A leading evolutionary biologist, Dr. William Provine of Cornell University, was asked if a student of biology could fully engage in Church Services, or if he would have to check in his brains at the church door. He declared that the student would have to check in his brains at the church door. Dr. Provine also taught that, “…if Darwinism is true, there are five inescapable conclusions:
• There is no evidence for God.
• There is no life after death.
• There is no absolute foundation for right and wrong.
• There is no ultimate meaning for life, and
• People don’t really have free will.”
This prevailing academic narrative is not based on correct science or philosophy of science, and it is one that needs to be properly addressed by university students, no matter what their major field of study will be. Concerned Christian parents would do well to offer this book as a gift to their sons and daughters going off to university. Moreover, this book could well be used as a text in Christian colleges and universities.
This book is intended to offer the reader an overview of, and handy reference to, the critical analyses of authors who are top-tiered scientists, philosophers (of science, rational psychology and ethics), and historians, who have clearly demonstrated the inadequacies of Darwinism which should disqualify it from being an acceptable, much less the dominant, narrative in Academia.
I show in my book that, although Darwinism was accorded privileged position as the dominant scientific theory by the time of the 150th Anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, there was already by then serious dissention at the level of top internationally acclaimed scientists in all the natural sciences. Since then, more top-notch scientists have abandoned Darwinism. Thousands of other Ph.D. scientists who are well recognized and publish in leading journals, have signed statements that they disagree with Darwinism. Some are atheists, some became Deists, while still others are now Christians who, in several cases, were led into atheism by Darwinian thinking and, once they saw its scientific and philosophical flaws, recognized in comparison the superior intellectual strengths of pure natural sciences and the advantages of the Christian Worldview, and came to Christ.
Since “ideas have consequences,” my book investigates what helped develop and propel Darwinian evolutionary ideas and where the shortcomings lie, both in terms of sustainable scientific development, and also in terms of the tragic logical outcomes of this naturalistic narrative played out in education, ethics, law and civil society. Darwinism is naturalism disguised as science.
My book looks into specific challenges to Darwinism from specialists in: Geology, Paleontology, Biology including microbiology and biochemistry, Cosmology, Physics and Astronomy. Furthermore, there are significant challenges to Darwinism from Mind Science. And, since Ideas Have Consequences, Applied Darwinism has historically wreaked havoc in Ethics, the Philosophy of Conscience, Racial Conflict and War.
At the level of philosophy of science, Darwinian naturalism is shown to fail to explain the existence of Complex Biological Information Systems, and how to meet the criteria of Functional Complexity, Irreducible Complexity and Specific Complexity.
A good tree does not bear bad fruit, and vice-versa. Darwinian thinking underlies such social and political systems as: Nazism, Communism, Fascism, and racial Apartheid. It also gives warped notions of bioethics that encourage such anomalies as abortion, infanticide, gender-changing experiments, and euthanasia, which are outcomes of contemporary society’s poorly defined consciences and moral decline.
My book’s Epilogue concludes with an explanation of the importance of the Biblical Worldview.
• About a century ago, several leading scientists were convinced that the universe had no beginning. Then Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, together with Clausius’ Second Law of Thermodynamics, persuaded scientists that the universe had to have a beginning. The Biblical Worldview always held that.
• There are no meaningless details in the Bible. The Old Testament starts with the word “Beresheet,” (i.e., in the beginning) The Gospel of John starts with the same Hebrew word, “Beresheet.” In the Creation account in Genesis, it is written six times that “God created,” and twelve times that “God said.” Why does the Bible emphasize the spoken Word of God in addition to His creative acts?
• The Hebrew and Greek words for WORD, Ha Dabar/Ho Logos, indicate : “information,” “meaning,” and “intelligibility.”
• And while the Word of God has power in the Old Testament, in the new Testament, the “Word of God” is a person, Jesus, in whom is undertaken both our Creation and our Redemption. His Hebrew name, Yeshua, means “God Saves,” and “God heals.”
• John’s Gospel starts with the words of Genesis’ creation story. It starts with the pre-existent Jesus and, the function of this Word—His action. God’s self/revelation consists in action. The Word of God was with God Himself and was God. The Logos is God in His revelation, communicating with us.
• Communications theory has applicability to our Christian philosophy of science and understanding of order and logic and reason in the universe; in short, the intelligibility of the world. God was the intelligent agent who created the universe. He is also the one who makes the world intelligible. The world is a place where God’s intentions are intelligible in morals, aesthetics and science. In God, what is, and what ought to be, are united as in God’s original intention at the creation. Contrasting to this view is naturalism in which the intelligibility of the world must always remain a mystery.
