External Intelligence Phenomenon -- Creation vs. Evolution Explained

External Intelligence Phenomenon --
Creation vs. Evolution Explained

From Reflections on the Worthiness of Human Creation by K. T. Chang

Since Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859, the Christian world has slowly evolved into two opposing camps of followers: the creationists and the evolutionists. This confrontation is most manifest in the United States, where school boards have to decide what to tell our children the “truth” about mankind’s origin. There was the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, and the still unresolved lawsuit over a new proposition called Intelligent Design.₁ First of all, a question that is not yet answerable by the best informed among us should not have been put to a mere judge – he can at best conduct an opinion survey among the leading scientists of our time and make a decision favoring the majority. But a truth cannot be decided like a presidential election (even there, the year 2000 election shall remain forever a unique question mark in history) – a majority opinion can be dead wrong. Let us just remember Copernicus (1473-1543): by vote count, it would have been one against all. Yet, his lone opinion against the rest of the learned people of his time proved to be true.

The most disturbing fact about this drawn out debate has to do with the pre-supposition of a binary contest, i.e., one of the two theories is assumed to be true. But this is not so. In mathematical logic, to evaluate the merits of two conflicting theories, a necessary condition is that the opposition be proved wrong; but a sufficient condition requires a much broader and difficult proof of answering to all challenges and critiques of one’s own theory. In other words, a truth pathway in a maze cannot be discovered by merely backtracking from one dead end – the search must continue to avoid all dead ends in order to reach a target.

Neo-Darwinism dodges answering how the first cell came into being, but tries to explain evolution from that point onward through the simple mechanism of natural selection. But the pathways of life are decidedly non-natural – as more and more of the details in cell development and maintenance functions became known (very recently and completely beyond the knowledge of Darwin and Alfred Wallace in their lifetimes), the argument in favor of natural selection is strained and stretched to absurdity. Darwin himself foresaw the impossibility of introducing a new and higher genus of life form from natural selection, so he wisely limited himself to a discussion of the origin of species. Present-day biologists who wish to extend this upward movement in complexity to be based upon random or blind mutations in the DNA sequence can do so only by ignoring completely the well-established laws of statistical analysis.

The books of the Bible were recorded long before the ages of human enlightenment. And as such, they erred in practically all details in creationism. The blame cannot be placed entirely on the authors of the books, as the extent of human knowledge at the time of writing did not make their description seem so ridiculous. But the absence of updates with the increase in knowledge is more responsible for the thinning out among the ranks of better informed people to accept a literal interpretation of the Bible. Martin Luther (1483-1546) did try to break away from the Roman Catholic Church practices of his time, but he challenged specifically the authority of the papacy, not the authority of the Bible. Perhaps, being a contemporary of Copernicus, he had heard of the heliocentric theory of planetary motion about a stationary Sun. Nevertheless, his belief in the Evangelistic tale of an afterlife was quite absolute. The printing press played a major role in distributing his reform theses all through Europe. Copernicus also took advantage of the printing press to present his idea in a book, but he was more cautious and waited until he was on his deathbed before he released his book to Pope Paul III.

How might mankind break out of this stalemate involving two erroneous pathways? It would require a fundamental shift in strategies, i.e., in addition to pointing out the mistakes in the opposition camp, one should try to see and understand the valid criticism directed against his theory. In this respect, I propose that EIP be adopted as the vehicle of scientific investigations into all aspects of bioscience.

What is External Intelligence Phenomenon? Click here to read Part II.

₁ A judicial ruling may have settled this case legally, but not in reality.