JUST THE FACTS, M’AM

Science vs. scientism (John Silber, The New Criterion, November, 2005)

The scientific assault on the place and dignity of humankind has continued and accelerated. While Copernicus and Darwin announced their findings with reluctance and trepidation, their followers announced further denigrations of the human species with the enthusiasm of tub-thumping evangelists. Freud in claiming to have discovered the unconscious proclaimed that the human individual was no longer master in his own house; his thoughts and behavior were determined instead by irrational and largely unconscious motivations. Edward O. Wilson in his Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene further extended Darwinism by reducing humans to the levels of animals whose behavior, like that of ants, is ever more reduced to the level of genetic determination. B. F. Skinner easily matched their extreme reductionism with his denial of the relevance of conscious thought in human action. (Sidney Morganbesser spotted his error: Skinner thinks, he said, “We shouldn’t anthropomorphize people.”) What are we to make of our own experience if the mind—thoughts, ideas, and consciousness for which there is no scientific understanding—is held to play no role in the behavior of individuals? According to these reductionists, all mental phenomena are at most epiphenomena, associated in totally inscrutable ways with brain functions responding to genetic mandates. In the final analysis, what an individual human being thinks or does cannot be an expression of his will or his consciousness but, to use the current metaphor, of the way he is wired. Criminal behavior, for example, is simply an expression of the genes. The self, understood “scientifically,” disappears as a causal responsible being. Praise and blame, guilt, pride and shame are all equally misplaced and illusory ideas. Scientism, this reductionistic unscientific extension of science, has furthered the climate of anti-humanist secularism and practical atheism in universities and intellectual circles.

Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and legions of cosmologists and physicists have proclaimed that science, not religion, explains the origin of the universe. We all know their view: our universe originated in the Big Bang. But when they are asked what banged, they have no answer, unless it is the matter left over from a prior universe, now collapsed into a black hole. But when pushed to explain where the earlier universe came from, these cosmologists are faced with an infinite regress which leaves unanswered the philosophical and theological question: Why is there something and not nothing?

Theologians have offered the view that God created the universe ex nihilo, from nothing. This is no explanation, but, except for Biblical literalists, it leaves the issue as the mystery it is. Is it not better to admit that no one knows the answer than to propose a “scientific” answer so patently inadequate?

And what shall thoughtful individuals say about Darwinism in its fulsome development and extension? It is impossible to confront facts objectively and deny that species have evolved. The evidence showing developments in physical structure that relate the human species to hominids is compelling, and the similarities in the DNA of humans and chimpanzees provide undeniable scientific evidence of their kinship. Thus far, evolution is not merely one theory opposed to another but a scientific truth amply confirmed by facts. And there is convincing plausibility to the idea that physical or intellectual advantages have survival value. We can accept without credulity that those species have survived which possessed qualities lending them a clear advantage over the species that have become extinct. An animal that can see, for example, is clearly advantaged over those that are blind. Survival of the fittest based on specific advantages provides factual support for the process of evolution.

The critical question posed for evolutionists is not about the survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutations and environmental influences over millions of years.

This view was challenged a century ago by Henri Bergson when he asked for an explanation of the extraordinary eye of the giant squid. Once the eye is fully developed, one need not question its survival value. But its development required hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Why was every random mutation so neatly and marvelously contributory to the development of this complex structure? No scientific explanation has been offered; the view is only a working but unproven hypothesis. The empirical scientist becomes a fanatical dogmatist by insisting that random mutation sans any formative principle explains it all. (One need not appeal to an intelligent designer in order to wonder if there is an organizing force in the universe offsetting entropy.) A magician who shows you his empty top hat at time t1 and then at time t2 produces a rabbit from the hat has never had the gall to offer the mere presence of the rabbit as an explanation of how it got there. He claims it is magic. The evolutionists can do no better.

More recently, even some scientists and mathematicians have begun to question the adequacy of the emergent aspect of evolution largely for its failure to explain what Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin’s Black Box, calls the “irreducible complexity” of organisms. Random mutation cannot explain scientifically their complexity and the addition of so many complex elements before any survival value is established; hence, the black box or the rabbit in the hat. In Abyss: The Deep Sea and the Creatures that Live in It, C. P. Idyll considers once again Bergson’s preoccupation with the eye of the squid. Idyll notes, “What the scientist finds hardest to understand in considering the squid and the human eye is that two entirely independent lines of evolution should have converged at the same point.” Why should evolution have produced eyes in two vastly different species through totally independent lines of evolution such that each has the eyeball with its lens, its cornea, its iris, its retina, its vitreous humor, and its optic nerve? How did random mutation produce such extraordinarily similar structures in the absence of any teleological or formative principles? And how many hundreds of thousands of years passed before each additional element significantly contributed the final capacity of sight that would ensure survival?

Random mutation might be the answer, but there is no evidence to prove it. Scientists should acknowledge the difference between what is proven and what is merely a hypothesis. One is not attacking or denigrating science to point out its hubristic extensions unsupported by any evidence or methodology that could be described as scientific.

MORE: While We’re At It (Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, October, 2005, scroll down)

Remember the old Saturday Night Live show when the news anchor began with, “Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” I loved the sheer chutzpah of it. That seemed to be the mode adopted by the nation’s prestigious scientific organizations when the Kansas Board of Education held hearings on teaching about the controversy regarding evolution and the origins of life. “We’re the experts and you’re not,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in effect, responded. Dr. Kenneth Miller of Brown University allowed that declining to testify “can be made to look as if you do not want to defend science in public, or you are too afraid to face the intelligent-design people in public.” The Kansas hearing was “a political show trial,” sniffed Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. Never mind that there are highly certified scientists, and not only intelligent design proponents, who think there is a legitimate debate about the way evolution is taught in the schools. There are times when you rightly refuse to dignify an idea by declining to participate in the discussion of it. Some time back, for instance, I declined an invitation to be part of a university panel exploring whether the CIA and Israel were behind the attacks of September 11. But it seems to me the scientific establishment is making a big mistake in adopting the Chevy Chase posture. A state board of education may be seriously mistaken but it is, after all, the legitimate educational authority in the state. It is not very smart, and certainly does nothing to enhance scientific education, to dismiss its members and those who elected them as a bunch of ignorant wackos. Dr. Miller and others of the establishment do plan to testify in a case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where teachers are instructed to acknowledge that there is controversy about the theory of evolution. “In a court of law, you have standards, rules, and laws you are interpreting,” Dr. Scott explained. “In Kansas, it was a free-for-all.” This is really not very smart. The mandarins of the scientific establishment will get together with the robed masters of the judicial usurpation of politics to keep the booboisie from questioning their betters. “We’re Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” And then, the dimwitted masses having been put in their place, the controversy over how to teach children about evolution will go away.

By now it should be clear that the resistance of the scientific community to teaching ID or creationsim in schools has little to do with protecting the integrity of science and everything to do with preventing the general public from challenging the scientific establishment on what is proven scientific fact and what is unproven theory.