Gelernter's Strong Arguments Against Intelligent Design Creationism

Having just written about David Gelernter's weak arguments against Darwinian evolution in his Claremont Review essay, I thought I should also write about his strong arguments against intelligent design creationism.  The people at the Discovery Institute--like David Klinghoffer--have been celebrating Gelernter's "wonderful essay" as a triumph for the cause of intelligent design theory.  But they have to reluctantly admit that while Gelernter has been persuaded by Stephen Meyer's criticism of Darwinian science, he rejects Meyer's claim that the best replacement for Darwin is intelligent design.

I have written (here) about the dishonesty and sophistry of Meyer's intelligent design theory.  Gelernter doesn't recognize Meyer's dishonesty, but he does recognize one of Meyer's two sophistical fallacies.

At the end of his essay, in the section on "Darwin's Limits," Gelernter indicates that Meyer hasn't offered any proof for intelligent design, because he hasn't explained exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer has intervened.

". . . What was his strategy?  How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms?  Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile--but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way.  What was his purpose?  And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job?  Why ae we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on?  An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract.  The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it.  Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer.  But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go."

By seeing that Meyer's critique of Darwinian science does not prove intelligent design, Gelernter recognizes, at least implicitly, that intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents like Meyer argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  Gelernter sees that this is purely negative reasoning, because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.  Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.

Meyer has admitted that this argument from ignorance is a fallacy, but he tries to show that proponents of intelligent design theory do not really commit this fallacy, because they offer explanations of intelligent design with positive content.  When he tries to do this, however, he must use the fallacy of equivocation--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

Gelernter has not spotted this fallacy of equivocation in Meyer's reasoning.  Nor has he spotted the dishonesty in Meyer's claim that intelligent design theory is a purely secular scientific theory that does not depend on religious belief.  Gelernter says that "intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way."  Gelernter is such a sucker.

If he knew more about the history of Meyer's work with the Discovery Institute, he would know about the founding document--"The Wedge Document"--of Meyer's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.  And he would know that the primary goal of the Center is declared to be "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies," and "to replace materialistic explanation with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

The Wedge Document was written only for private circulation among potential donors to the Discovery Institute.  They wanted this to be kept private because in public their rhetorical strategy was to deny that their attacks on Darwinian science and defense of intelligent design were designed to promote biblical creationism.  They needed this dishonest rhetoric as a way of getting around the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, which said that teaching "creation science" in public school biology classes was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment's ban on any governmental "Establishment of Religion."  Their way around this was to replace the term "creation science" with "intelligent design theory," and then to insist that the later had nothing to do with the former, because "intelligent design" was a purely scientific idea that had nothing to do with any religious belief in the Creator.

Clearly, Meyer's dishonest rhetoric has succeeded in fooling people like Gelernter.

I have written (here) about how Intelligent Design Theory should be understood as one of four leading positions on the creation/evolution debate among biblical theists--along with Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, and Evolutionary Creation.

The Dishonesty and Sophistry of Stephen Meyer's Intelligent Design Theory

That Stephen Meyer is one of the four authors in Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design is fascinating, because these four authors identify themselves as biblical creationists, even though Meyer defends a position--intelligent design theory--that Meyer and its other proponents say is not creationist!

This dishonesty in intelligent design theory--both denying and affirming biblical creationism--is made necessary by the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute, the leading organization promoting intelligent design, where Meyer directs the Center for Science and Culture.

The modern intelligent design movement in America originated with William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian, and a three-time presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, who took the side of the "fundamentalist" Christians, who defended a literal interpretation of the Bible as the inerrant word of God against the "modernist" interpretation of the Bible as compatible with modern science, and particularly the modern science of evolution.  The modernists defended a theistic evolutionism, and Deborah Haarsma's evolutionary creation could be seen as belonging to that modernist tradition of thought.

Continuing the tradition started by Plato, Bryan developed the four arguments that constitute the rhetoric of intelligent design.  (I have elaborated these points in chapter 7 of Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.)  His scientific argument was that the Darwinian theory of evolution was not truly scientific because it was based not on empirical evidence but on the dogmatic commitment to a materialistic naturalism.  His religious argument was that Darwinism promoted atheism by denying the truth of the Bible, and particularly by denying the biblical teaching that human beings were specially created by God in His image.  His moral argument was that the atheistic materialism of Darwinism was morally corrupting.  His political argument was that teaching Darwinism in the public schools was undemocratic, because it violated the wishes of the majority of parents, and because it denied the moral and religious principles of American political life as stated in the Declaration of Independence.

This fundamentalist attack on Darwinism led to the dramatic trial of John Scopes in 1925 in Dayton, Tennesse.  Scopes was tried for violating a Tennessee law that make it a misdemeanor for public school teachers "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal."  Bryan acted as a lawyer for the prosecution against Scopes, while Clarence Darrow joined the lawyers defending Scopes.  Scopes was convicted, although his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court.  Many states continued to enact laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

The publication in 1961 of The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris sparked a revival of scientific creationism, which stressed Bryan's scientific argument against Darwinism--the claim that the biblical creation story was actually more scientific than Darwinian evolution, and therefore that biblical creation should be taught as science in public school biology classes.

Creationists supported "balanced treatment" laws dictating that creation science be taught as a scientific alternative to Darwinian science in public school biology classes.  Such a state law in Arkansas was struck down as unconstitutional in 1982 in a federal district court case McLean v. Arkansas, because teaching creationism was said to be an unconstitutional establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.  The state of Arkansas did not appeal this decision, and so it did not reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1987, in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Edwards v. Aguillard, the creationists thought they had a better chance of winning, because the Louisiana law at issue in this case did not mandate the teaching of creation science, but it did require that if evolutionary science was taught in a public school biology class, creation science would have to be taught as an alternative.  In a 7-2 decision (with Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist dissenting), the Court decided that teaching scientific creationism did violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because the primary intent was to teach a particular religious doctrine.  It also held, however, that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."

Creationists saw that this left an opening for a new rhetorical strategy: if they adopted Bryan's scientific argument and claimed that creationist science was a strictly scientific position that did not depend on biblical teaching, they might justify teaching creationism in public schools as "validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."  Stephen Meyer and others who established the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture decided that the best way to do this would be to avoid the term "creationism" and, instead, to use the term "intelligent design," so that there would be no explicitly religious language of God as Creator.

