Mother Jones went through the previously published works of Dr. Ben Carson, presidential candidate. Why someone would do such a thing voluntarily is a question best left to historians, but this particular application of Dr. Ben Carson logic is I think by far the most intriguing, if only because of the great gobs of personal intellect that must be cast aside
in order to write it.
From what I know (and all we don't know) about biology, I find it as hard to accept the claims of evolution as it is to think that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could somehow assemble a fully equipped and flight-ready 747. You could blow a billion hurricanes through a trillion junkyards over infinite periods of time, and I don't think you'd get one aerodynamic wing, let alone an entire jumbo jet complete with complex connections for a jet-propulsion system, a radar system, a fuel-injection system, an exhaust system, a ventilation system, control systems, electronic systems, plus backup systems for all of those, and so much more. There's simply not enough time in eternity for that to happen.
I am going to confess right here that things like this irritate me more than they have any right to. Explaining why, however, is very difficult. The shorthand version is that it is an assertion by a person who has reached his own limits of knowledge and comfort that anyone who has a greater understanding or finds comfort in a more expansive universe must simply be wrong, and a call for readers to embrace that smug rejection as their own stopping point as well. And it is dishonest; statements like this are not intended to be logical arguments for or against something. There is no possible response that could possibly change the mind of someone who sees their personal God as the chief assembler of discarded junkyard parts.
This is a perfect example of The Boundary, that line within each of us that divides what we personally know from the things we do not understand, followed by the internal mental declaration that anything unknown or unaccepted by us personally is formally Unknowable or Unacceptable, period. The same mind that can follow all the vagaries of biology on the scale of one organism or fifty may not be able to comprehend the same processes whirring away on an evolutionary scale—and that is not a character flaw, because the human mind has great difficulty grasping time when scaled outside that which we experience within our own lifetimes—but wherever the line is drawn, it is drawn with gusto. This here is science; the part beyond the line is magic.
I suspect the above Carson explanation of evolution would receive plaudits by many, even if the rest of us are stumped by it, because for all the technical-sounding overlay it is an argument for one kind of magic set up in opposition to ... precisely the same kind of magic. It presents the notion of spontaneous creation of a complex system as inherently ludicrous, and does so by just supposing that all the complex parts naturally pre-existed before there was that providential gust of wind to assemble them. The adherents of this argument suppose, at least emotionally, that there were human hearts and human brains and human lymphatic systems all strewn about a large field all before humanity existed, all waiting for a factory-worker God to come along to rivet them together. Or maybe the factory created those parts individually, but they were pre-formed, damn it; different persons have different notions of where the magic occurred, but if the notion that the human heart is merely a variation of the typical mammalian heart design is controversial, the notion that the human heart is merely a variation upon a variation upon a variation of a design that had served admirably in prehistoric fish, now that is outrageous, and trying to imagine the previous link between that primitive heart and the greatest advance pre-pre-prehistoric life had ever experienced, the ability to merely twitch, is a longer journey than most imaginations can take. If you want to suppose an intelligent designer assembling parts, at least put them to work in your mind on the designs for those first microscopic clumps. Everything since then has been incremental.
This is what irritates me so much about anti-evolution fundamentalists. It is an argument, often by very intelligent people, for enforced ignorance. It is not that we cannot trace what happened during the long span of time before humans existed as a species, but that we are not allowed to, and we are not allowed to for the same reason past generations were chastised for supposing our planet orbited the sun or that the stars were not merely painted on the firmament—not because that vastly expanded universe or the unfathomable timescales disproved or diminished their God, but because with each expansion of the known universe mankind becomes a smaller and less central fragment of that universe, and a far more fleeting presence, and the notion of mankind not being the central reason that the entire vast sweep of reality exists is deeply, deeply angering to some people. It is not about God. It is about preserving some small sense of dominance and declared ownership of all things. It's neither science nor faith; it's just a psychological reflex, and not a particularly flattering one at that.
And that, short version, is why people like Dr. Ben Carson tick me off.
