* Nobody Doubts Darwin They Say: Nobody qualified, anyway. Certainly no scientists! This week celebrating Darwin Day the Pew Research Center claimed that evolution, "is accepted by virtually all scientists" and a while back PBS promoted their series, "Evolution" claiming likewise that, "Virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true." Taking that even further, theoretical physicist (emphasis on the theoretical) Lawrence Krauss told RSR that biological science cannot be practiced without a belief in Darwinian evolution and so "all scientists are atheists." And hence, Darwinists. However, he forgot James Tour. And they're all forgetting Fred Williams and Bob Enyart's ever-growing meta-list of highly-educated Darwin doubters including many thousands of Ph.D.s, scientists, and professors! The guys also have reported on the hundreds of astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists who doubt the Big Bang. (See below rsr.org/doubters#bb). So welcome to Real Science Radio's List of Scholars Doubting Darwin!
* Except for These Guys: Those who have gone out of their way to declare their doubt about Darwin include the:
- 100 scientists with master's degrees or Ph.D.s listed over at AiG
- 200 Ph.D.s listed at Australia's creation.com
- 300 medical doctors at Physicians & Surgeons for Scientific Integrity
- 500 Ph.D. scientists at the Korean Association of Creation Research
- 600 advanced degreed scientists at the Creation Research Society
- 1,000 scientists who signified their opposition at DissentFromDarwin.org
- 3,000 scientists and professors (most of whom hold a Ph.D. in some field of science) who reject secular Darwinism to varying degrees as named online by Dr. Jerry Bergman (also here)
* Another Scholar Doubting Darwin: A thousand evolutionists have incorrectly referenced Newsweek magazine to claim that 99.86% of scientists affirm Darwinism. (See RSR's original reporting and debunking of that misinformation, below.) In contrast to false reporting, consider that the famed atheist professor Thomas Nagel who wrote Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.
* Add to the those 5,000 Scientists, Ph.D.s. and Scholars: Those who think that almost all educated people affirm Darwin, are forgetting about those listed above, and then these folks, all identified by careful research conducted by pro-Darwin institutions:
- 30,000 U.S. public high school biology teachers do not endorse Darwinism in class
- 100,000 college professors in the U.S. alone who, according to Harvard researchers, agree that "intelligent design IS a serious scientific alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution."
- 570,000 medical doctors in the U.S., specialists in applied science, say God brought about or directly created humans, as reported by the prestigious Louis Finkelstein Institute. The field of medicine is an actual applied science (see definition and applied science section below) within biology, practiced by highly educated professionals each of whom has earned an advanced degree. Significantly, 60% of U.S. medical doctors reject the secular Darwinist explanation for our existence with three of five docs agreeing that either God initiated and guided the process that led to human life or that God specially created us human beings. The large sample (for a study of medical doctors) of 1,482 MDs were asked in Question 7 (pdf) of the Finkelstein poll if they agreed with:
- "God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings." 42% agreed.
- "God created humans exactly as they appear now." 18% agreed.
* Of Course There's Overlap: Admittedly the lists above contain some overlap but the orders of magnitude difference in the numbers indicate that the vast majority are not duplicates.
* Another Scholar, Yale University Prof. David Gelernter, Giving Up Darwin: Biology is increasingly understood in terms of information science. So from his relevant field, Yale "rock star" professor of computer science and contributor to parallel computing, David Gelernter, writes in Giving Up Darwin:
To help create a brand new form of organism, a mutation must affect a gene that does its job early and controls the expression of other genes that come into play later on as the organism grows. But mutations to these early-acting "strategic" genes, which create the big body-plan changes required by macro-evolution, seem to be invariably fatal... Evidently there are a total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.
* The Third Way: Twenty highly-credentialed anti-creationists at The Third Way agree with young-earth creationists on this specific point, that the natural selection mechanism of neo-Darwinism cannot account for the diversity of life. These "Third Way" scientists, who by blind faith believe that their must be a third way other than Creation and Darwinism, include molecular biologists, etc., from institutions like Oxford, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University, MIT, University of Vienna, University of Bonn, UCLA, and Princeton.
* Honorable Mention:
- 2.5 Million U.S. scientists and engineers believe in a personal God. This number comes from the 40% who believe in a personal God as reported by the New York Times in 1997 (see below). That percentage had stayed constant over the 80 years since the survey was first carried out in 1917. If that result has stayed consistent again over the past 20 years, then based on our 2016 population of more than 6.2 million scientists and engineers, two and a half million of them believe in God!
