Darwinism: Well then, no birthday cake for you, David!

The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren's birthday greeting to Darwin is

I oppose Darwinism because it is an intellectual & scientific fraud. I have opposed it all my adult life on that account alone; as I've told you before, I opposed it as crap science when I was an atheist. But I oppose it today with greater & greater passion, because I see that it provides the cosmological groundwork for real evil.

(Note: If you are looking for Mark Steyn's testimony on the Ontario Human Rights Commission, go here.)

He offers a link to a discussion of what it means to say that humans are unique.

Here are some further reflections from his column of today:

Darwin was an honest, capable, plodding man. Alas, of his great hypothesis of "the origin of species, by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life," it must be said that what was true in it was not original, and what was original was not true.

The basic notion of evolution -- that all living creatures are related, and that man himself descends from the primordial slime as the product of purely material forces -- is an ancient one, going back at least to Anaximander in the 6th century B.C. Likewise, the notion that creatures may be altered by selective breeding goes back as long as humans have bred animals.

Darwin's contribution was the mechanism of natural (and later, sexual) selection. This mechanism was simultaneously proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace, a true genius who made many other signal observations and discoveries; but Darwin alone became obsessed with this one, and insisted that it could carry us beyond adaptation within a species, across natural barriers to the creation of entirely new forms, over eons of time. Wallace was not so sure, and to this day, Darwin's notion exists merely as a surmise. It has never been proven.

Which is its great strength. For what cannot be proven can never be disproven, either. The Darwinian account is merely belied by the fossil record, which has provided none of the inter-species "missing links" that Darwin anticipated, and which instead yields only sudden radical changes.

I would add that when Darwinists claim that their theory is overwhelmingly confirmed, what they mean is that it must be true - because otherwise atheist materialism (or liberal Christianity?) would not be true. Can't help that, I am afraid.

I also suspect that they would dump it in a minute if they could think of an alternative satisfactory to atheist materialism or liberal Christianity.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Ottawa Citizen's David Warren vs. the Darwinoids

Here David Warren sends up the attempt - most recently fronted in the New York Times to expunge the word "Darwinism" from our vocabulary, so that evolution can mean whatever anyone anywhere wants it to mean, and therefore no nonsense can ever be confuted:

Olivia Judson, the house cheerleader for Darwinian evolution, was trying to retire the word “Darwinist.” Her typically breathless argument was that we know so much more about evolutionary processes today, than could be known in the age of Darwin, that the term has become useless.

Genes, for instance. Darwin knew nothing whatever about the genetic processes later discovered by the Polish Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel -- observations that would have wiped Darwinism clean out of biology were there not something else in Darwinism that people wanted to preserve.

Indeed, our “modern evolutionary synthesis” consists, in a candid view, of 100 parts of Mendel to zero parts of Darwin, and the whole idea of The Origin of Species -- that new species could emerge from the gradual accumulation of small random mutations “selected” by an impersonal nature for their survival value alone -- remains to this day utterly undemonstrable. It moreover flies in the face of the observed evidence, which is for dramatic, sudden, yet extremely complex changes.

“Darwinism” survives not as a science, but as an ideal: to eliminate God from any consideration of how nature works. It is intrinsically no more nor less rational than using God as the sole explanation for every event in view. The words, “Darwinism,” “Darwinian,” or as I prefer, “Darwinoid,” correctly describe those who continue loyal to this ideal, in the face of everything we now know about evolutionary biology.

I wrote on the same thing here, noting,

Darwinian evolution is in no fit state to be disproved. If it were, that would be progress.

To some, it means "cosmic Darwinism," to others, the "selfish gene" that creates "memes" that rule our minds, to others, group selection (long a no-no). To some, it still means a parsimonious, testable idea: Natural selection acting on random mutation to produce new species.

But there is only weak evidence that new species commonly arise that way. There are a number of ways that they might in fact arise, including gene-swapping, neoteny, and front-loaded design.

Some think that sexual selection, Darwin's other theory, should be included, but the problem is that at least one of its legendary icons (the peacock's tail) is in serious trouble.

Similarly, even common ancestry, long accorded the status of a religious belief, is showing cracks. For one thing, gene swapping, where it occurs, makes ancestry irrelevant, unless you mean where a given gene came from - information that may not be available or even important.

(Note: The image is from Real Clear Politics.)

The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

Here's Canadian journalist David Warren at his best on the "human rights" show trial of Canadian commentator Mark Steyn for "hate crimes" in Vancouver:

This is a disaster also for Canada’s Muslims, for the views of fanatical Islamists are being presented as representative of them all. No single person has done so much to advance contempt for Islam in this country as Mohamed Elmasry, president of the “Canadian Islamic Congress,” the complainant in this case -- whose public assertions have included e.g. the view that every Israeli citizen is a valid target for Palestinian hitmen.

The bland acceptance of this jackass, by mainstream Canadian media, as the definitive spokesman for Muslim interests in Canada, cannot be blamed on the Muslim community. Innumerable Muslims have disavowed him, and yet are entirely ignored. Indeed: Mark Steyn has been among the few journalists distinguishing between camps. He would be: for he has plenty of Muslim supporters.

Yes, I have seen all that happen myself. And the point I most want to get across to fellow Canadians (said better and more pungently by David) is that Canadian Muslims, by and large, are not doing this.

Leftwing activists are doing it, using the few Muslims who actively cooperate with their system as a crowbar to pry Canada loose from the historic civil rights that have always been our pride and their bane. Non-Canadians can best help us by monitoring the situation, spreading the word, and making sure it does not happen where you are.

Anyway, Warren begins,

Show trial

The writings of Canada’s most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada’s obscene “human rights” commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote “obscene” advisedly. Before Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, a respondent has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

I wrote “show trial” advisedly, for there has been a 100 percent conviction rate in cases brought to “human rights” tribunals under Section 13.

For the rest go here.

By the way, three other things:

1. I am adding Free Mark Steyn - Free the press in Canada! as the top link in my blogroll to the right.

2. This "human rights" situation is the reason I disabled the comboxes at my blogs recently. The galloping rate at which "human rights" commissions will hear cases of people claiming to have been offended by something they read leaves me with little choice. As a writer, I must subject myself to that risk, but cannot ethically subject others - not until or unless these commissions are relieved of most of their current responsibilities - including all responsibility for policing Internet content.

3. For information, rely on the blogosphere, especially the links through Free Mark Steyn . Legacy media have been surprisingly slow to catch on, given how much they are at risk. My friend Parliamentary journalist Deborah Gyapong wrote on Monday,

For those who are not ignorant of what's going on, I wonder whether there is a weird Stockholm syndrome at work. Rather than see they are being held hostage by their fear of radical Islam, (and tiptoeing so as not to offend or blaspheme so foreign correspondents won't get kidnapped or worse) they have displaced their fear and loathing onto the people who write about it. They are like the bank robbery hostages or hijacked plane passengers who get pissed off at police for shooting their captors. They have identified with their captors, even formed a bond with them, for their own psychological survival. If the captors see that I like them, they will like me and I will come out of this okay they tell themselves.

Most of it, though, is massive ignorance I'm afraid. I don't think most journalists can even conceive that we have such a shadowy, parallel "justice system" that can hand out severe penalties without any of the normal protections in a criminal or even civil law court.

I replied,

Deborah, two things:

1. It IS the Stockholm syndrome (SS). Not a weird form but the real thing. SS always looks weird up close. Think of the police officer who dodges bullets to rescue a hostage, only to have her denounce him as a fascist and promptly shack up with the sociopath hostage taker on his trailer weekends, hanging on to every bit of bullshirt that comes out of his mouth like it was the gospel reading (which, for her, it is). Think of that when we hear legacy media types making oblique excuses for FGM, honour killings, forced marriage, and the like.

Not everyone gets SS, and it is significant that the syndrome was first identified in Sweden.

The people who are especially susceptible to SS start out with fixed and very convenient ideas about who the villains are and who the victims are.

They “know” things, where the rest of us would withhold judgement before doing some research. As the threat advances, they erect ever more barriers to discovering a reality they are entirely powerless to face. Capitulation feels so good because it preserves their worldview (at the expense of their sanity and well-being).

2. Not every journalist needs or wants freedom of the press. That is the single most dangerous misconception out there. Many of our colleagues would be very happy indeed with a situation that prevented them from feeling badly about not taking REAL risks with their coverage because the government doesn’t allow it - “to protect minorities” and all that. No one will be more unctuous in advancing such explanations than the person for whom they are a cover for sloth and cowardice.

Those interested in David Warren's entertaining views on Darwinism (he is a serial offender against the Received Dogma whose skepticism is matched only by his good sense and good humour, go here. (Note: This is a search string on the Post-Darwinist, so the first story you see will necessarily be this one. Scroll down to the next one for the "David Warren vs. received witlessdom" stories.)

David Warren on how animals differ from machines, and other topics, including bizarre fur seal sex

The bizarre sex part got you reading, didn't it? Yes, well, buried in this pot pourri is a link to a truly bizarre story from the wild. But first, David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen often finds himself in discussions with Darwinists - people who believe that natural selection is an awesome creative force rather than a means of weeding out losers. He sometimes shares with me his correspondence with them.

On your points a. & b., I am trying to communicate a conceptual problem that you share with all Darwinoids, though not with all Darwinian evolutionists. It is a mistake that e.g. Aristotle didn't make, & it appears, no one made until modern times. It is the belief that animals are essentially inanimate.

Let me try to explain this again. Animals move. Their "source" of movement is not external to themselves, in the way the source of a mountain's movement is external to itself. They are not "laws of nature" but rather, laws unto themselves. They are, like us insofar as we are animals, under severe constraints from the laws of nature. In that sense alone they "obey" the laws of nature, which includes becoming extinct when they fly in nature's face.

If you want to say that they were, as it were, "created by natural laws," then you are going to have to create a few new natural laws such as "the will to life of all creatures." This talks its way around the problem, but leaves you with a law that cannot be tested.

No forces now known to physics can explain such behaviour as the actual independent "movement" of animals (in the broadest sense of "movement," including the growth & wiring & re-wiring of their bodies & brains).

That is just a big "given" in Darwinism, a fundamental problem that cannot be overcome.

>>Kelley makes the point that an intelligent engineer would have done a better job (if his objective were to prepare humans for the 21st Century). <<

This is the old Marxist & Stalinist argument, that an "intelligent engineer" could "easily" outdo nature. It leads to where Marxism & Stalinism led. (Nature won.)

"Intelligent engineers" design robots that can't even climb stairs reliably.

He adds, "We try to educate them. We really do." He also quotes Etienne Gilson (in, From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again): "We say that primitives take a watch for an animal, but only the genius of Descartes has been able to take animals for watches."

While we are here, Warren notes, in sex news from the Beeb, the odd case of a fur seal trying to mate with an adult king penguin noting (both parties male), adding "This has got everything: sexual selection, randomness, gradualism, gay activism." Perhaps the seal needs waterproof contact lenses. Also, male jumping spiders reflect ultraviolet B rays from their body to apprise females that they are available. Humans cannot see UVB and apparently scientists had assumed that animals couldn't either. It's unclear as yet just how the do see it. But where there is a will ...

Oh, and this too: Under the heading "Trying to explain intelligent design to a New Yorker", he writes,

Another way to explain this. I'm sure you have heard of baseball. This is a game with laws. The laws themselves have evolved somewhat, from cricket or whatever, whereas, so far as we can see, natural laws do not evolve but remain absolutely fixed. So in that sense it is a poor analogy. You will have to pretend that the laws of baseball, unlike the laws of nature, were fixed & immutable from the beginning of baseball in the first nanosecond after the Big Baseball Bang.

What you are saying is that "the laws of baseball" are responsible for creating Wee Willie Keeler, Roger Peckinpaugh, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, ... & all the other famous New York Yankees.

Laws do not create things. They only regulate.

Only socialists believe that regulations can create anything.

You would be right in guessing that Warren is not a socialist.

