How Stockholm Syndrome Christianity Hinders Scientific Progress

[00:00:05] ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Andrew McDiarmid: Welcome to ID The Future. I’m your host, Andrew McDiarmid. Well, today I’m back with Dr. John west to continue discussing what happens when Christians and science reject historic Christian teachings and embrace the tenets of scientific materialism. Dr. West is author of a new book called Stockholm Syndrome why Christian Leaders Are Failing and what We Can Do About It. In case you don’t know him, west is vice president and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he serves as managing Director of the Institute’s center for Science and Culture. His current research examines the impact of science and scientism on public policy and culture. He has written or edited 12 other books, including Darwin Day in America, the Magician’s Twin, and Walt Disney in live action. Dr. West has also directed and written several documentaries exploring intelligent design and the debate over evolution. And chances are you’ve seen one of his documentaries because he has made some really awesome ones that capture the spirit of the argument for intelligent design and indeed the argument against Darwinian evolution. Dr. West, welcome back.

[00:01:22] Dr. John West: Andrew, it’s great to be back with you.

[00:01:25] Andrew McDiarmid: Well, you know, we have this idea that what if American culture isn’t collapsing because of crusading secularists? What if it’s actually failing because leading Christians identify more with secular elites than with their fellow believers? Those are the questions you’re exploring in Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. And we’re talking about chapter two of your book, which you’ve titled Secularist Stockholm Syndrome Christians Diminished Role for God in Creation. And I want to jump right back into it. You know, in the last episode, we talked about Mr. Darwin coming on the scene despite a strong defense of theism and God having a role in creation. Mr. Darwin came along in the 19th century and proposed that this unguided mechanism by which an evolutionary process could progress on its own without recourse to a creator. And we talked about how that that led to a rise in scientific materialism. Well, you know, fast forward to the 20th century, once Neo Darwinism was crowned king in science, combined with ideas from genetics and really made what they they consider the modern synthesis.

Christians really who hoped to reconcile their faith with evolution had few options. Either tackle the shortcomings of Darwinian evolution head on, champion a guided form of evolution, or revise historic Christianity to fit the straightjacket of Neo Darwinism. And it’s that third option that seems to have been embraced by many Christian intellectuals over the past few decades. You explained, this approach, called modern theistic evolution, has corroded three foundational biblical beliefs for its proponents. Can you tell us what those are?

[00:03:12] Dr. John West: Sure. So the first one is just that God is an all knowing creator of everything who guided things and brought them into existence. And I should note that this is for whether you’re Protestant or Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, if you’re Jewish, frankly, even if you are Muslim, you, you know, sort of the modern monotheistic religions all think God is the creator of everything and guided things to the way they are today. But that’s a problem if you embrace Darwinism because as you’ve just pointed out, Darwinism posits that we’re the product of an unguided process. So you have to do all sorts of backflipping to try to bring these together. And so, you know, some of the options are to suggest that, well, maybe God himself doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. So God created an unguided evolutionary process that he himself doesn’t know. In fact, I remember being years ago on a panel with a theistic Darwinist, his name’s Ken Miller at Brown University where I was sort of trying to bring home this point and you know, where he talked about, well, there’s God as creator, but he also believes in this unguided Darwinian process. So, so which is it? And he basically said, yeah, God himself didn’t know whether the evolutionary process that he put in place would bring about a big brain dinosaur or us. Well, that’s pretty dramatic if you’re saying that God himself set, you know, created this unguided process, that he doesn’t know whether the thinking creature produced is a human being or a Tyrannosaurus rex with a big brain. I mean, that’s not the traditional theistic, monotheistic view about God. So that’s. So number one, modern theistic evolution undermines the belief, the foundational belief that God is actually a creator who guides things and, and brings about the purposes that he wants and that what we see in nature reflects that. Now for Christians in particular, there’s a, there’s a second big teaching of Christianity, that which, and again, whether you’re Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox, it’s that God created us, particularly human beings and nature originally good, and then human beings corrupted ourselves through a fall. And then that’s why we need a savior. The reason we need Jesus is because the original good creation created by God was corrupted. But according to Darwinian evolution, that doesn’t quite work because there is no good original creation. Basically we were sinful and evil from the start. And in fact, this point is made by physicist Carl Gibson in his book Saving Darwin, for which Francis Collins wrote a glowing forward. Giberson really point out there’s no fall because evolution itself is driven by selfishness. So humans were selfish and evil to begin with. So in that, that really makes hash of the idea of the Christian idea of salvation. What is God saving us from? Well, I guess from his own botched plan.

