Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Who is Anti-Science?




Creationists have long been smeared with being anti-science. However, few remember that atheism had also been notably anti-science. In Awesome Creation, Yosef Bitton writes:


  •  In the 1940s, the Soviet communist regime rejected Hubble and Gamow’s conclusions [regarding the Big Bang] completely, despite their scientific soundness, on the grounds that their hypothesis failed to comply with the tenets of Marxist Leninist ideology (i.e., atheism). The Soviets’ opinion on the Big Bang was summarized by Comrade Andrei Zhdanov: “Falsifiers of science want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing.”  The Soviets persecuted physicists who supported the Big Bang theory. Some of those scientists paid for their support of the Big Bang theory with their lives like Matvei Bronstein, who was shot after being arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage.


For these atheists, the findings that the universe had a beginning gave too much support to the biblical account. It wasn’t just the communistic atheists who were disturbed by this support. According to Bitton, C. J. Isham said it best:


  •  “Perhaps the best argument...that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas...being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory”


I don’t mean to pick on atheism. We all have our theistic-philosophical lenses through which we attempt to conform reality. However, I think that we need to be particularly suspicious of the pervasive influence of atheism since it now exercises such extensive control over the scientific community.

Here’s just one thing that should make us suspicious. Only natural, unintelligent causation or explanations are acceptable. Others are labeled and denigrated as “non-science.” However, it might be relevant to ask if this naturalistic monopoly is instead non-science. Is our determination to find only naturalistic explanations for the origins and fine-tuning of the universe, the laws of science, life, the cell, DNA and consciousness the product of science or religion?

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