It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
Richard Dawkins, prominent Oxford scientist and author

Ever since Darwin first published his theory of evolution, his defenders’ favourite tactic against critics has been to attack their character and intelligence. Darwin himself used it against some of the greatest scientists of his day, accusing them of superstition and religious bias. Now that Darwinism rules the scientific roost, such charges against dissenters are widespread. Not even schoolchildren are immune. Indeed, California’s science education guidelines instructs teachers to tell dissenting students, “I understand that you may have personal reservations about accepting this scientific evidence, but it is scientific knowledge about which there is no reasonable doubt among scientists in this field...” By today’s rules, criticism of Darwinism is simply unscientific. The student who wishes to pursue such matters is told to “discuss the question further with his or her family and clergy.” But is Darwinism so obviously true that no honest person could doubt it? Are alternatives like “intelligent design” so unscientific that no reasonable person could embrace them? Let us see.
Mutation and Selection
The essence of Darwin’s theory is that all living creatures descended from a single ancestor. All the plants, animals, and other organisms that exist today are products of random mutation and natural selection or survival of the fittest. According to Darwin, nature acts like a breeder, carefully scrutinising every organism. As useful new traits appear, they are preserved and passed on to the next generation. Harmful traits are eliminated. Although each individual change is relatively small, these changes eventually accumulate until organisms develop new limbs, organs, or other parts. Given enough time, organisms may change so radically that they bear almost no resemblance to their original ancestor. Most importantly, all this happens without any purposeful input: no Creator, no Intelligent Designer. In Darwin’s view, chance and nature are all you need. This all sounds very elegant and plausible. Problem is, it’s never been supported by any convincing data. For example, consider the fossil evidence. If Darwinism were true, the fossil evidence should show lots of gradual change, with one species slowly grading into the next. In fact, it should be hard to tell where one species ends and another begins. But that’s not what we find. As Darwin himself pointed out in his book, The Origin of Species:
. . .[The] number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.
Darwin, of course, attributed this problem to the imperfection of the fossil evidence, and the youthful state of palaeontology. As the discipline matured, and as scientists found more fossils, the gaps would slowly start to fill. But time has not been kind to Darwinism. Palaeontologists have certainly found more fossils, but these fossils have only deepened the problem. As the fossils piled up, what palaeontologists discovered were not gradual changes, but stability and sudden appearance. It seems that most fossil species appear all at once, fully formed, and change very little throughout their stay in the fossil evidence.
Things get particularly bad with the “Cambrian explosion”, which palaeontologists believe took place about 530 million years ago. In an instant of geological time, almost every animal phylum seemed to just pop into existence from nowhere. To understand just how big an “explosion” this was, it might help to understand what a phylum is. A phylum (phyla for plural) is the broadest classification of animals there is. As opposed to a single species, like a chimpanzee, a miller moth, or a crow, a phylum takes in a wide variety of organisms. The phylum that contains humans also contains elephants, squirrels, canaries, lizards, guppies, and frogs. Indeed, it contains every animal with a backbone and then some.
If the differences within a phylum are vast, the differences between phyla are really wild. As much as a chimpanzee may differ from a fish, it differs even more radically from a sea urchin or a worm. In fact, you could say it’s built on an entirely different architectural theme.
That’s why the Cambrian Explosion is so troubling for Darwinists. What palaeontologists find isn’t just the sudden appearance of a few new species. What they find is the appearance of species so utterly distinct they have to be placed in completely different phyla. Even Oxford zoologist and arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins has remarked, “It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.” Worse yet, after the Cambrian Explosion, almost no new phyla appear in the fossil record and many go extinct. By conventional dating, that’s a 500 million year dry spell.
This is exactly the opposite of what Darwin would have predicted. According to Darwinism, new phyla are produced by the gradual divergence of species. As species split off from each other, they eventually become so dissimilar as to constitute a whole new body plan. Over time, then, we should see new species slowly appearing, followed by the much slower appearance of new phyla; what Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould calls a “cone of increasing diversity.”
Instead, the cone is upside down. Even by conventional time-lines, the fossils look very non-Darwinian. Darwinists express confidence, of course, that future discoveries will clear up the mysteries. But so far, the research has only deepened them. A recent reassessment of the fossils has added perhaps 15 to 20 new phyla to the Cambrian zoo. Moreover, discoveries in 1992 and 1993 have shrunk the explosion’s estimated duration from 40 million years to less than 10 million.
Science or Philosophy?