So that’s the second idea, the idea that we need a savior to save us from the corrupted nature that God did not create, but that we created through the fall. And then finally traditional again Christian beliefs, whether Protestant, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, and you find this also in Judaism and you actually also find it in Islam, is the idea that God’s purposeful creative activity in nature can be clearly seen by us in nature. So in the biblical tradition you have Psalm 19 where it says the heavens declare the glory of God. And Romans 1, Paul, the apostle Paul talks about being able to see in nature God’s creative intelligence and activity.

Well, again, if we’re the product of a blind purposeless process, you’re probably not going to get that evidence. Or, or some Christians who say, well yeah, God may have guided things, but it was secret guidance. And so God. This is actually Francis Collins, a position that he argues in his book the Language of God that well, maybe God made things look like they were random and undirected, but we know subjectively through the eyes of faith that it isn’t all undirected, but he made the evolutionary process look undirected. Well, I’d say that this again counteracts this foundational idea of all branches of Christianity and also of Judaism and of Islam, that God’s activity actually can be discerned rationally in nature. That’s one reason why we can be held accountable for our belief or non belief in God according to the biblical tradition, is that God makes himself known through nature.

[00:08:01] Andrew McDiarmid: Right, right. And that’s definitely a symptom here. Now as an example of Stockholm syndrome Christianity, particularly the symptom we’re talking about, a diminished role for God in creation. You discuss Francis Collins, arguably the most celebrated evangelical Christian scientist in America. And in his best selling book The Language of God, he proposes that God may have made evolution look random and undirected. As you’re saying, you call this poor theology, but you also mentioned that it’s a brilliant tactic. Why?

[00:08:33] Dr. John West: Well, if you’re trying to get along and if you’re Francis Collins and trying to get up to the top of the food chain and you don’t want to be controversial and you have a view like this, well, this helps insulate you so. Because it really means that your Christian beliefs that there is a creator is really a distinction without a difference. Because. Because, yeah, I believe in God as a creator, but I also agree with you, arch Darwinian materialist, that he made things look like there isn’t a creator.

Well, you know, that’s a way of. I’m not saying that Collins consciously did this. I think Collins thinks his view is right. But it does happen that this action of saying, well, yeah, there’s God who’s a creator in some sort, but I’m willing to concede that nature looks like it was random and undesigned. At least biology was random and undesigned. Collins actually does sort of argue that maybe physics and cosmology might represent some evidence for design. But when it comes to biology and life, that’s where he suggests this, that it looks. Maybe God made it look random, undirected. If you have that belief, well, then you’re going to be a lot less offensive to the Darwinian materialist because, you know, you’re basically saying that the facts and evidence does substantiate what they say and it’s just sort of your fairy story that you believe subjectively that God guided things, even though reality shows otherwise. I do want to point out a really interesting irony here.

Collins, as you said, is the most celebrated evangelical Christian scientist, at least in pop culture. So he’s arguing that when it comes to biology, things look random and undirected, but we know through the eyes of faith subjectively that maybe they were directed.

But the world’s most known evolutionary atheist, biologist Richard Dawkins, retired from Oxford University.

