A Conservative View
The Culture War - Part 3

Is evolution a science or a faith? I guess that depends on what the definitions of faith, science, and evolution are.
Faith is the substance of what is hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. It is the hopeful expectation of what is to come. Faith may be weak or strong. It may be tested or untested. It may be blind or informed. Faith is used to bridge the uncertainty that exists between less than 100% and 100%. Belief in something being true depends on how much faith you have in that item being true. The opposite of faith is unbelief.
Blind faith is usually unwarranted. Informed faith is usually what is seen. The firmness of the faith expressed usually depends on how much information one has. Tested faith is faith that has withstood challenges to its validity. How about an example from science?
Everyone knows that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). However, that statement has many assumptions about it that are unstated. It assumes standard temperature, pressure, and volume (also an open top container). It also assumes pure water and nucleation sites on the vessel it is in. Otherwise, the boiling point will be changed either upwards or downwards. But it only requires a little bit of faith to believe those conditions are true at that moment in time and the boiling point is 100C.
Science is a discipline that seeks to determine and explain causality in the physical universe. There are two main branches of science; observational (physics, chemistry, and biology for example) and forensic (paleobiology, cold case murder investigations are a couple of examples). You could say it’s the difference in what is happening and what has happened.
Science is limited to the physical universe, from its beginning to its eventual ending. Science is further limited in what it can explain. Philosophy (which it is dependent on) and mathematics are presumed to be true before one can even attempt to use science. Further science has obvious limitations: aesthetic judgements ethical judgements, emotional judgements, metaphysical truths, supernatural causes, and even science itself.
Aesthetic judgements are on things such as beauty (How much does one gallon of ugly weigh?). Ethical judgements are used to determine good and bad (What is the density of hate?). Emotional judgements concern feelings (what is the volume of one gram of love?). Metaphysical truths are about things like self-awareness (I exist and am more than mymolecules). Supernatural causes are, by definition, beyond the natural, which is what science studies. And finally, the belief that the scientific method discovers truth cannot be proven by using the scientific method itself.
There are several philosophical views that one can take that will influence the determination of what the data (evidence) that science discovers actually means. Science never says anything. People says things about the data influenced by their philosophical biases. A materialistic philosophy will arrive at different conclusions than a theistic philosophy simply because the latter has not ruled out supernatural causes before starting their assessment. They may say the evidence points to the supernatural and give hints about the supernatural, but they cannot say specifically what the supernatural is. The question is, which philosophy better fits the data? But that’s probably a different question altogether.
The definition of evolution has been changing as evidence seems to poke holes in that claims that it makes. Classical evolution, in a nutshell, states that everything from the beginning to now is the result of random chance over time. But there are some very serious problems with this point of view (POV).
The universe as we know it has a specific starting point. In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, no time, no matter. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity clearly points to an event that occurred in the past that caused space, time, and matter to appear. Materialists call it the Big Bang. Theists call it Creation. Christian apologists don’t care what you call it. They just care that the beginning exists because it is evidence against pantheism.
Since this event occurred before science could look at it, philosophy must supply the answer of what caused the universe. Did nothing become unstable and act upon nothing causing nothing to explode into something or did God create something out of nothing? Depends on your philosophical outlook.
There are several problems for evolutionists. Without intelligent intervention (Intelligent Design), how did something come out of nothing (origin of the universe)? How did order arise out of chaos (design of the universe)? How did life arise from non-life? How did intelligence arise from non-intelligence? How did personality arise from non-personality? How did new life forms arise from existing life forms despite the evidence to the contrary: genetic limits; cyclical change; irreducible complexity; molecular isolation; nonviability of transitional forms; and the fossil record? (Macroevolution).
Microevolution is what we used to call variability in the species. That comes from the biological definition of sex (The exchange of nucleoproteins to facilitate chromosomal repairs and to provide variability of the species.) There may be variations in the species, but a bird does not have offspring that is anything other than a bird.
Science searches for causation. While there are many “just so” stories for evolution, there is no data for a cause of evolution given that evolution must be, by definition, random changes over massive amounts of time that add information to a living system aided by natural selection.
Due to the lack of data, one must have much more faith to believe in Evolution than to believe in Intelligent Design. And remember, Intelligent Design just points to an intelligent designer. It may be able to derive some attributes of the Designer, but it absolutely does not say who the Designer is. That presumably would lay in the sphere of philosophers and or theologists.
Why is any of this important? Because the underlying philosophy of one’s belief system is what informs the answers to life’s five biggest questions: Origin, Identity, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny. Where did we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live? Where are we going? Science can’t answer any of these questions, but the underlying philosophy can.