- Gravitas. It is observed that "authorities" should not be counted, but weighed. So weigh them. (Not counting the two million just indicated, the two-thirds of a million PhDs, MDs, professors, and advanced degreed scientists listed above who doubt Darwin would weigh more than 100 million pounds. :)
- Consider also the RSR list of the many fathers of the physical sciences, both before and after Darwin, who rejected naturalistic origins, including Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Huygens, Newton, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Dalton, Faraday, Pasteur, Joule, Kelvin, Lister, and Carver.
* Oxford Biology Professor Rejects Neo-Darwinism: In 2013 a British biology professor, Oxford University's Dr. Denis Noble, argued against Neo-Darwinism in the journal Experimental Physiology. Of great significance, partly because Noble remains a committed evolutionist, nonetheless, he acknowledged, "that all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved."
* Leading Evolutionary Biologist Agrees with Creationist Characterization: A Royal Society 2017 publication, of all places, has support for the central creationist characterization of Darwinism, that natural selection sometimes explains survival of the fitness but never explains the arrival of the fittest. Enter Austrian evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller who wrote that "current evolutionary theory… largely avoids the question of how the complex organizations of organismal structure, physiology, development or behavior—whose variation it describes—actually arise in evolution." Müller also admits what creationists have long observed, something that promoters like Richard Dawkins are blind to, that calls for "a major revision or even a replacement of the standard theory of evolution... cannot be dismissed as a minority view but rather is a widespread feeling among scientists..."
* Enyart Debate Opponent and Gerd Müller Admissions: Compare Bob Enyart's debate opponent, well-received author and evolutionist James Hannam's assessment with Müller's admission.
"...when it came to familiarity with the arguments, [Enyart] was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed." -British Author and Darwinist James Hannam
"Indeed, a growing number of challenges to the classical model of evolution have emerged over the past few years, such as from evolutionary developmental biology, epigenetics, physiology, genomics, ecology, plasticity research, population genetics, regulatory evolution, network approaches, novelty research, behavioural biology, microbiology and systems biology... None of these contentions are unscientific, all rest firmly on evolutionary principles and all are backed by substantial empirical evidence." -Austrian evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller
* A Majority of the Most Accomplished Nation: In 2013, 62% of Americans say that they believe that God either guided the development of, or specially created, human beings. This means, of course, that the majority of the population of the most technologically and scientifically accomplished reject the central tenet of Darwinism, which is that the diversity of life on Earth is explained by undirected, natural processes.
* Percent of Faithful Scientists Constant from 1917 to 1997: The New York Times reported in their article, Survey of Scientists Finds a Stability of Faith in God, on an old survey repeated verbatim 80 years later in 1997. "To the extent that both surveys are accurate readings, traditional Western theism has not lost its place among U.S. scientists, despite their intellectual preoccupation with material reality.” The 1917 atheist who conducted the original research, "predicted that more and more scientists would give up their belief in God, as scientific knowledge replaced what he considered to be superstition." However, as the NYT updated the story, eight decades later, "A full 40 percent of scientists believe in a personal God and afterlife, according to a 1997 study."
* Answering the Atheist's Argument from Authority: This list above is not an argument from authority. Rather, it is a REBUTTAL to logical fallacy committed often by evolutionists (including Krauss) when they commonly make their invalid argument from authority. There is nothing wrong with quoting an expert on a topic. But evolutionists frequently use the bait and switch tactic of identifying experts in one topic and then without acknowledging the switch, proceeding as though they were experts in a different field, which is one way of committing the logical fallacy of an invalid argument from authority. Being a pilot doesn't mean that you know how to make an airplane, let alone gravity. So we should take care not to commit the logical fallacy of argument from an invalid authority, like this:
Scientists are experts in operational physics, chemistry, and biology.
Most scientists believe in naturalistic origins.
Therefore naturalistic origins must be true.
Aside from the severe misrepresentation that "all scientists are Darwinists", it is also a logical fallacy to imply that success in operational science translates to authority regarding origins.
* Summary of the DI's Scientific Dissent from Darwinism: The Discovery Institute describes the hundreds of scientists who have signed their statement of dissent as made up of those holding "doctorates in biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, computer science, and related disciplines from such institutions as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Dartmouth, Rutgers, University of Chicago, Stanford and University of California at Berkeley. Many are also professors or researchers at major universities and research institutions such as Cambridge, Princeton, MIT, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, University of Georgia, Tulane, Moscow State University, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, and Ben-Gurion University in Israel."
* Non-religious Darwin Skeptics: As reported by Casey Luskin in the Christian Research Journal, the Non-Religious Skeptics of Darwinian Evolution include Rutgers' Jerry Fodor, National Academy of Sciences member and biology professor Lynn Margulis, Thomas Nagel, molecular biology post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University David Berlinski, the University of Warwick's Steve Fuller, and NAS member Philip Skell.
