104 Sermon Illustrations on Evolution

According to a study, many college students (38%) still believe human life started in Garden of Eden and not from evolution. Many also believe dinosaurs and humans co-existed. Blame is put on creationists who have watered down textbook discussion of evolution and origins.

Evolutionists are trying to figure out how the brain evolved, and how human nature can be explained. An important area of research is the differences between the sexes.

One cross-cultural study concluded: women seek money in a mate, men seek good looks.

Child abuse - step-children "are 100 times more likely to be fatally abused than a same-age child living with genetic parents." The risk was independent of such factors as poverty, family size or even personality characteristics of the abusers.

Argues that the depth of fossils is related to how far a creature could flee from the Flood. Men could climb trees so are on the highest levels.

H. G. Wells, once known as the world's greatest optimist, ended his life in despair. From the depths of his gloom he wrote: "The writer is convinced that there is no way out or round or through the impasse. It is the end. Mind may be near the end of its tether.

"Our world of self-delusion will admit none of that. It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities.... Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that way out or round or through the impasse...

"There is no way out or round or through. Our universe is not merely bankrupt; there remains no dividend at all; it is not simply liquidated; it is going clean out of existence leaving not a wrack behind. The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile.

"The human story has already come to an end and HOMO SAPIENS, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out. The stars in their courses have turned against him, and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind."

Scientific discoveries seem to be rolling out like cars off an assembly line this year, and Christian observers say the phenomenon offers mounting proof of God’s creative handiwork.

“The last six to 12 months we have seen powerful evidence,” said Southern California astronomer Hugh Ross. “I have never seen such a pace of discoveries proving that God created the earth.”

Ross is president of Reasons to Believe, a Pasadena-based ministry whose network of scientists come from physics, geology, mathematics and other disciplines. The ministry is gathering news of five to 10 discoveries per month that support creation belief, he said, compared to four a year during the mid-1980s.

Engineer James Odom, who managed the Hubble Space Telescope program for three years in the 1980s, believes these advances are uncovering the orderly pattern of the heavens.

“As we learn more about physics, earth, gravity and chemical reactions - the finite laws that apply to everything - we see the orderliness God has put in place,” said Odom, senior vice president of a major aerospace firm in Huntsville, Ala., and a deacon at First Baptist Church in nearby Decatur.

While such breakthroughs as a new life form and speculation over life on Mars have generated considerable news coverage, pastor Emmitte Cornelius of Jackson, Miss., said he is more excited about recent findings from the depths of the oceans.

Undersea expeditions have uncovered brightly colored creatures where no sunlight penetrates and new, unnamed species of aquatic life, said Cornelius, a former biology and physics teacher who is writing a scientifically based book on God and creation.

“That is more demonstrative of the awesomeness of God,” said the pastor of Grace Baptist Bible Church. “New life forms expand the vistas of God’s glory.

“All that has been hidden from man ... God looked at it and delighted in it and enjoyed it first,” Cornelius said. “I tell my church we live in a sea of glory. The glory of God evidences itself.”

Among the range of scientific developments attracting attention this year:

- speculation of life on Mars, based on certain minerals in a meteorite that fell to earth - the finding that generated the most publicity nationally. After the announcement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the White House announced Vice President Al Gore would convene a “space summit” to consider the future of the space program in light of the possibility of life on Mars.

- the discovery of a third life form, confirmed after nearly two decades of study of volcanic organisms. Known as “archaea,” its genetic code was recently reported in Science magazine. One scientist told USA Today, “Our understanding of this organism significantly increases the likelihood that life exists on other planets.”

- pictures taken through Hubble uncovering some 50 billion galaxies in the universe, much higher than previously estimated, according to media reports in January. An astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said there are as many galaxies in the sky as stars in our own galaxy.

- the Human Genome Project, which is running ahead of schedule in its efforts to identify the 50,000-plus genes of the body as one way of curing genetic diseases. Among this year’s reported discoveries are nine genes behind important inherited diseases, including Huntington’s disease and a form of colon cancer.

- strong evidence the earth’s inner core is spinning freely and faster than the rest of the planet, reported by scientists at Columbia University. The implications raise such questions as whether this produces fluctuations in gravity at the earth’s surface, according to media reports last July.

- a new species of early human reportedly discovered in the African desert of Chad last spring, challenging conventional thinking about the place of origin of humankind.

However, Ross said other advances are causing a bigger stir within the scientific community, such as new measurements of the mass density of the universe and the structure of cosmic background radiation.

Two other revelations he mentioned, which have received little media notice, are:

- recognition by anthropologists that humans are a distinct species and appeared very recently, less than 49,000 years ago. Research has eliminated any biological link between Neanderthals and the human species, Ross said, proving that humans can’t be the product of evolutionary processes.

- new evidence that life has been on earth for 3.9 billion years, but that all of the Kerogen tars (byproducts of experiments with RNA, DNA and proteins) have organic origins. This means that life could not have evolved from inorganic matter, Ross said.

In addition, evidence that the conditions necessary for our planet to support life must arise from intelligent design is 1 trillion times stronger than it appeared just a year ago, said Ross, author of four scientifically based books on creation.

Ross has identified 50 characteristics of a planetary system that must be “fine tuned” for life to exist. In mathematical terms, this is a probability of one part in ten to the 65th power, he said, and physics considers anything with a probability of less than one in ten to the 50th power an impossibility. [used 8/23/98]

“The new studies about life give evidence that God and only God is behind life,” Ross said. “This means that God must have some reason for creating us.”

Odom agreed, stating God has opened a small window into the universe during the 20th century and he expects humans to develop that knowledge.

“God put us here on earth to understand it,” Odom said. “The emerging knowledge of the human body, cells and the environment ... are things he has challenged us to learn about. He says knowledge will make us free and has given us the ability to expand our knowledge. However, he expects us to utilize these discoveries and technologies properly.”

________

Walker is a freelance writer in Louisville, Kentucky.

Naturalism has become the civil religion of our universities. The article presents a game plan for Christian response.

When Phillip Johnson was in college, a professor told a story about a boy from a backwoods family who was being interviewed by a visiting anthropologist. Asked about his siblings, the boy proudly declared that his brother was at Harvard. The astonished anthropologist asked what the brother was studying. "It's not that way," replied the boy. "They're studying him."

Likewise, the academic world regards Christian theism as an object for study rather than as a participant in academic discourse, as Notre Dame history professor George Marsden has shown (see his new book The Soul of the American University, Oxford). The standards of academia discourage a professor who is teaching, say, the history of Christianity from taking the position that Christianity may be true. Such restrictions do not apply to advocates of other viewpoints. Socialists teach socialism, and feminists teach women's studies. As Marsden wrote in the "Wall Street Journal" (Dec. 22, 1993), "Many contemporary academics insist that the only respectable place for religion in the academy is on the syllabus-as an object of study-where it may be subordinated to Western scientific methods of analysis."

Sometimes this double standard requires that a thinker or group be split into two parts, to separate the politically correct from the incorrect. In Marsden's words: "One conspicuous example is that, although universities welcome African-Americans and build programs in African-American studies, they find little place for positive evaluations of the dominant religion of African-American culture." One might paraphrase this point by saying that the secular content of the Reverend Martin Luther King's views on racial justice has a very different status from the religious background of those same views. The former goes to the university as an honored participant; the latter only as an object of scientific study. Why is that?

ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

One reason is that secularists employ a definition of rationality that allows no place for a supernatural Creator. An ongoing academic freedom case at San Francisco State University provides a striking example of the disapproval with which the scientific community regards the concept of a God who threatens to become a reality we cannot ignore. Biology professor Dean Kenyon was the co-author some 20 years ago of a respected book titled Biochemical Predestination that supported the orthodox scientific theory that living organisms evolved from nonliving chemicals through natural chemical processes. As the years went by, Kenyon's doubts grew, however, and eventually he concluded that the evidence did not support the assumption that unintelligent material processes are capable of forming living organisms by chemical evolution.

As instructor of a large introductory course for nonmajors, Kenyon taught the prevailing theories of chemical and biological evolution, but he also taught the weaknesses of those theories and suggested to his classes that life might in fact be the product of "intelligent design"-however distasteful that prospect might be to orthodox scientific materialists. A few students complained, and the professor was called on the carpet. The dean of science told him that his teaching of intelligent design amounted to biblical creationism, and that to consider this possibility favorably was to bring the forbidden topic of religion into science. To ensure that he had no further opportunity to advocate such absurdities, Kenyon was removed from his regular classroom duties and relegated to laboratory supervision.

Professor Kenyon challenged this administrative action by bringing a complaint before San Francisco State University's Academic Freedom Committee. The committee ruled that professors of biology, like those who teach other subjects, have a right to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy in their field. It therefore unanimously urged the administrators to reinstate Kenyon in the classroom. The dean and the department chair balked at first, but they gave way after the full academic senate voted to support the committee's recommendation.

Kenyon won a victory, but the conflict is not over. In late February, the Biology faculty at San Francisco State adopted, by a vote of 27 to 5, a resolution declaring that "There is no scientific evidence to support the concept of intelligent design," and that therefore "the intelligent design view is not scientific." In context, the statement, like many others on the subject from the scientific community, combines two discordant propositions. On the one hand, the scientific authorities want to say that intelligent design is not eligible for consideration because it is religion, not science, and hence cannot be tested. On the other hand, they want to say that they have thoroughly tested the concept and rejected it as false. The apparent purpose of this confused declaration is to set the stage for another effort to prevent Kenyon from suggesting to students that there really is evidence for intelligent design, but what will happen next is anybody's guess.

DEBATING DARWINISM

The Kenyon case thus constitutes only a limited victory for those who believe that genuine academic freedom requires a hearing for theistic thinking about problems such as the origin of life; but even this limited victory reflects the fact that a debate about the dogmas of naturalistic evolution has been successfully launched in the universities. In that debate, considerable attention has been paid to my own book Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity), and to the lectures on Darwinism that I have given on many university campuses, some of which have been widely distributed on videotape. Other Christian thinkers have also made substantial contributions to the debate. For example, Whitworth College philosophy professor Steven Meyer published a fine essay on the Kenyon case in the Wall Street Journal just before San Francisco State's academic senate voted on the matter. Kenyon's colleagues thus knew that he was not an isolated individual, but a person asserting a position that has support in the society at large.

The example of naturalistic evolution tells us why theistic thinking has so little standing in the academic world. The contemporary academic world takes for granted a philosophy called scientific naturalism. According to this philosophy, nature is "all there is," which is to say the cosmos is a closed system of material causes and effects that can never be influenced by anything outside of nature-like God-for existence.

"God," in this system of thought, is a product of the human imagination and largely a remnant of prescientific ignorance. At one time, humans believed in a host of gods living in places like Mount Olympus and attributed natural events like storms and fires to the whims of these beings. As knowledge advanced, humans gradually put aside the lesser spirits but retained the one Supreme Being as the cause of our existence.

At last, the greatest scientific discovery of all was made, and humans learned that we are the products of a combination of chance events and impersonal natural laws. This discovery set the stage for the famous "death of God," the insight that man created God rather than the other way around. The most advanced and influential thinkers thereafter ignored the Creator altogether, or they looked for a way to conform religion to naturalism through liberal theology. Others retained some remnant of supernatural religion by imagining the Creator as responsible for establishing the laws of nature at the ultimate beginning of the cosmos, where scientific investigation is unable to penetrate.

Naturalistic philosophy is not necessarily hostile to the "idea of God." On the contrary, that is just the point. For philosophical naturalists, God is not an independent reality but an idea in the human mind. Proper naturalists do not insist upon the nonexistence of God because that is to take the issue more seriously than it deserves. Instead, they consign the whole subject to the category of "religious belief," which is understood to be a product of the human imagination. Although God does not exist, or at least does not take part in historical events, beliefs about God do exist and have important consequences. Such religious belief contrasts with scientific knowledge. The difference is that beliefs are untestable and hence valid only for the person who holds them, whereas knowledge is objective and hence valid for everyone. That is why, in an educational system based on naturalistic principles, naturalistic evolution may be taught to students as fact regardless of whether they or their parents object. No statements assuming the objective existence of God may be made, however, because no student should have to listen to subjective beliefs being presented as if they were facts.

