Fossilization of Darwin’s Pet : Evolution: Surely the Curriculum Commission is aware that more scientists are openly critical his theory.

It’s very odd that the California Curriculum Commission has voted to recommend to the state Board of Education that evolution be taught as uncontested fact--just when more scientists than ever before are contesting it.

By claiming that “there is no scientific dispute that evolution has occurred and continues to occur,” the members of the curriculum commission are showing remarkable ignorance. Surely they can’t be unaware that more and more scientists are openly critical of Darwinism.

One among many is Australian biologist and agnostic Michael Denton, who claims that not one single discovery since 1859, when Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” has supported Darwin’s theory. Denton calls evolution “the great cosmogenic myth of the 20th Century.”

Where were the members of the commission in 1981 when Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist for the British Museum of Natural History, told biologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that belief in evolution is as much a commitment of faith as is belief in creation?

“I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way,” Patterson told his colleagues. He said that no real transitional forms have ever been found anywhere in the fossil record and “I don’t think we shall ever have any access to any form of (evolutionary) tree which we can call factual.”

He challenged other scientists to tell him one thing they knew for sure about evolution. “I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a very long time and eventually one person said, ‘I do know one thing--it ought not to be taught in high school.’ ”

Still, the members of the curriculum commission are apparently so rigidly committed to the dogma of evolution that they are insisting that it be taught to the next generation anyway.

Perhaps the commission members have not read Denton’s book, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” In it, he asks, “Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which--a functional protein or gene--is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man.”

The commission must have missed the comment by Murray Eden, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that Denton’s book “should be made required reading for everyone who believes what he was taught in college about evolution.”

Maybe they have not read “The Mystery of Life’s Origins: Reassessing Current Theories,” by Charles B. Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, former evolutionists with doctorates in chemistry, geochemistry and materials science, which concludes that a “creator beyond the cosmos” is the most plausible explanation for life’s origin.

Where has the curriculum commission been? Are the members blind and deaf to what is happening in the scientific community? Are they determined to maintain the status quo regardless of the facts, determined to make evolution true by a show of hands? Or, more likely, are they afraid of the theories that may have to be seriously considered if evolution doesn’t have center stage?

What if the best explanation for the data turns out to include a supernatural origin? Aren’t we big enough to handle the possibility that truth may not fit within our pre-conceived and arbitrary naturalistic confines?

Throughout the history of science, the most danger has come not from outside, from non-scientific theories, but from within, from the fossilization of attitude. As soon as science says, “our pet theory doesn’t work, but we’re going to advocate it anyway,” or “well, the data may indicate we go in a new direction, but we refuse to because it may lead to something we don’t like,” then truth has been irreparably compromised.

What the curriculum commission has done seems to confirm what evolutionist Dean Kenyon of San Francisco State University wrote after reading “The Mystery of Life’s Origins,” that many scientists hesitate to admit or study the theory’s problems because they “would open the door to the possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin of life.”

And we couldn’t have that, could we?