In 2002 Scientific American published an article by John Rennie, who was then an editor in chief of the magazine. The article was entitled "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense." Full of misstatements and appallingly bad reasoning, the article was an attempt to discredit all of the critics of Darwinism. Because articles in Scientific American keep linking to this 2002 article, it may be appropriate for someone to point out some of the ridiculous errors and sophistry it contained. I may note that Rennie's article didn't qualify as any type of expert statement, as he has a mere BS in biology.
First, let us consider the title. Rennie commits the mudslinging so commonly used by Darwinists: that of using the term "creationist" to refer to critics of Darwinism. Inextricably intwined with the term "biblical creationist," the term "creationist" is a term used to try to insinuate that someone is a fundamentalist. None of the arguments that Rennie discusses (none of the 15 statements he tries to rebut) has anything to do with scripture or the Bible, and such arguments and points are typically not made by fundamentalists, but by students or scholars of biological complexity. By calling such people "creationists" Rennie seems to be deliberately creating an inaccurate impression about the type of reasoning he will criticize, which has nothing to do with the Bible. The title of the article contains the word "creationist" in super-giant letters ten times taller than the article's small font, to help emphasize the mudslinging shaming effect.
Let's look at some of the statements that Rennie disputes. He discusses 15 different statements that sound something like may have been made by Darwinism critics. The statements appear as boldface section headers in his article. If we ignore the one statement appearing as a question, we find that not a single one of the remaining 14 statements is obviously untrue or clearly nonsensical. Every one of them sounds like something that could be reasonably argued or that might be true.
Let's look at some of the low points of Rennie's discussion.
(1) His rebuttal of the statement "evolution is only a theory." Rennie uses the standard Darwinist nonsense here of claiming that scientists use the word "theory" in a way different from the way ordinary people use the word. He says this:
"Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is 'a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.' ”
This claim long made by Darwinists simply is not true. Scientists use the word "theory" the same way that ordinary people use the word. For example, they use the term "string theory" to refer to a totally speculative physics theory that has no evidence to support it; and scientists use the term "MOND theory" for a gravity theory most of them don't believe in. Scientists also use the term "Everett many worlds theory" to refer to a physics speculation that is utterly groundless, and also the worst nonsense humans have ever thought up. There is a fact of evolution (microevolution) and a theory of evolution (including ideas such as the idea that all animals have a common ancestor, and that random mutations are the main cause of biological innovations). The fact of evolution is a fact, and the theory is a theory. In general, when scientists use the term "theory" they refer to things that are not yet proven, contrary to the claim Rennie makes.
(2) His rebuttal of a claim "evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth."
This claim that "evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth" is absolutely correct, and has been conceded by countless scientists and Darwinists. So why on Earth is Rennie claiming this as one of his examples of supposed "nonsense"? Doing that severely damages the credibility of his article. What is very much nonsense is the first statement in Rennie's rebuttal of this claim. He states, "The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry." Everything in that statement after "remains very much a mystery" is untrue, and is not supported by any laboratory experiments realistically simulating early Earth conditions.
I may note that "could have" claims are in general very weak responses to "never would have" objections referring to prohibitive odds. For example, if you make the unbelievable claim that you threw a deck of cards into the air and all of the cards luckily formed into a triangular house of cards, you do not effectively rebut someone saying that such a miracle of luck "never would have" happened by merely saying that it "could have" happened. The miracle of luck needed to accidentally get life from non-life is something vastly more improbable than the luck of someone throwing a deck of cards into the air, and them all forming into a triangular house of cards. Such a house-of-cards thing would require the favorable arrangement of only 52 parts, while even the simplest self-reproducing cell would require the favorable arrangement of something like 100,000 amino acid parts.
The next statement Rennie makes is also misleading. He states, "Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young." Nucleic acids have never been found in any comet, and only a few of the twenty amino acids used by living things have ever been found in space, with the quantities being only negligible trace amounts such as 1 part in a billion.
The truth about this matter was described by Karl Popper, who materialists love to cite:
"What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated...The code cannot be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a really baffling circle: a vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model, or a theory, of the genesis of the genetic code. Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of the universe) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science..."
Nothing has been done to solve this problem, which is only one of many insurmountable problems in coming up with a theory of life's accidental or natural origin. In a 2018 paper about 20 scientists stated the following:
"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)."
