Naturalist Claim: Global Flood Explains the Cambrian Explosion

Interesting article at Evolution News.

Stephen Meyer's new book Darwin's Doubt raises questions about how a vast array of life forms and body plans for those life forms could arise during the Cambrian explosion.  Critics of the book apparently mostly trashed it without engaging it, but Casey Luskin makes note of some attempts to deal with the specific question raised.

Here's the gist of a significant problem:  (more)


Evolution is supposed to work in a very simple manner, random variation occurs and natural selection allows advantageous variations to survive more readily than the rest of a population.   There is no cause to evolution other than random variation and natural selection.

Yet to deal with the problem of the Cambrian, where too many new creatures appeared in too short a time, some apologists for Darwinism suggest geologic changes caused a more rapid evolution.  How?

The hypothetical scenario is that some creatures already had the needed genetic variations but those genetic advantages were unexpressed until geologic shifts made their expression necessary and advantageous.  Convenient?   Perhaps.   Evidence?   Unnecessary.  Evolution is a fact, so any old explanation will do.

Luskin responds "the trouble is, in Darwinian theory, you don't survive and reproduce based on what will happen in the future.  You survive and reproduce based on what happens now."  So the very definition of evolution is subverted in order to defend evolution.

To defend Evolution, these apologists adopt a new notion that is contrary to the position they are trying to defend.  Instead of "random mutation + natural selection = evolution", the equation is now "inexplicably obtained dormant mutations activated by external forces = evolution on steroids.

But there is more.  The "trigger" for the needed "evolutionary cascade" is theorized to be a huge geological event....you guessed it....a global flood.

he Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks. - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/teamwork_new_yo077071.html#sthash.czdIkVYm.dpuf

The trouble is that, in Darwinian theory, you don't survive and reproduce based upon what will happen in the future. You survive and reproduce based upon what happens now. - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/teamwork_new_yo077071.html#sthash.czdIkVYm.dpuf

The trouble is that, in Darwinian theory, you don't survive and reproduce based upon what will happen in the future. You survive and reproduce based upon what happens now - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/teamwork_new_yo077071.html#sthash.czdIkVYm.dpuf

The trouble is that, in Darwinian theory, you don't survive and reproduce based upon what will happen in the future. You survive and reproduce based upon what happens now. - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/teamwork_new_yo077071.html#sthash.czdIkVYm.dpuf

The trouble is that, in Darwinian theory, you don't survive and reproduce based upon what will happen in the future. You survive and reproduce based upon what happens now. - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/teamwork_new_yo077071.html#sthash.czdIkVYm.dpuf

"...The Cambrian explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land..."

You need to read Luskin's article to get the full impact of the amazing creative power of evolution to pre-evolve itself, to lay dormant for 100 million years and suddenly explode into creative grandeur as a result of a cataclysmic event.  This, of course, resolves the Cambrian problem that Stephen Meyer's book speaks of and which other critics insist is not a problem to begin with... got it?

But there is another problem I see.

A global flood as a catalyst for amazingly rapid development of new life forms refutes another central notion of naturalistic science, uniformitarianism.

The entire enterprise of naturalistic science which gave birth to Darwinism is built on a principle that what we currently observe in nature must be the only mechanisms that operated in the past.   Invoking a "global flood", which in the case of a Biblical cataclism, we've been told for all this time is just a mythical story concocted by pre-scientific nomads, seems to contradict uniformitarian assumptions.

Why has it been inconceivable and grounds for utter ridicule in scientific circles for over a century that a Biblical flood could have occurred, but now suddenly a global flood is an acceptable means of explaining the Cambrian?  Is it catastrophism that science has abhorred all this time?  Or is it only the supernatural that cataclysms have been associated with that needs to be gotten rid of? This article at Creation.com briefly sketches the gradualism introduced nearly 200 years ago by Charles Lyell, to "free science from Moses". The present as key to the past was a necessary tool to subvert the prevailing theistic understanding of certain past events.  Yet, once freed from supernatural implications, the global flood gets a resurrection as long as it serves a naturalistic purpose.  The truth comes out.  It was never the flood that was the problem, it was the supernatural cause of the flood that had to be exorcised from the history of things.

Yet like relativism, uniformitarianism is self refuting.  If the universe had a beginning, whether that beginning is conceived as caused by a creator or caused by nothing at all, a beginning suggests a first event, one that cannot be explained as the result of the same sorts of things we observe in the present.

Uniformitarianism is preposterous because first events cannot be equated with "what has always been occurring" by definition.  They are first events with no precedent, hence they have not always been occurring.   A big bang can't be equated to any current processes.   The same, I would think, has to be true for the origin of life.  The first time something happens by definition means it was a unique event that cannot be observed to occur again in the same way precisely because it was unique.  The present cannot be the key to such past events, because a first event can only occur in a unique set of conditions.

Personally, I have come to think the naturalists, the theistic evolutionists and the young earth creationists are all missing the boat at this point.  Whatever the events of Genesis describe, whatever led to the rise of matter, energy, time, space and "natural law", they are events that cannot be reduced to explanations within our sciences, simply because of their utterly unique nature.   Natural law refers to a regularity of events according to a predictable pattern.  But the first events are the ones that create the pattern, they do not follow from that pattern.

Natural law, time, space, matter and energy all had a beginning beyond which our study of current natural phenomena cannot see.  Natural law cannot explain the origin of itself.  Time cannot measure the beginning of time. 

Still, it is almost comical to see a theory built on uniformitarianism defended with an appeal to cataclysm and change by natural selection defended by effectively suspending natural selection for millions of years. Seems to me the conclusion is rather independent of the evidence at hand.  Worse, the conclusion is even independent of the definitions of the terms being used.