For a long-time, I've been sympathetic to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. The theory is simple (at least in its basic, overall concepts) and apparently plausible (even though the concept of random mutations as the source of variation always had an air of implausibility to me). However, in recent years, I've becamed increasingly skeptical of this theory due to scientific and philosophical reasons. In fact, currently I consider it to be a pseudo-science, and this for several reasons:
1-The scientific debate about evolutionary theory is, almost always, infected with speculations about "creationism", which in principle seems to be irrelevant. Why do Darwinists insist too much to knocking down creationism each time a scientific critique against Darwinisim is formulated? It suggested to me that the motivation of Darwinists was ideological (specifically, atheism-driven), not scientific: You don't refute scientific criticisms appealing to ideology.
2-My discovery of Jime's Iron Law has made extremely skeptical of whatever doctrine, theory or idea is defended and articulated by hard-core atheists and "skeptics". I take whatever they say or argue for with a grain of salt. The reason is that Jime's Iron Law, if true, implies that these atheistic individuals are intellectually defective, i.e. positively irrational (e.g. cannot understand obvious arguments or concepts, suffer of chronic misrepresentation of other people's views, and also suffer of chronic and uncritical wishful thinking in favour of atheism) and are obviously spiritually impaired (i.e. blind regarding spiritual matters... see for example this recent Amazon review of Chris Carter's lastest book of the afterlife and tell me honestly if Jime's Iron Law is not clearly operative in that reviewer. The obvious blindess and clear intellectual deficience of such reviewer regarding a book about spiritual matters is precisely and exactly what Jime's Iron Law says you have to expect from these people).
Obviously, the fact that hard-core atheists are irrational doesn't imply what whatever they say is false or mistaken.Therefore, we have to examine carefully and objectively their arguments. But I think an a priori presumption of mistake is justified in regards to them, specially when they says something about spiritual matters (including and specially religious matters) since Jime's Iron Law is true about them.
Hence, having discoveried Jime's Iron Law, I inmediately became skeptical of the arguments by atheists in favour of neo-Darwinian theory. My skepticism was confirmed by the evidence against such theory.
3-The increasing number of sophisticated criticisms against the Neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection by first-rate scholars, including atheists and agnostics. Examples are these couple of books by (atheistic materialist philosopher) Jerry Fodor and agnostic journalist Richard Milton:
These books were instrumental in my skepticism about neo-Darwinism.
4-The sophisticated defenses of intelligent design, even by agnostic or atheist writers, like the book by atheist philosopher of science Bradley Monton:
It seems to me that intelligent design is a viable alternative in biology, specially if one has independent reasons to think that God exists. In other words, if theism is true, you would expect that human persons (and other rational, spiritual beings) were to exist, and that the world is directed (by an intelligent mind) to the creation of such persons. Pure blind natural selection operating over random mutations seem to be insufficient to do the work and unlikely, specially in a theistic worldview.
In any case, the criticisms against the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution are independent of theism. The evidence for it, when examined critically, seems to be too weak. I think philosopher William Lane Craig (who is a theist but an agnostic regarding intelligent design in biology) has summarized very well the problems of the contemporary neo-Darwinian theory of evolution in this way (the following comments by Craig comes from a response to an atheistic darwinist who asked Craig about Darwinism):
The neo-Darwinian paradigm is a synthesis of two overarching theses: the Thesis of Common Ancestry and the Thesis of Random Mutation and Natural Selection as the means of evolutionary development. The evidence for these two theses is anything but compelling; indeed, the theory involves a enormous extrapolation from evidence of very limited ranges to conclusions far beyond the evidence. We know that in science such extrapolations often fail (take, for example, Albert Einstein’s failed attempt to extrapolate a general principle of relativity that would relativize acceleration and rotational motion just as his special principle had successfully relativized uniform motion). Such failures make very pressing the question: how do we know that the extrapolation from local instances of evolutionary development to the grand story of evolution is a valid one?
Let’s first get our terminology clear. You misconstrue the notion of microevolution when you equate it with the claim of the fixity of species. Steve, not even six day creationists, not to speak of progressive creationists, limit microevolutionary change to variation within species! Certainly that’s not the way I was using the term, as should have been clear from the examples of evolutionary change which I considered. Microevolutionary change is simply change within certain vague limits, limits which fall far short of the wholesale development envisioned by the Thesis of Common Ancestry.
To give you a feel for the sort of extrapolation from evidence of microevolutionary change to macroevolutionary conclusions, consider the following chart, which displays some of the major phyla within the Animal Kingdom:
Notice that just the single phylum of the vertebrates (Chordata) includes all fish, mammals, birds, reptiles, etc. Seen in the context of the wider picture, typical examples of evolutionary change are seen to be microevolutionary changes. The evolutionary development of whales, horses, and elephants you mention are trivialities compared to the grand scenario envisioned by the theory. The transition from lower primates to humans is nothing compared to what the theory postulates on the grand scale.
You’ll remember my quoting Michael Denton to the effect that for a bat and a whale to have a common ancestor there should be literally millions of transitional forms, which are not there in the fossil record. But even that illustration obscures the fact of how trivial in the grand scheme of things such a development would be, for it would have taken place entirely within the class of Mammalia (mammals) in the phylum of Chordata. Even the evolution of amphibians from fish or birds from reptiles is miniscule compared to whole tree of life postulated by the theory, for it still only involves evolutionary development within a single phylum.
