Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design

by Matti Leisola

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.

man is only a machine produced by random processes.

If I was the confident and rational one, why was I so touchy?

In the Philebus of Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) Socrates considered this all-important question and laid out the two primary possibilities: “Whether we are to affirm that all existing things, and this fair scene which we call the Universe, are governed by the influence of the irrational, the random, and the mere chance; or, on the contrary, as our predecessors affirmed, are kept in their course by the control of mind and a certain wonderful regulating intelligence.”

methodological materialism,

It was soon conventional wisdom: In the normal course of things, only life begets life.7

The difficulties appear to have been greatly underestimated… difficulties seem to have been increased rather than diminished recently. Unfortunately, progress has not been helped by a strong tendency to make light of these difficulties, or even to ignore them altogether… The problem in fact seems as far from solution as it ever was… We are thus led to an apparently insoluble dilemma… The subject is full of difficulties.9

None of the amino acids with basic side chains (lysine, arginine, and histidine) have been formed in Miller-type experiments, and yet these are crucial for life.

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.

By “scientific” he meant materialistic.

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science,” he writes. “Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity... Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”

He calls “such logical dead ends antitheories” and says that “evolution by natural selection… has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong.”

I am now convinced that Darwin’s theory won out primarily because it fills a need: Scientism, with its allegiance to philosophical materialism, needs mindless evolution to be true, so the proponents of scientism continue to prop up mindless evolution no matter how many contrary fossils slam against it.

What young ambitious scientist wants to be told that she has arrived on the scene after all the excitement of debate and discovery has passed and all that’s left to do is dot the i’s, cross the t’s, and memorize things?

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.

Evolution stands on clay feet.”

the problem is that macroevolution is a philosophical concept starved of observational evidence.

first because they are examples of artificial selection rather than natural selection,

I do not know of a single case where the mutation/selection mechanism has created new information.

behind the birth of modern science were men like Galileo, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, and Pasteur, scientists who believed in real design in nature and in a cosmic designer, a faith that inspired them to go looking for the underlying rational order of the natural world.

So far, so good.

The fact that a disproportionate number of the signers are tenured faculty members, nearing retirement, and/or emeritus faculty is what one would expect in an academic culture where voicing skepticism of Darwinian dogma can be dangerous to one’s career.

the similarity of these genes in all types of animals is a problem for Darwinian theory: If flies and humans have the very same set of body-forming genes, why don’t flies give birth to humans?

one gets the impression that it was relatively easy for blind natural forces to make complex molecules, animals, and plants.

only a full suite of coordinated changes could provide beneficial rather than harmful change.

“the great Darwinian paradox.” He expresses the problem as follows: “Those (genetic) loci that are obviously variable within natural populations do not seem to lie at the basis of many major adaptive changes, while those loci that seemingly do constitute the foundation of many if not most major adaptive changes are not variable within natural populations.”12

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.

“Can a Church That is Bound to Naturalistic Scientism Be Credible?”

[the theistic evolutionist] is trying to ride two horses that are going in opposite directions.”

The survey also found evidence that the theory of evolution is reshaping people’s understanding of morality, with 55% of Americans now contending that “evolution shows that moral beliefs evolve over time based on their survival value in various times and places.”6

I got a letter from a member of that group saying he admired our work, since we published what we saw while they had published what they hoped to see.

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.

The Finnish Association of Skeptics wasn’t defending science. It was defending dogma, the dogma of evolutionary materialism.

As explained there, the twentieth-century understanding of genetics was an atomistic model, while the twenty-first-century understanding is a genome-centric model.

“information is an essential feature of biology and there is no evolutionary explanation for its origin.”

here, in 2008, a prominent science journal reports that a lab has uncovered the first evidence of evolution’s ability to innovate in an impressive way.

This isn’t the evolution of a new molecular feature. It’s the breaking of a molecular feature—a repressor switch.”12 So again, a minor innovation was achieved by breaking stuff. This is no way to build a cathedral. Or a new animal. Or a new plant. Or a new kind of cell. Or even a novel protein.

So, while the described experiments are often promoted as evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution, they either (a) are intelligently designed and do not accurately reflect what happens in nature, or (b) underscore the narrow limits of neo-Darwinian evolutionary change.

It calls to mind an old saying in Texas—all hat and no cattle. In other words, all talk but no real results.

IN 1847 A HUNGARIAN MEDICAL DOCTOR, IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS, NOTICED that many women died after childbirth of childbed fever. After investigating the situation more closely he started to suspect that this was somehow connected to doctors who came directly from autopsy to examine the women after birth. Semmelweis suspected that the doctors brought something on their hands that caused the childbed fever. His suspicions intensified when one of his colleagues got similar symptoms after cutting his finger during an autopsy. After he ordered doctors to wash their hands with chlorine water, the patient death rate plummeted. In spite of this clear evidence that Semmelweis was on to something, his colleagues and the larger scientific community did not take him seriously. He was humiliated and, growing increasingly bitter and erratic, was lured by a colleague into an insane asylum. When he tried to leave, he was beaten so severely by the guards that he died a few days afterward. Years later Semmelweis was vindicated when the role of bacteria in disease became clear. The term “the Semmelweis reflex” was coined in honor of him and as a warning to scientists. It refers to “the rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs and paradigms.”1

every scientific model that touches on origins automatically also has worldview implications.

New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel—an atheist—endorsed Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design,10 and himself published a book in 2012 with the pointed title Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

“Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.”11

The problem with this reasoning is that there are well-established theological reasons why a good and wise God would not create such a world, particularly one he knew would be peopled by fallen and sinful humans. Anti-design evolutionists ignore this rich body of theological reflection, invoke a superficial theology of creation, and then trash the strawman as incompatible with evidence from biology. And if you call them on this, you are accused of talking theology in a science discussion. They deserve credit for brazenness, at least, since they are the ones who introduced theology into the discussion, and badly at that.14

We had the following discussion: “Doctor Leisola, you are a very religious man!” “Professor Winterhalter, so are you!” “What do you mean?” “Your world view, like mine, is based on things that cannot be proved but have to be accepted finally by faith.” “Hmm... you may be right.” We both had a presupposition about the nature of reality. Each of us thought that his own view was reasonable and fit the facts. But neither of us as finite men could prove with mathematical certainty his own starting point. In this respect we both were believers.

Rarely has there been such a great disparity between the popular perception of a theory and its actual standing in the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature.”18

Recall the remark by atheist Michael Ruse quoted earlier: “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity... Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”22

The biological evidence, taken carefully and in total, does not point to the evolution of all living things from common ancestors by unguided processes. It points away from this.

Socrates asks the key question: “whether we are to affirm that all existing things, and this fair scene which we call the Universe, are governed by the influence of the irrational, the random, and the mere chance; or, on the contrary, as our predecessors affirmed, are kept in their course by the control of mind and a certain wonderful regulating intelligence.” Ever since then, great thinkers have debated those two possibilities. It’s educationally backward to declare this monumental issue off limits and insist that a properly rigorous approach to origins may only entertain the materialist position.

The I—the mind—is inescapable. Naturalistic science has no answer to this mystery of mysteries. “The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world,” writes atheist and philosopher Thomas Nagel.3 Cognitive scientist and philosopher Jerry Fodor goes further. “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious,” he remarks. “Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.”4