John Lennox in his book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? tells the story of Chinese palaeontologist Jun-Yuan Chen who visited the USA in 1999 during which time he gave several lectures. Lennox writes (p. 95) :
His work on the remarkable discoveries in Chengjiang of strange fossil creatures led him to question the orthodox evolutionary line. In true scholarly fashion he mentioned his criticisms in his lectures but they elicited very little response. This lack of reaction surprised him and so he eventually asked one of his hosts what was wrong. He was told that scientists in the USA did not like to hear such criticism of evolution. To this he gave the delightful reply that it seemed to him that the difference between the USA and China was:
In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin."
No doubt it is treacherous to criticize Darwinism in the United Kingdom as well. After all, it is the Oxford evolutionary extremist Richard Dawkins who famously said,
"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
To which John Lennox counters with a quote from the distinguished biologist Lynn Margulis:
"Like a sugary snack that temporarily satisfies our appetite but deprives us of more nutritious foods, neo-Darwinism sates intellectual curiosity with abstractions bereft of actual details -- whether metabolic, biochemical, ecological;, or of natural history."
Lennox offers a valuable overview of the evolution debate in the course of which he makes the observation that, to put it in my words, evolution is first and foremost a philosophy in search of evidentiary justification. rather than a theory developed on the basis of actual evidence. In other words, if one starts out with a philosophy of naturalism and materialism, then as Lennox says,
[...] merely as a matter of sheer logical necessity [emphasis his], it follows that some kind of evolutionary account must be given for life, apart altogether from any evidence which may be offered to support it. For, what other possibility can there be? If, for example, we start off with the materialistic hypothesis that all we have is matter/energy and the forces of physics, then there is only one option--matter/energy together with the forces of nature over time have produced life, that is, evolution of some sort.
Lennox goes on:
The fact that, from the naturalistic and materialistic perspectives, evolution appears as a philosophical necessity is nothing new. It was perceived centuries, indeed millennia, before Dawkins and Darwin. The ancient Greek materialist philosopher Epicurus used precisely this logic to produce an evolutionary theory from the atomic theory of Democritus. The most powerful expression of the Epicurean theory is to be found in the Latin poem De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe" as it is often translated), written around the middle of the first century B.C. by the Roman poet Lucretius. Benjamin Wiker in his recent detailed study of Lucretius calls him "The First Darwinian" and claims that Lucretius, whose philosophy was enthusiastically revived at the time of the Renaissance, should be regarded as the intellectual progenitor of contemporary naturalistic philosophy.
In the contemporary scientific world we thus have the very unusual situation that one of science's most influential theories, biological macroevolution, stands in such a close relationship to naturalistic philosophy that it can be deduced from it directly - that is, without even needing to consider any evidence, as the ancient arguments of Lucretius plainly show. This circumstance is extraordinary. Since it is very difficult to think of another scientific theory that is in a similar position. Think, for example, of trying to deduce Newton's theory of gravitation or Einstein's theory of relativity or the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics from a philosophical principle or worldview, whether materialistic, naturalistic or, even, theistic. There is no obvious way that it could be done. And yet, as Lucretius saw, and as anyone who thinks about it can readily see, it can be done with evolution." (p. 98)
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Readers might be interested in previous posts featuring Dr. John Lennox: