Dr Greg Bahnsen - Is Evolution Scientific?: Is Evolution Scientific? (Part 1)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Scientific in its nature and origin. And I suppose then some apology is called for. Why, by apology, I don't mean to say I'm sorry, but some defense, I mean some explanation. Why would you think that I have anything to offer on that matter, apart from maybe some training in Christian apologetics On the question of evolution, what is it that I have to offer you? Well, I want to suggest that what I have to offer you is going to go to the very heart of the matter in the debate over evolution. However, because many people don't understand the nature of that debate or that dispute, they're not aware of the fact that that the philosopher's perspective and what you might be able to offer, even apart from technical training, is going to decide the issue having to do with evolution. Philosophy used to include the natural sciences. We go far enough back the pre Socratic days, the Milesian philosophers and philosophers like Democritus, who give us our physical theory that we call atomism. Or even if we look at the days of Aristotle, you will see that the natural sciences were considered part of the domain of philosophy. And even as we move ahead in Western history, come up into something closer to the modern era, to the time of Bacon and Pascal and Leibniz, many philosophers at that time were still doing work, creative and important work, in the natural sciences and math and so forth. But even apart from the historical pedigree philosophers have for talking about natural science, the fact of the matter is that the philosopher's job, among other things, is to cross examine theories. You see, a philosopher need to be trained specifically in law in order to do cross examination of legal theory. Nor does the philosopher need to be trained in a natural science, although he should probably know the terms and something elementary about it in order to cross examine theories. In the natural sciences, philosophers examine theories, hypotheses, worldviews, if you will, to see whether they are cogent, whether they are coherent, whether the underlying assumptions or the nature of the theory comports with what it says it is. We look for good argumentation, we try to detect fallacious reasoning. That's part of the task of philosophy. And so I think it is part of the philosopher's job to be looking at the theory of evolution. And you'll see in a few moments, I trust, at the end of my lecture, when philosophy did turn a discerning and critical eye to the theory of evolution, what appeared to be this huge monster, this theory which no one dare accuse of being false or even examine as though it might be false, this overwhelming cultural paradigm of evolution that has got our universities in its grip, proved to be nothing, not even a pussycat. I mean, it turned out to not have any scientific credentials at all. And that is the shocking thing. That's what I'm here to talk about tonight. When I ask, is evolution scientific? My answer is going to be, no, it is not. It is not a scientific theory. And I'm going to drive that home and drive that home and drive that home tonight. Some of you will finally be exhausted by the end of this lecture saying, okay, you've made your point, but I want it to be something that sinks in deep. Because the reason why Christians so often are one intimidated or two driven back by those who propound the theory of evolution is that they do not know what they are dealing with. And as long as you think, well, the scientific facts support evolution, here I am stuck holding on to my views by faith, then you're going to be at a great disadvantage as a defender of the faith and someone who wants to set forth the Christian world and life view. In Hebrews 11. Three, we read these words by faith. We understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God so that what is seen has not been made out of the things which appear. Why do we believe in creation? We believe in creation by faith. We believe this because God has declared it in his own word. And we trust the word of God. And the word of God tells us that this world was made by the word of God so that the things that now appear did not arise from those things which we see. This world cannot be accounted for naturalistically. You cannot expect to take present forces and those things which we now encounter in the world, and in terms of them alone, account for the origin of the world by faith. We believe that the world was created by the word of God so that this world and the things that we experience cannot be understood, cannot be accounted for, did not arise from the things which appear. Since the Bible declares we believe this by faith, and many Christians think faith is just a matter of some kind of emotional leap without any regard for evidence or proof or intellect, for that matter. It's easy when we come up against the naturalistic scientist who has his own convictions about evolution, to be intimidated because the evolutionist wants you to believe that his theory is scientific, whereas you're just like some Sunday school deluded child who believes these things by faith. And so if I can Dislodge that one antithesis, that one contrast. Tonight then, we will take a very large step towards seeing why evolution is not a problem at all. In the second lecture, I'll get into some of the specific problems. The theory of evolution. So let's begin by just listing what people think a scientific theory is like. And then I'm going to talk about the theory of evolution as theories go. And let you be the judge as to its scientific credentials. People consider science to be something naturalistic. It's not scientific to be hankering for supernatural explanations. Science is to be naturalistic, not something that goes beyond the natural order or that appeals to that which goes beyond the natural order. Moreover, that is scientific, which is impersonal. We aren't to look at the world that we live in and think of it as somehow having personal attributes. And specifically the world we look at is not to be seen as having some direction or purpose or aim or design. To see things in a scientific light is to take every fact as a brute fact in itself, not try to connect it and see some kind of pattern and then personify that pattern. To use the fancy terminology, a scientific explanation of what happens is not or is non teleological. The word teleological means oriented toward a goal, that which strives after a specific purpose or that which is aimed at a specific end. Scientific explanations are not supposed to be teleological explanations. They are not supposed to be explaining the natural world as though it's moving toward a specific end or has inherent in it purpose or direction. By teleological. I just put in parentheses here, Remember, that pertains to whatever has aim or purpose or design in it. Moreover, and this will be more readily understandable by you. Something is scientific if it's not religious. People in our culture expect that scientists are not going to be affected by prejudices having to do with the nature of reality as a whole or God's existence, or whatever that may be. In fact, to be scientific in all honesty means you don't have any prejudices. You're supposed to be open minded and neutral in your investigation. Specifically, a particular theory is scientific or it falls within the realm of natural science if it is tested in an observational way. One