Stephen Meyer & Darwin's Doubt on RSR

Update: The CRSQ creation science journal has published Bob Enyart's book review of Meyer's Darwin's Doubt.

2019 Update: The journal Science reports on China's Qingjiang biota of 20,000 fossils, most of which represent new species, providing the "best evidence for [the] magnitude of the Cambrian explosion."

* New York Times Bestselling Author: Bob Enyart interviews old-earth anti-evolutionist Dr. Stephen Meyer, one of the founders of the Discovery Institute, on his instant bestseller, Darwin's Doubt. After a dozen conservative talk radio interviews with scientifically challenged show hosts hosts (like Dennis Miller who kept referring to the Caribbean Explosion rather than the Cambrian), Dr. Meyer relaxed and talked science, recognizing, as he said, that this program was "real science radio." Bob concluded asking Dr. Meyer, a leader in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, to keep an eye out in his future research for a particular kind of fossil at the base of the grand canyon. (Remember the Nautiloids!) If you enjoy this program, you may enjoy our follow-up interview during which Stephen Meyer answers his critics.

Darwin's Doubt by Dr. Stephen Meyer interviews on Real Science Radio* Bob's 2011 Comment Prefiguring Meyer: Part II of Stephen Meyer's 2013 book is about "The Cambrian Information Explosion", genes, epigenetics, etc. In a comment to an evolutionist on TheologyOnline.com in 2011, Bob wrote Alate_One, "And as for [Charles Doolittle] Walcott and the Cambrian Explosion, adding to his being stunned by the complexity of life so low in the geologic column, I imagine you've thought through the stunning discoveries in molecular biology that supercharges the 'explosive' part of all that variety?"

* Stephen Meyers is Not a Young-Earth Creationist: Sadly, Dr. Meyer, along with virtually all the Christians in the ID community, rejects the young earth as well as the need to take the scriptural account of the global flood as literal. (And, on an Alaskan cruise when he asked me to name one thing from Genesis that he doesn't accept, I replied, "That there were no thorns before Adam's sin", which Steve, with some evidence sadness, did not immediately contradict.) As a further result, typically, old-earth Christians also reject the literality of many divine interventions taught in the Bible, including about the Tower of Babel, the creation of the Earth before the stars, etc. So, sadly, it is incorrect to refer to them as creationists. Still, we love those guys and pray for them!

* A Shared Antagonist Eugenie Scott: Dr. Meyer seemed interested in the claims made by anti-creationist anthropologist Dr. Eugenie Scott when debating Bob Enyart on national TV. Hear these select soundbites from Eugenie Scott, an adversary of both Meyer's ID community and Enyart's creationist allies. In 1998, answering Enyart's repeated request for her best evidence for evolution, Eugenie said that the non-coding regions of DNA were affirmatively known to be useless, that further research would not show otherwise, and so that Junk DNA was great evidence against the existence of a Creator. (Of course, as offered for decades by virtually the entire evolution community, that is not an argument based on the laws of science, but a metaphysical argument, based on what a Creator may or may not be inclined to do; and the irony of it all, is that the this neo-Darwinian assumption retarded the advancement of science, for many years, as an evolutionary bias set in against recognizing function in the regions of DNA that did not code for protein.

* Another Shared Antagonist Jerry Coyne: Update: Bob Enyart submitted a comment to Jerry Coyne's blog, whyevolutionistrue.com, quoting this infamous anti-creationist who had written, "Note that the DI will continue to ignore negative verdicts [about Meyer's Darwin's Doubt] by scientists like Matzke..." Enyart and Coyne had previously sparred regarding a humourous disagreement over horizontal gene transfer and whether genetic sequencing shows "the tree of life branching in a nice Darwinian way." At any rate, to Coyne's comment about Meyer's book, Enyart added, "Just fyi, if you read the newly released paperback, you'll see that Meyer addresses Matzke's critique at length. For example, Meyer addresses the claim that the hypothetical creatures inferred by conflicting cladograms provide sufficient evidence of the actual existence of such transitional forms." That comment, submitted on May 30, 2014, would have been #22. If you notice that Jerry decides to post Bob's comment, feel free to let us know at Bob@RealScienceRadio.com

* The Lawrence Krauss/Stephen Meyer Parallel:
KRAUSS: Another shared antagonist is theoretical physicist (emphasis on the theoretical) and evolutionist Lawrence Krauss, who says that all scientists are Darwinists. When they say consensus, consensus, then question the consensus. Contradicting Krauss' representation, there are hundreds of thousands of highly educated professionals working in the applied sciences who say that God was involved in the origin of human beings, which claim is antithetical to the central, claim of non-directed neo-Darwinism. Further, there are tens of thousands of professors, and tens of thousands of scholastics who doubt Darwinism, tens of thousands of U.S. high school biology teachers who do not endorse Darwinism, and thousands of known and named scientists and professors with advanced degrees in some field of science, most with Ph.D.s, who disagree with secular Darwinism to varying degrees. Krauss' primary way of maintaining that "all scientists are Darwinists" is to rest on the "consensus" and to ignore the substantive challenges presented by the evidence and the many qualified scientists who reject Darwinism (including the ID community).

