Total truth--Darwinism on trial

In the next section of Nancy Pearcey’s book, Total Truth, she deals specifically with Darwinism. She believes that so much of what is wrong today in American society goes back to how we see the beginning of life on earth. The Christian perspective is that God created everything; the Darwinian view says matter randomly assembled itself without any overall design or plan. The crucial thing to realize is what Darwinism does for the concept of truth. If evolution is true, than both religion and philosophical absolutes (goodness, truth, and beauty) are false.

She begins by showing how limited the evidence for Darwinian evolution really is. First, evolutionists trot out the idea of Darwin's finches, showing the beak size differs according to the habitats where they live. However, this is nothing but a cyclical fluctuation; the birds were not evolving into a new kind of bird. Beak size either grew or went back to a smaller size depending on the amount of rainfall. This was cyclical, not heading anywhere. The same thing applies to resistance of bacteria and viruses to antibiotics. Once the drugs are removed, the changes reverse. Then there are fruit flies -- exposed to radiation, they produce many mutations. After fifty years of bombarding fruit flies with radiation, scientists have not managed to turn them into any kind of new insect or even a new and improved fruit fly. The fourth case Pearcey discusses involves peppered moths in England. Supposedly, dark moths survived in England rather than light colored moths because of soot which during the Industrial Revolution darkened tree trunks where the moths perched. The lighter colored moths were easier for birds to pick off. This has been touted as the showcase example of natural selection. Oops – it can now be revealed that the moths don't actually perch on tree trunks in the wild. But what about all the pictures of them doing so in textbooks? Actually, scientists glued those moths onto the tree trunks. Perhaps the most famous fake was a well-known exhibit of vertebrate embryos lined up side-by-side -- fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and human. The point of the illustration is to show how similar all the embryos are, suggesting common ancestry. It turns out the creator of this, Ernst Haeckel, fudged his sketches, making them look far more similar than they really are. Scientists in his time, more than 100 years ago, already knew these illustrations were fakes, yet only recently have they publicly been talking about them. Strangely enough, these illustrations still show up in biology textbooks.

These examples illustrate a flaw in the standard Darwinian argument. The essence of Darwin's theory is that minor adaptations (microevolution) can be extrapolated over vast periods of time to explain major differences in groups of animals (macroevolution). But small changes simply don't add up the way the theory requires. In 1980 there was a landmark conference on evolution held at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists reported at the conference that the fossil record does not, and never will, support the Darwinian scenario of a smooth, continuous progress of life forms, nicely graded from simple to complex. What do the rocks show? Forms appear suddenly, with no transitional forms leading to them, followed by long periods of stability where there is little change or none at all. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, a popularizer of evolution and science, called this "the trade secret of paleontology."

Something important is going on here, Pearcey says. She believes smart people tout evolution not because of the evidence but because of philosophical reasons. They have already committed themselves to what is called philosophical naturalism -- nature is all that exists, or at least the natural forces are all that may be invoked in science. Once people have made that commitment, they can be persuaded by relatively minor evidence. There’s no good reason science has to be run according to philosophical naturalism. It didn’t used to be—scientists followed the evidence, no matter where it led. Now the playing field has been changed. Only naturalistic answers may be given. So, based on this set of parameters, evolution is the best choice, despite its problems.