Recently, this comment was found on one of the many anti-creation websites on the Internet:
First of all, I am not against Christianity. In fact, I am a Christian . . . What I am opposing here is the secularization of our public schools under the guise of so-called “Creation Science” . . . It is pseudo-science . . . it is fundamentalist, radical, dogmatic, theocratic and self-justifying religion. In particular, I am opposing the specific doctrine of “Young Earth Creation Science. . . .”
Our Christian brother, instead of resorting to name-calling, need only list some empirical evidences for neo-Darwinian macroevolution to make his case. Such a summary would silence the “Young Earth Creationists.” In the meantime, let’s apply his list of names to the alternate view, that of evolution as viewed by its leading thinkers:
Pseudo-science? “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” (R. Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review, January 1997, p.31).
Fundamentalist? “. . . there was a world of bacteria here that preceded us” (Kenneth Nealson, microbiologist at NASA. Newsweek, September 21, 1998, p. 12). “Evolution is a process which has produced life from non-life, which has brought forth man from an animal, and which may conceivably continue doing remarkable things in the future. In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself” (T. Dobzhansky, “Changing Man,” Science, v. 155, January 27, 1967, pp. 409–15).
Dogmatic? “Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!” (Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended, 1982, p. 58).
Radical? The Kansas Science Education Standards (December 1998) states that these “unifying concepts and processes . . . transcend the traditional disciplines of science.” An anthropologist at Rutgers contends that “Darwinian science inevitably will, and should, have legal, political, and moral consequences. . .” (Scientific American, October 1995).
Theocratic? “Like all important ideas, evolution attracts controversy; . . . it has affected not only science but also philosophy, religion, and human attitudes” (Botany, W. C. Brown, 1995).
As is easily seen, naturalistic evolution is a total worldview, not well based in science. Name calling doesn’t change this fact.
