Intolerant Darwinists

It is fashionable in today’s “intellectual” circles to consider anyone who questions Darwin’s theory of evolution a buffoon. One need only read the recent works of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins to taste their condescension toward those who disagree with them.

Some of us have genuine scientific questions regarding evolutionary theory, but we often remain silent for fear of being castigated and called religious bigots. Whatever happened to the free intellectual environment in which honest questions could be raised and responded to with respect and dignity? I have serious questions about evolution, and I don’t think those questions are products of a deranged mind. I have a master’s degree; I speak three languages; I have played about half of Beethoven’s sonatas (on the piano, not the stereo). I am like millions of others whose cerebral processes work quite well yet who have been chastised by those sitting in ivory towers spouting their theories ad nauseam simply because, after weighing the evidence, we disagree.

I am not proposing teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. That would, no doubt, cross the line into the teaching of religion. But that doesn’t mean I am buying into evolution. There remain too many unanswered questions.

Let’s be clear on a few important points. First of all, Charles Darwin was not an atheist. Anyone who has ever read The Origin of Species knows this. Of course, most professing Darwinists have probably never held a copy of The Origin of Species in their hands, much less read it. (Admittedly, most professing Christians have probably not read the Bible either.) Darwin had no qualms with including reference to God in his writing. At one point he asserts that a particular proposition by his detractors “makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception.” Elsewhere, Darwin speaks of “the laws impressed on matter by the Creator” and proposes that one should not assume “that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man.” Though he would be out of sync with today’s creationists, Darwin believed in God. Darwinists who rank the religious among the world’s ignorant should include their founder in that number.

Secondly, I am not proposing that established scientific fact is disproved by the Bible. Science has made it quite clear that we live in an old universe. Otherwise, we would have to accuse God of a divine ruse by the very fact that we can see Andromeda Galaxy through our telescopes. Something 2.5 million light years away would be yet invisible to us if the universe were created a mere six thousand years ago, unless of course, God created a stream of photons between there and here to alert us to its existence.

Thirdly, there is a degree of micro-evolution that even the creationist accepts. Otherwise, he will have a difficult time explaining the existence of the races.

My problem is with the questions I am not allowed to ask, or if I ask them, are ignored as the questions of a simpleton. For example, if evolution is true, how did the first living organism survive longer than a millisecond? Let’s agree for a moment that over billions of years in a universe as vast as ours, it might just be possible for the substances that contribute to physical life to converge at a single point. How would its existence continue unless, simultaneous with that moment of conversion, a membrane form to encapsulate it? Even single-celled life requires a type of “skin” to survive. Otherwise, it would be much like the element number 118 that American and Russian physicists recently created but which lasted only a millisecond.

Of course, this raises another question. How is it that, with his magnificent brain, man has not managed to create even the simplest life form he asserts came about by random processes? We can duplicate the nuclear process that powers the sun, but creating a single living cell eludes us.

Another troublesome point for me comes from the second law of thermodynamics. Physical law states that, on a whole, everything is moving in the direction of higher entropy. However, whereas the physicist assures us that the material universe moves from definition to chaos, the evolutionist proposes that life is advancing toward greater sophistication. Am I the only one seeing the conflict here?

I have other questions, but I will leave it at this for now. Someone please answer my questions. Don’t just tell me I’m stupid. In no courtroom in the country can a lawyer simply call the members of the jury a bunch of dummies and expect to win his case. Of course, it is much easier for the Darwinist to denigrate people than to provide plausible answers to their questions. When he does so, however, rather than demonstrating his intellectual stature, he just shows his bigotry and intolerance.