Are evolutionists sure of the “fact” of evolution?

Joel Kontinen

Evolution is often presented as fact. But what do the evolutionists have to say? Two interesting examples might throw some light on the issue. I will quote the views of two evolutionists at length to show that I am not quoting them out of context:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
(Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review of Books, p. 31, 9 January 1997).

The extreme difficulty of obtaining the necessary data, for any quantitative estimation of the efficiency of natural selection makes it seem probable that this theory will be re-established, if it be so, by the collapse of alternative explanations which are more easily attacked by observation and experiment. If so, it will present a parallel to the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.
(Watson D.M.S. [British palaeontologist], "Adaptation", Nature, 3119:124, August 10, 1929, pp. 231-234).