The success of this rhetorical strategy depends on covering up the dishonesty of this strategy.  Meyer does this by insisting that his personal belief in biblical creationism is completely separate from his purely secular scientific argument for intelligent design, because the reasoning for intelligent design theory does not depend necessarily in any way on any belief in the supernatural.  And, therefore, he insists, the intelligent design argument of the Discovery Institute is not a deceptive rhetoric strategy of creationists to get around the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard , so that scientific creationism can be taught under the guise of intelligent design in the public school biology classes.

To support this conclusion, Meyer claims that a book by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen--The Mystery of Life's Origin--"marked the beginning of interest in the contemporary theory of intelligent design" (198).  And since this book was published in 1984, three years before the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, Meyer observes, this proves that the intelligent design argument was not devised as a disguised form of creationism to evade that decision (179).

Meyer points to the Epilogue of The Mystery of Life's Origin as presenting the "radical alternative" to evolution (198).  But Meyer is silent about the fact that this Epilogue explicitly appeals to the idea of "Special Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos" (Thaxton et al., 188, 196, 200, 209).  So this book was explicitly a creationist book, in which terms like "intelligent cause" were terms for the Creator.  This is what I mean by Meyer's dishonesty.

Similarly, Meyer is silent about the biblical Creationism in the founding statement of the Center for Science and Culture--"The Wedge Document," which can be found online.  The cover page has a reproduction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam fresco for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which makes clear the Creationist doctrine.  The opening line of the document affirms "the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God."  Meyer is identified as the Director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.  And the primary goal of the Center is declared to be "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies," and "to replace materialistic explanation with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

Meyer is also silent about the evidence supporting the decision in 2005 in the federal district court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Distinct that a public school endorsement of an intelligent design textbook--Of Pandas and People--as teaching an alternative to evolutionary science was actually an unconstitutional establishment of creationist religion.  The first versions of this book were written prior to the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, with the hope that a favorable court decision would allow this book to be taught in public schools as a supplementary textbook promoting creation science.  But when the court decision turned out to be unfavorable to the public-school teaching of creationism, the manuscripts for the book were revised so that the words "creationism" and "creation proponents" were replaced by the words "intelligent design" and "intelligent design proponents."  When the evidence for this was presented at the Dover trial, this made it clear that using the term "intelligent design" was a rhetorical strategy for promoting creationism disguised as a purely secular science.

Even if one sets aside the dishonesty of this rhetorical strategy, and looks at Meyer's substantive arguments for intelligent design theory as a real science, one can see the fundamental sophistry in his reasoning.  Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.

For example, Meyer points out that building a new animal form requires not just new genes and proteins but also integrated networks of genes and proteins called developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs).  He then argues that building a new dGRN from a preexisting dGRN requires altering the preexisting dGRN in some way that is likely to be catastrophic.  "Given this, how could a new body plan--and the new dGRN necessary to produce it--ever evolve from a preexisting body plan and dGRN?  Neither mainstream evolutionary biologists, nor evolutionary creationists have answered this question." 

If evolutionists cannot answer this question, Meyer assumes, this proves intelligent design.  But notice that Meyer does not himself answer the question that he poses to the evolutionists.  Exactly how could a new body plan--and the new dGRN necessary to produce it--ever be created by the Intelligent Designer from a preexisting body plan and dGRN?  Meyer cannot answer this question, because he cannot explain exactly where, when, or how the Intelligent Designer achieves all of the miraculous effects attributed to Him by the proponents of intelligent design.  Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.

Meyer admits that this argument from ignorance is a fallacy.  But he tries to argue that proponents of intelligent design theory do not really commit this fallacy, because they offer explanations with positive content:

". . . Proponents of intelligent design also offer design because we know that intelligent agents can and do produce specified information-rich systems.  As the information theorist Henry Quastler observed, 'Information habitually arises from conscious activity.'  Indeed, we have positive, experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause sufficient to have produced the effect in question--and that cause is intelligence or mind.  Thus, design theorists infer intelligent design not just because natural processes do not explain the origin of specified information in biological systems, but also because we know, based upon our uniform experience, that intelligent agents, and only intelligent agents, produce this effect.  That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (intelligence) that is sufficient to produce specified information" (204).

Notice Meyer's subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation here--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

Consider a slight alteration in the last sentence in the passage quoted above.  "That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (human intelligence) that is sufficient to have produced specified information."  Well, of course, we would all have to agree with that statement.  But what about this--"That is to say, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (supernatural intelligence) that is sufficient to produce specified information"?  There is no good reason for all of us to agree with that statement.  The fallacy of equivocation here is Meyer's implicit assumption that since we all have "positive experience-based knowledge" of human intelligent agency, we therefore all have "positive experience-based knowledge" of supernatural or divine intelligent agency.  The entire argument for the intelligent design explanation of the universe depends on this fallacious inference.

Consider also this remark by Meyer as illustrating this equivocation:

". . . We would not say, for example, that an archeologists had committed a 'scribe of the gaps' fallacy simply because--after rejecting the hypothesis that an ancient hieroglyphic inscription was caused by a sand storm--he went on to conclude that the inscription had been produced by a human scribe.  Instead, we recognize that the archeologist has made an inference based upon his experience-based knowledge that information-rich inscriptions invariably arise from intelligent causes, not solely upon his judgment that there are no suitably efficacious natural causes that could explain the inscription" (205).

Well, yes, again, we would all agree with this statement.  But what if we inserted "divine scribe" in place of "human scribe"?  That's different.  Because while we have "experience-based knowledge" of how human intelligent causes work, we don't have "experience-based knowledge" of how divine intelligent causes work.  The rhetoric of intelligent design theory depends on our not recognizing the equivocation here.

William Dembski has said: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences."  This rhetorical strategy hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and logic, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not.

So what would have to be done to turn intelligent design theory--or any other form of creationism--into a real science?  Hugh Ross in Four Views provides a good answer:

"According to famed physicist Paul Davies, anyone presenting a model identifying the designer, citing specific dates, locations, and means of design, showing how their model could be falsified, and making short-range predictions of what scientists should discover (distinct from other models' predictions), has earned a seat at the science research and education tables.  Commitment to such a model opens doors to discussion in public universities.  It also elicits valuable critique from non-Christian research scientists and provides opportunities to draw them toward faith in Jesus Christ" (216).

As long as Meyer and other proponents of intelligent design refuse to offer such a falsifiable model of intelligent design for scientific explanation, their position cannot be taken seriously as real science.

