The Darwinian Delusion
Dashing Dogmatic Materialism
Though I have an M.A. in philosophy, I am not an academic. I am a professional storyteller and I express myself accordingly. Please, do your own thinking, do your own research. I’m not here to tell you what your story should be, but merely to share part of my own.
As a storyteller, I have to say that the story that Life, as we know it, evolved through a process of random accidents, is the most absolutely ridiculous story I have ever heard.
I call it a ‘story,’ because I believe a scientific theory should, at least, be falsifiable. The so-called ‘theory’ of evolution is not.
Despite the immense amount of scientific evidence now available to show that the assumptions underlying this atavistic idea are massively incorrect, it persists.
Frankly, it stuns me that so many intelligent people still believe this outdated dogma.
There is literally no evidence for the proposition and despite the fact that a huge amount of what we do know contradicts it and even though basic logic and good sense should immediately rule it out, the idea is still repeated in schools and media, as though it was an obvious truth that should be the default position of any reasonable human.
It should not be, but lots of people are ideologically wedded to it.
It is the bedrock of the materialist world view and the false hope atheists cling to in order to explain how life came to be, absent a Divine Creator.
It is supposed to explain how it is possible for a super-complex piece of life, like an eye, to have come about without being designed, even though it may seem, in all its staggering intricacy, to have been designed for the purpose it serves, i.e. seeing.
The story of evolution also serves as the intellectual underpinnings of the dog-eat-dog world-view, which lets the power-mongers feel that they are in the Right, for if this world is devoid of inherent sanctity and governed only by a principle of ‘survival of the fittest’, then might is right and the only important question in life is who gets to dominate who.
The story suits our existing, top-down, often predatory, socio-political structure, so it has been pushed onto us, through propaganda and policy, despite its glaring shortcomings.
Nevertheless, for those who value truth over comfort, I will say the theory of evolution through random accident must rank as one of the dumbest theories to ever be held as truth in the entire history of the world and that to accept it is to abandon reason, sense and the need for explanation altogether.
The Story of Evolution
Humans aren’t rational beings. We are story beings. We think in a story because we are hardwired to do so.
Stories, in large part, bypass the mind and communicate more holistically, especially with our feelings and spirit.
We adopt the stories that fit most with our sense of life, even if they don’t really work on a rational level, which is why people can enjoy and even believe stories that make no sense at all, like the theory of evolution through random accident.
I must say, as a professional screenwriter, that if I wrote a story with as many plot-holes as the story of evolution through random accident, I would be laughed at, a lot.
I write ‘evolution through random accident’, because this is usually what is meant by the term ‘evolution’, but often people don’t state the full implications of their stance.
The ‘accidental’ part is important, because theists like me have no problem with evidence showing that genetic mutation is a mechanism for our evolution. It is clearly one aspect of the organic unfolding of our created reality.
Clearly, our beings mutate as we go, as does our environment and the world around us. I need not and would not dispute that.
Change is, very obviously, a fundamental part of our reality.
Life evolves.
I just don’t think that it, nor the mechanisms of its unfolding, are accidental.
If ‘evolution’ is to support a materialist world view, it has to be that the changes we see, the evolving story of our reality, cannot be the result of intelligence, or be purposeful in nature. They have to occur without intention, or design, i.e. they must be accidental in nature.
Hence the story of ‘evolution through random accident.’
There is some chance that I may not be doing this story justice, but the way I was taught it in school, it goes something like this:
Life begins in the formative stage of planetary evolution, when a pool filled to the brim with some sort of primal ooze was, perhaps, struck by lightning, maybe even repeatedly.
From that happy accident, somehow, the basic building blocks of life arose.
Simple stuff then became complex stuff, because even though things don’t become different things in a day or a year, and even though the same laws of physics seem to have been present all along, that’s just what happens over very long-periods of time.
So, after millions of years, atoms became single cell organisms, which became mighty dinosaurs, who died, but accidentally, there were other beings, who didn’t.
These beings and others all competed with one another, killing and fornicating and such and some died and some lived.
Fortunately, the accidental happenings inside the biology of these life-forms and the fact that instincts became a thing, allowed them to pass information about their lives onto their offspring and those offspring benefited from that and also from accidental mutations, which made them better at the competition that beings were engaged in and so, because of lots of time, amoebas became qualitatively different beings like you and me and dolphins and banana trees.
Then, the survivors continued to fight and then humans killed or conquered everything alive, including each other. The End.
Critiquing the Story of Evolution
It’s not my favorite story.
The tale certainly puts humans in the heroes chair, as both the pinnacle of evolution and also its ultimate victors, so I get why lots of folk like it, but I just can’t help noticing those pesky plot-holes.
They ruin the whole thing for me, especially when people still want me to accept that the story is ‘scientific,’ or true.
I barely know where to start speaking into it, given how much can be said against this ‘theory’.
There is, for example, no scientific evidence at all to prove that life can arise from some basic medium, ooze or otherwise, which contained no life before.
There is not one peer-reviewed, repeatable experiment that has proved that this is possible, so to say that this is an ‘evidence based’ theory is already a stretch.
Nevertheless, there is good reason why not many scientific theories have survived the last 150 years, or so, since Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’.
We know a lot more now about how our reality functions.
In Darwin’s time, people assumed that complex things must have arisen from simple things.
Not so.
Since then, we have learned that even the small things have a level of complexity comparable to the big things.
The idea that there are simple building blocks for life is long outdated.
In case you missed it, we split the atom and life just kept on going.
We now know that life emerges from a fundamental field of information and energy.
To imagine that this happens accidentally, on an ongoing basis, which it does, is absurd.
So too, imagining that biological life arises from some atomic cellular building block is also a fantasy of the past.
When we discovered DNA and learned some stuff about it, random accidental evolution should have immediately gone out the window, but its not too late.
DNA is a necessary precondition for evolution.
One cannot have random accidental mutation until one has organisms that have DNA and that are able to pass that DNA onto the next generation.
To spell it out, one can’t explain the evolution of DNA through accidental mutation, because accidental mutation depends on the existence of DNA.
And, as it turns out, DNA is not at all the sort of thing that could arise accidentally.
DNA is essentially a type of firmware, which utilizes a base 4 code to program the nature and behavior of bio-chemical organisms. It is also something of a nano-factory, in communication with its environment. And it stores so much information that we have, not at all-accidentally, been studying it for decades, striving to learn how it works, to next-level our own ability to store information.
In short, DNA is super-complex and amazing and seems in every way to exist for a very specific purpose, that of making organic life possible.
Setting aside the fact that a code implies a coder, I would love for someone to explain exactly how a lightning strike hitting some ooze, or some other such random, unintelligent accident, produced DNA.
To be fair to the materialists, some folk are doing their best to show that RNA is the basic building block of life and that DNA evolved out of RNA, somehow.
Even were this to be the case, I don’t think it much helps the materialist’s argument.
RNA is somewhat simpler than DNA, but it also cannot stand as the magical building block of biology that just could have happened through the sudden random amalgamation of elemental particles.
It also has a base 4 architecture, stores information, communicates with and responds to its environment and functions purposely in an elegant and efficient way.
These building blocks are simply not the sort of thing to be produced by rain and wind, thunder and lightning, or spawned through a primal pool.
Deeper Problems
That stupid pool is often presented as being at the ‘beginning’ of the evolutionary story, when it is not. Not even close.
If someone genuinely wants to convince me that accidental evolution is a true story, they are going to have to explain not just the biological issues, but the thousands of missing links in the causal chain, which extends back through billions of years of cosmogenesis.
To allow the evolutionist to begin the story of evolution after the existence of the earth and all the conditions needed for life to evolve, is to concede far more than is warranted.
Life, and what is needed for its evolution, began long before the earth formed.
One can’t have life on earth until there is a sun sitting a perfect distance away, or until one has the chemical molecules available to form life, which were birthed ages before, through the explosion of distant stars and so on.
If one is really to explain how life accidentally evolved to exist as we see it, one really needs to dial back to the beginning of the story, which is commonly believed to be the big bang.
The main product of the big bang was supercharged plasma, which then became atoms and molecules, stars and planets and the incredible diversity of life as we know it.
Not to mention consciousness.
The plasma must have become both consciousness and intelligence, for consciousness and intelligence do exist.
Sorry materialists, but it is the lived experience of every person on the planet that consciousness exists and that it is causally efficacious, even yours.
To pretend that the mental aspects of existence are merely some sort of epiphenomenon, arising from physical particles, contradicts an unmatched volume of experiential evidence and ignores the fact that pretty much everything that is created in the human world, from homes to technology, to stories, begin first in some person’s mind and then, only later, after a creative process, become part of the physical reality.
So the person who wants to think random accidental evolution explains life on this planet, actually has to explain how supercharged plasma birthed consciousness, intelligence, biology, elemental forces, the governing laws of physics, psychedelics, rainbows, vision, creativity, music, lovemaking, Love, Beauty and everything else we experience.
It’s a tall order and it hasn’t yet been done.
Personally, I don’t think it will ever be done.
But, as I’ve mentioned, I’m fairly convinced that the whole idea is totally ridiculous.
