Response
First, truth should not be determined by numbers, it should be determined by the evidence. In the past, the majority have been wrong.
Second, the stakes are high. It is very difficult to imagine any reason why a scientist would want to reject the law of gravity. However, we can think of plenty of reasons why the same scientist would want to deny the existence of a Creator. There is immense social and spiritual pressure to reject a belief in God. We hear about organizations like “Freedom From Religion” fighting desperately to keep Christ out of the classroom. When is the last time you have heard of a “Freedom from Gravity” foundation fighting desperately to keep the belief of the law in gravity out of the classroom? While a belief in gravity and a belief in a Creator are distinct (one is directly empirical, the other is accepted by faith based on directly empirical evidence), the point is that there is immense pressure for scientists to reject anything which might be seen as an endorsement of a belief in a Creator God. Because of this pressure, the “majority” argument loses its weight.
Third, many scientists have cited problems with evolution, even though they accept it. 1
Fourth, many excellent scientists reject evolution entirely for a biblical view of origins.
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Sources
Meyer, S. C. (2013). Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life And the Case for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne.
Notes
- Meyer, 2013, p. ix“Because despite the widespread impression to the contrary–conveyed by textbooks, the popular media, and spokespersons for official science–the orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution has reached an impasse nearly as acute as the one faced by chemical evolutionary theory. Leading figures in several subdisciplines of biology–cell biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, paleontology, and even evolutionary biology–now openly criticize key tenets of the modern version of Darwinian theory in the peer-reviewed technical literature. Since 1980, when Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould declared that neo-Darwinism “is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy,” the weight of critical opinion in biology has grown steadily with each passing year.”… “A steady stream of technical articles and books have cast new doubt on the creative power of the mutation and selection mechanism. So well established are these doubts that prominent evolutionary theorists must now periodically assure the public, as biologist Douglas Futuyma has done, that “just because we don’t know how evolution occurred, does not justify doubt about whether it occurred.” Some leading evolutionary biologists, particularly those associated with a group of scientists known as the “Altenberg 16,” are openly calling for a new theory of evolution because they doubt the creative power of the mutation and natural selection mechanism.”
xi: “The extent of the disparity between popular representations of the status of the theory and its actual status, as indicated in the peer-reviewed technical journals, came home to me with particular poignancy as I was preparing to testify before the Texas State Board of Education in 2009. At the time the board was considering the adoption of a provision in its science education standards that would encourage teachers to inform students of both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. This provision had become a political hot potato after several groups asserted that “teaching strengths and weaknesses” were code words for biblical creationism or for removing the teaching of the theory of evolution from the curriculum. Nevertheless, after defenders of the provision insisted that it neither sanctioned teaching creationism nor censored evolutionary theory, opponents of the provision shifted their ground. They attacked the provision by insisting that there was no need to consider weaknesses in modern evolutionary theory because, as Eugenie Scott, spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education, insisted in The Dallas Morning News, “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.”
“At the same time, I was preparing a binder of one hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in which biologists described significant problems with the theory–a binder later presented to the board during my testimony. So I knew–unequivocally–that Dr. Scott was misrepresenting the status of scientific opinion about the theory in the relevant scientific literature.” ↩