This is part one of a nine part essay which merely seeks to present what scientists have to say about science and scientists.
Introduction: What if…
What if I were to state something to the likes of, “I’m a theist and I believe that atheists contradict themselves. They state that science does not, and cannot, deal with the supernatural but that it disproves the supernatural. They claim to be atheists because science has proved that everything can be explained by naturalistic means without any need of a supernatural being”?
What If I were to state, “I’m a theist and I believe that atheism has, in the guise of science, established its own priesthood and mythology”?
What if I elaborated and stated that, in fact, the science that some atheists rely upon as a foundation for their worldview is often based on personal preference, social preconceptions, bias and that the personalities of scientists influence ideas?
What if I stated that the concept of fully rational and objective scientists is a self-serving mythology?
What if I stated that science has, for some people, become such a strong faith based belief system that even if all the data pointed to an intelligent designer such a hypothesis is excluded due to a prior commitment to materialism?
What if I said that atheistic scientists are forced by an a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive?
What if I claimed that they, in fact, purposefully will not allow a divine foot in the door?
What if I thought that atheists are so desperate to deny a creator, an intelligent designer, that they are willing to neglect scientific facts such as ordered complexity?
What if I state that some atheists would be willing to argue that an eye is no more complex than dust whirling in a puff of wind?
What if I said that scientists bully people into belief by stating that all knowledgeable people agree and preempting statements with the term surely?
What if I stated that scientists sometimes take positions simply in order to oppose other scientists and take dogmatic positions almost to the point of discounting the evidence?
What if I said that parts of the theory of evolution are a festering mass of unsupported assertions that read like imaginative literature rather than science?
What if I claimed that the scientific literature seeks to fill gaps in the data with speculations and nothing more and evolution is thus seen as a series of blind alleys?
What if I claimed that the concept that even minor types of organization can be evolved from the specialized end-products of the great evolutionary tree seems a rank impossibility?
What if I stated that the essence of the argument is that these theories are actually tautologies that cannot make empirically testable predictions?
What if I claimed that they are thus not scientific theories at all and that evolution is outside of empirical science since it cannot be refuted by any possible observations?
And if I said that every conceivable observation can be fitted into it and that evolutionary dogma accepted by most scientists as part of their training?
What if I stated all of these things?Would you commit the ad hominem and say, “You’re one of those fundamentalists aren’t you?”
Would you say, “Atheism is not a religion and therefore has no priesthood.”
Or would you ask me from whence I have gotten such odd, and obviously wrong, ideas?
Would you brush my statements off and claim that they are nothing but the propaganda of creation science and the intelligent design movement?
Well, let us put aside any and all statements by creation science and the intelligent design movement. Let us disregard the opinions of theists and anyone other commoner that has made similar statements. Let us hear what the people in the field have to say. Let us hear from anthropologists, paleoanthropologists, biologists, morphologists, cosmologists, Darwinists, atheists, etc. Let us hear what they have to state on the issue.
We will see what they have to say about subjectivism, emotionalism, elitism, and authoritarianism in what is supposed to be unbiased, truth seeking science. We will also see what they have to say about filling in the gaps of evidence with worldviews which inform interpretations of evidence.
In the next post I will begin presenting the information from the horse’s mouth.
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