Irreducible Interdependence

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Acetylcholine and muscular contraction

Without doubt, one of the leading evidences of which we are created and that we do not come from lengths and improbable, even impossible evolutionary processes is the amazing complexity of the human body. As all we know, unfortunately still there are scientific colleagues who create in fantasies and myths like the gradual evolution of the species, as well as in the operation and almost fortuitous assembly of all components and parts.

Today we will be reviewing some of the events that are related to the muscular contraction, and as the necessary factors for the correct operation of our machinery are several, which is an undeniable evidence of being the work of a Creator and not of fairy tales and speculative processes. Between these events we can find:

1. Action potential of motoneuron
2. Depolarization of motoneuron terminal
3. Ca 2+ enters motoneuron terminal
4. Acetylcholine (ACh)released into synaptic cleft
5. Ach diffuses across synapse
6. Acetylcholine binds to receptors
7. Depolarization of muscle end plate
8. Action potential in muscle
9. Liberation of Ca 2+
10. Increased intracellular Ca 2+
11. Actin and Myosin binds
12. Production of muscular tension because of filaments
13. Cross bridges pivot
14. Muscular relaxation

So, after all to drive of our muscles it does not seem as simple as before we believed no? In short, the totality of our capacities and our actions, physical, as mental and as much spiritual (related to God), is a fundamental part of the complete development of our being, and is ours to have to make a correct and suitable use of our faculties, like good administrators of our bodies.

“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.” (1 Corinthians 6:19,20)

“For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Psalm 139:13,14)

Why are Most Scientists Atheists If There is Evidence for Belief in God?

Introduction

In the early 20th century, studies showed that scientists were less likely than the general population to believe in the existence of God.¹ A survey conducted in 1969 showed that 35% of scientists did not believe that God existed.² In contrast, recent surveys on religious belief have shown that 90 percent of Americans believe in God and 40 percent attend a place of worship weekly.³ Is a lack of belief in God among scientists due to their higher intelligence and knowledge? A recent study was designed to look at differences in belief among scientists (and other academics) and what factors influence those beliefs.

Religion and Academics

Elaine Ecklund, and Christopher Scheitle questioned 2,198 faculty members in the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, and psychology from 21 elite U.S. research universities.⁴ Overall, 75% of professors contacted completed the survey. Among the different disciplines, disbelief in the existence of God was not correlated with any particular area of expertise:

Disbelief in God by Academics⁴

Discipline	%
Physics	40.8
Chemistry	26.6
Biology	41.0
Overall	37.6
Sociology	34.0
Economics	31.7
Political Science	27.0
Psychology	33.0
Overall	31.2

In fact, disbelief in the existence of God was nearly as high in the natural science as in the "soft" sciences. Earlier studies had shown a similar trend, with those in the social sciences regularly attended religious services less often than those in the life sciences.² So, it doesn't seem that study in any particular field is associated with a disbelief in God's existence. However, several factors unrelated to areas of expertise and training did correlate with belief in God. It was found those scientists who were immigrants (where belief in God is lower) disbelieved in God to a greater degree than those who were born and raised in the U.S. In addition, the study found that scientists come disproportionately from non-religious or religiously liberal backgrounds compared to the general population, suggesting that at least some part of the difference in religiosity between scientists and the general population probably due to religious upbringing rather than scientific training or institutional pressure to be irreligious. Most interesting was the correlation between marital status and number of children on religiosity. Those who were married (especially with children) attended religious services more often. Those who were cohabiting were more likely than married scientists to believe "There is very little truth in any religion." This could be a reflection of wishful thinking!

Another reason why social scientists are atheists comes from the public perception of the social science profession.⁵ Accordingly, children of liberals, atheists, Jews, and secularists perceive social sciences as more important issues compared with children from religious homes. Therefore, these professions have been abandoned by those brought up with religious backgrounds, leaving mostly secularists and atheists to fill those positions.⁵

Conclusion

It is true that scientists believe less in the existence of God than the general population of the United States. However, the recent study by Ecklund, and Scheitle reveals that the most important factors in belief were related to upbringing and family status, and not area of expertise. The fact that social scientists as well as those in the natural sciences expressed nearly the same disbelief in God suggests that rejection of God's existence is not a result of knowledge in any particular area of expertise. It is likely that those who have rejected religious morality (i.e., those who were cohabiting) wanted to justify their behavior by saying that there was very little truth in any religion. The conclusion by the authors:

"Instead, particular demographic factors, such as age, marital status, and presence of children in the household, seem to explain some of the religious differences among academic scientists... Most important, respondents who were raised in religious homes, especially those raised in homes where religion was important are most likely to be religious at present."

By R.D.

References:

1. Leuba, J. 1916. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological, and Statistical Study. Boston: Sherman, French, and Company.
   Leuba, J. 1934. Religious Beliefs of American Scientists. Harper's Magazine 169:291–300.
2. Trow, Martin and Associates. 1969. Carnegie Commission National Survey of Higher Education: Faculty Study [computer file]. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, Survey Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].
3. Gallup, G. Jr. and D. M. Lindsay. 1999. Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Religious Beliefs. Harrisburg, PA, Morehouse Publishing.
   Hadaway, C. K., P. L. Marler, and M. Chaves. 1993. What the Polls Don't Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance. American Sociological Review 58: 741–52.
4. Ecklund, E. H. and C. P. Scheitle. 2007. Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics. Social Problems 54: 289–307.
5. Fosse, E. 2010. Why are professor liberal.

Source

The moral implications of Darwinism

Human life seems to have lost its dignity and value. Ask a Muslim in Serbia, a Ba’hai in Iran, or a Christian in the Sudan. Observe Jack Kevorkian assisting suicide and then being embraced as a serious and even valuable contributor to our moral conversation. The question looms: What is important about being human?

Time was when we could blame barbarity on the pagan, the uncivilized, or the fanatics. Names spring to mind: Hitler, Ghengis Khan, or Pol Pot. But now we’re not talking about the past. We are at the edge of the 21st century. Knowledge has been increased: astronauts crisscross space; satellites circle the globe bringing information from everywhere to everywhere in a few moments; galaxies beyond our own have become objects of study; and genes within our bodies are searched and researched for a clue to the mysteries of human life. And yet there remains the question—simple, yet most profound: What is so special about being human?

For many philosophers, including some who call themselves Christians, the answer is increasingly, nothing much. With all of today’s scientific knowledge and technical achievements, and with the historical record in full view, human beings are still tempted to violate basic human rights.

After World War II, the Nuremberg Trials bared the evil that lurks in the human heart, and showed how even the most cultured and civilized society can crawl into the moral sewers, virtually erasing the spiritual meaning of “humanity.” The lessons of that war drove the United Nations to pass, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document affirmed the dignity and equality of every human being, requiring civilized societies to protect the weak from the strong. The declaration still stands. Why, then, are we still talking about human rights and dignity?

The myth of origins

The answer may be found in what is embraced as the scientific explanation of the origin of life and its diversity, a story that leaves out the biblical God. This perspective is clearly expounded in James Rachels’ 1990 book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press). The author reasons from a foundation of naturalistic evolution. His conclusion, robustly supported, is that Darwinism completely undermines the doctrine of human dignity. Human beings occupy no special place in the moral order; we are simply another form of animal.

