Sarfati: Evolution, Science, History, Religion

The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution 
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.
(A response to "The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution")

Excerpts from Chapter 17: 

Evolution, science, history and religion

     Dawkins resorts to guilt-by-association by comparing evolution-deniers with Holocaust deniers and deniers of the reality of the Roman Empire. Yet the Romans and the Holocaust are supported by eyewitness accounts and ample written records, unlike evolution.
     Dawkins and many other evolutionists fret that doubt of evolution will be the end of science, but most science works perfectly well without it, including biological. Indeed, most of the branches of modern science were founded by believers in biblical creation, including biological science. In reality, science flourished in the Middle Ages in a Christianized Europe, and increased further after biblical authority was rediscovered in the Reformation. This should not be surprising, since science requires certain presuppositions, and they are all provided by the Bible, but not by Dawkins’ materialism or, for example, by mystical religions.
....
     *The creationist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) fathered modern chemistry and demolished the faulty Aristotelian four-elements theory. He also funded lectures to defend Christianity and sponsored missionaries and Bible translation work.
     *Cell phones depend on electromagnetic radiation theory, which was pioneered by creationist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879).
     *Computing machines were invented by Charles Babbage (1791–1871), who was not a biblical creationist but was a creationist in the broad sense. He “believed that the study of the works of nature with scientific precision, was a necessary and indispensable preparation to the understanding and interpreting their testimony of the wisdom and goodness of their Divine Author.”9
     *The creationist brothers Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) invented the airplane after studying God’s design of birds.
     *The theory of planetary orbits was invented by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), famous for claiming that his discoveries were “thinking God’s thoughts after him”. Kepler also calculated a creation date of 3992 BC, close to Ussher’s.
     *The theory of gravity and the laws of motion, essential for the moon landings, were discovered by the creationist Isaac Newton (1642/3–1727), who also discovered the spectrum of light (so was the forerunner of my own speciality, spectroscopy), invented the reflecting telescope, discovered the exponential law of cooling, and co-invented calculus.
     *The moon landing program was headed by Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), who believed in a designer and opposed evolution. And a biblical creationist, James Irwin (1930–1991), walked on the moon.
     America led the world in the number of Nobel prizes awarded, including in biology, before evolution was part of the school curriculum. And the Apollo moon landings were achieved by scientists and engineers educated under the same curriculum.
     Furthermore, these great scientists had precedents in the Middle Ages, often wrongly called the ‘Dark Ages’. Science historian Dr James Hannam writes:
     “Popular opinion, journalistic cliché and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages were a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture. The compass, paper, printing, stirrups and gunpowder all appeared in Western Europe between AD 500 and AD 1500.” (See Hannam, J., God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, p. 5, Icon Books, 2009)


...Then what about medicine? Dawkins touched on this with antibiotic resistance (pp. 132–3), as refuted in ch. 4. I noted that even antibiotics were developed by the creationist Jew, Ernst Chain. What about other advances in science that are rightly credited with the vast drop in deaths of children due to disease and elimination of many scourges like smallpox and polio? No joy here for the evolutionists either. Many of the most important medical advances were made without the slightest use being made of evolution:

     *Vaccination was discovered by Edward Jenner (1749–1823—note that Darwin published Origin in 1859).
     *Aseptic surgery by Joseph Lister, creationist (1827–1912).
     *Anaesthesia by James Young Simpson (1811–1870), who believed that God was the first anaesthetist, citing Genesis 2:21.
     *Germ theory of disease by Louis Pasteur, creationist (1822–1895), who disproved spontaneous generation, still an evolutionary belief, as shown in ch. 13.
     *In modern times, we have the outspoken biblical creationist Raymond Damadian (1936– ), inventor of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner,15,16 and John Sanford (1950– ), the inventor of the gene gun. 

...Dr Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School stated:
     “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.” (Quoted in the Boston Globe, 23 October 2005.)

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