, too complex a subject to sum up in 1 web page, but some of the essentials are there and readable

“Anti-Evolutionism”
vs.
“Anti-Creationism”
... Oversights

I was inspired by the article “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense” by John Rennie, the Editor in Chief of Scientific American, that appeared in July 2002. (I found it online at their website, www.sciam.com). He made many important points about the specious arguments presented by “creationists”, or as they have more recently styled themselves, proponents of “creation science”, or even more recently, of “intelligent design”. But I feel there is much more to say about the whole subject, some of which is not flattering to science. In fact Rennie also presented points that were themselves questionable. I am a firm believer in “… right or wrong; when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.”

The current war between “creationism” and “evolutionism” (accent on the -isms) can much better be described — in essential part — as a war between “anti-evolution” and “anti-creation” (both obviously “-isms”), a war that lacks wisdom — and knowledge — on both sides, and tries to crush competent attention and reasoning in all directions. The creationist side is generally espoused by “religionists”, the evolutionist side by “scientists”. Continuing the oversimplification of this extremely complex set of issues, we can note that, historically, science has evolved out of religion by way of philosophy (itself still evolving) and the “natural philosophy” (now extinct) which evolved out of philosophy. (The evolution of religion is rather more obscure.) An anthropologist might offer the insight that religion and science are now engaged in some combination of sibling rivalry and an Oedipal type situation.

A main point of this “special letter” is that this war is characterized by a set of truly incredible oversights on both sides, as well as by its size, pervasiveness, and almost indescribable complexity. Some of the oversights are thousands of years old, some as recent as the Age of Darwin. All of them defy common sense, not to mention wisdom. Even more incredibly, all of these oversights have continued to these early days of the 21^st Century. Some of the oversights are so embarrassing that both sides will almost certainly react at first with fierce denial and outright attack, but both religion and science have in their hearts a kernel of desire for truth — that truth that will set us all free — which will eventually germinate, sprout and yield a rich harvest.

It might seem like a side issue here, and to some it might seem to be a politically incorrect thing to say, but it relates intimately to the origin of many of the oversights, as well as indicating how complex the issues really are: an anthropologist would definitely be interested in the fact that anti-evolutionists usually consider themselves to be “Christian fundamentalists”, thinking of themselves as taking the side of God’s religion against Godless science. No other religions or sub-cults seem to take much exception to evolution. (Most Christians who consider the word “cult” to be pejorative are surprised to learn that they are members of the cult of Jesus Christ; by standard and age old definition all “religions” are “cults”.) On the other hand, an anthropologist would also acknowledge that a similar insight is true of scientists who take an anti-creation stand, usually thinking of themselves as the natural champions of the side of science and reason against irrational religion, but it is much harder to oversimplify fruitfully.

Where to start in such a pervasively misunderstood complex of issues is a difficult choice. I will adopt John Rennie’s style and give a numbered list of major oversights, with some mildly digressive commentary mixed in for good measure.

1.      “Creation” in the original Hebrew doesn’t mean “creation from nothing”.

The reader is immediately referred to: the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Kittel, Friedrich, Eds., Bromiley, Trans. and Ed., Vol. 3, pp. 1000-35 (I am currently using the Logos Research Systems-Libronix Digital Library System version; there might be some minor differences from the 10 volume book set), which has many fascinating pages of historical analysis of the original Hebrew; to the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (135.1, again, the Logos Research-Libronix version); and to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (mostly to its Hebrew and Greek lexicons, recommended especially because, more than any other scholarly work, they attempt to explicitly distinguish what was known in the 1900s of the original meanings from the later translations of them in the King James; here the Logos Research version is distinctly not recommended since it was modified so that those all important distinctions of the original meanings from later translations were completely lost). Of the three, the TDNT makes it clearest that the “created” of Genesis 1:1 did not originally mean “creation from nothing”.

This oversight is thousands of years old, and is known by careful scholars of the original Hebrew. Perhaps this is not made public because these scholars know that even though the ancient power of the Inquisition has waned somewhat — evolved is more accurate, but it has lost some of its force… and has noticeably “favored” another major world religion — in recent years, it still invites a martyrdom of sorts to speak the truth if one does so concerning a “hot topic”, such as “creation” or “abortion”. In any case, neither the original Hebrew, nor the Greek (nor the Arabic; the Quran explicitly affirms the earlier Hebrew and Greek scriptures as fundamentally sacred to Islam) that followed, support the “creation from nothing” interpretation, which is part of the fundamentalism of the anti-evolution stance.