This view and concern about it are not new. In 1859, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce warned that Darwinism was “absolutely incompatible” with Christianity’s “whole representation of the moral and spiritual condition of man.” The Southern Baptist Convention of the United States echoed Wilberforce in 1987. But there is no unanimity among Christians. A century ago Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned preacher, suggested that the evolutionary perspective added to the glory of God’s creation. Pope John Paul II is willing to accept the evolutionary process as God’s means of creating the human body (although not the “spirit,” which he insists is God’s immediate creation).

Even scientists are divided on this issue. Some (such as Steven Jay Gould) say tha Darwinism and religion are not incompatible, that one can be both a theist and a Darwinist; while others (William Provine) assert that Darwinism makes all supernatural religion not just superfluous, but untenable.

Rachels argues (“Must a Darwinian Be Skeptical?”) that teleology (direction and purpose) in nature is irrevocably destroyed by Darwinism. Without teleology, religion must “retreat to something like deism,…no longer…support[ing] the doctrine of human dignity” (pp. 127, 128). This argument is a powerful one, and must be refuted if a religious Darwinist is to salvage the biblical teaching that humans are created in God’s image and have a special place in the divine order. As Rachels reminds us, “The ‘image of God’ thesis does not go along with just any theistic view. It requires a theism that sees God as actively designing man and the world as a home for man.”

In “How Different Are Humans From Animals?” Rachels concludes that Darwinism destroys any foundation for a morally significant difference between humans and animals. If humans descended from primitive ape-like creatures by natural selection, they may be physically different from non-human animals, but cannot be essentially so. Certainly not different in any way that gives every human more rights than any animal. In Rachels’ words, “one cannot reasonably make distinctions in morals where none exist in fact.” He calls his doctrine “moral individualism,” and it rejects “the traditional doctrine of human dignity” along with the idea that human life has any inherent worth that non-human life lacks.

Moral individualism

In “Morality Without Humans Being Special,” Rachels deals first with human equality, and then rejects it! Humans are entitled “to be treated as equals” only if there are no “relevant differences” between them. Rachels, lacking belief in sin and its power (and ignoring history), expects that “relevant differences” will be used in distinguishing individuals only, and not genders, races, religions, etc. Accepting Darwinian concepts extends the analysis to non-human animals as well, yielding no automatic superiority of human claims over those of rabbits, pigs, or whales. Under “moral individualism,” when faced with using a human or a chimpanzee for a lethal medical experiment, we can no longer decide the question by noting that the chimp is not human. “We would have to ask what justifies using this particular chimp, and not that particular human, and the answer would have to be in terms of their individual characteristics, not simply their group memberships” (p. 174).

Given the crucial role of “relevant differences” in this ethic, one looks for some formal definition of the term. Rachels provides none. Instead we get “something of how the concept works” in an example about testing cosmetics on the eyes of rabbits, and in a vague hypothetical: “If it is thought permissible to treat A, but not B, in a certain way, we first ask why B may not be treated in that way.…If A and B differ only in ways that do not figure in the explanation of why it is wrong to treat B in the specified manner, then the differences are irrelevant” (p. 181). This is no bulwark against the selfishness and evil we see in ourselves and in our fellow human beings.

Experience demonstrates that any soft, relativistic ethical standard will be twisted into whatever shape is needed to allow us to do whatever we want to our fellow human beings. Examples abound: chattel slavery; racial and religious persecution; one million annual U.S. abortions; the epidemic of abandoned, abused, and murdered babies; laws permitting assisted suicide and euthanasia; ethnic cleansing; etc. We must have a “bright line” standard of our obligations to every member of the human family. This is the difference between morality and amorality. There is no middle ground.

Darwinism and amorality

The connection between Darwinism and amorality is now explicit. In the New York Times Magazine of November 3, 1997, Stephen Pinker wrote about “evolutionary psychology.” He tells us that “moral philosophers have concluded that. . .our immature neonates don’t possess [the right to life] any more than mice do,” and alleges that “neonaticide may be a product of maternal wiring” since it has “been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history.” He thus ties infanticide directly to our evolutionary ancestry and the Darwinian struggle for survival, which sometimes demands that mothers kill their young in order to further their own reproductive future. In articles such as this, the formerly unthinkable is being presented as reasonable and acceptable. We are being “softened up” for a change in community morality—one holding that some humans deserve respect and protection, but that others do not, and can be killed with impunity. You can see this process at work today: in academic discourse, and increasingly in the popular media.

Just 50 years ago, every nation voting at the United Nations flatly rejected this kind of reasoning. The emerging ethic in the West is a direct repudiation of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In its preamble, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously (with eight abstentions) declared that “the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world” is “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” In the Articles themselves, we find that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” (Article 1); “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind” (Article 2); “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person” (Article 3); “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law” (Article 6); and “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law” (Article 7). This is not equivocal language; there can be no confusion about what was meant. Accepting what Rachels and Pinker are offering means turning our back on the settled wisdom of the past.

Maturity (and our safety) demands honest reflection. A system of ethics based on moral relativism will always end up with the strong in charge and the weak beneath their heel. The Darwinist worldview, followed to its logical conclusion, leads us nowhere else, and this should be sufficient for us to reject it. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find the secular and wholly naturalistic Darwinists espousing such a cold-blooded and utilitarian philosophy, but what is truly astounding is the number of ethicists, philosophers, and others who identify themselves as Christians and yet urge us to adopt an ethic that leads us down the Darwinist path.

The argument for moral relativism is subtle and appealing on the surface. Often it begins by reaffirming the biological (and biblical) truth that we are human from the moment of conception. But, then we are told that there is a difference between a “human” and a “person,” and that “personhood” is the category a human must attain in order to have a right to life. The qualifications for “personhood” vary—but generally they include the possession of self-consciousness as a necessary condition to be a “person” with full moral status (for instance, to have a right not to be killed). Of course, no human being is born with self-consciousness, and many of us may lose our self-consciousness, temporarily or permanently, due to injury, illness or age. Here, then, is the convergence of Darwin’s philosophy and that of some of today’s Christian thinkers, “moral individualism” meeting “proximate personhood.”

Moral individualism (or the “personhood” ethic) and the U.N. Charter’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights are colliding moral galaxies; they are totally incompatible. The galaxy represented by the U.N. Declaration is founded on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—a tradition going back for millennia. The galaxy of “moral individualism” purports to be founded on human reason, and is expressed in statements that begin with, “I argue…,” “I see…,” or “I contend….” “Moral individualism” and its clones propose that both humans and non-human animals are to be judged by the same relativistic criteria. In this moral universe, human beings have lost their inalienable right to life, something that Christians have always granted because “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27, NIV).

Pushed off the pedestal

Pushing humans off the pedestal of dignity on which the Bible has placed them has implications for everyone, not just for the comatose patients, the handicapped newborns, the old and feeble, and others not like “us.” Under the ethic of “moral individualism,” there is no principle preventing one race from classifying other races as less than fully human and enslaving or killing them. There is no principle calling to account those who seek to demote others to the status of “non-persons.” There is no principle condemning parents who use pre-natal testing to determine the sex of the unborn and then abort the female. There is no principle to stop a society from deciding that full human status isn’t reached until age 3 or 4, and establishing centers for the elimination of any unwanted “non-persons.” There is no principle to prevent the cloning of a (very rich) individual, or the use of the human being that results as a stock of spare parts. We may recoil at these suggestions, but the hard truth is that when we abandon the biblical imperative that innocent human life is sacred and must not be touched, we are all at risk, because when the strong take over, “might makes right.”

