Evolutionists Against Darwinism
Enlarged October 9, 2019 (first published August 27, 2015)
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
From: conservapedia.com
“A 2005 poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research found that 60% of American medical doctors reject Darwinism, stating that they do not believe humans evolved through natural processes alone. Thirty-eight percent of the American medical doctors polled agreed with the statement that ‘Humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement.’ The study also reported that 1/3 of all medical doctors favor the theory of intelligent design over evolution. ... The prestigious journal Science reported the following in 2006 concerning the United States: ‘The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year.’ In January 2006, the BBC reported concerning Britain: ‘Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll. Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design (ID) should be taught in school science lessons’” (“Evolution,” Conservapedia).
The following scientists do not hold to biblical creationism. In fact, some of them are strongly opposed to creationism. They hold to the long age of the universe. Some hold to theistic evolution and interpret Genesis 1-3 poetically, while others believe only in an undefined Higher Power or Designer.
But they criticize major aspects of Darwinian evolution and propose that Intelligence must be behind the universe. Many of these have been persecuted by the Darwinian establishment for daring to challenge its dogmas.
“Darwin's strongest critics were scientists, and the theologians who criticized him objected mainly to his philosophical insistence on natural causes and his denial of design--which Princeton's Charles Hodge regarded as ‘tantamount to atheism.’ Even today, many critics of Darwinism are not religious fundamentalists, and a growing number of critics are credentialed scientists” (Jonathan Wells, “The Problem of Evidence,” Forbes, Feb. 5, 2009).
“A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these ‘experts’ have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully” (Wolfgang Smith, cited from Ian Taylor, Origins Answer Book, p. 107).
“Scientists at the forefront of inquiry have put the knife to classical Darwinism, They have not gone public with this news, but have kept it in their technical papers and inner counsels” (William Fix, The Bone Peddlers, p. 180).
Consider some examples:
MICHAEL BEHE
Michael Behe, Ph.D. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania, is a theistic evolutionist who does not believe that Darwinian evolution can explain the origin of life. In Darwin’s Black Box and Signature of the Cell, Behe presents the case that at the micro level life is “irreducibly complex” and thus points to “intelligent design.”
Behe delves into the amazing mysteries of DNA and the other biological machinery of the living cell and refutes naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. He deals with current origin of life theories, including RNA first.
“It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed. ... the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science’s attempt to explain their origins. ... Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand, or will be sooner or later, but no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature. ...
“Over the past four decades modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell. The progress has been hard won. It has required tens of thousands of people to dedicate the better parts of their lives to the tedious work of the laboratory. ... The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell--to investigate life at the molecular level--is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. ...
“This triumph of science should evoke cries of ‘Eureka!’ from ten thousands of throats, should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even ben an excuse to take a day off. But no bottles have been uncorked, no hands slapped. Instead, a curious, embarrassed silence surrounds the stark complexity of the cell. When the subject comes up in public, feet start to shuffle, and breathing gets a bit labored. In private people are a bit more relaxed; many explicitly admit the obvious but then stare at the ground, shake their heads, and let it go at that” (Darwin’s Black Box, preface, chapter 11).
Behe concludes that “just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry.”
He documents the fact that “over the past 130 years Darwinism, although secularly entrenched, has met a steady stream of dissent both from within the scientific community and from without it.”
He makes this bold statement:
“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature--in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books--that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.”
Behe sites “a raft of evolutionary biologists [who] examining whole organisms wonder just how Darwinism can account for their observations.”
For example, he quotes Paleontologist Niles Eldredge: “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. ... Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else.”
He quotes biologists Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders: “... the success of the [neo-Darwinian synthesis] are limited to the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place.”
He quotes biologist Jerry Coyne: “We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak.”
He quotes geneticist John Endler: “Although much is known about mutation, it is still largely a ‘black box’ relative to evolution. Novel biochemical functions seem to be rare in evolution, and the basis for their origin is virtually unknown.”
He quotes Klaus Dose: “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”
Behe examines biology textbooks and how they deal with evolution and concludes:
“Many students learn from their textbooks how to view the world through an evolutionary lens. However, they do not learn how Darwinian evolution might have produced any of the remarkably intricate biochemical systems that those texts describe.”
Behe gives six reasons why he believes that intelligent design is science: (1) The case for ID is based on empirical evidence. (2) Advocates of ID use established scientific methods. (3) ID is a testable theory. (4) The case for ID exemplifies historical scientific reasoning. (5) ID addresses a specific question in evolutionary biology (e.g., origin of life theories). (6) ID is supported by peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Behe is not a biblical creationist. He believes that the earth is billions of years old and accepts some form of evolutionary common descent.
“For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world” (Darwin’s Black Box, chapter 1, “Lilliputian Biology”).
In spite of this deep sympathy and personal identity with evolutionary thinking, Behe has been treated like a moron and an apostate by the evolutionary establishment because he has had the audacity to suggest that Darwinism can’t explain life itself.
WOLF-EKKEHARD LÖNNIG
“Meet Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a brilliant scientist who worked at the Max-Planck Institute until his retirement. Though he has written four books on the subject of evolution, he has infuriated evolutionists everywhere by daring to challenge Neo-Darwinism on scientific grounds. He told the Diplomacy Post in March 2014: ‘A scientific hypothesis should be potentially falsifiable.... However,’ he added, ‘the idea of slow evolution by 'infinitesimally small inherited variations' etc. has been falsified by the findings of palaeontology... as well [as] genetics. Yet its adherents principally reject any scientific proof against Neo-Darwinism,’ he said, ‘so that, in fact, their theory has become a non-falsifiable worldview, to which people stick in spite of all contrary evidence.’ Scientists continue to support evolution despite the evidence that actually falsified evolution because ‘without Darwinism, philosophic materialism has lost its battle against an intelligent origin of the world.’ But Wolf had more to say. ‘According to Neo-Darwinism, all important problems of the origin of species are, at least in principle, solved. Further questions on the validity of evolutionary theory are thus basically superfluous. However, such a dogmatic attitude stops further investigations and hinders fruitful research in science.’ Though Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has stopped short of giving recognition to God as the Intelligent Designer, we applaud his work for showing that evolution doesn't even deserve to be called scientific” (CreationMoments.com, Mar. 25, 2015).
DAVID BERLINSKI
David Berlinski (b. 1942) has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics and has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the University of Paris, and elsewhere. He is a “secular Jew and an agnostic.”
In The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski exposes the weakness of Darwinism and reproves the dogmatism and censorship of the Darwinian establishment. One reviewer says:
“This book is so well written that superlatives seem inadequate. Berlinski begins by stating that he is not religious and has no particular religious axe to grind. He is a mathematician and scientist. Yet he skewers science in general, and Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris in particular with well-reasoned argument, simple yet cogent analysis, and more humor than I would have thought possible for this subject. Berlinksi makes it clear that he in no way means to disparage or belittle Science. He is only trying to show how Science has been twisted by The Four Horsemen in an attempt to prove an anti-religious point of view, and how that twisting promises so much and delivers so little.”
Another reviewer says:
“Any book by David Berlinski is bound to be fun. He is simply one of the most erudite writers in popular science and mathematics today. Those who particularly like seeing sacred cows treated with a hint of sarcasm and irreverence will enjoy his writing on almost any subject, but this book, attacking the "new atheism" as it does, is especially delightful if for no other reason than for how pompous writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchins are in their approach to this subject. In brief, Berlinski's argument boils down to three main points: there is nothing in science proper that undermines religion (a point that used to be widely recognized and even extolled by writers like SJ Gould), most of the new atheists badly misunderstand even the most rudimentary arguments of theology and are not logically consistent, and finally that much of science has become rather dogmatic, like a new religion.:”
Following are some quotes:
“If science stands opposed to religion, it is not because of anything contained in either the premises or the conclusions of the great scientific theories. ... We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging form a ‘warm little pond.’ The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. xiv, xv).
“The hypothesis that we are nothing more than cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Figures as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Jacques Monod, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins have said it is so. It is an article of their faith, one advanced with the confidence of men convinced that nature has equipped them to face realities the rest of us cannot bear to contemplate. There is not the slightest reason to think this is so” (Berlinski, p. xvi).
“The Landscape has, after all, been brought into existence by assumption. It cannot be observed. It embodies an article of faith ... There are by now thousands of professional papers about the Landscape, and reading even a handful makes for the uneasy conviction that were physicists to stop writing about the place, the Landscape, like Atlantis, would stop existing--just like that. This cannot be said of the sun” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. 119, 128)
“[The string theory] was an idea that possessed every advantage except clarity, elegance, and a demonstrated connection to reality” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 119).
“After all, the theologian need only appeal to a single God lording over it all and a single universe--our own. Dawkins must appeal to an infinitely many universes crammed into creation, with laws of nature wriggling indiscreetly and fundamental physical parameters changing as one travels from one corner of the cosmos to the next, the whole entire gargantuan structure scientifically unobservable and devoid of any connection to experience” (The Devil’s Delusion, p. 153).
“After years of punishing trials, a few of them have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their signs at one another. ... Simian social structures are often intricate. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas reason; they form plans; they have preferences; they are cunning; they have passions and desires; and they suffer. The same is true of cats, I might add. In much of this, we see ourselves. But beyond what we have in common with the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting, the differences are profound” (The Devil’s Delusion, p. 156).
“Mind is like no other property of physical systems. It is not just that we don’t know the mechanisms that give rise to it. We have difficulty in seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it” (Erich Harth, physicist, cited by David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 175)
“Within the English-speaking world, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You’ve got to be kidding, right?” (Berlinski, p. 186).
“Suspicions about Darwin’s theory arise for two reasons. The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by little evidence” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 187).
“This is the conclusion suggested by more than six thousand years of artificial selection, the practice of barnyard and backyard alike. Nothing can induce a chicken to lay a square egg or to persuade a pig to develop wheels mounted on ball bearings. It would be a violation, as chickens and pigs are prompt to observe and often with indignation, of their essential nature. If species have an essential nature that beyond limits cannot change, then random variations and natural selection cannot change them. We must look elsewhere for an account that does justice to their nature or to the facts” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 189).
“Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not” (Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 190).
“The [Darwinian] theory is what it always was: It is unpersuasive. Among evolutionary biologists, these matters are well known. In the privacy of the Susan B. Anthony faculty lounge, they often tell one another with relief that it is a very good thing the public has no idea what the research literature really suggests. ‘Darwin?’ a Nobel laureate in biology once remarked to me over his bifocals. ‘That’s just the party line’” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 192).
“By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? ... The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. 205, 207).
The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2010) features 32 essays spanning 15 years, including his award winning essays “What Brings a World into Being?” and “On the Origins of Mind” (Best American Science Writing 2002, 2005). Berlinski states in the title essay:
“The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin’s theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead ...
“The structures of life are complex, and complex structures get made in this, the purely human world, only by a process of deliberate design. An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different? ...
“For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin's doctrine.”
I. L. COHEN
Cohen is a mathematician and researcher, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and an officer of the Archaeological Institute of America.
“Micro mutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical, theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what happened in biology ... I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science” (cited in Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, 1987, p. 422).
“... it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end -- no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers. ... if in the process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside superintelligence is the solution to our quandary, then let’s cut the umbilical cord that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us back” (Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities, 1984, pp. 214, 215).
“… every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary and it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong” (Darwin Was Wrong, p. 209).
“The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science” (Darwin Was Wrong, p. 210).
FRANCIS CRICK
Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize as the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix shape and its properties of containing and transferring information. Though he was an atheist and an evolutionist who once said Christianity should not be taught to children, the complexity of the living cell convinced him that the evolution of life from inanimate matter would require a miracle.
In his 1981 book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature he wrote:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (p. 88).
Crick rejected Darwinism by concluding that there is no scientific evidence of a “primordial soup” in which life could have risen. He also stated that the beginning of the fossil record does not show evolution. Instead, it witnesses the sudden appearance of complex creatures.
