In a recent article on his website, Gary DeMar tries to pick a fight with a strawman to encourage his anti-evolutionist choir. This has bothered me so much that I had to write a response.
His main thrust comes at the end of the article in which he writes, “Atheist James A. Haught, writing in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, argues that it’s irrational to believe in invisible ‘things’:
“For anyone scanning the past and surveying the current world scene, it is nearly impossible to find any outstanding person—except for popes, archbishops, kings, and other rulers—who says the purpose of life is to be saved by an invisible Jesus and to enter an invisible heaven. But it is easy to find many among the great who doubt this basic dogma.”
DeMar remarks, “While belief in the invisible nature of God is a philosophical no-no, it’s OK to believe in the invisibility of this ‘evolution’ entity that has supposedly created life out of non-life and has developed a moral code for us to live by.”
There are no materialists who argue that believing in “invisible things” is irrational; read it again and you’ll see that Haught’s quote definitely doesn’t say that. A process (such as the concept of biological evolution) is a way we as humans group, classify, and seek to explain actual physical, observable phenomena. Just because certain processes are not observable in real time does not mean they are invisible. No one with a functioning mind denies that processes exist simply because these processes are not physical, visible entities. Processes are always invisible – people and places (like Jesus and heaven) generally aren’t. Believing in invisible things without any good reason is irrational (if not outright delusional), and the materialist argues that physical, visible evidence is the only good reason. They don’t deny God because He is invisible, but because they do not see any physical evidence.
Let me put it this way. What is responsible for the changing of the seasons? A scientist will say, “The earth’s revolution around the sun.” Does the creationist say, “No, silly! Who’s ever seen a ‘Revolution’? God is responsible for the changing of the seasons”? Thankfully, most don’t. Saying that God is responsible for establishing the physical processes that bring about the change of seasons is not inconsistent. There are, however, some that claim this position as a violation of Occam’s razor, which is sometimes stated as, “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.” The materialist says, “If all phenomena are physically explainable, then it is illogical and unnecessary to also superimpose a supernatural explanation.” Unfortunately, creationists place themselves in the position of either marginalizing God or denying science. Materialists aren’t inconsistent to believe in wind or the revolution of the earth around the sun, both of whose effects are observable, while denying the existence of a supreme being whose actions are arguably not observable by physical means. Creationists say that God’s actions are observable in that many physical phenomena such as the diversity of life were caused directly by Him and not by natural processes. A creationist is forced to argue the untenable position that whenever a physical explanation for a phenomenon is discovered, God loses His right to claim that He is responsible for the phenomenon. The biological explanation of how a life is created (i.e., the joining of sperm and egg) removes God from the equation.
The materialist’s application of Occam’s razor in this instance is an inaccurate critique of the Christian position, however, since theology’s role is to assign meaning to events, not to deny or replace scientific descriptions of how those events transpired. “Evolution is responsible” and “God is responsible” are completely unrelated and non-contradictory claims: one is physical and the other metaphysical. They have different domains and thus don’t have to play by the same rules.
If you have scientific problems with evolution, bring them on. But this is a trumped up pseudo-philosophical argument. No self-respecting logician will say that “Evolution is responsible” and “God is responsible” are contradictory. The fact is that most evolutionists would agree with this. Anyone who understand science knows that it cannot and should never be used to prove or disprove the metaphysical; it is only designed and equipped to explore the physical universe.
One of my main problems with DeMar and most creationists is that at times they appear to jump at whatever appears on the surface to be problematic about an evolutionary claim, and rather than digging in to see the reasoning behind the evolutionary position, they try to play gotcha and hope no one notices their bluff. This convinces no one who actually has some rudimentary understanding of evolutionary theory, but it does indeed excite those who already want to think that evolution is a ridiculous, preposterous, absolutely fantastic delusion.
For instance, another of DeMar’s pseudo-rational responses was to the claim of Dr. Robert Henkin of the Taste and Smell Clinic in Washington that, “Evolution taught humans to smell. . . . When people can’t smell, they can’t taste and they end up getting poisoned by food.” DeMar retorts, “What happened before animals could develop the necessary smell mechanism to detect poisons? They would have died. So how could they have evolved if they kept dying from ingesting poisons?” This is “logic” borrowed from the Intelligent Design movement. This disturbs me, because I, who have no science degree or training, can argue the evolutionary position based solely on what I learned in my cursory attempts to refute evolutionary theory and ensure that it really was as ludicrous as creationists claim (a pursuit at which I was abashed to admit that I failed).
1) We have no way of knowing at which point some things became harmful to an organism’s physiology, or for that matter when the different animal groups that were susceptible to poison came into contact with those poisons.
2) He makes the common but inexcusable mistake of assuming that all the organisms of a given population came into contact with the poison.
3) Even taking on this last assumption that all individuals were exposed to/ingested some sort of poison, a major problem remains with DeMar’s assumption that all animals were without a mechanism with which to smell across the board at the same time. There is no basis for this assumption: actually, as a function of typical intraspecies genetic variation, some individuals in a population likely carried the genetic sequencing that, although originally not developed specifically for smell, produced a rudimentary sensory response to harmful chemicals that has developed into what we call the sense of smell. The individuals within a species that carried this genetic ability survived and passed it on to their progeny, weeding out the gene pool of the species so that eventually it only contained those who could detect poison (“survival of the fittest”, anyone?).
4) An even more basic understanding of evolutionary theory that he somehow missed (ignored?) would have explained that any species that did not include any individuals with a poison-detecting mechanism did in fact die out! The ones that did survived. Is this really hard to understand?
I understand that there are atheists with an anti-theism axe to grind (i.e., they don’t just believe there is no God, but want to prove it definitively) who love to use naturalism and materialism as a way to paint God as a superfluous and excisable bed-time story. Let’s fight that erroneous mentality, but not by senselessly and illogically demonizing the innately benign tool of evolutionary theory that just happens to be the tool of choice for those anti-theists.
