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.