The Russian government, enthusiastically supported by its KGB church, is planning to rid school curricula of Darwin’s theory because it “contradicts religion”.
I don’t see how. Since we can’t know God’s ways, we have to assume he could in his omnipotence create things not just fast but also slowly.
Nor do I believe Darwin’s theory, slapdash though it is, should be excluded from curricula. It may be bad science, but no good science can compete with it for sheer influence. The same, incidentally, goes for Marxism: bad economics, worse philosophy, yet extremely influential and hence to be studied.
I’d definitely teach Darwinism, if only to train pupils how to think critically. They should be taken by the hand and gradually led to the realisation that the theory doesn’t hold water, certainly not as an all-encompassing explanation of life. It takes someone as philosophically ignorant as Dawkins to say that Darwinism “explains everything”.
I’d start by offering pupils this quotation: “Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” Who wrote this? Some fundamentalist preacher? No, it was Darwin himself, in My Life And Letters.
And, considering in his Origin the complexity of the human eye, he went even further: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
Unlike their idol, today’s Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, Darwinism, along with any other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider:
Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world has not existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time.
The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.
Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in the development of species. If millions of fossils collected over 180 years have shown no such evidence, one can safely assume it doesn’t exist.
Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been gradually created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.
Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that in a simpler form wouldn’t have existed at all. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present.
Geology is another example. How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?
Microbiology has shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements. Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced.
Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6). Yet using this criterion, man is much more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.
So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.
Much has been written about the universe obeying rational and universal laws, which presupposes the existence of a rational and universal law-giver. But rationality apart, look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies.
Particularly telling here is the golden section, which is obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length. Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.
Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.
Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and honest researchers have to admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.
After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may often endanger it. Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? Such an arrangement does nothing to make the stalk stronger. Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section?
The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose that’s not of this world. And this is revealed in so much more than just the golden section. Just listen to birdsong, to name another beautiful example, or look at the peacock’s tail that jeopardises the bird’s survival by revealing its location to predators and making it slower in trying to get away.
Examples of this kind, and every branch of science can provide thousands, would have been sufficient to put paid to any other scientific theory a long time ago (and even evolutionary fanatics never claim that Darwinism is anything more than that). Generally, if a theory doesn’t become fact within one generation, or at most two, it’s relegated to the status of a museum exhibit. Yet today’s world was prepared to throw its whole weight behind Darwinism because it needed it even more than Marxism.
The two theories dovetailed neatly and, if anything, Darwinism went even further. Not only did it attack religion more effectively than Marxism did, but it also rivalled Marxism for wide-reaching social and economic implications.
One no longer had to leave the realm of seemingly objective biology to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog competition for survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.
No, I definitely wouldn’t excise Darwin’s theory from school curricula. Instead, I’d use it as an introduction to natural science, philosophy, rhetoric and religious studies.
But then I believe in debunking false theories by rational arguments, not cancelling them or their exponents. That’s because I’m not a fascist of any hue: brown, black, red, green – or Putin’s.
In the succession of fossil horses from Eohippus angustidens (narrow-toothed dawn-horse) to Equus ferus caballus (wild horsey horse), there’s no shortage of what you call transitional forms. This disposes of your palaeontological argument.
Within limits, nobody supposes that a larger number of chromosomes is “better” than a smaller number of chromosomes. This disposes of much of your microbiological argument.
I could go on refuting you, but it would take too long. You get the general idea: there is overwhelming evidence that evolution, exactly as described by Mr Darwin and Dr Dawkins, has really happened.
The trouble is that Dr Dawkins thinks that evolution is the only thing that has happened. He thinks that chimpanzees and humans are pretty much the same, but Christians know that chimpanzees and rocks are pretty much the same, because neither chimpanzees nor rocks were made in the image and likeness of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
Sorry, I see no refutation. What I do see is that you may be confusing microevolution (such as one kind of horse turning into another) and macroevolution (a horse turning into, say, an elephant). There’s plenty of evidence for the former and next to none for the latter. And there’s certainly no evidence whatsoever that man, even a flawed man like Dawkins, originates from ape. Fossil records show plenty of apes and plenty of early humans, but nothing in between – that Missing Link continues to gape. I have, however, met many people (again Dawkins comes to mind) whom I’d describe as a centaur: half-man, half-horse’s arse. On a more serious note, when Watson and Crick (both atheists) discovered their double helix, they agreed mournfully that their discovery put paid to Darwin’s theory.
Like you, I don’t want to take too long, for otherwise I could quote numerous other scientists of a similar calibre who dismiss Darwinism out of hand – and cite much scientific evidence supporting the Genesis version of cosmology. Also, you refute yourself by saying, first, that evolution happened “exactly as described by Mr Darwin and Dr Dawkins” and, second, that man was “made in the image and likeness of the Holy and Undivided Trinity”. Which is it? According to Messrs Darwin and Dawkins, man has evolved out of a single-cell organism that in turn evolved from, well, nowhere.
In such matters, we always enter unknown territory. But Christian cosmology is more sound epistemically, rationally and scientifically – and hence more credible – than evolutionist musings. Neither natural selection nor microevolution is in doubt. But neither comes anywhere near to explaining life.