Foreword
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FOREWORD I was 10 years of age at the time of the Darwinian Centennial celebrations in 1959, the centennial of Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species. Thus, my own awareness of scientific knowledge was dawning just as Darwinism was attaining its greatest triumph. The Centennial occurred shortly after the famous origin-of-life experiments conducted by Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, who obtained small amounts of two amino acids by sending a spark through a mixture of gases which he considered to be like the atmosphere of the early earth. Amino acids are necessary precursors to the complex molecules of living material. These experiments produced wild optimism within the scientific community that the origin of the first living cell would soon be understood. I was unaware of the excitement, but the euphoria was so great that Julian Huxley, the most honored speaker at the Centennial, expressed the prevailing mood in terms which evoked a coming Millenium: Future historians will perhaps take this Centennial Week as epitomizing an important critical period in the history of this earth of ours - the period when the process of evolution, in the person of inquiring man, began to be truly conscious of itself. This is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution, from atoms and stars to fish and flowers, from fish and flowers to human societies and values - indeed, that all reality is a single process of evolution. . . . At that time I had no inclination to question the evolutionist orthodoxy which then reigned unchallenged. Even for a long time after I became a Christian in 1971, I did not understand, and hence did not seriously question, the philosophical naturalism which then dominated, and still dominates, the scientific and educational establishments. After my conversion I did become somewhat interested in how evolution and Genesis might be reconciled; but it still was not a pressing matter to me, because I felt confident that if evolution were true, then a reconciliation must be possible - and I left it at that. That is, I left it at that until one evening in the late 1970s when I attended a debate on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research squared off with a member of the UO biology faculty, and I found myself very surprised when Gish had the better of the argument. From that time I began to pay closer attention to the evidence for evolution as it was published from time to time in the mainstream media. Thus it did not escape my attention when, sometime around 1980, our local newspaper published the news that Stephen Jay Gould - until his death May 20, 2002 one of the world's most influential paleontologists and evolutionary theorists - had confessed that the fossil record cannot be forced into the traditional Darwinist mold of gradual change over extremely long periods of time. In announcing the death of gradualism, however, he introduced a completely new mechanism for evolution - "punctuated equilibrium" - to explain how evolution could have occurred despite the absence from the fossil record of the transitional forms predicted by the Darwinian model. Gould pronounced the new theory just as self-evidently beyond criticism as he had formerly maintained the old theory was. It was then that I realized that the theory of evolution must be in big trouble. The only evidence Gould cited for the new theory was the absence of evidence for the previous model. It is precisely what one would expect from a scientific establishment which does not know how evolution occurred, or even how it might have occurred, but nevertheless insists that it knows that it did occur, somehow. You see, by that time I had learned something about philosophical naturalism. Naturalism takes its name from the word "nature," and may be understood as the view that "nature" is all there is. According to naturalism, the universe is a closed system of physical causation, and there is nothing "outside" of the physical universe - such as God, or spirit, or anything else immaterial - which can interfere with the "course of nature." This is not a view which has been established as a result of rigorous scientific testing; it is merely a philosophical outlook - adopted, virtually without exception, with little or no regard to evidentiary concerns. It need hardly be said that for any scientist to form fixed conclusions concerning the causes for natural phenomena in advance of the evidence - whether those conclusions be naturalistic or otherwise - ought to place his or her objectivity in serious doubt. At any rate, by that time I had become deeply suspicious that Darwinian evolution, far from being based on inferences meaningfully connected to empirical evidence, was merely a product of naturalistic predispositions. Where was the evidence? I had been paying attention for quite some time, and I still hadn't seen it. Gould's statements aroused my suspicions further, so I began reading news articles about the latest fossil discoveries more carefully. I soon realized I was reading an endless stream of accounts of discoveries that were completely ambiguous, but which invariably resulted in the most confident evolutionist interpretations. Before long, I realized that the paleontologists were basically saying, "We still haven't found it (proof of evolution). In fact, what we just found means we have to completely change our understanding of how evolution occurred. But we don't need to question the fact of evolution itself - even though we just threw out everything that until now we thought we knew about evolution - because we know that evolution did occur. We know it occurred because it must have occurred. I mean, we're here, aren't we?" So when Gould admitted that the problem had been declared solved prematurely once before, how could I be sure that the same kind of error was not being committed all over again? I couldn't. Then in in 1995 or 1996 I read Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial. Here was a leading academic lawyer, a specialist in the proof of facts, who, after considering the evidence carefully and systematically, had concluded that "the positive evidence that Darwinian evolution either can produce or has produced important biological innovations is nonexistent."2 Still I withheld judgment, even though Johnson also stated several good reasons for thinking not merely that the theory of evolution was lacking in affirmative evidence, but also that it was contradicted by a growing body of negative evidence against it. It was not until late in 1998, when my pastor presented me with Michael J. Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution3, that I became convinced that the theory of evolution by natural selection is simply wrong, and obviously so in the light of the findings of molecular biochemistry - a science which did not even exist until the 1950s, because until that time the technologies for investigating living things at the molecular level had not been invented. Finally, in the summer of 2000, I attended John Montgomery's International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where one of the lecturers was J. P. Moreland, Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology of Biola University in La Mirada, California. Prior to that time I had heard only a little about "the fine tuning of the universe," and understood only that some people seem to believe that certain recent discoveries in the science of physics support the notion that God had created the cosmos. Moreland brought me quickly up to speed, showing that there are hundreds of physical parameters which specify the form of the cosmos, and that if any of them had been more or less than they are, life would not be possible. Moreland, whose training is in metaphysics and whose specialty is the philosophy of science, then showed that this specified complexity now plainly seen both in living things and in the structures of the universe - the information which they contain - is, in every other area of inquiry, always understood to be the unmistakable sign of active intelligence. Five years have passed since Behe wrote, and the findings he reported were accumulating long before that; yet most Americans remain unaware that one of the defining ideas of our time - that we descended from apes as a result of an impersonal, mechanistic process known as "natural selection" - is under frontal assault and is not likely to survive. And if it doesn't survive, our world will change radically. Darwinism has not merely been the basis for all of biology; in the popular mind, it practically defines science itself, and it has profoundly shaped our views of ourselves and the world we live in. If Darwinism collapses, the intellectual and social changes which will ensue will have our heads spinning for decades. This is News! Yet when Behe lectured at the University of Oregon in Eugene in November 1998, there was a virtual press boycott; and to this day, the scientific, educational and media establishments have, for the most part, ignored the new evidence for intelligent design of the cosmos and of living things, and have continued to treat natural selection as good doctrine. Was Behe simply wrong, or is there another way to account for the persistence of many scientists in treating Darwinism as a viable theory, or for the lack of interest which both the media and the public have demonstrated toward these revolutionary scientific developments? I account for it by the blind acceptance of philosophical naturalism on the part of the intellectual establishment and by the public at large. Most of us - scientists, journalists, and man in the street, all - are unaware of our own naturalistic views, because to most of us, naturalism is simply The Way Things Are. We are unaware that our view of life entails many assumptions which not only have never been established empirically, but which are demonstrably irrational. Being unaware of those assumptions, we are not in a good position to examine them critically. Those assumptions make us unreceptive to evidence which cannot be forced into our preconceived naturalistic mold, regardless of how compelling that evidence may be. But the mountain of evidence from molecular biochemistry and cosmology - evidence showing that the universe is not a closed system of mechanistic, impersonal causation, but is instead the result of intelligent design - is the proverbial "elephant in the room." Eventually our efforts to ignore it will fail, and in order to give an account of this evidence, we will be compelled to radically change our understanding of the nature of science and of the world in which we live. The following essay contains a detailed description of the scientific evidence I am referring to. It documents the profound logical fallacies that are inherent in naturalism and shows how those fallacies lead many scientists to dismiss relevant evidence concerning the origin of living and non-living things. And my essay shows why and how that evidence justifies the conclusion that the cosmos and everything in it resulted from intelligent design. While writing this essay - which, as I am not a professional writer, I did in my "spare time" - I often asked myself why I was doing it and whether the expenditure of time would prove to be justified. As I was nearing completion of the paper, I began to realize that I was not writing for the purpose of expressing my understanding of a complex subject: I was writing in order to understand. For what I did not realize when I began is that the common element which binds these topics together - information - is the infallible sign of Personality, and that this sign of Personality pervades all things. In turn, it is only this realization which justifies our hope that our own sense of personhood - our sense of freedom and moral weight - is not illusory, but real, and that we may have a destiny beyond the grave. For me, at least, as for others I hope, this was worth discovering. All material quoted from the following works is used by permission of the authors, to whom I am most grateful. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991). Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, J. P. Moreland, ed. (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996) Endnotes 1Quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), pp. 152-15F3. © 2002 Thomas O. Alderman |
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