I am aware of only one other scientist who has ever received such veneration bordering on worship as Charles Darwin—Isaac Newton. Edmund Halley's "Ode to Newton" well represents the Newtonamania of the late 17th and entire 18th century, with its flowery paean to Newton's "heaven-born mind" that "Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth." It ends with the famous, solemn assurance that "Nearer the gods no mortal may approach." Almost, but not quite, a god.

No scientific theory has ever been more fruitful than the one outlined by Newton in his Principia. No theory seemed more absolutely unassailable. Yet, brilliant as it was, nature was far more obscure, playful, and mysterious. Newton and Newtonianism gave way to the genius of Albert Einstein. Of course, Einstein enjoyed significant celebrity, but nothing on the level of the kind of veneration lavished on Newton.

There is, I think, an interesting reason for this difference. Newton seemed to solve the riddles of the universe in a way accessible to most people who were moderately competent in the mathematics of the day. If you knew Euclidean geometry, and got on well enough in the new calculus, you experienced the thrill of rooting about in the "hidden treasuries of Truth" with Newton, and as a consequence felt that you too were a mortal creeping up close to the gods. But few have any hope of wrangling with the mathematics upon which Einstein built his view of the universe. All most of us can do is nod from afar.

And that brings us to Charles Darwin. The thing that makes Darwin's theory so attractive is its simplicity. It never gets more complicated, as a theory, than the terse outline Darwin offered in his Origin of Species:

"As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form."

That's it. You don't even need to know any mathematics. Yet this tiny seed of an idea explains everything about the extraordinary complexity of living nature, from the beauty of a rose and the profound intricacy of its photosynthetic structures, to the moral and intellectual capacities of the lucky ape, homo sapiens.

Everything, without remainder. That is what makes Darwinism so attractive to atheists. You don't need God to explain how we got here. Random variations in the clay are molded by natural selection, the potter. Chance and death can do the job of creation, a job previously thought to be so daunting that it required a deity.

And that is why atheists love Darwin, love him to the point of veneration as a secular saint, a man who, like a kind of bearded patriarchal Moses figure, led us bravely out of the slavery of superstition and ignorance, and into a new godless land of infinite promise. Darwinism makes such a popular anti-religion precisely because (in the words of Richard Dawkins), it is "a remarkably simple theory, childishly so…in comparison with almost all physics and mathematics."

This same Richard Dawkins also famously stated that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." It's so simple not to believe now that Darwin's come along. The grand feeling of omniscience once experienced by followers of Newton is now had much cheaper—no need even to have mastered geometry and calculus. Nothing haunts the mind that perhaps, just perhaps, nature might be much more complicated, much more astoundingly strange and wonderful, stretching the very limits of the human intellect to the breaking point. Nothing at all. Darwinism explains everything about biology.

Stepping back from all this, and taking a kind of long philosophical view, shouldn't we be a bit skeptical of such claims, of such an easy intellectual victory for atheism? Think about it. Dawkins admits the almost insane simplicity of Darwinism in explaining all the intricate details of biology—a childishly simple theory when compared to those in physics and mathematics, say, in comparison to the kind of mathematics that undergirds Einstein's physics.

So you see the problem? How could the smallest architecture of the universe, the stuff out of which the whole immense web of endless biological creatures are spun, be so nearly impenetrably difficult to grasp, and yet the biological creatures themselves be understood so easily?

Doesn't that seem, well, upside down? If the details of the non-living substructure investigated by physicists boggle our minds, wouldn't we expect that the vast living intricacy built upon it would be far, far more difficult to understand?

If we might put it another way, looking at the history of science, we see in the last three centuries physics moving intellectually from Newton to Einstein, from relative simplicity to the dizzying complexity of relativity. How could biology move during the very same period in the opposite direction, toward childish simplicity?

The answer is that it didn't. The merest peak into a current biological textbook makes one gasp in wonder at the details of biology revealed over the past century. Here, in the details, one has moved from something like Newton to something like Einstein. But the problem is that the details—the intricate ingredients of biology, so to speak—are understood according to the Darwinian recipe. No matter how complex it looks, don't worry, it's ultimately got a childishly simple explanation—random variation and natural selection. No need for God.

