Bryan Fischer
Scientific McCarthyism
By Bryan Fischer
The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12 serves as a reminder that in his name scientific McCarthyism is alive and well in America's system of education. The same mentality that kept Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life is today punishing science teachers who dare to raise scientific questions about Darwinian orthodoxy.
Secular fundamentalists have so little confidence that the theory of evolution can stand up to rigorous scrutiny that they are gagging voices of dissent. For instance, one of the world's leading proponents of intelligent design is Dr. Scott Minnich, a biologist at the University of Idaho. Even though Dr. Minnich's advocacy of ID theory was done on his own time, the-then U of I president, Tim White, issued a campus-wide edict prohibiting the teaching of anything but evolutionary doctrine in all science classes. So much for the university as a marketplace of ideas. The Spanish Inquisition couldn't have done it any better.
I was invited last year to present the arguments for intelligent design to an advanced public school science class. When some Tyrants of Tolerance heard that — gasp! — some science students might actually hear both sides of this controversy, I immediately began receiving emails from them, threatening me with career-ending lawsuits and demanding that I out this teacher so they could see to it that he never taught in this town again. Torquemada lives and breathes.
This raises the question: What are they afraid of?
There are many scientific reasons to question the theory of evolution. One law of science is that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Thus science admits that nature can offer no explanation for the origin of either.
Evolutionary theory is contravened by the pre-Cambrian explosion, in which untold numbers of complex life forms appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record, with nary a trace of intermediate, transitional forms.
Further, evolution must depend upon genetic mutations as its primary mechanism. But every geneticist will tell you that the vast majority of randomly occurring mutations are harmful if not fatal to the organism. If genes are one day manipulated in the laboratory to produce more complex life forms, that will simply prove our point — it takes both intelligence and design.
And life itself, it turns out, is a huge problem for Darwinian dogma. As Michael Behé pointed out Darwin's Black Box, life is "irreducibly complex" — in other words, a very sophisticated arrangement of complicated chemical machinery must be in place all at once in proper working order for life even to occur. It's simply impossible to get there by the incremental steps required by evolutionary theory.
Significantly, not even Darwin believed his theory could explain the origin of life. That's why his seminal work is called Origin of Species rather than Origin of Life. The only question, Darwin said, was whether life had "been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."
Contemporary evolutionists look silly trying to keep a Creator out of the picture. At the end of the documentary "Expelled," noted Darwinian Richard Dawkins admits that life on earth is too complex for evolution to explain. His theory? It was brought here by aliens.
What's at stake here? Literally everything, since the Founders predicated our entire system of government on the truth that there is a Creator who is the source of our fundamental civil rights. Idaho's students deserve the right to know if their view of government makes scientific sense. Let's make February 12 "Academic Freedom Day" in America, and let the discussion begin.
© Bryan Fischer
February 9, 2009
The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12 serves as a reminder that in his name scientific McCarthyism is alive and well in America's system of education. The same mentality that kept Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life is today punishing science teachers who dare to raise scientific questions about Darwinian orthodoxy.
Secular fundamentalists have so little confidence that the theory of evolution can stand up to rigorous scrutiny that they are gagging voices of dissent. For instance, one of the world's leading proponents of intelligent design is Dr. Scott Minnich, a biologist at the University of Idaho. Even though Dr. Minnich's advocacy of ID theory was done on his own time, the-then U of I president, Tim White, issued a campus-wide edict prohibiting the teaching of anything but evolutionary doctrine in all science classes. So much for the university as a marketplace of ideas. The Spanish Inquisition couldn't have done it any better.
I was invited last year to present the arguments for intelligent design to an advanced public school science class. When some Tyrants of Tolerance heard that — gasp! — some science students might actually hear both sides of this controversy, I immediately began receiving emails from them, threatening me with career-ending lawsuits and demanding that I out this teacher so they could see to it that he never taught in this town again. Torquemada lives and breathes.
This raises the question: What are they afraid of?
There are many scientific reasons to question the theory of evolution. One law of science is that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Thus science admits that nature can offer no explanation for the origin of either.
Evolutionary theory is contravened by the pre-Cambrian explosion, in which untold numbers of complex life forms appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record, with nary a trace of intermediate, transitional forms.
Further, evolution must depend upon genetic mutations as its primary mechanism. But every geneticist will tell you that the vast majority of randomly occurring mutations are harmful if not fatal to the organism. If genes are one day manipulated in the laboratory to produce more complex life forms, that will simply prove our point — it takes both intelligence and design.
And life itself, it turns out, is a huge problem for Darwinian dogma. As Michael Behé pointed out Darwin's Black Box, life is "irreducibly complex" — in other words, a very sophisticated arrangement of complicated chemical machinery must be in place all at once in proper working order for life even to occur. It's simply impossible to get there by the incremental steps required by evolutionary theory.
Significantly, not even Darwin believed his theory could explain the origin of life. That's why his seminal work is called Origin of Species rather than Origin of Life. The only question, Darwin said, was whether life had "been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."
Contemporary evolutionists look silly trying to keep a Creator out of the picture. At the end of the documentary "Expelled," noted Darwinian Richard Dawkins admits that life on earth is too complex for evolution to explain. His theory? It was brought here by aliens.
What's at stake here? Literally everything, since the Founders predicated our entire system of government on the truth that there is a Creator who is the source of our fundamental civil rights. Idaho's students deserve the right to know if their view of government makes scientific sense. Let's make February 12 "Academic Freedom Day" in America, and let the discussion begin.
© Bryan Fischer
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