Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design

by Matti Leisola

How could science progress if we could never question or abandon the majority scientific opinion? We would all still be geocentrists who thought the continents were fixed and that eggs were terrible for you.

Teaching biology (or any field of science) as settled dogma, and a dogma moreover that points to a universe drained of meaning and purpose—that is an approach hardly calculated to fascinate and draw young people into the sciences.

The name for this dogma is methodological materialism, and I came to realize how irrational this view of scientific rationality was.

There is no human lottery that remotely approaches the long odds involved in the chance origin of the first life. Based on our current knowledge of what the origin of life would require, it appears that a trillion years times a trillion years wouldn’t have been long enough. The simplest self-reproducing organism is so insanely complex that the amount of time needed for luck to have a fighting chance vastly exceeds the age of the whole universe, and now we have a window both much shorter than that and much shorter than previously believed.

We have no evidence for an unguided origin of life, and mounting experimental evidence against it. The idea remains sheer speculation.

There seems to be only one explanation for this stubborn refusal to register all of the contrary evidence. We are dealing with a conviction deeply rooted in a worldview.

Take that assertion in for a moment. This is how one of the most cited Finnish naturalists proclaims unconsciously his own faith. To avoid the overwhelming problem facing the materialistic theories for the origin of life, he simply pretends that the line between life and non-life is largely meaningless.

For a life-form to evolve into a new and highly distinct life-form, existing proteins must evolve into new and very distinct proteins. If the neo-Darwinian mechanism can’t evolve new proteins, it can’t evolve anything new in the biosphere. The evolutionary process is stuck in the mud.

Axe looked at proteins of modest length (150 residues) and published his results in the Journal of Molecular Biology.29 He found that the ratio of functional proteins to non-functional gibberish was 1 in 1074. He found that the odds of getting a protein with a particular function was 1 in 1077. That’s one protein capable of carrying out that function for every 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000 dead-on-arrival wannabe proteins.

By the middle of the 1970s my doubts had become a conviction: Scientists have no materialist explanation for the origin and complexity of life. The confident bluffing of the dogmatic materialists notwithstanding, they weren’t even close. Experimental science, I concluded, seemed to point in a different direction.

“Let’s not grow impatient and start stuffing God or an ‘intelligent designer’ into the gap of our knowledge just because we cannot find an answer right away.” That response had once seemed unanswerably wise to me, but no longer.

Methodological materialism poses as “the scientific method”—empirical, neutral, disinterested. But this isn’t the case. It is not a neutral way to observe the world. It dogmatically limits possible answers. The possibility that life has been designed is deemed out of the question. In 1999, S. C. Todd put it plainly in the journal Nature: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”7

Thanks to this error-correction system, only about one mutation for every ten billion DNA letters is inherited by the next generation. If we could hand-copy the more than four million letters in the complete plays of William Shakespeare with the same speed and accuracy that bacteria read and copy their genomes, we could dash off some 200 copies of all his plays in twenty minutes with only a single typo in just one of the 200 copies.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, then, are fascinating from a scientific standpoint and challenging from a clinical standpoint, but they aren’t all they’re cracked up to be as icons for the powers of evolutionary change. Antibiotic resistance appears to occur within very strict limits.

Nelson’s and Sternberg’s excellent PowerPoint presentations were on my lab’s webpage, but I was pressured to remove them, which was unheard of. Also, none of those critical of the seminar was interested in the scientific content of the meeting or in the very positive feedback from the audience. None of the critics came to the seminar or requested a recording of the presentations afterwards. The power of prejudice can be overwhelming and override objective judgment.

No, the problem is that macroevolution is a philosophical concept starved of observational evidence.

Now, a documentary exploring what the Bible says about origins would be a fine thing, and given the Bible’s massive impact on the development of Western civilization, a perfectly appropriate topic for a Yle documentary on Good Friday or any other day of the year. However, this particular documentary offered only scientific criticisms from scientists skeptical of neo-Darwinism, not arguments based on appeals to Scripture. Airing the film on Good Friday was meant, I suspect, to obscure this fact.

What evolution and astrology share in common is a penchant for stories so vague and elastic they are difficult to falsify.

So the mutations that evolution needs in order to build new body plans do not occur, and those that do occur, evolution doesn’t need.

It is a pity that the Church of today, frightened by the universal noise made by scientific wolves, prefers to howl with them instead of trying to teach them some manners… When I was a student I revered the sciences and mocked religion… I am surprised to find how many dignitaries of the Church take seriously the superficial arguments I and my friends once used, and how ready they are to reduce their faith accordingly.

But it starts by giving up an active deity, then it gives up the hope that there’s any life after death. When you give those two up the rest of it follows fairly easily. You give up the hope that there’s an immanent morality. And finally, there’s no human free will. If you believe in evolution, you can’t hope for there being any free will. There’s no hope whatsoever of there being any deep meaning in human life. We live, we die, and we’re gone. We’re absolutely gone when we die.

Peer review, understand, isn’t an utter waste. It functions reasonably well in correcting clear mistakes. But referees can be motivated by ideological concerns and personal interests.

This chapter, notice, started by considering one kind of priesthood, roughly speaking—the theologians and clergy who have made it their mission to help enforce Darwinian orthodoxy. Then the chapter moved on to talking about another kind of priesthood—those in the scientific community who use peer review to guard the current scientific orthodoxies. Both priesthoods are bad for scientific progress. Science doesn’t progress by simply trusting the “authorities.” It doesn’t progress by using peer review to enforce orthodoxy. It progresses by following the evidence wherever it leads, no holds barred.

Evolution is slow and gradual, except when it’s fast. It is dynamic and creates huge changes over time, except when it keeps everything the same for millions of years. It explains both extreme complexity and elegant simplicity. It tells us how birds learned to fly and how some lost that ability. Evolution made cheetahs fast and turtles slow. Some creatures it made big and others small; some gloriously beautiful, and some boringly grey. It forced fish to walk and walking animals to return to the sea. It diverges except when it converges; it produces exquisitely fine-tuned designs except when it produces junk. Evolution is random and without direction except when it moves towards a target. Life under evolution is a cruel battlefield except when it demonstrates altruism.

Given all this, it is misguided and unfortunate that in many universities one can freely use theological arguments mixed with science to speak for atheism, while scientific arguments that count in favor of theism are considered to be insulting and bad for the reputation of the university.

In 2014 evo-devo proponent Wallace Arthur admitted this. He expressed a continued faith in common descent and in the evo-devo project, but also confessed that “when the fitness consequences of large-effect mutations in early development have been studied, they have in almost all cases been found to result in major fitness decreases. This is true, for example, of the homeotic mutations studied in Drosophila [fruit flies], and it is one of the main reasons for the rejection of Goldschmidt’s saltational theory of evolution.”26

Where does one go from here? Any time we encounter coded information and can trace it back to its origin, it always leads to a coder, to a designing intelligence. Increasingly I am convinced that only philosophical presuppositions prevent a person from detecting the intelligence behind the huge information content of life.

We need not embrace a simplistic dualism that sees no influencing role for the body and brain on the mind to recognize that mind, along with our awareness of freedom, remains the most primary thing we experience. Nothing is more immediately, more intimately evident, so it doesn’t do to dismiss it as an illusion. Who, after all, is experiencing the illusion? And if choice is an illusion foisted on us by a blind process of evolution, then why should we trust our reason at all—the very reasoning faculty that supposedly tells us that we evolved through a blind process? Evolutionary materialism saws off the very branch of reason that it sits on.