When Christian ethicists reach the same conclusions as Darwinists about our obligations to our fellow humans, it’s time to do some careful thinking. God created us, and He knows the evil of which we are capable. For this reason, He instructed us to treat all humans as worthy of equal dignity and respect. Neither “moral individualism” nor the ethic of “personhood” is compatible with the traditional interpretation of Scripture, and this should be reason enough for people of faith to reject them outright. But, in addition, for those whose faith is weak, history offers many demonstrations that before every slaughter there has been a division of the human population into “our group” (protected) and “those other guys” (not protected) that makes it permissible to do the killing. Most of the current relativistic ethicists have no such thing in mind. They are simply trying to create a non-dogmatic, rationalistic base for behavior they deem proper. This effort has been tried before, invariably with tragic consequences.

I believe that James Rachels succeeds in his argument: One cannot be a Darwinist and logically hold the traditional view that human life is sacred. The more immediate question for the “people of the Book” seems even more relevant: Can one hold that human life is not sacred and still be a Christian?

by Earl Aagaard (Ph.D., Colorado State University)

Biological Computers

A collection of articles on DNA computers and cell signaling provides some real insight into how the theory of evolution impedes scientific progress.

From Science Against Evolution

Yes, we know Scientific American is just a science tabloid that presents pseudo-science in a sensational manner. We subscribe simply to monitor the outrageous claims they make about the theory of evolution from time to time. That’s why we were shocked that they printed an excellent, informative story about a simple computer that plays tic-tac-toe using synthetic DNA as logic elements. It sounds bizarre, but this isn’t the first time that something like this has been done.

Researchers reported logic gates based on synthetic molecules as long ago as the early 1990s. 1

You might wonder why one would bother to build a computer using DNA. After all, modern silicon-based electronic computers are tiny, powerful, and can do almost everything. Why try to compete with them?

We did not aim, however, to compete with silicon-based computers. Instead, because Stojanovic had just finished a brief stint with a pharmaceutical company, we settled on developing a system that could be useful for making “smart” therapeutic agents, such as drugs that could sense and analyze conditions in a patient and respond appropriately with no human intervention after being injected. For example, one such smart agent might monitor glucose levels in the blood and decide when to release insulin. Thus, our molecular logic gates had to be biocompatible. 2 Using this new science, we have constructed molecular versions of logic gates that can operate in water solution. Our goal in building these DNA-based computing modules is to develop nanoscopic machines that could exist in living organisms, sensing conditions and making decisions based on what they sense, then responding with actions such as releasing medicine or killing specific cells. 3

Baby Steps First

Their goal is to create chemically-based systems that act like computers in the human body. That’s a pretty ambitious project. One has to work up to that ability step-by-step. So, they started with the same simple program that digital computer programmers wrote more than 50 years ago.

The first known video game, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses, 1952) for the EDSAC computer played perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent. 4 We have demonstrated some of the abilities of our DNA gates by building automata that play perfect games of tic-tac-toe. The human player adds solutions of DNA strands to signal his or her moves, and the DNA computer responds by lighting up the square it has chosen to take next. Any mistake by the human player will be punished with defeat. Although game playing is a long way from our ultimate goals, it is a good test of how readily the elementary molecular computing modules can be combined in plug-and-play fashion to perform complicated functions, just as the silicon-based gates in modern computers can be wired up to form the complex logic circuits that carry out everything that computers do for us today. 5

Since there are only 76 ways to put X’s and O’s on a 3x3 matrix, it is relatively simple to enumerate all the possibilities, and use a lookup table to see where to move next, and that’s basically what they did. The second version of their tic-tac-toe computer is called MAYA-II.

The sheer size of this automaton made building and testing MAYA-II an enormous challenge. One of us (Macdonald) led the project and trained several high school students to test automata, mostly during summers and on Saturdays. The students checked all 76 games multiple times. They had to make changes in MAYA-II’s design to deal with several problems (and then recheck all the games after each tweak). Our chief concern going into the project was that some sequences might bind in unintended places. Our computer-modeling tools were not advanced enough to be able to predict such difficulties. In fact, spurious binding was relatively rare. Instead the more serious problem turned out to be individual gates cleaving their substrates at different rates. We (or, rather, our students) had to adjust concentrations and structures to correct for this variability. We also quickly discovered that some gates acted differently within a mixture than they did on their own, necessitating other redesigns. Finally, after three consecutive summers and many Saturdays, through some changes of inputs and many small adjustments of gate sequences and concentrations, our team had a system in which we could clearly distinguish active and inactive gates in all wells, for all the games, reproducibly. 6

So, it is possible to create biologic systems which respond intelligently to external stimuli; but it took more than three summers of intelligent design! Imagine how long it would have taken using random trial and error.

Cell Signaling

Ironically, at the same time as this Scientific American article came out, Science magazine published a special report on cell signaling. It contained several interesting observations about the biologic computations that occur in living things.

Mammalian species use over 3000 signaling proteins and over 15 second messengers to build hundreds of cell-specific signaling systems. Many of the signaling components have multiple upstream regulators and downstream targets, creating a web of connectivity within and between signaling pathways. The presence of multiple feedback loops in these systems poses a challenge to understanding how receptor inputs control cellular behavior. 7 Signaling proteins operate in complex networks in cells. The networks are wired into long serial chains, and these chains are arrayed in numerous parallel pathways that diverge from common inputs, converge onto intermediate nodes, and diverge again to many different effectors. Signals from the external world that are detected at the cell membrane are transmitted in the plane of the membrane and through the cytoplasm, with feedback and feed-forward loops onto organelles and the nucleus. The upshot of this complex connectivity is the control of outputs as diverse as membrane transport, cell metabolism, protein translation, cell shape and migration, gene transcription, cell cycle, and cell survival. The shear number of signaling proteins and complexity of their connectivity is staggering, and the depictions in textbooks and on glossy posters from chemical companies are as dense and as difficult to decipher as spirographs. 8

It makes the MAYA-II look rather pathetic by comparison. Animal bodies already have many chemical computers that do the kinds of things the authors of the Scientific American article want to do. The specific chemical computer the authors of the Scientific American article want to simulate is called, “the pancreas.” But there are many other, less well known biological computers that control “outputs as diverse as membrane transport, cell metabolism, protein translation, cell shape and migration, gene transcription, cell cycle, and cell survival. The shear number of signaling proteins and complexity of their connectivity is staggering.”

Your Point of View Matters

Let’s look at this from an evolutionary perspective, and then from an intelligent design perspective.

If one takes an evolutionary approach, believing that these 3000 signaling proteins arose by chance, then the focus of study will be an analysis of the probabilities necessary to make this happen. Scientists will determine the number of independent variables, the number of ways they can be combined, speculate on the rate at which they can combine, and compute the average time it would take for the right combination to occur. This will necessarily lead to the conclusion that evolution must have been going on for a very, very long time for all these lucky breaks to happen.

Here’s how an evolutionary bias has affected one scientist in particular.

Given a signaling center, one can easily imagine how it can organize the pattern of cell differentiation in its neighborhood. But how does the signaling center itself arise? If we start with a more or less homogeneous field of cells, what internal mechanism can make one region different from another and break the symmetry? 9

Subconsciously, he must realize that this could not have happened by chance. But since there is no other explanation than chance, he imagines that cell differentiation takes place in a neighborhood. The mechanism by which cell differentiation takes place isn’t completely understood. (If it were, there would be no need for stem cell research.) But even so, he imagines that there must be some natural process that arose by chance because it happens. But even given his willingness to imagine the unimaginable, he still can’t imagine how the signaling center arose by chance in the first place. So, he is likely to focus his research by starting with a “more or less homogeneous field of cells” and look for some random process that “can make one region different from another and break the symmetry.”

But, if one believes that life is the product of intelligent design, then the scientist is going to ignore chance and focus on the underlying design philosophy of life. That is, the scientist will seek to understand what processes are taking place, and then seek to understand why those processes exist, and what their purpose is. He isn’t going to waste time trying to find some way that these processes might have arisen by chance.

The theory of evolution hinders scientific progress because it ignores the possibility that life operates as it does for a reason. Sometimes evolutionists claim that creationists cop out by saying, “God did it.” But, in fact, it is the evolutionists who cop out by saying, “There’s no reason for it—it just happened by chance.” If you don’t think there is a reason, then you won’t look for the reason—you just give the credit to luck.

Mum’s the Word

Despite the theory of evolution, science is progressing. Scientists actually are studying cell signaling. But, to keep their sponsors happy, they don’t ever mention that signaling is a form of communication, and communication implies intelligence. There is a reason why data is sent from the sensor to the actuator. There really is a purpose to it, but they hope that never occurs to anyone else.

Scientists aren’t free to talk about purpose because of the political and philosophical implications that result from such a conversation. But it has to be in the back of their minds. It slips out every now and again, as in this summary paragraph.

Conclusions Remote and noninvasive manipulation of proteins with light provides a powerful approach for studying and reengineering signaling pathways by selectively establishing a fast and reversible remote control over specific proteins at specific locations within a cell or organism. 10

Nothing can be reengineered unless it was engineered in the first place. The signaling pathways were designed, on purpose! If they really happened by chance in the first place, then it is pointless to study them. Just try random combination after random combination and see what happens. If that’s the way they arose, then more will arise through the same technique.

The MAYA-II computer didn’t figure out how to play tic-tac-toe all by itself. It took a conscious arrangement of biologic components by intelligent designers to achieve a goal. It would be foolish to try to reverse engineer it by examining the probabilities that those components arose and were connected by chance.

Intelligent design is a valid scientific hypothesis. But since it is incompatible with the failing theory of evolution, some people feel it must be suppressed.

Einstein and Intelligent Design

In the past few years numerous scientists, scientific journals, and popular authors have published a slew of articles and books ripping the concept of Intelligent Design. While not specifically denying the theory of evolution, the theory of Intelligent Design postulates that the incomprehensible vastness and complexity of the Cosmos are the result of design on the part of an inconceivably intelligent being.

Many scientists dismiss any concept of an intelligent designer as unscientific, and claim that any recognition of or belief in such a designer does harm to the scientific method. However, the greatest scientist who ever lived, Albert Einstein, did not share this outlook. His years of studying the universe not only led him to come up with the Theory of Relativity, but also led him to believe, in his own words, in a “spirit manifest in the laws of the universe,” in a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists” (Isaacson 2007: 44). He once wrote:

“The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence” (Ibid. 46).

In a 1930 essay entitled “What I Believe” Einstein wrote: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man” (Ibid. 47).

He also made the following statement in an essay entitled “The Religiousness of Science,” which appeared in a collection of his essays published in English under the title “The World As I See It”:

“The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an INTELLIGENCE of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire” (Updike 2007: 77 [emphasis added]).

These statements are highly significant, considering that no scientist of any worth would dismiss Einstein as superstitious or unscientific. Moreover, the above quotes can’t be dismissed as the product of a religious bias on Einstein’s part, because, except for a brief period of “deep religiousness” when he was twelve, Einstein rejected organized religion (Ibid.).

According to the April 16 2007 issue of Time magazine, in his youth Einstein “rejected at first his parents’ secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world” (Isaacson 2007: 44). The magazine further reported: “Einstein’s parents…were ‘entirely irreligious.’ They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father Hermann referred to Jewish rituals as ‘ancient superstitions,’ according to a relative” (Ibid.). As mentioned, the 12-year-old Albert briefly embraced strict Judaism, but he later wrote: “Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true” (Ibid. 46).

Einstein’s belief in an intelligent designer thus derived not from a pre-conceived religious bias, but from the phenomenal insights into the Universe that he possessed as the most brilliant scientist who ever lived. His recognition of a creator refutes the recent claims by atheists that belief in any sort of god is unscientific.

By Stephen Caesar

References:

Isaacson, W. 2007. “Einstein and Faith.” Time, 16 April.

Updike, J. 2007. “The Valiant Swabian.” The New Yorker, 2 April.

Stephen Caesar holds his master’s degree in anthropology/archaeology from Harvard.

Why Evolution is False

What Are We Talking About?

Here is Coyne’s definition of evolution:

In essence, the modern theory of evolution is easy to grasp. It can be summarized in a single (albeit slightly long) sentence: Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection. 1

Notice that he intentionally excludes the origin of life. He postulates the existence of a single kind of living thing, “perhaps a self-replicating molecule,” upon which all subsequent changes build. Because of this definition, he avoids all discussion of how a lifeless Earth produced that first living thing.

According to Coyne, evolution begins with a living thing that already contains a mechanism for obtaining energy from the environment, a mechanism for storing that energy, converting the energy to other forms, using that energy for useful purposes, the ability to grow, the ability to reproduce itself, intrinsic genetic information, and has a method for expressing that genetic information as physical features. This living thing came about by some natural process which we can’t even begin to imagine, but isn’t of any real importance to answering the question of how we came to be on this Earth.

Clearly, the origin of that first living thing is vital to the theory of evolution. Why doesn’t Coyne include the origin of life in his definition of evolution? You know the answer. He can’t begin to explain it. Defining evolution as he did gives him an excuse to not even try.

Excuses

If you are expecting a book with the title, Why Evolution is True to contain proof for the theory of evolution, you will be disappointed. What it really contains is excuses why evolutionists can’t prove evolution is true, why it is unreasonable to expect evolutionists to provide proof, and why you should believe in evolution anyway. Let the excuses begin!

Why We’ve Never Seen It

Nobody has ever observed macroevolution in the laboratory or in nature. Here is his excuse for why we have not.

