Darwinism; Too Old-Fashioned To Be True

Darwinism; Too Old-Fashioned To Be True By Marvin Olasky Thursday, October 25, 2007

New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of "intelligent design": All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.

Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories -- life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) -- is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse.

I interviewed Michael Behe, author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" and a new book, "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism." This Lehigh University biology professor points out that "Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the cell, which is the foundation of life. Microscopes of that era were too crude to see many critical details. So 19th-century scientists thought the cell was simple protoplasm, like a piece of microscopic Jell-O."

Behe explained what has changed: "Now we know that the cell is chock-full of sophisticated nanotechnology, literally machines made from molecules. The same goes for the universe. In Darwin's era, the universe was thought to be pretty simple. Now we know its basic laws are balanced on a razor's edge to allow for life and that our planet may be the only one in the universe that could support intelligent life. The more we know about nature, the more design we see."

We also have data now from a half-century of careful malaria-watching, which -- because malaria reproduce so quickly -- lets us see what happens to thousands of generations of parasites that are under constant attack from man-made drugs. Darwin predicted that random mutation and natural selection would lead to the development of new species, but no new kinds of malaria have emerged, just tiny changes in existing strains.

The mass killer HIV also has provided evidence to disprove Darwin. Behe points out that HIV, like malaria, "is a microbe that occurs in astronomical numbers. What's more, its mutation rate is 10,000 times greater than that of most other organisms. So in just the past few decades, HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world. Yet all those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little."

Behe's summary of HIV: "It still has the same number of genes that work in the same way. There is no new molecular machinery. If we see that Darwin's mechanism can only do so little even when given its best opportunities, we can decisively conclude that random mutation did not build the machinery of life."

It's important to remember that Behe and other "intelligent design" believers are talking about macroevolution, a change from one kind of creature to another, and not the microevolution of longer beaks, different-colored wings and so forth; no one doubts that microevolution happens. Behe sees development as an incredibly difficult maze that an intelligent agent could navigate but an utterly blind process could not -- and Darwin's most radical claim was that evolution is utterly blind.

One more analogy: Some Darwinists have portrayed evolution as a walk up the stairs of a building, but it's hard to keep going higher if many of the steps are missing. Behe says Darwin did not know that "there are many biological steps, called amino acids, between biological floors, and many are missing. Even plentiful microbes have great difficulty jumping missing biological stairs to go from floor to floor. So we can conclude that life did not ascend by Darwinian evolution."

Marvin Olasky is editor-in-chief of World, vice president for academic affairs of The King's College and a professor at The University of Texas. For additional commentary by Marvin Olasky throughout the week, go to www.worldmagblog.com. To find out more about Marvin Olasky and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

There is a world of difference between “ID” (Intelligent Design), and “intelligent design”. No rational person argues against ‘intelligent design”.

“I say, what would life be without the effulgent beauty of being? And yet, the overflowing presence of this beauty is a mystery that can never be explained on any materialistic basis. ..

Not only is there no reason for the universe to be so beautiful, there is no reason why a species should suddenly pop out of a recently dead universe and have the ability to apprehend the beauty that courses through its every artery and capillary — or every branch, stem and itsy bitsy green leafy lovely.

Why? And not only is this species able to appreciate beauty, but it is driven to create beauty in all its forms — visual, auditory, tactile, linguistic, mathematical, scientific. Why is that? Why this appetite for beauty? It seems so unnecessary. Why are women so much more excruciatingly beautiful than they need to be to get the Darwinian job done? Ouch! Why beauty to the point of pain?

...I posed the non-obvious question — at least it wasn’t obvious to me .. — of whether the beauty that surrounds and abides in us is discovered or just projected.

In other words, the universe has been in existence for what, 14 billion “years,” right? During its first 10 billion years there was no life and therefore no consciousness — or so they say, as little sense as that makes. Biological life has only existed for 3.85 billion years, and human consciousness in any meaningful sense only emerged 40,000 years ago next Tuesday.

So if we truly believe that this was a dead and unconscious universe prior to 4 billion years ago, we can’t really say that it had any qualities at all, let alone something as complex as beauty. After all, beauty — along with every other quality — is a perception of a nervous system. Therefore, it is very difficult to say which is weirder: that a dead and unconscious universe suddenly produced a creature with an ability to apprehend, and a drive to create, beauty; or, alternatively, that the beauty was already there, just waiting to be unpacked and appreciated. And if the latter, I again ask: how and why?

