Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design

  

Vincent J. Curtis, M.Sc.


5 August 2005

A question put to President Bush recently has reignited debate in the United States about the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in biology class.  The proposition is that ID (i.e. the intervention of God) be mentioned along side that of Darwinian theory as a competitive, or alternate, theory of evolution and the origin of life on earth .  Of course, we in Canada can laugh among ourselves in our apparent evolutionary superiority over those rubes to the south who refuse to acknowledge that man descended from apes, and who want, once again, to preach from the bible in science class.  However, the actual state of play is not as favorable to the Darwinists as most scientists and the liberal press would have you believe.

In the first place, two important principles of biology stand contrary to any theory of evolution and to the theory on the origins of life that most Darwinists adhere to.

The first principle of biology is that life only comes from life.  Dead meat does not all by itself produce maggots and flies, as was once believed.  The second principle of biology is that a species can only produce members of its own species.  A chicken will not lay an egg that hatches into a monkey, for example.  Chickens only produce chickens.

Taken together, these two fundamental principles of biology undercut any theory that suggests that life began spontaneously from dead matter and that one species evolved from another species, as for example that man evolved from apes.

There is yet another problem that the principles of biology present to evolutionists, and it is a corollary of the second principle quoted above.  It is that insofar as evolution does occur, the evolution of monkeys is toward a better monkey, not to evolve into man.  Thus, even if a tendency to evolve is granted, there is no support for the proposition that evolution would have led from a primitive ape to homo sapiens.  Evolution ought to have led to the descent of a modern ape.  If monkeys were disposed to evolve into men, then there ought to be second or third line of ape-men evolving even now; yet there are not.

The problem that scientists face and perhaps do not recognize is that theories on the origins of life and of evolution do not yet belong to the science of biology.   Biology is concerned with life that has existed, exists, or could exist; but nothing that we know as yet about life can tell us how life as such came to be in the first place.  Theories about how life on earth came to be are speculative philosophical opinions, some more

persuasive than others.

It is in the nature of science that speculative philosophical opinions concerning a science can one day be incorporated into the science once enough knowledge to support the speculation is gained.  But science is not able to shed light directly upon the existence or nature of God: science cannot invoke God and remain scientific.  Science, at best, can explain systematically the splendor of His handiwork.

Scientists, when they work scientifically, must therefore reject direct reference to God when they theorize and speculate about a scientific discipline.  But that limitation does not mean that ID adherents are necessarily wrong, they are just being unscientific when they so speculate.

A further problem that scientists face in presenting a theory of evolution concerns the philosophical problem of change itself.  We can with our own eyes observe the kinetic evolution of a body in motion: we can see it move and change direction under the forces acting on it.  But evolutionary change in a biological sense is not directly observable by our senses, and assigning a cause to such change is not so easy.  Changes occur between generations, not within a particular generation; and evolutionary changes are subtle.  It is not always clear and isolatable what precisely causes change in biological evolution, as we can see with our own eyes that a hockey puck changes direction upon impact with a stick or the glass.  Thus, even if evolution is granted, it cannot be disproved that an Intelligence guided biological matters to take the turn they did.

Here is where the weakness of the scientist’s position on the origin of life and evolution admits of an argument for Intelligent Design.  The theory on the origin of life is that out of the chemical soup that was the earth’s primitive oceans, self-reproducing chemicals spontaneously came together and thus began life.  Intelligent designers argue that that coming together was not as spontaneous as the scientist’s mechanism would have it.  The molecules and mechanism of life are far too complex to be an accident.  Moreover, if such a thing happened spontaneously, how does one explain that it does not happen now?  Dead matter ought to be spontaneously producing life out of sheer random chance.  Yet it does not happen.  Intelligent design a long time ago perhaps?

Similarly, the theory of evolution that holds that a whole series of biological accidents kicked out a line leading to homo sapiens from the line that led to modern apes is open to the challenge that the accidents were not accidental.  While one can accept that evolutionary accidents are rare, the scientist’s position fails to explain satisfactorily why these things were one time events.

The modern theories on evolution and the origin of life are not, strictly speaking, scientific statements of biology.  They are philosophical positions, theories and opinions.  Scientists are predisposed to present theories that are neat and self-contained.  They like random chance and mechanisms, not the hand of God.  A theory that requires the intervention of a superior outside power is decidedly not in the scientific style.

Intelligent design works as an explanation of the theories of the scientists: where scientists say spontaneous and accident, the ID adherents say only apparently spontaneous and only apparently accidental.  The scientists have nothing, as yet, to resolve the argument decisively in their favor, though many try heated indignation.  ID adherents make no attempt to bolster their side, for they cannot.  The weakness of ID is that it may be a non-disprovable statement, for it seems able to operate like a conspiracy theory: when confronted with apparent disproof, the conspiracy theorist merely alleges a bigger conspiracy than previously thought.  The rational weakness of ID theory is not that it cannot be proven, but that it cannot be disproven.

The Darwinist theories of evolution and the origins of life do not stand on as firm scientific ground as its adherents would have us believe, but it is the only ground they have.  Their theories may have greater scientific standing than Intelligent Design for they are more in the scientific style; but that doesn’t mean they are right.  Hence, there is nothing inherently wrong in a biology teacher mentioning ID as one of the competing theories explaining the operation of evolution and of the origin of life, for the competing theory – that of random chance – has its problems, and is itself not truly scientific either.  It must be made clear, however, that ID theory must forever stand outside of science and to use it as a non-disprovable argument offends against reason.

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A version of this was published in the Hamilton Spectator.