Intelligent Design Theory Is a Sophistical Argument from Ignorance and Equivocation

In Chapter 7 of Darwinian Conservatism and in various posts on this blog, I have claimed that the argument for intelligent design theory (as developed by people like Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer) is a sophistical argument from ignorance and equivocation.

It's a argument from ignorance, because the proponents of intelligent design argue that if Darwinian scientists cannot explain in precise detail the step-by-step assembly of some irreducibly complex biological mechanism by evolutionary natural selection, then this proves that this biological mechanism was created by a divine intelligent designer. 

So, for example, Behe has argued that the bacterial flagellum (the rotating tail of bacteria) is an irreducibly complex biological mechanism, and since no biologist has provided convincing evidence for the step-by-step assembly of bacterial flagella by natural selection in evolutionary history, we must infer that the bacterial flagellum was created by the intelligent designer. 

Similarly, Dembski assumes that there are only three kinds of explanatory causes--natural necessity, chance, and design.  If we can eliminate natural necessity and chance as likely causes for some event, then we are left with design as the only explanation.  If we cannot explain the precise step-by-step path by which the bacterial flagellum arose through purely natural causes or by chance, then we must assume it was designed by some sufficient powerful intelligent agent.  Thus, Dembski defines design as the negation of natural regularity and chance, and consequently design has no positive content.

For intelligent design to have some positive content, Behe and Dembski would have to explain exactly where, when, and how a disembodied and sufficiently powerful intelligence designed flagella and attached them to bacteria.  Behe and Dembski don't do this, because it better serves their rhetorical strategy of negative reasoning that puts their Darwinian opponents on the defensive.  The trick is to demand a standard of proof for Darwinian science that the intelligent design proponents have not themselves met by showing exactly how a disembodied intelligence works in the world.

The argument for intelligent design is also an argument from equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design."  Both Dembski and Behe speak of "intelligent design" without clearly distinguishing human intelligent design from divine intelligent design.  We have all observed how the human mind can cause effects that are humanly designed, and from such observable effects, we can infer the existence of human intelligent designers.  But insofar as we have never directly observed a disembodied, omniscient, and omnipotent intelligent designer causing effects that are divinely designed, we cannot infer a divine intelligent designer from our common human experience.

Behe is right that from an apparently well-designed mousetrap, we can plausibly infer the existence of a human intelligent designer as its cause, because we have common experience of how mousetraps and other human artifacts are designed by human minds.  In the same way, William Paley was right that from a well-designed watch, we can plausibly infer the existence of an intelligent human watchmaker.  But from an apparently well-designed organic mechanism (like the bacterial flagellum), we cannot plausibly infer the existence of a divine intelligent designer as its cause, because we have no common experience of how a divine mind designs things for divine purposes.

Dembski has written: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences."  This sophistical rhetorical strategy of equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design" hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and inference, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not.

At Dembski's website ("Uncommon Descent"), Barry Arrington wrote a post a few years ago responding to these criticisms.  Here's the post:

ID opponents sometimes attempt to dismiss ID theory as an “argument from ignorance.”  Their assertion goes something like this:

1.  ID consists of nothing more than the claim that undirected material forces are insufficient to account for either the irreducible complexity (IC) or the functionally specific complex information (FSCI) found in living things. 

2.  This purely negative assertion is an invalid argument from ignorance.  As a matter of logic, they say, it is false to state that our present ignorance concerning how undirected material forces can account for either the IC or the FSCI found in living things (i.e., our “absence of evidence”), means no such evidence exists.  In other words, our present ignorance of a material cause of IC and FSCI is not evidence that no such cause exists.

This rejoinder to ID fails for at least two reasons.  First, ID is not, as its opponents suggest, a purely negative argument that material forces are insufficient to account for IC and FSCI.  At its root ID is an abductive conclusion (i.e., inference to best explanation) concerning the data.  This conclusion may be stated in summary as follows: 

1.  Living things display IC and FSCI.

2.  Material forces have never been shown to produce IC and FSCI.

3.  Intelligent agents routinely produce IC and FSCI.

4.  Therefore, based on the evidence that we have in front of us, the best explanation for the presence of IC and FSCI in living things is that they are the result of acts of an intelligent agent.

The second reason the “argument from ignorance” objection fails is that the naysayers’ assertion that ID depends on an “absence of evidence” is simply false.  In fact, ID rests on evidence of absence.  In his Introduction to Logic Irving Marmer Copi writes of evidence of absence as follows:

In some circumstances it can be safely assumed that if a certain event had occurred, evidence of it could be discovered by qualified investigators. In such circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof of its occurrence as positive proof of its non-occurrence.

How does this apply to the Neo-Darwinian claim that undirected material forces can produce IC and FSCI?  Charles Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859.  In the 152 years since that time literally tens of thousands of highly qualified investigators have worked feverishly attempting to demonstrate that undirected material forces can produce IC and FSCI.  They have failed utterly. 

Has there been a reasonable investigation by qualified investigators?  By any fair measure there has been.  Has that 152 year-long investigation shown how undirected material forces can account for IC or FSCI?  It has not.

Therefore, simple logic dictates that “it is perfectly reasonable to take the absence of proof” that undirected material forces can account for IC and FSCI as “positive proof of its non-occurrence.”

As far as I can see, there are two and only two responses the Darwinists can make to this argument:

1.  The investigation has not been reasonable or reasonably lengthy.

2.  Give us more time; the answer is just around the corner.

Response 1 is obvious rubbish.  If thousands of researchers working for over 150 years is not a reasonable search, the term “reasonable search” loses all meaning.

Response 2 is just more of the same Darwinist promissory notes we get all the time.  How many such notes will go unpaid before we start demanding that the materialists start paying COD?

Notice how this illustrates the intelligent design argument from ignorance and equivocation.  Notice how Arrington fails to provide any explanation for exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer creates "the irreducible complexity (IC) or the functionally specific complex information (FSCI) found in living things."  So intelligent design theory has no positive explanatory content whatsoever.

Arrington claims that ID is not an argument from ignorance, because it is actually "an abductive conclusion (i.e., inference to best explanation) concerning the data."  But notice the third step in his abductive inference: "Intelligent agents routinely produce IC and FSCI."  He doesn't specify who these "intelligent agents" are.  If he's referring to human intelligent agents, then, of course, we can all agree that human intelligent agents routinely produce IC and FSCI.  But if he's referring to divine intelligent agents, then he will have to explain to us exactly how "divine intelligent agents routinely produce IC and FSCI." 

