10.
Observable Dilemmas for Evolutionary Theories
The April 3, 2004 issue of “World” magazine featured separate articles by four leaders of the “Intelligent Design Movement”, which described observable new information that defies the traditional theories of vertical evolution. I’d like to summarize these articles here where that information can be compiled as reference material on this interesting subject. These leaders each have their own reasons to disbelieve in the Theory of Evolution and each is very scientific about supporting their views. Whatever the truth is, it ought to make sense in the light of scientific investigation.
1) Phillip Johnson is a law professor at the University of California at Berkley and the author of books such as: Darwin on Trial, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Reason in the Balance, The Wedge of Truth, and The Right Questions. He is promoting the strict use of the scientific method vs dogma.
The late scientist, Carl Sagan, promoted a dogmatic naturalistic philosophy as if it were a fact that had been discovered by scientific investigation. Endorsement of such scientists is all that is necessary for the media to report an ideological dogma as a scientific conclusion. Sagan’s public television series, Cosmos, announced that the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be. Therefore everything in it is simply the result of natural processes over time – lots and lots of time. God could not do it, but ‘time” did. This series elevated philosophical naturalism to the status of science, assuming that it had been scientifically verified. If a personal God existed, He was irrelevant to our condition. Science and ever-advancing technology would eventually resolve all our problems and create a utopia; and belief in a supernatural Creator Being was expected to fade away as public education enlightened the masses. The attendant philosophy is that an uncreated universe is indifferent to good and evil. All values are merely subjective – moral relativism over any universal standards of truth, morality, or reason. Yet, after a century of scientism and nihilism, the public has started to count the cost of all that has been destroyed. Apparently it is not inevitable at all that technological progress will lead to naturalism, any more than communism must eventually replace capitalism. We seem to be watching the more educated and discerning public re-looking for truth and not simply buying the party lines promoted in the media. If this is the case, then whatever is really true should eventually win out. A theory such as Evolution, which has never been able to scientifically support itself with hard evidence, should disappear from main stream and eventually even from those public education textbooks and museum exhibits. A discerning public will not stand for nonsense being heaped on them as fact. The question then becomes, “What other explanation is there, that makes logical sense in terms of the observable evidence?” In our interpretation of the evidence, it is not a matter of religious faith versus scientific fact. It’s a matter of science versus science – you can’t split the truth. We need to use the scientific method to investigate questions such as: How could natural processes assemble the intricate structures found within living cells? How could chemistry alone account for the origin of life on the earth? What is the origin of the genetic information encoded in living organisms?
2) Jonathan Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of, Icons of Evolution. He holds a PhD in Biology from the University of California at Berkley and a PhD in Theology from Yale University. He makes a case for Intelligent Design over Natural Selection and Time.
Darwin argued that all life was the product of undirected natural forces, time, chance, and a process he called, “natural selection”. This was the first process that seemed to have the ability to produce biological change over time, and so it was used to justify the theory of evolution not just within species, but across species. It was used to explain the appearance of design, without the need for a designer. In actuality it works well in explaining the simple adaptations within species, but not the complex differences between species
Now enter the new concept of “Intelligent Design”.
The more we learn about life’s complexity the more evidence we find of an intelligent designer. In the last 50 years our knowledge of the cell has exploded. At the very basis of life we have discovered molecular machines each executing detailed functions. Where do they come from? How can natural selection construct something as basic yet complex as the flagellum of a bacterium – a biological equivalent of a rotary motor.
Dr Wells introduces the recent scientific recognition of a principle called Irreducible Complexity, first presented by Biologist, Michael Behe. Irreducible complexity requires that every part of a system must be present in order for the device/machine to work. There is a fundamental point when retracing a development backwards, where you will get to a system that cannot be reduced further and still work. The flagellum is an example of irreducible complexity. Natural Selection cannot explain how a piece of this mechanism would be preserved until all the other parts were evolved and assembled in precisely the proper order. You’d need to know the final design before you start this process, because you have nothing useful until you get this done totally right. This complex mechanism could not possibly have been formed by a series of slight modifications producing useless intermediate products. The integrated complexity of this system points instead to Intelligent Design.
3) Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz is a research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of over 100 scientific publications in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry. His latest book is entitled, The Mind and the Brain. He promotes the recent discovery that the Mind is separate from the Brain.
Cognitive neurophysiology has attempted to reduce the mind to brain function. The idea is that there is no mind except as a product of the physical brain. However, all aspects of the mind cannot be explained in physical terms. Naturalistic science would hold that all causes are material causes. Thus the brain was only going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances. This argues that people are not truly capable of making free and generally moral decisions.
A recent science called neuroplasticity examines the discovery that throughout one’s lifespan the brain is capable of being rewired by the human mind. Brain-imaging technologies discovered that there are locations in the brain that are responsible for specific conditions. One example is a condition called, obsession. The feeling that “something is wrong” when the person generally knows that the feeling is false and really doesn’t make any sense, has been traced to a physical brain glitch. In the 1990s something that the ancients knew was given the label, “Mindful awareness”. People could learn to resist temptations towards compulsive behavior in response to these obsessive feelings. They learned to use a rational perspective when viewing their own inner experience. The self-help gurus called this technique, “getting outside yourself” or “getting in touch with your inner self”. The major scientific discovery using brain imaging techniques, was that people, who used the power of their minds to redirect regularly their focus of attention in wholesome ways, had actually rewired their brains; in precisely the brain circuit that had been associated with causing the problem. People are capable of using their mental effort to re-frame their perspective on their experiences. By doing so, it was clearly demonstrated that they could systematically change the response of the brain to given situations.
Physicist Henry Stapp realized that quantum physics can explain how the action of the mind changes how the physical brain works. A well-established principle of quantum mechanics called the quantum zeno effect (QZE) explains how mindfully directed attention can alter brain circuitry adaptively. Focusing attention on your mental experience maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. It holds in place brain circuits associated with whatever is focused on.
As expected, the QZE mechanism works the same way to hold in place the brain’s response to meditation or prayer. Clearly, the mind is separate from the physical brain and not merely a product of it. The mind programs the physical brain.
4) William Dembski is associate research professor at Baylor and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and author of several books including, The Design Inference(1998) and the Design Revolution (2004.) He argues that the fundamental make up of the universe is “information”, which when organized (by thought) creates matter and energy.
William Dembski established a reliable, empirical, and scientifically rigorous criteria for deciding if something is “designed”. Humans correctly detect the activity of intelligence, ie “design”, whenever they detect a highly improbable event that matches a recognizable, specific pattern. Together small probability with a recognizable pattern is equivalent to “information”. DNA has a structure that is ideal for carrying a tremendous amount of information. There is no entity in the known universe that carries more information, more efficiently than the DNA molecule. Bill Gates said that DNA is like a computer program only far more complex than anything we have ever devised. This is a highly suggestive observation, since we know that Bill does not employ wind, erosion, or random number generators to design his software. He employs intelligent software engineers. Everything we know in our experience suggests that information-rich systems arise not from evolution, but from intelligent design.
What do we make of the fact that there is information in every living cell? Where does that information come from? Intelligent Design provides the best explanation for the origin of the information necessary to build the first living cell. We observe that intelligent beings are capable of producing information. Conversely, we do not know of any non-intelligent, natural source of information - not natural selection, not self-organizational processes, not pure chance - that can produce information. So, when scientists infer “intelligent design” from the presence of information in DNA, they are making what historical science calls, “an inference to the best explanation.” So also, when we see an information-rich system inside the living cell, in the DNA molecules, we can infer that an intelligence played role in the origin of that cell, even if we were not there to observe the cell coming into existence.
18 April 2004
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