Wallace Dixon wrote:
> Hmm. If I were on the biology search committee, and we needed someone to
cover evolutionary biology, and if it became conveyed to us that > the
individual was skeptical of evolutionary theory (directly impacting on the
individual's credentials with respect to the job description), I might, > I
just might come to the conclusion that there wasn't a good fit (after
picking my jaw up off the floor from incredulity).
And that's apparently without knowing that Dewitt also wrote this:
http://www.nljonline.com/October1999/evolution4.htm
"In Darwinian evolution, natural laws and processes only are invoked to
account for the origin of the solar system and origin of life.
Once life arose, mutations in DNA (alterations in hereditary instructions)
occurred randomly to produce the vast array
of plants, animals and other living things on the planet".
Um, "randomly"? Is this supposed to be his understanding of evolution?
Note the date of the essay. Dewitt had completed both of his degrees by
that point. This isn't ignorance.
(and I can't help but also notice that he falsely suggests that Darwinian
evolution is "invoked to account for the origin of the solar system")
In the same essay he writes
"Many of the social issues that Christians fight, such as abortion and
racism, really have their roots in an evolution world view".
Perhaps my understanding of history is deficit, but I thought that I'd
heard that there were a few acts of racism that occurred BEFORE Darwin wrote
"Origin of Species" in the 1850s. I'm almost certain that there was some
racism and perhaps even a few abortions before the "evolution world view"
got a real foothold about 100 years later. <grin>
Would I consider Dewitt for a position? Of course not. Character counts.
Incidentally, in that essay you can get a good look at what I meant in my
earlier post when I wrote "a person whose sense of
'truth' and 'falsehood' was so seriously flawed that the person could not be
trusted in completely important conceptually unrelated areas". The point of
the essay is to argue that Christians should not try to accommodate
evolution to their Christian beliefs. The reason given is
"To believe that God started or guided this process, limits His creative
power. It further denies that God has any interaction with the
creation except for getting the ball rolling. In theistic evolution there is
little need for God".
There's quite a bit more of this kind of argument, which is clearly
directly opposed to a scientific worldview.
I think that this also illustrates another important strength of
science. Dewitt has apparently done research, and published that research,
and that research is accepted as part of our scientifically-justified
knowledge of how the world works. Should it be? Part of me is very
suspicious, for reasons that should by now be obvious ("...could not be
trusted in...unrelated areas"). But at the same time, I believe that peer
review and replication provide a reasonably good protection against this
kind of thing. Because science is public, and includes the work of people of
a wide variety of viewpoints (including even professional creationists like
Dewitt, as long as they behave themselves), in the long run we can expect
that even deliberate fraud will be exposed.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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