Author: Barton Jahn

The orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world are two of its uniquely spectacular features.  Our entire program of scientific investigation, formulation of natural laws, and the organization of information into distinct categories…is built upon these two pillars of reality.

For macroevolution to attempt to explain the origin of the orderliness and intelligibility of the living biological world…using as change agents the opposite and contrary concepts of blind, mindless, unguided, indifferent, trial-and-error, genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection…to create the organized diversity of life we observe in the world today…should be suspect for its inconsistency…for its non-correspondence to observable reality…for its mysterious and nonsensical leap from randomly unguided processes according to naturalism…to the brilliantly ordered and intelligible diversity of life we see today.

From the standpoint of the history of science…the living biological world is not at all like the slow-moving geological phenomenon of water and wind erosion, plate tectonics, mountain building subduction zones, rivers that carve out ravines and canyons, and the buildup of water-born sediments over long periods of time to form river deltas…all having initial starting points in the distant past, momentum in certain fixed directions, and easily discernable end-points that demonstrate change over some interval of time…in a rigidly deterministic way.

Inanimate, non-living things like mountains, rivers, oceans, lakes, rainfall, snow, wind, and storms do not contain the billions of bits of genetic information that differentiate living from non-living things.

Non-living things do not contain genes, do not compete for survival, and do not sexually reproduce.

Non-living things do not contain microscopic living cells having miniature biochemical machines of fantastic complexity…coordinating massive amounts of information…that can copy themselves according to a pre-ordered program…to replicate new living cells.

There is no reason that the orderliness and intelligibility of the immensely more complex diversity of life…should be analogous as an explanation for its origin…to the slow-moving, deliberate pace of change we see in non-living phenomenon like geology.

The analogy of the living world…to geology…is like comparing apples to oranges…but more precisely very complex and complicated apples…to relatively very simple oranges.

The influence of Charles Lyell’s gradualism in geology upon Darwin’s thinking in crafting his theory of evolution in biology…is now seen from the viewpoint in this new Age of Information…in the recent recognition of complex, high specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the phenomenon of the natural world…as being inconsistent, inapplicable, and misleading as an analogy to Darwinian macro evolution.

A hybrid blend of the radical change required to produce the diversity of life today…with gradual change over long periods of time like we see in geology…should result in a myriad of ongoing macroevolution clearly observable today in the form of animals and plants part-way in transition toward their future end-point outcomes.

Slow-up the rate of change…that Darwinists already claim for macro evolution…and it becomes untenable as a plausible explanation for the vastly creative, imaginative diversity of the living and non-living world.

Speed-up the rate of change and macro evolution would be so dynamic that it would be visually observable and apparent to everyone.

But open-up the genetic boundary limits around species altogether…remove the bracketed upper and lower defining boundary-lines around animals, flowers, vegetables, and fruits…for example…and we have a hypothetical world that does not match the natural world we observe today.

In my opinion, Darwin’s theoretical extrapolation from microevolution to macroevolution is brilliantly revolutionary…in its conceptual simplicity and originality…of removing the limiting boundaries around species in an ever expanding, common-descent tree-of-life…but that Darwinism upon closer scrutiny paints an imaginary ancient picture of continuous and unending radical change in the natural world…that compared with the scientific fact-based evidence observed in the natural living world today…is a fiction.

Linking together ancient fossils according to dates, physical similarities, and DNA comparisons according to a working program of common descent…which is a necessary, commendable, and normal task of scientific inquiry…nonetheless transforms itself into a hypothetical fiction when this pursuit goes beyond the outer edges of the well-established scientific fact-based evidence for microevolution…when it is used to extend its findings as an argument for open-ended macroevolutionary change.

Semantically confusing the words microevolution and macroevolution together into the single term evolution is a hypothetical over-reach that was not supported or justified by the empirical evidence in 1859…is still unsupported by scientific fact-based evidence today…and is the author of much ambiguity in the discussions on Darwinian macroevolution.

The generic word evolution…when it refers to biological history…should be more accurately split into micro and macro.

Micro and macro evolution are two entirely different things.

Where should we draw the line between micro and macro evolution?  We should draw the line where it belongs…between empirical facts and speculative theory.

The microevolution half of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species is spot-on…evidenced by enumerable examples observable in the natural world of small adaptive changes within species over time…combined with the obvious evidence for the variability within species for change…demonstrated in the human activity of artificial selection in plant and animal breeding.

The understandably alluring temptation for Darwin to take it a step further in his research and in his book…to theorize the hypothetical extrapolation to macroevolution using a purely naturalistic program…to make an argument for macroevolutionary change in the living world according to common descent…by necessity explodes the boundary limits around genetic variability.

A person like me…reading The Origin of Species…without having a starting bias of naturalistic materialism…quickly notices that Darwin does not specifically differentiate between micro and macro evolution…but uses the single term evolution for the detailed arguments throughout his book.

I have to consciously make a mental interpolation between micro and macro evolution as I read through each chapter of The Origin of Species…recognizing that Darwin went all-out in favor of the macro half of his theory.

As the title of his book implies…Darwin went for the whole enchilada…in courageously making the full argument for macroevolution in the naturalistic explanation for the origin of species.

But what is extremely important to discern at the beginning of this discussion, is that instead of being able to simply point to its obvious operation in full action in the natural world…at that time in 1859…as clearly recognizable and observably empirical facts that stand on their own as evidence…the Darwinian macroevolutionary half of the data presented…curiously refutes itself at the outset…by the very need to approach the argument…in every case without exception…from the sole direction of hypothetical theorizing.

If true in 1859 and true today…the macroevolution half of the origin of species would be so obvious as to need no bold introduction into the marketplace of ideas, no defense, and no speculative theory requiring further scientific investigation over the past roughly 160 years.

