Misplaced faith in evolution as a materialistic explanation of origins
Misplaced faith in evolution led rationalists to adopt a materialistic cosmology. They hoped that the universe, including life, came about by materialistic processes such as evolution – not by an act of creation by God.
But evolutionary theory does not provide, and never has provided, a basis for believing that life evolved from non-living matter. So now, rationalists are left with no more than a religious dogma that the universe and everything in it came about by evolution’s materialistic processes.
Exclusion of logical possibilities
Rationalists refused to start reasoning from presuppositions regarded as divine revelation. That has led them to exclude certain otherwise logical possibilities. For example, they refuse to presuppose that the universe was designed and created even though a rational case for creation has existed since William Paley’s watchmaker analogy in the early 19th century. The idea of the argument is as follows:
- no observer has ever recorded an exception to the principle that humans must apply intelligence and design to create ordered systems that function predictably
- therefore it is both reasonable and likely that a superior being applied intelligence and design to create the vast ordered systems of the universe that function so predictably
An attempt to counter that argument was made by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in “The Blind Watchmaker.” However, his argument fails because his ‘blind watch maker’ has a ‘guide-dog’ – namely, the information provided to his computer model by rules that simulate genetic instructions.