It is not clear why “creation from nothing” would support an anti-evolution stance since creation from nothing still allows for evolution to be the mechanism of that creation (more on this below). It seems to be mainly an unnecessary aggrandizement of God (unnecessary pretty much by definition) and an avowal of the impossibility of ever knowing God scientifically. (This latter makes some sense since science is actually — indulging in just the tiniest bit of humor — still in its “conceptual” stage, working its way toward what we may hope is a promising infancy; or we could also think of it as a “preemie”.) But they espouse it nonetheless, so it makes sense to clear the air concerning it.

The Bible speaks of “the world that was” (i.e. that was before the world created from it as described in Genesis 1:1, ostensibly the one we now live in, and that we distinctly fail to love as much as God does), and goes into immense detail on how God brought about and brings about changes in the world. The closest that one can easily come to “creation from nothing” in the original Hebrew is that the pre-existing “stuff” was vastly indescribable, ineffable, sometimes described as “chaos” though that description has traditional, psychologically powerful misunderstandings associated with it. (In the original Greek “chaos” literally meant “gap” or “chasm”, a birth canal symbol — or fallopian tube symbol — related to the Garden of Eden as a womb symbol, and other such.)

The Hebrew word that we translate as “create” in the first line of Genesis actually has, as some of its original root meanings, “to cut” and “to select”. Special emphasis is placed on that last for obvious reasons: that same concept appears in, of all places, Darwin’s theory of evolution through “natural selection”. Hebrew scholars have known this for thousands of years, and it is an extremely embarrassing oversight that this is not more publicly known, especially for anti-evolutionists, whose position is seriously undermined by it.

This creation from nothing oversight is not the primary one here, so we will forgo any deeper analysis of this to move to the next related oversight.

2.      The Bible actually describes “creation” as a process of “evolution”.

The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament entry on creation mentioned above gives a detailed explanation of this even though they steer clear of the word “evolution” as too controversial (as it is even now, a half century after its publication).

Not only does the book of Genesis use a Hebrew word a primary original root meaning of which is “to select” for the process of “creation”, this same book of Genesis goes on for many verses describing a process of “punctuated evolution” as if that is in fact the process of “creation”, implicitly by “intelligent design” (although nothing is clearer than that the author(s) of the Bible want us all to question these things deeply and recurrently). It is not Darwin’s evolution, to be sure, it is rendered poetically and from the standpoint of spiritual evolution, it covers cosmological and seemingly geological aspects that are normally ignored in our “scientific” theory of evolution, it is by “intelligent design” (the possibility of which is studiously ignored by our “modern science”), and it is clearly just an abstracted, thumbnail sketch of a vast evolutionary process, but it is clearly evolution nonetheless.

Even people who consider themselves atheists remember about the light, the waters and the fishes, the fowls, the herbs, and especially the “male and female created he them” leading up to the “garden of Eden” (where, in the Bible’s continuing description of that evolution, Adam and Eve were completely unashamed of their own nakedness until — let’s pick some labels, even if we don’t understand the original intent or meaning — “Satan”, disguised as a “serpent”, deceived them). Creationists and evolutionists alike should be completely embarrassed by this oversight. Our modern word “evolve” is actually one of the literal translations of some of the words we translate as “create”, even if sometimes used as a transitive verb.

But oversight isn’t monopolized by the anti-evolution side. The anti-creation side needs to be heavily glanced at.

3.      Darwin’s theory of evolution grossly fails to explain all the scientific evidence to date.

It has become increasingly evident that something like the “punctuated evolution” concept (more commonly referred to as “punctuated equilibrium”, advanced in 1972 by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)), that has become a popularly known theory in recent decades, in fact must be happening in nature. “Punctuated evolution” consists of periods of rapid change, followed by long periods of almost no noticeable change (thus the term “equilibrium”). The problem is that Darwin’s version of evolution predicts slow (and quasi-constant) rates of change and does not predict “punctuated equilibrium”, neither the rapid changes nor the long periods of almost no change. And current scientific evidence clearly finds instances of punctuated equilibrium, but does not nearly as clearly support classical Darwinian evolution. In fact, it is a statistical necessity that much more concerted evidence is still needed from “enough” (obviously very many) closely spaced time intervals over long periods to clearly verify that Darwin’s slow, quasi-straight line change version of evolution occurs at all.

