Abstract

But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes. And the servant of the Lord must not strive…

2 Tim 2:23

© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 March 2005
Wednesday, 05 April 2006

Science in Schools

Evolution is no longer a theory. It is a fact.

Richard Leakey

Christians in Kansas, the home state of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and 17 other US states, prefer to believe fairy tales rather than established truth. Christian parents are trying to tell science teachers what science is. It is a contagious disease, ignorance! About four in ten people in the UK and the US think religious alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught as science in schools. Asked what should be taught in science classes, 69% of 2112 UK adults say evolution, 44% say creationism and 41% say ID. Forced to choose one option of the three, 48% opted for evolution without God, 22% chose creationism and 17% chose ID. A substantial proportion want biology teachers to tell their pupils that women began with Adam’s rib, and were made from it by God. They want history teachers to tell about Noah, Abraham and Solomon. They tell their children that teachers who teach evolution are lying.

Is it not alarming that a nation able to destroy the world with the push of a button has a president, a cabinet and half its population who believe in an apocalyptic religion? Many crackpot Christians are worse than Moslem suicide bombers, imagining the end of the world will mean they start a new life with God on the heavenly beach. What can be happening when a third of the mightiest country ever known in the world, whose power is based on science, repudiate the basis of their modern lives in favour of an ancient story book? They say the theory of evolution is not a fact but the theory of Genesis—the fairy tale of Adam and Eve and the serpent—is a fact! They want science textbooks to carry a warning that the theory of evolution is not a fact, but they do not say the bible should carry a warning that the stories of Genesis are not facts—or, for that matter, most of the rest of it. Religions are based on sets of arbitrary beliefs. The Christians want science to be the same.

These people are still living in the year dot. They do not appreciate that science is a field of human endeavour independent of the bible, and without which they would have no medicines, CAT scans, disinfectants, TVs, mobile phones, cheap foodstuffs, motor cars and aeroplanes, detergents or hygiene, and all the other benefits delivered by science, and instead they would have to cure disease by spit, ride on donkeys, and take their chances with leprosy, filth, blindness, poverty, starvation, and stench. All this rather than accept that the bible is practically useless but science has given us the practical advantages we now have.

Would these Christian fundamentalists want to reintroduce crucifixion, since it appears in God’s own book as a punishment fit for His own son? Now, the American Christians who want to stop science teaching in schools have elected a President whose administration has tortured and killed people as a matter of policy in Abu Graib in Iraq and in Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. They want a world dominated by Christianity as it was in the Dark Ages and the times of the Inquisitions and the Witch Hunts when people were routinely burned alive, because Christians said they were evil. Like the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, these victims of Christianity had no defence. They were guilty, full stop! Christians said so!

The center of the Christian hatred of truth is evolution. The theory of evolution has been around now for 150 years. In that time it has endured constant attacks by the Christians who hate it, and are desperate to disprove it, yet it has gone from strength to strength. If evolution can be discredited, Christian creationists think their own Christian belief, and particularly Genesis, is ipso facto proved to be true. It is not so, but it is the reason they keep persisting.

Why then are they so desperate about it? Creationist Dr D T Gish explains what is at the heart of it all:

The biblical doctrine of creation is of critical importance to the Christian faith.

Its importance is that, in the bible, humanity were created sinless and therefore perfect, but they fell from this perfect state by choosing to disobey God. The bible says that Christ had to die on the cross to redeem humanity from its fallen state. Now, evolution contradicts the bible. Humanity did not fall from any state of perfection, it says, but evolved from a lower state to a higher one. The human race is not fallen but is ascending a ladder of complexity. If this is so, then the supposed vicarious death of Christ on the cross is false. Humanity has no need for redemption, and Christianity is wrong in its basic tenet. Gish himself writes:

The claim that God used evolution rather than special creation to bring the universe and the living things it contains into being denies the omniscience and omnipotence of God and makes a mockery of scripture.

The opponents of evolution were stymied in 1987 when the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of the Louisiana Creationism Act—legislated to give equal time for creation “science” with evolution in schools—that public schools that taught religion as science in science classes were unconstitutional. Creation “science” was not science because it did not start with a falsifiable hypothesis. The Supreme Court in 1987 ruled that creation science was religion, and so violated the US First Amendment, separating church from state. Specifically:

The Act violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it seeks to employ the symbolic and financial support of government to achieve a religious purpose.

So, creationists invented the notion of “Intelligent Design” (ID) which they claim is a scientific hypothesis, even though it has no scientific track record and cannot be scientifically tested. Creation science and ID are the same, inasmuch as neither are testable hypotheses, and so the same judgement applies to ID as to the Lousiana Act.

ID is not a testable theory in any sense and as such is not accepted by the science community.

Catholic professor, Kenneth Miller

The creationism anarchists had tried to circumvent the ruling immediately by publishing a new edition of their creationism textbook Of Pandas and People with references to “creationism” replaced by “intelligent design”. ID, they said, is not religious because it does not mention God, but is scientific because they call it a hypothesis. The fact that this is a sham because the Intelligent Designer they mean can only be God in their hypothesis, and that scientific hypotheses are not just anything that some gash preacher can think of and call a hypothesis, but has actually to explain things that other hypotheses cannot, and yet be testable, fruitful and predictive, escapes them totally. These people do not get an important difference between religion and science—science is not arbitrary!

An almighty, omniscient being could easily have made evolution a part of Genesis had He wanted to, and, if He had, all Christians would have been defending it. He could have cured not just one or two lepers or even ten of them but could have eradicated leprosy from the earth had He wanted to. Now that would have been a miracle that earned respect. It is science that is doing it, not the Christian religion. Religion is arbitrary because believers believe whatever they are told to believe. It could have been anything. They do it because one of the things they are told is that unbelief is a sin, and will cause them to go to hell. It is psychological blackmail, all the more disgusting and wicked because no one with any sense believes it, so it is used on simple and uncomprehending people, like children.

Christians have to deny all the natural evidence in favour of what they regard as supernatural evidence, though all they have as evidence of that is a book of ancient tales. They have to prefer myth to reality. It is why no scientist could be a Christian, and why no Christian could be an honest scientist.

Even so, most Christians can see what we all can—that science is a legitimate endeavour that has produced for us some astonishing benefits. Few of us could imagine a world without these benefits. Yet, they have different criteria for biological science and particularly evolution. Non-Christians can only see Christian bickering over evolution as a sign that Christians have indeed lost touch with reality. They have gotten so obsessed with the supernatural that their beliefs are irrelevant to normal life. Evolutionary biology is just as valid as any other science, and is getting to be more important than most. In fact, biochemistry is the frontier of science not just evolutionary theory, but Christians think Moses and the Exodus are facts, something immaterial called “the Spirit” effects people who profess their faith, and God was conceived by Himself in the womb of a human woman to be born as a human being to redeem people from Himself! What is the benefit of such nonsensical beliefs in real life, except to fill the coffers of evangelical rogues? In particular, what is the advantage of this malarkical faith over knowing things to be true by testing them using scientific method? The only advantage is that it preserves Christianity, but at the cost of reality and reason.

Mythology in the White House

Creationism and Intelligent Design

There is a national crusade under way to inject religion into our public schools, and it must not succeed. Religious Right activists are looking for every opportunity to proselytise students into their doctrines.

Barry Lynn, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

ID is the notion that life is so complex that it must have been designed by a being of high intelligence. Darwinian natural selection is therefore inadequate to account for variety in life, despite the vast amount of evidence that it does. ID is a religious dogma, not science. ID has similarities with creationism, and creationists use the expression ID. Really, ID is a version of creationism, and the US supreme court ruled in 1987 that creationism could not be taught alongside evolution. So, schools teaching it as science are violating the separation of church and state specified for good reason in the constitution. Many of the arguments of ID are creationist arguments that have long ago been refuted. Oxford University evolutionist, Professor Richard Dawkins, comments:

If somebody professes disbelief in evolution, it is highly probable that they know nothing about it. These ignorant people would probably welcome enlightenment. It is up to scientists to get out of their labs and enlighten.

The natural history broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough, agreed that scientists should defend science against religion:

Science teachers know perfectly well that science is based on evidence and that intelligent design is not based on evidence—quite the reverse.

Both ID and creationism depend on the living world being so large and complex that science in only 150 years has not yet explained all the features of it. All ID does is try to place God as the Designer in the gaps in evolution, such as gaps in the fossil record.

Advances in science progressively confine God to the ever decreasing gaps in knowledge.

R J Berry, Professor of Genetics, University College, London

ID differs from creationism in accepting much of the scientific evidence, such as that the world is millions of years old. Creationists take Genesis 1-3 as literally true and so the earth is only 6,000 years old. Creationism takes all life to have been created complete, in a few short acts by God, but ID concedes that species do change, though not by random genetic mutations and natural selection. It is because God built change into organisms from the outset, an idea that would effectively provide the theological basis for evolution that many Christians accept anyway as permitting evolution! Proponents of ID do not name the Designer as God, thereby pretending their belief is not religious, but it is a pretence because none of them actually doubts that God is the Designer.

IDers claim random mutation and natural selection cannot account for the creation of new complex genetic information. Have any god botherers bothered to demonstrate that this is true? The Darwinian hypothesis has been shown to work at the species level, and the devotees of ID agree it does. They dismiss it nevertheless as the ultimate cause of profound differences in taxonomic families even though droplets of rain eventually form huge rivers, and we can see ancient stone steps worn hollow by countless feet walking up and down them. The timescales involved are such that small changes to species can become major physiological differences, but also that the original differentiation was long ago, and is now lost from view in the geological record. Macroevolution is therefore not proved, but it is an hypothesis that does not need a supernatural non-explanation. That is what fundamentalists do not like.

Science is based on evidence, so what evidence is there for ID? No definitive evidence for it exists, nor has it any unequivocal experimental or theoretical background. Hypotheses in science must be testable and ID cannot be tested. Evolution has made predictions that have proven to be true, and for which no better explanations have been offered.

ID is based on religious belief not on science. Believers in ID cannot discredit the scientific evidence that contradicts their belief and simply choose to ignore it. So, ID cannot be considered as science. That leaves it as a philosophical or a theological notion. Its provenance shows it to be theological. It has no theoretical base for testing its hypotheses, and offers no new directions of research, as all good science does. It has never contributed to any improvements in life, medicine, agriculture, forestry, pathology, or offered anything except normal religious confusion. Evolutionary theory has illuminated all of these, and hugely ordered the confusion, leading to the discovery of the genetic code which is now allowing formerly incurable diseases of plants and animals to be cured.

Australian, Paul Mealing reminds us that many clergy oppose the teaching of creationism in schools. They acknowledge creationism is an intrusion that serves no purpose except divisiveness. Simple creationist believers think science and religion are interchangeable, and are unaware that if you bring God into science you stop doing science. Creationism (or ID) answers all questions without explanations, which is why it is the road to the end of science. The answer to the problem of including creationism in school curricula is to accept that that the Genesis story should be taught, but only in comparative religion, alongside all other creationist myths such as Hindu and Aboriginal ones. And scientists must avoid the error of appearing to have all the answers. Science is always open to question. It is perpetually dynamic. Frozen knowledge is religion.

Bobby Henderson is more satirical. A physics graduate of Oregon State University, in June 2005, he objected that people who believe in creation by the Flying Spaghetti Monster were being sidelined in this debate. To resolve the problem, the US Supreme court should consider splitting science lessons in schools three ways:

One third time for ID, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Henderson’s satirical point is that his “religion” is just as rational as ID. Once mad non-scientific ideas are admitted, then education becomes nonsense. The fact that large numbers of Christians and Moslems believe something irrational is no scientific argument. Science is not based on weight of opinion however impressive it might be thought to be, it is based on weight of evidence. On that basis, Adelphiasophism has a genuine case to be taught in religious instruction lessons!

In truth, IDers want evolution to be declared as atheistic, and then they can argue that religion is needed as a counter balance to atheism in schools. Certainly evolution has nothing to say about God, but there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to accept that evolution is the way that God has worked. To claim anything else, is to claim that God is not sovereign, they believe. God is no explanation of suffering, but anti-evolutionists like to think that evolution is a cruel and wasteful method for their good God to have invented. So they are accepting that God can tolerate suffering, on the one hand, as a holy mystery, and yet have the presumption to declare it as unacceptable to them for God to cause on the other.

Michael Behe

Dr Michael J Behe, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University, is the guru of Christian apologetic critics of evolutionary theory. He is a Catholic but seems to think that science should be God. His criticisms of evolution are that it is not as good as his God! God can explain everything in the whole of Nature, but science cannot, so science is wrong and God is right! Note that God has not actually explained anything, and never did. Even Christians like William Neil in his One Volume Bible Commentary says:

The Bible does not stand or fall by the accuracy of its information because it is not a textbook of science, or history or archaeology.

All material things were willed by God, the bible tells us, but it does not explain any of the detail of how God willed things to happen. So, Behe did not like the idea that the fish shaped legless water mammals called whales had evolved from four legged landlubbers. He denied it, jeering in 1994 that no transitional fossils linked the first fossil whales with their forebears that lived on land. The ink had scarcely dried on his claim than three transitional fossils between whales and their eocene predecessors were uncovered.