GENTEEL NIHILISM

Naturalistic philosophy has ethical consequences, and these are also manifest in public education and law. At one time it was thought possible to find a basis for morality and justice in science itself, but with the fall of Marxism, that hope has been discredited. The current fashion in academia is a genteel nihilism. Because scientific knowledge extends only to questions of fact and not to questions of value, matters of morality are inherently subjective and relative. In consequence, students in public schools are taught that they must choose standards of morality themselves and should subject all morality that comes to them by tradition or training in the home to critical analysis.

The predominance of naturalistic assumptions in the universities and colleges guarantees that theistic thinking will be taken more as a personal eccentricity than as a serious contribution to knowledge. What is the value of a theism that is founded upon unreality? As naturalists see it, when God died, humankind lost nothing important because we still retained the goodness and rationality that we had projected onto this imaginary father figure in the first place. To bring God back into the picture now is, at worst, to embrace irrationality or, at best, to add some superfluous God-talk to ideas that are justifiable on naturalistic grounds. The most favorable thing you can say about a Christian theist in academia is that his work is so good you would never have guessed he was a Christian.

Many Christian college and seminary professors have understandably wanted to win the respect of their peers in the secular academic world, and so they have worked mightily to reconcile the naturalistic understanding of knowledge with Christian faith. Intelligent naturalists do not necessarily disapprove of this effort, provided it is clear who is in charge. What they do insist upon is that subjective religious belief must always conform itself to objective scientific knowledge, never the other way around. Thus, if a Christian college professor teaches "evolution" exactly as Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould would teach it, he may append a theistic interpretation that characterizes the process as God's way of creating. This interpretation will earn him no great credit from naturalists, but they will be tolerant so long as it is clear that the theism in "theistic evolution" refers to a personal reflection upon a process that is objectively explainable on a naturalistic basis. If a professor were to give his theism some scientific content - for example, by suggesting that pre-existing intelligence may be required to make living organisms from nonliving chemicals - he would forfeit instantly his standing in the scientific community and the secular academic world. Like Dean Kenyon, he would be accused of injecting subjective "religion" into the objective realm of science.

Biblical creationists who challenge the theory of evolution on a combination of scriptural and scientific grounds have fared no better. Their premise, that the Bible has some standing as a record of natural history, seems nonsensical to those who see the world through naturalistic spectacles. To metaphysical naturalists, the Bible belongs to the realm of religion, whereas the history of life on earth belongs to the naturalistic realm of science. There is no reason whatever to expect the two to be consistent, because the biblical account of natural history is deemed to be composed of prescientific legends. The program of squaring science with the Bible is thus about as sensible as trying to square the scientific account of childbirth with the story that the stork brings babies. For naturalists, the proper way of reconciling science and Scripture is to adopt a naturalistic interpretation of Scripture. This is accomplished through what is called the "higher criticism" of the Bible, and it is the orthodox theory of interpretation in most mainline seminaries today.

WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T

If neither theistic evolution nor biblical creationism is effective in challenging the domination of scientific naturalism in our colleges and universities, what approach does have a chance of success? When I began writing my book Darwin on Trial, several basic points were clear to me:

First, the Darwinian theory of evolution is not merely or primarily a scientific theory of interest to professional scientists in their laboratories and classrooms. It is, first and foremost, a creation story for the culture, a story that is endorsed by government and propagated through the media and the public schools. The story tells us that we were created by blind and purposeless material processes rather than by a purposeful Creator who cares about what we do and what happens to us. The theory entails a naturalistic view of God, whether or not that implication is made explicit in a particular textbook or television program.

Second, what is fundamentally important about the Darwinian theory is not the claim that biological creation was a gradual, long-term process. The important claim is that purposeless material processes, such as random mutation and natural selection, were capable of doing all the work of biological creation so that there is no need for a Creator. This claim - which I call the Blind Watchmaker thesis - masquerades as something that has been proved by scientific evidence. On the contrary, the evidence that the mutation/selection mechanism can create new complex organs or new types of organisms is somewhere between very weak and nonexistent. The Blind Watchmaker mechanism is a child of metaphysical naturalism, not of empirical science. It survives because the leading alternative is supernatural creation, which is unacceptable to the rules of today's science.

Third, the all-important task was to mount a critique of the Blind Watchmaker thesis that the academic and scientific culture could not easily ignore. To do this, it was necessary to put aside all questions of biblical interpretation or veracity and to concentrate entirely on the claims of Darwinism. In the academic world, a Bible/science debate is a nonstarter, because it invokes a stereotype that shuts off thought. What was needed was to press questions that are legitimated within the context of mainstream academic thinking, questions about what has been proved about evolution and what has merely been assumed.

Finally, conditions were, in many respects, more favorable for a re- examination of Darwinism in the 1990s than previously. During the 1980s, widespread publicity had been given to the writings of certain prominent fossil experts, who had insisted that the fossil record was incompatible with the Darwinian picture that major evolutionary changes occur in gradual increments by the accumulation of tiny random mutations through natural selection. The Darwinists had proposed a subtheory to solve the problem, called punctuated equilibria or "punk eek," but this improvisation was vulnerable to criticism. The very need for a new theory to deal with the fossil record indicated that the problem was conceded to be serious.

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Philosophical foes Richard Dawkins and Phillip Johnson both miss the point of the argument from design.

Richard Dawkins is absolutely confident that science will finally accomplish what philosophy has been unable to do in more than 2,000 years -- make theism intellectually indefensible.

Dawkins, a fellow of New College at Oxford University and the author of several best-selling expositions of Darwinism, acknowledges that prior to Darwin, philosophers who rejected belief in a divine creator had no good explanation for the order and complexity of living organisms. An atheist like David Hume could only say to a theist: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." According to Dawkins, Darwin supplied that better explanation and "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Dawkins is quite explicit that Darwinism is more than simply a scientific theory. In the preface to his most recent book, "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life" (the title is taken from Genesis 2:10), Dawkins writes,

Not only does the Darwinian theory command superabundant power to explain. Its economy in doing so has a sinewy elegance, a poetic beauty that outclasses even the most haunting of the world's origin myths. One of my purposes in writing this book has been to accord due recognition to the inspirational quality of our modern understanding of Darwinian life. There is more poetry in Mitochondrial Eve than in her mythological namesake.

Indeed, Dawkins is a forceful and persuasive advocate of Darwinism precisely because he does not belittle the order and complexity of the natural world that theists point to as evidence of a creator. In "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design," Dawkins attempts to better William Paley's description of the marvelous complexity of the human eye by describing the incredible engineering wonders that make it possible for bats to "see" with their ears. Dawkins insists, however, that the "good design" seemingly apparent in human eyes and bat ears is, in fact, the product of cumulative selection working on random errors in the genetic code.

The notion of cumulative selection is at the heart of Dawkins's argument. He agrees with many theists who argue that the odds against atoms bouncing around in the void and by chance arranging themselves into a human eye or a bat's ear are too astronomical to be taken seriously. Of course, pre- Darwinian atheists like Hume argued that in an infinite amount of time anything is possible. But while this argument might satisfy a philosopher, Dawkins does not think such a response will ever satisfy one who has spent much time examining the amazing complexities of nature.

To explain such wonders it is necessary, he says, that we understand the power of cumulative selection. Cumulative selection is simply the ability of living organisms to transmit to their progeny useful errors in the genetic code while weeding out those that are harmful to the organism. While the errors in the genetic code are wholly random, the selection of small but useful changes is not random. This is the all-important difference between Humean and Darwinian explanations of biological complexity. To illustrate this difference, Dawkins considers a single line from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Methinks it is like a weasel." The odds against a monkey producing this sentence by randomly hitting keys on a typewriter, Dawkins calculates, are "about 1 in 10,000 million million million million million million. To put it mildly, the phrase we seek would be a long time coming, to say nothing of the complete works of Shakespeare." Since a single cell is vastly more complex than this line from Shakespeare, Dawkins says that it is simply not reasonable to believe that organic cells evolved by chance in a single step.

But suppose a computer starts with a random sequence of 28 letters (the number of letters in the sentence from Hamlet, counting each space between words as a "letter") and duplicates the sequence repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error (or "mutation") in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the progeny of the original phrase, and chooses the one that, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase ("Methinks it is like a weasel"). Or, to use a familiar game analogy, consider the difference in the odds between rolling five dice in three tries so they all are sixes and rolling a Yahtzee -- five sixes in three tries but now allowing the player to select and keep any of the dice that serve his purpose and rethrowing the others. When Dawkins wrote a program to play computer Yahtzee with "Methinks it is like a weasel" as its goal, his computer came up with the winning combination in only 43 tries.

Now there is an obvious objection to this analogy that Dawkins anticipates. While the processes inside the computer may have been random, the target phrase was supplied by Dawkins himself, not random chance. Therefore, following the analogy, if evolution is to work, it must have a target or goal supplied by an intelligent being -- not a happy conclusion from Dawkins's point of view, since he says that evolution has no long-term goal and no controlling intelligence.

To circumvent this objection, Dawkins wrote a computer program in which extremely simple stick figures randomly evolve into complex figures. Using the principle of cumulative selection, within a period of only 30 to 40 generations, amazingly lifelike pictures evolve of everything from jumping spiders to a man wearing a hat. And in this case, there never was a preselected target. This illustrates in Dawkins's mind how evolution can proceed without any goal other than the survival of the individual organism.

But this leads to a second objection. To speak of an organism's survival presupposes the existence of creatures able to reproduce. "The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful," says Dawkins, "given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection." Dawkins realizes that this is a big assumption because he has already told us that the complexity necessary for even a single cell to replicate itself is much greater than the odds against the chance creation of a single hemoglobin molecule or "1 with 190 noughts after it!" To which he adds, "And a hemoglobin molecule has only a minute fraction of the complexity of a living body." In other words, cumulative selection can only provide a naturalistic explanation of the complexity if replicators exist. But cumulative selection cannot, without arguing in a circle, explain the existence of primitive replicators, which are themselves astronomically complex.

At this stage, Dawkins admits that "we cannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in the origin of the cumulative selection itself." While Dawkins believes the number of planets in the universe is large enough to make this single-step chance event sufficiently probable so as to have happened on at least one planet (ours), he does not hide the speculative nature of his argument at this point. "This chapter has had," he writes, "the modest aim of explaining only the kind of way in which it [the origin of life] must have happened." In other words, when it comes to the origin of life1, even Dawkins relies on philosophical arguments: Well, I don't know how life originated, but I know God isn't a good explanation.

If Dawkins represents Darwinian orthodoxy, Phillip Johnson is the Darwin establishment's most prominent critic. Johnson, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, entered the evolution debate with the bestseller "Darwin on Trial." He resembles Dawkins in his ability to present his views clearly and persuasively to a large audience.

Johnson says that he approaches "the creation-evolution dispute not as a scientist but as a professor of law, which means among other things that I know something about the ways that words are used in arguments." Now one of the first things lawyers learn is that the burden of proof falls on the prosecution, not the defense. Though the title "Darwin on Trial" is ambiguous, Johnson assumes the role of a defense attorney: he does not attempt to prove theism to be true; he only attempts to show that Darwin's case against theism is unproven. He objects that the National Academy of Science's "rule against negative argument automatically eliminates the possibility that science has not discovered how complex organisms could have developed. However wrong the current answer may be, it stands until a better answer arrives. It is as if a criminal defendant were not allowed to present an alibi unless he could also show who did commit the crime."

Further, the Academy of Science rules out a priori supernatural explanations as antithetical to the scientific method. Its position is "heads I win, tails you lose." If theists provide a supernatural explanation for biological complexity, naturalistic scientists rule such an explanation out of court. On the other hand, if creationists limit themselves to pointing out weaknesses in the evolutionists' arguments, evolutionists complain that creationists have no positive account to explain the evidence.

Johnson's frustration with the academy is understandable given his reliance on Karl Popper's philosophy of science. The last chapter of Darwin on Trial, "Science and Pseudoscience," begins by asserting that "Karl Popper provides the indispensable starting point for understanding the difference between science and pseudoscience." According to Popper, the mark of real science is that it makes risky predictions that open its theories to the possibility of falsification.Pseudoscientific theories, such as those of Marxists and Freudians, are formulated in such a way that no matter what occurs, they win. As Johnson wittily summarizes, "If wages fell this was because the capitalists were exploiting the workers, as Marx predicted they would, and if wages rose this was because the capitalists were trying to save a rotten system with bribery, which was also what Marxism predicted. A psychoanalyst could explain why a man would commit murder -- or, with equal facility, why the same man would sacrifice his own life to save another." Such "heads I win, tails you lose" arguments clearly deserve the label "pseudoscience."

