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

Scientists Avoid the Issue!

Behe has to lie to make his points because he cannot legitimately make them with the truth behind him. It is typically Christian. He says science has avoided the issue of molecular evolution, particularly the emergence of the complex biochemical pathways he says are irreducibly complex.

If you look in the biochemical literature for scientific papers that try to explain how biochemical systems developed step-by-step in a Darwinian fashion, there aren’t any. It’s startling.

Scientists are astonished at his sheer mendacity! Yet, in a weaselly way, there is some truth in what he says, akin to a motorist complaining that the garage mechanic has not started to repair his vehicle because he is still stripping down the engine. The “step-by-step” studies he seems to mean require a large amount of preliminary work, and that is being done. It is a difficult field needing special tools that have only started to come into use in the last few decades, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of authors who have written accounts of their work on molecular evolution. Oxford scientist, Peter Atkins (author of Creation Revisited), writes:

Science requires truly hard work to achieve the reliable understanding it purveys. There it is in sharp contrast to religion’s fatuous attempts at providing understanding or its human-treasonable claims that understanding is beyond human comprehension.

Molecular Systems

The bacterial flagellum, a spinning whip-like tail is made up of about 40 proteins, blood clotting involves the coordinated interaction of 10 different proteins. Behe calls these mechanisms irreducible complexity, they cannot function properly without all their components. They cannot evolve by the accumulation of chance mutations since partial assemblies are useless, Behe says.

The evolution of morphology and anatomy is vouchsafed by ample evidence from palaeontology, embryology, and the distribution of species, and how can evolution at the physical level occur without evolution at the molecular level? It cannot. The one implies the other. What reason could there be that allows evolution of the physical body, but stops it from happening at the level of molecular processes in the cell of that body? There is no obvious reason, so what evidence is there that it happens? Plenty of direct evidence exists for the evolution of molecules. The most important molecule of cells is their DNA, and the DNA of cells can be compared from one species to another. The changes of the DNA at the cellular level from species to species should broadly match the changes at the physical level. It does! The evolutionary trees or phylogenies obtained from molecules like DNA matches those from anatomy. The same is true of proteins and enzymes.

In other words, cellular molecules—like enzymes, proteins, genes (including those involved in the immune system and blood-clotting) and pseudogenes (ones that are no longer functioning, like the human gene for ascorbic acid production)—are closer in kind for similar species than for more distant ones. Are creationists ready to accept that the DNA sequences in the pseudogene region of the betaglobin of humans and gorillas match exactly, proving that the two animals share a recent ancestor? It is one of the features of evolution that Behe accepts even if creationists do not.

When looked at more closely, irreducible complexity turns out to be an illusion. The bacterial flagellum and cilium are among Behe’s examples of irreducibly complex cellular processes. A flagellum is a rotary propeller that bacteria use to swim with. Rotating wheels are unusual in Nature, and the flagellum needs a static frame, a rotating wheel and motor powered by ions to work. The E coli flagellum has about 40 different kinds of proteins to make it work. Behe thinks removing any one of them would destroy its functioning. In fact, careful science shows two proteins are not central to torque generation in the E coli flagellum, but are accessories to the mechanism. Another protein is apparently essential to the functioning of the flagellum. These three proteins were considered to be among those that were part of the irreducible complexity of the flagellar rotor.

Moreover, Helicobacter pylori operates its flagellum adequately with 33 proteins, not 40, suggesting that seven of the ones in E coli are incidental. In any event, two of the proteins can be dispensed with and the rotor functions, so the whole mechanism is not irreducibly complex. Unlike Behe, real scientists are confident that careful work will tease out the way the supposedly irreducibly complex mechanisms work, and how they evolved. Behe is not a real scientist and prefers to waste his time and and his university’s money telling fairy tales.

So, how is it possible for the proteins to get together sub-optimally? The answer is simply that they did not get together originally to do what they ended up doing. Biochemical paths did not evolve only to function at the end of it. Earlier organisms had simpler paths with other functions to fulfil. They served quite different functions, forming a mechanism called the type III secretory system, which pathogenic bacteria use to inject toxins into their host’s cells. The collection had incidentally a motor property which gave the cell an advantage and which then became the flagellum. Behe ignores the likelihood that some essential protein in a biochemical pathway was not essential at an earlier stage, due to adaptative modification of other proteins or enzymes. Alternatively, one protein doing two things in an earlier mechanism, could specialise, and another protein take over one of the functions. Duplication of genes caused redundancy in some reactions which could be co-opted for other uses. For Behe, proteins like dynein and tubulin could not have been copied by gene duplication then adapted to provide parts of a flagellar system, even though varieties of dynein and tubulin occur elsewhere in a cell. What is the meaning of the word “adapt” if it does not mean change of form and purpose?

