It is amazing to me that after many decades of having evolution taught exclusively in all public schools and even in many private and religious schools, a Harris Poll (here or here) reports that a full 64% of people STILL believe we were "created directly by God", and another 10% think it was a "Powerful Force/Intelligent design." Only 22% believed humans "Evolved From Earlier Species."
It is hard to convince people to disbelieve something that is so obvious because contrary to popular "elitist" belief, most people aren't stupid.
Obvious? Yes, obvious!
Consider this: Imagine that I took 100 people and put them in a room with a BMW. Then over a period of months, they were told over and over in various ways, by various authorities, that this BMW was NOT designed and NOT manufactured by a group of engineers, but instead it simply came into existence by random chance exactly as they see it before them. These people would understand what they were being told was ludicrous. Every person with a working brain would continue to see that it was OBVIOUS that something complex like this BMW was clearly designed by intelligent beings!
Everyday, science continues to discover more and more complexity in our world. Especially, the complexity of the human body. The cell "machinery" that inexplicably works is so incredibly complex scientists are literally baffled by how it came to be. They cannot explain how each cell came to manufacture all the machinery that it needs to sustain life as we know it.
However, the staunch "Darwinists" insist that even though they don't understand how it could be, they KNOW that what they observe HAS to have natural explanations. Their "religion" (Darwinism) insists that a supernatural explanation is NOT an acceptable explanation even if all the evidence indicates otherwise.
Darwinists start with a naturalist view that something can ONLY be labeled as "science" if it has a natural explanation. Since a super-natural explanation violates this presupposition it MUST be rejected, even if it is likely TRUE! So Darwinist's spend much time trying to force all observations into a naturalistic view. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them by offering a supernatural explanation as being unscientific heretics!
Good thing burning at the stake has been outlawed.
For many decades, Darwinists have controlled the very definition of the word "science." In spite of this, their control has not resulted in the common people believing in their theory. Why? Because it simply cuts against the grain of what appears OBVIOUS to most people. Something as well designed and well functioning as the human body (in fact, the entire cosmos for that matter) HAS to be designed by something intelligent!
This has led to what is becoming a HUGE movement within academia at all levels called "Intelligent Design." Michael Behe's Darwin's Blackbox pretty much kicked off this movement almost a decade ago. It is a great read. In fact, it discusses how Darwin himself said,
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory [of evolution] would absolutely break down." - Charles Darwin
Behe then goes on to show several such "irreducibly complex" systems from his own field of molecular biology.
Even more telling in the Harris poll is that in the last 10 years, in spite of the continual pounding on the public mind that evolution and Darwin was TOTALLY PROVEN as fact, people who actually believe that humans evolved from earlier species dropped from 44% to 38%. The Darwinist's are losing ground even though they control virtually all the schools and almost all the media!
Why?
Because design is obvious.
A thinking person finds it very difficult to come to the conclusion that our complex, intricately designed world simply HAPPENED BY RANDOM CHANCE! Their brains reject the thought and say, "no way!"
This really makes Darwinist's upset! They attack on the growing majority of Intelligent Design scientists and "common people" with increasing intensity everyday. You can expect the volume of their emotional attacks to increase even as their influence wanes. They are no different than the religious zealots who persecuted Columbus, Copernicus, Galileo etc. because what they discovered challenged treasured beliefs. The truth eventually wins out however!
The Discovery Institute is a good resource for more on Intelligent Design. And an excellent book on the subject is The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God, by Lee Strobel.
The arguments will go on and on but the Harris Poll shows that Darwinist's have really already lost. The obvious is, well, obvious!
