Letter to the Editor, Redding Record Searchlight May 24, 1998

[Initial note to editor on April 23, 1998: This is 1,000 words, perhaps too long for any convenient use. However, once it started flowing, I just couldn’t help myself. If you want to use it and would like it e-mailed in .rtf (rich text format), give me a call. If you don’t use it, I at least hope the editorial staff reads it. Regards. JSB]

[Several weeks later, the RRS called and said they would use it as a "Speak Your Piece" op-ed article, and it appeared on May 24, 1998, under the headline, "Science needs evolution to deny God's existence," in a full page panoply of letters and opinions titled "Evolution." At the end of this essay, the paper gave my web site and stated "Joseph S. Busey, a psychologist who lives in Red Bluff, is a former dean of faculty at California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco." CSPP, as it is known, is now in the East Bay, and although I was indeed a dean there, in 1972-73, this was long before I started investigating evolution. I would imagine that if anything, CSPP promotes the "party line" on evolution. My interest actually began with reading Michael Denton's book, see below, and that was part of a long chain of intellectual and emotional events that led to my (re)conversion to orthodox Christianity.]

[The RRS used my entire article and did an admirable job of transcribing it, with no noticeable misteaks or mispellings. They did leave off the final sentence, perhaps out of space limitations, but that does not change the tone or conclusion of the article — it merely deleted my sardonic reference to modern-liberal power-grabbing, which happens not only in African countries, but in America's universities, as well.]

Dear Editor:

In an editorial last week lauding the teaching of evolution in our schools, you did not present other sides, perhaps from being uninformed, or perhaps from fear of opprobrium by "real scientists" had you even dared suggest the theory of evolution might be in question.

And that’s understandable, for "Scientific Fundamentalists" are very rigid and often hyper-emotional about anyone questioning their worldview, even though most of them know almost nothing substantial about contrary views. After all, "everyone" knows that evolution is the only explanation for life on earth and therefore is simply "fact" that cannot — must not — be questioned. I, myself, taught Darwinian-based theory to undergraduates and grad students for years without ever having known there were sides other than just "Creationist propaganda" (at least that’s what our professors said).

While still one myself, I happened upon the thinking of agnostic Michael Denton, an Australian physician who wrote Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, which showed, among other things, that the systematic variance in certain cellular components, such as cytochrome-C, did not follow paths suggesting evolution. Then Phillip Johnson, a top-flight academic, a full professor at Boalt Hall (UC-Berkeley law school), and a "believing Presbyterian," wrote Darwin on Trial, a book that made Harvard Prof. Stephen Jay Gould, a self-professed atheistic Marxist, lash out like a triceratops caught in the bogs as the asteroid was impacting.

Johnson, whose credentials are nonpareil, simply stated that if brought to a fair, impartial trial the weight of the evidence would not support evolutionary theory. Backlash spewed forth that he was not a scientist, but an attorney, albeit a brilliant one — as if "scientists" cornered the market on "truth." At least Johnson has read many sides of the issue, which is more than can be said about the vast majority of people who’ve studied the sciences, or at least what’s currently taught as science and the philosophy thereof.

How many teachers and scientists (even including the "soft sciences," like psychology) can truthfully say they’ve read even one other side of the evolutionary debate? I know of four sides: evolution by faith (Scientific Fundamentalism, or Scientism), evolution by reason (Agnostic Creationism), non-evolution by reason (Agnostic Evolutionism), and non-evolution by faith (Biblical Creationism). Actually, one can find well-reasoned points in all sides, if one bothers, or cares, to be well informed about the pre-suppositions guiding our beliefs.

Many "scientists" are so knee-jerk anti-religious that they condemn viewpoints they have not read directly, but rather have read about, often from people just as upset as they about their worldview being questioned. (It reminds me of some of the last forty years’ graduates of seminaries, many of whom have not read the Scriptures, only about the Scriptures — and then from non-believing authors.)

Recently, Prof. Michael Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University and a practicing Catholic, wrote Darwin’s Black Box, which suggests that the human cell is so self-contained it could not have evolved from disparate components. I have not heard this argument refuted, except by those who can only assert that evolution "just had to have happened, there’s no other way."

Actually, there is another way. Gould now talks about "saltatory" (leaping) mutations that somehow explain the huge gaps in the fossil records. These jumps just "came about," as if by prestidigitation. So, magic is allowed, but not a Creator God, a concept that can explain the earth’s diversity just as well, or perhaps better, than a non-supernatural cosmology.

This is the basis of the rift. Those who are today in charge of defining "science" do not allow anything supernatural in their playing field; they are Naturalists (or Materialists). Even to allow for a deistic god (who made the world and then didn’t stay around) might open the door to a theistic one, who just might have ethical rules and values He wants us to follow. Heavens forbid! (Pun intended.) For as Phillip Johnson says, those who win the battle to explain cosmology, our Creation Story, get to set all the rules. Just look at public education today.

And I haven’t yet gotten around to the Anthropic Principle or the cladists, but since I don’t have an ever-expanding space, I must close. So, here are two final question to those scientific types now smoldering about my arguments and anxious to fling pejoratives: one, what teleological principle keeps us "evolving" upwards so that we’re become more complex than blue-green algae (which are perhaps best-suited for a life with no struggle for survival)? Or is evolution just a purposeless cosmic crap shoot?

And two, what actually would change in our lives if the overlay of macro-evolution were removed from science (even from biology, where evolution is heralded as the ultimate organizing principle — perhaps the "entire basis")? Other than losing some naturalistic attempts at explanations for cosmology or human behavior, I wonder what actually would be different. Penicillin? Computers? Open-heart surgery? The behavior of ants? Or just the inability to posit as absurd the existence of a Provident, or even Creator God?

Incidentally, micro-evolution is another matter, for there is almost no disagreement, even among Creationists, that a given gene pool can vary widely, from dark to light moths, from teacup poodles to standards, from finches with small beaks to those with different ones. (A finch is still a finch is still a finch — but not a muskrat.)

In sum, I maintain we should teach all sides of the evolutionary-creationism debate. Let me agree for once with the ACLU, who said, paraphrased, that both sides should be taught. Of course, that was at the time of the Scopes Trial, when the evolutionists just wanted to get their camel’s nose in the tent. Sorta reminds you of those emerging Third World nations: one man, one vote, one time. [This last sentence, "Sorta reminds . . .,"  was the only text excised from the entire article. I hope it was for reasons of space limitations.]