He doesn't want us to see that, because he wants to hide the movement by equivocation from human intelligent design to divine intelligent design.

On the Evidence for Evolution (2): Mark Isaak & the Creation/Evolution Debate

The best way to judge the evidence for evolution is to study the creation/evolution debate, because this allows us to see whether evolutionary science can be persuasively defended against its most relentless opponents.

High school students and college students could benefit from studying the creation/evolution debate, because this could show them how debating science ultimately raises questions in morality, politics, philosophy, and religion. Isn't this the purpose of liberal education--to see how the deepest questions of life cross all of the intellectual disciplines?

One can see this rich interdisciplinary thought in the creation/evolution debate by looking at Mark Isaak's The Counter-Creationism Handbook, which was published first by Greenwood Press in 2005 and then reprinted by the University of California Press in 2007. The book is the printed version of Isaak's online text--"An Index to Creationist Claims," which has helpful internet links.

Isaak's book is a meticulous collection of the over 400 most common claims made by creationists, along with brief answers to these claims. The creationist claims range over the full spectrum of creationism, including Biblical creationism and intelligent design theory. A point-by-point rebuttal from the Biblical creationists can be found at the "Creation Wiki", which is the online "Encyclopedia of Creation Science." Rebuttals from the proponents of intelligent design theory can be found at various sites, including the website for the Discovery Institute's "Center for Science & Culture."

Looking over Isaak's collection of creationist claims and his responses, one can see how the creation/evolution debate touches on many of the biggest questions in ethics, epistemology, psychology, mythology, religion, and history, as well as the life sciences, anthropology, geology, astronomy, cosmology, physics, and mathematics. One can almost imagine devising an entire curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences organized around this creation/evolution debate.

From my experience in debating creationists, Isaak is remarkably acute in stating their claims and in recognizing the flaws in their reasoning. Generalizing from Isaak's work, I see five fundamental flaws: (1) the implausibility of Biblical science, (2) the equivocation between human design and divine design, (3) negative argumentation, (4) the problem of ultimate explanation, and (5) the yearning for a Platonic cosmology of Mind and Purpose.

(1) The Implausibility of Biblical Science.
The Biblical creationists treat the Bible--and particularly the opening chapters of Genesis--as a science textbook. So, for example, they take the story of Noah and the flood as a literal account of a world-wide flood. Consequently, they explain geology and the fossil record as showing the effects of that flood; and they even look for Noah's Ark in Turkey. They also assume that the creation story of six days is a literal account of origins over six days that occurred about 6,000 years ago.

Isaak is meticulous and rigorous in responding to the hundreds of scientific claims that come from this literal reading of the Bible as a science textbook and in showing how scientifically implausible they are.

The fundamental mistake is the failure of the creationists to see that the Bible is a book about the relationship of human beings to God, for which the natural history of the Earth is largely irrelevant.

One can see this in the creationist assumption that the Bible shows us everything being created in 4,004 BC. In fact, this date is nowhere to be found in the text of the Bible. This date was calculated in the seventeenth century by Bishop James Ussher based on some dubious assumptions about the dating of Biblical history. Creationists have to read this into the Bible.

(2) Equivocation Between Human Design and Divine Design.
Proponents of intelligent design theory--like William Dembski and Michael Behe--try to escape the implausibility of Biblical creationism by setting aside Biblical arguments and appealing to a logic of design inference as truly scientific reasoning that does not depend on the Bible.

Dembski claims that "intelligent design is detectable; we do in fact detect it; we have reliable methods for detecting it; and its detection involves no recourse to the supernatural. Design is common, rational, and objectifiable." (Here I am drawing from my chapter on intelligent design in Darwinian Conservatism.) The problem with Dembski's logic of detecting design, however, is that it depends on equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design."

Both Dembski and Behe speak of "intelligent design" without clearly distinguishing human "intelligent design" from divine "intelligent design." We have all observed how the human mind can cause effects that are humanly designed, and from such observable effects, we can infer the existence of human intelligent designers. We might also infer that some nonhuman animals are intelligent designers. And we might search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for evidence of some human-like intelligent design. But insofar as we have never directly observed a disembodied, omniscient, and omnipotent intelligence causing effects that are divinely designed, we cannot infer a divine intelligent designer from our common human experience.

(3) Negative Argumentation.
Creationists and intelligent design proponents employ a rhetoric of negative argumentation, in which they point to gaps or difficulties in evolutionary science and then assume that any such incompleteness or uncertainty in evolutionary explanation must demonstrate the truth of creationist intelligent design. Of course, this doesn't follow. Scientific knowledge will always be incomplete or uncertain, but this by itself does not prove that the proper explanation must be supernatural design. "The Intelligent Designer did it" is not an explanation. It's a confession of ignorance.

To substantiate their position, creationists and intelligent design proponents would have to explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer intervened to create the irreducibly complex forms of life that we see in the world. But they generally don't do that, because that would be a burden of proof that they could not satisfy, and they benefit from enforcing standards of proof for evolutionary scientists that they themselves can never satisfy. Actually, the Biblical creationists are better than the intelligent design theorists in offering specific causal explanations--such as Noah's Flood--but then they expose themselves to refutation when the empirical evidence doesn't support such claims.

(4) The Problem of Ultimate Explanation.
In Scientific Creationism (1985), Henry Morris defends the creationist view of God as First Cause. "An omnipotent Creator is an adequate First Cause for all observable effects in the universe, whereas evolution is not an adequate cause. The universe could not be its own cause" (20). Of course, the evolutionist could ask, "But, then, who made God?" Morris answers:

"Such a question of course begs the question. If the evolutionist prefers not to believe in God, he must still believe in some kind of uncaused First Cause. He must either postulate matter coming into existence out of nothing or else matter having always existed in some primitive form. In either case, matter itself becomes its own Cause, and the creationist may well ask, "But, then, who made Matter?"

"In either case, therefore, one must simply believe--either in eternal, omnipotent Matter or else in an eternal, omnipotent, Creator God. The individual may decide which he considers more reasonable, but he should recognize this is not completely a scientific decision either way." (19)

Here's how Isaak answers this argument:

1. The assumption that every event has a cause, although common in our experience, is not necessarily universal. The apparent lack of cause for some events, such as radioactive decay, suggests that there might be exceptions. There are also hypotheses, such as alternate dimensions of time or an eternally oscillating universe, that allow a universe without a first cause.

2. By definition, a cause comes before an event. If time began with the universe, "before" does not even apply to it, and it is logically impossible that the universe be caused.

