Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson

Author:Phillip E. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781621575139
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

PREBIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION

When the Supreme Court struck down the Louisiana law requiring balanced treatment for creation-science, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the decision because he thought that “The people of Louisiana, including those who are Christian fundamentalists, are quite entitled . . . to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools.” Stephen Jay Gould was baffled that a jurist of Scalia’s erudition (he had held professorships at several major universities) would entertain the absurd notion that fundamentalists could have scientific evidence against evolution. Gould went looking in Scalia’s opinion for an explanation, and found it in various sentences implying that evolution is a theory about the origin of life.

In an article correcting “Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding,” Gould tried to set the matter straight. Evolution, he wrote, “is not the study of life’s ultimate origin, as a path toward discerning its deepest meaning.” Even the purely scientific aspects of life’s first appearance on earth belong to other divisions of science, because “evolution” is merely the study of how life changes once it is already in existence. Because he misunderstood the strictly limited subject matter of evolution, Scalia had tumbled into the misunderstanding that it is possible to have rational objections to the doctrines of evolutionary science.

In fact, Justice Scalia used the general term “evolution” exactly as scientists use it—to include not only biological evolution but also prebiological or chemical evolution, which seeks to explain how life first evolved from nonliving chemicals. Biological evolution is just one major part of a grand naturalistic project, which seeks to explain the origin of everything from the Big Bang to the present without allowing any role to a Creator. If Darwinists are to keep the Creator out of the picture, they have to provide a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.

Speculation about prebiological evolution began to appear as soon as The Origin of Species had made its impact, with Darwin’s “German Bulldog” Ernst Haeckel taking the leading role at first. Darwin himself made a famous contribution to the field in an 1871 letter:

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.