Copyright 2002, 2005 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

Having observed evolutionists and their methodology for a while there are certain striking factors I've found that account for why evolution is so widely believed. So on this page I have some important thoughts that did not easily fit into the Life page.

I think at the top of the list there is the fact that at the very heart of the matter the people leading the charge to evolution are doing so for psychological, emotional and even religious reasons. Once you have such reasons for wanting evolution to be true you tend to believe whatever comes down the line. At the top of this list I believe the number one reason for believing in evolution is that it does away with the need for a creator so that it fits in with atheism. Evolution is the creation myth of Atheism. A close second reason is that if a person still wants to believe in a god but not the God of the Bible then evolution lets them dismiss the Bible. Either way it is essentially rebellion against the God of the Bible. Some evolutionists are as zealous in their proseletyzing as the most zealous Baptist minister. The more zealous the proselytizing the more obvious it is that the basis of their belief is religious in nature. Evolutionists will frequently tell you not to believe anything you hear from "religious zealots" however the strange fact of the matter is that the Athetists who warn you about Christians are religious zealots themselves!

This DOES NOT mean that every believer in evolution has this religous agenda. Some people believe it because they were trained to believe it. Other people simply have not looked at the evidence very carefully. Other people say they believe it because if they don't they will be insulted, ridiculed and discriminated against.

The second big reason for the popularity of evolution is that the methods of biology in researching evolution are not nearly as good as the methods you find in a hard science like physics. It is pretty common for evolutionists to claim that there are "mountains of evidence" in favor of the theory and that it is "as well established as the law of gravity". But when you analyze the "evidence" it is not evidence of the sort you find in a hard science (And absolutely nothing like the evidence we have for the law of gravity!), what you have are mountains of opinions. If you believe in evolution to start with then you can interpret the evidence as confirming evolution but if you start out with a belief in design you can see the evidence as pointing to design. Unlike a hard science like physics there is no objective way to settle the dispute. The situation brings to mind something that happened to me many years ago. Once upon a time I had a radiometer in the window. Viewed from the top the vanes of the radiometer moved clockwise. One day I was laying down and looking up at it while it was moving very slowly and I saw it moving counter-clockwise. That was surprising! I took a closer look and found it was going clockwise as usual. It was only the way my mind interpreted the images that made me see it going around the other way. After a while I found I could make myself see it go one way or the other.

For many years evolutionists could get away with arguing for evolution using purely verbal arguments that on the surface seem entirely reasonable. Now that has become increasingly difficult as we know more and more about life, DNA and the cell. When you do a mathematical analysis of what is happening at the nuts and bolts level it is clear that evolution cannot happen. There are some nice analogies that apply. Long ago people were puzzled by fire and they came up with the phlogiston theory to explain it. Also long ago people were thinking and debating whether or not you could turn lead into gold. They could argue all they want and get nowhere. Indeed they had another cute problem about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But all they could do was give plain old clever arguments. It is only now in modern scientific times that we can deal with the lead into gold argument because we know what the basic components are: protons, neutrons and electrons. Now that we know about atoms, molecules and photons we know how fire works. Biology was in a similar primitive state until DNA and the workings of the cell were discovered and so people could get away with their primitive wordy arguments in favor of (or against) evolution. So now just as we now have an explanation of fire and just as we now know that there is no profitable way to turn lead into gold it is safe to say that evolution cannot happen.

Evolutionists ignore the mathematical results and then go on to claim that there are "mountains of evidence" for evolution. The "evidence" however is subjective. In a hard science like physics, you model the problem and derive an equation that predicts specific numbers. In some cases the equation you use could be empirical, that is, derived from some previous experiments. Thus physicists at the time of Newton discovered Newton's second law of motion, F=m*a and the law of gravitation, F=G*m1*m2/r^2. Either way anyone around the world can read the theory, apply the equations and measure the numbers. This is an objective way of doing of doing science.

One of the nicest examples of doing science this way has to do with gravity. Newton and his predecessors started work on gravity and it was summarized by his famous equation, F=G*m1*m2/r^2. This generally works pretty well but it failed to explain the orbit of the planet Mercury. Einstein came up with a better version called General Relativity. It predicted that light from a distant star would be bent by the sun's gravitational field. Scientists went looking for the effect and found it. (A really good theory should predict something new, something no one else expected and General Relativity did exactly this.) Nevertheless the ability of scientists to measure the effects of gravity were limited and other physicists proposed other theories of gravity, for instance I remember reading an article about the Brans-Dicke theory of gravity. At the time it was proposed and for a little while afterward no one could measure the numbers involved to the degree of accuracy necessary in order to be able to be able to determine which theory was right. As time went by however, scientists came up with more experiments to test the theories and more accurate ways of measuring the numbers. Einstein won. The numbers are so close to the answers given by General Relativity that any capable scientist anywhere in the world can do many different experiments and see for themselves that Einstein was right, not Brans-Dicke and not any other theory. Evolutionists sometimes boast that Evolution is as well established as the law of gravity but this is mere bluff and bluster, there is NO objective evidence that suggests evolution is true and if you do the math, AS ANY GOOD SCIENTIST SHOULD, you find out that evolution just won't work.

Here's another example but it is probably too complicated for many people and unnecessary if you understood the General Relativity example:

Or consider a recent example. For many years scientists have been collecting evidence that the universe exploded in a "Big Bang" out of absolutely nothing, an explosion in which space-time and matter were created. However in recent years a new candidate has been proposed, the "ekpyrotic universe". (See for instance the September 22, 2001 Science News.) In this theory "branes" crashed into each other forming a "big bang" of their own. This theory predicts much the same thing as the Big Bang but there are subtle differences that can be used to pick one over the other. Quoting from the end of the article there is this:

At least one empirical test of the ekpyrotic theory may soon be possible. The test would examine gravitational waves, the radiation produced when massive object accelerate.

Big Bang plus inflation predicts that gravitational waves can have extremely long wavelengths, while the ekpyrotic theory does not. Long-wavelength gravitational waves would leave a distinctive fingerprint on the cosmic microwave background.

Future experiments with a new generation of space, balloon-borne, and ground-based telescopes may be able to detect that fingerprint ...

Thus there are specific numbers that can be measured and the numbers can point you to the right explanation and eliminate the wrong ones.

I was reading Russian physicist Igor Novikov's The River of Time and found this description of what Sir Isaac Newton did for science:

If we can briefly describe his attitude in this respect, it could be: try to achieve total order in the knowledge of nature, try to gain knowledge which is accurately supported by experimental data and adequately described by logic and mathematics. These are exactly the requirements that science sets for us today.

As with many other great ideas, the theory of gravitation had its precursors. For instance, Giovanni Borelli concluded that there was mutual attraction between all bodies in the Universe; also, he conjectured that as planets revolve around the Sun, its attraction balances out the centrifugal forces that were discovered by Huygens. Another contemporary of Newton, Robert Hooke, came to the conclusion that the force of gravity between bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating the bodies. We believe, nevertheless, that it was Isaac Newton who created the theory of gravitation.

We do give the highest regard to the vision of other researchers but we recognize Newton as the true discoverer? Why? Because he and no one else gave a proof of his constructs. From abstract arguments, Newton made the step to mathematical calculations, to physical experiments and to the interpretation of astronomical observations.

That was the beginning of the new physics.

Going to John Gribbin's, Schroedinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality we have Gribbin writing about Newton's method as well:

Before Newton, the way philosophers developed their ideas about the natural world was largely through pure thought. Descartes, for example, thought about the way in which light might be transmitted from a bright object to the eye, but he did not carry out experiments to test his ideas.

Thus Newton set a brand new standard for others to follow. Philosophical arguments, like those of the ancient Greeks are just are not enough.

Evolutionists don't work this way and instead they are merely interpreting data. Once you believe in evolution it is easy to see the data as fitting evolution, on the other hand if you don't believe in evolution to start with the data could just as easily be the result of intelligent design. So the "mountains of evidence" are in the eye of the beholder.

For an example from evolution, consider the supposed evolution of whales. The tradition in evolution has been that whales evolved from bears who simply spent a large amount of time diving into the ocean for food. However in the September 22, 2001 issue of Science News there is the story of how one researcher is promoting the idea that whales evolved from hippos. However we also have in that article criticism from another expert:

"None of the fossil evidence supports hippos and whales as being sister taxa," says Kenneth D. Rose, a paleontologist at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

Who should we believe? Even supposing evolution was true, how do you distinguish between one theory of whale evolution vs. some other theory? It is one expert against another, just subjective opinions. You can find yet more opinions on whales on the page: A Whale Fantasy from National Geographic. Note that some people are pushing certain forms as ancestors to whales while other experts find plenty of problems with the claims. Who do we believe?

Then there is the old claim that Archaeopteryx is intermediate between dinosaurs and birds. Yet these days you will find many opinions that Archaeopteryx is not intermediate at all but only an odd bird. You will even get a few opinions that the feathers were faked. This is after over a hundred years of study and debate!!!