has got to go out and have observational evidence either through yourself or through others. You must see or hear or taste or touch and bring that evidence of the senses. Bring perceptual or observational evidence to bear on it, rather than coming to your conclusions in a speculative way. To be scientific then, is to be observational. Not speculative. And then one other crucial characteristic of scientific theories as they're usually understood is that a scientific theory is one that's not propounded dogmatically but in a tentative way and in a way which leaves it testable by our observation. Okay, so as we get started, when I ask the question, is evolution scientific? When you listen to those who propound not only the theory of evolution, but when they set science over against other approaches to human knowledge and to human conduct, you will find that the scientific approach is usually described in one, if not all of these ways. To be scientific is to be naturalistic. It's to have an impersonal view of that which you're studying. It's not to have a teleological or a purpose of explanation of what we see in the world. It's not to be religious. It's to approach things without prejudices. It's to be observational in your approach to evidence rather than speculative. And it's to set forth theories that are not dogmatic but testable by faith. We believe the world was formed by the word of God. And now when you go off to the university, you'll be told, oh, yes, you believe those things by faith. But here at the university, we need to be scientific. Let's look at the history of evolution and the nature of the evolutionary hypothesis and see what conclusion we come to about that particular conflict or alleged contrast between the factual approach of science and the faith approach of the Christian. In the course of the 19th century. In the 1800s, the scientific approach to man's understanding of his own past came increasingly to dominate over a supernaturalistic outlook, and particularly to dominate over a traditional religious belief. Darwin's theory of evolution saw man as unmistakably part of the order of nature, unmistakably part of the history of nature. That is, man is natural in his physical as well as his mental and moral characteristics. Everything about man was to be explained naturalistically, although there was, of course, a contrast and a conflict to be found between religion and science prior to the evolutionary controversy. Darwin's theory elevated the issue of the relationship of religion and science to the level of a major international cultural concern. It's as though all of those issues that had predated it finally came to a head. And in this one particular issue, the notion of naturalism versus supernaturalism, the debate between those two would finally be decided, with all of the ramifications for man's understanding of himself, of his culture, of his history, and how he should live his life, their lives following from that. And so for good or for ill, the year 1859, when Darwin published his book the Origin of Species, became a significant turning point in the history of man's thought, particularly in the history of the way man thinks about himself and about his world. Previous to 1859, the diversity that we find in the world, all the different kinds of plants and animals and so forth, the diversity that we find in the world was interpreted and set in order and seen as part of the harmony of God's creation of the world revealed in the Scriptures. Not only that, the orderly and harmonious condition of things had been one of the major evidences advanced by Christian defense defenders of the faith for the truth of the Bible. Darwinian evolution threatened that outlook on the natural world as well as threatened the ability to use the world as a proof for God's existence. Darwinian evolution threatened to eradicate the notion of any creative design in the world, saying that we can explain the natural order without reference to God's creative purposes. And in that sense, Darwinianism would pave the way for the full ascendancy of an unadulterated naturalistic view of the world and man. I don't want to make Darwin out to be the be all and end all of the debate between religion and science, but it becomes a very significant turning point in the history of man because at this point, if man can be understood naturalistically and his history can be interpreted naturalistically, then we're on the verge of giving up any supernatural conception of this world at all. Charles Hodge, the well known Princeton theologian, wrote a book entitled what is Darwinism? And he answered the question what is Darwinism? By saying it is, very simply put, atheist. Now in our second lecture, we're going to get into the idea of theistic evolution. But you need to understand that at the beginning of the conflict between Christianity and, and evolution, it wasn't so much an issue of what version of creation do you want? How is it that God went about making the world? It was seen for, I think in essence what it is as a conflict between atheism and theism, between naturalism and supernaturalism. Darwin himself formulated his fundamental theory of evolution within two years of ending an exploration that he took on a ship called the Beagle. He went down to the Galapagos Islands and thereabouts. And by that time, by the time that he had formulated the doctrine of evolution, he had also in his personal life come to declare his rejection of the doctrine of everlasting punishment. He called it tongue in cheek, a damnable doctrine to believe that God would damn people for all eternity. He, moreover, had rejected the truthfulness of the Gospels as they recounted the miracles of Christ. You have to understand then that Darwin himself had something of an axe to grind with the supernaturalistic outlook of the Bible. He wasn't somebody who was utterly indifferent or neutral on religious questions. By the time he wrote the Origin of Species, he was a rigorous opponent of any divine intervention. The course of nature. He went on to call the doctrine of special creation, and I quote, a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. I want you to remember those words because I intend to have them come back and haunt this man for making that kind of horrible remark. He says, the Dr. Creation is a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. Darwin wanted to banish any thought of divine control of the world and the direction of history. And so he said, and I quote him again, no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations in the natural order were intentionally and specially guided. Darwin was at best a deist, someone who does not believe God is actively in control of and intervenes in the the natural world. In the course of history, he was at best the deist. But he later abandoned even deism for sheer agnosticism. And he said, I quote, the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us. So you need to understand that. Darwin, you see, ultimately becomes agnostic. He doesn't even want to say God is, in a deistic way, the one who winds up the universe, sets it in order, then stands back and it evolves and develops in its own way. Darwin says we are not able to say anything about the origin of this world itself. Now, if you have any training in apologetics along the lines that we tried to use in the study center, I trust at this point you see an immediate problem. Darwin is a rationalist. He believes that there are laws that, that