How would you react if I said, “If you meet somebody who claims to believe in evolution, the person is ignorant, stupid or insane”?Wouldn’t that be a little narrow-minded? This is said all the time, with one slight change. The actual quote came from Richard Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist. He said, “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, the person is ignorant, stupid or insane.”Hold on! I can’t even question evolution!? What’s the deal?In the next two weeks, I would like to discuss evolution. I’m aware that evolution is a big enterprise, so I’m not going to pretend to smash the whole thing in two teeny columns. However, I do want to mention a few difficulties with evolution that aren’t even discussed in science classes.Science, it is said, deals with the real world, and religion deals with feeling and fantasy. The two fields are in conflict.Are they? I think this current conflict between science and faith is contrived. At least the Christian faith isn’t necessarily contradictory to science. While some faiths don’t take the material world seriously, biblical Christianity does.If faith means “mere subjective belief disregarding the facts” then yes, “faith” is in conflict to science. However, this “blind leap” isn’t Christianity. Biblically, faith is an intelligent trust in what can’t be seen based on the evidence that is seen. The Bible commands us to use reason to test truth claims. Evolutionist Douglas Futuyma said, “Fifty-seven years after the Scopes trial, fundamentalist religion and evolutionary biology are again fiercely at odds, and science is still on trial.” According to him, Creationists are flat-earth “fundies” whose adherence to superstition makes them blind to reality. Evolution is a fact.This characterization is patently false.There are a number of troubles with evolution. For example, there are no plausible evolutionary explanations that can explain how life arose from non-life. Evolutionist Dr. Robert Shapiro’s book Origins decimated the six naturalistic and one creationist theories of a biogenesis. Another example is evolutionist Michael Denton’s book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. He stated, “The Darwinian theory is the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century… like the Genesis-based cosmology which it replaced.”No friend of religion here, folks. These guys have a beef with the facts themselves. There are countless other examples. Another error is that two conflicting definitions of science are used interchangeably. The first definition is science as a methodology, using observation and testing. The methodology has produced the litany of concerns with evolution. The second is science as the philosophy of naturalism, which states that matter and energy governed by natural law is all that exists. However, the philosophy trumps the methodology every time when the methodology, properly applied, points to intelligent design, because that is inconsistent with the philosophy. In evolution, when the facts suggest design, the second definition is invoked arbitrarily. For instance, Douglas Futuyma in his textbook on evolution states, “The fact is, in a scientific sense, there can be no evidence for supernatural special creation.”How does Futuyma know that in advance? The only way he can know that in advance is if he stacks the deck, force fitting the evidence to fit the philosophy before the evidence is considered. He can’t know it by using the methodology. Even if there is evidence of design, it isn’t allowed.This is what happened to Lehigh microbiologist Michael Behe when he wrote his critique of Darwinism. He gave a ton of evidence, but it was just dismissed as “religion disguised as science.”That’s name calling. “You deny evolution? That’s religion. I don’t have to listen to your evidence.” Intelligent design theorists are happy to present a wealth of evidence for their view. The evidence needs to be addressed, not disqualified.So, let evolution be taught in schools, but let it be critiqued, where both the evidence for and against it is considered, and, as Phillip Johnson states, “let students be taught how to tell the difference between what biologists really know by observation and what they fervently believe because it fits their philosophy.”Teaching that isn’t teaching religion; its good critical thinking.
Rich Bordner is a senior English and philosophy major. He can be reached at [email protected].