Evolution Defanged (page 3)

Evolution: Theory or Theology?

Charles Darwin was born into Victorian England. The predominating idea of God at the time was that God was everyone’s cosmic grandfather, infinitely wise, infinitely kind, and expressing his goodness through the beauty and perfection of his Creation. One scientist among the many who endorsed this view was the geologist Rev. Adam Sedgwick, who at different times served as president of the Geological Society of London, president of the British Association, and vice-master of Trinity College. Darwin was exposed to Sedgwick’s views on several occasions during his time at Cambridge: in addition to the reverend-geologist’s frequent addresses there, he once selected Darwin to accompany him on a field expedition to Wales. Darwin liked and respected the man, but he soon plunged into doubt, as his own scientific findings increasingly seemed to contradict Sedgwick’s view of the world. Cornelius Hunter examines the conflict of ideas that began to separate the two men:

“According to Sedgwick, nature was never anomalous or fortuitous. Sedgwick’s idealism was as apparent in what he did write as in what he did not write. When he quoted Scripture he consistently avoided the passages that link God and evil. Sedgwick quoted the passage in Job where God reveals His power but not the passage where He reveals that the ostrich treats her young harshly because He has deprived her of wisdom. He quoted the Romans passage where Paul revels in God’s eternal power and how it is reflected in creation but not the passage where creation groans because God has subjected it to futility. He quoted the psalmist’s proclamation that creation declares God’s glory but not Isaiah’s prophecy of how God creates calamity.

Sedgwick and his generation had rather idyllic expectations for the natural world. What was a young naturalist like Darwin to think when he found parasites slowly torturing their hosts? Nature was turning out to be less pretty than Sedgwick had predicted, and Darwin searched for an explanation. His solution was to distance God from creation by interposing a natural law—his law of natural selection.”[1]

We can see how deeply Darwin was shaken by nature’s unpleasant side in a letter he wrote to a friend. “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature,” he grieved.[2] For Darwin, each sad new revelation of nature (cats playing with mice, animals eating their young, tons of pollen going to waste each year) was further proof that the omni-benevolent God envisioned by Victorian society could have nothing to do with its arrangement. Darwin made this clear in his autobiography. “That there is much suffering in the world,” he wrote, “no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain it in reference to human beings, imagining that it serves their moral improvement. But the number of people in the world is nothing compared with the numbers of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient. It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; and the abundant presence of suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have developed through variation and natural selection.”[3]

This “negative theology” argument is still a popular avenue of attack in evolutionary circles, carrying more weight in the acceptance of Darwinism than most scientists would like to admit.

Prominent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould argues, “Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect His wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.”[4] He also states, “Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.”[5]

Darwin disciple Douglas Futuyma objects, “When we compare the anatomies of various plants or animals, we find similarities and differences where we should least expect a Creator to have supplied them.”[6] Earlier we find him perplexed by the existence of two varieties of rhino: “What could have possessed the Creator,” he asks, “to bestow two horns on the African rhinoceroses and only one on the Indian species?”[7]

And what about those pesky species nobody likes? Would God, Kenneth Miller asks skeptically, “really want to take credit for the mosquito?”[8] Similarly, geneticist J. B. S. Haldane sneered that the Creator must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles to have created over 250,000 species.[9]

Ernst Mayr comes close to admitting that Darwinists simply have nothing better to believe: “The greatest triumph of Darwinism is that the theory of natural selection, for 80 years after 1859 a minority opinion, is now the prevailing explanation of evolutionary change. It must be admitted, however, that it has achieved this position less by the amount of irrefutable proofs it has been able to present than by the default of all the opposing theories.”[10]

As evolution continues to achieve supremacy by default, large numbers of scientists have grown increasingly disgusted with the Darwinist establishment. As early as the 1950’s, distinguished scientists from many different fields of knowledge were expressing displeasure with the prevalent attitude of carelessly giving credence to every suggestion to originate inside the Darwinian bubble.

Dr. Pierre Gavaudan, a prominent French botanist, charged: “The pretence of neo-Darwinism to be able to open on its own account the door to truth looks a little childish.”[11] Arthur Koestler, a philosopher of science, stated in 1971, “There is a considerable proportion, perhaps even a majority, of eminent biologists inside the scientific Establishment, who…feel that while the Darwinian theory of natural selection operating on random mutations answers some of the problems posed by evolution, it leaves the most important ones unanswered.”[12] Dr. W. R. Thompson, a world-renowned entomologist in the 1950’s, included a similar warning in his introduction to a new edition of Darwin’s Origin: “The modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts…Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction mingle in an inextricable confusion.”[13]

Professor G. A. Kerkut of Southampton University has been much distressed by the intellectual laziness that seems so common in both students and teachers of evolution. “It seems at times as if many of our writers on evolution have had their views by some sort of revelation,” he chastises.[14] He also recounts some of his typical struggles against the lack of critical thought given to the theory by students. “For some years now,” he writes, “I have tutored undergraduates on various aspects of biology. It is quite common, during the course of conversation, to ask the student if he knows the evidence for evolution. This usually evokes a faintly superior smile…

”Well, sir, there is the evidence from paleontology, comparative anatomy, embryology, systematics, and geographical distributions,” the student would say in a nursery-rhyme jargon…

“Have you read any book on the evidence for evolution?” I would ask.