But evidence that something happens is always insufficient for people like Behe. Religious fanatics are never impressed by evidence. He demands to know precise details of evolutionary processes, even when he knows science is not yet so mature that it has been able to work them all out. If we are to believe believers, God had eternity to work out how to create life, but science has only had a century or so, since On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. The practical discoveries that have confirmed evolutionary theory since are more recent still—genes since the basis of heredity began to be understood when De Vries discovered Mendel’s work in 1900, DNA, the basis of evolution, since its structure was worked out in 1953, recombinant DNA techniques allowing DNA to be closely studied, since they were developed in 1972, the genome, since the 1990s when the first complete genome of a bacterium, a simple animal, was decoded, and now the genomes of the human species and its nearest cousins (yes, indeed!) have been worked out fully.

What have ID advocates worked out in that time? How to point us back to the dark ages, the inquisition and abject ignorance. You will notice that Behe does not seek to know precisely how God made species. That is Christian double standards at work. The Intelligent Designer, God, has to be accepted on no evidence but simply on the say so of professional Christians and their indoctrinated flocks, but they have an altogether more rigorous standard for those who prefer naturalistic evolution instead.

Incoherently, Behe concedes that evolution means common descent—the idea that all organisms living and dead have a common ancestor. He says:

I have no quarrel with the idea of common descent, and continue to think it explains similarities among species.

But he does not think it is enough to explain the differences between species. If this is not a non sequitur, the supernatural Creator must intervene each time a species is descending from another one. The likenesses between descendents are because they have the same ancestor, but the differences are caused by divine intervention. It is Arthur C Clarke’s 2001, but the extra-terrestrials do not modify just the ape to make a potential human, they modify species at every level of their descent from the common ancestor. It sounds insane, and it is.

Behe actually has an even more insane idea. He thinks the Intelligent Designer put some mystical blueprint into the first cell He made that provided for all the important differences in the species. In some super-DNA, no doubt of a non-material substance since no one has ever seen it whether in ancient or in modern cells, the first cell had all the information needed for future change. Species did not therefore adapt, they were pre-designed in this mystical way for everything that subsequently happened.

Apparently, the finches can take care of themselves, but conspicuously different species must certainly have had a Designer in their background, who it seems must have devised them in his celestial studio.

Father Edward T Oakes, SJ, Regis University, Denver, Colorado

Behe agrees that Darwinian theory accounts for the beaks of Galapagos finches, the shift in the ratio of dark and light moths of a certain species in England when pollution made the light moths more visible to predators on blackened tree trunks, and bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. Previous creationists had claimed evolution was not actually testable, yet these are tests of it. Dobzhansky’s laboratory work on third chromosomal inversion in the fruitfly Drosophila pseudo-obscura is a classic case of the practical use of orthodox science in evolution. The colour of the moth is one of many observations of the influence of warning colour or camouflage on survival. Snails and insects like ladybirds have been seen adapting their colours to their environemt. Resistance to medicines is so well known now that medical doctors have to consider it when treating patients, and hospitals are finding themselves up against the so-called super-bugs that are resistant to most bacterial agents. Resistance of insects like aphids and mosquitoes to pesticides is a constant battle that GM crops are being devised to win by transferring genes conferring certain immunities between plant species. Rats have developed a resistance to warfarin. Plants in polluted areas get tolerance to heavy metals. And many more.

Despite all these examples happening on short enough time scales to be studied, Behe complains that more significant adaptations have “not been demonstrated”. Whatever the evidence, the fanatics simply retreat a little and draw a new line in the sand, sneering that their criteria are never met! Behe will not be satisfied until a new species is made before your very eyes by some scientist, and even then he will appeal to the mystical blueprint, yet he is happy to believe on no evidence at all that the God of the Jews and Christians made species change to suit His purpose. The double standards of Christians disqualifies him from being a scientist, because there is no way at all that the Christian hypothesis he supports can be tested.

Science and Intelligent Design

ID arguments against Darwinian evolution are nearly identical to those used unsuccessfully by traditional creationists. But ID uses the language of science to argue that we will never understand Nature unless we take the supernatural, meaning God, into account. The case centres on the question of how complex structures originated. Living things are full of multi-component structures that only function if all their parts are present. ID advocates argue that these biological structures are too complex to have been created by natural selection and so must have been designed in a supernatural way (such as by God). They introduce two concepts:

• “Irreducible complexity” proposes that some biomolecular systems, such as blood clotting, can only function as a complete unit, and so could not have been created by natural selection.
• “Specified complexity” uses probability theory to try to show that certain biological structures are so unlikely to have emerged through natural processes that they must have been designed.

