Thursday, October 28, 2021

Science reviews a creationist book

You can't get much more anti-science than a book about Adam and Eve. Nevertheless, Stephen Schaffner—a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT in Boston—decided that such a book was worthy of a mostly favorable review in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world [Adam. Eve, and the evolution of humankind].

Schaffner is reviewing a book by William Lane Craig whom he describes as "a widely published philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist." There are others who would dispute that laudatory description including Richard Dawkins in a ten-year-old essay published in The Guardian [Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig].

I won't bother to mention all of the issues with the review since Jerry Coyne has covered them on his website but I would like to quote part of the second-last paragraph of the review.

Craig’s goal in writing this book, of course, is not a scientific one, and it cannot be judged on scientific grounds. I suspect that for many scientists, including religious ones, the exercise will be seen as misguided or simply incomprehensible.

Having followed Craig's anti-science crusade for several years, I have no difficulty in understanding why he would write such a book. What I find truly misguided and incomprehensible is why Science would publish such a review. Perhaps it's because AAAS, the publisher of Science, has a history of accommodating religion?


6 comments:

  1. This is becoming a cottage industry in religious circles, including Catholic ones: the cartwheels even theologians with an understanding of evolution will go through... to prop up the belief in 'First Parents'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Replies
    1. What a memory! In 1999 Stephen F. Schaffner of talk.origins worked at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University and then he moved to MIT. It's the same guy!

      http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/interpretations.html


      Delete
    2. He took us on a brief tour of the Human Genome Project when we visited Boston c.2001

      Delete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete