Sunday, August 19, 2012

Distinguishing Between Science And Materialism


The information we have considered throughout this book has shown us that the theory of evolution has no scientific basis, and that, on the contrary, evolutionist claims conflict with scientific facts. In other words, the force that keeps evolution alive is not science. Evolution may be maintained by some "scientists," but behind it there is another influence at work.

This other influence is materialist philosophy. The theory of evolution is simply materialist philosophy applied to nature, and those who support that philosophy do so despite the scientific evidence.

This relationship between materialism and the theory of evolution is accepted by "authorities" on these concepts. For example, the discovery of Darwin was described by Leon Trotsky as "the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter."388

The evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma writes, "Together with Marx's materialist theory of history and society…. Darwin hewed the final planks of the platform of mechanism and materialism."389 And the evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould says, "Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature."390

Materialist philosophy is one of the oldest beliefs in the world, and assumes the absolute and exclusive existence of matter as its basic principle. According to this view, matter has always existed, and everything that exists consists of matter. This makes belief in a Creator impossible, of course, because if matter has always existed, and if everything consists of matter, then there can be no supramaterial Creator who created it.

So the question becomes one of whether the materialist point of view is correct. One method of testing whether a philosophy is true or false is to investigate the claims it makes about science by using scientific methods. For instance, a philosopher in the tenth century could have claimed that there was a divine tree on the surface of the moon and that all living things actually grew on the branches of this huge tree like fruit, and then fell off onto the earth. Some people might have found this philosophy attractive and believed in it. But in the twentyfirst century, at a time when man has managed to walk on the moon, it is no longer possible to seriously hold such a belief. Whether such a tree exists there or not can be determined by scientific methods, that is, by observation and experiment.

We can therefore investigate by means of scientific methods the materialist claim that matter has existed for all eternity and that this matter can organize itself without a supramaterial Creator and cause life to begin. When we do this, we see that materialism has already collapsed, because the idea that matter has existed since the beginning of time has been overthrown by the Big Bang theory which shows that the universe was created from nothingness. The claim that matter organized itself and created life is the claim that we call the theory of evolution-which this book has been examining-and which has been shown to have collapsed.

However, if someone is determined to believe in materialism and puts his devotion to materialist philosophy before everything else, then he will act differently. If he is a materialist first and a scientist second, he will not abandon materialism when he sees that evolution is disproved by science. On the contrary, he will attempt to uphold and defend materialism by trying to support evolution, no matter what. This is exactly the predicament that evolutionists defending the theory of evolution find themselves in today.

Interestingly enough, they also confess this fact from time to time. A well-known geneticist and outspoken evolutionist, Richard C. Lewontin from Harvard University, confesses that he is "a materialist first and a scientist second" in these words:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our 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, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, so we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.391
The term "a priori" that Lewontin uses here is quite important. This philosophical term refers to a presupposition not based on any experimental knowledge. A thought is "a priori" when you consider it to be correct and accept it as so even if there is no information available to confirm it. As the evolutionist Lewontin frankly states, materialism is an "a priori" commitment for evolutionists, who then try to adapt science to this preconception. Since materialism definitely necessitates denying the existence of a Creator, they embrace the only alternative they have to hand, which is the theory of evolution. It does not matter to such scientists that evolution has been belied by scientific facts, because they have accepted it "a priori" as true.

This prejudiced behavior leads evolutionists to a belief that "unconscious matter composed itself," which is contrary not only to science, but also to reason. The concept of "the self-organization of matter," which we examined in an earlier chapter, is an expression of this.

Evolutionist propaganda, which we constantly come across in the Western media and in well-known and "esteemed" science magazines, is the outcome of this ideological necessity. Since evolution is considered to be indispensable, it has been turned into a sacred cow by the circles that set the standards of science.

Some scientists find themselves in a position where they are forced to defend this far-fetched theory, or at least avoid uttering any word against it, in order to maintain their reputations. Academics in Western countries have to have articles published in certain scientific journals in order to attain and hold onto their professorships. All of the journals dealing with biology are under the control of evolutionists, and they do not allow any anti-evolutionist article to appear in them. Biologists, therefore, have to conduct their research under the domination of this theory. They, too, are part of the established order, which regards evolution as an ideological necessity, which is why they blindly defend all the "impossible coincidences" we have been examining in this site.

388 Alan Woods, Ted Grant. "Marxism and Darwinism," Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science, London, 1993
389 Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2. b., MA: Sinauer, Sunderland, 1986, p. 4. (emphasis added)
390 Alan Woods, Ted Grant, "Marxism and Darwinism," Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science, London, 1993.(emphasis added)
391 Richard Lewontin, "The Demon-Haunted World," The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28.(emphasis added)

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