Why Naturalism Makes Darwin Unfalsifiable

Naturalism. By definition, it is the presupposition that the world came into being, developed [i.e. – evolved] to its present state and is sustained by purely material processes. God is not needed. Or so they hope. I think they’ve mistaken the concept of a God who is not wanted [by them, at any rate] with an unnecessary being.

The universe, which shows so much evidence of design and purpose, was not designed. And though the universe offers no explanation for why it bothers to exist at all, they insist that it is irrelevant and immediately begin speculating about multiverses that cannot be observed, tested or even made plausible with the barest of supporting data. After all, they’re trying to explain to us why the world spontaneously came about and became increasingly complex to its present point by purely natural processes. They’re trying to explain away the extreme improbability, using speculation to keep their theory from being falsified, but never being able to test whether these proposed universe bubbles or multiverses actually exist! Another speculation [Dare we refer to such Just So Stories by the respectable name of a scientific theory?] is that our universe was created in a lab experiment by aliens from another universe [extracosmolians?] who were successful, but will never know whether this was so any more than we could ever prove they in fact existed much less conducted said pointless experiment [For what would be purpose or point of such an experiment, if one could never know if it were successful or not?] And let’s not forget my all-time favorite yarn of why the universe bothers to exist: It just always has. Big Bang theories of every stripe stand in opposition to the idea of a steady-state universe, so we propose rebounding universes [Nevermind that we only observe an expanding universe and have never seen a contracting cosmos. Nevermind that there isn’t enough energy left for another such endeavor. They need a universe without God. What can they do?]. Why isn’t this stuff considered science fiction again?

 Nor can they explain why the universe is so amazingly fine-tuned for the existence of our particular kind of life [the anthropic principle]. When cornered, they glibly shrug, “Well, we’re here, aren’t we?” [So says Richard Dawkins, who hypocritically says that God must not exist because, ignoring entirely an entire set of data with all the glassy-eyed zeal of a religious fanatic, he finds God to be improbable. This is yet another example of the classic double standard atheist scientism [How can we call such biased faith in pure naturalism “science?”] applies when considering evolution versus Creation/ID.] Or they claim it only has the appearance of being designed while assuring us that it wasn’t.  It’s like saying the pyramids only have the appearance of design but are, after all, simply a complex variant of geology. No one would suggest such a farce in the face of overwhelming and obvious evidence of design, but these guys do so on a daily basis when it regards the irreducibly complex, intricately inter-related intelligently designed universe! The “It’s not designed; it only looks that way,” excuse fails precisely because it can offer no fair and accurate definition of design that would not allow for the existence of a Grand Designer. Unless they fall back on an arbitrary “made by man” definition that would exclude the idea that beavers build and design their homes and dams and that birds build nests whose design varies by variant of bird or that spiders design webs. These are not purely natural phenomena, like a rock lying on a beach, but require some level of intelligent intervention in their creation. We recognize rocks as natural until they are arranged as they are at Stonehenge. We recognize dead wood as natural until they are arranged into nests and dams. Denialism [when acknowledging the facts might hurt your pet dogma theory] is not science. We must account for these realities of the observable world, even if cosmological evolution and biological evolution cannot [except in speculations theory].

And what of life? Life spontaneously generated, they insist. Chemicals changed and became proteins and enzymes and the stuff of life. I won’t get into just how improbable this is. The Stanley-Miller experiment has been thoroughly discredited, though it still gets put into our textbooks. [Propaganda anyone?] That leaves the “crystals became chromosomes” theory, which over-reaches more than they usually do. It’s also purest speculation. They seem to have a hard time telling the difference between speculation and establishing whether something actually occurred according to those speculations. Speculating that something might have occured a certain way does not establish that it did. There has to be a way to test it and then to repeat the results of that test until a discernable pattern emerges to avoid the possibility that we were only witnessing an anomoly. Here’s the rub: Creating life in a test tube from nonliving material, even crystals, would only prove that such things can be CREATED by intelligent design. It would not prove that such things have occurred by NATURAL processes. 

Yeah. They really don’t have anything. Oh, except aliens. Whom they’ve speculated as having existed. Though Richard Dawkins insists that these aliens might have designed us to develop by evolutionary processes [Wasn’t this a Star GTrek: The Next Generation episode?], he also insists that the aliens must have come about by evolution too. He has no way of knowing this other than by assuming evolution to be true. Unfortunately, this has a problem. There isn’t enough time for man to have developed by pure naturalistic processes on this planet, but he’;s saying that aliens would have evolved on a different planet, had enough time to develop space travel [or dimensional travel, whichever] and master genetics and THEN come all the way here from God Only Knows Where to seed life on this planet for reasons unfathomable. I mean, why do you farm life on another planet but leave it to develop on its own? It’s the stuff of sci-fi, which is pretty much the only place this stuff belongs.

A purist Darwinian will object at this point that we have only address cosmological evolution and that Darwin’s theory only applies to biology. But then they have to explain to me exactly what means life and the universe came into being, if it was not by naturalism. Pure Darwinism, despite the capitulations and equivocations of so-called theistic evolutionists, rather demands naturalism since it does not allow for the interventiuon of the supernatural [God] at any point in the process. Apologists for theistic evolution might insist that Darwin’s theory allows for divine intervention at the outset [a sort of biological deism] or at crucial points of the process [as the catalyst of punk eek], but they cannot explain why God must be limited by working by evolutionary processes, nor why He would state that it only took days in His Infallible Word and nor else why He would deceive the world by using naturalistic processes to hide a supernatural work of Creation.

I digress.

The preceeding served only to show that naturalism has three [largely unaddressed] problems:

1. Naturalistic origins is mostly speculation. While natural processes are observed, origins is beyond observation, much less testing. The sort of things naturalism assumes [something from nothing, continuing and increasing complexity and order in defiance of observable entropy, life from nonlife, common descent when we only see variation with set kinds of animals] require giant leaps of faith — and continual adaptations of the theory [read: more speculation] to shore up persistently increasing cracks in Darwin’s Dyke.

2. It is presumed. I think I’ve already covered this point. That rivers cut canyons out of rock its observable now. Uniformitarianism [the idea that things have always done thus] make presumptions about the unobservable past. But catastrophists are increasing in number, even amongst nontheistic scientists. Worse, for biological evolution, more is presumed, namely that one kind of animal can change into another, even though no one has ever seen this occur. We’ve seen variations within the kinds, but a cat is still a cat and never anything else.

3. Naturalistic origins is beyond science. We can experiment with creating life, but we cannot say beyond all doubt that life or the universe actually began that way. We will have only demonstrated intelligent design. We can speculate about it, but we cannot prove it occured according to our speculations. The only way such a thing could be proven would be to observe it occuring naturally, but we would still be supposing it occured in the past [though said speculation would seem more reasonable in light of our observations]. Unfortunately, Darwinian evolution occurs much too slowly to be observed [I speak of evolution from one kind into a new kind, not variation within a kind], so If it occured by purely naturalistic processes, man shall be long gone before he has future natural proof of it.

Which, along with the makes Darwin patently unfalsifiable.    

 –Sirius Knott

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