Mild digression: There are many fuzzy, intermediate possibilities between the standard Darwinian concept and the now standard punctuated equilibrium concept, i.e. that are neither Darwin’s more or less straight line slow changes nor rapid changes followed by “long” periods of quasi-no change “equilibrium”, which are of necessity quasi-straight line, but these are still not discussed publicly. For example, there is the possibility that evolution often occurs on a 3 steps toward, 2 steps away basis, or, more controversially, 10 stumbles down out of the tree, 9 leaps back up into it. In fact, statistically speaking, Darwin’s quasi-straight line slow change is about the least likely of all the major variants, the most likely being non-straight line change, i.e. periods of non-straight line more rapid change alternating with periods of non-straight line slower but non-“equilibrium” change, with frequent reversals of course. And as long as we are speaking of rapid change, on the overall cosmological and biological scales, 15 billion years is just a tiny fraction of the trillions of years the cosmos seems to have left in it, almost “instantaneous creation”, a fact that anti-creationists and anti-evolutionists alike ignore.

This can be considered an embarrassing oversight for the anti-creation side since punctuated evolution is a primary characteristic of creation-by-guided-evolution, i.e. guided by “intelligent design”. (More on this in the next section.)

Modern mathematics is developing theories that can help us begin to model various possibilities for punctuated evolutions and how they might arise. “Complexity theory” and its co-theory “chaos theory” are beginning to give us clues as to how qualitatively different “behaviors” (e.g. new species, in our case) can “emerge” rapidly within a system. In fact, complexity-chaos theory and its computer simulations could easily be one of our best bets for evaluating the various evolutionary scenarios currently being argued about, punctuated versus slow-quasi-constant-rate, micro-evolution and macro-evolution, species competition and selection versus individual competition and selection versus gene competition and selection versus…, etc.

Mild digression: Complexity theorists, for some reason, like to emphasize that the emergent behavior is “unexpected” or even “unpredictable”. They are probably wrong since great improvements in our abilities to expect and predict will inevitably “emerge” in the future, even if we can’t expect to be able to predict how or when any time soon. Also, and ironically, complexity-chaos theory (implicitly) supports reductionism, but at the same time it predicts its ultimate futility. For more on complexity theory, check out the Santa Fe Institute’s web site at www.santafe.edu. It should also be noted that mathematical-computer simulations could also be “intelligently designed” to yield Darwinian style, quasi-constant rate change, but our current crop of complexity-theorists are so far mainly enamored of the (to them) unexpectedly rapid change systems, i.e. “punctuated equilibrium-evolution” type systems.

We can also note that all of the systems studied by complexity theorists are in fact — and of necessity — created by “intelligent design”, even if they discard some from further consideration as unlikely to offer “interesting” emergent behaviors, or whatever. They often study what they can do to the systems to generate certain emergent behaviors, and stand in the place of that “Big Intelligent Designer in the Sky” in their computer simulations. And the little animalcules that evolve within their simulations… well, they still haven’t noticed that their evolution is being “intelligently designed” and guided by these same theorists. Hmmm…

By the way, it is not just the Judeo-Christian Bible that affirms the existence of evolution that is designed and guided by heretofore invisible entities. The religion of Islam, somewhat ironically, is even more explicit in defining the process of divine salvation as divinely designed and guided evolution. Religions are not intended for the already heedful, wise and knowledge­able, but for those that need heedfulness, wisdom and knowledge. The same can be said of sciences.

4.      Darwin ignored actual “un-natural selection” by “intelligent design”, as well as the possibility of “super-natural selection”.

In his Origin of Species, before he goes on to “natural selection”, Darwin spends the whole first chapter describing attempts at the breeding — by humans — of various animals and plants, and how quickly they can produce new breeds or varieties, ones that breed true (if bred within the breed). The successes of these attempts are in fact examples of punctuated evolution — rapid change followed by almost no change — since the rapid changes have taken almost no time in evolutionary terms. (We would also need to leave the breeds alone for long enough to look for the long “equilibrium” period, but that is easy to gedanken.) They are also examples of “un-natural selection”, by “intelligent design” at least at the human level, even of “super-natural selection” if we consider man to somehow be above nature.

