s from David Lindley's book The End of Physics, will help to illustrate what I mean: [Sir Isaac] Newton mathematicized physics to turn the "tendencies" and "potentials" of Aristotelian thought into what we now recognize as true science, based on quantitative and precise relations between masses, forces, and motions. Numbers were needed to measure these quantities, so physical laws had to take the form of relationships between numbers -- mathematical laws, in other words ... . There is a temptingly simple explanation for the fact that science is mathematical in nature: it is because we give the name of science to those areas of intellectual inquiry that yield to mathematical analysis. Art appreciation, for example, requires a genuine effort of intellect, but we do not suppose that the degree to which a painting touches our emotions can be organized into a set of measurements ... . Science, on the other hand, deals with precisely those subjects amenable to quantitative analysis, and that is why mathematics is the appropriate language for them. The puzzle becomes a tautology: mathematics is the language of science because we reserve the name "science" for anything that mathematics can handle. If it's not mathematical to some degree at least, it isn't really science. Fair enough, if that is what you mean by science. It follows, of course, that science cannot deal with all subjects open to intellectual inquiry and cannot explain everything, but has a limited scope, and not necessarily the highest one. But the triumphs of mathematical science in the past four centuries have been so stunning that multitudes uncritically assume that if science cannot verify it, it isn't real. Or at least it isn't knowable, and belongs in the realm of poetry or myth.
This assumption turns not only religion but any philosophy that goes beyond the material into mythmaking and superstition. It also lends the enormous prestige of science to materialism, where matter is the real, and the real is matter. It thus enables materialists to dismiss any criticism or even questioning of their scientific theories as "unscientific."
Fr. Stanley Jaki, who is himself a scientist, says: "Most Darwinists, consider the scientific theory of evolution as a confirmation of the following: the process of evolution is utterly purposeless, there is only matter and motion; the universe is purely material and strictly uncreated; the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon of material processes." Given such suppositions, it is not so much that Darwinism confirms materialism, as that materialism leaves Darwinism as the only, or at least the best, explanation of evolution.
So we have Richard Dawkins, who holds the Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, assuring us that biology "is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose," but are in fact the unintended products of random minor changes in matter over very long periods of time. When it is objected that such changes, being small, leave few if any traces in the fossil record, he replies that "we know a lot more about animals and plants than Darwin did, and still not a single case is known to me of a complex organ that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications."
That no one has shown that a complex organ could not have been formed by minor successive changes seems to be a weak argument. Lack of proof that something could not have occurred by a certain process is hardly a convincing reason for believing that it did occur in that way, especially when the evidence for it is lacking. This amounts to saying that unless you can prove to me that evolution could not have occurred by random variation and natural selection, I will take it as given that it did because, in the framework of scientific materialism, no other explanation is admissible. Incidentally, this also admits that the Darwinist idea of evolution via successive slight modifications is not an object of scientific observation but a hypothetical explanation.
Michael Behe, a