Further, we shouldn’t expect to see more than small changes in one or a few features of a species—what is known as macroevolutionary change. Given the gradual pace of evolution, it’s unreasonable to expect to see selection transforming one “type” of plant or animal into another—so-called macroevolution—within a human lifetime. Though macroevolution is occurring today, we simply won’t be around long enough to see it. Remember that the issue is not whether macroevolutionary change happens—we already know from the fossil record that it does—but whether it was caused by natural selection, and whether natural selection can build complex features and organisms. [italics his] 2

There is a process known as “microevolution” that really does occur. Microevolution is the variation within a species that occurs because of loss of genetic information. But he is talking about “macroevolution,” which is the creation of a new kind of living thing resulting from genetic information that previously did not exist.

He asserts, without proof, that macroevolution is occurring today, while admitting that one can’t see it happening. That is, genetic information is supposedly arising spontaneously that will create a new kind of creature. He just knows it, even though nobody can actually see it. The alleged reason nobody can see it is because it happens so slowly.

For one thing, natural selection in the wild is often incredibly slow. The evolution of feathers, for example, probably took hundreds of thousands of years. Even if feathers were evolving today, it would simply be impossible to watch this happening in real time, much less to measure whatever type of selection was acting to make feathers larger. 3

The real reason why nobody has ever seen it is because it hasn’t happened! Genetic information doesn’t just magically appear.

He thinks he sees macroevolution in the fossil record. This is remarkable because he spends so many pages trying to explain why there are no missing links in the fossil record!

Why There Are No Missing Links

We don’t find any missing links in the fossil record but, according to Coyne, we should not expect to find any.

Taking into account all of these requirements, it’s clear that the fossil record must be incomplete. … we can estimate that we have fossil evidence of only 0.1 percent to 1 percent of all species—hardly a good sample of the history of life! [italics his] 4 What should our “missing link” with apes look like? Remember that the “missing link” is the single ancestral species that gave rise to modern humans on the one hand and chimpanzees on the other. It’s not reasonable to expect the discovery of that critical single species, for its identification would require a complete series of ancestor-descendant fossils on both the chimp and human lineages, series that we could trace back until they intersect at the ancestor. Except for a few marine microorganisms, such complete fossil sequences don’t exist. And our early human ancestors were large, relatively few in number compared to grazers like antelopes, and inhabited a small part of Africa under dry conditions not conducive to fossilization. Their fossils, like those of all apes and monkeys, are scarce. This resembles our problem with the evolution of birds from feathered reptiles, for whom transitional fossils are also rare. We can certainly trace the evolution of birds from feathered reptiles, but we’re not sure exactly which fossil species were the direct ancestors of modern birds. Given all this, we can’t expect to find the single particular species that represents the “missing link” between humans and other apes. We can hope only to find its evolutionary cousins. Remember also that this common ancestor was not a chimpanzee, and probably didn’t look like either modern chimps or humans. Nevertheless, it’s likely that the “missing link” was closer in appearance to modern chimps than to modern humans. We are the odd man out in the evolution of modern apes, who all resemble one another far more than they resemble us. 5 [italics his]

We will return to this issue of humans being so different from modern apes later; but let’s stick to the impossibility of finding missing links for the moment.

Clearly, he is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He says that complete fossils sequences don’t exist, except for a few microscopic marine organisms. Microscopic fossils are controversial because scientists don’t always agree that they even are fossils. But, let’s suppose they really are fossils. Just because they look similar doesn’t necessarily mean that they are biologically descended from one another. Even if they are descended from one another, they are all still just microorganisms which demonstrate variation—not evolution. So, actually, the alleged microscopic fossils don’t really show evolution.

Human and bird fossils allegedly provide the best (although incomplete) sequence of fossils, but even they don’t really show a clear pattern of evolution, so Coyne remains in full-blown excuse mode.

Although far from complete, the record of human evolution is one of the best confirmations we have of an evolutionary prediction, and is especially gratifying because the prediction was Darwin’s. But a few caveats. We don’t (and can’t expect to) have a continuous fossil record of human ancestry. Instead, we see a tangled bush of many different species. Most of them went extinct without leaving descendants, and only one genetic lineage threaded its way through time to become modern humans. We’re not sure yet which fossil species lie along that particular thread, and which were evolutionary dead ends. The most surprising thing we’ve learned about our history is that we’ve had many close evolutionary cousins who died out without leaving descendants. It’s even possible that as many as four humanlike species lived in Africa at the same time, and maybe in the same place. Imagine the encounters that might have taken place! Did they kill one another, or try to interbreed? 6

After saying they unable to tell how the different fossils are related, he next admits they aren’t even able to classify the fossils with any degree of certainty.

And the names of ancestral human fossils can’t be taken too seriously. Like theology, paleontology is a field in which the students far outnumber the objects of study. There are lively—and sometimes acrimonious—debates about whether a given fossil is really something new, or merely a variant of an already named species. These arguments about scientific names often mean very little. Whether a humanlike fossil is named as one species or another can turn on matters as small as half a millimeter in the diameter of a tooth, or slight differences in the shape of the thighbone. 7

It is important to remember that when paleontologists talk about “human fossils” they generally aren’t talking about complete skeletons. Often they are talking about one or two bones, a partial skull, or a few teeth. One can’t even be sure that the teeth and bones go together. This is why there are so many arguments. The models of our “human ancestors” that are displayed in museums are based on a few bones and a lot of speculation based on the presumption of evolution.

Here is his self-contradictory summary.

Looking at the whole array of bones, then what do we have? Clearly, indisputable evidence for human evolution from apelike ancestors. Granted, we can’t yet trace out a continuous lineage from an apelike early hominid to modern Homo sapiens. The fossils are scattered in time and space, a series of dots yet to be genealogically connected. And we may never have enough fossils to join them. 8

It is indisputable and yet unproven. How can you argue with “logic” like that?

For the Birds

Coyne makes general claims that the evolution of dinosaurs to birds, and the origin of flight, is well documented in the fossil record. But when he gets to specifics, he just makes excuses for why they don’t really know anything at all about the evolution of birds.

Because reptiles appear in the fossil record before birds, we can guess that the common ancestor of birds and reptiles was an ancient reptile, and would have looked like one. We now know that this common ancestor was a dinosaur. 9 [italics his]

Coyne so easily goes from “guess” to “know.” Even if the fossil record showed that a particular reptile died before a particular bird, it doesn’t prove that the bird is a biological descendant of the reptile. It is an indisputable fact that Big Brown (the horse that won the 2008 Kentucky Derby) died in 2008, and President George Washington died in 1799. Does that prove that Big Brown was a biological descendant of George Washington? Of course not!

We want you to get the full impact of Coyne’s explanation about bird evolution, so here is a long passage. As always, colored highlights are ours, but the italics for emphasis in the quote are his.