While we are here, his comments on the uproar around the Expelled film linking German Darwinism and the death camps single out John Derbyshire, who - he thinks - is overreacting on the subject:

I am no great fan of Ben Stein, & would begin by clarifying, that science & murder are not natural bedfellows. More precisely, SCIENTISM & murder go together well, & scientism in the service of murderous regimes was a commonplace of the 20th century.

But science, in the sense of free empirical inquiry, is just a big open season. It offers no conclusive view of anything; by definition it cannot; it is just a vast, constantly updated manual on how things work.

I agree that Darwin would have wished nothing to do with Hitler. In his own mind, "survival of the fittest" was an observation, not an ideological prescription.

On the point of fact, the equally excitable Derbyshire probably doesn't realize that what Stein is saying is technically true. Hitler's death camps were run by people who presented themselves as scientists, acting upon racial "theories," & they often had scientific or medical credentials, some of them from quite respectable institutions. And Stein's immediate ancestors were indeed among their victims. So I quite understand Stein's excitability on the issue.

David Warren: "Darwinism blocks our view of the past, as well as the present and future"

My friend Toronto-based journalist David Warren on why teachng Darwinism alone in schools is a bad idea:

On that term "evolutionary biology" -- it is important, for more than antiquarian reasons, to understand that evolutionary biology has roots deeper than Darwin, going down all the way to the Greeks. "Darwinism" blocks our view of the past, as well as the present & future. And I say, more than antiquarian, for again & again we find some insight in an older source that
has been overlooked & is ripe for reappraisal.

On my opposition to teaching "Darwinism" (as opposed to strictly empirical evolutionary biology) in schools - & may I add, on my insistence that history of science be taught broadly & openly, & not narrowly & ideologically -- let me add, that it is no small thing. Children have no
equipment to test the claims of their teachers until they have acquired the equipment, & few are genuinely sceptical by disposition. (I myself was sceptical from a very early age, & thus the bane of smooth-talking gliberal teachers, but I was also obviously some kind of freak.)

You cripple a child's potential for artistic, philosophical, & spiritual growth, by ramming a desiccated, politically-correct materialism down his throat from an early age. It is an attack on his very sense of wonder, & thus on his capacity for science, too. This is a seriously wrong thing to
do.

Thoughts from an old author on methods of science...

Toronto journalist David Warren writes about a "new" old book he has discovered, Studies in the History & Methods of the Sciences (1958), by Arthur David Ritchie, then chair of Logic & Metaphysics at Edinburgh University:

"The best book I've yet found in the field, without Pierre Duhem in the index, & worth any price second-hand (it won't be in print) for sheer wit & the glee with which he crushes the philosophical pretensions of his scientistic contemporaries, & predecessors. The breadth of his knowledge of actual science is extraordinary. His insistence on calling them "sciences" in the plural, his suspicion of the singular, & his doubt that any one-sized scientific method can fit all, are apparent everywhere.

On objectivity: "An object is objective in virtue of being handled by a subject."

On what makes a science: "No study can be reckoned fully scientific until it has undergone the Ordeal by Quackery, whether painless & quick as for Greek mathematics or painful & long as for chemistry."

On natural selection (including random mutation): "This means that forms which are less suited to an environment in which they find themselves tend to die out in favour of those better suited. It does not however explain how they come to find themselves in that environment nor how the changes in their forms has come about. It is customary to say that changes come about by chance; legitimately, if to say so amounts to a confession of ignorance.

Thus the doctrine of natural selection is negative. It is the biological equivalent of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; it states that types, like individuals tend to die out. Whatever the rate of dying out may be it always holds. If forms change, if forms remain unchanged, if some organisms die out, if others survive, natural selection explains it all equally easily. Thus it can be used as a blanket to smother further questions."

Add genetic sophistications to the above: "If, when they say 'chance', they mean simply that they do not know what causes variations to occur, then their position is secure, in fact impregnable. If they mean by 'chance' that they know that there are no causes of certain sorts at work, then their claims are no better than the Lamarckian."

On the positivist impulse: "What has been said about Hobbes may also be said about the similar theories of the French Enlightenment of the 18th century & similar ones of the 19th. These last were the most ambitious, flamboyant, & least excusable efforts to produce 'scientific' sociology in imitation of physical science; namely those of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, & Herbert Spencer. The first criticism to be made is that if we take the three theories together they pretty well cancel out, & this is precisely what they should not do if they are scientific & about the same subject, as they claim to be. The second criticism, if a second is required, is that all three smell of the midnight oil & the ivory tower. They none of them have the smell of places where collective or public human action occurs. ..."

On the illusions of technicians: "Positivists themselves are armchair critics, who do no work & therefore little harm. Technicians on the other hand do work & may do a great deal of harm. ... The technicians' chief illusions are two, & were pointed out by Socrates. The first is that because a man can do some things successfully he can do many other things equally successfully; in fact almost anything. The second is that practising any technique is an inherently virtuous act."

Materialist myths: David Warren on anti-Christian rubbish taught in science classes

What I find really helpful about the Ottawa Citizen's David Warren is the historical context he kindly provides. We are so often a-swamp in materialist nonsense. For example, the idea that the culture of Christian Europe promoted the idea that the Earth is flat. I've blogged on this before, here, here, and here, (and this last is David again).

Still, David says it so much better:

One of the constants in the long clash between Scientism & Christianity has been the repetition & elaboration by the Scienticists of quite incredible myths & lies, that are still used in our public schools, media, &c, to mock & slander Christians & Christianity. I know about the potency of these myths & lies, for I myself was taught many of them, in school, saw them endlessly repeated in the press, heard them repeated by all liberal adults, & actually believed several of them until I came to riper years, & began to realize that public atheism requires the defence of a "bodyguard of lies." (And you will find them all repeated uncritically in Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, & all the current bestselling atheist tracts.)

