"Faith-based science"?

ITEM: "Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg lashed out against conservatives yesterday," reported the New York Daily News for May 26, "for ignoring science and common sense on issues such as stem-cell research, global warming and even evolution. Making his latest foray into national issues, the mayor blamed ideologues for trying to drag the nation back decades by disputing scientifically proven facts.... Bloomberg said he was angered to see fundamentalists trying to turn back the clock on teaching evolution in schools--and denounced the intelligent design theory as 'creationism by another name.'"

CORRECTION: Darwinists would have us think that only snaggle-toothed, dim-witted snake-handlers dare challenge the orthodoxy of Darwinism, but that is far from the case. Notable scientists have indeed challenged Darwinism. These include atheists. For example, prominent Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle concluded that the mathematical probability of life evolving randomly was "so utterly minuscule" (listing the odds of it happening at 1 to 1 plus 40,000 zeroes) that it was too ridiculous to believe. To help illustrate those long odds, Hoyle used a metaphor: a living organism emerging by chance from a pre-biotic soup, he said, is about as likely to occur as "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein." Then there's Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of DNA, who echoed Hoyle's conclusion.

Bloomberg and his ideological allies probably would also burn Louis Pasteur at the figurative stake because the French microbiologist and chemist was a critic of Darwin--on scientific grounds. After all, Pasteur was one of those dreaded "faith-based" fellows, who actually believed that "science brings men closer to God."

Scientific Fraud

Darwinism is not only worthy of skepticism on mathematical and religious grounds, but in other areas as well. Darwin said that "by far the strongest class of facts" that proved his theory came from embryology--in particular relying on German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel made drawings of classes of vertebrates, showing them to be very much alike in their initial stages of formation, allowing Darwin to point to them as "proof" that all animals have the same origin. In 1997, wrote Tom Bethell in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (2005), "British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team compared Haeckel's drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclusively that the drawings misrepresented the truth. Richardson was quoted in Science: 'It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.'"

Other frauds have been perpetrated on behalf of "evolution," yet Darwinists, especially in the academic world, often treat Darwin's theories as revealed sacred writ. One wonders if they would be a bit embarrassed to find that, on occasion, those indisputable truths had to be changed or repackaged. Such a makeover occurred when Darwin asserted in the first edition of his The Origin of Species: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." This was deemed so preposterous that a professor from the British Museum prevailed on Darwin to leave out the "whale-bear story" from future editions.

Myths of the "Monkey Trial"

The infamous trial of John Scopes, who was charged for breaking a Tennessee law that forbade teaching "any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal," has been widely misrepresented. In fact, movies have been made portraying a false account of what happened. There have been several renditions of Inherit the Wind--which Scopes himself admitted was not a factual account of the "Monkey Trial." These portrayals ridicule Christian beliefs and boost the credibility of Darwinism.

Though the movie is often shown in science classrooms as if it were a true chronicle of the events, it is fiction. Even a dedicated modern-day evolutionist, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, acknowledged the falsity of that widespread cinema propaganda. Gould summarized the legend as follows: "In the heroic version, John Scopes was persecuted, [Clarence] Darrow rose to Scopes' defense and smote the antediluvian [William Jennings] Bryan, and the antievolution movement dwindled or ground to at least a temporary halt. All three parts of this story are false."

In the Scopes Trial, the ACLU sold the teaching of evolution as being a matter of "free speech." Yet, today, the ACLU would gladly help tar and feather any teacher who strayed from Darwinian orthodoxy. In Georgia, that so-called civil liberties group backed a case against a local school district that wanted to put stickers on biology textbooks urging pupils to study the topic of evolution "with an open mind," giving it careful and critical consideration. That kind of free speech the ACLU cannot stomach.

Now those are facts. And we'll bet that such facts are not being taught in the schools where the liberal establishment holds sway. That is certainly the case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where the power of the federal judiciary recently ordained that the teaching of "intelligent design" is the unconstitutional establishment of religion.

No doubt to the dismay of the devotees of Darwinism, a recent Gallup poll found that only 13 percent of American adults believe that God played no part in the development of human beings. No wonder the secular high priesthood needs a federal judge to outlaw any possible mentioning in public schools that there might be a divine origin to life, rather than the blind-chance presupposition of Darwinists (as happened in the Pennsylvania case referred to above).

The faith called Darwinism will brook no false gods. Seeking to strengthen their near-monopoly on those topics in discourse in public schools, Darwinian fetishists would make monkeys of us all.