Christian Research Journal Reads 82: Just So Science

folk tales from India and Africa, are great fun. However, despite their great imaginative power, they have no basis in historical or scientific truth. Derwinian tall Tales. Bookstores today abound with would be latter day Kiplings, natural and social scientists who tell their own just so stories to explain why humans think and desire, behave, and interact the way they do,

but with one major difference. Whereas Kipling knew his just so stories were not true, these writers, who ground their cause slash effect explanations in a Darwinian worldview, believe theirs are to make matters worse. They don't just think that natural selection can explain why our bodies function the way they do. They think their just so stories can also account for mysterious things unknown in the animal kingdom, things like love, virtue, and altruism, as well as our desire

for beauty, transcendence, and purpose. When modern readers encounter such explanations, they tend to shake their heads in agreement, because they have been trained to believe that natural selection not only can, but must explain all the mysteries of human nature. Having your cake and eating it too. The naturalist, the one who thinks that all things can be explained and accounted for solely based on natural physical mechanical forces, is inconsistent.

He asserts that nature is structured in a certain way naturalism and then tries to hold on to a view of reality that demands a supernatural origin for morality, freedom, reason, and meaning. In the eighteenth century, David Hume admitted that one cannot get an aught. A moral obligation out of an is a fact of nature, but that did not stop him from seeking to live a moral life and

expecting the same of others. In the nineteenth century, T. H. Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, reduced human life to physical causes and processes over which we have no control, but then rejected determinism,

insisting that our will is free. In the twentieth century, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis taught that naturalism is self refuting, for if naturalism is true, then our reason is the result of random processes, and we therefore have no grounds for trusting our reason, including and especially when our reason tells us that naturalism is true. To back up his argument, Lewis quotes an evolutionary neo Darwinist named J. B. S. Haldane.

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true, and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Needless to say Haldane did not abandon his naturalism to day in the twenty first century, Richard Dawkins constantly reminds his readers that our world has only the appearance of design, while continuing to act and live as if the world has the very design and meaning he denies it quantitative versus qualitative. The naturalist who would explain all human behavior based on Derwinian evolution refuses to acknowledge that the difference between the most developed ape and the most primitive man

is not quantitative but qualitative. As G. K. Chesterton argued a century ago in the opening chapter of The Everlasting Man, the shift from ape to man is not an evolution but a revolution. The so called cavemen who painted reindeer on their cave walls were fully human. They were not primitive artists, but artists using primitive tools. They were as much artists as Michelangelo or Van god or Picasso. A monkey, in contrast, does not begin to begin to begin to

create art. Art marks a leap. A revolution that allows for no incremental stages or chance mutations primitive verses advanced. The power of the evolutionary paradigm is so strong that it has convinced modern people that the flow of history is always progressive and evolutionary. In matter of fact, primitive tribes still exist in the world to day. While the oldest civilizations we know of Egypt and Babylon were highly advanced. The primitive and the urban have always existed side by side.

Had I, when my son was born, switched him with a newborn boy from a stone age tribe in Papua New Guinea. My son would have grown up as a full primitive, while the other boy would have grown up as a full modern. More amazingly, when some one who grows up in a stone age tribe is afforded the chance to study in a civilized university, he quickly learns and adapts without the need for a score of generations

to evolve his brain. Caveman and missing links, the so called cave man was as much a man as any stone age tribesman living to day. Apes and monkeys continue to be apes and monkeys. Perhaps there was a great primate that possessed a hominid shape, but it was a primate none the less. The qualitative leap between the unconscious hominid and the conscious cave man is not like that between two sides of a cavern, but between the Earth

and the Andromeda galaxy. It is true that in the Problem of Pain, Lewis spins a myth of creation and fall, in which he suggests that God might have used evolutionary forces to shape our hominid form. But he makes it clear that that hominid was not human. It was only

after God breathed the soul into that hominid. There is that qualitative leap Chesterton's Revolution that takes place outside of time and space, and in violation of both Darwinian gradualism and neo Darwinian mutation, that man became man and could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and could perceive time flowing past. The missing link is called the missing link because it is missing, it continues to be so

naturally so selected heroes. Now that I have described the flawed and contradictory nature of Darwinian just so stories, I would like to offer an example of just such a story from a recent book that I have enjoyed greatly and from which I have gained much insight, Christopher Madougall's Natural Born Heroes. How a daring band of misfits mastered The Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance Enough twenty fifteen.

