{"id":8610,"date":"2016-06-09T22:29:37","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T02:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gornahoor.net\/?p=8610"},"modified":"2020-06-09T08:18:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T12:18:06","slug":"from-worms-to-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/?p=8610","title":{"rendered":"From Worms to Gods"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nIn which we review Wolfgang Smith<\/strong>\u2019s writings on Darwinism and biology.\n<\/p>\n

\nI am worm, I am slave, I am king, I am God. ~ Gavrila Derzhavin<\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spiritual and mystical writers are often criticized, e.g., as being \u201clife denying\u201d, for describing themselves as \u201cworms\u201d or \u201cslaves\u201d. Here, however, the Russian poet Derzhavin gives us the complete formula of the evolution of Christian gnosis: subconscious, waking consciousness, the Real Self, and finally God consciousness.<\/p>\n

By now, even old men in the forest have heard the news that God is dead. Unlike the men in the marketplace who rejoice because now \u201call things are possible\u201d, the old men see that nothing is possible. Man is once again a worm, with no higher purpose, and a slave to his passions, his neurons, his genes, and the molecules that compose his body. Consciousness itself is unreal, an epiphenomenon, an artifact of a certain complexity. The new god is Science, although men seldom grasp what that means. They go on with their lives as if the One God still exists.<\/p>\n

I recently read a list of items that, it was claimed, Americans are ignorant of. Among indisputable facts about who was George Washington or who fought in the Civil War, they slipped in some disputable items such as neo-Darwinism vis-\u00e0-vis Intelligent Design. Of course the \u201cintelligent\u201d know that Darwin is correct. The intellectual equivalent of cheap grace, it gives the scientifically illiterate and innumerate the illusion of being among the cognoscenti. There are two ways, however, to understand, or misunderstand, the \u201ctheory of evolution\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Marketplace<\/h2>\n

Option 1 is to go on with life as though nothing has changed, as in this vignette about Galileo<\/a>. Man goes on just as before Darwin. His self-awareness is still as a person with a moral will, who can create and love, and so on. The only difference is that he assumes that the human race evolved naturally, albeit randomly, from lower forms of life, rather than as a being who is created in the image and likeness of God.<\/p>\n

The Mad Men<\/h2>\n

The Mad Men, however, understand that the very concept of the human race is radically altered, in conformance with the demands of the neo-Darwinist theory. By this standard, man is an animal, consciousness is at best a by-product or epiphenomenon of a certain brain complexity, and free will is an illusion. There is no moral absolute, since all behavior is governed by genetics and evolved in order to achieve a certain level of social harmony.<\/p>\n

Wolfgang Smith on the Refutation of Darwin.<\/h2>\n

Smith\u2019s arguments against Darwin are spread across different books, so what follows is an amalgamation. In preparation for this review I listened to two debates involving William Dembski: one against a philosopher and other against a biologist. Dembski\u2019s demonstration of Specified Complexity<\/a> is one of the foundational elements of intelligent design theory. We can\u2019t go into the maths here, but hope a simple illustration will help. Suppose you encountered a bullseye in the forest with some arrows in the centre. Of course, you would recognize the unlikeliness of that discovery since it is so different from the forest ambiance. The twigs on the ground, for example, are dispersed in random directions, unlike the specific formation of the arrows. It would be absurd to look for natural causes like wind, animals, etc., to explain such a structure in the forest. Dembski\u2019s accomplishment was to formalize such events in terms of information and probabilities. The higher the information content, the more likely there was design involved.<\/p>\n

Now the philosopher and the biologist were not at all interested in Dembski\u2019s equations. They focused solely on the identity of the designer. Working backwards, their assumption of the non-existence of a designer disproved Dembski a priori. The philosopher, for example, went on and on about an \u201cold man in the sky\u201d, showing an absurd level of ignorance for a degreed scholar. The biologist, moreover, claimed that evolution has been fully \u201cestablished\u201d, so it would be pointless to refute it.<\/p>\n

The Wikipedia article on pseudoscience<\/a> identifies two of its qualities, which apply to both opponents. You can make your own judgment about which is pseudoscience. These are:<\/p>\n