Ours is the great transition age. For the masses, the glowing assumption is that the transition and transformation age we are undergoing is the work of a long, evolutionary process of “natural” “progress.” Wandering about their bubbles, these presuppositions never go challenged or examined, having dobbed their cafeteria plate lives from a long string of newsbite phrases and empty slogans overheard in establishment schooling. “We are evolving,” and “We live in an era of change,” and numerous other advertising blurbs that underlie modernity’s plastic ideology actually form the basis for most of humanity’s worldview. Yet are any of these assumptionsactually true? Are we in living in an era of “progress” and “human ascent”?

I answer in the negative and the reasons for my dark assessment are many. Listening to a recent interview between someone of a truly skeptical bent with a figure in the scientism/skeptical crowd, I was irked to hear a bevy of fallacies and incongruences and unexamined assumptions that will here be analyzed with scalpel-like precision. As mentioned above, what precisely is meant by the terms “evolution,” “change,” “progress” and “Nature”? According to those in the ranks of establishment scientism, these are givens, terms of brute factuality and reason, all of which mystically coalesce to give us the “best possible model” of the world under the new grand narrative mythos of “science.”

What is meant by “evolution”? According to modern scientism, the observation of small-scale changes in a species that appear to aid in the species’ extension into the future through reproduction is the basic understanding of evolutionary adaptation. Thus, because certain breeds of animals can be bred with fitter members of the species, we can extrapolate that large-scale aeons of time resulted in the origins of all life from a single amoeba. When it is pointed out thataeons – millions of years – of adaptation and change are not observed, the reply is that bacteria purportedly adapt under conditions of pressure. Thus, it follows that all life mutated under conditions of pressure to “evolve” into what we see today.

On the surface, this has an appearance of being reasonable. Almost no one denies micro-evolutionary adaptation and change, that within the mechanics of various organisms there resides the DNA programming to adapt to environmental circumstances. Where the bait and switch comes is the dogmatic assertion that from this observation, it is certain that all life originated from a single cell millions of years ago, following billions of years of “Big Bang” expansion. The evidence for these theories nowadays is, of course, taken as dogmatic fact, with any dissension on these matters scorned and mocked. Why? Because religion is irrational and “unscientific” and cannot be tested. Yet can these assertions be tested as scientific?

The reply is that they are proven by carbon dating and observing various UV rays that appear to “expand” from the presumed “singularity” point. There are numerous problems with these claims, but the most glaring will suffice in illustration. First, carbon dating is notoriously unreliable, with examples of testing on recent artifacts showing outrageous time stamps for items that are manifestly not ancient. Further, the carbon dating itself works on the assumption of millions of years of evolutionary, chaotic flux, which begs the question. In other words, if your testing methods already operate on the assumption that matter is aeons in age, then the results of the tests are obviously predetermined.

Second, the appearance of light expanding from some locale is only as coherent as the assumption that it comes from some point of singularity, of which there is absolutely no observable evidence. As you point these facts out to those enmeshed in the religion of scientism, many will admit these are “theories,” but they are “the best models we have.” Says whom? Why does the scientism crowd never admit they are subject to biases and greed (for grants)? How is it that science or the lab is magically averse to the failings of the rest of human endeavors? “Ah, well, yes, it is subject to those things, but that is the beauty of science, we are always changing and adapting our theories to fit the evidence,” the general response comes.