The fossil problem is just one of Darwinism’s woes. Virtually every other area of research poses problems, too. But like Jacko in the Energizer battery commercials, Darwin’s theory just keeps going. Why? Because Darwinism is perhaps more a matter of wishful thinking than fact. Professor Phillip Johnson is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley. While on sabbatical in England several years ago, he became fascinated with the serious problems in Darwin’s theory. He was also struck by how Darwinists continually evaded these difficulties with tricky rhetoric. As he dug deeper into the scientific literature, he eventually became convinced that Darwinism wasn’t so much a scientific theory as a grand philosophy; a philosophy whose goal is to explain the world in strictly naturalistic terms.
“The whole point of Darwinism is to explain the world in a way that excludes any role for a Creator,” says Johnson. “What is being sold in the name of science is a completely naturalistic understanding of reality.” The assumption that God doesn’t exist is made from the very beginning.
According to Johnson, the reason Darwinism won’t die is that its basic premise is simply taken for granted: namely, that chance and the laws of nature can account for everything we see around us. Even living things. God need not come into the picture. Once that assumption is made, Darwinism has to be true, because nothing else will work. Creation has been ruled out from the start, and the other naturalistic theories are even worse than Darwin’s. So the argument that Darwinism is wrong can’t even be heard.
And yet, when ancient artefacts are discovered, archaeologists claim that they have found evidence of intelligent creative design. How could we ever distinguish a random piece of stone from an arrowhead except by appealing to the purposes of primitive artisans? We recognise design in events or objects that are too improbable to happen by chance. Stones don’t turn into arrowheads by natural erosion. Writing doesn’t appear in sand by the action of waves. A fair coin doesn’t come up heads a hundred times in a row. These things only happen when intelligence is allowed to determine the outcome. Many biologists are unfortunately looking for evidence that will uphold Darwin’s theory, rather than gathering evidence and then arriving at a conclusion that is supported by the evidence.
If archaeologists can use this kind of thinking to spot arrowheads, why can’t biologists use it to look for design in the living world? It’s not hard for most of us to recognise design in the living world. The exquisite complexity of living organisms virtually proclaims the existence of a Creator. In fact, many Darwinists admit this except they say it’s only an illusion, produced by strictly natural forces.
For Michael Behe, a Catholic biochemist at Lehigh University this complexity is just too extreme for Darwinism to be plausible. He argues that many systems in living organisms are “irreducibly” complex. They consist of several parts, all of which must be present for the system to work.
“It’s like a mouse-trap,” says Behe. “A standard household mouse-trap has about five parts, all of which must be present for the trap to work. If you take away any of those five parts, you don’t have a functioning mousetrap. You can add the parts one by one, but until you get to the full 5 parts, you have no function. It’s an all or nothing kind of thing.”
This irreducible complexity exists even at the level of a single cell. “It was originally thought in Darwin’s day that cells were very, very simple things; like little blobs of gel,” says Behe. But as science has progressed, it’s shown that cells are extraordinarily complex, more complex than anybody thought.”
One example is the system that transports proteins within the cell from where they’re made to where they’re used. As it turns out, the cells that make up most organisms have several compartments. For the most part, proteins and other molecules don’t just float around loose in the cell, but must be moved from place to place to place.
Enzymes are a class of protein that helps the cell digest other kinds of proteins. They are created in a compartment called the endoplasmic reticulum. But they do all their work in another compartment, called the lysosome. In order to get from the one compartment to the other, they have to be stuffed into a kind of bus (actually, a vesicle). The “bus” then travels to the destination compartment and eventually merges with it, spilling its contents into the compartment. Achieving this task requires several very specific proteins. You need certain proteins (along with certain fats) just to form the little capsule that contains the enzyme. You need others to help the capsule grab onto just the right protein, since the endoplasmic reticulum creates all sorts of proteins at the same time. Finally you need proteins that help the “bus” attach itself to the destination compartment and merge with it.
“Now if you think about irreducible complexity,” says Behe, “virtually all of these proteins have to be there from the beginning, or you simply don’t get any function.” That makes it tough for Darwinists to argue that design is simply an illusion produced by mutation and natural selection.
Darwin said one thing pretty strongly in the Origin of Species. He said that if it could be shown that many small steps could not produce any system or organ, continuously improving the system at each step, then his system would absolutely fall apart. Now the thing about irreducibly complex systems is that numerous small steps cannot produce them, because one does not acquire the function until close to the end, or at the end. Therefore irreducibly complex systems cannot be produced by Darwinian evolution.
Modern science tries to account for the world that we live in without relying on the use of a creator. But the scientific data doesn’t support Darwin’s theories. Believing in Darwin’s theory (or perhaps one could say that having faith in Darwin’s theory) does not appear to be particularly scientific. It’s more “philosophy” than “science”. There seems to be ample evidence pointing towards a creation by a creator. So maybe the notion of design is not such a preposterous and unscientific idea after all. Maybe it’s the way things really are.

S. Liacos