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How Science Lost Its Mind 

Writing for The American Spectator, Jay Homnick has observed:

It is not enough to say that design is a more likely scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.”

Before Darwin, nearly everyone, in every corner of the world, believed in some type of ‘‘intelligent design,” and the majority still do. That is for good reasons. Since the publication of Origin of Species, science has discovered that living things are far more complex and clever than Darwin ever could have imagined. So how did it happen that the majority of our scientists “lost their minds” and are unable to see the design in living things that is so blindingly obvious to the layman?

Becoming a Scientist

I believe there are two primary reasons.

First, when one becomes a scientist, one learns that science can now explain, without appealing directly to design, so many previously inexplicable phenomena that one comes to believe that nothing can escape the explanatory power of our science. Why should evolutionary biology be so different, why should it be the only scientific discipline where we cannot explain everything by appealing only to more fundamental laws of nature? (Though these fundamental laws of nature are actually themselves fine-tuned for life, as we are discovering.)

Second, when one becomes a biologist, or a paleontologist, one discovers many things about the origin of species, particularly the evidence for common descent from homologies (similarities), that give the impression of natural causes. “This just doesn’t look like the way God would create things” is an argument used frequently by Darwinists, and by Darwin himself.

A Mathematician’s View

Part I of the video below (a much improved version of a video I have highlighted in the past) shows why evolution is different. Part II shows why similarities do not prove the absence of design. These two themes were central to my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and have been the focus of most of my writings on intelligent design since then. 

The video is currently being translated into Polish by the En Arche Foundation, an organization that is translating a number of ID books (including mine) into that language. No doubt they will also make the video more professional-looking, but meanwhile I think you will find that the current version shows very convincingly “Why Evolution Is Different,” and “Why Similarities Do Not Prove Absence of Design.”

https://youtu.be/Zv1LbPE0zPY

Photo: Darwin statue, Shrewsbury, by ceridwen [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.