Authority and Qualification
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Ran into this on Fr. Joseph’s blog.
…if you have a Ph.D. in engineering, mathematics, computer science, biology, chemistry, or one of the other natural sciences, and you agree with the following statement, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged,” then please contact us…
No. I don’t care what a medical doctor thinks about how my submarine works. I don’t care what an astrophysicist thinks about how my spleen works.
And I don’t care what mathematicians, medical doctors, physicists, veterinary doctors, computer scientists, or my local car mechanic have to say about biological evolution, because they are unqualified. They have no authority in the relevant fields.
The New York Times ran an article on this, noting the lack of biologists and noting that signers often possessed beliefs that verged on fundamentalism — including scriptural literalism and disbelief in the great age of the earth and the cosmos (4.5 and 15 billion years respectively, give or take a few billion).
Several said that their doubts began when they increased their involvement with Christian churches.
Some said they read the Bible literally and doubt not only evolution but also findings of geology and cosmology that show the universe and the earth to be billions of years old.
…
Roger J. Lien, a professor of poultry science at Auburn, said he received a copy of the petition from Christian friends.
“I stuck my name on it,” he said. “Basically, it states what I believe.”
Dr. Lien said that he grew up in California in a family that was not deeply religious and that he accepted evolution through much of his scientific career. He said he became a Christian about a decade ago, six years after he joined the Auburn faculty.
“The world is broken, and we humans and our science can’t fix it,” Dr. Lien said. “I was brought to Jesus Christ and God and creationism and believing in the Bible.”
He also said he thought that evolution was “inconsistent with what the Bible says.”
Just in case you wondered, the advice of a chicken doctor on how to read the Bible also doesn’t interest me.