Many of the specific lies descend from old Protestant broadsides against Catholics -- for instance, the lie that the mediaeval scholastics debated how many angels on the head of a pin, lurid & untruthful accounts of proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, various folk myths about what Catholics do in Mass, the misrepresentation of the trial of Galileo, &c. All except this last were products of virulent anti-Catholic pamphleteering, in the 17th century. (The Galileo myth was invented later, for in the 17th-C the Protestants themselves were opposing the heliocentric theory, & often trying to suppress it as a popish "heresy" -- on grounds that the people propagating it were all Catholics & often monks & were well-received in the Vatican.)

But while Scientism has taken aboard all the old Protestant smears, & turned them into smears against Christians in general, it has also been industriously manufacturing its own myths, lies, & vitriolic sneers, from the philosophes of the Enlightenment, forward. (The Darwinists of the 19th century were even more inventive, in their determination to associate Christian belief with idiocy.)

Among the most universally taught & least subtle, lies taught to this day, is that Christians throughout the Middle Ages believed the world was flat; & that the Church taught this, & defended it as religious doctrine against Copernicus, Kepler, & Galileo. Yet the Church never taught the earth was flat, nor did any educated person, Christian or otherwise, ever believe it.

Indeed, the old Ptolemaic system -- universally accepted by intelligent Christians, Heretics, Atheists, Jews, Muslims, & even Hindus until the age of Copernicus -- was very clear on the fact that the earth was a sphere.

The American scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote an excellent history of the foundation & propagation of the "flat earth myth" in the 19th century, of which I've just become aware. (His earlier series of books on the historical development of doctrine & beliefs about the monotheist personification of the Devil may be familiar to some of you.) Russell is pedestrian in the best sense: a very thorough scholar who walks patiently through a broad range of evidence, insists on consulting original sources, & writes very clearly.

Here, anyway, is his own summary of his findings in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991).

The lazy paddlefish could have hands, feet - but never got round to it?

Fellow hack David Warren draws my attention to a paper earlier this year in Nature, according to which,

Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers in the May 24, 2007, issue of Nature.

Paddlefish? Hmmmm.

Instead of using zebrafish—the hallmark animal for laboratory development studies—the scientists used paddlefish as a proxy for a more primitive ancestor. Unlike the simple fins of zebrafish, paddlefish have an elaborate fin skeletal pattern similar to that seen in more primitive vertebrates such as sharks and many fossil fish. This sturgeon-type fish is farm raised for caviar, which gives scientists relatively easy access to the animal for study.

[ ... ]

Tetrapods have a second phase of Hox gene expression that happens later in development. During this second phase, hands and feet develop. Although this second phase is not known in zebrafish, the scientists found that it is present in paddlefish, which reveals that a pattern of gene activity long thought to be unique to vertebrates with hands and feet is in fact much more primitive.

Warren comments,

So this fish walks into a bar ...

Owing to the complete non-evolution of certain species, such as the American paddlefish, over very long periods, such as hundreds of millions of years, we are today able to do genetic soundings on "living fossils," & by proxy look into that evolutionary bag of tricks, just as if we could travel back through time. Amazing what we find (as ever)!

In the case of the paddlefish -- an entirely submerged creature, that has never even dreamed of stepping out of the water (it is a big lake & slow-river fish, with a great spoonbill, that makes good eating both flesh & roe) -- we find a complete "second phase" genetic tool-kit for growing limbs, that it has never got around to using. (Even though it could probably use that kit now, to step around a few man-made dams when spawning.) That is to say, it could keep its fins, & walk out of the water, at any old time of God's choosing.

Now this is fun. We have reached a point in the evolution of our own knowledge of biology -- e.g. current genetics, & molecular biology -- where we can actually establish that things happened in the wrong order. I mean, wrong, nonsensical, according to all the biology textbooks & all those contrived, "pious fraud" exhibits at the Smithsonian & other natural history museums, designed to impress small children & the mentally retarded. Not wrong in any philosophical sense.

Example: fish did not develop arms & legs after leaving the water, & while slithering about haplessly in the mud, wheezing & lunging for food supplies to which they were not yet adapted. They developed arms & legs BEFORE leaving the water &, I daresay, made their exit graciously.

There's something bigger happening here, that is going to disturb all the phylogenetic chronologies. We have built the entire "tree of life" on the Darwinist assumption of increasing complexity. That was perfectly plausible, & it is easy to understand why, even without Darwinism, we would have done that. If you have three obviously related creatures, & two have a feature that the third lacks, we call the third creature the most primitive, & assume it evolved earlier. But as Dr Marcus Davis & colleagues at the University of Chicago, & many others are beginning to demonstrate, that wasn't a safe bet.

And he acknowledges Michael Behe too:

I am only beginning to grasp that Michael Behe's "black box" arguments are more powerful than first appeared. (At first glance they were overwhelmingly powerful.) For ID arguments from irreducible complexity will work even better on the reconstructed genetic sequence than prima facie on the contemporary evidence -- i.e. in circumstances where the complexities of the past lead to the simplicities of the present.

More broadly, it begins to appear -- indeed, it is already obvious from the genomic studies -- that all of God's animals are carrying design plans for a vast range of possible creatures elaborately different from themselves, so that the turn-of-the-last-century speculation of that Dutchman, De Vries -- that speciation must happen by sudden complete mutational twists -- must begin to look a hell of a lot more plausible than the natural-selective gradualism the Darwinoids decreed. (And which has never overcome the missing-links objection: a perfect sesquicentennial track record of total failure.)

This does not disprove Darwinism, of course. Because Darwinism has consistently avoided proposing anything that could be falsifiable, over 150 years, it is not science, & it can never be disproved. Given its use today as the cosmological component of a dark atheistical public religion, it will just have to be ridiculed to death.

Yes, well, maybe the Expelled movie will help.

David Warren on Darwin as a member of a new priesthood ...

Here's one of Toronto journalist David Warren's observations on Darwin, Darwinism, and its place in the philosophy of science, from a note sent to friends:

It is a wonderful thought: that "science" has been, unconsciously & semi-consciously, performing gigantic null-hypothesis experiments for the purpose of disproving the Christian faith -- or, "the claims of the Catholic Church," if we want to get personal about it. This observation is true as stated. And it carries within itself an intimation of the triumph of Christianity over "The Enlightenment" -- perhaps the most impressive adversary (including Islam) that Christianity has yet faced.

