Award-Winning
Neurosurgeon Condemned by Major University for Not Believing in Evolution
Dr. Ben Carson is a nationally
recognized neurosurgeon and Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins
Hospital. Dr. Carson does not believe in evolution. Since 1989, he has
delivered 73 commencement speeches. This year, a number of faculty members and
others at Emory University are upset that Dr. Carson will deliver this year’s
commencement address.
Before discussing the evolution dust
up, let me give you some background on Dr. Carson.
In 1987, with a 70-member surgical
team, Carson was the first surgeon who successfully separated Siamese Twins
conjoined at the back of the head. For this groundbreaking surgery and other
accomplishments.
“Carson has received numerous honors
and many awards over the years, including over 61 honorary doctorate degrees.
He was also a member of the American Academy of Achievement,
the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, the Alpha Omega Alpha
Honor Medical Society, the Yale Corporation (the governing body of Yale
University), and other prestigious organizations. He sits on many boards
including the Board of Directors of Kellogg Company, Costco Wholesale
Corporation, and America’s Promise.”
In 2008, President George W. Bush
awarded Dr. Carson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom award, the highest
civilian award in the United States.
His rise from struggling student to
gifted surgeon is told in Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. In
2009, the book was adapted for television and starred Academy Award winning
actor Cuba Gooding Jr.
While acknowledging Dr. Carson’s
achievements, 500 faculty members, grad students, and alumni want Emory
University to issue some disclaimers. They are not asking that Dr. Carson be
disinvited, but only that some comments be made to “those students, their families,
and the Emory Community” who “listen to his speech” that some mention be made
of “the enormous positive impact of science on our lives and how that science
rests squarely on the shoulders of evolution.”
How many times have you heard
evolutionists claim that
people who don’t believe in evolution don’t make good scientists? Well, Dr.
Carson is one person who demolishes the myth, and he’s not the only one. There
are too many scientists to list who don’t believe in the theory that nothing
evolved into what we see in the cosmos today.
Science, as any honest student of
history knows, developed within the context of a Christian worldview.
Christians don’t deny the “positive
impact of science” just like they don’t deny the negative impact of science,
for example, nuclear weapons and eugenics, to name just two. Science is not
neutral, and you don’t have to be an evolutionist to be a good scientist. In
fact, I would go so far as to say that a consistent evolutionist could never do
science. Science assumes a rational and fixed set of natural (creational) laws.
Given the assumptions of evolution, a scientists would never know what he’s
going to get.
The letter accuses Dr. Carson of
disregarding the “importance of science” and “critical thinking.” How can these
university-educated men and women make such an asinine statement?
What parent would ever put their child’s life in the hands of a man who has no
regard for the “importance of science” and “critical thinking”? What university
or hospital would hire him? Who would give awards to such a man?
Evolutionists have been telling the
world that anti-evolutionists are “anti-science” because they do not believe
that matter can evolve into intelligence, biological complexity, and morality
in the same way that liberals argue that conservatives who do not believe that
they should be forced to pay for a woman’s birth control devices are
“anti-women.”
Evolution is a philosophical and
moral dead end. There’s no way to rescue it by asserting the claim “that
science rests squarely on the shoulders of evolution.” If it does, we are in
deep trouble. Dr. Ben Carson knows better.
