In the introduction to a zoom lecture he is to give in Budapest January 28, Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse writes,
Many people, notably Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, argue – or are taken to argue – that the chief effect of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was to finish off Christianity. I shall argue that the story is more complex – and interesting – than this. Darwin’s chief achievement was to show how the design-like nature of organisms – the hand, the eye, the heart – can be explained by unbroken law, without direct need of a reference to a Designer, a deity like the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus. Having offered up such an explanation, the way was opened for sound non-belief, although almost always non-believers – agnostics and atheists – take their stance less on science and more on grounds of theology and philosophy.
Not what they usually say themselves.
The lecture is sponsored by Center for Religious Studies at Central European University.
Explained by unbroken law? That’s not at all what random mutation requires.
Random is total law-breaking by definition. The purpose of asserting randomness is to eliminate all traces of design at all levels. If evolution was believed to be an organized predictable process that followed a specific plan, the plan would then imply a designer. (Isn’t this pretty much what ‘theistic evolutionists’ say? I’m not sure about them, so may be wrong.)
Michael Ruse claims that, “Darwin’s chief achievement was to show how the design-like nature of organisms – the hand, the eye, the heart – can be explained by unbroken law, without direct need of a reference to a Designer,”
Michael Ruse is wrong. Darwin achieved no such thing. In fact, one of the main failings of Darwin’s theory that prevents Darwinian Evolution from ever becoming a hard and testable science is that no one can ever seem to find a ‘natural law’ for evolution.
As Ernst Mayr himself conceded, “In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.”
Roger Highfield makes much the same observation as Ernst Mayr and states, “Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology.”
And Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated that “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
To drive the point home that Darwinian evolution is not based on any known physical law (as Ruse falsely claimed), all I need to do is point out that it is impossible, (as Brian Miller states), “to craft an evolutionary barometer that measures the selection pressure driving one organism to transform into something different (e.g., fish into an amphibian). The fact that no such instrument could be constructed highlights the fictitious nature of such mystical forces.”
And to further drive the point home that the terms ‘selection pressure’, and/or fitness, belongs in the fictitious realm of ‘luminiferous aether’, and as the following article asks, “How is fitness to be measured? What are the units? Physicists have degrees Kelvin, ergs and Joules of energy and Faradays of electricity, but do 100 Spencers on a Haeckl-o-meter equal 10 Darwins of fitness?”
And as Professor of Zoology John O. Reiss himself honestly admitted, “there is as yet no universally agreed upon measure of fitness; fitness is either defined metaphorically, or defined only relative to the particular model or system used. It is fair to say that due to this lack, there is still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is. This is clearly a problem.”
Contrary to what Ruse and other Darwinists may falsely believe, there simply is no known ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe:
In fact, besides having no known ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for Darwinists to base their theory in, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science almost directly, (if not directly), contradicts the primary Darwinian claim that greater and greater levels of functional complexity can easily be had and/or ‘naturally selected’ for over long periods of time. Indeed, entropy’s main claim is that, over long periods of time, everything in the universe will eventually decay into simpler and simpler states until what is termed thermodynamic equilibrium is finally reached. (see Brain Miller and Granville Sewell for more information on how the second law of thermodynamics is fatal to Darwin’s theory)
This is not a minor problem for Darwinists. As Arthur Eddington himself explained, “if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
Thus, directly contrary to Michael Ruse’s claim that “Darwin’s chief achievement was to show how the design-like nature of organisms – the hand, the eye, the heart – can be explained by unbroken law, without direct need of a reference to a Designer”, the fact of the matter is that Darwin achieved no such thing. Nor have any of Darwin’s modern day followers ever been able to find a ‘unbroken law’ in nature so as to make Darwin’s theory a rigorous science instead of being, basically, an endless exercise in ‘just-so’ story telling:
Moreover, the ‘one general law’ that Charles Darwin himself put forth of “multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die” is far more of an ‘ANTI-morality’ statement about the world than it is a statement of any natural law that could possibly be measured in the laboratory:
To clearly illustrate just how “ANTI-moral” Darwin’s statement actually is, Hitler, almost exactly, echoed Darwin’s own words when he stated, “Nature,,, wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the strong.”
Chilling!
Moreover, Michael Ruse’s claim, via Darwin, that the hand, the eye, the heart, and humans in particular, “can be explained by unbroken law, without direct need of a reference to a Designer” has now been falsified by, none other than, advances in quantum mechanics itself.
Specifically, the late Steven Weinberg, (an atheist) stated, “In the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
As leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Moreover, Anton Zeilinger and company have, as of 2018, pushed the ‘freedom of choice’ loophole back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter(s) in the quantum experiments are truly free.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining ‘freedom of choice’ loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are (indeed) brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself admitted, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Thus in conclusion, Michael Ruse’s claim that Darwin’s ‘chief achievement’ was to find a ‘unbroken law’ in order to explain life, particularly human life, is a patently false claim on Ruse’s part. Darwin certainly did no such thing! Nor have his modern day followers been able to find such a ‘unbroken law’ in order to make Darwin’s theory a science instead of, basically, an endless exercise in ‘just so’ story telling.
Moreover, the fact that there never will be a law of nature that is capable of explaining human life in particular is now established by the fact that it is now demonstrated, (via quantum mechanics), that “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, (and that inclusion of humans into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level, obviously and necessarily, precludes humans from ever being explained by, or caused by, the laws of nature).