If Darwinism is Unfounded, Why Do So Many Smart People Believe It?

Edited transcript from a lecture sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Friday evening, November 15, 2002

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles… They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. (Romans 1: 18-23,25)

This is a passage of Scripture that I come back to again and again. When I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley during my first year at graduate school, I read just the very first part of this to my students; not the part about the wrath of God as being revealed from heaven, but the part about how God’s invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-are clearly seen, being understood from what is made. I read that to my students who were there for a Chem-1A review session. I made sure I did it before seven o’clock, so it was before company time. But still some of the students reported me, and I had to talk to the head professor about my proselytizing.

This is probably something you’ve all run into-the prejudice against even mentioning the fact that perhaps God is revealing himself in the creation. In this lecture I want to talk about that prejudice, about why it is that when a person refuses to acknowledge God and refuses to give thanks and honor and glory to God, that person’s heart becomes darkened and their thinking becomes futile.

But before I do that, I do need to establish that Darwinism has problems, that Darwinism is at least slightly unfounded. I think the best way to do this is to consider what goes on inside of a cell when it divides. [For detailed explanation of the process of cellular division, refer to Dr. Macosko’s lecture of November 14, 2002, Life’s Molecular Machines: By Chance or by Design?] When you consider the whole process of cell division, the beauty and the complexity of an event that happens on a daily basis inside of the cells of every person and animal on this planet, I don’t think you can come away not feeling that there is some inherent problem with a “chance plus blind law” explanation for how these things are put together. There is a powerful argument against Darwinism-mere chance and law-being able to do all the creative work necessary to build and construct cellular systems.

So the thesis I’m starting from is that Darwinism is unfounded. Darwinism has some problems right at its very foundation which cause it to be completely inadequate to explain intracellular processes. Now the big question is this: If this is true, and if Darwinism has these problems, why do so many smart people still believe in it?

Seven Reasons Why People Believe in Darwinism:

1. They were always taught Darwinism.

Why do people believe in Darwinism? Well, I think there are a few reasons. For one, they were always taught Darwinism. Their teachers taught them Darwinism, and their teacher’s teachers taught them Darwinism. For many generations in our culture we’ve been taught by our teachers and professors that Darwinism is true. So why wouldn’t we believe it?

When we’re taught that Darwinism is true, there are a few things that stand out in our minds. I call these the “icons of evolution.” There’s an interesting book out, calledIcons of Evolution, that goes through ten of these icons, things that you’ve seen in your biology textbooks-about moths that are landing on trees, about embryos that look similar. If you’ve heard anything about icons of evolution, you know that these icons have major flaws in them. For example, the moths that you see resting on tree trunks in your textbooks never land on tree trunks; they land on the undersides of branches high in the canopy. The pictures that you see in your textbooks are staged, either by pinning or gluing dead moths to the tree, or scaring them with bright lights and then letting them land on a tree trunk. I don’t think that that’s a real good proof of Darwinism, even though that’s been used to teach Darwinism in the schools. Also the embryos that you see all looking like little cashew nuts, and they all look the same-those were faked almost a hundred years ago by Ernst Haeckel. Those were known to be fakes back then, but yet they continue to appear in textbooks.

So that’s one reason why people believe in Darwin: it’s just something they’ve been taught.

2. They believe there is “overwhelming evidence.”

When people say “overwhelming evidence,” a lot of times what they’re thinking about is those very same icons that they were taught when they were younger. But sometimes they think that maybe there is other overwhelming evidence out there. I think that when somebody says, “But there’s overwhelming evidence for it,” if you ask the question, “What is the overwhelming evidence?” it’s very instructive. Either they won’t have any overwhelming evidence to give you, or when they give you the overwhelming evidence, if you go and look it up and learn about it, and you might be a little bit underwhelmed by that evidence.

People tell me, “But there’s an experiment where people have found RNA that can self-replicate.” I read the study-obviously with my own bias, but I read it-and I see that in order to get something that’s complex you have to put complexity into it, especially if you want it to happen by itself. If you want to have a RNA that self-replicates coming out of a test tube, you have to set that test tube in a very complicated experimental apparatus in order for this RNA to pop out. The early earth is not going to have people standing around designing clever apparatuses in order to bring about self-replicating molecules.

These are just preliminary thoughts that I’m giving you. But go ahead and try it-ask somebody who’s told you about “overwhelming evidence” and see if they can come up with any.

3. Their hearts are darkened.

As the first chapter of Romans states, a lot of times people’s hearts are just darkened. Sometimes even a Christian’s heart can be dimmed-not completely darkened, but dimmed in this way-because they’re refusing to acknowledge God and give him glory and give him thanks for the creation that we see all around us. I think as soon as you start down that pathway, whether or not you’re doing it because you were just taught it or because you don’t like the implications of there being a God, then immediately, as Paul tells us, a law takes effect: hearts get darkened, minds become foolish. It’s not something you can really even predict happening. I mean, a perfectly smart individual who’s smart in every other way might have a heart darkened in this dimension.