Though no biologist has yet worked out how a flagellum evolved, it is no refutation of natural selection. It is like Dr Johnson saying he did not know why the rock was so bloody hard but try kicking it and you will see that it is! The fact that there is such huge masses of evidence for evolution in Nature generally, gives biologists confidence that they will find it in complex biological systems too, and so far they have, when they have had the chance to study them in depth. Natural selection works by adapting existing systems for new roles. The evidence so far points to exactly this process for the flagellum.

Even if proponents of ID were persuaded that the bacterial flagellum evolved by natural selection, they could not accept they were wrong. That is why they have conceded large swaths of biology to Darwinism. They can then simply yield any loss to science, and draw a new line in the sand. Again, it is just what they, as creationists , have been doing for years. It is quite pathetically touching.

In the case of blood clotting, Behe seems to think that the absence of any part of the clotting cascade made it hopeless, and so dangerous to the creature that had it. Yet jawless fish like lampreys that feed by sucking blood, stop it from clotting with just six proteins compared with the normal 10. Obviously, despite the assertions of the IDers, blood clotting is not irreducibly complex because lampreys have reduced its complexity to their own advantage. Mice can have much of their clotting process hindered or erased by genetic manipulation and still seemed to survive quite happily. They might well have been less fit in an evolutionary sense, but that is not Behe’s point. It shows the clotting system is not irreducibly complex. Indeed haemophliacs are scarcely fit but they can survive with their disability. Then, Russell Doolittle investigated the evolution of blood clotting, showing how this complex system might have evolved, and, from comparisons, how it probably did. In blood clotting, thrombin is an important protein but it also has a function in cell division, and is similar in structure to to the digestive enzyme trypsin. “Not good enough”, says Behe, predictably. The fossil record shows how parts of the body can adapt from one purpose to another one, but Behe simply ignores it because it refutes his claims. He repeats his mantra that it does not apply to molecules.

These examples show that ID is not scientific. Scientists test their claims before they make an issue of them, and they do it with reason. When scientists have not done so, they have often been shown up as foolish. IDers stand among foolish scientists.

What is Scientific?

Science that is so well established that it is taught in high school has survived rigorous scientific testing. From initial publication in peer reviewed journals to their use in technology based industries, scientific hypotheses cannot just be clever opinions, as many Christians seem to think. Opinions do not fly aeroplanes or make life-saving medicines. Throughout the process the discovery is being tested, and when they fail, they are discarded. The importance of science is that it works, and anything you think of does not, including God. If God were any good, no one would have had to invent the scientific method. And it was largely invented by Christians, so they ought to have known, if Christianity had something better. Furthermore, even if ID were a genuine scientific controversy, why should it be taught, before it was settled one way or the other. No one wants to teach the advantages of Qubit theory versus String theory in the classroom, though one or the other might eventually be taught, when it is shown to be better than the other. Of course, both might eventually be rejected for something else. To teach controversy for its own sake can be done without having to teach nonsense.

So, science has to be tested and upheld before it is admitted as being scientific. Even then it is subject to other criteria, and to other tests whenever new evidence is found. It is under constant scrutiny, and hypotheses have to fit all the criteria for any one to be accepted. Only the best hypothesis, the one that explains the evidence subject to the criteria, is admitted into science, and that has to continue to explain, to continue to be accepted. Evolution is an hypothesis repeatedly tested and brilliant at answering the questions we have. What of ID? A proponent of it is reported as saying:

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”—but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.

Paul Nelson, ID proponent

A devotee admits ID has no theoretical base, and is not a theory itself. ID does not even have any support, let alone proof. Devotees do not know how to determine when a living feature has been designed rather than evolved conventionally. Many gullible religionists who seem to be impressed by it, cannot seem to understand that science is not just an opinion, whereas ID is just that—an opinion. They think it open minded that any new “theory” should be taught as science! New theories in science have to go through a rigorous scrutiny to be accepted, then they can be taught as science. Scientifically, it is not enough to question existing interpretations of evidence. A successful hypothesis must:

• explain as much of the evidence as the old hypothesis did
• explain important additional facts that the old hypothesis could not explain
• be fruitful by generating new lines of reasearch.

ID has not met the criteria. No one is researching ID, or publishing ID experiments that test the hypothesis, or produce any useful predictions. ID advocates have no hypotheses to test the alleged designs. Nor is there any experimental base to it. Only a few articles have been written in scientific journals about ID, and mainly they are reviews of the ID campaign not experimental evidence. Dr Behe admitted in court that only one peer reviewed paper had been published supporting ID, and the phrase “intelligent design” per se was not in it, and this he should know because he wrote it. It compares with roughly 10000 articles a year on evolution published in scientific journals. To get ID into the science curriculum, someone needs to do the scientific experiments to provide a foundation for ID, write up the method and results, and publish them in peer reviewed science journals. To make any counter impact to the evidence for evolution, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of papers, reviews and books over 150 years, a minimum of a few hundred outstanding papers would be needed. No one has yet started.

In the Dover school case, Dr Behe admitted under oath that, if ID is science, then so is astrology. Behe had offered a looser explanation of science than the one scientists accept, to try to bring ID under its mantle.