3. This claim raises the question of what caused God. If, as some claim, God does not need a cause, then by the same reasoning, neither does the universe. (262-63)

This debate over how to understand the First Cause of everything, including the laws of nature, points to the deepest problem for human understanding--the problem of ultimate explanation. All explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, we might answer that we must just accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That's just the way it is!

The response of the creationist is that it is very unlikely that the universe would exist uncaused, and it is more likely that God would exist as the uncaused cause of everything.

In our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature or to God as the unexplained ground of all explanation. Thus does the natural desire to understand lead us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation. Philosophy cannot refute revelation, and theology cannot refute philosophy, because any attempted refutation would have to beg the question at issue. As Leo Strauss observed: "All alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief in revelation, and all alleged refutations of philosophy presuppose already faith in revelation. There seems to be no ground common to both, and therefore superior to both."

(5) The Yearning for a Platonic Cosmology of Mind and Purpose.
One of the most common arguments from Biblical creationists and intelligent design theorists is the appeal to the "anthropic principle": the cosmos is fine-tuned to permit human life, because if any of several fundamental constants in the universe were slightly different, human life would be impossible. The claim is that this shows that the cosmos has been intelligently and benevolently designed by a cosmic Mind to sustain human life.

According to Plato's Phaedo (97c-99b), Socrates was attracted to this kind of intelligent-design cosmology in which a cosmic Mind orders all things for the best. In the Laws and the Timaeus, Plato elaborated the intelligent-design cosmology that came to dominate Western culture for almost two thousand years. A fundamental claim of this Platonic cosmology was that the supremacy of the contemplative life could be sustained by the thought that the human mind could participate in the intelligible order of the universe as designed by a cosmic Mind. Biblical religious believers could infer that this cosmic Mind was the Creator God of the Bible. The anthropic principle seems to offer modern scientific support for this Platonic/Biblical cosmology.

But rather than refuting evolution, the anthropic principle can be understood in a way that supports evolutionary reasoning. As Isaak suggests, evolutionary thinking proposes not that the cosmos is fine-turned to life, but that life is fine-tuned to the cosmos, because life has evolved in adaptation to the cosmos, which includes the adaptation of the human mind for understanding the cosmos. Of course, this evolutionary adaptation is imperfect, and therefore we have no reason to think that this is the best of all possible worlds. The human mind is fallible in ways that we can explain as a product of evolutionary history. But even with its fallibility, the human mind is capable of endless exploration in striving to satisfy the natural human desire for understanding.

So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it. We come from nature. It is our home.

Or, as Strauss once wrote: "Becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith of the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind."

A few of the many related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here,here, and here.

The Fallacy of the Universe Being Fine-Tuned for Human Life as Proof for the Existence of God

I have written about how the idea that the Universe is fine-tuned for life has become the most common cosmological argument for the existence of God.  Recently, I have been thinking more about the fallacy in this argument.  My thinking has been stimulated by reading some work by Simon Friedrich--particularly, his article on "Fine-Tuning" for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and his book Multiverse Theories: A Philosophical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

According to many physicists, it is surprising that the Universe supports life--and particularly human life--because this depends precisely on certain fundamental characteristics of the Universe--the quantitative values of some constants of nature, the form of the laws of nature, and the conditions in the early universe.  Even slight variations in these values, laws, and conditions would have made life impossible.  As one example, if the strength of gravity had been only slightly weaker or slightly stronger than it is, stars and planets could not have formed in the way they are today, and thus there would have been no habitable planet for life.  There is a long list of physical constants like gravity that had to be "just right" for a Universe favorable to life to exist.  Sometimes this is called the "Goldilocks principle": the porridge needs to be not too hot and not too cold but just right.

In this way, the Universe appears to be fine-tuned for life.  Why?  Theistic creationists can say that if the Universe is fine-tuned, that must be because there is a divine fine-tuner.  Or is there some better explanation?

From the start, we should recognize that saying the Universe is fine-tuned is a metaphorical use of the term fine tuning.  Metaphor is a form of reasoning in which we understand one thing through its resemblance to something else.  We need to be careful that our metaphorical reasoning does not lead us into the fallacy of equivocation in which we deceptively call two different things by the same name.  And my argument is that the idea of the fine-tuned Universe commits that fallacy of equivocation.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives three definitions of "fine tuning."  The primary definition is "the action or process of tuning a musical instrument very precisely, so as to play at exactly the correct pitch."  The second definition is:  "Originally: the action or process of making minor adjustments to a radio in order to receive or broadcast on specific frequencies.  In later use more generally: the action or process of making minor adjustments to a device, apparatus, etc., in order to achieve a precise setting or calibration."  The third definition is: "The action or process of minor adjustments to something in order to achieve the best or a desired performance; (Economics) the policy or process of making a series of minor changes in monetary and fiscal policy in order to maintain a stable level of aggregate demand, usually that associated with full employment."

Notice that these definitions concern technological devices (such as musical instruments or radios) or social technology (such as planning an economy) in which human beings adjust technological artifacts or social institutions so that they function to satisfy human desires.  The fine-tuning is the product of human fine-tuners.  And we understand how this works because of our common experience of how human beings design, make, and control physical and social tools so that they function in desirable ways.

If this is what we mean by fine tuning, are we right in saying that the Universe is fine-tuned?  Or is this a deceptive equivocation--because the idea of fine tuning assumes human beings as the fine tuners, and it would be ridiculous to assume that the Universe was fine-tuned by human beings?  Presumably, if there were cosmic fine tuners, they would have to be supernatural or transcendent beings with the divine intelligence and omnipotence that allow them to create the Universe as they will.  But our ordinary human experience of human fine tuning tells us nothing about divine fine tuning.

In previous posts, I have shown how the argument for intelligent design is an argument from equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design."  Both William Dembski and Michael Behe speak of "intelligent design" without clearly distinguishing human intelligent design from divine intelligent design.  We have all observed how the human mind can cause effects that are humanly designed, and from such observable effects, we can infer the existence of human intelligent designers.  But insofar as we have never directly observed a disembodied, omniscient, and omnipotent intelligent designer causing effects that are divinely designed, we cannot infer a divine intelligent designer from our common human experience.