But if feathers didn’t arise as adaptations for flying, what on earth were they for? Again, we don’t know. They could have been used for ornamentation or display—perhaps to attract mates. It seems more likely, though, that they were used for insulation. Unlike modern reptiles, theropods may have been partially warm-blooded; and even if they weren’t, feathers would have helped maintain body temperature. And what feathers evolved from is even more mysterious. The best guess is that they derive from the same cells that give rise to reptilian scales, but not everyone agrees. Despite the unknowns, we can make some guesses about how natural selection fashioned modern birds. Early carnivorous dinosaurs evolved longer forelimbs and hands, which probably helped them grab and handle their prey. That kind of grabbing would favor evolution of muscles that would quickly extend the front legs and pull them inward: exactly the motion used for the downward stroke in true flight. Then followed the feathery covering, probably for insulation. Given these innovations, there are at least two ways flight could have evolved. The first is called the “trees down” scenario. There is evidence that some theropods lived at least partly in trees. Feathery forelimbs would help these reptiles glide from tree to tree, or from tree to ground, which would help them escape predators, find food more readily, or cushion their falls. A different—and more likely—scenario is called the “ground up” theory, which sees flight evolving as an outgrowth of open-armed runs and leaps that feathered dinosaurs might have made to catch their prey. Longer wings could also have evolved as running aids. The chukar partridge, a game bird studied by Kenneth Dial at the University of Montana, represents a living example of this step. These partridges almost never fly, and flap their wings mainly to help them run uphill. The flapping gives them not only extra propulsion, but also more traction against the ground. Newborn chicks can run up 45-degree slopes, and adults can ascent 105-degree slopes—overhangs more than vertical!—solely by running and flapping their wings. The obvious advantage is that uphill scrambling helps these birds escape predators. The next step in evolving flight would be very short airborne hops, like those made by turkeys and quail fleeing from danger. In either the “trees down” or “ground up” scenario, natural selection could begin to favor individuals who could fly farther instead of merely gliding, leaping, or flying for short bursts. Then would come the other innovations shared by modern birds, including hollow bones for lightness and that large breastbone. While we may speculate about the details, the existence of transitional fossils—and the evolution of birds from reptiles—is fact. 10

The only real science here is the study showing that wings can help birds run uphill. All the rest is, as Coyne admits, speculation—and therefore an undeniable fact!

We don’t have space this month to point out all the times Coyne makes bold general claims about the fossils, and then makes excuses for why the fossil data doesn’t support the general claim. We hope we have given you enough examples to prove our point, and hope that you read his book to find more examples for yourself.

Not Like Apes

Earlier in this essay we did promise, however, to examine Coyne’s statement about humans being so different from apes. This is important because evolutionists are stuck in the middle. On the one hand, they need to prove that we are so close genetically to apes that we must be biologically related to them. On the other hand, they need to explain how such a small genetic difference can produce such obvious, significant differences between men and apes.

That oft-quoted 1.5 percent difference between ourselves and chimps, then is really larger than it looks … More than 6 percent of genes found in humans simply aren’t found in any form in chimpanzees. There are over fourteen hundred novel genes expressed in humans but not in chimps. … Despite our general resemblance to our primate cousins, then, evolving a human from an apelike ancestor probably required substantial genetic change. 11 [italics his]

He is pretty close to the truth here. We’ve shown before that the allegedly small genetic difference between apes and man is a fictitious result of some artful mathematics. ¹² There really is a substantial genetic difference between apes and humans which evolutionists don’t like to admit because it weakens their argument that we share a common biological ancestor.

The Discontinuity Problem

The most basic problem with the theory of evolution is staring us right in the face, but it is so obvious that it is often overlooked.

Indeed, perhaps the most striking fact about nature is that it is discontinuous. When you look at animals and plants, each individual almost always falls into one of many discrete groups. When we look at a single wild cat, for example, we are immediately able to identify it as either a lion, a cougar, a snow leopard, and so on. All cats do not blur insensibly into one another through a series of feline intermediates. And although there is a variation among individuals within a cluster (as all lion researchers know, each lion looks different from every other), the clusters nevertheless remain discrete in “organism space.” We see clusters in all organisms that reproduce sexually. These discrete clusters are known as species. And at first sight, their existence looks like a problem for evolutionary theory. Evolution is, after all, a continuous process, so how can it produce groups of animals and plants that are discrete and discontinuous, separated from others by gaps in appearance and behavior? How these groups arise is the problem of speciation—or the origin of species. That, of course, is the title of Darwin’s most famous book, a title implying that he had a lot to say about speciation. … Yet Darwin’s magnum opus was largely silent on the “mystery of mysteries.” And what little he did say on this topic is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled. 13 [italics his]

If the theory of evolution were true, then plants and animals really would blur together without clear distinctions. It really is a problem for which Coyne has no good answer.

No Excuse for Sex

The origin of sex is one of the hardest things for evolutionists to explain. Coyne doesn’t have an answer. As usual, he just punts.

The question of the number of sexes is a messy theoretical issue that needn’t detain us, except to note that theory shows that two sexes will evolutionarily replace mating systems involving three or more sexes: two sexes is the most robust and stable strategy. The theory of why the two sexes have different numbers and sizes of gametes is equally messy. This condition presumably evolved from that in earlier sexually reproducing species in which the two sexes had gametes of equal size. 14

False Claims

On those rare occasions when Coyne isn’t attacking creationists or making excuses for why there isn’t any real proof for evolution, he makes false claims about evidence for evolution. Here are just a few.

If we know the half-life, how much of the radioisotope was there when the rock was formed (something that geologists can accurately determine), and how much remains now, it’s relatively simple to estimate the age of the rock. 15

Geologists have no possible way of knowing how much radioactive material was in the rock when it formed.

Several radio-isotopes usually occur together, so the dates can be cross-checked, and the ages invariable agree. 16

No, they don’t invariably agree, unless you throw out the ages that don’t agree! The discordant dates of the Apollo 11 moon rocks are typical. (Only 10 of 116 measurements agreed with the “accepted” age of the moon. ¹⁷)

The fossil record documents the gradual loss of toes over time, so that in modern horses only the middle one—the hoof—remains. 18

This story about horse evolution has been debunked by evolutionists themselves for years! Even the Chicago Field Museum admits it. ^{19 20} How could Coyne not know that?

Getting His Haeckels Up

Coyne even goes so far as to try to defend Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law, sort of.

Noting this principle, Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionist and Darwin’s contemporary, formulated a “biogenetic law” in 1866, famously summarized as “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This means the development of an organism simply replays its evolutionary history. But this notion is true in only a limited sense. Embryonic stages don’t look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel claimed, but like the embryonic forms of ancestors. Human fetuses, for example, never resemble adult fish or reptiles, but in certain ways they do resemble embryonic fish and reptiles. Also the recapitulation is neither strict nor inevitable: not every feature of an ancestor’s embryo appears in its descendants, nor do all stages of development unfold in a strict evolutionary order. Further, some species, like plants, have dispensed with nearly all traces of their ancestry during development. Haeckel’s law has fallen into disrepute not only because it wasn’t strictly true, but also because Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are. Yet we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Embryos still show a form of recapitulation: features that arose earlier in evolution often appear earlier in development. And this makes sense only if species have an evolutionary history. Now, we’re not absolutely sure why some species retain much of their evolutionary history during development. The “adding new stuff onto old” principle is just a hypothesis—an explanation for the facts of embryology. 21 [italics his]

In summary, embryos look similar during development, except when they don’t; and this only makes sense to evolutionists. They don’t know why this happens. They don’t know why it only happens in some species. But it explains the facts of embryology!

We don’t know why Coyne thinks Haeckel was “unjustly” accused of faking the drawings. There is no question that he did fake them. His guilt has been known for decades.

Ignore the Contradictions

The theory of evolution is full of contradictions, resulting in debates and arguments among evolutionists. Coyne says these controversies prove how strong the theory is.

