Jousting With the Dark Knight of Creationism

By Mark Morgan

Certainly this interview with Tom Willis is the most disturbing thing I've read this year. How can this man claim to be trained in logic and then say the things he does?

I'm not afraid of the big bad fundamentalist. I've criticized the woman with the highest IQ in the world. After that, a mere peasant like Tom Willis holds no fear for me.

Complexity, thy name is deceit

Out of the starting gate, Willis makes a recurring fallacious creationist argument, the "watchmaker" argument. The standard form of this is if you find a watch, you cannot reasonably argue that it was created at random. Willis uses a comb--explain how a comb could be created at random.

I can't, and evolutionary biologists don't. They say that the randomness of nature is constrained by the forces of natural selection. Take the hemoglobin molecule, complex as all hell. Surely the odds against that are too high to have evolved at random. Well, no. First, hemoglobin did not evolve at random. It evolved in the framework of natural selection. Second, what's so special about hemoglobin? Maybe there are ten million different molecules that could do hemoglobin's job; if there is a on in ten million chance of any of them evolving by random, then one will.(1)

My point is not that I know anything about how hemoglobin evolves; my point is that neither does Tom Willis. Nothing in evolution is completely random; all of evolution happens within the constraints of environment and survival of the fittest. It's an argument with flawed logic. Technically, it is called a straw man argument: create a false version of your opponent's argument, then demolish that. Evolution does not say life evolved out of pure randomness; but if you claim it does, you can easily demolish that claim. You attack the straw man, and not the reality.

Further, quite frankly, people are not the best designed things in the world. Our eyes have parts that are backwards and upside down. Most engineers could design a better system than the lower back for supporting the weight of our bodies. It just doesn't hold water to say that we must have been designed. I dunno, maybe we are, but the evidence is not as clear as Willis and other Intelligent Design Creationists would have the world believe. "Obviously we are designed to wear spectacles; look at how the nose is perfect for spectacles!"

The Pointless Accusations of Evil Game

But that kind of bush-league non-logic should not bother any of us. Surely the schools, if they had any damn backbone, could teach children the critical thinking skills necessary to see around such crap arguments. But then Willis begins to play the Game.

"You can argue that the Inquisition and the Crusades came from Christianity. But you cannot defend either from Scripture. But you can easily defend Nazi and Communist behaviour from evolutionary theory. Certainly, before Hitler started shooting at Joe Stalin you would not have found many people defending an anti-Hitler view, even in the great bastion of freedom in the United States. That's important. It's important to realise that was a scientific view. Hitler's views were argued to be scientific by many men on every side of the pond, and they managed to carry the day in Eastern Europe. If you recall, Hitler walked into Austria without firing a shot. That's how popular his views were. It is not just an idle notion that men will believe things that are silly and call them scientific."

Oh, you insidious bastard. Keep reading, and he goes on to tell us that evolution is "[O]ne of the best-crafted apologetic systems for evil that I've seen in history." On the one hand he blithely dismisses the Inquisition and the Crusades, and on the other he blames biology theory for the Holocaust.

Well. I shan't play the Game back, since I keep score and I have to remain neutral and all that. I'll resist the urge to find Scripture that could be quoted by a Hitler to justify his claims (which Hitler did, I am sure--any tool in the propoganda toolbelt). But I will talk briefly about Social Darwinism, which is what Hitler and the Nazis practiced. Social Darwinism is the idea that the weak of society should be allowed to die to allow the strong to survive. First, it's relationship to Darwinism: the name. That's it.

Social Darwinism makes the classic mistake of confusing the "is" with the "ought." It makes the same mistake Indian Buddhism makes: people "are" some place in society, so they "ought" to be in that place in society. They call it Karma, and it's the main reason I'm not a Buddhist any more. But there is nothing in evolution that supports this argument. It's based on a distorted view of natural selection, that to prosper it must be at some others' expense. But evolution proposes no goal and no direction, so anything that makes you prosper is Good Enough. A lot of biology is dependent on cooperation. You have bacteria in your intestines that break down foods so you can absorb it. It's a cooperative relationship. Evolution no more automatically implies a dog-eat-dog philosophy than Christianity autmomatically implies a world that God put for us to do with however we wish.

Okay, a little bit of the Game, blaming Christianity for the destruction of the environment. I promise that's it.

Politics, science, and God

Willis' goals are clearly not to find a better answer; it is for schools and society to accept his answer, and abandon the scientific enterprise. "You virtually never hear a Christian defend evolutionism from the Bible." He tries to position evolution as politics, or another religion. But science is neither. Humans are inherently political, but scientists come from all walks of life and sometimes can't stand to be in the same room. Science is apolitical, so it is obvious that Willis is just trying to tell you what's wrong with you. Don't let him.

Science is the only human endeavor that is better than we are. I might be pushing my political agenda in my research on species diversity, but when the researcher in Malaysia tries to duplicate the findings, how likely is it that they are pushing the same agenda? Or that they have exactly the same biases? I might fudge my data, but after putting my paper through blind peer review--where they don't know who I am when they eviscerate my paper--and then the results are published where everyone can see them, how likely is that to survive?

Take the recent flap National Geographic caused by rushing into publication some supposed fossil evidence. No peer review. And the second the scientific community took a look at it, the flaws in the research stood out like a sunburn after a day at the beach. The public nature of science is such that science is inherently apolitical and areligious. Particularly now, when research is conducted, in public, all over the world.

I'm sorry that Willis feels it is necessary to lie to you about evolution, to attack it as evil and harmful, to claim a political agenda where there is none. I will merely say what I always say: check the evidence, and decide for yourself. But do take the time to really try and understand evolution in particular, and science in general, before you fall under the spell of such as this man.

(1)This part of my argument has engendered some debate. Might I be misusing probablity as badly as I claim others are?

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