“Darwinian theory has so many holes it hardly casts a shadow.” This is just one of many similar opinions from unimpeachable scientists who have actually read Stephen C. Meyer’s latest blockbuster “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.” Teachers and students should at least read the prologue of the book and the comments on Amazon.com to get “the rest of the story.”
From the prologue: “In the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. ‘…puzzled by a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the geologically sudden appearance of animal life…during the Cambrian period’ later called the “Cambrian explosion”. Yet today’s public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students.” [This correlates with Ben Stein’s documentary film “No Intelligence Allowed” in which scholarly discourse on the subject is universally suppressed by “scholars.”] “…since the 1950s, when Watson and Crick first illuminated the chemical structure and information-bearing properties of DNA, biologists have come to understand that living things, as much as high-tech devices, depend upon digital information – information that in the case of life, is stored in a four-character chemical code within the twisting figure of a double helix. …Scientists now know that building a living organism requires information, and building a fundamentally new form of life from a simpler form of life requires an immense amount of new information. …Although we don’t know of a material cause that generates functioning digital code from physical or chemical precursors, we do know –based upon our uniform and repeated experience – of one type of cause that has demonstrated the power to produce this type of information. That cause is intelligence or mind. As information theorist Henry Quastler observed, ‘The creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.’ Whenever we find functional information – whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument, etched on a magnetic disc, or produced by an origin-of-life scientist attempting to engineer a self-replicating molecule – and we trace that information back to its’ ultimate source, invariably we come to a mind [italics mine], not merely a material process. For this reason, the discovery of digital information in even the simplest of living cells indicates the prior activity of a designing intelligence at work in the origin of the first life.”
By the way, Meyer’s conclusion that an intelligence or mind provided input to biology syncs with Stephen Hawkings’ conclusion in “A History of Time” explaining the expanding universe.
In the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, et. al., Meyer uses his doctorate of philosophy in the manner it was intended: he gathered facts from all available sources on a topic and began asking questions as to cause and effect. His findings are supported by many (unreported) world-renowned specialists in those specific fields of research – some of whom lost their jobs for conducting such pure research and having the audacity to publish it. As I read Meyer I’m reminded of Socrates’ journey to the city-state of Syracuse (the Greek D.C.) to inquire into why Dionysius is the tyrant that he is. Dionysius demands to know why Socrates is there. Socrates simply states “I’m looking for a virtuous man.” Dionysius tells Socrates “You’ve wasted your time!” and tries to have him murdered as he leaves. The tyranny of politically correct “knowledge” is millennia old. Meyer’s work is a voice of truth shouting into a hurricane of anti-religious bias. We’ve arrived at George Orwell’s 1984 warning when telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
As today, the media of Darwin’s era ignored more qualified, scholarly criticisms of Darwin’s Origin of Species. “Swiss-born paleontologist Louis Agassiz, of Harvard University, was one of the best-trained scientists of his age, and he knew the fossil record better than any man alive. …Darwin sent him a copy of On the Origin of Species hoping to enlist Agassiz as an ally. Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin’s theory. …In an 1874 Atlantic Monthly essay titled “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” Agassiz explained …small scale variations…had never produced a ‘specific difference’ (i.e., a difference in species). …It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.” Professor Agassiz was sidelined by the main stream media of his time. Sound familiar? Meyer spends the rest of the 400 page book explaining in molecular detail why that is so with the last four chapters articulating intelligent design. It’s not an easy read.
And like evolutionary biologists opining on the origin of man, many devolutionary religionists conduct their version of Krystalnacht by picking and choosing doctrinal aspects that appeals more to their flocks comfort level than to the original Christian church. This is called keeping the paying customers happy and it started with the Nicean Creed – a compromise to keep both animists and spiritualists happy. Many of today’s clergy actually issue dire warnings to not read certain religious books, (“There are some things worse than burning books. One of them is not reading them”- Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet and essayist); call other churches cults, murder their missionaries, and tear pages out of the King James version of the Bible that contradict popular clerical opinion – or print their version and call it scripture. I received powder burns on the right side of my face when a fellow Georgia high school football player saw me walking to church and shot me at point blank range with a starter pistol. He did so with religious fervor based on the lies his pastor told him about my church. Needless to say, I didn’t go to the reunion. One world-wide church was banned from further archaeological research by the Israeli government for taking samples of the Dead Sea scrolls and sealing them within their Mediterranean catacombs lest any doctrinal contradiction be revealed (and there was). It was the same church that made it illegal to read the first printed bibles and burned at the stake those who did (William Tyndale, October 1536). So, before “straining at the [beam] in thy evolutionary brethren’s eye, take a good look at the beam in your own eye.” (slightly paraphrased) I don’t know who is more dangerous – secular bigots or religious bigots.
I’m not a scripturian (but I have read the KJV Bible through once or twice) but I seem to remember the first time Moses came down from Mt. Sinai he found the children of Israel in various acts of debauchery worshipping the golden calf – kind of like America today (only we call them cars, clothes, careers, sports or movie/rock stars). When poisonous serpents appear and begin biting the idolaters Moses tells them to simply look upon his staff and live (the origin of the medical cadeuces). Those who listen and obey live. Those who refuse die. He said it best: “Ye shall know the Truth and the truth shall make you free.” Intelligent Design is to Life as Truth is to freedom. Perhaps that’s why we as a nation are losing ours.