• Our worldview holds that human language is a divine gift and through it we are freed from the naturalistic worldview which is devoid of transcendence. The fact that creation proceeds through a divine spoken word has deep implications not just for the study of human language .
• Einstein once said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” For naturalism, the riddle is how we can have any knowledge at all. They have no solution.
• We theists know we have knowledge and see error and distortion as attributable to the Fall of man, resulting in alienation and falsehoods that we must root out as they try to overthrow knowledge.
• The Biblical worldview also has a coherent system of ontology describing the fundamental constituents of reality. Naturalism holds that the world is fundamentally an interacting system of mindless entities, such as: particles, strings or fields, etc.
• True human existence requires being in communion first with God and then with the rest of His creation. It follows that the fundamental science that needs to ground all other science, is communications theory and not an atomistic, reductionist and mechanical science of particles, strings or other mindless entities, which then need to be built up to even greater orders of complexity by equally mindless principles of association.
• Communications Theory’s object of study is not particles, but information that passes between entities. Naturalistic science has no resources for recognizing and understanding information. The Intelligent Design Scientists have developed the specified-complexity criterion for recognizing information.
• All information is mediated from the Divine Logos, who is before all things and by whom all things consist. God acts now in the world by dispensing information. This even has scientific content. Some examples are:
• The fine-tuning of the universe and irreducibly complex biochemical systems are instances of specified complexity and signals information imputed by God at its creation.
• Language communications between humans is an instance of specified complexity and signals information transmitted from one human to another. The positivist science of the 19th and 20th centuries was incapable of coming to terms with information. The science of our new millennium will not be able to avoid it.
• We already live in an information age. Let’s thank God for his Logos, which gives understanding and meaning to our individual lives and communities and our universe.
My book’s strength is that of combining in one tome the compelling reasoning of several outstanding intellectuals concerning what is defective in Darwinism; in its scientific and philosophical claims, and in the bitter fruits it has generated. Darwinism is now the prevailing narrative in academia worldwide. My book furthermore lists the well-founded strengths of the theories of Intelligent Design and Creationism which allow for intelligibility, teleology, and the roles of purpose in life and conscience, which are based on Truth needed for sound mental and spiritual health at the personal, family and societal level. My book can serve as an excellent resource text for students in Christian universities, as well as for Christian students in secular universities, to confront the challenge of scientific naturalism.
Part V, Darwinism's Tragic Legacy in Philosophy, Education and Law. This looks into the bitter fruit of Darwinism applied to Ethics, the Philosophy of Conscience, and how this has affected racial conflict and the morality of war.
David Berlinski was born in the United States and has taught philosophy and mathematics in several universities in the United States and in Europe, including l’Université de Paris, the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and at L’Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France. I will allow him to have his word here on his synthesis of Neo-Darwinian Causality.
Sheer Dumb Luck:
Although biologists are unanimous in arguing that evolution has no goal, fixed from the first, it remains true nonetheless that living creatures have organized themselves into ever more elaborate and flexible structures. If their complexity is increasing, the entropy that surrounds them is decreasing. Whatever the universe-as-a-whole may be doing… biologically things have gone from bad to better…as a counterexample to the prevailing winds of fate.
….The structures of life are complex, and complex structures get made in this, the purely human world, only by a process of deliberate design. An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different?
Darwin’s theory of evolution rejects this counsel of experience and intuition. Instead, the theory forges, at least in spirit, a perverse connection with the Second Law [of thermodynamics] itself, arguing that precisely the same force that explains one turn of the cosmic wheel explains another: sheer dumb luck.
If the universe is for reasons of sheer dumb luck committed ultimately to a state of cosmic listlessness, it is also by sheer dumb luck that life first emerged on earth, the chemicals in the pre-biotic seas or soup illuminated and then invigorated by a fateful flash of lightning. It is again by sheer dumb luck that the first self-reproducing systems were created. The dense and ropy chains of RNA—they were created by sheer dumb luck, and sheer dumb luck drove the primitive chemicals of life to form a living cell. It is sheer dumb luck that alters the genetic message so that, from infernal nonsense, meaning for a moment emerges; and sheer dumb luck again that endows life with its opportunities, the space of possibilities over which natural selection plays, sheer dumb luck creating the mammalian eye and the marsupial pouch, sheer dumb luck again endowing the elephant’s sensitive nose with nerves and the orchid’s translucent petal with blush.”