It is my contention in this book…that if the limiting boundaries around species are removed…if these boundary constraints to unlimited genetic variation do not exist…not only would the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural living world that we critically rely upon for the creation of the science of taxonomy…the meaningful classification of living things into groups…fly out the window…but this would also allow for revolutionary variant traits for adaptation and the enumerable transitional pathways to the origin of new species…that would be so everyday ordinarily obvious…as to not require a hypothetical argument for this extrapolation from micro to macro…at all.

In my opinion…macroevolution is in that rare territory where it is either obviously true…and if not…it is obviously false…without a happy middle-ground center.

Macroevolution is a pure either/or proposition.  It is either obviously true…and if it falls short of this basic visual test…of being clearly seen among the phenomenon of the natural world…then it is obviously not true.

This is one of several general arguments for why Darwinian macro evolution cannot be true…this being a non-technical argument accessible to expert scientists and to the general public today…open to easy contemplation as disqualifying evidence to the macro half…the bold theoretical assertion…of Darwinian evolution.

It is one of the contentions in this book…that if macroevolution is true…it would be so prolific…so profuse in nature…so ongoing in its outwardly obvious recognition…that it would enjoy the same empirical evidentiary status as the daily appearance of the noonday sun.

The commonsense fact that has been missed in the Darwinian debate…or at least temporarily set aside as unanswerable until more data can be obtained…is that a conceptually theoretical  extrapolation starting from the diversification of finch birds on 13 varied oceanic islands in the Galapagos Archipelago…to become the expanded, all-encompassing explanation for the origin of eyesight, avionic flight, the human intellectual capacity to conduct scientific investigations, and the billions of unique architectural body-plans with their accompanying lifestyle habits we can observe and differentiate into sensible taxonomic groupings…requires open genetic borders around species for continuous, ongoing, radically new genetic and lifestyle-habit variations…that we emphatically do not see as confirming evidence in the present-time natural world…anywhere.

This single, scientific evidentiary fact should be immediately obvious and uncontroversial to both scientists and lay observers today…extending backwards in time as observable fact to the dawn of human civilization…long before the start of the modern Scientific Revolution.

If this contention holds true…if open-ended and randomly ungoverned macroevolution today…should exhibit an enormous number of individual species part-way in their development…caught mid-stream in our current snapshot of time…being 20, 30, 40, or 90 percent complete toward some future developmental end-point outcome…obvious to everyone…then again…Charles Darwin’s macroevolutionary component in The Origin of Species refutes itself by its very introduction into the marketplace of new ideas…as late in the Scientific Revolution as 1859.

If macroevolution was the revolutionary, radical change-agent that it should be if it is true…then it would be so obvious as to render the book The Origin of Species unnecessary and superfluous as to the reality of macroevolution.

But a book written in 1859 observing, describing, and critically analyzing microevolution…absent macroevolution…as seen in the radiation of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands…would be an important and novel discovery…timed perfectly within the middle of the Scientific Revolution…in the mid-19^th century burgeoning field of biological science.

But the title of Darwin’s book is not Microevolution in the Development of  Immutable Species. 

The full title is: On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life.

Charles Darwin tells us exactly where he intends to go in his book…as he should…in the book’s title.

If open-ended and randomly unguided macroevolution without genetic boundaries is true…we should expect to see today a veritable three-ring circus of enumerable examples of animals and plants…unmistakably progressing along experimental pathways testing out undeveloped, genetic variant traits before our eyes…with no rhyme or reason, and no momentum in any discernable direction other than for immediate, competitive survival and reproduction…as guided by natural selection.

The Darwinian theory of macro evolution is based upon a concept that would be called in politics a reform agenda…substantial, across-the-board, continually occurring, progressive new change…to create the massive diversity we now see in the natural living world today.

As Charles Darwin observed the radiation…the diversification…of finch birds into varying sizes, colors, beak sizes, song patterns, and lifestyle habits on the 13 islands of the Galapagos Archipelago in the 1830’s…finches of the same species still able to interbreed…yet adapting more precisely to the different geographical ecologies of these islands through the natural selecting of variant physical characteristics…this led Darwin to the pioneering leap of imagination that this might finally be the key that unlocks our scientific understanding of how new species of animals and plants are created.

Darwin spent over 20 years researching and perfecting this innovative idea…culminating in his famous 1859 book The Origin of Species.

Darwin’s bold theoretical extrapolation…the speculative, conjectural stretch…of the minor-league microevolutionary changes he observed…advancing into major-league, universal macroevolutionary change through an accumulating progression of incremental small steps…like the diversification of finches observed on the oceanic islands of the Galapagos…but on a broader, long-range, and continual basis without limits…requires developmental boundaries around species that are open or semi-open to revolutionary genetic variation.

This hypothetical concept should exhibit the putting-out of radical new, variant physical traits…albeit according to Darwinism spread-out into small progressive steps over long periods of time…chosen after-the-fact in the reactive mode by natural selection for improved functional survivability and thus reproductive advantage…that can change fish into amphibians…amphibians into reptiles…reptiles into birds…and primitive ancestral mammals into intellectually mature, upright walking, and language speaking human beings…by way of gradual change over long periods of time through continuous common descent…the lynch-pin of macroevolution as shown on Darwin’s tree-of-life drawing.

But as we look at the current natural world all around us…the political illustrative analogy of a reform agenda…touched upon above…presents a far different, contrary picture…that is as conservatively unchanging…on the whole…in the macro sense…as is imaginable.

A radical, reform agenda of dynamic, fluid, ongoing change is not what we see…as the works-in-progress, change-agent reality in the living world…as we should expect in a macroevolutionary program that is genetically open-ended and without boundary limits.