Crick theorized that life began somewhere in outer space and was transported to earth by alien life forms using space travel technology. He called this “Directed Panspermia.”
“Directed Panspermia -- postulates that the roots of our form of life go back to another place in the universe, almost certainly another planet; that it had reached a very advanced form there before anything much had started here; and that life here was seeded by microorganisms sent on some form of spaceship by an advanced civilization” (Life Itself, p. 141).
PAUL DAVIES
Paul Davies (b. 1946) has a Ph.D. in physics from the University College London and did post-doctoral studies under Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on cosmology, theoretical physics, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He has taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Adelaide and currently is a professor at Arizona State University. He is the recipient of the Templeton Prize (1995), Kelvin Medal (2001), and the Faraday Prize (2002).
He doesn’t believe in biblical creation, but he does believe that life is too complicated and perfectly arranged to have happened by chance. He develops this in his 2007 book The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?
“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. ... It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. ... The impression of design is overwhelming” (Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability Tt Order the Universe, 1988, p. 203).
“Had this exceedingly delicate tuning of values been even slightly upset, the subsequent structure of the universe would have been totally different. ... Extraordinary physical coincidences and apparently accidental cooperation ... offer compelling evidence that something is 'going on.' . . . A hidden principle seems to be at work” (Davies, The Accidental Universe, pp. 90, 110).
MAREK DEMIANSKI
Marek Demianski is a Polish cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw and is a professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Warsaw. He is Co-Principal Investigator in two European consortia preparing the Planck Surveyor mission.
“Somebody had to tune [the universe] very precisely” (Science News, Sept. 3, 1983, p. 152).
MICHAEL DENTON
Michael Denton (b. 1943) has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from King’s College London. He is Senior Research Fellow in molecular biology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. In Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Denton argued that natural selection and mutations cannot explain life.
“It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. ... It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate” (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1986, p. 32).
“Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small ... each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world" (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis).
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle” (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 264).
It is alleged by evolutionary propagandists that Denton changed his views after the publication of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, yet the fact is that he has always been an evolutionist and anti-creationist, but he still believes that Darwinianism is faulty and that an unidentified intelligence guided the process of evolution.
In a 1995 interview, Denton made the following statement:
“I think the current Darwinian picture is insufficient. I don’t think it gives a credible and comprehensive explanation of how the pattern of life on earth emerged. ... The theory of evolution permeates much of our thinking now in the Western world. I think there are problems with the current Darwinian world, and they should be discussed. ... My fundamental problem with the theory is that there are so many highly complicated organs, systems and structures, from the nature of the lung of a bird, to the eye of the rock lobster, for which I cannot conceive of how these things have come about in terms of a gradual accumulation of random changes. It strikes me as being a flagrant denial of common sense to swallow that all these things were built up by accumulative small random changes. This is simply a nonsensical claim, especially for the great majority of cases, where nobody can think of any credible explanation of how it came about. And this is a very profound question which everybody skirts, everybody brushes over, everybody tries to sweep under the carpet” (An interview with Michael Denton, Access Research Network, Vol. 15. No. 2, 1995; the interview was produced in conjunction with the University of California and was the first in a series of interviews with noted scientists and educators entitled Focus on Darwinism).
Answers in Genesis contacted Dr. Denton in 1999 and he assured them that the quotes from the 1995 interview represented his current view (“Blown Away by Design,” Creation, September 1999).
His 2002 book Nature’s Destiny continues to argue for intelligent design. The subtitle is “How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.” The following quote should leave no doubt about this:
“All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology--that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact” (p. 389).
FREEMAN DYSON
Freeman Dyson (b. 1923) is a renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for work in nuclear engineering and solid-state physics. He is the recipient of the Heineman Prize (1965), the Wolf Prize (1981), the Templeton Prize (2000), and the Pomeranchuk Prize (2003). He worked on the Orion Project, which studied the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion, and led the design team for TRIGA, a small, safe nuclear reactor that produces isotopes and medical and research use.
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming” (Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 1979, p. 250).
“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together for our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we are coming” (Freeman Dyson, “Energy in the Universe,” Scientific American, 1971, p. 59).
ANTONY FLEW
Antony Flew (1923-2010) was a British philosopher and a famous atheist who converted to “Deism” in 2004. In 2004 he published There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.
“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design” (Dr. Antony Flew, “Atheist Becomes Theist,” interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew by Gary Habermas, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005).
JERRY FODOR
In What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), Jerry Fodor and Massimo Platelli-Palmarini critique neo-Darwinism from the perspective of atheism.
Publishers Weekly says:
“The authors of this scattershot treatise believe in evolution, but think that the Darwinian model of adaptationism—that random genetic mutations, filtered by natural selection, produce traits that enhance fitness for a particular biological niche—is fatally flawed. Philosopher Fodor and molecular-biologist-turned-cognitive-scientist Piattelli-Palmarini, at the University of Arizona, launch a three-pronged attack (which drew fire when Fodor presented their ideas in the London Review of Books in 2007). ... Their most persuasive, and engaging, criticism is that evolutionary theory is just tautological truisms and historical narratives of how creatures came to be.”
A Booklist review by Ray Olson says:
“Remaining staunchly atheist all the while, philosopher Fodor and cognitive scientist Piattelli-Palmarini challenge Darwinism more effectively than the entire creationist/intelligent-design movement has. Their short, deliberate, and—for readers consulting (and reconsulting) their dictionaries about the philosophical and scientific vocabulary the authors decline to dumb down—slow-reading tract lays out biological and conceptual arguments against natural selection. Natural selection as the driver of speciation has become decreasingly explanatory as research continues to appreciate the complexity of internal and external processes impinging on development. For one thing, inherent physical limitations of developing organisms nullify blind selection; adapt as they may, pigs will never grow wings. Conceptually, natural selection is faulty because it necessarily implies intentionality (selection is made by something), never mind that how something with adaptive effect is chosen is utterly elusive logically. There is a great deal more to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s arguments, which ordinary general readers won’t be able to articulate afterward but will gratefully refer others—and themselves—to again and again. Many may find this the hardest, absolutely essential reading they’ve ever done.”
DAVID GELERNTER
The following is excerpted from ‘Renowned Yale Computer Science Prof Leaves Darwinism,” The Stream, Aug. 21, 2019:
“David Gelernter isn’t someone you’d expect to reject Darwin. He lives and works at the heart of the intellectual establishment. He’s a renowned computer scientist at Yale University — the New York Times called him a ‘rock star’ — and served on the National Council on the Arts. He explained in a recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books why he no longer believes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He makes similar points in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson. Gelernter, who is famous for predicting the emergence of the World Wide Web, credits three books with changing his mind. One is Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer of The Discovery Institute. A second is The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays, by mathematician David Berlinski. A third is Debating Darwin’s Doubt, an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer. ...
“Perhaps the biggest flaw with Darwinism, he writes, is how hard it would be to randomly make new functional proteins. Darwinian evolution depends on a huge number of them. Our understanding of molecular biology developed after Darwin. His theory doesn’t fit well with this new understanding. Gelernter carefully reviews the evidence, and his article provides a very helpful short guide to the problem. He cites Douglas Axe, a distinguished scientist, who has calculated the chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore be preserved by natural selection, are only 1 in 1077. That’s just one of the many, many proteins needed for any organism. Gelernter summarizes the evidence. ‘Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is — so far — a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million — you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.’
“He has plenty of other problems with Darwinism. The last one he brings up is the (neo-)Darwinian belief that ‘gene mutations driv[e] macro-evolution.’ These can explain changes in existing forms, but not the development of new forms. The mutations are fatal, and the organism dies before it can reproduce. There are no examples of mutations that are not fatal. This Georgia Tech geneticist John F. McDonald calls ‘the great Darwinian paradox.’ ...
“Gelernter appeared in an interview in June with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, entitled ‘Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.’ Two of the authors he cites appeared along with him, Berlinski and Meyer. In the interview, Gelernter expanded on his article. He explained that it wasn’t the mathematics that challenged Darwin, it was that Darwin didn’t understand the biology. Meyer says we didn’t figure out that the possibilities of random molecules forming a meaningful protein are extraordinarily rare until the last couple of decades. Back in Darwin’s day, very little was known about molecular structure. Science has outgrown Darwin’s theory. ...
“Gelernter admits intelligent design is an ‘absolutely serious argument.’ It’s the ‘first, and obviously most intuitive one that comes to mind.’ It’s got to be dealt with intellectually. It can’t be dismissed with anti-religious bigotry. His colleagues have treated him courteously since he changed his position on this issue, he says. Still, for them Darwinism has passed beyond a scientific argument. ‘You take your life into your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you.’ He’s seen ‘nothing approaching free speech on this topic.’ It’s not a scientific or intellectual discussion. They think he’s attacking their ‘religion.’ Alas, he’s not hopeful that Darwinism will be phased out of academia anytime soon.”
RICHARD GOLDSCHMIDT
Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958), Ph.D. in zoology, was a pioneer geneticist. He described the nervous system of the nematode and the sex determination of the gypsy moth and experimented for decades with mutations in moths and fruit flies.
Through his research, Goldschidt came to the conclusion that Darwinian evolution by natural selection and the accumulation of gene mutations is unable to account for the origin of species. He wrote:
"In the best-known organisms, like Drosophila, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual, this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a [new] species in nature” ("Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist, "American Scientist, January 1952, p. 94).
In his 1940 book The Material Basis of Evolution, he wrote:
“This statement of the problem already indicates that I cannot agree with the viewpoint of the textbooks that the problem of evolution has been solved as far as the genetic basis is concerned. ... At this point in our discussion I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the translation of the gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, enidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given” (pp. 6, 7).
Refusing to give up on evolution, Goldschmidt invented “the hopeful monster” theory, hypothesizing that evolution takes place in giant leaps that are invisible in the fossil record and non-reproducible in the mutation laboratory.
But even though Goldschmidt never gave up on evolution, he was counted a traitor and a heretic by the evolutionary establishment because he questioned Darwinism publicly.
PIERRE-PAUL GRASSÉ
Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895-1985) was a distinguished French zoologist, editor of the influential 28-volume Traite de zoologie, ex-president of the French Academy of Sciences; Thomas Dobzhansky, in his book Evolution, said, “Grassé’s knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic.” Grassé was an evolutionist but he debunked Darwinian evolution as contrary to the facts of nature.
“Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs” (Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977, p. 8).
“Our ignorance is so great that we dare not even assign with any accuracy an ancestral stock to the phyla Protozoa, Arthopoda, Mollusca and Vertebrata. ... From the almost total absence of fossil evidence relative to the origins of the phyla, it follows that an explanation of the mechanism in the creative evolution of the fundamental plans is heavily burdened with hypothesis. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution” (pp. 17, 31).
FRED HOYLE
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was the director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. He was the recipient of the Royal Medal (1974), the Klumpke-Roberts Award (1977), the Crafoord Prize (1997), among others. He was snubbed for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 when his co-worker was awarded while his original contribution was overlooked. Hoyle rejected Darwinism but believed in evolution driven by alien intelligence.
Hoyle came to the conclusion that Darwinian evolution could not be true, because the universe is too complicated and orderly and the Darwinian theories aren’t supported by the evidence.
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that BIOMATERIALS WITH THEIR AMAZING MEASURE OR ORDER MUST BE THE OUTCOME OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. No other possibility I have been able to think of” (“Evolution from Space,” Omni Lecture, Royal Institution, London, January 12, 1982).
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question” (Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981).
“The fossil record is highly imperfect from a Darwinian point of view, not because of the inadequacies of geologists, but because the slow evolutionary connections required by the theory did not happen. Although paleontologists have recognized this truth for a century or more, they have not been able, in spite of their status as the acknowledged experts in the field, to make much of an impression on consensus opinion. ... Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well-known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle decisively on the theory” (Hoyle and Wickramasinghem, Evolution from Space, 1981, pp. 147, 148).