So is the Academy of Science's defense of evolution itself a species of pseudoscience? The issues raised here go to the very heart of much-debated questions in the philosophy of science. One event in the history of science illustrates the problem.

By the late nineteenth century, Newtonian physics reigned without rivals. So much was this the case, that when slight irregularities (from the Newtonian point of view) in the orbit of Uranus were observed by astronomers, they refused to believe that Newton's theory was false, or even in need of correction. Instead, they calculated where and how big a heretofore unobserved planet would have to be in order to account for the irregularities of Uranus's orbit. Shortly thereafter, astronomers pointed their telescopes to the predicted location and were rewarded with the discovery of Neptune.

A short time later, similar irregularities in the orbit of Mercury were observed. Following the same procedures, theoretical astronomers calculated where the missing planet would have to be according to Newton. Given the previous successes of Newtonian physics, it did not seem to be an act of hubris when the missing planet was given a name, Vulcan, before it was ever observed.2

But this time, there was a difference. Observations never revealed another missing planet. However, this "negative evidence" was not considered either a reason to stop looking for Vulcan or proof that Newton's theories were imperfect until Einstein came up with an alternative naturalistic explanation for Mercury's irregularities.

It is events such as this in the history of science that have led to the negative-evidence rule and the requirement that naturalistic alternatives be provided. Philosophically speaking, it is not obvious that the Academy of Science has stacked the deck in its favor. After all, as physicist Owen Gingerich observes, "science's great success has been in the production of a remarkably coherent view of nature rather than in an intricately dovetailed set of proofs."3 Though followers of Popper had hoped to discover a clean demarcation between the sciences and philosophy, cases like this have led most scientists and philosophers to conclude that the division between cutting-edge science and difficult philosophical questions -- such as whether the universe is the result of chance or design -- is pretty fuzzy.

Whatever one thinks about the purely scientific case for evolution, few Christians would disagree with Johnson that evolution has become the idol of many moderns. As we noted earlier, when it comes to biogenesis, even Dawkins becomes openly philosophical: "The present lack of a definitely accepted account of the origin of life should certainly not be taken as a stumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view."

As Dawkins here admits, and as Johnson will not allow us to ignore, evolution is more than a purely scientific theory; it has become part and parcel of what might be called the "naturalistic popular culture." In "Scientific American," "The Sciences", and other leading magazines, in the steadily increasing output of science books for the general reader (by Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and a host of other scientists who are also skillful writers), in television documentaries such as the Pbs-aired "The Human Quest" -- in these and many other forums (including countless classrooms), the compelling evidence for evolution and the dubious dogmas of naturalism are presented as a seamless whole, under the unchallengeable authority of Science.

In his new book, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education," Johnson clearly demonstrates this cultural connection between evolution and naturalism. He also addresses the difficult legal and political issues that such a connection raises. If evolution is more than a scientific explanation of the observed data, then how should evolution be taught in the public schools? And how should Christian scientists respond to dominance of their disciplines by naturalistic philosophy? Johnson's advice to Christians seems to be this: fight in the courts and actively resist in the academy.

While the general thrust of Johnson's position is clear, several of the particulars need further clarification. In the opening chapter of Reason in the Balance, Johnson reviews the 1987 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard, in which the Court declared unconstitutional the Arkansas statute requiring that creation science be taught whenever evolution was taught. He writes, "suppose the basic claim of 'creationism' is that God created us, whether he did so suddenly a few thousand years ago or gradually over a much longer period of time. Suppose further that creationists claim that certain features of living organisms, such as the extreme complexity of even the simplest living organism, give support to their claim that a preexisting intelligence was necessary for biological creation" (emphasis added). Having clarified the essential issue, Johnson argues that it was the Court's naturalistic bias, not sound legal reasoning, that drove them to forbid the teaching of creationism in public schools.

The problem with Johnson's argument is that his two essential suppositions are quite different. The first supposition focuses on the fact that God created us, not on how he created us. It defines a position that theistic evolutionists such as Nancy Murphey, William Hasker, and Owen Gingerich could all endorse. As someone said of astronomy in Galileo's time, the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. The second supposition, on the other hand, is really a summation of Paley's teleological argument for the existence of God, a standard topic in Introduction to Philosophy courses taught to college freshmen around the nation.

Commenting on the Court's decision, Johnson writes, "the majority opinion in Edwards said that the state was not only permitted to exclude the creationist viewpoint but was required to do so -- and not because belief in a supernatural Creator is necessarily false or irrational, but precisely because it is religious. The logic implies that creationist arguments must be excluded regardless of the merits and that students may hear only the naturalistic viewpoint on the subject of origins." But what is "the creationist viewpoint": the first or the second supposition? It cannot be the first, because theistic evolutionists have no desire to restrict the current teaching of biological evolution. But if it is the second, then Johnson is implicitly requesting that standard issues in college philosophy courses be taught in high-school biology courses. And if the unbiased treatment of Paley's argument is to be maintained in the public schools, then philosophers will insist that it be balanced with something like David Hume's "Dialogue on Natural Religion."

The issue is further complicated when Johnson writes, "Science always has to fight the prevalent bias of the age if it is to be free to follow the evidence where it leads. In the past, geology had to free itself from religious bias so that it could consider possibilities like an old Earth or the occurrence of ice ages rather than a worldwide flood. That job was accomplished long ago, and now scientific thought is restricted by naturalistic bias." Comments such as this, repudiating the ten-thousand-year-old Earth and the flood geology of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), have led scholars such as Mark Noll and Alvin Plantinga to speak of Johnson as a more reasonable critic of evolution than his young-Earth predecessors. But to say that the refutation of young-Earth creationism was accomplished long ago is itself problematic. Does Johnson simply mean to say that there is no credible scientific evidence in favor of a young Earth? Or does he mean that young-Earth creationists are as nonexistent as flat-earthers?

Either interpretation causes difficulties for Johnson. To say that almost no one believes in a young Earth is simply false. According to a 1991 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans believe that God made man -- as man is now -- in a single act of creation, and within the last ten thousand years.4 And, of course, this is the position taken by the ICR.

The other interpretation, however, causes even greater difficulties for Johnson's criticism of the Edwards decision. He writes, "If a high-school curriculum incorporates the subject of biological origins, and if supernatural creation is a rational alternative to naturalistic evolution within that subject, then it is bad educational policy as well as viewpoint discrimination to try to keep students ignorant of an alternative that may be true. Of course, this reasoning does not apply if the excluded alternative is irrational or demonstrably false. We do not give the view of the Flat Earth Society a respectful hearing in geography classes." The problem for Johnson is that the Arkansas case was about a law that defined creation science as including "the occurrence of a worldwide flood and a relatively recent inception of the Earth and living kinds."5 Now, Johnson cannot have it both ways: he cannot reject flood geology and a young Earth as refuted long ago and still find the Supreme Court guilty of bias in requiring that such positions not be taught in biology courses.

It seems that Johnson has at least three distinct understandings of what constitutes a creationist. The first (theistic evolution) is simply the belief that God created the Earth and everything on it irrespective of how or when he accomplished this.6 The second (Paley's argument) is the belief that the biological complexity exhibited on Earth can only be adequately accounted for by positing the existence of a supernatural creator. The third (icr's position, and the most common meaning of "creationist") entails belief in a universal flood and a relatively recent creation of the Earth.

While Johnson moves back and forth among these three definitions as the argument necessitates, it is only the second that he does not himself repudiate in other places. As we have just seen, he explicitly rejects flood geology and a young Earth. And concerning theistic evolution, he has said that this "manner of thinking is profoundly atheistic.... That is why I think the appropriate term for the accommodationist position is not 'theistic evolution' but rather theistic naturalism. Under either name, it is a disastrous error."7

Though Johnson's conclusion is, in one sense, diametrically opposed to Dawkins's viewpoint, in another sense he and Dawkins are not that far removed: both assume that a current biological theory will have substantial effect on a perennial philosophical issue. Dawkins explicitly sets out to refute Paley's explanation of biological complexity by replacing it with cumulative selection (biological evolution), while Johnson's defense of creationism is, in fact, no more than an attempt to save Paley's argument from the attack launched by Dawkins. Both assume (wrongly, I believe) that the argument from design as formulated by Paley is an essential element of Christianity.

Theistic evolution, Johnson argues, is fundamentally misguided in its willingness to accommodate Christianity to the course of modern science. In Johnson's mind, accommodation is but the first step to appeasement, and we all know what happens when we try to appease a tyrant. As William Jennings Bryan once said, theistic evolution is an anesthetic used to remove a Christian's faith without pain. Once it is assumed that evolution and Christianity are compatible, there is a slippery slope where the slide to atheism is unstoppable. The assumption of compatibility implies that one day science might incontestably prove that evolution is true. And if this occurs, then sooner or later Christianity will be viewed as merely the disposable belief of a few religious fanatics.8

The argument here is historical. Once people accept a scientific explanation for what was long held to be the result of divine agency, then, within a few generations or centuries, belief in God's power is seriously eroded. Early Christians prayed to God for healing. Now that we know about bacteria, we ask a doctor for penicillin.Prayer for healing seems natural to moderns only after doctors determine there is nothing more medicine can do.

This is a sad truth in the history of Christendom. As our knowledge of God's creation has increased, our trust in the Creator has decreased. But science itself is not the problem. Luke records the time Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God while in prison, when all of a sudden the gates of the prison flew open. In his description (Acts 16:26), Luke makes no attempt to hide the fact that it was an earthquake that caused the gates to open. And why should he? If this event in Paul and Silas's missionary work is recorded in Scripture to increase our trust and confidence in God, there is no reason to hide, ignore, or explain away the efficient cause God used to do his will.

There are two compatible understandings of the events recorded in Acts: first, its efficient cause was the shifting of geological plates along fault lines; second, it was a display of God's providence and his sovereign control of creation. The second explanation adds to without subtracting from the first.Many theistic evolutionists defend an analogous understanding of God's creation of the universe and all that it contains.

When Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of botany, friend of Darwin, avowed Christian, and perhaps the first explicit theistic evolutionist, made similar arguments, his critics replied, "Professor Gray simply says that development [evolution] is harmonious with theism. But we want what will prove theism."9 Professor Johnson has the same desire. If human existence, he says in Christianity Today, is merely "a combination of chance events and impersonal natural laws ...[then] Christian theists would deserve their marginalized status in the academic world." He repeats this point in "Reason in the Balance." Theistic evolution (a position Johnson prefers to call "methodological naturalism") "seems to rely on 'faith' -- in the sense of belief without evidence," and that, he says, "is why theists are a marginalized minority in the academic world and always on the defensive."

While Dawkins and Johnson represent important positions in the ongoing debate over evolution, they do not exhaust the alternatives. There is, for example, a powerful alternative viewpoint from the Thomistic tradition.10 Thomistic Christians share Johnson's distaste for those who, out of timidity or ignorance, leave their faith at the laboratory or library door. But they would insist that there is no incompatibility between the best scientific account of the efficient causes operative in the natural world and the psalmist's assurance that "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1). And when scientists leave their area of expertise to boast that biology will soon discover the answer to all our questions about where humans came from and where they are going, then they are engaged in philosophical speculation that Thomists are quick to critique.

In doing so, Thomistic Christians follow Aquinas's dictum that grace always completes nature, it never contradicts nature. Thus, they argue that evolution and theism are compatible, but that an evolutionary explanation itself requires a theistic foundation.11 Like all foundations, it is not on the same level as the house it supports.

Johnson's confusion, from the Thomistic point of view, is that he looks for evidence of theism in the house itself -- that is, the chain of efficient causes leading to the existence of life on Earth. Hence, he points to gaps in the fossil record and "the failure of molecular evidence to confirm either the reality of common ancestors or the adequacy of the Darwinist mechanism." Thomists, on the other hand, argue that the evidence of final causation is conceptual and is observed at a higher level of analysis. Final causes do not exist between efficient causes or at the beginning of a temporal series of efficient causes. Instead, they are the logically necessary foundation of efficient causes. Any attempt to make science self-sufficient is doomed to failure.

