Do you believe that the theory of evolution has never been observed? That it is purely theoretical and has never been, can never be, demonstrated in the laboratory?

Well, it appears that this ICR and AIG favorite is no longer a sustainable argument:

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

This population of E. coli was observed to evolve a new trait known as Cit+, the ability to metabolize citrate. What’s really interesting is that the inability to metabolize citrate has previously been one of the distinguishing features of E. coli. This is more remarkable than it may seem on the surface. How so?

Dr. Keith Miller’s recent essay on the Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution site entitled “Creation, Evolution and the Nature of Science” included the following statement:

In fact, as I have argued, God is unnecessary for a scientific description, but a scientific description is not a complete description of reality.

Someone responded that this appeared to be a God-of-the-gaps kind of position. I responded with the following observations, and thought it a succinct statement of my view that I would like to have here on my blog for any visitors wanting to know my position on these things.

I think the point of Dr. Miller’s quote was that even a full description of what physical things occur and how they occur in a mechanical fashion does not preclude a third descriptor: why. Philosophical materialists insist that satisfactory answers to “what” and “how” questions are sufficient, and since they are answerable in the laboratory, the picture of reality that the laboratory furnishes for us is, by their estimation, altogether complete. Theists argue that we should not ignore the question “why”, even though it cannot be recovered by the scientific method; discounting “why” as a valid question shows a presuppositional bias toward materialism and does not constitute an argument for it.

God created (or “is creating”, some would say) the universe as it is today by willing it to be as it is. His role was/is the role of intentionality, meaning it to happen. If He had not wanted it to, it would not have happened. Out of all the alternative possibilities that could have arisen from our cosmological womb, out of all of the other paths the evolution of our universe might have taken anywhere throughout its 13.73 billion year age (give or take 120 million years), it is this universe that happened. Science can hypothesize about “what if”, but not “why this?” Materialism has no answer - cannot propose an answer - but does this mean there’s no such thing as the question? Philosophical materialism’s denial of the supernatural based on the existence of the natural essentially attempts to argue just that. I’m not saying that the existence of the question “why” proves there is an answer to itself. There may be meaning and there may not be, but materialism has no authority or power to come down on either side of the question.

By definition, a supreme supernatural being’s purpose for the universe is altogether unanalyzable by the scientific method, so arguing that such a being exists and that he/she/it gives it purpose does not qualify as a God-of-the-gaps argument. Gaps in our knowledge of the natural are gaps we should try to fill with natural explanations; we should try to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the supernatural with supernatural explanations. They are non-overlapping and not contradictory in their aims.

I’ve been quite vocal on this blog in pointing out my disagreements with the Christian critics of science (ID advocates and other creationists). Unfortunately, these special creationists have had quite a bit of help constructing a wall between faith and science.

Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is an outspoken evangelical who also happens to be utterly convinced that the method of God’s creation was natural processes. His confidence in the theory of evolution has been bolstered tremendously by the work on comparing the human genome with that of other species. His tone is always conciliatory and never strident, which makes him an excellent evangelist for Christ among scientists and science among Christians.

The brilliant Isaac Newton described the universal law of gravitation and the laws of physics and explained the elliptical orbits of the planets using calculus, a new form of math that he developed just to answer that question. Yet after describing the movements of the objects in the solar system with an astounding precision, he reached a point where he paused in awe of the stability of the motion of the celestial bodies, and stating that he could not see how his equations were able to explain the universality of gravity, he summarized in his monumental Principia, “This most beautiful system of the Sun, Planets, and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being, a God.”

Does this sound at all familiar?

Here’s the sad part: the Principia was written at the astoundingly young age of 35, and he went to his grave at the ripe old age of 84 without exploring the issue any further. About a century later, however, the French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, using Newton’s own calculus and the laws of physics and gravitation Newton first postulated, explained the stability of the motion of the celestial bodies described by Newton with a method of mathematics that was certainly well within Newton’s mathematical ability. What caused the difference? Why did the English genius not solve the problem in the fifty years between Principia and his death? Laplace saw a challenge and went for it; Newton thought he saw an intelligent design and stopped looking.

This is why the ID movement’s masquerade as science produces such a negative reaction among Christian scientists. Scientific research is harmed and hindered by those who say, “Our current scientific understanding has not explained X, therefore X lies outside the bounds of scientific inquiry.”

HT to elbogz on Steve Martin’s site, who referred me to a talk by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that made this point about Newton.

Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did we come about?”

Actually, you’re asking two different questions. The first, concerning the origin of life itself, I have not come to any conclusions on. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a supernatural act of intervention. But then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by some natural process. The fact is, even scientists don’t have a really good explanation for “abiogenesis” (life from non-life), although they’ve got lots of hypotheses. Yet this current lack of knowledge alone does not make me immediately decide, “Oh! Miracle!” I have explained elsewhere why this God-of-the-gaps explanation is a sinking ship; that some rain god’s direct, miraculous intervention is behind the phenomenon of rain might have seemed like the only possible explanation before an understanding of meteorology, but such a claim would not only have been entirely premature, but, when displaced by a scientific explanation, would appear quaint and superstitious. Just because we don’t know now doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out, and we may even one day be able to reproduce it.

