Evidence of Design So Overwhelming Only the Wilfully Obtuse Deny

Is science showing there really is a God?

• ERIC METAXAS
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• DECEMBER 26, 2014 2:38PM

Science is increasingly making a case for the existence of God. Source: Getty Images

IN 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete — that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumours of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place — science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion — 1 followed by 24 zeros — planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion — 1 followed by 21 zeros — planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis — 0 followed by nothing.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Do You Believe in Magic?

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

October 29, 2014

Okay, so it is a bit disturbing when the head transubstantiationist says that we need not believe in magic.

Now I grant that his subject was not the Lord’s Supper, but rather creation and evolution, but still. His subject was God’s relationship to the world, which is relevant in all things. We must keep in mind that the pontiff’s remarks were run through the interpretive grid of journalism, which has an enormous capacity to muddle things, but even so, we also have to admit that these comments, taken at face value, are what analytic logicians are wont to call a “dog’s breakfast.”

In their scramble to stay away from boo! words and phrases, respectable theologians can talk almost perfect nonsense about creation and intelligent design. “No, no, I am not a creationist. Well, yes, God did create everything . . .” “No, no, not intelligent design. All the designing occurred earlier.”

What it boils down to is that accomodationist Christians, who are in a state of low tension with the surrounding environment of unbelief, want to keep it that way. Low tension is the way to go, and you can still be in with the right crowd, you can still get invited to the right parties.

More Headscratching Amongst Evolutionists

Darwin’s Doubt: An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer

Justin Taylor
May 30th, 2013



Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, has a new book being published June 18 by HarperOne: Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. 
(For the best discount and free shipping, you can pre-order the book here, and they’ll also send you four free eBooks on intelligent design.)

Dr. Meyer argues that the mysterious features of the Cambrian explosion are better explained by intelligent design than purely undirected evolutionary processes. He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

What is the “Cambrian Explosion”? 
The Cambrian explosion is an important event in the history of life where nearly all of the major animal body plans appear abruptly in the fossil record without any apparent evolutionary precursors.

Why is that significant?
What this means, in essence, is that virtually all of the major animal groups (called “phyla”)—vertebrates like fish, to arthropods (e.g., trilobites and shrimplike creatures), to various types of worms (e.g., earthworm-like annelid worms), to mollusks (e.g., shellfish), and many other types of animals—appear in a geological “blink of an eye,” without any direct ancestors in the fossil record. Even Richard Dawkins has observed that the Cambrian animals looked as if “they were just planted there without any evolutionary history.”

Founding Rocks, Part VI

Still Speculating After All These Years

It's worse or better, depending upon your point of view.  Michael J Behe has written a postscript to his book Darwin's Black Box in which he reviews ten years of controversy since its first publication.  The basic thesis of the book is that molecular biology has now known revealed to the world that living cells are so complex that they imply a designer--an intelligent designer.  This stands in stark contrast to the ruling paradigm: that living cells exist by a process random, brute mutation.

What has happened over the past ten years?  Lots.  Ten years is a long time when it comes to molecular biology.  If scientists thought cells were complex back in the mid nineties, they now realise that are far, far more complex than they thought back then.

Foundering Rocks, Part V

Pure Speculation

Michael Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box in 1996.  It caused quite a stir amongst molecular biologists and others passionately committed to Darwinism.  It was regularly ridiculed, misrepresented, and cavilled over.  Behe must have anticipated that his book advocating intelligent design drawing on his years of research as a molecular biologist, would be controversial.  [Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 10th edition (New York: Free Press, {1996}, 2006).] 

He ended the first edition with a chapter entitled "Science, Philosophy, Religion".  In it he discussed the increasing tendency of scientists to slide off into pure speculation.

Foundering Rocks, Part IV

Publish or Perish

Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority.  There is no publication in the scientific literature--in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books--that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.  There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations.  Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that--like the contention that the Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year--the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.