Though plausible sounding, scientifically they are fundamentally wrong. American IDers want science to be redefined not as finding “natural” explanations but as finding “adequate” explanations, so that supernatural ones can be brought in. Yet an adequate explanation is not necessarily scienctific. God was indeed an adequate explanation for millennia, but He is no longer adequate. If He were, there would have been no need for science, yet there plainly has been, and still is. Christianity, however, cannot give any adequate evidence that God Himself exists. Christians try to justify their stance by appeals to philosophy, but they misuse it. Kant rigorously demolished arguments for the existence of God, but apologists can commend him while reproducing the discredited arguments. Kant pointed out that just because something can be conceived does not imply that it exists. Fundamentalist ministers would quickly complain if their congregations started putting hypothetical money on to the platter. A hypothetical God no more implies God than a hypothetical payment implies payment.

Science is not what is merely adequate or even plausible, it must be shown by testing to be so. Crucially, these two notions cannot be tested, so they are not scientific. Moreover, scientific ideas have to be fruitful, leading onwards to further investigation and discoveries. If ID were science, it would stop research. Molecular biologists would halt when they met a biological structure too complicated to explain immediately that must therefore be the work of the Intelligent Designer. When the Intelligent Designer did something, that would be the end of any further investigation, because the ID is too clever for us to comprehend.

IDers speak of a ‘controversy’ between evolution and ID, but no one teaches children non-scientific speculations elsewhere in science, so why should ID be any different? No one thinks there is any controversy over perpetual motion, say, or between astronomy and astrology. To speak of controversy implies there are two equal options, but there are not two equal options and there is no controversy. Evolution by natural selection has survived over a century of scientific scrutiny. The US National Academies of Sciences called it the “most important concept in modern biology”. Evolution has helped us to interpret the fossil record, understand how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, and described the rapid changes in species taking place before our eyes. It explains some spectacular examples of unintelligent design, such as cave dwelling species with functional eyes blinded by skin flaps. Natural selection has even been used by the biotechnology industry to make new drugs. ID has produced nothing.

The controversy is really about whether non-scientific beliefs held on the basis of religious belief alone, should be taught as if it were science, as creationists want it to. The people behind ID would rather readers saw ID as purely scientific, yet a goal of the Discovery Institute, ID’s sinister Seattle base, is to preach “that nature and human beings are created by God”. This is creationism. Stephen Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, says one of the reasons why humans and chimpanzees cannot share a common ancestor is that humans have immortal souls and chimps do not. What more evidence is needed that the Discovery Institute and its baby, ID, is theological not scientific. Jonathan Wells, a fellow of the Discovery Institute has a PhD in biology, and has said his attacks on evolution follow from years of studying biology. The truth is more satanic. In an essay, Darwinism: Why I went for my second PhD, he admits he is a disciple of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Moonies or, as they call themselves, the Unification Church. As a Moonie he was told to set about undermining Darwinism. That is why he took up biology to give him some credentials. ID is not science, but probably is blasphemy.

Longest Running Lie

Dr William Dembski, the self promoting creationist, says all the debate in this country over evolution will not matter in a decade. By then, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead. “I see this all disintegrating very quickly”, he said. But Dembski has being saying it for longer than a decade already. He wrote an introductory essay to the book he edited, Mere Creation, (1998) in which he said:

Darwin gave us a creation story, one in which God was absent and undirected natural processes did all the work. That creation story has held sway for more than a hundred years. It is now on the way out.

He has continued to predict the “imminent demise” of evolutionary theory ever since, yet there seems to be no actual signs it is dying, quite the reverse. In 2004, the theory of evolution, Dembski claimed, was a vision “now faltering”, and he looked forward to writing about the “implications of Darwinism’s imminent demise and replacement by intelligent design”.

It is interesting that this demise of Darwinism has been predicted by bible thumpers ever since, and indeed before, Darwin published his theory, if the previous geological evidence against creation is also taken into consideration. G R Morton has detailed such claims back for 180 years. Thomas Cooper in 1878 thought he saw “some signs of this whimsical theory of Evolution” being wrong. The evidence was that man seemed, according to Carl Vogt, to have descended from the dog! Equally, the lies about Genesis being proved by science were being spouted by creationists as long ago as 1894:

In so far as Genesis is concerned it has been practically decided by scientific exploration.

J William Dawson (1894)

By the start of the twentieth century, we were getting the story more or less in the form Dembski and his Discovery Institute fakers still use:

A mere glance at the history of the theory [of evolution] during the four decades that it has been before the public shows that the beginning of the end is at hand.

Zockler (1903)

Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past.

