MUMBAI – Satyapal Singh is India’s Minister of State for Human Resources responsible for Higher Education. He holds several post-graduate degrees, not the least of which is a Ph.D. in Chemistry. He is a member of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and is the former chief of police for Mumbai. In January of this year – and again in July – he rocked India with his scientific observation that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution “is scientifically wrong.”

His comments outraged India’s scientific community which largely espouses the theory as factual.

Singh’s concern is driven by textbooks that “make children see their fathers as useless kinds . . . it says our ancestors were monkeys. That we are children of monkeys.” He has mounted a campaign to remove the teaching of evolution from the Indian educational system.

Singh’s position is strictly based on scientific principle and the definition of science itself. Science has traditionally been defined as “a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations.”

The Academic Press Dictionary of Science & Technology defines sciences as

1. the systematic observation of natural events and conditions in order to discover facts about them and to formulate laws and principles based on these facts.
2. the organized body of knowledge that is derived from such observations and that can be verified or tested by further investigation. (Emphasis ours)

Elsewhere, science is defined as “the concerted human effort to understand, or to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding.”

Singh correctly observed that “Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral history said that they saw an ape turning into a man.”

As a self-described educated politician, Singh faces an uphill battle amongst his colleagues, although he claims to have support from many people who are reluctant to speak up.

One of the purposes of this article is to raise awareness in North America that evolution is not strictly a debate between evolutionists and Christians. Acceptance of this unproven and unprovable theory is undermining destroying our understanding of our own value and worth to our Creator and His purposes for us in this world.

We cannot fail to comprehend that the world system is underpinning the spread of the theory of evolution by redefining science itself.

Prior to his demise in 1994, Karl R. Popper proposed that “we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a body of knowledge but, rather, a system of hypotheses or as a system of guesses or anticipations that, in principle, cannot be justified.”

Dr. Singh is not a Christian. He is a dedicated Vedic scholar. Nonetheless, if his efforts to change the textbooks in India is successful, the country may come to understand the value of every created individual without superiority or inferiority to any other. His efforts are worthy of our prayers.