“... we hit a difficulty that knocked the stuffing out of us. No matter how large the environment one considers, the life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare ... The same is true for living material. As our ideas developed, a monstrous spectre kept beckoning. Just as the brain of Shakespeare was necessary to produce the famous plays, so prior information was necessary to produce a living cell” (Evolution from Space, p. 148).
“It is understandable that the biologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not appreciate the extreme chemical complexity of living systems. Without doing serious violence to the evidence it was then possible to think in terms of processes leading to the origin of life that were not much more subtle than those which take place naturally in the Earth’s crust, as for instance the geochemical processes which led to the formation of metallic ores. ... This was the situation in 1924 at the time of the work of A.I. Oparin, work that was widely acclaimed as putting the final nail in the coffin of the older religions. All of life (and death) could be seen, it was claimed, to spring from natural causes. With the development of microbiology in the second half of the twentieth century it became overwhelmingly clear that the truth is quite otherwise. Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed WHERE IT IS INSENSIBLY DIFFERENT FROM ZERO” (Evolution from Space, p. 3).
“Anyone with even a noodling acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the fiftieth power blind persons (standing shoulder to shoulder, these would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling (random variation) of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidence of nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon” (Hoyle, “The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, November 19, 1981, p. 527).
For these views, Hoyle was persecuted and ridiculed by the Darwinian establishment and is still treated as a nutcase. His intelligent design statistics, showing that the possibility of life evolving from nothing is comparable to a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747, has even labeled “Hoyle’s Fallacy.” The Wikipedia article on “Hoyle’s Fallacy” claims that Hoyle failed to “grasp how powerful a force natural selection can be.” Indeed, it must be exceedingly powerful to create everything out of nothing.
ROBERT JASTROW
Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) was an astronomer, physicist, and cosmologist. He had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University and joined NASA at its formation in 1958. He was the first chairman of the Lunar Exploration Committee and the founding director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was a self-professed agnostic, but he did not believe that science can answer the mysteries of life.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” (God and the Astronomers, 1978, p. 116).
VERA KISTIAKOWSKY
Vera Kistiakowsky (b. 1928) has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California. She was a professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science until her retirement in 1994. She is the daughter of renowned physicist George Kistiakowsky (d. 1982), who worked on the Manhattan Project and developed a trigger for the first hydrogen bomb.
“The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine” (Vera Kistiakowsky, cited by H. Margenau and R. A. Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, and Theos, 1992, p. 52).
SØREN LØVTRUP
Søren Løvtrup is a Swedish biologist. He authored Epigenetics: A Treatise on Theoretical Biology (1974) and The Phylogeny of Vertebrata (1977). Løvtrup is an evolutionist but he does not believe that natural selection and mutations can explain life. He presented his refutation of Darwinianism in his 1987 book Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth.
“I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science” (Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, 1987).
“... the reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous” (Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, p. 275).
NORMAN MACBETH
Macbeth (J.D., Harvard Law School), published Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (1971) after making the study of Darwinism his avocation for many years. He attended private monthly meetings of experts at the American Museum of Natural History, where evolutionists freely acknowledged the problems of evolution (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ435.html). Macbeth says that “any fool can see that evolution died years ago.”
One reviewer described the book as follows:
“He does not appeal to any religious authority to contradict Darwinism, nor does he reject the idea of evolution in toto. Rather, he finds the evidence and arguments for Darwinism to be deeply flawed. Questions are begged, evidence is fudged, and extrapolations are unwarranted. This is a thoughtful and fair critique well worth reading. Let me end with a quote from the author: ‘Any profession [he has biology in mind] that does not supply its own criticism and iconoclasm will discover that someone else will do the job, and usually in a way it does not like.’”
Macbeth also published Darwinism: A Time for Funerals (1982), which is a booklet of interviews about the weakness of the Darwinian theory.
Macbeth exposes the censorship of anti-Darwinian thought in the evolutionary establishment. In A Time for Funerals, he gives the example of a department head in an “Ivy League College” cutting out an article containing a critical analysis of Selection Theory from a book in the college library. After admitting responsibility, the professor said: “Well, of course, I don’t believe in censorship in any form, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of my students reading that article.”
RICHARD MILTON
Richard Milton (b. 1943) is a science journalist and design engineer and a member of Mensa, the high-IQ organization. He has been a member of the Geologists’ Association for over 30 years. He is not a creationist and in fact claims to have no religious faith, believing rather in the evolution of life by some process over millions of years.
He has debunked Darwinian evolution, though, in the strongest terms. In Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (1992), Milton claims that the evidence supporting the Darwinian theory of evolution is mythical. He calls the British Museum of Natural History “a kind of headquarters for Darwinism” and says that he has “been unable to see with my own eyes the decisive evidence for the general theory of evolution” (p. 3).
He calls Darwinism “the urban myth” with many faces and says there is “the myth of radiometric dating; the myth of uniformitarian geology; the myth of gradualist fossil record; the myth of beneficial mutations, the myth of natural selection; the myth that evolution is blind; the myth of the beak of the finch; the myth of the biogenetic law; the myth of vestigial organs; the myth of homology; the myth of the ‘missing link’” (p. 272).
He charges Darwinism with promoting speculation and faulty data.
“I am seriously concerned, on purely rational grounds, that generations of school and university teachers have been led to accept speculation as scientific theory and faulty data as scientific fact; that this process has accumulated a mountainous catalog of mingled fact and fiction that can no longer be contained by the sparsely elegant theory; and that it is high time that the theory was taken out of its ornate Victorian glass cabinet and examined with a fresh and skeptical eye” (p. 4).
He begins by exposing the lack of absolute science supporting the evolutionary dating methods and the doctrine of geological uniformitarianism. He observes,
“... it was the imperative need for great antiquity that deposed catastrophism, rather than any new scientific discoveries or observations; it was a new way of looking at things, not a new piece of knowledge. ... Darwinists needed time, and lots of it: uniformitarians had the geological theory that demonstrated great antiquity. ... Thus an unusual academic interdependence sprang up between the two sciences that continues to this day. A geologist wishing to date a rock stratum would ask an evolutionist’s opinion on the fossils it contained. An evolutionist having difficulty dating a fossil species would turn to the geologist for help. Fossils were used to date rocks: rocks were used to date fossils” (p. 28).
Milton observes that “if even one hundredth part of the evidence presented in this book is correct, then it will be obvious to any thinking person that there is a huge question mark hanging over the central issues of the life science” (p. 273).
Milton has been attacked fiercely by Darwinists. In his review of Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, Oxford University atheist Richard Dawkins devoted two-thirds of the review to attacking the publisher for daring to print a book criticizing Darwinism and the other third to assassinating Milton’s character. Dawkins said the book is “loony,” “stupid,” “drivel,” and referred to Milton as a “harmless fruitcake” who “needs psychiatric help” (Shattering the Myths, pp. ix, x).
Dawkins has tried to have Milton blacklisted so that his scientific writings cannot be published. He has lied about him, calling him a “secret creationist.” He was effective in having the Times Higher Educational Supplement stop publication of one of Milton’s articles.
Milton describes one group of Darwinist vigilantes who use the Internet to attack those they find guilty of promoting the heresy of intelligent design. They call themselves “howler monkeys.” Milton says, “The effects of the howler monkeys of the Internet are profoundly damaging to academic freedom of expression, whoever their current victim happens to be” (p. 270).
Because of the Darwinist gestapo led by the likes of Richard Dawkins, the field of biology has been likened to “working in Russia under Brehznev.” “Many biologists have one set of beliefs at work, their official beliefs, and another set, their real beliefs, which they can speak openly about only among friends” (Rupert Sheldrake, cited by Milton, p 274).
JOHN A. O’KEEFE
John O’Keefe (1916-2000) was a planetary scientist with NASA from 1958-95. He was a leader in the development of the lunar space program.
“We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in” (John O’Keefe, cited by F. Heeren, Show Me God, 1995, p. 200).
ARNO PENZIAS
Arno Penzias (b. 1933) has a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He worked for Bell Laboratories and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978 for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which is used as evidence for the Big Bang.
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan” (Penzias, The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1979).
MICHAEL PITMAN
Michael Pitman was a chemistry professor at Cambridge. In his book Adam and Evolution, he documents his critique of and rejection of Darwinian evolution. He says:
“I started as devil’s advocate for the creationist view and came, in principle, though not to any particular creed, to prefer it. ... the direction of the argument is clear -- there has been neither chemical evolution nor macro-evolution” (p. 254).
Pitman takes doctrinaire evolutionists to task for pretending that their theories are based on proven science.
“But I hope I have shown that apparently convincing arguments in support of a belief can often be seen to be either based on insufficient data or open to more than one interpretation; and that much of what passes for science is no more and no less emotional, illogical and idiosyncratic than many of the opposing arguments. Science, useful as it is, does not explain a host of things; nor is all that it does not explain false. ... A man’s gospel is his business: that he teaches evolution as holy writ in television series or in schools and colleges--with no alternatives properly considered--is a more serious matter” (Adam and Evolution, p. 254).
Pitman also condemns the evolutionary establishment for suppressing debate on this subject.
“Presenting one viewpoint exclusively is faulty teaching. Our descendants will marvel at the attempts of the neo-Darwinian lobby to suppress alternative inquiry, as we today marvel at the power of churchmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Adam and Evolution, p. 255).
The book begins with an overview of Darwin’s teaching and of the neo-Darwinian theory developed in the 20th century, which added chemical evolution, mutations, and genetic relationships to Darwinian natural selection as mechanisms of evolution.
The book critiques the major evidences that are put forth as support for evolution: the fossil record, natural selection, the doctrine of species, homology, cladistics, genetic mutations.
For example, Pitman describes the fruit fly experiments and shows that they actually disprove evolution:
“Morgan, Goldschmidt, Muller and other geneticists have subjected generations of fruit flies to extreme conditions of heat, cold, light, dark and treatment by chemicals and radiation. All sorts of mutations, practically all trivial or positively deleterious, have been produced. Man-made evolution? Not really: few of the geneticists’ monsters could have survived outside the bottles they were bred in. In practice, mutants die, are sterile or tend to revert to the wild-type” (Adam and Evolution, p. 70).
Pitman brilliantly develops the argument from design:
“‘We do not believe in the theory of special creation because it is incredible.’ In this way Sir Arthur Keith, a distinguished anatomist of the 1930s, echoed the rationalist feeling. But life itself is incredible, starting with every cell of every organ of every organism that Sir Arthur investigated. ... there is no evidence that, left to itself with whatever start it had over man, chance could evolve machines for work like men do, even the soft biological machinery of life. The creationist stops haggling over terms and looks for the designer. Through any but blinkered eyes the biological world shows clear signs of planning and order. It is not the order that constitutes a crystal, but a more complex order--the kind revealed in a developing seed or a growing embryo--the kind that, in any other context, we would unhesitatingly think of in terms of ingenuity and deliberate design” (Adam and Evolution, pp. 26, 27).
Pitman examines the living cell and its machinery, the human eye, the bird, the flying insect, metamorphosis, the bat’s radar. For example, he asks how evolution could possibly explain metamorphosis:
“Within this dry shell the organs of the caterpillar are dissolved and reduced to pulp. Breathing tubes, muscles and nerves disappear as such; the creature seems to have died. But processes are in operation which remould that pulp into different, coordinating parts, and in due course the insect, which has not grown up or developed in any normal sense, re-emerges as a beautiful, adult butterfly. It is a kind of resurrection. Certainly it demonstrates the absurdity of invoking natural selection by successive mutation to explain such an obviously, yet subtly programmed, process. Why, on that basis, should the ancestral insect have survived the mutations that projected it into the chrysalid stage, from which it could not yet develop into an adult? Where was natural selection then? How could pre-programmed metamorphosis, in insect, amphibian or crustacean, ever have evolved by chance? Indeed, how could development have evolved piece-meal? The ball is in the evolutionist’s court, tangled in a net of inexplicability” (Adam and Evolution, p. 71).
