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As I’ve said before, the whole ID v Darwin debate was never of great concern to me (although the stupidity of some of the statements made on both sides would often irritate me). When I recently became re-interested in the issue, while I was certainly not coming from a philosophical materialist point of view, I was open-minded about evolution; I could have easily accepted the Francis Collins approach, without much thought.

Ay, but there’s the rub: without much thought. The more I read the arguments from both sides, the more I am convinced that Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism) is so full of holes that it would instantly collapse if it were not for all of the hot air being blown into it by its supporters. I don’t think that it even qualifies as a theory. Rather, Darwinism at this point is a collage of hypothesis, data (there is some data), speculations, assumptions and assertions, all pasted onto a foundation of philosophical materialism. It only works if you assume that there is nothing outside of the material world, and therefore the reach of science. As soon as you open the presumed system, it collapses.

Anyone who’s done any reading on the subject at all has encountered the ridicule that the “scientists” heap on the ID community; the ad hominem approach is, I think, their first line of defense. By portraying IDists as fools (i.e. Creationists), so therefore there is no need to even consider the ID position. This is not true of all Darwinians, obviously, but it appears to be the norm for those outspoken on the subject. Other complaints are that they don’t understand the subject matter, they misquote evolutionists, they use selective facts, and so on. What I am often finding, however, is that the evolutionists are the ones guilty of ignorance of the IDist arguments, who misquote IDists, and so on.

As I have complained before, I would really like an evolutionist to seriously consider the various anti-Darwinian arguments, and give serious responses. There are a few out there, but they are very few and far between (more rare than the mythological transitional fossil).

The truth is that macro-evolution, which many Darwinists claim is no different than micro-evolution, is not supported by the evidence (unless, again, you presuppose a materialist, evolutionary world). Instead of ID being a “God of the gaps” argument, neo-Darwinism is very much a “theory of the gaps” argument. Rather than admitting that there are holes in the theory, you hear things like, “we just don’t know enough; when we do, it will make sense.” What is that, science? Hardly. It is nothing more, as someone has said, but the creation myth of Philosophical materialism.

The list of problems with macro-evolution is too long to list here. Things like the inadequacy of the fossil record, the fact that there are no smooth transitions but many jumps like the Cambrian Explosion, and the problem of the Big Bang, are all major problems for Darwinism that have no real answers, just a faith in future science. Even the oft-ridiculed “irreducible complexity” argument has not been disproved, but deserves a good, close review.

Tomorrow, a look at another often-overlooked challenge to evolution.

I have a hypothesis, based on my own recent observations, that thinking too much makes you stupid. This is not necessarily a new or groundbreaking thought; in fact, it fits well with the well-known and generally accepted principle known as Occam’s (or Ockham’s) Razor, which I’ll talk about in a moment. First, take a look at this, from USA Today’s website under Science & Space:

“Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults’ resistance to certain scientific ideas,” note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. “This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning,” the psychologists say.

Okay, let that sink in for a moment.

Occam’s Razor, named after a 4th century Franciscan friar, William of Occam, states that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” It’s been translated from Latin, but it still may need some interpretation. Isaac Newton restated the rule as “we are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” This has been further adapted by scientists today to mean that all things being equal, if you have the option between 2 explanations for something, the simplest one is probably correct.

Now, consider that old William (of Occam) was first of all, a Catholic friar. Furthermore, note that he used this principle to argue, among other things, that the only entity that need exist is God. He also argued that God’s existence cannot be proved exclusively through reason; we will only know that through revelation. For William, the “simplest” explanation would be God. Fast forward a few hundred years, and we have the materialists using the Razor as a basis for dismissing all talk of God; the Razor has evolved to say that if there is a materialistic explanation for something (whether it is “simple” or not), God is the “excess” entity that we don’t need to consider. I suspect that the logic used to turn the razor inside out is flawed, as it is now used to support overly complex and occasionally illogical theories and to exclude more simple and obvious theories.

Now, consider that Occam’s Razor is only a method for deciding between competing theories of equal merit – the key to the rule is “all things being equal.” And, it doesn’t mean that the simplest answer is necessarily true; it’s just a rule based on probability. The more complicated an answer is, the greater the probability that there is some defect in the analysis. It’s like a new car with all the extras vs the old VW bug. The new car has way more things to go wrong, and the chances that you’ll need to take the car to a shop is far greater.