Another common type of claim you get from evolutionists is that the evolution of something or other is relatively easy. Phillip Johnson describes it this way in terms of fossils from Darwin on Trial:

The Darwinist approach has consistently been to find some supporting fossil evidence, claim it as proof for "evolution" and then ignore all the difficulties.

The change from reptilian scales to feathers is also believed to be a simple mutation in a few genes.

However from Denton's Evolution a Theory in Crisis we have:

It is not easy to see how an impervious reptiles scale could be converted gradually into an impervious feather without passing through a frayed scale intermediate which would be weak, easily deformed and still quite permeable to air. It is true that basically a feather is indeed a frayed scale - a mass of keratin filaments - but the filaments are not a random tangle but are ordered in an amazingly complex way to achieve the tightly intertwined structure of the feather. Take away the exquisite coadaption of the components, take away the coadaption of the hooks and barbules, take away the precisely parallel arrangement of the barbs on the shaft and all that is left is a soft pliable structure utterly unsuitable to form the basis of a stiff impervious aerofoil. The stiff impervious property of the feather which makes it so beautiful an adaption for flight, depends basically on such a highly involved and unique system of coadapted components that it seems impossible that any transitional feather-like structure could possess even to a slight degree the crucial properties. In the words of Barbara Stahl, in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, as far as feathers are concerned "how they arose initially, presumably from reptiles scales, defies analysis".

Science News from August 18, 2001 also considers the evolution of the feather. Nothing simple was reported there either. The experts couldn't agree on anything and they were darn nasty about it all as well.

So what happens is that one evolutionist will get the spotlight for a moment with a claim that is never clearly and unambiguously substantiated with all the complexities solved and yet the people who want to believe in evolution will not look very deeply or critically and they tend to repeat these claims for quite a while.

So where's the objective evidence? You have people making guesses. People with opinions. People telling stories. And no way to tell which one, if any, is right. The only objective evidence in the evolution/design debate is the mathematical analysis that says that evolution can't happen. Evolutionists frequently tell creationists that they "just don't understand science" yet as it turns out it is the evolutionists who just don't understand science.

One thing that happens quite often is that you get an author like Behe who will criticize evolution on some solid nuts and bolts basis. Evolutionists claim the criticism is invalid. Thereafter people who favor evolution and know even less than the critic will then repeat the mantra over and over and so the myth can spread quite easily among the unsophisticated faithful followers of evolution.

Once upon a time there was a Barbie doll where if you pulled the string the doll said: "Math class is hard." I've discovered at least one PhD in Biology who can't handle the math, including simple probability, stuff that I had in high school. The fact that at least some PhDs in biology can't handle high school math is pretty revealing.

Biologists have been imagining all sorts of scenarios to support evolution. They do this without having any real reasons to do so. They are behaving like Calvin and Hobbes in this cartoon:

For instance:

• They assumed there was a prebiotic soup.
• They assumed the non-coding DNA is a place where new genes can develop instead of figuring that all the non0coding DNA is actually good for something.
• They assume gene duplication and mutation will solve many problems but there never was any reason to assume that this would work. But it gets repeated over and over in their just-so stories because they really have to do it or they are sunk. It becomes like E=mc^2 in physics but whereas there is adequate evidence to cite E=mc^2 there is NO reason to think that duplication and mutation will work.
• They assume that domain shuffling will work as well.

Rush Limbaugh used to say that the Clinton administration was constantly looking at this problem: "How can we fool them today?" The same might be said of evolutionists. In this section are a couple of clever examples that will give you the impression that evolution is easy. The real life situation however is hardly anything like the examples.

The first example was invented by a believer in Evolution named Richard Dawkins in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. I have not looked up Dawkins' description. In the Behe book Behe quotes from Elliot Sober's book, Philosophy of Biology where Behe says Sober used essentially the same example as Dawkins. Schroeder also describes the Dawkins example in The Science of God. Not only does the example illustrate why evolution can't work in my opinion it also illustrates the lengths to which believers in evolution have to go to keep the faithful faithful.

With the probabilities going against Evolution, Dawkins/Sober invented an analogy using a combination lock as a way to try and convince readers there was still hope. The combination lock consists of 19 disks with 26 letters on each disk. The lock opens when all 19 disks are right. If the disks are spun at random the chance of all 19 coming up right is (1/26)^19, rather small. There is a viewing window so you can see which of the 26 letters has been selected after the disks have been spun. Sober says let the string that opens the lock be: "METHINKSITISAWEASEL".