The only serious quibble to this criticism in the context of current evolutionary theory is that the different breeds are not “species” in the sense of Darwinian evolution. The concept of species and the (by definition) inability to crossbreed species has become an unnoticed pivot point in our concept of biology and evolution, so it is worth taking a closer look at it in this context.

Mild digression: It is essential, not merely continued harassment, to note that the breeding experiments and programs referred to here were/are designed and guided by humans. The point needs to be made and emphasized that “intelligent design” and guidance of evolution is emergent behavior, especially in systems large and complex enough to allow the evolution of human level “intelligence”, even if human intelligence — and science — are still far from “The Ultimate”. Complexity theory, of course, suggests that such emergence is open ended, so there will in fact be no “The Ultimate”. Many might take renewed hope in the fact that complexity theory and chaos theory say that we cannot yet predict it, but eventually we will “emerge” from this world with its ignorance, wars, famines and the catastrophic collapse of its ecosystem — its “ecolapse” — as if from a cocoon.

When humans breed animals, they pick characteristics to breed for. To breed for these characteristics, they need to be have the further characteristic that the animals can… crossbreed. No breeder would consciously breed for the characteristic of not being able to crossbreed, i.e. for the characteristic of producing a relatively cross-sterile species. Or at least they haven’t done so yet. It should actually be fairly easy to experimentally produce another fertile breed of dog, say, that was sterile when crossbred with other breeds of dogs, purebred or not. (Similar things have been done with seedless watermelons and wheat.)

The reason this is relevant is that human breeding programs are “un-natural selection”, since we must allow man’s peculiar place in the ecosystem to place him above the inanimate, unintelligent, (bio-) mechanical nature of Darwin’s “natural selection”. Inescapably, too, human breeding programs are an example evolution by “intelligent design” and distinctly not by “natural selection”. The only quibble, that of human breeding programs not producing “species” that are cross-sterile was shown above to be itself a sterile argument.

Once any intelligence is involved — some would emphasize once life is involved — then Darwin’s natural selection can only remain one of many “entropic forces”. (No one force can guarantee the course of events, but each will lend tendencies that add synergistically.) And both life and intelligence are emergent behaviors in sufficiently complex systems. So, if we were able collect enough of the right data, statistically we would probably find at least a few “pure” examples of Darwin’s natural selection, but we will mostly find that other forces, such as intelligence and even “life” itself, predominate.

Complexity theory shows that inanimate systems can produce life-like and even intelligence-like emergent behaviors. These should not be mistaken for life or intelligence themselves. The theory really shows that inanimate systems can entropically generate “vehicles” that are convenient for life and intelligence to get into and drive to the store. Once life gets into the drivers seat of, let’s say, a deep sea submersible, it does not necessarily remember the “intelligent design” that went into the creation-evolution of the vehicle, nor the “intelligent designer”, and the vehicle may not provide the sense perceptory apparatus to reestablish such awareness (although it may emerge later).

After that, it is really only a small step to “super-natural selection”. The eventual recognition of “super-natural selection” and supernaturally “intelligent design” will require “only” a relief from our perpetual blindness to such things. Scientists, who routinely accept the Turing test (as a test of whether a machine is “intelligent”), sound silly or much worse when they deny essentially the same criterion(a) for “intelligent design”. If famous cosmologists aren’t anti-creation or anti-intelligent design, why should evolutionists be?!

5.      Both sides have studiously ignored that it has been accepted by the wise for thousands of years that: “It is impossible to prove that something is impossible”.

Philosophers have known for thousands of years that — except for certain mathematical systems — we can never prove that something is impossible. To do so would require us to have omniscience and infallibility, neither likely in the near future. If we have an infinite number of boxes, and we look in ten of them and find nothing, we must still look in all the rest to “prove” their emptiness. And we would need to keep going back to recheck them all for “spontaneous generation”, “illegal entry”, or whatever. Gravity may be our only law of physics and… oops, electric fields… oops, magnetism… oops, strong and weak interactions… oops, quarks… and so on, open endedly. It is that inescapable open-endedness inherent in the real world, even looked at through a glass darkly by means of abstract reasoning, that makes proving something impossible itself impossible, or at least incompetent. (And complexity theorists have shown that even abstract mathematical systems can display open-endedness, allowing “intelligent design” the chance to create realities and the vehicles for life to drive around in them.)

