Is there any proof God exists?

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THE FAILURE OF DARWINISM AND ITS FULLER IMPLICATIONS

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
(Adler and Adler: Bethesda, Maryland, 3rd ed. 1986) 368 pages, hardback $19.95.

reviewed by John F. McCarthy
The central thesis of this book is that Darwin's theory of evolution has not been validated by one single empirical discovery or scientific advance since its publication in 1859. Denton succeeds in refuting Darwinian evolution in terms of the empirical facts as they are known to natural scientists today, yet, for emotional reasons, he cannot entirely give up the theory. Because of the irrational element of this attachment, some of the historical judgments that he expresses are unsubstantiated and contradictory.


THE FAILURE OF DARWINISM


Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, expressing therein a view which implied that "all the diversity of life on the Earth arose from natural and random processes and not, as was previously believed, from the creative activity of God" (Denton, 17). "Before Darwin, men had believed a providential intelligence had imposed its mysterious design upon nature, but now chance ruled supreme" (15). The mechanism of evolution depended on the ultimate premise that all organisms are subject to an intense struggle for existence which favors by natural selection the preservation of beneficial variations (Denton, 42). "Thus not only was God banished from the creation of species but from the entire realm of biology" (53).

According to Denton, Darwin was aware that the evolutionary edifice he had constructed was "entirely theoretical" (55). Darwin had "absolutely no direct empirical evidence" in terms of clear-cut intermediates that large-scale evolution had ever occurred (56); he was not able "to point to the bona fide case" where natural selection had actually generated an evolutionary change of any kind, let alone a new species (62).

For Denton "there can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution," (69) and yet Darwin's theory was elevated into an "unchallenged dogma" in little more than twenty years. Denton sees this to have been the result of "non-scientific factors of a social, psychological and philosophical nature" (70). The big appeal for many scientists was its "general harmony with scientific thought," and it was to be used by them to "wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory" (72, quoting J. Tyndall). In fact, Denton observes, "today all biological phenomena are interpreted in Darwinian terms and every professional biologist is subject throughout his working day to continued affirmation of the truth of Darwinian theory," (74) even though "neither of the two fundamental axioms of Darwin's macroevolutionary theory ... have been validated by one single empirical discovery or scientific advance since 1859" (345) These two axioms never verified by science were (a) a functional continuum linking all species of life together, leading back to a primeval cell and (b) all the design of living things the result of a blind random process.

Humans share 98% of their DNA with Chimpanzees. End of argument.

I'm willing to accept that apes descended from humans.