HOLMES ROLSTON
Holmes Rolston (b. 1932) earned a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. He is professor of philosophy at Colorado State University. He received the Templeton Prize in 2003.
“The physical world is--shades of Bishop Paley!--looking like a fine-tuned watch again, and this time many quantitative calculations support the argument. The forms that matter and energy take seem strangely suited to their destiny” (“Shaken Atheism: A Look at the Fine-Tuned University,” The Christian Century, Dec. 3, 1986).
ALAN SANDAGE
Allan Sandage (1926-2010) earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He was a graduate student assistant to Edwin Hubble, of Hubble Telescope fame. He has received the National Medal of Science (1970), the Crafoord Prize in astronomy (1991), among many other prestigious awards.
“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing” (Alan Sandage, cited by J. N. Willford, “Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomer’s Quest,” New York Times, March 12, 1991, p. B9).
“The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle--an architect” (“A Scientist Reflects on Religious Belief,” Truth, vol. 1, 1985, p. 54).
HENRY SCHAEFER
Henry Schaefer, III (b. 1944) has a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford University. He is Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a signer of A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.
“The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan” (Henry Schaefer, cited by J. Sheler and J. Schrof, “The Creation,” U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991).
ARTHUR SCHAWLOW
Arthur Schawlow (1921-1999) had a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Toronto. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 and was one of the creators of the laser. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1961-96:
“It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. ... I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life” (Arthur Schawlow, cited by Henry Margenau and Roy Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, and Theos, 1992).
ROBERT SHAPIRO
Richard Shapiro, an atheist and an evolutionist, is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University. He has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard and postdoctoral training in DNA chemistry at Cambridge.
In Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986), Shapiro argues that life is too complex to have evolved through any known evolutionary process. He criticizes the major origin of life icons used by evolutionists, such as the Miller Experiment and the RNA-first theory.
The Washington Monthly review says:
“To the skeptical eye of Shapiro, explanations that have been offered look more like mythology than like science. ... The debate, as Shapiro presents it, is rife with speculations presented too forcefully, with inconclusive data put forward as definitive evidence and with explanations that look very much like Creation myths.”
The New Yorker says:
“He shifts through the various hypotheses about the origin of life and demonstrates that most are scientifically implausible or are simply forms of creation myth, sometimes in the guise of science.”
Shapiro writes:
“The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle” (Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide).
In spite of 150 years of evidence that Darwinian evolution is not true and Shapiro’s acknowledgement that it has failed to be proven scientifically, he holds steadfastly to evolutionary and naturalistic explanations of life. In fact, he says that even if evolution is totally disproven, he will not look to religion for answers. He writes:
“Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin for life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or process leading to life, elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder” (Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide).
This is not a scientific approach; it is willful blindness. There is no scientific reason whatsoever to rule out God from the universe. In fact, many top notch scientists have believed that the universe is evidence for God.
WOLFGANG SMITH (b. 1930)
Wolfgang Smith (b. 1930) has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University. He researched the problem of atmospheric reentry for Bell Laboratories. He has been a mathematics professor at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University.
“The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings created themselves, which is, in essence, a metaphysical claim. ... Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb” (Teilhardism and the New Religion, p. 24).
LEE SPETNER
Lee Spetner received a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1950. He worked with the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University from 1951-70. His book Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution was published in 1997.
“Despite the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is a fact, it is really no more than an improbable story. No one has ever shown that macroevolution can work. Most evolutionists assume that macroevolution is just a long sequence of microevolutionary events, but no one has ever shown it to be so” (“Lee Spetner/Edward Max Dialogue,” 2001, The True Origin Archive).
“But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it. ... Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time. The neo-Darwinians would like us to believe that large evolutionary changes can result from a series of small events if there are enough of them. But if these events all lose information they can’t be the steps in the kind of evolution the NDT is supposed to explain, no matter how many mutations there are. Whoever thinks macroevolution can be made by mutations that lose information is like the merchant who lost a little money on every sale but thought he could make it up in volume. ... Not even one mutation has been observed that adds a little information to the genome. That surely shows that there are not the millions upon millions of potential mutations the theory demands. There may well not be any. The failure to observe even one mutation that adds information is more than just a failure to find support for the theory. It is evidence against the theory” (Not By Chance, 1997, pp. 131, 132, 159 160).
DAVID STOVE
David Stove (1927-94) was an Australian philosopher, educator, and author. He taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney.
He claimed to be “of no religion” and believed in evolution in general, but he rejected Darwin’s teaching on the evolution of man.
In Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution, Stove showed that Darwin’s principle of natural selection, which is a foundational part of his theory, is not applicable to human society.
He called Darwinism “a mere festering mass of errors” and “ridiculous slanders on our species.”
In his review of the book, Martin Gardner says, “Whatever your opinion of ‘Intelligent Design,’ you’ll find Stove’s criticism of what he calls ‘Darwinism’ difficult to stop reading. Stove’s blistering attack on Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book.”
Consider the following sharp refutation of the Darwinian survival of the fittest doctrine:
“But no tribe of humans could possibly exist on those terms [natural selection, survival of the fittest]. Such a tribe could not even raise a second generation: the helplessness of the human young is too extreme and prolonged” (p. 5).
“Huxley should not have needed Darwinism to tell him--since any intelligent child of about eight could have told him--that in a ‘continual free fight of each other against all’ there would soon be no children, no women, and hence, no men. In other words, that the human race could not possibly exist now, unless cooperation had always been stronger than competition, both between women and their children, and between men and the children and women whom they protect and provide for” (p. 9).
Stove had no patience for doctrinaire Darwinists, as the following quote illustrates:
“Such cases, I need hardly say, never bother armor-plated neo-Darwinians. But then no cases, possible or even actual, ever do bother them. ... In neo-Darwinism’s house there are many mansions: so many, indeed, that if a certain awkward fact will not fit into one mansion, there is sure to be another one into which it will fit to admiration” (p. 39).
WILLIAM R. THOMPSON
William Thompson (1887-1972) was Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada
“... it does appear to me, in the first place, that Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce paleontological evidence sufficient to prove his views but that the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different today. The modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible, are in the nature of things unverifiable” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, pp. xvii-xix).
“A long-enduring and regrettable effect of the success of the Origin was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculations. 'Explanations' of the origin of structures, instincts, and mental aptitudes of all kinds, in terms of Darwinian principles, marked with Darwinian possibility but hopelessly unverifiable poured out from every research centre” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxi).
“As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution. But some recent remarks of evolutionists show that they think this unreasonable. This situation, where scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxii).
“To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxiv).
CHARLES TOWNES
Charles Townes (b. 1915) has a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 and has been a professor at Columbia University, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley.
“Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that ‘well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right.’ Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate--it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that’s why it has come out so specially” (Charles Townes, “Explore as Much as We Can,” UCBerkeley News, June 17, 2005).
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY (1895-1979)
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) had an M.D. from the University of Moscow. He was a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1950 Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, providing evidence for his view that an event in earth history caused a global geological catastrophe. He theorized that this event was a near collision from the earth and other planets. Velikovsky was an evolutionist, but what he challenged was the uniformitarian view of geology that has dominated science since Darwin’s day.
He was treated shabbily by Darwinian Inquisition.
“What must be called the scientific establishment rose in arms, not only against the new Velikovsky theories but against the man himself. Efforts were made to block the dissemination of Dr. Velikovsky’s ideas, and even to punish supporters of his investigations. Universities, scientific societies, publishing houses, the popular press were approached and threatened; social pressures and professional sanctions were invoked to control public opinion. There can be little doubt that in a totalitarian society, not only would Dr. Velikovsky’s reputation have been at stake, but also his right to pursue his enquiry, and perhaps his personal safety. As it was, the ‘establishment’ succeeded in building a wall of unfavorable sentiment around him: to thousands of scholars the name Velikovsky bears the taint of fantasy, science-fiction and publicity” (Alfred De Grazia, The Velikovsky Affair, 1966).
In his second book, Earth in Upheaval, the persistent Velikovsky provided evidence for a worldwide catastrophe. These included the existence of beds of fossilized terrestrial animals thousands of feet deep, the young age and rapid building of the mountain chains, and the global sedimentary rock formations. Velikovsky was not a Bible believer, but not only did he debunk Darwinian uniformitarianism, he inadvertently provided evidence for a global Flood. No wonder he was excommunicated by the scientific community.
WERNHER VON BRAUN (1912-1977)
Wernher von Braun (1912-77), a German rocket scientist, was the leading force behind the American Apollo moon mission.
Though he didn’t believe in a literal Genesis account of creation, von Braun did believe that God created the world and that it did not arise by a purely naturalistic process. He argued that the design of the world implies and requires a Designer, and he considered it unscientific to rule out a Creator just because we can’t “test” him scientifically. Von Braun published an article entitled “My Faith: A Space-age Scientist Tells Why He Must Believe in God.” This appeared in the American Weekly, February 10, 1963, and was republished in many other newspapers.
“Through science man strives to learn more of the mysteries of creation. Through religion he seeks to know the creator. Neither operates independently. It is as difficult for me to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. ... As we learn more and more about nature, we become more deeply impressed and humbled by its orderliness and unerring perfection.”
In 1972, von Braun made the following statement in a letter to the California State Board of Education. This was written to encourage the inclusion of intelligent design theories into the public school classrooms. Because of Darwinism’s elitist mentality and fear of challenge, von Braun’s wise counsel was ignored.
“For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without evoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all. In the world round us, we can behold the obvious manifestations of an ordered, structured plan or design. We can see the will of the species to live and propagate. And we are humbled by the powerful forces at work on a galactic scale, and the purposeful orderliness of nature that endows a tiny and ungainly seed with the ability to develop into a beautiful flower. The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based. ...
While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion--that everything in the universe happened by chance--would violate the very objectivity of science itself. Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system or the human eye?
Some people say that science has been unable to prove the existence of a Designer. They admit that many of the miracles in the world around us are hard to understand, and they do not deny that the universe, as modern science sees it, is indeed a far more wondrous thing than the creation medieval man could perceive. But they still maintain that since science has provided us with so many answers the day will soon arrive when we will be able to understand even the creation of the fundamental laws of nature without a Divine intent. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?
Many men who are intelligent and of good faith say they cannot visualize a Designer. Well, can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him? I am afraid that, although they really do not understand the electron either, they are ready to accept it because they managed to produce a rather clumsy mechanical model of it borrowed from rather limited experience in other fields, but they would not know how to begin building a model of God.
I have discussed the aspect of a Designer at some length because it might be that the primary resistance to acknowledging the “Case for Design” as a viable scientific alternative to the current “Case for Chance” lies in the inconceivability, in some scientists’ minds, of a Designer. The inconceivability of some ultimate issue (which will always lie outside scientific resolution) should not be allowed to rule out any theory that explains the interrelationship of observed data and is useful for prediction.
We in NASA were often asked what the real reason was for the amazing string of successes we had with our Apollo flights to the Moon. I think the only honest answer we could give was that we tried to never overlook anything. It is in that same sense of scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happened by chance (http://www.creationsafaris.com/wgcs_4vonbraun.htm).
In 1961, von Braun said,
“But I can’t help feeling at the same time that this space effort of ours is bigger even than a rivalry between the United States and Russia. The heavens beyond us are enormous beyond comprehension, and the further we penetrate them, the greater will be our human understanding of the great universal purpose, the Divine Will itself” (This Week Magazine, Jan. 1, 1961).
Thus, the world’s top rocket scientist who was the leading mind behind putting men on the moon was operating from and motivated by a perspective of theism rather than that of evolutionary atheism. It proved to be no discernible drag on his impressive scientific achievements.