(3) His attempt at rebutting the claim "Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance."
The claim stated is a very weighty one because of the known very high complexity and very high organization of protein molecules. Functional protein molecules consist of very well-arranged sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, arranged in just the right way to produce some particular biological function. It is necessary that a functional protein molecule have a sequence of amino acids close to its actual sequence for the protein molecule to achieve its hard-to-achieve folding and have the function that it has. Given that there are twenty amino acids used by living things and twenty-six characters in the English alphabet, and given that the sequence of amino acids in a protein is as well-arranged as the characters in a paragraph or page of functional grammatical text, a good analogy would be to compare a protein molecule to a long well-written paragraph or page correctly explaining how to accomplish some particular task. Because there are more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body, the amount of functional instructions in each of our bodies is as great as in a bookshelf containing ten long technical manuals describing how to accomplish very specific tasks.
Trying to rebut the claim quoted above, Rennie starts out by making the claim below containing some misleading language:
"Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving 'desirable' (adaptive) features and eliminating 'undesirable' (nonadaptive) ones."
To the contrary, Darwin's theory of natural selection has the most gigantic dependence on chance, as Darwin himself conceded in The Origin of Species, when he stated, "Natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur." Rennie's statements above contradict each other. First he says that "chance plays a part in evolution," and then he says that "evolution does not depend on chance." Rennie inaccurately states that natural selection "harnesses nonrandom change," when in fact Darwinism has always been based on the idea of so-called natural selection capitalizing on lucky random changes, also called random mutations or random variations.
What is going on in Rennie's language is a sleazy word trick, one deployed by Darwinists to try to make random evolution sound nonrandom. The word trick works like this: you imagine a purely blind, mindless random process, imagine it producing a stream of random outputs, and then imagine it occasionally producing some miracle of luck that results in something useful; and when you then get such a result you call that result "nonrandom" simply because it is useful. That is just the most ridiculous type of misleading word trick. The Cambridge Dictionary gives this as its first definition of "random": "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan." According to that definition, all of the results of Darwinian evolution are random, because they never occurred according to a plan.
Next Rennie gives us a piece of sophistry that I offer as Exhibit A that Scientific American has no shame in arguing for materialism, and is willing to publish nonsense about as glaring and as bad as anyone can state. He writes this:
"As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence 'TOBEORNOTTOBE.' A million hypothetical monkeys, each typing out one phrase a second on a keyboard, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison, then at Glendale College, wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days."
Let's very carefully consider the computer program Rennie has discussed, claiming it as an analogy for natural selection. As a long-time computer programmer, I know the exact components such a program would have. The program would have these parts:
(1) A target text consisting of some very well-arranged sequence of characters (such as the text of a Shakespeare play) that could only have been produced by an intelligent agent.
(2) A random character generator.
(3) An "accumulating successful text" string variable (analogous to a notebook) consisting only of characters that have matched the correct character of the target text at a particular position.
(4) An integer variable that that keeps track of the length of the "accumulating successful text" variable (or a function that gives the character length of such a variable).
(5) A utility that is able to run in a loop that keeps checking the intelligently designed target text for a match to see whether the latest randomly generated characters matches the character at a particular position in the human written text, the integer variable position mentioned in (4). So, for example, if so far the "accumulating successful text" string variable has 1000 characters, then the utility keeps generating random characters until one of the random characters matches the target text at position 1001. Then that random character is added at the end of the "accumulating successful text" string variable.
Yes, using this type of computer program, you can create copies of intelligently designed human-written target text fairly quickly. But such a program is nothing like Darwinian evolution, and nothing like natural selection. This is because the intelligently designed computer program requires the pre-existence of the human-written intelligently designed target text, and neither natural selection nor Darwinian evolution has any such thing. For example, before anything like a successful rhodopsin protein molecule came into existence, natural selection didn't have target text to try to match. And neither natural selection nor Darwinian evolution ever do anything like letter-by-letter target matching.
