Why Evolutionists Can't be Neutral

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Why Evolutionists Can't be Neutral

Cornelius Hunter

 

Rene Descartes hated doubt and wanted to know what he knew with certainty.

Descartes wanted to find a method for proving universal truths, and he had

just the thing: geometry. Centuries before the ancient geometers had

constructed elegant proofs based on a few fundamental axioms. They had

discovered a method—logical reasoning based on few rock solid premises—that

produced new truths.

 

For Descartes, one of the great rationalist thinkers of modern times, method

was crucial. Euclidean geometry was the template that Descartes would use.

Begin with some simple axioms that everyone could agree were true, and then

reason your way to new truths. After Descartes, the Cartesians continued to

refine and apply rationalism in philosophy and science.

 

Rationalist approaches hinge on their axioms. Bad axioms lead to bad

conclusions, so rationalists need to caveat their conclusions. Instead of

claiming a conclusion to be true, they need to make it clear that the

conclusion is true if the axiom it relies on is true.

 

In practice, however, things are not so simple. Once rationalism gets

rolling it takes on a life of its own. The axioms are taken for granted and

assumed to be universal; the conclusions are taken as new truths, method is

crucial, and anyone who disagrees must be naïve or nefarious.

 

As one philosopher of science put it, "The distinction between science and

non-science is straight-forward for the rationalist. Only those theories

that are such that they can be clearly assessed in terms of the universal

criterion and which survive the test are scientific." Furthermore, "The

typical rationalist will take it as self-evident that a high value is to be

placed on knowledge developed in accordance with the universal criterion.

This will be especially so if the process is understood as leading towards

truth. Truth, rationality, and hence science, are seen as intrinsically

good." [1]

 

Sound familiar? Anyone who has debated evolutionists will recognize these

characteristics. There has always been rationalist influences in science,

and today evolution has brought them to a fever pitch. It is a rationalist

approach and its axioms are religious. Darwin's book was full of claims

about how God would create the species, and these led to his conclusion that

God never would have created the biological world we observe. As Stephen Jay

Gould put it, odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of

evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread. Darwin and the latter

day evolutionists assume their view of God is universal—an axiom that can be

taken for granted.

 

Today Ken Miller rhetorically asks, would a designer "really want to take

credit for the mosquito?" [2] Miller and today's evolutionists expound at

length about how evolution must be true because design must be false. This

bad world does not fit their religious view of God. As Hume observed so long

ago, evil trumps design.

 

True enough for evolutionists. For if one holds such religious views then

one has no choice—evolution, in one form or another, must be true. It does

not matter how unlikely evolution is or how many just-so stories must be

told.

 

So when we read evolutionists, we must realize what we are reading. The

evolution literature is a genre. The premises and ideas are similar, whether

coming from the seventeenth century or today. There are easily identifiable

metaphysical themes threading through the literature. From a scientific

perspective evolution is not a good theory. We have no good reason to think

that bald eagles, blue whales and, yes, mosquitoes arose from mutations and

the like. We don't even have good reason to think that a single microbe

could have so arisen. It is not as though scientists look at these complex

machines and conclude, "Gee, this looks like something that would have

sprang up from a warm little pond."

 

But such evidence means nothing to rationalists. Using empirical science to

dispute evolution is like using tennis balls to fight tanks. An evolutionist

could discover a code for transmitting biological designs and it wouldn't

matter. Evolutionists have their religious axioms and their conclusions must

be true. The scientific evidence must fit their axioms, not the other way

around.

 

This is why evolutionists are not good at making theory-neutral evaluations

of the empirical evidence. For evolutionists, evolution is not something

that might be wrong. It must be true.

 

1. A. F. Chalmers, What is this thing called science? 2d ed., (Indianapolis,

IN.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982) 102.

2. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God (New York: Cliff Street Books,

1999) 102.