Click for Bob's review of Darwin's Doubt in the CRSQ

MEYER: Ditto for Meyer and the Big Bang. Just Google: big bang predictions, and see our RSR article at rsr.org/bbp ranked #1 out of 700,000 pages. And see rsr.org/big-bang for the extraordinary empirical observations which, as repeatedly admitted by leading astronomers, contradict many major predictions of big bang theory. See also rsr.org/krauss for our informal debate with a leading BB theorist. If hundreds of thousands of professionals received actual feedback from working with astronomy data the way physicians working on the human body do regarding biological systems, surveys of astronomers might show a percent, similar to those in the applied sciences, who reject the materialistic big bang. Cosmology dogma, further removed from human observation than anatomy, benefits from the herd mentality reinforcing the tendency to believe authorities because most people lack daily experience with first-hand evidence contradicting (or supporting) the accepted account. Krauss, being more of a marketing rep than an objective scientist, claims that all scientists are Darwinists, and that "All evidence overwhelmingly supports the big bang." So he asks rsr.org/krauss2#big-bang-doubters histone excerpt... click for Bob's full review of Darwin's Doubt in the CRSQexpects everyone to "Trust us", i.e., trust those with the inscrutable knowledge. But see for hundreds of astronomers, cosmologists, and many other advanced degreed scientists who reject the big bang. So, like the Darwin lobby, the ID movement trusts the BB model of secular academia by ignoring the mountains of hard evidence, as admitted by BB proponents, which contradict the theory, and by overlooking the many qualified scientists who risk their careers to dispute the Big Bang.

* Another RSR Disagreement with Meyer: From rsr.org/DI#disagreements, Dr. Meyer in Darwin's Doubt writes, "radiometric dating methods" are straightforward and do not "depend on a host of contingent factors" (p. 109) which I critique in my published book review and get a hearty laugh over when reading that claim on air to a PhD in nuclear chemistry. (And see the thorns disagreement, above.)

* Update: Atheists Attend Denver Creation Meeting: One of the visitors from the Denver Atheists Meetup Group, attending this month's Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship meeting, spoke briefly with Bob Enyart. Chauncey graciously considered these arguments: 1) If you don't have a theory of origins that accounts for human consciousness, then you don't have a theory (and you don't even have a hypothesis). 2) There is a demonstrable pattern to atheist claims about origins in that:
- the origin of species begins with species already in existence (see Darwin)
- the origin of stars begins with either: the explosion of existing stars or already existing protostars (see anyone)
- the origin of genes that code for new proteins begins with the modification of existing genes (see anyone)
- the origin of life on earth very possibly begins with pre-existing alien civilizations (see Crick, Dawkins, etc.)
- the origin of the matter of the universe came from the universe (see Hawking :)
- the origin of the universe itself increasingly is explained by claiming that our fine-tuned universe is merely a byproduct of the pre-existing multiverse which is forever popping trillions of universes into existence.

* Stephen Hawking Flashbacks: Hawking reasons in a circle to explain the origin of the the matter of the universe, claiming that it was borrowed from the gravity of the universe, to which RSR asks, What universe?, and, What gravity? Hawking also urges people to avoid talking to aliens (really, that is, you happen to meet one on the street), and to avoid global warming by colonizing the Moon and Mars, evidently forgetting that the Moon's daytime temperature is over 200 degrees F and that neither location has liquid water or breathable oxygen, Mars ranges from 1 degree F down to 178 below, while overlooking the more logical safe havens of Antarctica, Greenland and Siberia

* Regarding ID and the Age of the Earth: If you search the web for: dinosaur soft tissue, of 600,000 pages, Google ranks our RSR report, KGOV.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue usually within the top three sites. RSR currently outranks phys.org, Science Daily, Discover Magazine, CNN, scienceblogs.com by PZ Myers, et al. , Wikipedia, other creation sites, and the entire ID community. (As with the evidence against the big bang, ID leaders show remarkably little, i.e., zero, interest in extant dinosaur tissue, which is undoubtedly, the greatest paleontological discovery in history. In Darwin's Doubt, Meyers surmises that the Cambrian fossils must be the greatest such discovery, but certainly, hadrosaur DNA, intact T. rex blood vessels, triceratops osteocytes still anchored in the surrounding bone matrix, etc., must dwarf those trilobite and other Cambrian-layer fossils. At RSR we know at least a bit about arguments for the age of the earth (as seen also at our YoungEarth.com and on our annual List of Not So Old Things). Whereas Dr. Meyer and the entire Intelligent Design movement seem to simply trust that secular academia is not as equally biased about their beloved big bang as they are about Darwinism. So, we encourage IDers to investigate the still soft dinosaur tissue finds, the fast-decaying Carbon 14 found everywhere it's not supposed to be including in places virtually impossible to contaminate, such as in the center of diamonds, in collagen, and in still soft, endogenous (i.e., original, and therefore, obviously non-contaminated) dinosaur bones.

With all that said, we are thankful for Dr. Meyer's testimony for the Lord Jesus Christ. And just as we use discoveries from Einstein and Hubble, RSR is eager to use scientific evidence against evolution amassed by Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Charles Thaxton, William Dembski, Jonathan Witt, Stephen Meyer, and others in the ID movement. But we hope that they will re-evaluate age in light of the mountain of evidence for a young earth. After all, according to all known psSpike Psarris fabulous video, What You Aren't Being Told...ychological data, realizing that the evidence shows that the earth is young, has been a 100% effective antidote to atheism.

Today’s Resource: Get the fabulous Spike Psarris DVD What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy! Also, have you browsed through our Science Department in our store? Check out Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’ Privileged Planet (clip) and Illustra Media’s Unlocking the Mystery of Life (clip). You can also consider Bob Enyart’s moderated Age of the Earth Debate before a live audience two members of Hugh Ross' Reasons to Believe, noted geophysicist John Nicholl, former president of the  EEGS, and mathematics professor Gordon Brown, from the University of Colorado in Boulder. See also Bob's creation vs. evolution informal debate with Eugenie Scott about junk DNA, etc. And finally, we highly recommend subscribing to creation.com/magazine!