Eberhard Dennert, At the Deathbed of Darwinism (1904)

Morton’s article, which has many more examples, can be found on line by a search for “The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism”

William Dembski, also of the Discovery Institute, argues that the odds against getting complex structures from chance mutations are insurmountable. For two proteins to interact to perform some new function their shapes would have to fit together. So in principle, he says, we can calculate the probability that one protein could change by chance to fit perfectly with another. Dembski claims two calculations put the odds so long as to rule out chance. Sadly, Dembski cannot or will not see that these calculations are logically flawed. They focus on a single, specified outcome, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, “It is a retrospective fallacy”. It is like being amazed that a dollar bill in your pocket has the number it has out of all the numbers possible. Miller says:

By demanding a particular outcome, as opposed to a functional outcome, you stack the odds.

A dollar bill with any of the numbers minted on it functions as currency and could be in your pocket. If you have a dollar, then you have one of the numbers, and there is nothing amazing about it. What these calculations fail to recognise is that the numbers are not remarkable unless specified beforehand on the basis of some criterion. In the same way, the protein sequences are not remarkable unless we know on the basis of some other criterion that they cannot be functional. Proteins in different species can vary by 80 to 90 per cent, but still perform the same function, just as dollar bill with any legitimate number on it could be in your pocket, and one must be! The “improbability argument” also misrepresents natural selection. A set of simultaneous protein mutations to form a functioning complex mechanism is so unlikely as to be unfeasible, but that is not what Darwin suggested. He suggested an accumulation of small changes without any final goal, except that each step must be advantageous to the organism since otherwise selection would eliminate it. Biologists might not yet understand why some subtle advantages are conferred, after all, biologists are mortal human beings not gods with an eternity to think about it. So, as yet full answers have not been had for everything that can be observed in Nature, and to complain that they have not is either idiotic or dishonest.

Crucially, ID does not make testable predictions. It thinks complex systems are evidence of a designer, but as soon as a system is explained by natural selection, it no longer is. So, the Intelligent Designer God is just Coulson’s God of the Gaps repainted. Tracey Hemingway-Wright thinks it wonderful “to read scientific apologies for Christianity just to laugh at how far their God of the gaps has been shoved from the ‘adore me or be damned’ genocidal megalomaniac to become the ever so cryptic ‘cosmic conscience’. Even if there is a limit to what science can explain, there is no scientific bandwagon too high for Christian lunatics to jump onto to justify their lame brained notions of sky fairies.”

Dembski admitted ID had no predictive power, as any scientific hypothesis must have, to be scientific, in his 2004 book The Design Revolution:

To require of ID that it predict specific novel instances of design in nature is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience.

Father George Coyne, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, says:

Intelligent Design is not science even though it pretends to be.

A Mousetrap—An Irreducibly Complex System?

Behe tells us Darwin’s theory encounters its greatest difficulties explaining the development of the cell. In a living cell, complex molecular exchanges and reactions occur, including blood-clotting, the immune system and intracellular transport, such that any missing step looks as though it would prevent the process from working. He explains this “irreducible complexity” by considering a mousetrap:

If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function. In other words, the simple little mousetrap has no ability to trap a mouse until several separate parts are all assembled. Because the mousetrap is necessarily composed of several parts, it is irreducibly complex.

If any of the several parts of a normal mousetrap fail, then it will not kill mice. Behe thinks such a contraption cannot grow in a Darwinian way by gradual increments.

You can’t catch a mouse with just the platform and then catch a few more by adding the spring. All the pieces have to be in place before you catch any mice.

It is what Dawkins calls the “argument from personal incredulity”. Believers are mainly incredulous that evolution can happen naturally, but are utterly credulous when it comes to inventing a superbeing to make species from scratch. Behe cannot imagine evolution happening, so it cannot happen.

Creationist, Duane Gish, once tried to show that mammals and reptiles had been separately created because the jaw of each is made from different bones, the bones that were the jaws of reptiles being in the ear of mammals. In mammals, the three smallest bones—the malleus, incus, and stapes—carry sound vibrations across the middle ear, from the membrane of the tympanum (the eardrum) to the oval window. The ear, according to Behe’s criteria, is “irreducibly complex”—all of the five components are essential, so it cannot possibly have evolved. It is obvious, creationists thought, that any transitional form must have its jaw unhinged and reassembled. What would happen to the poor reptile waiting for two of his jaw bones to move into the ear? It could neither hear nor eat!

Yet it did, and it is written in fossils. Bones that formed the back of the lower jaws of reptiles, through selection, moved backwards and reduced in size until they formed the inner ears of modern mammals. In Behe’s book, this is impossible. Then A W Crompton unearthed and described the fossil of a mammal-like reptile with a double jaw joint made of both pairs of bones. A double articulation of the jaw joint allowed the transitional animal to eat and hear at the same time. Having both sets of bones functioning is something the creationists had not thought of, but provided a perfectly simple way in which the impossible could happen! Professor Kenneth R Miller, Professor of Biology, Brown University, writes:

The multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual parts, despite Behe’s claim that they must. They evolve together, as systems that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes.

