Dr. Farooq's Study Resource Page
"Scientific
Fundamentalism"
According to Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
CHAPTER TWELVE:
How much of evolution has really happened
"It was unfortunate that the genuinely difficult problem of the origin
and evolution of living organisms became bound up in the nineteenth century with a cultural struggle which, being a human affair, had no
relation at all with the world of objective scientific reality. It was because Darwin's book the Origin of Species came to be regarded as
the declaration of war between a new culture and the old Judaeo-Christian culture, with science, industrialism and socialistic concepts
of the organization of society as its main threads, that the book became historically famous, rather than because it contained anything
new. In fact, the Origin of Species was put together very largely from the already published work of other men, its subsequent fame resting
far more on liberalistic thinking than on its original scientific content. From the Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, it is clear that
he saw the great issue of the last decades of the nineteenth century to be one of replacing prevailing Judaeo-Christian dogma with new
ideas. There was hardly any examination at all of the relevant scientific questions and problems by those who became embroiled in an
acrimonious battle between church and science. Every scientific issue was dealt with by the claim that the answers were all 'in Darwin', a
kind of scientific fundamentalism not greatly different in its
philosophy from that we associate today with religious fundamentalism. All
hope of improving our understanding of the origin and evolution of living
organisms thus became blocked, and it is quite likely to remain so for some
time to come because of the extent to which it has become diffused
throughout the education system."
[pp. 127-128; Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution, London: J M Dent, 1993]
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