Doctors Doubt Darwinism
Original ArticleIf you believe you are just a blob of cellular tissue, please raise your right protoplasm.
Does your own doctor treat you like a human being, or just an accidental collection of chemicals, haphazardly arranged by dumb chance?
A recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research suggests an answer. The poll finds that 60 percent of doctors reject the mechanistic Darwinian belief that “Humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement – no divinity played any role.” Only 38 percent of the doctors polled agreed with this statement.
Given their “hands on” experience with individual human beings, doctors appreciate the intricate design implicit in every part of the body. For example, an eye surgeon knows the intricacies of human vision in detail; so vague evolutionary stories about how the eye appeared by a process of random variation and selection do not overawe him.
Darwin himself said, “if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
Notice that Darwin shifts the burden of proof away from his theory. Despite this rhetorical sleight of hand, the eye is no friend of his theory, both because Darwinists have utterly failed to offer a detailed, plausible account of how it might have evolved, and because design theorists have laid out positive evidence showing that the eye has the hallmark of designed systems.
And the eye is just one of countless organs and interdependent systems in the body whose origin defies Darwinian or other solely mechanistic explanation.
Recent discoveries about the inner workings of the cell provide additional powerful evidence for design. In Darwin’s time, the cell was just a black box, a great unknown. The discovery that in fact, all cells possess astounding complexity and meticulously calibrated function has convinced a growing number of scientists that modern evolutionary theory is utterly inadequate to explain how this complex organism could have developed.
My fellow physicians and I were taught that evolution is how we came to be, starting from those first mysterious single-celled living organisms. Alternative theories are not usually presented to medical students or even to biologists studying for doctoral degrees, since such theories are quickly branded as “creationism,” mocked, and dismissed.
So how is it that 65 percent of the doctors surveyed by the poll, even though they obviously received the full dose of evolution-as-the-only-answer indoctrination in medical school, responded that they thought intelligent design should be allowed or required to be taught in schools along with Darwinian evolution?
Why is this issue important to patients treated by doctors? If a doctor believes human beings and other creatures do indeed show evidence of intelligent design, those same human beings are due significantly more reverence and respect than if they simply reflect natural selection working on a pointless series of chance events.
If a person is due no more respect than a chicken or lump of clay, he is as easily disposed of should someone more powerful (such as the doctor or a government agent) decide he has outlived his usefulness. That anti-human attitude isn’t science fiction. It’s the stated position of some contemporary bioethicists.
Fortunately, mounting evidence in the medical sciences points in a different direction—toward the conclusion that you and I were designed for a purpose.
Detailed poll results are at http://www.hcdi.net/polls/J5776/CumulativeReportNoGraph.htm
Editor’s Note: Robert J. Cihak wrote this week’s column.
Robert J. Cihak, M.D., is a Senior Fellow and Board Member of the Discovery Institute, the leading think tank and research facility on intelligent design theory. Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., is a multiple-award-winning writer who comments on medical-legal issues.