Science Dives Down Rabbit Holes

Consensus science has never been
more technologically capable, and
never more epistemologically fragile

 

“Curiouser and curiouser” – Science in Wonderland

by John D. Wise, PhD

As Jenny and I immerse ourselves in the modern marvels of scientific discovery—a process intensified by writing for Creation Evolution Headlines—we find ourselves gripped by reverent disillusionment. We are awestruck by the technological brilliance of modern genomic and cellular investigations, probing micro-realms that previous generations couldn’t even dream of. And we are spellbound by the macrocosmic grandeur unfolding through Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, each revealing vast vistas that leave even seasoned astrophysicists blinking in starlit puzzlement.

And yet, with all this breathtaking sophistication, something is off.

The story being told doesn’t match the discoveries. For all this dazzling achievement, much of science seems at odds with itself. It is scrambling to incorporate new and contradictory data at every turn, to patch theories with epicycles and just-so stories. Maybe it’s time to revise THE story, and not just its subplots. When, as in Wonderland, we encounter so many unexpected and strange characters, maybe it’s time to turn back to reality and away from the Jabberwok.

The scenes are familiar: an enchanting smile flashes, but its cat is gone. Wonder has lost its subject. Let’s chase evolutionary thought down two rabbit holes[1] at very different scales—beginning at the beginning.

The Microcosmic Rabbit Hole

The Harvard Gazette (July 22, 2025): “A step toward solving central mystery of life on earth: Experiment with synthetic self-assembling materials suggests how it all might have begun.”

It is the ultimate mystery of biology: How did life begin?

So opens this article in the Harvard Gazette, reporting on a major new study:

A team of Harvard scientists has brought us closer to an answer by creating artificial cell-like chemical systems that simulate metabolism, reproduction, and evolution — the essential features of life. The results were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Don’t get me wrong—this research is remarkable. The team demonstrated that abiotic chemicals can bond into membrane-bound vesicles, which in turn alter their internal chemistry in a way that triggers a self-perpetuating cascade, driven only by the addition of light energy.

For years, these efforts remained theoretical explorations without an experimental demonstration. Then came a laboratory breakthrough with the advent of polymerization-induced self-assembly, a process in which disordered nanoparticles are engineered to spontaneously emerge, self-organize, and assemble themselves into structured objects…. At last, these tools enabled Pérez-Mercader and his colleagues to bring their theories to life — literally.

It is fascinating work, and I’m filled with genuine admiration. But: “bring their theories to life—literally”?

Let’s not lose our heads.

What has been demonstrated is the chemical capacity for non-living matter to do what life has always done: produce its scaffolding. It’s now evident—thanks to this research—that these sorts of reactions can be coaxed into view under the right laboratory conditions. This is more than soap-bubbles, but it’s not even in the same galaxy as life. We know more about how certain chemical systems behave in and around cellular membranes.

But what we don’t know any more about is life itself, much less its origin.

Evolutionary thinkers are compelled to turn every new discovery into evidence for its theory, and most especially when the process points in the opposite direction of their conclusions. It took years of mathematics and theory before the “laboratory breakthrough.” What has this meticulous scientific process proven? That one of the most basic and simple components of life – a simple membrane devoid of all the complex pore gatekeepers and other complex mechanics that make a living cell-wall functional – requires amazing fine-tuning and precise laboratory conditions.

Why must every chemical insight be stretched into a tale of proto-biology, every vesicle turned into a would-be cell, every self-assembling structure a proof for Darwin’s dream? The data has turned against the story; simplicity and disorder – the demand of Darwinian evolution – everywhere conceals undreamed of structural complexity, and … at every level of investigation.

It’s a recurring motif: the more miraculous the evidence, the more desperate the efforts to smuggle it back under the old narrative.

Desperation is not attractive, Science.

The Macrocosmic Rabbit Hole

If the Harvard team’s synthetic vesicles left us marveling at mere chemistry’s “mimicry”[2] of life, a different kind of wonder—and disorientation—greets us on the cosmic end of the spectrum. This time, the rabbit hole opens into the yawning mouth of a black hole: one that – according to consensus science – should not exist.[3]

The headline from our friend Darren at Popular Mechanics (July 2025): “Scientists Found a Black Hole That Shouldn’t Exist. Now Physics Has a Problem.”

According to the standard model of black hole formation, there’s a mass gap—a no-go zone—between about 50 and 120 solar masses. When stars that massive die they explode so violently that they don’t leave behind a black hole, or … so says the theory. And yet there it is, a black hole smack in the middle of the forbidden zone, weighing in at 72 solar masses.

This is a celestial singularity in a mass range that physics says should be impossible. Like the mature galaxies JWST is revealing at red-shifts where they cannot be … theoretical faults are opening up across the scientific spectrum, and the consensus is quaking.

What follows is the predictable flurry of patchwork explanations: maybe it’s a merger of smaller black holes. Maybe the models need tweaking. Maybe pair-instability supernovae don’t behave quite like we thought. The desperation is increasing, but they placed their bets long ago and now … they will double-down.

