwin's day (DNA, information theory, complex systems theory, etc.) should all be used to test, improve or correct the original theory of origin of species.

I agree with you that adaptive changes have been well confirmed over these years and that emergent functions and species (complexity, autonomy, semiosis) have been brought into question (mostly by mathematicians).

This article typifies the attack on science anti-evolutionists in their misunderstanding perpetrate on a daily basis. It is their intent to push a religious agenda into the scientific community in an attempt to oust the methodological naturalism of science, with no consideration of the efficacy of a science based on supernatural explanations.

This is not simply an attack on evolution; it is an attack on the methodology used by all science. A false dichotomy has been created by anti-evolutionists to facilitate a negative campaign against the sciences. The dichotomy simply stated is as follows; either Creationism is true or Evolution is true. If evolution is shown to be unworkable, creationism is proved true and, conversely, if evolution is not proved unworkable then creationism is proved false. Because the methodology used in all fields of science is the same and the close ties evolution has to other sciences this dichotomy applies to all sciences. Even the much touted ID (which is nothing but thinly disguised creationism) argument basically comes down to pointing out the problems with science without offering a more feasible scientific theory.

Anti-evolutionists have gone so far as to misuse the colloquial definition of the word theory to try to elevate creation science and ID to the same level as evolution. In fact this misuse actually lowers evolution and all other connected fields of science to the same level as CS and ID, as evidentially thin assumptions.

Both Creation Science and ID are at their core untestable, simply because the supernatural can be used to explain everything, whether there is independent evidence or not. It removes the possibility of identifying anything as ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘designed’. The use of supernatural causes weakens all of science, including any science said to be a part of CR and ID, to the point of uselessness. This is because testability is an essential attribute of a hypothesis; without it no hypothesis can be ruled out when developing a theory. The evidence for ID at this time is not so much evidence as an argument from incredulity, simply assigning a supernatural explanation to anything that appears to be too complex to easily understand. Behe’s method of IC determination is completely subjective, relying on the human ability to see patterns and infer causes. This subjective test can hardly be considered scientific. There is also no rigorous methodology yet in any DI subsystem. At this point, the only way ID can be considered a theory is as a ‘supposition’.

Science is methodological naturalism, based on theories developed from well tested hypotheses. The definition used in science for the term ‘theory’ reflects the high certainty that issues from extensive testing done during the development process. Evolution, the main anti-science target, is currently not able to explain all that we see, but it doesn’t profess to do so, nor does this inability make the Theory of Evolution useless, as extant problems may become extinct problems later, as is shown throughout the history of science.

If anti-evolutionists were to apply the same standards of observable proof to their own assumptions that they try to apply to evolution they would see that CS and ID fall far short of reliably and convincingly explaining nature.

There are reasons science does not and can not use the supernatural when investigating and developing theories about natural phenomenon. These reasons, and not any desire to disprove the existence of god, is what is behind science’s reticence in using intelligent Design or any other creationist philosophy in a naturalistic explanation. It is also why they should not be included in science classes. When ID becomes a true ‘theory’ based on objectively tested hypotheses, then science will consider it a valid alternative. If the struggle is to include teaching the difficulties within the methodology of science and to show the problems within the Theory of Evolution, this can be done, and in fact is done at the university level, without resorting to teaching untestable, unfalsifiable, non-predictive hypotheses such as CS and ID.

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