Accepting Design

Two and two are four,
Four and four are eight,
Eight and eight are sixteen,
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…

Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic, you’ll likely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how lovely they are.

 Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
With such determination you’ll surely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

The one fact that will eventually prove fatal to the mainstream scientists’ atheist-materialist view of reality is the certainty that Some Intelligence designed this universe. If you study the scientific evidence with even minimal objectivity, then sooner or later you must conclude that the universe and the life that it contains simply cannot have developed randomly, or even semi-randomly. Anything with so many trillions of moving parts that all must have fit together precisely and consistently during its entire process of assembly and growth, and down to even its most minute details, or it all would instantly have collapsed in upon itself or altogether blown apart, simply cannot be the product of happenstance. That sentence, while overlong, is true. But nevertheless, mainstream scientists still carry blithely on with their atheist-materialist religion-like belief-system, while ignoring that plain truth’s profound implications.

This problem exists in even more precise detail with scientists’ ongoing attempts to investigate the origin and development of life on this planet. Scientists will notice only what they think is favorable to their atheist-materialist position, and will over-hype each isolated bit of what might look to them like a successful discovery, while ignoring the larger fact that mainstream scientists have made little or no real progress in establishing the probable origin of life in their more than a century of earnestly trying. In fact, the prestigious mainstream scientific journal Nature has just published a major critique of the efforts being made by scientists in the field of origin-of-life research. To quote from that Nature article, “Explaining isolated steps on the road from simple chemicals to complex living organisms is not enough. Looking at the big picture could help to bridge rifts in this fractured research field.” And, “The origins-of-life field faces the same problems with culture and incentives that afflict all of science — overselling ideas towards publication and funding, too little common ground between competing groups and perhaps too much pride: too strong an attachment to favoured scenarios, and too little willingness to be proved wrong.” Ouch. That Nature article’s authors helpfully list whole basic areas for research that mainstream origins-of-life researchers are ignoring, from how natural selection is targeted through where genes and proteins actually came from. And these authors are true believers in what the researchers they are critiquing are doing. They actually are trying to be helpful!

Meanwhile, of course, while the scientific gatekeepers rail pointlessly against what are in fact undeniable truths, mainstream science itself has more and more basic problems to address with even its most fundamental theories. For example, scientists still do not understand at all the dark energy that they theorize makes up a full two-thirds of this universe, while the 2022 Nobel Prize winners in physics earned their prize for proving that the universe is not even locally real. And in another groundbreaking recent Nature article, Oxford emeritus biologist Denis Noble calls for a major “rethink” of biology by charging that “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life” because this “view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date.” Wow. So right there are three major areas of science where a whole lot more fundamental work is going to be needed! We have been saying for a while in this space that when the scientific gatekeepers finally give up on enforcing materialism as their “fundamental scientific dogma,” they will have to largely rework or even altogether abandon most of the scientific discoveries of the past century; and more and more, that is looking to be a pretty sure bet. When you base the work of major fields of research on a flawed fundamental dogma like materialism, you are building your system on such a crooked foundation that inevitably, it is all going to fall apart.

Meanwhile, creationist scientists under the leadership of The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle continue to enjoy ever-increasing success. Their field of study is often referred to almost dismissively as “intelligent design,” but in fact they are fully credentialed scientists who just are broadly researching what is true. Their basic difference from mainstream science is that they don’t enforce any predetermined dogmas, and they simply welcome the obvious fact that of course there is a fundamental Intelligence behind it all. Researchers in this broad field test mainstream scientific theories, and they will incorporate them or parts of them wherever in their work that seems to make sense. I enjoy reading their newsletters, just as I do those sent by the major popular-science magazines. But while Popular Science and New Scientist will generally have pitifully little real news to offer, The Discovery Institute’s Evolution News is often full of the kinds of groundbreaking information that ought to be making headlines. Their new information would make for the most part the kinds of headlines, however, that Charles Darwin’s biggest supporters would likely be saddened to read.