This leads to an important clarification of my understanding. The rotation of the earth, gravity, photosynthesis, fossil formation - what do these have in common? 1) God is responsible for all of them. 2) They operate independently from overt divine activity. What’s my point? What I’m trying to say is that I affirm that all the rules of the universe, such as those responsible for the processes I just mentioned, operate just as they were designed to do. Therefore, I’m an intelligent design advocate of a different kind. As Howard Van Till says, God designed a “fully gifted creation”, which means that He set it up to run in a way that did not require Him to break His own rules in order to create us. I contrast this with Van Till’s assessment that ID posits a “system of natural causes [that] fails to include the formational capabilities needed for assembling certain complex biotic structures, such as the bacterial flagellum.” I contend that there was in fact more design put into the universe than ID advocates or creationists allow for, only that this design lies so deeply embedded within nature that the unbeliever will not be likely to notice it.

For the believer, however, God’s involvement in nature is much more visible on the surface than even ID advocates claim: scientists in the intelligent design movement go to great lengths to dust biology for God’s fingerprints, when the fact that the laws of nature even exist is God’s smoking gun - He’s responsible for it all, not just the gaps! Note, however, that I’m not using the cosmological argument and asserting that the existence of natural laws are proof of God’s existence; on the contrary, God’s role in the physical processes that perpetuate the natural world is one of intentionality and purpose, unrecoverable by science and unprovable by philosophy. God doesn’t have to keep making the universe work; all He has to do is will it to work. Of course, even creationists and ID advocates would agree: where we differ is that whereas I believe this essentially naturalistic manner of cosmos management started further back than the present day, the stance of the ID/creationist crowd is that God began using natural laws to run the universe only after the creation. This is seen by the fact that they don’t regularly posit the necessity of God’s intervention to make sure that iron rusts when exposed to water nowadays, yet (under a literalist, historiographic understanding of Genesis) the creation, including plants created on the third day, was able to get along without light from the sun until the fourth day, because ostensibly the laws of nature did not apply until after He was done.

Now to the second part of Josh’s question: how did we (humans) get here? We determine these sorts of things by examining all available resources.

What surprises some Christians is that I am fully confident that the Bible is not one of those resources, nor was it ever intended to be. In Genesis 1-11, until we get to Abraham, we are not getting history as we would from a history book; we are looking at stories common throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE), remolded and adapted to serve God’s purposes. I have previously linked to the conservative Wheaton scholar Dr. John H. Walton’s presentation on Genesis 1. Watch it or else: it’s an hour-long presentation, but if you’re at all interested in understanding my position, you’ve got to check it out. An inelegant way of summarizing it is to say that this chapter is a complex literary work affirming that YHWH is responsible for the universe using imagery drawn from the Jewish temple. The Garden narrative, while retaining firm roots in Mesopotamian mythology, has been reformulated as an archetypal story showing God interacting with humanity, in terms reminiscent of and serving as commentary on the Torah. I plan on addressing this stuff later.

If we don’t use Genesis as a science book or to determine the origin of humanity, where do we look? My choice has been to look to those who dedicate their life’s work to observing, analyzing, and hypothesizing about the natural world: scientists. And no, that group of people is by no means primarily made up of atheistic conspirators against theism. For Pete’s sake, the head of the Human Genome Project is a devout evangelical Christian who, from his intimate knowledge of DNA, cannot conceive of another explanation of the data he’s seen than common descent.

I’m not going to be dogmatic about exactly how everything got here in scientific terms, because I’m not a scientist. But for me, as with any question beyond my ken, I yield to those people who have studied the matter in depth. To sum up my position as a non-scientist who doesn’t think the Bible speaks to the “how” of creation, I would like to quote Dan Werner’s comment on Mike Beidler’s post discussing Van Till:

As to the scientific question, I stand with the whole of scientific tradition these past 140+ years in affirming full-fledged evolution. There can be no other acceptable position for a layperson such as myself. To believe otherwise would not be humble.

During the course of his interview with Ben Stein that I mentioned in an earlier post, R. C. Sproul recounted the story of his conversation with a college professor. At one point the professor said that the universe came about by chance. Sproul then started to flip a coin and asked him what the chance was that it would come up heads or tails. The answer of course came back that there was 100% chance it would land on one of the two sides, and 50% chance of either. After the coin fell, Sproul asked the clever question, “How much power did chance exert upon this coin toss? . . . Chance didn’t influence it . . . because chance has no power because it has no being. It’s nothing.” In this clever demonstration, Sproul follows most critics of naturalism^* and misconstrues that the naturalist actually believes that chance is literally an agent, rather than a description of a self-driven process that appears random except from a teleological point of view. He is falsely construing the phrase “by chance” as an instrumental of agent rather than as an instrumental of manner. Now unless the brilliant Sproul is really somehow unaware of this, one has to admit that while this was very clever of Sproul, it severely misrepresented the professor’s stance. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this argument used.