"Publish or perish" is a proverb that academicians take seriously.  If you do not publish your work for the rest of the community to evaluate, then you have no business in academia (and if you don't already have tenure, you will be banished).  But the saying can be applied to theories as well.  If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at explanation, then it should be banished.  Despite comparing sequences and mathematical modeling, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be.  In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish.[Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 10th edition (New York: Free Press, {1996}, 2006), p.185f.] 

Foundering Rocks

The Devil Is in the Details

One of the great mythical mantras of our age is the evolution of life.  It really has been a matter of repetition making certain.  Repeat the mantra endless times, confirm that everyone else is chanting the same mantra, and hey presto, it must be true.  However, the appeals to numbers and to authority have always been fallacious--and remain so to this day.

One thing has changed, however.  Scientific analysis and research have discovered far, far more about life than was once known.  Michael Behe, a molecular biologist who has rejected Darwinism as a viable theoretical explanation for life  summarises recent discoveries and their implications for Darwinism.

Not a Shred of Respectable Evidence, Part II

 The Sovereignty of God, of Mathematics, and of Man

Deep within the bowels of the atom--where the eye of man cannot see--researchers have had to feel around the dark, as it were.  But particle physicists are not blind.  They have access to the universal language of mathematics which accurately describes and predicts how the universe works and ought to work.  This includes those parts which are so small we cannot see them; we can only see traces of them, fleeting signatures as sub-atomic particles are accelerated to travel at unbelievable speeds and crash into each other.  

The effects of the crashes tell us something about their properties and how the sub-atomic particles work.  But all along mathematics is predicting how these things will work, what will happen and what physicists should expect to find.

"Not a Shred of Respectable Evidence"

Weird, Wonderful and Inexcusable

The natural world, the universe testifies to God.  It shows His footprints and His handiwork.  This testimony is so pervasive that it takes inveterate blindness not to acknowledge it: a blindness born of contumacy and stubbornness and prejudice.  Unbelief is never about a lack of information or demonstration.  It is always the product of arrogant, stiff-necked pride.  Thus declare the Scriptures: the fool says in his heart, "There is no God" (Psalm 14: 1-3).  Unbelievers, we are told, actively suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18ff). 

What are some of the testimonies of God in His creation?  One is the universal application of mathematics.

Keeping Up Appearances

Quasi-Religious Evolutionism

In ancient Athens, no-one really believed in the gods.  But the city required a formal adherence.  Failure could be terminal.  So Socrates passed from the sight of mortal men because allegedly he corrupted the young men of Athens with a form of atheism.

In our day, atheism is more the established religion.  Failure to comply and do due deference can be devastating for one's career, social standing, or fiscal prospects.  Anyone in the media, academia, or the school system who dares to question the prevailing orthodoxy of evolutionism is subject to likely effective self-immolation.  But, underneath it all, as in Athens, few people really believe the prevailing narrative of existence evolving via randomness.  It's just that it's not politic to say so.  According to John G. West:

Darwin Versus Chesterton

 Just the Facts, Ma'am

There is an interesting essay by Denyse O'Leary in the book God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards.  The book represents a collection of essays which give a defence for Intelligent Design"ism"--by which we mean the argument that Intelligent Design offers a reasonable, if not a better, explanation for the beginning and existence of the world than Darwinian evolution theories.  The essay is entitled "Everything Old is New Again: The Older Catholic Apologists' Responses to Darwin." 

The author puzzles over why the Roman Catholic church cuddles up to Darwinism.  She observes that the media, including Roman Catholic media, defer to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as representing the official church position.

And the Academy, for its part, assures us that Darwinism (survival of the fittest, without evidence of design) is the best way to interpret the creation of the Lamb of God who was crucified to take away the sins of the world. Denyse O'Leary, "Everything Old Is New Again", God and Evolution, p.167.

She notes that this was not always the case.  A century ago Darwinism was being vigorously denounced by such English writers and intellectuals as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and St. George Jackson Mivart.  These protagonists, she tells us, rejected Darwinism on rational grounds--including its striking absence of key evidence for Darwin's beliefs.  But absence of evidence--which she assures us continues to this day--has not stopped Darwinism triumphing in the West to the point where it has become virtually the established religion.  This historical development was not what Chesterton and his colleagues expected at all.

