The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [13]
Scientists themselves will tell you that this is entirely appropriate. “All scientific knowledge,” said no less an authority than the National Academy of Sciences, “is, in principle, subject to change as new evidence becomes available.” 41
What does this new evidence show? Be prepared to be amazed—even dazzled—by the startling new narrative that science has been busy writing over the past few decades.
“The Old Story of Science is scientific materialism,” wrote theoretical physicist George Stanciu and science philosopher Robert Augros. “It holds that only matter exists and that all things are explicable in terms of matter alone.” 42 But, they said, in recent years “science has undergone a series of dramatic revolutions” that have “transformed the modern conception of man and his place in the world.” 43
This astounding “New Story of Science”—with its surprising plot twists and intriguing characters—unfolds in the coming pages, starting with an interview that rewrites the books that first led me into atheism.
3
DOUBTS ABOUT DARWINISM
No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact.
Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr 1
Scientists who utterly reject evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities. . . . Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science.
Larry Hatfield in Science Digest 2
There were one hundred of them—biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, molecular and cell biologists, bioengineers, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, and other scientists. Their doctorates came from such prestigious universities as Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Rutgers, Chicago, Princeton, Purdue, Duke, Michigan, Syracuse, Temple, and Berkeley.
They included professors from Yale Graduate School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tulane, Rice, Emory, George Mason, Lehigh, and the Universities of California, Washington, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
Among them was the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry and scientists at the Plasma Physics Lab at Princeton, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
And they wanted the world to know one thing: they are skeptical.
After spokespersons for the Public Broadcasting System’s seven-part television series Evolution asserted that “all known scientific evidence supports [Darwinian] evolution” as does “virtually every reputable scientist in the world,” these professors, laboratory researchers, and other scientists published a two-page advertisement in a national magazine under the banner: “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism.”
Their statement was direct and defiant. “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” they said. “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” 3
These were not narrow-minded fundamentalists, backwoods West Virginia protesters, or rabid religious fanatics—just respected, world-class scientists like Nobel nominee Henry F. Schaefer, the third most-cited chemist in the world; James Tour of Rice University’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology; and Fred Figworth, professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale Graduate School.
Together, despite the specter of professional persecution, they broached the politically incorrect opinion that the emperor of evolution has no clothes.
As a high school and university student studying evolution, I was never told that there were credible scientists who harbored significant skepticism toward Darwinian theory. I had been under the impression that it was only know-nothing pastors who objected to evolution on the grounds that it contradicted the Bible’s claims. I wasn’t aware that,