“A 2005 poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research found that 60% of American medical doctors reject Darwinism, stating that they do not believe humans evolved through natural processes alone. Thirty-eight percent of the American medical doctors polled agreed with the statement that ‘Humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement.’ The study also reported that 1/3 of all medical doctors favor the theory of intelligent design over evolution. ... The prestigious journal Science reported the following in 2006 concerning the United States: ‘The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year.’ In January 2006, the BBC reported concerning Britain: ‘Just under half of Britons accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life, according to an opinion poll. Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design (ID) should be taught in school science lessons’” (“Evolution,” Conservapedia).
The following scientists do not hold to biblical creationism. In fact, some of them are strongly opposed to creationism. They hold to the long age of the universe. Some hold to theistic evolution and interpret Genesis 1-3 poetically, while others believe only in an undefined Higher Power or Designer.
But they criticize major aspects of Darwinian evolution and propose that Intelligence must be behind the universe. Many of these have been persecuted by the Darwinian establishment for daring to challenge its dogmas.
“Darwin's strongest critics were scientists, and the theologians who criticized him objected mainly to his philosophical insistence on natural causes and his denial of design--which Princeton's Charles Hodge regarded as ‘tantamount to atheism.’ Even today, many critics of Darwinism are not religious fundamentalists, and a growing number of critics are credentialed scientists” (Jonathan Wells, “The Problem of Evidence,” Forbes, Feb. 5, 2009).
“A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these ‘experts’ have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully” (Wolfgang Smith, cited from Ian Taylor, Origins Answer Book, p. 107).
“Scientists at the forefront of inquiry have put the knife to classical Darwinism, They have not gone public with this news, but have kept it in their technical papers and inner counsels” (William Fix, The Bone Peddlers, p. 180).
Consider some examples:
MICHAEL BEHE
Michael Behe, Ph.D. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania, is a theistic evolutionist who does not believe that Darwinian evolution can explain the origin of life. In Darwin’s Black Box and Signature of the Cell, Behe presents the case that at the micro level life is “irreducibly complex” and thus points to “intelligent design.”
Behe delves into the amazing mysteries of DNA and the other biological machinery of the living cell and refutes naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. He deals with current origin of life theories, including RNA first.
“It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple. That expectation has been smashed. ... the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science’s attempt to explain their origins. ... Many scientists have gamely asserted that explanations are already in hand, or will be sooner or later, but no support for such assertions can be found in the professional science literature. ...
“Over the past four decades modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell. The progress has been hard won. It has required tens of thousands of people to dedicate the better parts of their lives to the tedious work of the laboratory. ... The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell--to investigate life at the molecular level--is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. ...
“This triumph of science should evoke cries of ‘Eureka!’ from ten thousands of throats, should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even ben an excuse to take a day off. But no bottles have been uncorked, no hands slapped. Instead, a curious, embarrassed silence surrounds the stark complexity of the cell. When the subject comes up in public, feet start to shuffle, and breathing gets a bit labored. In private people are a bit more relaxed; many explicitly admit the obvious but then stare at the ground, shake their heads, and let it go at that” (Darwin’s Black Box, preface, chapter 11).
Behe concludes that “just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry.”
He documents the fact that “over the past 130 years Darwinism, although secularly entrenched, has met a steady stream of dissent both from within the scientific community and from without it.”
He makes this bold statement:
“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature--in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books--that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.”
Behe sites “a raft of evolutionary biologists [who] examining whole organisms wonder just how Darwinism can account for their observations.”
For example, he quotes Paleontologist Niles Eldredge: “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. ... Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else.”
He quotes biologists Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders: “... the success of the [neo-Darwinian synthesis] are limited to the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place.”
He quotes biologist Jerry Coyne: “We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak.”
He quotes geneticist John Endler: “Although much is known about mutation, it is still largely a ‘black box’ relative to evolution. Novel biochemical functions seem to be rare in evolution, and the basis for their origin is virtually unknown.”
He quotes Klaus Dose: “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”
Behe examines biology textbooks and how they deal with evolution and concludes:
“Many students learn from their textbooks how to view the world through an evolutionary lens. However, they do not learn how Darwinian evolution might have produced any of the remarkably intricate biochemical systems that those texts describe.”
Behe gives six reasons why he believes that intelligent design is science: (1) The case for ID is based on empirical evidence. (2) Advocates of ID use established scientific methods. (3) ID is a testable theory. (4) The case for ID exemplifies historical scientific reasoning. (5) ID addresses a specific question in evolutionary biology (e.g., origin of life theories). (6) ID is supported by peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Behe is not a biblical creationist. He believes that the earth is billions of years old and accepts some form of evolutionary common descent.
“For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world” (Darwin’s Black Box, chapter 1, “Lilliputian Biology”).
In spite of this deep sympathy and personal identity with evolutionary thinking, Behe has been treated like a moron and an apostate by the evolutionary establishment because he has had the audacity to suggest that Darwinism can’t explain life itself.
WOLF-EKKEHARD LÖNNIG
“Meet Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a brilliant scientist who worked at the Max-Planck Institute until his retirement. Though he has written four books on the subject of evolution, he has infuriated evolutionists everywhere by daring to challenge Neo-Darwinism on scientific grounds. He told the Diplomacy Post in March 2014: ‘A scientific hypothesis should be potentially falsifiable.... However,’ he added, ‘the idea of slow evolution by 'infinitesimally small inherited variations' etc. has been falsified by the findings of palaeontology... as well [as] genetics. Yet its adherents principally reject any scientific proof against Neo-Darwinism,’ he said, ‘so that, in fact, their theory has become a non-falsifiable worldview, to which people stick in spite of all contrary evidence.’ Scientists continue to support evolution despite the evidence that actually falsified evolution because ‘without Darwinism, philosophic materialism has lost its battle against an intelligent origin of the world.’ But Wolf had more to say. ‘According to Neo-Darwinism, all important problems of the origin of species are, at least in principle, solved. Further questions on the validity of evolutionary theory are thus basically superfluous. However, such a dogmatic attitude stops further investigations and hinders fruitful research in science.’ Though Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has stopped short of giving recognition to God as the Intelligent Designer, we applaud his work for showing that evolution doesn't even deserve to be called scientific” (CreationMoments.com, Mar. 25, 2015).
DAVID BERLINSKI
David Berlinski (b. 1942) has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics and has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the University of Paris, and elsewhere. He is a “secular Jew and an agnostic.”
In The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski exposes the weakness of Darwinism and reproves the dogmatism and censorship of the Darwinian establishment. One reviewer says:
“This book is so well written that superlatives seem inadequate. Berlinski begins by stating that he is not religious and has no particular religious axe to grind. He is a mathematician and scientist. Yet he skewers science in general, and Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris in particular with well-reasoned argument, simple yet cogent analysis, and more humor than I would have thought possible for this subject. Berlinksi makes it clear that he in no way means to disparage or belittle Science. He is only trying to show how Science has been twisted by The Four Horsemen in an attempt to prove an anti-religious point of view, and how that twisting promises so much and delivers so little.”
Another reviewer says:
“Any book by David Berlinski is bound to be fun. He is simply one of the most erudite writers in popular science and mathematics today. Those who particularly like seeing sacred cows treated with a hint of sarcasm and irreverence will enjoy his writing on almost any subject, but this book, attacking the "new atheism" as it does, is especially delightful if for no other reason than for how pompous writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchins are in their approach to this subject. In brief, Berlinski's argument boils down to three main points: there is nothing in science proper that undermines religion (a point that used to be widely recognized and even extolled by writers like SJ Gould), most of the new atheists badly misunderstand even the most rudimentary arguments of theology and are not logically consistent, and finally that much of science has become rather dogmatic, like a new religion.:”
Following are some quotes:
“If science stands opposed to religion, it is not because of anything contained in either the premises or the conclusions of the great scientific theories. ... We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging form a ‘warm little pond.’ The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. xiv, xv).
“The hypothesis that we are nothing more than cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community. Figures as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Jacques Monod, Steven Weinberg, and Richard Dawkins have said it is so. It is an article of their faith, one advanced with the confidence of men convinced that nature has equipped them to face realities the rest of us cannot bear to contemplate. There is not the slightest reason to think this is so” (Berlinski, p. xvi).
“The Landscape has, after all, been brought into existence by assumption. It cannot be observed. It embodies an article of faith ... There are by now thousands of professional papers about the Landscape, and reading even a handful makes for the uneasy conviction that were physicists to stop writing about the place, the Landscape, like Atlantis, would stop existing--just like that. This cannot be said of the sun” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. 119, 128)
“[The string theory] was an idea that possessed every advantage except clarity, elegance, and a demonstrated connection to reality” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 119).
“After all, the theologian need only appeal to a single God lording over it all and a single universe--our own. Dawkins must appeal to an infinitely many universes crammed into creation, with laws of nature wriggling indiscreetly and fundamental physical parameters changing as one travels from one corner of the cosmos to the next, the whole entire gargantuan structure scientifically unobservable and devoid of any connection to experience” (The Devil’s Delusion, p. 153).
“After years of punishing trials, a few of them have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their signs at one another. ... Simian social structures are often intricate. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas reason; they form plans; they have preferences; they are cunning; they have passions and desires; and they suffer. The same is true of cats, I might add. In much of this, we see ourselves. But beyond what we have in common with the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting, the differences are profound” (The Devil’s Delusion, p. 156).
“Mind is like no other property of physical systems. It is not just that we don’t know the mechanisms that give rise to it. We have difficulty in seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it” (Erich Harth, physicist, cited by David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 175)
“Within the English-speaking world, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You’ve got to be kidding, right?” (Berlinski, p. 186).
“Suspicions about Darwin’s theory arise for two reasons. The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by little evidence” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 187).
“This is the conclusion suggested by more than six thousand years of artificial selection, the practice of barnyard and backyard alike. Nothing can induce a chicken to lay a square egg or to persuade a pig to develop wheels mounted on ball bearings. It would be a violation, as chickens and pigs are prompt to observe and often with indignation, of their essential nature. If species have an essential nature that beyond limits cannot change, then random variations and natural selection cannot change them. We must look elsewhere for an account that does justice to their nature or to the facts” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 189).
“Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not” (Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 190).
“The [Darwinian] theory is what it always was: It is unpersuasive. Among evolutionary biologists, these matters are well known. In the privacy of the Susan B. Anthony faculty lounge, they often tell one another with relief that it is a very good thing the public has no idea what the research literature really suggests. ‘Darwin?’ a Nobel laureate in biology once remarked to me over his bifocals. ‘That’s just the party line’” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 192).
“By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? ... The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation” (David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion, pp. 205, 207).
The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2010) features 32 essays spanning 15 years, including his award winning essays “What Brings a World into Being?” and “On the Origins of Mind” (Best American Science Writing 2002, 2005). Berlinski states in the title essay:
“The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin’s theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead ...
“The structures of life are complex, and complex structures get made in this, the purely human world, only by a process of deliberate design. An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different? ...
“For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin's doctrine.”
I. L. COHEN
Cohen is a mathematician and researcher, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and an officer of the Archaeological Institute of America.
“Micro mutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical, theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what happened in biology ... I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science” (cited in Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, 1987, p. 422).
“... it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end -- no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers. ... if in the process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside superintelligence is the solution to our quandary, then let’s cut the umbilical cord that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us back” (Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities, 1984, pp. 214, 215).
“… every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary and it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong” (Darwin Was Wrong, p. 209).
“The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science” (Darwin Was Wrong, p. 210).
FRANCIS CRICK
Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize as the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix shape and its properties of containing and transferring information. Though he was an atheist and an evolutionist who once said Christianity should not be taught to children, the complexity of the living cell convinced him that the evolution of life from inanimate matter would require a miracle.
In his 1981 book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature he wrote:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (p. 88).
Crick rejected Darwinism by concluding that there is no scientific evidence of a “primordial soup” in which life could have risen. He also stated that the beginning of the fossil record does not show evolution. Instead, it witnesses the sudden appearance of complex creatures.