give uniformity to nature in terms of which we can predict what's going to happen and explain what has happened in the past. He's very rationalistic about the way nature works. But on the ultimate question of where the natural order comes from, he's irrationalistic. No one can know. It's impossible. It's, as far as he's concerned, a chance universe. And so on the firm foundation of chance, we have built a world that operates not randomly and by chance, but in terms of irrefutable order and predictability and determinism. You have indeterminism leading to determinism. The man who formulated the theory of natural selection simultaneously with Charles Darwin, his name was Alfred Wallace, broke with Darwin and announced that natural selection does not apply to man. Wallace said, does not apply to man's mental powers. And he argued that man's spiritual essence came into action at the appearance of man. That is, Wallace favored a theistic evolutionary approach. And so he said, and I quote Wallace now, a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose. When Darwin heard the that this co formulator of the theory of natural selection had written these words, he immediately decried this as a failure of nerve on the part of Wallace. He called it a disdainful hankering for miracles. A disdainful hankering for miracles. That here you have the natural world evolving, doing its own thing, and then at a certain point God intervenes, there's the miracle and makes man a special spiritual kind of being with the mind and morality and so forth. You see, as far as Darwin was concerned, nothing was to interfere with the determinism of natural law. Nothing was to break the continuity of man with the animal kingdom from which he evolved. There was to be no special creation at all. It should be obvious from what I've said thus far that the theory of evolution was a far reaching religious theory. Then it was certainly religious in its commitments and religious in its implications. It had definite theological assumptions and it had theological consequences. You can't overlook that. Here's Darwin. He doesn't say, well take this theory and if you want to put a religious garb on it, that's fine. When Wallace does that, Darwin explodes. Don't go hankering after miracles. We can't know about the origin of the world beyond what we see in the natural order and how things are progressing in our own day. Evolutionists have made it rather clear that the theory of evolution is anti religious in its character. In 1873, President Bernard of Columbia university explained, and I quote him, if organic evolution were true, then the existence of God was impossible. The German materialist Buchner went on to say that that is exactly what evolution does. It proves that there is no God. Only a year after Darwin published the origin of speaker, Asa Gray wrote, and I quote him, the proposition that things and events in nature were not designed to be so if logically carried out, is doubtless tantamount to atheists. If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected. No argument is needed to show that such belief is atheistic. The southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney made a similar observation. He said, if you persist in recognizing nothing but natural forces, it will land you if you are consistent nowhere short of absolute atheism. Darwinism was trying to push a naturalistic philosophy or worldview. And though some people tried to dress it up, put it under the same yoke with theism, the fact is that in and of itself it aims at a naturalistic and thus atheistic view of, of the universe. Darwinism attempted to obliterate divine revelation, obliterate the intervention of the creator in this world, and to obliterate our ability to know that there was a creator who even started things out. And so Charles Hart said the system is thoroughly atheistic as much as that of Epicurus and Comte, the positivist of France. Think for a minute here about T.H. huxley, the man who was called Darwin's bulldog in the last century. Huxley fully realized that by his endorsement of evolution he had taken up arms against the teaching of scripture. He realized he had chosen certain assumptions and certain methods and that he had proceeded upon a journey to explore the province of natural knowledge. And then I'd like to quote him. I think you'll find this interesting, he said. Yet I found that whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall, formidable looking fence, confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way. Before me stood the thorny barrier with its commendatory notice board. No thoroughfare by order of Moses. The only alternatives were to give up my journey, which I was not minded to do, or to break the fence down and go through it. I mean, when you have people who are defending the theory saying things like that with the literary flourish that you find it should be obvious to us, when people pretend that evolution is just a neutral scientific attempt to explain things, that they aren't telling you the whole story. Evolution from the very beginning is marked in its original author, and the ones who defended his theory is marked by an anti religious motivation and a prejudice. And so Huxley preferred to stick to his own naturalistic presuppositions and thus said I had to denounce mosaic teaching about the creation of the world, that if my approach to science was going to be pursued, I had to give up Moses. So we should understand that when Darwin promulgated his theory of evolution, he was not riding simply on his scientific credentials. He was, as it were, body surfing on a wave of anti religious sentiment. And that that wave gave strength to the theory far more than did any of the empirical or scientific evidence that he could offer. We'll see more of that in, in a few moments. Let me quote W.T. jones. Those of you who are students of philosophy will know that name. He's one of the leading writers in the history of philosophy in our century, has a five volume set on the history of Western philosophy that's considered fairly standard in many of your colleges and universities. And he writes in his history of philosophy, as we've pointed out, in the 19th century the concept of development was in the air. Darwinism caught this interest and focused it on a specific biological problem. In doing so it brought to bear an immense amount of concrete evidence. And so proved, he puts in scare quotes, proved what had earlier been only a philosophical hypothesis. So here's this person who has no sympathy for Christianity, admitting that if you know the history of thought, you realize that Darwin was just riding the crest of a wave. That philosophers in the 19th century have been proposing what we call developmental theories of reality. That reality is constantly in process, that it's constantly developing. Darwin comes along and he just focuses this philosophy, this way of looking at reality on a specific biological question. And so it appears to people he's being scientific, he's proving something, when in fact he's just giving expression to a worldview, a perspective or a philosophy, a way of looking at things. Let me go back to Huxley for a minute and quote him further. Huxley says we wanted not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions. The origin of the Origin of Species by Darwin. The origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did us the immense service of freeing us forever from the dilemma. Refuse to