Whatever one thinks about the purely scientific case for evolution, few Christians would disagree with Johnson that evolution has become the idol of many moderns. As we noted earlier, when it comes to biogenesis, even Dawkins becomes openly philosophical: "The present lack of a definitely accepted account of the origin of life should certainly not be taken as a stumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view."

As Dawkins here admits, and as Johnson will not allow us to ignore, evolution is more than a purely scientific theory; it has become part and parcel of what might be called the "naturalistic popular culture." In "Scientific American," "The Sciences", and other leading magazines, in the steadily increasing output of science books for the general reader (by Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and a host of other scientists who are also skillful writers), in television documentaries such as the Pbs-aired "The Human Quest" -- in these and many other forums (including countless classrooms), the compelling evidence for evolution and the dubious dogmas of naturalism are presented as a seamless whole, under the unchallengeable authority of Science.

In his new book, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education," Johnson clearly demonstrates this cultural connection between evolution and naturalism. He also addresses the difficult legal and political issues that such a connection raises. If evolution is more than a scientific explanation of the observed data, then how should evolution be taught in the public schools? And how should Christian scientists respond to dominance of their disciplines by naturalistic philosophy? Johnson's advice to Christians seems to be this: fight in the courts and actively resist in the academy.

While the general thrust of Johnson's position is clear, several of the particulars need further clarification. In the opening chapter of Reason in the Balance, Johnson reviews the 1987 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard, in which the Court declared unconstitutional the Arkansas statute requiring that creation science be taught whenever evolution was taught. He writes, "suppose the basic claim of 'creationism' is that God created us, whether he did so suddenly a few thousand years ago or gradually over a much longer period of time. Suppose further that creationists claim that certain features of living organisms, such as the extreme complexity of even the simplest living organism, give support to their claim that a preexisting intelligence was necessary for biological creation" (emphasis added). Having clarified the essential issue, Johnson argues that it was the Court's naturalistic bias, not sound legal reasoning, that drove them to forbid the teaching of creationism in public schools.

The problem with Johnson's argument is that his two essential suppositions are quite different. The first supposition focuses on the fact that God created us, not on how he created us. It defines a position that theistic evolutionists such as Nancy Murphey, William Hasker, and Owen Gingerich could all endorse. As someone said of astronomy in Galileo's time, the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. The second supposition, on the other hand, is really a summation of Paley's teleological argument for the existence of God, a standard topic in Introduction to Philosophy courses taught to college freshmen around the nation.

Commenting on the Court's decision, Johnson writes, "the majority opinion in Edwards said that the state was not only permitted to exclude the creationist viewpoint but was required to do so -- and not because belief in a supernatural Creator is necessarily false or irrational, but precisely because it is religious. The logic implies that creationist arguments must be excluded regardless of the merits and that students may hear only the naturalistic viewpoint on the subject of origins." But what is "the creationist viewpoint": the first or the second supposition? It cannot be the first, because theistic evolutionists have no desire to restrict the current teaching of biological evolution. But if it is the second, then Johnson is implicitly requesting that standard issues in college philosophy courses be taught in high-school biology courses. And if the unbiased treatment of Paley's argument is to be maintained in the public schools, then philosophers will insist that it be balanced with something like David Hume's "Dialogue on Natural Religion."

The issue is further complicated when Johnson writes, "Science always has to fight the prevalent bias of the age if it is to be free to follow the evidence where it leads. In the past, geology had to free itself from religious bias so that it could consider possibilities like an old Earth or the occurrence of ice ages rather than a worldwide flood. That job was accomplished long ago, and now scientific thought is restricted by naturalistic bias" (emphasis added). Comments such as this, repudiating the ten-thousand-year-old Earth and the flood geology of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), have led scholars such as Mark Noll and Alvin Plantinga to speak of Johnson as a more reasonable critic of evolution than his young-Earth predecessors. But to say that the refutation of young-Earth creationism was accomplished long ago is itself problematic. Does Johnson simply mean to say that there is no credible scientific evidence in favor of a young Earth? Or does he mean that young-Earth creationists are as nonexistent as flat-earthers?

Either interpretation causes difficulties for Johnson. To say that almost no one believes in a young Earth is simply false. According to a 1991 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Americans believe that God made man -- as man is now -- in a single act of creation, and within the last ten thousand years.4 And, of course, this is the position taken by the ICR.

The other interpretation, however, causes even greater difficulties for Johnson's criticism of the Edwards decision. He writes, "If a high-school curriculum incorporates the subject of biological origins, and if supernatural creation is a rational alternative to naturalistic evolution within that subject, then it is bad educational policy as well as viewpoint discrimination to try to keep students ignorant of an alternative that may be true. Of course, this reasoning does not apply if the excluded alternative is irrational or demonstrably false. We do not give the view of the Flat Earth Society a respectful hearing in geography classes." The problem for Johnson is that the Arkansas case was about a law that defined creation science as including "the occurrence of a worldwide flood and a relatively recent inception of the Earth and living kinds."5 Now, Johnson cannot have it both ways: he cannot reject flood geology and a young Earth as refuted long ago and still find the Supreme Court guilty of bias in requiring that such positions not be taught in biology courses.

It seems that Johnson has at least three distinct understandings of what constitutes a creationist. The first (theistic evolution) is simply the belief that God created the Earth and everything on it irrespective of how or when he accomplished this.6 The second (Paley's argument) is the belief that the biological complexity exhibited on Earth can only be adequately accounted for by positing the existence of a supernatural creator. The third (icr's position, and the most common meaning of "creationist") entails belief in a universal flood and a relatively recent creation of the Earth.

While Johnson moves back and forth among these three definitions as the argument necessitates, it is only the second that he does not himself repudiate in other places. As we have just seen, he explicitly rejects flood geology and a young Earth. And concerning theistic evolution, he has said that this "manner of thinking is profoundly atheistic.... That is why I think the appropriate term for the accommodationist position is not 'theistic evolution' but rather theistic naturalism. Under either name, it is a disastrous error."7

Though Johnson's conclusion is, in one sense, diametrically opposed to Dawkins's viewpoint, in another sense he and Dawkins are not that far removed: both assume that a current biological theory will have substantial effect on a perennial philosophical issue. Dawkins explicitly sets out to refute Paley's explanation of biological complexity by replacing it with cumulative selection (biological evolution), while Johnson's defense of creationism is, in fact, no more than an attempt to save Paley's argument from the attack launched by Dawkins. Both assume (wrongly, I believe) that the argument from design as formulated by Paley is an essential element of Christianity.

Theistic evolution, Johnson argues, is fundamentally misguided in its willingness to accommodate Christianity to the course of modern science. In Johnson's mind, accommodation is but the first step to appeasement, and we all know what happens when we try to appease a tyrant. As William Jennings Bryan once said, theistic evolution is an anesthetic used to remove a Christian's faith without pain. Once it is assumed that evolution and Christianity are compatible, there is a slippery slope where the slide to atheism is unstoppable. The assumption of compatibility implies that one day science might incontestably prove that evolution is true. And if this occurs, then sooner or later Christianity will be viewed as merely the disposable belief of a few religious fanatics.8

The argument here is historical. Once people accept a scientific explanation for what was long held to be the result of divine agency, then, within a few generations or centuries, belief in God's power is seriously eroded. Early Christians prayed to God for healing. Now that we know about bacteria, we ask a doctor for penicillin.Prayer for healing seems natural to moderns only after doctors determine there is nothing more medicine can do.

This is a sad truth in the history of Christendom. As our knowledge of God's creation has increased, our trust in the Creator has decreased. But science itself is not the problem. Luke records the time Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God while in prison, when all of a sudden the gates of the prison flew open. In his description (Acts 16:26), Luke makes no attempt to hide the fact that it was an earthquake that caused the gates to open. And why should he? If this event in Paul and Silas's missionary work is recorded in Scripture to increase our trust and confidence in God, there is no reason to hide, ignore, or explain away the efficient cause God used to do his will.

There are two compatible understandings of the events recorded in Acts: first, its efficient cause was the shifting of geological plates along fault lines; second, it was a display of God's providence and his sovereign control of creation. The second explanation adds to without subtracting from the first.Many theistic evolutionists defend an analogous understanding of God's creation of the universe and all that it contains.

When Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of botany, friend of Darwin, avowed Christian, and perhaps the first explicit theistic evolutionist, made similar arguments, his critics replied, "Professor Gray simply says that development [evolution] is harmonious with theism. But we want what will prove theism."9 Professor Johnson has the same desire. If human existence, he says in Christianity Today, is merely "a combination of chance events and impersonal natural laws ...[then] Christian theists would deserve their marginalized status in the academic world." He repeats this point in "Reason in the Balance." Theistic evolution (a position Johnson prefers to call "methodological naturalism") "seems to rely on 'faith' -- in the sense of belief without evidence," and that, he says, "is why theists are a marginalized minority in the academic world and always on the defensive."

While Dawkins and Johnson represent important positions in the ongoing debate over evolution, they do not exhaust the alternatives. There is, for example, a powerful alternative viewpoint from the Thomistic tradition.10 Thomistic Christians share Johnson's distaste for those who, out of timidity or ignorance, leave their faith at the laboratory or library door. But they would insist that there is no incompatibility between the best scientific account of the efficient causes operative in the natural world and the psalmist's assurance that "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1). And when scientists leave their area of expertise to boast that biology will soon discover the answer to all our questions about where humans came from and where they are going, then they are engaged in philosophical speculation that Thomists are quick to critique.

In doing so, Thomistic Christians follow Aquinas's dictum that grace always completes nature, it never contradicts nature. Thus, they argue that evolution and theism are compatible, but that an evolutionary explanation itself requires a theistic foundation.11 Like all foundations, it is not on the same level as the house it supports.

Johnson's confusion, from the Thomistic point of view, is that he looks for evidence of theism in the house itself -- that is, the chain of efficient causes leading to the existence of life on Earth. Hence, he points to gaps in the fossil record and "the failure of molecular evidence to confirm either the reality of common ancestors or the adequacy of the Darwinist mechanism." Thomists, on the other hand, argue that the evidence of final causation is conceptual and is observed at a higher level of analysis. Final causes do not exist between efficient causes or at the beginning of a temporal series of efficient causes. Instead, they are the logically necessary foundation of efficient causes. Any attempt to make science self-sufficient is doomed to failure.

Though he is certainly no Thomist, Hilary Putnam makes this point with simple elegance. We all understand perfectly well what it means to say that the cause of the pressure cooker exploding was a stuck valve. Now, from a purely technical standpoint, we could say that the reason the pressure cooker exploded was the absence of randomly placed holes in its lid. The only reason for preferring the stuck-valve explanation is that pressure cookers by design are made with a single hole in the lid controlled by a valve. Had pressure-cooker makers not intended there to be a single hole in the lid, we would not identify a stuck valve as the cause of the explosion. A purely "scientific" explanation begs the question, because, as Putnam concludes, the "notion of things 'causing' other things is not a notion which is simply handed to us by physics."12

The same problem arises when one tries to give a purely "scientific" explanation of any biological organism without invoking intentional terms. It is impossible to say what a heart is, much less what it does, without specifying what a heart is for. Organisms conceptually must be intentionally ordered such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A heart that serves no function is no heart!

The ultimate failure of biological reductionism is that it assumes the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. But as Aristotle noted a long time ago, this is a fallacy of composition. Music is composed of acoustical disturbances, but it is not merely acoustical disturbances; written words are composed of ink lines on paper, but they are not merely ink lines on paper.

When doing biology, Aristotle himself made this point absolutely clear. Asking whether a philosopher's explanation of animal behavior in terms of efficient causes or an explanation in terms of intentional causes (or final causes) is to be preferred, he concluded, "Is it not rather the one who combines both in a single formula?"13

Darwin's response to Asa Gray's theistic understanding of evolution is instructive here. Darwin well understood that the issue -- Is the universe the result of chance or design? -- is one of philosophy, not science. Did God ordain, Darwin asked, "that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did he cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport?" Surely no one could admit divine providence in these matters! Darwin concluded, then, by parity of reasoning, that "no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided."14 Darwin's objection to Gray is not that he is importing illicit matters of faith into science; rather, it is that Gray's theistic evolution creates an insuperable philosophical problem: What kind of God would permit so much evil?

