The WorldNutDaily and Intelligent Design

The WorldNetDaily has just published an article by Lynn Barton on intelligent design. It’s title alone makes a bold claim. Why intelligent design will change everything.

Barton starts out with arguments we’ve heard before. The anger from the scientific community over intelligent design is proof that the old evolutionary paradigm is coming to an end and that Intelligent Design is good science, not creationism.

The last claim, that intelligent design is not creationism, is the most absurd of all because Barton spends the majority of the article appealing to the bias of her audience that evolution is the root of all social evils, and that intelligent design is society’s hope.

Let’s look at a few of her claims.

She starts out by talking of intelligent design and irreducible complexity.

Microbiologist Michael Behe has coined the term “irreducible complexity” to describe this. That is, the cell consists of coordinated, interlocking parts that must all be in place simultaneously, or it won’t function at all. You can’t improve the cell through one random mutation at a time because if you change any one aspect, the whole thing will crash. For evolutionary change to occur, every single piece of its Rube Goldberg-like factory would have to mutate at exactly the same time, and each single mutation would have to be beneficial, or the cell would just die.

The textbook example of irreducible complexity is the bacterial flagellum. Behe loves to claim that the whole structure is useless without its 40 proteins arranged in place all at once. Take away a protein and the flagellum is a wet noodle.

This claim, and Barton’s repetition of it, shows a lack of understanding evolutionary theory. One of the things scientists believe happens, with good reason, is that many events in evolutionary history involve co-option, where an existing biological function is incorporated in a new process.

Ken Miller has provided a particularly lucid explanation of how this works in the bacterial flagellum. Essentially, a subset of the flagellum’s proteins are found in use in a system that certain bacteria use to inject poisons into our cell membranes. This would be analogous to finding your car’s transmission at work doing a completely different function in another system. And this is hardly the only example of co-option we know of. It occurs repeatedly throughout nature. What it means is that structures can come about not just through gradual processes like the addition of 40 separate proteins to a flagellum, but rather through co-opting existing proteins for new uses.

Darwinists cannot explain irreducible complexity. They keep saying that it poses no problem for evolution, as if repetition would make it so. They insist that just because we don’t yet understand how evolution can work in light of this doesn’t mean that we won’t figure it out eventually. But they will never figure it out, because irreducible complexity makes evolutionary change at the cellular level logically impossible.

The only repetition going on is the assertion that irreducible complexity “disproves” evolution. Even after clear arguments have been presented against this claim, ID proponents fail to engage the evidence — the very thing Barton claims to desire earlier in her article. The old saying about not wrestling with a pig because you both end up in the mud and the pig likes it comes to mind here. (And perhaps I’m in the mud right now by discussing the article).

And it’s after these brief poor arguments on intelligent design that Barton plunges off the deep end.

And not a moment too soon, since evolutionary theory did not stay in the scientific realm but oozed into all the sciences, the liberal arts and out into culture, with horribly destructive results. The biblical view of man as a spiritual being created in God’s image has been replaced by the view that man is nothing more than a highly evolved animal struggling to survive in a meaningless universe. Scratch any social ill and you will find Darwinism underneath. [my emphasis]

I laughed out loud at her statement of evolution oozing into all of science and culture. Anybody seen Canadian Bacon? This comedy with John Candy features a plot where an American president is trying to start a war with Canada to boost his popularity. There’s a newscast which features a map of North America with maple syrup slowly falling across the border. A newscaster’s voice seriously warns, “Like maple syrup, Canadian evil oozes across the border…”

Her claim that Charles Darwin and his scientific theory is the root of evil should be a clue that we’re in for a rough ride over the rest of the article.

One of the worst consequences has been the devaluation of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that Darwinism has led to the killing of untold millions of human beings. […] Eugenics helped Hitler convince an entire country to follow him in his attempt to wipe out the “inferior” Jews, not to mention the toll in blood it took to stop him.

Yep. Barton’s appealing to her audiences ignorance and bias. Let’s take her claim on Hitler. She gave a few other absurd examples of evolution’s murderous history, but Hitler in particular is one that’s easy to refute. In fact, just a couple of days ago, Ed Brayton over at Dispatches worked over another article at the WorldNetDaily that claimed evolution leads to Hitler. Ed points out a couple of quotes that give Hitler’s Christian basis for his policies. Consider the following from Hitler in a 1922 speech:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…. And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people…. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people is plundered and exploited.

Anybody think it’s particularly fair to claim that Christianity was the cause of Hitler’s actions? It couldn’t have been that Hitler used whatever means available to manipulate his people, could it? Barton should be ashamed of her dishonesty in linking evolution to Hitler and his atrocities.

Barton then sums up her article claiming that intelligent design is the hope of the world.

But intelligent design is on the move, and this is a great gift to everyone, especially Christians. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes accepted as a legitimate competing theory of origins, and as it does it will unleash enormous changes for good, not only in science but all of culture – because if people understand that there is (or at least could be) a Designer, then we can once more ask, what is the purpose of that design? What are things for?

I think this sentiment more than any other is what so greatly offends me. She’s betting the ranch on the fact that intelligent design will prove God to the world, and she’s holding a pair of 2’s.