National Geographic interviewed atheist Jerry Coyne.1 The subject was not science, but Coyne's personal beliefs. Will Nat Geo provide the same platform for a researcher who believes that God, rather than nature, created all things?
In the article posted online May 31, 2015, Coyne took shots at the idea that God created the world from the perspective of his belief in an evolving universe. He is a professor of evolution at the University of Chicago, the author of the book Why Evolution is True, and has frequently contributed to National Geographic. In this new article, Coyne accused religion of being harmful superstition and promoted his new book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.
But what does Coyne mean by "science?" Conclusions derived from repeatable experiments confirm the Bible. For example, the various plant and animal kinds always breed within their kinds, and life always comes from life. But if Coyne defines science as conclusions derived from atheistic beliefs about an imagined distant past where life comes from non-life and animal kinds magically morph into other kinds, then of course "science" would be incompatible with Scripture.
Coyne said in the interview,
If you teach evolution, you're teaching the one form of science that hits Abrahamic religions in the solar plexus. You can teach chemistry and physics and physiology and other forms of science-based inquiry, like archaeology and history, and religious people don't have any problem with that. But, for evolution, they do.1
ICR has been communicating this same message for over 40 years! But we have another message that accompanies it: Science in the form of repeatable experimentation refutes evolution.
All Jerry Coyne needs to establish that evolution from particles-to-people actually happened is to provide the results of two key experiments. One experiment should show that lifeless chemicals coalesce on their own to form living cells. No such experiment exists, so there are no results. Second, scientists should have documented one fundamental kind of creature or basic life form morphing into a different fundamental form, like a fish morphing into an amphibian. No experiment has shown this either.
Since particles-to-people evolution is a mere story—one with no scientific backing—it poses no real threat to "Abrahamic religions" like Christianity.
Will National Geographic discuss these fundamental weaknesses of evolution? Will they supply a platform for creation scientists? So far, Nat Geo has focused on only one side of the origins debate—the side that supports the religion of atheism.
Reference
- Worrall, S. In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'? National Geographic. Posted on news.nationalgeographic.com May 31, 2015, accessed June 15, 2015.
*Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on June 16, 2015.