The theme ties in with something I've [said] about Darwin (specifically, I don't mean "Darwinism" here), somewhere. That you read early & middle Darwin & cannot help noticing that he WANTS to find evidence in nature that will not merely challenge, but destroy Christian claims. And the unwarranted philosophical assumptions carried throughout his Origin of Species & Descent of Man confirm that he thinks he has found it.

This does not make Darwin special, but rather typical of a broad class, or faction, of scientists, from the earliest Cartesian & Baconian era to our own. Among the physicists & cosmologists, for instance, there is the constant effort -- leading to the circular "string theories" of today -- to prove the existence of a material infinity. The desire behind this is to eliminate God: to systematically remove any dark corner where God might be "hiding." And practically, to provide infinite space & time for some sort of random evolutionary process to account for all the observed peculiarities of our (now demonstrably finite) universe.

These are not, for the most part, raging atheists. The ones I got to know in e.g. the particle physics community in the 1980s were the exact equivalent in current society of what I've called "Victorian parlour atheists." They are, as it were, Fabians, not Revolutionary Communists. They think of themselves less as members of the Atheist Party, putting their lives on the line at the religious battlefront, than as an atheist "priesthood" or "clerisy," sneering at the superstitions of the common people. Just as Christians -- they suppose -- once sneered at primitive Pagans. Progress for them is progress towards a scientific materialism that they, exclusively, will be able to interpret to the masses.

And many, not of this faction, are deluded, often wan & nominal Christians who simply do not grasp that if e.g. Darwin's premises are true (N.B. not Darwin's evolutionary theory, but Darwin's philosophical premises), Christianity cannot be true; or assume that every unbridgeable chasm will be bridged later. This may even be the majority: for I have found in all countries where I've stayed that people cope very easily with flagrant contradictions in their lives. Because at some level they do not cope at all.

This isn't linked anywhere but here's the link to Warren's columns.

Further thoughts from outspoken Canadian journalist, David Warren, on Darwinism ...

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen is another Canadian journalist who, having travelled and read widely, is skeptical of Darwinism. I sometimes publish some of his musings on the subject, often in correspondence with other thoughtful people:

Warren, a Catholic, quotes George Sim Johnston, Did Darwin Get It Right? Catholics & the Theory of Evolution, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1998, pp. 22-24:

Now, it may be argued that Darwin's hostility toward Christianity is beside the point. Shouldn't a scientific theory be judged on its own merits, rather than on the motives and psychology of its progenitor? Yes, of course - if the theory is truly scientific and confirmed by empirical observation. Isaac Newton was as strange as they come; as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, Newton's private philosophical notebooks make one think of an ancient Babylonian magician. But Newton's scientific theories were rigorously formulated. They can be tested and shown to be true for most of material reality. But an ideology dressed up as science is a different matter. Theories like Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism have an explanation for everything (natural selection, economic repression, the unconscious) and so finally explain very little; they are elastic and vague enough to absorb almost any contradiction; when they run into falsifying data, they simply mutate. And since these theories began, consciously or not, as highly skewed readings of the available evidence, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point.

It is the job of a scientist to explain things without reference to a Creator. Great scientists like Gregor Mendel, who deciphered the genetic basis of heredity, operate this way, and when evaluating Mendel's work, we don't need to know what he thought about God. His rigorous mathematical analysis of his breeding experiments with peas can be tested and verified on its own terms. Mendel happened to be an Augustinian monk, but it makes no difference. A Christian physicist or biologist who runs into an intractable problem is not obliged to throw up his arms and say, "Well, God did it that way." Rather, he waits patiently for a natural explanation. If such is not forthcoming, he admits a scientific mystery and humbly hands over his data to philosophers and theologians, who may then talk about design and creation.

At the same time, a scientist who takes the (often covert) position, that because there is no God, any puzzling phenomenon can in principle be explained entirely by material causes is also out of bounds. As is the case with a Christian physicist who solves any mystery in nature by simply positing divine intervention, scientists who adopt this strategy are practicing bad philosophy rather than sound science. Many Darwinists take the position that because other material explanations (for example, Lamarkism; the inheritance of acquired characteristics) of evolution are false, Darwin's must be true. But they can only do this if they rule out of court nonmaterial first causes. As scientists, they are not qualified to do this. Science, which deals only with physical reality, can have nothing to say about what, if anything, is outside that reality.

...Twenty years before the publication of the Origin, Darwin was a convinced materialist who wished to rid nature of a Creator. In other words, his agenda was not strictly scientific; it was metaphysical - or, we might say, counter-metaphysical. Darwin's materialism was antecedent to, and not a result of, his scientific work. Even so, his philosophical biases would not be an issue if his theorizing had, like Mendel's or Pasteur's, been limited to secondary and proximate causes. But Darwin was stalking the First Cause. It was, he confessed in a letter, like committing "murder." And this agenda must be taken into account when judging the argument of the Origin, because virtually every chapter of that book contains hidden and unwarranted philosophical assumptions.

Warren also draws my attention to Governor Huckabee fielding a line drive from Darwinists.

Quoting a friend on the “random” part of “random mutations”, he notes:

Huxley in his presentation of Darwin makes a very critical point. He says that "random" means a mutation in the offspring that we observers could not have predicted from looking at the parents. In short, it means "unexpected" and "surprising," and it is defined purely and strictly in respect of human observers. Huxley's definition, in other words, has zero metaphysical or theological implications. From the mere fact that we human observers cannot predict an event, it is absurd to conclude that the event does not follow a regular pattern. Early human beings could not predict eclipses--so they appeared to happen at random. Yet this did not mean that eclipses did not follow a regular and predictable pattern. For Huxley, "random" simply referred to the limits of our knowledge; it did not mean that the course of evolution was itself random. The course of evolution could be the unfolding of an intelligent design or it could the result of a cosmic law of progress.

It is simply bad logic to jump from the Darwin/Huxley concept of random to conclusion that the process of evolution is itself random. People today forget the fact that those who embraced Darwin's theory in the 19th century saw it as scientific proof that progress was built into the universe--after all, if evolution led from microbes to Michelangelo, then who could possibly fail to see that the universe was constantly progressing, and not simply drifting randomly and without direction.