But you are clear, under your definition, the definition that sweeps in intelligent design, astrology is also a scientific theory, correct?

Attorney, Eric Rothschild

Yes, that is correct.

Dr Michael Behe

The audience in the court room burst into laughter, giving practical proof that the idea of ID is risable. It should not be taught as science for the same reason that astrology is not taught as a science—it is not science. ID is not a theory or a body of hypotheses, it is just another attack on evolution. It is a religio-political campaign, and depends on being misleading, or simply on lying:

The inescapable truth is that both Bonsell and Buckingham [members of the Dover school board] lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions… Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner… Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony.

Judge Jones, the Dover School trial

ID is a belief! It is the opposite of scientific. It explains nothing because everything is the work of the Intelligent Designer—God. Any theorizing has to stop there because there can be no knowing what principles the Intelligent Designer had in His mind when He turned to His drawing board with his set square. There is an unbridgeable chasm between the product and the Intelligent Designer’s concepts. All scientific theories, even if well supported by evidence are provisional because it is the purpose of science to test the bounds of its theories. Science constantly has to question even the best established theories. It is something believers cannot understand. God’s concepts cannot be tested, so ID is not scientific at all. Moreover, since there is no knowing what the Intelligent Designer had in mind, the hypothesis cannot be fruitful, one of the sub-criteria of scientific validity. There can be no additional hypotheses that might lead us in useful directions. ID is it!

Some Christians might argue that we can indeed work out what God had in His head when he was designing the world. Just as we can reverse engineer a captured weapon, or a computer program, all we have to do is reverse engineer Nature. Then we can work out what God had in mind when he designed things. And you know what? It leads to precisely the discoveries of science. Science is already reverse engineering Nature without having to hypothesize an Intelligent Designer. It leads to the conclusion, for example, that all of the species in the world evolved from other species—evolution!

It shows that God is superfluous to the way science works even according to the theological principle worked out by a Catholic Scholast and adopted by science called Occam’s Razor. It is that concepts and entities that are superfluous should not be introduced into rational explanations, and, when they have been introduced, they should be ruthlessly excised! The Intelligent Designer therefore has to be cut out as an unnecessary and therefore superfluous concept. It does not stop Christians from believing in God. It is their own free choice, but they ought to accept that He must have created the world as it is, knowable by science, and otherwise unknowable, and keep their insanities to themselves.

In fact, much of Nature seems very unintelligently designed. Why do people suffer back pain by walking upright? A book could be written about unintelligent design. Long ago, scientists knew that the human eye, extolled by creationists as a wonder of divine design, was none too impressive as an optical instrument. Why do people have to invent spectacles to correct the designer’s lack of intelligence in designing the human eye? As J R Firth put it in 1937:

If we had the power of creation, we could design and make a better one.

The Tongues of Men

Human beings have designed optical instruments that can show minute things, and immensely distant things, but also humans have designed optical instruments that do not even use light, like the electron microscope. The Creator, as the Intelligent Designer, could have given us microscopic vision and telescopic vision or even electronic vision, as His particularly favoured creature, but did not.

What is more to the point is that, if the Intelligent Designer had to design what He created, then He was constrained by the laws of Nature! A God that has to design what He creates cannot have been almighty as believers believe. An almighty God can do just as He likes. Human beings cannot do just as they like but have to work within the constraints imposed by Nature. That is why they have to design things. A divine designer, intelligent or otherwise, must have been subject to the same constraints or His designs would never have been intelligible to us.

An argument of modern creationists or intelligent designists, is that some natural things are “irreducibly complex”—they mean they are too complicated to have evolved. Even the slightest change in the design, they say, would have stopped them from functioning and rendered them useless. Even a reduction of one iota in their complexity would have made them useless to any evolving creature, and so they must have been designed fully by an intelligent designer and put in place in the creature, which itself therefore must have been designed and built by an Intelligent Designer and creator God! They are wrong about this irreducible complexity, but if we suppose it to be so, then the maker of the creature was not almighty, the designer having to use His intelligence to circumvent the constraints already present in Nature—the laws of Nature!

The real proof of God would be irreducible confusion—whatever He had made would be forever utterly mysterious to the human intellect, however refined it might become, and even the smallest change from the confusion put in place by God would make the object useless for what it was made for. Everything on earth would work as God intended it to work but without any possibility of any creature ever understanding it, interfering with it, or copying it. The world would function but would be irrational and incomprehensible at any level of understanding.

The trouble with belief is that the world is comprehensible, and is getting to be comprehended by human beings within only a few hundred years of the Enlightenment, when the world threw off the blanket of religious dogma and began to look at Nature as it is, not as believers said it was, based on a faulty and mischievous book. Since then, one after another mystifying confusion—declared by the Churches as mysteries of God—have succumbed to the growth of human knowledge of Nature. The world began as if it were made by God—covered in dust and spiders, and not even good to the kids, mysterious and confusing—but we are gradually making sense of it. It is rational. God’s world need never even seem it! What is the scientific merit of a theory based in theology? Evolution is the scientific explanation for why all species are related down to intricate details of their chemistry. That is the science that should be taught in science classrooms. Anyone interested in God can go to Church.