People who thought of themselves as having “faith” in God once denied the possibility that the Earth revolved around the Sun on “religious” grounds. But, today, almost everyone, even rabid anti-scientists, have accepted that it does — more or less. (There’s the further bit — open-endedness, like change, is universal and eternal — about the revolution being around the common center of mass; also, to be fair, mathematicians will from time to time point out that the Ptolemaic epicycle approach is mathematically valid, i.e. a theoretically different point of view with its own mathematical peculiarities.)

We accept the fact that those earlier anti-Sun-centralists, “modern scientists” of their day, were scientifically — and even religiously — incompetent. But we forget that scientists of our day are equally incompetent when they deny things as “impossible”. Anti-creationists who say or would say that “creation-evolution, designed and guided by supernatural intelligences” is “impossible” sound like anti-evolutionists who might say that “evolution by competition and selection among invisible ‘genes and other genetic material’” is likewise “impossible”. It would be perfectly appropriate for creationists — or anyone — to point out that the people who now say that “creation” (“-evolution”) by “intelligent design” is “scientifically impossible” are the “same ones” (i.e. scientists) who proved only a few decades ago that it is “scientifically impossible” for bumblebees to fly.

Mild digression: When I was growing up in the ’50s, I developed an early love of science, but also of philosophy. So I was never impressed then or since by the ostensibly scientific attitude that, for example, “UFO”s and “ESP” are “impossible”. Remarks about there being quite a few flying objects that have yet to be identified are still apropos, satirically speaking, but more so are comments about the various large scale prototypes of “flying saucers” we can see on the Discovery Channel, functioning large scale prototypes, ones that fly almost as well as bumblebees which still defy modern science. (Actually, scientists have long since stopped embarrassing themselves by insisting that bumblebees can’t fly, but our “best” modern science still predicts that they can’t, even though scientists think they are starting to understand how they do, a first step to scientifically predicting that they can. Any who think science can competently prove something to be impossible should definitely “remember the bumblebees”.) And it takes infants many weeks, months, years to learn — punctuated evolution, again, with steps toward, steps away… — to perceive the world around it. ESP may be some kind of emergent behavior, emergent for some but not for others. Complexity theory reminds us how difficult it is for science to predict — or even recognize — such emergent behaviors in complex systems, until they are highly evolved… or perhaps not even then.

Too, science is sure that there exist dimensions beyond the four of our immediate acquaintance, and that things happen in those dimensions that affect us here even though we know little about them. So how can we say with scientific competence that there is no life there, e.g. no people there who could be sending us inter-dimensional flying cups and saucers, communicating with us by ESP (except that, unlike Helen Keller with her Annie Sullivan, we have not yet become aware of it), kidnapping us to those other dimensions while our bodies remain here and then returning us, raising (dare we hope) Elvis’ space-alien love child, and perhaps even watching over us and guiding our evolution-creation by “intelligent design”?

Scientists (like John Rennie) sometimes refer to “methodological naturalism”, “a central tenet of modern science” that “seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms”. There is essential circularity involved in references to its success since “mechanisms” are not considered “natural” — to legitimately even exist as part of the universe — unless they can be thus “observed and tested”. Further, the successes of this seeking are themselves circularly “observed and tested”, again by those same standards of “observation and testing”. Also overlooked is the fact that a “theory” distinguishes itself from a “phenomenology” (here not a modern philosophy, but the far older study of observable “phenomena”, i.e. that makes no attempt to speculate on anything not actually observed, such as unobservable, metaphysical mechanisms that produce the observable phenomena) because it goes well beyond the “observable and testable” and has a central core of metaphysics, one that is never acknowledged as such because science’s continuing claims to superiority over religion are still inexplicably based on denunciations of metaphysics. (Careful philosophers of science are familiar with this. Galileo and Kepler were “phenomenologists” who recorded observations of falling and revolving bodies, but Newton, who posited the existence of a directly unobservable “force of gravity, was a “theorist”, and a metaphysician, especially since Newton’s gravity has been dethroned in favor of relativity’s curved spacetime.)