Once again, our analysis of evolution leads to a perennial philosophical issue, exactly as Thomistic philosophers have long been saying it must. Christians can thus approach the purely biological evidence with the calm assurance that wherever it leads, the really difficult philosophical issues will remain the same, and the standard philosophical defenses of the faith that have served Christians well since the time of Augustine will continue to serve us well in the future.

Phillip Johnson responds:

I see no reason to complain about a review that pairs me with Richard Dawkins as setting the boundaries of the debate over evolution and creation, regardless of what intermediate position the reviewer personally favors. So, with appreciation for the attention, I will respond only on one important point.

The question whether Darwinism fits the scientific evidence is prior to the question of whether Christianity can or should be reconciled with Darwinism. Although he relegates the prior question to an endnote, Mr. Machuga actually agrees with me that Darwinism does not explain "biogenesis" (origin of genetic information), but only "diversification of existing species."

Although this distinction leaves open the question of exactly where the line between origin and diversification is to be drawn, it acknowledges that there are scientific as well as philosophical defects in Dawkins's Darwinian argument for atheism. I urge theists (and atheists too, for that matter) not to overlook the scientific objections to the more expansive Darwinian claims in their determination to pursue a philosophical objective -- whether that objective be to further materialism, or to show that Thomistic philosophy can incorporate just about any scientific theory about material causes.

---------------------------

FOOTNOTES

1. Darwin's title, "The Origin of Species," hides an ambiguity. The "origin of species" can refer to either biogenesis (the origin of life) or the diversification of existing species. While Darwin is himself clear that these are two distinct issues, and that he only has an answer to the second, other writers have glossed over the distinction and treated them as a single issue. But even speaking from a wholly scientific view, these are distinct issues. There is a wide range of arguments, each supported by independent evidence, to support that claim that, on the whole, older species tend to be biologically less complex or developed than younger species. The geographic distribution of species, vestigial organs, similar anatomical structures put to differing uses, the distribution of fossils in the geologic column, and so on all point to the same explanation -- natural selection, either gradual or punctuated. However, when it comes to the origin of life, while there are a number of independent explanations that scientists are currently exploring, the evidence does not currently converge toward a single explanation. The convergence of many arguments and independent sources of evidence toward a single explanation is a measure of the coherence of a theory -- that is, a theory's ability to organize a wide range of data into a single, interconnected whole. It is now generally acknowledged that the truth of a theory is more established by the theory's coherence than any single fact or observation. It is thus misleading for Dawkins to treat the origin of life and the diversification of species as if their scientific status were the same. Dawkins needs a scientific theory of the origin of life if his assumption -- that science will refute theism in a way that philosophy has not -- is to remain even plausible. But philosophical needs are nothing more than wishes in science!

2. Though these events are a commonplace among historians of science, one place to begin study is W. M. O'Neil's "Fact and Theory: An Aspect of the Philosophy of Science" (Sydney University Press, 1969).

3. "Science and Theology," edited by Murray Rae, Hilary Regan, and John Stenhouse (Eerdmans, 1994), p. 43; see note 1 above.

4. Ronald Numbers, "The Creationists" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. ix. In a response to William Hasker in a recent theme issue of Christian Scholar's Review (Vol. 24, No. 4 [May 1995]) focusing on "Creation, Evolution, and Christian Faith," Johnson writes, "Let's face the facts. All the leading scientific authorities who write for the general public -- including Weinberg, Hawking, Davies, Sagan, Crick, Futuyma, Dawkins, Johanson, and Gould -- are engaged in promoting metaphysical naturalism." While there is no question that these scientists are so engaged, the poll numbers belie Johnson's worry that Christians are in danger of losing the propaganda war to pbs and the popular press.

5. "Historic Documents of 1982" (Congressional Quarterly, 1983), p. 9.

6. "A creationist is simply a person who believes that the world (and especially mankind) was designed, and exists for a purpose." "Darwin on Trial," p. 115.

7. "Christianity Today," Oct. 24, 1994, p. 26.

8. See "Reason in the Balance," pp. 225-26.

9. A. Hunter Dupree, "Asa Gray 1800-1880" (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 368. Paley's own famous proof is not itself inconsistent with an evolutionary account. If a person found a watch in the desert, he would immediately infer the existence of a designer. But what if, says Paley, "The watch is found, in the course of its movement, to produce another watch similar to itself; and not only so, but we perceive in it a system or organization separately calculated for that purpose. What effect would this discovery have, or ought it to have, upon our former inference? What, as hath already been said, but to increase beyond measure our admiration of the skill which had been employed in the formation of such a machine?"

10. For an excellent, philosophically informed critique of Darwinism from a Thomistic point of view, see Etienne Gilson, "From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution" (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

11. Asa Gray, in response to his critics said, "As I have said before, what you want is ...[a system] which theism only can account for. That, it seems to me, you have. And again, It has been and always will be possible to take an atheistic view of Nature, but far more reasonable from science and philosophy only to take a theistic view.... It is the best, if not the only, hypothesis for the explanation of the facts." "Natural Science and Religion" (Cambridge University Press, 1880), p. 91.

12. "The Renewal of Philosophy" (Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 50.

13. "On the Soul," 403b7. See also "On the Parts of Animals," 642a.

14. "Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, II" (D. Appleton and Company, 1875), p. 415. And as Johnson himself notes (but without drawing a similar conclusion), the problem of evil was more than a mere philosophical puzzle for Darwin. Johnson quotes from Gertrude Himmelfarb's "Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution" (1959): "One of the passages which was deleted from [Darwin's] autobiography explained why Charles not only could not believe in Christianity but would not wish to believe in it. Citing the 'damnable doctrine' that would condemn all disbelievers to eternal punishment, he protested that 'this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends.'" Himmelfarb concludes, "There may be more sophisticated reasons for disbelief, but there could hardly have been a more persuasive emotional one" (quoted in "Darwin on Trial," pp. 163-64).

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Books discussed in this essay

Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design" (Norton, 349 pp.; $10.95, paper, 1987 [first published 1986]).

Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life" (Basic, 172 pp.; $20, 1995).

Phillip E. Johnson, "Darwin on Trial," 2nd ed. (InterVarsity, 195 pp.; $10.95, paper, 1993).

Phillip E. Johnson, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science," Law and Education (InterVarsity, 245 pp.; $19.99, 1995).

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Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review bcjan96bccurrmrj6B116a614v

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Christian perspective on Darwinism [taken from longer article]:

WHY BELIEVE IT?

One question that naturally occurs to a reader of the book [Darwin's Dangerous Idea]: Why does Dennett think we should accept Darwin's dangerous idea? Concede that it is audacious, revolutionary, antimedieval, quintessentially contemporary, with it, and has that nobly stoical hair-shirt quality Bertrand Russell said he liked in his beliefs: still, why should we believe it? I think Dennett means to attempt an answer to this question (and isn't merely preaching to the naturalistic choir). He repeats several times that believing in an "anthropomorphic" God is childish, or irrational, or anyway nowadays out of the question. What he sees as an anthropomorphic God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in -- a God whom we human beings resemble by virtue of being persons, the sorts of beings who are capable of belief and knowledge, who have aims and ends, and who act on their beliefs in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.

Well, why is this childish? Dennett's answer, as far as I can make it out, is that the traditional arguments for the existence of God don't work. He mentions only one argument, the so-called argument from design: the universe and many of its parts give the appearance of having been designed by an extraordinarily knowledgeable and powerful designer, so probably there is an Intelligent Designer. Dennett thinks Darwinian considerations suffice to dispose of this argument; they show how it could be that all this apparent design in the living world arises without the aid of an Intelligent Designer. Nowadays, however, the most popular version of the argument from design involves the exquisite fine-tuning of the laws or regularities of nature. The fundamental constants of physics -- the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces -- must apparently have values that fall within an extremely narrow range for life to be so much as possible. If these values had been even minutely different (if, for example, the gravitational constant had been different in even the most minuscule degree), habitable planets would not have developed and life (at least life at all like ours) would not have been possible. This suggests or makes plausible the thought that the world was designed or created by a Designer who intended the existence of living creatures and eventually rational, intelligent, morally significant creatures. Like its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, this version of the argument is probabilistic rather than deductive: given the nature of the world, it is likely that it was fashioned by an intelligent Designer. The premises don't entail the conclusion but are supposed to give you some reason to accept it.

Dennett's rejoinder to the argument is that, possibly, "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out;(7) as it happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the development of intelligent life (where else?).

Perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again, perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I know it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following?Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot." Dennett's reply shows at most ("at most," because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a probabilistic argument, not one that is deductively valid.

Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, you can't refute it just by pointing out that it isn't deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn't entail that it ever took place, but only makes that fact likely. You might as well reject the evidence for the earth's being round by pointing out that there are possible worlds in which we have all the evidence we do have for the earth's being round, but in fact the earth is flat. Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it.

But there is a more important question here that Dennett completely ignores. As I say, he seems to think one could be a sensible believer in God only on the basis of some argument, something like one of the traditional theistic arguments. But why think a thing like that? Why think you need an argument to be rational in believing in God? There are plenty of other things we rationally accept without argument -- that there has been a past, for example, or that there are other people, or an external world, or that our cognitive faculties are reasonably reliable. Moreover, one lesson to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume and Reid is that there probably aren't any good arguments for these things -- but we are still perfectly rational in accepting them. Couldn't the same be true for belief in God? Still further, Christian thinkers such as Aquinas, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards (not to mention Saint Paul) have held that belief in God and in the more specific truths of Christianity is rationally justifiable, all right, but need not be accepted on the basis of such arguments. Still further yet, this very question has been at the heart of contemporary philosophy of religion (right here in the U.S., where Dennett lives) for at least the last 20 years or so.(8) But Dennett totally ignores the question, blithely assuming that belief in God is rationally justifiable only if it is accepted on the basis of argument, or at least only if there is a good argument for it.

I say Christian thinkers going all the way back have claimed Christian truths need not be accepted on the basis of "rational argument" in order to be intellectually or rationally justifiable. On what basis then? Suppose we think about the cognitive or intellective faculties involved in science: they would include perception, memory, and what we could call "rational intuition," the faculty whereby we know mathematical and logical truths. Use the term "reason" to refer to these faculties (perception, memory, rational intuition, whatever else is employed in science) together; then what Aquinas, Calvin, and most of the rest of the Christian tradition have held is that the truths of Christianity don't have to be (and probably can't be) proved on the basis of reason in order to be rationally acceptable. For there are other sources of knowledge in addition to reason: there are also (to put things Calvin's way) the sensus divinitatis, and faith, which is a response to the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit. It is by virtue of these sources of knowledge that one knows the truths of faith, such truths as that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. One position a Christian might hold on evolution, then, is that one knows by faith that (contrary to Darwin's dangerous idea) God created the living world in one way or another, and by reason (science) that he might have done it or probably did do it by way of evolution. But what about the origin of life itself? Here the salient fact is the absolutely enormous difficulty in conceiving of some way in which this might possibly have happened just by way of the regularities of physics and chemistry. A Christian or other theist, therefore, might sensibly conclude that God did something out of the ordinary here, specially creating life.

Dennett notes this possibility, but makes a most extraordinary reply. He quotes Richard Dawkins:

"This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity .... But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself." (9)

Dennett apparently considers this a masterstroke: "Dawkins' retort to the theorist who would call on God to jump-start the evolution process is an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier." I am sorry to say that it doesn't seem to me to be a masterstroke at all. Dawkins's retort is neither unrebuttable, nor devastating, nor even relevant; it irrelevantly addresses a claim not at issue. Dawkins accuses theists of giving a circular explanation. They set out to explain organized complexity (e.g., mind); they then propose as an explanatory hypothesis that there is an uncreated Eternal Mind who created everything else; but they stupidly overlook the fact that this Eternal Mind would be (naturally enough) a mind, and would have to think thoughts complex enough to match the complexity of what it creates.(10) So they set out to explain organized complexity, but absent-mindedly just assume or postulate it.