This is critical for understanding the inherently and fundamentally agnostic stance of science on the question of the divine. Science cannot say “who” or “what” caused or didn’t cause anything, especially if the Creator is supreme and chose to front load the system to run itself using the principles He set up. Those few scientists who would argue against that are deserving of correction, but they are in the decided minority; because of their error, should the entire discipline disband and its practitioners shrug with a sigh of, “Goddidit”? The implication that anyone believes actual entities named “chance” or “evolution” created anything is a misrepresentation - a falsehood - and Christians will not make any inroads with these people if they continue to use bad arguments like this.

At another point he remarked, “David Hume said that the word ‘chance’ is used as a magic word for ignorance. When you don’t know what causes something, you say, ‘Well, it happened by chance.’ That doesn’t explain anything.”

Surely Sproul is aware of the actual intent of such a statement. When a scientist says “chance”, he is acknowledging that some necessary contingent of the myriad of factors that caused the actual outcome and averted an infinite number of other outcomes remains, to date, unknown. Hume’s derisive comment on chance was a criticism of those who stop seeking evidence to fill the gaps in knowledge and are content to let the unknowns remain unknown. This is exactly what ID advocates do! Watch what happens if I change a few keys words of Sproul’s comment: “The word ‘design’ is used as a magic word for ignorance. When you don’t know what causes something, you say, ‘Well, it happened by intelligent design.’ That doesn’t explain anything.” Now whose position looks more eligible for Hume’s critique?

Arguing that something was “designed” every time there is no obvious answer to how it happened relegates God’s activity only to the currently unexplained. To quote myself, “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.” Thus, for instance, “The biological explanation of how a life is created (i.e., the joining of sperm and egg) removes God from the equation,” by the terms decided upon by critics of natural explanations. Surely God is not content with such a recessive domain as this. Can God only receive credit for miracles, those instances in which He suspends the laws that He Himself created? Should we not give Him the glory for natural phenomena with natural explanations? As long as this is the case, there will be nothing atheistic about evolution.

^*By “naturalism”, I do not mean the type that excludes the possibility of the supernatural, but that which merely focuses on natural explanations of physical phenomena. I am open to alternative terms if one is necessary.

Many thanks to Mike Beidler for directing me to this article by Dinesh D’Souza. This quote stands out:

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way. Textbooks frequently go beyond the scientific evidence to make metaphysical claims about how evolution renders the idea of a Creator superfluous. My book What’s So Great about Christianity? provides several examples of this…

Most Christians don’t care whether the eye evolved by natural selection or whether Darwin’s theories can account for macroevolution or only microevolution. What they care about is that evolution is being used to deny God as the creator. For those who are concerned about this atheism masquerading as science, there is a better way. Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.

Now, I don’t know that the number of Christians who “don’t care” about the origins debate is so insignificant (at least in America). But my impression of Expelled as it is being paraded by Christians is that it declares open season on the pernicious religion called “Darwinism,” demonized with guilt by its association with evangelical atheists, and in this, D’Souza and I share a concern over casting aside science in favor of “unscientific ID theories.”

The main point of this quote, however, gets at the heart of my hesitation to come down for or against the film before seeing it. Inasmuch as materialists are overplaying their hands and claiming that naturalism is evidence against the supernatural, they should be chided and corrected just as any other apologists for ideologically driven inaccuracies (such as ID!) should. It is important for this to happen because allowing these guys to mischaracterize science bolsters the false impression that fuels the anti-evolution crowd’s fervor to draw and quarter poor Darwin. The denial of the innately spiritually agnostic nature of scientific inquiry is contradicted by such prominent unbelieving scientists as Stephen Jay Gould, who comments in his famous essay, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria“,

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

What Gould wants to express in this essay is some measure of disbelief that there is so much attention paid to the so-called “faith vs. science conflict”. Faith is not scientific; it is, by nature (and Heb 11.1) belief in the unseen, unobservable, and non-empirical. It is metaphysical - so why should anyone expect there to be any intractable conflicts with observations of the physical? Gould and Francis Collins, as well as an innumerable list of other atheists I have interacted with, all agree that in the field, a scientist’s position on any of the various scientific theories is not diagnostic for that person’s position on faith or their likelihood to have a personal faith. This may or may not be the case (I suspect it really isn’t so much) in liberal, activist academia.