This is a fine example of what Behe is calling an irreducibly complex system: it only works when ALL the parts are in just the right places. Having half the letters right will not do, having 17 letters right will not do, 18 letters right will not do only having ALL of them right will have an effect and the lock will open. At the level of the cell, irreducibly complex systems require ALL of certain biological molecules to be present, the body must be making all of them so the cell can do it's job, skip one molecule in the process and NOTHING works. Let's say the task is to make the cell do something useful for vision, maybe just a light sensitive spot. If you started with an animal whose cells did not have these molecules present and you wanted to do the task you would need many generations to pass just to get a single favorable mutation, let that probability be tw (teensy-weensy) and say that you need 19 mutations in all. Getting those 19 mutations to come up all at once is highly unlikely, tw^19. Getting 18 right is pretty unlikely and so on. And if you finally had ONE right, there is no value in that, the cell will still not be able to perform it's vision task. As reproduction continued you're as likely to lose the necessary mutation as you are to gain a second necessary one. This is why Behe can be so confident that such a system cannot be approached by the kind of gradual random mutations that Darwin proposed. It's an all or nothing system. Furthermore Behe says he has searched the biochemistry literature and has not found anyone who can propose a way for these irreducibly complex biochemical systems to evolve. Believers in Evolution have for years been able to spin tales about how a given biological feature like an eye might have evolved by assuming that living things are as pliable as clay but now that biology has reached the rock bottom with biochemistry showing that there is very intricate machinery within each cell no one has been able to spin a tale about how to evolve one of the complicated machines within the cell that is required for an eye to function. The days of fantasizing are over.

But now back in the Dawkins/Sober lock analogy Behe quotes Sober as saying:

But now imagine that a disk is frozen if it happens to put a letter in the viewing window that matches the target message. The remaining disks that do not match are spun at random, and the process is repeated. What is the chance now that the disks will display the message METHINKSITISAWEASEL after, say, fifty repetitions?

The answer is that the message can be expected to appear after a surprisingly small number of generations of the process.

Variation is generated at random, but selection among variants is non-random.

Well, if you put an intelligent agent in charge of the opening of the lock, an agent who knows the combination, it will go much faster but then Evolution is supposed to be blind, not guided, it doesn't know the answer, why lock anything in place when it comes up? Now certainly if a mutation produces something of survival value the environment can lock in the mutation. If one mutation suddenly generated a light sensitive spot and a light sensitive spot had survival value (having survival value is iffy because you need an optic nerve to connect it to the brain and I imagine you need a specialized area of the brain to handle the nerve impulses as well), that would lock in the mutation but the fact is that you can't just wish a light sensitive spot into existence with a single mutation, it takes a great many mutations and they must all be just right. It's instructive to read the example Behe gives early in the book about how a retinal cell handles a photon, a whole collection of molecules must be present just do deal with a photon and if any of them is missing the whole system fails. (A page by Behe is online and it covers all that happens when a retinal cell receives a photon: Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference: Behe, Michael It covers related ideas as well.)

Behe is pretty charitable toward Dawkins and Sober, he simply says:

The fatal problems with the analogy are not difficult to see. It was amusingly skewered by Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, in his book Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Origin of Life, which was published seven years before Sober's book. The fact that a distinguished philosopher overlooks simple logical problems that are easily seen by a chemist suggests that a sabbatical visit to a biochemistry laboratory might be in order.

Schroeder says of the Dawkins/Sober analogy:

It is pure deception -- I hope self-deception and not deliberate chicanery.

There is another similar example of deception going around. There is a computer program from Dan Nilsson and Suzanne Pelger that evolves an eye in 400,000 generations. Except when you examine the details of the program you find out that it was designed to arrive at that result, so it's no surprise that it does. It can reasonably be used as an example of how over a very long period of time very minor changes can accumulate to produce a major result. No one would argue against this in the first place and there is no need to produce a computer program to show this. But the model is also such a simple model that it does nothing to help prove that the eye can evolve by random changes. To prove an eye can evolve you need to do the program with real DNA and proteins and this has not yet been solved. In fact if you find a way to evolve an eye with DNA and proteins you don't really need to bother with a program. Again, if there was a rational way to show how an eye could evolve using DNA and biological molecules they would use that instead of a meaningless program. People who believe in evolution ought to be denouncing it as too simplistic to have any relevance but instead many true believers in evolution use it as a sort of holy icon they can point to to "prove" that evolution of the eye is possible. It has become like a Shroud of Turin for atheists, a way to rally the faithful.

There are other ways to fool people. One of their arguments goes like so.

• Microevolution consists of small changes within a species.
• Macroevolution is just the creation of new species.
• Macroevolution has been observed in the laboratory and in the wild.
• Therefore macroevolution is true.