Darwinist Tormentors Cry Over Torment Caused by Their Victims

Evolutionists Claim the Persecuted are Persecuting the Persecutors

A Review of a Review

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

A review of a new book on Galileo, one of my interests, caught my attention in the new issue of Nature.[1]  Mario Livio’s book, Galileo and the Science Deniers, in short, claims that the Churches and religious persons are today persecuting scientists, then compares this persecution to the Catholic Church persecuting Galileo. His ironic claim is that those who have strong valid scientific reasons to reject Darwinism (whom Livio calls derogatory names such as Science Deniers) are persecuting scientists today – just like the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo.

The Nature book review grossly distorts the Galileo story. Compare it with the account by a leading science historian, Ronald Numbers, who correctly concluded that the Galileo affair may not only be the most quoted example of alleged “persecution” of science by religion, but one of the most misunderstood events in history.[2] Another academic agreeing with Numbers is History of Science Professor Timothy Moy, an agnostic. Writing in an anti-creationist journal The Skeptical Inquirer, 2001, Moy commented,

Unfortunately, Galileo’s trouble with the Church later became a popular archetype for the historical relationship between science and religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. For most of the medieval and Renaissance periods, and even stretching into the eighteenth century Enlightenment, the primary supporter of research and teaching in the sciences was the Roman Catholic Church…. the Church, in the aftermath of the Galileo affair, continued to promote research into evidence for heliocentrism, even to the point of turning entire cathedrals into giant pin-hole cameras to measure the apparent diameter of the solar disk at various times of the year.[3]

Moy wrote this not to help creationists, but to warn his fellow atheists and agnostics that fake history hurts their cause. Having seen others make statements like those in the Nature review, he is concerned that such false statements do not help the atheist cause because persons well informed about the Galileo affair will recognize that the authors do not know what they are talking about. Here is an example of misleading history from Abbott’s review:

Galileo and the Science Deniers …  stand[s] out by placing the original Renaissance man and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts. In particular, he argues, the charges of heresy that Galileo faced for his scientific claims in the seventeenth century have their counterparts in science deniers’ condemnations today.[4]

Abbott and Livio reveal their political and anti-religious biases in this non-sequitur:

And what of today’s science deniers? Livio briefly addresses how religion and business interests still conspire to attack evidence for evolution and anthropogenic climate change. In general, “processes that are not fully understood don’t constitute flaws”, he points out, but critics from creationists to Donald Trump discredit scientific arguments by exploiting gaps in knowledge. It’s a chillingly relevant theme, yet the parallels he draws between Galileo’s trial and contemporary science wars feel thin, and ….  demonstrate the continuity of denialism through the centuries.[5]

Victims Suffering in Silence

Creationists lack the power to affect the scientific establishment, even in minor ways, but evolutionists have enormous power. They have managed to get the courts, academia, the media, and even many (or even most) clergy and Christian colleges on the side of evolution. What we have on the other side, though, are the actual facts, even though Nature would never publish a more factual account if written by a creationist or Darwin skeptic. The claim that “processes that are not fully understood don’t constitute flaws” is a clever way of excusing the reality that the more we learn about life, the more we comprehend the utter impotence of naturalism. No viable way exists by natural processes to cause dead molecules to become living cells by abiogenesis – even after 160 of trying since Darwin’s Origin. (See the short film “First Life” by Illustra Media.)

We now understand quite well why molecules cannot come alive by unguided material processes; it is not a matter of “not fully understanding” the problem. That is why some of our leading scientists have proposed directed panspermia as an alternative explanation for the origin of life on Earth. Those who take this alternative realize full well that abiogenesis is not feasible, so they consider the only naturalistic alternative to be that life must have traveled here from other planets.

This evidence-free hypothesis was advocated by a man of outstanding scientific credentials, Nobel laureate Francis Crick. Crick, a doyen of modern molecular biology and the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, recognized that the probability for the origin of life by chance is essentially zero. Unwilling to even consider the creation alternative, he proposed the idea that an advanced extraterrestrial society had deliberately seeded Earth with life by sending elemental life-forms on a rocket ship over the vast distance from his planet to Earth.[6] Such is the desperation of materialists.

Consensus of the Absurd

Directed panspermia imagines that life was wafted by radiation pressure through interstellar space. This idea has been considered by scientists past and present. Past supporters include Hermann E. Richter, Jacob Berzelius, Svante Arrhenius, Hermann Helmholtz, Armand Delsemme,[7] Michael N. Mautner,[8] G. Matloff, Iosif Samuilovich Shklovskii, Leslie Orgel, and the late Carl Sagan.[9] These scientists did not look for alternatives to abiogenesis on Earth because of “processes that are not fully understood,” but because of evidence that is well understood. From this evidence, they have rejected abiogenesis as untenable.

