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 So initially
both contending parties are trying to explain good design which is conceded
to be such; this was not initially a point of controversy
between the postulates of design or unordered evolution. However, anyone
who follows the internet has become aware of a major devolution in
evolution: the atheists are now arguing in favor of bad design, even
atrocious design, even lethal design. Why 'natural selection' has
failed to weed out these purported defects, resulting in needless
death and thus disproportionately poor reproductive success, they do
not say. Are they conceding their system doesn't work? It is, after all,
supposed to 'optimize' design: "It is clear that here on Earth we
are dealing with a generalized process for optimizing biological
species, a process that works all over the planet, on all continents
and islands, and at all times." (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion,
p. 167). Funny thing, it turns out sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't; you get good design, you get bad design, there's just no
telling, not even to mention 'predicting.'
The people of God should stand back and let these evolutionists
self-destruct, because in arguing on behalf of 'bad design,' they
are really arguing more on behalf of design not yet understood. When
I was a young person, I had my tonsils surgically removed, as they
used to do back then. Why? Because these were vestigial organs devoid of function,
which only served as a locus of infection. Or so they told my parents. And
the surgeons were happy to remove these useless excrescences, for a fee, of
course. At that time the immune system was not well understood. But
then they discovered the function. Oops. So as the 'poorly
understood' list grows shorter, the atheists will sink into
extinction alongside.
When the atheists tell you, 'this organ is poorly designed,' they
are saying, 'I have a better design,— I can build you a better
esophagus, fully functional, without prodigal waste of resources, that will not be
subject to the disadvantages of the present design.' Ask them to
show it to you: tell them to draw a picture. If they can even do that much, their
creation is likely no improvement, if it would even work at all. Of
course, the vast majority of these people cannot produce a picture of
anything, above the level of a stick figure.
Darwinian evolution has often been criticized for its lack of any
independent criterion of fitness. Evolution proclaims the 'survival
of the fittest.' And who is fit? Why, he who survives! "George Gaylord
Simpson (1964): 'Natural selection favors fitness only if you define
fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact geneticists do define it
that way, which may be confusing to others.'" (Darwin on Trial,
Phillip E. Johnson, Kindle location 402). So this
once-popular catch-phrase means, 'he will survive who survives.' In
fact this 'scientific theory' makes no prediction as to what animals
or plants will be found in the world; it makes no testable
predictions at all. Moliere, in his play 'The Imaginary Invalid,' raises the
question why opium puts people to sleep. His budding doctor explains
that opium puts people to sleep owing to its dormitive virtue. Asked and
answered. We can go one better: “. . .Gould himself explains the
survival of species as due to their possessing the quality of
'resistance to extinction.'” (Johnson, Phillip E. (2015-12-01). Darwin
on Trial (Kindle Locations 3114-3115).)
Given its lack of falsifiability, it is not
properly categorized as 'science' but as a non-scientific
world-view. However, at this late date it seems they have, at long
last, found an independent criterion of good design: and it is not
fitness! It has, in fact, nothing to do with survivability or
reproductive success, because those organisms which have
successfully leaped these hurdles are nevertheless declared poorly
designed. It is an aesthetic criterion, it would appear, though
questioners who try to pin the atheists down on what it is or where
it comes from will find themselves spinning in circles.
Long experience in this area shows that the speaker who says,
'this organ is useless,'— whatever it may be, the tonsils,
'junk' DNA, or the appendix,— can express himself more accurately
and more modestly by saying, 'we don't yet know the function of this
organ.' When it comes to the claims made by his opponents, Richard Dawkins
is capable of understanding this distinction:
"The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this:
'I [insert own name] am personally unable to think of any way in
which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step
by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is
designed.' Put it like that, and you immediately see that it is
vulnerable to some scientist coming along and finding an
intermediate, or at least imagining a plausible intermediate." (The
God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, pp. 154-155).
To be sure, these people are gifted with great imaginative powers.
But it would be better for them to say, 'I [insert own name] am
personally unable to think of any function performed by the appendix.'