I use the culinary metaphor for a very good reason, because the whole thing reminds me of the morality tale, "Stone Soup," where hungry soldiers come into a town, and trick the villagers into preparing them a feast by making them think they can cook soup fit for a king with only a stone and some water. The villagers want to believe such an amazing thing, and they go about helping them, prodded by the soldiers into adding a host of other ingredients: beef, celery, carrots, milk, barley, peas, potatoes, salt, pepper, garlic, and so on. As the soldiers leave after the feast, the amazed villagers remark, "Such good soup—and with only a stone!"

Darwinism is like stone soup. "Such biological complexity—and with only random variation and natural selection!" the village atheists declare. That's why atheists love Darwin.

Update on Darwin Day 2009

Hundreds of events have taken place since February 12, 2009 celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. The official Darwin Day website boasts 743 events in 45 countries were planned to be exact. A quick scan through the list of events and their sponsors reveals with startling clarity that the lion's share of these celebrations are hosted by and promoted by atheist organizations.

Two years before Darwin Day 2009, John G. West noted this trend in his NRO article, The Gospel according to Darwin. West notes that idea of making Darwin's birthday a day of international celebration was conceived of by the Stanford Humanists and the Humanist Community over 10 years ago.

"Given such sponsors, it should be no surprise that Darwin Day events often explicitly attack religion. At a high school in New York a few years ago, students wore shirts emblazoned with messages proclaiming that “no religious dogmas [were] keeping them from believing what they want to believe,” while in California a group named “Students for Science and Skepticism” hosted a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, on the topic “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without a Designer.” This year in Boston there is an event on “Biological Arguments Against the Existence of God.”

West also raises this obvious but rarely heard observation,"Darwin Day celebrations are fascinating because they expose a side of the controversy over evolution in America that is rarely covered by the mainstream media. Although journalists routinely write about the presumed religious motives of anyone critical of unguided evolution, they almost never discuss the anti-religious mindset that motivates many of evolution’s staunchest defenders."

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NWEzZGRiMzE0ZDRhNzE2ZGJjMjVjYTZhMzJiZjJmMzI=

“The Biocentric Universe,” by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman

The article by Lanza and Berman trumpets the news that they are about to propose to the reader, “A radical new view of reality: Life creates time, space, and the cosmos itself.” The article is based upon a yet to be released book entitled, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. It is difficult to assess the caliber of their arguments from the short synopsis in Discover Magazine. That having been said, if the synopsis is an accurate representation of what is in the book, well, it is hard to be polite.

The basics of their argument are as follows, and I’ll number the steps so you don’t get lost. (1) We know from Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” in quantum mechanics that in the subatomic world, observation affects the state of the observed, or to be exact, trying to measure the momentum of subatomic particles blurs the location and vice versa. (2) Therefore, neither time nor space exist as independent entities, but are instead, creations of the human mind. (3) But the human mind is a biological entity, therefore since the human mind creates time and space, it must be that it creates the universe and everything in it. That’s why they call the universe biocentric.

In their words, “Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.” And so, “Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.”

One doesn’t know where to begin.

Solipsism is not a very good launching pad for creating a theory of everything. The main confusion of Lanza and Berman is, unfortunately, all too common. They apply the Heisenberg principle to levels of reality where it shouldn't be applied. That is, they confuse something that occurs on the subatomic level (uncertainty about the position and momentum of a particle) with what occurs on the macroscopic level, the level we actually inhabit. You cannot make that kind of leap. My observation of a subatomic particle may have an effect on its position or momentum, but if I am standing directly under a window, and look up and see a 500 lb anvil being pushed out, then I think Lanza and Berman would both agree that the multidimensional object hurtling toward my head will soon be remolding my mental software, whatever our difficulties in calculating the position and momentum of individual subatomic particles in the anvil.

But another part of the confusion of Lanza and Berman is caused by their surprise that time and space do not exist as independent entities. That is a surprise only because they haven’t read their St. Augustine, who said of God, “You made time itself. Time could not elapse before you made time.” Nor was there space before God created it. It was in fact only with Isaac Newton that the notion of time and space as something like eternal entities arose, or at least became scientifically important. Einstein and the Big Bang turned us back toward St. Augustine’s insight, and he also provided the other commonsense assertion that we see things because they exist (and not the other way around). But that, we hope, is hardly news—except to Lanza and Berman.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin is due out June 2, 2009

The problem with Charles Darwin is not evolution itself, but his strange insistence on creating an entirely godless account of evolution. That evolution must be godless to be scientific is the Darwin Myth, so profoundly misleading that it must be called a great lie, one that is unfortunately at the heart of his life and legacy.

http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Myth-Life-Lies-Charles/dp/1596980974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239393110&sr=1-1

Leslie Stephen, a former clergyman who lost his faith as a result of On the Origin of Species, "admired Darwin as a god."