Behe is right that from an apparently well-designed mousetrap, we can plausibly infer the existence of a human intelligent designer as its cause, because we have common experience of how mousetraps and other human artifacts are designed by human minds.  In the same way, William Paley was right that from a well-designed watch, we can plausibly infer the existence of an intelligent human watchmaker.  But from an apparently well-designed organic mechanism (like the bacterial flagellum), we cannot plausibly infer the existence of a divine intelligent designer as its cause, because we have no common experience of how a divine mind designs things for divine purposes.

Dembski has written: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences."  This sophistical rhetorical strategy of equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design" hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and inference, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not.

Similarly, if we hear a musical instrument that has been fine-tuned, we can infer the existence of some human fine-tuner, because we understand how musical instruments need human fine-tuners.  But if the Universe appears fine-tuned for life, we cannot say that this proves the existence of a divine fine-tuner, because we have no experience with or understanding of a divine being creating the Universe so that it is fine-tuned for life.

If Humans and Chimps Are 15 Percent Genetically Different, What Difference Does That Make?

Think about how often you've heard it said that the genetic difference between human beings and chimpanzees is only slightly more than 1 percent, and therefore humans are 99 percent similar to chimps.  It is also said that this proves that chimps--and also bonobos--are our closest living evolutionary relatives.  This seems to be confirmed by the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos are more genetically similar to humans than to gorillas.  This 1 percent difference between humans and chimps fits the evolutionary timeline of five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor.

But now an article published last May in Nature (Yoo et al., 2025) reports that a complete sequencing of ape genomes shows that the genetic difference between humans and chimps is a lot greater than 1 percent--more like 15 percent!  And yet perhaps I shouldn't say this article "reports" this because if you read the main article, you won't see this claim of a 15 percent difference.  You have to go to the Nature website and print out the "Supplementary Data" for the article, and even then, you have to work through the technical jargon to find the 15 percent difference.  Casey Luskin has posted a helpful article at the Discovery Institute website that digs deep into the "Supplementary Data" to uncover this remarkable finding.  You would think that such a surprising discovery would be prominently announced in Nature and in press releases: "The Chimp-Human Genetic Difference Is Not 1% But 15%!"  I think Luskin is right to suggest that the editors at Nature must have worked hard to hide this finding because it refutes the popular claim about "only a 1% difference" separating humans and chimps.  

Luskin says this refutes one of the "icons of evolution," as Jonathan Wells called them--that is, widely believed assertions about evolution that the proponents of "intelligent design theory" and "young-Earth creationism" deny.  It's not surprising, therefore, that creationists like Ken Ham have cited Luskin's article as proving that the creationists are right to deny that there is any common evolutionary ancestry linking humans and apes.  Ham explains that Bible teaches us that God created the "ape kind" and the "humankind" separately and created humans as a unique kind made in the image of God.

And yet I don't see that this newly discovered "15% difference" provides any support for the intelligent design theorists or the creationists in their denial of evolutionary science.

But first we need to understand how this new research allows us to calculate genetic difference and similarity.  The title of the article in Nature is "Complete Sequency of Ape Genomes."  The emphasis is on "complete," because the first human and ape genome sequences were incomplete.  They excluded extremely repetitive sequences and large-scale structural differences such as inversions and duplications of genomic sequences.  So the first reports of only 1% differences between human and chimp genomes were based on incomplete drafts of the genomes.  But now the complete sequency in this article allows for a fuller comparison of similarities and differences in the sequences.

The authors found two kinds of differences--"gap divergence" and "single nucleotide variation" (SNV).

Luskin prepared this figure to illustrate the difference between "SNVs" and "Gaps" between two genomes.  Gaps represent nucleotides or segments of nucleotides that don't exist in one of the genomes.  SNVs represent places where the nucleotides are different for the two genomes.  In this illustration, we have 30 nucleotides of the target genome with 3 SNVs and 9 gaps relative to the query genome.  So SNV divergence is 10%, and gap divergence is 30%, which means a total divergence of 40%.

If you go to the Supplemental Data for the Yoo et al. article, you will see that Figure III.12 shows the SNVs in comparing the genomes for humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans--the four "great ape" species who belong to the Hominidae family.  When the human genome is the "target" genome, the "gap divergence" for the gorilla genome is 27.3 percent, for the Sumatran orangutan it's 16.5 percent, for the bonobo it's 14.4 percent, and for the chimpanzee it's 13.3 percent. 

Figure III.11 shows the SNV divergences, which are 2 percent for the gorilla, 3.6 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 1.6 percent for the bonobo, and 1.6 percent for the chimpanzee.

If we add the gap divergences to the SNV differences, we get these total degrees of difference between human and ape genomes: 29.3 percent for the gorilla, 20.1 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 16 percent for the bonobo, and 14.9 percent for the chimpanzee.  That's how we get the estimate of almost 15 percent difference between the chimp and human genomes, which is a lot higher than the purported 1 percent difference.  

It should be noted that these comparisons are for the 44 non-sex chromosomes in the human genome--that is, excluding the X and Y chromosomes.  As compared with chimps, the human X chromosome has a 4.4 percent gap divergence and 1.1 percent SNV divergence, while the human Y chromosome has an amazing 56.6 percent gap divergence and 3.9 percent SNV divergence.

Although this new research shows that the genetic differences between humans and apes are greater than had been previously reported, this does not deny the evolutionary story of the common evolutionary ancestry of humans and apes.  The genetic similarity between humans and apes is still very great--85 percent!  And humans are more genetically similar to chimps and bonobos than they are to orangutans and gorillas, which supports the claim that chimps and bonobos really are our closest living evolutionary relatives.

ALL IN THE GENES?  OR FOUR DIMENSIONS OF EVOLUTION?

There is an obvious problem here, however.  All of us have seen chimpanzees in zoos.  And many of us have seen bonobos if we have gone to zoos in San Diego, Milwaukee, or Cincinnati that have bonobos.  Those zoos often have displays that say something about the 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees.  Now those displays might have to be changed to read 15 percent.  But even so, when we look at those apes and compare them with humans, it's very hard to believe that the difference is only 1 to 15 percent.  It's simply not true that humans and apes are 85 percent the same.  The gap between the mental achievements of human beings and those of the apes is staggering.

Most human beings don't believe that evolutionary genetics can fully explain that gap, and that's why so many people reject the science of evolution, and why so many believe that the superiority of the human mind over the ape mind can only be explained by the supernatural work of an Intelligent Designer or Divine Creator.

They are right to believe that evolutionary genetics cannot fully explain the achievements of the human mind.  But that's because genetics is only a small part of evolutionary science.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are four levels of evolutionary inheritance--genetics, epigenetics, culture, and symbolism (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005).

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. But genetic reductionism and determinism fail to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.  The chemical modification in epimutation is not in the DNA itself but in the chromatin marking. Methylated DNA has a small methyl group attached to some of its bases. The pattern of methylation influences which regions of DNA are expressed. The different kinds of cells in the human body have the same DNA, but the different patterns of methylation regulate the expression of DNA.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. 

To explain why humans are somewhat similar to the great apes and yet radically different from them, we have understand how all four levels of human evolution have shaped human beings to be the unique animals that they are.

COMMON DESCENT OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN?  OR BOTH?

Although Casey Luskin is an advocate of intelligent design theory as the best alternative to evolutionary science, he stresses that he is not pointing to the new estimate of 15 percent difference between humans and chimps as evidence that refutes evolution.  As long as the five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor is enough time for this 15 percent difference to evolve, then the evolutionary story of common ancestry is still defensible.  

But still, Luskin suggests, intelligent design theory has a better explanation for this genetic similarity--85 percent--between chimps and humans:  "Functional genetic similarities between humans and chimps could be explained by common ancestry or by common design.  Common ancestry is not the only way to explain genetic similarities.  Intelligent agents can re-use functional code in different designs.  Common design can explain shared functional genetic similarities just as well as common descent can."

There are two mistakes in Luskin's reasoning, however.  First, he mistakenly assumes a dichotomy between common descent and common design, as if they were mutually exclusive.  As I have noted previously, one of the leading advocates of intelligent design theory--Michael Behe--argues (in The Edge of Evolution) that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is evidence that human beings evolved from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees.  He explains that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life (kingdoms, phyla, classes) but not the lower levels (orders, families, genera, species).  This means that the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian.

Behe is an intelligent-design evolutionist, because he insists: "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain.  What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).  Luskin refuses to recognize Behe's position.

Luskin is also mistaken, however, in assuming the plausibility of the arguments for intelligent design.  He thus ignores my objection that the arguments for intelligent design are fallacious in two respects.  First, intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design can offer no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.  

The second fallacy is the subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of seeing how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of seeing how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

CREATED BY GOD IN HIS IMAGE?  OR EVOLVED IN THE IMAGE OF PRIMATES?  OR BOTH?

Ken Ham (2025) argues, on the contrary, that even if we have not seen with our own eyes God creating everything out of nothing, this has been revealed to us through the Bible; and part of that revelation is that God created all the "kinds" of plants and animals separately, and He created the "chimp kind" to be utterly different from the "humankind," which was created in His image.

But as I have said in my previous posts on Ham and his two museums in Kentucky--the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter--he mistakenly assumes that he is conveying the clear meaning of the Bible and that the Bible's clear teaching is incompatible with Darwinian evolution.

The Bible says nothing about God creating apes and humans as separate "kinds."  The Book of Genesis never mentions apes.  Actually, in the whole Bible, the Hebrew word for "ape" appears only twice (I Kings 10:22, 2 Chronicles 9:21), and never in the context of creation.  And while Genesis speaks of God creating plants and animals "after their kind," it never identifies human beings as a "kind."  Consider Genesis 1:26--"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  The phrase "after our likeness" takes the place of "after their kind," suggesting that in being created in the likeness of God, man is not bound by a "kind."  So there is no Biblical basis for Ham to speak of "humankind."

Moreover, the Hebrew word min that is translated as kind in the King James Bible is ambiguous.  In the Latin translation of the Bible, min is translated as the Latin word species.  Consequently, for almost two thousand years, Biblical believers assumed that God's creating "kinds" meant that God created each "species" separately, and that each species was eternally fixed.  But then after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, in which he argued against the "theory of special creation" that God had created each species separating, some Christians began to believe that the created "kinds" in the Bible referred not to "species" but to some higher level of taxonomy.  Then, in 1941, the Christian biologist Frank Marsh coined the word baramin (combining the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind") as the best term for "created kind."  He argued that a "created kind" was not at the taxonomic level of "species" but at or near the level of "family."  This allowed Biblical believers to accept Darwin's theory of the origin of "species" by natural selection while also believing that God had created the "families" of plants and animals to be fixed and separate.  So, for example, we could say that God originally created the "family" of the finches, but within the limits of that "family," the separate species of finches endemic to the Galapagos Islands evolved by natural selection to be adaptive to those islands.

Notice what this means for the taxonomic classification of human beings.  If the "kind" of human beings refers to their taxonomic "family," then in modern taxonomy, human beings belong to the "family" of Hominidae, which includes chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutan.  Even the young-earth creationist Todd Wood (2010) accepts this Hominidae classification of humans with the great apes, although he identifies the "human holobaramin" as the genus Homo.

This idea of "created kinds" was crucial for Ham in solving an old problem with Noah's Ark.  If the Ark carried all the "kinds" of land-based plants and animals, how could the Ark be big enough to hold all of the land-based species--which could be numbered in the millions?

Ham's creationist researchers have solved this problem by calculating that among these land-dependent vertebrate species, there are fewer than 1,400 known living and extinct kinds (that is, families).  This allows them to estimate that Noah had to have fewer than 6,744 individual animals on the Ark.  Once these animals left the Ark, speciation by natural selection within kinds could create all the living and extinct species that we know today.  The Ham's Ark Encounter is designed to show how as many as 6,744 animals and 8 human beings (Noah and his extended family) could survive on the Ark for almost a year.  But notice that this is a speculative reading of the Bible that never defines "kind" in this way.  This is not the clear meaning of the Bible, as Ham claims.  Indeed, if you go to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you might notice one display that speaks of the need for "Arktistic license" in making up details in the story of the Ark that have no basis in the Bible.

Since the Bible is so obscure in its creation story, and since so much of that story sounds like a figurative folk tale that was not meant to be a literal account of natural history, many Christians (like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Deborah Haarsma) have decided that the Bible could be read as allowing for theistic evolution or evolutionary creation.  According to this conception, God created the universal laws of nature at the beginning of the Universe, but then He allowed all the forms of life to emerge by natural evolution.  God is the "primary cause" of everything.  But the evolutionary process unfolds through the "secondary causes" of nature.  Even Darwin himself accepted this metaphysical conception of "dual causality" that reconciles belief in God as First Cause with acceptance of evolutionary science.  At various points in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, there are displays that acknowledge that many if not most Christians accept some version of this theistic evolution.

