A Canard Atop a Mirage

If It Can Be Described, It Cannot Possibly Be True

Darwin and evolutionism are increasingly under fire from secular scientists.  In 1981, a senior paleontologist of the British Natural History Museum was delivering a lecture to his trans-Atlantic colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History.

He acknowledged that Darwinism was being surrounded by an increasing number of doubting-Thomas scientists.  He argued that,

Darwin's theory of natural selection is under fire and scientists are no longer sure of its general validity.  Evolutionists increasingly talk like creationists in that they point to a fact but cannot provide an explanation of the means.  [Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2nd ed., 1993), p. 9f.; quoted by Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1 -- 2:4 in the light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997), p.24.]

Others are more blunt.  Take, for example, Lynn Margulis, Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts:

She shows that molecular biology has as yet been unable to demonstrate the formation of a single new species by mutations, and concludes that neo-Darwinism is "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology." [Kelly, ibid.]

Ouch.  A "minor twentieth-century religious sect"!  Could you put the matter in a less equivocal manner, Professor?

There are only three choices:  either one presupposes the Eternal God Who made all things out of nothing in the space of six days, and all very good, or one presupposes the eternal existence of matter, or one asserts that out of nothingness something spontaneously self-generated in what appears to be a Big Bang.  The last option--now favoured amongst cosmologists--denies at the outset the very possibility of certain knowledge and founded science.  For whatever knowledge we can glean must have no meaning or certainty, in the face of "Big Bangs". The fact that we do know and we can do science is a daily testimony that the secularist's Big Bang is a myth.

The agnostic option (the eternal existence of matter) is a theory hung on a sky hook which satisfies no-one.  It presents scientists with a big locked door over which is a signpost, "The Origins of the Universe" and on the door is painted "You Shall Not Pass!".  The eternal existence of matter is what some call the ornery agnostic position, as opposed to an ordinary agnostic position.  The latter confesses ignorance and uncertainty--which, of course, must also apply to the propositions about the eternal existence of matter.  The former insists upon it for all as a religious proposition.  But, like the Big Banger, the mere insistence of universal ignorance is proof that it just ain't so, for the insistence of ignorance represents a positive precept.  If you can argue for it, you are thereby providing evidence it cannot possibly be true.

Every so often Unbelievers capture the despair and meaningless of life in the secular void.  It is, to crib from Sartre, a case of Being and Nothingness.  Reflect upon the following testimony:

William Provine, scientist, Cornell University:

The implications of modern science, however, are clearly inconsistent with most religious traditions . . . . No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society.  The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life. ["Scientists, Face it!  Science and Religion are Incompatible," The Scientist, September 5, 1988, 10.]

Leslie Paul:

No-one knows what time, though it will be soon enough by astronomical clocks, the lonely planet will cool, all life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it had never happened.  That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is travelling, that is the benevolent end of the furious living and furious dying . . . . All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.  The final result . . . . is to deprive it completely of meaning. [The Annihilation of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945), p. 154.]

From the secularist scientist's perch, such expressions of despair are understandable, reasonable, rational, and logically compelling.  But to be able to make the case in an understandable way is also compelling evidence that it cannot be at all true.  Notice how Paul meaningfully insists that all is meaningless.  The perch has been a magician's mirage from the get go.

In Isaiah 46, the prophet mocks the idol gods of Babylon--and their creators.  If mockery was apropos then, how much more now.  The more Modern Unbelief has learned, the darker its soul has become.