We are coming up on the 200th year after Darwin's birth, and 150 since he first published The Origin of the Species. Since that time the western world has been subjected to one of the biggest and most sustained propaganda campaigns of all time in an attempt to indoctrinate mankind into darwinism.
For the past 150 years, in almost every classroom, every university, every hall of learning, every mass media outlet, and every government programme the evolutionist paradigm has been assumed, pushed, propagated, and promoted. So militant has been the offensive that evolutionism has been elevated to where it is synonymous with science and reason and intelligence. Not to believe, adopt, and promote evolutionism either overtly or indirectly is regarded by definition as being obscurantist, unscientific, irrational, and ignorantly superstitious.
The billions of dollars spent on promoting the theory is beyond estimation--not to mention the man hours of effort. The sheer comprehensiveness of the campaign, the breadth and depth of the propaganda consensus, and the magnitude of the effort, has been unparalleled in history.
What has been the outcome? Well, The Guardian recently raised eyebrows with the assertion that half of Britons do not believe in evolution. This is the result of a recent survey undertaken in that country. Over a century of relentless propaganda and inculcation and still half the population thinks it's either rubbish or unlikely! Of the 50 percent who do believe in evolution, half of them think it only probably true, which means they think it is possibly wrong. We quote:
Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, according to a survey.
The poll found that 25% of Britons believe Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "definitely true", with another quarter saying it is "probably true". Half of the 2,060 people questioned were either strongly opposed to the theory or confused about it.
The Rescuing Darwin survey, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, found that around 10% of people chose young Earth creationism – the belief that God created the world some time in the last 10,000 years – over evolution.
About 12% preferred intelligent design, the idea that evolution alone is not enough to explain the structures of living organisms. The remainder were unsure, often mixing evolution, intelligent design and creationism together. The survey was conducted by the polling agency ComRes on behalf of the Theos thinktank.
This situation is not isolated to Britain as if the inhabitants of that country were somehow afflicted with implacable ignorance. Similar results have emerged from surveys in the United States. According to one science reporter at Physorg.com
Public opinion surveys consistently have shown that Americans are deeply divided over evolution. The most recent Gallup poll on the issue, in June 2007, found that 49 percent of those surveyed said they believed in evolution and 48 percent said they didn't. Those percentages have stayed almost even for at least 25 years. . . .
A Harris poll published last December found that more people believe in a devil, hell and angels than in evolution.
We are reminded at this point of the relentless suppression of the Christian faith and the promotion of "scientific atheism" in the USSR and Eastern Europe for most of the twentieth century. At the end of it, after it had all come to an end, the majority of the population in the disintegrating Soviet Union still professed belief in a deity.
Why has evolutionist propaganda failed so miserably to win over the population, despite the extent, breadth, and length of the effort? There is no doubt a cluster of reasons.
First in importance (although regrettably not in influence) is the internal irrationality and illogic of the theory. Any theory that seriously proposes structure, pattern, order, and natural laws while advocating at the same time that the universe (being, matter, dimensions, time, space, existence, etc) is radically random and the product of brute chance, is so internally contradictory that it is doomed to failure from the outset. It cannot even get to first base, let alone past it. To even attempt to propound the theory rationally is to contradict it.
Secondly, people over the long haul find the arrogance of evolution protagonists tiresome. They are forever talking about "facts" without ever being prepared to examine their assumptions or their theories of fact. They assert the science is settled--and when challenged their modus operandi is to assert more loudly. They name call and demean their intellectual opponents--engaging in ad hominem attacks.
All of these failures in scientific rationality are on display even in the Guardian's article.
A spokesman for Sense about Science, an independent charitable trust, said it was important for scientists and educators to disentangle religious belief from evidence.
James Williams, a lecturer at Sussex University, said: "Creationists ask if people believe in evolution. Evolution is a theory and a fact. You accept it because of the evidence. What the creationists have done is put a cloak of pseudo-science to wrap up their religious belief."
