Scientists looking at the differences between 14Th Century skulls and modern skulls were surprised to find significant differences.^[1] I would like to consider, briefly, something the article does not. If skulls have changed noticeably in the last 650 years, how much more must they have changed in the last 2000 years? In the last 10,000 years? When does that change become significant enough for fossil finders to decide a new species has been discovered? Should that difference really denote a new species?

1. Ms. Rebecca Morelle. “Time changes modern human’s face” BBC News (online). 2006-01-25 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4643312.stm

Dr. Vij Sodera’s One Small Speck to Man: the evolution myth looks to be a tome worth owning. Unfortunately, for ease of wish listing, it is not available (at least not yet) from Amazon. You can read about it (and order it) here.^[1]

1. Mr. Dennis Wagner. Review of One Small Speck to Man: the evolution myth. The ID Update. 2006-01-21 http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2006/01/21/one_small_speck_to_man_the_evolution_myth

I recall from the previous Microsoft trial (the Department of Justice one a few years ago) that it is rather hard to overturn a judge’s Findings of Fact. The recent Dover trial makes me regret that. If Mr. West is accurate, then the Judge in that trial badly misrepresented the arguments made in favor of intelligent design, but instead created a straw man and/or red herring argument to debunk and discredit instead.^[1] This write-up really makes it sound like Judge Jones had his mind made up before the trial started, a real tragedy.

1. Mr. John West. “Dover in Review: An Analysis of Judge Jones’ Flawed Ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” Evolution News & Views. 2006-01-06 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/01/dover_in_review_an_analysis_of_1.html

I would like the gray version of this T-Shirt.^[1] An explanation, if necessary, is available here.^[2]

1. CafePress.com. “Intelligently Designed Apparel and Merchandise” contains a T-Shirt saying “Freud is dead, Marx is dead, and Darwin is not feeling very well.” viewed 2006-01-05 http://www.cafepress.com/accessresearch/964771
2. ARN Staff. “Freud is dead, Marx is dead, and Darwin isn’t feeling very well.” In the News ID and Current Events. 2005-12-09 http://www.cafepress.com/accessresearch/964771

With the latest article on Cardinal Schönborn’s thoughts on evolution and Intelligent Design,^[1] I conclude that I simply cannot trust the media’s, any media’s, representation on this issue. Which is rather depressing.

See also:

• The Church and Darwin
• Appealing to Rome on evolution
• The Church and evolution

1. Mr. Tom Heneghan. “Vienna cardinal draws lines in Intelligent Design row” Reuters 2005-11-20. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=uri:2005-11-20T111756Z_01_KWA040635_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-EVOLUTION-CARDINAL.xml&pageNumber=0&summit=

So Mr. Scott Adams, of Dilbert, poked his fingers into the debate over Intelligent Design, and the Darwinists promptly proceeded to roundly attack him.^[1] He proceeded to try to clarify how many of the comments proved his point exactly,^{[2] I think he did so less than clearly, but I do not think his lack of clarity mattered to much by that point.}

The point he is trying to make, badly, is that when you attack people instead of their positions, or when you attack ideas that people really do not profess, others will question you even where you appear to be, and perhaps are, credible. If you want to convince me that you are right, and I am wrong, then you had best either know what I think and refute that, or stick to your own position and not claim to address mine at all. When you attack a straw man, those with the wit to realize what you are doing will doubt your position. If it was all that accurate, why would not not attack my position directly?

Beyond this point that Mr. Adams attempts to make though is a larger one. Evolution might be, I think is, the best materialistic theory for life as we know it. But science, in practice, claims more than that. It claims that evolution is not just the best explanation that science can offer, but an explanation that we must accept as objectively true. The realm of objective truth cannot be restricted to materialist explanations without proof that only such explanations are in fact objectively true. Such a proof is outside the realm of science, and so a counter argument would be equally outside the realm of science.

If you restrict your focus to what can be studied by a materialist approach, all the available evidence will support a materialist theory. That does not make the theory an accurate description of history. I care more about learning what is historically true than what is the best science can offer.

1. Mr. Scott Adams. “Intelligent Design, Part 1″ Dilbertblog 2005-11-12. http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/intelligent_des.html
2. Mr. Scott Adams. “Intelligent Design, Part 2″ Dilbertblog 2005-11-15. http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/intelligent_des_1.html

Mr. William Rees-Mogg has taught me some on evolution and the Church’s understanding of it.^[1] I did not know of Saint Augustine’s theory of evolution, one in which God created first chaos, but a chaos with the seeds of order embedded in it. It is a compelling theory, it takes all that science suspects of the Big Bang, and all that science detects of the deterministic nature of the physical world, the narrow ranges in which life could exist and so on, and unifies it more cleanly than, I think, even the neo-Darwinists do. Which is not to say I think Saint Augustine right on this. Merely that he could be right. And if he is, then all of physics would be unified cleanly with theology.