“Yes, sir.” And here he would mention the names of authors of a popular school textbook. “And of course, sir, there is that book by Darwin, The Origin of Species.”

“Have you read this book?” I would ask.

“Well not all through, sir…”

“I see. And that has given you your firm understanding of evolution.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, now, if you really understand an argument you will be able to indicate to me not only the points in favor of the argument, but also the most telling points against it.”

“I suppose so, sir.”

“Good. Please tell me, then, some of the evidence against the theory of evolution.”

“But there isn’t any, sir.”

Here the conversation would take on a more strained atmosphere. The student would look at me as if I were playing a very unfair game. He would take it rather badly when I suggested that he was not being very scientific in his outlook if he swallowed the latest scientific dogma and, when questioned, just repeated parrot fashion the views of the current Archbishop of Evolution. In fact he would be behaving like certain of those religious students he affected to despise. He would be taking on faith what he could not intellectually understand and, when questioned, appeal to the authority of a “good book”, which in this case was The Origin of Species.”[15]

Professor C. P. Martin of McGill University in Montreal echoed this complaint, saying that the leaders of evolutionary thought are “almost entirely devoid of a critical attitude.” He also said of his fellow anti-Darwinist evolutionists, “As to our fewness, it must be remembered that unless we command independent means of publication it is very difficult for us to obtain a hearing today.”[16]

It seems their resentment was well founded, as evidenced by the record of a high-level conference held in 1967 between leading evolutionists and mathematicians who specialized in life sciences. At one point, Dr. S. M. Ulam had just concluded a paper in which he had mathematically proven that the evolution of the eye was virtually impossible, and was in the process of fending off a herd of outraged Darwinists. Sir Peter Medewar, one of the aforementioned herd, rose to challenge Ulam’s unaccountable reliance on inductive reasoning.

“I think the way you have treated this is a curious inversion of what would normally be a scientific process of reasoning,” he protested. “It is, indeed, a fact that the eye has evolved; and, as Waddington says, the fact that it has done so proves that this formulation is, I think, a mistaken one.”

This stunning display of illogic was later matched by Dr. Ernst Mayr, who assured his colleagues that “Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by knowing that evolution has occurred.”

Clearly, the attitude adopted by these Darwinists was “Don’t confuse this conversation with facts.”

Sadly, it appears that while many evolutionist scientists are honest enough to admit the shortcomings of Darwinism, their aversion to Creation leads them into more obscure reasoning. Pierre-Paul Grasse, the French zoologist, concludes his critique of Darwinism with the knowledge that something must be offered as an alternative theory. Since creation is out of the question, he ends up claiming that living matter contains mysterious “internal factors” that cause life to evolve in a predetermined way, that these factors are not magical but physical, and that the world’s biologists should make every effort to find out what they are. He is forced by rejecting creation to grasp at any straw that comes his way. Likewise, the British botanist J. C. Willis, whose careful examination of Darwinian theory led him to a predecessor of the “punctuated equilibrium” theory, wanders into peculiarities when attempting to account for his discoveries. “It is an inspiring thought,” he says, “that so great and complex a process as evolution has not been a mere matter of chance, but has behind it what one may look upon as a great thought or principle that has resulted in its moving as an ordered whole, and working itself out upon a definite plan…there is a general law, probably electrical, at the back of it.”[17] Professor H. S. Lipson, a high-ranking member of the Institute of Physics, was forced to reject Darwinism after careful study of its mathematical probability. His research brought him at last to this vague conclusion: “It seems to me that in our present state of knowledge, creation is the only answer—but not the crude creation envisaged in Genesis.”[18] Odd as these statements are, they are by no means the pick of the litter for strangeness: some scientists who have been similarly caught between Darwinism and Creationism have actually proposed that life on earth originated when passing aliens littered the planet with “bioseeds” which predetermined our development. Is the cure for Darwinism worse than the disease?

With the theory of evolution now discredited on three fronts (natural selection, the fossil record, and metaphysical preconceptions), we will turn to the issue that currently divides creationists themselves: the age of the earth.

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