* U.S. Nat'l Academy of Sciences Member Doubts Darwin: The late Dr. Philip Skell has remarked that biology papers typically include an obligatory evolutionary gloss that adds nothing to and has nothing to do with the actual published research. From Bob Enyart's Dobzhansky paper:
[C]onsidering... discoveries, such as those that earn Nobel Prizes, evolution is surprisingly irrelevant according to dozens of the world’s leading scientists, as assessed by a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
Philip Skell reports that he "asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No" (Skell, 2005, p. 10). Decades worth of Nobel Prizes awarded for discoveries in the life sciences falsify Dobzhansky’s third and key expectation, that nothing in biology would make sense apart from evolution. Those awards track worldwide progress in biology and therefore should be able to catalog amazing evolution-based discoveries. However, the late Pennsylvania State University professor Dr. Skell summed up the actual history of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. "I decided to explore this further by examining the 100 Nobel Prizes in biology-related areas over the last century. And I could not find among them any that had been awarded the Nobel Prize for their breakthrough discoveries that I could recognize depended upon Darwinian concepts to design the experimental work on which their discoveries were based. … So here again, the Darwinian theory did not provide the guidance that was necessary for those great breakthrough discoveries" (ID the Future, 2007).
* Evolutionary Journal Says Darwinism Seems Superfluous: Agreeing with the late Academy member Dr. Skell, the Darwinian peer-reviewed journal BioEssays lamented:
While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. "Evolution" would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.
* Another Evolution Journal Admits Doubt of Primary Evidence: Many evolutionists including Dawkins (as in his extrapolation from canine diversity) oversell the claim to the public that small changes within species prove that over long periods, the species themselves arose naturally. However, out of the hearing of the general public, evolutionary biologists themselves are more honest. As in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology itself,
A persistent debate in evolutionary biology is one over the continuity of microevolution and macroevolution – whether macroevolutionary trends are governed by the principles of microevolution.
In house, this is a debate. Outside, Darwin marketing reps like Dawkins, Coyne, PZ Myers, and Krauss pretend this is settled science. As Nagel concluded "Mind and Cosmos", today's evolution "consensus... will come to seem laughable in a generation or two."
* Templeton Funds Evolution Rethink: From the journal Science, "For many evolutionary biologists, nothing gets their dander up faster than suggesting evolution is anything other than the process of natural selection, acting on random mutations. So some are uneasy that the John Templeton Foundation has awarded $8.7 million to U.K., Swedish, and U.S. researchers for experimental and theoretical work..."
* Scientists Doubting or Rejecting the Big Bang: See cosmologystatement.org. Unlike as with Darwinism, big bang cosmology is relatively insulated from real-world feedback because millions of professionals do not work in related fields as with biology. If hundreds of thousands of professionals received actual astronomical feedback in the same way that farmers, veterinarians, and physicians do daily while working with biological systems, then surveys might show a picture similar to that regarding Darwinism. That is, if professionals interacted daily with all the astronomical data that challenges and undermines the expectations of big bang theory, then the world would likely see a similar percentage of professionals in related scientific fields rejecting the big bang too. Cosmological dogma, further removed from human observation than are theories on anatomy, "benefits" in a backward sense, from the herd mentality that reinforces the tendency to believe authorities because most people lack daily experience with first-hand evidence that may contradicting (or support) the received account. Thus when that theoretical physicist (emphasis on the theoretical), Lawrence Krauss told RSR that, "All evidence overwhelmingly supports the big bang", he of course was ignoring all the apparently contradictory evidence. So he asks expects everyone to "Trust us", i.e., trust those with the inscrutable knowledge. Scientists who doubt or outright reject the big bang include:
- acclaimed astronomer Fred Hoyle, father of stellar evolution theory (whom Stephen Hawking pointed out also rejected Darwin; see biography, A Life in Science)
- acclaimed astrophysicists Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge
- the 50 astronomers and physicists at the 2nd Crisis in Cosmology Conference
- the 100 Ph.D.s listed at Australia's creation.com
- the 200 scientists with master's degrees or Ph.D.s listed over at AiG
- the 500 Ph.D. scientists at the Korean Association of Creation Research
- the 600 advanced degreed scientist at the Creation Research Society
- the National Academy of Sciences which in 2003 published an alternative model for a bounded universe and the
- hundreds more secular scientists who have signed the extraordinary declaration at cosmologystatement.org including those working at leading institutions such as at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions.
- Etc.
* Crichton on Consensus: When you hear consensus, consensus, you might have reason to doubt the consensus. Physician and Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton warned at CalTech: "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. ... I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."
