The word is getting out: Darwinism and God are incompatible (which doesn’t mean that science and God are incompatible)

I have been saying for years that Darwinism and God are mutually incompatible, an insight I was first persuaded of by Carol Iannone in her 2001 article in the New York Press, “Wm. Jennings Bryan was right.” I have argued that scientists and religious believers have been playing a self-serving political dance with each other: the scientists claim that Darwinism is compatible with religion, in order to maintain their respectability in America as people who are not anti-God, and the religious believers claim that Darwinism is compatible with religion, in order to maintain their respectability in the modern world as people who are not anti-Darwin.

Now, in The New Republic, Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, not only announces that Darwinian evolution and religion cannot be reconciled, he says that declarations to the contrary have been “a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious.”

“Once again,” writes Carol Iannone at Phi Beta Cons,

William Jennings Bryan has been proven right…. Remember this when you see a version of Inherit the Wind, with its fraudulent implication that the Bible and Darwin are perfectly compatible, and its closing scene with the Clarence Darrow character exiting happily with both in his briefcase. Generations of schoolchildren have been misled by this lie. Now at last we have the truth and can begin again to build on that.

However, the story does not end there, and this is not all good news. Coyne is not merely saying that religion and Darwinism cannot be reconciled; he is saying that religion and science cannot be reconciled. And this, of course, is the formula for the atheist war against religion that has been building to new and hateful heights in recent years. Fortunately, Coyne is wrong. There is no conflict between religion and science. There is, however, a conflict between religion and scientism, also known as positivism, a non-scientific ideology which insists that only the material is real. True science follows the evidence where it leads, and admits what it doesn’t know. Scientism declares as an absolute dogma that the only thing that exists is the material and that which can be discerned by scientific instruments, and it automatically dismisses any indications, even those arising from the evidence that it itself has discovered, that point to non-material realities. In short, scientism claims that the material universe as explored by material science explains everything, a patently false statement.

It is patently false because there are certain fundamental realities that material science cannot explain.

To start with, material science cannot explain the existence of the universe itself, since the universe, erupting into existence in the micro instant of the Big Bang, came out of something that is not itself, i.e., it came out of something non-material, something beyond space, time, and matter, something that material science cannot know. Material science cannot explain the existence of life, since, as Fred Hoyle argued, it would be as impossible for the thousands of enzymes needed to produce life to have organized themselves into the first living cell, as it would be for a tornado to blow through a junk yard and produce a Boeing 747. Finally, most immediate to human experience and most irrefutable, material science cannot explain, and has never “seen” with scientific instruments, human consciousness. Indeed, as Alan Roebuck wrote the other day in response to the atheist bloggers at Secular Right, consciousness is by definition non-material; the human self (our “I”) is by definition non-material; our thoughts are by definition non-material. These statements cannot be contradicted, since to contradict them is to make oneself absurd. Now, does the existence of the self-evidently non-material reality of consciousness contradict the findings of science about the material universe? Of course not. It doesn’t contradict physics, it doesn’t contradict chemistry, it doesn’t contradict biology, it doesn’t contradict astronomy. It only contradicts the non-scientific claim that the material is the only thing that exists. Therefore there is no contradiction between science and non-material reality, and therefore there is no contradiction between science and religion.

At the same time, however, there is a contradiction between Darwinism and religion, as there is a contradiction between Darwinism and science, since Darwinism, going beyond legitimate science, makes a dogmatic claim which science has not demonstrated and which many of its own findings contradict, that random genetic mutations plus natural selection have produced all life forms on earth. Indeed, so implausible and unsupported is the Darwinian theory of the origin of species that the exponents of Darwinism constantly cover up what the theory actually says, so as not to expose the theory to ridicule and rejection. Darwinism is a vast fraud that science has tragically attached itself to and made the touchstone of its own legitimacy, thus transforming itself from science, the pursuit of the truth of the material universe, into scientism, a tyrannical dogma that seeks to crush and silence all positions that differ from it.

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My articles on Darwinism are collected here.

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Ben W. writes:

I have just finished reading Coyne’s “Seeing and Believing” article. And something struck about his method of defending Darwinism. In trying to defend Darwinism against criticisms that cripple Darwinism, he resorts to what I call a sneaky and underhanded defense.

He tries to establish the plausibility of Darwinian evolution appearing (not evolution itself but its plausibility—ie. it can happen) by resorting to “metaphysical” (unempirical) arguments from physics (eg. the multiverse). On its own Darwinism collapses and has to be propped up by external theories.

Notice the sublety of his argument. It is not that Darwinian evolution happened and we know this to be true. His argument is that it could happen given certain theoretical constructs and therefore we conclude that it did happen. “Could” leads to “did.” The majority of this article is concerned with the plausibility (the “it could have happened”) of the theory. And to do so he has to resort to arguments outside of the Darwinian theory of evolution. In other words the theory cannot stand on its own.

Ben continues:

We do not say the we went to the moon because we could go to the moon. We do not derive the fact that we went to the moon from the fact that we could go to the moon. It is a fact in and of itself that we went to the moon. The “could” does not lead to the “did.”

But this is the way Coyne proceeds and I gather every Darwinian must by virtue of the fact that as Coyne says, we cannot rewind history, go back and see evolution happening. They have to emphasize the “could happen” since they have no empirical basis for “did happen.”

LA replies:

And then, after having established Darwinian evolution as a mere “could,” they turn around and declare it an empirical fact with which no one has the right to disagree. Do people reading this still think I’m exaggerating when I call Darwinian evolution the biggest intellectual fraud in history?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2009 03:09 PM | Send