That would be pretty absent-minded, all right, but of course theists do no such thing. For first, they aren't here trying to explain the existence of organized complexity but rather the existence of life on earth. And second, they don't postulate the existence of God, as if this were a scientific hypothesis of some kind. They don't typically propose the existence of God (let alone other characteristic Christian doctrines) as a kind of hypothesis, designed to explain organized complexity or other phenomena. They don't believe in God because God's existence and activity is a good hypothesis, a good explanation of organized complexity in the world. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn't say, "Hey, look at that weird bush! It's on fire but isn't burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What's the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of?Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. Yes, that must be it, that's a good explanation of the phenomenon." Christians do not reason as follows: "What is the best explanation for all that organized complexity and the rest of what we see about us? Well, let's see, perhaps there is an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good being who created the world. Yes, that's it; and perhaps this being is one of three persons, the other two being his divine son and a third person proceeding from the first two (yet there are not three Gods but one); the second person became incarnate, suffered and was crucified, and died, thus atoning for our sins and making it possible for us to have life and have it more abundantly. Right; that's got to be it; that's a dandy explanation of the facts." What Christian would reason like that?

Hardly any. Rather, the traditional Christian thinks she knows these things by way of faith and its correlate, divine revelation through divinely inspired Scripture and/or the teaching of the church, the body of Christ. She doesn't, of course, claim that these teachings constitute the best scientific explanation of some phenomenon, any more than we believe that there has been a past because we think this is a good scientific explanation of such present phenomena as wrinkled faces, dusty books, rusted automobiles, and crumbling mountains. (Of course, once she knows, as she thinks, that God has created the heavens and the earth she can use that fact to explain what might otherwise be inexplicable.) Dawkins and Dennett make a wholly unjustified, unargued, and implausible assumption about Christian teachings: that they are really proposed and held as a sort of science, an effort to explain such things, for example, as that there is a great deal of organized complexity and variety and apparent design in the world. Looked at as a scientific hypothesis designed to explain organized complexity, Christian doctrines are perhaps wanting -- perhaps almost as wanting as science is, looked at as religion, as a way of coming to be in the right relationship with God.

Now Dennett notes that believers in God have often claimed that there are sources of knowledge in addition to reason. His riposte, once more, is monumentally inadequate:

"The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as 'intellectual tennis without a net,' and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I rudely return service as follows: 'What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!' "

Well, probably not, but what prompts Dennett to bring up this miserable ham sandwich in the first place? What is his point? It's not easy to tell. The topic is the claim on the part of some (most) Christians that they have a source of knowledge or information about the world in addition to reason. Is Dennett claiming that anyone who makes such a claim is carrying on as irrationally as Dennett would be if he launched that ham sandwich zinger? I think so; further down the same page he says: "think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side." Then follows a tale about how you are sightseeing in a foreign land, your loved one is killed, and, at the trial, the judge is swayed more strongly by testimonies (from the killer's kinsmen) to the fine character of the accused than by the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw him commit the crime: that would be unreasonable, and you wouldn't like it, would you? He goes on:

"Would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways.... But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, then either you have seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher has (for none has come up with a good defense for this) or you are kidding yourself."

But philosophers have come up with a good defense of the idea that there can be sources of knowledge in addition to reason (i.e., perception, memory, rational intuition). Furthermore, it looks as if Dennett thinks that if there were any sources of information and knowledge in addition to reason, the deliverances of those sources would necessarily go contrary to reason. But of course that's just a confusion. Christians and other theists may think they know by faith that God created the world and in some way superintends or orchestrates or guides the process of evolution (perhaps by seeing to it that the right mutations arise at the right time, that certain bands of creatures don't suffer untimely extinction, etc.); then they would be claiming to know something in addition to what reason delivers -- but not, of course, something that goes contrary to reason. (There is nothing in current evolutionary science to show or even suggest that God did not superintend evolution.) It is no part of reason to insist that there can't be any other source of truth; it is perfectly in accord with reason to suppose that there are sources of truth in addition to reason.(11) It looks as if here it is Dennett who is conveniently lowering the net a foot or two when he makes his return. (Perhaps a more apt tennis metaphor would have him take a whack at the ball and miss it altogether.)

But what he says also suggests still a third possibility:

"Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play.... [W]hat I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other.... But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify."

Here Dennett seems to assume that if you can't show by reason that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Lockean, Enlightenment claim that, while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any belief as divinely revealed unless we could give a good argument from reason that it was. But again, why think a thing like that? Take other sources of knowledge: rational intuition, memory, and perception, for example. Can we show by the first two that the third is in fact reliable -- that is, without relying in any way on the deliverances of the third? No, we can't; nor can we show by the first and third that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is. Nor can we give a decent, non-question-begging rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable. Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Certainly not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept, say, the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit unless we can give a rationally conclusive argument for the conclusion that there is indeed such a thing, and that what it delivers is the truth? Why treat these alleged sources differently? Is there anything but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception and memory?Perhaps God has given us several different sources of knowledge about the world, and none of them can be shown to be reliable using only the resources of the others. Once more, arbitrarily lowering the net (or missing the ball).

Finally, it seems to me that there is one respect in which Darwin's dangerous idea is vastly more dangerous than Dennett realizes. According to Richard Rorty, "The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increated prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass --a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck." (12)

Rorty's pronouncements do not always inspire maximum confidence, but here he seems to be on to something (although, like Dennett, he fails to see the real danger). He says that two ideas are un-Darwinian: that we have a mind oriented toward the Truth and a conscience that puts us in touch with right and wrong. Now Dennett does try to deal with the second from the Darwinian perspective (although what he really tries to explain is not how there could actually be such a thing as right and wrong, good and bad, from that perspective, but how it is that we think there is such a thing.) But the other part of Rorty's suggestion is where the real intellectual danger in Darwin's dangerous idea lies (at any rate, if Rorty's "Truth" is just ordinary everyday truth). Why so? Here I can only hint at the argument.(13) Darwin's dangerous idea is really two ideas put together: philosophical naturalism together with the claim that our cognitive faculties have originated by way of natural selection working on some form of genetic variation. According to this idea, then, the purpose or function of those faculties (if they have one) is to enable or promote survival, or survival and reproduction, more exactly, the maximization of fitness (the probability of survival and reproduction). Furthermore, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable (i.e., furnish us with a preponderance of true beliefs) on Darwin's dangerous idea is either low or inscrutable (i.e., impossible to estimate). But either gives the devotee of evolutionary naturalism a defeater for the proposition that his cognitive faculties are reliable, a reason for doubting, giving up, rejecting that natural belief. If so, then it also gives him a reason for doubting any beliefs produced by those faculties. This includes, of course, the beliefs involved in science itself. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore, provides one who accepts it with a defeater for scientific beliefs, a reason for doubting that science does in fact get us to the truth, or close to the truth.(14) Darwin himself may perhaps have glimpsed this sinister presence coiled like a worm in the very heart of evolutionary naturalism: "With me," says Darwin,

"the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (15)

Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism.

=======================

Endnotes:

7. But is that at all obvious? How would one know a thing like that?

Further: wouldn't one of the possibilities be that a certain possible set

of values just never turns up? If so, the suggestion isn't merely

baseless; it's incoherent.

8. See, for example, William Alston's magisterial "Perceiving God" (1991) and

Plantinga and Wolterstorff's "Faith and Rationality" (1983).

9. The quotation is from page 141 of Dawkins's "The Blind Watchmaker."

10. There is also the tradition according to which God, despite the

complexity of his creation, is himself wholly simple; but this is a story

for another occasion.

11. Indeed, it isn't even part of reason to claim that there couldn't be a

source of truth whose deliverances were (to some degree) contrary to the

teachings of reason.

12. "Untruth and Consequences," "The New Republic," July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.

13. For a development of this argument, see my "Warrant and Proper Function"

(Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 12.

14. Indeed, in providing one who accepts it with a defeater for anything that

person believes, it also provides a defeater for itself; evolutionary

naturalism is therefore self-defeating.

15. "Letter to William Graham," July 3, 1881. In "The Life and Letters of

Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter," ed. Francis Darwin

(D. Appleton and Company, 1887), vol. 1, p. 255.12. "Untruth and

Consequences," "The New Republic," July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE May/June 1996,

Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 16 bcmay96mrj6B316b6423

A big problem with Darwinian evolution is its explanation of the transition from reptiles to mammals.

Francis Hitching is a science writer who is a convinced evolutionist. He thinks creationism is wrong. He also thinks Darwinism is just as wrong.

It is a common belief among Darwinian evolutionists that reptiles evolved into mammals. There is a total lack of intermediate fossils. Even more than this, it is hard to see how it could possibly have happened. How, he asks, did mammals evolve their jaw and their ear?

All reptiles have a lower jaw made up of at least four separate bones on each side, and a single bone in each ear. But every known mammal, alive and extinct, is the opposite: it has a one-piece jawbone, and three bones in the ear.

All these bones fossilize readily, yet there is not a single fossil species with two bones in the ear or with two or three bones in the jaw. Nor has any Darwinist offered a plausible explanation WHY these changes should have occurred, or HOW they might have happened.

If these intermediates ever existed, how did they survive with jaws and ears that were neither one thing nor the other? And they certainly would not have worked well even if they worked at all.

Sermon in Big Questions Series. Darwinian evolution. Genesis 1:20-26

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CREATION OR EVOLUTION?

======================

I. Did God really create everything?

II. Inner tensions.

A. Truth of Bible - but Science also tries to establish truth.

B. Some Christians have made dumb statements concerning science.

C. Faith and facts.

III. A theory that has changed the world.

A. The voyage of the "Beagle" in 1859.

B. Theory took society by storm.

C. Unintended consequences.

IV. Problems with Darwinism.

A. Improbability of random mutations.

B. The "missing links" are still missing.

C. Macro or micro?

V. Varieties of Creationism.

A. Theistic evolution.

B. Young earth creationism.

C. Ancient earth creationism.*

VI. People are special.

A. Darwinianism and the human animal.

B. Bible is adamant that humans are special.

C. Are you related to your Creator?

#3998

*

[Evolutionist claims that this theory is incompatible with religion. Also gives some of the ramifications of being a materialist.]

I am a committed evolutionist and, like most evolutionists, a materialist to the core… While I readily acknowledge its defects, I am a staunch and unapologetic admirer of science. Like it or not, the modern world is almost entirely a product of science. Despite unparalleled success, however, science is currently under assault by various pseudo- and anti-science constituencies that attack the materialism that is the central ontological bias of the scientific world view. Usually considered a “science-like” endeavor, archaeology is caught up in this controversy…

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Science can be defined as a collection of methods for evaluating the credibility of knowledge claims about the experiential world. Science does not pretend to certainty; it only seeks better and better approximations of it. Scientific conclusions are continuously subjected to critical scrutiny. Science is, therefore, self-correcting. No topic or question is off-limits to science. The only thing that is antithetical to the scientific world view is dogma. Dogma is the stuff of religious belief. From the standpoint of science, the illusion of absolute, unchanging truth is the most pernicious of vanities.

Physicist Edgar Pearlstein points out that the essential disagreement between science and religion is not in the conclusions (e.g., evolution, the heliocentric solar system, the origin of disease), but rather in the way of arriving at conclusions. Religion relies upon authority (from a book, a person, or tradition) and its truth is claimed to be universal, unchanging, and eternal. In science, authority lies in evidence and reason, which are always open to challenge, so its truth is always relative and tentative. Scientific investigation starts with a question, and tries to find an answer through strong inference founded on evidence and reason. A theological investigation, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion, and tries to wiggle around any impediments of logic and reason in order to warrant, or justify, that conclusion (1).

EVOLUTION AND MATERIALISM

There are, of course, many views of humans and their place in the natural world. I argue, however, that there is only one scientific view – that of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. As the most powerful explanatory framework that humans have ever devised to account for the origins and diversity of life on Earth, evolution is central to Western science, extends far beyond the life sciences in which it arose, and subscribes to the same materialist biases and assumptions that underlie all of science.