Behe is utterly lacking in imagination, and that is his trouble. Ordinary physiology offers well known examples of Behe’s irreducible complexity. The whole of the physiology of any animal or plant is an irreducibly complex system, yet not only did it evolve, a fact that Behe questions, but it grew in its own lifetime from a single cell. How did the creature survive all the changes from a single cell to the fully developed adult creature with a heart, lungs, digestive and nervous system, and brain, none of which would function without the others. The hypothesis of irreducible complexity says the single fertilized cell could never become a mature organism.

Others have had little trouble in imagining how a conventional mousetrap could have evolved from just a piece of springy wire, which could be a moustetrap on its own, but can be progressively improved by adding additional parts. Moreover, a part which was optional at an early stage of development may later become essential when other parts get modified to depend on it. Nowadays Behe equivocates on this part of his argument, but still says processes like this could not have evolved from simpler ones, and the only explanation is that these processes were designed from scratch by a superior intelligence. As they could only have occurred that way, they prove that there was an Intelligent Designer.

Behe’s thesis is the threadbare argument from design which creationists keep on trying to re-upholster. Paley first used this sort of argument in his famous analogy of the watch. Finding a watch in the grass in a pristine world would prove that intelligent life existed to design it. The argument continues that Nature has many such wonderfully complex things, and all therefore testify to a designer. What Christians hated above all about Darwin was that his theory showed how the illusion of design could arise naturally by life being selected to suit its environment. It got rid of Paley’s Watchmaker.

The Evolution of the Vertebrate Eye

The wing of a bird and the vertebrate eye were such amazingly “designed” things that creationists thought they were certain proof of God the Designer. Eyes have evolved many times, including many non-vertebrate compound eyes, and the vertebrate eye is not the most efficient example of a camera eye. Capillaries on the surface of the retina interfere with the passage of light. It is not at all an intelligent design. The similar eye of molluscs is better designed with the blood vessels beneath the retina. Nor is the vertebrate eye too difficult to imagine developing by natural selection from a spot on a creature’s skin that is sensitive to light. This first creature had an the advantage of being able to seek or avoid light and therefore had an advantage over those that had no such sense. Its descendents in some environment had an advantage and proliferated.

Random mutations happened most of which were disadvantageous, and so they did not get selected. Then some mutation put the light sensitive spot at the bottom of a depression in the skin. The edges of the depression kept light out at the edges giving the creature a more directional vision, a slight advantage which was selected. Then the depression became such an advantage that it deepened by mutation and selection until the eye spot was at the bottom of a round chamber, making a crude pinhole camera which gave a crude and faint image on the light sensitive spot.

At this stage there was an advantage in the spot growing, and so mutations in this direction, which previously would have been a disadvantage now became an advantage, and the spot became a retina which could distinguish the intensity of light in different places, and so allow the animal to recognize the image. This was an immense advantage because now the creature could see food and predators, and there was a strong evolutionary trend for selection of this trait.

The light sensitive cells were delicate, and damage to them would have left the creature without its advantages. This is another reason why there was an evolutionary pressure for the selection of creatures in which the eye was protected by being at the bottom of a cavity with a protective rim. The pressure to protect the sensitive area led to selection of a mutation in which the rim joined across its edges. That would, of course, have made the animal blind and so would not have been selected, but in one mutation the skin was transparent and the eye cavity was thoroughly protected without interfering with the ingress of light. Indeed, the transparent layer sealed in a layer of fluid which could then change its composition by having salts and proteins exuded into it, making it thicker and denser, with a high refractive index, and helping to focus the light.

While this was happening the transparent protective layer doubled and another layer of liquid was exuded between the layers, causing them to bulge and form a lens. Again the light was focused better, and the changes that caused it were selected in the environment of the animal. Now all the elements of the vertebrate eye and the molluscine eye were in place, and evolution continued as the selection of mutations that improved the focus and sensitivity until it made the eyes we now see and see with.

Every one of the variants of eye that have been mentioned can be found in creatures with eyes, sometimes more than one of the refinements being present on a single creature, such as jellyfish. The earliest creatures with what seem like primitive eyes lived 500 million years ago, yet calculations based on conservative factors suggest that an eye could evolve in the way described in only about half a million years.

Sylvia Baker, author of a creationist book called Bone of Contention (1976), gives an account of how she became a creationist from discussing the evolution of the eye in a college seminar:

What use is a hole in the front of the eye to allow light to pass through if there are no cells at the back of the eye to receive the light? What use is a lens forming an image if there is no nervous system to interpret that image? How could a visual nervous system have evolved before there was an eye to give it information?

