Are we special? Or just another species, glorified baboons? “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work,” said Darwin.52 Angel genesis, today’s Darwinists argue, is a most presumptuous theory, not a very “humble” approach to the origin of mankind; we are inordinately prideful to align ourselves with the divine, they say. Jared Diamond calls it “our smug self-image” that makes us believe we “were specially created by God.”53 And this they call anthropocentrism: nothing but vanity, they say, prevents us from realizing that human beings are just another animal. Our hubris “is absurd,” for we are nothing but “creatures of chance.”54
This chapter was written to give the reader an alternative perspective. Your choice: ape or angel.
People often say we will never know about these things. But this time in which we live is the age of truth: we will attain to know all things. It is not so far from reach.
There must be understanding. . . . why else for the universe to utter us into existence?
JACK KERLEY, THE HUNDREDTH MAN
Ashley Montagu, on the preface page of his book, wrote: “There are some anthropologists who declare that it is not the business of anthropology to tell anyone what he was born for. . . . I do not agree. I think one can and should study man in order to learn what he is.”
Sure, man may fit physically into the order of primates; but from his birth he also belongs to the order of angels. We come from a divine root, and we are gods in the making, gods and goddesses in training. It is unlikely that the question of origins will be solved until the science of soul is also understood.
Within his house of clay, there is an everlasting life.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU
Figure 7.10. Es: the unseen worlds, where angels live; all that is beyond. Openings in the circle represent beautiful shafts of light coming from the emancipated heavens.
No, the soul of man cannot be left out of the definition of Homo sapiens. You cannot neuter man of his transcendent nature. Strip man of soul force, and we are back to Asu man—a blank, like a tree. The missing link, as ever, is in the unseen. So let us turn now to that eternal debate, to which chapter 8 is devoted.
8
“THAT MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES”*107
Science vs. Intelligent Design
Think not O man that I did not foresee the time when men should question, and say there is no Great Spirit. . . . For I foresaw these things and provided . . . in advance to show . . . that the cause of evolution came from the Great Spirit and was directed unto righteousness.
OAHSPE, THE LORDS’ FIFTH BOOK 4:21
Here is another hypothetical debate between POE (professor of evolution) and A (adversary).
POE: It is generally agreed that we can rule out extraordinary processes in the ascent of man—touched by nothing more than tangible, observable nature. Some of my colleagues and friends find it appalling that any serious publication would dignify the creationists’ agenda, presenting their views on an equal footing with evolution. And when those uninformed folks say evolution is “just a theory,” this is amazing to scientists. Why, it is a phenomenon, a fact.
THE GOD PARTICLE
A: Each man decides for himself. Some people can picture descent with modification. Others can picture man brought forth by the hand of Creator. Some, like my colleague, John W. White, try to reconcile the two: “It doesn’t matter whether the various human species were natural mutations or special creations. . . . God is the motive force of all history, including evolutionary history.”1
POE: Sorry, but I have to agree with Professor Jerry Coyne and many others besides who see creationism as folly. Evolution is science, not philosophy or belief; it is a child of the scientific method.
Figure 8.1. Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
A: Scientific method? It reads more like rhetoric. The books by Richard Dawkins, although filled with zoological cases (regaling us with long-winded examples of so-called evolution in the animal kingdom—insects, birds, fish, bats, rats, moles, gazelles) still read as turgid, rhetorical tracts, brimming with hypothetical scenarios, impossibly lengthy analogies (highly recommended for insomniacs), mathematical models, arguments from probabilities, analogies, and the composition of “luck”! Not to mention other philosophical intangibles and sci-fi scenarios. Dawkins’s “explanations,” as one biochemist saw it, could be “filed alongside the story of the cow jumping over the moon.”2 In one debate over the God particle, he responded “Why would a theologian have anything to contribute to any worthwhile discussion, on any subject whatever?”3 And in reviewing Richard Milton’s brilliant book, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, he calls the author a “harmless fruitcake [who] needs psychiatric help.”4
POE: Dismissal, condescension, insult, or ridicule certainly should not be the primary weapon. Nevertheless, I do agree with Dawkins that evolution should be taught as science, and intelligent design should be taught as philosophy.
A: But in reality both are philosophy—notwithstanding all the scientific trappings—for they both deal in causality, first causes. With actual scientific evidence admittedly too far removed in the past for direct testing, evolution itself is just as hypothetical as creation-by-design.
POE: We can nonetheless approach the facts by indirect means, and ultimately prove evolution by comparative analysis and extrapolation.
A: Yet evolution, of all scientific theories, is the least provable or proven. You cannot prove, or even demonstrate, the gradual transformation of species, any sooner than opponents can prove creation. It is a matter of ideology. Not science, really.
