LEADER TIMES WEEKEND RELIGION ARTICLE FOR
June 29, 2013 by William H. Scarle, Jr.
Darwinism is a religion. It has sacred texts. “The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection “was published in 1859. “The Decent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” was published in 1871. Darwin was not an experimental scientist. He was a naturalist. The sacred texts include serious errors which his sympathetic critics have since reinterpreted. Darwin believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That is, if a short necked giraffe like creature stretched his neck to reach the tender sprouts of the high branches of a tree, he or she could pass that trait on to their offspring. Believe it or not, I was taught that in my philosophy classes in college. Please, no comments on how long ago that was. Darwin (1809 – 1882) paid no attention to Gregor Mendel (1822 – 1884) who developed the Mandolin Laws of Heredity which are still used today. If he had he would have known his theory was impossible.
Of course that mechanism is rejected today and substituted with genetic mutation. One must understand that such mutations must be almost innumerable, and to accommodate those outlandish amounts of time must be read into the scheme.
Then there are the miracles of Darwinism as religious faith. The first miracle is the appearance of life from non-living matter. Then there is the miracle of the existence of a rational universe capable of rational examination by man and the development of natural laws which enable humanity to develop science, art, and culture and all by accident. That sounds like a religion to me.
One must remember that no one has ever seen a new specie develop from a pre-existing specie. To make matters worse there is no paleontological evidence that this even happened. All this is taken by faith.
This leads me to the point of his brief article. Stephen Meyer has just published a new book called “Darwin’s Doubt.” It was just released last week, and I have read only the preface which was previewed in an email issue of WORLD magazine. Meyer has a degree in physics and earth science from Whitworth College (1981) and a Ph.D. in history and the philosophy of Science from Cambridge University (1991). In the book he examines in detail the “Cambrian explosion,” a fact that was known to Darwin and is well known in scientific circles. During the Cambrian age all the known life forms appeared suddenly without any intermediary stages. Darwin was convinced that the “missing links” would be discovered in time. That has not happened.
Previously Meyer published “Signature of the Cell” in 2009 in which he examined the information coded into every living cell by a four character chemical code resident in the DNA molecule. He was viciously attacked by the Darwinian establishment as an apostate and a heretic. This is, of course, expected religious behavior by an established faith when undercut by the facts.
I am aware not all my readers are interested in this debate. It is not a debate between science and the Bible. It is a debate between two religions, and Meyer’s new book is must reading for those who want to understand the issues. I am not at war with science, especially the science that created the computer on which I write these articles. We need to recognize a religion when we see it, even if it disguises itself as science.
(Bill Scarle can be contacted at ravscarle@verizon.net). END-whs