Thinking to Believe

This is old news, but this quote was brought to my attention again recently and I wanted to share it with you.

In 2005 Harvard University funded a $1 million project to find an explanation for the origin of life. Harvard professor of chemical biology, David Liu, said, “[M]y expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention.”

This is important for two reasons. First, it shows that scientists still don’t know how life arose from purely naturalistic processes. It’s too bad the media was not more forthcoming about this fact. The way scientists and reporters alike talk about evolution to the public one would think this problem has been resolved. You have to go to the scientific journals to find admissions of just how bleak the state of origin-of-life research really is.

Secondly, Liu’s statement shows just how ideologically driven science has become. Why spend all this money? To find a purely naturalistic origin of life. Clearly Harvard’s “scientific” pursuit is a pursuit to justify materialistic philosophy. By all accounts the best explanation of the origin of life is rooted in Intelligent Design. But since that contradicts materialistic philosophy, and science is currently ruled by materialists in either profession or practice, it is excluded from the start. No matter how unproductive the search for life’s origin is, materialists like Liu will continue to look, never considering the possibility of design. They will maintain their faith in materialism until the bitter end, if not beyond. Origin-of-life researchers, Robert Shapiro, wrote of this tendency:

We shall see that the adherents of the best known theory [soup theory, RNA world] have not responded to increasing adverse evidence by questioning the validity of their beliefs, in the best scientific tradition; rather, they have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology. In response, many alternative explanations have introduced even greater elements of mythology, until finally, science has been abandoned entirely in substance, though retained in name.[1]

Ouch!