This book looks to be the
definitive critique of theistic evolution. It is a massive tome, weighing in at just over 1 kilopage. It looks exciting for those of us who have been waiting for a more or less thorough critique of theistic evolution, which has begun to invade even the more conservative NAPARC denominations. The critique comes from scientific, philosophical, and theological directions. And it is on sale right now at 50% off!
I’ve made my way through introduction and the portion of this book that critiques Neo-Darwinism—this comprises about the first 1/3 of the book. There are a lot of excellent critiques of Neo-Darwinism in this section; however, some of the typical flaws commonly associated with ‘creationist scientists’ and Intelligent Design proponents are also on display. Unfortunately, some of these flaws are significant enough to provide academic theistic evolutionists and atheistic evolutionists with ammunition to (again) dismiss many of the experts in the book as ‘failed’ scientists or individuals who somehow acquired academic credentials, but who clearly don’t actually understand their field, and have thus been relegated to obtaining a job at a creationist or ID organization.
In this respect, this book so far has been frustrating. The academic credentials of the contributing authors are highly touted in book advertisements and in the book itself. Yet, errors basic to molecular biology (literally at the high school level) are made by these experts, and are apparently not caught by the book editors (who also possess credentials that undoubtedly should allow these mistakes to be caught). Two mistakes are particularly unforgivable: 1) On pages 230-231, Stephen Meyer’s description of DNA molecule assembly is simply incorrect. 2) On page 240 Jonathan Wells incorrectly describes the structure of a nucleotide (the basic structure of DNA molecules). While these two errors might seem minor in the context of 330 pages of text, the nature of these mistakes legitimately calls into question the competency of the authors and editors to critique their chosen topics within Neo-Darwinism (there are additional minor oversights too). This is really too bad—because, these fundamental errors aside, the force of some of these authors’ arguments against Neo-Darwinism were really very good.
Additional noticeable shortcomings in this section are: 1) The book’s definition for theistic evolution will certainly generate controversy. The operating definition for the book is “
God created matter and after that did not guide or intervene to cause any empirically detectable change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by purely natural processes.” It is highly questionable whether this definition captures a significant proportion of theistic evolution adherents. 2) A central component of Wells’ critique is that DNA sequences
do not contain programs or plans for embryonic development. This is in direct contradiction to Meyer’s contention that DNA sequences
do contain programs for embryonic development. 3) The critique of the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) model associates neutral theory (NT) with EES, and Michael Lynch with NT. A careful reading of the primary literature suggests that NT is more often associated with standard evolutionary theory and that Lynch developed aspects of nearly neutral theory (NNT). Again, while these may appear to be small differences, they will be noticeable to experts in these fields, and will provide ammunition for the contention that the book’s experts are not qualified to offer sound critiques.
There are several authors who present great critiques of Neo-Darwinism and origin of life theories with no associated errors or contradictions, and I am happy to incorporate their arguments into my understanding of the topic. But, for me, the above highlights a common problem with ID and creation scientists: I really like a lot of their arguments, but can I trust them? They often make fundamental blunders, often demonstrate that their reading of the primary literature is not as careful as it should be, and sometimes contradict each other on central issues.
I still look forward to making my way through the rest of the book.
Off to buy book.
