Heady Times

Living Amidst a Kuhnian Scientific Revolution

Amongst scientists and the various scientific disciplines, evolutionism--as a cosmology--is collapsing.  The evolutionist paradigm is falling apart.  The more strident the secular evolutionists become on the matter, the more they betray their deepest doubts and uncertainties.  

Most scientific paradigms do not collapse due to a full scale frontal assault from a competing paradigm.  Usually they collapse from within.  Those who once held the reigning paradigm, who had been card carrying members of the Association of the Ruling Paradigm, begin to find data and results and research that just "does not make sense" in view of current received wisdom.  The disquiet grows gradually.  Usually, the stridency of the ruling paradigm is toned down.  Folk don't discuss it much in polite scientific society.  It becomes a bit of an ugly cousin no-one talks about much any more.  It takes on the characteristic of a myth, a just-so story which no-one really believes "nowadays".

The textbooks used in schools and colleges which teach the incumbent paradigm are the last to change.  They represent the "establishment", particularly the State establishment.  It is here that the incumbent paradigm becomes "official".  State schools use state approved textbooks.  State textbooks teach the dominant paradigm.  State schools and state textbooks are usually the last to hear about a scientific revolution overthrowing the existing paradigm because neither the State, nor State schools are engaged in real science.  Rather, they represent the propagandists for the incumbent view.  As a paradigm is being overthrown, real scientists distance themselves, grow quiet, and adopt a "yes, but" mien towards the ruling official view.

This is the state of the current evolutionist paradigm.  It is crumbling from within.
 There have been two scientific disciplines/developments which have done more unintentional work to undermine evolutionism than any others.  The first is physics.  The second is biology, particularly micro-biology.  In the light of research and discoveries in these two disciplines, the evolutionist paradigm "just does not compute" any longer.  First: particle physics.

Although it has not yet entered into the popular consciousness, much of empirical or experimental science (or perhaps, "operational science") for most of the twentieth century has  been functionally abandoning the various dualisms of eighteenth century secularist philosophy. . . . (T)he philosophical framework which has excluded divine creation and nourished materialist evolution for several generations is now collapsing.  [Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1.1--2.4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Rossshire, Scotland: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997),  p.18.]

The concept of the Big Bang being used to record the beginnings of the universe is now a part of the established structures of modern physics.

The physicists have not only persuaded themselves of the merits of Big Bang cosmology, they have persuaded everyone else as well.  The Big Bang has come to signify virtually a universal creed, men and women who know nothing of cosmology convinced that the rumble of creation lies within reach of their collective memory.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p.70.]

Big Bang sounds suspiciously like creation.  This inevitable implication of the theory has caused consternation amongst many physicists--exactly the kind of discombobulation that occurs when a reigning paradigm comes under attack from within.  Some physicists are more candid on the matter:

"The best data we have concerning the big bang," the Nobel laureate Arno Penzias remarked, "are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole." [Berlinski, ibid., p.71.]

Ouch.

The second scientific discipline to assail the paradigm of evolutionism has been micro-biology.  The tiniest organic cell is now understood to be horrendously complex, such that it demands an intelligent designer.  Randomness and stochasticity just does not cut it any longer.  They take one beyond the bounds of the credible.

At the tiniest levels of biology--the chemical life of the cell--we have discovered a complex world that radically changes the grounds on which Darwinian debates much be contested.  . . . In summary, as biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity, with dozens or even hundred of precisely tailored parts . . . . As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummets.  Darwin looks more and more forlorn.

New research on the roles of the auxiliary proteins cannot simplify the irreducibly complex system.  The intransigence of the problem cannot be alleviated; it will only get worse.  Darwinian theory has given no explanation for the cilium or flagellum.  The overwhelming complexity . . . push us to think it may never given an explanation.  [Michael Behe, cited by Douglas Kelly, ibid., p.56f.]

The next three to four decades may well present us with a full-scale scientific revolution of Kuhnian proportions.   All the signs are there.