Between the big bang and the pool of ooze, any number of miraculous accidents would have to have occurred, in temporal and spatial order, to make it possible that life could begin its journey onward, from the point of the primal pool to where we stand today.
If the strong nuclear force had been off by an infinitesimal fraction, there would be no life. If the other fundamentals, the weak nuclear force, the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were off, there would be no life.
If the universe had expanded a fraction slower, or a fraction faster, there would be no life.
If the Earth was too close, or too far from the sun, there would be no life.
If we didn’t have an atmosphere, DNA, or instincts, there would be no life.
And so it goes, on and on, as the basic impossibilities of being are multiplied by the stunning complexity and wondrous nature of what is.
The ‘fine-tuned’ precision of the universal unfolding is miraculous enough, but the materialist must still account for the fact that, the whole phenomenon of life, from the Big Bang till today, on his account, was caused by Nothing.
Which is to say that even though there was no such thing as cause and effect, because there was Nothing, still from that Nothing came a plasma that unfolded into a universe in which everything is vibrating frequency, in which everything is music and everything has its own note.
I would not think that Nothing could do that, but many people do.
I will add that I’m pretty sure that no one has even tried to prove, experimentally, that something can come from nothing.
I would be fairly curious how one would even attempt to do it.
So, again, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the story of evolution by random accident is anything more than a story.
The Multiverse Cop Out
The materialist must account for the staggering odds against all the above impossibilities and many, many, more having occurred for us to be here now, pondering the improbability of it all.
I’m not a mathematician, but I’ve seen some figures in the past and I feel comfortable saying, in this public forum, that the odds against all those accidents happening together are far greater than the odds of any human being, with our current abilities, throwing a dart and hitting a standard-size bullseye on the other end of the universe.
It isn’t possible. It cannot happen. Not in this universe.
Which is why the Multiverse is the last refuge for informed materialists, who know it would take much longer than our universe has been around for all these accidental happenings to have happened accidentally.
The truly diehard materialist takes all this information in stride and says simply: ‘fine, statistically it may be very unlikely that our reality should exist as it does, but we live in a Multiverse, in which there are an almost infinite amount of universes, so many that it is mathematically inevitable that at least one contains life and we just happen to live in that one. Nothing surprising here. It’s simple mathematics.’
And so this diehard kills the entire endeavor of seeking to explain anything at all.
If a UFO appeared in the sky tomorrow and proceeded to start terraforming the landscape and I wondered how it came to be, how it could do what it is doing and why it is doing it in the first place, my die-hard materialist friend could equally well say there is no explanation needed for its existence at all. It’s pure accident. There are an almost infinite amount of universes and we just happen to live in one in which a UFO appeared out of nothing, without cause, to start transforming our environment. Nothing to wonder at. It’s simple mathematics.
Even if the UFO were to beam him up and strange beings probed him in uncomfortable places, still there need be no reason behind the happenings, which are all reduced to dumb luck and the accidental behavior of physical particles.
In other words, causal explanation is no longer needed because, in a multiverse, anything and everything must happen. We simply have physical sensations and emergent awareness of the particles bouncing around. Because we’re in that universe.
Beyond the intellectual cowardice implicit in this position, the materialist who resorts to the multiverse defense has made his position impossible, for now he must explain not just how it is that one universe accidentally exists, but instead how an almost infinite number of them came to accidentally exist.
He has exponentially increased the complexity and difficulty of his task.
Then he must also admit that there is no way for him to know whether there is life in those other universes or not.
His mathematics require that there not be, but he has no way of knowing that there aren’t, so again he is simply imagining what he wants and calls it a credible explanation.
It could well be that, as some quantum physicists postulate, other universes are life-baring variations of own, with differing story-lines and mutations in character and characteristics.
Personally, I fully believe that we live in a multiverse, but I’m a storyteller, who sees verses everywhere.
But, I’m sorry to say, I do not believe that the existence of an accidental Multiverse is any more plausible than the existence of an accidental universe, in fact, it seems almost infinitely less plausible to me.
In Conclusion
We resonate with stories that speak to our sense of life.
Our world can be a difficult and dangerous place, full of despair and suffering, so many people feel like this is a dog-eat-dog reality and that life unfolds without purpose or point. From this point of view it is easy to embrace a ‘story’ that makes sense of how that came to be, no matter how absurd.
It can’t be denied, however, that our world is also Wondrous, filled to the brim with Mystery and Magic, which requires a different type of explanation.
Nature is the Master our technology cannot match, a creative force that unfolds through all we know, present in each moment of our unfolding story.
And it really looks to me like it knows what it is doing.