Crick theorized that life began somewhere in outer space and was transported to earth by alien life forms using space travel technology. He called this “Directed Panspermia.”
“Directed Panspermia -- postulates that the roots of our form of life go back to another place in the universe, almost certainly another planet; that it had reached a very advanced form there before anything much had started here; and that life here was seeded by microorganisms sent on some form of spaceship by an advanced civilization” (Life Itself, p. 141).
PAUL DAVIES
Paul Davies (b. 1946) has a Ph.D. in physics from the University College London and did post-doctoral studies under Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on cosmology, theoretical physics, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He has taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Adelaide and currently is a professor at Arizona State University. He is the recipient of the Templeton Prize (1995), Kelvin Medal (2001), and the Faraday Prize (2002).
He doesn’t believe in biblical creation, but he does believe that life is too complicated and perfectly arranged to have happened by chance. He develops this in his 2007 book The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?
“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. ... It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. ... The impression of design is overwhelming” (Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability Tt Order the Universe, 1988, p. 203).
“Had this exceedingly delicate tuning of values been even slightly upset, the subsequent structure of the universe would have been totally different. ... Extraordinary physical coincidences and apparently accidental cooperation ... offer compelling evidence that something is 'going on.' . . . A hidden principle seems to be at work” (Davies, The Accidental Universe, pp. 90, 110).
MAREK DEMIANSKI
Marek Demianski is a Polish cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw and is a professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Warsaw. He is Co-Principal Investigator in two European consortia preparing the Planck Surveyor mission.
“Somebody had to tune [the universe] very precisely” (Science News, Sept. 3, 1983, p. 152).
MICHAEL DENTON
Michael Denton (b. 1943) has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from King’s College London. He is Senior Research Fellow in molecular biology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. In Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Denton argued that natural selection and mutations cannot explain life.
“It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. ... It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate” (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1986, p. 32).
“Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small ... each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world" (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis).
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle” (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 264).
It is alleged by evolutionary propagandists that Denton changed his views after the publication of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, yet the fact is that he has always been an evolutionist and anti-creationist, but he still believes that Darwinianism is faulty and that an unidentified intelligence guided the process of evolution.
In a 1995 interview, Denton made the following statement:
“I think the current Darwinian picture is insufficient. I don’t think it gives a credible and comprehensive explanation of how the pattern of life on earth emerged. ... The theory of evolution permeates much of our thinking now in the Western world. I think there are problems with the current Darwinian world, and they should be discussed. ... My fundamental problem with the theory is that there are so many highly complicated organs, systems and structures, from the nature of the lung of a bird, to the eye of the rock lobster, for which I cannot conceive of how these things have come about in terms of a gradual accumulation of random changes. It strikes me as being a flagrant denial of common sense to swallow that all these things were built up by accumulative small random changes. This is simply a nonsensical claim, especially for the great majority of cases, where nobody can think of any credible explanation of how it came about. And this is a very profound question which everybody skirts, everybody brushes over, everybody tries to sweep under the carpet” (An interview with Michael Denton, Access Research Network, Vol. 15. No. 2, 1995; the interview was produced in conjunction with the University of California and was the first in a series of interviews with noted scientists and educators entitled Focus on Darwinism).
Answers in Genesis contacted Dr. Denton in 1999 and he assured them that the quotes from the 1995 interview represented his current view (“Blown Away by Design,” Creation, September 1999).
His 2002 book Nature’s Destiny continues to argue for intelligent design. The subtitle is “How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.” The following quote should leave no doubt about this:
“All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology--that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact” (p. 389).
FREEMAN DYSON
Freeman Dyson (b. 1923) is a renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for work in nuclear engineering and solid-state physics. He is the recipient of the Heineman Prize (1965), the Wolf Prize (1981), the Templeton Prize (2000), and the Pomeranchuk Prize (2003). He worked on the Orion Project, which studied the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion, and led the design team for TRIGA, a small, safe nuclear reactor that produces isotopes and medical and research use.
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming” (Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 1979, p. 250).
“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together for our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we are coming” (Freeman Dyson, “Energy in the Universe,” Scientific American, 1971, p. 59).
ANTONY FLEW
Antony Flew (1923-2010) was a British philosopher and a famous atheist who converted to “Deism” in 2004. In 2004 he published There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.
“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design” (Dr. Antony Flew, “Atheist Becomes Theist,” interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew by Gary Habermas, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005).
JERRY FODOR
In What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), Jerry Fodor and Massimo Platelli-Palmarini critique neo-Darwinism from the perspective of atheism.
Publishers Weekly says:
“The authors of this scattershot treatise believe in evolution, but think that the Darwinian model of adaptationism—that random genetic mutations, filtered by natural selection, produce traits that enhance fitness for a particular biological niche—is fatally flawed. Philosopher Fodor and molecular-biologist-turned-cognitive-scientist Piattelli-Palmarini, at the University of Arizona, launch a three-pronged attack (which drew fire when Fodor presented their ideas in the London Review of Books in 2007). ... Their most persuasive, and engaging, criticism is that evolutionary theory is just tautological truisms and historical narratives of how creatures came to be.”
A Booklist review by Ray Olson says:
“Remaining staunchly atheist all the while, philosopher Fodor and cognitive scientist Piattelli-Palmarini challenge Darwinism more effectively than the entire creationist/intelligent-design movement has. Their short, deliberate, and—for readers consulting (and reconsulting) their dictionaries about the philosophical and scientific vocabulary the authors decline to dumb down—slow-reading tract lays out biological and conceptual arguments against natural selection. Natural selection as the driver of speciation has become decreasingly explanatory as research continues to appreciate the complexity of internal and external processes impinging on development. For one thing, inherent physical limitations of developing organisms nullify blind selection; adapt as they may, pigs will never grow wings. Conceptually, natural selection is faulty because it necessarily implies intentionality (selection is made by something), never mind that how something with adaptive effect is chosen is utterly elusive logically. There is a great deal more to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s arguments, which ordinary general readers won’t be able to articulate afterward but will gratefully refer others—and themselves—to again and again. Many may find this the hardest, absolutely essential reading they’ve ever done.”
DAVID GELERNTER
The following is excerpted from ‘Renowned Yale Computer Science Prof Leaves Darwinism,” The Stream, Aug. 21, 2019:
“David Gelernter isn’t someone you’d expect to reject Darwin. He lives and works at the heart of the intellectual establishment. He’s a renowned computer scientist at Yale University — the New York Times called him a ‘rock star’ — and served on the National Council on the Arts. He explained in a recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books why he no longer believes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He makes similar points in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson. Gelernter, who is famous for predicting the emergence of the World Wide Web, credits three books with changing his mind. One is Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer of The Discovery Institute. A second is The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays, by mathematician David Berlinski. A third is Debating Darwin’s Doubt, an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer. ...
“Perhaps the biggest flaw with Darwinism, he writes, is how hard it would be to randomly make new functional proteins. Darwinian evolution depends on a huge number of them. Our understanding of molecular biology developed after Darwin. His theory doesn’t fit well with this new understanding. Gelernter carefully reviews the evidence, and his article provides a very helpful short guide to the problem. He cites Douglas Axe, a distinguished scientist, who has calculated the chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore be preserved by natural selection, are only 1 in 1077. That’s just one of the many, many proteins needed for any organism. Gelernter summarizes the evidence. ‘Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is — so far — a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million — you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.’
“He has plenty of other problems with Darwinism. The last one he brings up is the (neo-)Darwinian belief that ‘gene mutations driv[e] macro-evolution.’ These can explain changes in existing forms, but not the development of new forms. The mutations are fatal, and the organism dies before it can reproduce. There are no examples of mutations that are not fatal. This Georgia Tech geneticist John F. McDonald calls ‘the great Darwinian paradox.’ ...
“Gelernter appeared in an interview in June with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, entitled ‘Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.’ Two of the authors he cites appeared along with him, Berlinski and Meyer. In the interview, Gelernter expanded on his article. He explained that it wasn’t the mathematics that challenged Darwin, it was that Darwin didn’t understand the biology. Meyer says we didn’t figure out that the possibilities of random molecules forming a meaningful protein are extraordinarily rare until the last couple of decades. Back in Darwin’s day, very little was known about molecular structure. Science has outgrown Darwin’s theory. ...
“Gelernter admits intelligent design is an ‘absolutely serious argument.’ It’s the ‘first, and obviously most intuitive one that comes to mind.’ It’s got to be dealt with intellectually. It can’t be dismissed with anti-religious bigotry. His colleagues have treated him courteously since he changed his position on this issue, he says. Still, for them Darwinism has passed beyond a scientific argument. ‘You take your life into your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you.’ He’s seen ‘nothing approaching free speech on this topic.’ It’s not a scientific or intellectual discussion. They think he’s attacking their ‘religion.’ Alas, he’s not hopeful that Darwinism will be phased out of academia anytime soon.”
RICHARD GOLDSCHMIDT
Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958), Ph.D. in zoology, was a pioneer geneticist. He described the nervous system of the nematode and the sex determination of the gypsy moth and experimented for decades with mutations in moths and fruit flies.
Through his research, Goldschidt came to the conclusion that Darwinian evolution by natural selection and the accumulation of gene mutations is unable to account for the origin of species. He wrote:
"In the best-known organisms, like Drosophila, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual, this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a [new] species in nature” ("Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist, "American Scientist, January 1952, p. 94).
In his 1940 book The Material Basis of Evolution, he wrote:
“This statement of the problem already indicates that I cannot agree with the viewpoint of the textbooks that the problem of evolution has been solved as far as the genetic basis is concerned. ... At this point in our discussion I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the translation of the gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, enidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given” (pp. 6, 7).
Refusing to give up on evolution, Goldschmidt invented “the hopeful monster” theory, hypothesizing that evolution takes place in giant leaps that are invisible in the fossil record and non-reproducible in the mutation laboratory.
But even though Goldschmidt never gave up on evolution, he was counted a traitor and a heretic by the evolutionary establishment because he questioned Darwinism publicly.
PIERRE-PAUL GRASSÉ
Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895-1985) was a distinguished French zoologist, editor of the influential 28-volume Traite de zoologie, ex-president of the French Academy of Sciences; Thomas Dobzhansky, in his book Evolution, said, “Grassé’s knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic.” Grassé was an evolutionist but he debunked Darwinian evolution as contrary to the facts of nature.
“Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs” (Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977, p. 8).
“Our ignorance is so great that we dare not even assign with any accuracy an ancestral stock to the phyla Protozoa, Arthopoda, Mollusca and Vertebrata. ... From the almost total absence of fossil evidence relative to the origins of the phyla, it follows that an explanation of the mechanism in the creative evolution of the fundamental plans is heavily burdened with hypothesis. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution” (pp. 17, 31).
FRED HOYLE
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was the director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. He was the recipient of the Royal Medal (1974), the Klumpke-Roberts Award (1977), the Crafoord Prize (1997), among others. He was snubbed for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 when his co-worker was awarded while his original contribution was overlooked. Hoyle rejected Darwinism but believed in evolution driven by alien intelligence.
Hoyle came to the conclusion that Darwinian evolution could not be true, because the universe is too complicated and orderly and the Darwinian theories aren’t supported by the evidence.
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that BIOMATERIALS WITH THEIR AMAZING MEASURE OR ORDER MUST BE THE OUTCOME OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. No other possibility I have been able to think of” (“Evolution from Space,” Omni Lecture, Royal Institution, London, January 12, 1982).
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question” (Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981).
“The fossil record is highly imperfect from a Darwinian point of view, not because of the inadequacies of geologists, but because the slow evolutionary connections required by the theory did not happen. Although paleontologists have recognized this truth for a century or more, they have not been able, in spite of their status as the acknowledged experts in the field, to make much of an impression on consensus opinion. ... Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well-known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle decisively on the theory” (Hoyle and Wickramasinghem, Evolution from Space, 1981, pp. 147, 148).