Here are some links to earlier Warren comments posted here:

Another Toronto journalist takes swat at Darwinoids

David Warren’s further correspondence with the Darwin fans

David Warren defends Mike Behe

David Warren's further correspondence with the Darwin fans

I don't know what I would do without my regular fix of Toronto journalist David Warren, who - having made clear that he thinks Darwinism a crock - is constantly hearing from anxious Darwin fans, who don't know what they'll do if it isn't true.

If life cannot be produced accidentally by jiggling chemicals in a test tube, ... apparently life makes no sense to them - or something like that anyway.

Warren continues to offer boilerplate responses (one must live, after all). Indeed, he appears to know some of the same Darwoids as I hear from, to judge from their inimitable prose style:

"Atrociously bad, pig-ignorant garbage." ... "Mixture of gall & negligence." ... "Sheer brazen quality of this ignorance is a wonder to behold."

This is what's said ABOUT the likes of me, third-personally, by the more articulate correspondents advising my editors to sack me. The letters to me personally are, however, much ruder. As usual, among the charges, I am a "faggot," or at least a "closet fag."

[ ... ]

Many, many, of my apoplectic correspondents refer me to websites on "The God Delusion," & other standard sources for atheist proselytizing. Several correspondents refer to a website where Michael Behe's "claims" are "refuted" in a similar manner to the above (i.e. with a lot of more-or-less clinical abusive language).

And apparently, many of these ill-tempered illiterates have taken to styling themselves "the New Enlightenment."


Warren also muses on the "survival instinct":

This is where it becomes interesting: at the very point where post-modern Darwinist "evolutionary biology" throws up its hands (or alternatively, declares victory, & then cuts & runs).

I am hardly saying the instincts, including the survival instincts (really they are complex & plural), don't exist; I am only pointing out that they are non-material. Which is not to say that their operation does not correspond to particular, detectable parts of the brain -- i.e. the "amygdala," in the higher vertebrates: the emotion centres. Only that you won't find them there. It is the part of the brain that is working when survival & other emotional issues are at stake, but the instinct to live & not to die is in itself an arbitrary, "irrational" thing (i.e. super-rational; or if you prefer, the premise that precedes the logical proposition). It has to be "posited" in some sense. Once it is posited, we can begin to make some sense of the machinery. Until it is posited, the machinery makes no sense.

Already we are "lost in space," or rather, entering the territory of "Intelligent Design."

I said the survival instincts are complex & plural. Think I mentioned before watching a rabbit, once, simply give up the struggle against a Doberman, when the rabbit was out of breath, & out of cover. That is a common trait among many animals at all levels of the food chain (& it is further interesting that, from that point, animals often seem to experience neither panic nor pain). If you think about it carefully, you will see that it is behaviour that cannot possibly be explained in any conceivable Darwinist way. It can in no possible way advance the cause of rabbit survival.

But so are so many other things, inexplicable on strictly Darwinist assumptions. The survival instinct works both on the individual, as individual, & on the individual on behalf of his tribe or species or even allied species. Survival itself would be impossible without the most complex instinctual arrangements -- which are also minutely inter-dependent. All the convincing progress that has been made (by Tinbergen, contemporaries & successors) in understanding instinctive behaviour in animals has been possible only because various abstract, arbitrary, "immaterial" requirements have been assumed from the point of departure.

What I am saying is that the instinctive behaviour of animals -- conscious, semi-conscious, & entirely unconscious -- provide a parallel universe to the purely material, organic one, for the purpose of demonstrating the impossibility of development by trial & error. Not only does a machine not work when it is missing parts, or missing fuel, or has external obstacles in its way, &c; it also doesn't work when it is not driven.

Returning to the question of origins, the scandal is that the most primitive unicellular organisms discoverable on this planet are already monstrously complex, & already require genomic instructions that could fill telephone directories. Under some circumstances I'm willing to be a putz, & say, "yes, that's the product of trial & error, & it just happened to work out nicely," but this is too much for me. I am simply not capable of credulity on that scale.

But even supposing we started the day with just one happy-accident instruction, & built from there (this is where the 15 billion times 15 billion times 15 billion years for trial & error will come in really handy), I don't get why that first organism wanted to survive & reproduce? It has no way of knowing that the odds against it even existing are infinity to one. Why doesn't it just wink, & call it a day?

Even the ancient Greeks had trouble grasping why a man would want to live, given that life is full of pain. There is nothing self-evident about the survival instinct.

But some other day we may raise the stakes further by climbing from organism & instinct, to consciousness, & beyond.

David Warren defends Mike Behe, and offers boilerplate responses to Darwinists

David Warren offers the "boilerplate" replies he must provide (to conserve time for useful activities) to the Darwinists who write him in defense of their idol. Here I print here a few:

- On "intelligent design," Behe & company have been content to demonstrate that evolution through random mutation & natural selection can't work, & have averred that they specifically do not account for independently-operating biological machinery from the molecular level up that is both incredibly complex & incredibly precise. It does not follow that they are simple "creationists." For once again the critics construe a negative as a positive. Behe would be no more content to say "God intervened miraculously" at every step of evolutionary transformation than Richard Dawkins would be. He is saying that since complex precise systems require design, we must look for mechanisms of design, instead of pretending that "design is unnecessary."

- On Behe personally, I am outraged by the constant slandering & misrepresentation of a good, honest, intelligent man who is doing his best to pursue the truth according to his lights. In his case & several others I have had a good look at how the Darwin party pursues heretics. Behe is not a smooth political operator, but he is up against some real pros.

- I myself happen to disagree with Behe, & more with some other ID advocates, on various little points, & I think they are foolish sometimes to promote ID as if it were an alternative "general theory," when it is instead an attempt to get around an unworkable general theory: i.e. to remove untrue theoretical trash from the observable scientific landscape. But that doesn't
matter: for what I am defending is their freedom to pursue their studies without heresy trials.

- On my "tone" generally, I doubt it has changed. The difference is that you were earlier reading things you agreed with, then later reading things you did not agree with. But be assured, people who disagree with me on other topics get just as vexed. My views on Darwinism have been fairly consistent in print & elsewhere over the last thirty-something years, going back to when I was myself an atheist; & so, my vexing of Darwinist true believers is not something new. (Take that in: I myself, like many other free-thinking types, first realized that random mutation & natural selection could not explain the origin of a single species, long before I ever "accepted Christ as my personal Saviour." You may say that I am a religious nutjob, but you cannot say that my views on evolution are the product of my Catholic Christian faith.)

And if you think this is fun, you might also try O'Leary vs. the Darwinbots.

Canadian journalist David Warren’s further thoughts on Darwinism as a crock

From “Unmoved Mover”

I should like to add today, a footnote to the column I wrote on Sunday, in which I again confessed to being a heretic in the holiest shrine of scientism, where random mutation and natural selection are worshipped by the high priests, and from whose ivory towers we hear the academic chant: “There is no God, but Darwin.”

[ ... ]

What struck me, hard, in reading so much more apoplectic rubbish about Darwinism, which I drew down on myself with my Sunday column, was the refusal to look at the key, the hinge, of the whole argument. For I wrote: “We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, and 15 billion years more-or-less is proving much too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.”

This, in a nutshell, is the insuperable problem with random mutation, and natural selection, so far as they are taken not as factors in an evolutionary development, but as the determinants of it. ...

Warren has been inundated with apoplectic rubbish since he started to reflect thoughtfully on the Darwin religion. At one point, he wrote to friends,

Meanwhile I return to several billion emails on Darwinism (I exaggerate), to one of which I replied thus:

... I am with you on the inherent deficiencies of computer models, but at a loss to know how Behe relies on them in any way. He is a microbiologist. His first book advanced the thesis of irreducible complexity in a microbiological way; his second book tied this in with the other problems of Darwinism. He is not a statistician, & in showing the astronomically long odds against a purely Darwinian account of the origin of anything, he is surveying other people's work. Using a computer, as they do (including Darwinists themselves until they discovered what a mistake it was) -- to calculate odds, given assumptions -- that is not computer modelling.

Verily, Behe & many others have attacked the computer modelling that has been imported into Darwinism itself to get around statistical & other problems.. (They love to create computer models, which are programmed in a circular way, to produce evolutionary results in electronic space that supposedly mimic reality. The weakness being they have left out most of the known environmental factors, together of course with all of the unknown ones.)

[ ... ]

To my mind, we have several religions in play in the world around us: in the West, chiefly Christianity, Islam, & Darwinism (plus small minorities of Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, &c). It may be a little unfair to call this last Darwinism, for Darwin has supplied only its cosmology; the larger religion takes the implications of this cosmology to vindicate a more universal denial of God, & replacement of His function in the universe with blind evolutionary forces. The idea of necessary material progress, though seriously damaged by actual human experience, is built into this larger worldview as it has been since the 19th-C, together with economic determinism, not necessarily in the Marxist form. Yet Marxism has provided the background materialist assumptions to its economic thinking, & Freudianism the moral assumptions. But of the three great Prophets of Postmodernity, I have come to think Darwin is by far the most influential, today, since Marx & Freud have been fairly thoroughly debunked, & are increasingly replaced by unanswerable New Age vagueness.

The thing is, Darwinism is a form of magic. The fact that it is a form of magic believed by academics (the high priests of our day) does not and cannot make it more plausible, any more than “scientific socialism” (Marxist economics) became more plausible because the brainiacs believed in it.

And on the ID guys, Warren writes,

Now, ID ain't a universal theory, in the way Darwinism is. It consists of observing that, as random mutation & natural selection do not adequately explain the way creatures are designed, & indeed, do not even come close --
& as, in particular, random mutation does not happen in nature except within easily demonstrated restraints of self-correction -- we must look for other explanations if we are to explain the phenomena of common descent (which both the ID & Darwin people take to be demonstrated as true, in opposition to the Biblical Creationists).

What the ID people demand is not the right to "attribute everything directly to God." I've never met a Christian, let alone a proponent of ID, who is THAT simple-minded, who does not gather that God works through agencies. Instead, the IDers demand the right to explore, publicly, alternative explanations of "evolutionary descent" from the Darwinian one. And these must necessarily involve looking at the phenomena in new ways, in light of the fact they do manifest design principles, in the extreme.

Warren agrees with me on the significance of Edge of Evolution

Lastly, let me draw your attention to this essay on defending society against funadamentalist cults in science, where he notes, among other things:

As Paul Feyerabend, one of my scientific heroes, wrote in his 1975 essay, "How to defend Society against Science":

"In society at large the judgement of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. Science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer."

Likewise Freeman Dyson, whose most recent book, Many Coloured Glass, is only the latest fruit of a lifetime of dangerously independent thinking, in which he has shamelessly crossed over from one scientific speciality to another -- as all the great scientists of history did. He devotes a robust chapter to cataloguing the marvellous accomplishments of men who refused to be intimidated by the dull, heavy hand of professional authority in his own time. And he adds today: ...

(Go there. Why should I spoil it for you?)

Another Toronto journalist takes swat at Darwinists (or Darwinoids)

One of the most interesting journalists in Toronto is a friend of mine, David Warren, who - as if he did not have enough troubles - has gotten sick of bloviating Darwinists and decided to take them on. At least I am not alone. Far from it.

Writing to friends, Warren notes, "I have been remiss. I have allowed several months to do by without taking another kick at the Darwinoids. I endeavour to correct this oversight in my column for Sunday," whereupon he directs us to his recent column for The Spectator:

I get such apoplectic letters, whenever I write about "evolutionism," that I really can't resist writing about it again. This is not, of course, because I have any desire to tease such correspondents. Perish the thought. Rather, when a writer finds he has hit such a nerve, he can also know that he is approaching a great truth.