By contrast, what is the evidence that a bat and a sponge are descended via mutation and natural selection from a common ancestor? And now reflect that the above chart shows only some of the phyla within the Animal Kingdom, which is only a part of the domain of the Eukarya, which also includes the whole of the Plant Kingdom, and that in addition to the domain of the Eukarya we’ve also got the domains of the Bacteria and the Archaea to account for! Clearly we’re dealing with a mind-boggling extrapolation from limited instances of microevolutionary change to conclusions that far outstrip the evidence. Caution certainly seems appropriate here.
So consider now your objections to my presentation. Take first the Thesis of Common Descent. In my podcast, I shared some reasons to be cautious concerning this claim, while acknowledging the biomolecular evidence in its favor. You complain that I mentioned only Archaeopteryx as a transitional fossil. But my purpose here was to provide an example from the fossil record for the most significant sort of transition afforded by the evidence. Most of the examples you cite are trivialities by comparison, for they don’t involve change across large categories. To mention them would only have weakened the case for macroevolution from the fossil record, which is what I was trying sympathetically to present. Michael Denton’s point that we ought to see millions of transitional forms if the neo-Darwinian paradigm were true is hardly out of date and remains a pressing problem. (Your cheap shot against Denton, who is, by the way, a fine scientist, is all too typical of those who turn to ad hominem attacks when they can’t refute the evidence.) So I don’t see that you said a whole lot beyond what I shared to greatly strengthen the case for the Thesis of Common Ancestry.
In any event, as I emphasized, the Thesis of Common Ancestry is really the less important of the two claims of the neo-Darwinian paradigm: far more important is the Thesis of Random Mutation and Natural Selection. As you note, theorists like Michael Behe embrace the Thesis of Common Ancestry. Their bone to pick (no pun intended) is with the postulated explanatory mechanisms of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Here you had nothing to say to show that the staggering biological complexity which our world exhibits could have been created by such mechanisms in the span of four billion years. Recall Barrow and Tipler’s claim that there are at least ten steps in the evolution of homo sapiens, each of which is so improbable that before it would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the Earth! Here is where my greatest hesitation about the neo-Darwinian paradigm lodges. I haven’t seen any evidence that the hypothesis of random mutation and natural selection has the sort of explanatory power which the neo-Darwinian paradigm attributes to it. It seems to me that even given the Thesis of Common Ancestry, a theory of progressive creationism fits all the facts and could well be true.
All this occasions the question: how could a theory which is so speculative and so weakly confirmed as neo-Darwinism be held with such confidence and tenacity by the scientific community? Here’s where Philip Johnson’s insight is relevant to the discussion. (Of course, he’s not a scientist, as you note, but his contribution is philosophical, not scientific.) As I explain in my article “Naturalism and Intelligent Design,” in Intelligent Design, ed. R. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), pp. 58-71, Johnson’s insight is that the neo-Darwinian theory’s status as the best explanation of biological complexity depends crucially on excluding from the pool of live explanatory options non-naturalistic hypotheses. Johnson has often said that he would have no objection to evolutionary theorists’ claiming that evolution is the best naturalistic hypothesis available for explaining biological complexity. What he protests is the claim that evolutionary theory is the best explanation simpliciter. Were we to admit into the pool of live explanatory options non-naturalistic hypotheses, then it would no longer be evident that evolutionary theory is the best explanation of the data. It is in that sense that the theory presupposes naturalism. The theory itself doesn’t imply naturalism; rather it is the theory’s current exalted position as the reigning paradigm which depends crucially on excluding from consideration non-naturalist alternatives. For if naturalism is true, then as Alvin Plantinga likes to say, evolution is the only game in town. No matter how improbable, no matter how weak the evidence, evolution’s got to be true because there just isn’t anything non-natural to account for biological complexity. Hence, the confidence.
Ironically, Steve, your own letter illustrates precisely the point I am making. It is evident that you object to non-naturalistic theories on theological grounds. You don’t like the image of the tinkerer God meddling in the evolutionary development of things like the bacterial flagellum. You think it makes God into a meddler and a bungler, and you don’t want to worship a God like that. Don’t you see that you have abandoned an objective assessment of the evidence, following it where it leads, in favor of following your theological predilections? Frankly, I find this over and over again in discussions of this sort: it is philosophical and theological presuppositions that determine where people end up, not the evidence itself.
As for your personal theological preferences, I caution you not to presume that God has to conform to your preferred theological outlook. It is enormously presumptuous to think that we can say with confidence what God would or would not do when it comes to His creating life on this planet. Better to keep an open mind and look at the evidence to see what He did, in fact, do!
Moreover, maybe your model of God is all wrong. Maybe God is not like the engineer who can be faulted if his machine doesn’t function perfectly without his meddling. Maybe God is instead more like the artist who enjoys getting His hands dirty in the paint or the clay to fashion a spectacular world. Why not?
In any case Intelligent Design of the world needn’t involve God’s intervening in the series of secondary causes in the way you imagine. If God has middle knowledge, then He can create a world in which the appropriate counterfactuals are true such that from certain chosen initial conditions a designed world will issue naturally (see again my article referenced above). Such a view doesn’t commit you to interventions at all.
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