accept the Christian hypothesis and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? These are his own words. He says the reason Darwin caught on is because he gave us a way out. Now we don't have to answer this challenge. And if you reject the Christian view, what do you have to put in its place? You see, whether it was true or not, Darwin's theory revealed a way to avoid creationism. And so Huxley hailed the Origin of Species as, and I quote him, a flash of light which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road that whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. Yeah, that says it all Darwinism was going his way. It may not be home, it may not be direct, but that's the way he wanted to go. So it was like a flash of light to him. And so Wilbert Rush correctly analyzes the situation when in his article Darwinism Science in the Bible, he writes so it seems as if Darwin's prime claim to fame lies in this. That at the precise time when fear and dislike of God was on the increase, he happened to synthesize the previous evolution theories into a single presentation, clothing it in a hypothesis that seemed adequate to explain the marvelous adaptation of living things by the mere action of natural forces without the necessity of bringing in divine intervention. George Bernard Shaw put it very well. He said the world jumped at Darwin and well it did. You may not know this on the day that Darwin's Origin of species appeared, November 24, 1859, printer had made 1250 copies, quite a large run for that day. It sold out the first day as though the world wasn't waiting for Darwin, wasn't ready to leap at this, as Huxley put it, bright light that was going its way. Darwinism, see, it's just too convenient if you know the history of thought. When you look at this, other things like why was Darwinism so popular? The reason Darwinism was so popular is because what it gave to men was an attempt to campaign for naturalism, for naturalism, over against the supernatural explanation of man and his world. And so notice the campaigning nature of Darwinism and notice that it was motivated by anti religious prejudice. Is Darwinism non religious? Oh, you cannot in all honesty say that. Even unbelievers will not say that. They'll say it of course was religious, not in the sense that it bowed down to some God or had some ritual, but it was religious because it had a commitment on religious issues that it was pursuing. Moreover, Darwin did not merely introduce a restricted biological hypothesis in his theory of evolution. What Darwin introduced was a complete way of looking at reality, what we call a worldview. And the popularity of his ideas, his evolutionary worldview, brought about a cultural revolution in the way in which people understand reality, brought about a new paradigm for understanding the world. And that was the paradigm of constant process and development. Darwin shifted attention away from the model of the world that saw things according to certain types and classes, saw, if you will, a kind of permanence in the way the world works and the way things exist in it. He shifted attention away from that view of reality to the idea that the world is in constant flux. Now you see the idea was one of transition. Everything's in transition, everything is developing, everything is evolving. In fact, that has to be true of man's morals as well. That has to be the view of man's society in his social mores. That has to be the view of man's state in his constitutions. Everything changes. Isn't that true? You know, the people today don't think of anything being permanent or set or unchangeable. Everything's up for grabs, everything's in flux, everything passes. Well, that isn't the way people have always approached the nature of reality. But you see, evolution pushes that along, gives you not just a theory about biology, but a theory about the nature of reality as a whole. And where does this theory of nature as a whole come from? It doesn't come from examining the facts of our experience. You'll find that this naturalistic, evolutionary, or if you will, evolving developmental understanding of reality can be found as early as the pre Socratic philosophers. That's why it's always just a little bit, you know, humorous to somebody who's a student of the history of philosophy to see people get all excited about evolution. Here's this new thing, theory, new theory, nothing. And Aximander promulgated it years ago, many years before Christ, before Plato. There were others as well, Empedocles. The difference is that when the philosophers did it, it seemed like a speculative way to understand the whole of reality. When Darwin did it, people thought, this is scientific. Now we're getting down to the details and the facts of observation. But in the nature of the case, evolution could not be detailed and observational because what it's talking about is the whole of reality and the way we approach it and understand it. And nobody has eyeball observational experience of the whole of reality and how we're supposed to approach it. But you see, as long as people thought, well, he's doing science, when in fact what he was pushing is a philosophy, then of course they're buying a new paradigm without even knowing it and buying it under the credentials of, well, this looks very scientific. Darwin's success in advancing his evolutionary argument rested completely upon his proposal of a mechanism for evolution. Others had believed in evolution. Darwin, however, offered what seemed to be a scientific explanation of it. He offered a mechanism for evolution, the mechanism of natural selection. The vast variety of species which exist or have existed have not been created in a special fashion by God. But Darwin said they have arisen over time by the operation of natural causes. And the machinery of this evolution was not the guiding hand of A personal creator, but rather natural selection. In the struggle for existence, the fitter species will survive to propagate their kind and thus inevitably replace those species that are less fit and bring it about. That all of life will tend to get better and better because the fitter will survive and the less fit will die out. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest made the Genesis story superfluous. Now we don't need a creator God who makes all the diverse kinds of animals, plants, and so forth. Now we've got natural selection that can account for it. Naturalism could now become the victor philosophically because we have the facts, the mechanism that will drive out the traditional dogma and and religious convictions about God. At least that's the way it would seem. Until someone will offer some serious philosophical attention to the theory of evolution itself. The alleged victory of scientific naturalism over theological supernaturalism, which people so readily attribute to Darwin's theory of evolution, bears scrutiny. And when you look at it, you'll see that the natural study of hard facts refutes not the theological dogmas of the Bible, but refutes nothing at all, because there was no natural study of hard facts that supported the theory of evolution in the first place. I'm going to wait till my second lecture to talk about some of the scientific evidence that evolution has trouble with and just stick right now for the remainder of this lecture to analyzing the nature of the theory of evolution itself. I want you to notice first that evolution is not a testable scientific hypothesis. It is not a