A Catholic View of ID

Jesuit Father Edward T Oakes of Regis University, Denver, relates that Cardinal Newman had accused secular intellectuals of using a rhetorical trick:

They persuade the world of what is false by urging upon it what is true.

Phillip Johnson, a fundamentalist lawyer, claims that he, as a Christian apologist, aimed to expose this trickery, yet, as a Christian apologist, he cannot avoid it himself. All IDers do the same. They harangue born again believers with simplistic mousetrap models of molecular mechanisms. Plainly, a mousetrap did not evolve, but Lo! next comes the false revelation. The biomolecular mousetrap did not evolve either, and they conclude falsely it had been designed and assembled by God!

This is not a trick of secular intellectuals but a trick of Christian intellectuals, if for no other reason than that for a thousand years anyone who could claim to be an intellectual had to be a Christian. Universities required those entering their cloisters to be Christians. Apologists always pointed out wonderful and inexplicable natural things, like the “irreducible complexity” of the IDers, and come to a false conclusion like God the Draftsman. The sleight of hand conjurers promoting ID use the trick without a blush, and, in fact, no conscious awareness they are using it, they are so used to being dishonest.

What is happening, though, is that the ID devotees are having to concede more and more to the scientists. Objections to evolution by creationists were based on assumptions attributed to evolution by its critics, not on science. Johnson, a creationist lawyer, not a scientist, but seen as God’s bulldog set against against Darwinians, now admits:

If nature is all there is, and matter had to do its own creating, then there is every reason to believe that the Darwinian model is the best model we will ever have of how the job might have been done.

His get out is the qualifying clause. Christians do not believe that Nature is all their is, so the conclusion for them is false. Scientists, however, try not to begin with baggage. They eschew belief and let the facts speak for themselves. So far, no facts have cried out “God designed me”, and until they do, no scientist should believe otherwise. Fr Oakes thinks some “extreme Darwinians” are fond of claiming “the very idea of religion somehow undermines the efficient functioning of the human brain”. His response is that there is no evidence for it. Well, there is no evidence for it that any believer will accept, but that is an obvious tautology. For anyone who reads the history of religion, there is plenty of evidence of it.

Fr Oakes asks in relation to the supposed proof of ID:

Who, pray tell, is this artificer? The God of Genesis 1–3? Visitors from outer space expert in cell engineering? David Hume’s clumsy craftsman who botched the job? Malign Sartrean gods who, to paraphrase Gloucester’s lament in King Lear, kill us for their sport as wanton boys do to flies?

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

The ID brigade, according to Johnson, has identified the designer. Johnson, after all his wingeing and wailing about the inadequacies of science, concluded that “the Holy Arranger is the Logos of God, the Second Person of the Trinity”, as Oakes puts it. Scientists can now be quite clear about it all. The Logos set DNA replicating itself, engineered the first bacterium, and periodically altered the physiology of a species like a rabbit to make it into a cow or a fox. Father Oakes is scathing, calling:

…the logic fallacious, and the theological implications grotesque.

The ID God is “one who, with disconcerting inconsistency, intervenes every now and again. It is Deism under a stroboscope.” What Oakes finds “eye popping” is Johnson’s utter two-facedness. For the first six chapters of his book, The Wedge, Johnson had been protesting the impossibility of macroevolution while conceding microevolution to Darwinism, then he makes his own saltatory jump to Jesus, the son of God and Demiurgos of Nature. Johnson says, presumably apropos of evolution:

A God created by human philosophy is just another idol.

Fr Oakes, no friend of scientists whom he labels as “atheistic materialists” and such like terms of abuse, comments:

Thus does the lawyer himself lapse into contradiction.

What the Jesuit does not like is that the fundamentalist design advocates accept virtually the whole ground that the scientists, naturalists and materialists do. He retorts, “Nego suppositum”, meaning “I deny the premise of the argument”, as he kindly explains to us.

Oakes quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein against materialist scientists and their practically materialist ID opponents. The great philosopher is, in fact, expressing the wonderment that drives scientists to find out what they can about the world, until they come to some insurmountable barrier. Scientists do not accept that they should stop at the outset on the supposition that the barrier to further understanding is there. IDers do, because God is a barrier to further understanding. No one can ever know what God had in his mind at the time, if He were the Creator. Interesting, though, is this quotation, because, if scientists are supposed to be stopped dead in their tracks by the great philosopher, then what about religionists?

Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is interesting is that Nature is not supernatural, and so this maxim precludes the Supernatural from being exporessed naturally. If that is so, then the natural world could not express God, and God cannot reveal Himself in it, nor can he intervene in history or to answer prayer, but then all of that seems obvious to materialists. Oakes’ complaint against ID is that design is the founding axiom of deism, “as Darwin’s own life attests”.