That way, when the function of the appendix is at long last discovered,
they will not look like fools. This dispute has been going on for centuries, millenia even. The
early atomists, while they had some good ideas, were so incapable of
explaining the evident design in biological organisms that
they would outright deny that large, important organs like the
kidneys had any function at all:
"Instead of listening, as they ought, to the reason why
liquid can enter the bladder through the ureters, but is unable to
go back again the same way,—instead of admiring Nature's artistic
skill—they refuse to learn; they even go so far as to scoff,
and maintain that the kidneys, as well as many other things, have
been made by Nature for no purpose! And some of them who had allowed
themselves to be shown the ureters coming from the kidneys and
becoming implanted in the bladder, even had the audacity to say that
these also existed for no purpose; and others said that they were
spermatic ducts, and that this was why they were inserted into the
neck of the bladder and not into its cavity." (Galen, On the Natural
Faculties, Book I, Chapter XIII, p. 57 Loeb edition).
Try telling someone suffering from kidney failure that the kidneys
perform no useful function! No one argues this today, not that the atheists didn't try it, because the debate
was won long ago by the design side. A betting person, if prudent, would go with the odds, given the long and lop-sided track record, and declare for design
in cases still unclear.
On the one hand, the Darwinian evolutionist fearlessly predicts
natural selection will produce good design, or rather the illusion
of good design:
"Or, to choose an example that doesn't involve
advertising, there is 'anting:' the odd habit of birds, such as
jays, of 'bathing' in an ants' nest or otherwise applying ants to
the feathers. Nobody is sure what the benefit of anting is —
perhaps some kind of hygiene, cleaning out parasites from the
feathers; there are various other hypotheses, none of them strongly
supported by evidence. But uncertainty as to details doesn't —
nor should it —stop Darwinians from presuming, with great
confidence, that anting must be 'for' something. . .If there is a
one-sentence manifesto of this 'adaptationist' principle, it was
expressed — admittedly in somewhat extreme and exaggerated terms
— by the distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin: 'That
is the one point which I think all evolutionists are agreed upon,
that it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism
is doing in its own environment.' If anting wasn't positively useful
for survival and reproduction, natural selection would long ago have
favored individuals who refrained from it." (Richard Dawkins, The
God Delusion, pp. 191-192)
. . .On the other, bad design, even lethal design. So, dear reader, put on your thinking cap and let's test your ability
to simultaneously believe contradictory things: namely, that the human
appendix is so badly designed as to cause needless death, and yet
natural selection doesn't eliminate it, whereas 'anting' must be
beneficial, or else natural selection would eliminate it. You see if you
cannot simultaneously believe contradictory things about the world, you
are just plain not cut out to be an atheist.
Connoisseurs of atheist science are very familiar with the
pattern by which these bold pioneers fearlessly predict, either one
thing, or its opposite, or some intermediate. They 'box the
compass,' so to speak, predicting all possible outcomes. Take
Sigmund Freud, for example, a redoubtable atheist. Let's say a man
loves his mother; that's one thing. Or he might hate his mother; but
this is 'reaction formation,' the magic box by which the result
supposed to be produced by a given process is transmuted into its
opposite. The two tendencies might battle each other to stasis, with
the result that the man views his mother with indifference, or
oscillate, alternate, or combine in all possible quantitative
mixtures. So what does Freudian 'science' actually predict?
Everything that could possibly happen! Will the man love his mother
or hate her? Both! Either/or! Neither! In a similar vein, atheist
evolutionary biology predicts, no specific organisms of course,
perish the thought, but neither any stable or reliable global
characterization of the outcome. Will evolution produce good design?
Yes! Will evolution produce bad design? Yes! So-so design? But of course! So you see, whatever
happens in the world, no matter what it might be, is fully and
completely predicted by atheist science! Isn't atheist science
wonderful! It can never, ever, be disconfirmed, because it has been made,— by
design, you might almost say,— to be bullet-proof to reality.
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