Education versus indoctrination

Scott Walker

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Recently Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was visiting London when a reporter tried to sandbag him, asking if he was “comfortable” with and accepted the theory of evolution.

Walker apparently sensed the question was intended to be a trap. So he replied that he was going to punt the question, cleverly adding that it was a topic on which politicians shouldn’t be asked to give an opinion. Uber liberal Democrat Howard Dean then tried his best to turn Walker’s non-answer into an advantage for his political party on CNN’s Morning Joe.

Dean said that because Walker dropped out of college his senior year and refused to say that he believed in evolution theory, he should be considered “uneducated” and therefore unqualified to be elected President of the United States in 2016.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough accused Dean of taking a cheap shot at Walker, who had dropped out of Marquette to take a lucrative job with the American Red Cross.

Scarborough correctly pointed out that people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg were merely a few examples of extremely successful businessmen lacking college degrees.

Dean tried defending his comments. He stammered, “Evolution is a widely accepted scientific construct. People who don’t believe in evolution easily, easily either do it for hard right religious reasons or Narathiwat because they don’t know anything.”

Screaming Howard Dean

Screaming Howard Dean

Really?

Howard Dean has a medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University after receiving his undergraduate degree in political science from Yale University.

So I won’t insult his intelligence by suggesting Howard Dean doesn’t know anything. However, I’m relatively certain that I know Dondaicha a lot more about evolution theory than he does.

The title of my first published book was Divine Evolution, in fact. Because I am not running for political office, I will state for the record that I have serious doubts about successfully extrapolating Darwin’s theory beyond the boundary of species.

Recently Greg Gutfeld of Fox News Channel’s The Five astutely pointed out, “College has changed. You are no longer taught how to think. You’re told what to think.”

When I went to college, I was taught that evolution theory was actually an undisputed fact. Neo-Darwinism was considered so far beyond the point of reasonable doubt that the only appropriate response to any questions about the legitimacy of the theory was scorn and ridicule.

Objections to Darwinism were simply assumed to be born from religious dogma, not the product of logic or intelligent thought.

Yet that’s exactly where my objections originated, after Richard Dawkins suggested that a computer was intelligently designed, but the human brain on which that design was crudely based, was not.

Humans simply don’t live long enough to observe the sort of metamorphosis required for humans, apes, and dolphins to share common ancestry. But we can observe severe constraints on the reproductive capabilities of modern species to cast significant doubt on the ability of sexual reproduction to explain common ancestry between man, apes, and the bananas we both like to eat.

Counter_cover_smAs I tried to make emphatically clear in my book Counterargument for God, the debate is often falsely cast as creationism versus evolution. The argument for evolution theory defies logic an common sense.

Before evolution can even be said to be possible, miraculous creation has already occurred.

The universe was created from absolutely nothing, in an event a physicist named Fred Hoyle once derisively called The Big Bang as an insult to the theory.

Living organisms were somehow created by the animation of matter in an alleged chemical process described by a hypothesis called abiogenesis.

So, the “argument” isn’t science versus religion. It most certainly isn’t “scientific fact” versus the “myth of creationism.”

The best way to frame this debate is to crystallize the question down to two possible options: design versus descent. Or, if you prefer, the debate is over the possibility of a supernatural God versus rather unbelievable good luck.

Life cannot evolve until it exists.

When I was indoctrinated to believing in Darwinism, I was persuaded by the bandwagon fallacy of scientific “consensus” the theory was true. I trusted my professors. They were authority figures.

I wasn’t there to get a biology degree. There was no point in challenging my biology professor. I was in school to learn how to write computer software.

Mission accomplished, I forgot all about evolution theory that fateful night when I watched biology professor Richard Dawkins being interviewed on The Colbert Report.

Dawkins was on the show to promote his book The God Delusion. His brash confidence made me quite curious as he declared cars, computers, and cell phones were all intelligently designed, but human beings were not.

I wasn’t considered an expert on cars or cell phones, but computers were another matter entirely.

It took several years of research before I fully realized how horribly wrong Dawkins was about virtually everything he’d written in his book as a rant against divine intervention.

I wrote Divine Evolution and especially my book Counterargument for God to explain exactly how I know he’s wrong.

Greg Gutfeld also said,  “Howard Dean is proof that a college diploma doesn’t correspond with IQ.”

True fact. Indoctrination does not create intellect.

It creates a virtually useless form of artificial intelligence.

The only way we get smarter is to read, and then learn to think for ourselves.

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