testable scientific hypothesis. It is rather a philosophical vision. It is a perspective that is preferred by some men to the biblical doctrine of creation. And ironically, the evolutionary theory does not end up defeating the notion of creative design as we see it taught in the Bible. It doesn't get rid of the idea of a teleological world. It rather reintroduces the notion of design in a metaphorical way and a naturalistic way. That is, evolution doesn't get rid of a designer, it just makes nature the designer rather than God. And in the nature of the case, pardon the pun, naturalists aren't allowed to import that kind of designer, and yet they keep talking about it. So let's note that evolution was a thoroughly speculative theory in its origin. Evolution was first proposed by philosophers, not by scientists. The philosophical climate of Darwin's day was characterized by a view that was against the idea of a transcendent God intervening in the world. It was a philosophical milieu that emphasized dynamic and monistic process and was materialistic. Philosophers Like Kant in Spinoza and Fichte and Goethe and Krauss and Hegel and Feuerbach and Engels and Marx and Diderot and La Mettrie and de Holbach and Bouc? Ner. All of them proposed something that was naturalistic, materialistic and developmental in terms of how to account for reality and man's place in it. These are all philosophers who have said this. And so you'll notice in 1861, year following or the year following the publication of Darwin's book in The Edinburgh Review, Volume 3, there is a reviewer who takes Darwin to task sharply. His name was Richard Owen. Because when Darwin explained the historical background to the Origin of Species, he didn't make any mention of his philosophical precursors. And so he was sharply criticized very early. Within a year you have a reviewer saying, Darwin, you talk about the background of this theory. You make it sound like it's scientific, that all of a sudden you've come up with this. We know it's been around for a long time. The theory of evolution had its philosophical precursors and was encouraged more and more not by the scientific evidence but by the defection of theologians who were committed to, to a higher critical view of the Bible, who were unwilling to defend the historical authority of Scripture and the scientific accuracy of its teaching. Darwin came later. Darwin was the Johnny come. Lately in this process. You already have the philosophers talking about developmentalism, materialism and naturalism. You have the theologians giving up the defense of the historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible. And then Darwin shows up on the scene and, and says, oh well, here's a scientific explanation for where man came from. The theory of evolution was not only speculative in its origin, as we've said already, was anti religious in its motivation. And this is the very embarrassing thing. This speculative, anti religious theory has been and continues to be maintained by men who recognize that it is contrary to, to the known facts or principles of scientific investigation. Men who have acknowledged the scientific problems with the theory, nevertheless hold on to it tenaciously and will not let the counter evidence refute the theory that indicates that it is what we call presuppositional in its nature. It's being held as an elementary assumption. So that when counter evidence is brought against it, people will say, well, I see that there's a problem here, but I'd rather hold onto my assumption and expect that the counter evidence will be explained away someday than to say that my assumption has been refuted. It is presuppositional in nature. It is, if you will A paradigm, a way to think about the world and to organize the facts about the world. It is not a theory that arises from the facts, nor is it a theory that is controlled by the facts themselves. Quoting from the Encyclopedia Philosophy, an article by Jack Kaminsky where he observes, it is fairly clear that the theory of evolution had the same logical status for Spencer, an early evolutionist, as the dialectic had for Hegel. These are damning words. The dialectic was Hegel's way of organizing all the facts of history and the direction of history. Hegel was once. This is probably apocryphal, but it captures the spirit of things Hegel was once told by a student. But the facts don't fit your dialectic, Herr Professor. And to which Hegel is supposed to have said, then the facts be hungry, because you see, I've got a system for organizing things and if something doesn't fit in with it, then it won't be called a fact. And so Kaminsky says, it is fairly clear that the theory of evolution had the same logical status for Spencer as the dialectic had for Hegel. No evidence was to be allowed to repudiate the doctrine. That was undeniably the case in Darwin's day. It is undeniably the case today. Evolutionism has been surmounted over and over and over again by strong arguments. It was so at the very beginning. It has been refuted along the way. There are incredible arguments against it in our day and yet people still maintain it. Evolution can still not explain the mechanism of evolution. Evolution can still not explain the taxonomic gaps in the fossil record. Evolution cannot avoid contradiction with known principles of genetics. Evolution cannot explain the appearance of matter or the eternality of matter. It cannot explain the emergence of life. It cannot explain the emergence of self conscious intelligence. It cannot explain the emergence of morality. The modern evolutionist is just as gratuitous in his commitments as was the evolutionist in the days of Darwin and Huxley. I give you as my prime example, Theodosius Dobhansky. Dobhansky claims to be able to explain evolution. And I quote him, if the assumption is made that life arose from matter only once, That's kind of like saying I can raise a million dollars if you just give me a million dollars to start with. I can make evolution explain the origin of life. If the assumption is made that life arose from matter only once, kind of get me going here. And then we can explain everything after that. This is a modern evolutionist. He's one of the best known of the bunch in the current edition of the origin of species, Dr. Thompson writes, and I quote, personal convictions are presented as if they were proofs. Scientists still recognize the inalienable flaws of the theory. This is a great quote. Paul Westermaier says, and I quote, evolution is useful, but it is a mystery. We keep following it because it's useful to us, but it's a myth. Evolution continues to be propagated despite its problems. Perhaps the evolutionary. Excuse me. The presuppositional status of the evolutionary theory is nowhere quite as obvious as in the writings of Pierre Tillard de Chardin. He says that even if all the specific content of the evolutionary explanation of life were to be demolished, evolution would still have to be taken as our fundamental vision. And so he says, the defenders of evolution. I'm going to quote him. Get a load of this. Defenders of evolution must never let themselves be deflected into secondary discussions of the scientific hows and the metaphysical whys. We're not going to be bogged down and answering questions scientifically, how did it happen? Or. Or in terms of the nature of reality, why did it happen? We mustn't be bogged down with that. Evolution, you see, has now assumed the unassailable, authoritative, what we would