Creationism on Trial...Again!

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from World Magazine, February 19, 2005, with the headline: “Science’s New Heresy Trial—Science is typically praised as open ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable, open to further inquiry and revised as new data emerge. Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship and persecution. By these standards Darwinists have become the dogmatist.

“Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, supported by American taxpayers, are punishing one of their own simply for publishing an article about intelligent design. Steven Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge, wrote an article that deals with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, that point in the fossil record in which dozens of distinct animal body forms suddenly sprang into existence.

“Mr. Meyer argued that the need for new proteins, new genetic codes, new cell structures, new organs, and new species requires specific biological information. That flies in the face of the Darwinist assumption that biological origins are random. Mr. Meyer submitted his paper to the proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute.

“After being subjected to a peer review and making recommended revisions, proceedings editor Rick Sternberg ran Meyer’s article. Major academic publications expressed outrage, so the wrath of the Darwinist fell on Mr. Sternberg, the editor. His supervisors at the Smithsonian took away his office, made him turn in his keys and cut him off from access to the collections he needs for his research.

“In addition, he is being shunned by his colleagues, who are refusing to talk to him or even greet him in the hallways. The dogma of the scientific establishment is that intelligent design is unscientific by definition. ‘Historically,’ said Mr. Meyer, ‘scientists sought the best explanation period, or wherever the evidence leads. But now, the scientific establishment is requiring something else, the best materialistic explanation for the phenomenon.’”

Tom: Dave, in our previous segment, we were talking about the church and how they’ve bought into a false idea of faith and how ludicrous it is, but in the world we esteem scientists, and so on, but the same thing is going on. You have these dogmatists, these individuals who have turned science into scientism or into a religion and people are buying it.

Dave: Tom, that too, has come into the church, of course. Theistic evolution—the idea that God used evolution and they are trying to be scientific. However, evolution is not scientific at all, and these men start out with the assumption—in fact, this is their dogma that creation could not have happened, that there cannot be a God, these are atheists. Well then, if you start out that way, that’s what you will end up with, you couldn’t possibly come up with anything else. But if you are open, as this author says, if you are open to the facts, then you will come up with the facts.

You know, we offer a terrific book, In Six Days. These are not nobodies, these are top scientists from many fields, from astrophysics to microbiology, and they each write a thesis, you know, in this book, fifty of them, declaring the scientific reasons why they as scientists, believe that the universe was created in six literal 24-hour days.

Now, you know that the whole Scopes Trial, you know what it began over, they were not allowing evolution to be taught in school; it had to be the Bible. So, it was all about, “Well, let’s have freedom! We should have academic freedom; we should be allowed to teach evolution, too, as an alternate.” What is the situation today? They have absolute control. You can’t even suggest creation, and yet all the evidence is round about.

DNA—my gracious, you couldn’t have life without words—this is a language, this is information, it has grammatical rules, syntax, and so forth. When you see information and it is written on the DNA, the entire instruction manual for building and operating this body with trillions of cells, such complex, nano-chemical machinery—we don’t even know how it works, most of it. No one has ever written a scientific article in any journal on how microbiology can be passed on by evolution. But when you see information, it came from an Intelligence, you can’t escape it.

Tom: I’m not a scientist—I mentioned earlier, I have a design background, and so on, but this is about intelligent design. Now, I go to a place, and I’m looking at these mountains, and on these mountains I see these forms—they look like Presidents, all right? They are carved into the mountain. Now, Dave, am I being unscientific by saying, “Wow, I don’t think this happened by chance. I think there must have been some intelligence involved here. One of them looks like Washington, another one like Roosevelt, one like Lincoln. I’m thinking there must have been some form of intelligence that brought that about.” Now how is that unscientific?

Dave: But Tom, it gets—when you get into the DNA, it’s even far beyond that.

Tom: I know.

Dave: Right. Richard Dawkins, for example, in his book, The Blind Watchmaker—he’s one of the world’s leading evolutionists—he acknowledges it. He says, “The nucleus of every cell [not the cell, just the nucleus of every cell, has a digitally to the organized data base larger in information content than the 30-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannia.” Now, you’re going to get all those letters in the right order to say information. I mean, there is all kinds of information in the Encyclopedia Britannia, there are all kinds of nano-chemical machinery in the many cells in the body—you’ve got to have specific directions how to operate them, how to build them and so forth, and that is on every cell. And this all happened by chance over a period, process, you’ve got to be kidding! Anybody that believes that, they just are simply stubbornly determined not to acknowledge that God exists. You couldn’t possible do it. Furthermore, you couldn’t get it started by chance.

Tom: Dave, isn’t it sad that science—this is what we are appealing here, for true science—but isn’t it sad that the scientific establishment is taking us in the direction that they accuse biblical Christians—you know, they are saying, “That’s mythology, but we are taking you to truth.”

Dave: They have already taken us there, Tom, and the tragedy is that it’s in the church. You have people like Hugh Ross on James Dobson, for example, and they teach theistic evolution—that there was death here before Adam sinned. That’s not biblical. Death came by sin. So, they’ve got evolutionary processes going on and finally we produce some humanoid critters, Adam and Eve. No, God created Adam and out of a rib He created Eve. It just does not fit with the Bible, it doesn’t fit with the facts, it’s not scientific and it certainly isn’t Christianity by any means.

Tom: The things that you are talking about, about the nucleus of a cell, and so on, we have a video called, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, and it is absolutely tremendous. It presents all this information, and I would encourage our listeners to call us and try and get hold of it.

Dave: A group of top scientists, but anyway it’s fabulous.