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0306.htm

British historian Paul Johnson doubts that Darwin would have put atheist slogans on buses

My guess is that Darwin's general theory will eventually be overthrown, or fundamentally modified, as Newton's was by Einstein's relativity. Unlike his fundamentalist followers, Darwin was not afraid of change, even if it proved him wrong about some things. He saw science as progressive. He continued to practise science in old age. He studied earth- worms. He found them to be surprisingly intelligent. He turned his billiard room into a working laboratory so he had more room to examine them and see how they responded to stimuli. He had them in earth-pots covered in glass. At night he flashed lights at them -- lanterns, candles, paraffin lamps. He found that intense light frightened them but anything dim had no effect. He organised his household to see how they reacted to noise. One played the piano, another the bassoon, or shouted, or shrilled on a tin whistle. He puffed scent and tobacco fumes at them.

I wish his followers and panegyrists today would engage in such entertaining and possibly useful activities, instead of treating him as a god. And I wish the spirit of Darwin would forbid them to engage in the vulgar activity of advertising atheism on buses.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0306.htm

In the early 1800s Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposed that acquired characteristics deliberately cultivated by the parent, such as a giraffe stretching its neck to better reach foliage, may pass to offspring. Darwin would have none of this intentionality; all variations are purely random. It appears now that Lamarck may be right.

For too long, scientists have assumed that there isn’t anything “above” the gene. That is, anything that appeared to be above the gene—the cell, and more importantly, the larger multi-celled organism and everything it is, does, and ever will do—they declared to be reducible to the gene. If we map the entire genome—the entire genetic sequence—then human nature will be an open book. Having cracked the code, we’ll be able to read our form and fate.

Such was the doctrine of necessity, but “it ain’t necessarily so.” According to science writer Ethan Watters, the recent work of epigeneticists “has made it increasingly clear that for all the popular attention devoted to genome-sequencing projects, the epigenome is just as critical as DNA to the healthy development of organisms. Researchers found that affectionate mother rats actually had a positive effect on their offspring after they were born.

The nurturing activity (licking their young) actually caused the hippocampus in the brain of offspring to develop more fully and to release less of a particular stress hormone, cortisol. The result: calmer, less skittish rats. The rats with cold and distant mothers, by contrast, were nervous and timid, and developed smaller hippocampi.

Why? The mother’s motherly licking released serotonin in her little pups’ brains, which nudges the hippocampus to send a protein message to turn on genes that inhibit stress. A little motherly love, and DNA is no longer destiny.

From mice (and rats) to men? What does it mean?

To begin with, this crack in reductionism cannot help but become bigger and bigger. If mere diet changes and a little motherly love can have such dramatic effects, what else might change our DNA expression from a pre-written script, to a story we help write, both for ourselves and our offspring?

Epigenetics therefore represents a major shift…back to common sense. Predestinarian DNA-ism denies the common sense notion that what we choose to do and not to do has a real effect on our lives and the lives of others. But if such small changes makes such large differences in mice and rats, what we human beings choose to do and not to do could make a world of difference. Free will is not only real; to a yet undetermined extent, it can override DNA.

But these latest scientific discoveries also spell the end of the reductionist paradigm of neo-Darwinism. As with Darwinism, neo-Darwinism wanted to keep everything simple. The chant that DNA is destiny was a way to make life, including human life, so simple that it needed no other explanation than that provided by brute materialism.

Neo-Darwinians therefore claimed that they could explain all of human life in all its complexity in terms of genes—bodies, minds, romance, art, literature, passions, pursuits, politics, religion, music. All could be put down to which genes won out in the struggle for survival, and some occasional happy mutations.

Now it seems like the reverse. The greatest effect on our genes might be epigenetic. Beautiful music, deep romance, and great art could yield just as significantly beneficial results as motherly and fatherly affection. Suddenly, epigenetically caused gene expression is as much if not more important than the genes themselves.

This presents a serious difficulty to neo-Darwinism.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

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