THE ID PARADIGM HAS ACCURATELY ANTICIPATED SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS

Atheistic naturalism/materialism and neo-Darwinism (ND) are directly opposed to intelligent design (ID). For one thing, they argue that ND has been able to make accurate predictions about future findings, while ID has failed to anticipate such findings.

In Heretic, Finnish biologist Matti Leisola points to many instances where ND has predicted wrongly. For an example, ND is confounded by ORFan genes, which have been found to stand alone without any evolutionary antecedents. Leisola cites:

• [Biochemist Branko] Kozulić [who] analyzed the literature on sequenced genomes and concluded that each species has hundreds of what are termed ORFan genes or singleton genes. These are genes with no resemblance to those found in other taxa (categories of organisms such as species, genera, and families).

The finding of ORFan genes presents a major problem for Darwinian gradualism, since there is no evidence of any gradual appearance of these unique genes. Leisola therefore asks:

• Could blind evolution possibly make a great leap from one gene to a very different ORFan gene, and so eliminate the need for a series of small random mutations and an extended series of intermediates? In 2015 Kozulić and I made a careful analysis of studies by Nobel laureate Jack Szostak’s group, and we concluded that even with extremely generous assumptions the probability of a random process landing on functional activities among random RNA or protein sequences is so low that it represents a practical impossibility.

In order to rectify this problem by producing evidence of macroevolution, biologist Richard Lenski had cultivated more than 68,000 generations of rapidly reproducing E. coli bacteria. Leisola reports that:

• ...in 2008, a prominent science journal reports that a lab [Lenski’s] has uncovered the first evidence of evolution’s ability to innovate in an impressive way.

However, Leisola cites biochemist Michael Behe’s assessment of Lenski’s findings. Behe asserts that they fall far short of their claim that this research had produced new and viable genes:

• Nothing fundamentally new has been produced. No new protein-protein interactions, no new molecular machines.…some large evolutionary advantages have been conferred by breaking things. Several populations of bacteria lost their ability to repair DNA. One of the most beneficial mutations, seen repeatedly in separate cultures, was the bacterium’s loss of the ability to make a sugar called ribose, which is a component of RNA. Another was a change in a regulatory gene called spoT, which affected en masse how fifty-nine other genes work, either increasing or decreasing their activity. One likely explanation of the net good effect of this very blunt mutation is that it turned off the energetically costly genes that make the bacterial flagellum, saving the cell some energy. Breaking some genes and turning others off, however, won’t make much of anything. (Heretic)

Leisola concludes that “this is ‘evolution’ by losing or damaging genes.” This represents an evolutionary dead-end. Besides, “there is a strict limit to what unguided evolutionary processes can achieve.” However, ID would predict common structures would be used by a single intelligent Designer, but not in a way consistent with Darwinian gradualism.

ND had also predicted that any genome would consist of a hodge-podge of no-longer-functioning evolutionary leftovers – “junk” DNA. However, according to Leisola, recent findings have overturned this prediction:

·       In 2012 the results of ENCODE were published and showed that the great majority of DNA is not junk but functional. The ENCODE results confirmed and extended what has grown increasingly clear ever since Watson and Crick first unraveled the double-helical structure of DNA more than sixty years ago: Far from being a cobbled-together, trial-and-error hack job, the cell is the most sophisticated information system known to man. The expectations of ID scientists were right.

This represents a great blow to ND. Instead of the anticipated hodge-podge of “junk” leftover DNA, science has discovered a necessary function for almost all of our DNA.

ND had also assumed that the simplest life-forms lacked complexity. As a result, ND proponents expected that the emergence of life could be explained naturalistically (without any regard for ID). However, it is increasingly found that even these simplest forms of life are tremendously complex:

·       Michael Denton can aptly describe even the smallest bacterial cell as “a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.” (Heretic)

Based upon many such findings, Leisola observed:

·       …today there is growing awareness that the genome and the cell are so sophisticated that we have barely scratched the surface. This growing understanding of life has pointed more and more insistently toward intelligent design.

·       Years ago, scientists thought they had a good and tidy materialistic explanation for the origin of the first living cell. Today, we are light years from a materialistic explanation and the “micro-miniaturized factory” that is the single cell—bustling with robotics and a sophisticated information-processing system—looks for all the world like an intelligently designed system.

In contrast to ND’s hopeful expectations of finding a naturalistic explanation, ID and the Bible have always recognized the marvel of life as something that was incapable of naturalistic explanation. Naturalism has failed in many other ways:

·       The laws and constants of physics and chemistry appear fine-tuned to allow for life. If the strength of gravity, or electromagnetism, or of the strong or weak nuclear force, or the speed of light—on and on the list goes—if any of these were even a tiny bit different, you couldn’t get atoms beyond hydrogen and helium. You couldn’t get life-essential carbon and water. You couldn’t get stars and moons and planets. And without these, no life. (Heretic)

The evidence of our finely-tuned universe alone should be enough to put the kibosh on naturalism. However, this naturalistic Designer-substitute is too esteemed to be simply exchanged for God, even as its explanatory power is called into question. For example, naturalism had held to the Steady State Theory, which had claimed that the existence of the universe did not require explanation, because it always existed. However, now that Big Bang cosmology has established that the universe had a beginning (as the Bible had claimed), scientists are confronted with an uncomfortable question, “Who started it?”

Robert Jastrow was the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a professor at Columbia University, and the director emeritus of the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Jastrow observed:

·       When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote, "My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details." (God and the Astronomers (1978), Ch. 1: In the Beginning)

Yet, Jastrow does acknowledge scientific evidence for the existence of God. In one interview, after strongly asserting his agnosticism, Jastrow admitted:

·       …that scientific evidence (including Hubble’s discoveries) pointed quite clearly to the existence of a supernatural Creator. Yet, the materialistic philosophy he had long embraced rebelled at such a conclusion. He ended with an admission I’ll never forget: “I’m in a completely hopeless bind.” https://thejohn1010project.com/blog/2018/05/17/god-and-the-astronomer/

Is the naturalistic/materialistic paradigm productive? Instead, it has been the ID paradigm that had anticipated all of the above findings! Leisola credits this paradigm as the father of modern science:

·       And almost to a man the founders of the major branches of modern science were Christian—some Catholic and some Protestant. As Copernicus explained, he was seeking to uncover “the mechanism of the universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly creator.” Kepler went even further. The laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind,” he wrote, because “God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”

However, within several generations, science had been co-opted by atheism to do its bidding in favor of naturalism/materialism. As a result, science no longer represents the search for truth. Instead, all of its conclusions are required to exclude any consideration of intelligent design. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin frankly admits this:

·       We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs… in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism...It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (Heretic)

Why the rejection of the Divine Foot? The atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, had argued that no one can be impartial about God:

• I am talking of...the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true...It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that...I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God. (The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, 130)