He’s actually closer to the historic Christian position on this point than Collins, because Dawkins actually concedes that when you look at biology, it looks designed and purposeful. Unlike Collins, docket actually said biology is the study of these complicated things that look like they’re designed for a purpose. But in his view, well, we have this extra knowledge from Darwin, sort of the secret knowledge from science that shows that that appearance of design really isn’t true. But then you have Collins going here and saying, oh no, no, no, no. You look at biology, maybe it looks random and directive, but we know subjectively through this secret knowledge of faith that it was maybe directed. Although he goes back and forth on that and we may get into that.

So, yeah, it’s a convenient position if you’re trying to get along in a world of Darwinian materialist elites.

[00:11:25] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah. And his book, you know, convinced many that they had to embrace the idea of evolution and reject intelligent design. But it turns out many of the scientific claims in his book haven’t aged well. And I thought we could just spend a moment looking at a few of those examples.

[00:11:41] Dr. John West: Yeah, it really hasn’t aged well.

I mean, I would argue at the time the book came out, he got a lot of his critique of intelligent design from Brown University biologist Ken Miller. And those were pretty slipshod, but they sounded convincing. But in the couple decades since, it really has fallen apart. So probably the most, the biggest doozy of a challenge is the idea of junk DNA. So junk DNA is the idea that the vast majority of our DNA doesn’t code for proteins. And so Darwinists for decades argued, well, that means that it really doesn’t do anything interesting, because if you don’t code for proteins, how can you build new things? And how can you have random mutations in proteins building new things? So this was sort of central. You know, coding for proteins was central to the Darwinian story. And so if it doesn’t code for proteins, the 90% plus or a genome that doesn’t do that, that just means that that was just left over from the blind Darwinian process. It’s, in fact, they argued, well, that’s what the Darwinian process would predict is all this stuff that was gibberish that doesn’t do anything because of course, Darwinism is an unguided process. It’s based on hit or miss. And so that was the argument. And Francis Collins embraces that argument in, you know, he does allude to that. Well, it might be a little bit of hubris to call things junk, but then he goes right along and basically gives an endorsement of that. You know, the majority of the human genome is filled with basically garbage, the detritus of stuff, of mishmash of stuff. And he says, well, you know, and for him, this was a key argument against intelligent design in biology. Because he says, well, you know, someone could argue that maybe God put that garbage there. I’m paraphrasing, but this is basically what I’m saying. You know, maybe someone could argue that God put all that garbage there in our genome for some purpose. Ha ha ha. But, you know, we know that that’s not true. And so, but. But since, you know, right. Thinking people aren’t going to believe that and you recognize that there’s so much garbage in our genome, well, that couldn’t have been the product of intelligent design. So that was basically his argument.

The really a stupendously interesting fact was that at the very point that he was making that argument, researchers at his own NIH were or at the NIH were busily documenting that actually all this supposedly junk DNA was performing biological functions and was not junk at all. And the really big irony was that many of the papers that came out just a couple of years later with the ENCODE project had Francis Collins name on it. Not because he did the research, but because as the head poncho of some of these programs, his name was just tacked on. And so it was exploded by his own. One of his key arguments against intelligent design and biology was exploded by research that he ended up putting his own name on. And today he won’t use that term. I think he sort of, the evidence is now so overwhelming. And I just say, you know, for people who claim that belief in intelligent line has no real world consequences or, you know, where are the, the predictions of the intelligent design theorists? Well, junk DNA is one of the most, you know, probably one of the most important, the exploding of that myth. It was probably one of the most important discoveries in our lifetimes.

