WHY REMAIN AN EVOLUTIONIST?

Even though scientists claim to be neutral truth seekers, Matti Leisola charges the scientific community with bias:

·       Methodological materialism poses as “the scientific method”—empirical, neutral, disinterested. But this isn’t the case. It is not a neutral way to observe the world. It dogmatically limits possible answers. The possibility that life has been designed is deemed out of the question. In 1999, S. C. Todd put it plainly in the journal Nature: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” (“Heretic”)

Cell biologist Franklin Harold confessed the bias of many scientists against ID:

·       “We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity” even though “we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” (Franklin Harold, “The Way of the Cell” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205.)

The late German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was fair enough to admit this. “It is not by its conclusions, but by its methodological starting point that modern science excludes direct creation,” he wrote. “Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied.” (Carl F. von Weizsäcker, “The Relevance of Science: Creation and Cosmogony” (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 102.)

Leisola claims that these confessions are not unusual, at least in private, among evolutionists:

·       Practically all of the hundreds of scientists I know admit in private, confidential discussions that science does not have a clue where genetic language, proteins, cell membranes, metabolic pathways, cell control systems, and the basic body plans of organisms came from.

In their more candid moments, they may even question the entire evolutionary narrative:

·       Stanford University physicist and Nobel laureate professor Robert B. Laughlin...says that “evolution by natural selection… has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong.” (Robert B. Laughlin, “A Different Universe” (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 168–169)

Why then do they remain within the evolution establish? Some admit that evolution remains the only safe-house where they might find a momentary relief from the demands of God.