Creationists are "pseudo-scientists"; they deceive by "wrapping up their religious beliefs in cloaks," etc. Moreover, in the quotation above, we have just another manifestation of "the science is settled, shut up" approach to one's opponents.
The theory-evidence-fact claim is pretentious. Evolutionism is a cosmogony--it endeavours to explain how life came into existence. Since the scientists were not present and their laboratories were not functioning at the time life came into existence, all they can do is project from the present backwards, which is inherently speculative. All rigorous scientists know that extrapolation (either back or forward in time) is a dangerously tentative and speculative activity. The best that one can say is extrapolation may or may not provide the truth. But no. The evolutionist propagandists insist that there is no speculation here: only hard evidence and the facts, baby. The self-blindness and the pretension is breathtaking.
Actually, when you think about it, the allegation against creationists in the quotation above is actually misleading. Creationists do not usually wrap up their religious faith--they are most often overt and clear and honest about it. But the allegation is far more fair and accurate when applied to evolutionists, for it is they who put up a cloak of pseudo-science in which to wrap up their religious beliefs. The "science" of evolutionism is nothing more than speculation and endless extrapolation into the past and therefore is pseudo-science. Moreover, beliefs about origins are inherently religious insofar as they purport to deal with the ultimate questions of being itself. Therefore evolutionism is inescapably religious. It is flat out dishonest not to acknowledge that this is the case.
The non-scientific status of evolutionism can be demonstrated another way. Ask any evolutionist whether evolution as a scientific hypothesis could be falsified. (This is a loaded question, since potential falsifiability is a put forward as a distinguishing characteristic of genuine science.) Most evolutionists will then happily describe conditions or experimental circumstances which would allegedly falsify their theory.
But if the world is radically unpredictable, why would these unexpected outcomes disprove the theory? After all, in a world "ruled" by chance--as evolutionists allege--anything is possible. In the end, evolutionism cannot be falsified for it "accounts" for even the most random of outcomes. (It is like the predictive climate models now being employed by another pseudo-science. Whatever happens to the climate it is trumpeted as "proof" the world is warming due to man-released carbon dioxide.)
So, people get tired of the hectoring and the bludgeoning tactics employed by evolutionists. It seems that they might protest too much. We believe that this has probably led to the current disquiet over Darwinianism.
Further, we live in an age when authority is pervasively distrusted. People have been told for over a century now that nirvana and paradise is just around the corner, and that all they need to do is elect this or that political party to government, and all will be well. The government can and will solve every problem. As the decades pass, this becomes more and more obviously untrue. The outcome is a widespread distrust of "official" positions. (Hence the plague of conspiracy theorists and conspiracies now abroad.) Evolutionism has been the official position for so long that it has begun to suffer from the pervasive scepticism attributed to what is perceived to be government propaganda.
So, all evolutionists can do now is plead for more time. One hundred years of relentless propagandising and active suppression of other views have not been enough. If evolutionism is so "factual" and so "obvious" and so "self-evident" and so "true" and so supported by "evidence", why might this be the case? "Well", one imagines the answer would come back, "we just need more time".
Meanwhile, the theory of evolution itself is mutating and changing. It was reconstructed and reshaped around the middle of last century as more and more evidence made original Darwinianism less and less believable. The revision was called the "Modern Synthesis" and people began to speak of neo-Darwinians. Now, there is talk of another major revision being needed--a kind of Modern Synthesis 2.0. Presumably we will now have to speak of neo-neo-Darwinians.
Revisions of scientific theory--even radical revisions--are not unknown. Consider, for example, the move from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. Newtonian theories now die the death of a thousand qualifications. What is far less normal is that under a revised theory people would still cling to the old. You don't find many physicists still calling themselves "Newtonians" any longer or asserting that Newtonian mechanics are a "fact".
Yet the evolutionists still do. This is a further evidence of how religiously committed evolutionists are. But, such limited success after such a long time. . . .
Another two hundred years, anyone?
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