Magic, Information, and Faith

The article below has been sent as a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper in the U.K., following yet another diatribe against creationists.

It is amusing that Professor Steve Jones refers to his latest effort (and I use the word advisedly) in the Telegraph as “View from the lab,” when nothing he has to say owes anything to the sort of real science carried out in laboratories.1 Professor Jones is one of the “high priests” of scientism, who believe that if you make the piece sound clever enough, you can slip nonsense past the ordinary reader.

For example, he accuses creationists of believing that life started by “magic.” And he thinks that his doctor has to believe that he evolved from a fish in order to know how the various organs of the body work. What nonsense! In fact, a belief in evolution has no benefit to a surgeon at all. He is free to believe what he likes, I guess, but the evolutionist belief in vestigial organs has probably damaged a lot of children, over the years, who have unnecessarily had appendices or tonsils removed.

As for the “magic” of how life started, Jones, as a geneticist, should surely have talked about genetic information. But, of course, he believes that inorganic molecules just happened to arrange themselves in self-replicating molecules of tremendous information. No doubt he believes that if you leave a blank CD long enough, it will “magically” rearrange so that he can pop it into his HiFi and listen to a Beethoven symphony.

Creationists understand that the presence of information requires an intelligent designer. So, it is Jones and his ilk who actually believe in magic. But then, his friend Professor Dawkins has commented, “Faith means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.” A belief that molecules could, by themselves, evolve into mankind, is a good example of blind faith.

Yours Faithfully,

Paul Taylor