But what about the creation of human beings in the image of God?  If the "image of God" refers to the God-like intellect of man, then we might argue that the extraordinary mental capacities of human beings could have evolved through the evolution of the primate brain.  I have argued that the evolution in the size and complexity of the primate brain passed over a critical threshold so that now there are 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and of that total, 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  That emergent evolution of the brain created the uniquely powerful human mind.  We were created in the image of the primate brain.

Even if we are only 15 percent genetically different from chimps, we are different in kind from chimps because we have the mental capacities for language, morality, and symbolic abstraction that they do not have at all.  That's the difference that makes all the difference.

REFERENCES

Behe, Michael. 2007. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the  Limits of Darwinism. New York: The Free Press.

Ham, Ken. 2025. "Study Finds Chimp DNA Is Not '99% Identical' to Ours." Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham Blog. May 27. Online.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Luskin, Casey. 2025. "Fact Check: New 'Complete' Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome." Science and Culture Today, May 21, online.

Wood, Todd Charles. 2010. "Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin." Answers Research Journal 3: 71-90.

Yoo, Dong Ahn, et al. 2025. "Complete Sequencing of Ape Genomes." Nature 641: 401-418.

The MPS in the Galapagos (13): The Human Mystery and The Limits of Scientific Materialism

At the MPS conference, we had spent most of the week talking about how science--particularly, evolutionary science--explains human social life.  But at the end of the week--the afternoon of June 27th--we heard lectures that raised questions about the limits of such scientific explanations.  We were invited to wonder whether human life in the cosmos is mysterious in ways that point beyond scientific materialism to some immaterial or spiritual reality.

This began with James Le Fanu talking about "The Problem with Science."  He is a medical doctor, a newspaper columnist, and a historian of science and medicine in England.  He is the author of Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (2009), which seemed to be the basis for his lecture.  He has summarized much of his argument in an article for Prospect magazine.

As suggested by the title of that book, his theme was "the mystery of ourselves" as transcending the materialist explanations of modern science.  I was reminded of similar thoughts expressed by people like Walker Percy, Leon Kass, and Wendell Berry.

Le Fanu argued that in recent years we have seen what John Horgan called "the end of science":  modern science has answered many of the "big questions," but the "big questions" that remain unanswered are beyond science.  For example, debates in cosmology raise questions about how the universe arose from nothing, or whether there are multiple universes.  The completion of the human genome project has not deciphered the "Book of Life," as was originally hoped, because the complexity of genes interacting with one another, with epigenetic factors, and with the physical and social environments of the organism has proven too complex to explain precisely.  Similarly, neuroscience shows us that everything is connected to everything else, even in the simplest tasks, and we cannot explain how or where all this information is brought together into a unified sense of consciousness.  Indeed, our introspective experience of self-consciousness is itself beyond neuroscience because it is not observable except as a private experience.

Many neuroscientists assume that brain = mind.  But there is no warrant for this assumption because the human mind is not fully explicable in purely material terms.  Our mental and moral experiences of free will, consciousness, and self-identity cannot be reductively explained as mechanistic products of neural activity.  Human thought and imagination are in principle immaterial and thus not explainable through the materialist naturalism of science.

Some people have wondered whether Le Fanu is a creationist who denies evolution.  He has written a blog post in which he explains that while he accepts Darwin's theory of evolution, he thinks it cannot fully explain those mental, moral, and spiritual capacities of human beings that make them unique.  He accepts much of the evidence for evolution by natural selection--such as the adaptive radiation of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos.  But he doubts that this can explain everything about living beings, especially human beings.

As I listened to Le Fanu, I was reminded of David Lack.  Le Fanu was lecturing at the Charles Darwin Conference Center in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on Wreck Bay in the island of San Cristobal.  In December 14, 1938, Lack landed on Wreck Bay to begin his famous study of "Darwin's finches," which would provide evidence for Darwin's theory, evidence that Le Fanu accepts.  But some years later, Lack wrote a book--Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief--in which he argued that although evolution was a scientific fact, it could not explain everything about human beings: "Science has not accounted for morality, truth, beauty, individual responsibility or self-awareness, and many people hold that, from its nature, it can never do so, in which case a valid and central part of human experience lies outside science" (114).

I am not sure, however, that Le Fanu really does accept the truth of evolution, as Lack did, because I have noticed that the speech Le Fanu gave at the MPS conference was also given in Seattle and broadcast as a podcast sponsored by the Discovery Institute, which is the leading promoter of "intelligent design theory."  If Le Fanu is advancing "intelligent design" as superior to evolutionary science, he should have indicated that at the MPS conference.  If he had done that, he would then have had to explain the content of his theory:  Exactly when, where, and how did the Intelligent Designer create all forms of life?  Like the advocates of intelligent design, Le Fanu employs a purely negative style of argumentation--criticizing scientific materialism as inadequate for explaining things but offering no alternative explanatory framework.

At the end of Why Us? Le Fanu calls for a "new paradigm" in science.  Although he is vague about what this would be, he is clear that it would be devoted to "restoring man to his pedestal" and to "a renewed interest in and sympathy for religion" (258-59).  From this would emerge a new respect for intelligent design reasoning, he suggests, and he cites Michael Behe as the best theorist of intelligent design.  He thinks the clearest evidence for intelligent design is the genetic code: "just as it requires human intelligence to produce anything with a high information content, whether books or dictionaries, music scores or compact discs, so by analogy it would be reasonable to infer that it would require a 'higher intelligence' to formulate the genetic code" (259).  (In my debates with Behe and other intelligent design theorists, I have pointed to the equivocation in this anthropomorphic analogy: although human intelligent design is known by ordinary experience, divine intelligent design is not.)  He then concludes the book by pointing to Marx, Freud, and Darwin as the three great proponents of scientific materialism, and then predicting that just as Marx and Freud have been proven wrong, so will Darwin.

This clearly identifies Le Fanu as a proponent of intelligent design theory.  But in his MPS lecture, he was silent about this.

Le Fanu's speech was engaging for many in the MPS audience, but some people became increasingly agitated as he spoke.  Peter Whybrow was particularly irritated.

In the question period, Whybrow assumed a mocking tone in praising Le Fanu for his rhetorical skills in moving his audience, and he said that in the future he would adopt some of Le Fanu's tricks for persuading an audience.  Le Fanu answered: "Thank you for those condescending remarks."

This testy exchange manifested the emotional depth of the debate over whether Darwinian science can fully explain human experience.  This pointed ahead to the final two lectures of the conference on the evolution of religion.

Some of my posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here., here., and here.