0509 Biased Science
Science is generally taught and promoted as a discipline characterized by objective investigation and fact-based authority. But deeply entrenched prejudices are being unmasked, sometimes by scientists who have decided to follow the scientific method where it leads.
Genuine scientific method dictates that a neutral human being observes the presence of a phenomena or an event in the material world. “Dr. Neutral” then describes observations and proposes a likely explanation for the experience (hypothesis). Having accurately described the challenge and predetermined an answer, Dr. Neutral begins extensive testing and analysis to verify or invalidate the predetermined solution. At the end of the process, the results are analyzed. If things do not work out as planned, Dr. Neutral either scraps the prediction or figures out how to modify it for another round of testing. If everything goes according to plan, repeated testing with identical results will bear out the original educated guess. In other words, true science is falsifiable.
In the world of evolutionary anthropology, biology, paleontology, etc., Dr. Neutral is a myth. Mainstream science is overwhelmingly atheistic/agnostic in its view of the universe. It begins with an unavoidable assumption, that the only real universe is the material one and that it alone is its own best explanation, having come into existence from nothing without explanation. In other words, our “uni-verse”, while predictable and rational, got that way by unpredictable and irrational processes. Magic. With this assumption, as well as many others, Dr. Neutral becomes Dr. Bias, a creature trusting in the validity of his assumptions (worldview) and whose observations, hypotheses, test structures, interpretations and theories are filtered and shaped by his faith.
It was in a 1993 meeting that agnostic and theistic evolutionist scientists, after honestly recognizing the faith problem, renewed the idea of intelligent design (I.D.). Over the last ten years a growing number of geneticists, physicists, biochemists and microbiologists have been looking at I.D. seriously. Decades of observation and research have revealed evolution to be patently unscientific. It is a worldview that unapologetically accepts contradictions and impossibilities as fact. Evolutionary scientists reach into the unobservable, untestable, unrepeatable past to explain the present and call it science in violation of their own scientific method. The list of offenses is long – biogenesis, phylogenetic crossovers, genetic leaps, biochemical divergences, conflicted paleontology and anthropology, a contrived geologic table, unreliable and contradictory dating and violated laws of thermodynamics. The list could be longer and it is admittedly technical, but it should serve to illustrate the profound dogmatism of evolutionist pseudo-science.
I.D. at least recognizes the obvious. It introduces a viable alternative to the evolutionary magic required to overcome the offenses above by recognizing our consistent, predictable and rational universe as originating from a consistent, structured and rational source. The fact is that evolution is just as much a philosophy as Intelligent Design and no less religious.
To qualify as Biblical creationism, I.D. would have to also accurately portray its author, God. It does not do so. It says nothing about man’s condition before God or what to do about it. It asks no one to worship or even love their neighbor. It carries no moral creed and proclaims no spiritual paths or solutions. Instead, like theistic evolution, its open-endedness allows for belief in a system that could be mindlessly self-directed except at strategic points. Its designer could be hiding behind self-correcting, self-glorifying “natural” processes of trial and error. He would have allowed millions of not-quite humans to die in brutish stupidity with half-evolved souls, experiencing the pain and death of a fallen world while waiting for evolutionary processes to completely develop their humanity, and therefore their sinfulness. In so doing, he would have waited to apply a solution only to the most sophisticated humans and would now be demanding accountability for behaviors and attitudes which are merely products of upward development.
At the end of the day, there simply is no possible objectivity in the natural sciences as long as the investigations or principles taught have even the remotest relationship to origins or processes in the past. There are only two possibilities to work from – either nothing to everything or someone to everything. The first option can be disproven through good science; the second one cannot. Therefore, no scientist working from the first option is justified in rejecting the second. If an intellectually honest scientist lacks that capability, so does a science curriculum or any media presentation to the public.