What Rennie has done here is something as about as appalling a piece of sophistry and bad reasoning as you could possibly make. He has described a human-written program for copying intelligently designed human-written text in a roundabout inefficient manner (one having randomness as some mere window-dressing), and has tried to pass that off as something showing the feasibility of generating intelligent-seeming novel purposeful creations by the blind mindless processes of random mutations or natural selection or Darwinian methods. This is every bit as nonsensical as someone claiming that an automobile proves that Darwinian evolution can produce complex innovations.
Rennie gives us no further reasoning to defend against the proposition that proteins are too complex and well-arranged to have arisen through Darwinian processes. The claim is a very solid one that has never been refuted or even substantially damaged. What we have learned about the sensitivity of protein molecules to small changes (that they typically will become nonfunctional after only very small changes) only reinforces such a claim. Such a claim is also reinforced by what we have learned about protein complexes: that a large fraction of proteins are useful only as team members of "molecular machine" protein complexes far more complex than a protein, complexes often requiring more than a dozen different proteins be arranged in just the right way. The CORUM database of protein complexes currently lists 3637 human protein complexes, each of them protein teams requiring multiple types of proteins to do their job. The 2020 paper here says protein complexes have between 2 and 116 proteins, with a median of 13 proteins per complex.
You can't redeem Rennie's train-wreck reasoning here by appealing to some principle that each time an amino acid that is part of its final functional sequence is added to a protein, that would be like the "matching the right character in the right position" happening in the programs Rennie refers to. To argue that would be committing the "every tiny step in the right direction gives a benefit" fallacy that is one of the principle fallacies of Darwinists. The average protein molecule requires nearly 500 well-arranged amino acids to be functional, and it is not at all true that each little addition of one more amino acid would produce a benefit. Benefits occur when a functional threshold is reached, requiring a minimum number of well-arranged parts to achieve a functional end, often very many well-arranged parts. For example, a bridge that only takes you 10% across a wide river has not reached its functional threshold, and is a mere suicide machine that will you dump you at the bottom of the river; and ditto for bridges across wide rivers that only cross 30% or 50% of the river's width. About a majority of proteins we can say: their individual origin would have no beneficial effect on an organism because the proteins are team members of complex systems that require multiple types of proteins (often dozens) working together in just the right way, in purposeful very complex "molecular machinery" arrangements we would never expect chance or Darwinian evolution to produce.
To perform the task a particular protein molecule performs, a type of protein molecule typically requires an amino acid sequence with most or nearly all of its actual amino acid sequence, a chain of hundreds or thousands amino acids specially arranged to produce a functional effect. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." A biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." And we read on a science site, "Folded proteins are actually fragile structures, which can easily denature, or unfold." Another science site tells us, "Proteins are fragile molecules that are remarkably sensitive to changes in structure." A paper describing a database of protein mutations tells us that "two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." Those who think that functional folded protein molecules could gradually arise (getting longer and longer from a small size) will be dismayed to read this statement in a 900+ page textbook on protein chemistry: "Polypeptides less than about 70 amino acids in length should not fold because they should not be able to bury a large enough number of hydrophobic amino acids to overcome the configurational entropy of their random coils." Folding is required for most functional protein molecules.
The number of cross-dependencies among proteins is gigantic. A large fraction of all proteins only serve a benefit when they act as team members of protein complexes consisting of something like 5, 10 or 20 different types of proteins. Also a large fraction of all proteins cannot fold correctly unless they are assisted by other types of specialized proteins called chaperones; and there are hundreds or thousands of types of such chaperone proteins, with these chaperone proteins making up 10% of the total mass of proteins in the body. According to the source here, twenty to thirty percent of protein molecules require chaperone proteins. The mere existence of a type of protein molecule does nothing to improve an organism unless many other requirements are met, such as having sufficient numbers of that type of molecule exist in the body in the right place and at the right time. With so very many cross-dependencies in the world of proteins, and with proteins being so easily disabled or destabilized by small changes, and with so many interconnected requirements for a new type of protein molecule to be useful, nothing could be more fallacious than to assume something like that an uncompleted protein produces a survival or reproduction benefit when it does something like move from having 35% of its final amino acid sequence to having 36% of its final amino acid sequence. At such a time no functional threshold would have been met.
What Darwinists frequently forget is that so-called "natural selection" (a misnomer term) can only "select for" inheritable changes that produce an improvement in survival or reproduction. There's a very simple formula to remember for any biological component that has not yet reached a functional threshold: "no benefit yet = no natural selection."
