New Creation
[Originally published as Brittany Martin’s article, Darwinism and the Decline of the Liberal Arts, Part 2: The Scientific Method Strikes Back]
Darwinism is Falsified
Spontaneous Generation
The Scientific Revolution began when the scientific method falsified Geocentrism, and continued on to the final undoing of Aristotle’s mechanics when Newton devised his Law of Universal Gravitation.
In the 19th century, the tools of the scientific method were also applied to Darwinism. The same year that Origin of Species was published, Louis Pasteur set out to falsify the theory. Pasteur was a conservative Roman Catholic who understood Darwin’s implication that living organisms were makers of themselves.
“He was, you see, a good Catholic….It was beginning to be the fashion of the doubters to believe in Evolution: the majestic poem that tells of life, starting as the formless stuff, steaming in a steamy ooze of a million years ago, unfolding in a stately procession of living beings until it gets to monkeys and at last–triumphantly–to men. There doesn’t have to be a God to start that parade or to run it–it just happened, said the new philosophers with an air of science.”1
To falsify Darwin’s theory, Pasteur decided to take on another theory of Aristotle’s spontaneous generation. Aristotle had observed maggots growing on meat, and assumed that living organisms could arise from non-living organisms. After studying microorganisms, Pasteur presumed that this theory may be incorrect, so he designed an experiment whereby he boiled chicken broth and then let it sit out for days.
After several days, he observed microorganisms growing in the broth. For his next step, Pasteur set up several pots of chicken broth in glassware that contained very narrow, winding stems. After boiling the broth, he tilted the glass so that some of the chicken broth was caught in a turn of the stem, closer to the open air. He did not do that to the other pot. Several days later, he observed microorganisms growing in the stem of the broth, but not in the broth in the glass, confirming that life was coming from outside the food and not arising from the food itself.
Pasteur announced that by disproving spontaneous generation, Darwinism could not be true, since life cannot arise from non-living molecules.2
Genetics
The next challenge to Darwinism was the discovery of the DNA molecule as the mechanism of inheritance. Darwin lived before the mechanism of inheritance was discovered, so his notion that observable small, incremental changes over time that organisms experience through adaptation could occur between any organisms on earth was not an unreasonable idea. Darwin suggested that because adaptation can occur naturally within closely related species, then given enough time, change could occur between any species.
Unbeknownst to Darwin, his contemporary Gregor Mendel was a German monk who bred pea plants in his garden to discover the mechanism of inheritance in living organisms. Although his paper was largely forgotten when published, it was rediscovered in 1900 when scientists were attempting to determine the purpose of the DNA molecule. When scientists discovered that Mendel’s genes were actually present on the DNA molecule, the science of genetics was founded. The identification of DNA as the mechanism for inheritance was fully complete by 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick published the structure of the DNA molecule.
The discovery of the mechanism of inheritance proved that the unlimited gene alterations required by Darwinism did not exist. No longer could a bacterium become a human being with slow changes over vast eons of time, because the information required to make a human being did not exist in the bacterium. Every trait an organism has is inherited by its parents, and any mutations of the genome create a loss of genetic information, rather than a gain. A great chasm opened up between Darwin’s theory of a common ancestor for all life, and what we now call microevolution, or adaptation. Just like Galileo’s observations provided a counterexample to Geocentrism, the disproving of spontaneous generation and the discovery of DNA provided a counterexample to Darwinism.
The Return of Platonic Science
At this point scientists had the opportunity to denounce Darwinism, or to at least hold it as a highly contested theory. The 500-year-old scientific method that had brought about the Scientific Revolution had once again successfully used falsification and counterexample to disprove a popular theory. However, rather than acknowledge that doubt had fallen upon Darwinism, the scientific community largely decided to re-define science.
Nine years after Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Returning to ancient Greek philosophy, Kuhn argued that empirical evidence is less important to the definition of science than the consensus of scientists. Without empirical evidence, the reigning paradigm becomes a religious devotion, as Kuhn describes the need to make “conversions.” He states, “the man who continues to resist after his whole profession has converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.”3
As a result, much like Plato’s Republic, scientists become the philosopher-kings, whose job it is to control the paradigm by censoring any dissent. Darwinism can no longer be questioned because it is the consensus of scientists, and this return to consensus has fundamentally altered the study of science over the past 60 years. This is one of the reasons why creation scientists are so often met with mocking and scorn, rather than intelligent conversation. The empirical evidence of creationism cannot be discussed when creationists are no longer scientists.
This has also entered the field of climatology where scientists are regularly censored or fired for any dissent of the environmentalist story. Even more recently, the Covid-19 debacle has shown what can happen when scientists form a consensus that is not allowed to be questioned, with the full backing of the state. This is why there have been no apologies or regrets about lockdowns, masks, or school shutdowns. Scientists can claim a change in the reigning paradigm, and if there’s no absolute truth, no unchangeable natural laws, then they can’t be held accountable to decisions made under a different paradigm.
A Way Forward
The development of empirical science is distinctly tied to the Christendom of the Middle Ages and over 1,000 years led to the Scientific Revolution. Without this heritage of medieval scientists, our modern world would not exist. Although primarily a way to study the natural world, the principles of empirical knowledge applied to government led to constitutional republics, and applied to theology led to the Protestant Reformation.
It is not a coincidence that as the Western World has accepted Darwinism, it has also experienced a a loss of civic liberty and theological faithfulness. As long as scientists continue to remain faithful to Darwinism, despite evidence to the contrary, we are at risk of losing the heritage of the Scientific Revolution. Only a full repudiation of Darwinism will restore empiricism to scientific study.
Footnotes
- De Kruif, Paul, Microbe Hunters, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926, 78-79.
- Ibid., 88.
- Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 2012, 158.
