Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny?

For some people the sheer size of the universe is an intimidation to their belief in God. Our planet, rather than being at the centre of anything, is circling an unremarkable Class G yellow star in the outer part of one of the spiral arms of a not-very-spectacular galaxy - one of hundreds of billions of such structures within the known universe. It's kind of hard to attribute any importance to the puny little creatures on such a backwater as ours. Not only are we infinitesimally small compared to the universe, but we are too undramatically, unstrategically, unimportantly placed to be of any significance.

This whole view dovetails nicely into the 20th Century mindset that scientific thought has developed for us. It fits most comfortably into the picture of a random physical universe arising from a mathematical point of infinite density, which explosively expanded, without purpose, to create space-time. In the scientific view we are insignificant, random ephemeral by-products of chance. Ironically (perhaps even comically), it is only because we are able to perceive our own unimportance that science may consider the great importance of coming to the conclusion of just how unimportant we really are!

It is of no help for scientists to say that "life" itself is important, because we only know of one place where there is life and that is our puny planet. And the only self-conscious beings we know of are Homo Sapiens Sapiens, commonly known as us. And, if we really want to get picky, the only consciousness we know for sure exists is our own personal consciousness. Oh, there might be other life out there. Until very recently it was all the rage in scientific circles to speculate on the probability that, in our galaxy alone, there were hundreds of thousands of planets capable of supporting life - and thousands which probably did, or had, or would. Life was just busting out all over, if only we could figure out where!

But, in the last year or so, some cosmologists are beginning to think planets like ours are very rare indeed - perhaps only a few in the whole of our Milky Way. This shift is based on early data about the nature of planetary systems that we are just now discovering around other stars. It seems that most of the planets are gas giants like Jupiter and Neptune, and their orbits do not allow for earth-like interlopers.

I suppose the point is that good science is, and always has been, good science, whereas science as philosophy is, like Ephraim, "a cake not turned". What is accepted as the current scientific "wisdom" today may be passé in only a few years. I once remember reading a book in which Isaac Asimov was pontificating with almost apoplectic rage about the way in which people sometimes criticized science, as I seem to be doing now. Science, he insisted, may have been wrong when it said the earth was flat - then changed its mind to believe it was, in fact a globe - but it was only wrong by an order of magnitude. With the facts it had at any one time an imperfect theory was proffered. That theory was amended when additional facts became available from which was produced a more accurate theory - and so on. Progress according to Asimov!

But is it really progress when earths are as common as flies one minute and as rare as blue moons the next? I think not. While there is some truth in what Asimov asserted, those who use science as a philosophical instrument rather than a physical one, can jump from one "plausible" theory to another, of entirely the opposite import, in the blink of an eye. Even this would not be so bad as long as they were fully up front about their guesses and didn't carelessly disguise them as facts to the uninitiated.

One only has to recall that little gem which once formed one of the smaller pillars of evolutionism - that pearl of biological wisdom, championed by Ernst Haeckel, which told us that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". What was implied was that developing fetuses go through stages that look a bit like the stages of animal evolution. Single to multicellular organism, fish, amphibian, mammal, lemur/monkey, ape, human - or something like that. Though it was discredited long ago, elements of this blatant and false conjecture still persist in some science publications to this very day.

We've all imagined similar "transformations" in the way clouds move, but without postulating that they are proof of evolution. What we perceive in a set of data may say more about us than it does about the information we are looking at. In this case, it seemed to - especially since Haeckel altered the drawings to make his point. But that didn't stop fervent evolutionists from using this particularly wacky idea as a club to pound away upon a less scientifically minded public by presenting it as fact, and by using it in the arsenal of weapons assigned to ridiculing those who thought God made everything from nothing, as it says in Genesis.

Truthfully, science knows nothing of origins, of consciousness or of being - and I do not think it ever will. The physics of origins is riddled with unresolved infinities. Consciousness is interlaced with observed reality through quantum strangeness in ways we can not understand. Science has reached the barrier where observation must give way to postulation, and where theory cannot be tested without completely vitiating the result. The Anthropic principle looms larger the deeper science delves, until we can see only the mirror of ourselves when we look too deeply.

I don't advocate that we stop looking. I am, after all, not against science as science. But I do tend to prefer a science which, if it simply must philosophize, starts from a God centred, doctrinally sound, orthodox position, using Christian logical presuppositions, and which humbly and reverently inquires of our Maker what He would have us know about His universe. I suspect that ontogeny will truly have to recapitulate phylogeny before that happens!