The natural living world instead appears to be organized and structured to preserve the current status quo…to be static, well-defined, and unchanging…fully developed to its logical physical and lifestyle-habit end-points in the billions of living things…fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, insects, echinoderms, microbes, bacteria, plants, trees, fruits and vegetables… precisely coordinated to fit near-perfectly within exclusively individualized niches…interacting seamlessly within a mind-boggling ecological balance…and apparently bracketed top and bottom by brilliantly determined genetic limits.

We do not see open-ended and randomly defined genetic boundaries around species…with unlimited gene pool variations lined-up in waiting to put out radical new physical characteristics to be chosen by natural selection…which we would expect to see if in fact macroevolution is true.

In the large African land mammals on the savanna plains…elephants, water buffalo, hippopotamus, zebra, giraffe, rhinoceros, wildebeest, and lions…we observe no new physical characteristics…zero in number or scope…being put forward by genetic variation for natural selection to choose…driving forward visually apparent radical new change.

Where would further macro evolutionary development take these extraordinary African land mammals?  They appear to be fully developed in their unique physical traits, lifestyle habits, and conceptually imagined architectural body-plans for survivability and reproduction.

There is no further developmental place for elephants, water buffalo, hippopotamus, zebra, giraffe, rhinoceros, wildebeest, and lions to go ecologically or physically…to evolve up or down…backwards or forwards…within the imaginative conception of human beings.

This is a major point of refutation of the theory of Darwinian macroevolution.

Within ourselves…human beings…we detect no new radical genetic variations of physical or lifestyle-habit developments…no new input of revolutionary genetic information…and no ancient, latent genetic capacities coming to the forefront…to be chosen by natural selection… gradually or otherwise…to create new beneficial characteristics in human beings.

There is a reason why I am 6-feet tall and not 10-feet tall.  There is a reason why I cannot “jump out of the gym” with springs in my legs…giving me an exceptional leaping ability…that would make me a sensation in the NBA (National Basketball Association).

There is a reason why I cannot run 50 miles per hour.  There is a reason why my I.Q. is much, much lower than 300.  There is a reason why I do not have wings, claws, and eat my prey raw.

Human genetic boundaries set limits to the variant traits that human beings can put-out for natural selection to choose from…creating on the one hand the incredible human diversity that makes “people watching” such an interesting activity amongst the international crowds in New York City’s Times Square or Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Stars in Southern California, for example…but on the other hand this same diversity is brilliantly limited within the strict borders of the availability of change-agent options within the human gene pool range…above and below a static, basic norm…that defines human beings.

Naturally fixed, rigidly closed genetic boundaries are why human breeders cannot…through artificial selection…create dogs that are as large as elephants.

The reason simply is that dogs are not putting-out increasingly larger size Great Danes, German Shepherds, or Labrador Retrievers for human breeders to proactively select…after-the-fact…in the reactive mode.  The maximum size of dogs has reached its genetic limits.

But genetic limits…on the low side of the norm…also exist.  We cannot breed dogs below a certain size.  We cannot breed dogs that run at a very slow speed…that cannot chase after and retrieve a thrown tennis ball…or that are not smart enough to obey the command to “sit” at attention, to “wait” before jumping into the car, or to “stop” before running into the street.

Genetic variability does not give us these heading-in-reverse options.  Gene pools that define a “dog” fall within a range that has definite limits on the high side and the low side…in the areas of physical traits and lifestyle habits.

There are no open-ended genetic boundaries at these high-side and low-side limits…observable in the natural living world today.

What is observable and recognizable in the living world today…are genetic high-side and low-side limits that define the distinctive characteristics of living things like apples, oranges, pears, bananas, wheat, oats, barley, soy beans, and corn…all uniquely different from one another…but also having the capacity for variation within their own specific, individualized types.

How would an apple…for example…a living entity…reach the conceptual end-point of the upper boundary-line that defines the shape, color, size, taste, aroma, and nutritional value of an apple…yet also achieve a very tight lower boundary-line range that allows for variations in apple types…but excludes any possible confusion between an apple and other fruits?

According to Darwinian macroevolution…this requires a purely naturalistic process of radical progressive development, distinctive differentiation from other fruits and vegetable, and an inconceivably targeted end-point outcome that falls within a narrow bandwidth of upper and lower boundary-lines that define an apple in today’s natural living world.

The same can be said of an orange, pear, banana, grapes, watermelon, grapefruit, and a host of other fruits that have recognizable boundary-line limits of discontinuity…yet each having a degree of internal genetic variability that allows for differences in their types.

This same targeted, pin-point precision that creates distinctive definitions for every living thing…bracketed top and bottom within narrow ranges of physical characteristics, lifestyle habits, and fitting functionally within ecological niches of enumerable variations…is not only way beyond a naturalistic explanation for its origin and maintenance…but it is light-years in complexity and coordination beyond anything that we as intelligent designers could create and manage as an entire, integrated system.

The breadth and the complexity of the information content from the microbiological level of DNA to the macro level of the environmental ecologies…adding in the features of the non-living world such as the properties of water, the strength of gravity, the make-up of our atmosphere…and dozens of other components necessary to support complex life like ourselves…this breadth and complexity of information content far exceeds any conceptual system based on things simply falling into place on their own…according to the philosophical concept of naturalistic materialism.

This should give the student of Darwinian evolution pause as to the validity and truthfulness of the macro half of the theory…there being no visual scientific fact-based evidence for open-ended genetic boundaries…as undeniable, empirical, obvious phenomenon observable in the present-day natural living world.

The action of problem-solving in the reactive mode in housing construction is easily recognized, even when mistakenly misinterpreted by the casual, unsophisticated observer.  Problem-solving in the reactive mode becomes even more clearly recognized when it beneficially translates into a written, hard-copy, documented feedback loop of information directly communicated back to the design and construction team to be proactively re-designed and field-managed out of the construction of future projects entirely.

Looking for and identifying the reactive mode in housing construction is easy.  It is like looking for something easy to find in broad daylight…with a flashlight.

In the microscopic world of DNA, RNA, proteins, amino acids, and in the diverse body-plans formulated at the initial division of embryonic cells, we do not see any feedback loop of information that would constitute the main creative informational basis for the physical and lifestyle variation of living things we observe in the natural world.

Natural selection, as far as science can tell, as well as by definition, is entirely in the reactive mode.  The mountain of creative information in the living cell and its DNA is already there, fully functioning, and in-place.  The differences in genes that produce the slight variations within species that allow for adaptation to differing ecosystem habitats are already in existence.

The genetic based variations in Darwin’s finches that allows for their survival amidst cyclical weather pattern changes on the Galapagos Islands chain are already in operation.  The inbuilt variability in finch characteristics, adapting to cyclical weather changes affecting habitat conditions, producing temporarily oscillating fluctuations in the relative populations of the thirteen types of finches identified on the Galapagos archipelago, was fully functioning in the mid-1830’s when Darwin first observed this phenomenon.

This microevolutionary process in the reactive mode does not cause fluctuations in the basic body-plan architecture of Darwin’s finches.  Genetic variation is not putting out radically creative characteristics that can be naturally selected that would alter Darwin’s finches into something entirely different like a hybrid finch/duck or a finch/hawk or a finch/goose…yet this is the central motive force theorized for common descent.

The casual observer witnessing the field supervisor directing the work on the jobsite, answering questions and resolving problems in the reactive mode, does not result in the house design “type” radically changing mid-stream from a traditional New England Cape Cod architecture to something entirely different like Wallace Neff’s Santa Barbara/Montecito style architecture, circa 1928 to 1932.

There are not even imaginable, transitional, intermediate hybrids between the two architectural styles.

Once construction of the house begins, the design “type” of the house remains the same except for slight changes and modifications consistent within the parameters of that architectural style.  Moving a few interior walls a few inches this way or that way to improve function…providing additional space for door casing to fit or for kitchen cabinets to fit…does not affect the overall architectural design.

When successful hybrids do occur in building design they are the product of intelligent agency…intelligently conceived aesthetic and functional design considerations.

In editing and re-editing and fine-tuning this book, the addition of one key word here and there can greatly improve what I am trying to say.  One key word will improve a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, and even a portion of a chapter.  But a substitution of a key word for a previously chosen word will not change the whole book.

The very rare genetic mutations that are advantageous, acted upon by natural selection, by definition occur in the reactive mode alone.  These advantageous genetic mutations are no more a part of the massive systems of creative information that make up the body-plans of living organisms, than is the problem-solving in the reactive mode in housing construction that occurs at the peripheral margins of building design and construction technology.

The notion that macroevolution is said to be a massive collection of infinitesimally small genetic improvements…actually relegates genetic variability and natural selection to the peripheral, outer edges of the body-plans of living things…because functional survivability is not achieved until full development.

The water buffalo newborn on the African savanna plain must be up and running within 20 minutes of birth to keep up with its mother and stay protectively within the herd.

The pathway through inception to embryological development to functional survivability requires foresight…a conceptual leap across from DNA architecture to mature functioning life-form…which contains too much information, too much foresight, and far too much integrated complexity to be anything other than intelligently designed.

The problem with a thoroughly gradualistic scenario is that it requires a leap across a large number of intermediate, non-functional, developmental stages to reach the mature point of function.

But how would function leap across non-function without premeditated foresight?  The growing infant water buffalo in the womb of its mother cannot forego any of the embryological development phases, yet does not reach the point in time of functional survivability until birth.

Common descent as the key element in Darwinian evolution requires innumerable, infinitesimally small improvements acted upon by natural selection, to be plausible as a purely naturalistic explanation for the diversity of life we see today.

Yet the reactive mode has no place in embryological development.  The embryological phase of every living thing is a premature time-period of non-survivability…of non-viability…where the reactive mode has no influence.  The functional “survival of the fittest” has no applicable meaning in the embryological development phase.  Premeditated foresight is needed to bridge the gap between DNA architecture and the fully formed “essence” of the life-form in its functionally mature, unique approach to survival…whether plant, tree, insect, fish, reptile, bird, or mammal.

Charles Darwin did not know about DNA and the molecular machinery in living cells, the inconceivably massive amount of information that went into the Big Bang creation of the universe, or the intelligently designed information that goes into computer software code that crystalized for us the concept of information theory within the last three decades.

Darwin did not know about the enormous base of information content that forms functional systems.  Without this perspective it might be understandable to form enthusiasm for the theory of macroevolution.  But today we are now clearly knowledgeable about these things.

The well-ordered and intelligible precision of the natural world appears to be designed because it is not in the reactive mode.

Natural selection applying genetic variation to procure survivability, and in some rare cases utilizing beneficial mutations to produce permanent variation within species, occurs at the peripheral edges of the total information packages of living things…defined as microevolution.

The natural world can be said to be divinely created by an Intelligent Designer precisely because it is not in the reactive mode.  What we observe in the natural world is not the reactive mode.  What we see in the natural world is not dynamic, obvious, universal change in the middle of reactive transitional revisions continually leading towards radically new life-forms.

Darwinian macroevolution…using the methodology of natural selection responding one-at-a-time to random chance genetic mutations…is a human construction overlaid upon the biological world.

Microevolution extrapolates to macroevolution only if naturalism projects its philosophy over the facts…a philosophy that is no longer tenable in light of our modern understanding of the enormous amounts of information contained within DNA, the Cambrian Explosion, and the Big Bang.