call logically primitive standard of truth for the scientist. And so I might quote, evolution has long since ceased to be a hypothesis and has become a general epistemological condition which must henceforth be satisfied by every hypothesis. This has become a God that lays down a law that says, you dare not have any other gods in my presence. You dare not make up your own ideas or even test my existence. Every hypothesis must now be tested by this standard. Is it evolutionary or not? So says de Chardin, to which you will say, and who gives you the right to dictate that? And so W.T. jones, the philosopher earlier quoted, says the scientists have now elevated Darwinism to the level of a religious dogma. This is not a Christian that writes this. This is just a man who knows the history of thought. He says Darwinism is now treated like it's a religious dogma. And Thompson, the one who writes the introduction to the Origin of Species, concurs, saying the concept of organic evolution was an object of genuinely religious devotion. And so is evolution scientific? Wasn't scientific to begin with. It was philosophical. Is evolution scientific in the way that it is defended? No, it's not defended that way. It's made a precondition for anything to count as science. Is evolution non religious and neutral? No. In fact, it is a religious presupposition. That's held to tenaciously, even in the face of contrary evidence, even when a man has to say, well, just give me life from matter once, and then I can make the theory work. Evolutionism, you see, was the spirit of Darwin's day, and it's the spirit of our day as well. It arises not from the scientific explor explanation of the world or even the observational approach to the facts. It arises from the hearts of men who are looking for a way to avoid their creator. Darwinism merely gives this philosophical presupposition a veneer of scientific respectability. The theory was refuted by leading scientists of his day, but men held onto it with all their lives like it was a religious faith. But something further needs to be said about evolutionary theory, beyond its speculative origin and its presuppositional tenacity, that is the way in which people hold on to it. Evolution is now being held and defended, not just presuppositionally, but it's being treated as a dogma in the scientific community or in the scientific guild. I give you an example of that. 1959, Julian Huxley, who is a great, great grandson of T.H. huxley, Darwin's bulldog. Julian Huxley, wrote, I still can't believe that anybody would have the audacity. He wrote, quote, the evolution of life is no longer a theory, it is a fact. And so dedicated evolutionists, you might not be surprised to find, are very intolerant of those who disagree with them. They are as intolerant, if not worse than those religious fundamentalists that they like to ridicule. Those who question the sacred cow of evolution are coincidentally in graduate school, blocked from admission or success in their studies if they happen to have already gotten a job. They are not invited to present papers at colloquiums, their books are not reviewed, and they are not hired in the major universities of our land. What a coincidence. Scientific evidence contrary to evolution may not be taught, and alternative theories of man's origin may not be presented in most public schools in our land. In the state of California, where I come from, you try to teach an alternative theory of man's origin, you'll be fired. It's forbidden. Well, what happened to this open minded, we're all just out there looking for the truth attitude? You see, as soon as we got rid of those bigoted religious fundamentalists and their creationist views, so we could open up everything to impartial investigation of the facts, lo and behold, a new bigotry took over. The bigotry that says nobody will be allowed to contradict the reigning dogma of evolution. In 1881, the British Natural History museum presented an exhibit on Darwin's theory of evolution. And in the exhibit, in the explanatory cards that are there for the exhibit, we read that the theory of evolution, Darwin's theory of evolution, is one possible explanation, one possible explanation. And it admitted that the concept of natural selection is not strictly scientific. That's because it's not empirically demonstrated, not demonstrated by observational evidence. This exhibit that said only that much, again, one possible explanation, not strictly scientific. This exhibit caused such uproar. So much anger arose because of it, and there was such political pressure that the museum removed any acknowledgement of problems in the theory of Darwin. Political pressure was put on so they wouldn't even say something like, this is one possible theory. You see what we have in the case of evolution. If I can stand back. And again, I'm just coming as ignorant philosopher looking at the history of thought. What you have here is not science. You have sociology. This is the sociology of knowledge, the way in which people interact with one another and impose views on each other. In his 1991 book, Darwin on Trial, Philip Johnson, who is a lawyer, writes these interesting. What first drew my attention to the question was the way the rules of argument seem to be structured to make it impossible to question whether evolution is really true. He said, that's what got me thinking. Why is it that the rules are always bent and guided in such a way that you're not allowed to even ask questions about this? Evolution is now propounded as a bigoted religious dogma, and it is not empirical in its nature. It is not something that men hold to because they have observational evidence. In his 1985 book A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton writes, and I quote, there can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution. When Darwin wrote no speciation and no evolution was directly observed in the natural order. When he wrote there was no direct evidence that natural selection had ever caused any biological change, Darwin himself said that the infinitude of connecting links in the natural order was crucial to his theory of evolution and went on to admit he was unable to demonstrate even one. Everything the theory called for to be credible from a scientific standpoint was missing down to the point that when Darwin explained natural selection, he said, let me beg my reader to offer a couple of hypothetical examples. Does that sound like science to you? Let me give you a couple of hypothetical examples of how we hear polio, not scientific. Darwin had a vision. He had a perspective, he had a presupposition, he had a philosophy. And the best he could do is show hypothetically how it might work. In 1874, Professor J. Tyndall wrote, the basis of the doctrine of evolution consist not in an experimental demonstration, for the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof, but in its general harmony with scientific thought. We claim and shall wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory. He said, no, we don't have observational evidence, but we're not going to let the theologians tell us where the world came from anymore. You see, the theory of evolution is, in its nature now, basically a matter of historical reconstruction. It's an attempt to reconstruct the history of where man came from or where species come from. And in the nature of the case, that's impossible to experimentally verify by observation. Ever stop and think about this? Evolution cannot