Materialism is the idea that only matter exists, and that what we regard as “mind” or “spirit” consists exclusively of matter arranged in complex ways (2). More precisely, “mind” is a consequence of brain evolution, and, because our brains have evolved over the 5 million years for which we can document the existence of the Hominidae [human ancestors], what constitutes “mind” has also evolved. From this perspective, humans are only animals (albeit highly intelligent, technologically sophisticated, socially complex ones). Religious views of humans and their place in nature, dependent as they are on concepts that have no reality outside the mind, are epiphenomena (and – for a materialist – absurd). Despite our very considerable capacity for compartmentalization, ONE CANNOT SIMULTANEOUSLY UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT EVOLUTION AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS, AND SUSTAIN A BELIEF IN THE NONMATERIAL [emphasis by Holwick]. From the standpoint of science, religious beliefs are curious survivals of earlier cognitive evolution (3,4). As our cognitive capacities expanded slowly over the long millennia of the Pleistocene, we came to imagine more and more complex realities, and populated them with the gods, demons, and spirits that are the stuff of conventional religious belief. Religious tenets and precepts (especially those dealing with morality and ethics) are ex post facto rationalizations for existing social conditions. To the extent that they converge cross- culturally and through time, it is because they reflect universal aspects of human social life.

–––––––––

1. Pearlstein, E. 1997. “Science and religion.” Science 279:1591.

2. Gould, S. J. 1994. “Darwin’s Revolution in Thought.” Northampton, Mass.: Into the Classroom Video, Inc.

3. Mithen, S. 1997. “The Prehistory of the Mind.” London: Thomas & Hudson.

4. Mithen, S. 1997. “Cognitive archeology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural transmission, with particular reference to religious ideas.” In “Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory in Archeological Explanation” (C. Barton and G. Clark, eds.). Washington: Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association No. 7, pp. 67-74.

*

In 1967 astronomers were startled to discover radio pulses coming from outer space. "Our first thought," they said, was that "this was another intelligent race" trying to communicate with us. They labeled the signals "LGM," standing for Little Green Men.

But it turned out they had discovered a pulsar, a rotating star that mimics a radio beacon.

How can scientists tell whether something is coming from a natural or an intelligent source? When you think of it, this is the question at the heart of the creation-evolution debate: How can we tell whether life originated by natural causes or was created by an intelligent being?

Think for a moment of some common analogies. Imagine we are traveling through South Dakota and see a mountain with the faces of four presidents carved in it. Immediately we recognize the work of an intelligent agent. No one would mistake Mount Rushmore for a natural phenomenon.

Or imagine finding an arrowhead beside a stream. No one would attribute the shape to water erosion.

This ability to distinguish human workmanship from the products of nature is crucial in archaeology. Digging through the dust in Mesopotamia, the archaeologist has to decide whether he has found a bit of rock or a bit of broken pottery.

It's true that the physical world can produce a regular pattern -- like the ripples on a beach. Or like the radio pulses that fooled astronomers into thinking they had found Little Green Men. But what nature cannot produce is complexity.

Imagine we're walking along a beach and come across some words written in the sand: "John Loves Mary." Immediately we recognize a different level of order from the surrounding ripples -- what scientists call complexity.

Or imagine we're looking up at the sky and we see something that looks fluffy and white like a cloud but spells out the words "Drink Coca-Cola." Without a moment's doubt we conclude that this is no ordinary cloud, and we start looking around for an airplane pilot doing sky-writing.

You see, common everyday experience gives us a good idea of the things nature is capable of creating by itself -- and the things that can be created only by an intelligent source.

So what does that tell us about the origin of life?

At the core of life is the DNA molecule. Geneticists tell us the structure of DNA is identical to a language. It acts like a code -- a molecular communication system within the cell.

In other words, when geneticists probed the nucleus of the cell they came across something analogous to "John Loves Mary" or "Drink Coca-Cola."

Of course, DNA contains a lot more information than these simple phrases. The average DNA molecule contains as much information as a city library. So if "John Loves Mary" had to be written by an intelligent being, how much more the DNA code?

You don't have to have sophisticated knowledge of chemistry and genetics to respond to challenges from evolution. Based on common experience -- and, after all, science is supposed to be based on experience -- you can argue logically that life was created by an intelligent agent.

Which is exactly what Christians have always believed.

_________________________________

Copyright (c) 1999 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

He graduated from Harvard. He has a Ph.D. in geology. He studied under eminent evolutionist Stephen J. Gould.

One would not expect a man of Kurt Wise's credentials to argue strongly and convincingly for biblical creation. Nevertheless, during the Gheens Lecture series at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., Wise debunked his former professor's viewpoint -- presenting theories of fossil records and the flood which sustain a young earth creation.

"I do believe that based upon the nature of God that the testimony in Genesis is a perspicuous account -- a clear historical narrative of the origin of things," said Wise, the director of origins research at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn.

Despite claims by conventional science to the contrary, Wise said, issues of creation and biblical accounts are far from settled.

In fact, as one compares the "crazy idea" of biblical creation with evolutionary and old earth theories, often a young earth seems more probable, Wise contended.

Much of Wise's reasoning for a young earth proposal is based on his belief in the validity of the biblical flood accounts.

He theorizes that an ocean catastrophe of tremendous proportions initiated the flood, a cataclysm which resulted in a number of simultaneous occurrences.

The ocean crust, being denser than the mantle below it, subducted, or literally dove into the strata below it, Wise said. As massive slabs of rocks plunged lower into the earth, they pulled continents with them. Such force, moving at a meter per second, created enough velocity to move the continents to where they are today and to create mountains where they collided (as is the case with the Himalayans between India and the neighboring region of Asia).

This model, as validated by computer simulation, is the only one that provides sufficient velocity to create these huge mountains, Wise said, while an old earth theory, in which continents move as fast as a fingernail grows, would not produce such velocity.

At the same time as subduction, hot mantle material moved upward, vaporizing ocean water, shooting water thousands of feet into the air, Wise said, describing the spouts are the "fountains of the deep" mentioned in Genesis.

Wise speculated the rising mantle combined with rain also raised water levels about a mile -- thus creating the flood.

Covered with water, the earth, in a manner similar to tides, turned beneath the water, Wise said, and the resulting massive swishing moved debris and buried the fossils. Thus, many rock patterns and fossil accounts are explained, he said.

This fossil record perhaps presents the best proof of creation and disproof of old earth theories, Wise said.

With an evolutionary model, one would expect to find characteristics of the fossils in the rock layers such as a gradual evolving of species up the layers. On the contrary, scientists have discovered little variation. The fossil records in the layers are missing the so-called "missing link" species.

This sameness of species throughout the layers, Wise said, fits more with a theory of a flood burying the various species randomly.

"Catastrophic plate tectonics is a very powerful explanatory tool," Wise said. "It explains an enormous amount of data on the surface of the earth. Not that we're done -- this is only the beginning because there's a whole bunch of questions that we don't know the answer to."

Thus, the crazy idea, Wise said, "as is true of every good theory of science, generates more questions than it seems to answer." One of those questions deals with the age of the earth -- "a difficult topic," Wise said. Traditionally, scientists have argued that a universe billions of light years in diameter would have to be billions of years old in order for one actually to see the stars.

But, Wise argued, such a theory ignores the idea of God creating the light from the stars "in transit." In addition, the traditional theory assumes a flat universe -- a proposition which is far from universally accepted.

In considering the many different theories, Wise said, some scholars argue strongly for a young earth, while others that argue strongly for an ancient earth.

"Ultimately," Wise explained, "it comes down to a question of which of those you wish to believe."

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But design in living things is obvious. Even the single-celled organism is complex beyond the ability of scientists to understand, let alone duplicate. All of life is governed by the marvelously complex genetic code, which contains not only design and order, but what is equivalent to written information. This DNA code must not only be written correctly, the rest of the cell must be able to read it and follow its instructions, if the cell is to metabolize its food, carry out the myraid of enzyme reactions, and, especially, to reproduce.

This code had to be present at the origin of life. How could it have written itself? And how could all the various organelles learn how to read and obey it?

Carl Sagan, the modern-day evolutionary spokesperson had admitted: "The information content of a simple cell has been established as around 10 to 12th power bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica." --Impact January, 1992 Dr. John D. Morris (Inst for Cr Res)

YOUR BODY has 100 trillion cells. 3 billion die and are replaced each minute. YOUR BRAIN continuously receives and sends signals far more sophisticated than the best of computers. YOUR EYES have 130,000 light receptors. YOUR EARS have 100,000 hearing receptors and can distinguish 2,500 different tones. YOUR TASTE has 3,000 different receptors in your mouth. There are 30,000 different receptors for HEAT, and 250,000 different receptors for COLD. There are 500,000 receptors measuring pressure of TOUCH. There are 4 million PAIN SENSORS, 10 million NERVE CELLS and 100 million BRAIN CELLS for storing memory.

THE HUMAN EYE is the most perfect camera ever known to man! It automatically adjusts to light, distance, focusing instantly. TWO EYES on a horizontal plane are able to measure DISTANCE. It has the ability to distinguish between 1 million colors, and can increase the ability to see 100,000 times. The eyes have BROWS, LASHES, TEARS, and a NOSE for protection.

Unlike any other creature, the human can SPEAK and UNDERSTAND 3,000 languages, and millions of words.

YOUR HEART beats an average of 72 times per minute, and in a year's time it pumps five quarts of BLOOD

through 60,000 miles of VEINS and ARTERIES (a total of 600,000 gallons). If you cut yourself, your blood has a CLOTTING SYSTEM for life preservation.

You have a well-engineered SKELETAL SYSTEM of 204 BONES. You have a rugged, yet sophisticated DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, and a sensitive, analytical TASTE-SMELL system. You have a marvelous MUSCULAR-CONNECTIVE TISSUE SYSTEM connecting the bones and allowing for free movement of the different parts of the body.

You have a programmed GLANDULAR-HORMONE SYSTEM. Your LUNGS filter and warm the oxygen it places in the blood and takes away the carbon dioxide. You have SKIN that both insulates and ventilates and serves for protection for the body. You have a WASTE DISPOSAL SYSTEM, a system to take OXYGEN and NUTRITION to every cell in your body. You have a WHITE CELL DEFENSE SYSTEM to fight disease. Your body has a SELF-RESTORING, SELF-HEALING system.

Your two and one-half pound BRAIN is the most complicated structure known to the universe, with each cell connected to every other cell!

There is much much more that could be said about our physical bodies, but we consider this to be sufficient to convince anyone who WILL be convinced that our bodies are NOT the byproduct of the accidental working of Nature, or some evolutionary process, but rather the INTELLIGENT DESIGN of a MASTER BUILDER! We agree with the Bible which says:

"In the beginning God created..." (Gen. 1:1).

"For every house is built by someone, but he who built all things is God" (Heb. 3:4).

"The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the works of His hands..." (Ps. 19:1).

"By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible" (Heb. 11:2).

The body is a masterpiece of exquisite design. Beautifully "engineered," it is governed by several hundred systems of control - each interacting with and affecting the other. His brain has 10 billion nerve cells to record what he sees and hears. His skin has more than 2 million tiny sweat glands - about 3000 per square inch - all part of the intricate system which keeps his body at an even temperature. A "pump" in his chest makes his blood travel 168 million miles a day - equivalent of 6720 times around the world! The lining of his stomach contains 35 million glands secreting juices which aid the process of digestion. And these are but a few of the involved processes and chemical wonders which operate to sustain his life.

A young student had been impressed with the fact that most new products have some "bugs" that must be ironed out before they can operate efficiently. As he stood gazing at a chart showing the organs, nerves, arteries, and glands in the human body, he suddenly exclaimed, "Just think, the first time God put it together, it worked!"

Dr. Emile Borel, one of the world's experts on mathematical probability, formulated a basic law of probability. This law states that the occurrence of any event where the chances are beyond one in one followed by 50 zeros is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many conceivable opportunities could exist for the event to take place (PROBABILITIES AND LIFE, New York, 1962, ch. 1 and 3).

The chance of life evolving on one planet, i.e., the earth, has been calculated by Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University to be one chance in one followed by two billion zeros (COMMUNICATIONS WITH EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE, MIT Press, 1973, p. 46). A number this large would fill more than 6,000 books of 300 pages each just to write it out. A number this size is so infinitely beyond one followed by 50 zeros (Borel's upper limit for an event to occur), it is simply mind boggling. There is, therefore, absolutely no chance that life could have evolved on earth.