A God-composed journey of faith life-script…and a journey of self-reliance apart from God…are on opposite ends of the spectrum.  Darwinian macroevolution promotes the idea of responding to chance events in life in the reactive mode…leading nowhere.

The biblical narrative stories of faith tell us that God has unique life-plans for each of us that are steeped in purpose, meaning, and direction.

The competing issues at stake here are enormous…they are not superficial, not minor, not inconsequential, and not random…but rather located at the fundamental point of the meaning of life itself.

If after 500 years of the modern scientific quest to rid mankind of superstition, folklore, magic, witchcraft, and “old-wives tales”…if this effort reveals unmistakable patterns of complex information arranged to create living creatures, which clearly points towards design by intelligent agency by means currently outside of our understanding…then our worldview philosophy will simply have to change and adapt to include this new reality…as it has numerous times over the last 500 years.

In housing construction, field supervisors can take a reactive or a proactive approach to answering questions, problem-solving, and issues resolution.  The reactive approach responds after-the-fact to issues one at a time, in-the-moment, as they arise.  By contrast the proactive approach attempts to identify potential questions, problems, and issues ahead of time with the aim at prevention before some problem or mistake occurs.

The reactive mode has some clear advantages.  Problem-solving in the reactive mode is a sure thing, because it only deals with actual problems and questions.  The reactive mode invests no time upfront on the prevention of hypothetical future problems that might or might not occur.  The reactive mode is an approach that simplistically assumes the risk that most of the bad things that can happen won’t happen…and those bad things that do materialize into real problems we will deal with individually when the time comes.

A difficult thing to account for after-the-fact in hindsight, in the proactive approach, is how to calculate a value for the successful prevention…of a negative problem that was avoided through in-advance corrective  action.

This difficulty tends to lend a degree of artificial credence to the reactive approach because it has the outward appearance of actively solving real problems…of actually, physically doing something.

The proactive approach of successful prevention has nothing to show for itself in terms of noticeable action because prevented issues do not surface…do not materialize into real problems that need to be fixed.

The obvious downside to the reactive mode is that it waits until problems actually mature into reality before the reactive mode for problem-solving kicks-in.  The reactive mode first requires the problem to identify itself in concrete material reality, after which it is too late for proactive prevention.  This is expressed in the old classic truism in building construction that “pencil erasers are cheaper than concrete erasers.”

Although there is some reactive mode problem-solving on every building construction project, which falls into the category of unavoidable assembly-line debugging, the reactive mode is generally the default field management approach in single-family residential construction for inexperienced novices.

People entering into housing construction from other fields such as law, accounting, engineering, or real estate fall back upon the most expedient approach of dealing with individual field problems individually as they arise, as a matter of necessity rather than choice, because they do not as yet have the construction background to formulate an effective, methodical, proactive system for prevention utilizing past “what not to do” debugging information.

There is a close analogy between the conceptual approach of natural selection choosing variant traits produced by genetic mutations, by definition in the reactive mode, and the reactive mode as seen in operation in housing construction.

Novices inexperienced in housing construction can successfully operate in the reactive mode in responding to field problems one at a time…because they are sitting atop a mountain of pre-existing housing design and field “means and methods” bodies of information in the form of architectural and engineering plans, and established building trades practices, that will get the house eventually constructed regardless of reactive or proactive problem-solving occurring at the marginal edge of the operations.

The same is true for mass-production assembly-line manufacturing.  The initial trial-run debugging phase, before full production begins, is made possible by the mountain of information already embodied in the design of the product and the mechanical engineering and robotics technology invested in the assembly-line process.

Likewise, the debugging of computer software program code may involve the locating and removal of only a few scattered lines of defective computer language code hidden amongst thousands of correct lines of final-draft program code that make up the architecture of the soon-to-be successfully functioning software program.

In other words, even though “bugs” in the design plans or “human-error” mistakes made in the field by tradespersons can cause time delays, cost overruns, and poor quality, the actual information content addressed in the reactive mode in resolving these issues in housing construction is infinitesimal compared to the massive body of entirely correct and functional information contained within the “standards of the industry” technology in-place through design plans and established building trades practices.

Problem-solving in the reactive mode is not a part of the massive body of information that makes up the creation of the originally designed product, whether a new house, a computer software program, or tens of thousands of assembly-line manufactured automobiles.

It takes the outside addition of an auxiliary, separate, and novel feedback loop of identifying and recording field problems one at a time, communicated back to the design team through sketches, photographs, and explanatory text, in order to integrate reactive mode problem-solving information backwards from the field into the main body of design and construction technology.

The reactive mode is thereby translated into practical, “concrete,” proactive prevention which then can eliminate future housing design and construction problems from occurring.

How does this relate to the conceptual approach in biology of theoretically extrapolating microevolution into macroevolution?

A casual, unsophisticated observer on a housing construction site might reasonably misinterpret the field supervisor verbally discussing issues, giving directions, and waving their arms for workers on the jobsite to go here or there and to do this or that, in-the-moment in the reactive mode, incorrectly assuming this visual representation to be the main creative source of the information that designs and builds the house.

What this casual observer is actually witnessing on the jobsite in terms of information dissemination is miniscule in relation to the mountain of information already in-place that forms the “body-plan” design and construction of the house…and its “lifestyle habits.”

Charles Darwin observing the variations among finches on the Galapagos Islands in the middle 1830’s…might reasonably infer that what he was witnessing was the creative process in action, totally unaware of the massive body of information contained in the microscopic world of DNA not discovered until a hundred and twenty years later in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson.

Without an understanding of the mountain of information that supports the genetic makeup and the incredibly complex body-plan architecture of a finch or any other type of bird, Darwin at the time would be like the casual observer on the housing construction site mistakenly interpreting in-the-moment problem-solving in the reactive mode as the main creative force, rather than merely a few fine-adjustments being made at the marginal periphery of the total information package.

Climbing the “Mount Improbable” of Richard Dawkin’s explanation for the accumulation of small, incrementally beneficial steps…fails to recognize that a totally free and random system built on chance alone will not go straight up the gradual backside slope of the mountain toward an optimum end-point destination, but may also …according to unguided random-chance…regress backwards or sideways down the slope in an endlessly undirected series of futile “wrong turns” in DNA science referred to as “junk.”

That the hundreds of billions of different plants, trees, bacteria, fungi, insects, fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals would all reach the level of functionality, survivability, and adaptability in a balanced worldwide ecosystem…is more akin to an intelligently designed worldwide air-traffic control system or a well-run, big city train station…than to some random-chance assemblage of complex parts that somehow…without foresight…lock into place (accumulate) beneficial variations for future use.

If the atheistic philosophy of naturalism is true then someone might reasonably ask: “what is fundamentally wrong with the material particles” to produce such a contrary reality of evil and suffering in the world?

All of the breadth and depth of reality, good and bad, does not originate from physical matter.  The creative artistry of Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 does not derive from the statics and mechanics of the length of the piano keys, the density hardness of the felt hammers, and the physical tension of the strings.

Our commonsense judgment should govern…at some point…and transcendently insist that logic, reason, and artistic creativity are not determined by material particles.

Post-modern relativism renders the viewpoints of everyone equally suspect, including the philosophy of naturalism.

Materialism, at its extreme end-point in trying to reduce human intelligence and communication to an explanation solely based upon the properties of material particles alone, dissolves itself.

If our thinking, reasoning, and judgments are based upon the material particles in our heads alone, then what differentiates the value of one opinion over another opinion?  What differentiates the value of the information content of a four-year old sitting at the piano banging out random noise without pattern or melody, and the 10-year old playing flawlessly…as the result of much prior practice…a Chopin prelude at her first music recital?

The same charge that atheists and agnostics rail at the biblical God today regarding the inexplicable presence of evil and suffering in the world…turns back upon themselves in having to explain the presence of morally deficient, faulty particles in the solely materialistic scheme of naturalism.

Taking apart a Steinway & Sons concert grand piano piece-by-piece to understand how it works, no matter how thorough and expert is the scientific methodology in dissecting and analyzing the function of its parts, will never on its own make the artistic leap to the creative invention of a Beethoven piano concerto or a Chopin etude.  The imaginative inspiration of a musical composition is on another level…in another domain of reality…informationally unconnected to the basic physical mechanics of the parts of the musical instrument.

This is a huge argument against the inadequacy of the atheistic naturalism of Darwinian macroevolution…because it subtly blends together two distinct yet related parts…focusing in great anatomical details on the architectural body-plans of living things…while ignoring as an unknowable mystery…not amenable to scientific study…the equally important connection between architectural body-plan designs…and lifestyle habits.

The artistic creative brilliance of the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven or Ballade No. 2 by Chopin…cannot be measured quantitatively or qualitatively in terms of size, weight, length, or force.  Music is like romantic love…of human friendship…or courage in military battle.  These realities are not measureable…and are therefore not amenable to strict scientific analysis.

This same reality applied as an analogy to the biological world…leaves out half of the characteristics of lions, elephants, giraffes, falcons, sharks, whales, redwood trees, and rose bushes…their singularly unique and entirely discontinuous lifestyle habits…their behaviors for survival and reproduction that are tied to their architectural body-plan designs…yet too subjective…too creatively artistic…to fall within human scientific investigation.

The creative, artistic program of information that goes into the “why” component of the ingenuity of a Beethoven piano concerto is not at all the information package that makes up the mathematics, physics, and chemistry of “how” the concert grand piano produces beautiful sounding individual notes.

Dissecting the piano painstakingly piece-by-piece for scientific analysis will not uncover the secret of music or the purpose behind the creation of the body-plan of the musical instrument.  The secret of music composition will not be found in the physics and chemistry of the keys, the strings, the soundboard, or the distinctive shape of the wood box, raised lid, and three supporting legs.

The most skilled modern scientist, using the best techniques and finest equipment available, analyzing the acoustic features of the sound-board and the vibrating resonance of the various strings while clunking away at the piano keys, may or may not be artistically inspired to create a musical composition simultaneously as the investigative work progresses, based upon a positive reaction to the beauty of the sounds he or she is producing at the keyboard.

The beautiful tones of the concert grand piano tells the researcher there is the possibility of “music” inside, but if they fail to respond in an artistic way to experiment with the highly specified arrangement of the musical notes of the various piano keys to create a musical composition, they will remain in the purely materialistic zone of the physics and chemistry of the musical instrument alone.

The two potentially parallel, simultaneous efforts…first the scientific investigation of the workings of the piano and second the creative discovery that the sounds produced can be arranged into an interesting and satisfying musical composition…are intimately connected yet are very different, discrete programs of information.

This is one explanation for the dichotomy between the differing viewpoints of atheistic materialism and theistic creationism.

The Christian sees the order and intelligibility underlying the “body plans” of the varied phenomenon of the natural world as a confirmation for the experiencing of beautiful lives…like creating musical compositions.  The scientist working within the narrower worldview of naturalism sees no such transcendent reality above the ceiling line of the pure mathematics, physics, and chemistry of the functioning parts.

Taking this argument of the different levels of existing information a step further…the creative, directional, information program that assembles the cheek bones, nose, chin, lips, forehead, muscles, tendons, and skin of the face of a beautiful woman is likewise entirely different from the informational program that arranges the basic parts of the DNA, protein, and amino acid molecules…encased within the microscopic eukaryotic cells of the human body.

The information program that forms the intended limits and boundaries of the shape of the beautiful woman’s face is analogous to both the creative mechanical imagination that invents the functional body-plan arrangement of ascending and descending notes on the keyboard of the concert grand piano…combined with the artistic genius that composes Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Chopin’s Ballade No. 2.

Some guiding informational program must tell each living cell precisely where to go in the human body and what function to perform, in exactly the right artistic arrangement to produce the sparkling eyes, radiant smile, beautiful hair, lovely shape of the face, and melodious voice having perfect pitch, tone, and resonance coming from the beautifully attractive human female.

Like the information contained within a musical composition that transcends the mechanics of the piano, the essence of what makes a beautiful woman enchantingly feminine is a mystery that transcends far above the hypothetical creative capacity of material particles…particles acting without the outside guidance of blueprint instructions according to the naturalistic scenario.

The artistic imagination contained within the creation of the body-plan form of the face of the beautiful human female cannot be reduced to the materialistic parts of proteins, amino acids, and DNA any more than the musical genius of a Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms can be explained merely by the inked musical notes drawn on the page of a musical score, or the engineering statics and mechanics composition of the parts of the concert grand piano.

Darwinists might complain here that the materialistic aspects of the anatomical parts of living things…is all that we have to go on…are the only facts available to scientific investigation and analysis.

But that is the point of this essay.  Darwinian macroevolutionary theory makes the grand claim that common descent is the explanation for the vast diversity of life…achieved through genetic accidents putting out variant traits…chosen by natural selection…without guidance or intelligent design.

But Darwinism makes this grand claim with only half the data…the materialistic data analogous to understanding the physics, chemistry, and mathematics of the concert grand piano…while skipping altogether the artistic body of data…which requires a Bach, a Beethoven, or a Chopin…an intelligent designer…to create and bring into existence.

This is not to say that Darwinism understands the mechanism that might produce evolutionary change on a macro level in the biological world…in the same way that we do actually understand how the components of a concert grand piano produces its beautiful sounds.

Simply giving the benefit-of-the-doubt to Darwinism in this area of focusing upon the precise details of the anatomies of living things…which we can study, measure, and categorize into groups…as if the similarities we find…homology…equates to common descent…still leaves out the huge considerations of lifestyle habits…as vastly different and distinct as the number of animals and plants in the natural world.

One of the reasons why Darwinian evolution has never caught on with the majority of people, at least in America, is that people sense that the atheists and agnostics who preach the philosophy of naturalism intermixed with evolution, are proposing a simplistic explanation entailing only the mechanistic side of the equation…that is inadequate to encompass the fullness of reality that includes innovative lifestyle-habit programs as well.

Scientific investigation is incapable of answering the larger, fundamental question as to why the concert grand piano was created in the first place.  Analyzing the various parts of the piano…no matter how thorough and complete…will not answer the fundamental “why” question as to the piano’s origin or its functional integration within the world of music.  This basic limitation of the explanatory reach of the scientific method is profound.

The empirical evidence for an extrapolation from microevolution to macroevolution, including the all-important, essential lifestyle changes required…is simply not there.  People look at the complexity of the outside natural world and the intricate coordination internally in the functioning of their own bodies and conclude by mere commonsense that all of this is beyond a complexity…that random chance could possibly assemble into functionally coordinated realities.

To fill-in the gaps of our understanding with the speculative philosophy of atheistic naturalism and materialism is not the automatic, default option of reason.  The atheistic philosophy of naturalism has enormous philosophical problems, leaving humanity at the extreme end-point of a cold and purposeless existence having no meaning, no compass, no anchor, and no sure confidence in our own mental reasoning capacity when reduced to mere materialistic particles…in other words…only the materialistic understanding of the mechanics of the concert grand piano…but without the beauty of musical compositions.

God created the precision of the natural world so that God-composed journeys of faith could be experienced by people of faith…like playing Debussy’s beautiful Claire de Lune on a piano.

The idea that living things of incredible functionality, adaptability, fearsome power, and breathtaking beauty merely self-assembled themselves, according to the naturalistic philosophy that nature can create itself through a random-chance search strategy, without any guidance from outside intelligence, requires the clearest scientific explanation in detailed and specific terms of the method of how Darwinian macroevolution might occur.

Fill-in speculative philosophy will not suffice in this incredibly important area of scientific investigation and worldview formulation.

The natural world appears commendably mechanical in its mathematical precision by God’s intentional and purposeful design.  A natural world filled with the insecurity of constant miracles divinely produced to keep it functioning properly is not conducive to a biblical-quality journey of faith, or even conducive to a worldly journey of self-direction lived in unbelief totally apart from God.

Orderliness and intelligibility in the natural world are an inbuilt part of the expert craftsmanship of God that provides the consistent stability to be able to understand and put into practice something of God’s own character and personality traits, intelligible to Spirit-led people of faith through life lesson-plans “down-loaded” by God within biblical-quality walks of faith.

The lesson-plans of God require a stable natural environment for undistracted, learned experiences focusing on the issues at hand.  Trial-and-error, trial-run iterations and adjustments of an imprecise natural world, through intermittent divine miracles bordering on the edge of just-in-time remedies, would indeed prove the existence of God to skeptics, but reveal Him to be the author of a natural order having confusion, ambiguity, insecurity, and chaos.

Instability in the natural world, defining God as a maintenance handyman forever engaged in the fixer-up mode of re-adjusting His imprecise universe, would be a discordant contrast to an ordered and intelligible journey of faith designed by God to instill stable confidence, self-worth, and validation into the people of faith developed through divinely crafted life events.

The purpose behind the reality of the appearance of near-perfect craftsmanship in the natural world is just the opposite of the conclusions of atheistic naturalism of an absentee or non-existent clockmaker.