Once Darwin became a naturalist (an investigator and collector of species), his departure from Christian orthodoxy was well–nigh inevitable.

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

The theologian fears anyone being drawn into the intricacies of Nature because it snares them first into deism, thinking god is simply the prime mover—taking to his celestial deckchair after the sixth day, and still languishing there—then into agnosticism or even atheism. The whole design argument is based on God being the archetypal designer who, according to Behe, programmed species to evolve in small ways, but already had designed in the main features of the various families of organisms. Conceding that evolution controls small changes in species, such as beak shape, colour and so on, means God is asleep on the heavenly beach. Christians want to be sure he is always wide awake, stirring Nature and history with his purposeful index finger, but ID accepts He is not at work on small scale adaptations, evolution is!

Catholic theologians must read a lot of Thomas Aquinas, and Oakes points out Aquinas thought bad arguments for God’s existence do more harm than good, since they give unbelievers an occasion to laugh. True enough, but where is the argument for God’s existence that is not risable? Father Oakes proceeds to say Newman has cogently summarized every logical flaw in ID, as expressed by Johnson, anyway:

Half the world knows nothing of the argument from design—and when you have got it, you do not prove by it the moral attributes of God—except very faintly. Design teaches me power, skill, and goodness [accomplishment], not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which three are of the essence of religion… I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design.

Cardinal Newman

The IDers say they agree with this latter sentiment of Newman’s if not the rest. It condemns their whole claim of being scientific. They are thereby saying at the outset they do not accept the scientific method. Cardinal Newman suspects any attempt to find the nature of God in the universe, calling it “physical theology”:

True as it may be in itself, still under the circumstances [it] is a false gospel. Half of the truth is a falsehood.

Oakes writes:

The idea that God swooshed down from heaven 3.5 billion years ago to toggle some organic–soup chemicals into self–replicating molecules and thereafter, as occasion warranted, had to intervene to jump–start new species is, quite literally, incredible.

The Jesuit theologian is rightly emphatic that order must not be confused with design. The word kosmos in ancient Greek meant “order” not “universe”. The Greeks thought the cosmos emerged out of chaos, but Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way maintains it is metaphysically impossible, a priori, for order to emerge out of chaos. For that reason, his argument is called the “cosmological” argument. As a Thomist in this regard, Oakes says all complexity, designed or not, irreducible or not, must emerge from some pre-existing order, not chaos. From this, Oakes cannot see God being a sort of primeval Maxwell’s demon, or as he says the “traffic cop of cellular evolution” !

Such philosophical speculations depend on definitions, as always, and there is truth in what Oakes says, if order and chaos have certain meanings, but otherwise it is not necessarily so. If chaos means the utter absence of any natural laws (utter chaos), then admittedly no order or complexity can come of it. If, however, chaos is not an absence of physical laws but a confusion of them for some reason, then order can come of chaos by resolving the confusion. Science shows that Nature has certain forces, but in some conditions, such as at very high temperatures, they cannot apply. The high temperature state is chaotic, but order can emerge as the temperature falls. The Greeks had from the Persians this idea of kosmos, from arta, as Persians called it, and they believed that order preceded God. After all, how could even God ever exist if utter chaos was all there was? So, if God was doing anything with chaos, it depended on the existence of order within it. That seems philosophically sounder than thinking that God could exist in chaos and then order it. The real point is that design is necessary because Nature restricts the designer to what is possible. Otherwise anything is possible and Nature could not look designed at all, but a random collection of things that work for no discernible reason.

Behe, master of legerdemain, writes that ID “can suggest that the world may be more complex than anyone had been led to believe.” Why is this sleight of hand? Because the appeal to God is to simpify our view of the world not to complicate it. Christianity always appealed to simpletons because God did everything. One reason why it is not scientific is that it does not lead to anything new. “God did it”, is as far as you can take the argument.

The First Cause of [ID] theory must remain by definition beyond human specification, as even advocates of Intelligent Design admit when they concede that we really have no idea who this remarkably clever Designer might be without dragging in special revelation at the last minute…

Fr Oakes

There is the potential for a poetic irony in this ID nonsense—Behe and his cohorts ending up not saving God the Creator but stimulating evolutionists to tidy up what they have left unresolved.

Cells, molecules, bacteria, etc, are not so much irreducibly complex as, so to say, awesomely complex.

Fr Oakes

Holes for God to Hide in

The success of science in explaining much of God’s mysteries has not deterred Behe and people like him from finding the gaps that science has not yet filled. Behe accepts the mechanisms of evolutionary change such as natural selection, genetic drift, founder effects, gene flow, meiotic drive, and transposition, which account for some features in organisms. He seems to be conceding the argument, but it turns out he is getting some insurance for his main hypothesis:

The production of some biological improvements by mutation and natural selection—by evolution—is quite compatible with intelligent design theory.