And it was, I remember back in, when we started the center for Science and Culture in the early mid-1990s, and particularly mathematician Bill Dembski among others, were making arguments that, well, we shouldn’t just be calling all this junk DNA because based on Darwinian presuppositions, if things are designed, we will probably end up finding out that this has real functions. And they were laughed at and they were scoring. I actually still remember dealing with a science reporter from the Washington Post around this time, just a couple of years before the myth was exploded, asking for what, you know, things were, predictions were being made by, by ID proponents, you know, to show that it was scientific. And I gave him this, well, that a lot of this DNA so called junk will likely turn out to be functional. He said, well, that hasn’t been shown yet. Well, he ended up breaking the story for the Washington Post when the ENCODE project came out that showed the opposite. And I tried to engage him then, but he wouldn’t respond. He said now because I wanted to get him to say, you know, I wanted him to answer, well, now are you willing to concede that ID is scientific? Because we’ve just shown something that you admitted was a big prediction but you thought wasn’t substantiated. And now it is in any case. So junk DNA, junk DNA is a key part of that language of God book. And that was exploded. But Then the second one that is really a real doozy involves a bacterial flagellum. And of course, this is the iconic, the swim motor, the outboard or the motor that looks like a, you know, a boat motor in a way. I mean, how it performs in, in bacteria that Michael Behe, biochemist Michael Behe, one of Discovery’s, you know, founding fellows of our program, has written about and shows that an unguided Darwinian pathway is hard to use to explain this because you have this system of all these parts that if you take out, you know, even one of them, you don’t get a less functional system. You get a completely non functional system for that purpose of swimming. And so how you get this step by step through an unguided process that can’t see the end in view is really hard to understand. And Behe’s, despite what people may have heard from people like Francis Collins, Behe’s, you know, argument on this has not been refuted. It’s actually been substantiated. And so what Francis Collins did in his Language of God book is he claimed, aha, this has been refuted because. Why? Well, because there’s something called the Type 3 secretory system. And, and that was actually a building block, he argued for the bacterial flagellum. And so, so that that was a subsystem that. And so this is the idea that, you know, evolution, Jerry, rigs existing things and so it used that to build the flagellum. There are all sorts of problems with. Even if that were true, that doesn’t actually negate the irreducible complexity of the overall system for the system of swimming. So it really, for reasons, sort of complicated, so I don’t want to get into here, but even if that were true, it really wouldn’t negate Behe’s argument. But turns out it’s not true. And in the 20 years or so, you know, since that book, what has the evolutionists have come to the conclusion that the type 3 secretory system was not a precursor of the bacterial flagellum that helped build it. It was a descendant, if anything. So in other words, you had the flagellum and then it, you know, things were knocked out and you devolved.

Well, no one disputes that if, you know, and Michael Behe has written a whole book on this, Darwin devolves. You can, you know, if you knock out certain things from existing systems and maybe have a lesser functional system for something else.

So that doesn’t refute his thing at all. So this example, even Darwinists don’t use it anymore. The best evidence suggests that the type 3 secretion system devolved from a functional flagellum, not the other way around. Interestingly, someone must have at least told Francis Collins this because last year he came out with a new book like the Road to Wisdom or Path to Wisdom. He has a new section attacking Michael Behe and the bacterial flagellum. But this time, like I said, someone must have told him because he deleted a reference to anything specific. So he deleted a reference to the type 3 secretion system, but instead he makes this broad claim that basically scientists have shown that the flagellum has evolved from these lower level systems. He doesn’t give any specifics now. Normal, no documentation. And you know, I. And it’s just not true. Scientists actually haven’t shown that. And the one concrete example that supposedly existed has been refuted. But rather than going back on his and admitting he was wrong, he just drops a specific example and makes a broad, contentless, unsubstantiated assertion.

[00:20:29] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, the island he’s clinging to is shrinking. Yes, by the year.

[00:20:35] Dr. John West: It is, yeah. And that’s funny because in his book he talks about, you know, well, for design, you know, God of the gaps and that, you know, that’s shrinking and stuff. Well, no, actually the evidence for Darwinian theory is shrinking, you know, and you’re right, he is a holdout because that’s actually the other interesting thing about his newer book is a lot has happened since and people who listen to Idea of the Future know this, that the Royal society meeting in 2016. I mean I wrote actually an essay last year called Darwinists Devolved. Because it’s really hard now to find a gifted, smart, cutting edge scientist who embraces traditional Darwinism. This is just in the last five to six years Darwinism has imploded. The only place you find the real die hard supporters of Darwinism are on Internet trolls like non Professor Dave on YouTube or unfortunately among some evangelical Christians who are clinging to what they still think is the cultural mandate of Darwinian elites, even when that’s been self destructing. It’s kind of quaint to read Collins latest book because it’s clearly he has not stayed up on the debates over the last 10 years. And I think his book would have been helped by some more peer review. I mean at least they caught the. They didn’t repeat the blunder of the type 3 secretion system, but it could have used some more peer review.

[00:22:05] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, well those are some great examples of how his book unfortunately has not aged well at least scientifically.

And I personally have been, you know, with discovery for about 13 years now, and, and I, I remember, you know, seeing the junk DNA myth just disintegrating, you know, and that’s been pretty rewarding to, to see how intelligent design, you know, really predicted that and sort of was, was verified through that. That’s been exciting to watch. Well, one of the ways Collins has attacked fellow Christians for their skepticism toward Darwinian evolution is through an initiative called the biologos Foundation. Why was that started and how has it fueled a rise in Stockholm syndrome Christianity?

[00:22:54] Dr. John West: Well, basically, the short answer is it was part of a larger initiative of a foundation that has megabucks called the Templeton foundation that ended up spending millions of dollars. I mean, I’ve lost track, and some of this is now not publicly available. But at a time several years ago, I added up what was publicly known. They at that time had given like $20 million to fund the creation of various groups around the world to basically get the faith community, especially Christians, to support Darwinian evolution. And BioLogos was their initiative in the United States, and its target was evangelical Christians to basically get evangelical Christians to adopt and make their peace with Darwinian evolution.

Now, I won’t get into it here, but this will be a reason for people to read my book. What’s come out in just a couple years ago is the backstory. So Collins, along with Carl Gibson and Darrell Falk, helped found the BioLogos with money from Templeton. But there’s a backstory on that, and it involves a meeting in the George W. Bush White House between Collins and two White House officials where they began to plot that basically, I’m not going to name them because you could read my book, find out about this, but they basically commiserated about how embarrassed they were that their fellow evangelicals didn’t support Darwin’s theory and they needed to do something about that. And so what I didn’t know until just a couple of years ago when this sort of one of the participants in this discussion talked about it, was that the backstory to BioLogos, as far as Collins is concerned, was this White House meeting with a speechwriter and another White House official who still is involved in public debates today. So if you want to know the real backstory of the BioLogos, you should read this chapter in my book.

[00:24:55] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, well, Collins and other materialists have attacked scientists who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution, calling them anti science, liars and threats to America’s future. But what’s funny is in order for Science to thrive, it needs dissenting views. Why is that? Why is that so important?

[00:25:14] Dr. John West: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same reason. Why do we believe in the germ theory of disease today? Why do we use antibiotics? Why do we use. We didn’t, you know, 150 or 200 years ago. Why? Because science has progressed, and it’s progressed not because everyone was all one happy family agreeing to everything. It’s because there was vigorous disagreement. I mean, the original. For anyone who knows anything about the history of science, you will know that scientists who come up with major new discoveries are often not touted as these great people among their peers. Because who wants to be told that you’re wrong? I mean, this is human. It’s not that scientists are evil or fallible more than any other human beings, but they’re equally fallible with all of us. And who wants to be told that they’re wrong? And so science thrives and proceeds on. On disagreement and vibrant open debate. And if you can’t have that, if you don’t have the right to say, the emperor has no clothes, if you don’t have the right to basically, you know, argue for dissenting views, you get static ideology, not science. You don’t actually progress into a better understanding of the world. And so this is. I mean, we’ve seen it in real time. Without getting into all the debates over Covid, let’s just do one thing which was the debate over, you know, was Covid entered into the world through a lab leak, or was it just, you know, out there among bats in nature and then just sort of spread in the market to human beings? Remember, in real time, this is just over like two or three years that the people who argue that, well, maybe it was a lab leak were denigrated, demonized, censored. This is all conspiracy theory. Pretty much all this was claimed without much evidence. It’s just. How dare you believe it? Well, now we’ve just been told that our United States government, it’s not just the current administration, apparently this was the CIA analysis that was done under the last administration, but it was just now released, is that they think that the best evidence says that it was the result of a lab leak.