In short, leading scientists have proposed directed panspermia not because of what they don’t know, but because of what they do know. They know full well about the fatal improbability of abiogenesis. But there’s a fatal problem with panspermia as well: how did life originate in the place (wherever it was) that sent it to Earth? Panspermia in its various guises only pushes the problems with abiogenesis to another unknown planet, out of sight and out of mind. That is not a scientific hypothesis.

Wielding Power Against the Censored

An ID supporter in Denmark stated his experience trying to get intelligent design information published.

Disinformation about ID [Intelligent Design]  has been spread over past decades and the ordinary Dane therefore believes that ID is either creationism, theistic evolution, or some sort of new age phenomenon. The foes of ID have been really busy poisoning the well. The disinformation annoyed me for some years so last autumn I ….  wrote a book explaining the ID hypothesis in detail, why it’s science and not creationism, that it’s not theistic evolution but in fact is a scientific hypotheses which places itself in opposition to evolution. Hence, it is also critical of theistic evolution. This new book, Enter ID, has just been released. Because no publishing company in Denmark will have anything to do with a critique of evolution or ID, my wife and I established one ourselves, just to get this book out—a lot of work to get one single book out, of the sort that doesn’t produce any significant income. If it goes really well maybe a thousand to twelve hundred copies will be sold, not many, but that’s because Danish is a minority language.[10]

A similar persecution problem is also common in America.[11] But Abbott continues her fake history, saying,

In his first observations, Galileo saw that the Moon was not a smooth sphere, but was mountainous. This contradicted the church’s view that the heavens were pristine and unchangeable, unlike the corrupt, mutable Earth. He also saw satellites orbiting Jupiter, shooting a hole in the geocentric argument that if Earth were to move, it would lose its Moon.[12]

The view “that the heavens were pristine and unchangeable, unlike the corrupt, mutable Earth” was the Catholic churches’ view only to the extent that they relied on the secular science and philosophy of their day. Thus, the blame falls on the scientists (natural philosophers) of his day, not on the Church (except that clerics then and now have often relied uncritically on the scientific consensus). The same is true of the geocentric view mentioned.

Editor’s Note: In his recent book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion, Historian of science Dr Michael Keas gives a more nuanced view of the Galileo affair, showing that it was not a simple matter of science vs religion. He also explains that the church leaders were not opposed to adopting the Copernican system, but did not feel either Copernicus or Galileo (both loyal to the church) had proved it with sufficient evidence. Indeed, incontrovertible proof would take decades to arrive. Either way, “science denialism” was not the reason Galileo was persecuted. Personalities and politics entered into the affair in significant ways. See also our biographies of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

German Evolutionary Scientists and “Consensus”

“Science denialism” can be a righteous cause when the scientific consensus is wrong or evil. Consider the involvement of German scientists in the Holocaust, a well-documented fact which I have been writing about for almost a half-a century.[13]

A Brief Summary of Darwinian Scientists’ Support of the Holocaust

Scores of  major academic studies have convincingly documented the critical role of Germany’s “best and brightest” scientists in the design and prosecution of the entire Nazi Holocaust and genocide. Decisions related to the regulations and practices of the Holocaust were typically not made by Hitler or other Nazi career politicians, but rather by a wide variety of highly educated scientist professionals (all staunch Darwinians). This fact was reflected in the conclusions of Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote, if we regard humans “as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment” as taught by Darwinism,

we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.[14]

Many of the worst offenders in the scientific establishment essentially got away with murder and crimes against humanity.

• In 1930, Joseph Mengele, M.D. (1911–1979) the most notorious German Nazi scientist, became intrigued by the then burgeoning field of heredity and eugenics. He consequently went back for another doctorate, this one a PhD in anthropology. The subject of his thesis was, “attempting to demonstrate that one could differentiate racial groups according to jaw shape.”
• After World War II ended, Joseph Mengele’s sponsor, Darwinian eugenist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (1896-1969), “head of the genetic and hereditary research program … was fined [only] 600 marks” (about 150 dollars) for his war crimes. Then, in 1951, he became “Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster; three years later, he was promoted to the position of dean of the medical faculty … honors were bestowed on him by the American, Italian, Austrian and Japanese societies for [his work in] human genetics.”[15]
• Mengele’s academic competitor, Professor Hans Grebe, a propagandist of the Nazi racial doctrines and a pupil of the racial hygienist von Verschuer, was director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene. Soon after the war he obtained an academic position in the department of human genetics at the University of Marburg.
• Dr. Robert Ritter, whose work resulted in the genocide of Gypsies, was also never prosecuted for his part in the Darwinian eugenic goal of producing a superior race by genocide. He was hired to teach biology at the University of Tübingen from 1944 to 1946, and later brought in his former assistant in his eugenics work, race scientist Dr. Eva Justin (1909-1966), to work with him as a psychologist.[16]
• Eva Justin earned her PhD in ‘race science’ at the University of Berlin for a thesis, titled in English, Biographical destinies of Gypsy children and their offspring who were educated in a manner inappropriate for their species–1943. The Gypsy children that Justin studied were selected for deportation to the concentration camps, but deportation was delayed until she completed her research and received her PhD. Most of them were eventually murdered in Auschwitz.

In an effort to dissociate itself from its Nazi past after the war, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was renamed “the Max Planck Institute.” In June 2001, the society’s president, Professor Hubert Markl, admitted that scientific evidence has proven “beyond the shadow of a doubt that directors and employees at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were together intellectually responsible for, and sometimes even actively collaborated in, the crimes of the Nazi regime”[17]. It is now undeniable that the murder of over 6,000,000 Jews, 7,000,000 Poles, and 70,000 Gypsies occurred under the direction and willing cooperation of the nation’s leading scientists and scientific institutions. I only mentioned five of the perpetrators; many more exist. The now classic study by Columbia University Professor Robert Jay Lifton has clearly revealed the central role that evolutionary professors played in the Holocaust.[18] Specifically, Lifton documented that they did more than just “conduct bizarre experiments on concentration-camp inmates; they supervised the entire process of medical mass murder, from selecting those who were to be exterminated to disposing of corpses.”[19]

So while Mario Livio (the author) and Alison Abbott (the reviewer) moan and weep about the trouble that “science deniers” cause the scientific establishment, let us never forget: the science establishment brought more tears to the world than any skeptic of Darwinism ever did. Claims that the persecuted are persecuting the persecutors ring hollow – as if a prison guard has a right to complain that whipping the prisoners makes his hands hurt.

References

[1] Alison Abbott. 2020. Galileo’s story is always relevant. With science denialism stronger than ever, who better to revisit?  Nature 581:27-28.

[2] Numbers, Ronald. 2009. Galileo Goes to Jail. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. See Myth 8, pp. 68-78.

[3] Moy, Timothy. 2001. “Science, Religion, and the Galileo Affair.” Skeptical Inquirer 25(5):43-49, p. 45.

[4] Abbott, 2020, p. 27.

[5] Abbott, 2020, p. 27.

[6] Crick, Francis. 1981. Life Itself: It’s Origin and Nature. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

[7] Delsemme, Armand. Our Cosmic Origins. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[8] Mautner, Michael N. 1997. Directed Panspermia. 3. Strategies and Motivations for Seeding Star-Forming Clouds. J. British Interplanetary Society 50:93–102.

[9] Crick, F.H. and Orgel, L.E. 1973. “Directed panspermia.” Icarus 19(3):341–346.

[10] Pultz, Dane Karsten. 2020. ID Is Now Thriving In Europe. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/dane-karsten-pultz-id-is-now-thriving-in-europe/ Emphasis added.

[11]  Bergman, Jerry. 2012. Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press; Silencing the Darwin Skeptics. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press. 2016; Censoring the Darwin Skeptics. How Belief in Evolution is Enforced by Eliminating Dissidents. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press. 2018.

[12] Abbott, 2020, p. 27.

[13] Bergman, Jerry. 2012. Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazi Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada: Joshua Press; Bergman, Jerry, 2014. The Darwin Effect. Its influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism, Capitalism & Sexism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books; Bergman, Jerry. 2020. Darwinian Eugenics and The Holocaust: American Industrial Involvement. Ontario, Canada: Involgo Press.

[14] Frankl, Victor E., The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. New York: Vintage, 3^rd edition 1986. p. XXVII, Originally published in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager.

[15] Negev, E., and Y. Koren. 2013. Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz. New York, NY:: MJF Books, p. 209.

[16] Schmidt-Degenhard, T.J. 2008. Robert Ritter 1901–1951:.Zu Leben und Werk des NS-“Zigeunerforschers” (Medical dissertation). Tübingen, Germany: University of Tübingen.

[17] Negev, E., and Y. Koren, 2013, p. 210.

[18] Lifton, Robert. The Nazi doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Second Edition 2017. The First edition was published in 1988. .

[19] http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/nazi-doctors-medical-killing-and-psychology-genocide.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.