Here is his protean gap for God. Whatever evolution explains, God remains secure in the gaps that still exist. These crypto-creationists make the “God of the Gaps”, once a joke, into a virtue—a transparently pathetic venture, but one which appeals to uncritical people like Christians. Supposing that the biochemists managed to work out the structure of the flagellar rotor and then its evolutionary stages, men like Behe would simply point to those processes that were not yet understood. Whatever was understood by solid scientific endeavour, there would still be the gaps not yet filled. Creationists would say they were the irreducibly complex holes where this lurking God of theirs still hides. Science makes no pretence that it will ever make us into gods by discovering everything there is to know. So, there will always be gaps for the God of the gapers.

Sabotaging Science

Dr Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, one of the Smithsonian’s prestigious scientific journals incredibly published an article, by someone called Stephen Meyer, supporting the “theory” of Intelligent Design. No scientist, and especially one entrusted with such a responsible job could possibly be unaware of the controversy over evolution created by US Christian fundamentalists. He knew what he was doing.

I am sorry to see us made into a laughing stock, even if this rubbish sells well”

It is not a scientific controversy but a religious one, and ought not to have appeared in a scientific journal unless it is plainly marked as an opinion piece not meant to be understood as science. That religion is at the core of this and not science is shown by the interest shown in it by George W Bush, President of the US, and a man noted for his meretricious public displays of Christianity and utter vacancy when it comes to science.

The dedicated scientists of the Smithsonian Institute, supported by most of the scientific world, think that publishing the piece as a scientific paper has brought the famous scientific institution, which runs sixteen of America’s most reputable museums, into disrepute. Linda St Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, had to plead with journalists:

We do stand by evolution. We are a scientiflc organisation.

The Office of Special Counsel meant to investigate victimization of federal government employees by the government, properly a protection against the victimisation of scientists that has gone on under Bush’s regime, but run by Bush’s hand-picked appointee, has accused the Smithsonian of victimizing Sternberg, one of their own peers. Evidence is the mass of protesting emails Sternberg invited by his action and received from respectable scientists who see the Christian right continuing its erosion of secular knowledge. And indeed, some alleged that he was a closet priest or that he was an agent for radical conservative groups that peddle ID or even creationism, which accepts Genesis and views fossils not as evidence of extinct species but of Noah’s Flood. One Smithsonian scientist wrote to Sternberg:

We are evolutionary biologists and I am sorry to see us made into the laughing stock of the world, even if this kind of rubbish sells well in backwoods USA.

Sternberg complained to The Washington Post newspaper, itself the mouthpiece of a Christian sect:

They were saying I accepted money under the table, that I was a crypto-priest, that I was a sleeper-cell operative for the creationists. I was basically run out of there.

James McVay, the principal lawyer and Bush appointee involved in the Sternberg case, agreed. McVay had no power to punish the Smithsonian, but the aim was plainly to embarrass it and the republican party has the political motive to do it. It is amazing that the country with the most advanced technology ever seen, all the product of its science, still supports ancient Jewish myths. A recent Gallup poll showed that nearly a half of Americans believe in the creation theory of Genesis for the beginning of the world and life. Only one third accept evolution. Darwinism explains our being here for most of the deve1oped world, but not for Americans.

A report said “retaliation came in many forms… misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false”. McVay comforted Sternberg by referring to a rumour mill and refuting someone who alleged he was not a scientist by circulating his CV, but Sternberg condemns himself. He claims to be “agnostic” about ID.

That claim proves he is not a scientist because scientists cannot be agnostic about science. Science is what is established by careful, indeed, meticulous, study, and confirmed by those who sought to disprove it by testing it but could not. The very point about ID is that it cannot be disproved by testing because believers will not believe any negative results of the tests. If any sign of unintelligence in the design of the world is considered as disproof, then the theory has been disproved already. ID cannot be disproved by experiment precisely because it is not scientific. Its proponents will not accept any disproof, a sign of pseudosciences. Nevertheless, Sternberg defends his decision to publish the article that discussed it.

I am not convinced by intelligent design but they have brought a lot of difficult questions to the fore. Science moves forward only on controversy.

In this Sternberg is correct, but the controversy is scientific controversy—controversy between scientists on scientific grounds, not controversy caused by political intervention in science to further the aims of Christian politicians and religionists.

The Aim—To Demolish Science

Underlying the ID agenda is a challenge to the basis of science. The Christian backwoodsmen and women are not just trying to discredit evolution, but the whole of scientific method. The Discovery Institute has admitted authorship of a document called The Wedge, a strategy to undermine science over a twenty year period beginning in 2000. They aim to return western thinking back to the Dark Ages no less, “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”. People should read a little about Europe in the one thousand years of Christian bliss called the Dark Ages before they sign up to any such strategy. Already, supposedly respectable Christian governments are torturing their enemies in secret. Charred bodies tied to stakes in the ground will follow, unless it is stopped. History has a habit of repeating itself unless everyone is on guard to stop it.

