By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
In my atheist days, I regularly read atheist magazines. Actually, I still do, focusing on anti-creation and pro-evolution articles and books.
This reading provides me with ideas to research and write about. Recently, I re-subscribed to a magazine titled Free Inquiry, which I have subscribed to in the past for years.
Atheists tend to avoid the term ‘atheist’ and prefer the term ‘Secular Humanist,’ the subtitle of Free Inquiry magazine.
One reason why I enjoy reading Free Inquiry is that it includes numerous anti-creation articles and articles supporting evolution.
The current issue included four long articles promoting evolution and opposing creation. The reason atheist magazines publish so many anti-creation and pro-evolution articles is that they recognize the fact that evolution is the doorway to atheism.
One of the articles features a summary of a large survey on the reasons why people accept creation and reject evolution.
The author, Professor Peter Fisher, concluded that most people who accept creation and reject evolution do so based on their religious beliefs. Fisher also concluded that most of the creationists he interviewed could not effectively defend their beliefs.
Exposure to what Fisher viewed as the facts of evolution, he claimed, would easily cause many people to reject their anti-evolution assumptions and accept evolution.
In some cases, many people would go the next step and accept atheism as well. This observation is valid based on the fact that a large number of young people who were taught creation at home and in their church accept evolution.
To facilitate this goal, Fisher recommended that public schools focus more on what he claimed was the enormous amount of evidence supporting the fact of human evolution.
These claims are ironic because, when I was an atheist, Free Inquiry published some of my articles. My journey from atheism, as is true of thousands of others, involved a detailed study of evolution.
This study forced me to reject the atheistic creation story as scientifically invalid. Professor Fisher is correct in claiming that once exposed to evolutionary claims, evolution is very effective in converting creationists to evolutionists.
This fact for Christians stresses the importance of what is called belief inoculation. Inoculation means exposure to scientific facts to help them realize that the scientific evidence in favor of creation, and also those facts opposed to evolution, will prevent them from succumbing to evolutionary indoctrination.
This issue of Free Inquiry also had an editorial opposing President Trump, noting that readers should be warned against “Trump’s Version of American History,” specifically, Trump’s support for Task Force 25, which Hillsdale College is producing to support the Task Force 25 program. Task Force 25 promotes what Free Inquiry calls “a slanted take on history.”
I have faithfully read Hillsdale College’s well-written monthly eight-page magazine called Imprimis, which does an excellent job of briefly discussing current issues.
I do not know Hillsdale College’s stand on the atheistic creation story, often referred to as evolution. A friend who attended Hillsdale College offered to pay for a subscription to Creation Research Society Quarterly, which the science department flatly turned down.
His impression was that they did not want students to be exposed to the case for creation and against the atheistic creation story.
Creation Research Society has over 500 scientists with graduate degrees in science. The PhDs of members include those from Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech, and the University of Michigan.
Hillsdale did support a lecture/debate with Intelligent Design supporter, University of California, Berkley (PhD in molecular and cell biology), Jonathan Wells, and paleontologist Niles Eldridge. Eldridge was, with Stephen Jay Gould, the founder of the punctuated equilibrium theory, which challenges the classical Darwinism theory of phyletic gradualism.
Phyletic gradualism suggests that evolution is a slow, continuous process, and Gould and Eldridge argue that evolution occurs in jumps or leaps. I attended the Eldridge-Wells debate on the Hillsdale campus.
After the event, I was able to talk to a few Hillsdale students about their perception of the debate, which I thought was very professional on the part of both Wells and Eldredge.
The students I talked to were very angry at Hillsdale for allowing Wells to speak against what they believed was the proven, well-documented science of molecules to man evolution.
Creationists, they firmly explained, are unethical liars who mislead people about the large number of scientific facts supporting the atheistic creation story.
I assume that the students would have preferred the theistic evolution label, which is misleading because it tends to have a solid core of evolution covered with a thin veneer of theism.
According to his writing, the evolution Eldridge supports was the atheistic creation story, molecules to man, purely by natural means.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. Has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools.