Welcome to this week’s services at the Church of the Infinite Chasm, where the goal is a bit unusual: to sow seeds of doubt, or at the very least to get people to really think about the theory of evolution.
“The theory?” you say. “Evolution is no longer a theory. It is an established fact.”
If you are right, evolution is perhaps the strangest of all “facts.” The “fact” of evolution is actually in serious dispute by its most ardent supporters: evolutionary scientists themselves. There is nothing even close to general consensus among evolutionists about how life originated or the mechanisms of evolution down through the millennia. The acknowledged experts in the field, the elite among evolutionary scientists, do not agree among themselves about even the ABCs of evolution.
And yet evolution is practically a religion. Like most religions, the mass of adherents do not concern themselves with details. They are long on faith and short on proof. We suggest that science is a strange institution in which to place so much faith.
Not that there’s anything wrong with science, per se. Science has brought us massive advancements in health care; it has facilitated huge leaps in life expectancy all over the world, even within just the past few years; it has brought astounding technology to our fingertips; it has improved the quality of life for billions of people.
But as news journalist Eric Sevareid (1912-1992) once said, “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” Many of mankind’s most vexing problems – usually brought to us by science, incidentally – were at one time solutions. DDT, as but one example, was once the miracle chemical that would end malaria. Pesticides still wreak havoc, despite their benefits. Other advancements brought to us by science have contributed to pollution, global warming, the arms race and nuclear proliferation, and a host of other problems. Scientists in various fields including medicine have, in decades and centuries past, held as absolute truth beliefs that are now thoroughly discounted as dangerous, misguided, or just plain silly. When it comes to “fact,” there is very little of most disciplines of science that survives the test of time. A popular recent book was entitled, “The Half-Life of Facts,” exploring the very short life expectancy of “facts.”
Science and technology are great. But if they’re your source of “facts,” be prepared for facts that frequently fade to fiction.
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