Most doctors doubt Darwin:

It is refreshing to hear of doctors who doubt Darwin. In the general trample to canonize the old Brit toff as the greatest of secular saints, many doctors (60 percent actually) are asking, "What madness is this?"

This issue - demands that doctors support Darwinism - came up while I was writing By Design or by Chance?, when Texas student Micah Spradling had problems qualifying for med school because his prof insisted at that time (scroll down) that students profess faith in Darwinism; otherwise, they might make "poor clinical decisions".

As I reported,

Several area doctors took issue with Dini'sclaims and said that evolution has nothing to do with clinical decisions. ... How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people? (p. 136)

(I'm told the prof has since changed the rule to a more appropriate requirement that students demonstrate knowledge of same.)

Meanwhile, here are a couple of good reasons for doctors to doubt the Darwinist account of the human meat puppet:

- a popular argument for Darwinism has been that many human organs are vestigial - that is, useless clutter from previous evolution that should have been cleared away but wasn't - in other words, a sign of unintelligent design. The trouble is that research has shown that almost all existing organs have a known function. Here's the rub: The function is not always critical. If you lost the organ or its use, you might not die. But redundancy is valuable for functions that can be duplicated without causing confusion (for example, riddance of pathogens). Plus, you may not need a given organ at all times in your life. But that's different from claiming it is useless. Indeed, the history of claims that certain organs are vestigial has been so dismal that it would be wiser to conclude that no organs are vestigial.

- the very existence of the placebo effect (people get better when they think they are taking a powerful medication, even if it is just a sugar pill) damages the Darwinist belief that no human mind can be distinguished from the functions of the human brain. And few facts of medicine are better attested than the placebo effect. The forthcoming book The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007), which I am co-authoring with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard will address this issue among others.

Most likely, the doctors who think that the human body was intelligently designed have concluded that from their lifetimes of practice, not from the frantic press releases from science academies.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.