Many opponents of Intelligent Design have attacked The Discovery Institutes’ list of 500+ scientists who dissent from Darwinism. The list was created to prove that there is significant scientific dissent to evolution, contrary to what the priests and believers of evolution keep telling us. A week or so back, the NYT published an article entitled Few Biologists but Many Evangelicals Sign Anti-Evolution Petition, seemingly supporting the idea that the people who signed this really are doing it for religious, not scientific reasons. However, it has now come out that the journalist misrepresented what he found:
Chang has now admitted in an interview that 75% or more of the scientists he interviewed did not fit this description. In other words, Chang and his editors selectively reported the results of their own investigation to convey the exact opposite of what they found….On a related issue, Chang did not want to tell Crowther why he only investigated the religious beliefs of the scientific critics of Darwinism and did not similarly investigate the religious (or anti-religious) beliefs of supporters of Darwinism.
Read more here.
It takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe in evolution. It takes far less faith to believe that we were created by a loving God.
Yeah, the critics aren't commenting much on this – all I can hear is the wind blowing across the empty arguments.
First, I remember reading the article and somehow managed not to come to the same silly conclusions as the Evolution News & Views people. The article didn't imply that the signers were all YEC'ers; nor did it imply that the scientists' reasons were all religious. Rather, it noted that the scientific & religious reasons for opposition to evolutionism are interrelated. Since it's well known that science is premised on non-scientific assumptions, this implication is non-controversial, or even banal.
Second, the EN&V article looks like it was written by a lawyer. As soon as I started reading, by BS-meter jumped. Take this sentence:
"…[the NYT author] admitted that the overwhelming majority of those he interviewed were not Biblical literalists whose skepticism of evolution grew out of their religious beliefs."
Ok. This could be taken in one of two ways. It could be that the NYT author admitted that the majority weren't YEC'ers or that their opposition wasn't related to their non-YEC religious belief. The other interpretation replaces that or with and, which makes for a (predictably) small subset, indeed, given that we know that the YEC'ers (literalists) already comprise a small subset of scientists opposed to evolution.
Since this passage is bolded, it's supposed to be some kind of bombshell rather than an obvious fact that follows naturally from set theory (a small subset of a set yields a very small set). That it's supposed to be a bombshell also follows from the fact that the language used is the same used by the NYT author: it looks like it's refuting his central charge (the interrelation of religious & scientific beliefs).
Still, the syntactic structure leaves the actual meaning open; this is why it looks like a lawyer wrote the piece. And I'd bet any amount of money that a review of the interview with the NYT author reveals that the sentence actually should be read both/and, rather than either/or.
Please note that my comment has the structure of science: it creates a testable prediction based on valid logic (if the author of the EN&V piece is fundamentally dishonest, he will have been intentionally misleading in the above-cited passage).