Wednesday, January 12, 2005
A sensible view
David Warren is an essayist and a columnist for a couple of prominent Canadian dailies. His website offers all of his interesting commentary, on a wide range of topics. In a January 5 essay he wades into the snake-infested waters of the evolutionism vs. creationism debate.
In the last few weeks there has been something of a blogstorm on the subject of intelligent design, with many fine writers taking up the issue. As with much that the blogosphere takes up en masse, there is simply too much to read.
But here in Warren's piece, while we don't go near the intelligent design debate, we get some pretty clear thinking.
...I think "evolution" is not a science but an ideology, a quasi-religion, a colossal scientistic put-on; that "evolutionary science" is a cant expression, a pretence unworthy of a scientific researcher. His job is to inquire, not to advance a worldview. The people who study the development of living organisms through the fossil record should be called, unpretentiously, "palaeobiologists".
What I'm saying comes down to this. Science cannot now explain, and probably will never be able to explain, the origin of any species in nature -- least of all man. It can assemble the succession of species in the fossil record; it can catalogue resemblances between species in space and time; it can begin to show the fine adaptations of each to its environment; and the workings of "natural selection" when the environment changes; it can even look into the mechanism by which heritable traits are passed along from individual to individual within a species (thanks, incidentally, to a line of intellectual descent not from Charles Darwin, but from an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel). But science cannot even tell you how a species is defined, let alone how life emerged from the lifeless sterility of the "primordial swamp".
"Evolutionism" is the prevailing speculation, that by minute alterations in traits, in continuing response to environmental pressures, an isolated group within a species "evolves" to the point where its members can breed with each other but no longer with others, and -- presto! -- you have a new species. But the "presto" has never been observed in nature, and there is a universal paucity of transitional forms. The speculation may even seem plausible, but remains an act of faith. It isn't science, because it isn't falsifiable: there is no way to test if it might be wrong.
There is one of the keys: that in order to be science something must be falsifiable. But the money lines are here:
[Evolutionism] flourishes because it gives comfort to its believers. It assures them that nature is random. In the words of the late Czeslaw Milosz, which I quoted a few months ago: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged." Evolution is the guarantee that nothing really matters.
Warren professes to have been an atheist into his twenties, yet is now a Catholic Christian. Therefore he can speak with some credibility, as he does here:
My more intemperate readers accused me of buying into "Biblical creationism" . It does not follow from the fact I am intensely sceptical about "evolutionary science", however, that I would be credulous about "creation science". Both require a kind of po-faced cleverness, to talk a little faster than the phenomena can be presented, but the latter is based on premises that are even sillier than the former. The Bible is not a textbook in cosmology or biology, it is not about nature but about God. To my mind, "evolutionism" and "creationism" are competing "isms". But they reduce finally to the same thing: an attempt to explain how something comes from nothing.
Read the entire essay here.
In the last few weeks there has been something of a blogstorm on the subject of intelligent design, with many fine writers taking up the issue. As with much that the blogosphere takes up en masse, there is simply too much to read.
But here in Warren's piece, while we don't go near the intelligent design debate, we get some pretty clear thinking.
...I think "evolution" is not a science but an ideology, a quasi-religion, a colossal scientistic put-on; that "evolutionary science" is a cant expression, a pretence unworthy of a scientific researcher. His job is to inquire, not to advance a worldview. The people who study the development of living organisms through the fossil record should be called, unpretentiously, "palaeobiologists".
What I'm saying comes down to this. Science cannot now explain, and probably will never be able to explain, the origin of any species in nature -- least of all man. It can assemble the succession of species in the fossil record; it can catalogue resemblances between species in space and time; it can begin to show the fine adaptations of each to its environment; and the workings of "natural selection" when the environment changes; it can even look into the mechanism by which heritable traits are passed along from individual to individual within a species (thanks, incidentally, to a line of intellectual descent not from Charles Darwin, but from an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel). But science cannot even tell you how a species is defined, let alone how life emerged from the lifeless sterility of the "primordial swamp".
"Evolutionism" is the prevailing speculation, that by minute alterations in traits, in continuing response to environmental pressures, an isolated group within a species "evolves" to the point where its members can breed with each other but no longer with others, and -- presto! -- you have a new species. But the "presto" has never been observed in nature, and there is a universal paucity of transitional forms. The speculation may even seem plausible, but remains an act of faith. It isn't science, because it isn't falsifiable: there is no way to test if it might be wrong.
There is one of the keys: that in order to be science something must be falsifiable. But the money lines are here:
[Evolutionism] flourishes because it gives comfort to its believers. It assures them that nature is random. In the words of the late Czeslaw Milosz, which I quoted a few months ago: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged." Evolution is the guarantee that nothing really matters.
Warren professes to have been an atheist into his twenties, yet is now a Catholic Christian. Therefore he can speak with some credibility, as he does here:
My more intemperate readers accused me of buying into "Biblical creationism" . It does not follow from the fact I am intensely sceptical about "evolutionary science", however, that I would be credulous about "creation science". Both require a kind of po-faced cleverness, to talk a little faster than the phenomena can be presented, but the latter is based on premises that are even sillier than the former. The Bible is not a textbook in cosmology or biology, it is not about nature but about God. To my mind, "evolutionism" and "creationism" are competing "isms". But they reduce finally to the same thing: an attempt to explain how something comes from nothing.
Read the entire essay here.
# posted by mds : 10:03 AM