An orderly and intelligible natural world that runs self-sufficiently with the precision of a well-made clock creates the optimum environment for a God-composed journey of faith to functionally operate, but equally necessary for radical skeptical unbelief to functionally operate as well.

Too much “miracle” in either our natural world or our spiritual-moral world would contaminate the orderliness and intelligibility of a journey of faith.  Too much answered prayer in the form of miraculous solutions to every problem…like our high school math teacher doing our algebra homework problems for us…would limit our participation in the lessons contained in each individual scenario in a walk of faith, divinely crafted for our instructive benefit.

If God solved every problem through miracles, we could never learn anything ourselves through first-hand experience.  Scientific investigation…one aspect of human discovery…could not occur in a miracle-rich environment because miracles are unique, one-time events not amenable to experimental study and thus not reducible to repetitive natural laws.

The irony here is that the combination of orderliness and intelligibility…hallmarks of the scientific method…argue for the existence of an ultra-precise, supernatural, Intelligent Designer God…and not the trial-and-error, random-chance serendipity of Darwinian macroevolution.

If God solved every problem through miracles, reality would be reduced to everyone becoming idle spectators, with clapping hands applauding God in the “see God go” mindset of the small business, autocratic owner insisting upon doing everything themselves and never delegating responsibilities or placing confidence in others.

This is a reason why the information-rich, sophisticated, biblical journey of faith is so remarkable in terms of leadership and management theory, and thus parallels the major discoveries in science like the Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record, the Big Bang, and DNA in living cells.

Biblical journeys of faith are complete and ready to adventure through, yet they contain the very modern and highly sophisticated element of delegation through a joint-venture walk of faith framework, with God acting as knowledgeable guide rather than know-it-all and do-it-all autocrat…through the amazing environment of an orderly and intelligible world.

There must be a divinely crafted balance between the supernatural and the natural for a biblical-quality adventure of faith to operate correctly. 

This is one reason why there is no initial human collaboration in our God-composed journey of faith life-scripts.  We could not possibly have the wisdom and the foresight to produce the right mix of divine and human.  Only God has the divine perspective to get journey of faith life-scripts complete, correct, and properly balanced from the first moment we step into them.

An uncertain natural world needing supernatural corrections constantly would not allow enough stable security to mount high-quality, proactively envisioned, long-term expeditions of faith.

For example, there would be too much uncertainty if the rotational speed of the earth fluctuated daily causing the sun to rise and set at widely differing times.

If the strength of gravity changed radically from its current value to near-zero then back to full-strength on an hourly basis, our dexterity in performing everyday tasks like washing the dishes or driving to work would be a central, all-consuming challenge.

Life would be chaotic in a world where wind speeds exceeded 100 miles per hour once or twice a month as the norm.

If it typically snowed once during summer, or if large hailstones were the norm instead of rainfall, or if we had two weeks straight of totally dark skies that shut down all travel or work, once or twice a year, these occurrences would dominate our attention and our lives.

Imagine life on our earth where every 100 square-foot patch of ground raised or lowered several inches constantly, creating a teeter-totter effect making it difficult to stand or walk safely…much less construct stable building structures, railroads, highways, or play sports like golf or baseball.  These unstable conditions in the natural world would dominate human existence and would be the chief, central issues in our reality.

God is both First Cause and Continuing Cause in every aspect of physical reality and moral reasoning, whether or not we can visually see, measure, and quantify His presence.  The brilliant arrangement of the complex and ordered information that is found in every aspect of the non-living and living world, plus the beneficial moral transformation that occurs in the lives of new Christian converts, is the signature autograph of the one, true, living God.

Deism…the idea that God created our precise world then removed Himself to a safe distance offsite…has never been the reality for people accepting the New Testament and personally experiencing the words of Jesus that He will be with us always, even to the end of the world.

A person cannot personally know the intimacy of God’s participation in a biblical-quality journey of faith and at the same time countenance the philosophy of deism.

God active in the lives of believers is central to Christianity, is central to the biblical record, and is central to contemporary Christian experience.  By definition God’s interaction and personal relationship with us is supernatural.  Immanuel (Isa. 7:14)…meaning “God with us” in the person of Jesus Christ…is as supernatural and as personal as it gets, and is far removed from the notion of deism.

The narrative stories of faith in the Bible portray this theme all along, from Abraham through Paul.  Relationships with God are by definition supernatural, in addition to the more spectacular things like Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread to feed thousands of people gathered on a hillside.

Yet portions of the changing philosophical outlook even among some “believers” at the end of the Scientific Revolution (1300-1700) sadly degenerated into “deism” (the idea that God created the natural world but is not an active participant in its day-to-day operations), as if scientifically discovering a smooth-running, machine-like creation is now somehow revelatory evidence that God might be far-removed and hands-off in both the operation of the natural world and the affairs of mankind.  But an intelligently designed functional system, on autopilot, is still evidence for an intelligently designed functional system…designed that way for a greater purpose.

From a Christian viewpoint encompassing the cross of Christ, integral and active in the biblical adventures of faith, God was never merely the absentee Divine Clockmaker.  But even if God did design the natural world in such a precise way to function independently and what might outwardly appear to be deterministic in its perfection, this would have nothing to do with His active participation in the lives and affairs of mankind other than to provide a consistently stable environment.

If God as maintenance handyman appears to be absent because the machinery of the universe is designed so well it runs smoothly for its current 14-billion year history, without the need for a scheduled service tune-up and oil change, this does not logically have to extrapolate to an absent, non-participant Manufacturer God inaccessible to our lives.

The concept of deism, that a precise clockmaker means an absent clockmaker, is a faulty inference of men who did not and do not have the starting perspective of a personal relationship with the living God of the Bible, and who were and presently are ignorant of the divinely unique, novel qualities of the way of the cross of Christ inherent within God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…recorded in the Bible.