Science cannot be arbitrary or it would not work consistently in reality. Reflecting the whole of the real world, all of science is interconnected. Taking a Kango hammer to one part of the scientific edifice is meant to weaken it all, Christians pray. Once science has been demolished, in the Christian dream, the set of lies and fantasies called Christianity can rule the roost. Those who do not accept the Christian farrago will be subject to Inquisition and violent torture without trial, or, at the least, loss of all possessions and incarceration out of sight of anybody for a lifetime. The Christian leader of the world has started it already.

Christians have always been bullies. The want everyone to think like them, and will make them when they cannot persuade them. History shows it, and the present day behaviour of Bush and Blair confirm it. The USA President says he wants to make the world free. He means he wants the world to think how he thinks—not a lot! We are free to agree with him, and his obligatory Christian mores. Otherwise we are free to be incarcerated, tortured and killed. We can see it happening.

And for Christians, there is nothing hypothetical about this. God gave us free will to do as we wish, but, unless we choose to be Christians, we shall be tortured eternally by burning in hell. Naturally, Christians have always thought, what is good for God must be acceptable to Him, so begin the job for Him. Torture and Inquisition is the natural consequence of Christian belief, once Christians get enough power.

What is particularly sinister is the way Christians revise history to justify their dogmas. Evolution is atheistic and leads to Naziism, they say. They ignore the centuries of crimes committed by Christians in the name of Christ for two millennia, and ignore the fact that the Nazi leadership were almost uniformly brought up as Christians, and so too were the vast majority of Nazi members and voters. Germany was a deeply Christian country in 1933. Just like the USA now! To sensitive and thoughtful people, Christianity is not only wrong and unnecessary but harmful.

Some Contributions

A Christian, Geoffrey Clifford, complains that his fellow Christians, the creationists like Henry Morris, knowingly feed lies to the Christian public. Even when shown how the “evidence” they present is old, incorrect and misapplied, as they have been on many occasions, they simply ignore it. All of it has been systematically proven false. There is not a shred of truth to Creation Science at all

Creation Science is an abhorrent fraud. Plain and simple.

He asks why Henry Morris would commit such a sin as lying to us, especially when he so righteously accuses the scientific community of doing so. It is no wonder the scientific community scoffs at Christianity as a religion of delusional looneys.

Arnold Neumaier, the Austrian Christian mathematician, sympathizes with Clifford. He points out several things in the Christian bible that modern dimwit Christians do not seem to recognize. Thus they think that simply by professing Christianity, they will be saved, whereas their own God says otherwise:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you—depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Matthew 7:21-23

Unfortunately for the smuggies, they have little to be smug about especially as being smug is sufficient to get them kicked out of the coming kingdom! You have to be humble to get in. As a matter of fact, they might consider some of the other wisdoms Jesus utters in the same speech, and that ought to give them pause to doubt the fakers who take advantage of them, the TV evangelists, fire and brimstone pastors, and other money grubbing sharks:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.

Matthew 7:15-16

Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Matthew 7:13-14

All of them are certain they are getting to heaven, and the crazier they are, the more certain. Yet their own God tells them repeatedly, “It is no slam dunk, mate!” Neumaier, in his pastoral mode, reminds his lamb that Paul said:

Test everything, hold on to the good.

2 Thessalonians 5:20-21

It is the very thing that science does, but these false Christian prophets declare the work of the Devil. Neumaier goes on, plainly arguing against Christian swindlers:

If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.

1 Corinthians 8:1-2

In other words the creationists are spouters, trying to get themselves a false following by dividing God from the laws of Nature—that Christians believe are God’s—that scientists are discovering. This passage again is almost a scientific credo. The whole object of science is to refine and refine our knowledge in a process that can only end up when human beings become gods by knowing everything. In other words in an impossibility. Scientists know they know little and that there is much much more out there still to discover… always! Christian spouters think their idol the bible is the philosopher’s stone to all knowledge. It is not. Neumaier comes up with an apt quotation from S Augustine:

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and of facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Then Neumaier sums up brilliantly:

If some Christians don’t take that advice it is not the fault of the bible, but of these Christians’ shallowness. And that Christian leaders don’t dare to fight this shallowness as Jesus, Moses, Paul and Augustine did is a sign of weakness, caused by fear of science and a complete lack of awareness of the damage they do to their own cause.

Neumaier shows that not all Christians are as howling mad as the creationists. Some are just barking mad! It is a shame that there are not more like him, but it seems that most are howling mad, or are too scared to say anything against the ravening wolves. Cowards as well as hypocrites.

Michael Abraham notes that someone must have asked the question, “Who designed the cosmic designer?” If no one designed the designer, then a designer is not needed to design something as irreducibly complicated as the designer, so why is a designer needed to design a butterfly?