“... we hit a difficulty that knocked the stuffing out of us. No matter how large the environment one considers, the life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare ... The same is true for living material. As our ideas developed, a monstrous spectre kept beckoning. Just as the brain of Shakespeare was necessary to produce the famous plays, so prior information was necessary to produce a living cell” (Evolution from Space, p. 148).
“It is understandable that the biologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not appreciate the extreme chemical complexity of living systems. Without doing serious violence to the evidence it was then possible to think in terms of processes leading to the origin of life that were not much more subtle than those which take place naturally in the Earth’s crust, as for instance the geochemical processes which led to the formation of metallic ores. ... This was the situation in 1924 at the time of the work of A.I. Oparin, work that was widely acclaimed as putting the final nail in the coffin of the older religions. All of life (and death) could be seen, it was claimed, to spring from natural causes. With the development of microbiology in the second half of the twentieth century it became overwhelmingly clear that the truth is quite otherwise. Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed WHERE IT IS INSENSIBLY DIFFERENT FROM ZERO” (Evolution from Space, p. 3).
“Anyone with even a noodling acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the fiftieth power blind persons (standing shoulder to shoulder, these would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling (random variation) of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidence of nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon” (Hoyle, “The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, November 19, 1981, p. 527).
For these views, Hoyle was persecuted and ridiculed by the Darwinian establishment and is still treated as a nutcase. His intelligent design statistics, showing that the possibility of life evolving from nothing is comparable to a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747, has even labeled “Hoyle’s Fallacy.” The Wikipedia article on “Hoyle’s Fallacy” claims that Hoyle failed to “grasp how powerful a force natural selection can be.” Indeed, it must be exceedingly powerful to create everything out of nothing.
ROBERT JASTROW
Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) was an astronomer, physicist, and cosmologist. He had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University and joined NASA at its formation in 1958. He was the first chairman of the Lunar Exploration Committee and the founding director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was a self-professed agnostic, but he did not believe that science can answer the mysteries of life.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” (God and the Astronomers, 1978, p. 116).
VERA KISTIAKOWSKY
Vera Kistiakowsky (b. 1928) has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California. She was a professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science until her retirement in 1994. She is the daughter of renowned physicist George Kistiakowsky (d. 1982), who worked on the Manhattan Project and developed a trigger for the first hydrogen bomb.
“The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine” (Vera Kistiakowsky, cited by H. Margenau and R. A. Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, and Theos, 1992, p. 52).
SØREN LØVTRUP
Søren Løvtrup is a Swedish biologist. He authored Epigenetics: A Treatise on Theoretical Biology (1974) and The Phylogeny of Vertebrata (1977). Løvtrup is an evolutionist but he does not believe that natural selection and mutations can explain life. He presented his refutation of Darwinianism in his 1987 book Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth.
“I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science” (Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, 1987).
“... the reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous” (Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, p. 275).
NORMAN MACBETH
Macbeth (J.D., Harvard Law School), published Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (1971) after making the study of Darwinism his avocation for many years. He attended private monthly meetings of experts at the American Museum of Natural History, where evolutionists freely acknowledged the problems of evolution (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ435.html). Macbeth says that “any fool can see that evolution died years ago.”
One reviewer described the book as follows:
“He does not appeal to any religious authority to contradict Darwinism, nor does he reject the idea of evolution in toto. Rather, he finds the evidence and arguments for Darwinism to be deeply flawed. Questions are begged, evidence is fudged, and extrapolations are unwarranted. This is a thoughtful and fair critique well worth reading. Let me end with a quote from the author: ‘Any profession [he has biology in mind] that does not supply its own criticism and iconoclasm will discover that someone else will do the job, and usually in a way it does not like.’”
Macbeth also published Darwinism: A Time for Funerals (1982), which is a booklet of interviews about the weakness of the Darwinian theory.
Macbeth exposes the censorship of anti-Darwinian thought in the evolutionary establishment. In A Time for Funerals, he gives the example of a department head in an “Ivy League College” cutting out an article containing a critical analysis of Selection Theory from a book in the college library. After admitting responsibility, the professor said: “Well, of course, I don’t believe in censorship in any form, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of my students reading that article.”
RICHARD MILTON
Richard Milton (b. 1943) is a science journalist and design engineer and a member of Mensa, the high-IQ organization. He has been a member of the Geologists’ Association for over 30 years. He is not a creationist and in fact claims to have no religious faith, believing rather in the evolution of life by some process over millions of years.
He has debunked Darwinian evolution, though, in the strongest terms. In Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (1992), Milton claims that the evidence supporting the Darwinian theory of evolution is mythical. He calls the British Museum of Natural History “a kind of headquarters for Darwinism” and says that he has “been unable to see with my own eyes the decisive evidence for the general theory of evolution” (p. 3).
He calls Darwinism “the urban myth” with many faces and says there is “the myth of radiometric dating; the myth of uniformitarian geology; the myth of gradualist fossil record; the myth of beneficial mutations, the myth of natural selection; the myth that evolution is blind; the myth of the beak of the finch; the myth of the biogenetic law; the myth of vestigial organs; the myth of homology; the myth of the ‘missing link’” (p. 272).
He charges Darwinism with promoting speculation and faulty data.
“I am seriously concerned, on purely rational grounds, that generations of school and university teachers have been led to accept speculation as scientific theory and faulty data as scientific fact; that this process has accumulated a mountainous catalog of mingled fact and fiction that can no longer be contained by the sparsely elegant theory; and that it is high time that the theory was taken out of its ornate Victorian glass cabinet and examined with a fresh and skeptical eye” (p. 4).
He begins by exposing the lack of absolute science supporting the evolutionary dating methods and the doctrine of geological uniformitarianism. He observes,
“... it was the imperative need for great antiquity that deposed catastrophism, rather than any new scientific discoveries or observations; it was a new way of looking at things, not a new piece of knowledge. ... Darwinists needed time, and lots of it: uniformitarians had the geological theory that demonstrated great antiquity. ... Thus an unusual academic interdependence sprang up between the two sciences that continues to this day. A geologist wishing to date a rock stratum would ask an evolutionist’s opinion on the fossils it contained. An evolutionist having difficulty dating a fossil species would turn to the geologist for help. Fossils were used to date rocks: rocks were used to date fossils” (p. 28).
Milton observes that “if even one hundredth part of the evidence presented in this book is correct, then it will be obvious to any thinking person that there is a huge question mark hanging over the central issues of the life science” (p. 273).
Milton has been attacked fiercely by Darwinists. In his review of Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, Oxford University atheist Richard Dawkins devoted two-thirds of the review to attacking the publisher for daring to print a book criticizing Darwinism and the other third to assassinating Milton’s character. Dawkins said the book is “loony,” “stupid,” “drivel,” and referred to Milton as a “harmless fruitcake” who “needs psychiatric help” (Shattering the Myths, pp. ix, x).
Dawkins has tried to have Milton blacklisted so that his scientific writings cannot be published. He has lied about him, calling him a “secret creationist.” He was effective in having the Times Higher Educational Supplement stop publication of one of Milton’s articles.
Milton describes one group of Darwinist vigilantes who use the Internet to attack those they find guilty of promoting the heresy of intelligent design. They call themselves “howler monkeys.” Milton says, “The effects of the howler monkeys of the Internet are profoundly damaging to academic freedom of expression, whoever their current victim happens to be” (p. 270).
Because of the Darwinist gestapo led by the likes of Richard Dawkins, the field of biology has been likened to “working in Russia under Brehznev.” “Many biologists have one set of beliefs at work, their official beliefs, and another set, their real beliefs, which they can speak openly about only among friends” (Rupert Sheldrake, cited by Milton, p 274).
JOHN A. O’KEEFE
John O’Keefe (1916-2000) was a planetary scientist with NASA from 1958-95. He was a leader in the development of the lunar space program.
“We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in” (John O’Keefe, cited by F. Heeren, Show Me God, 1995, p. 200).
ARNO PENZIAS
Arno Penzias (b. 1933) has a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He worked for Bell Laboratories and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978 for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which is used as evidence for the Big Bang.
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan” (Penzias, The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1979).
MICHAEL PITMAN
Michael Pitman was a chemistry professor at Cambridge. In his book Adam and Evolution, he documents his critique of and rejection of Darwinian evolution. He says:
“I started as devil’s advocate for the creationist view and came, in principle, though not to any particular creed, to prefer it. ... the direction of the argument is clear -- there has been neither chemical evolution nor macro-evolution” (p. 254).
Pitman takes doctrinaire evolutionists to task for pretending that their theories are based on proven science.
“But I hope I have shown that apparently convincing arguments in support of a belief can often be seen to be either based on insufficient data or open to more than one interpretation; and that much of what passes for science is no more and no less emotional, illogical and idiosyncratic than many of the opposing arguments. Science, useful as it is, does not explain a host of things; nor is all that it does not explain false. ... A man’s gospel is his business: that he teaches evolution as holy writ in television series or in schools and colleges--with no alternatives properly considered--is a more serious matter” (Adam and Evolution, p. 254).
Pitman also condemns the evolutionary establishment for suppressing debate on this subject.
“Presenting one viewpoint exclusively is faulty teaching. Our descendants will marvel at the attempts of the neo-Darwinian lobby to suppress alternative inquiry, as we today marvel at the power of churchmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Adam and Evolution, p. 255).
The book begins with an overview of Darwin’s teaching and of the neo-Darwinian theory developed in the 20th century, which added chemical evolution, mutations, and genetic relationships to Darwinian natural selection as mechanisms of evolution.
The book critiques the major evidences that are put forth as support for evolution: the fossil record, natural selection, the doctrine of species, homology, cladistics, genetic mutations.
For example, Pitman describes the fruit fly experiments and shows that they actually disprove evolution:
“Morgan, Goldschmidt, Muller and other geneticists have subjected generations of fruit flies to extreme conditions of heat, cold, light, dark and treatment by chemicals and radiation. All sorts of mutations, practically all trivial or positively deleterious, have been produced. Man-made evolution? Not really: few of the geneticists’ monsters could have survived outside the bottles they were bred in. In practice, mutants die, are sterile or tend to revert to the wild-type” (Adam and Evolution, p. 70).
Pitman brilliantly develops the argument from design:
“‘We do not believe in the theory of special creation because it is incredible.’ In this way Sir Arthur Keith, a distinguished anatomist of the 1930s, echoed the rationalist feeling. But life itself is incredible, starting with every cell of every organ of every organism that Sir Arthur investigated. ... there is no evidence that, left to itself with whatever start it had over man, chance could evolve machines for work like men do, even the soft biological machinery of life. The creationist stops haggling over terms and looks for the designer. Through any but blinkered eyes the biological world shows clear signs of planning and order. It is not the order that constitutes a crystal, but a more complex order--the kind revealed in a developing seed or a growing embryo--the kind that, in any other context, we would unhesitatingly think of in terms of ingenuity and deliberate design” (Adam and Evolution, pp. 26, 27).
Pitman examines the living cell and its machinery, the human eye, the bird, the flying insect, metamorphosis, the bat’s radar. For example, he asks how evolution could possibly explain metamorphosis:
“Within this dry shell the organs of the caterpillar are dissolved and reduced to pulp. Breathing tubes, muscles and nerves disappear as such; the creature seems to have died. But processes are in operation which remould that pulp into different, coordinating parts, and in due course the insect, which has not grown up or developed in any normal sense, re-emerges as a beautiful, adult butterfly. It is a kind of resurrection. Certainly it demonstrates the absurdity of invoking natural selection by successive mutation to explain such an obviously, yet subtly programmed, process. Why, on that basis, should the ancestral insect have survived the mutations that projected it into the chrysalid stage, from which it could not yet develop into an adult? Where was natural selection then? How could pre-programmed metamorphosis, in insect, amphibian or crustacean, ever have evolved by chance? Indeed, how could development have evolved piece-meal? The ball is in the evolutionist’s court, tangled in a net of inexplicability” (Adam and Evolution, p. 71).
