Conversion of a Darwinist:
Rational Principles and Empirical Evidence Challenge Materialism
By Joseph A. D'Agostino (Human Events, June 16, 2000, page 14)
| Up until a year or so ago, I believed
in evolution. Since then I have
undergone a conversion to an entirely different way of thinking, a conversion that is currently provoking a counterrevolution in the way I think about everything. Though it involves no change in faith or creed and thus would not commonly be termed a religious conversion, its import is far greater than that of most changes of faith. My conversion grew purely from rational principles and empirical evidence. I have always believed that reason overwhelmingly favors a supernatural, intelligent design model for what used to be called Creation, not a materialist one that explains life through the operation of blind mechanistic forces. But I was a theistic evolutionist who thought God developed life through a long, gradual process that included the power of natural selection, that is, one species changing into another because mutations produced creatures better able to survive. New Information
|
have proposed that before what we
would normally call life began, some
form of natural selection produced amino acids and protein sequences that led to a functioning organism. But no one can explain how this could happen unless sequences that are, for all intents and purposes, living organisms are first formed by random chance. l Chemical Necessity of Origin of Life. Other scientists speculate that there is something about the nature of substances and chemical laws themselves that make the formation of the building blocks of life more likely. All the evidence so far gathered points in the opposite direction. l Many Earths. Some argue that there may be trillions of earth-like planets in the universe, thus increasing the chances of life's developing randomly somewhere. But, as Meyer pointed out, the chances of there being many earth-like planets is extremely slim, given the many improbable characteristics of our planet, and even if there are many, the chances of life's, developing randomly are still very remote. l Cambrian Explosion. The available fossil record indicates that all the major body types of creatures existing today appeared in one relatively short period, not as part of a long, gradual process as predicted by orthodox Darwinists. Evolutionists have come up with speculative theories to explain this phenomenon, but, curiously, said Meyer, most textbooks do not mention it. l Conditions of Early Earth. Scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments purporting to show that, under the conditions supposedly prevalent when the Earth was young, amino acids could have formed spontaneously. These substances are the building blocks of proteins, which are the building blocks of life. But in his First Things article, Meyer pointed out that the scientific consensus today, accepted even by Miller, is that the conditions of the early Earth were actually highly unfavorable to the creation of amino acids. Meyer also noted that Miller's experiment could produce amino acids only as a result of intelligent design: "Without human intervention," wrote Meyer, "experiments like that performed by Miller invariably produce nonbiological substances that degrade amino acids into nonbiologically relevant compounds." At the conference, Meyer said that Miller's now discredited experiments are still presented in biology textbooks. l Peppered Moths. Though no reputable scientist claims to have observed the evolution of one species into another, scientists claim to have noticed natural selection working within a species. This does not violate the principle I laid out above, that only God produces new genetic information, but it is interesting to note that at least one famous example is a fraud. Biology textbooks still use the example of the peppered moths of England. When the industrial revolution darkened the tree trunks around some cities, the proportion of moths who were dark-colored supposedly increased dramatically, since birds could easily eat the light-colored moths, leaving the dark moths to produce dark offspring. The problem is, as Dr. Jonathan Wells points out in an article available on the Discovery Institute's website (another version appeared in The Scientist, May 24, 1999), scientists today recognize that no such pattern took place. They even recognize that the moths hardly ever settled on tree trunks at all. l Fossil Record. Evolutionists use the fossil record as their great trump. They argue that, independent of any theoretical meandering or other empirical evidence, the fossil record clearly shows the gradual development of one species into another, even if during the Cambrian explosion it happened much faster than they previously believed. Meyer contends that the fossil record shows species changing into other speciesóif that is even the right wordóthat are of equal or lesser complexity than themselves. In other words, no new information is produced by evolution, and the central narrative that the fossil record is supposed to tellóof simple organisms developing into more complex onesódoes not exist. Evolutionists point to the development of the modern horse as a classic example of the fossil record's supporting their position. "Jonathan Wells deals with that in his new book," Meyer said after the conference. "They have the order all wrong. If anything, the record shows a loss of genetic information over time." |