Well now she knows! The point about evolution that creationists have to ignore—though Darwin himself pointed it out—is that function evolves in parallel with form. The eye can begin crudely as simply a light sensitive cell, but that is an advantage over organisms that cannot sense light. It does not function at first as a camera, forming an image, but that function evolves. Given a light sensitive cell in some organism of our world initially, it would be strange had it not evolved into something more complex. Like Behe and others in their camp, she lacks the imagination and comprehension needed to be a scientist. Not only that but she completely lacks humility, something we were once taught was an essential Christian virtue. She, lacking brain function, cannot imagine how the eye can evolve, and so it cannot evolve! There is this tendency to self-deification in most Christians. They want to be God, but have to settle for the next best thing—being his favourite pal.

The Intelligent Designer

Few, if any, IDers are not professed Christians, but they are always coy about what sort of designer they are thinking of. They know that by admitting the designer is God, at the outset, they become simple creationists and not scientists, and so they pretend the designer is to be identified, as if they meant to do it by experiment. It also helps their campaign to get ID into the classroom, by hiding the truth that they know who the designer is—it is God—thereby admitting they are religionists not scientists.

Even so, Behe, a lifelong Catholic, has tried to resurrect Paley as a molecular process in a cell. Behe went back to Darwin. One of the ways Darwin himself suggested his theory might be tested and falsified was by finding in organisms biochemical parts that evolution could not have produced. Behe pretends he has them in his “irreducibly complex” criterion of the work of the Intelligent Designer.

Unfortunately his hypothesis is not scientific, as he seems to think it is. It is not falsifiable, no test could be offered to disprove it. All scientific hypotheses must be testable in a way such that one possible outcome of any test is failure. As long as the test does not fail, then the hypothesis is sound, but failure of the test must be possible. Although Behe has studied biochemistry and become a professor, he has failed to understand scientific method, and the reason is the Catholic indoctrination he has experienced all his life. Ignatius Loyola was allegedly frank about the value of early indoctrination, and Behe knows it well. Christians have to accept “revealed ideas” just on the say so of other Christians. Yet accepting something with no evidence is uncritical and anti-intellectual—the tendency of infants of all ages to think the answer to anything is sticking your fingers in it and licking them. To think that God is an explanation is licking jam off of dirty little fingers, and looking pleased. It is certainly quite anti-scientific, but Behe prefers to believe the lies of those who indoctrinated him to the vast treasures of scientific discovery.

Yet others did not succumb to the indoctrination to the same ridiculous extent. Professor Kenneth Miller is also a Catholic, but he is rather more aware of what intelligent design says about God, if it is supposed true:

If an intelligent designer used his skill, cunning and craft to make all these things, the fact that most of them go extinct is an embarassment. Why have they gone extinct if he is so intelligent?

Rather than accepting a sticky finger explanation as Dr Gish did, it is better to accept the adage of a great biological scientist:

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J B S Haldane

So, Who is the Designer?

Galileo invited the professors from the university of Padua to look through his telescope. The profesors were Christians. Anyone who was not a Christian could not have tenure at universities in those days, and most, if not all of them will have been ordained clergy. The Catholic professors thought looking at something was a silly way to solve problems. All the answers, they thought, were in the Christian bible, supplemented by such post mortem Christians as Aristotle. Modern Creationists are remarkably similar.

The difference between the professors and Galileo is the difference between accepting belief on the basis of the authority of tradition and belief on the basis of checking it by observation. Christians cannot accept the notion of checking, or people might begin to check their belief in Christianity, by looking at Christian history, for example. Or believers might begin to think that to check something a criterion is needed, and begin to wonder what the criterion of Christian “truth” is—the mantra of Christians being that theirs is the “true” belief. There is no criterion of Christian truth except personal feeling, and the trouble with that is that so much objective evidence shows how misleading personal feeling can be. Even so, it has to be the basis of Christian faith because there is no other convincing evidence.

That is exactly what Christians do not like, and it is this that makes them invent pseudo-sciences like Creationism and ID to try to persuade the ditherers. Yet even the object of the pseudo-science they offer is dishonest. They try to find ways of proving there is a Creator. For them, success is proof of the the Christian God, but it is nothing of the kind. If they were to prove there was a Creator, the proof says nothing about Him. His creation might say something about Him, but might not. Ultimately, as the IDers say themselves, to show there is a designer of life says nothing about who the designer is. To conclude that the designer of a world that is the cause of massive suffering is the Christian God of love is obtuse. It is easier to believe it was the Devil.

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