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
A: Even Dr. Einstein said, famously, life isn’t a crapshoot. Kurt Gödel, mathematical genius, devoted to rationality, and good friend of Einstein, established that mathematical systems are essentially incomplete, simply because—not everything that is true can be proven to be so. It seems that some facts of natural numbers are true but unprovable. Gödel struggled, probably unsuccessfully, with an ontological argument for the existence of God, and also looked into the world of the paranormal; psychic factors and intuition, he thought, might be as important as elementary physics. Brains are a machine, but minds aren’t. Gödel: “I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner . . .the laws [of life] . . . are not mechanical”5; the mind, he thought, is immaterial (incorporeal), not measurable in any orthodox sense.
OK, intelligent design may not be science; it could, though, be the truth. Science can’t explain everything. Paleontology or genetics is only one discipline concerned with the origin of man. The way you are saying “science” or “scientific,” it sounds like you are out to exclude all evidence from other lines of inquiry: oral tradition, ancient tablets, epigraphy, psychogenesis, protohistory, cosmogony, philosophy, and so on. The origin of man is not something anyone can monopolize. And something else: As I see it, we have been laboring under the delusion that science and reality are the same thing—that evolution is objective while creationism is subjective. But either side is a matter of conviction. The materialist’s disbelief, in short, is the belief that no higher power is behind the order of the universe; and its corollary of creation by accident is just as much ideology as creation by design.
POE: Perhaps so, but we have tried to maintain religious neutrality in the study of evolution.
A: Why not let impartial thinking include the possibility of things being created?
POE: God simply does not belong in the sphere of rational discussion. Our parameters must be real—not imagined.
A: People talk about the real world. I wonder if they even know what the real world is. To say that a creator was not involved in any way is, itself, a judgment. There’s no “neutral” position, as you suggest. You know, Darwin turned to materialism, partly in reaction to the fundamentalism of the overbearing Captain Fitzroy, whose conversation and evangelical dogmatism poor Darwin had to endure, in close quarters, for five years on the HMS Beagle. There is also
the matter of Darwin’s father Robert, an overbearing man who was a closet atheist, though maintaining an orthodox appearance. The son would come out of the closet. Indeed, Darwin’s pal and watchdog Thomas Henry Huxley invented the word agnostic, and Darwin cheerfully adopted it. But I’d like to ask: Can science alone clear up all the mysteries of the universe? And how qualified is the agnostic professor—unaware of developments in parascience—to judge questions of cosmogony or supernature or the unseen dimensions?
POE: Ah, but we are concerned with no higher authority than nature herself in this scheme called evolution. Science deals with the material content of the universe and must not overlap with matters spiritual or irrational.
A: I say it is no more presumptuous or irrational to assign the order of the living to a great Designer than to the blind forces of nature, which we are then asked to believe could have accomplished (accidentally) something as complex as the human eye or human brain.
Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving. . . . His origin, growth, hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN
Species are evolutionary accidents.
JERRY COYNE, WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Speciation is an accident.
NILES ELDREDGE, DARWIN: DISCOVERING THE TREE OF LIFE
I know of no reputable science that pins all on accident and randomity. Could mere chance produce elaborate—almost perfect—design? The coordination of parts into a functioning whole is characteristic of intelligence—not blind chance.
POE: You must grasp the way natural selection operates—toward the improbable. Is that not marvelous? Nothing in nature is unlikely!
A: You lost me there.
POE: Let me put it this way: The evolutionist trades design for nature’s power of selection. Indeed, there are scientists who believe in a supreme being but draw the line with creation, giving nature alone that power, for it is utterly unacceptable to bring an unknown deity into the scientific equation.
A: If species traits can be correlated to climate and environment, wouldn’t an intelligent designer be able to do the very same?
The cases of the South American four-eyed frog and the snake-tailed caterpillar raise the possibility that these species exist as we know them today because of an artful plan. A caring higher being could have easily equipped these animals with such features to improve their chances of survival.
BALAZS HORNYANSZKY AND ISTVAN TASI, NATURE’S I.Q.
POE: We must hold supernatural forces in abeyance in order to be scientific, to observe the laws of nature impartially.
A: Nature’s law? Or man’s assumptions? Like the law of selection; the law of succession; the principle of common descent (really, a chain of inferences); the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which, disproven, is now no longer a law; or the law of collateral evolution, which assumes that an alleged common ancestor held the latent possibility for its descendants to manifest a trait it didn’t have!
Thou hast blockaded the way against Me on every side. Thou hast put Me away, and said: Natural law! Moral law! Divine law! Instinct!. . . I say unto thee: I have no laws; I do by virtue of Mine own Presence. I am not far away; behold, I am with thee.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 10:16–20
POE: Let me tell you: No mind planned it.
A: How do you know that? Can it be by sheer chance that human beings ended up on this planet? How could a mindless process produce mind? Impossible. Purposeless order is really a contradiction in terms: organization means a plan. Some of Richard Dawkins’s circuitous arguments could actually be taken to prove the opposite of his belief. The complexity of the eye, for example. It’s really stupid: both sides are using the same examples! ID (Intelligent Design) says life-forms are too organized and complex to have arisen by purely natural circumstances. Evolution says life-forms are too organized and complex to have been created suddenly. To me, the remarkably complex design of organisms coming along by pure chance is actually more irrational than a purposeful, planned genesis.