Critics of evolution seize upon these controversies, arguing that they show something is wrong with the theory of evolution itself. But this is specious. There is no dissent among serious biologists about the major claims of evolutionary theory—only about the details of how evolution occurred, and about the relative roles of various evolutionary mechanisms. Far from discrediting evolution, the “controversies” are in fact the sign of a vibrant, thriving field. What moves science forward is [sic] ignorance, debate, and the testing of alternative theories with observations and experiments. A science without controversy is a science without progress. 22

This is just amazing! There are controversies precisely because the theory is wrong. He says all the people who believe in evolution really believe in evolution (they just believe other believers in evolution are wrong). The fact that there is so much ignorance and controversy about evolution proves how true it must be.

If it is true that debate about evolution promotes scientific progress, why is it that evolutionists go to court to prevent debate about evolution from being discussed in American public schools?

The more you read about evolution, written by evolutionists, the less you will believe it!

Footnotes:

¹ Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 2009, page 3
² ibid. page 133
³ ibid. page 132
⁴ ibid. page 22
⁵ ibid. pages 195-196
⁶ ibid. pages 196-197
⁷ ibid. page 197
⁸ ibid. page 207
⁹ ibid. page 34
¹⁰ ibid. pages 46-47
¹¹ ibid. pages 210-211
¹² Disclosure, January 2003, “98% Chimp”
¹³ Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 2009, page 169-170
¹⁴ ibid. page 156
¹⁵ ibid. page 23
¹⁶ ibid. page 24
¹⁷ Disclosure, June 2008, “The Age of the Moon”, http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v12i9f.htm
¹⁸ Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 2009, page 65
¹⁹ Disclosure, February 2002, “Horses and Peppered Moths”, http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v6i5f.htm
²⁰ Disclosure, October 1997, “Education Behind the Times”, http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v2i1e.htm
²¹ Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 2009, page 78
²² ibid. page 223

Source

Does Religion Always Lose?

A common debating tactic, and a successful one in the eyes of many, is to say that whenever religion and science have a dispute about some question of fact, religion always loses.1 The implication is that religion should never make any factual claims, and it is even implied that religion has no contact with reality. Supporting evidence for this claim is said to include the physics of Galileo, the geology of Hutton and Lyell, the biology of Darwin, and the psychology of Freud and others. Religion, especially
supernatural religion, has always lost in the past, and it will always lose
in the future. We should either abandon it or at least adopt a liberal version
that makes no testable claims.

There are several problems with the above scenario. First, strictly
speaking, the disputes were not really between science and religion; there
were scientists on the “religion” side, and theologians on the “science”
side. It would be more proper to make the claim that the argument was
between naturalistic and supernaturalistic philosophies.
If so, the Galileo affair does not really belong with the other examples.
The Galileo affair resulted from the reaction of the Catholic Church,
which had just been rocked by the Protestant Reformation, to the
cosmology of Copernicus. The only issues which might impact the conflict
between naturalistic and supernaturalistic philosophy were whether
incidental details in the Bible were to be treated as ontologically (really)
accurate, or merely phenomenologically (only describing appearances)
accurate, and the authority of the Catholic Church. As far as I know, it
does not even involve the authority of the Pope speaking ex cathedra, as
I know of no such pronouncement of the Pope on the Galileo affair.
It could be (and has been) argued that the other “advances” listed
above were not really advances. Certainly a creationist will not find them
very persuasive. But there is a more basic flaw in the argument. Specifically,
there are important counterexamples to the argument. Religion does
not always lose.

We need to rephrase the above statement to give it more empirical
content, because we can never be completely certain that science has a
particular theory. Even if a theory appears to be well ahead of another, it
is always possible that more evidence will tip the scales in favor of the
currently out-of-favor theory. Thus a believer in naturalism could always
claim that in a given subject where a supernaturalist explanation fits best
with the known facts, more facts will tip the scales. Just wait a while;
your supernatural explanation will turn out to be wrong or unnecessary.
Of course, a supernaturalist could argue in a similar manner. And both
statements are basically faith statements. The only evidence we can have
for them is that the same process has occurred in other areas of knowledge
in the past.

So we will rephrase the proposition more carefully. Scientific and
historical hypotheses arising from and/or compatible with supernaturalistic
philosophy sometimes have considerably more empirical support
than hypotheses arising from and/or compatible with naturalistic philosophy.
Perhaps more importantly, this support has, in some cases increased
with time.

In the domain of history, one counterexample to the “religion always
loses” argument is the reliability of the chronology of the books of Kings
and Chronicles in the Bible. For a long time, skeptics believed a “Biblical”
chronology did not exist, and that what confused pieces of chronology
did exist were totally incompatible with the “real”, secular chronology.
After Thiele,2 the chronology of Kings and Chronicles was (and is) seen
not only as coherent, but able to serve as a corrective to secular chronology.
A Biblical approach has won, or at least has shown itself to be
much better at explaining the data. Religion did not lose in this case, and
it appears unlikely to lose in the future here.

Another counterexample is the book of Daniel, where skeptics originally
confidently stated that Belshazzar never existed, that the chronology
was hopelessly confused, and that since the entire book was fiction, there
was no point in looking for the characters in history. With time, that view
of history has been forced to change. Belshazzar not only existed, but
also turned out to be the crown prince (also king in Hebrew parlance),
able only to offer the third rulership in the kingdom. The chronology of
Nebuchadnezzar taking captives from Jerusalem turns out to have been
precisely correct. Perhaps most interesting, the names of Daniel4 and his
three friends5 have been found in Babylonian documents. This does not
mean that every statement in the book of Daniel has been confirmed.
The identity of Darius the Mede is still in doubt (although we have not
eliminated all candidates). But the case for the historicity of Daniel is
clearly better than it was in the past. Religion is winning here.

These cases are from history. Can the same be said of science? If one
is a Seventh-day Adventist, it can. For over a century, Adventists defended,
on the basis of what they believed to be inspiration, the view that tobacco
was an insidious but deadly poison. At the time this view was not shared
by the scientific community, but over the last 50 years the evidence has
become overwhelming that the hypothesis originally associated with religion
was correct. Religion did not lose here. The same comments, although
not quite as vigorously, can be made about vegetarianism.
But it could be countered that these supernaturalist positions were
sectarian, and in any case did not deal a major blow to naturalism. Are
there any cases more directly relevant to the creation-evolution controversy?
It turns out there are. The first example is in cosmology. The question
at issue was whether the universe extended backwards in time indefinitely
or if there was a finite limit to the age of the universe.

The former was strongly favored by most scientists, often with an explicit anti-supernatural
bias expressed as the reason for their preference. This bias formed a
major part of the objection to Big Bang cosmology. If the universe had a
beginning, it at least suggested that it might require a Creator. The desire
to protect an eternal universe was so great that in attempting to do so,
Einstein made what he later called his “greatest mistake”, introducing a
cosmological constant into the equation for the universe to keep it roughly
static. However, the weight of evidence now is solidly behind the concept
that the universe did have a beginning. Religion is not losing here.
Another example is the existence of vestigial organs. Vestigial organs
have been used as an argument against design, and therefore against a
designer, since Darwin. In the classical exposition, Wiedersheim listed
over 150 structures that he considered vestigial. He was careful to note
that some of them, such as the thyroid and adrenal glands, probably had
some function, in which case they might not be truly vestigial, and that
this could be the case with other organs. But some of his followers were
not so cautious, and it was not uncommon for such organs as the thymus,
the pituitary, and the appendix to be written off as completely useless.

