Counterintuitivity Must Be Earned, Not Merely Asserted

Good comment:

Indeed, belief in intelligent design of the world, and especially of the biological world, was the norm before materialist ideology gained power, while materialist and deterministic philosophies were the odd exception. In a sense, we could say that common sense prevailed.

One of the arrogant boasts of the emerging materialist science has been that it can prove things which are against common sense, delivering us from our slavery to silly trivial views of reality.

Now, in some cases that boast is indeed justified: the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and some of the achievements of astrophysics, are IMO true pearls of scientific thought, and all of them have some aspects (but not all!) which are counter-intuitive. So, in a sense, science can reveal aspects of reality which common sense would never suspect.

But we have to consider that, in all the examples cited above, there is a very strong mathematical background which supports the counter-intuitive conclusions. Mathemathics, being a truly abstract science, and scarcely understandable by most people, can certainly support bold counter-intuitive concepts about reality: the true mystery, and IMO a strong argument for cosmological ID, is that such abstract mental tools have such a strong explanatory power about reality; in other words that physics (a science of the external world) seems to be fully governed by mathemathics (a science which originates in the mind).

But can we reason the same way about the theory of darwinian evolution? Absolutely not. Here, the same thing which makes relativity and quantum mechanics so strong and beautiful (their mathematical rigour and power) is absolutely lacking. Indeed, as we all in ID know so well, darwinian theory escapes any mathemathical argument about its basics as though it were the devil itself! It is so disappointing to see such a (politically) successful scientific theory, based for its same foundations on supposed random causes, systematically try to elude any serious statistical analysis. And it is not only mathematics and statistics, but logic itself which is constantly betrayed in darwinian thought, in all its forms, old and new: scientific methodology, while applied brilliantly to some details of the research (I really do admire those biologists who daily achieve wonderful acquisitions about the working of biological beings), is constantly forgotten as soon as the fundamental parameters of interpretation of the results are at stake. And the basics of rational thought (non contradiction, causal inference, and so on) and of philosophy of science and epistemology (such as the difference between theories and facts) are not only regularly disregarded, but often openly scorned.

That’s why, if quantum mechanics has all the rights to defy common sense in few, but important points, darwinian evolution is totally unqualified to do the same. Indeed, the confrontation between darwinian theory and common sense has really no history: not only common sense wins practically everywhere, but if we analyze more deeply the essence of the fundamental disagreements between the two, using the only powerful rational tools we have, logic and mathemathics and statistics and cognitive philosophy and epistemology, the conclusions of common sense are absolutely confirmed and strengthened, while all the points of darwinian theory appear at best as bad fairy tales.