* In a Third of a Century, Creationism Holds, Theistic Evolution Declines: Over a 32 year period, the Gallup organization has asked Americans about human origins. While of course surveys are often inaccurate and people's views often more complex and nuanced, and even self-contradictory, than polls tend to reveal, notice the general trend. The godless view, that humans evolved without any kind of divine involvement, more than doubled from 1982 to 2014. The young earth creationist view mostly held steady, within the survey's margin of error, from 44% to 42%. That staying power exerts itself against the onslaught. Consider the Darwinist propaganda funded by hundreds of billions of dollars spent through public school teaching, TV entertainment networks, Hollywood messaging through a high percentage of their films from animated children's movies to scifi, biased government grants, the mainstream news media and publishers including virtually all magazine and newspaper editorial boards, all of the cable science, discovery, and National Geographic networks, and through the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, all mainline Protestant denominations and most Protestant seminaries and Bible colleges. But then, if Gallup shows a determined continued belief in young-earth creationism, as their third option described, "God created human beings within the last 10,000 years or so", then where was the defections from belief that enabled the materialistic view to about double? Not surprisingly, it came from a camp that can roughly be called, very roughly, theistic evolution. During the 32 years of these surveys, those who held that "Humans evolved with God guiding" lost nearly ten percent of that camp, dropping to just over 30% of the population. No wonder. See our Trading Genesis video, above! 2019 Update: Gizmodo reports on the latest Gallup poll, "40 percent of American adults comply to a strict view of creationism, in which God brought humans into existence within the last 10,000 years." So the truth is withstanding the mega-billion dollar onslaught from every front. Congratulations young earth creationists!
* RSR Asks Newsweek Reporters about their 1987 Statistic: As often claimed by evolutionists, AronRa told Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart that 99.86% of scientists affirm Darwinism, a statistic that is unintentionally fabricated by a confused misuse of a 1987 Newsweek article that reports no poll or survey but a "count" of 700 creationist scientists. This figure came from the size of the voting membership of the Creation Research Society, which at that time was 700 scientists with advanced degrees.
But regarding the fabricataed Newsweek statistic, by such an overtly invalid statistical method, atheists themselves would comprise only two-hundredths of one percent of 230 million U.S. adults if we calculated using "one count" of atheists, namely, the membership of the Skeptics Society. Of course that's wrong.
* Newsweek Reporters Larry Martz and Ann McDaniel: In 1987 Martz & McDaniel wrote, "By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientist) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared "abruptly." To a request for more details, on June 12, 2012 Ann McDaniel replied to Real Science Radio: "Bob – I wish I had the notes for that story, but I don’t have everything from 25 years ago, and I don’t remember. So sorry that I cannot help you." On April 1, 2013 Larry Martz wrote, "Mr. Enyart, ... I was the New York writer on this story, working from reports from Ann McDaniel and others who weren't named in the byline, along with whatever telephone reporting I did myself. I don't remember which of them came up with that figure, or what its provenance was. It might well have been Ginny Carroll, who was Newsweek's principal reporter on Christian religious affairs; but sad to say, Ginny is dead. Your conjecture seems entirely reasonable, but none of us can confirm it... I think you are probably safe to use your conjecture for the source, along with 'probably.' best, larry martz".
* NCSE Also Sees CRSQ as the Source for this "Count": From the anti-creationist group founded by Eugenie Scott, the National Center for Science Education, Glenn Branch writes, "As for 700, I speculate that it was chosen as the number of members of the Creation Research Society, which requires its voting members to have earned a 'postgraduate degree in a recognized area of science.' Its membership hovers around 700... So... ~0.75% would have been a better estimate of the prevalence of creation scientists in the U.S. life sciences and earth sciences communities circa 1987." Branch admits that his "better estimate" is only a "lower bound" (because of the invalid statistical method used) yet concludes by referencing the "97%" of scientists who agree with the (highly ambiguous) statement that "living things have evolved", a sentiment shared by most creation scientists. NCSE seems to consistently ignore, as documented over at rsr.org/doubting-darwin, that "60% of all U.S. medical doctors reject the strictly secular Darwinist explanation for our existence, with three of five docs agreeing that either God initiated and guided the process that led to human life or that God specially created human beings."
See more on the Newsweek saga at rsr.org/newsweek-99-percent-of-scientists-reject-creation-1987.
* Sure Scholars Doubt Darwin, But What Do Christians Doubt? In a discussion over at Prometheus Unbound, Santi, an agnostic, asked RSR host Bob Enyart about his doubts. You can read that discussion and Bob's answer over at rsr.org/on-doubt that begins like this: Santi, to help myself think this through, I’ll first list the things I never ever doubt.
- I never doubt that I exist.
- I never doubt that truth exists, because for example, it is true that I exist. more...
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* PSSI RSR Backup: In case this list becomes otherwise unavailable online, Real Science Radio backups here the Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity list of 300 Darwin doubters.