Dear Theophilus, 

In the last letter we had left off with the question: if there is so little concrete evidence to support Darwin's theory, why is it so widely accepted? The answer to this lies in understanding better what science is and in understanding human psychology.

At the outset, let me state the following bald fact. If the theory of evolution were to be removed from human consideration tomorrow, its effect on the study of health sciences like biochemistry and medicine would be nil. To illustrate this, just pick up any biochemical text, and you will find there lip service paid to the theory of evolution and then serious matters of concern are turned to. Darwin's theories have not produced any important biological innovations, at all.

To a large extent, Darwin's theory is an attempt to exclude any consideration of a creator from the universe. Darwinist theory is an imaginary tale about who we are and how we supposedly came to be in the light of naturalistic explanation only. In a very deep sense, the Darwinian theory of evolution is a creation myth freeing man from the delusion that somehow man's fate is guided and overseen by some supernatural power. This is important to point out because very often it is claimed that those who criticize Darwinism are really anti-science. This is so far from the truth that I want to explore what science is and what it isn't by referring to the work of an influential investigator of science, Karl Popper.

The theory of evolution has a characteristic that immediately signals that there are internal problems in the theory. Any theory that explains everything, irrespective of the data, is suspect. To illustrate this we could consider Marxism. Marx stated that if wages fell, the reason for this was the greed of the capitalists who were trying to maximize profits by exploiting workers. However, if wages rose, then Marx explained this as capitalists trying to bolster a sagging capitalist system by trying to win the support of workers. In essence, Marxism says nothing and any theory that explains too much, itself is saying nothing. What is crucial to any theory is the consideration of how it could be shown to be false. Darwinists do not do this. One of the signs of a non-scientific approach is to look only for examples that confirm the theory. And when other examples are brought forward, a theory can be so flexible that everything becomes a confirmation of it.

In science, so we are told, facts and observations are gathered and then a trend is noticed and generalizations are made which lead to theories and laws. In actuality, the matter is quite different. In science, the practise is normally that a theory precedes the fact gathering process. There is an important practical reason for that. Without theories, or a better word would be hypotheses, scientists would not know what kind of experiments to design or what data is significant and what data is not. The theory is a filtering device making observations selective. And here lies a problem - the data gathered could be selectively chosen in favor of a theory. What all this shows is that science is not quite as objective as it is often portrayed.

A series of factual observations cannot prove or confirm a general law of science. There is always the possibility that disproving evidence is still out there and has not been encountered or discovered. Thus, Newtonian physics was accepted for several hundred years. It was only in the twentieth century that the flaws in Newton's laws were finally discovered and a new theory was developed.

One of the powerful tools used in science is that of induction. It generalizes and enables us to predict outcomes of experiments. If you were to hold an apple and drop it, it falls. The same happens with a book, with a wrench, and with many, many other things. From this we deduce that if we were to hold a cat, and let it go, it too would drop. And this does happen. We ascribe this behavior to what has come to be known as the law of gravity. This gives the impression that science is very objective, and very sure, as opposed to the study of history or theology, for example. But this is not so because knowledge gained through induction is always open-ended in the sense that it could be proved incorrect or incomplete as more data is gathered. It is virtually impossible to prove something; it is much easier to disprove.

Science should state what it truly is - an imaginative or mythological picture of the world and processes that take place in the world. What is important to underline, and this is what makes science a noble enterprise, is that progress in science is made not by searching the world for confirming examples, there are always some around (this is one of the reasons for the popularity of pseudo-science), but by searching for falsifying evidence that reveals weaknesses in a given theory. The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right. That is not the point of science. What is sought is the truth or as close as we can get to the truth.

The above discussion leads us to consider some of the important areas where evolutionary theory is not quite as scientific as it claims to be. Darwinists hide the fact that their position is more philosophical than true science. Evolutionists crave the certainty of knowing that they understand completely. They cannot tolerate that there can be any agency outside nature which influences and guides nature, and which is beyond their investigative scope. It is important to realize why I state that Darwinians are not scientific. Science is not so much what the subject being studied is, but the method and philosophy used. The point of science is to search out, to look for disproving examples and in this way to extend knowledge. Evolutionists do not do this but resort to tautologies. A tautology is an empty statement which under the guise of saying something, really doesn't say anything at all. Take the often heard statement: the survival of the fittest. What are the fittest? Those who survive. Who survives? Those who are fittest. What have we learned from the statement? Nothing. This is akin to a dog chasing its own tail and getting nowhere but thinking that it has run fifty kilometers.

Some of those who are Darwinists have come to realize that there is really little substance in the claim being made that life somehow arose spontaneously through only the operation of natural laws. This position was held in the nineteenth century when the complexity of cells was unknown. It was thought that the cell was simply a gelatinous body which contains a few constituents and therefore, the leap from inorganic, nonliving matter to living cells was not seen as so great. Now that the complexity of cells is better understood, the chance of life coming from strictly natural sources seems highly unlikely. Francis Crick, one of those to whom a Noble prize was given for discovering the structure of DNA, has come out with the proposal that life did not originate on earth at all. He states that life probably came from other planets and was seeded on earth and has grown to the extent that it has. This is somewhat a drastic solution, with really no scientific data to support it, but it shows how desperate the search for the beginnings of life has become. Even if what Crick says were shown to be true, this would simply push the question further back, but the question would not disappear. How did life arise on those other planets? This is sheer imagination working here, but it seems, at least to Crick, that there is no other alternative.

There is so little evidence for macroevolution that a proposal dubbed the hopeful monster conjecture, has been suggested. By chance, a whole new creature comes to be formed as if a crocodile laid an egg and a chicken hatched. There is absolutely no evidence for this, but the desperateness of those seeking to explain everything in totally naturalistic ways shows through.

Why are these desperate, almost ridiculous claims being made by otherwise sane, rational, learned men? The reason for this is an often unstated but powerful prejudice, which we have referred to as naturalism. According to these adherents, the purpose of science is not to seek the truth through a ruthless criticism of what is known and constantly seeking contradictory evidence, but to uphold the materialist position that there is no God, nothing outside the known universe or outside the known laws of science. Science, according to Darwinists, must invoke only natural causes and explain everything by reference only to natural laws. It was this fear that led even as great a scientist as Einstein to do something very foolish. His equations of his Theory of General Relativity led to the conclusion that the universe begun in what has come to be called the Big Bang. This idea of a beginning of the universe was abhorrent to Einstein and he added, for no objective reason except his bias, a fudge factor which annulled the conclusion that the universe had a beginning. He later repented of his action, dropped the fudge factor, and bowed to the objective data that the universe was and is expanding and therefore, by projection going backward in time, had a beginning. It takes greatness to bend to reality and not to uphold one's position at all costs.

Theophilus, I have gone through a lot of material and maybe in the next letter, we will wrap things up.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

Return to Index