An online petition has collected the signatures of more than 1,000 scientists who are calling into question Darwin’s evolutionary theory, a theory that has remained unchallenged for more than 150 years. Many are skeptical of the theory and one religious scientist calls the insistence on random mutation a “conspiracy” intended to remove the possibility of a Creator, something Darwin himself never intended.

Last week, scientists around the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist and biologist, who first proposed the theory of evolution based on random natural mutation and natural selection. But not everyone is celebrating.

The petition states simply, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The statement was first drafted and circulated by Discovery Institute in 2001 in response to widespread claims that no credible scientists existed who doubted Neo-Darwinism. Discovery Institute subsequently took out an ad in The New York Review of Books and elsewhere showcasing more than 100 scientists who were willing to publicly express their scientific skepticism of Neo-Darwinism.

Since 2001, the signatories of the statement have grown to over 1,000 scientists, both in the United States and around the world. Signatories of the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism must either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine.

Dr. Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jewish physicist with a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), signed onto the petition, agreeing wholeheartedly with its premise.

“It’s time to review the knee-jerk conclusion that evolution is driven by chance,” Dr. Schroeder told Breaking Israel News. “The unquestioning insistence on random mutation is a conspiracy by the scientific community against the possibility that there might be a creating God.

“Darwin himself never said it was by chance,” Dr. Schroeder noted, citing the final paragraph in Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Dr. Schroeder explained that this paragraph was included in the five final editions of the book but not in the first edition which was published in haste.

“Some scientists who discuss the theory of evolution intentionally refer to the first edition which omits the mention of the Creator,” Dr. Schroeder said. “Or they quote Darwin but omit the word ‘Creator,'”

Dr. Schroeder was careful to differentiate between the theory of evolution and the fact of evolution.

“It has been proven that life developed from the simple to the complex,” Dr. Schroeder said. “But this perfectly reflects the process of creation as presented in the Bible. The fossil record follows precisely what Genesis outlined in the first chapter.”

The theory of evolution as presented by Darwin describes a random process, an assertion Dr. Schroeder believes exposes a “prejudice” in the scientific community.

“The word ‘evolution’ does not intrinsically demand that the process be random,” Dr. Schroeder said. “There are no data that shows that mutations are random. The likelihood of evolution being random is totally about zero.”

He noted that there are facts which seem to disprove the theory that have yet to be dealt with. One such inconvenient challenge to random natural selection is the Cambrian Explosion that took place an estimated 541 million years ago when all major animal phyla simultaneously appeared in the fossil record. Previous to the Cambrian explosion, all fossils were microscopic. Darwin himself noted that the lack of fossil evidence for a gradual and random process of evolution posed a difficulty for his theory.

“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer,” Darwin wrote. As per his theory, Darwin insisted several times in his book Natura non facit Salturum (Nature Does not Make Jumps). The fossil evidence of the Cambrian Explosion directly contradicts this non-jumping aspect of his theory.

This anti-evolutionary gap in the fossil record has not been resolved in the more-than 150 years since Darwin wrote those words yet most modern scientists refuse to cope with the contradictory evidence. Stephen J. Gould, one of the most influential science authors of the past 50 years, wrote about this failure of science to criticize random natural selection in Natural History in 1987, calling it a “trade secret.”

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils ….We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.”

Dr. Schroeder added a strong disclaimer to his refutation of random mutation and natural selection.

“That doesn’t necessarily prove that there is a God or that evolution requires a God,” Dr. Schroeder said. “But it certainly proves that the way evolution has been taught to schoolchildren for the past 200 years is a lie.

“This is evil,” Dr. Schroeder said unequivocally. “This is all part of an overriding anti-religious agenda by the scientific community to establish that the world is the result of random forces. There are so many possible wrong answers, wrong mutations and vastly few that are good that the possibility of life evolving randomly is statistically very unlikely.”

Dr. Schroeder emphasized that learning science in general and evolution in particular in an intellectually honest manner can lead to a deeper belief in the Creator. It is interesting to note that Dr. Schroeder’s video, “Believe in God in 5 Minutes (Scientific Proof)” has garnered over three million views.

“But it also has over 20,000 dislikes,” Dr. Schroeder said, using this to illustrate that reason and logic do not always win the day in public discourse.