Some Theories are Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Darwinism is not One of Them
Joe Bonnette closes his comment on my post about A Parent’s Guide to Intelligent Design with this:
As our level of knowledge grows, the theory becomes more fleshed out and refined, but it rarely ever gets disproven, even though it can be. Gravity is a theory, so is plate tectonics, the spheroid earth, heliocentric theory, cell theory, atomic theory, germ theory. And many of those have less evidence backing them than evolution does.
Joe is right that many scientific theories are so well established that it would be intellectually irresponsible to withhold assent after become acquainted with them. But Darwinism today (Neo-Darwinism) is not one of those well-established theories. By Neo-Darwinism I mean the theory of universal common descent by means of natural selection acting on random variations (and other unguided natural processes). It is a theory in crisis. The evidence against it far exceeds the evidence in its favor. If by “evolution” one simply means things change in the trivial sense (earth’s surface changes, frequencies of types of genes change in a population, etc.), then of course this is as well founded as our understanding of gravity and the germ theory of disease.
Darwin promoted the narrow-minded proposal of methodological naturalism (no intelligent causes allowed) in the origin sciences. This is making a huge assumption even before you begin investigation. Methodological naturalism has not been good for science. For example, Darwinism held back progress since the 1970s by its “junk DNA” theory (see my earlier post), which finally died in September 2012 after more than a decade of impressive discoveries of function for what had been called “junk” by Darwinists.
Richard Dawkins cited “junk DNA” up to 2009 as evidence for Darwinism and against intelligent design, but in September 2012 during a BBC encounter with the UK’s chief Rabbi (who confronted him with the “myth of junk DNA”), Dawkins suddenly crafted a new story: he said Darwinism expects “usefulness” not junk (of course, Darwinists will claim to make sense of anything we see in nature, but not plausibly so). See the many www.evolutionnews.org posts about this topic (the ENCODE project refuting “junk DNA”) since September 20th.
“Follow the evidence where it leads” (which, historically, Christianity helped generate), not methodological naturalism, describes “science” at its best. Why have we forgotten most of the positive contributions of Christianity to the rise of modern science? Answer: Myths about science and Christianity perpetuated by recent scientists, science textbooks, and popular culture. These myths proclaim the triumph of methodological naturalism over Christianity. I will be talking about this in a public lecture on Tuesday October 2 at Texas A&M.