Contrast this with the neo-Darwinist position that posits randomness and yet at the same time says that the material is all, that we are our genes. That suspects to find the cause and whole of thought in the mechanics of the mind. An argument that, combined with physics, would reduce all of nature, all of man and all of his intellect to the mathematics of atoms bouncing. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not save us from this clockwork existence, for while perhaps no one can know the speed and position both at once, yet each atom has both. It would be a mistake, I believe (though I cannot prove), to say that the statistical understanding of the subatomic world is real. Each atom has a position and has a speed at any given instance. Not many speeds, but one. It is simply impossible for man, at least for now, to know it without changing the system. But that speed and position, unknown, still determines in (unknowable) mathematical precision exactly what is and what will be. Or it would, were the materialist correct, if the material were all that is. The only randomness available to the neo-Darwinist then is the randomness of the initial state, the composition of the pre-bang mass. Its nature, at best unknown and more likely unknowable, and the cause and nature of its explosion together provide the initial state after which all is determined by the geometry and physics of sub atomic collisions and wave equations.

Saint Augustine replaces this finite source of randomness. He replaces this unknowable disorder with a precision-crafted mass, and a carefully triggered explosion. A mass and explosion created, designed, to produce what we see. How much cleaner a picture this paints. It explains why each physical constant is exactly within the oh-so-narrow range it needs to be in. Why nothing is even the slightest out of place to yield life. It explains that great leap of improbability: the origin of life, an event so improbable as to cause some scientists to speculate that there must be many universes, or at least that the one universe must have collapsed and exploded time and time again, so that sufficient tries exist to allow the infinitely improbable to occur. All this messiness, this unprovable supposition is swept away with one simple and yet natural theory: that we are because some One willed it.

And yet, this too is not doctrine. It is merely, some 1449 years before Darwin published, the Catholic theory of evolution. It is the answer to the ancient Greek thought envisioning a world of atoms, whose random interactions negate the need of a Deity, and thus opens the way to the intellectually fulfilled atheist.

The Church, as Mr. Rees-Mogg states, might well want to distance itself from protestants who seek to find science in Genesis. But not necessarily because the Church thinks they must be wrong. Merely because they could be wrong. Again we face the temptation that Galileo succumbed to. We are tempted to say that we know that something is for no better reason than that the theory appeals to us. But the theory could be “beautiful,” it could be incredibly useful, and yet be wrong. Just as Newton’s laws proved wrong, and now perhaps even Quantum Mechanics will pass away,^[2] so too could Saint Augustine be wrong here, and all of evolution with him. There is no proof, there is only facts that fail to contradict at this point. That failure to contradict can lend strength, but, in the end, it cannot prove Truth, only find to be False. The temptation is to pride, to think we can know as God knows, to think that we cannot be wrong. To assert that all, even God, must give way before the power of our minds. And it was for this crime, and no other, that Galileo was found guilty.

Perhaps the science behind Intelligent Design is bad. Or perhaps it is only the Creationists whose science is bad, those asserting seven day creation. Or perhaps Genesis, beyond all expectation, does contain historical truth, and they will be found to have been right. We cannot know, do not know, with the data in hand.

1. Mr. William Rees-Mogg. “A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican” The Times Online 2005-11-07. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1052-1860310,00.html
2. Alok Jha. “Fuel’s paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head” www.guardian.co.uk 2005-11-04. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html Much thanks to Vincas for passing this on.

ARN brings word via the New York Times that

the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association have denied the Kansas Board of Education permission to use their copyrighted materials as part of the state’s proposed new science standards because of the standards’ critical approach to evolution.^[1]

1. Mr. Tom Magnuson. “Kansas Fight on Evolution Escalates” The ID Update 2005-10-31. http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/3/2005/10/29/kansas_fight_on_evolution_escalates

It is deeply disappointing to read that Cardinal Schoenborn accepts the idea of independent magisteria.^[1] Such a view accepts that science and theology can at times be at odds, and yet somehow both can be “right,” by accepting that science can be functionally materialistic, and provide only materialistic/naturalistic explanations. I believe such a view is disordered, because only one of the two explanations can be True for any given topic. What we seek with science is not the best materialistic explanation for a given phenomena, but the most useful model for it. Note well the change from “best” to “most useful.” A model which ascribes everything to direct Divine intervention may be most True, but is not particularly useful as it allows for no prediction and no manipulation. It provides no means for the will to be exercised intelligently. Alternatively, the materialistic explanation will often be the most useful, providing as it does solid equations, but will fail in the face of the exceptional. I would argue, as does the Intelligent Design movement, that life itself is one such exception, that the materialistic explanation simply fails and that no other explanation except design (and thus Divine intervention) is even adequate. On the other hand, I find gravity a more useful explanation than the idea that angels push the planets, though the later may be more True (we cannot know).

The limits of scientific inquiry and of a scientific theory are indeed a crucial element to the co-existence of science and theology, the good Cardinal and I agree on that. Science has as its goal the “saving of the facts,”^[2] and can in only very few circumstances legitimately claim to know what is True, if at all.

1. Catholic News Agency. “Series of conferences by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn titled ‘Creation and Evolution’” Catholic News Agency (online) 2005-10-05. http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=5061
2. Mr. Wade Rowland. Galileo’s Mistake : A New Look At the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church Arcade Publishing 2003-07-16. ISBN: 1559706848

The Institute for Creation Research presents an article talking about design in the human eye today.^[1] Not an incredibly technical article (at least by the standards set in Darwin’s Black Box), yet a good read.

1. Various Authors. “Is the Backwards Human Retina Evidence of Poor Design?” Institute for Creation Research 2005-10-05. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=2476