ATHEISM: A Giant Leap of Faith | Part 9

Intellectual Terrorism

Many scientists who believe in creationism or intelligent design experience discrimination from some atheists in the scientific community. Examples include:

• Richard Von Steinberg, a well-published Smithsonian researcher, was called an intellectual terrorist and was pressured to leave his job because he authorized a peer-reviewed paper presenting evidence for intelligent design. (Interview with Ben Stein,  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Documentary (2008-04-18) https://youtu.be/V5EPymcWp-g?t=329 @ 5:29)
• David Coppedge, who worked at NASA as a team lead on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, was demoted then terminated after he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design. ( https://freescience.today/story/david-coppedge/)
• Günter Bechly, a curator at Stuttgart’s State Museum of Natural History, with ground-breaking studies on the evolution of dragonfly wings, and with several species named after him, found his Wikipedia page deleted when he came out against evolution and in favor of intelligent design. ( https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/erased-paleontologist-bechly-gets-support-from-science-and-health-council/, 2018)
• When the open-access scientific journal, PLOS ONE published a peer-reviewed paper which mentioned the Creator in reference to the complex biomechanical architecture of the hand, the public outcry was immediate and swift. One editor posted: “Just found out @PLOSONE published a paper with ‘evidence’ about some ‘creator’. If not retracted immediately, I will resign as editor.”
• Buckling under the pressure, the journal did exactly that. Its rating was downgraded and the authors apologized for daring to refer to the Creator. ( https://creation.com/hand-design-peer-review)
• The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this incident (2016) as follows: “Paper Praising Creator Puts Fear of God in Open-Access Giant.” ( http://chronicle.com/article/Paper-Praising-Creator-/235610)
• Wikipedia referred to this incident as “CreatorGate.”
• When the Chinese paleontologist, Jun-yuan Chen —an acknowledged expert and lecturer on the Cambrian explosion— presented that recent fossil finds in his country were inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution, his conclusion so upset American scientists that it brought forth his famous comment:

“In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.” ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB934759227734378961 )

• The 2011 book, Slaughter of the Dissidents, (Leafcutter Press; 1st Edition ) by Dr. Jerry Bergman, gives a detailed report of the efforts in US academia to insulate evolutionary theory and philosophical naturalism from critical assessment. It describes the suppression of critical views, and the victimization of dissenting teachers and pupils in schools, and students and faculty at universities. ( https://creation.com/slaughter-of-the-dissidents)
• The 2008 documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,discusses the conspiracy in academia to oppress and exclude people who believe in  Intelligent Design. The film portrays several academics including Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, Caroline Crocker and others as victims of persecution by major scientific organizations and academia for their promotion of intelligent design and for questioning Darwinism. The documentary also features numerous anonymous people who said that their jobs in the sciences would be jeopardized if their belief in intelligent design was made public. (Interview with Ben Stein,  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Documentary (2008-04-18)

Schools in many places in the Western world are mandated to teach evolution and are prevented from teaching intelligent design. When the State of Louisiana tried to teach both, its decision was struck down by the US courts. The same happened in Pennsylvania, where a judge ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design in biology in US schools.  For this service to the evolution lobbyists, the judge was cited as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.  This is ironic, in a country where the official motto, printed on its currency is: “In God, we trust.” In the UK, even free schools are forced to teach evolution. ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9713524/Free-schools-forced-to-teach-evolution-in-science-classes.html, 2012) Haeckel’s embryo drawings are still taught as evidence for evolution in schools and they are still present in a large number of biology textbooks, years after they were exposed as fraudulent drawings. ( https://evolutionnews.org/2015/04/haeckels_fraudu/, 2015) What happened to critical thinking, objectivity and free thought in education? In higher education and research forums, academics may be denied tenure and research funding, lose employment and be ostracized for questioning evolution. Dr. James Tour, one of the world’s top 10 chemists —named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine in 2013 ( https://www.rdworldonline.com/inspired-chemistry/);  with over 640  published papers and 120 patents— announced that he did not understand evolution and issued a lunch invitation to anyone who could explain it to him. He tells us that, in the backrooms of science, National Science Academy members and Nobel Prize winners admit to him privately that they do not understand evolution either. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aVNfx5fJh0&feature=youtu.be) Even Internet search engines show bias. According to Paul Price, Wikipedia is a dubious source but a powerful tool for suppressing dissent. Its editors and contributors are mainly younger Westerners, indoctrinated in Darwinism, tending more and more towards the abandonment of religion. Wikipedia openly and blatantly classifies creationism as “pseudoscience.” ( https://creation.com/wikipedia, 2018) I experienced this bias first-hand during the research for this series. Often, during a Google search for specific papers on intelligent design, using the exact title, author and keywords, I would first get a list of articles debunking that research (mainly from Wikipedia) before I got the actual article I was searching for, on the second or third search page. To combat the aggression of the pro-evolution lobbies and their efforts to monopolize science, a statement, A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, was issued in 2001 as follows: We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. There is scientific dissent from Darwinism. It deserves to be heard. ( https://dissentfromdarwin.org/faq/) The statement was signed by leading pioneers in science, including scientists from the US National Academy of Sciences, Russian, Hungarian and Czech National Science Academies, as well as from leading universities such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, UCLA and others. The list of signatories is found at: ( https://www.discovery.org/m/securepdfs/2021/07/Scientific-Dissent-from-Darwinism-List-07152021.pdf) The Third Way is a grouping of scientists, including Denis Nobel, and James Shapiro. Denis Nobel is a British Biologist, who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of Computational Physiology. He was the first scientist to model cardiac cells (in two papers published in Nature in 1960) and has published over 350 research papers. He is regarded as a leading researcher in the field of Systems Biology. James A. Shapiro is the author of Evolution: A view from the twenty-first century, (FT Press Science, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, ISBN 10: 0-13278093-3). The Third Way claims an alternative way to explain the origins of biological diversity (other than creationism and neo-Darwinism). According to them, neo-Darwinists have elevated natural selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. ( https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com) Alvin Carl Plantenga—an American analytic philosopher awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017— views the position of some modern-day atheists, who fight faith and stand against science if it paves the way to belief in God, as similar to the position of the Church in the Middle Ages when it stood against science because it mistakenly believed that it paved the way to atheism. So, when we are next assured that something is proven scientifically without any doubt, it may be valid to ask: “According to what: strictly policed science or true science?”

…To be continued in Part 10