This lack of caution was necessary if vestigial organs were to be used
against believers in design, because if there was some function that could
be attributed to them, then their existence in a designed organism would
not count as evidence against a designer.8 However, this lack of caution
was ill-advised, as further investigation has found a reasonable function
for all these structures, destroying, sometimes dramatically, the argument
against design. It could be argued that in this case anti-supernaturalist
prejudice actually was detrimental to science, tending to cause scientists
not to investigate possible functions for a structure because the prejudice
was that it had no function.

It could be further argued that anti-supernatural prejudice actually
killed people. Although the spleen was not on Wiedersheim’s list, when
I went to medical school it was commonly written off as a practically
useless organ that we would be better off not having, as it tended to bleed
when it got injured. Its only use was to show that humans and dogs, for
example (where it stores blood for autotransfusion in case of bleeding),
shared a common ancestor. As a result, when it did get injured, it was
commonly removed, without any attempt to preserve its function. It was
only later that it became apparent that not having a spleen predisposed
one to overwhelming pneumococcal infections. Surgical practice today
is to preserve splenic function whenever possible, either by repairing the
spleen, or failing that, by leaving small bits in the abdomen and hoping
that they attach themselves.

History repeated itself with the “junk DNA” controversy. When DNA
was discovered, many evolutionists predicted that there were vast quantities
of totally useless DNA in the genome of various organisms including
humans. As noted by Standish,9 they were perhaps ignoring evolutionary
theory in their anti-supernaturalist bias. But the point remains that supernaturalists
generally made a better prediction about the extent of “junk
DNA”, and that in this case an anti-supernaturalist bias actually hindered
research (the reverse of what is usually claimed).

This brings up an important point. One of the reasons “science”
(naturalism) claims not to lose is that it incorporates findings which were
originally thought to favor “religion” (supernaturalism). Thus the temporality
of the universe, and some other ideas such as the harmfulness of
tobacco, are simply incorporated into the naturalistic model, and the modern
believer in naturalism often may not be aware of the religious overtones
to the previous controversies. The topic is viewed as simply another
example of the steady advance of science.

The same could have been true for religion. For example, most theologians
have incorporated a heliocentric view of the solar system into
their theology. But the believers in naturalism will not let them forget
that at one time the majority of Christians (not all; note Philip Melancthon)
disagreed with the heliocentric theory, and the Catholic Church disagreed
strongly enough that it forced Galileo to recant and banned his books, an
action it has been forced to repudiate. The Church was in error here. But
if one can hold modern Christianity accountable for the mistakes of the
majority of its predecessors, one can also hold naturalism accountable
for the mistakes of the majority of its predecessors.

This brings us to a final point. The argument that “religion always
loses” is used to avoid having to deal with some subject where supernaturalism
is apparently winning at present, and where if it wins, naturalism
is dead. Naturalism can survive the historicity of the numbers in
Kings and Chronicles, or the toxicity of tobacco, or even (as deism) the
Big Bang. Naturalism cannot survive without a naturalistic explanation
for the origin of life. And yet there is not such an explanation, not even a
remotely plausible one. The more we know, the worse it looks.
Naturalism implicitly recognizes this.

The best evidence for this is the insistence on the monophyletic origin of life.
In the face of the Cambrian explosion and different genetic codes for some organisms (e.g., Paramecium), naturalists continue to insist that all organisms on Earth share
a common ancestor. If they really believed that life were that easy to
start, they would simply accept the hypothesis that it started a number of
different times. The fact that they insist on the monophyletic origin of
life is testimony that they implicitly recognize that it is extremely difficult
to get life started even once, let alone multiple times.

But believers in naturalism are absolutely committed to a naturalistic
origin for life. Some idea of the strength of the commitment can be
gathered from a passage in an excellent (and still accurate) book by Robert
Shapiro entitled Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on
Earth.10 In it he points out the flaws of the various theories, finally opting
for a theory of short non-modern peptides as the least problematic. But
on p 130 he displays his own viewpoint:

Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical
experiments run to discover a probable origin for life have failed
unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a
sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have
explored the universe and found no trace of life, or processes
leading to life, elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists might
choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself
included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable
scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still
more likely than the remainder.

So naturalism requires a defense against the obvious. And the best
defense is, “We have never lost yet. You always do if you wait long
enough.” In the case of the origin of life, it appears that naturalism would
have lost a long time ago if its adherents had not refused to recognize the
loss. The major problem with the “religion always loses” defense is that
it is not true. Even in hindsight it is not true without distorting the record,
and from a prospective point of view (the only point of view from which
we can currently view the future), it is certainly not true. It should be
recognized as what it is, a faith statement disagreeing with the apparent
lessons of history. Religion does not always lose.

P.A.G.

ENDNOTES

1. See, for example: (a) Yandell KE. 1986. Protestant theology and natural science in the
twentieth century. In: Lindberg DC, Numbers RL, editors. God and Nature: Historical
Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, p 448-471. Berkeley and
London: University of California Press; (b) White AD. A history of the warfare of science
with theology in Christendom. 2 vols. NY: Dover Press.
2. Thiele E. 1983. The mysterious numbers of the Hebrew Kings. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids,
MI: Zondervan Publishing House.
3. Strand KA. 1996. Thiele’s biblical chronology as a corrective for extrabiblical dates.
Andrews University Seminary Studies 34:295-317.
4. Shea W. 1988. Bel(te)shazzar meets Belshazzar. Andrews University Seminary Studies
26:67-81.
5. Shea W. 1982. Extra-biblical texts and the convocation on the Plain of Dura. Andrews
University Seminary Studies 20:29-57.
6. Robert Jastrow (1978. God and the astronomers. NY: W. W. Norton and Co.) notes the
phenomenon. Although the supernaturalists were not always on one side, or the naturalists
on the other, as noted by Helge Kragh (1999. Cosmology and controversy. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, p 251-268), there was still a tendency to line up on the
side most compatible with one’s evaluation of theism.
7. Bernard H, Bernard M, translators. 1895. The structure of man: an index to his past
history. Howes GB, editor. London: MacMilllan and Co.
8. For an anti-supernaturalist argument to succeed, it is important for the structure under
consideration to have no function. It is not enough simply for it to have minimal and
easily compensated function. Otherwise, such structures as little fingers or toes could be
considered unnecessary, as there are very few functions that cannot be performed equally
well by humans who have lost their little fingers and toes, and yet it seems unreasonable
to claim that they could not have been designed.
The attractiveness of such an argument is such that it is still not completely dead. It
surfaces, for example, in: Miller KR. 1999. Finding Darwin’s God. NY: Cliff Street
Books, p 100-101.
9. Standish TG. 2002. Rushing to judgment: functionality in noncoding or “junk” DNA.
Origins 53:7-20.
10. Shapiro R. 1986. Origins: a skeptic’s guide to the creation of life on Earth. NY: Summit
Books.