4. They imagine “crazy” creationists.

As you are telling people about creation, they have the movie Inherit the Wind going through their mind at all times. They imagine a preacher standing out there in the dark of night saying, “What do we believe? We believe in the God! We believe in Adam and Eve! We believe in this!” They imagine Jeremiah Brown standing out there with a white collar and going crazy in that movie. I mean, I was terrified when I saw that movie, with that preacher who was just the embodiment of evil. That’s what goes through the minds of a lot of people. You’ll see it every time a news article is printed. It’s as if their computer is set on a certain setting that only allows stories about crazy creationists to come through .

5. Creation “spells the end of science.”

If I go and give a talk at a research university, invariably I will get the comment, “Excuse me, Dr. Macosko. That’s not science,” or, “Are you saying that we should just give up and conclude everything is designed and go home and put away all of our experiments?” I think that the point here is not that the Intelligent Design perspective squashes science, but it actually frees science. It frees science from the shackles and the chains that are put on it for no real reason, for no scientific or logical reason-the chains of naturalism. Naturalism says that the only thing that’s allowed on the table are natural causes. And when they say “natural” they mean processes that we can attribute to a law or to chance occurrence, not processes that are designed-unless they happened to be designed by something like us, an animal that can design things.

And so yes, creation spells the end of that type of science, science that only plays by those rules. Definitely. But it doesn’t take anything away from science, because it only adds to it one more component, and that is the component of attributing things to a designer, even if that designer doesn’t turn out to be us, even if that designer turns out to be somebody who we don’t know much about yet, or we can’t necessarily test or examine because perhaps that designer is outside of the material universe, such as God. I think that that’s very scary for people. But it definitely doesn’t spell the end of science.

6. Everybody else believes it.

The next point is that everybody else believes it. This ties into the idea that they were always taught Darwinism. Not only were most people’s teachers and professors teaching them Darwinism, but most people’s peers also were believing it. No matter where you go in the scientific community, everybody else is believing it. Interestingly, though, when you poll people in the United States about creation and evolution, about 45 percent consistently will say that they believe God created man in our present form less than ten thousand years ago. Another 45 percent will say that God used evolution to create man and had man in mind, that God somehow working through evolution to bring about mankind. Only 10 percent don’t believe in creation. So that’s an interesting little side bit. But a lot of the people you’ll talk to in academia will believe in Darwinism because other people believe it.

7. Probabilities are difficult to understand.

It’s very hard for people to grasp how big of a number 1 out of 10150 is. I certainly can’t grasp that number. And there’s something sort of intuitively appealing about the idea that there’s always a chance. It’s hard to break people of the feeling that if you give it enough time there’s always a chance. But there are limits to the amount of things that can happen in the universe. And unless you have a priori, beforehand, ruled out the possibility of a designer, then at a certain point when the probabilities get low enough you have to conclude there’s a designer, if you’re going to be fair and logical.

Design Filter:

LAW : High probability (dominoes falling)

CHANCE: Low specificity (pair of dice)

DESIGN: Low probability, high specificity (three darts in bullseye)

Law

Since probabilities are difficult to understand, I want to explain the design filter. This is simply a way of concluding whether something is designed or not. We filter out the first thing, law, which we recognize by high probability. If something happens nine times out of ten, or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, chances are that there’s a law explaining why that happens. When I drop a penny, a hundred times out of a hundred it will fall to the ground. That’s the law of gravity. We can understand that. In our scientific research we look for laws; that’s the first thing we want to find, because if we find a law then we can explain things that might happen down the road.

Chance

Sometimes we can’t find a law, because something happens in a different way every time, or something is very aperiodic, such as the strand of amino acids that fold into a nice corkscrew pattern. This sequence of amino acids has different amino acids at every position along the corkscrew, and if that corkscrew interacts with a second corkscrew, then there has to be different patterns between the two corkscrews that interlock, and those patterns are not always the same. It doesn’t go ABCD, ABCD, ABCD. It goes ABFGCD, for example; it goes back and forth like that. That means there is a very low probability of getting a particular sequence.

Now, chance deals with specificity. When I drop my penny, that penny may land here or it may land there; it all depends on exactly how I flip it. And since I’m not really a perfect flipper, when I tell my thumb “flip,” it flips slightly differently every time. So there’s a chance it’s going to go this way or that way, and which way it goes is a low-specified event. I can’t specify exactly where it’s going to land, because I’m not perfect at doing this. We call that process “chance.” It may not exactly be chance, because probably somebody, probably God, knows exactly where everything is going to go. But according to our limited way of looking at it, since we can’t control things, when certain things have a low specificity and they happen differently every time, we attribute that to chance.

Now, someone may ask: How high is high probability? How low is low specificity? Well, we can tune that to whatever we want. If we’re sending somebody to the electric chair and we’re a judge, we want to be very sure that we set the specificity very high and the probability very low before we conclude that this was done by design.

