RSR's List of Scholars Doubting Darwin
* 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. So welcome to Real Science Radio's List of Scholars Doubting Darwin! (URL: rsr.org/doubters.)
* Except for These Guys: Those who have gone out of their way to declare their doubt about Darwin include the:
- 100 Ph.D.s listed at Australia's creation.com
- 200 scientists with master's degrees or Ph.D.s listed over at AiG
- 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
* 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. And in addition to the 5,000 or so scientists, Ph.D.s. and scholars above, those who think that almost all educated people affirm Darwin, are forgetting about 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. Whereas Darwinism is dominated by storytelling, the field of medicine is an actual applied science (see definition and applied science section below) within biology that is practiced by highly educated professionals. Thus it is significant 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 as we are.
* 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.
* 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.
* Even 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: 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 the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions.
- Etc.
