Being a Professor of Medicine, Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center doesn’t mean that you understand or accept science as an effective method of inquiry, and Robert Eckel surely doesn’t. Though he has some scientific publications in unrelated fields, Eckel is opposed to the application of scientific standards to fields he clearly doesn’t know much about. He is, for instance, a hardcore creationist and both a signatory the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism and on the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation.
Eckel thinks that evolution is just a theory (so he doesn’t really understand the basics of science in general), and that evolution being just a theory immediately entails that the Biblical account of creation is equally valid and that creationists and scientists just interpret the same data using different worldviews (which could only work if you overlook the fact that creationists just reject almost all the data, but really not even then). So why do so many scientist subscribe to evolution? Well, thinks Eckel, it’s because they haven’t accepted Jesus. But of course.
Diagnosis: Yet another raging fundamentalist anti-science champion. The US is apparently crammed with them, but Eckel has credentials that might make him look, to those who don’t care to look too closely, as if his claims should actually carry some weight, which they shouldn’t.