For beauty is always a function of wholeness. That is, the beauty of a beautiful object inheres in its wholeness, harmony and radiance. A work of art cannot be reduced to its parts without losing sight of the artistic vision that organizes the parts and reveals their beauty. Thus, we would have to affirm that wholeness is a prior condition of beauty. But... assuming the cosmos is full of beauty — which it is — is the wholeness already there, or is it only in us? Are these “beautiful wholes” a function of our nervous system, or does the universe just effortlessly crank them out?

It’s not just the material beauty of the earth and heavens; how about all the incredibly beautiful animals? It’s easy to understand how one reptile will be “attracted” to another for the purposes of reproduction ...

But animals of one species do not find those of another species beautiful or attractive, unless they are very, very confused. Rather, they are generally either indifferent to them or frightened of them. They certainly don’t find them beautiful. .. No deer thinks to itself, “wow, what a majestic mane on that lion!,” or “those beady little eyes ...are kind of a turn-off.” No. For animals, it’s either 1) have sex with it, 2) eat it, 4) ignore it, or 4) run away from it.

But in the case of humans, we find our fellow animals to be beautiful. We even collect them and put them in zoos so that we can admire them. Again I ask: are these animals actually beautiful? Or is it just a trick of our nervous system?

If the former, why were these animals beautiful with no self-conscious being to appreciate them until 40,000 years ago? And if the latter, what possible evolutionary reason is there for humans to be hung up on the beauty of other animals for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive fitness?

It’s not just the obvious things, like sunsets, mountains, oceans and thunderstorms that are beautiful to us. How about a long and happy marriage. Why is that a beautiful thing, while divorce is felt to be ugly (not to cast moral aspersions or deny that it is sometimes necessary)? Marriage is a kind of “frame” that serves a similar function as the frame around a painting — after all, without a frame to define it and set it apart, you can’t have a work of art.

Balthasar writes that marriage is “a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual’s cravings to ‘break out’ of its bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence’s tendencies to disintegrate, and compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves — the shifting songs of their own freedom — but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons.... “

Spouses “entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life — from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the holy spirit.” Paradoxically, freedom “is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery, which mystery is no longer accessible from the sphere of the general.”

“...both Truth and Beauty — and the freedom to discover them — are a function of wholeness.

Indeed, wholeness is the cosmic prerequisite of the possibility of truth or beauty. And as a matter of fact... it is also a precondition of Darwinian evolution. That is to say, natural selection rests on the assumption that there exist prior “wholes” — whole organisms — for it to operate on. There is no materialistic philosophy that can account for wholeness, or true unity in diversity.

Therefore...the point of this post: love, truth, beauty, and freedom are not effects of existence. Rather, they are causes of existence. Thus, to say, for example, “God is Love,” is not a mythological or speculative statement. Rather, it is a scientific statement. No, it is beyond that — it is a metaphysical certitude upon which the foundation of science rests....”

.... parts cannot exist in the absence of the whole — nor time in the absence of eternity, the many in the absence of the One, or beauty without a Creator.

Or, in the words of Rabbi Kushner, “the end is seeing for even one moment that the apparent multiplicity is in reality a unity.”

But a dynamic unity in diversity in which the one is a necessary condition of the other — and whence the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time (Eliot).

Full commentary here: http://tinyurl.com/2cel7q

More: “...In the scientistic flight from the center to the periphery, one becomes lost in details which cannot be integrated in a holistic way. This “downward pull” puts an end to ideational life, as the resultant fragmentation leads to an obsession with parts, and with it, an inability to intuit the whole. Hyper-specialization leads to a kind of cognitive deformity, as the world shrinks in proportion to our quantification of it. As a pathetic compensation, modern man is puffed up with the vanity of being able to describe some minute portion of the world, but this is merely postmodern provincialism of the most naive sort. In the end, the separation of knowledge from religion is the separation of facts and knowledge from the metaphysics that explains them and gives them meaning. ..” Continue: http://tinyurl.com/24buzh

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