Darwinists this month are celebrating the 80th anniversary of
the Scopes trial. But critics of evolution note an irony lost on
the Darwinists in the midst of their celebrations, namely, that
they now behave exactly like the silencers of science they once
reviled.
Desperate to shut down debate that exposes their evolutionary
theory as unsustainable conjecture, the Darwinists are using the
incantations of an ideology they call science and the power of law
to prevent the teaching of any concepts besides random variation
and natural selection. While Darwinists still pose as champions of
free inquiry, they actively suppress it in the name of their
scientific dogmatism.
Treat critics of evolution no more seriously than
segregationists, Darwinists urge the media and school boards. Just
as segregationists, whose views are manifestly irrational, don’t
deserve “equal time” in discussions, the critics of evolution don’t
deserve equal time either, Darwinists plead.
In a media forum aired on C-SPAN a while back, Slate’s
Jacob Weisberg in effect said this to New York Times
executive editor Bill Keller, upbraiding him for running stories
about a school board controversy in Kansas that had quoted critics
of evolution. Why did you give them equal time? Weisberg asked
Keller. Would you give segregationists their say? Keller found
Weisberg’s criticism too radical and unfair, but assured him that
anybody who read the Times’s Science section would know
that the paper was in the tank for Darwin.
Ed Brayton of Michigan Citizens for Science, commenting on
another school board tussle over evolution, recently said no critic
of evolution even belongs in the classroom. “They haven’t done
anything scientifically to warrant being in the classroom,” he told
the Michigan press. “Evolution is beyond a doubt one of the most
well-supported theories as a result of a century and a half of
painstaking research by literally thousands and thousands of
scientists. Yet they are demanding equal time.”
In June, the Washington Post published an editorial
blasting the Smithsonian Institution for merely allowing a group of
intelligent design scientists to use its auditorium to show a
documentary called “The Privileged Planet.” Critics of evolution
should not receive a spot on the stage, the Post
editorialized, lest Americans take them seriously. Letting them on
to scientific turf threatens the “scientific consensus about the
origins of life and the universe” and gives “a patina of scientific
credibility to the idea of an intelligent creator,” it said. “This
is precisely how the intelligent design movement has gotten as far
as it has: by advocating outwardly inoffensive ideas in ever-more
prestigious places, thereby giving the movement scientific
validity.”
John West of the Discovery Institute has reported the ongoing
harassment of scientists who dissent from Darwinism. He writes that
at “the Smithsonian Institution, biologist Richard Sternberg, the
former editor of a respected biology journal, says he faced
discrimination and retaliation after accepting for publication a
peer-reviewed article supportive of intelligent design last
year.”
At the Mississippi University for Women, West writes, “chemistry
professor Nancy Bryson was removed as head of the division of
natural sciences in 2003 after presenting scientific criticisms of
biological and chemical evolution to a seminar of honors
students.”
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn is receiving flak from
scientists for arguing in a recent New York Times op-ed that evolutionary theory is not science
but ideology. The piece was a commendable effort to correct the
erroneous claim, fostered by dissenters inside the Church and
opportunists outside it, that Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian
theory. He didn’t. What happened, according to an account from a
well-informed Church intellectual I’ve heard, was a theologian
wrote a half-baked letter that appeared to endorse Darwinian theory
and Pope John Paul II signed the letter without reading it.
Scientists who have been exploiting this gaffe for
propagandistic purposes are very upset that Schonborn has clarified
the Church’s rejection of evolutionary theory and are trying to
dismiss his op-ed as the irrelevant musings of a theologian. But
Schonborn’s point — and this is what really unnerves them — is
that evolutionary theory is bad science, a misreading of nature,
and that those who build theories on the basis of it are engaged in
an ideological project.
“Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific
claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in
cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose
and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again
defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident
in nature is real,” he wrote. “Scientific theories that try to
explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and
necessity’ are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an
abdication of human intelligence.”
Faced with straightforward critiques like this, sputtering
evolutionary scientists can only respond by pulling rank.
Naturally, Catholic organs dedicated to overthrowing official
Church teaching and putting irrational liberalism in its place are
helping them. The National Catholic Reporter ran a story
chiding Schonborn titled “Catholic Experts Urge Caution
In Evolution Debate” that quoted scientists who were “disappointed”
with his op-ed. Who were these so-called experts? Just scientists
who are enamored with evolutionary theory and who dissent from the
Church’s philosophy of being that has always held, on the basis of
a rational examination of nature alone, that God is the necessary
ground of all creation.
While the evolutionists continue their tired celebrations of the
Scopes trial, they glance anxiously over their shoulders. They are
running scared, and as the list of scientists and thinkers who
dissent from Darwinism grows — the Discovery Institute lists
hundreds of scientists who now regard it as an intellectually
bankrupt theory — the evolutionists will increasingly mirror the
intolerance they used to bemoan.
