The first lines of the chapter are a quote from evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr: "No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact." This chapter starts by describing how one hundred scientists from various fields and a variety of prestigious universities and scientific centers and laboratories took out an ad stating that they were skeptical of Darwinism and evolution. Why did they do this? It was in response to PBS' series titled "Evolution" and their spokesperson's claim that "all known scientific evidence supports evolution" as does "virtually every reputable scientist in the world." They adamantly disagreed. I recall this series, though I had no interest in watching it. The author states that when he became an atheist, he didn't know that there were credible scientists that disagreed with evolutionary theory and had since the turn of the century. Viewers of the PBS series weren't informed of this either. There was a 151-page critique of the program written, which said that it, "failed to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the evidence for Darwinian evolution" and ignored "disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves."
The interview the author conducts is with Jonathan Wells. His credentials are impressive. He studied geology at Princeton; geology, physics, and biology at Berkeley; religious studies (specializing in controversies surrounding Darwin) doctorate at Yale; molecular and cell biology (focus on vertebrate embryology and evolution) doctorate from Berkeley; post-doctorate research biologist at Berkeley; now a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. He grew up in the Presbyterian church, but had become an atheist about halfway through college.
One of the basic questions that the author asks of Mr. Wells is an accurate definition of evolution. He states that many people use it as meaning "change over time."
Jonathan Wells answers, "If that's all there was to Darwinism, then there wouldn't be any controversy, because we all agree there has been biological change over time. Others define evolution as just being 'descent with modification.' But again, everyone agrees that all organisms within a single species are related through descent with modification. This occurs in the ordinary course of biological reproduction.
"Darwinism claims much more than that--it's the theory that all living creatures are modified descendents of a common ancestor that lived long ago. You and I, for example, are descendents of ape-like ancestors--in fact, we share a common ancestor with fruit flies. Darwinism claims that every new species that has ever appeared can be explained by descent with modification. Neo-Darwinism claims these modifications are the result of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations."
The author then asked Mr. Wells what his examination of the icons of evolution that we discussed in chapter two resulted in. Mr. Wells said, without hesitation, that they are false or misleading. Lee Strobel said, "If these icons are cited by scientists so often because they're among the best evidence for Darwinism--"
"--And if they're either false of misleading," Mr. Wells interrupted, "then what does that tell us about evolutionary theory? That's the point. The question I'm raising is whether all of this is really science--or is it actually a kind of mythology?"
Now, back to the icons....
The first one was the Miller Experiment. For the Miller Experiment, Stanley Miller used hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor to simulate the early earth's atmosphere and lightning to create amino acids. Not long after his experiment, scientists began to believe that that was not what the atmosphere was made up of and with proof against it, considered his experiment defunct. For one, they said that the hydrogen would have been too light and would have escaped into space. They have no way of knowing for sure, but they now believe that it was made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. So, if you repeat the experiment using the correct atmospheric gases, you do not end up with amino acids. You end up with formaldehyde and cyanide! As Mr. Wells so eloquently put it, "...to suggest that formaldehyde and cyanide give you the right substrate for the origin of life, well, it's just a joke. Do you know what you get? Embalming fluid!"Even supposing you could get amino acids, it's still a long way from a living cell. "You would have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up to create a protein molecule--and that would still be a long way from a living cell. Then you'd need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence, to create a living cell. The odds against this are astonishing. The gap between nonliving chemicals and even the most primitive living organism is absolutely tremendous....the problem of assembling the right parts in the right way at the right time and at the right place, while keeping out the wrong material, is simply insurmountable," says Mr. Wells.
Jonathan Wells: "It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there's no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation--for instance, intelligent design--then the evolutionists claim you're not a scientist."
Walter Bradley: "I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there's an Intelligent Designer."
Gregg Easterbrook: "Science doesn't have the slightest idea how life began. No generally accepted theory exists, and the steps leading from a barren primordial world to the fragile chemistry of life seem imponderable."
Francis Crick: "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
The second icon of evolution was Darwin's tree of life. This part was really hard for me to follow, so let me try to simplify and sum up as best as I can. Darwin knew that in his day, no fossil evidence of his theory of the tree of life existed. But, he believed that someday, scientists would find fossils of animals that were "missing links", so to speak, so that he could prove that this species evolved from this other one. However, in the 150 years since Darwin, this evidence has never been found. In fact, what has been discovered is exactly the opposite. It is called the Cambrian Explosion and is also referred to as "Biological Big Bang". Fossil records show that the Cambrian period began 540 million years ago. According to fossils, prior to this point, there were jellyfish, sponges, and worms. But, suddenly, all sorts of animal groups appear. This didn't happen gradually, as Darwinian evolution dictates. Instead of a tree, beginning with a single trunk and branching out, Mr. Wells says it looks more like a lawn with many blades of grass with their own beginning, not branching out of anything.Darwin, himself, said that if the fossil records did not eventually back up his theory, it would essentially be the death of his theory.
Michael Denton wrote, "...[T]he universal experience of paleontology...[is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life...what they have never yielded is any of Darwin's myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin. The intermediaries have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record."