Let’s look at a typical week’s sample of what the researchers whose work is featured by The Discovery Institute have lately had to say: 

Carnivory in Plants is a Problem for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution . There are approximately 500 species of carnivorous plants, belonging to nine families and six different plant orders, so carnivory in plants must have arisen several times independently. Carnivorous plants use a number of different methods for catching their prey, and researchers now believe that the pitchers might have arisen seven times independently, adhesive traps at least four times, snap traps twice, and suction traps possibly also twice. The fact that each of these complex systems arose separately so many different times in plants poses a direct challenge to Charles Darwin himself, who said in the Origin of Species that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” “Junk DNA” May be a “Placeholder for Ignorance.” It is even now still assumed that some 90% of our genome is what is called “junk DNA,” which has no function; but upon closer study, a surprising amount of this so-called junk DNA does turn out to have an actual role to play. This article’s author says, “science writer Philip Ball, formerly a lead editor at the journal Nature, … is exasperated by junk DNA defenders who blithely assure the rest of the biological community that the non-functional portion of the human genome… can be fixed at 90 percent or thereabouts. The mindless processes of evolution, junk’s proponents say, are of course responsible for this huge putative junk percentage. As long as species continue to leave offspring, junk can accumulate in their genomes like so many cardboard boxes piling up in the attic, filled with school trophies and old sweaters. … Here is Ball’s proposed rule for molecular biologists: “stop assuming,” he writes, (that) “we know which parts of DNA matter and which don’t.” Take another look in that waste bin. Stifling Opposition is the Real Anti-Science Position . Until recently, it has been fashionable to talk about the science on various matters as being “settled” in order to shut off debate. But the author here argues that no science is ever settled, and that shutting off scientific debate this way on anything is the antithesis of the actual scientific method. He offers wonderful examples of instances where the “experts” were wrong, from the need to close schools during the time of COVID through the purported uselessness of the actually quite useful human appendix. As he says, “Stifling the messy and contentious process required for scientific knowledge to advance undermines science. Yes, that means charlatans and frauds may, at times, successfully beguile the ignorant. But just like the most efficacious answer to bad speech is good speech, the way to overcome bad science is for good science to demonstrate its veracity. Attempts to short-circuit that contentious process betray the very purposes science is supposed to serve.” Memories Are Not “Stored” in the Brain . Here a brief philosophical discussion helps us understand that memories are not material, and they cannot be stored in the same way that something that is physical can be stored in one’s back pocket. We might have expected a discussion of how those memories are stored in consciousness itself, but this careful author doesn’t go that far; he simply says, “Knowing is an ability to do something, and memories are our retained knowledge. I remember how to play chess and I remember my grandmother. That means I retain the ability to play chess and I retain the ability to recognize my grandmother. So that’s all memory is — retained knowledge.” Does the World Need Another Book About Darwin? Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert F. Shedinger is just out, and his article about why he wrote the book makes for fascinating reading. Shedinger says that “In truth, The Origin of Species was an abstract of a much larger book on species that Darwin was working on (and that was three-quarters complete) before events forced him to put the larger book aside and instead publish a mere abstract of it. Once the Origin was in circulation, Darwin’s many correspondents anticipated that he would quickly follow up with the publication of his big book on species so they could better evaluate the argument for natural selection made in the Origin. Indeed, Darwin himself created this expectation both in the Origin and in his correspondence. … A rough, handwritten manuscript of Darwin’s big book, titled Natural Selection, survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1975. Yet despite the easy access scholars now have to this work (I bought a copy on Amazon), there has been little detailed engagement with its contents or comparison of this work with its abstracted form in the Origin. Such a comparison proves enlightening, for it serves to highlight the secondary nature of the Origin as a hastily written abstract rather than a finely honed scientific treatise, thus challenging the iconic status of the Origin as the foundational text of the modern biological sciences. This, of course, may be precisely why the big book gets overlooked. And in short, Shedinger finds that the ultimate book by Darwin, Natural Selection, never was finished and published because Darwin never was able to solve his theory’s most intractable problems.

Five interesting, well-reasoned, and scholarly articles. All of them balanced, useful, and worthy of a much broader audience than they will receive.

What gets me most of all when I compare the limited and dead-ended world of mainstream science with the open and joyous research of the creationists is the fact that most mainstream scientists, like that inchworm, really are missing so much! By looking at our reality so often first in terms of numbers; by self-limiting to the dogma that intelligence can never be a factor, and with the corollary dogma that matter must be primary; and finally by requiring so many scientists to need to seek funds for their separate little bits of research, mainstream science still is missing just about everything. Above all, as those articles in Nature lately have pointed out, mainstream science is missing altogether the beautiful and truly far beyond glorious Big Picture, which is what science really is supposed to be all about! 

Two and two are four, four and four are eight…
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

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