Now, I don’t. I’m not an expert on that. I’m not a CIA analyst, so I don’t know what the evidence is on it. But what I do know is that it didn’t serve anyone when the government and big tech and government scientists like Collins tried to shut down people who were raising serious questions about Was this a lab leak or not? Because that has public policy implications for whether we do gain of function, research, whether we do other things. And so science thrives. You’re not going to advance if you can’t critique, if you can’t offer alternate ideas.

[00:27:52] Andrew McDiarmid: Right, Exactly. And you do make the point also in your book that when you do shut down other ideas, when you do close down that dissent and debate, it betrays an insecurity for your own ideas.

And I think that’s quite telling as well.

[00:28:09] Dr. John West: Yeah, actually this is another.

Some people might be upset that I’m so forthright critical of Francis Collins. But one of Collins biggest failures in my view as a public scientist in America is his hyper insecurity. And we saw this in the Intelligent Design movement. He did not want to debate people in the Intelligent Design movement publicly and maybe that he didn’t want to give a platform. But I think it’s also, he maybe didn’t feel, I don’t know, didn’t think that he could adequately, you know, have, have a response on, on some of this. And he certainly during COVID it was the same thing that he didn’t want to, you know, he wouldn’t go on shows or answer questions of people who had thoughtful critical questions. And he pretended that. And actually when he did, I write in the book about the, the BioLogos foundation in its early years, that when Collins was, was involved in setting it up, then he left to go to the government. But he convened these private meetings that he said was to promote dialogue about issues involving evolution.

But it wasn’t really dialogue. They were monologues because they excluded all the major proponents of intelligent design. They only invited people who were scholars and scientists who promoted Darwinian evolution. Because the point of those meetings wasn’t dialogue. It was to get people to get with the mission of embracing Darwin. But again, that shows insecurity. If you really think that the evidence of Darwinian materialism is so strong that no rational person can oppose it, then the last thing you would want to do is be afraid of meeting the yahoos on the other side because you could allow them to expose their own ignorance.

The only reason you want to shut people up on the other side who have equal science credentials, if not better and know their stuff is that you’re fearful that you’re not going to be able to hold up your part of the argument. And we saw that with Collins with regard to Intelligent design. And so it did not shock me that we saw the same things in Covid where he was not Willing to interact with, you know, when the scientists we now know that he demonized privately and tried to get them to squash on something called the Great Barrington Declaration. And again, without getting into whether it was right or wrong, it was these, you know, world class epidemiologists who were arguing that in the early years, this is pre vaccine that we should target, not have general shutdowns or lockdowns, but we should target it among the most vulnerable. And we now know from, you know, private emails and things that were finally released that Collins was about trying to demonize these people and shut them down. How much better had he engaged them in public dialogue and allowed a platform to discuss? Because based on what we now know about the general lockdown downs and the harms to kids and schools and other things, it would have been a whole lot better if we had that debate. But we didn’t because Collins, among others, want, you know, didn’t want to engage that. And I do think that comes from a level of insecurity. And this is important for the future. And I write about it a little bit in my book, but also in essays I’ve written. Because if you actually look at what Collins has said the last couple of years, some people think, oh, he made the statement that indicates that, well, maybe we went over too far and didn’t pay attention to other people’s views during COVID he said a little bit about that. But if you actually go back to those public events, as I did, and watch everything he said, his really number one point is that the government needs to engage in more censorship and control in the future. And again, this comes from insecurity. A person should not be a top science official is so insecure that the answer is shutting down people, credible people. I mean, these aren’t just, you know, these aren’t flat earthers, people who have more prestigious degrees than he does, trying to shut that down. That’s not someone you should want at the head of this, of the scientific establishment.

