Review: Darwin\'s Doubt (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 19, 2013, 23:50 (4083 days ago)

A full exposition of the problem the Cambrian Explosion is for Darwinism:-"Here Meyer also demonstrates the mathematical implausibility of the neo-Darwinian explanation for the origin of new genetic information. The speedy appearance of animals with new body plans creates a big statistical problem. Its key point is easily grasped. Guessing a one-digit number might be easy and won't take that long. But guessing a ten or a one hundred digit number will likely take you a very long time. In biology, random mutations are equivalent to the "guesses" and the DNA and proteins are like numbers with hundreds or thousands of precisely arranged digits. The "right guess" corresponds to a DNA sequence that will produce a new protein with some heritable "adaptive" benefit for the offspring.-"If our own minds can disturb matter in ways that cannot be explained by materialists, is it not possible that some larger or more encompassing Mind can impact the world of nature? No, say the materialists. Why not? Because, in their philosophy, matter is all that exists. That's why they call themselves materialists. And that is why Thomas Nagel's book is so significant. His book is subtitled "Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False." Incidentally, Nagel has also gone out of his way to praise Stephen Meyer.-"It follows that those Darwinists who are also materialists — most of them are — can take this philosophy as their backstop and relax. They don't have to master or rebut ID arguments. They don't even have to listen to them. Their science is already built into their philosophy. But if Nagel's doubts about materialism hold up (and few laymen really accept materialism in the first place, because it denies free will and we know that consciousness is real), then the idea that there never was much to support Darwinism may one day be accepted. It was extrapolated from the observed facts of variation; it was assumed but has never been demonstrated.
 
This much is clear: The Darwinists cannot live with ID as their enemy. They can easily co-exist with creationism, but that came from the Bible, which can be dismissed in our secular age. They rage at ID, on the other hand, because it challenges them in what they have seen as their strong suit: Science."-http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/18/darwinism-and-materialism-they/