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
LUNATIC FRINGE
POE: ID is a superstition that has long since been discredited by thinking people. Most intelligent folks frankly think the creationists are gulled, humbugged, duped—in short, religion and its dogmas are not our turf and certainly have no place in science.
A: Let me clarify something, I am using the term believer not to mean church or fundamentalism or Christianity or any other particular creed, but to encompass all—regardless of faith—who trust in a supreme power. That is not the same as superstition. It is faith.
POE: And in contrast, evolution comes from a long tradition of rationalism. Reason veers people to science and empiricism and away from religion and doctrine.
Nothing that is destitute itself of life and reason can generate a being possessed of life and reason.
ZENO
A: Yet reason, deep reason, may also be a path to God. Francis Bacon said of atheism: “A little philosophy makes men atheists; a great deal reconciles them to religion.” It is not the irrational mind, but the rational one, that infers a creator from the grand design of the universe. I am ready to argue that belief is actually part of our makeup. All I’m saying is unbelievers do not have a monopoly on reason! It is no more outlandish or “uncritical” to infer a divine, unknowable hand in all things than it is to strike all things sacred from the record of life. To me, the spontaneous transmutation of species is more a piece of magical thinking than the creation of life by an intelligent designer!
POE: Yet for us scientists, it is standard operating procedure to place ID in the category of mythological and supernatural trappings.
A: Treating it like the tooth fairy or snake oil. This is insulting, as if creationists were kooks or cranks. The pop science mags, especially New Scientist in the UK, are full of demeaning, condescending, and hostile remarks on ID as if it were a nasty piece of work by the lunatic fringe.
POE: Admittedly, the problem for us evolutionists is we cannot prove there is no creator. It cannot be falsified (Popper’s rule). It is beyond the realm of science, in the realm of the invisible, intangible.
A: Well, yes, perhaps the answer does lie beyond the domain of science, and since science divorces itself from religion, it thereby relinquishes the right to declare one way or the other on the existence or nonexistence of a creator. The Cartesian way would be to recognize “a fundamental core of unknowability,” the idea that corporeal beings may be incapable of using reason to discover the sublime. Sometimes hidden things are the most potent—intangible but real.
No man can measure my mysteries.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF SAPHAH EMP’AGATU:1
POE: Science does not traffic in intangibles, unknowables. But what we really dislike is the religious intolerance displayed by fundamentals, especially in the U.S., where ID advocates see the hand of a higher being throughout nature, making scientific investigation pointless. Settling for a given such as an unseen intelligence would be, well, just giving up.
Organisms are not less mechanistic for being manifestations of the Creative Power.
MARTIN RUDWICK, THE MEANING OF FOSSILS: EPISODES IN THE HISTORY OF PALAEONTOLOGY
A: Nonsense. Even if Creator made this world, it is still subject to scientific scrutiny! Natural law is not suspended by an original act of creation. You know, Schopenhauer called Darwin’s Origin “soapsuds,” missing the “hidden force.” Adam Sedgwick, a beloved teacher of Darwin’s, regarded Origin as “a string of air bubbles.” Sedgwick, “perhaps the best teacher in England,”6 concluded that man was utterly unaccounted for by the “laws of nature.” My point: there is nothing unscientific about God.
Figure 8.2. Intelligent design. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at t
he work of the Creator. . . . A bit of science distances one from God, but much science nears one to Him.
LOUIS PASTEUR, QUOTED IN THE LITERARY DIGEST
There is no conflict between transcendent knowledge and science, only the conflict we ourselves have created in our darkness.
POE: You must realize that science is mechanistic and religion isn’t; science is neutral of belief.
[T]he stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
SIR JAMES H. JEANS, THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE
A: I’ll grant you this: Evolution is the greatest triumph of atheism in the world today.
POE: Would you deny that man can be known from his parts: femur, dental arch, cranial bones, genes?
A: This gives us materialism per se, reductionism, which will never produce a satisfactory account of the origin of mind. Never. As long as science and religion maintain their apartheid, the inexplicable will remain just that. The failed marriage of science and religion has a lot to do with intransigence on both sides. It is emphatically not due to any intrinsic conflict.
OF ALL THE ANIMALS
We are not unique. We are animals.
COLIN PATTERSON, EVOLUTION
A: Isn’t man worthy of a bit more than mere biological, zoological explanation? Should all scientific research be limited to the material, visible realm?
POE: Yes. Nonphysical ideas should not be admitted to science.
A: Like mesons and dark matter? Or subatomic particles? Or neutrinos—particles with no mass, that move about with the speed of light?
POE: To Darwin, humans were quite simply domesticated animals; their social instincts, not really unique, are deeply rooted in animal behavior. We are actually more like chimps than chimps are like lower monkeys, according to degrees of consanguinity. You may not like it, but Boule saw comparisons between the most intelligent modern apes and “savages in the natural state.” Darwin himself found the rudiments of architecture, dress, and even language among the pongids.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 27