HOLMES ROLSTON
Holmes Rolston (b. 1932) earned a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. He is professor of philosophy at Colorado State University. He received the Templeton Prize in 2003.
“The physical world is--shades of Bishop Paley!--looking like a fine-tuned watch again, and this time many quantitative calculations support the argument. The forms that matter and energy take seem strangely suited to their destiny” (“Shaken Atheism: A Look at the Fine-Tuned University,” The Christian Century, Dec. 3, 1986).
ALAN SANDAGE
Allan Sandage (1926-2010) earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He was a graduate student assistant to Edwin Hubble, of Hubble Telescope fame. He has received the National Medal of Science (1970), the Crafoord Prize in astronomy (1991), among many other prestigious awards.
“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing” (Alan Sandage, cited by J. N. Willford, “Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomer’s Quest,” New York Times, March 12, 1991, p. B9).
“The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle--an architect” (“A Scientist Reflects on Religious Belief,” Truth, vol. 1, 1985, p. 54).
HENRY SCHAEFER
Henry Schaefer, III (b. 1944) has a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford University. He is Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a signer of A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.
“The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan” (Henry Schaefer, cited by J. Sheler and J. Schrof, “The Creation,” U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991).
ARTHUR SCHAWLOW
Arthur Schawlow (1921-1999) had a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Toronto. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 and was one of the creators of the laser. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1961-96:
“It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. ... I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life” (Arthur Schawlow, cited by Henry Margenau and Roy Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, and Theos, 1992).
ROBERT SHAPIRO
Richard Shapiro, an atheist and an evolutionist, is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University. He has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard and postdoctoral training in DNA chemistry at Cambridge.
In Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986), Shapiro argues that life is too complex to have evolved through any known evolutionary process. He criticizes the major origin of life icons used by evolutionists, such as the Miller Experiment and the RNA-first theory.
The Washington Monthly review says:
“To the skeptical eye of Shapiro, explanations that have been offered look more like mythology than like science. ... The debate, as Shapiro presents it, is rife with speculations presented too forcefully, with inconclusive data put forward as definitive evidence and with explanations that look very much like Creation myths.”
The New Yorker says:
“He shifts through the various hypotheses about the origin of life and demonstrates that most are scientifically implausible or are simply forms of creation myth, sometimes in the guise of science.”
Shapiro writes:
“The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle” (Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide).
In spite of 150 years of evidence that Darwinian evolution is not true and Shapiro’s acknowledgement that it has failed to be proven scientifically, he holds steadfastly to evolutionary and naturalistic explanations of life. In fact, he says that even if evolution is totally disproven, he will not look to religion for answers. He writes:
“Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin for life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or process leading to life, elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder” (Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide).
This is not a scientific approach; it is willful blindness. There is no scientific reason whatsoever to rule out God from the universe. In fact, many top notch scientists have believed that the universe is evidence for God.
WOLFGANG SMITH (b. 1930)
Wolfgang Smith (b. 1930) has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University. He researched the problem of atmospheric reentry for Bell Laboratories. He has been a mathematics professor at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University.
“The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings created themselves, which is, in essence, a metaphysical claim. ... Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb” (Teilhardism and the New Religion, p. 24).
LEE SPETNER
Lee Spetner received a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1950. He worked with the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University from 1951-70. His book Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution was published in 1997.
“Despite the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is a fact, it is really no more than an improbable story. No one has ever shown that macroevolution can work. Most evolutionists assume that macroevolution is just a long sequence of microevolutionary events, but no one has ever shown it to be so” (“Lee Spetner/Edward Max Dialogue,” 2001, The True Origin Archive).
“But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it. ... Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time. The neo-Darwinians would like us to believe that large evolutionary changes can result from a series of small events if there are enough of them. But if these events all lose information they can’t be the steps in the kind of evolution the NDT is supposed to explain, no matter how many mutations there are. Whoever thinks macroevolution can be made by mutations that lose information is like the merchant who lost a little money on every sale but thought he could make it up in volume. ... Not even one mutation has been observed that adds a little information to the genome. That surely shows that there are not the millions upon millions of potential mutations the theory demands. There may well not be any. The failure to observe even one mutation that adds information is more than just a failure to find support for the theory. It is evidence against the theory” (Not By Chance, 1997, pp. 131, 132, 159 160).
DAVID STOVE
David Stove (1927-94) was an Australian philosopher, educator, and author. He taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney.
He claimed to be “of no religion” and believed in evolution in general, but he rejected Darwin’s teaching on the evolution of man.
In Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution, Stove showed that Darwin’s principle of natural selection, which is a foundational part of his theory, is not applicable to human society.
He called Darwinism “a mere festering mass of errors” and “ridiculous slanders on our species.”
In his review of the book, Martin Gardner says, “Whatever your opinion of ‘Intelligent Design,’ you’ll find Stove’s criticism of what he calls ‘Darwinism’ difficult to stop reading. Stove’s blistering attack on Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book.”
Consider the following sharp refutation of the Darwinian survival of the fittest doctrine:
“But no tribe of humans could possibly exist on those terms [natural selection, survival of the fittest]. Such a tribe could not even raise a second generation: the helplessness of the human young is too extreme and prolonged” (p. 5).
“Huxley should not have needed Darwinism to tell him--since any intelligent child of about eight could have told him--that in a ‘continual free fight of each other against all’ there would soon be no children, no women, and hence, no men. In other words, that the human race could not possibly exist now, unless cooperation had always been stronger than competition, both between women and their children, and between men and the children and women whom they protect and provide for” (p. 9).
Stove had no patience for doctrinaire Darwinists, as the following quote illustrates:
“Such cases, I need hardly say, never bother armor-plated neo-Darwinians. But then no cases, possible or even actual, ever do bother them. ... In neo-Darwinism’s house there are many mansions: so many, indeed, that if a certain awkward fact will not fit into one mansion, there is sure to be another one into which it will fit to admiration” (p. 39).
WILLIAM R. THOMPSON
William Thompson (1887-1972) was Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada
“... it does appear to me, in the first place, that Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce paleontological evidence sufficient to prove his views but that the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different today. The modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible, are in the nature of things unverifiable” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, pp. xvii-xix).
“A long-enduring and regrettable effect of the success of the Origin was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculations. 'Explanations' of the origin of structures, instincts, and mental aptitudes of all kinds, in terms of Darwinian principles, marked with Darwinian possibility but hopelessly unverifiable poured out from every research centre” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxi).
“As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution. But some recent remarks of evolutionists show that they think this unreasonable. This situation, where scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxii).
“To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion” (Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition, 1956, p. xxiv).
CHARLES TOWNES
Charles Townes (b. 1915) has a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 and has been a professor at Columbia University, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley.
“Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that ‘well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right.’ Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate--it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that’s why it has come out so specially” (Charles Townes, “Explore as Much as We Can,” UCBerkeley News, June 17, 2005).
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY (1895-1979)
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) had an M.D. from the University of Moscow. He was a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1950 Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, providing evidence for his view that an event in earth history caused a global geological catastrophe. He theorized that this event was a near collision from the earth and other planets. Velikovsky was an evolutionist, but what he challenged was the uniformitarian view of geology that has dominated science since Darwin’s day.
He was treated shabbily by Darwinian Inquisition.
“What must be called the scientific establishment rose in arms, not only against the new Velikovsky theories but against the man himself. Efforts were made to block the dissemination of Dr. Velikovsky’s ideas, and even to punish supporters of his investigations. Universities, scientific societies, publishing houses, the popular press were approached and threatened; social pressures and professional sanctions were invoked to control public opinion. There can be little doubt that in a totalitarian society, not only would Dr. Velikovsky’s reputation have been at stake, but also his right to pursue his enquiry, and perhaps his personal safety. As it was, the ‘establishment’ succeeded in building a wall of unfavorable sentiment around him: to thousands of scholars the name Velikovsky bears the taint of fantasy, science-fiction and publicity” (Alfred De Grazia, The Velikovsky Affair, 1966).
In his second book, Earth in Upheaval, the persistent Velikovsky provided evidence for a worldwide catastrophe. These included the existence of beds of fossilized terrestrial animals thousands of feet deep, the young age and rapid building of the mountain chains, and the global sedimentary rock formations. Velikovsky was not a Bible believer, but not only did he debunk Darwinian uniformitarianism, he inadvertently provided evidence for a global Flood. No wonder he was excommunicated by the scientific community.
WERNHER VON BRAUN (1912-1977)
Wernher von Braun (1912-77), a German rocket scientist, was the leading force behind the American Apollo moon mission.
Though he didn’t believe in a literal Genesis account of creation, von Braun did believe that God created the world and that it did not arise by a purely naturalistic process. He argued that the design of the world implies and requires a Designer, and he considered it unscientific to rule out a Creator just because we can’t “test” him scientifically. Von Braun published an article entitled “My Faith: A Space-age Scientist Tells Why He Must Believe in God.” This appeared in the American Weekly, February 10, 1963, and was republished in many other newspapers.
“Through science man strives to learn more of the mysteries of creation. Through religion he seeks to know the creator. Neither operates independently. It is as difficult for me to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. ... As we learn more and more about nature, we become more deeply impressed and humbled by its orderliness and unerring perfection.”
In 1972, von Braun made the following statement in a letter to the California State Board of Education. This was written to encourage the inclusion of intelligent design theories into the public school classrooms. Because of Darwinism’s elitist mentality and fear of challenge, von Braun’s wise counsel was ignored.
“For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without evoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all. In the world round us, we can behold the obvious manifestations of an ordered, structured plan or design. We can see the will of the species to live and propagate. And we are humbled by the powerful forces at work on a galactic scale, and the purposeful orderliness of nature that endows a tiny and ungainly seed with the ability to develop into a beautiful flower. The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based. ...
While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion--that everything in the universe happened by chance--would violate the very objectivity of science itself. Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system or the human eye?
Some people say that science has been unable to prove the existence of a Designer. They admit that many of the miracles in the world around us are hard to understand, and they do not deny that the universe, as modern science sees it, is indeed a far more wondrous thing than the creation medieval man could perceive. But they still maintain that since science has provided us with so many answers the day will soon arrive when we will be able to understand even the creation of the fundamental laws of nature without a Divine intent. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?
Many men who are intelligent and of good faith say they cannot visualize a Designer. Well, can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him? I am afraid that, although they really do not understand the electron either, they are ready to accept it because they managed to produce a rather clumsy mechanical model of it borrowed from rather limited experience in other fields, but they would not know how to begin building a model of God.
I have discussed the aspect of a Designer at some length because it might be that the primary resistance to acknowledging the “Case for Design” as a viable scientific alternative to the current “Case for Chance” lies in the inconceivability, in some scientists’ minds, of a Designer. The inconceivability of some ultimate issue (which will always lie outside scientific resolution) should not be allowed to rule out any theory that explains the interrelationship of observed data and is useful for prediction.
We in NASA were often asked what the real reason was for the amazing string of successes we had with our Apollo flights to the Moon. I think the only honest answer we could give was that we tried to never overlook anything. It is in that same sense of scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happened by chance (http://www.creationsafaris.com/wgcs_4vonbraun.htm).
In 1961, von Braun said,
“But I can’t help feeling at the same time that this space effort of ours is bigger even than a rivalry between the United States and Russia. The heavens beyond us are enormous beyond comprehension, and the further we penetrate them, the greater will be our human understanding of the great universal purpose, the Divine Will itself” (This Week Magazine, Jan. 1, 1961).
Thus, the world’s top rocket scientist who was the leading mind behind putting men on the moon was operating from and motivated by a perspective of theism rather than that of evolutionary atheism. It proved to be no discernible drag on his impressive scientific achievements.
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