The tragic death of thought

“Your name?”

“Luke Kinsfield.”

“Year?”

“First year.”

“Does anyone else think the same as you Mr Kinsfield?”

“I can’t say.”

“We do not entertain the notion of a God,” said the judge. “That was declared to be an absolute eons ago.¹ The point of these hallowed halls of learning is to allow the greatness of human thought to captivate these simplistic explanations and illuminate them with the brilliance of human science and technology. You belong neither to this place nor this age.”

“Your mind has succumbed to the superstitions of a past age and, as such, you belong with those of a simpler, more neurotic disposition.”

“The whole theory of evolution is built on a chance happening, which we, as students, are expected to ‘believe’.² When we do have a problem believing, you assure us that it’s only natural as the human mind is actually unable to fully grasp concepts like infinite time or space. Yet you dictate that God could not have created the earth. The rationale? If there actually is a God, then He too would have only come about by a selective evolutionary process over a humongous period of time. Dare I suggest that an infinite God would, by definition, belong to a realm of understanding that is way beyond the thought processes of man? Surely your dogmatism in this area is no more or less than a sort of ‘scientific blasphemy’!

“You cannot explain to us where life comes from, nor can you give a scientific reason for where the encyclopedic information comes from in every cell.³ The expected proof of evolution from the fossil record has never materialised—instead we are given the explanation that intermediate stages have ‘disappeared’ because they failed to be preserved as fossils, and that is supposed to be acceptable?⁴ You add and subtract millions of years to make the facts fit your theory. But the truth of the matter is that you do this to mask the weaknesses in your own argument.

“And you succeed—the average Joe is not going to question you. Some excellent mathematicians don’t hold you in such high esteem, though, and have deemed all your chance happenings statistically impossible.⁵ You still don’t fully understand how the bee flies and you spin an exasperatingly ridiculous yarn about how the peacock got its tail.⁶

Dignity, hope and justice for all mankind is now just a faint memory, taken out and dusted off at concerts by phenomenally rich celebrities. You can keep your ‘brilliant illumination’, and while the spotlight is on, why don’t you have a good hard look at the damage you have done to the human spirit.”

Referenced quotations

1. “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that 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, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” Prof. Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and one of the world’s leaders in promoting evolutionary biology; Billions and Billions of Demons, The New York Review, 9 January, 1997, p. 31. Return to text.
2. “We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but not too much. The question is, how much? The immensity of geological time entitles us to postulate more improbable coincidences than a court of law would allow, but even so there are limits. Cumulative selection is the key to all our modern explanations of life. It strings a series of acceptable lucky events (random mutations) together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished product carries the illusion of being very very lucky indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone, even given a time span millions of time longer than the age of the universe so far. Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started, and we cannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in the origin of cumulative selection itself.” Prof. Richard Dawkins, former holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986, p. 139. See also this response, <https://creation.com/a-response-to-richard-dawkins-the-blind-watchmaker>. Return to text.
3. “The computer on which I am writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes (one byte is used to hold each character of text). The computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding my words is in an array of some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells have each more than a thousand ‘electric wires’ connecting them to other neurones. Moreover at the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire computer.” Prof. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986, Preface, p. xvii. Return to text.
4. “No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must first have been formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient and ancestral forms long since become extinct.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (6^th edition), Everyman’s Library, 1928, p. 170. Return to text.
5. “ … there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is … an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the earth [by chance, naturalistic processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.” Professors (and competent mathematicians) Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe; Evolution from Space, 1981, p. 176.
   
   Dr. H. B. Holroyd, mechanical engineer and retired head of the Department of Physics, Augustana College, Illinois, USA., independently came to similar conclusions: “The Darwinian error was caused by the failure to use necessary mathematics. … “Darwinism is physical and mathematical nonsense, and it is logical nonsense as well, for a sound thinker does not assume anything which must be deduced from his theory. Darwinism is, indeed, far more a blunder than a theory, and physical scientists should have shown this clearly and effectively decades ago.” Darwinism is Physical and Mathematical Nonsense, Creation Research Society Quaterly 9(1):5–13, 1972. Return to text.
6. “For me the peacock’s fan has the unmistakable stamp of positive feedback. It is clearly the product of some kind of uncontrolled, unstable explosion that took place in evolutionary time. So thought Darwin in his theory of sexual selection and so, explicitly, and in so many words, thought the greatest of his successors, R.A. Fisher. After a short piece of reasoning he concluded (in his book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection): ‘ … plumage developed in the male, and sexual preference for such development in the female, must thus advance together, and so long as the process is unchecked by severe counter selection, will advance with ever increasing speed. In the total absence of such checks, it is easy to see that the speed of development will be proportional to the development already attained, which will therefore increase with time exponentially, or in geometric progression.’ ” Prof. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986, p. 199.
   
   In contrast to this story, is the opinion of this expert engineer and biomimetics researcher (mimicking nature’s designs): "My favourite evidence is the peacock tail feather. It has beautiful iridescent colours produced by thin film interference. The feathers have layers of keratin with precision thickness comparable to the wavelengths of the individual colours of light. The feather barbs are also incredibly well aligned to produce mathematical patterns like ellipsoids and cardioids. The design of peacock feathers is so precise that engineers cannot replicate it. Yet the feathers seem to exist purely for decoration! I think that the peacock feather shows not only that there is a Creator but that the Creator is supremely wise and caring. I have no doubt that God wanted humans to enjoy the beauty of the peacock feather." Prof. Stuart Burgess; Expert Engineer Eschews “Evolutionary Design”, Creation 32(1):35–37, 2010. Return to text.
7. “Darwin’s theory offered a resolution to humanity’s perennial crisis of guilt. By proposing that each organism’s drive for self-containment actually benefited the species as a whole, Darwin found a convenient formula for expiating the accumulating guilt of an age when self-interest and personal aggrandizement ruled supreme.” Jeremy Rifkin, socialist and critic of social Darwinism; Algeny, Viking Press, New York, 1983, p. 95. He also wrote (p. 89): “The bourgeoisie was in need of a ‘proper’ justification for the new factory system with its dehumanising process of division of labour. By claiming that a similar process was at work in nature, Darwin provided an ideal rationale for those capitalists hell-bent on holding the line against any fundamental challenge to the economic hierarchy they managed and profited from.”
   
   Jacques Barzan writes: “In every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power, and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens—all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, or even before, invoked Spencer and Darwin which was to say science incarnate. … Race was biological, it was sociological; it was Darwinian.” Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a heritage (2nd edition), Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1958, p. 94–95. Return to text.