The truth on this matter was told us by four Harvard scientists who stated this: "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." Darwinism does not have credible explanations to offer for any of the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in our body. For an intelligent discussion of the question of the difficulty of explaining the origin of proteins, see the lengthy peer-reviewed paper "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems" by Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. That year 2020 paper tells us in Section 4.1 that for a "typical functional protein" the probability of its appearance is less than 1 in 10 to fiftieth power. The paper gives very much precise support to the claim that the odds against protein origin by Darwinian evolution are utterly prohibitive, and helps show that such a claim is not at all nonsense as Rennie claims.
For a fairly good discussion of why our knowledge of protein complexity discredits Darwinism as an explanation, see the 2019 book review "Giving Up Darwin" by computer scientist David Gelernter, who does a good job of explaining things but rather "pulls his punches" by understating the complexity of protein molecules (which have more than twice as many amino acids as Gelernter states).
(4) His attempt at rebutting the claim that "living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated," and that "the only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution."
This is a very weighty claim, and Rennie does nothing of substance to rebut it. He just very lazily appeals to the groundless legend that Darwin did something to explain the origin of vision, stating this:
"The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution—what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even 'incomplete' eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics."
The idea that Darwin did something to explain vision is one of the many groundless legends of Darwinism. The existence of mere light-sensing organs in organisms in phyla other than the phylum humans belong to (Chordates) does nothing to explain the appearance of vision systems in the Chordates phylum that humans belong to, because (1) such mere light-sensing organs are found in phyla not believed to be ancestors of the phylum of humans, and (2) we now know that such mere light-sensing organs are not at all simple things (as Darwin supposed) but fantastically complex structures requiring all kinds of fine-tuned molecular and cellular organization before yielding any function, and (3) there is such a gulf between such mere light-sensing organs and mammal vision systems that it's like the difference between a 1960's hand calculator and a 21st-century digital computer.
Far from having "vindicated Darwin" on this matter, the facts discovered by biologists have done quite the opposite. By now it has been shown that vision requires many thousands of times more of a fine-tuned arrangement of parts than Darwin ever dreamed, with most of that being in the intricate biochemistry required for vision. Moreover, organisms don't see by mere eyes: they see by virtue of fantastically intricate vision systems consisting of eyes, fine-tuned protein molecules requiring hundreds of well-arranged parts, optic nerves, and incredibly complex brain parts.
You don't show that some accidentally achievable thing could arise by accident by showing that there could be incomplete versions of something that could still have benefits. For example, pull out the seats and the kitchen of a 747 jet, and you have an incomplete jet that still could have benefits, and could still fly. But that does nothing to show that big aircraft like 747 jets can form by natural processes. Modern biology has discovered 20,000+ types of complex inventions in the human body (20,000+ different types of protein molecules) that each has more well-arranged parts than Darwin ever thought an eye had. Darwinists have no credible tale to tell of how such proteins arose, except for bad efforts like the baloney computer program analogy Rennie gave (discussed above).
Stating "we know absolutely nothing about the evolution of the eye of the vertebrate," and saying "in mammals, all sense organs evolved almost simultaneously," a French biologist told us in 1977 the truth about Darwin's futile attempt to explain the origin of eyes:
"Darwin (1859) devotes four a half pages of the 'Origin of the Species' to the eye and its genesis, possibly thanks to innumerable mutants, to natural selection, and to time. But we note that he does not overcome any of the obstacles raised against his doctrine by 'reality.' "
(5) His attempt at rebutting the claim that "recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution."
The statement is a justified one, if by "evolution" you mean blind Darwinian evolution. In recent decades scientists have discovered in the human body very many fantastically complex protein complexes that scientists themselves are calling "molecular machines." We now know that in our bodies are a vast number of different types of molecular machines, many requiring many thousands of well-arranged parts to function properly. Below is a quote from a very widely cited peer-reviewed paper written in 1998:
"We have also come to realize that protein assemblies can be enormously complex. Consider for example the spliceosome. Composed of 5 small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) and more than 50 proteins, this machine is thought to catalyze an ordered sequence of more than 10 RNA rearrangements as it removes an intron from an RNA transcript. As cogently described in this issue of Cell by 18, these steps involve at least eight RNA-dependent ATPase proteins and one GTPase, each of which is presumed to drive an ordered conformational change in the spliceosome and/or in its bound RNA molecule. As the example of the spliceosome should make clear, the cartoons thus far used to depict protein machines (e.g.Figure 1) vastly underestimate the sophistication of many of these remarkable devices. Given the ubiquity of protein machines in biology, we should be seriously attempting a comparative analysis of all of the known machines, with the aim of classifying them into types and deriving some general principles for future analyses."