It’s “atheism masquerading as science” that we Christians should be uneasy about, and we’re only marginalizing ourselves by burning the entire town where the materialist atheist lives in an attempt to ferret him out.

R.C. Sproul recently had a discussion with Ben Stein, host of a documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. This documentary takes a look at the way some colleges appear to be discriminating against their faculty who entertain the possibility of Intelligent Design (ID). It apparently makes the case that draconian measures are being used to deny tenure or even fire professors critical of “Darwinism” (as the critics of evolutionary theory customarily refer to it). I must reserve judgment upon the legitimacy of Stein et al.’s concerns until I see the documentary. My evaluation will depend on the specific basis upon which these professors are being released or denied tenure.

You won’t believe this. I didn’t believe it. I can’t even really comment on it without getting flustered, and the article speaks for itself anyway, so let me just give you this link.

Oklahoma state legislature ponders evisceration of science curriculum

Please return here to offer me your stunned responses.

In my explanation of man’s depravity from the view of a recurring, individualized (non-historical) Fall, I have argued that mankind’s natural separation from God was in origin a result of natural self-preservation instincts. These instincts progressed first into childish selfishness and then, with the onset of divinely gifted God-consciousness (Romans 1:18-21), those instincts gone unchecked morphed into moral failure (sin), to the effect that scarcely had our species become aware of its Creator before it began to reject Him.

I thought of this when I came upon the following quote from C.S. Lewis:

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

It strikes me that God uses the selfsame aspect that damns us to redeem us. Self-regard is not an absolute evil; it is a neutral currency of the universe, one of which our ultimate God naturally demands the ultimate possession. This is no doubt because our blessed Maker, in molding man in His Own image, also imprinted upon him another, converse attribute of which He is the ultimate expression: self-sacrifice. In fact, it is this expectation God has of us, not the self-regard shared by every creature from amoeba to ape, that separates man from beast. That God demands something we are in some sense capable of but not predisposed to do is analogous to a parent teaching her daughter to help her in the kitchen, or her son to brush his own teeth (without swallowing the toothpaste!) so they won’t rot out of his head.

In order for us to become like Him, we must subordinate our self-regard to our self-sacrifice; but thankfully, as Lewis notes, we are not required — nor are we able — to perform self-sacrifice wholly independent of self-regard.

What do you think of this?

In a recent post on his popular blog, Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presented a predictable take on the origins debate. He states,

I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist . . . or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution — the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists — explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

I am frankly amazed that one so learned and esteemed should display such an obvious oversight concerning the most fundamental of the philosophical and theological grounds for theistic evolution (TE). Even in the purest form that affirms absolute naturalism and denies overt divine intervention in the process, theistic evolution affirms that God alone is responsible for setting the universe as we know it into place, but that the “divine creation” occurred by laws He and He alone created and set in motion. It does not rule out supernatural design but rather views God’s design as taking place at a higher level of sovereignty. The universe was created and life developed into human life because God purposed that they do so. TE in its fullest form does indeed rule out “interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum”, or rather, it renders such interference superfluous. The Author of nature did not need to step in and manually execute the actions of the Creation subroutine after He struck the “enter” key to run what He had already carefully programmed.

Later he triumphantly quotes a TE who happens to be a theology professor at the Claremont School of Theology apparently partial to open theism who tries to argue — with no success, from my vantage — that “[t]heologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God.” I can’t see how this helps anyone’s case, but Mohler doesn’t even attempt to deconstruct that argument analytically, choosing rather to herald it as proof that TE “is not biblical Christianity.” Of course, I can see why he accepts that theologian’s understanding of TE: Mohler agrees with this mistaken theologian that evolutionary advances which appear random preclude any intentionality, even on the behalf of God. I don’t understand how any theologian, whether at Claremont or SBTS, can accept such an anemic view of the sovereignty of God. Scripture consistently declares that God ordains events beyond our purposes.

Another thing that really bugs me is how TE opponents speak incessantly of “Darwinism” and reference Darwin as the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings for evolutionary theory despite his reported demise in the nineteenth century; they don’t consistently apply their criticism to Christians who accept the theory of gravity as “Newtonists” or some such. Both Darwin’s and Newton’s views have been tremendously modified and/or overhauled since they originally formulated them, so the men who first hypothesized what later became accepted as a workable theory can hardly stand in as representatives of the current views, unless of course you need to demonize those views and need a voodoo doll to burn. “Darwin” becomes a boogieman, used to marginalize the theory of evolution as a personality cult. This tactic is manifest in Mohler’s closing stinger, so typical of anti-evolutionists, “…and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.” Two favorite red herrings here: 1) evolutionary theory is a religion and 2) Darwin the man = the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that have confirmed some of the basic notions he first articulated.

Come on, Al. You may have reached the top of evangelical academia’s heap, but that doesn’t give you leave to stop thinking critically.

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.