Toe the line on evolution or else

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Thomas-Nagel (1)Mind and the Cosmos

 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel, who made a serious challenge to materialism in his book Mind and Cosmos,1 is still the focus of heated debate.

At a gathering of philosophers and scientists that included Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, a workshop on naturalism turned into an all-out attack on Nagel, a Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University.

Nagel’s claim that materialists’ conception of nature is wrong was too much for the workshop participants, according to Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

In an article titled ‘The Heretic’, Ferguson discussed what happened in the workshop and also considered why Nagel’s book so angered his critics.2

His report is challenging reading, he asks probing questions of his own about materialism in general while sometimes poking fun at philosophers and scientists.
Ferguson is taken by what he sees as Nagel’s challenging approach:
His working assumption is, in today’s intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.
Tellingly, Ferguson points out:
Nagel’s touchier critics have accused him of launching an assault on science, when really it is an assault on the nonscientific uses to which materialism has been put.
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IS CONSENSUS SCIENCE, ANTI-SCIENCE?

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Ben Stein Expelledignaz_semmelweis
Pictured is Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. He struggled against the scientific consensus of his day. The cost of ignoring his research findings was the loss of countless lives and much suffering.

Sadly consensus science has a poor record. In fact the task of science has nothing to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science on the contrary requires only one investigator who happens to be right.

Dr Ignaz Semmelweiss, a Hungarian surgeon, was one of those investigators who was right. He discovered that ‘childbed fever’ which typically caused a ten to thirty percent mortality level, could largely be abolished if doctors simply washed their hands in a chlorine solution before examining pregnant mothers.
The compelling evidence however failed to impress his superiors and he was eventually dismissed from the clinic even though the mortality rate for his patients was essentially zero. Semmelweis’s procedure went contrary to the whole theory of medical consensus existing in his day. He spent the last years of his life unsuccessfully trying to convince European doctors of his systems effectiveness. He ended his life in a mental hospital and his ideas forgotten until Dr Joseph Lister took up the battle this time successfully.
The story of Dr Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen is much the same. In 1795 he suggested that the fevers which were the number one killer of women following childbirth were an infectious process and he was able to prevent/cure them. The consensus said NO…. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right/same conclusion. These are but two of many examples of scientists resistance to accepting the truth when it conflicts with accepted dogma.

Evolution is also an entrenched dogma despite the overwhelming evidence for amazing design of life and the universe. Since the discovery of the complexity of  DNA (ENCODE PROJECT) and sub-microscopic cell machinery of irreducible complexity there is a growing number of eminent scientists embracing intelligent design.  Why the establishment is so wedded to materialism and evolutionary naturalism is perhaps best explained by Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and probably one of the world’s leaders in promoting evolutionary biology.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment , a commitment to materialism. It’s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori  adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations no matter how counter- intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”

Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist from Kansas State University said it more succinctly: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”

Evolution sheds no light on the beginning of the Universe and life. It postulates matter, energy and time brought this beautiful orderly Cosmos into being, with its intricate life forms, its complex natural laws, its intangible moral qualities and the creative and reasoning powers of man. Even Aristotle and Plato knew this speaks of infinite intelligence and yet evolution insists blind chance can account for it all. At a foundational level we are involved in a battle of world views.

Christians know God, so the idea that matter and energy and blind chance can produce the Cosmos we inhabit is absurd.

Recommended reading: By Design, Dr Jonathan Sarfati, The Design Inference, Dr William Dembski, The Edge of Evolution, Dr Michael Behe and of course  www.creation.com

ANOTHER EMINENT SCIENTIST CLAIMS EVOLUTION DEAD

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Dr Smalley8671-buckyball-3
Dr Richard E Smalley was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1996 for discovery and research on a totally new allotrope of carbon. Many researchers date the dawn of the modern nanotechnology field to Dr Smalley’s “buckyball” discovery.
Dr Richard (Rick) Smalley M.A. PhD Princeton University was the Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy at Rice University, Houston Texas.
Professor Smalley’s many awards included eight honorary doctor of science awards.
Whilst sceptical of religion most of his life, Rick Smalley became a Christian only in his last years, partly due to his intensive study of intelligent design.
He claimed that Darwinian evolution had been given its death blow due to the advances in genetics and cell biology and that it was now clear that biological evolution could not have occurred.

If evolution is dead as so many leading scientists now acknowledge, isn’t it time it was buried.
The real problem is revealed in the following quotes from leading evolutionists.

“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” Dr Scott Todd, Kansas State University.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…because we have a prior commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create as apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive , no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.” Professor Richard Lewontin (retired Harvard University evolutionary biologist and geneticist).