Koonin: “We don’t know evolution is true.”
I like Eugene Koonin. As we have pointed out many times on these pages, he is refreshingly candid about the utter bankruptcy of the “chance dunnit” origin of life hypothesis. To be sure, he has a Loony Tunes answer for that difficulty (the multiverse dunnit). That’s OK. We can argue about that another day. At least he admits the truth in regard to the key question — if we are talking about the probablistic resources available on this planet in the last four billion years, “chance dunnit” is a non-starter.
Thanks to UD News, we now know that Koonin is equally candid about the sheer idiocy of assertions like this:
The statement that organisms have descended with modifications from common ancestors—the historical reality of evolution—is not a theory. It is a fact, as fully as the fact of the earth’s revolution about the sun.
Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (1998)
Contrast Futuyma with Koonin’s recent statement in the Huffington Post:
Indeed, if you want to be rigorous in a way, there is nothing we can know about the past. Everything we’re saying about the past is inference — yet, inference is not a derogatory term. We are very confident about much of this inference. We are confident that all animals had a common ancestor about 700 million years ago, a little less. Although, do we know that? No. And no one ever is going to find that ancestor and experiment on that ancestor. In that sense, we do not know that.
We “know” that the earth orbits the sun because we have observed it doing so. Koonin admits that when we are talking about Darwinian evolution we do not “know” that it happened at all, if by “know” we mean “observed.” To be sure, as Koonin goes on to say, many people infer that Darwinian evolution happened. But I take it the whole point of Koonin’s observation is that inference, even a very confidently held inference, has lower epistemic status than an observation. If Koonin is right about this (and he surely is) it follows that Futuyma’s statement is blithering nonsense.
Koonin: “Nevertheless, we have absolutely no doubt that evolution is true.”
Given what Koonin has just said, you might infer that he holds his beliefs about evolution with some degree of epistemic modesty. But you would be wrong. The very next thing he says is:
Do we have doubts? No. Reasonable evolutionary biologists have no doubts about that.
Let me get this straight Eugene. You have said two things: (1) You don’t know (indeed, in principle, cannot know) that evolution is true. (2) You do not have the slightest doubt that evolution is true.
How can both of those statements be true? There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable answer to that question. The statements are made at different levels of metaphysics.
The first statement is based on the mundane day-to-day level where the nuts and bolts of science are put together. At that level evolution is a historical science, and like all historical sciences it suffers from this limitation: All of the facts you are trying to explain with your theory have already occurred and therefore you cannot observe them. Since you cannot observe what happened, the best you can do is infer what happened from the evidence left behind.
The second statement, in contrast, is made at the “worldview” level of metaphysics. At that level Koonin is following the same lodestar as Richard Lewontin when he famously wrote:
we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations . . . Moreover, that materialism is absolute . . .
Phillip Johnson replied:
And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes capable of producing complicated organisms . . .
There you go. Koonin’s refreshingly honest approach to science allows him to say that we cannot “know” that evolution is true. But his devotion to the god of materialism compels him to say that he cannot doubt it either. As Johnson said, if materialism is true, it follows as simple logic that something like Darwinism must also be true. In summary, Koonin’s first statement is based on his analysis of the facts. His second statement is based on his faith commitments.
Surely Koonin would admit that at the very least alternate explanations are possible, even if they do not seem to him to be plausible. And if an alternate explanation is possible, should there not be room for at least a teeny tiny bit of doubt in his preferred explanation? No, his god is very demanding and will countenance no doubt.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying faith is a bad thing. Indeed, it is inevitable. Everyone has faith commitments. But it is one thing to have a blind unreasoned faith, and it is something altogether different to have a reasoned and reasonable faith. I wonder whether Koonin has examined his faith commitments critically. Because as we have explained on these pages many times, materialism is a snake that eats its own tail. It is ultimately incoherent, because if it is true there is no way we could ever know that it is true. And I wonder why someone would give their unquestioned allegiance to such a god.