be demonstrated scientifically because we can't go back and watch the evolution of the species. And moreover, we can't even watch the alleged evolution of any species that are now coming about because it takes such long periods of time. No one lives long enough to test it. It's not, in the nature of the case, something subject to empirical validation. It must always remain somewhat speculative. So now listen to this quote by Stephen Jay Gould, one of the leading campaigners for evolution in our culture today. He wrote in the journal Paleobiology for 1977, the general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a metaphysical stance. Metaphysics is a division of philosophy, the division of philosophy that studies the nature, origin and structure of reality, and so forth. I'll just reread that with the word philosophical in there to make the point. The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism is a philosophical stance embedded in the history of Western cultures. It is not a high order empirical observation. It is induced from the objective study of nature. This man goes around and testifies in court cases against people who want equal treatment of evolution and creation in the classroom to say that it's unscientific to teach a creationist view of man as one possibility. And yet he admits himself that evolution is philosophical in nature, not observational, not scientifically, if you will, grounded. But the worst is yet to come. I think I have pretty much discounted the idea that we're dealing with a scientific theory. But it turns out, I told you earlier, that when philosophers turned to investigate the theory of evolution as a theory, what was found out, to the embarrassment of the dogmatists of our day, Is that the theory of evolution doesn't count as a scientific theory at all. Let me see if I can work this through for you before we take our break. You look out at the world and you find an amazing, a remarkable diversity of living things, don't you? You see out there tigers and you see whales and goats, you see eagles and carrots and cockroaches and roses and roosters and you see grapes and giraffes and gorillas and germs. And on and on it goes. Just amazing, the diversity of living things that are out there. Now, how did such a profuse variety of species come about? Well, as I've already told you, the evolutionary idea is that they came about naturally by means of a gradual transformation from simpler forms, each having its place in a complex but common genetic tree stemming from a primordial blob of life then developing outward. And Charles Darwin says this is where species come from. The idea carried no scientific credibility until Darwin. And the reason why Darwin gave it scientific credibility is because he for once offered a mechanism, allegedly a mechanism for this evolutionary transformation from the initial blob to all the germs, giraffes and gorillas of this world. How did it happen? It's caught very nicely in the title of his 1859 book. Let me give it to you now, its long version. We call it the Origin of Species. That's an abbreviation. The title of the book was on the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Says it very nicely once again. On the origin of species. Where did giraffes and germs and gorillas come from? The origin of those species differences in the animal world. On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Darwin said, given the competition for preservation or existence in this world, those types of organisms which are most fit, those which are best adapted to the environment, will be the ones that survive to propagate their kind. The less fit will over time be replaced by the more fit through this process that he called natural selection. And so natural selection is supposed to cause genetically advantaged organisms to survive better than the less advantaged organisms and thus to evolve into more advanced organisms over time. And this mechanism is supposed to be inherent in the natural world itself, Something of a built in drive toward adaptation and improvement. You understand what the theory is? What's the problem with it? See if we can slay it with one philosophical stroke. Whenever a theory, I'm just Talking about theory development, any philosopher will tell you the same thing. Anytime you develop a theory that relates one class of things to another class of things, either it relates by identity, by causation, by subclass, by left, right relationship is not important. But when you say this class of things is related to this class of things in the following way, the only way you can test that theory is if you can identify class A independently of of class B. Have I lost you here? What if I say that all of the best basketball players in the world are Danish? I don't know why I would say that with a name like Bahnsen, but just kind of popped into my head once. Now then, if I'm going to say all the best basketball players in the world are Danish, the only way I can test that is by finding the best basketball players as a class and finding out if each and every one of them turns out to be from known as Danish people. Now, right. What if I do it this way? What if every time you bring me one of the best basketball players in the world, I say, oh, well, then he's Danish? You say, well, no, wait a minute, how do you know? You got to find out that he's Danish before. No, no, no, no, he's Danish because my theory says all the best basketball players are Danish. You say, no, no, no, no. You've got to independently prove that this person's Danish and then independently prove that he's one of the best basketball players in the world. You can't just go from he's Danish to he's a great player, or from he's a great player to he's Danish. It's not a scientifically testable hypothesis unless you can independently establish the classes that are being related. Now do you understand what I'm getting at? Let's go back and look at evolution. Darwin said that the fittest organisms will survive. But Darwin's theory had no independent criteria for fitness. There was no independent way to say which are the most fit organisms or animals. If you want, let's just talk about animals here. There's no independent way to identify the fittest animals. Apart from what looking at which animals survive. And thus it's not a testable theory in any scientific sense. It's only what we call a trivial verbal truth. That is, you are just repeating your commitment to the idea that the fittest are going to survive. So whenever I bring you a survivor, you say, well, that's because it was the first fittest. Now, some people will balk it. They'll say, no, no. Scientists have independent. Have independent criteria for fitness. And it is true that if you get into this in detail, many of you tonight won't. Some of you might. When you get into it, you'll find that some people have tried to have independent criteria for fitness. They've all failed and they always will fail in the nature of the case. It's not because I'm a prophet that I predict that anybody who knows the nature of theory formation knows that it must fail. And I'll show you why. Here is an independent criteria for fitness. Let's say we're studying a pack of wolves or various kinds of wolves and we want to decide which is the most fit, which we could predict would survive. And we find that this one particular kind of wolf has highly developed back quarters, has strong back legs, almost in a mutant sense, has much larger back leg muscles