Materialists: What Do You Know?

10/28/2009
Creation - Evolution Headlines

For people who brag about their work, scientists are an odd lot. At one moment they are touting science as the surest path to knowledge and understanding. The next moment it seems like they are at square one. This is particularly true of materialist cosmologies and Darwinian theories for the origin and development of life. A couple of recent examples might invite the mildly sarcastic greeting, “Good day, Mr. Darwin. What do you know?”

1. Nothing about physics: New Scientist posted an article entitled, “Seven questions that keep physicists up at night.” Included are: What is everything made of? and What is reality reality? For those thinking physicists were the most likely among scientists to be in touch with reality, this sounds like a bad dream. Another question pertains directly to “the rise of life from inert matter” – How does complexity happen?

2. Nothing about humanity: Live Science posted a Letterman-style list called “Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans.” For those thinking evolutionists were just filling in the details, some these questions seem pretty fundamental. Where do modern humans come from? Who was the first hominid? Why did modern humanity expand past Africa about 50,000 years ago? Is human evolution accelerating? Why did our closest relatives go extinct? What happened to our hair? Why do humans walk on two legs? Why did we grow large brains?

Contrasting with this are triumphant sounding headlines that border on the mystical. “A Solution To Darwin’s ‘Mystery Of The Mysteries’ Emerges From The Dark Matter Of The Genome,” Science Daily announced – yet the details of the article fail to show a real solution other than suggestive changes in gene regulation and speculative hypotheses. The team admitted, “Speciation is one of the most fascinating, unsolved problems in biology.” Isn’t the solution what we are supposedly celebrating next month with the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species?

Another article highlighted “‘On the origin of nematodes’ -- A phylogenetic tree of the world’s most numerous group of animals.” A look inside the article only shows scientists sorting roundworms into groups based on similarities of certain genes. It doesn’t say anything about how roundworms evolved in the first place.

Getting back to “the rise of life from inert matter,” PhysOrg assured its readers that Charles Darwin “really did have advanced ideas about the origin of life.” His main idea, though, was that “science was not advanced enough to deal with the question (hence his reluctance to speak of it in public) and that he would not live to see it resolved,” according to Juli Peretó of the Cavanilles Institute in Valencia, who co-authored a paper with Jeffrey Bada and Antonio Lazcano to debunk a myth that Darwin didn’really think deeply about the question. It appears their main finding after re-reading Darwin’s letters was that he stuck to his materialistic guns. Peretó said, “Darwin was convinced of the incredible importance of this issue for his theory and he had an amazingly modern materialist and evolutional vision about the transition of inanimate chemical matter into living matter, despite being very aware of Pasteur’s experiments in opposition to spontaneous generation.” But then, one might ask, didn’t Darwin himself offer the possibility of a Creator at the end of his famous book? “It is utterly wrong to think that he was invoking a divine intervention,” Peretó continued, as if proud to exonerate the Great Man from any charges of letting a Divine Foot in the door; “it is also well documented that the mention of the ‘Creator’ in The Origin of the Species was an addition for appearance’s sake that he later regretted.”