S Wilson points out that the implications for religion of a successful theory of evolution were plain before On the Origin of Species was published. Darwin kept his work from his devoutly Christian wife for years. Friedrich Nietzsche saw that “God is dead… we have killed him”, and Marx thought the same about teleology. That there should be any common ground here between science and religion is oxymoronic. Galileo could not find any, and only survived the corrections of the Church by agreeing to keep quiet.

From Roy Smith—Religious education is illegal in US schools. In the UK, it is compulsory. As an atheist, he used to favour the US model but now sees two advantages to the UK system. It sets out a national religious studies curriculum that is inclusive and discursive, challenging dogmatism. And it means that there is no significant pressure to include religious viewpoints such as creationism within science classes—such ideas can be included in religious education classes where they belong. Maybe American scientists should be arguing for religious education in schools, to take the pressure off the science teachers.

From Peter Foster—ID is not science, it is a strategy used by creationists of the religious right to try and get their religious ideas into the classroom. If their ideas had any merit, they would have gained acceptance by the scientific establishment. The aim of ID is to spread confusion about evolution without being too overtly religious. This will not fool scientists. The danger is that members of the public may be tricked into thinking that there is a controversy where none exists. The same strategy is used by the economic right to spread doubt about the causes of, or even the existence of, global warming.

The problem with ID is that it is defeatist and intellectually bankrupt, its proponents say, “Here is a biological structure that we can’t understand, so God did it.” Scientists say, “Here is a biological structure that we can’t understand. How can we find out about it?”

From Rev R Partridge—The dichotomy between science and faith forces conservative believers to test their faith, or become an opponent of science. Yet some believers love science too. They take their faith to relate to their personal values and purposes, and to the framework God provided for nature. (Sadly, faced with the choice, believers often choose faith, showing that they were no scientists at the best of times.)

From Graham Rankin—Could someone please ask George Bush (and now it seems, also the Pope) why, if everything was so intelligently designed, it was necessary to crash a Mars sized planet into the earth to create the moon, which could then slow our rotation sufficiently to allow any life to develop? And could they also ask why, as ID initially led to the domination of the dinosaurs, it was then necessary to crash a New York-sized meteorite into Mexico to kill them off and allow tiny mammals to develop into men? Does science not come into “intelligence”, or was God just making it up as he went along?

From Julie Courtney—It’s surely no coincidence that the majority of exponents of ID are men. Any woman will tell you that the female reproductive system, with its monthly difficulties and risky, painful childbirth, has been anything but intelligently designed. Or maybe it just proves that God is male?

From Marc Perkel—President Bush has said that schools should teach the so-called ID theory. This states that life is complex and had to be designed by someone, or something. But when you ask who the designer is, the supporters of the theory don’t want to talk about it, because it becomes clear that ID is a front for creationism. If you think through what ID is saying, you could conclude that God doesn’t exist because something as complex as God couldn’t just happen. If life requires a designer, then who is the designer and who made the designer?

The difference between science and fictional beliefs is that science isn’t afraid of scrutiny. Science isn’t afraid to think matters through and ask the tough questions. Trying to rename creationism as ID is dishonest, and Christians aren’t going to win over any souls by being caught taking liberties with the truth. They should think about their own commandment about bearing false witness.

From Alan Howe—Your article is crammed full of opinions masquerading as facts. Firstly, it is erroneous to identify the theory of ID with creationism. William Dembski, one of the leading proponents of ID, states baldly that the theory “shares none of scientific creationism’s religious commitments”. Secondly, Darwinism, while accepted by much of the scientific community, is a theory under increasing attack from within that community. Michael Behe, the well-known author, is himself a professor of biochemistry. He is not a creationist [†]He is a Catholic Christian.. Thirdly, it is absurd to claim that creationists are without scientific evidence to back up their claims. You may disagree with, for example, Henry Morris, but his work is backed up with a vast amount of he scientific data.

From Rosalind Riley—Alan Howe makes an erroneous judgment, common among proponents of both ID and creationist theories. He implies that the fact that Darwin’s theories are “under attack” within the scientific community is somehow anti-evolution. Scientific rigour demands the continual questioning and “attack” of all current theories—it is the basis of scientific method that no idea is allowed to stand without question, and that new data demands new applications of logic. In other realms, such as religion and politics, questioning might constitute an attack, but in science it is without stigma.

From Mohammad M Daneshi—Proponents of intelligent design obviously mean God as the Intelligent Designer, but their arguments bring down His position and pronounce Him as no different from us, with a human like purpose and plan for its achievement. Humans habitually attribute our own characteristics to God because we cannot conceive of a God beyond ourselves. Douglas Adams’s noted how odd it was to the intelligent puddle of water that the depression in the ground in which it found itself was so mysteriously suited to its existence. God the Creator by definition created time and space, and so is beyond time and space. We just do not know and cannot imagine what sort of intelligence a being beyond time and space would have, or what design they would carry out. Describing God as if He were a human designer might be a type of blasphemy.

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