than the other types of wolves. And then the reasoning goes like this. Such a wolf will be faster than the other kinds of wolves. That means that generally speaking, such a wolf will make it to the kill faster than the others. And so if any wolves die out from starvation, it will be those that are the slower, less fully developed hindquarter wolves. Looks like a pretty good scientific theory. You can test it and so forth until you remember that living organisms are highly developed and interdependent biological organisms, and that the hindquarters of the developed wolf might put such a strain on its heart that it causes it to have a heart attack, which happens when you get some animal mutations and human mutations. But such a strain on the lungs, the heart or other vital organs that that advantage proves to be deadly. We know that happens. And so now how are we going to know whether the wolf with the highly developed hindquarters is more fit or less fit than the competing types of wolves in the world. It's all going to depend on whether he survives. And so we're right back to the survival of the fittest, which means the survival of the survivors. Darwin did not offer the world a scientific theory, my friends, although the smoke and mirrors game has been used in our secular universities for over a century. This was never a scientific theory. It was always a perspective of philosophy that was imposed in advance on the facts rather than something that arose from or could be tested by the facts. And so let me quote TH Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize for chromosome mapping of the fruit fly. Yeah, that's not the sort of thing you want to do, but he's a very smart man and he said, and I quote, it may appear little more than a truism, to state that the individuals that are best adapted to survive have a better chance of surviving than those not so well adapted to survive. Yeah, it might appear a little more than a truism, that's for sure. The prominent geneticist C.H. waddington said natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a logical truism, a statement of an inevitable, although previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population, defined as those which leave the most offspring, will leave the most offspring. And so it might not surprise you, although it ought to anger you, that Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection has been quietly abandoned in the universities of our land. It's been quietly abandoned, or if the terminology is still used, it's redefined. And that galls me because, you see, I know better. You see, I've done my homework and I know what's going on out there. And yet this idea that, well, we all believe in evolution and, you know, so forth and so on. The fact is, no one defends Darwinian natural selection. No one. What is now called natural selection, as you find, for instance, in R.A. fisher's book the Genetical Theory, selection amounts to the theory of differential reproduction. Differential reproduction is just the view that some organisms have more offspring than others. Some organisms produce more babies than other organisms. Ernst Mayer in 1963 wrote, those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition the fittest ones. R.C. lewontin, professor of zoology at Harvard, wrote in 1974 the genetic basis of evolutionary change. In the latest evolutionary theories, he says, natural selection plays no role at all. Natural selection no longer explains how we came to have giraffes and germs and gorillas. It no longer explains how we get different species. It only explains how different species become more or less numerous. The question was supposed to be, how did they come into existence in the first place? And so Waddington concedes that the whole real guts of evolution, which is how you come to have horses and tigers and things, is left behind. In this neo Darwinian theory of differential reproduction, Morgan observed, and I quote, selection then has not produced anything new, but only more of certain kinds of individuals. Evolution, however, means producing new things, not more of what already exists. So what I'm saying is the theory of evolution is not scientific. Never was, is not, never will be. It is a philosophy, it's a way of looking at things. It does not arise from the evidence of our senses and observation of the world. It is not tested by our observations of the world, and it cannot be. One last thing, and then we'll take a break. Remember that one of the things scientists are going to do is get rid of teleological explanations, explanations that suggest that there's order or purpose or aim and what's going on in the world. We just want mechanistic explanations. And that was supposed to be one of the advantages of evolution. We get away from this idea of a personal creator guiding the development of the natural order, and now we just have mechanisms. You have the world itself going on blindly. Evolutionists present evolution as some kind of impersonal, mechanical, blind and haphazard process in the physical world. But then when you read the evolutionists, you will see that they mislead themselves by attributing to the natural order a creative role. Evolutionists will explain their theories by means of analogies to animal breeders. That's a false analogy, isn't it? You see, to say nature works like the breeder of a rose or a particular kind of sheep or dog is to assume that nature has personal qualities like the breeders do. It is true that breeders sort out qualities and they purposely try to develop a superior species or whatever they want. They think it's going to sell. But nature is not a person, is it? And so the analogy to a breeder is very misleading. And then you read also of metaphors that the evolutionists will use for natural selection. What they end up doing is personifying and reifying making into a separate substance or person, nature as a whole. They'll speak of nature like a composer or nature like a sculptor or a poet or a playwright. These are all taken from the words of evolutionists. See, that's as silly as that commercial. Do you remember this long ago? It's not right to fool mother Nature. There is no mother nature that acts like a composer, a poet, a sculptor, a playwright. And yet, when evolutionists try to explain their theory, they always make the natural order into a kind of person they personify. And so an alleged purposeless natural process gets treated as though it were something that has intelligence and design and personality. Well, I told you that I was going to drive, drive and drive and drive because, you see, I'm very hot under the collar about this. This idea that you Christians, you follow faith, we follow the facts. You're religious, we're scientific. And by scientific, they're supposed to be naturalistic, impersonalistic, non teleological. They're supposed to be without religious prejudices, observational and not speculative. They're supposed to give theories that are not dogmatically held but testable. And on every point I find them wanting. The nature of the theory of evolution, whatever you want to make it out to be philosophical, religious, personal, speculative, whatever you want to call it, it is certainly not scientific. Now, if you come back for my second lecture tonight, I will try to convince you that theistic evolution ain't going to help.

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our bonsoninstitute.com where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.