Design

Design is the third level of our filter. Design is low probability and high specificity; it is the opposite of law and chance. You can see that we have little examples to illustrate this. First we have the dominoes. They fall by the law of gravity and the laws of Newtonian physics. Next we have these dice that, because we’re not perfect at throwing them, come up different every time. Then we have the darts. Only if you’re a good dart thrower would you ever see a pattern of three darts in the board, or if somebody cheats while you’re not looking and puts them there. But either way, it’s a designed event, because there’s a bullseye. That tells us specifically where the mark is.

The probability is taken as the chance of this one dart hitting the bullseye by chance. It kind of depends on how large of a wall you have. I mean, if this is on a very large wall, I probably would throw a dart everywhere else on that wall. So it’s the area of the bullseye divided by the area of the wall, times the area of the bullseye divided by the area of the wall, times the area of the bullseye divided by the area of the wall, because you have three darts in the center. You can imagine that if you had a thousand darts in the center it would be even more improbable. So probability is defined by the number of events that you have that conform to that specific pattern, versus the number of possible other events, the contingent events, that you could have.

This explanation has gone into great detail and involves some of the works of a man named Bill Dembski. His high-level mathematical treatise on this is published in Cambridge University Press. I don’t think very many of us here can grasp all the mathematics; I certainly can’t. But he’s published a more popular work where he really goes through this in detail. I think that it’s important to understand this if we’re going to try to understand probability.

What Can We Do About It?

If Darwinism is unfounded, yet people continue to believe it for a variety of reasons, what can we do about it if we are Christians and want to reach out? I want to talk a little bit about Paul’s experience, and how he addressed this issue. He’s the one who wrote that men’s hearts are darkened. When he was in Athens, he spoke to the Athenians after seeing an image to the unknown God:

“Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth. . . .God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.”

When Paul was in Lystra he said,

“Turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them. In the past he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your heart with joy.”

Now, I think that that’s a pretty bold example of what a Christian can do. Paul spoke out boldly, even knowing that the audience he was speaking to was an audience whose hearts had been darkened to the very possibility that God was revealing himself in crops, in rain, in the sea and the earth, and in the heavens. Just because the people who we’re speaking with have hearts that are darkened doesn’t mean that we don’t have to do anything. In fact Paul shows the opposite example. Paul is very proactive about speaking out about the creation.

Practical Suggestions:

1. Avoid Bad Arguments

I’d like to share some practical suggestions for sharing the gospel with Darwinists. First, stop using bad arguments. Sometimes we use bad arguments because we haven’t learned about which arguments have been disproven. There’s a wonderful web page called “Answers in Genesis.” [www.answersingenesis.org] It’s a young-earth creationist web site; however, they have wonderful credibility in my mind because they have a list of about twenty-five different arguments that we as Christians shouldn’t use when trying to speak on behalf of creation.

2. Don’t be Marginalized

Secondly, stop letting people marginalize you. Paul was never one to allow himself to be marginalized. Occasionally he had to wipe the dust off his feet and leave town, but he would not stop proclaiming his message in the very heart of that particular time’s academic community, that particular time’s political hierarchy. He proclaimed it from the kings to the governors to the people right there on the streets with him. I believe when you are marginalized as a Christian it’s because you are letting yourself be marginalized. You need to start speaking winsomely for design, start befriending Darwinists, and start learning more about science. Each one of these three points will allow you to prevent yourself from being marginalized.

3. Befriend Darwinists

It’s very difficult for somebody who’s your friend to just turn completely away from the types of arguments you’re making for design. I had a lot of friends in Berkeley who completely disagreed with me about creation. But they still heard me out, they still listened to what I had to say. Most importantly, they didn’t marginalize me. They didn’t say, “Oh, this guy is completely crazy,” because we were friends. I think that’s an important component.

4. Learn More About Science

The more you know about science the less a person can legitimately marginalize you. I think Christians over the last eighty years have neglected loving God with the mind, loving God with your whole mind, and using that to learn more about the world around us.

5. Avoid Minor Issues

Stop arguing over minor issues, such as the age of the earth and how best to present design. We will know on judgment day, or when we meet the Lord, how old the earth was. Right now that is a contentious issue that won’t be resolved until after design is on the table. Once design is on the academic table, then academic people who have been telling us all along how old the earth is will maybe have new paradigms with which to look at the data. I think everything is going to take a completely different turn at that point. But before that point, arguing about the age of the earth only divides the momentum of the opportunity to speak winsomely for design.

6. Speak Winsomely for Design

By speaking winsomely for design you’ll be reaching out to people with the kind of message that Paul preached at Athens and Lystra. There are plenty of different ways to present design. Hugh Ross will present the evidence from astrophysics, and he will argue for a particular Creator, a particular Jesus, right from the very fabric of the universe. He’s wonderful to listen to. Other people will present design in just rudimentary things like the way that the earth is put together and the type of atmosphere we have. I present things from molecular biology. People can present in all different ways, making all sorts of different points, as long as we’re presenting Design, not “designoids”, things that look designed but aren’t.

I don’t want to come across as judgmental, saying, “Stop, stop, stop.” But I think you get the idea that really the key to sharing the gospel with Darwinists is speaking winsomely, befriending them, and doing things that are proactive, just like Paul would have done if he were alive today.