Evolution Diary

Nice to have a religious person looking rationally at evolution

I Return at Last to the Creationism-Intelligent Design… .

I am persuaded that the evolutionists have far the better case. In an essay titled “Unintelligent Design,” Scott Atran, in the last volume noted above, points out that “no scientific theory can ever be proved true, but states that “scientific theories are validated when their surprising predictions are confirmed …” Predictive confirmation of evolution has appeared again and again, and converging lines of evidence from varied sources are rife with thousands of corroborating examples.

Intelligent design proponents have argued that there are no transitional fossils to demonstrate evolution across whole species. This was pretty much true in Darwin’s time, and he was troubled by it, but many have since turned up and more all the time. Another creationist argument is that there are some things in nature that are “irreducibly complex,” that is, they could not have been functional until all of their interrelating parts had become fully formed, and thus had to have been created full-blown, not evolved. The human eye is a classic case, but that claim was satisfactorily refuted by Darwin himself long ago.

Evolutionists are ready to concede that there are many questions left in the study of evolution and related matters, just as there are many unanswered questions in all sciences. But these do not constitute serious challenges to the theory. Experience has shown that ongoing research has resolved one such problem after another, whereas the main theory has correctly predicted all manner of phenomena.

Intelligent design, on the other hand, hasn’t predicted anything – as, of course, fiat creation wouldn’t. But what is more serious, nature shows vast numbers of examples of poor adaptation, moments when the ever moving selective process didn’t get it right.