By Ian Jobling • 1/17/08
Lawrence Auster’s View from the Right is one of the best websites on the Internet. Larry is straightforwardly race realist and pro-white; even better, he is one of the very few race realists who, in my view, has a sane position on Israel, the Middle East, and Islam. However, no one’s perfect, and Larry does have his folly: creationism. His constant reiteration of discredited creationist canards and the unfair insults he directs against evolutionists, including myself, are examples of the way in which the human need for faith can pervert even the sharpest intellects. Today, Larry posted a comment by one of his readers criticizing Darwinian race realists for their “nihilistic world-view which is the very antithesis to the Christian one which gave rise to our Western civilization in the first place.” Larry agrees with the reader that Darwinism is incompatible with the survival of the West, and adds that Darwinists are “unable to articulate a meaningful politics.” Larry then agrees with another commenter that Darwinism “inevitably leads to viewing those races whom [sic] are considered to be less ‘evolved’ as something less than fully human.”
This is libel. I challenge Larry to give examples from my work, or from that of other Darwinist race realists named in the post, such as Jared Taylor and J. P. Rushton, backing up his claim that we believe non-whites to be less than fully human.
I’ve long wondered whether I should address the evolution/creationism debate, and this comment made me decide to set down my thoughts about it at last. Not only am I being libeled, but, if it is true, as Larry says, that a Darwinist can’t possibly defend the West, then that is definitely a problem for me, as this is my major goal.
This is a complex topic that must be addressed in at least two, and possibly more, posts. I will eventually argue that Darwinism, far from representing a nihilistic denial of Western values, in fact represents their highest embodiment and that it is creationists who are being unfaithful to the Western spirit. Before I can make that claim, there is the small question of whether Darwinism is true to clear up.
By “creationism” I mean any biological theory that asserts that supernatural intervention into nature was required for life to develop into its current form. Creationism thus includes “intelligent design” theory, which posits that evolution was guided by a supernatural hand.
The fallacy of the creationist position (see Larry’s version of it here) can be summed up in a few words. Creationists think they prove their theory by pointing out (often imaginary) weaknesses in evolutionists’ arguments. However, doing this proves nothing at all about the validity of creationism. In order to prove their theory, creationists would have to prove that their theory is supported by stronger evidence than the opposing theory is. And that is impossible because creationism is a non-testable theory that cannot be supported by evidence in principle. As Stephen Jay Gould says in a classic article:
“Scientific creationism” is a self-contradictory, nonsense phrase precisely because it cannot be falsified. I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential data could lead creationists to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science. Lest I seem harsh or rhetorical, I quote creationism’s leading intellectual, Duane Gish, Ph.D. from his recent (1978) book, Evolution? The Fossils Say No! “By creation we mean the bringing into being by a supernatural Creator of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of sudden, or fiat, creation. We do not know how the Creator created, what process He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe [Gish’s italics]. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by the Creator.” Pray tell, Dr. Gish, in the light of your last sentence, what then is scientific creationism?
Gould’s article also lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution: direct, observational evidence of evolution in action, the fossil record, and the revealing imperfections of species. I won’t go over this evidence here, since it has been spelled out in such detail at the TalkOrigins website.
The non-testable nature of creationism makes it impossible for creationists to mount a serious scientific challenge to Darwinism. There is one other way, however, that creationists could give their theory some credibility: they could prove that evolution couldn’t possibly have happened, and that divine intervention is the only possible alternative explanation. This has been the tack taken in recent years by Michael Behe and other intelligent design theorists, whose arguments have been popularized by Ann Coulter in Godless. (Larry finds Coulter’s criticisms of evolutionary theory “devastating.”) These people argue that “irreducible complexity” in nature disproves evolutionary theory. Irreducibly complex mechanisms are those components of living things that have many interdependent parts that could not function without each other. One example used by Behe is the bacterial motor, the cilium, which depends on the coordinated action of 30 protein parts, none of which would be functional without the others. Behe triumphantly proclaims that it is staggeringly unlikely that all of the interdependent parts could have appeared simultaneously through random genetic mutations and that he has therefore slain the dragon of Darwinism.
However, evolutionists never claimed that all the parts of irreducibly complex mechanisms evolved simultaneously. Rather, simpler components of such mechanisms appear in other life forms, making an evolutionary progression through random mutation far more plausible than Behe makes out. See this article for an account of theories of how the cilium evolved. Furthermore, see this article that shows Behe is not acquainted with much of the literature on this question.
Do scientists have a definitive, certain explanation of how cilia evolved? No, and they admit it. Coulter jubilantly concludes in Godless that since evolutionists can’t explain everything about life in all of its details, evolutionary theory must be false. However, no scientific theories can explain everything about their areas of focus. What makes scientists believe a theory is true, or the best approximation of truth possible, is that it explains more than other theories. There is no reason to expect a theory to explain everything about its subject matter because explanations require more than just a theory; they also require empirical information that is often unavailable. The evolution of cilia took place a long time ago and was not preserved in the fossil record, so scientists can’t know exactly how it happened. But that does not disprove their theory of how living things change.
And here we lay our finger the silliness of creationism: creationists prefer a theory that explains nothing at all about the world to a theory that doesn’t explain everything. They prefer complete ignorance to partial and imperfect knowledge. They prefer a theory that answers all our questions about nature with the same leaden phrase—“Because that’s how God wanted it”—to a theory that can illuminate, albeit partially and imperfectly, the complex causal network that gave rise to the organisms we see around us.
Darwinism is thus scientifically better grounded than creationism, which is not really a scientific theory at all. However, it could still be, as Larry says, that Darwinism is a pernicious form of nihilism, that it erodes Western values, and that it leads to dehumanization of non-whites. I will examine these claims in subsequent posts.