[00:32:17] Andrew McDiarmid: Right? And with all due respect to Mr. Collins and to what he has accomplished in his career, I think it’s time to return to the basics. And one of the basics is intellectual humility. You know, when I teach young people about intelligent design, the arguments for it, we also touch on good and bad reasoning and arguments and how to make arguments. And one of the key things when it comes to an inquiring mind, having an inquiring mind, is the ability to collect other viewpoints, other perspectives. And that’s what we need more of in science. You know, as you said it’s privy to the same things that other human endeavors are part of as far as just the bias and the slippery slope of groupthink. And so having that intellectual humility and collecting other viewpoints can help you refine your own and also make sure that you’re not influencing others in the wrong way. Well, final question for you, Dr. West. You write that the attitudes that Collins exemplifies is endemic in many Christian universities and institutions in America today. In the second half of your book, you offer some cures for Stockholm syndrome Christianity as it pertains to the scientific enterprise. What are a few things that can be done to reverse this?

[00:33:37] Dr. John West: Yeah, well, I think the number one thing is to don’t deify the consensus. Consensuses should be paid attention to, but they’re not God. They’re not infallible. And so you have to vigorously defend free speech and counteract among your kids, at school, at church, among your friends, this idea that whatever the majority of scientists says at any given time should just be given absolute deference and also counter this false idea that science and scientists as a quote class, are simply neutral arbiters of truth. And I have a section in one of the chapters of my book where I go through all the voices that people listen to in our society. You know, social media, traditional media, entertainment media, experts, college professors, scientists. I have a section on it. And this myth, I’d say it’s a myth of the scientists in the white lab coat. Again, I’m not demonizing scientists. Scientists are. Are great. We want to rely on the best scientific research, but they’re human, which means they’re fallible. We have great survey data that shows that, unfortunately, in the United States, most scientists, especially those at the top of the food chain at the major research universities, at the major professional societies, do not look like most Americans. Ideologically, philosophically, politically, theologically. They’re all. I mean, you could read my book to find out what their views are, but they’re lopsided, I mean, to the level of 60, 70% or more on all sorts of cultural indicators. So this idea that scientists in America are somehow these neutral parties so that you can believe anything they say because they’re just wanting to get the facts. And, you know, they’re. These scientists in the white lab coats is false.

And so another reason to be able to ask tough questions about claims in the name of science in our own country is that the scientific establishment, just like the academic establishment, is largely skewed to a set of views that actually theologically if you happen to be a traditional monotheist, let alone a Christian, their views are largely regard that as fairy tales. Culturally and ethically and politically, they’re out of step with huge numbers of Americans. And so you can’t just trust that what they’re saying hasn’t been skewed. That’s why you should be able to ask tough questions. And if it is just based on the evidence, they’ll be able to respond with evidence. If it’s not, you’ll be able to find out that they’re basically smuggling in their ideology in the name of science. And so I think having teaching people, including your kids, including yourself, including your friends when they bring this, oh, we just need to trust the science. Well, yeah, the actual scientific evidence, not claims made in the name of science by any given scientist and not, you know, science that doesn’t allow debate. Counteracting that idea will be life freeing and culture changing.

[00:36:36] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, I agree. And that’s a great first step for all of us, I think. Well, Dr. West, I’ve really enjoyed unpacking some of the, you know, great points you make as it relates to science in your new book. I hope we can come back and continue discussing this because it’s very timely and a very important topic to be looking at.

[00:36:56] Dr. John West: That would be fun.

[00:36:58] Andrew McDiarmid: Well, listeners, you can order your copy of this book@StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com that’s StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com in addition to ordering the book, there you’ll find practical tools to help you resist captivity and stand for truth in your family, your church and your community. So the website is StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com. Also, stay tuned for a separate episode featuring Dr. West reading an exclusive excerpt from his new book. So look out for that as well for I D the Future. I’m Andrew McDiarmid. Thanks for listening.

This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.