How Evolution Devolves Into Metaphysical Hypotheses Resembling Occult Belief Systems, But Based on Scientism.

Why is it difficult to find an Atheist who does not believe in Evolution?

"G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it, he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The 'death of God', or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret 'container' with his or her own fears and hopes. "
Umberto Eco; God isn’t big enough for some people. [Emphasis added]

The relationship between the occult promises and the promises of evolution seem to be precise. Evolution provides promises with exactly no hope of ever being proven, physically, experimentally despite being called "science". Evolution is not objective knowledge, it is merely empty promises of a "truth" which it cannot, in fact, produce. The belief in evolution is indiscernible from belief in other occult promises, except that evolution is falsely couched as "scientific", when it clearly is not in the least empirical.

Let's take some examples. Under the new "Extended Synthesis" much attention is given to "emergence". It is proposed (not proven) that in the Cambrian explosion (when all the phyla suddenly appeared, preceded only by single cells and sponges), that rapid emergence of complexity could occur, physically. This is justified by Chaos Theory and Mandelbrot plots, and by the Butterfly Theory. But the rapid rise in animal complexity had to have been based on a preceding massive increase in semantic information which was used to create all these different phyla and all their new features. Semantic information - containing meaning which is not arbitrary - is non-compressible and cannot be reduced to a simple algorithm like that used in Chaos Theory. There is nothing about Chaos theory which justifies the concept of increased semantic information in the Cambrian explosion, nor its existence in the first place . In fact, that is never discussed, because there is no possible way to deduce either its initial occurrence, nor its spectacular change into actual, functional living complexities of wide variety. So the connection being attempted between the complexity of life and the algorithmic generators is not a physical "theory", it is an incorrect metaphysical inference promising an unattainable truth: it is metaphysical-only and it is an occult belief based in the required fantasies of Scientism and Philosophical Materialism.

The entire goal of empirical science is to generate objective knowledge. This is done by creating a cause/effect demonstration (experiment) which always produces a given output for a given input, a given effect for a given cause. Evolution cannot and will not ever do that, purely due to physical constraint of not being able to observe it as it happened in the fossil record. Even worse, evolution is not falsifiable since every outcome or no outcome at all, are all predicted, albeit without generative mechanisms.

So true believers rely on story telling instead, stories that they come to believe intensely, no differently than religious believers believe. Every hypothesis, no matter how bizarre or logically impossible, is now called a "theory" regardless of the inability to provide empirical proof for it. The term, "theory" has been perverted from its original meaning in empirical, Enlightenment, experimental science, where it referred to the explanation of phenomena by means of objective knowledge.

"For the core problem is not that of producing the kind of order that is to be seen in a crystal, honeycomb, or even a Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction. It is that of producing the qualitatively different, language-type of structures formed by the complex ordering of the amino acids that form a protein."
John C. Lennox; God's Undertaker, p132.

And this:

"Life is actually not an example of self-organization. life is in fact specified, i.e. genetically directed, organization. Living things are instructed by the genetic software encoded in their DNA (or RNA). Convection cells form spontaneously by self-organization. There is no gene for a convection cell. The source of order is not encoded in software, in can instead be traced to the boundary conditions of the fluid. In other words, a convection cell's order is imposed externally, from the systems' environment. By contrast, the order of a living cell derives from internal control... The theory of self-organization as yet gives no clue how the transition is to be made between spontaneous,of self-induced organization - which in even the most elaborate non-biological examples still involves relatively simple structures - and the highly complex, information-based, genetic organization of living things"
Paul Davies; "Darwinian or 'Oriented Evolution'?", Evolution,29 June 1975, 376-8."[Emphasis in original]

From Niels Bohr:

"The recognition of the essential importance of fundamentally atomistic features in the function of living organisms is by no means sufficient, however, fora comprehensive explanation of biological phenomena, before we can reach an understanding of life on the basis of physical experience. Thus, we should doubtless kill an animal if we tried to carry on the investigation of of its organs so far that we could describe the role played by single atoms initial functions. In every experiment on living organisms, there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allot the organism in this respect is just large enough to permit it,so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us."
[Emphasis added]

I.e., there can never be "objective knowledge" regarding the essence of life in living biological entities.

From Ernst Mayr:

"One of the properties of the genetic program is that it can supervise its own precise replication and that of other living systems such as organelles, cells and whole organisms. There is nothing exactly equivalent in inorganic nature."

And from Hubert P. Yockey:

"The belief of mechanist-reductionists that the chemical processes in living matter do not differ in principle from those in dead matter is incorrect. There is no trace of messages determining the results of chemical reactions in inanimate matter."

That life is DNA based is not in question. That DNA is digital code, and that the code has genetic meaning (semantic, incompressible, non-algorithmic) is not in question. That the information content in DNA is semantic and not syntactic (i.e. it is not generated by a simple algorithm) is not in question. That a living organism contains many codes, cogent receiving and transmitting agents which use communication channels to transfer meaningful information resulting in actions by those or other agents, is not in question.

And thus the idea of deterministic, mechanistic reductions to physical cause can be deduced for life in living things is logically absurd.

That in turn leads one to observe that, since evolution cannot account for either the existence of such massive semantic information, nor for its rapid development into all the different complexities represented suddenly in the Cambrian era, evolution consists of a failed set of metaphysical hypotheses to which one must commit blind assent in order to "believe" in them.