And yet, despite the headlines and hedging, the logical conclusion following the evidence is almost never spoken aloud: maybe we don’t know what we think we know. Science has wandered far from “scientific skepticism,” from accepting its own ignorance, from allowing the observations to lead the conclusions.

In both the micro and macro realms, the same pattern emerges: the deeper we peer, the more the standard expectations unravel, and not just in the mutable details, but in the underlying assumptions. Consensus science has never been more technologically capable, and never more epistemologically fragile.

When Reason Forgets Reality, Only the Grin Remains

So here we stand at a unique moment in human history.[4]

Data floods in from twin portals previously sealed from human scrutiny. One rabbit hole plunges us into the microscopic depths of quantum weirdness, the other lifts our gaze to the edges of the universe. It is an awe-inspiring vision at every scale, if only we have the courage to see it for what it is.

And we should never forget that the near-miraculous tools of science have opened access to this Wonderland.

But the cosmos we behold in this mirror is too structured at every scale (even our own) to be accidental, too paradoxical to be mechanistic, and too finely tuned and intimate to be indifferent. And yet, the reigning credal dogma demands allegiance to Hegelian process and mechanistic natural laws – to evolution.

The further we follow the rabbit, the clearer the pattern becomes: consensus science is no longer primarily about discovering what is, but about preserving what must be true to sustain the consensus. New findings—however miraculous—are pre-fitted into the narrative, regardless of how ill-fitting they are. The story cannot be allowed to fail. And when reality resists, the story is what survives.

But this isn’t science in its classical sense. It is science after The Fall—after Reason declared its autonomy from revelation and enthroned itself as its own oracle. After Hegel and Darwin seized the reigns of science, and the Church, regrettably, capitulated.

We are now living in a world that has confused explanatory coherence with metaphysical truth. As long as the story holds together—even via ad hoc patches and just-so redefinitions—it is assumed to be true. This, however, is not science; it is narrative maintenance. It is Hegelian dialectic disguised as empirical discovery, consensus substituting for certainty.

The result? Reason has become unmoored from reality, spinning ever more ornate maps that no longer match the terrain. As Iain McGilchrist warned,[5] we’ve allowed the Emissary—our analytic, fragmented reason—to seize the role of a wholistic confrontation with Reality. We’ve lost the orienting whole. The cat has vanished. All that remains is the grin.

And yet, wonder remains.

Even through the distortions of narrative and theory, the glories of the microcosm and the macrocosm shine through—stubborn realities pointing beyond themselves. They are not illusions. They are signs. But to see them for what they are requires something the modern mind has largely abandoned: epistemic humility. The willingness to accept that we are not the center of the story. That we do not write the script.

The coherence we crave, seek and find was created, not subjectively imagined.

This is where true science begins again—not in self-validating dialectic, but in the recovery of wonder at His creation. In the recognition that light did not emerge from the void through blind accident, but because Someone said, “Let there be light.”

Footnotes

[1] Neither of these “rabbit holes” is about Evolution as a biological theory, but both are about evolution (1) as a way of thinking, and (2) as a starting point for thought. Origin of Life research for instance is pre-biotic. Cosmology is abiotic. To defeat evolution, as CS Lewis pointed out in his essay, “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” we must first realize that the biological theory of evolution is just a symptom of the disease – the evolutionary myth. Lewis understood that evolution is not irrational, but hyper-rational. Underneath scientific materialism lies a profound lived-faith in reason that cannot be justified within the theoretical structure. Secular scientists are not materialists, but Hegelian pantheists unable to acknowledge their theism. Reason for them is a lived-Absolute, a fundamental reality. This is the profound self-deception within which materialist science must operate. And this is exactly the system of Hegelian thought that permeates our world.

[2] I would have liked to have written more extensively on the language used in this article. It is filled with irony. I will present a few examples (with my own emphases) without comment to spur the reader’s critical instincts: “artificial cell-like chemical systems that simulate metabolism, reproduction, and evolution”, “generate a structure that has the properties of life”, “… it mimics key aspects of life”, “disordered nanoparticles are engineered to spontaneously emerge, self-organize, and assemble themselves into structured objects”, “modeling what the researchers called ‘a mechanism of loose heritable variation,’ the basis of Darwinian evolution”, “the PNAS study opens a new pathway for engineering synthetic, self-reproducing systems — an achievement that past experiments attained only with more complex methods.” ‘Nuff said.

[3] It is, for my purposes, the very prosaic nature of these two examples of scientific hubris  – overconfidence in their theories – that make them work so well. These “evolutionary” theories are brilliantly explanatory except for the details. But the details are the whole point. In the Origin of Life scenario we see the discovery of a simple non-biological membrane being blown into cosmic-scale theoretical proof (like Miller-Urey) for the possibility of Life, and in the case of the too-massive black hole, science must minimize the failure of theory to predict what actually exists. The massive failure must become a mere blip, so that the theory can stand. What’s small is large, and what’s large is small. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

[4] Daniel 12:4: “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

[5] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. This is an astonishing book for anyone interested in the modern world and its twisted failures. McGilchrist is not a Christian, but his empirical findings are astoundingly correlated with a Biblical understanding of our fallen world.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.