Eve Had it Right All Along

Intelligent Design Theories

We have been reading a book entitled God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards.  Its default position is the promotion of Intelligent Design, with a collection of essays by Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jewish contributors.  In this and some future posts, we will interact with some of the contributions.

Now, on one level--the broadest referent--nobody denies "evolution"--the concept of development, change, and adaptation is  universally taught in the Scriptures and self-evident everywhere in the creation.  In a similar fashion, all Christians acknowledge "intelligent design" of the universe.  To believe that God created all things of nothing necessarily requires a belief in intelligent design.  After all, "in the beginning was the Word. . . . All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being."  (John 1:1-3)  the Greek noun, "logos", used here for the Word, means rational, verbal expression. 

But Intelligent Design protagonists want to say something more.

Intelligent Design and Primitive Irrationality

Intelligent Design Theory is a Christian Cop-Out

There has been a frenetic controversy swirling around the legitimacy or otherwise of teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution in schools. Christians have argued that Darwinian Evolution is only a cosmogenic theory; there are other theories, equally plausible, equally able to marshal supporting evidence. Intelligent Design is one. Christians have argued for “equal time.”

Now this has a ring of reasonableness attached to it. Scientific inquiry is supposed to be open, rational, reasoned, objective, non-prejudiced, and neutral. Therefore, nothing could or should be excluded from the outset. Open minded inquiry would argue that one should follow the facts wherever they lead. Refusing to give “air time” to Intelligent Design in schools seems to smack more of prejudice and propaganda than honestly objective self-critical scholarship. The resistance seems downright unscientific.

The other side, however, will have none of it. Intelligent Design is unscientific by definition. In their telling of it, Intelligent Design means that one has to deny the evidence, give up on the scientific method, lay rationality aside. To incorporate Intelligent Design theories in schools would be like going back to the ignorance of the Dark Ages where superstitious prejudice suppressed reason.

This debate is one great big hoot. But it does betray two fundamental weaknesses in the Christian camp. Firstly, it shows a regrettable naivety on the part of Christians over what the state school system is all about. The state school system is essentially an extended secular humanistic propaganda machine. It represents the received wisdom of Athens—a City which is deadly opposed to Christians and the Christian faith. We will use the term The Academy to represent the entire academic—instructional complex of secular humanism. It is completely unrealistic and naïve to expect the Academy to give any air time to Intelligent Design or similar theories.

Secondly, it demonstrates a fundamental compromise, by Christians, of the Christian faith itself. Jerusalem is being untrue to itself if it looks to The Academy to grant it even a modicum of credence. Both world-views, while being at root respectively fundamentally very simple, are diametrical contra-polar opposites. Jerusalem asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around and depends upon the Living and Eternal God. Truth is what God says it is. The Academy asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around man. Truth is what man says it is.

In going to The Academy and asking for an audience, Christians are wanting the Christian world view to be assessed, judged, and determined by man. In do doing, they are accepting the world-view of The Academy. If The Academy could authoritatively determine the truth of Jerusalem, if it were to be countenanced for a moment, then it clearly proves that Christianity is false and a lie. If all truth is subject to man, and determined by him, then clearly the Christian world-view cannot possibly be true; truth cannot be what God says it is.

Thus, we must regrettably conclude that Intelligent Design theories, and the campaign to have them accepted within The Academy, while well-meant, are both naïve and an implicit, denial, at root, of the Christian faith itself. Intelligent Design theories, as constructed and pitched to The Academy, are indeed sub-rational and inconsistent, a kind of Unbelief itself. Insofar as they look for the mind of man to be the canon and measure of all truth, they fundamentally agree with The Academy's world-view. It is indeed a return to Unbelieving dark ages. To this extent, The Academy is being true to itself, it is being consistent, in its lampooning of Intelligent Design and in its refusal to even consider for one moment Intelligent Design within its halls.

But this is not to say that Unbelief and The Academy has any credibility whatsoever. It is utterly and hopelessly bankrupt—intellectually, philosophically, and ethically. The Academy is one gigantic crock. The ignorance and contradictory blind prejudice of The Academy is far greater than any so-called medieval Dark Ages.

