Warren Leroy Johns matters

Warren Leroy Johns is a lawyer.  Naturally, as naturally as a beaver builds dams against a river, lawyer Warren constructs a watertight case against evolution.  So he constructed Creation Digest, a pioneer website dedicated to the controversy. It has been replaced by GenesisFile.  On both sites Mr. Johns not only has offered his own essays and books but an anthology of especially compelling pieces by“The Blue Ribbon Panel,” academic people presenting data and discussions in the most scientific style.  No nonsense.

With one exception.  Yours truly.  It was my privilege to be included on the panel.  My contributions – and my perspective -- stuck out from the exemplary academic discourses like a monkey among wise elephants.

In 2005 Mr. Johns invited each Blue Ribbonist to submit an essay on a specific topic.  I eventually did, but with this apology:

• An E-mail to the Editor of Creation Digest, Sunday, July 31, 2005

In yours of July 28 you invited me to write 1,000 words or so to be added to the Blue Ribbon Science menu.  The topic: “The single bit of scientific evidence you personally find most persuasive to falsify Evo thought.”

It is embarrassing to admit but I had a trouble with the phrase “…persuasive to falsify…thought.”  Is that a legal expression with a meaning familiar to the profession?  Unfamiliar with it, I parsed it.  “Evo thought”?  Does that commission me to delve into Evolutionary thinking?  Metaphysics?  Philosophy?  Ideology?  Having come to know your preferences, I doubted it.  For none of that is “scientific evidence,” which would constrain consideration to things like the fossil gap.  So I rephrased the question as I thought you would prefer, and be publishable: What single segment of scientific data, e.g. the fossil gap, of Evo do I find most questionable?  But that didn’t work.  My mind stayed blank.  I trust the truer-Blue Ribbons can take over.  Throwing up my hands in frustration,  again I took the liberty of rephrasing the question, this time recklessly: how do I personally decide between Evo and Creation?

Having reworded the assignment, things popped instantly to mind.   But if it was now easy for me, it quite likely will not be useful for you.  But however long I might try, this and this only is what I could come up with.  So without delay I’ll go ahead and get it to you, for your amusement and trash basket.  Unashamedly more poetic than scientific, it follows:

                                                               DETAILS MATTER, CLOUDS MATTER

It seems to me that doctrinaire all-by-chance Evolutionists do not actually look first at individual fossils, as Darwin did, but directly at Evolution as an already perfected fact, possessed of such self-evident veracity that any other process, notably Design, becomes obviously untenable -- "unscientific," as they put it.

Should I, then, hurry to challenge any of Evo's segments, thus assuming to discredit the whole? Evo is prepared. "Any scientific theory must have gaps," and the like. Details don't matter.

I think the opposite way.

Like Darwin with his fossils, I start by looking at details as they lead to the encompassing generality.  I believe that's called "induction." And not just at fossils, or rock strata, or comparative embryology, or even DNA, as much as I can take in. I look from the sub-fathomable atomic particle and a single quantum of stringed energy to black holes thousands of light-years across emitting cosmic forces driving a spiral Seyfert galaxy, to the whole cosmos of galaxies and constellations beyond Hubble.

From primal atomic particles to huge but microscopic organic molecules, like DNA, like the blood's array of auto-activated enzymes of the coagulation cascade, each as complex yet as kinetic and interacting as the cosmos itself. From viruses to Orca whales. From a paramecium's cilia to a filamentous but somehow living mosquito's legs to Lance Armstrong's. From hawks diving vector-straight to butterflies bobbing. I see the shadows on the Grand Canyon or on my window sill relentlessly, charmingly changing just because the earth rotates and orbits.

From backlit clouds to the human mind, to his soul, to poetry, to science, intangible things; to the sun, to nebulae, to galaxies, to the universe, intangible beyond tangible beyond intangible. Any single thing is persuasive. The aggregate is simply overwhelming. It is evidence. It is self-evidently evidence demanding a designing, a very artistically designing Creator. Also self-evident is that Evoeans, unscientifically oblivious to shadows changing, cells replicating, cilia and wheat waving, would scoff off such an overview as prehistoric and poetic.  To them it hardly matters.

Well, speaking of poetry, maybe that's what Darwin, a pretty good poet, is mainly for.  It doesn't matter.

MATTERING