Gallup recently announced that forty percent of all Americans believe in creationism.  A better storyline to its recent polling data might be that only one in five Americans believes in Darwinism, which was a wobbly theory when first proposed almost two centuries ago and which has become an increasingly improbable explanation for the origin of life and species during the last two hundred years.  That would be a better storyline, but it is not the storyline presented by Gallup.

Darwinists are invariably the product of an educational system that has as little to do with free thought as the educational systems of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.  Groupthink, instead, is what these institutions create and nurture.  There are no longer "schools of thought," but simply "settled science" and its detractors (those with free and thinking minds). 

It is Darwinism, not its alternative theories, that is an intolerant system of blind faith that brooks no reconsideration, no conflicting scientific opinion, and no independent thought.  This shows up not only in the purging of academicians who hold politically incorrect views in life sciences, which Ben Stein exposed in his 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but in deliberate mischaracterization of the debates about the origin of life.  

Consider creationism, one strain which comprises the theory that life developed literally according to the Bible.  Darwinists dishonestly pretend creationism is presented as the only non-Darwinian explanation for the beginning and development of life and any theory that conflicts with Darwinism is in fact creationism. 

In fact, creationism is one explanation for the origin and development of life.  Anyone who suggests that no true scientist could believe in creationism shows ignorance of the scientific opinion of practically all the great scientists who gave us the Scientific Revolution.  Lord Kelvin, whose Second Law of Thermodynamics was considered the most important law in all science by Einstein, and who lived well into the twentieth century, was a creationist.

Intelligent Design is a second explanation for the origin and development of life.  The premise of that theory — that a Creator made a universe in which life would develop and grow — is "unscientific" only to those who find the idea of God "unscientific" as well, again something that virtually none of the fathers of modern science believed.

Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist in history, devoted the latter part of his life almost exclusively to biblical studies and was considered by contemporaries as one of the greatest biblical scholars alive.  This was pre-Darwin, and the attitude of prominent atheists of the time, like Voltaire, was that Newton had gotten silly in his old age.  Voltaire based this upon his own anti-theistic bigotry and nothing else.

There is a third body of scientific opinion that rejects Darwinism as an old, failed explanation theory that merited serious consideration until we began to understand the breathtaking complexity of life at its lowest levels without embracing any theological opinion on the origin of life.

Sir Fred Hoyle, without whose work in determining how heavy elements could be formed in the universe Darwinism would have collapsed decades ago, began to calculate how probable the development of life by accident would be an concluded that it is impossible: life could never develop randomly, as proposed by Darwin, whose theory Hoyle in the 1980s called "nonsense of a high order."

Forty years ago, the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Physiology held a symposium of mathematicians and biologists.  The conclusion of the mathematicians, after calculating all of the many wildly improbable layers of assumptions necessary for Darwinism to work, was that the origin and development of life according to Darwin's old, worn out theory was simply impossible.  What was the response of the Darwinist biologists?  Simply this: The calculations of the mathematicians must be wrong since evolution happened.  No evidence or analysis could disprove Darwinism.

What that means is that Darwinists are too lazy and too dumb and too corrupt to look for a more workable scientific theory for the origin and development of life.  They view as "science" what props up their creaky ideology, just as Marxists consider their prophets' failed musings as "science" and Freudians ignore all the utterly unproven assumptions in Freud's theories as "science" and global warming disciples rewrite old temperature data to conform to their phony theory and consciously suppress data that disproves it.

Scientism is the enemy of science.  The triumph of scientism is the death of science.  Scientism forecloses alternative theories and demands totalitarian groupthink.  No task ahead is more vital than exposing and debunking the invented pseudo-science of scientism.  Indeed, if we fail in this task, we are doomed.