The third image is that of Haeckel's embryos. Jonathan Wells denounced them as fakes. "Apparently in some cases Haeckel actually used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he figured he didn't have to draw them separately. In other cases he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really are. At any rate, his drawings misrepresent the embryos."He only shows a few of the seven vertebrate classes....Four are mammals, but they're all placental mammals. There are two other kinds of mammals that he didn't show, which are different....He used a salamander to represent amphibians instead of a frog, which looks very different. So he stacked the deck by picking representatives that came closest to fitting his idea.
"To me, as an embryologist, the most dramatic problem is that what Haeckel claimed is the early stage of development is nothing of the sort. It's actually the midpoint of development. If you go back to the earlier stages, the embryos look far more different from each other. But he deliberately omits the earlier stages altogether. Remember Darwin claimed that because the embryos are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like--sort of like a fish....Vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There's no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it's extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place. Then at the midpoint--which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage--the embryos become more similar, though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again."
Another similar argument about embryos, has to do with gills. The author said that he read in Life magazine and other encyclopedias that mammal and human embryos grow something like gills which is "compelling evidence of evolution."
Jonathan Wells said, "It's just an anatomical feature that grows out of the fact that this is how vertebrate embryos develop....They're not gills!"
Lewis Wolpert, a British embryologist, said that the "resemblance is only illusory."
An icon that Lee Strobel hadn't mentioned, but Mr. Wells brought up was that of "homology." Homology is similarity such as the bone structure in a bat's wings, porpoise's flippers, horse's legs, and human hands, which is argued as proof that they all share a common ancestor.Mr. Wells says, "Frankly, it remains a mystery. If you read the literature on homology, the experts know it's a mystery. They may not give up Darwinism, but they know they haven't solved the problem. To me, if you haven't solved the problem of a mechanism, then you haven't distinguished between common descent and common design. It could be either one. The evidence isn't pointing one way or the other. I think students deserve to know that scientists haven't resolved this problem. Instead, some textbooks simply define homology as similarity due to common ancestry. So the theory becomes true by definition. What the textbook is saying is that similarity due to common ancestry is due to common ancestry. And that's circular reasoning....Similarity by itself doesn't distinguish between design and Darwinism."
As for archaeopteryx, in 1985, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, Larry Martin, said that it is "not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it's a member of a totally extinct group of birds."Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, a staunch evolutionist said, "We are not even authorized to consider the exceptional case of the archaeopteryx as a true link. By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds, or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediary stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown."
You may have heard of other fossil discoveries recently. An evolutionary biologist, Alan Feduccia said, "There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it's difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake-fossil factory in northeast China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found."
And on to human evolution.... If you haven't heard of Java man, he is thought to be the link between apes and humans. Hank Hanegraaff wrote, "What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination."Lee Strobel writes, "[Eugene] Dubois' shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today's standards. Or that the femur apparently didn't really belong with the skullcap. Or that the skullcap, according to prominent Cambridge University anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today. Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois' claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution."
It is said that the only evidence that has been found for human evolution can fit into one small box. This was likened to trying to "reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book."
Mr. Wells quoted a science writer, Henry Gee, "...[T]he conventional picture of human evolution is 'a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story--amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.'"
Jonathan Wells goes on to say, "Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit. The narrative can take several forms depending on one's biases....Darwinism is merely materialistic philosophy masquerading as science, and people are recognizing it for what it is."
The author, Lee Strobel, went on to say that there is just no scientific data to back it up.
Mr. Wells sums it up succintly: "As scientists, it's not our job to make the data fit a theory that just isn't there."
So, here's the natural question: if these icons of evolution have been debunked, either by being proved by modern science as having been mistaken or outdated or by being exposed as out-and-out fraud, why are they still prominently featured in textbooks today? The author wanted to know this too.
For example, Haeckel's fraudulent drawings were exposed in the 1860s, yet they are still in textbooks. Lee Strobel said he saw those drawings in his science books in the 60s and 70s and they were instrumental in influencing him to follow after atheism. He wanted to know why no one had told him that the drawings were fakes!
A few years ago, an article exposed this treachery and Stephen Jay Gould from Harvard said that it was nothing new and that he had known about it for 20 years. He called it "the academic equivalent of murder," for these textbooks to continually churn out outdated and untrue material.
Scientists often explain it away by saying that although the drawings are false, they illustrate a concept that is basically true. But, we learned here that it is not. Many of these textbooks literally say that the early embryos are nearly identical, but we know that they are vastly different in their early stages and that it is only at their mid-development that they are most similar. The textbooks are teaching absolute falseness.
As parents, I think we should be aware of what is being taught to our children. I'm not saying that all children should be in Christian schools or home-schooled. That just isn't possible for all of us. But, we should be our children's primary teachers, no matter what type of school they are in and we should know that these things are most likely in their textbooks and that they will be taught to them. We must equip them with the truth. Not just a mindless following, as some accuse Christians, but of the true scientific facts that are too often skewed and misrepresented in order to further agendas and possibly stall while they desperately try to find some proof that hasn't materialized in the last 150 years.