If a “magician” said that all “stones” could be detected and even attracted by his “magic stone”, which we knew to be a magnet, we would be able to predict that he would be hugely successful in producing testable results and would probably impress many sophisticatedly ignorant people, but we would also know that he would ultimately miss all but 3 of the world’s elemental metals, not to mention non-metallic “stones”, and would keep missing them until new methods of “observation and testing” emerged to help his complex system of partial but willful ignorance to evolve. Yet the magician himself would point out the obvious success of his variant of “methodological naturalism”, that he is the magical priest of, and only priests can properly determine such things. When we think of this with regard to “intelligent design”, it reminds us of the story of the neonates in the nursery: a few of them were beginning to open their eyes for longer periods and told the others “there are big people taking care of us”; the scientists in the group said that this was not only impossible but completely unscientific because there was no way of testing this hypothesis, at least not repeatably, and they refused to open their eyes, avowing that that, too, was unscientific since the impressions they then received were chaotic. It can take a long time to open eyes or invent a telescope, much more time than that to learn to see through them, and, more subtly, to learn to see despite them.

Mild digression: Mention of  “entropy”, “disorder”, and their ostensible equivalence often come up during  anti-evolution-anti-creation battles. The reader is referred to Entropy’s... Oversights in our Science section.

Science has not yet evolved to the point that it can satisfactorily model, measure, or test life, especially when intelligence is involved. Yet life exists, and it has evolved to the point where it is pervaded with the emergent behavior of intelligence… well, the beginnings of it, anyway. As science evolves in this early conceptual stage, its ability to “measure” (take scientific cognizance of) things is “emerging” from the complex chaos of possibilities. It is really just a matter of time till science’s ability to deal with “intelligent design” emerges from this early “chaos”. This process will continue forever… punctuatedly, to be sure, even when it evolves beyond anything recognizable as today’s science.

To paraphrase the well-known and well-loved Arthur C. Clarke:

“any sufficiently advanced science-like-substance is indistinguishable from magic.”

We have yet to reach that state of advancement in all of science, especially since we still completely overlook that:

any sufficiently understood supernatural/magic-like substance is indistinguishable from what science may eventually evolve into… if it becomes wise.

and that:

any sufficiently emerged-advanced-evolved “objectivity” becomes indistinguishable from “subjectivity”.

The Greek word that we translate as “faith” has as its root meaning “to put to a test”, not at all the affirmation from a state of ignorance — quite often willful — that we take as its primary meaning in religion, as well as all too often in science. But it doesn’t mean that our tests must be in an immature state of emergence from the complex chaos of reality. Science is practicing hypocrisy when it tries to hold that only those methods of observation and testing which have so far successfully “emerged” in “science” are competent, not to mention that new such methods are continually emerging. The world is filled with infinitely more things that are unmeasurable and untestable by science’s current standards than that are. Science is continually redefining and transcending itself, so the unmeasurable and untestable “subjective” of today will be the “objective” science of tomorrow. The same can be said of religion. But, whenever we refuse to “look through the telescope” because it is “unscientific” or “sacrilegious”, we have already failed scientifically… and morally.

It bears repetition that religion is divinely intended for those that need it, not those who are already heedful, wise, and knowledgeable. The same can be said of science.

Science and religion both need to give up those most popular modes of proof, proof by ignorance, proof by lack of imagination, and proof by shouts of “heresy”. Anti-evolutionism is really the Inquisition, still all too powerful in our “modern” world. But so is anti-creationism. It is characteristic of such that they have “opposing” hands, with their own “opposing” thumbs and fingers (sound familiar?). The truth of reality is strangled between them. People are told that they must “take sides” with one or the other, but all the offered alternatives are fatally flawed… by “intelligent design”. “Legions” are there to compel the taking of sides… etc., etc., etc.

There is nothing really wrong with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection except that it’s naïve, in fact incredibly naïve scientifically. (Consider how many obvious possibilities have had to be taken into account since Darwin published Origin.) “Creation” by “intelligent design” has essentially the same problem. Eventually, science (and religion) will evolve to where something like “creation science” and “intelligent design” will no longer be the contradiction in terms that they seem to be today. The future evolution of “complexity science” will help greatly with this. Our science of evolution will evolve similarly, and together with them, eventually yielding a synergistic synthesis.

To close, a quote from Henry (David Thoreau) suggests itself:

“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”