The other day, I questioned Richard Dawkins’s intellectual credentials as related to the issue of God. Not only is he ignorant of basic philosophy, but he can’t even think logically, routinely relying instead on the full complement of rhetorical fallacies.
One of them is argumentum ad populum: because many people believe something to be true, it is. Thus Dawkins never tires of citing “the overwhelming preponderance of atheists” among top scientists.
This betokens his belief that truth is democratic, like Western politics. A simple show of hands is sufficient to determine what’s true and what’s false. That’s nonsensical even in politics, and even more so in philosophy or indeed natural science.
In fact, all major discoveries started as minority propositions, held by few scientists or even one. That possibly apocryphal apple fell on Newton’s head only – it wasn’t a hail of apples bombarding the arithmetic majority of contemporaneous scientists.
Dawkins’s assertion would be irrelevant even if it were true. But it isn’t. I have this on good authority: Lewis Wolpert, as strident an atheist as Dawkins but a much more accomplished scientist, mournfully admits in one of his own agitprop books that over half of today’s scientists are believers.
And even those who aren’t still know that Darwin’s slapdash theory not only doesn’t “explain everything”, in Dawkins’s illiterate assertion, but in fact explains very little. Its principal attraction isn’t scientific but political.
Here’s a random selection of statements made by top scientists, most of whom believe in neither God nor Darwin:
Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician, Cambridge University: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution … if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”
Dr Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner: “The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientist can ever prove.”
Dr A Fleishmann, Erlangen University: “The theory of evolution suffers from grave defects, which are more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge.”
Prof. R Goldschmidt , University of California: “It is good to keep in mind… that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted.”
Prof. J Agassiz, Harvard University: “The theory of the transmutation of species is a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency.”
Dr Ambrose Fleming, President, British Assoc. Advancement of Science: “Evolution is baseless and quite incredible.”
Gerald Aardsman, Ph.D., C-14 dating specialist: “It is possible (and, given the Flood, probable) that materials which give radiocarbon dates of tens of thousands of radiocarbon years could have true ages of many fewer calendar years.”
Dr Edmund Ambrose, evolutionist: “We have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the views of conservative creationists.”
Dr Pierre-Paul Grasse, evolutionist: “No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”
Dr Michael Denton, molecular biologist: “Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which – a functional protein or gene – is complex beyond … anything produced by the intelligence of man?”
Lyall Watson, Ph.D.: “Modern apes … seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans … is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.”
Dr N.H. Nilson, botanist: “My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.”
Wolfgang Smith Ph.D.: “The evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable than ever before.”
David Kitts, Ph.D. Palaeontology and Evolutionary Theory: “Evolution requires intermediate forms between species, and palaeontology does not provide them.”
Dr Ludwig von Bertalanffy, biologist: “The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.”
Dr Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth: “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens, many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?”
Dr Tom Kemp, Oxford University: “As is well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record.”
Dr Gary Parker, Biologist/palaeontologist: “In reality, fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation. If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fossils that show how one kind of life slowly and gradually changed to another kind of life. But missing links are the trade secret, in a sense, of palaeontology. The point is, the links are still missing. What we really find are gaps that sharpen up the boundaries between kinds. It’s those gaps which provide us with the evidence of Creation of separate kinds. As a matter of fact, there are gaps between each of the major kinds of plants and animals. Transition forms are missing by the millions. What we do find are separate and complex kinds, pointing to Creation.”
And finally, Darwin himself: “Not one change of species into another is on record … we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.”
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
When Dawkins says that “evidence is the only reason to believe anything”, he displays a deficit of intellect. And by shilling for a theory that’s contradicted by infinitely more evidence than there is to support it, he displays a deficit of integrity.
It’s most unfortunate that Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless is no longer in business. Dawkins could be its honorary chairman.
“Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician, Cambridge University: ‘The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it'”
Even Sir Freddie was astonished by this. He was also a self proclaimed atheist and yet he did have his doubts. That statement of Sir Freddie based on his study of the carbon atom, that alone. Evidence further only confirms?
For all his ‘professional Yorkshireman’ conceit, Fred Hoyle was rather a metaphorical street fighter of the type recently expelled from the West Wing. He would resort to insult, hyperbole and self-contradiction when defending his territory (or rather his tramplings on the regions outside his territory).
Most of the ID crowd was miffed when he (an atheist) appeared to support their cause. His attacks on Darwin were beside the point and not rational but were probably an attempt to promote his own theory of life from outer space. He could never abide R A Fisher (arguably the greatest statistician and geneticist of the 20th Century- but not a nice man) who at college dinners would regularly humiliate him on matters of probability.
He apparently did not notice the contradiction of ID theory and his own theory of a steady state universe of continuous creation (as opposed to what he called the ‘big bang theory’ (another insult but it backfired on him because other folks used it with admiration). A steady state universe would be infinitely old and would last infinitely longer than that, thus any imagined ‘random event’, however unlikely has a chance to happen without any help from ID, just as the EU will keep you voting again and again until you get it right.
The intention of the Nobel bequest was to recognize and reward discovery. Hoyle should have been awarded that recognition for his work on stellar nuclear generation. However, Nobel committees are secret and obviously human.
More important, is the recent claim that half the atoms of the heavier elements present on Earth come from beyond the Galaxy. So where and how will the EU set its tariff wall on carbon based products?
Alexander, you have collated a good range of quotes by respected scientists, including Darwin, and there are many more scientists who know God operatives outside of our discovered laws. An example of divine power is where Jesus used a very short fermentation process, and also used water rather than grapes, to produce outstanding vintage wine; that is, of course, scientifically impossible.
Many people suppose, like Dawkins, that evolution is an accepted fact rather than the proposed theory that was put forth. Maybe their belief is strengthened because they see adolescent boys carrying on like monkeys and it reaffirms that physical connection. However, the biggest hurdle for those of the evolution faith is non-life turning to life. The best they can come up with is the Miller-Urey experiment which was hailed as an important breakthrough in the study of the origin of life. The problem is that all they got was a puddle of amino acids, which would still be a somewhat drier puddle of amino acids a million years later, and still without life.
The problem of life disappears when you get rid of the beginning.With the multiverse theory where there was never a beginning but there has always been a universe which keeps morphing into another universe problem solved. We have a term for it called “forever”