The chance of life evolving in the universe, on the one followed by 20 zeros of estimated planets that could be hospitable for life, has been calculated by Dr. Frank Salisbury to be one chance in one followed by 415 zeros (NATURE, October 1969). This is still infinitely beyond the one followed by 50 zeros of Borel's upper limit for an event to occur, and so life could not evolve in the universe (We do not know that there are any hospitable planets beyond our solar system, so this is conjecture and supposition at the very best). Even if we paced the entire universe with mythical hospitable planets, so that no space was left between them, the chance of life evolving on one of these planets would still be only one in one followed by 377 zeros. This shows that life simply could not start at any time or any place by chance.

We know, of course, that life is here on the earth, and since it could not have evolved, it must have been created. Life could not have evolved elsewhere in the universe, so if there is corporeal life elsewhere in the universe it must have been created. However, the Bible does not give any indication that there is created life elsewhere than on earth, other than angelic or demonic, or the present or future resurrected life of human beings, and of course, our great God and His beloved Son and the blessed Holy Spirit. All of these most probably are in a completely dimension from that which we know.

As we have shown, the possibility of life originating and developing by chance anywhere is absolutely nil. Yet, otherwise intelligent men and women would rather believe such an impossibility than to believe in the obvious alternative of creation by a Supreme Being. The explanation for this must be spiritual-- "the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not" (2 Cor. 4:4).

--the Central church of Christ COUNSELOR, Harrisonburg, VA

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a

long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and

tell God that they were done with Him.

The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no

longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many

miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist

was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a

'man-making' contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"

God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old

days with Adam." The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and

grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"

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aplication

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The story makes a good point. True, scientists are not able to create

life, but in all their attempts to duplicate God's feat, they overlook one

very important point -- God started with nothing! Everything around us was

not just rearranged, it was "created". God spoke, and the world came into

existence.

Every time we think we can accomplish great things (maybe even as great as

God), we need to remind ourselves of that truth. Take nothing and try to

make something out of it, and you will realize just how far short of God's

omnipotence you fall.

"By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so

that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible."

(Hebrews 11:3).

Have a great day!

Alan Smith

Boone church of Christ

Boone, NC

The elderly Rabbi was flying first class where he would be more comfortable, and his grandson was flying coach. The Rabbi was sitting next to a scientist, and they shared some pleasantries. The scientist noticed that the grandson kept coming up to check on his grandfather, make sure he was comfortable, get some food or drink for him, help him up, etc.

It was nonstop help and attention, and he commented on it to the Rabbi, saying, “It’s simply wonderful. Look how beautifully your grandson treats you! My children and grandchildren would never travel anywhere together with me, and certainly would never put so much effort into helping me out. How do you do it?”

The Rabbi replied, “It’s really quite simple. You believe in evolution. By that theory, your children are one step further from the apes than you are. I believe that man was created in the image of God. By that theory, I am one step closer to God than my children are. So of course our grandchildren treat us correspondingly.

BETTER WORK LATELY

A little boy asked his Dad: "Dad, did God make you?"

"Yes, of course," said his Dad.

"And did He make me?" asked the little boy.

"Yes, He did," said his Dad.

"Well," said the boy, "He's being doing better work lately, eh?"

Most people would picture Charles Darwin as a self-assured, convinced evolutionist. But there is a little-known side of his life that highlights the failure of non-Christian worldviews to provide meaning and purpose for human existence. Charles and his wife, Emma, had a little girl who was the joy of their lives-a devotion many parents identify with. In her fifth year, however, little Annie Darwin fell ill. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, she died. The Darwins' grief was profound and deep. Charles was inconsolable. Twenty-five years later he wrote that the thought of her still brought tears to his eyes. Those of us who are parents can empathize with the Darwins' anguish. Charles Darwin grieved, and well he should have. But the fact that he mourned the loss of his daughter exposes a fundamental contradiction in the world view he spent a lifetime propagating. Darwin's evolutionary world view purports to explain the existence of the universe-a universe in which there is no room for concepts like "meaning" or "purpose." The human species "happens" to possess certain biological traits that enable us to survive. And if any part of humanity should perish through some natural or man-made calamity, it will simply be added to a long list of "nonsurvivors." Like, for instance, little Annie Darwin. One can only imagine the dark doubts that must have clouded Darwin's mind about the meaninglessness of his own life's view. Eastern religions fare no better when it comes to providing meaning for human existence. In his book The Dust of Death, Christian thinker Os Guinness relates the story of the nineteenth-century Japanese poet Issa, who also suffered a great tragedy. His wife and all five of their children died before he was 30. Issa went to a Zen master for solace, only to be told that he had no business grieving. Why? Because Zen Buddhism teaches that the world is an illusion, like the morning dew that evaporates with the rising sun. There is no enduring meaning for the existence of his wife and family. Issa returned home and penned the following poignant words: The world is dew- the world is dew- and yet, and yet Issa the believer in Zen Buddhism confessed that the world is an illusion, just as Charles Darwin believed it was the product of evolution. But, faced with their inconsolable losses, both grieving fathers could only cry out, as Os Guinness puts it, "into the unfulfilled darkness." In stark contrast to such pessimism, the Bible teaches that every person is indelibly stamped with the imago Dei-the image of God. We can rejoice with the psalmist, who declares: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful." While Christians surely mourn the loss of their loved ones, the apostle Paul taught that we "do not grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope." That's because we recognize a spiritual purpose and a future that transcends our mortal lives. And we can rest assured that every precious life-like Annie Darwin-is endowed by our loving God with infinite value.

(c) 1998 Prison Fellowship Ministries Copyright notice: We encourage liberal distribution of these transcripts through email and print. Please do not post on the world wide web or use this content for profit.

The late Gerald Kennedy once told about an old lady who heard the

implications of evolution explained to her and said, "God grant that

it may not be true, but if it is true, God grant that not many people

will hear about it."

Hoover Rupert, {Why Didn't Noah Swat Both Mosquitoes? }(Lima,

OH: CSS Publishing Co. Inc., 1994), p. 85

NEW CHALLENGES TO EVOLUTIONARY DOGMA

"There is sound, geological evidence that suggests the earth is no older

than 10,000 years, according to a feature article in the June 16 issue of

US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT. John Baumgardner, acclaimed by the magazine as

'... the world's pre-eminent expert in the design of computer models for

geophysical convection,' has designed a computer program named Terra that

demonstrates the processes by which the Earth creates volcanoes,

earthquakes, and the movement of the continental plates. However,

Baumgardner, described in the magazine as a '... fundamentalist Christian

who believes, in accordance with the Bible, that the earth was created by

God less than 10,000 years ago,' designed Terra expressly to prove that the

story of Noah and the flood actually happened as the Bible described it.

Now, a tool that is used by geophysicists around the world tangibly

demonstrates the geological validity of a global flood. Baumgardner, who

received a master's from Princeton in electrical engineering and a Ph.D.

from UCLA in geophysics, suggest that when God decided to bring judgment

upon the earth, He caused an enormous surge of magma to rush from the

earth's core at an incredible velocity. The material ballooned close to

the Earth's surface, displacing a tidal wave of seawater over the

continents. After 150 days, the bubble retreated with equal speed into the

Earth, and as the continents emerged, they sent the runoff back to the

oceans at around 100 miles per hour. U.S. NEWS pointed out that a very

fast river with a substantial erosion capacity runs at only ten miles per

hour. Baumgardner suggests that a 100 mile per hour runoff would have been

sufficient to create the Grand Canyon and other massive geological features

and to deposit the various sedimentary layers in about one week. Terra,

when fed the proper data, viably demonstrates the various elements of the

geological process that would produce such an event. Baumgardner

challenges opposing theories in several areas. Citing the inconsistencies

in popular dating techniques, he says there is legitimate reason to

question radiometric measurements. He also points to the differences in

erosion and sedimentary patterns between various rivers, and to the

discrepancies in various fossil records, as a further evidence of a global

flood. Secular geologists discount his theory, but they don't discount his

qualifications, or his contributions to the study of geological

transformation. Brad Hager, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology

geophysicist, disagrees with Baumgardner's conclusions on a global flood,

but agrees that Terra is one of the most useful and powerful tools in

existence. 'Baumgardner is seen as one of the world leaders in numerical

models of mantle convection,' he said. Gerald Schubert of the University

of California-Los Angeles Department of Earth and Space Sciences said, 'As

far as the code goes, Baumgardner is a world-class scientist.' And for

this world class scientist, faith and science do not contradict, but rather

embrace each other." (SBC Life, Jan. 98)

What motivates people when they makes choices? Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan believes the majority of our daily decisions are issued in the service of gaining or maintaining a feeling of virtue. In this Kagan is refuting the "Pleasure Principle," the idea that when a person consciously selects one act over another, he does so to attain a conscious feeling of pleasure. Those who adhere to this concept believe that sensory pleasure is the basis of all morality, that is, a child experiences a reduction in fear and thus an increasing sensory pleasure when he conforms to adult demands. Over time, obeying family and community standards becomes a habit, a moral.

Darwin believed that CONSCIENCE or ETHICS in humans was a product of the social behavior of animals. But WHICH ethics of humans? Kagan writes:

"Anyone with a modest knowledge of animal behavior and only minimal inferential skill can find examples of animal behavior to support almost any ethical message desired. Those who wish to sanctify the institution of marriage can point to the pair bonding of gibbons; those who think infidelity is more natural can point to chimpanzees. If you believe that people are naturally sociable, point to baboons; if you think they are solitary, point to orangutans. If you believe sex should replace fighting, point to rhesus monkeys; if you prefer the father to be the primary caretaker, point to titi monkeys. If you believe that surrogate care is closer to nature, point to lionesses. If you are certain that men should dominate harems of beautiful women, point to elephant seals; if you believe women should be in positions of dominance, point to elephants. Nature has enough diversity to fit almost any ethical taste."

Kagan says that it is an error to assume that any human ethic is a clear product of some particular class of animal behavior.

When you ask some people what they believe, they'll say they're "agnostic." What they usually mean is that they don't have enough evidence to decide whether or not God really exists.

Agnostics in America today are a lot like Switzerland during World War II -- while the battle rages all around them, they try to maintain neutrality.

It's interesting to note the origins of the word "agnostic." It was coined in the year 1870 by Thomas Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog." Huxley was an atheist at a time when it was socially unacceptable, so he found a more comfortable word to describe himself: agnostic. In Huxley's sense, agnosticism means there's no credible scientific evidence for the existence of God. So, if God does exist, he's irrelevant.

Huxley championed Darwin's evolutionary theory tirelessly -- not because he felt Darwin was infallible but because Darwin's theory helped Huxley ignore the Creator. Privately he admitted that the fossil record seems to suggest that sharks have always been sharks and crocodiles always crocodiles, but Huxley believed it was "more profitable to go wrong than to stand still."

He hid his doubts from laymen, making bold statements like, "The whole evidence is in favour of evolution, and there is none against it."

To Christians who were alarmed by Darwin's theory, Huxley was reassuring. During a lecture to the Young Men's Christian Association, Huxley declared that the sciences "are neither Christian, nor unchristian, but are extra-Christian." And it's precisely this contention that holds many Christians hostage today.

To suggest that science is somehow outside the scope of Christianity is to suggest that Christianity is not a total worldview. Huxley's implication is clear: Christianity deals with the unseen and with faith, while science deals with cold, hard facts and reality. Don't worry if Darwin's description of reality seems to contradict your faith -- just place each one in its own compartment and let them be.

When Christians accepted this point of view, they retreated. Suddenly, Christians couldn't take faith into the laboratory or, by logical extension, into other "secular" places like the courtroom, the classroom, or the media.

Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview. We've lost our voice in the public square because we forgot, as Psalm 24:1 says, "the earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." God is sovereign over all of reality!

Once a Christian understands this, he's prepared to enter the debate. And students who view their faith as a worldview can stand firm on college campuses, even in the face of atheism.

Darwin's Bulldog caused problems, alright, but he also clarified the debate. Because nothing is "extra-Christian." And remembering this helps us understand the sovereignty of God, and the all-embracing scope of our Christian worldview.

For further reading:

Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: The Devil's Disciple. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.

Huxley, Thomas H. "Lectures on Evolution." In "Agnosticism and Christianity" and Other Essays. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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