In this case, we must ask ourselves why so many people get so excited about an area of science that should not concern them. For most of these correspondents know precious little science, and haven't the stamina to engage in detailed argument. They are simply shocked and appalled that anyone would dream of challenging what they believe to be the consensus of "qualified experts," whom they assume are a closed camp of hard-bitten materialists, with no time for religious or poetical flights.

The answer to this question is clear enough. People without a stake in a controversy pay little or no attention to it. They will hardly be vexed by assertions of one party or another, when the result of the controversy cannot touch their lives. It is rather when a person does have a stake, that he begins to care.

It follows that my most apoplectic correspondents have a stake in evolutionary controversies. They imagine themselves to have an impersonal interest in defending science against "religious superstition," and the dangers to society that the latter might present. They in fact have strong and uncompromising religious beliefs of their own, which they are loath to have questioned.

Much of the "star chamber" atmosphere, that has accompanied the public invigilation of microbiologists such as Michael J. Behe, and other very qualified scientists working on questions of design in organisms and natural systems, can only be explained in this way. The establishment wants such research to be stopped, because it challenges the received religious order, of atheist materialism. Any attempt, or suspected attempt, to acknowledge God in scientific proceedings, must be exposed and punished to the limit of the law; or by other ruthless means where the law does not suffice.

Not to be missed.

An author friend asked Warren recently,

Suppose Lemaitre had offered his Big Bang idea in our current intellectual climate, rather than in 1931. Would he be denounced as a crypto-creationist, trying to dress up the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo in scientific garb? After all, a universe that has always existed does not need a God to create it; that is why the eternality of the world has been a cardinal tenet of those who do not need the hypothesis of God. Once the eternality of the world is no longer accepted, then we are right back to Leibniz' question, "Why is there something rather than nothing," and this question has dangerous theological implications.

and he replied,

For sure, Lemaître would have died an ignominious intellectual death in our time. But then, he never tried to call attention to himself, & even now, everyone has heard about Einstein & Hubble, & no one about the man who went "behind & beyond" them.

When I asked Warren if he realized that he would be vilified, as neurosurgeon Mike Egnor has been vilified, he merely replied,

Well, as someone says on your blog (maybe it was you), the way the news on ID gets out, is by all these Darwinoid idiots drawing attention to it. Pravda used to make the same mistake. Nobody realized there'd been a riot in Gorki, until Pravda denied anything had happened.

Yes, that was me, David. I said that the Darwinists have done far more to promote the intelligent design guys' theories than the evil Discos could ever have done. In fact, I remember listening to a Toronto Darwinist announcing to a media person that the Discovery Institute was very well funded. When I pointed out to him that Discovery's Center for Science and Culture (the ID think tank) is actually quite small - and that it relies largely on converting the negative energy generated by people like himself into positive energy - it was obvious that he didn't believe me.

How about that! There he was, actually demonstrating the phenomenon, and he still did not believe me. David, I am afraid there's no help for people like that.

Oh, and, Warren also writes,

Meanwhile, entirely unrelated, my time is taken up answering in detail the most ridiculous allegations against me, against Prof Michael Behe, & against God, by correspondents to the Tottawa Zit [Ottawa Citizen].

Let me give you JUST one example of the sort of sh*t I'm dealing with.

There was a show trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, two years ago, in which a local school board was prosecuted by the Darwinoids for having permitted the teaching of "Intelligent Design." This was publicized by the gliberal media as, "Another Scopes trial in America!" The defence called Michael Behe, so the plaintiffs brought very high-powered attorneys, to lure him into traps. One of them, a certain Eric Rothschild, made tendentious points on the definition of "science." Prof Behe wouldn't play, & noted only, & rather dryly, that if the official definition of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were used, almost every major advance in modern science would have to be ruled illegal. Rothschild then paraphrased Behe's position as, "So you believe astrology is valid science." Needless to say, Behe does not.

This was reported, in e.g. the New Scientist, as, "Behe forced to admit that astrology is valid science according to his definition."

And now, in letter after letter to the Zit, the Darwinoids have simplified this to, "Behe also believes in astrology."

Note: If you are looking for the story about the major film about the ID guys, starring Ben Stein, go here.

Origin of life research: A perfect circularity

Here is neuroscientist Michael Egnor, who has said such kind things about The Spiritual Brain on on origin of life research:

The National Research Council’s report — The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems — is a must read. Not for the science — what there is of it can be summed up simply: we have no clue how life began. No, the report is a must read for the insight it offers into the current state of origin of life research:

For generations the definition of life has eluded scientists and philosophers. (Many have come to recognize that the concept of “definition” itself is difficult to define)… Indeed, because the chemical structures of terran biomolecular systems all appear to have arisen through Darwinian processes, it is hardly surprising that some of the more thoughtful definitions of life hold that it is a “chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” [emphasis mine]

Aside from jargon that would make Derrida squirm— “the concept of definition is itself difficult to define”— the Council claims to see, through post-modern haze, a more thoughtful definition of life: life is defined as “a chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”! This more thoughtful definition of life is an even grander tautology than 'survivors survive': Darwin’s theory must explain life because life is defined as ‘what Darwin’s theory explains.’ You've got to admire the audacity.

Here's a backgrounder on why origin of life is such a difficult problem. Oh, and here is a $1 million dollar prize if you can figure out how the genetic code arose spontaneously.

And the theory that life began in outer space has fallen on hard times, according to recent reports:

For the first time, there are solid data to refute a popular theory that life came to the Earth aboard a comet, Rutgers researchers said Monday.
Deteriorated DNA from microbes, frozen for millions of years in the Antarctic ice, shows that organisms could not have survived the bombardment of cosmic radiation during deep space travel from outside the solar system, said Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers biologist and oceanographer.

Toronto journalist David Warren comments,

Like every other pointy-head Darwinoid theory, the idea behind "Panspermianism" is to transfer the problem of life's origin on earth, out of the finite space & time of the earth's own geological history, & into some abstract place where the laws of chance have an infinite amount of time to do whatever is necessary. But the game is up. We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, & 15 billion years is WAY too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.

There are some miracles that just cannot be explained away.

Note: If you are looking for the story about the major film about the ID guys, starring Ben Stein, go here.