Rennie fails to rebut claims that evolution theory has no credible explanation for such things. He mentions only two examples: the bacterium flagellum and the blood clotting system. Appealing to dubious speculations, he attempts to explain such things by claiming some of their parts could have existed beforehand.
But you don't show that some fantastically improbable arrangement of parts is accidentally achievable by showing that some of the parts could have existed beforehand. Whenever we have anything that requires very many well-arranged parts that have to be just right or almost just right for the thing to work, then we have something that is not reasonably attributed to accidental processes, even if all of the parts existed in scattered places. Consider the case of a junkyard that has scattered around it all of the parts needed to make an automobile. Accidental processes will never construct an automobile from such parts. After an extinction of mankind, you could have a billion years of floods and earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes, and there would be no chance that such things would ever construct a car from car parts scattered around in junkyards. There's a very simple rule that prohibits such things: the rule that the improbability of getting an accidental invention increases exponentially with the number of well-arranged parts required. Once you get beyond very simple things, the odds against an accidental invention very rapidly become prohibitive, something that would never occur in the history of the universe. We face such prohibitive odds all over the place when we consider the molecular machines that are required all over the place for the human body to work.
We know from our life experience that accidents don't produce complex inventions. Such a principle is not nonsense, but a sound principle derived from a lifetime of experience. Any careful mathematical analysis will abundantly confirm such a "gut feel" intuition, and abundantly support the principle that accidental effects cannot produce complex inventions. For an example of such reasoning, see the lengthy peer-reviewed year 2020 paper "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems" by Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer.
The believer in ideas of accidental origins of biological innovations is faced with endless thousands of "too hard to get the needed parts" problems on his left hand, and endless thousands of "too hard to arrange the parts usefully" problems on his right hand. So, for example, it's too hard for unguided processes to get non-racemic amino acids needed for the origin of protein molecules, too hard for unguided processes to get the amino acids arranged in the right way to make the countless types of fine-tuned protein molecules needed for types of molecular machines or organelles or cells, and too hard for unguided processes to arrange such protein molecules in a useful way for you to get the required molecular machines and organelles and cells. Generically, you do not help such difficulties by merely suggesting that before some magnificent biological innovation appeared, some of the too-hard-to-get parts may have already existed; because by doing that you're just moving some of the "miracle of luck" from one point in natural history to another, not reducing the overall improbability. Similarly, you wouldn't show that you could have produced a triangular house of 52 cards by throwing a deck of cards into the air, if you merely said that the full house of cards didn't appear all at once, and that you threw half of the pack in the air last week and half of the pack into the air today.
It is very strange that Rennie cites the human blood clotting system as something to try and rebut the claim that human biochemistry is too complex to have appeared through blind Darwinian evolution. That system is a marvel of fine-tuned intricacy requiring the coordinated interaction of about 24 proteins, which altogether require about 12,000 well-arranged amino acids that have to be just right, something that requires a fine-tuned arrangement of more than 100,000 atoms. Rennie merely makes the feeble far-fetched speculation that the proteins of the human blood-clotting system "involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion." Rennie mentions some scientist who supposedly thinks this, but fails to mention or link to any scientific paper or article by such a scientist, just as if he had no decent evidence to support such a claim. The idea sounds preposterous, as blood clotting is vastly different from digestion (blood clotting involving a building up from liquids and digestion involving a breaking down of solids or semi-solids). And when the odds are prohibitive, you don't show that miracles of chance could have happened by merely speculating that they happened earlier in the history of life.
