Summary of Part 1

Few doubt that amazing progress has been made thanks to science, especially visible in the wonders of technology all around us that have improved our life expectancy and quality of life worldwide.
History demonstrates, however, that science has made mistakes. A number of these stories are told in the book, such as the rejection—for 50 years—of Alfred Wegener’s plate-tectonics hypothesis. There is very strong peer pressure, or groupthink, for scientists to conform to the ruling orthodoxy. This can result in fear of revealing or disclosing counter-evidence in the first place, or rejection of such evidence when subjected to a peer review process.
Seemingly well established, unquestioned scientific paradigms, or ways of thinking about the world, can be overturned, or at least significantly modified, by a new paradigm decades or even hundreds of years later, when anomalies and counter-evidence bring the ruling paradigm into crisis.

Alfred Wegener

Not all branches of science speak with equal authority. Science is not a monolithic set of disciplines. In particular, the “origin” or “historical” sciences such as cosmology, historical geology, palaeontology and evolutionary biology cannot speak with the same authority as “operation” sciences such as physics, chemistry, and the medical and engineering sciences. Theories held by the former meet lower-confidence criteria than those held by the latter.
The ever-present danger is that low-confidence science may be inappropriately portrayed as high-confidence science.
All scientific theories are provisional and may need to be revisited in the light of new evidence. The theory of evolution, therefore, just like any other healthy branch of science, should be open to legitimate critique in the light of new evidence from, for example, molecular biology.

There is a sense in which the authority attributed to “science” has elevated it to the status of a pseudo-religion: the putative one true source of all knowledge in Western society.
Some high-profile scientists have effectively become the priesthood of this new creed, whose pronouncements are widely regarded as incontestable in the same sense in which statements made by priests in the medieval church were beyond dispute. Richard Dawkins, for instance, once held the Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.

“Scientism” is the notion that science is the only source of truth. But this is a philosophical claim about science, and is not demonstrable by scientific experiment.
Contrary to the popularly held view, there is no inherent conflict between Christianity and the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Instead, historical evidence supports the view that the scientific enterprise took off and was sustained only in medieval Europe precisely because scientists “… expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver”.
There is a conflict, however. But it’s not between Christianity and science. Rather, it’s between theism and philosophical materialism. These are both belief systems. The former believes a God exists who created the universe, is independent of it, but can act supernaturally within it. The latter takes the view that the universe is a closed system and that everything must be explained in terms of interactions between matter and energy.

The media primarily give publicity to ‘high priests’ of science who adhere to this materialistic worldview.
Most of the public, and even scientists themselves, don’t realise the pervasiveness of this bias. They believe that “science” is a neutral investigative tool, blissfully unaware that much of mainstream science adheres to a specific ideology – philosophical materialism.
In most spheres of science this would be of no importance, but when we’re considering hypotheses relating to how all living things came into being, then we’d be wise to keep this in mind going forward. What if materialism is not true? What if it misrepresents reality, as so many scientists, philosophers, artists and other scholars attest?
There is a tendency for the public to believe that our current state of scientific knowledge and understanding of the universe is entirely settled, ‘unsinkable’ science. But, just as ships “made of iron” are not “unsinkable”, so even apparently well-established theories universally accepted within the current scientific consensus may turn out to be incomplete or simply wrong in the light of new discoveries and understandings. This principle applies as much to the theory of evolution as to any other set of scientific theories. Arguably the ideological baggage incumbent in the theory may be protecting the science from proper critique and scrutiny.

As a historical science, the grand claims of the theory of evolution tick most of the low-confidence-science criteria.
Charles Darwin is often portrayed as the one who independently discovered the principle of natural selection, but he was very protective of his theory and largely failed to give credit to a number of others.
Edward Blyth, for example, had already identified natural selection as an active mechanism in biology.
Yet, while Darwin made the grand claim that, thanks to natural selection, all extant species had evolved from “one or a small number” of original creatures, Blyth concluded that natural selection was strictly limited in its ability to effect change.
History gave Darwin the ideological victory, but does evidence accumulated since support Darwin or Blyth?

Most objections to Darwin’s theory were actually on scientific grounds, not religious ones as the popular myth would have us believe. Such a tactic diverts attention from genuine questions about the science.
Yet oddly, it’s many of today’s evolutionists who most often use theological (God-wouldn’t-have-done-it-that-way) arguments to justify their conclusions.
Darwin didn’t know what the source of variation is that natural selection operates upon. Neo-Darwinism, also known as The Modern Synthesis, identifies that source of variation as genetic mutations (copying errors in the genes).
The word “evolution” is often used to mean different things by evolutionary biologists at different times. Such equivocation can mislead students of the subject and the public at large, because evidence that supports one meaning, say “change over time”, may be used later—even within the same sentence—to support a particles-to-people evolutionary claim (which the cited evidence does not automatically support).
“Evolution” will be our shorthand designation for unguided particles-to-people evolution.

Credits and Permissions

Alfred Wegener image, courtesy of Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Dawkins image, courtesy of David Shankbone [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Darwin Statue photograph, courtesy of Xavier da Costa e Silva [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.