Looking back to the quote above, I have to ask the question, “could it be that people can’t accept some of science because they are asking people to violate Occam’s Razor in order to accept it?” Perhaps the problem isn’t in people’s “resistance” to accept that everything a scientist is true” (the 50′s are over, people!) but is rather that sometimes it just defies common sense? Maybe, for instance, people see a disconnect in being warned against eating genetically altered food, but encouraged to genetically engineer people? Perhaps it’s not the “findings” of science itself, but the fact that there are competing worldviews, and materialism doesn’t cut it? Or, perhaps it’s just that materialism as science can’t see the gaps in what it presents?

Granville Sewell, mathematics professor at the U of Texas El Paso, states:

SCIENCE HAS BEEN SO SUCCESSFUL in explaining natural phenomena that the modern scientist is convinced that it can explain everything, and anything that doesn’t fit into this model is simply ignored. It doesn’t matter that there were no natural causes before Nature came into existence, so he cannot hope to ever explain the sudden creation of time, space, matter and energy and our universe in the Big Bang. It doesn’t matter that quantum mechanics is based on a “principle of indeterminacy”, that tells us that every “natural” phenomenon has a component that is forever beyond the ability of science to explain or predict, he still insists nothing is beyond the reach of his science.
- from A Second Look at the Second Law

So, William of Occam, how would you use your razor here?

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

As I started to explore in a recent post, ““What the [blank] do we know?” our ability to reason our way to knowledge may be much more limited than we like to think. As much as I like Aristotelian logic and reason (and I like them a lot), I am aware that not all cultures think this way, and this kind of thinking is rarely, if ever, involved in either their decision-making or belief. The Old Testament, for example, tells the story of one of these cultures (although we try to evaluate it using our own adopted logical systems). The original Star Trek series tended to illustrate this point quite often, showing that Spock’s “pure” logic was not only “inhuman,” but often deficient to decision-making which combined logic and human emotion.

The questions then, for me, are: Does our current formal system of logic (based on the principles devised by Aristotle) represent the highest form of reason (thinking)? Relying on formal logic, what can we actually know?

One of the primary weaknesses with formal logic as a means to knowledge is that it usually presupposes that we actually know something to start with; even a priori knowledge is to some extent presuppositional. For example, the statement all men are not women seems patently obvious and logical; however, it presupposes as fact that there are 2 classes, men and women, which are mutually exclusive. Much of the time, the truth of a particular premise will not be so immediately obvious, and here is where a lot of flaky logic happens. It is possible to have a perfectly logical argument that results in a conclusion which is false, because it is based on a false premise. (Examples include every argument against the existence of God that I’ve ever seen.)

Logic, however, is still a wonderful tool in helping people get from point A to point E; it’s a great way of organizing what you know (or think you know) and believe, and how it shakes out. It is especially helpful in testing an idea or belief – often we find that when taken to its logical conclusion, some of our ideas are pure nonsense.

What logic is perhaps best used for is to challenge ideas and prove things false (or logically impossible). In fact, I would hazard a guess that it is much easier to prove something false than to prove something is true. For one thing, to prove something true, you have to account for all other possibilities. However, all you have to do to prove an argument false is to show that either a premise is not true, or that there’s a logical inconsistency somewhere.

But, (to show how tricky logic is) here’s the problem with my last statement: does proving that an argument is illogical mean that the conclusion is false? Unfortunately, no. What you can prove is that the argument is invalid, not the truth or falsity of most (especially a posteriori) statements (you could perhaps disprove “black is white” types of statements).

Again, logic is an extremely beneficial tool, but it is my opinion that logic cannot really prove or disprove truth. Now, I realize that theories of knowledge have been argued for centuries; it’s not my goal to be the next Kant, and I’m not going to debate the nature of a priori knowledge, etc.

My point, rather, is that logic has the same limitations that I discussed concerning scientific knowledge. Logic, even at its best, can only take us so far. An oft-used example is that of a chair. We can prove with impeccable logic that a certain chair is capable of supporting your weight. You carefully evaluate the argument and conclude that this conclusion is true. At this point, are you sitting in the chair? It still takes a decision for you to sit in that chair. Whether by logic, science, or supernatural revelation, you still have to make a decision based upon what you have chosen to believe as knowledge. Now, you are sitting in the chair, and have proved that the conclusion to our logical argument about the chair is true. Or have you?

Have you really proved that the chair can support your weight? Isn’t is possible that there is some other unknown, invisible force that is supporting you? You can’t even prove that you have considered all of the other possible options, because being finite we cannot possibly know all of the options. It would seem, then, that truth is impossible to prove either by logic or by experience, and it certainly can’t account for your belief.

You can lead someone to a conclusion (which may or may not be the truth) but you can’t make them believe.

Do you believe?