originally posted by: whereislogic
Is evolution a scientific fact? No.
If not a fact, what is it? A religious “faith”? A philosophy/idea or set of philosophies/ideas?
Evolution “is also being questioned by reputable scientists”.
‘Unbelievers are uninformed, unreasonable, irresponsible, incompetent, ignorant, dogmatic, enslaved by old illusions and prejudices.’ In these
ways leading evolutionists describe those who do not accept evolution as a fact. However, cool, logical, scientific reasoning, backed by observational
and experimental evidence, need not resort to such personal invective.
The position of the evolutionists is more characteristic of religious dogmatism. When the chief priests and Pharisees saw the crowds accepting Jesus,
they sent officers to arrest him, with this result: “The Temple police who had been sent to arrest him returned to the chief priests and Pharisees.
‘Why didn’t you bring him in?’ they demanded. ‘He says such wonderful things!’ they mumbled. ‘We’ve never heard anything like it.’
‘So you also have been led astray?’ the Pharisees mocked. ‘Is there a single one of us Jewish rulers or Pharisees who believes he is the
Messiah? These stupid crowds do, yes; but what do they know about it? A curse upon them anyway!”’—John 7:32, 45-49,
The Living
Bible.
They were wrong, for evidence proves that many of the rulers were being affected by Jesus’ teaching. Even individual priests became his followers.
(John 12:42; Acts 6:7; 15:5) Unable to refute Jesus, the Pharisees as a group resorted to tyranny of authority. Today evolutionists adopt the same
tactics: ‘Stupid crowds, what do they know? All reputable scientists accept evolution!’ Not so. As
Discover magazine said: “Now that
hallowed theory is not only under attack by fundamentalist Christians, but is also being questioned by reputable scientists.”—October 1980.
Writing in
Science, R. E. Gibson said that Galileo possessed “a passionate antagonism to any kind of dogma based on human authority.” It
was his intellectual integrity that got him into trouble with the Inquisition. But such integrity, Gibson asserts, “is not fashionable now; the
present tendency is for the scientific community, now grown powerful, to behave much as the church did in Galileo’s time.” Is modern science
handling power and prestige any better than the Catholic Church did? Einstein once remarked that we are not as far removed from Galileo’s time as we
would like to think.—
Science, September 18, 1964, pp. 1271-1276.
Robert Jastrow refers to “the religious faith of the scientist” and his irritation when the evidence doesn’t match his beliefs. J. N. W.
Sullivan calls belief in spontaneous generation “an article of faith,” and T. H. Huxley said it was “an act of philosophical faith.” Sullivan
said that to believe that evolution made all life on earth was “an extraordinary act of faith.” Dr. J. R. Durant points out that “many
scientists succumb to the temptation to be dogmatic, seizing upon new ideas with almost missionary zeal . . . In the case of the theory of evolution,
the missionary spirit seems to have prevailed.” Physicist H. S. Lipson says that after Darwin “evolution became in a sense a scientific religion;
almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.”
Proving the above,
U.S. News & World Report (March 2, 1981) told of scandals in science labs. A researcher at Yale said: “It’s the
Watergate of science.” The article concluded: “‘It’s shocking,’ acknowledges Dr. Arnold Relman, editor of the
New England Journal of
Medicine. ‘It strikes yet another idol. Everyone turns out to have clay feet—even some research scientists.”’ Simpson, in
The
Meaning of Evolution, said evolutionists “may use the same data to ‘prove’ diametrically opposed theories” and each one “puts his
particular theory into the data.” (Pp. 137-9) Sullivan said that scientists do not “invariably tell the truth, or try to, even about their
science. They have been known to lie, but they did not lie in order to serve science but, usually, religious or anti-religious
prejudices.”—
Limitations of Science, pp. 173-5.
The original quest for truth is often forgotten as each one gleans for ideas to bolster his own emotional conviction, whether it be scientific dogma
or religious creed. Evolution is not the caliber of the science that sends men to the moon or cracks the genetic code. It is more like
religion—priestlike authorities that speak
ex cathedra, sectarian squabbles, unexplainable mysteries, faith in missing links and missing
mutations, a laity that blindly follows, wresting evidence to fit their creed, and denouncing nonbelievers as stupid. And their god? The same one the
ancients sacrificed to, preparing “a table for the god of Good Luck.”—Isa. 65:11. Along with Mother Nature/Gaia and conveniently selective
feigned agnosticism in the cop-out phrase 'we don't know (yet)' that functions as a sort of god-of-the-gaps (in its implication, that 'we don't know
yet', but Mother Nature did it anyway, nature found a way, life finds a way, self-assembly, self-organization, etc.; puzzlesphere made some wild
inaccurate, incorrect, claims regarding the self-organization of amino acids; ignoring for example the chemical engineering, creation, techniques used
in the experiments conducted by Urey, Miller and Szostak; which at most one could describe as providing proof of concept for the intelligent creation
of amino acids, if we're talking engineering terms here).
In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale of the emperor’s new clothes, it took a small child to tell the emperor that he was naked. Evolution now
parades as fully clothed fact. We need childlike honesty to tell it that it’s naked. And we need courageous scientists like Professor Lipson, who
said: “We must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is
creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists,
as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.”
What evidence is there for belief in creation? See next comment (or some of my other comments).
THE “TYRANNY OF AUTHORITY” USED BY EVOLUTIONISTS:
“When he [Darwin] finished, the fact of evolution could be denied only by an abandonment of reason.”—Life Nature Library, “Evolution,”
p. 10.
“It is not a matter of personal taste whether or not we believe in evolution. The evidence for evolution is compelling.”—“Evolution,
Genetics, and Man,” p. 319, Dobzhansky.
“Its essential truth is now universally accepted by scientists competent to judge.”—“Nature and Man’s Fate,” p. v, Hardin.
“The establishment of life’s family tree by the evolutionary process is now universally recognized by all responsible scientists.”—“A
Guide to Earth History,” p. 82, Carrington.
“No informed mind today denies that man is descended by slow process from the world of the fish and the frog.”—“Life” magazine, August
26, 1966, Ardrey.
“It has become almost self-evident and requires no further proof to anyone reasonably free of old illusions and prejudices.”—“The Meaning
of Evolution,” p. 338, Simpson.
“There is no rival hypothesis except the outworn and completely refuted one of special creation, now retained only by the ignorant, the dogmatic,
and the prejudiced.”—“Outlines of General Zoology,” p. 40