The Academy insists that the universe does not reflect Intelligent Design, but rather it is a brute (that is, unintelligent) chaos. At the same time, in the same breath, and with a straight face, The Academy not only wants to talk about rationality, order, structures, categories, laws, it uses these constructs to propound and describe its assumptions of a universe of brute chance. Breathtaking irrationality, inconsistency, and blindness.

What The Academy relentlessly suppresses—and it has to, for it is a truth most inconvenient—is that if it were actually true that there is somewhere in the vastness of the universe just one molecule or one particle or one entity that is truly random, then everything in the universe must be truly random and utterly chaotic in principle. All order is a mythical illusion. This has to be the case because order cannot withstand true chaos or brute chance. The least amount of true chaos breaks order apart and makes it meaningless, unpredictable and, therefore, ultimately unintelligible. This is what Chaos Theory, in part, has argued and demonstrated successfully.

But, The Academy has done far worse than that: it does not accept that somewhere in the universe is one a single particle of chaos—rather The Academy insists, from the outset, that the entire universe is grounded in brute chaotic chance. Yet it still insists upon its science, and its order, and its study, and its research—and insists still further that these things alone define and determine truth. And it wants to be taken seriously and have its self-claimed gravitas honoured and respected! Truly, The Academy represents the foolish babblers of our time.

The remarkable Mircea Eliade has given us reason to suspect that all Unbelief has been characterised by similar foolishness. This ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy of The Academy is not new. The bankruptcy of The Academy reflects the same motifs as the oldest primitive traditions of mankind.

Eliade has shown that one recurring motif of primitive religions is to believe in an all governing, all creating god, then over time gradually to banish that god out of frame, replacing it with contradictory deities because those constructs enable them to deal with the phenomenon of the world as it was actually experienced, and offer the promise of controlling the world. He writes:

. . . neither the religions called “primitive” nor those classed as polytheistic are ignorant of the idea of a god who is the creator, omniscient and all powerful. Yet we have only to look at things a little more closely to realise that such supreme deities enjoy hardly any religious worship. . . . These are not objects of worship: they are regarded as deities so remote as to be inactive, indifferent . . . in fact. . . .

There is no need to multiply examples. Everywhere, in these “primitive” religions, the highest heavenly being has declined in practical religious importance; he has withdrawn from human beings. He is remembered, however, and prayed to as a last resort, when all the petitions put up to other gods and goddesses, demons and ancestors, have been ineffectual. . . . .

(T)he divinities , who among the “primitives” are substituted for the Supreme Beings, are . . . divinities of fecundity, riches and the fullness of life; in short the deities who exalt and amplify life, the life of the cosmos—its vegetation, agriculture, herds and flocks—no less than the life of man. Their religious importance was due precisely to their strength, their illimitable reserves of vitality, their fecundity.

Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality (Glasgow: William Collins, 1957), pp 135—137

This spiritual and intellectual legerdemain, so characteristic of primitives, the motif of positing a supreme entity responsible for all things yet only to banish it in favour of narrowing down and focusing upon mastery of man over the natural world, is precisely evident in The Academy.

In so doing it has taken up this age-old, primitive, deceit. It has posited chance as the supreme and most fundamental force of the cosmos, responsible for all things—then, banished it from consideration, while it focuses upon man and his mastering of nature, in complete contradiction of the supposed fundamental cosmic force. The radical disconnection of these two things, even while both are held to be true, is the mark of the superstitious primitive mind. It is why irrationality and ignorance lies embedded in all that The Academy does and represents. It is why The Academy can be so credulous and manipulated and easily led. Superstitions lie at its roots; its trees of knowledge draw deeply from them.

What, then, has Jerusalem to do with The Academy of Athens? Precisely nothing. You cannot test truth while lying upon an irrational bed of self-imposed, self-contradictory deceit.

Athens remains seduced and transfixed by the myths and contradictions of ancient, pagan primitivism. Its Academy is a crock.