At Scientific American John Horgan has provided a helpful reminder of Karl Popper’s skepticism of evolutionary theory and why it doesn’t matter. The great philosopher found evolution to be “almost a tautology” and “not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.” He was browbeaten by evolutionists into a forced retraction but in fact he remained a skeptic as evidenced when Horgan interviewed him in 1992. “One ought to look for alternatives!” Popper exclaimed to Horgan, banging his kitchen table.
Popper’s call for alternatives may sound reminiscent of evolutionists themselves, but it is altogether different. One of the most common rebuttals evolutionists make when confronted with science is “so what’s your alternative?”
That question is the barcode on a long history of religious claims regarding origins. Open the box and you’ll find thinkers from Leibniz and Kant in the Enlightenment days to Jerry Coyne and Ken Miller these days pronouncing metaphysical truths that mandate a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. Darwin and his theory were, at bottom, all about what god would and wouldn’t do. And he wouldn’t create this world, that was for certain.
So when evolutionists ask “so what’s your alternative?” it is implicit that god must not be the answer. That answer is dismissed out of hand, for it has long since been falsified. The answer must be strictly naturalistic. Horgan makes this abundantly clear:
The philosopher Daniel Dennett once called the theory of evolution by natural selection "the single best idea anyone has ever had." I'm inclined to agree. But Darwinism sticks in the craw of some really smart people. I don't mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.
If you think biology was designed, you’re one of the religious ignorami—an IDiot. And why is that? Because you have violated the religious mandates of evolutionary thought. Evolution is an anti intellectual, cowardly religious movement that propagates lies about science. Don’t expect intelligence to emerge from it.
