Hilary White, "Psych Prof Advocates Human/Chimp Hybrids – But only to Offend Christians" (2006)

By Hilary White
> &nbsp;<br> WASHINGTON, July 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an op ed piece in the LA Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, says that reproductive facilities should work towards creating a race of human/chimpanzee hybrids, but, he admits, only because it would offend Christians.
> &nbsp;<br> Some geneticists have postulated that their distant evolutionary ancestors may have interbred with those of chimps, and Barash argues that this means there is no moral difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, or indeed, between a human being and a sea sponge.
> &nbsp;<br> The psychology professor looks forward to the day when IVF facilities will create human/animal hybrids. He reveals, however, that his motivation is not a pure interest in advancing science, but his hatred for “know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” and “religious fundamentalists,” who hold human life to be sacred.
> &nbsp;<br> Barash says he advocates interbreeding humans with animals not because it would be a good idea in itself, but because it would offend believers. “In these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” he writes, “with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed.”
> &nbsp;<br> Barash says that creating animal/human hybrids would effectively quash the belief that “the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.”
> &nbsp;<br> “Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism,” Barash writes, “it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.”
> &nbsp;<br> One of the ideological offshoots of Darwinsim is radical environmentalism, advocates of which hold that human beings are a kind of virus threatening the earth’s ecosystems. According to the pure materialist philosophy, the environmental threat is directly the fault of “a bogus ‘faith based’ worldview,” the “Judeo-Christian proclamation of radical discontinuity between people and the rest of ‘creation.’”
> &nbsp;<br> Such shrill anti-religious polemics are increasingly being challenged from within the scientific community as bigotry, however, and recent revelations have indicated that Barash’s pure Darwinian faith may be going the way of the dodo.
> &nbsp;<br> In a new book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, asks scientific skeptics to approach religious belief God with a more open mind. Collins is among a growing movement in the science world that asserts there is no necessary rift between real science and religious belief.
> &nbsp;<br> Collins is far from the stereotype religious “know-nothing” presented by anti-religious Darwinists. One of the world’s leading geneticists, he led the international Human Genome Project that mapped the 3.1 billion chemical base pairs in humanity's DNA. He now runs the government research foundation guiding work in the medical applications of this historic international project.
> &nbsp;<br> Collins attributed his rejection of the atheistic position to the writings of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, the early 20th century English professor known and loved around the world for his ironclad logic in explaining Christian doctrines and debunking modern liberal atheism.
> &nbsp;<br> At a conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, Collins said, “For a scientist, it's uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn't going to be able to address.”
> &nbsp;<br> Collins refutes the Darwinists’ out-of-hand rejection of religion. An article in the Washington Post quotes him saying scientists are “not supposed to decide something is true until [they’ve] looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not."
> &nbsp;<br> Collins decries both the anti-religious materialists who dominate his profession, and the Christian reaction that, he says, attempts to ignore hard scientific evidence. Both approaches, he said, are “profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary.”
> &nbsp;<br> Read Washington Post article:
> God, Under a Microscope<br> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...
> &nbsp;<br> Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
> EvolutionCreation Debate Now Science vs. Science not Science vs. Religion
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