Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Religion & Law Blogs -> Thoughts in a Haystack

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Fire Sale

By John Pieret

ADVERTISEMENTS

You know it's going to be painful when an alleged news story is titled "Liberty University refuting evolution." The "refuter" is "Neuroscientist" David DeWitt, who claims:

"I show them side-by-side ? Here's the human. Here's the chimpanzee," he said. "If I would not present evolution and their best evidence and arguments, then I would not be a scholar and I would not be providing the best service for the students.
"I actually teach more about evolution than I received in my undergraduate (biochemistry) program at Michigan State (University). I also teach a lot more about creationism."

So let's see how well he representing the science (and if Michigan State has an action for defamation):

This is an advanced section of the course, and many of the students are biology majors. Neuroscientist David DeWitt, their professor, leads a lecture on natural selection.
He draws on an example from the documentary film "March of the Penguins" that shows female penguins journeying to find food, and then a seal singling out one to attack.
"Which penguin gets eaten?" he asks. "The one that's genetically inferior, or the one that's in the wrong place at the wrong time?"
That element of chance, he argues, begins to unravel the idea of natural selection, or "survival of the fittest," a key mechanism in the theory of evolution.
At the front of the class, a slide on DeWitt's presentation displays a biblical passage from Ecclesiastes 9:11.
"I have seen something else under the sun," it states. "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong; nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."

Uh huh. And some organisms get hit by lightning or caught in landslides. But if those chance elements are truly random, what difference would it make to natural selection, which, after all, was never proposed as an iron rule of "the fittest" inevitably surviving in every circumstance? It is a statistical tendency over time, where the issue is whether, on balance, some organisms with certain traits leave more progeny over generations.

And it isn't as simple as DeWitt paints it, because there could be genetic factors that put that individual penguin in position to be in the path of that seal. Penguins will often gather at the shore, hesitating to enter waters where seals may be lurking. Those with a tendency to enter early may have an advantage in their own hunting but raise their risk of being caught themselves. In any event, as noted before, creationists are constantly assuring us that they accept "microevolution" by selection, so how would chance factors begin to "unravel the idea of natural selection," when they supposedly accept it anyway. After all, if chance negates natural selection it would have to negate its "microevolutionary" effects as well as its "macroevolutionary" ones.

Amazingly, DeWitt claims not to be denigrating science, while apparently supporting Liberty's preference for young-Earth creationism, which denies just about all of science, including astronomy, physics, biology and geology, to name just a few. The truly scary thing is that Liberty is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award degrees in biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, as well as nursing, psychology, engineering, health sciences and kinesiology. The graduates in the former studies will probably wind up teaching in places like Liberty or "Christian academies" or, worse, public schools, given that they cannot legitimately find employment in the sciences. And, while the latter graduates might not directly need evolutionary biology in their work, it is still worrying that people in health fields, who have a deep distrust in science, will be loosed upon an unsuspecting public.

Lastly, we have this concerning my own field from Matt Staver, the dean of Liberty's law school and someone whose legal expertise is less than overwhelming:

Staver said that the theory of evolution "has impacted everything," including his area of expertise ? law.
An evolutionary model for arguing cases, for example, now impacts the creation of law, he said.
Instead of the previously accepted practice of basing arguments on the original source, the U.S. Constitution, Staver said, now lawyers instead use case studies that build upon each other and "evolve" over time.

Quite apart from the fact that the Founders deliberately kept our Constitution minimalistic (as compared, for example, to the Constitution for Europe, that runs to over 800 pages) to avoid our government being too hamstrung by "original intent," Staver seems unaware of the English Common Law, that our system of jurisprudence is based on, and its principles of applying the law to individual cases which then become precedent for later cases. This is certainly an evolutionary process but one that long predated Charles Darwin.

It's bad enough that Liberty will be turning out lawyers ignorant and dismissive of science, but turning out lawyers ignorant of our system of law is inexcusable and will doubtless have the same sort of effect as Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School has had.

I can't help but feel that Liberty University's motto of "Knowledge Aflame" and its logo including a burning book are no accident.