Brian McNicoll holds an odd, but all too common, set of ideas.[1]
He thinks that the problems with Darwinism stop at the explanation
of intelligence. He thinks Galileo was arrested for believing the
Earth orbits the sun. He thinks that the proof of the age of the
Earth is fairly solid. Of these, one is false, one is blatantly
false, and the other is debatable but believable.
Intelligent Design has poked far more holes in Darwinism than
the age-old question of how did intelligence develop. As far
as that goes, evolution is more or less right, it is not that
simple. It likely did not produce exactly 2 thinking beings,
but a population. It likely did not produce what we now know as
intelligence or morality over night. If it happened evolutionarily
at all, it happened gradually and over time. However, it is
unlikely that it did happen via evolution. Far from being a
good guess, a near guess, evolution is simply wrong. And here,
Mr. McNicoll makes a surprising statement, he recognizes that
Galileo was wrong. Galileo was bad science, and his theory had
all of the same complexity, epicycles, fudging the “center” of the
solar system, so on, that geocentrism did. It was Kepler who came
up with ellipses (at the same time Galileo was pushing circles,
Kepler was asking him for support), and did so from is own, odd
but real, religious beliefs. Science is known for its mistakes.
It thought light needed a media (ether). Turns out that it does
not seem to. It thought Newton’s three laws described reality.
They do not. They provide useful results on a human scale, but
fail, utterly and completely, on a solar scale or on a atomic scale.
They thought that men and women breathed differently, they do not
(in any meaningful sense), the difference was a difference in garments.
They thought leaches and bleeding were a kind of cure-all, that
the body was made of humors. They studied alchemy (Newton is
well known for it). They have advocated all sorts of silly (in
retrospect) things. Yet they still insist that their theories
can and should be trusted, blindly, to describe reality, instead
of merely “saving the facts” more or less well. They persist in
making Galileo’s real mistake: asserting that their math
must be true in an absolute sense, must be a true, in an absolute
sense, explanation, not merely a description.
The flaw here is subtle. It will escape many readers (if I had
many readers). Granted God truly is omniscient and omnipotent, is
it possible for Him to have created a world that appears
to be thousands of years old, but is not? Obviously yes. I do
not believe He would intentionally deceive us, but the overall
point remains. We cannot know that our understanding
of the world is complete or correct. The world could be far
more complex than we are yet aware, and it is shear presumption
to assume that because we know of no more, that we must be right,
and that revealed Truth must give way before our guesses, guesses
that time and time again we have rejected in favor of more complex
(relativity is certainly more complex than Newton’s 3 laws, otherwise
you would not use Newton as an approximation any more, you would
simply use the more simple theory directly), but more accurate.
[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brianmcnicoll/bm20050510.shtml
