Light On Dark Water

Is Evolutionism Science?

The indignant charge I keep hearing against the theory of
intelligent design is that it isn’t science. As best I can
tell this complaint can mean one of two things: either that ID
allows for the possible existence of non-material reality, or
that it is not an experimental science. The first of these is
just materialist philosophy trying to pass itself off as science.
But the second, I suppose, is true. I’ve always thought
that the function of ID is necessarily only negative. It seems to
me that the term itself might involve a bit of over-reach,
because it can only hope to show that the theory of development
by accident is inadequate to explain the facts, not to prove
positively that any other mechanism is operative.

The Darwinist antagonists of ID say that it is non-testable
and non-falsifiable, and has no predictive power. How could one
test it, they say?—wait around for God to create something?
And they seem to find this a very witty and telling question.

But it strikes me, as a layman, that this charge can just as
easily be made against materialistic
evolutionism—let’s call it evolutionism, for
convenience. The simplest claims of evolutionism are not, as far
as I know, contested by any one, even the young-earth
creationists: everyone agrees that organisms undergo
modifications which are passed on to their progeny, and that if
conditions favor the survival of individuals with a certain
modification it will eventually become a characteristic feature.
This sort of evolutionary theory has been understood and put
to practical use for millennia, although, obviously, no
one had any idea of the mechanisms involved. What is only predicted by the
theory, and in principle can never be verified
experimentally, is that chemical and genetic events are
sufficient to account for the entire development of the cosmos,
including the presumed evolution of our planet from lifeless rock
to the home of millions (billions?) of species, including one
which has the ability to ask how it came to be here. How could
one test this?—wait around for evolution to create life on
a bare rock?

There are three great transitions which, I think, are likely
always to remain mysterious: that from nothing to something, from
non-life to life, and from life to consciousness. The first
of these is inherently unknowable, and evolutionists seem content
to ignore it—understandably enough, because it shakes their
whole edifice. As for the second, I’m aware that some
scientists claim to have produced in the laboratory minute
changes in both non-living and living materials of a sort that
they believe might be involved in the evolution of life on the
grand scale. Although I’m not remotely qualified to pass
judgment on their real significance, I think I’m entitled
to say, as a reasonable person exercising reasonable judgment,
that they do not constitute anything approaching a proof of the
dogma that no causes other than material and accidental ones are
required to produce everything we know, up to and including human
consciousness. And as for that third transition, well, I
can’t think of any bigger leap of credulity than that taken
by those who assume that consciousness is a by-product of the
activity of the brain. There is no evidence whatsoever for this;
it is a logical deduction from materialist premises, but no
more.

How can evolutionism ever conceivably be anything more than an
hypothesis? Its adherents insist that science in general would be
retarded significantly if it could not proceed on the assumption
that evolution works more or less as they describe it. I
don’t see why this should be true: why it is necessary to
make so many hypothetical postulates about the origins of things
in order to study them as they presently are? As a matter of pure
logic, the fact that all living things share fundamental building
blocks, and that they can be grouped into smaller categories on
the basis of more specialized components (e.g. bones),
doesn’t imply common descent from the more simple to the
more complex any more strongly than it implies the sort of design
that we practice every day—i.e., variations on certain
basic ideas and features. (I understand that there are other
reasons for believing in common descent, but the existence of
common features has never struck me as very persuasive one way or
the other.)

Would it really damage science so badly to admit that we
simply don’t know, and probably never will know, exactly
how things came to be? What drives someone like Richard Dawkins
to venture so far beyond any knowable facts in insisting that
evolutionism is proven? And whose is the real offense against the
method and spirit of scientific investigation?