In choosing this book, I mean no disrespect to Medougal, nor do I mean to imply that his book is weak or flawed. His book is just one of thousands to day that take the exclusive explanatory power of Darwinian evolution as a given and expect their readers to do the same. A survey of books not selected. Rather than choose MacDougall's book, I could have taken up the works of Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett, but like their fellow New atheist Dawkins, they thankfully reject the racist and eugenicist

implications of their Darwinian worldview. I could have considered the fine work of Jared Diamond, whom I respet beck and admire, but his works are so reductive that they border perilously

close on being anti humanistic. I could have looked at the provocative and entertaining work of Oliver Sachs, but the stories he tells, far from proving Darwinism, prove that Christianity is correct to teach that we are not souls trapped in bodies, but in fleshed souls, and that therefore whatever happens to our bodies brains has a direct effect on our souls minds. I could even have selected the work

of my personal hero, Jordan Peterson. But though he bases many of his bracingly true insights on Darwinian macroevolution, those insights only necessitate a microvolutionary belief that God equipped every species with adaptation strategies, and that he sometimes reuse those strategies. Why heroism makes no Darwinian sense, So woudougle it is? But let me say again what a wonderful book Natural

Born Heroes is. If you are interested in the legacy of ancient Greece, the Greek theater of World War Two, the nature of heroism, or the newest breakthroughs in health, diet, and exercise, you will enjoy this book. If, like me, you are interested in all four, then it is a must read. At the core of the book are questions

of perennial importance. What prompts people like the British and Cretin rebels, who risked all to literate Crete from the Nazis to perform self sacrificial acts of heroism, and how are they able to accomplish those acts physically? Though he goes on to suggest all manner of just so Darwinian stories to account for the heroic altruism of the Cretins. Medougal begins by confessing that natural selection alone cannot explain why people do such things. Even Charles Darwin found heroes bewildering.

Darwin's great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics. Your one and only goal on Earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk a grave for someone else if there's no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids,

smart dying for arrivals, genetic suicide, evolved bodies. Maybe. In trying to account for this Darwinian conundrum, Madougle tells fascinating stories about how our bodies are capable of far more than we might think. The elastic fascia connective tissue that runs through our body is remarkably tough and resilient, and we can run off the fat stores in our body for a remarkably long time, our fight or flight instincts can be channeled, and our fascia retains a physical memory

of what we once did and can do again. Could some of these physical capabilities have evolved in a group of hominate primates, perhaps, but as I explained above, those hominids were not human. Madougle does make convincing arguments that early hunter gatherers had these physical skills, But those hunter gatherers were as fully human as the caveman artists of Lasco, and in any case, they still exist today side by

side with modern evolved humans. Evolved souls impossible. It is true that our bodies are equipped to perform heroic and altruistic deeds, and that our instincts often allow us to call on that equipment in situations of great stress and danger, but that does not explain why we choose consciously to perform altruistic deeds rather than run away, which our bodies

are equally equipped to do. It is also true that our decision to choose the way of altruism is often instilled in us by myths and legends passed down by our ancestors. But those stories were passed down by human beings who were themselves conscious agents, and who made conscious choices that very often ran counter to the instinctual demands of their bodies. Perhaps a Darwinian scientist will someday come up with a way to account for the chemical composition

of the DNA by means of natural selection. Even if he succeeded in doing so, however, he would still be unable to account for the non physical information that is front loaded on to those chemical strands, the real root of heroism. Near the close of his book, Medougal questions a nonagenarian survivor of the cret and Resistance as to why he and his fellow freedom fighters acted so altruistically.

The answer he received strikes in with the power of a divine revelation, and he assures us that he will never forget that rare moment of illumination. But the answer that is revealed to him points not to the ironclad laws of natural selection, but to a uniquely human legacy of people, primitive or modern, hunter gatherer or urban who so transcended their biology and their animal instincts as to achieve an ethical spirit and a moral imagination qualitatively different

from anything in the animal kingdom. When you live in a place like this, small by itself. You're brought up to give help, not wait for it. When your neighbor needs something, he needs you the person he knows, not the army, not the police. You, And if you're not there, someday you'll have to look him in the face and explain emphasis in original. Madougal, for all his great insight into the way the human body works, cannot reduce heroism

to the Darwinian goal of multiplication. Nor can his just so stories account for why he and all of us are so powerfully drawn to the actions of heroes that we cannot stop writing and reading engaging books like natural Born Heroes.

our other podcasts. Wherever you find your favorite podcasts, you will find the Christian Research Journal Reads podcast, the Postmodern Realities podcast, which features interviews with Christian Research Journal authors, our flagship podcast, The Bible answer Man Broadcast, and the Hank Unplugged podcast, where CRI President Hank Canagraph takes you out of the studio and into his study to engage in in depth, free flowing, essential Christian conversations on critical

issues with some of the most interesting and informative people on the planet. At equipp dot org, you will also find a lot of resources to equip you, including many thousands of Christian Research Journal articles. That's e qu ip dot o RG