Wednesday, November 6, 2002

In a very long letter last month a writer proposed a more reasoned and less emotional approach to the issue of creationism and science. I wholeheartedly agree with that idea; I disagree with virtually everything else in the letter.

First, it is a fallacy that the Bible claims a particular age for the earth and universe. Very few Christian apologists today claim the earth to be 6,500 years old yet most believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. At my conservative, evangelical Christian church, we are discussing why the Bible DOESN'T make that claim. That was the only claim made against creationism which lead to the description of it as being "at best a mythology and at worse intellectual fraud." Attacking the Bible on the basis of the age of the earth is attacking a straw man.

Second, the idea of gradual development of vision is said to have been explained by a computer model in 1994. Consider than in 1998, Lehigh biochemistry professor Dr. Michael Behe wrote the following in the book, "Darwin's Black Box," "No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner, no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion [through gradual changes]."

Perhaps Dr. Behe was totally unfamiliar with the computer model that had revolutionized the explanation of eye development four years earlier, but that seems incredibly unlikely. And as Darwin himself wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Third, the idea of intelligent design is completely disregarded as being unscientific, and as such it is unfactual and should be dismissed by our educational system. The truth is that science is providing more and more evidence for creationism and secular science is admitting this fact.

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle wrote that "...a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology." Astrophysicist Paul Davies, who wrote the first book ascribing the creation of the universe to a quantum fluctuation, concluded in a later book, "The impression of design is overwhelming." Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, wrote, "...one is driven to the conclusion, inescapably, that living systems could not have been generated by random processes, within a finite time-scale, in a finite universe."

Even the great physicist Stephen Hawking wrote, "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings just like us."

The point being, that even though each of these scientists have actively written against the idea of supernatural creation, they recognize that there is tremendous scientific evidence for it. But no matter how strong the evidence, even when that evidence is recognized, someone can still choose not to believe. In Bible-speak, that is called free will.

There is so much scientific data that contradicts Darwinism and its faith counterpart, naturalism, (i.e., the Cambrian explosion, the creation of the universe, the creation of first life, the fossil record, just to name a few) I believe that the intellectual integrity of the scientific community will inescapably lead to the introduction of intelligent design and elimination of Darwinism from our high school and college curriculums within 10 years.

Pepper Adams

Pepper.Adams@delta.com