Alfred Russell Wallace, co-conceiver with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection:
“‘I fully accept Mr. Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily structure with that of the higher mammalian, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes,’1 he conceded. However, man’s intellectual powers and moral sense, among other things, he said, ‘could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone, and_, therefore, some other influence, law, or agency is required to account for them.’2 Darwin was naturally upset by what Wallace called ‘my little heresy,’ and he wrote to Wallace in 1869 lamenting, ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’”3
“any theory of human evolution must explain how it was that an apelike ancestor, equipped with powerful jaws and long, daggerlike canine teeth and able to turn at speed on four limbs became transformed into a slow, bipedal animal whose natural means of defense were at best puny. Add to this the powers of intellect, speech, and morality, upon which we ‘stand raised as upon a mountain top,’ as Huxley put it, and one has the complete challenge to evolutionary theory.”4
Atheism and scienceDonald Johanson making reference to Richard Leakey:
“‘There has been a controversy that has been going on now for nearly three years between Richard and myself, and it specifically focuses on the family tree,’ says Johanson. ‘We presented our family tree, let’s see, it must have been in January 1979, and very shortly thereafter I know that Richard and others, but specifically Richard, had said that it does not fit the evidence of the fossil record.’”5
Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson, “would like to see a lot more fossils discovered.”6
Sir Arthur Keith, “In all these journeys into ancient times and to primitive people there is one adage, an article of Darwinian faith, which we must bear in mind. Nature is jealous of her species building. Progress-or what is the same thing, Evolution-is her religion; the production of new species is her form of worship. She is up to every trick in this game she plays with living things.”7
Anthropologist David Pilbeam, “virtually all our theories about human origins were relatively unconstrained by fossil data_The theories are_fossil-free or in some cases even fossil-proof.”8
“What is the role and status of our own species, Homo sapiens, in nature and the cosmos?’9 This, suggests Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard University, is the ‘cardinal question of intellectual history.’”10
Atheism and scienceAgnostic Astronomer Robert Jastrow wrote:
“Theologians generally are delighted with the proof that the Universe had a beginning, but astronomers are curiously upset. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind-supposedly a very objective mind-when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in our profession. It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases.”11
Regarding the scientific discovery that proves that the universe had a beginning, or moment of creation, Jastrow wrote:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”12
Atheism and scienceIn relation to the shocking and upsetting discovery that the universe had a beginning, as postulated in the Big Bang theory, Jastrow points out the following:
“some prominent scientists began to feel the same irritation over the expanding Universe that Einstein had expressed earlier. Eddington [English astronomer Arthur Eddington] wrote in 1931, ‘I have no axe to grind in this discussion,’ but ‘the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me_I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang_
the expanding Universe is preposterous_incredible_it leaves me cold.’ The German chemist, Walter Nernst, wrote, ‘To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundation of science.’ More recently, Phillip Morrison of MIT said in a BBC film on cosmology, ‘I find it hard to accept the Big Bang theory; I would like to reject it.’ And Allan Sandage of Palomar Observatory, who established the uniformity of the expansion of the Universe out to nearly ten billion light years, said, ‘It is such a strange conclusion_it cannot really be true’_
Einstein wrote, ‘The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.’ This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.”13
Atheism and scienceMoreover, he states:
“_the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy. Some scientists are unhappy with the idea that the world began in this way. Until recently many of my colleagues preferred the Steady State theory, which holds that the Universe had no beginning and is eternal. But the latest evidence makes is almost certain that the Big Bang really did occur.”14
Roger Lewin, Reports on the 1980 Conference on Macroevolution held in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History:
“Clashes of personality and academic sniping created palpable tension in an atmosphere that was fraught with genuine intellectual ferment_The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No_according to most paleontologists the principle feature of individual species within the fossil record is stasis, not change.
No one questions that, overall, the record reflects a steady increase in the diversity and complexity of species, with the origin of new species and the extinction of established ones punctuating the passage of time. But the crucial issue is that, for the most part, the fossils do not document a smooth transition from old morphologies to new ones. ‘For millions of years species remain unchanged in the fossil record,’ said Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard, ‘and they then abruptly disappear, to be replaced by something that is substantially different but clearly related.’ The absence of transitional forms between established species has traditionally been explained as a fault of an imperfect record, an argument first advanced by Charles Darwin_
According to the traditional position, therefore, if sedimentation and fossilization did indeed encapsulate a complete record of prehistory, then it would reveal the postulated transitional organisms. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. This ancient lament was intoned by some at the Chicago meeting: ‘I take a dim view of the fossil record as a source of data,’ observed Everett Olson, the paleontologist from UCLA. But such views were challenged as being defeatest [sic]. ‘I’m tired of hearing about the imperfections of the fossil record,’ said John Sepkoski of the University of Chicago; ‘I’m more interested in hearing about the imperfections of our questions about the record.’ ‘The record is not so woefully incomplete,’ offered Steven Stanley of Johns Hopkins University; ‘you can reconstruct long sections by combining data from several areas.’
Olson confessed himself to be ‘cheered by such optimism about the fossil record,’ and he listened receptively to Gould’s suggestion that the gaps in the record are more real than apparent. ‘Certainly the record is poor,’ admitted Gould, ‘but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change.’ To the evident frustration of many people at the meeting, a large proportion of the contributions were characterized more by description and assertion than by the presentation of data.”15
Atheism and scienceNote that the sort of subjectivism that we have demonstrated here is not solely limited to the realm of anthropology, paleoanthropology, biology, morphology, cosmology, macro-evolution, Darwinism and atheism. The field of medicine is likewise subject to subjectivity, as reported by Newsweek magazines book review of Dr. Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctors Think (4-23-07, p. 50):
“The number of ways in which a doctor can screw up make for uncomfortable reading: ‘satisfaction of search,’ the tendency to stop considering alternative explanations once you arrive at a plausible hypothesis; ‘diagnosis momentum,’ the unconscious suppression of evidence that conflicts with an existing theory; ‘commission bias,’ the preference for action for its own sake. Groopman has particular disdain for snap judgments and intuitive leaps not supported by rigorous logic.”
Dr. Marcia Angell wrote the following in “Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009 AD. She is a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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