Below is a quote from a French biologist describing how utterly inadequate Darwinist ideas are for explaining the human blood clotting system:
"Take, for example, regulation of the coagulation of blood, a highly complex phenomenon to which biologists seems to have given little thought...The lip of the wound (damaged tissues) become the site of chain reactions ending in the formation of a clot. This is possible because there preexist in the blood reaction agents or their precursors whose end effect is to coagulate certain proteins of the blood plasma...Such a process forms a complex whole; a lack of a substance arises, an enzyme is affected, and the system will not work. One does not see how it can have formed by successive chance effects supplying a protein or an enzyme in any random order. Besides, we know that the effects of mutations on the system are disastrous and form the lengthiest chapter in blood pathology. The system has become functional only when all of its components have come together and adjusted themselves to each other. The Darwinian hypothesis compels us to postulate a preparatory period during which selection acts upon something that does not, physiologically speaking, yet exist. Under the necessary conditions, the action can only have been prophetic!"
And very strangely it is this very marvel-of-fine-tuning blood clotting system which Rennie offers while attempting to rebut the claim that "life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution." It's like someone offering his 10-speed bicycle as proof that complex machines can accidentally arise.
(6) The appeal to the faulty principle of "methodological naturalism."
People following bad policies often try to describe their bad policies as a principle. And so Rennie evokes a principle they call "methodological naturalism." Rennie describes this principle like this: "A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms." There is no such principle of modern science. In general, human psychological phenomena cannot be explained "in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms." Scientists frequently encounter things they do not understand and cannot credibly explain in terms of "observed or testable natural mechanisms," including endless mysteries of the mind, endless mysteries of paranormal phenomena, and the very fact of subjective experience. The proper thing for a scientist to do when encountering such phenomena is to study the phenomena and say "I can't credibly explain this yet," rather than always trying to implausibly explain things by evoking "observed or testable natural mechanisms" when such mechanisms fail to credibly explain things. A perfect example is the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. There is no observed or testable mechanism that can explain such a thing, and there never will be. And when cosmologists who study the universe introduced the idea of dark matter and dark energy, they were not using "observed or testable natural mechanisms." Neither dark energy nor dark matter are mechanisms, neither have been observed, and you can't test something until you have observed it. It's mostly the same for the "primordial cosmic inflation" so beloved by cosmologists, which is something never observed and which cannot be tested.
Rennie would have us believe in macroevolution, but believing in such a thing would not be an example of explaining "the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms." Allegedly occurring over vast lengths of time, macroevolution cannot be observed or tested, unlike microevolution that can be observed in a human lifetime. And macroevolution as described by Darwinists is not a mechanism. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a mechanism as "a way of doing something that is planned or part of a system," and the idea has strong connotations of physical parts working together to produce an effect at a particular time (as when we talk about the mechanism of blood circulation). Appealing to lucky mutations scattered over eons is not a case of describing a mechanism. Last year a doctor and a professor put it this way:
"Macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10−50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest...Microevolution is probabilistically realistic; macroevolution is not, and this is documented empirically."
"Methodological naturalism" as evoked by materialists effectively amounts to the foolish principle of "claim that everything in biology and cosmology and physics is accidental no matter how enormously designed it looks, and claim that everything you see is material-caused no matter how much it looks like something that cannot have a material cause." That amounts to a foolish "don't follow the evidence when it conflicts with your beliefs" kind of principle that is the opposite of being scientific.
We also have in Rennie's article this nonsensical-sounding claim: "Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land." The fossils typically cited to back up this speculation have estimated ages relatively close to each other, making such fossils ineffective as evidence to support such a claim (as a paleontologist points out). Using his trademark vacuous reasoning tactic of merely saying something like "I see no difficulty" to try to establish the most far-fetched claims, Darwin stated this in the original edition of his main work: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." Darwin struck the statement from a later edition of the same work, as if he were ashamed of it.
It is interesting that while Rennie's article title refers to "nonsense," the only clearly nonsensical nonsense found in the article is nonsense reasoning or nonsense claims made by Rennie himself. Giving us no quotations from named Darwinism critics, Rennie shows in this article no signs of having carefully read the thinkers he is criticizing, no signs of having very carefully and deeply studied biological organization or biological complexity, and no signs of familiarity with the relevant probability mathematics. But his article with such glaring falsehoods and such appallingly bad reasoning is still being linked to by many a Darwinist. Is it that an article as bad as his is the best they can find to defend Darwinism?
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