Guest Piece: The Descent of Darwinism

By Bruce Walker

Darwin was born two hundred years ago this month.  A serious and decent man, Darwin’s name has become connected with modern Darwinism. Today the Theory of Evolution of Species by Natural Selection has been mystically elevated from a “Theory” into a “Law,” which it is not.  As a working theory, evolution by natural selection serves an important scientific purpose.  The Ptolemaic Theory of the revolution of heavenly bodies around the Earth also served an important scientific purpose.  Both, at the time these theories were proposed, did a fairly good job of explaining how nature works.   

When the Ptolemaic Theory was propounded almost nothing was known, beyond observation with the naked eye, about the movement of heavenly bodies.  When the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection was propounded, almost nothing was known of the genetics of life.  Both theories worked.  In a practical sense, both theories provided an effectively, though imperfect, model of how nature operated.   

In a theoretical sense, natural selection works.  If the most adaptable members of a species are most likely to survive to reproduce, then those members will tend to increase over time and will tend to develop into an evolved species.  Yes, but so what?  This theory states the obvious.  It is also equally obvious that a highly intelligent alien species, as far above us as we are above farm animals, could have guided the process of life on Earth.  Lamarckism, the theory in which acquired characteristics are transmitted through generations, also “worked,” in a limited sense:  Absent knowledge about how genetic characteristics were transmitted, Larmarckism explains evolution. 

Darwinian evolution fails for the same reason that other theories fail.  Although it could explain how life evolved, it has proven a very weak explanation.  Darwinian evolution presumes much about the transfer of genetic characteristics which we now know is false.  Darwin (no shame to him) thought heredity operated through a blending of parental traits.  He assumed that the human cell was relatively simple.  Darwin used the science of his time, and used it well.  But hereditary characteristics are not “blended.”  The cell, the genetic code, and all the mechanics of biology and reproduction which Darwin and his supporters thought was relatively simple is actually fantastically more complex than they had dreamed.  Each new twist and turn that science reveals makes the accidental origin of life increasing improbable. 

If Darwin could explain a successful mutation (or, rather, a happy coincidence which produces a dozen or so complementary mutations at once) by one hundred consecutive tosses of the dice which each time produced snake eyes, today the mountain of improbability is much higher.  The number of consecutive snake eyes which must be rolled is a thousand-fold greater.  A theory whose explanation becomes progressively more improbable as scientific knowledge increases ought to lose cachet.  Not Darwinism, though. 

Darwinism, almost from its inception, began a fencing sword with which enemies of the notion of a Creator could invent their own creation.  Social Darwinists defended the cruel conditions of industrial workers by explaining that the survival of the fittest was not simply the practical result, but the moral goal of life.  Sanger and Hitler enthusiastically agreed.  Bolshevism found in Darwinism the perfect finesse of creation and a model for the future utopia (with all the millions of murders needed to reach this heaven on earth.) 

The very real scientific objections of Darwin’s theory were ignored.  Enemies of Darwinism were discarded as simply religious kooks.  Although Ben Stein chronicles well how far totalitarianism has replaced real science in his film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the intellectual and scientific problems with Darwinian evolution were such that Darwin himself had many more worries about his own theory in his final edition of Origin of Species than in his first edition.   

Scientists, in far too many cases, simply want to take the place of God or to abolish the idea of God entirely.  That is not science:  It is rather very human, much skewed, very fragile vanity.  Cosmologists once thought that the atheistic idea of an eternal universe made sense.  Then the “Big Bang” became a central part of physics.  How did the Big Bang begin?  No one knows and no one can ever know.  We can just make educated guesses.  Nature (or God?) has placed an absolute barrier to our knowledge.  Quantum mechanics at the subatomic level operates based on probabilities, not absolutes.  There are clear, absolute limits to human knowledge which are imposed by science and which have not budged despite the increasing sophistication of mathematical models.  Ptolemy would recognize many of these new “scientific explanations.”  Rather than growing simple, they become increasingly more bizarre, more complex, and more inelegant. 

The idea that a Blessed Creator made the universe and guided the creation of life is much more elegant than Darwinism or any other explanation for an operational godless nature.  God makes sense.  Out of religion came science (not the other way around.)  There was a reason for this:  God demands a reasoning mind and an orderly universe.  Godlessness, by contrast, demands nothing but the banishment of God.

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Bruce Walker is the author of two books:  Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book,The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

http://outskirtspress.com/swastika_against_the_cross 

 http://outskirtspress.com/Sinisterism

Comments

[Philip France]

Mr. Walker's article is outstanding and much appreciated.

Much of the misunderstanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory may be found in the failure to distinguish between MACROevoltuion and MICROevolution.

In microevolution, we can all see with the common eye that species adapt to environments and certain genetic traits develop within species to ensure the survival and propagation thereof. Darwinian evolutionary theory correctly presumes this in many, if not most cases.

However, macroevolution, in which these adaptations eventually cause one species to "morph" into another is entirely without merit or evidence. Not without lack of trying, though. Some hideous experiments have been conducted on fruit flies but no matter how their genes and embryos were manipulated, they remained a fruit fly. Indeed there is not one shred of evidence to support this aspect of evolutionary theory. Not even in single-celled organsisms or in bacteria, let alone more complex organisms such as animals plants and humans.

Some great DVD documentary expounds on this subject in interesting and often breathtaking detail. It is "Unlocking the Mysteries of Life" and "Icons of Evolution", available through Illustra Media (another worthwhile DVD on a different, but similar subject and also available through Illustra is "The Privileged Planet".

I am also reading an outstanding book on this subject called "The Design of Life" (Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems) by William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells. These men expound on this subject in vivid and sometimes excruciating detail and from a purely scientific perspective. No mention of "God" or a "Creator" can be found except for the obvious inference by the use of the term "intelligence".

[W. Tieff]

Albert Einstein was vastly more gifted with natural intelligence than Charles Darwin. And to the last Einstein dedicated his efforts toward discovering an "elegant" design to the universe. And he believed in God.
This tells me that the issue is not one of "science/evolution = nature, not God," but rather "man = God". And we all know how well that has turned out in the past....... ugh.