Objection Three: Evolution Explains Life, So God Isn't Needed; Walter L Bradley, PhD.
CS Lewis Quotes: 0 (I miss you, CS)
Mentions of Former Atheists: 2 ('Scholar Patrick Glynn [was] lead back to faith in God'; 'I was more than happy [...] to jettison the idea of God'
How Do I Know Walter Bradley Is Like Me? 'The soft-spoken, self-effacing Bradley [...] is a strong family man [...] his wife, Ann; daughter, Sharon; and grandchildren Rachel, Daniel and Elizabeth joined us for lunch.'
How Forceful Is Strobel In Presenting The Questions? Very. 'I asked, incredulity in my voice [...] I slumped back in my chair, amazed at the implications of what Bradley had disclosed [...] new discoveries have changed everything [...] I let out a low whistle.'
With a headline like that, you know just where this is heading. Craig has done his best to promote the 'rational face of Christianity' - and Lee has even toned down his purple prose a fraction in deference. But now it's back to business as usual. Which is good news for me. There's nothing more tedious than having to respond to genuine points. Instead, here we get by-the-numbers Creationist tripe, backed up by Strobel's pantomime credulity.
Strobel opens as he means to go on, with a burst of unsupported claims that run counter to all the evidence. So we get:
[quote]
New discoveries [...] have prompted an increasing number of scientists to contradict Darwin by concluding that there was an Intelligent Designer [...] more and more biologists, biochemists, and other researchers - not just Christians - have raised serious objections to evolutionary theory in recent years.[/quote]
Strobel doesn't bother to back up any of this. He doesn't tell us what he means by 'recent years'. Nor does he give any examples (here or elsewhere) of any non-Christians who think that Intelligent Design Creationism represents a serious challenge to evolutionary theory. And of course it is an outright lie that Creationism is gaining ground among scientists.
Next we move onto Strobel's personal hobby-horse: people only 'deny God' because they are immoral. His support for this, of course, is his own personal lack of morals:
[quote]
I was more than happy to latch onto Darwinism as an excuse to jettison the idea of God so I could unabashedly pursue my own agenda in life without moral constraints.
[/quote]
We are presumably supposed to conclude that a self-described 'morally unconstrained' person is now utterly trustworthy in assuring us of his own former untrustworthiness.
If that is not enough of a transparent piece of invective, next we get to following unintentional irony:
[quote]
My training in journalism and law compels me to dig beneath opinion, speculation and theories, all the way down until I hit the bedrock of solid facts.[/quote]
Let's hold Strobel to that for the quite reasonable length of one chapter, and see how good his 'digging' is.
He claims that bacterial resistance is 'micro-evolution'. He doesn't define 'micro-evolution', or point out that this is a basic change to cellular chemistry that adds information (by at least one of the criteria he is about to use). Then he repeats a common out-of context quote from David Raup, that 'we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time'. Had he bothered to do the quite basic 'digging' of reading Raup's original paper, he would have realised that Raup agrees that the fossil record given incontrovertable evidence of change over time, and disputes only whether a gradualistic mechanism can be deduced from this alone. Raup continues, for instance: 'what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appear to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.' - got that? More complex, but still evidence for evolution.
As if that weren't bad enough, he then uses Philip Johnson (the Creationist lawyer) as a source for a quote about the Cambrian Explosion. I've read Johnson's book, and it's flat-out dishonest. Perhaps Strobel is even aware of this; most of his sources are cited in the text, but Johnson's name is hidden away in the end-notes. The quote in question is simply wrong, claiming that all nearly all modern animal phyla first appear in the Cambrian (they don't - only eleven of around thirty two animal phyla have a fossil record starting in the Cambrian) and that they appear 'without a trace' of evolutionary ancestors (they don't). Apparently Strobel's 'digging' doesn't extend to checking the 'facts' he is searching for, at least not when they support the conclusion he wants.
As if that weren't enough, he (again) cites Behe's concept of 'Irreducible Complexity' - see the Craig section for a note that even Behe has been forced to admit this is unscientific. It is also wrong, since it is possible to conceive of evolutionary mechanisms that can produce structures that would meet Behe's definition of 'irreducible complexity', either by losing a part or by having more than one function.
So Strobel has engaged in a lengthy and poorly researched diatribe before he even starts his interview here. But this is just standard Creationist double-talk; where is the pantomime prose we have come to love from Strobel? Where is the sudden astonishment that passes for digging 'until I hit the solid bedrock of facts'? Fear not, it is not far from hand.
Finally, The Interview
Strobel has stressed his drive to 'dig' until he reaches the truth. It is natural therefore that he would interview a well-qualified biologist, without regard to religious opinion, about evolution. If he has natural bias that he is trying to deny even from himself, he might subconsciously end up chosing a Christian biologist, which at least would give him some plausible deniability. Instead, he selects... a devoutly fundamentalist materials scientist and mechanical engineer, who also happens to be a Fellow of the main ID pressure group, the Discovery Institute. And here I really have to cry foul. A mechanical engineer? Is Strobel genuinely 'digging'... or is he chosing someone he thinks will give him the answers he needs to hear? I think the answer speaks for itself.
So, never mind the obvious bias and questionable honesty. How does Dr Bradley do in his attack on science?
Firstly, note that he flat out refuses to dispute evolution at all. Apparently, this is a lost cause even in a book of fundamentalist apologetics (though Strobel seems unaware of this). Instead, he focuses purely on the origin of life, known as abiogenesis.
His first port of call is the Miller-Urey experiment. This, he tells us, has been 'invalidated' and that 'the deck was stacked in advance to get the result they wanted', and that 'the scientific significance of Miller's experiment today [...] is zilch'. Clearly Bradley doesn't understand the significance of Miller-Urey, that complex biological molecules that were previously thought to be too complex to form spontaneously can actually be generated from the simplest available precursors, rapidly and under realistic conditions. Nor does he seem aware that variations of Miller-Urey have been repeated with a variety of atmospheres, including those likely to have been found on the early Earth, with better results, not worse. The claim about 'stacking the deck' is yet another outright falsification, designed to make Miller and Urey (and, by implication, all atheists) look dishonest. In fact, they used the atmospheric mix considered most likely at the time they ran their experiment. Our scientific understanding of this has since changed, and the experiment been duly re-run; but to imply that Miller and Urey were dishonest is itself simply dishonest.
Now we move on to another Creationist trope, 'information'. Bradley gives a very idiosyncratic definition of life, that includes information but not, for instance, movement, homeostasis, cellular structure, growth, adaptation or response to stimuli. As far as I can tell, salt crystals meet Bradley's definition at least under some circumstances. I have to wonder why Bradley doesn't go for a more standard definition of life; the answer would seem to be that he needs information in there to make a theological point.
But never mind. The important point here is what Bradley's definition of 'information' is. He never offers one, and from the way he uses the term it is clear that he is using it in at least two different ways. This is of central importance to his argument. There are many definitions of 'information'. Under some of them, it is impossible for evolution (or any process) to increase information. Under some, evolution does not require an increase in information. The challenge Bradley must meet is to give a definition of information that (a) must increase in order for evolution to occur, and (b) cannot or does not increase by undirected, natural processes. He never even attempts this, instead using different meanings of the word 'evolution' to support each of those points separately. This means he simply has no case here.
Fortunately, Strobel is still giving leading questions that stand in comic relief to his claims to be 'shocked' by the 'revelations' Bradley is making: 'Did Darwin consider [...] a one-cell organism to be rather simple?' Gosh, what a strange thing to think of in the midst of an interview. It's almost as if he already knew what the standard Creationist response to this is.
Our expert on metal fatigue spends a lot of time attacking the idea that the first replicators were amino acids - something that is a very minority position, if anyone still holds it at all. He then claims that scientists thought the Earth was infinitely old until 1965! (There was no measure its age; that's not the same as saying they thought it was infinitely old. In fact, radiometric dating methods revealed an age of the Earth surprisingly high to many geologists, who were thinking in terms or hundreds of millions of years - Lord Kelvin, for instance, put it at between 20 and 400 million years. But there's no reason to expect someone qualified in strain computations to know the history of radiometrics - unless, apparently, you are Lee Strobel.)
After all this, Strobel and Bradley have not even touched on most of the evidence in favour of evolution. Instead, they have side-stepped the issue by focusing on abiogenesis, where they can make a 'god of the gaps' argument. Even within abiogenesis, they simply haven't considered the most widely accepted idea, that the first replicators were RNA. Are we really supposed to take this as - to quote the cover blurb, and naming and shaming - 'the tenacity of a tough interrogator' (Ravi Zacharias), or 'probing interviews [to] some of the toughest intellectual obstacles to faith' (Luis Palau, President, Luis Palau Evangelistic Association)?
The run-through of theories continues with equilibrium and non-equilibrium ideas, as though these were in themselves models of the early Earth rather than categories into which other models fit, plus Cairns-Smith's crystalline theory, which again is not really a major contender anyway. (It is at this point, incidentally, that Bradley explicitely compares biological information to the number of letters in an encyclopedia - if that is the definition we are using, we can observe that natural processes such as evolution do cause increases in information. But of course by that definition, evolution has been observed to cause an increase in information). And he uses the example of the film Contact as an example of how easy it is to distinguish intelligently designed information from natural processes, apparently unaware of the confusion quasars caused when first discovered, and under the strange impression that the genetic code is literally writing.
Strobel, of course, leaves the interview claiming that 'a rudimentary understanding of evolutionary science had once propelled me toward atheism; now, an increasing grasp of molecular science was cementing my confidence in God.' I can only concur with his own thoughts: 'How ironic.'
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