Wow, that chapter took some doing and I have literally been writing this blog entry for three days. For those that are more scientifically minded, you may have found my analysis of this chapter quite basic. If that is the case, I encourage you to read it for yourself. They do delve deeper into scientific jargon and processes. My job was to try to understand and boil it down for those, like me, who aren't necessarily savants at science.
The Big Bang was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. Science had taken us to the First Event, but it can't take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence.
That passage takes us to chapter four and states the assessment of Allan Rex Sandage, one of the greatest cosmologists in the world, who was the protégé of Edwin Hubble himself, and has received many prestigious accolades. He said, "It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence."
Lee Strobel interviewed Stephen C. Meyer for this chapter of the book. His credentials include degrees in physics and geology, a master's in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge (his focus being on "the history of molecular biology, the history of physics, and evolutionary theory"), and a doctorate at Cambridge including an exciting dissertation analyzing "the scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology".
Remember the quote from chapter two from Richard Lewontin about science being the only begetter of the truth? The author quotes a couple of other scientists who said virtually the same thing. But, Mr. Meyer does not agree. For one, he says we know certain things by introspection which cannot be proved by science. Secondly, we know some things through history which cannot be tested in a scientific manner.
But what about the relationship between Christianity and science? Mr. Meyer has something to say about that, as well: "...[S]cientific evidence actually supports theistic belief. In fact, across a wide range of the sciences, evidence has come to light in the last fifty years which, taken together, provides a robust case for theism. Only theism can provide an intellectually satisfying causal explanation for all of this evidence."
So, what is the new evidence that he is speaking of? "The fact that most scientists now believe that energy, matter, space, and time had a beginning is profoundly antimaterialistic. You can invoke neither time nor space nor matter nor energy nor the laws of nature to explain the origin of the universe. General relativity points to the need for a cause that transcends those domains. And theism affirms the existence of such an entity--namely, God." Creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing, provides the answer to the cause that transcends the laws of nature.
The next evidence is that of "anthropic fine-tuning." This is a set of numerical values of fundamental laws of physics that could have been set at anything, yet are somehow set in an mathematically unbelievable way to allow life to exist on this planet. "Take the expansion rate of the universe, " Mr Meyer said, "which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction--a little faster, a little slower--we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life." When you add those figures to the astronomical figures of the other laws of physics, can you honestly believe that this all happened by random chance?
If you pick up a book or look at a painting or use a computer program, did it just happen randomly? Did information just randomly land on a page or did information just come by chance to computer software? No, someone intelligent created it and inserted information. DNA is proof of an intelligent designer as well. DNA contains information that is written on every cell in every living creature. Richard Dawkins said, "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like." How did the information get there? DNA information is no more a random chance than is a novel or a computer program.
Meyer went on to his next example: "Then there's the evidence for design in molecular machines that defy explanation by Darwinian natural selection. These integrative, complex systems in biological organisms--which microbiologist Michael Behe calls 'irreducibly complex'--include signal transduction circuits, sophisticated motors, and all kinds of biological circuitry....The problem with irreducibly complex systems is that they perform no function until all the parts are present and working together in close coordination with one another. So natural selection cannot help you build such systems; it can only preserve them once they've been built. And it's virtually impossible for evolution to take such a huge leap by mere chance to create the whole system at once."
Human consciousness is another mystery that supports theism. "...we are more than just matter....We have the capacity for self-reflection, for representational art, for language, for creativity. Science can't account for this kind of consciousness merely from the interaction of physical matter in the brain."
Stephen Meyer's view is succinct: "Maybe the world looks designed because it really is designed."
But, Lee Strobel had a question. If this evidence is so compelling, why don't more scientist believe in intelligent design? Mr. Meyer gave several reasons why, in his opinion, more scientist do not believe in a Creator. First, it takes time for theories and discoveries to "percolate" and a lot of the research is fairly new. Second, scientists in one field may be unaware of discoveries made in another field. Third, the "materialistic worldview" has held sway in the scientific community for a long time. Many are hesitant to admit their theistic beliefs for fear of ostracism. Lastly, many scientists will only consider naturalistic explanations as scientific and therefore and wearing blinders, so to speak.
What would Meyer like to see change in the scientific community? "Let the evidence speak for itself....I don't think it's right to invoke a self-serving rule that says only naturalistic explanations can be considered by science. Let's have a new period in the history of science where we have methodological rules that actually foster the unfettered seeking of truth. Scientists should be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads--even if it leads to a conclusion that makes some people uncomfortable."
Meyer's parting words: "I look at the stars in the night sky or reflect on the structure and information-bearing properties of the DNA molecule, and these are occasions for me to worship the Creator who brought them into existence. I think of the wry smile that might be on the lips of God as in the last few years all sorts of evidence for the reliability of the Bible and for his creation of the universe and life have come to light. I believe he has caused them to be unveiled in his providence and that he delights when we discover his fingerprints in the vastness of the universe, in the dusty relics of paleontology, and in the complexity of the cell."
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