Darwinism

Does God exist? You can answer that question in at least two ways, including, notably, “yes.” But how do you argue for that particular answer?

A new cottage industry among the religiously minded is the re-articulation of the so-called “cosmological argument” for the existence of God. Its proofs work backward. They start with visible creation and reason that it can only be the work of an uncreated First Cause. Such proofs were once compelling to educated people. Now the average college graduate can do without them. He doesn’t know exactly why this is so; he simply believes that Darwin and Stephen Hawking have somehow managed to explain creation without reference to a Creator.

Darwin and Hawking, of course, have done no such thing. Science can never answer the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? The universe is a massive fact that does not account for its existence and — some would say, following Goedel’s incompleteness theorems — cannot do so. This does not stop certain astrophysicists from trying to generate whole universes from mathematical equations. But a mathematical model does not tell us why there is a universe to describe in the first place.

If we cannot so easily dismiss the brute fact of the universe, neither can we ignore its appearance of having been designed. As one staunchly atheistic 20th-century astronomer put it: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” How do you get around such a “common sense” interpretation? Darwin supplied the answer: Any “design” in nature is only apparent, the work of blind mechanisms. All you need to produce the bombardier beetle, for example, is random variations directed by natural selection — and a lot of time.

Last week the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove from state standards references to evolution as the underlying principle of biology. While the vote allows schools the freedom to teach about evolution, the battle is being reported as a simple conflict between scientific ‘evolutionists’ on one side and fundamentalist ‘creationists’ on the other, following the standard trope of the Read More ›

A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: Read More ›

Evolution has enormous purchase on the public imagination, and it’s easy to understand why. Just peek into the average living room where toddlers everywhere are sitting wide-eyed before videos like The Land Before Time series. This series offers nothing less than an excursion into evolution. Colorful one-celled organisms arise in a blue-green primeval ocean, where they “change again and again,” Read More ›

En Español When the physics of Galileo and Newton displaced the physics of Aristotle, scientists tried to explain the world by discovering its deterministic natural laws. When the quantum physics of Bohr and Heisenberg in turn displaced the physics of Galileo and Newton, scientists realized they needed to supplement their deterministic natural laws by taking into account chance processes in Read More ›